The Loom (11 page)

She hated him. Hated her servant, but only for the hours it took for Beatrice to come to her, late in the night, bowing before her, sobbing into her lap, sorry, so sorry, her tears sticking the thin skirt of her dress to her knees. Emma cupped the back of her head and cried in agony and forgave the worst of sins.

When she gave birth to Elizabeth, Beatrice cared for the girl as if she were her own. Dark hands lifted her, cleaned her, cared for her, held the child, spoke life into her. Elizabeth was her slave’s daughter, their hearts knit together from her baby’s first breath.

She was too bitter to fill her arms with the babe. That night, Michael took one look at the child that brought her to the brink of death and with a nod, left, out to the slave quarters. That night, she vowed never to allow him in her bed again.

A month later, a bitter root sprang up on the Kelly plantation and it scared Emma speechless.

Each harvest she had watched Beatrice in the gardens. Intrigued by the woman’s interest, one dawn she followed her out to the rich ground of soil, setting the soles of her shoes in the footprints of the one who traveled ahead.

Beatrice walked nearly a yard before she paused. Glancing over a bony shoulder, the edges of her lips curved.

“I want to come with you,” Emma announced.

“Come.” The wide neck of her burlap dress had slipped back against her throat, baring a narrow back and the sharpest of blades. The early-morning rays cast a glow around her as she high-stepped across the field. From behind, her dark brown legs and elbows looked like broken twigs, thin and fragile.

Emma gripped her woolen shawl around her shoulders against the wind and trotted faster until she clipped the back of her friend’s heel.

When they reached the rows of vegetation, Beatrice squatted, her skirt hiked up over dark patched knees. Even from the front, she was all angles, except her head, made especially round by the tightly tied gingham scarf covering it. Emma leaned over her and watched. Beatrice teetered forward as she yanked on tiny, feathery branches then steadied herself with her left hand. Plucking the carrot from the dirt, she wiggled it at Emma. “This is a nice one. Nice and smooth, don’t you think?” Earth packed into half moons under her nails. “You try it.”

Emma looked around. She knew little about gardens, even less about reaping.

“Go on.”

She scrunched up her skirt over her calves and knelt beside Beatrice. The damp soil caved around her as she leaned over ruffled green foliage.

“Watch it!” Beatrice warned when Emma’s fingertips grazed a purple trimmed leaf. “Look at that. That’s no carrot, ma’am.”

Wide-eyed, Beatrice shook her head. “That there is dangerous. See here.” She held her long, curved fingers inches under the limp leaf. “See those four corners and that there purple on the outside, that’s not good. That’s poison. I ain’t seen nothing like this since I been here. Seen it all the time on your father’s land.”

Emma stared at Beatrice’s trembling hands and listened to her fear now bound in whispers.

“Back home, this here plant killed nine folk, Emma. Nine! You remember that?”

She nodded. Scarcely, just barely she recalled the incident.

“Three men, five women, and a child, no bigger than this here.” She held her dark palm a couple of feet from the ground.

“Barely walking, he was. It was something awful. Nine Coloreds gone just like that.”

Emma stared at the olive plant. Hard to believe something so small, so fragile, had so much power.

“Look at it real good so you remember.”

Later that evening, standing in the back corner of her candlelit dining room, Emma leaned against a cold wall, watching her husband. The brisk night air invaded the room and sent a shiver down the length of her.

When Beatrice served him kale, she thought of what else her friend had placed before him, what more he had eagerly received, taken. When she poured olive oil over crusty slices of bread, she thought of the warm liquid she had drizzled over her own body for him. When she served the cherry pie, she thought of her bleeding heart, the softness of a soul devoured.

Michael’s fork pierced the brown crust and a thick red stream oozed onto his white plate. A drip slipped over the edge of the porcelain and splattered into a crimson tear.

Emma’s chest pounded.

Her husband spooned pie into his mouth. With each scoop, Emma saw limp olive and purple chopped so finely, diced so obscurely, sprinkled with venom in every bite. She watched the man of the house eating, enjoying each mouthful, and she imagined his pleasure fading, his smile freezing, his heart stopping….

“Emma? Is that you?” Michael leaned back in his chair, his head cocked toward the corner she was standing. “I didn’t even see you back there.”

But all Emma could do was stare. The vision had strangled her words, smothered her voice.

“Emma?”

She ran out of the room, terrified.

Seasons passed. The poison never erected itself again, except in Emma’s heart.

She became bitter, filled with violent images of her husband’s destruction. Wagons, tractors, men tearing him apart, limb by limb, piece by piece, as he had done her soul. On the few nights she found him asleep in their sitting room, one leg dangling off the sofa, or passed out on the barn floor, hay stuck to the beads of sweat across his forehead, his mouth ajar, his breathing heavy through thin nostrils, she leaned over him and whispered death, begging the heavens the privilege of witnessing his last breath, the honor of watching him draw in the last bit of air cursed enough to fill his lungs.

Every sign of hatred, every wretched thought of his demise, she kept hidden deep inside, reined under a shawl of grace, the guise of a lady, but inside she raged. She was always able to control her fury, except for one drizzly summer evening.

