Balm (4 page)

I
N LATE SUMMER
1865, S
ADIE
'
S FATHER WROTE TO
say that her mother was ailing and to come at once. It would be the first time Sadie had returned home since her marriage, and she longed to see the familiar sights of her town: Market Street, George Street, the courthouse, Centre Square. No canal ran through York, carrying with it the stench of sewage and dull sight of barges. She was full of expectations, so when the conductor walked through the car yelling
York!
she stared through the window, signaling frantically for him.

“What happened to the station?”

“They burned it,” he answered. “Didn't you know? But the people have built another one. A testament to their spirit, I'd say.”

The old depot had been made of wood. The new one was brick. To steady herself, she recalled the feel of her mother's fingers in her hair, the tilt of bacon from pan to plate, the plain dress sewn each year. When she saw her, Sadie would admit the letters had been lies. She would tell her all about James.

But for the second time in her young life, Sadie arrived to the news of death. In front of her house, Sadie's trunk still on the seat of the hired carriage, a neighbor woman reported her mother had died of fever. Sadie ran inside, anticipating her father's face, but the rooms were empty. She sat in a chair, removed her hat, and placed it on her lap.

The fact that the house had been spruced failed to cheer her. Freshly laundered linens covered the bed in her old room. Fennel sprayed from a jar on the kitchen table. She waited for the old man, but when he arrived, they said little to each other. The bookbinder's hands were more curled than she remembered, fingers reaching toward palms. That night, he cooked supper for the two of them, dropped the spoon twice. She sat at the table watching and did not stoop to pick it up. He plated the food, and she tugged at the meat on her bone. Across from her, he studiously chewed. The kitchen was hot, close. He wiped his forehead. She remembered the small “mh” her mother would make as she ate, the soft grunts of satisfaction. Her father had cooked on occasion, her mother waiting patiently at the table, relieved of duty. Sadie put down her fork.

“You told me she was ailing. She's been dead for months.”

He did not wait to take his last bite, rushing into the story as if he had been burning to tell it for the past two years. His voice surprised her. It had grown thin. He did not stop until he had told it all. How the city leaders gave up, surrendering to the invaders so quickly and unconditionally that the townspeople had little time to think. By then, free coloreds had scattered, hurrying out of town on the winds of rumors that they would be captured and sent south into slavery. Confederates were cutting telegraph wires, destroying railroad depots, tearing up track, burning bridges. Even the neighbors gave in to the fright, shuttering their windows, keeping the children inside. With the absence of their daughter, Margaret and Andrew felt safe, their most valuable possession put away in another place, far from the battlegrounds of war and the looting hands of men. But by the time
hundreds of wounded soldiers poured into the hospital buildings set up on Penn Common, Margaret was restless and eager to help. Each morning, she walked down the road carrying a bag full of things she thought might give the men comfort: a Bible, ink and paper for letters, bound magazines from her husband's shop. After doing this for a little over a year, Margaret came home one day with a young woman on her dogcart. This woman, another volunteer from the hospital, had fallen ill, and Margaret was determined to move her out of that place of men. Andrew did not approve, but his wife could not be stopped. The volunteer nurse got better, and as soon as she was able, urged by a calling deeper than Andrew had seen in a woman so young, returned to the place that had sickened her. He begged his wife not to follow, but she did. Soon after that, Margaret became ill. Given her age, her fever proved calamitous.

Sadie looked down at the cold meat on her plate. It had all been such a pointless sacrifice. And for what? What god had taken the offering? It was not even likely the nurse had appreciated what her mother had given. Now her mother was dead. James was dead. Samuel, remembered by a loveless widow, had not fared much better. This war had destroyed families, and it was a shame, even for the imperfect ones like her own.

“I need to see the hospital for myself,” she said.

“There is not much to see there now.”

“I need to meet the nurse.”

“She is no longer in the city.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked for her.”

“I need to go there.”

“It will not bring her back, Sadie.”

She turned from him, her hair brushing the wall. Sweat rode the groove of her nose and met her upper lip.

“Very well,” he said. “We will go together.”

The two of them ventured out on the dogcart the next morning. Her father allowed a man on a mule to pass, and he raised a hand in gratitude. Two others climbed down from their horses to help a boy who'd fallen. Even though the war was over, the pall of tragedy remained. Women walked arm in arm, eyes cast down. An empty sleeve dangled at a man's side. A waif begged for food. The town had awakened to an awareness of its mortality, and it moved with relief. But in her mind, the people of York needed a reminder of all that was wrong in the country. Their marked optimism struck her as false, a contrivance built up by minds eager to forget. Even her own mother. A casualty of war. These people could not see it. No rift this deep could heal. Sadie longed for simpler times, when her mother had rousted the embers of the fire to make bread and dusted the tools in the shop with a careful swipe of her rag, then woke up the next day to do the same thing all over again. This burgeoning web of sufferers, these people attempting to put their lives back together as quickly as they'd rebuilt the train station mystified her. She could barely see three feet ahead. Earlier that day, she'd tripped on a crack in the road, her shoe crushing a forgotten handkerchief.

