A Light in the Wilderness (5 page)

June turned hot but Davey still chopped wood, piling it up for winter. He fixed a broken fence, reworked a gate that Rothwell had figured out how to open. He filled holes the tan and white dog dug when Rothwell rooted like the hogs for whatever he searched for in the woods. The man took long chats with neighbors, sharing stories with Letitia of a whole number of Platte County folks preparing for the journey west.

At the hotel, Letitia learned how the mistus wanted sheets cleaned and hung. She bit her tongue when the owner’s wife ordered her to do her work where she wasn’t seen. “Some folks don’t want to sleep on linens if they know they’ve been touched by colored hands.” In Kentucky, folks expected their slaves to do their wash. Missouri was an in-between place, especially for a free black woman.

Even if there’s soap between the
sheets and my hands?
Letitia didn’t say the words out loud, but she thought them and then chided herself for allowing the downcasts of others to turn her
own good nature their way. Her touching the laundry for Davey Carson didn’t displease him one bit. She’d hang on to that. But it wouldn’t be so come next spring when he was gone and she was still in Missouri looking for a new place to do her wash. He had not asked her to go with him and she hadn’t proposed it. She had her job. And maybe she could arrange to stay at the hotel, exchanging Charity’s milk for a portion of her bed and board. She would talk to the owner that morning.

“These girls’ll be taking your place, Letitia.” The hotel owner stood beside the washtubs in the backyard, his body no longer blocking her sight of two girls, not more than fifteen, who sent captured smiles toward her.

“My work ain’t pleasin’?”

“Your work’s fine. But I bought these two at the Weston sale, so no need of you. Except for you to show them how the mistress likes things done. She’s feeling poorly today. Girls,” he nodded toward the two, one round as a bucket and the other thin as a mop handle, “this is Letitia.”

“Who you be?”

“I’m Cora. This here’s Beulah.” The taller girl did the talking. “We brought from Tennessee.”

“You get working, now. No idle chatter. Come by the office when you’re finished, Letitia, and I’ll wage you.”

“Yes suh.”

Cora waited until the owner had climbed the steps and gone inside before speaking again. “You free then?”

Letitia nodded. “Looks like I’s free to be dismissed.”

The bucket girl nodded. “Only bad thing ’bout being free I can think of.”

“He treat you good?”

“He a good man. Likes things done a patterned way, but most men does.”

“Amen to that.” Beulah raised her eyes to the heavens and all three women laughed.

“Mistus carries a heavy stick but once you learn her ways she good.”

Cora told her then about where they’d come from, sold out of a good home when their owner died. Beulah leaned in toward Letitia and whispered, “We taught to read and write, and one day we buy our way free. That how you came to be free? Earning your way?”

“I’s given freedom. But I just beginnin’ to earn my way.”

“Best we get started.” Cora spoke again. “Where you get the water from? That the woodpile for heatin’ it?” She pointed with her chin. “At least we together, right, Beulah? Got someone to lean on.”

In that moment Letitia longed to keep working beside them, girls who brought a lightness to their day, made do with what they’d been handed.

Letitia stopped at the owner’s office, waited outside while he talked with the deliveryman bringing in pickles and wine from off the steamer. As quick as a lamb’s tail her life had changed. But as the girls had said, it was a caution to being free, this unpredictability. Just like the slave girls, others could still make choices for your life even if you planned it out well. She had lots more ways to respond though than those girls. She vowed to make the best of it.

The owner motioned her inside his office as the drayman left.

“Hoping the mistus doing better.”

The owner nodded as he pulled an envelope from the drawer.

“I’s thinkin’. Maybe you still have need of butter daily. I brings it to you. Might try my hand at cheese too. Fresh is good.”

The owner handed her the envelope. “No need if we get our own cow.”

“That so, but then you got your girls milkin’, churnin’ the butter, and you end up with fewer hours for washin’ and cleanin’ and servin’.”

He was thoughtful. “Bring me two pounds of butter tomorrow
and cheese as soon as it’s ready. We’ll see how you fare as a businesswoman. But don’t tell folks, Letitia. Not everyone likes an enterprising woman, especially one who used to be a slave.”

July danced like a sultry woman, promising clear days and then ending with thunderstorms that didn’t cool. The county filled with travelers like children to a picnic as more folks in wagons came from North Carolina and Kentucky, Iowa, Illinois, all talking of heading to Oregon in the spring. Davey sold beef and cord wood to them and buckets of coal as they found temporary housing to winter over. He boasted over pamphlet messages that made Oregon sound like the Promised Land.

