A Light in the Wilderness (6 page)

The August heat made her skin hot to the touch. She sat outside mending a tear in her tow linen, the frogs chirping their opinions that no one listened to. Charity had dried up getting ready to calve, so they’d made the trip north to see Davey’s brother about cheese. She thought of that trip now, how Davey had spoken so little of the years between their meeting, how his brother had grunted at the sight of him and said in passing how disappointed he was in Davey for “doing like you did.”

“I’m here now. Wondering if you’d advise me on cheese-making. Got meself a neat cow giving milk enough for butter and cheese.”

Letitia hadn’t corrected him about who owned the cow. Getting the information was what mattered.

And Smith Carson had shared what he knew, spoke of how to use the fourth stomach of a cow when butchered, how to dry the rennet in strips, and how much to use for each batch of cheese. What they ate of Smith’s cheese was tasty. Letitia thought she could experiment with salt and maybe herbs, and would.

“Brought your slave along, I see.”

Smith was a bigger man than Davey. He looked older than his years and not well, his skin the color of dusk. His own slave—she thought it was his slave—brought cooled water for them after they’d finished with instructions. The man looked into Letitia’s eyes as he served her sitting on the steps while the men rocked on the porch above. She felt sorrow and guilt.

“She’ll do the cheese-making so figured she should see it firsthand.”

“Hope she’s got a better memory than yours, little brother. You’re prone to forget important things.”

“I’ve got confidence in her.”

Letitia heard tension in their words, wondered what important things Davey had misplaced, what eelish darkness slithered beneath the surface of this family. Or any family. They’d left with Smith giving Davey two sizes of firkin, wooden barrels in which to transport the cheese. They smelled of salt and scalded milk.

“Ouch!” Letitia poked herself with her sewing needle. She was back on Davey’s porch, still listening to the frogs talk.

Charity decided to calve in the heat, starting late afternoon. “It’s a good time of year,” Davey told Letitia. “Calf’ll be strong to get through the winter without trouble.” But the cow labored well into the night, and even after the calf dropped to the hard ground, the afterbirth hung from the mother.

“’Spect we’d best get Charity up and tend to that,” Davey said.

They stood outside the rail corral, Davey swinging the lantern to circle the light. Charity licked her newborn in spurts, bellowing as she swung around, mucous and blood staining her legs these hours after giving birth. The calf stood and sucked, a good sign, but Charity didn’t allow him enough time before she began prancing and pacing. Davey moved then to tie up the cow that resisted being led into the barn. The calf straddle-legged its way behind its mother, bleating like a lost kitten. Letitia followed them inside.

The work was messy with warm hands inside the cow feeling what to pull and what to push back in. Charity shifted on her legs, turned and twisted but then tired, and Letitia and Davey accomplished what they’d set out to do, watched as the calf sucked.

Yellow streaks of sunrise greeted them when they washed up side by side at the wooden stand outside the house, splashing water up to their elbows from the tin bowl, blood staining the water red. Letitia handed Davey a towel. She could hear Rothwell digging and yelping his rabbit cry in the woods behind them.

“Thank you.” She kept scrubbing. “Good to have help.”

“’Spect so.” He cleared his throat, leaned against the porch post while still wiping his upper arms, sleeves rolled up. “I know there’s no way of marrying ye,” he said.

“What?” Moisture formed on her upper lip. “Are you harshin’ on me?” She kept her back to him, hands deep in the washbowl. She fingered a chipped place at the bottom.

“Lookee. I know there’s no way of legally marrying ye, you being colored. But I wish there was. I know I’m old as those bluffs up there, but I feel a younger man around you. Able to get things done, and it’s good to have a woman noticing that a man is still accomplishing. Things.”

She turned toward him, hands trembling.

“Oh, I’ve scared you. Didn’t mean to do that.” He handed her the towel he’d used.

She knew her eyes must look like chestnuts in cream. Her life with him had been an easy comfort, but now . . .
Maybe I should have gone west with the Bowmans.

“Mistah Carson—”

“I’m Davey to you.” He cleared his throat, rushed into her hesitation. “I know that on the plantations a Negro man has to ask permission to take a wife, and then there’s all the talk about the ‘issue’ and who that child will belong to, the owner of the man or the mother’s master.”

Letitia stood still as a rabbit with a hawk hovering above. She was startled by his awareness of what humiliation it was for a man to risk the loss of his children once they were born. Every man wanted to protect his wife and children, didn’t he? She swallowed, kept wiping her arms though they were dry as tinder.