The halting cart jolted her and she shook her head as her father extended a hand to help her down. They strode onto the grounds of Penn Common, her father's arm hooked through hers.
Mother, help me to understand. Did you want to take them all with you?
The corridors had recently been emptied and few patients remained, but Sadie imagined what her mother had seen: wasted faces like shriveled vegetables, thickets of beards, foul bedpans. She tried to understand the motivations of those women: cooking, washing, changing bandages as the men murmured gratitude through ruined faces. Her mother had rescued that sick nurse from a canyon of convalescents, an act for which she had given her life. A pain struck Sadie in her stomach. She needed to spit.

“Your mother was a new person when she was here,” her father said, passing her a handkerchief.

“I've had enough,” she told him.

Her mother was buried on a rise of land behind the Presbyterian church. Sadie stood quietly in the soft dirt, not praying but remembering.

For several nights, she could not sleep. To pluck out that ill nurse, save her, yet sacrifice her own life. Which was the greater need, one's own or another's? This question unraveled her. She sat in her mother's chair in the dark. Her foot grazed a stack of books, and it slid, tumbled. She reached down to straighten them, recognizing the bookbinder's signature gold leaf. The smell of calfskin. She touched a spine and brought it to her nose, thinking of the days she'd spent working with him in the bindery.

“Let me get them.”

She had not known her father was awake. He kneeled beside her, handling the books gently as he squared them off and pushed them into a corner. The shelves were full. They lined the walls. He sat in the chair across from her. She considered going back to bed, but instead she lit a second candle. Even in the dim light, she could make out little half-moons of exhaustion puckering beneath his eyes. He looked intently at her. Once, that look would have withered her.

“I barely knew him.”

“You were safer with him.”

“You married me to the first soldier who came knocking.”

“Not the first.”

Something landed on the back of her hand.

“The wealthiest.”

“His money had nothing to do with it.”

“You sold me.”

He laughed. “I thought marriage would strengthen you.”

“I—” She coughed. He rose to touch her back. His shadow fell over her. She willed the coughing away. He sat back down.

“I hear a voice.”

He stared.

“A spirit's voice. From the other side. I speak to the dead, Father.”

“Dear God.”

“I'm afraid of him. I'm afraid of everything.” She began to cry.

“Sadie, Sadie.” He rose up a little, sat again. “If you can't forgive me, then at least honor the memory of your mother. Don't try to punish me with this exaggerated talk.”

“I barely knew the man, yet you married me to him.”

“There was a war.”

“So you washed your hands.”

A ship passed over his face. “Sadie, you must marry again. You must come home.”

For a moment, she was suspended, a spider extending its web to an object it can barely see. It was not just that she was an abandoned widow in a foreign city. It was more than that. The opposite, even. Within that space, a brightening, an assembling of desires. She did not say it, but she knew the sensation was simply this: she preferred her new life to her old one, a dead man over a living one.

She listened to the sounds of night, the whirr of nature's hum outside the window, and she found it easy to recall how large this house had once seemed, how vast even this chair had been. She held on to her arms, sitting in the dark long after her father had retired.

S
ADIE NO LONGER HAD
to go on carriage rides to hear the voice. Now he visited her right there in the parlor beneath the portrait of her dead husband. One night, when she entered the room and sat at the small
round table, he did the unthinkable. He brought forth her mother as she sat fixed in a spell.

Word spread that soldiers were pouring in. Lice-infested, bloody, malodorous, the men were deposited one after another in beds, and when there were no more beds, they lay on the floor, curled like snails beneath thin blankets. I volunteered three days after the battle at Gettysburg ended, virtually moving into the building for female nurses. At night, their haunted voices echoed as they called out the names of loved ones. My dear, it was something no mother should witness. So little of their youth remained. I was happy to do what I could to help: salving open wounds, holding down a man while his leg was sawed. Needless to say, it took its toll. Soon I found something I could do better than the others. I took men's halting words and transformed them. Your father always said a word, properly spoken, could save a life, but those men taught me the power of poetry. It felt so good to be useful. I even read your letters to them, my dear daughter, though I did not, for a second, believe you. But I hoped you were living a better life in Chicago, that your lies hid the joyous freedom of an eligible young widow in a large city. The war frightened us so, and Samuel had presented as a respectable man, eager to wed after having seen so much. What I now understand, and what you must know, is how much those men needed something to hold on to, something more than love of country.

