American Gods (13 page)

Several years passed, and Essie was no longer a thin little
thing: now she curved and billowed like the swell of the green sea, and her
brown eyes laughed, and her chestnut hair tossed and curled. Essie’s eyes
lighted on Bartholomew, the squire’s eighteen-year-old son, home from Rugby,
and she went at night to the standing stone on the edge of the woodland, and
she put some bread that Bartholomew had been eating but had left unfinished on
the stone, wrapped in a cut strand of her own hair. And on the very next day
Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own
eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was
cleaning out the grate in his bedroom. He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie
Tregowan.

Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essie’s
condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and
as a favor to Essie’s mother, who was a very fine cook, the squire’s wife
prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position
in the scullery.

But Essie’s love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for
his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a
neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah
Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and
unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the
family slept on.

Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it
was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squire’s wife
distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where
the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and
his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was
convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandler’s in
Exeter, passing one of the squire’s notes. The squire identified it as his, and
Horner and Essie went to trial.

Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the
slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge
took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced
her to seven years’ transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called
the
Neptune
, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to
the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame
captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife,
and to take her to his mother’s house in London, where no man knew her. The
journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco,
was a peaceful time and a happy one for the captain and his new bride, who were
as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each
other or giving each other little gifts and endearments.

When they reached London, Captain Clarke lodged Essie with
his mother, who treated her in all ways as her son’s new wife. Eight weeks
later, the
Neptune
set sail again, and the pretty young bride with the
chestnut hair waved her husband goodbye from dockside. Then she returned to her
mother-in-law’s house, where, the old woman being absent, Essie helped herself
to a length of silk, several gold coins, and a silver pot in which the old
woman kept her buttons, and pocketing these things Essie vanished into the
stews of London.

Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished
shoplifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins,
consisting chiefly of stolen bolts of silk and lace, and she lived life to the
full. Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the
creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose
influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a
wooden bowl of milk on a window ledge each night, although her friends laughed
at her; but she had the last laugh, as her friends got the pox or the clap and
Essie remained in the peak of health.

She was a year shy of her twentieth birthday when fate dealt
her an ill blow: she sat in the Crossed Forks Inn off Fleet Street, in Bell
Yard, when she saw a young man enter and seat himself near the fireplace, fresh
down from the university. Oho! A pigeon ripe for the plucking, thinks Essie to
herself, and she sits next to him, and tells him what a fine young man he is,
and with one hand she begins to stroke his knee, while her other hand, more
carefully, goes in search of his pocket watch. And then he looked her full in the
face, and her heart leapt and sank as eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky
before a storm gazed back into hers, and Master Bartholomew said her name.

She was taken to Newgate and charged with returning from
transportation. Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly,
although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually
spurious) were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed
with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say.

Her sentence of death was once more commuted to transportation,
this time for life.

She rode out this time on the
Sea-Maiden
. There were
two hundred transportees on that ship, packed into the hold like so many fat
hogs on their way to market. Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely
room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of
the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward,
she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly
into the choppy gray sea. Essie was eight months gone, and it was a wonder she
kept the baby, but keep it she did.

In her life ever after she would have nightmares of her time
in that hold, and she would wake up screaming with the taste and stench of the
place in her throat.

The
Sea-Maiden
landed at Norfolk in Virginia, and
Essie’s indenture was bought by a “small planter,” a tobacco farmer named John
Richardson, for his wife had died of the childbirth fever a week after giving
birth to his daughter, and he had need of a wet nurse and a maid of all work
upon his smallholding.

So Essie’s baby boy, whom she called Anthony, after, she
said, her late husband his father (knowing there was none there to contradict
her, and perhaps she had known an Anthony once), sucked at Essie’s breast
alongside of Phyllida Richardson, and her employer’s child always got first
suck, so she grew into a healthy child, tall and strong, while Essie’s son grew
weak and rickety on what was left.

And along with the milk, the children as they grew drank Essie’s
tales: of the knockers and the blue-caps who live down the mines; of the Bucca,
the tricksiest spirit of the land, much more dangerous than the redheaded,
snub-nosed piskies, for whom the first fish of the catch was always left upon
the shingle, and for whom a fresh-baked loaf of bread was left in the field, at
reaping time, to ensure a fine harvest; she told them of the apple-tree men—old
apple trees who talked when they had a mind, and who needed to be placated with
the first cider of the crop, which was poured onto their roots as the year
turned, if they were to give you a fine crop for the next year. She told them,
in her mellifluous Cornish drawl, which trees they should be wary of, in the
old rhyme:

Elm, he do brood

And oak, he do hate,

But the willow-man goes walking,

If you stays out late.

She told them all these things, and they believed, because
she believed.

