Dessa Rose (9 page)

“Let me fix them pillows so you can nurse more better.” The woman bent over Dessa, her hands moving deftly. Dessa lay quietly but warily. “There, now; you turn just a little on your side and you both be more comfortable. Well, go on; put the nipple in his mouth.”

Dessa looked down quickly, then up at the woman's smiling face. She did as she was told, gingerly touching her breast and awkwardly guiding it toward the baby's mouth. The nipple touched his cheek and he turned his head toward it, his mouth opening to grasp and clamping tightly around it, all in one sudden movement. A sharp pain shot through her breast at the first tug and she gasped.

“You got to get used to that,” the woman said conversationally. “Pain going get worse before it get better—that is, if you ain't dried up. It's a mercy if you not, way you been carrying on.” She laughed. “Attacking white folks and scaping all crost the country in the dead of night.” Laughing again and shaking her head. “I told her don't be coming in here less one of us was with her. But you think Miz Ruint going listen at me?”

At least she could understand these words even if they still made no sense to her. Who was this woman? Where was “Harker?”

“She sent the boy at him. He be here directly. You go on see at that baby. He getting some, huh?” she asked, peeking over at the nursing baby. “It be all right, now.”

Every pull of the baby's lips sent a thrill of pain through Des
sa's breast. She looked up at the woman and smiled before she closed her eyes.

 

Rufel watched the colored girl, not as she had at first from the rocker by the window, rocking gently as she nursed the babies or shelled peas. The colored girl was young. Don't look no more than twelve or thirteen, Rufel had thought. Couldn't be more than fourteen, she would say to herself, don't care what Ada said. She disliked disagreeing with Ada. The older darky had an abrupt way of speaking that Rufel found daunting. Rufel herself was not, of course, a child to be corrected by some middle-aged darky—Who knew no more about birthdays, she would continue sullenly to herself, than “planting time” and “picking time.” Why, even Mammy hadn't known how old she was or even her own birthdate. That was why they
—she
, Rufel, “Miz 'Fel,” had chosen Valentine's Day as Mammy's birthday. Mammy had refused to accept a date—“This way I don't have to
age
, see,” she had joked, “I just gets a little older.” Eyes full and shiny, a smile fluttering about her bee-stung lips—Rushing from the wound of that memory, Rufel would silently declare, All darkies know about is old age.

Rufel would sew or rock for a minute, until another point occurred to her. Thirteen, even fourteen was young to have a baby, even for a darky. Well. Rocking again, maybe sewing, fifteen. But no older and Ada talked about her as if she were a grown woman. Even if the girl were eighteen, as Ada said, she was too young to live as a runaway, hand to mouth, Rufel thought scornfully, like the rest of these darkies. And Ada was no better than the rest of them. Why, any white person that came along could lay claim to them, sell them, auction them off to the highest bidder. They should thank their lucky stars she was a kindhearted person. Bertie—But she resolutely closed her mind against the thought of her husband. She had done what she could do. He would see that when he came. Rufel would resume her task, all the while watching the colored girl. If she didn't want to go back to her people—

The wench was the color of chocolate and Rufel would stare at her face as she tossed or, more frequently now, slept quietly, at the thin body that barely made an impression in the big feather bed. The girl would be all right. Rocking again or returning to the rocker if she had stood as she sometimes did to fetch some article, to stretch, or just to look more closely at the colored girl.

Ada and Harker said she—they called her Dessa—had been sold south by a cruel master. She certainly acted mean enough to have been ruined by a cruel master—kicking and hitting at whoever got in the way the few times Rufel had seen her roused from stupor. But the girl's back was scarless and to hear Ada tell it, every runaway in the world was escaping from a “cruel master.” Ada herself claimed to have escaped from a lecherous master who had lusted with her and then planned the seduction of Ada's daughter, Annabelle. Rufel didn't believe a word of that. She could see nothing attractive in the rawboned, brown-skinned woman or her lanky, half-witted daughter—and would have said as much but Mammy had cut her off before she could speak, thanking Ada for her help and God that Ada had escaped from her old master.