Sadie drew a breath, afraid the spirit would end the message too soon. Her mother had been an accomplice in the decision to marry her off. A conspiracy between the two of them and no one had thought to ask Sadie's opinion. Her fury swelled, then flattened. She began to weep.

For days, she roamed the house, grief-stricken. It took weeks for her head to clear. If he could bring forth her mother, who else could he summon? He'd claimed he came to her because he wanted to help the families, and Chicago was full of widows. He suggested she could be a
vehicle for them. She was still thinking of this when Olga delivered a newspaper along with her breakfast one morning.

“I don't subscribe to this one.”

“We may as well keep it,” said Olga.

Sadie leafed through the paper, scanning the columns. “Communications from the Inner Life.” She turned to the back page, reading the advertisements. The breadth of them fascinated her: clairvoyant physicians and counsels, healing mediums, prophetic mediums, magnetic physicians, electropathists, spirit painters, psychometrics, telegraphic and inspirational mediums, business mediums, homeopathists. She could not believe there were others like her, people who could open doors to the other side. She had read of this spiritualist movement, but mostly the stories she'd heard told of men and women rapping on tables. She did not view her spirit as one of these; he was merely a voice in her head. But the sheer variety of people claiming to possess telepathic powers meant that there was more to the movement than she'd realized. She pored over the essays, poetry, and announcements.

Ultimately, it was the prospect of earnings that did it. The thought woke her up in the morning and kept her awake at night. Fifty cents per visitor was not much, but it wasn't the amount that convinced her. Earnings meant something else. With more than a little trepidation, and without telling anyone, she placed an advertisement in the spiritualist newspaper announcing that she would offer “spirit intercourse” between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. for entranced communication with the dead.

E
ARLY
,
BEFORE THE HAIRS SPROUTED BENEATH HER
arms like fungi, Madge understood the joy of the complaint. To ache was to long. To long was to be human. There was ecstasy even in the anguished telling of it. Unknowingly, folks were pleasured by a strained back, a rheumatic knee, a stiff neck, a burning pisshole, their suffering both comfort and grievance. Her task was not just to relieve them of it. First she had to listen, allow them to tell of it, so they could be, in that moment, fully alive. They needed her to acknowledge that this tale was not imagined. This pain that had not allowed them to work or have sex or hoist a musket or shell a pea mattered. And after her full acknowledgment of its power over them, she had to declare that they would be freed of it, and she would be the one to do it. Sometimes just this glimmer of hope was enough. The thought of relief proved relief itself. It was a mercy to allow the moment of diagnosis to linger as they weighed the news.

Finally, the pronouncement.

In the dark of a shed in the Tennessee countryside, she'd planned her decoctions. In the city, she worked to build a similar store in the widow's pantry: roots, herbs, powders, ointments, solutions, tonics. Working with plants, Madge knew exactly who she was. She was more than a woman who stuck her hand in fire for money. More than a Negro servant to a well-meaning white woman. She was a doctress, a healer. To relieve people of their pain was the greatest gift. What the widow did not understand was that this life reigned over the next. Madge had no need for a spirit guide to grant her authority. The Great Spirit itself anointed her with the knowledge tucked inside her head, bestowed upon her by the sisters. It lay in the hands that soaked crushed berries in alcohol, steeped veiny leaves in hot milk, wrapped a boil in a leaf, flushed out worms with purple bergamot tea. Even when the illness was feigned, Madge could pronounce. Malaria, dysentery, miasmatic or otherwise, she could pronounce.

But what she especially loved were the teas. The hunt in the woods for just the right leaf. Bark. Root. Scent of the brew. Shallow slurp of the sick. Knobby hands cradling the cup like a sacrament. Drying leaves, crumpling, mashing in a mortar. Roasting, grinding, stirring seeds into lard. The forest was a natural wonderland of spirit-growths.

She lined up her jars in the widow's kitchen, stacked bark, hung sacks of dried leaves from hooks, watered newborn stems in cups along the windowsill. She needed more herbs before she could start selling. A trip out to the Illinois country was in order, but Madge hadn't the faintest idea how to get there. It had to be far away because Chicago was too packed. One thing closed in on another, leaving little room for breath. She did not believe that anything with power could grow in such a place. She loved the city, but she loved it as one loves something that is so far removed from oneself as to stand outside all understanding. It was nothing less than the wonderment of it that besot her, the question of the divine's intent on those crowded, noisy streets. Surely
the forest could not be far. She had been in Chicago for months, and she needed to go soon. The sisters had foraged year-round, picking through leaves, stabbing frozen ground, brushing back the occasional thin bed of flakes. Here, endless sheets of snow daunted Madge. She'd once been lost in a storm, only to find she was on the widow's street all along, just three doors down, had blindly walked the block twice in the implacable white haze.