The farm prospered, and Essie Tregowan placed a china saucer
of milk outside the back door, each night, for the piskies. And after eight
months John Richardson came a-knocking quietly on Essie’s bedroom door, and
asked her for favors of the kind a woman shows a man, and Essie told him how
shocked and hurt she was, a poor widow woman, and an indentured servant no
better than a slave, to be asked to prostitute herself for a man whom she had
had so much respect for—and an indentured servant could not marry, so how he
could even think to torment an indentured trans-portee girl so she could not
bring herself to think—and her nut-brown eyes filled with tears, such that
Richardson found himself apologizing to her, and the upshot of it was that John
Richardson wound up, in that corridor, of that hot summer’s night, going down
on one knee to Essie Tre-gowan and proposing an end to her indenture and offering
his hand in marriage. Now, although she accepted him, she would not sleep a
night with him until it was legal, whereupon she moved from the little room in
the attic to the master bedroom in the front of the house; and if some of
Farmer Richardson’s friends and their wives cut him when next they saw him in
town, many more of them were of the opinion that the new Mistress Richardson
was a damn fine-looking woman, and that Johnnie Richardson had done quite well
for himself.

Within a year, she was delivered of another child, another
boy, but as blond as his father and his half sister, and they named him John,
after his father.

The three children went to the local church to hear the
traveling preacher on Sundays, and they went to the little school to learn
their letters and their numbers with the children of the other small fanners;
while Essie also made sure they knew the mysteries of the piskies, which were
the most important mysteries there were: redheaded men, with eyes and clothes
as green as a river and turned-up noses, funny, squinting men who would, if
they got a mind to, turn you and twist you and lead you out of your way, unless
you had salt in your pocket, or a little bread. When the children went off to
school, they each of them carried a little salt in one pocket, a little bread
in the other, the old symbols of life and the earth, to make sure they came
safely home once more, and they always did.

The children grew in the lush Virginia hills, grew tall and
strong (although Anthony, her first son, was always weaker, paler, more prone
to disease and bad airs) and the Richard-sons were happy; and Essie loved her
husband as best she could. They had been married a decade when John Richardson
developed a toothache so bad it made him fall from his horse. They took him to
the nearest town, where his tooth was pulled; but it was too late, and the
blood poisoning carried him off, black-faced and groaning, and they buried him
beneath his favorite willow tree.

The widow Richardson was left the farm to manage until
Richardson’s two children were of age: she managed the indentured servants and
the slaves, and brought in the tobacco crop, year in, year out; she poured
cider on the roots of the apple trees on New Year’s Eve, and placed a loaf of
new-baked bread in the fields at harvest time, and she always left a saucer of
milk at the back door. The farm flourished, and the widow Richardson gained a
reputation as a hard bargainer, but one whose crop was always good, and who
never sold shoddy for better merchandise.

So all went well for another ten years; but after that was a
bad year, for Anthony, her son, slew Johnnie, his half brother, in a furious
quarrel over the future of the farm and the disposition of Phyllida’s hand; and
some said he had not meant to kill his brother, and that it was a foolish blow
that struck too deep, and some said otherwise. Anthony fled, leaving Essie to
bury her youngest son beside’his father. Now, some said Anthony fled to Boston,
and some said he went south, and his mother was of the opinion that he had
taken ship to England, to enlist in George’s army and fight the rebel Scots.
But with both sons gone thfe farm was an empty place, and a sad one, and
Phyllida pined and plained as if her heart had been broken, while nothing that
her stepmother could say or do would put a smile back on her lips again.

But heartbroken or not, they needed a man about the farm,
and so Phyllida married Harry Soames, a ship’s carpenter by profession, who had
tired of the sea and who dreamed of a life on land on a farm like the
Lincolnshire farm upon which he had grown up. And although the Richardsons’
farm was little enough like that, Harry Soames found correspondences enough to
make him happy. Five children were born to Phyllida and Harry, three of whom
lived.

The widow Richardson missed her sons, and she missed her
husband, although he was now little more than a memory of a fair man who
treated her kindly. Phyllida’s children would come to Essie for tales, and she
would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and
Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only
wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and
his Cat and the King. She loved those children as if they were her own flesh
and blood, although sometimes she would call them by the names of those long
dead.

It was May, and she took her chair out into the kitchen
garden to pick peas and to shuck them in the sunlight, for even in the lush
heat of Virginia the cold had entered her bones as the frost had entered her
hair, and a little warmth was a fine thing.

As the widow Richardson shucked the peas with her old hands,
she got to thinking about how fine it would be to walk once more on the moors
and the salty cliffs of her native Cornwall, and she thought of sitting on the
shingle as a little girl, waiting for her father’s ship to return from the gray
seas. Her hands, blue-knuckled and clumsy, opened the pea pods, forced the full
peas into an earthenware bowl, and dropped the empty pea pods onto her aproned
lap. And then she found herself remembering, as she had not remembered for a
long time, a life well lost: how she had twitched purses and filched silks with
her clever fingers; and now she remembers the warden of Newgate telling her
that it will be a good twelve weeks before her case would be heard, and that
she could escape the gallows if she could plead her belly, and what a pretty
thing she was—and how she had turned to the wall and bravely lifted her skirts,
hating herself and hating him, but knowing he was right; and the feel of the
life quickening inside her that meant that she could cheat death for a little
longer ...