Balm (22 page)

T
HE REVEREND REPORTED THAT THEY WERE LINED
up to see her, each person holding some token they would exchange for a touch, a pronouncement. Madge told him to report that she did not have her balm with her. He responded that they knew that—all they wanted was relief. Why the devil did this toe hurt? Why can't I move my bowels? Later, she promised she would bring a healing balm. But for now, the reverend reported that all they wanted were her hands. She had already decided she would not accept payment. Not now. These were her people, many of them newly arrived from their nightmarish pasts, many still suffering the hurts of slavery. She had already glimpsed them. Some were missing fingers, ears. Others bore scars across their faces. Their hair was knotted, their scalps bumped with infection, fingers gnarled from long-ago traumas. These were not just the humbled people brought to their knees while tilling American land. These were her kinfolk, and she loved them too much to not give freely of her gift.

A couple of nights before, she'd had a dream. A snowstorm in the winter of 1864. She'd been out on some forgotten errand when the light snowfall turned violent, white flakes as big as walnuts dumping out of the sky. As she turned to go back home, a white man stopped her.

“Where are your papers?” the man demanded.

She looked about her in fright, realizing she had become so accustomed to being in the new city, she had taken to leaving her free papers behind in the rooming house. The man wore neither uniform nor insignia, but his tone was authoritative.

“I don't got none. I mean—”

“No papers?”

“I mean, I didn't bring 'em.”

“Well, have you paid your bond? Even if you are free, you cannot remain in the city without paying a bond.”

“A what?” Her voice was lost in the wind.

“Come on,” he said, yanking her. He led her down a street, and she thought of the orange sash tucked inside her waistband. The man cared nothing about her story, and she was struck with a fear that she would be sent into slavery for the first time in her life. She searched for a friendly face, but the people averted their eyes, emerging out of the snow and disappearing right back into it.

“Hurry it up,” he growled.

He led her through an alley that led to Wells Street. A team of runaway horses charged out of the whiteness, pulling a bed of lumber behind them. The man twisted her arm to pull the two of them out of the way, but Madge wrenched free, running through an alley as fast as she could. She did not look back, her heels sinking into the rising snow. She was running for her life, running the way the sisters had taught her to do should someone come after her. She kept going, not pausing for a breath until she was safely in the colored district, her dress soaked, hair
stuck to her face, fingers numb with cold. In Tennessee, the sisters' knowledge had protected them, but Madge's close brush with danger taught her that in Chicago, she would have to fight to survive. The city was no safe place for any colored person, let alone a single woman without family.

The dream had awakened her and she could not get back to sleep. That was when she'd decided to accept the reverend's invitation. Now she was wondering if she'd made the right decision.

Hemp patted her shoulder and stepped back to let her work. The reverend led the first to her, a woman bent over in pain. Madge knew this was a back problem that she would not be able to fix. Only a warming oil rubbed on her back by a loved one would give her some temporary relief. The woman was so young. Too young for such troubles. When Madge laid hands on her, she saw the women attempt to visibly straighten, so fervently did she want to believe.

“They think I can work miracles,” Madge whispered to the reverend after the woman left. “You got to tell them that I can't do that.”

“That's why they're here, Miss Madge. These people need to believe. You giving that to them.”

“Yeah, but Reverend, you of all people ought to know it ain't right to play God.”

“You not playing God, but you got to admit your hands are special. What if you can help somebody?”

“I can't lay hands on them and heal them. I didn't bring no herbs with me, and besides, that woman can't be helped with no teas. Her back is near about broke.”

“That's all right. Can't you see? If medicine can't help her, maybe her faith is all she got.”

Madge did not like it, but as person after person came in to see her, she began to understand the reverend's argument. She had said it to
herself more than once. In a land so devastated by death, the best healing balm was hope. The sisters had taught her that even if they did not claim the lesson. She was one of them after all.

And look what hope had gotten her? A man who loved her enough to put his ghosts to rest and marry her. She smiled at him, and the look he returned to her was enough to break her down.

“Come on in,” she called out to the young mother leading a tiny boy by the hand. Madge took in his sightless eyes and thought of her mother. She suddenly did not feel well herself.

Madge placed her hands on the boy's head. She did not feel anything. Perfectly healthy other than the eyes. A smile turned up his lips as he ran a finger down her arm. Little angel. She heard a commotion at the door.