“That ain’t much of a way for a man or a woman to live. In the territory, here, before the Platte Purchase had good, principled people living in it, marriage came by, well, someone saying good words over a man and his Pawnee wife or a senorita he brought up from old Mexico. No priests or pastors around. Just like it
ain’t allowed here, being as how you’re . . . and I’m . . . well, our . . . we’re different.”

It was the longest span of speech Davey had ever made to her. He wasn’t finished.

“I don’t know what it would take for you to feel married to me. Be easier to keep you safe in Oregon if you and I . . . belonged to each other.”

She turned, raised that eyebrow.

“Lookee here.” He tugged on his beard. “In Oregon you’d not have to worry about folks questioning your status, free or . . .” He looked away.

“You can say the word, Mistah Carson.”

He wagged his finger in front of a smile that showed a broken eyetooth.

“Davey,” she agreed to call him. “You can say ‘slave.’ I ain’t one, though I was, and yes it tainted who I is, but I’s free, always was even when owned. Free in my thinkin’. Free as a child of God.”

“Consider my proposal then, free-thinking woman.” He gave a high-pitched laugh that she hadn’t heard before.

He’s nervous.
It made her face grow warm. “Your proposal? Your offer.”

“Call it what you will. I offer my name if you choose it, free and clear and a promise to be your husband as best I can. God willing.” He cleared his throat. “Think on it, would you? I gotta go chop more wood.”

Letitia watched him walk away. He tripped on the step, caught himself. She grabbed her straw hat and headed for the hotel with spring-cooled butter and a basketful of thoughts burdening her narrow shoulders.

Later that day while she heated the tub of steaming water to wash linen sheets, she thought of Davey’s offer. There was no love in it, but kindness. And shelter and safe-guarding, which might
be stepping stones to something deeper. His power didn’t rain down like hail. He’d been generous in allowing the exchange of her work and a place to sleep in return for the grazing and had not taken any money from her milk and butter, kale and carrot sales to the hotel. He’d been fair with her. Just. That too was a stepping stone to love, wasn’t it? She had not loved her children’s two fathers. They’d taken her. Later one sold his own child away from her. Nathan had died so young, and God forgive, at least she didn’t have to see him grow to be beaten or sold.

She sank the laundry stick deep into the blob of cloth, the hickory bent with the weight. Was child-bearing a part of his offer? He hadn’t said. She should be pleased enough that he proposed marriage rather than assuming she was his for the taking. And he did ask her opinion of things, which she described as a kind of respect, something else she thought necessary for love to follow. And who was she anyway to assume love would be a part of any pairing in her life. It had not been a part of her mother’s. Love was a dessert. Not everyone was blessed with such earthly sweetness.

She wished she had a woman to talk to. The pastor’s wife at the Baptist church who braided her hair, she might lend an ear. But subverting the law by acting married rather than owned could put those who knew of it in trouble. She hung the sheets on the line, thought of Sarah Bowman as the wind snapped the wetness against her face. Sarah would curl her nose up at the very idea of matching a white man to a colored woman and sniff at the thought there could be love between them. There’d been plenty of white men who took wenches; they could never be joined in God’s eyes. But if love was there, then couldn’t such a marriage one day be? Marriages were arranged all the time by owners and sometimes love flourished. Look at Robin and Polly Holmes. They’d been mated by a master but love grew where only commerce had been intended and they’d had six children together. She wondered how they fared on the trail to Oregon, how they must have grieved leaving their three children behind. But their owner had promised
them freedom if Robin helped him prove up his Oregon claim. The promise of freedom could be a balm to grief. It would be a balm to uncertainty too.

Letitia pressed wooden pins over the sheet corners. Birds chirped and she heard a playful bark of Rothwell among the trees.

If she accepted Davey’s offer, they’d head west. If she stayed, she’d have an uncertain road. Even though she earned money, she’d never be able to purchase his farm and have the safety of a shelter of her own, not in Missouri. Not in any slave state. Maybe one day somewhere free. And G.B. Smith would haunt her if she walked the roads at night. She’d heard of men carrying free papers who had been kidnapped, sold, the patrollers keeping the coins after destroying the papers and sending the free black into slavery. But in Oregon Davey could find new land. If he was a citizen. Maybe she could get free land too? She scoffed to herself at that. She’d always be at the mercy of people who saw
her
as property rather than her being able to
buy
property. If she bought another cow she’d have to get someone to buy it for her, as no one would trust that she hadn’t stolen the money.

She was left with the next best path: having a say in what she cared about and deciding how she’d challenge any threats to that hope. Maybe those were the choices any human had, free or not.