Vexed, Rufel had bit her lip, remembering then what the utter nonsense of the darky's statement had made her forget. They needed Ada. That was the plain fact of it.

Often, misery washed over her. She would struggle against the familiar tide, feeding her indignation at Ada's story. At least Uncle Joel and Dante, the darkies Bertie had brought back from that last trip, had stayed, she would remind herself then. And, forgetting her angry, and silent, exasperation at Bertie's conviction that he had somehow gotten the best of a deal that netted him an old darky and a crippled one, took some satisfaction in their loyalty to the place. Mammy said they had been some help at harvest, but the real work was done by the darkies Ada knew. Still, Rufel hadn't been able to resist pointing out Ada's lie to Mammy.

“No white man would do that,” she'd insisted; unless he tied a sack over her head first, she had continued maliciously to herself. Mammy, folding linen
—black hands in the white folds, Mammy's hand against her face, and even then, maybe, that scaly, silvery
sheen creeping over the rich, coffee-colored skin—
had paused. “Why, Mammy, that's—” Rufel wasn't sure what it was and stuttered. “That's—”

“Miz Rufel!” Mammy had said sharply. “You keep a lady tongue in your mouth. Men,” Mammy had continued with a quailing glance as Rufel opened her mouth, voice overriding Rufel's attempt to speak, “men can do things a
lady
can't even guess at.”

Rufel knew that was true but could not bring herself to concede this openly. “Well—” She had tossed her head, flicking back locks of hair that tumbled in perpetual disarray from the artless knot atop her head. “Everyone know men like em half white and whiter,” she had finished saucily.

“Miz Rufel,” Mammy had snapped. “Lawd know it must be some way for high yeller to git like that!” Shaking out a diaper with a low pop and folding it with careful precision across her lap. “Ada have a good heart and at least she know how to work that danged old stove.”

Mammy's retort about the stove had silenced Rufel. She shared Mammy's antipathy for the beastly and expensive contraption Bertie had so proudly installed in the kitchen lean-to during the first months of their marriage. Its management had baffled every cook they ever owned; meals were most often late or the food burned, when the darky could manage to get the fire going at all. None of them had ever understood how to regulate cooking temperatures by sticking a hand into the oven and counting until it had to be withdrawn, the method prescribed by the manufacturer. And it took Mammy's constant supervision to see that the stove was kept clean and blackening applied to prevent the rust of its many surfaces and joints. To his credit, Bertie had seldom complained about the tardy and overdone meals (often he was not there to share them), and usually laughed when Rufel apologized for the quality of the meals set before him. How, he would ask, could she be expected to teach darkies to regulate the temperature of the stove when most of them couldn't count beyond one or two? Still, Rufel felt she had failed in a crucial duty and she was both relieved and piqued
that Ada seemed to have an instinct where the operation of the stove was concerned.

Despite Ada's considerable skill in the kitchen, Rufel still itched sometimes to throw the lie back in Ada's face (White man, indeed! Both of them probably run off by the mistress for making up to the master), but she was glad she hadn't provoked Mammy that day. Mammy had probably not believed Ada's story herself, Rufel thought now, but had not wanted to antagonize Ada. Mammy, perhaps even then foreseeing her own death, trying to secure the help Rufel would need until Bertie came back, knew Rufel would need that scheming Ada. No, Rufel had concluded, hurrying now lest she be trapped in grief and fear, the “cruel master” was just to play on her sympathy.

But—maybe—there were no people for this wench to return to. Timmy had said the other darkies called her the “debil woman.” His blue eyes had rolled back into his head and he had bared his baby teeth in a grotesque grin as he said it. Repulsed by his mimicry, she had scolded him for the mockery. “But that's the way they do it, mamma; and laugh and slap their thighs.” He had imitated that also and she had relaxed, a little surprised at how seriously she had taken the joke. And it was a joke, she told herself, a foolish nickname, “debil woman” (He talk plain when he with me, she thought defensively). What could there be to fear in this one little sickly, colored gal? Oh, she was wild enough to have some kind of devil in her, Rufel would think, smiling, remembering the way the girl's eyes had bucked the first time she awakened in the bedroom, just the way Mammy's used to when something frightened her. Mammy, Mammy's hands in her hair—Sudden longing pierced Rufel. Mammy's voice: “Aw, Miz 'Fel” that was special, extra loving, extra.

