Hester(72)

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TWO DAYS PASS. I wait, but Nat doesn’t come.

He said he was going to Maine with his uncle—perhaps he’s already gone and had no way to tell me. I wonder at the carelessness I saw in him, the flash of something I didn’t want to acknowledge. But he’s in me now in every way, and I’m heartsick that he is absent.

I line up the last pairs of gloves for the Philadelphia ladies and make the marks. I make the stitches but feel no joy in it. I watch the needle push through the fabric all day long, something alien and separate from myself.

It’s only work; it is not my heart. And still, my bleeding has not come.



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ON THE FOURTH of July, I roam the Common licking a lemonade ice in the heat. It’s America’s Independence Day and the whole town is out for the celebration. The summer air smells of roasted meats, peanuts, and fire—scents that usually make me happy, but today make me queasy. A parade of men in costume marches through the center of the square singing and banging drums. Children and dogs run alongside them, making a ruckus. Girls vibrate with holiday merriment as they twirl long colorful ribbons on sticks. Boys blow wooden whistles and toss balls in the air.

Booths along the square sell gingerbread, sugarplums, and confectionary, spruce beer and lemonade. Mrs. Remond’s cake shop offers red-and-blue sugar cookies, Mr. Tillerman is selling his liquorice whips, and Mrs. Spencer is doing a quick business selling her Gibraltar candies at the new price of three pennies each.

I’m looking for Nat, and at the same time I’m trying not to look for him. I want to see him, and I want to see him before he sees me. It’s been six days. He’s never stayed away so long without forewarning, and I’m desperate for him to find me.

At a root beer booth, three or four strange men stand with city magistrates and other officials.

“Runaway slaves make up counterfeit papers and move freely in our northern cities,” one says. His words are hard green, tinged black. “But I think it’s our duty to send them back south where they belong.”

“Not to mention collecting the reward,” says another with a foul chuckle. I turn to see what a slave catcher looks like, but he is ordinary in every way, with a curled mustache that is waxed and trim. Evil in the shape of an unexceptional man.

“A good neighbor will do that,” says a third, who wears a white carnation in his lapel. “Just like you would with a runaway cow or a horse. It’s the right thing to do, no matter what the Quakers have to say about it.”

There’s a man with a monkey in a red hat who takes peanuts from his hands, and a group of rowdy boys—perhaps the same boys who taunted the widow on the day of our arrival—who toss pebbles at the poor creature for sport.

Folks I know from church or from town greet me, and I move as if in a daze.

“The New Harmony is due in port soon,” one says.

“You’ll be a sight for your husband’s sore eyes, Mrs. Gamble,” says another.

Every few moments it seems I see a man who looks like Nat, and I must remind myself not to say his name aloud.

At the waterfront a line of bonfires is burning and smoldering, tended by a cadre of shirtless young Black men who blink away the sweat that pours into their eyes. I walk south along the water where I’ve never gone before, away from the festivities and families full of happiness. At the almshouse, I see children playing hoops with the old top of a rusted barrel and wish I had something to give them.

The lemon ice sours in my stomach—God forbid I ever have a child who plays hoops at the almshouse—and I hurry away. I pass fishermen’s houses that face the open sea and the soap factory that backs up against a long field. Along the lake is a dock of rowboats, and some of them are in the water. I see a family with a child. A man and a woman. The man looks like Nat, but of course it is not.

Kites dip and soar and twirl in the air. A trio of young ladies comes skipping along the lakefront, and a boat in the water comes to shore. A man hops out and splashes. His back is to me, and his shirt is the blue of Nat’s shirt. He puts out a hand and tugs the boat, and lopes to the left just as Nat lopes to the left. But it is not Nat.

I trudge home as rockets begin to whistle through the sky and find Mercy at the well in my yard.

“It’s so hot I ran out of water.” She looks me up and down. “You been in town?”

“Yes.”

“Freedom Day they call it, but freedom for who?”

I see it now. Freedom, the way the word leaves her lips and flies up in a blaze of yellow tipped with orange like a flame. Mercy and freedom are linked, like the chain of something worked with a long tambour stitch. Like the rosebud and the hawthorn branches I embroidered together.



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THE NEXT MORNING I heed Mercy’s advice about going unseen. I tuck up my hair and walk close by the window of the Mannings’ stagecoach office, but Nat’s not inside. He must have gone north without telling me. Perhaps his uncle rushed him away. Perhaps he saw someone, or someone saw him, and he’s afraid to come back.

Twice I walk by our gray boulder, and once I even sit and wait. But I dare not wait long, for I’m freezing even in the July heat. I’m shivering from fear and shame and something that makes me feel so ill I can only think it is love, or the child, or both.