Davey chopped at weeds threatening the borders of Letitia’s garden. It had been a spur-of-the-moment comment to offer her an arrangement, one his fellow patrollers would scoff at. “Take the wench,” they’d tell him. Assumed he already had, likely. But Tish had a presence about her, a dignity and calm. She deserved to have respect. He wasn’t much of a planner. Being in Carroll Township inside Platte County raising stock was the most settled and organized he’d ever been, and he found the work less burdensome with the woman beside him. She held a steady hand, didn’t faint or falter at the sight of blood or bind like most women he encountered. And she wasn’t a minx like that Eliza either.
I
did
not
hurt
that
girl
.

The hoe snagged a rock as he chopped and he felt the vibration through the wooden handle clear to his clenched jaws. He stopped to rest, removed his floppy hat, and wiped his forehead of the August heat. If she agreed, what could he do to make it official-like, he wondered? No minister of the Word would allow it. He might get a lawyer sympathetic to the abolitionist cause to speak some
legal words to satisfy the woman. And himself for that matter. He didn’t want this arrangement to be a toss in the straw. He wanted to know she’d stand with him during planting and harvest, work beside him splitting logs and raising them to roof, and, God willing, bear his children. He didn’t want to have to chase her down if she took off running. Maybe he should seek out someone now. That way she’d know that he was making it as respectful as possible. Yes, that’s what he needed to do.

He put up the hoe, washed his face and arms before heading out to Platte City. Here he was, planning ahead. Why, the woman had already changed his ways.

Letitia walked the path to the colored church, a tiny clapboard building recently washed white as piano keys. She’d helped pay for the stain herself, being one of the few who attended who had a little money to spare. After the service she would speak to the pastor, an old Negro man who had seen the worst of things before he got his freedom. He told his people more than once how the Lord had led him to Platte County, to open this little church in an abandoned chicken coop, and lo, here they all were years later singing and praising, the smell of chickens feathered into the walls forever.

“Oh, no, no, Miss Letitia. That’d be a dangerous thing for you to do.” She and the pastor stood out under a spreading oak tree, moving the heat with chicken-feather fans. “Folks find out about it and arrest you for illegalities.” He paused. “Is he a good man, Sister? There was that incident with Sister Eliza and he does patrol . . .” He let his voice trail into the unspoken.

“He been nothin’ but good to me, Preacher. Allowin’ me shelter and sharin’ his food. That and doin’ the Lord’s work. Lookin’ after widows and orphans as I’s both.”

The old man patted her hand. “Not safe—though I think the Lord would abide it, love being foremost in our Savior’s heart.
But I wouldn’t want the sheriff pressing either of you saying you broke the law.”

“We be common law then? No word from God to bless us?”

“Best people think you belong to him but not as husband and wife. Safer that way. The two of you would know. The Lord would know. That’s enough.”

“Is it?”

It felt unsettled, like she was giving up something of herself to accept the proposal without the hope of God’s blessing on it. Wouldn’t it risk the future, being with a man without the words uniting them? She was free, neither belonging to nor the property of a father, brother, husband, or son. She wanted to stay that way, but she also wanted what binding together brought: safety, laughter, lives entering the world and strengthened inside a family. Especially if they headed west to the unknown. Others might never see her as his wife, even if they had the preacher’s words said over them. But still, she’d like to know that was how the Lord saw their union.

“I agrees to your offer.” They stood in the barn, watching the calf suck.

“My proposal? You do?” Davey leaned back, wanting to look at her. She had a profile as chiseled as the statues that graced the courthouse hall. He liked how she pulled her hair back away from her face in those long braided rows, leaving her high forehead clear and a lamb’s frizz at her temples. She turned to him, lips plump as berries eased now into a smile; a nose rounded and promising to be as soft as a lamb’s ear. Her brown eyes glistened, looking deeper surrounded by that pure white.

“Yes, I’s willin’ to become Letitia Carson. But I likes it to be . . . official.”

He nodded. “I spoke to the solicitor, the one who handled the Eliza case.” He frowned.
Why did I bring that up?
“He says we shouldn’t worry over words. Say them myself maybe? And you
say them too.” He pushed away hay scratching at his back in the manger. “Or maybe that preacher you hear on Sundays. Would he?”

“We had words but he say no.”

She was serious if she brought it to her preacher friend.

“He say it would be . . . would put me at risk. Maybe you too if folks think we breakin’ the law. Even though God’s law don’t say no to it—God findin’ it merciful to have people cleave to each other for all time.”

