Hester(85)

“I remember the man on the wharf, you gave him a burlap sack, too,” I say to Zeke.

Mercy nods.

“We help each other,” she says. “Food, sometimes a little more.”

At the bottom of the hill, with the brick homes behind us, Zeke stops the cart beside a cobbler’s ten-footer. The shoemaker is a Black man old enough to have seen many hard seasons, perhaps to have been a slave himself; the years are evident by the ashy lines on his face and his nearly toothless mouth. I show him the cracked soles on my boots where water has begun to leak in. His work is quick, with thick black tar.

Before we settle up I ask if he can fashion a leather strap to my description. He looks at Mercy and asks, “Why would she want that?”

Mercy nods at me, says, “She can tell you best herself.”

I explain it simply enough, and Zeke lets out a low whistle.

“I believe you’re a lady who finds a solution to most anything,” he says.

“Like you and Mercy,” I say. I give them a sly, encouraging look. “I believe I know what you are doing with your embroidery and the sugar house.”

Mercy shocks me by grabbing my wrist. “Get down out of this cart,” she says.

She tugs me into a crumbling doorway, where she turns with a look on her face like nothing I have ever seen.

“Whatever you think you know is wrong. It is as wrong as Nat calling you a witch, and as dangerous as anything you could ever imagine. If you want to be my friend you must never speak of it. You must never see it. You must never say it. Ever.”

Keep silent: I have been told this by women I love and trust and by women who care nothing for my fate. But how can I live and be silent? How can I speak and be safe?

“Do you hear me?” Mercy asks with another rough shake of my wrist.

I nod, and she says nothing more.





TWENTY-EIGHT





I’m counting out the last of my coins and worrying how I will pay for food and fuel when a sallow white man in a black hat knocks at my door. He leans on a crooked stick and spits tobacco juice into a tin. It is the undertaker in his patched black coat, and the sight of him pitches me back on my heels.

“I hear you need work.”

I have a flash of my pap in his coffin, gray-faced and gaunt, and I know in my heart that my father has died. I’m not yet twenty years old, but it’s already clear to me that death moves round the earth the same as the sun, illuminating one land while stealing light from the last, taking souls as it rolls across the great scape of mankind.

“That’s true,” I say. Perhaps Nat has sent him. Perhaps this is the sort of help he means to give me.

“A child is dead. A boy, not ten years old.” The undertaker lets out another stream of brown spit that hits the tin with a sharp zing. “Folks think it’s bad luck to make a child’s shroud.” He looks me up and down. “But maybe that don’t matter to you?”

He offers a fair fee, and I agree to stitch sailboats and birds and to finish by tomorrow morning.

“See that you do a good job,” the undertaker says before he goes. “The dead make steady work.”

It’s on this very night, while I’m sewing birds onto the boy’s shroud, that I feel the infant flutter deep in me for the first time. It startles me at first and I stay perfectly still, waiting. I haven’t realized how I’ve held wonder and fear so tightly together until I feel it again and laugh out loud in sheer joy.



* * *



A FEW DAYS later, on a sweltering afternoon, I’m heading to the notions shop for more white thread when I pass the Charter Ale House and see Captain Darling at a table in the window. He taps at the glass, waves me over, and meets me at the tavern steps beside the shipping news posts.

“I returned just yesterday.” He takes off his hat, wipes the sweat from his brow, and wastes no time on niceties. “Widow Higgins tells me you were dismissed from your job by Felicity Adams, and that my gloves were the cause.”

His eyes on me are discomfiting. My child is three months along. I’ve begun to feel the fullness in my abdomen and have let out the stays on my day dress. I’m carrying a package of lavender-checked gingham and hold it at my waist just as I told Charlotte to hold her flowers to disguise her bloom.

Adulteress, Felicity called me, even without knowing anything about Nat or the child.

“It’s for the best,” I say. “I’m doing my own work now.”

“It must be a blow,” he says. “I haven’t forgotten about your dream for a dress shop.”

“Please don’t worry yourself.” In truth, I’m pleased that he remembers. The days I sat with him working white on white were some of the sweetest I have had since I left home. Now they seem from another life, when all was still innocent. Now I must worry that my friendship with the captain puts me in danger of gossip and more. I must remember all that I have been warned.

“I don’t like to think of you alone in the long winter,” he adds before we say our goodbyes. “The cold is hard here, Mrs. Gamble—long and bitter.”



* * *



I AM TENDING my garden the next morning when the captain comes into my yard with a sack on his shoulder and drops it at my feet.

“I saw this on a boat in Nova Scotia and thought of you.” He opens a drawstring to reveal a rainbow of silks—deep saffron, jewel-like magenta, a pillowy pile of deep green blue the very hue of the horizon where sea and sky met on the day the colors returned to me.