“Excuse me, excuse me.”

She recognized the doctor's voice before she saw his face. What could he possibly want? It couldn't have to do with that old ankle injury again.

But when the crowd cleared she saw that he led a young woman by the hand. Was she the sick one? Madge's eyes went from the woman to the doctor and back to the woman again. A short mass of hair. A prominent nose standing guard over tiny lips. It all came to a point in a sharp chin, the irregularity of it creating an unforgettable face.

“What can I do for you, Doctor?” Madge asked before glancing over at her husband. But his look was enough to sink her. She looked back at the girl. It couldn't be. Her promises to honor the memory of Hemp's family faded, and she was ashamed to admit the lesser thoughts that threatened her.

Michael whispered something in the woman's ear. It had taken some time, but he had finally been able to bring Hemp's daughter to Chicago. Peter had found her, but it had been up to Michael to bring her there. It had taken a while. In the meantime, he'd heard from Sadie
about the wedding, about Hemp's attempts to start over. He hoped he wasn't too late. Maybe bringing the girl to them would bring about some closure. Even though his agents delivered the sad news that Annie was dead, surely Hemp would welcome her daughter. Michael vaguely remembered that she was not Hemp's blood relative, but he assumed a measure of paternalism existed between the two given the often unusual circumstances of slave families.

Here was the story Peter had delivered to him several months before. In 1863, the group of women from Harrison's hemp farm were sold to another farmer who lived a hundred miles east. After the war ended, the girl and her mother made their way to Indiana. Eventually, they ended up working together as domestics in a house. The family who hired them happened to be the cousins of a man who'd worked as a missionary at Camp Nelson during the war. When he read in the newspaper of a man named Hemp “Horse” Harrison looking for his family, he remembered the ragged man asking everyone around the camp about a woman and girl. Annie was long gone, but her daughter still worked for his cousin.

As Michael watched the confusion on Madge's face turn to concern, he wondered if he had done this the right way. Perhaps he should have warned them he was coming. A part of him had not believed the woman would actually show up until she stepped onto the train platform. And he'd assumed that since he wasn't bringing the man's previous wife, it would not disrupt the new marriage.

One look at Madge, and he recognized his misjudgment.

“That'll be all for today,” the reverend said. He spread his arms as if to sweep everyone out of the room. They did not move at first, still hoping for Madge's touch. But none dared challenge the reverend.

Hemp stepped forward, then stopped, his emotions in a tangle. During that first church séance, he had heard from the girl, hadn't he? She was supposed to be dead. She was the one who told the widow's spirit
man that something happened between them that night in the cabin, not Annie. Annie didn't know anything about that. Right? Right?

Relief. He had been wrong to assume that the spirit at the church that night was Herod. The girl was alive. Panic. Annie wasn't with her. Astonishment. How much she had grown! Shame. She was still beautiful.

“Dr. Heil? I don't believe you and I have met. Might I interest you in some coffee? I believe I got some pie to go with it.”

“I would be honored.” Michael followed the reverend out of the room.

Herod looked at Madge, as if to ask why she was staying when everyone else had cleared out.

“I heard you got a new wife. This her?”

Hemp nodded slowly.

Herod narrowed her eyes. “Mama never could make a fresh start.”

“Where is she?” Hemp whispered.

“She didn't make it.”

“Couldn't?”

“She passed on not long after the war ended. Her heart was broke.” Herod dropped her head, wiped at her eyes. Then she looked back up at him. “There was a time I would have blamed you for that.”

Hemp thought of his attempt at a grave, wondered what Herod would think of him burying her mother before he knew for sure the woman was dead. He wanted to know everything that had happened to them after they left. There was so much to say. Too much. But he knew the stories this girl might tell him had the power to take away everything. The wedding had been a chance. Now here was the past, knocking on his door again and threatening his very survival.

“You took her away from me, you know. They said I was cursed, but I ain't never done nothing to nobody.”

“Nothing?”

“What I done to you?”

They both turned to Madge who was looking down at her hands as if wondering who they belonged to.

“I ought to leave,” Madge said, not looking at the two.

“I don't have no secrets from you, Madge,” Hemp said.

“I didn't come here to make trouble.”