“Funny, that word,” Davey said. “Used to puzzle myself as a boy told to cleave the bogs of their fuel for our stove. Cleave is a sticking and splitting word. It’s the sticking that the Bible speaks of.” He suggested again, “We could speak the words ourselves.”

She nodded.

She didn’t seem too certain, but he’d move ahead before she changed her mind. “Good idea. What about Saturday next?” He clapped his hands. “Charity can be our witness.”

Letitia frowned. He had wanted to lighten her mood, but instead his words robbed the occasion of gravity. He cleared his throat. “God will be our witness.” He touched her elbow crossed over her narrow chest. “He’ll see to it that we’re never cleaved apart.”

They planned for it on a Saturday in late August so she could still go to church the next day and none would be the wiser that she was now Letitia Carson. Yellow tickseeds bloomed along the roadway to Davey’s house, and in the woods he found surprise lilies, their pale purple like a winter sunrise. He picked a few, wishing the butterfly weed with its splash of orange might bloom, but the milkweed held a hint of a later flower. It would have to be enough. He carried the posies in his wide palm. Funny what women liked. Truth was, he liked flowers too, and he held the bouquet to his nose. He wished in a way that there could be human witnesses. Letitia was a good woman and she might have liked to have a friend or two along. Maybe she had none, though that didn’t seem right, her being so generous and kind. People were attracted to traits like that just as stockmen wanted good beef-to-bone ratios.

Now why was he comparing his intended to a good cow? He shook his head. At least he hadn’t said it out loud to Letitia and he’d be sure he wouldn’t when he handed her the flowers.

Davey read her the actual words from the Bible he took from the cupboard. Leathered with stains, he said he’d brought it from Ireland when he came as a lad. His mother died on the crossing and his pa never recovered, giving himself to drink, leaving his boys and one girl to fend for themselves. He pointed to the names in the Bible, of his sister, married now, and his brothers back in North Carolina. “’Cept for my older brother Smith.”

“Met him.” She ran her fingers over the name of Carson most real to her besides Davey. Davey had been the one to branch out, was ready when the Platte Purchase opened in 1837. He left the mountains and streams of North Carolina, settling into stock-raising. Somehow the Bible had come to his hands and he’d kept it well, considering the weather he’d carried it through. His voice held pride that he was the keeper of that family book. Letitia listened as he read the words she couldn’t. She’d like to learn, but there were laws against teaching slaves, and after she was freed there were other things needed doing besides making sense of the scratches on paper. But now, it would be nice if she could read what Mistah Bowman’s paper said about her freedom; and it would be good to read for herself the words in the Bible that Davey Carson said she was to repeat. She had a good memory for words. They practiced them together days before the event.

“So are you ready then. To marry meself?”

“’Spect so.” She watched him smile, his lips surrounded by that fading red mustache. Looking at him made her face grow warm. She wore her best tow linen and fitted herself with a crocheted belt that showed her small waist. She’d asked the pastor’s wife to part her hair in the middle, making tight twists, but had kept a braided strand to form a small medallion-like cluster centered at
her forehead. The pastor’s wife asked no questions about the ornate hairdo or her plan, but Letitia figured the pastor and his wife had few secrets between them. The rest of her rinsed hair she pulled back tight into a knot at the back, smoothing it with her coconut mixture. She’d bought a ribbon at the Weston store and worked it into a bow at the top of the cascading braids.

“I brought these for you.” Davey handed her a blush of colors, his face a little pink as he did. “And may I say you’re looking, well, like a woman should on her wedding day.”

Her eyes dropped to the tips of his polished boots. “Thank you.” She took the flowers. “I puts them in a jar.”

“I’ve something else for you too.” He handed her a pewter cowbell with a hawthorn leaf engraved on the side.

It was cool to the touch. Letitia shook the bell, liking the clanking sound. She turned it upside down and put the flowers into it. Her fingers rubbed the hawthorn engraving. “’Spect this’ll work.” She walked to the pump and filled it with water.

Davey said, “Are we ready now?”

“Yes, Mistah Carson. Davey.”

“You remember the words?”

“I ’member.”

He cleared his throat, took a deep breath as they heard the jingle of a bell from the road. The tinker’s bell jangled, the man in his cart with buttons and bows and pots and pans making his monthly stop to sell to ladies of the house. He waved his hat at them, jostling the two curls that framed his face and stopped just at his jaws. The single horse carriage rolled forward. Rothwell barked, then wagged his tail in greeting, recognizing the man.