“It’s the poor market for tobacco and hemp rope bringing them this way, wouldn’t you say?” Davey asked Letitia. He leaned against a fence post using a shredded twig to clean his teeth while Letitia weeded the garden she’d planted.

Fresh cabbage would be ready before long if the moles left them alone and Letitia could keep Rothwell from digging those holes he liked so well. She sold the produce along with butter and milk to the hotel. Making cheese proved a harder challenge, as she’d never done such a thing. “I’s wishin’ I could make cheese to sell travelers. Got enough milk.”

“My older brother might know how,” Davey said. “He always kept a few cows and we had cheese in Ireland, as a boy. We can seek him out, if you’ve a mind to.”

He has brothers? Nearby?

Her earnings were but a pittance of what they’d been working at the hotel, but no one asked her to serve drinks at night and she found she liked spending more time with this man. Making cheese would add to her purse if she could do it well. And meeting Davey’s brother sounded interesting. She’d see if kindness ran in the Carson blood. “Kind of you to offer.”

A comfortable silence settled between them.

Then, “I do wonder what makes a man pull up roots and put wheels beneath him. Don’t you, Tish?” He tossed aside his tooth-picking twig.

She wasn’t sure what drew people from their homelands to the unknown, what certainty they felt compelled to set aside for the imaginations of a future believed to be somehow in a “better place.” There could be no better place than where one was, and thinking there was bore a hole in a person’s heart. But she supposed people could reinvent themselves, become mellow like old dogs in a new place, leave behind the recklessness of poor thinking. She’d been attempting to leave a past behind while preparing for a future, hadn’t she?

Davey squatted down to tug at weeds. She must have looked surprised because he squinted up at her and said, “What? Can’t a man work on the greens or is he relegated to hunting rabbits and coons for supper?”

“My mama said never turn down a helpin’ hand.”

“Your mama’s a wise woman.”

“Was.”

Later that evening Davey blistered his hand on the hot kettle he’d set on the stove to heat so she could wash up the dishes. He yelped like a dog.

“Here.” Letitia soothed the pain with a poultice of slippery elm she’d brought with her from Kentucky. She ran the salve over his hand with her own, aware of the wound heat and the cool of the poultice.

“Now that’s a mighty help.” Davey laid his good palm atop hers.

It was the first time he’d ever touched her ’cept for helping her onto the pillion. A candle flickered over their hands and Letitia allowed the calloused fingers to cluck like a hen’s feathering safety over hers. No demand. No expectation like some men she’d served. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt a man’s touch without a hint of harm. Letitia let Davey’s hand cluck for a bit, then she pulled back. Davey didn’t grab her wrist nor persist. Instead
he coughed, thanked her for the poultice, and didn’t look into her eyes for some days after that.

Davey watched Letitia move through the shanty shack he’d built with his own hands, fixing supper. Her hips swayed as she brought molasses from the larder, her slender frame belying the strength he’d seen as she chopped wood or weeded the garden for hours on end. She kept herself tidy and smelled of lavender and coconut, though he didn’t know why. She never complained, said more than once she was grateful for his letting her and the cow stay. What she didn’t say but he suspected is that she felt safe with him. He wasn’t sure she should feel that way. If she knew what he’d done on patrol—picking up colored men and under orders lashing them to within an inch of their lives for being someplace where the patrollers didn’t think they should be—well, if she knew that, she might not put him on a safe shelf. But he had never pushed her to treat him like he owned her. G.B. Smith was one who assumed he’d taken advantage of her and would think him a dolt for not having done so.

There was something about her that kept him from assuming she’d stay if he tried to bed her, and he realized he didn’t want her to go. On Sundays he felt a twinge of emptiness, like drinking the last drop of a good cup of coffee, when he watched her walk down the road to the Baptist Negro church. She stayed later to sing, she told him, when the slaves were allowed. He didn’t fill up again until he heard her swaying down the lane singing in that husky voice of hers. He liked her cooking and, yes, her kindness, the way she tended women in their birthing. He didn’t want to lose any of this comfort he’d found in her presence.

“What you lookin’ at, Mistah Carson?”

“Meself? Oh, nothing.” He leaned back in the hickory chair.

“Don’t you harsh on me, now.” She teased him with smiling eyes.

He would like to bed her one day, but he suspected she’d want it
done proper and that couldn’t be, the laws being what they were. No colored could marry a white man. Seemed a shame to him, that separating for no good reason. Her heart appeared to be the same color as his. He rose and went out to talk to the dog. He’d have to make sure he kept his distance yet stay close enough to ensure she didn’t go away.