The House Girl (38 page)

M
ARCH
15, 1853

S
TANTON
, V
IRGINIA

The moon hangs low and lights this page. I have put away the candle for it is a full moon, a harvest moon my father would have called it, beaming down brighter almost than a midday sun. Tonight is the last I will spend under my brother’s roof with you asleep in the room beside. I have not said my good-byes, though this, I think, is for the best. Forgiveness is not easily earned, not for me, and I have no wish to trouble Jack further with my presence here. It is hard for him to bear, I can see it in the set of his jaw, the way he turns his face away from me. He is busy with preparations for your journey west, to the Oregon territory and a new life there, and I distract and remind him of what he seeks to forget. Perhaps you have sensed already that I will not travel with you. I suspect so. Children know more than we adults care to fathom, and you I feel are wise already.

I know well that the circumstances of a child’s birth and raising, the hopes and frustrations of his parents, their fears and desires, shape in ways great and small the kind of man that child in time becomes. I do not want you always to wonder how you came to Jack, about the events that set your life in forward motion, away from your mother and the place where you were born. You should know all that I know, and it is this aim that guides my pen tonight.

In such an exercise, there are limitations, and of these I am manifestly aware. I am not practiced in the narrative arts and what I set down here may turn rough or discursive. There are things you will read about myself, about Jack and Dorothea, about Josephine and Mr. and Mrs. Bell that may cause you some distress. Once you have finished with these pages, you may think of me in a new light, a harsher light. You may wish that my conduct had been different, better, braver than it was. When you are older, you will, I hope, learn something of the world and understand that each man carries with him imperfection and regret, and day by day he strives to make right the wrongs he has committed, to repair what he has broken. This is what I have struggled to do, in ways human and flawed.

It is difficult for me to consider my past and not be consumed by a great and abiding sadness, a sense that nothing I have touched will stand for good. That no amount of amends I perform will account for the wrongs already done. I hope that wherever else I have failed, whatever harm I have caused to strangers and friends, that you may speak for me. Not before a pulpit or upon a stage. Not with words great or loud. But only to be, to persist, to live a life with pride and worth. In twenty years’ time, thirty, or forty, I hope that you may sit upon the porch of your home, look out upon a greening field that you have tilled, see your children surrounding you with love, and think for a moment upon me. That is all now that I truly wish for. To be for a moment in your thoughts, when I have long passed from this earth, and perhaps in that way I may find my redemption, an earthly redemption, not everlasting, but sacred nonetheless.

Here then is the story, Josephine’s story, your story, and mine.

The day I first saw Josephine is etched clear and bright in my mind. It was a late summer morning in the year 1852. I had slept scarcely an hour when Little Sullivan, one of Mr. Rust’s boys, called round for me. He knocked so hard on the guesthouse door that I awoke thinking there was a fire or flood or some other manifestation of God’s wrath bearing down on me. I looked out the window and saw Little below, motioning up at me. We need you, Doc, Little called. Down at the barn.

Little was not a man known for patience or good humor. I gathered my things with haste. My head ached from the previous night’s drink and my knees seemed partial to giving way as I stepped slowly down the stairs and onto the porch. The stale taste of whiskey still filled my mouth and I spat into the dry grass. That September had seen summer stretch further than it ought, and the haze on the horizon, the cloudless sky, indicated another humid and close day. But the morning had not yet turned to hot and I thanked the God that still remained to me for the air cool on my face. I nodded at Little as he brought my horse round and before mounting I shook my head to clear the haze that hung there too.

I followed Little to a field about three miles east outside of town, to a place I had come to know well. There had once been a farm here but not in my lifetime and all that remained now of that failed venture was a falling-down pile of rotting timber where the house had once stood and a gray leaning barn, its walls and roof slanting towards the earth at such an angle that the lessons of physics surely could not explain why it still stood.

