Hester(99)

Mercy points out the kettles and tools used to sap the maples in the fall.

“We used to come here just to tap and boil the syrup,” she says. “Widow Higgins’s husband took me here and taught me. It was peaceful—all those years we never saw a soul. When Mr. Remond brought Ida and Abraham, I thought right away to hide them here. That’s how we started.”

Mercy spoons out molasses and beans for the three of us and we eat.

Ivy asks no questions, but she must have many. Or perhaps her life has always been this way. I see now why Ivy says so little, her eyes always watching, and imagine how she must feel—waiting without knowing fully what she’s waiting for. A sign? A moment? A knock upon the sugar house door?

“May I see your doll?” I ask.

Ivy brings the figure to me. It’s stitched of burlap, small enough to hold in her lap. The doll has legs and arms and a face but no hair or clothes.

“Would you like for her to have a dress?”

“One like mine.” She nods.

Ivy’s dress is green and brown, the color of the forest. I realize now it is clothes made for hiding among the trees.

My cloak is stained with Edward’s blood, and I do not want to take it where I am going—I must leave it behind. My story must be my own now. I must rely on myself and begin anew.

I trim around the bloody stains to cut strips from the cloak with all the figures and words I’ve sewn since I left home. By evening I’ve made the doll and Ivy matching dresses. The red comet flies across Ivy’s small chest, and the doll’s dress shows half a ship sail and a creature from the sea.

“Captain Darling says this one is good luck.” I point to a fish with wings that he inspired, and the blue words that sparked my colors when he spoke them. I owe you my life. “You be sure to show this to him when you see him.”



* * *



TOWARD EVENING THERE’S a birdcall outside, then a knock. There are no windows in the sugar house, only a sliding latch in the door.

Mercy slides the latch and opens the door to Widow Higgins, bundled up against the November cold.

“Your friend was buried yesterday.” She comes to sit beside me as she takes off her layers of wool. “I stitched together the pieces of the shroud I found in your cottage, and she was put in it in the Silas home. Someone remarked that the shroud could only be the work of the old woman who made the gloves for Felicity Adams.”

So not everyone knows about the captain’s gloves and the lies Felicity told.

“There is no old woman.”

The widow smiles.

“I know,” she says. “I’ve always known your needle and your colors, special as they are.”

The widow has gone to my cottage and brought my sewing tools and warm brown cloak. With it around my shoulders I feel that I’m no longer the woman who came across the ocean in red and walked into one of Nat’s stories. I’m the woman Mercy saw, and the woman who saw Mercy and the words barely visible in her work.

“The captain sent this.” Widow Higgins hands me a long package wrapped in brown paper.

It is a new card of Chinese threads, the rainbow of possibility the captain gifted me on the crossing. Captain Darling was the first man who ever said it plainly; who put color in my hands and said I could be an artist.

I pull the threads from the card one by one and soon I’ve begun stitching a design of symbols onto one of the burlap sacks that will be used by the undertaker one day to carry an escaping slave through town.

I stitch Nell’s shamrocks and the captain’s wild sea animals for luck, and by morning my work is stitched across an endless ocean and sky. I have put my love and gratitude, hopes for freedom, and wishes for the world into this very shroud, and now I understand: by keeping silent I hold my gifts and my strengths close. I do not need to speak of them aloud; I can let the colors speak for me.



* * *



TUESDAY, THE DAY Nat’s carriage is coming, I wake to low voices in the predawn darkness to discover Mercy and Widow Higgins folding Ivy into the shroud I decorated with sea animals and shamrocks.

“Captain Darling’s ship is waiting,” Mercy explains to the girl. “You will be with Auntie Higgins or Joseph the undertaker or Captain Darling. We’ll never let you be alone for even one moment—they’ll take you all the way to your brother and Uncle Atlas. You just have to keep yourself quiet.”

Together we stitch the child safely inside the shroud, leaving a small space for her to breathe. Just before they set off, I tell the widow where to find my Adam and Eve shawl.

“Sell it for me,” I say. “Give the money to the captain, to pay for what’s needed.”

As Ivy and the widow ride toward the dawn and the wharves, I lie abed and feel my child kick and roll in my womb.

My heart aches as I think of Nat’s promises, the ones I thought he’d made, and the ones I will never get to see. I imagine his coach rolling up to the sycamore tree where I stood that afternoon with him hidden behind me and Zeke in front of me, and I think of all the lies that were hidden that day and all the truths I know now.

All along I imagined Nat would be in the carriage, but now I see in my mind what likely would have been—me, alone, handing a small bundle to the coachman. Climbing into an empty, cold cabin. Riding unaccompanied into the snow.