Angels Make Their Hope Here (24 page)

“You take care of my Dossie now! Cissy, you bring her back good and safe,” he whispered an entreaty to his sister. He put his head onto the table before him in complete surrender to the grief and the whiskey.

Folk fleeing the lynching and burning in New York City carried horrible tales to every crossroads and meeting place along the roads. Hat threatened to dash herself off a boulder at the back of the house when word of Jan’s murder reached her. Duncan and Pet held her and allowed her to thrash at them in her grievous fury. Hat might not have cried so much if her own leg
had been taken off. Noelle was stricken with pain radiating along her arms when she was told of Jan’s death. She lay down on a pallet facing westward and refused to speak to Duncan, Hat, or Pet.

Duncan, Hat, and Pet went to the landing at Paterson to meet Dossie and to take Jan’s coffin from the barge. Dossie revived at the sight of them, when she knew she had accomplished her duty. She had brought Jan home. Now she had leave to let go of herself and fall down in her grief.

Duncan saw her at the landing when she stood at the rail of the boat and thought she was changed though recognizable. Her body was different. He saw it instantly. He was swept with the wholly inappropriate idea to remove her clothes and remove his own and press their bodies together—their skins touching. It seemed the only right way to know what changes there had been. He felt ashamed of this feeling and ashamed of crediting these thoughts in the face of his grief. He knew the circumstances had changed somehow. She had written it. She was bringing Jan home dead. But skin to skin was how he longed to renew his acquaintance with Dossie Bird.

Duncan’s house—Dossie’s home—was familiar but shabby in some measure. Dossie saw that the curtains were dirty and hanging east and west. The house had not fared so well without her, she thought. On crossing the threshold she pushed back her cuffs and took up the broom. She collected dirt in circular swirls and brushed it out of the front door to thwart ill will. Duncan busied himself with bringing in water and warming up the stove. He moved slowly. Perhaps it was the drag of grief. Had he changed so much? Was it only sadness and shock? Did she seem to him to be changed? Did he notice a change in her? Had he noticed that she carried a baby?

Dossie stopped her sweeping and stood across the room from Duncan.

“I am three months along and it is Jan Smoot’s child and I will not lie about it to you,” Dossie said plainly, facing him. He better know right away in case he did not want her to stay in the house even for one night. She’d seen his eyes on her. She knew he had questions.

“Ah, the citified woman is bold!” Duncan said ruefully. “I thank you for being straight, Dossie girl,” he continued. “You and your baby are at home.”

Duncan wanted to rush up and entangle her in his arms with soft affection, to touch and hold her and assure her. But Dossie did not invite him.

“Not a girl anymore,” she said kindly to keep Duncan from going back and getting honey names and thinking all was the same.

“Aw… no, no. I know it. I wan’ to call you by a sweet name because you been in so much trouble. Dossie. I can call you that, missus?”

She smiled at him. “A cup of coffee, sir?” Dossie put the broom to rest in a corner and took a seat at the table.

“You want me here?” she challenged when both were seated. She reckoned she knew what Duncan was thinking. “You lookin’ for Dossie girl to come back? She didn’t come back. Emil Branch took her off. No, I dropped her myself. I lef’ her right nex’ to the body of the sheriff. I’ve been a real grown woman since. And now Jan is dead? I do what I want to do, Duncan. I drink whiskey, too, if I want.

Duncan looked at her and said nothing. Yes, he wanted her. And he wanted her to stay as he always had. And he was itchy about it as he’d always been.

Later they drank whiskey together. Dossie was modest. She had not become a sloppy, excessive drinker. She sipped, sat back in her chair, and listened to his talk of the doings about the place. She smiled. The sauces in his groin came to a pitch and he wanted so much to touch her and then he did. He reached across the table to stroke her face and then to touch her breast. Dossie didn’t start. She pushed off his hand. She wore an unsurprised expression as though she’d waited to confront this moment and had designed a response. She’d never before pushed him with a gentle, firm reproof, in the way of this short sweep of the fingers. “Another time, Duncan,” Dossie said so clearly and quietly and decisively that he wanted to bawl.

Pet’s first recollection, the point his world began, was the delight in baby Jan’s eyes when his mother bent over the bed in which they both lay. She sang to them. Both babies reached for her, both kicked their feet, both were taken up by Jan’s mother. Both were satisfied at that first most alluring tit. When Pet tasted warm sugar and butter spun together in a toddy or in a pie, he thought of his aunt Cissy. He was sure this was how her skin had tasted in their mouths. She was a big woman, as he remembered, though he remembered also that they were very small then. She could lift and carry them both, and both of them would let their sleep heavy heads fall onto her. He and Jan had lost her so early! Cissy! Cissy! But didn’t none of them—not even his own mama—credit that he’d suffered her loss, too. It was not just Jan who was crushed by his mother’s death. And now he was expected to bear up under Jan’s death? The fear that he might not be able to worried him.

Pet hadn’t opened the document his father gave him on leaving the country. He thought it contained the pernicious receipt of his mother’s purchase. He didn’t want to lay eyes on that paper, though he knew its contents. When he opened the envelope that lay at the very bottom of a box of keepsakes, he saw it was a legally executed copy of his falsified birth certificate. He was named and listed as the son of a deceased white mother
and his own white father and thus was himself completely white. A note accompanied the document.