Rufel squeezed her eyes tight. She—the colored girl—had probably been scared out of her wits at finding herself in a bed. Even in her fevered state, she would know that no darky could own a room like this. It was a spacious and light-filled chamber, handsomely proportioned and stylishly finished from the highly pol
ished golden-oak flooring to the long, French-style windows that faced the morning sun. Even the open-beam ceiling, so long an ugly reminder of that good-for-nothing darky's unfinished work, seemed, since Mammy had hit upon the idea of painting the rough wood white, almost elegant. The highboy and matching cupboard, the cedar clothespress and thin-legged dressing table with its three-quarter mirror had come with her from Charleston; the crib and the half-sized chest had been made by the estate carpenter at Dry Fork as the Prestons' christening gift for Timmy. She had only to look at these to see Dry Fork again—not as she had come to know it during her lying-in with Timmy and the weeks she had spent there regaining her strength, as a bustling, virtually self-sufficient, miniature village, but as she had seen it on her first visit, the year she and Bertie went to Montgomery to buy a cook: the stately mansion built in the English style with an open court in front, the circular carriage drives and broad walks, the gardens opening before it: large flower beds and mounds, empty at that season but since pictured in her mind in a riot of blooming colors, rose, snowball, hyacinth, jonquil, violet. A mockingbird sang perpetually from bowers of honeysuckle and purple wisteria, perfumed and heavy with spring blossoms.

There was no comparison, of course, between the Glen and such magnificence; you couldn't build an establishment like Dry Fork in five or even ten years. Not without slaves, not without “capital.” Unconsciously, Rufel quoted Bertie, and shrugged, impatient with herself. What could a darky have to compare the Glen with? Certainly it offered a better home than any runaway could hope to have. Even that scheming Ada didn't want to go back out in the wild.

And, if the darky wasn't from around here—No angry owners or slave catchers had descended on the house as Rufel had half expected would happen. She had been in the yard drawing water from the well, because that idiot girl of Ada's had forgotten to do it, the morning Harker rode in with the girl. She had been startled by the sight of darkies on horses and frightened when she recognized Harker. What would these darkies steal next? And: She would
have to say something; people might not come way out here looking for a chicken or a pig, but somebody would want to know about these horses. The darkies had been as startled as Rufel, but, after the briefest hesitation, had continued walking their horses toward the kitchen lean-to. “Harker.” She had stepped into their path—and seen the girl strapped in the litter Harker pulled behind his horse. There was something in the ashen skin, like used charcoal, the aimless turning of the head that had kept Rufel silent. The baby had started to cry, a thin wail muffled by layers of covering. The girl's eyes had fluttered open and seemed to look imploringly at Rufel before rolling senselessly back into her head. “Go get Ada,” Rufel had ordered without hesitation. “Take her on into the house; bring the bucket,” she said as she bent to look for the baby.

She shouldn't have done it; Rufel had been over that countless times, also. If anybody ever found out. If they had been followed. But nothing of that had entered her head as she picked her way carefully up the steep back steps, the baby hugged close to her body. The girl's desolate face, the baby's thin crying—as though it had given up all hope—had grated at her; she was a little crazy, she supposed. But she could do something about this, about the baby who continued to cry while she waited in the dim area back of the stairs for the darkies to bring the girl in. Something about the girl, her face—And: She—Rufel—could do something. That was as close as she came to explaining anything to herself. The baby was hungry and she fed him. Or she would imagine herself saying to Mammy, “Well, I couldn't have them bringing a bleeding colored gal in where Timmy and Clara were having breakfast,” wheedling a little, making light. As long as the girl wasn't from around here—Though it would serve the neighbors right, she thought, resentful now, if the darky did belong to someone around here. Many times as Bertie had gone looking for a darky and been met with grins and lies. Truly, it would not surprise her to learn that some jealous neighbor had been tampering with their slaves, just as Bertie had always said, urging them to run away.