A few days after Olga told the widow Madge knew how to doctor, the widow called the servant upstairs. Madge was not surprised by the summons. She had learned early on that they always wanted something—a hand to mix, two arms to lift, a fingertip pressed against a pulsing temple. To survive, she would just have to figure out what the widow wanted.

Seated in front of the mirror, the widow pulled down a sleeve, exposing a bony shoulder. The skin had puckered into a lump, red in the center and ringed white at the edges. Madge touched it, and the widow winced. Madge pressed a hand into Sadie's neck and thought of all she'd been taught. There was clearly a boil, yes. But what else was there? To be a healer was to see the invisible. The sisters had, in their own admission, not been as good at it as their mother. The sisters had not allowed Madge to pronounce, had never acknowledged how Madge could feel things with her hands. Pronouncing was reserved for the eldest. But Madge could feel, and sometimes hear, things the sisters could not. Like now. The soft wheeze of breath that signaled the beginnings of infection in the chest. A knot of gas in the stomach from last night's dinner. She pressed more deeply into the widow's neck. If she was going to be called on to heal the widow, she would need to feel it all. Something sparked and she drew back her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“That spirit.”

“What did you bring to put on my boil?”

“That spirit man that talk to you. He hurt you?”

“Are you going to talk it away or are you going to put something on it?”

Back in the kitchen, Madge's hands shook as she ground a palmful of thimbleweed root with oil until it was paste. There was something wrong with the way that spirit occupied Sadie's body. She didn't know what it was, but there was no way that dead man could do the widow any good. She wondered what she could say. The woman would never listen to her. She carried the bowl up to the widow's room and set it on the table. She scraped the poultice onto a flat wooden handle and mashed it into the skin. When she had covered the boil in a thick green paste, she flattened a square of dry cloth over it and covered it with another dampened cloth.

“Just sit and rest a while.”

“Where on earth did this thing come from? Is my dress too tight on my shoulders?”

“I don't know.” Madge picked up her bowl, then paused. “Could I ask you a question, Mrs. Walker?”

“What is it?”

“What you know about this spirit?”

“Well, I believe in him, if that's what you're asking.”

“He say why he choose you?”

“What?”

“What do he want from you?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don't you?” Sadie looked up at Madge. She had relaxed under the colored woman's touch, but then the woman had drawn her hand back as if she'd been burned. What skills did this healing woman possess? She had been putting her hand in fire without getting burned. What else could she do? Sadie's contact with the spirit had newly opened her to mysteries, but she was still not entirely comfortable with this newfound knowledge. “Well, he came to me about a
year after his death. I suppose my needing him keeps him connected to this side. He wants to help.”

The widow rushed her words when she talked, and Madge did not always catch everything.

“Ain't no good ever come from raising the dead,” Madge said flatly.

The widow did not answer, and Madge did not speak further out of fear she would anger the spirit. She looked past the widow's shoulder, thinking it might be better to get out of this spirit's way, make her way back to Tennessee while she still had time to beg the sisters' forgiveness.

“You plan to tell me why you brung me here?”

“To be my maid.”

“Is that right.”

“Yes.”

The widow's voice was high and reedy when she got excited, but in her calmer moments, it was as gentle as a girl's. Madge suspected it was the kind of voice that would not deepen with age, unlike her own, which had already gained its force. She stared at the widow's reflection in the mirror. Ringlets framed her face. Sometimes she appeared much younger than Madge, but other times she reminded Madge of someone wise and old.

“Since you asked, I'll tell you. I saw you putting your hand in that fire and I thought you were a believer.”

“A believer in what?”

“I thought you'd understand me.”

This the girl side of her
, thought Madge.
Most days, I don't even understand my own self, let alone you.

“Now I want to ask you something.”

Madge held on to the bowl:
I done lived among women my whole life, and I still don't understand nem
.

“I want you to help me.”

Here it was. The truth.

“Take their shawls, that sort of thing. I asked Olga, but she refused.”

“Deliver me.”

“I'm not asking, Madge.”

“Yea though I walk.”

She could hear the lowing, the sound of a cow dragging its feet as it was roped into a death pen, neck pinched. And as sure as she recognized she was that cow, the lowing sound in her own head, she knew she would do it: take capes in winter, store parasols in summer, cover the windows, pull back the portière to reveal a portrait and a table covered in black cloth. She would do it out of fear the widow would turn her out if she didn't.