The sun was right and truly risen when we reached the barn and I narrowed my eyes against it as I looked at what the patroller Josiah had brought. This was when I saw her first, the girl, Josephine. She was hitched to the back of Josiah’s old mare, a sorry sway-backed animal that twitched its ears in mad frustration as the wind hit them. Her dress seemed the dress of a house girl, not homespun, but it was stained with sweat and blood, and the hem was frayed and torn. She wore fine boots, and Josiah pulled them off her as I watched and stuffed them inside his pack.

There were three runaways that morning, Josephine and two men, one who’d been beat within an inch of his life and the other named Bo. The men were sat on the ground beside the barn, their backs against the gray slatted wall, the first either asleep or unconscious, I couldn’t say which.

I could tell right away that Josephine was poorly. Her right eye was crusted over shut, yellow pus seeping from the corners, and she seemed only half-aware, something vital gone from her face and the good eye that rolled upwards as she stood and swayed beside the mare. Josiah let her loose and brought her to the edge of the barn where I waited next to a three-legged stool left out by Mr. Rust for these occasions. She sat, shaking as her knees bent to shift her weight.

Watch this one, Josiah said and pointed his chin towards the girl. She came on us with a knife.

I examined her in the methodical way I’d been taught at the medical college, working from head to toe and left to right. She seemed to notice me no more than you would a bird passing overhead or a beetle crawling beside your toe. Part of her had already departed this world and her head swung from side to side like a doll’s as I looked in one ear then the other. She moaned once, I remember, a deep throaty sound that reminded me of heaven and hell, of the preacher’s moans when his eyes rolled up after sermoning on sinning and its consequences.

As I conducted my examinations, Josiah stood to the side awaiting his payment and working his hat in his hands. He was a small man, stoop-shouldered and bony, like his horse. I heard Mr. Rust tell once that Josiah was burdened by a wife who would not stop bearing children, nine at the last count, and a dry farm that barely yielded enough for two hungry stomachs. He had come to patrolling out of need, not design, and I felt a degree of sympathy for him. This was not a job for a family man, nor for any man with a heart and sense of justice.

Once I’d finished, Mr. Rust inquired with eyebrows raised as to the value of the goods on offer. I nodded towards the girl and Bo, but not the other. The risk with him was too high, the Lord’s breath was in his face already or it’d take him so long to recover from his beating that any profit would be spent on feeding and housing him in the meantime. I wasn’t sure what made me choose Josephine, she could have been the same as the other, too much risk. Maybe something in that moan, a spirit sound from deep down, or maybe the way she kicked her legs when I tapped the kneecaps, like she was still running, showed me she was mostly alive in there.

I cannot say that it was then, that morning, I began to love her. Such thoughts were the furthest from my mind. I saw only limbs, a head, a body requiring repair, and I the one charged to do it.

I should explain something about my position, how I came to be there with Josephine and the others at the barn on that wind-riven day. We were thieves, of a sort, though the kind sanctioned by the federal legislature. Since passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, all manner of men had turned their hand to slave catching, the sole requirement for the subject of their attentions being simply a Negro face. It made no difference the true status of the man, woman, or child—be they rightfully free, or another man’s property, or indeed a slave escaped from any manner of indignities that no creature should be made to bear. On the sugar fields and great cotton plantations of Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, the need for slaves was great, the sums paid beyond imagining. Five, six, sometimes ten times the prices in Virginia could be fetched at market in New Orleans. It was a simple calculus for the men engaged in such larceny.

I was employed by one of their number, a slavecatcher by the name of Benjamin Rust. He stood tall and bony, a beady-eyed man with a long dark mustache, droopy at the ends, that traveled up and down as he spoke. He had no God and never spoke a kind word if it wouldn’t serve his own benefit but for all his wanderings and deals, his ambitions were not great. The accumulation of wealth and the things it purchased were his only cares. Most days I could barely stand to look at him, but I worked beside him, I did as he bade me, I took the notes he paid.

A long cloud has drifted across the moon and tempers its rays so I have lit a candle to continue. The flame is weak and flickering but it will serve until the clouds recede again.