She was reclining, rocking in the white paint-chipped swing on the front porch of their colonial, watching the sprinkle of rain when the front door swung open and Michael stepped out, a gust of wind blowing the wild curls of his hair back over his forehead.

He glanced at her and started for the steps.

“Where are you going?” she found herself asking.

He didn’t answer.

“Where are you going?” she asked again, the question clipped in anger.

Michael stopped.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” He didn’t even turn around, just waited for the submissive silence sure to follow, then jogged down the steps, but when his feet hit the gleaming grass below, something in her raced. She saw herself going after him, had thought it was just in her mind, but before she knew it, she was moving to the edge of the porch, walking down planks of wood, marching, running, sprinting toward him, her heavy dress swooshing around her legs, confining her movement only slightly because what was in her burst loose. She sprang forward, leapt on his back, her arms locked around his neck, scrambling, gripping, screeching at him, beating his flesh with tiny fists, pounding him, slapping against his skull. He swung around, grabbed at the legs wrapped around him, but he couldn’t shake her. She held on, snatching his damp hair from the roots. Swearing, he stooped, tumbling her forward, farther on top of him now, her stomach curved over the crown of his head, her hands gripping his ears, she grappled, bit down, tasted the hot salt of his cheek. He swung hard, his elbow jamming into her ribs, and threw her off of him, but not before her fingernails dug deep, streaking his neck red.

She scrambled up in the wet grass, heaving, watching, waiting.

He gripped his sun-parched neck, blood dripping down the square nails of his fingers and his cream collar, his back bent as though the weight of her was still upon him. His narrow eyes said everything she felt, but to her surprise no sound came from his lips, just a quiver he bit down against. Not a word exchanged between them.

She swept her hand over her hair, swiped her forehead with her trembling palm, and pulled her dress straight as she staggered to her feet. She took a deep breath and left him in the field alone.

Neither mentioned that day, never spoke of it. In the morning, she had thought it a dream, until she saw the bunched-up shirt in the wicker basket of soiled laundry. She picked it up, the smell of lust still clinging to its fibers, the drops of blood at its collar. She scrubbed it endlessly but never could remove the blemish.

As the months passed, she knew, didn’t want to know, there was something growing, flourishing in the womb of the one she loved. She glanced at the small bump under Beatrice’s dress, tried to ignore the pouch of life that made her restless, stole the last of what was in her, her slumber, her hunger to live.

Even Beatrice was different. With each month, she grew sadder, spoke less, spending each day in the garden, each night at the loom.When she went into labor in the fall, Emma sat at her feet, gripping her hand in the midst of slaves, frail chocolate and mocha arms lifting Beatrice, clenching her shoulders, her wrists, as she squatted, teetering on the balls of her feet in the dirt cabin. Among them, an old, gray-haired midwife, Odessa, mumbling, praying something, in tears, but when Beatrice collapsed and the cry of mother and child united, it was Emma who caught the baby’s slippery body in the folds of her wool dress, sliding to the ground with the new life, her skirt as bloody as the one who birthed her. She stared into the deep-set brown eyes of her husband and wept.

She didn’t know whether Michael knew Cora was his. If he even cared.

Months later when Beatrice was found in the garden, Emma died too. No more reason to fight. Nothing else to give.

She watched the young ladies gleaning the last of the fruit from the bushes, their wooden buckets barely grazed, her husband marching through the fields between them, his boots covered with the juice of everything he had crushed. Emma watched it all.

She saw nothing.

Lydia smiled at John as he crossed his outstretched legs, one scuffed boot on top of the other. When he leaned back on his palms, her gaze followed the bulging vein at his wrist, the bicep of his arm, flexing as he twisted himself comfortable, to the rolled-up cotton sleeve and a smile that made her blush. Three candle flames flickered, danced, cast shadows on his face in the muggy storehouse.

Since their secret discussion, thoughts of liberation overwhelmed her as much as they had that night in the woods. She couldn’t shake the idea of being with him loose, boundless, released to stroll through wide rainbow fields of flowers, their locked fingers swinging together against their sides without a curfew or a master to answer to for anything. Sauntering through dark hallways to spacious dining rooms lit with candelabras.

Lydia looked away. It was Jackson’s Victorian she imagined, his laughter she could now hear rising and falling around her.

“You’re not here,” John said.

Was she ever? She could feel his gaze on her, studying her face.

“You’re thinking.”

“I am.”

“About?”

“What you said last night. Do you really think it’s possible?”

He nodded.

“I need it to be true, John.” The feeling was eating at her again. Unrest always started the same way. Bit by bit, bite by bite, it wouldn’t be long before she was completely consumed. Soon peace would become as unfamiliar as a stranger. All joy would be wrapped into wanting. She was slipping into that place again, that space in her soul where she knew, was completely aware that nothing would satisfy like the thing that eluded her. She was nothing without it. What was a person anyway without rights, without a choice?

“You need it?”

“I do.”

“Why? Why so much?”

Why? She blinked.

“Why do you need it? This is not enough?”

“This?” She glanced around the stuffy storehouse that was not even theirs, their backs jabbed with spiky pieces of straw against paint-peeled walls and a ratty blanket he’d brought. “John.”

“I don’t know, Lydia. You’re with me. I’m with you. I can’t seem to think of nothing better.”