Dead slaves had a tendency to come back hankering after unfinished business. Maybe white spirits were different, but Madge suspected many of those men who'd died on the battlefields had not left the earth singing hymns.

“I don't know why you came to Chicago, but I suspect you ran away from something. I know you were free down there, but something happened, didn't it?”

Free freedom
, Madge wanted to say.

“You and I have something in common.”

The woman was crazy. They had nothing in common. Madge placed her beliefs beside the widow's. To Madge, the spirits were in the flick of a flame. The ancestors inhabited whatever space they chose. The wrinkled bark of a tree. The bright anther of a flower. Core of a cabbage head. A baby's wormy tongue. When a pig was slaughtered, every part from tail to snout was filled with spirit. The Lord King was inseparable from the spirit world. Why, the widow did not even pray! How could this woman talk to spirits without recognizing the holiness of everything, the carefully and ingeniously drawn earth? If the two were not one, then where did bowels-of-Christ leaves and Adam-and-Eve
root come from? It was true that Madge believed in the widow's abilities, fully believed, as only a fellow person who respected life's mysteries could. What Madge did not agree with was the woman's understanding of it.

Madge wanted to turn and leave without answering. She didn't trust Sadie with her hurt. That's what the sisters had taught her, but alone in this new city, she did not know how she would keep it all bottled inside. She tried to think of what she could say that would make the widow understand.

“You ever wonder what heaven look like? You ever think it might be just 'round that corner only you can't see it none 'cause your steps too short to make it that far?”

“I'm afraid I'm not very religious,” answered Sadie. “I think heaven is right here in this room.”

“It ain't what I was running from. It's what I was running to. We all trying to get to the same place, Mrs. Walker.”

“Where's that?”

“Blessed deliverance.”

Sadie thought of her mother. Perhaps that was what she had been looking for in that hospital.

Madge paused. “Truth was, I didn't have no freedom with them women.”

“What women?”

Madge rubbed her nose with her forearm, gesturing toward Sadie's shoulder with the bowl as she turned to leave the room. “You best stay out tight dresses till that thang heal.”

“Y
OU
'
VE GONE AND GOTTEN RICH
, have you? Funny thing. I thought you worked here same as me.” Olga poked her head out of the back door, breathless. “She's calling for you again.”

Madge did not hurry as she rose from her sitting position on the back step and made her way up the stairs to the widow's room. The boil had dried to a blemish, but the woman still insisted on a fresh poultice every other day.

“We can't be long because I have people coming this afternoon.”

Madge slid the dress down. The good news was that when there weren't customers visiting the parlor, the widow let Madge be, preferring books over walking, talking company. On the second floor of the house a room was filled with them, the shelves packed with only the occasional slit of space like a missing tooth. Because she could not read, the room frightened Madge more than the darkened parlor ever had, and she imagined they contained a knowledge far more harmful than recipes for tonics and teas passed down through three reclusive sisters.

But she had done as she was told, because although she had never worked in someone's house, she found the work tolerable, relished the freedom allowed by the widow's distraction, and on those evenings when there were no visitors scheduled, Madge ceased her chores, sat on the back step, and chewed tobacco, streaming brown juice into the grass.

Every now and again, when the widow spoke at length in that strange accent, Madge struggled to understand as Sadie retold the story of a mother who died rescuing some nurse in a soldiers' hospital and a father, yet living, who had sold her off to a man she barely knew. Madge had the passing thought more than once that the widow might not be altogether right in the head. After all, a spirit guide was a far-fetched notion, no matter how sincere, and even the death of an unloved husband could do strange things to a woman.

“Madge,” Sadie said after a few minutes, “don't you have anyone you'd like me to contact on the other side? Surely you do.”

“No, ma'am.” Madge dabbed at the mark with a wet cloth.

“Well, what about a letter to your people? Shall I send something for you? I hear the battles down in Tennessee were terrible. You should at least check on them.”

“I don't write and they don't read.”

Concern radiated from the widow, but Madge did not know what to do with it. She did not know how to receive what this white woman had to give. She could not forge something out of thin air where before none had existed. It had been hard enough to grow accustomed to the widow's odd indulgences: a sack of oranges, a scratched brooch for a gift. Madge frequently used the lessons she had been taught early on, staying low in the bushes, watching the widow from a height, seeing her in light of the things she owned: a fine house, a crepe-trimmed dress, ribboned shoes, strands of pearls. The things this white woman owned made it difficult for Madge to accept her kindnesses. But even more than that, if the sisters could not bring themselves to love her, then this woman surely couldn't either.