As I look at the black, hard center of the flame, it is clear to me that I must go back, I must redraw this narrative and begin long before the day I first saw Josephine. Long before even the day I met Mr. Rust.

Certain events begat others, and these then followed on to more, a cascading flow of places and people, sorrow and guilt, a river that led me to you, and you to Jack, in ways that perhaps lend a purpose to the unspeakable tragedy that befell us. The tragedy that my hand delivered.

This is not a digression that I begin here, but a prelude of necessity to what came after. After I departed my brother’s house in disgrace, after I left respectable employ and became a spectacle of ridicule and contempt, after Mr. Rust found me shoeless and sick outside a tavern, after I tended to the fugitive Josephine.

But, before. Before.

Before, I had worked alongside a good and kind man, Dr. John Coggins.

Dr. Coggins was my professor at the medical college in Philadelphia. He instructed us in anatomy, medicinal herbs, and medicinal topography, his specialty. He was white-haired and whiskery, with sharp green eyes and a face lined like the body of a tortoise. Though he stood short of stature, his deep, grave voice and the very presence of him always seemed to me much larger than his physical size. In my memories he is always towering above, looking down at me as if from a great height.

I looked to him as I imagine a young man might look to a father. I do not think he ever regarded me in quite the same familial way, but he did take a shine to me. While a student, I often met him on weekends for walks along the banks of the Delaware and paths of Port Richmond Township. We would collect herbs and flowers and later press them between heavy gray sheets of paper bound with twine. This plant, he would tell me, is for bettering the spleen when mixed with arrowroot, or the bark of that tree helps ease a woman’s pain when birthing. I committed all his lessons to memory.

During my final year at the medical college, Dr. Coggins invited me to join him in bringing medicine to the rural folk throughout the small towns in southern Virginia. His plan was to establish a clinic in Randolph Township in Charlotte County. This was a place I knew well. My childhood had been spent in neighboring Lynnhurst, a town I had left at the age of 15, vowing never to return. Although eager to accept Dr. Coggins’s proposition, I was loath to return to that familiar region, full of failing tobacco fields, ruined mansions, the poorest folk in all the South, and the bitter memories I still held of my upbringing there. You see, my parents never developed a true fondness for me or my younger brother Jack, it being difficult for them to feed and clothe us adequately. I would not describe my early years as aggrieved, seeing as all my base physical needs were met, but I had no desire to extend the period of my youth any longer than was necessary. As soon as I could ride a day’s distance on horseback and knew how to fire a pistol, I set my departure.

I urged my brother Jack to accompany me. Although as distinct as potatoes and peas, we were as close as I believe two brothers could be. I saw no future for him if he stayed on our father’s meager farm. But Jack declined. He was but 13 when I left, and slight in size, his height had not yet taken. He looked still like a child, and it seemed the child in him could not foresee a life outside our parents’ house, no matter how oppressive that life might continue to be.

During my years away from home, working first in Philadelphia as a physician’s assistant and then later attending the medical college, I rarely thought of my parents. I wrote but once. My letter notified them of my place at the college and my intention to remain in Philadelphia until I earned my degree, perhaps longer.

My thoughts, however, turned often to Jack. I hoped he studied the books I had left. I hoped my father’s beatings had lessened in frequency and degree. I wondered when he might leave that place. But still, year after year, I did not write to him. I knew not the words to use.

It was Jack finally who sent word to me. In the spring of 1849 I received a letter informing me of my father’s death. Jack asked that I return home to pay respects to both my father and my already dead mother whose grave I had never seen. He explained that he had sold the family farm in Lynnhurst, purchased another in the neighboring town of Stanton, and recently married a woman whom we had known in childhood, Dorothea Rounds. It was Dorothea’s father, the undertaker, who had helped him with the burial of our mother and it was over our mother’s funeral rites that Jack had again met Dorothea.

Dorothea and Jack welcomed me to their marital home, he wrote. And so I came.