Dossie’s waters broke at dawn and she set off on a loud keening. Her body was wracked with her work, and her wailing was earsplitting. At noontime, the baby seemed to go still, a small skiff in a calm. The struggling mother continued to wail and her throat became sore. When the midwife arrived, she was cross that the mother had been allowed to weaken herself with hours of crying. Martha Remsen massaged her patient with practiced hands, relaxed her, steadied her through the throes, and shortly after nightfall a little girl came forth.

“Your wife will need more than a root woman the next time, Mr. Smoot. A midwife or a doctor should be called sooner,” she said to Duncan, when she had been given some supper, a glass of ale, and her fee.

Duncan leapt up in alarm, but was stopped by Martha Remsen. “She is at the end of her energy, sir. She is sleeping, but she will recover. She is young and the baby is robust.”

Duncan sat back in his chair and thought about the long day when Pet was born. He glanced up at Hat’s placid, pretty face and remembered that he and Wilhelm got stupid drunk that day and brought a white doctor in from town that they had threatened with a gun. The man was surly, and he scared Hat, and the boy only came when the doctor had gone onto the porch to smoke and Cissy alone was there to catch his slick body like grabbing up a trout.

Through the first hours Dossie’s baby was fretful. Dossie slept, then roused before dawn light and saw Duncan by the window holding the baby and looking out. What did he look at in the dark? Who did he look at in the shadows? “Jan,” she called in a hazy consciousness.

“No, Dossie Bird, it is Duncan,” he answered very quietly, very softly. “I am sorry, Dossie. It is only me and your baby girl.”

“Ah, Duncan, you so good,” Dossie said as her confusion cleared. She had heard Jan’s voice in her dream and she started to remember his words. He was not soft. He did not plead. He hectored. He’d invaded her deep dream state, and each time she had turned from one side of the bed to the other, it was to escape his voice and his implacable grimace. He was not coy. He did not smile. He demanded that she tell it all and make the terms she’d pledged. “Don’t lie to him and don’t soften to him unless he swears,” Jan hollered at Dossie in her head, causing her ears to throb. When she was fully awakened, when Duncan had handed her a cup of water, when she sat upright in the bed, Dossie spoke out as though a hand pushed her at the center of her back and would not let her stall, turn back, or turn around.

“Duncan Smoot, you got a daughter now? Do you accept my daughter now? Jan made her for the Smoots. He said, ‘Uncle will make my child fortunate and you will make him beautiful and, if she is a girl, she’ll be a prize.’ ” Dossie smiled inside herself to recollect this talk, but her face was heavy with grief and could not express a smile just then. “Is it in you to know all of these things and call her daughter without hesitation?” Dossie watched Duncan’s eyes and thought she would recognize if he tried to dissemble.

“Hush,” he answered. For the first time since Dossie had returned with Jan’s body, Duncan felt impatient, miffed at her. Is he so small a man as to be unable to accept what Grandmother has given him? “What will you call her? Will you name her for your Ooma?”

“No, no. Give her a name from your people? Is she your daughter then?”

“Sarah then,” Duncan said quickly. “Sarah Smoot. It is my mama’s name. She was Sarah Vanderhoven. She became Smoot just after the Vanderhovens split up. Some of the family went to Cincinnati calling themselves Hoven. The others stayed in Russell’s Knob and called themselves Vander. So my mama became a Vander, then a Smoot. The People are curious acting sometimes, Dossie girl,” Duncan babbled, letting his words trail off and smiling to himself.

There was a touch on her spine. She turned her head toward her left shoulder and saw his head very large. She knew his curls.

“Jan did not rape me. Emil Branch did that, and his baby left me when I reached New York. Jan Smoot, your nephew, did not do me any harm. He did not fool me or force me or
wear me down with pleading or frighten me. I came to him with the plan. I wanted a favor and I begged him so that I could bring a baby for you. I wanted it for myself most of all. I was so jealous of the other women. I only wanted him to put her there. It is what he did finally as a gift to me… and to you. I was a silly and spoiled girl who wanted what every other woman had. Jan loved me and I knew it. I ought to have loved him at least by half of what he loved me, but I never did. He loved you very much and I knew it and I trifled with his love and his loyalty so I could have my prize and have you. I lost him. I know you threatened him not to harm me or lose me in New York. I harmed him. I lost him. It would be wrong for you to think that he took an advantage with me. He did not. I welcomed him. I coerced him. It was me who used him.”

Duncan tried to take up talking as if he hadn’t heard what she said. “Sarah Jane because of Jan. It’s a good name: Sarah Jane Smoot. Sarah was Cissy’s given name, too.” He spoke almost as if he was completely surprised to remember his sister’s name. “Papa coined her name Cissy to call her something different from my mama. Sweet, lovely Cissy. Her name was Sarah Jane.” He paused in speaking, then breathed deeply, he sighed and held on to the child more firmly. “Dossie.” He said the name in a way he’d never spoken it before. It was her name as it stood, not embellished with his endearments, fripperies, and decorations of speech. It was her as she stood before him with no desire, no lust attached.