“Well then, what did you come here for?” Hemp wanted to walk over to Madge and take her hand, let her know he was still with her. But he felt that to do so was to turn his back on Herod. Though he spoke harshly, he couldn't bring himself to turn his back on the girl. Not again. So he just stood there, stuck in the middle of his past and his present.

“I come to close the door on it. Let you know I was sorry for what happened. I'm glad my mama found you. Gave her a little bit of sunshine for a while.”

Hemp said nothing.

“I'll be going now. The doctor said he find a place for me to stay the night.”

“Herod?” Madge rose. She walked over to the girl and put her arms around her. The girl stood stiffly, not returning the embrace. Madge did not need her to. She felt all the hurt rising through the girl's body, pain that was not the physical kind but the kind that took years and years to root in a person's soul. It was not just the girl's pain but that of a thousand women—wronged women, unloved women, sad women—that rose up through Herod. Madge wished she could will it all away, pull it out of Herod with this inexplicable rush of love she was feeling for the girl. Then Madge felt the hurt settle back down into the girl's trunk. It would take more than a hug from a root doctor to set this girl right again.

“We ain't got no home yet. He still living in a room full of men and I'm sleeping in a white woman's house. But you stay here in Chicago and once we do get a home, you got a place in it. You hear me?”

“I don't need it.”

“Hush,” Madge said. “Yes, you do. Your body tell me everything I need to know about you. You need it more than any of us.”

S
ADIE
'
S CARRIAGE MOVED SLOWLY OVER THE SNOWY
road. Even in the storm, men walked in the streets, hats pulled down over their faces, heads angled forward. The wheels ran over something, and Richard apologized as the carriage righted itself again, continuing on through the city, over the bridge into the North Division, the tall buildings fading into the white sky behind them.

In the house, Sadie removed her cloak, hat, gloves, and wet boots. The snow had started to mix with rain, and her outerwear was drenched. Olga brought her slippers, then stoked the fire. Sadie heard the front door open, and though she knew it was her father, she started abruptly as if it were an intruder. She wanted to move out into the hall, say something, but she hesitated as she heard him climbing the steps, the slow thud of cane on the wooden floor as he fussed with his foot.

“Mrs. Walker, your father is upstairs. Shall I have Olga serve dinner?”

“Yes, that will be fine, Richard. Thank you.”

The driver had become both butler and coachman. She thought it might be scandalous, a widowed woman allowing a colored man access into the private recesses of her home, but there were so few people to lean on, so few she could trust. Her father needed help while he convalesced, and Richard served the man faithfully.

Her father remained in Chicago for the time being, and she did not mind it. She was still hoping for some kind of truce before his departure. She had not sat down with him again since he'd first arrived back from the hospital, but she knew it would happen before long. There would come a night when they would sit together in that dark parlor and she would tell her truth and he would tell his, and they would struggle to acknowledge each other's sides. She did not care how long it took. She was willing to wait. He was her family.

She sat in her drawing room and removed her gloves, thinking of the war once again. She could remember the end of it as if it were yesterday. Once news reached Chicago that Richmond had been taken, businesses closed, flags waved, pistols reported, crowds rushed the streets. In the street, spontaneous parades had formed as songs rang out. She had been there, on the steps of the palace hotel. A hundred-gun salute erupted, the smell of gunpowder filling her nose. A brass band marched. Sadie had raised a black cotton umbrella to shield her face from the dust.

Six days later the end of the war was declared, and the wheels of the city halted. Olga asked for two days off, and Sadie stayed in the house away from the commotion of the celebrations across the bridge. She sat in her drawing room embroidering newly arrived fabric from New York, finding comfort in her needle. They said it was an end to the country's dark. But she had not believed that, had needed to see that document of surrender with her own eyes. One wild cannon fired and the war would be on again, men suited and rearmed, sacks slung over shoulders. Hemmed by doubt, a thickness in her throat, her vision
waned with each stitch. Sadie hated the clangor of war. Men locked fist to fist, a cranny growing, year by year, into a fissure. When she was nineteen years old, a battle in faraway South Carolina had changed her life, and she still resented the intrusion even though it was over. She'd clipped the loose threads on the surface of the fabric as she struggled to interpret all that had happened.

