Hester(70)

Perhaps he feels liberated and unclaimed here, where the earth is like a bowl of blue water and blue sky. But I’m not free.

We scramble back onto the shore and he tosses the food off the blanket and wraps it around me. He crushes my face into him and kisses me and rubs the blanket along my arms and legs to warm them.

“You’ll dry quickly in the sun,” he says.

We stretch out on the rocks, and he twirls a bit of my hair. I look up at the sky, my cheek resting against his shoulder. Now. I must tell him now.

“Do you like it here in Salem?” he asks.

I love you. This is what I want to say—that I believe we have a shared fate, accused and accuser destined to mend our family stories one to the other. If there is a power in stories, surely there is power in ours.

“I like the sea close by. I like the sky at night,” I say instead.

The light in his eyes is the color of candles.

“If you were to leave here, would you go home to Scotland? Or would you like to live somewhere else?”

Is he asking me to go away with him?

“I’d like to go to Maine.” My ears buzz with my own pounding heart. “I’d like to go to Maine with you.”

His finger stops curling my hair. Too many moments pass before he says evenly, “Maine is beautiful in summer.”

He describes the morning air, a lake the color of sea glass. He speaks of silence cut by loons at daybreak.

“I’d like to take you to Maine.” He twirls a long piece of my hair around his finger. “I’d like to show you Sebago Lake and the White Mountains.”

Only a short while ago I felt the whole ocean and the whole world was open to me. I was swimming, and he was behind me making sure I didn’t flail.

“It’s light and clean in Maine, nothing like Salem—there are too many ghosts here, too many shadows and secrets. Too much cruelty—too much terrible history.”

He’s speaking of his ancestors now. I’ve seen him go dark in this way and then I have lost him.

“You’re not like them,” I say. “You’re not like your grandsires, you didn’t condemn women to be hanged or whipped through the streets, and your family didn’t have slaves when others did.”

“Slaves?” he asks.

“Yes, slaves,” I say. How long has it been since I saw Mercy and her children? “I was told that the Silas family and others in Salem had slave ships.”

“Old Captain Silas is dead and no one in Salem trades in slaves anymore—there are laws against it.”

“But did he?”

“Maybe he did.” He is irritated.

“I heard men in town talking about a slave catcher looking for a child,” I say.

Nat looks up at the sky.

“A slave is a valuable bit of property.” His hands are propped behind his head, his elbows poking out like wings. “A strong Black man is worth four hundred dollars or more—a child is worth half that, but it’s still a good deal of money.”

An uneasy feeling comes over me. My wet clothes haven’t dried. The sun is past high noon, and folks will soon be freed from Sunday meeting for an afternoon stroll in the forest.

“It’s best not to interfere in the property of others,” he says. So casually. As if he doesn’t know any children like Abraham or Ivy.

“But a child is a living person with a heart and a soul.”

He sits up, shrugs off my hand. The spell between us is broken; the moment I might have told him about Edward is gone.

He brushes tiny pebbles off the backs of his bare arms.

“My family never owned slaves, Isobel.” There’s a catch of impatience in his voice. How can Nat hate the men who imprisoned innocent women and not the men who chained and enslaved fellow human beings? “Slavery is the South’s problem, not mine—let’s not talk of it on such a lovely day when we have so little time left.”



* * *



IT’S WELL PAST noon when we lace up our dry clothes and our shoes and leave the clearing in the hemlocks. We’re quiet on the path, for there’s a sadness now that our day has come to an end.

We haven’t walked very far when I hear carriage wheels and Zeke’s cart clips toward us from the north. Nat is behind me and the next minute he’s gone. I try to keep my eyes from dancing around in the brush as Zeke stops the carriage and tips back his hat.

“Miss Isobel, what brings you up this way?”

The horse recognizes me and nuzzles at my hand through his bridle. I’m glad I’ve put my cap back on so that Zeke can’t see my hair is wet.

I’ve always felt safe with Zeke, felt the goodness of him. It was Zeke who helped me plant my garden, Zeke who escorted me home after dark, Zeke who made the glove forms that I use to make my meager living. But now his voice is strange, and there is no color—no juice in his letters, no dusk in his words. He’s stripped everything out of himself so that he’s as empty as the feedbags tossed beside a stack of sapling buckets and wooden barrels in the back of his cart.

“The day is too pretty to spend inside at Sunday meeting,” I say. Birds caw overhead, and Zeke glances farther along the path. He is distracted, as if he’s seen something amiss in the forest.

“And you?” I draw his attention back to me so that he doesn’t spy Nat. “What brings you out this way?”