Then news of the president's death had turned the city's mood again. The neighbor's son, eyes reddened, stood on her doorstep carrying the message at ten o'clock at night near the end of Good Friday. When Lincoln's body arrived by train on the first of May, thousands of mourners lined the streets in cold, driving rain as the procession made its way through the city. Sadie watched from her carriage as ten black horses pulled the hearse carrying the man who had inspired a nation. A band played, but she could not hear it. She could not believe the man was actually dead. She'd thought of her father, comparing the two. Both men tall, thin, one rugged with the hands of a farmer, the other pale with the hands of an artisan. Her father cleared his throat when he was nervous. His ears protruded. His hair grayed early, and on his chin he wore a trimmed silver bush. He could not sing, but he always did so when he was in his garden. He avoided their coarser neighbors, detested gossips. He was short-tempered, but he hid it with deep swallows, a calculated turning of the back when someone's news tested his limits. His favorite poets were Keats and Browning, and she wondered about this sign of a latent sentimental side. He'd built a bindery in the basement of their home, where he worked for hours amid the dust and scent of pulp. He was widely admired. Young men sought him for advice. He was everyone's father, a voice of reason even during more panic-stricken moments in time, a man rigid in belief, stalwart in character, monumental enough to capture rooms when he entered. When she heard the president had died, all she could do was think of her father, the litany of traits that had led him to thrust her into the clutches
of a man he barely knew, and she wondered at the two of them, daughter and father, fellow survivors ineluctably riven by war.

Now as she sat in her parlor waiting for the call of dinner, she remembered the delicate, sallow faces of the returning soldiers, how the country had wheeled into a new grief. The damage had sullied everyone around her, yet in that tall house on Ontario Street, she had somehow survived.

M
ADGE MADE HER WAY
toward the bridge that crossed into the northern district of the city. Businessmen rushed about, couples strolled, vendors hawked their wares. It was a bright Chicago day, and although heaps of snow lined the road, it was the kind of day that made her forget the harshness of winter. One of the city's new steam-run streetcars rattled past her, smoke clouding the air. She turned her face and coughed as she considered a quieter street she could take. Her step was light, the morning sun bright on her face.

Once she crossed the bridge, she walked until she reached Ontario Street, a few blocks from the widow's house. She thought of the wedding dress Sadie had given her, the feel of the silk against her skin. When she'd first met her, the widow had worn only black. Now there was a rainbow in her closet. Time sure did change things. Each night, she and Hemp—no, Thomas—considered their strange new world as they discussed the future with fear and uncertainty. At least they had each other. And Herod.

Inside the widow's kitchen, Madge was more than a healer and a wife. Chopping and steeping, brewing and tasting, she felt transformed into a person set to do something remarkable in the world. As she walked toward the widow's house she thought,
I am sure enough American. This what Americans do. Make something out of nothing. Start over and make a new self
.

“You're late. It's work to be done,” Olga said, swishing a broom across the floor. “Seems like I'm the only one around here without a paying customer.”

“I can teach you a few things if you like.”

“I'd like to teach you a few things,” Olga muttered as she leaned the broom against the wall.

Olga's foul humor could not disturb Madge's joy, but as Madge took the empty jars from her sack and spread them out on the table a bolt of sadness ran through her. She was thinking of how she'd left her family behind twice. The first time, on the walk up from Tennessee, she had dreamed of them as she slept on the prairie floor, the moist ground sinking beneath her. The second time, she had dreamed of them as she leaned her face against a train car window. Now the memories flooded her, triggered by the start of a ritual that would always tie her to the sisters. Thomas had been right. She had known love, and the past was real. Designing a life of her own making would not be easy, and though she was finally freer than free, it had cost her. Sometimes it seemed like everyone, everywhere, had sacrificed something to get to something better.

She shook her head, thinking if she just kept moving, she could momentarily rid herself of the memories. She mashed ginger root in a bowl.

She felt someone looking over her shoulder, and she stiffened, thinking it was that worrisome spirit again. When she saw it was Olga, she relaxed and began mixing again.

“It sure does take a lot of different ingredients to make a healing balm,” Olga said.

“Ain't that the truth,” Madge said.

Olga lit the fire in the oven, and the kitchen warmed. The two women worked beside each other, the clamor of pots and bowls filling the room.