The Loom (3 page)

Let it be night. Music played in her mind before faces appeared. Daddy. Grandma Lou. Lizzy. Funny her White friend should come to mind.

Suddenly, she felt a tickle on the back of her neck. Her fingertips slipped under the nape of her braid, dropped as paper-thin legs danced across her knuckles. She screamed, leapt forward, and tumbled the bucket to its side.

Kicking against the river of water streaming around her, she fussed herself weary. Get your own water! Her head hurt. The ladybug lifted its tiny wings and flew up, high above her head. She wallowed in the dust for several minutes, watching it flutter and fly, fly away. Free.

When she could no longer see it, she gathered herself, yanked her lopsided, soiled hem straight, and trudged several yards back up the hill.

Pausing between pumps, Lydia scanned the land. The colonial sat center front next to a tobacco field in which several slaves labored. What field slaves did every day put her to shame. Lydia watched them hover over the leaves they would soon dry in heavy bunches in the tobacco barn near the slave quarters. The supply house and an empty barn were adjacent, but across from it, a breathtaking garden in the valley. Rows and rows of Indian corn, turnip greens, and tomatoes led to vibrant magnolias, marigolds, and roses of every hue.

Lydia looked up at the pale sky. More than halfway there. She picked up the bucket, leaned back under its weight, and trotted down the side of the mount. The swooshing of water mirrored her thoughts: back and forth, back and forth from the day’s duties to night’s rest.

Behind the Kelly manor, Lydia filled a washbasin with water and poured suds of lye over her hands, scrubbing under the white tips of her nails, her fingers, and her wrists until they were streaked pink. With her elbow, she pushed her way inside the house, jamming her foot against the door before the screen slammed shut and the smell of crackling pork roused her hunger.

Cora’s knife rested on a slab of ham as wide as it was round. She smiled when she looked up, her deep-set, large brown eyes sparkling in a face as dark and sweet as molasses sugar. With more flesh on her cheeks than her chest, she was merely a girl no more than twelve or thirteen.

Her mother, Beatrice, had been Mrs. Kelly’s favorite, had nursed the Missus’s child as her own. A sleek, coffee-colored woman with long limbs and a solemn soul, Beatrice was as connected to the earth as any plant that sprouted from its soil. Her palms were as dark as the back of her hands no scrubbing would wash clean. Every autumn evening, she would sit in the Kelly garden with seeds pinched between long fingertips, digging, sowing, weeding, her knees bent on each side of her like petals, her back curved, swaying in the wind like a rose. During the harvest of 1847, her spirit dried out and she was found wilted on her side, her cheek pressed against the damp red clay. Word had it she was buried in the slave graveyard several miles behind the Kelly barn, but Lydia believed otherwise, because the following spring and each year following, in the garden, a single black rose emerged among the lilies.

After Beatrice died, Mrs. Kelly kept the slave’s newborn under her roof and was particularly solemn in the fall. All obliged to be in her presence knew well enough to speak softly during the season, and most certainly to not make mention of the woman whose presence still sparked in her daughter’s spirit.

“I didn’t expect to see you up, Cora.”

“Fever’s gone. I’m as good as new.” She nodded toward the hearth. “Got the grits on already.”

Lydia tied an apron, frayed on the edges, around her waist and leaned over the pot of bubbling white hominy. She stirred, scraping a clump from the bottom of the pot. “They up yet?”

Cora nodded. “The Missus and Lizzy.”

Of course. Mother and daughter dined alone morning after morning though Mrs. Kelly insisted the girls prepare as if her husband were likely to join them. But rarely did his evening outings in the slave quarters stir a hunger for food. Lydia tugged the front of her cotton dress higher at the thought of his eyes on her, grateful he harnessed his desires in the arms of the field women.

Her cheeks burned the moment she thought it. They no more wanted his touch than she wanted his stare.

“Lydia!” Lizzy sprang into the kitchen swooning. Several blond tendrils fell from the chignon at the top of her head as she spun around the sunlit room in a yellow gown of satin. She bumped into Lydia and wrapped her arms around her neck, giggling. “I love it.” “Oh, Lizzy, you know I’m not finished.” Lydia swiped her hands across her apron and shook her head, but smiled. “I still need to add several buttons to the back.”

“I know. I just couldn’t wait.” She twirled, draping the fabric out around her like a fan. “What do you think, Cora? You like it?” Cora smiled and nodded.

The three girls turned when Mrs. Kelly entered the room. Her thin face and frame were nothing more than a withered Lizzy.

Her sunken cheeks, lined neck, and hands, spotted brown, aged her more than her husband, though he was several years her senior.

“Lydia and Cora, I’m waiting. Is breakfast ready?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, get a move on, please. I’m starved.” Her eyes shot over the length of her daughter. “Elizabeth, what are you doing in your dress?”

“Just excited, Mother.”

“Out of it at once before it’s soiled.”

“May I take it to Richmond?”

“That’s nearly three months away. We’ll see if you’re even as fond of it by summer’s end.”

“I will be.” Lizzy smoothed her cotton-white hands over the fabric. “I’m going to love it just as much.”

“Is my gown finished, Lydia?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is. I just have a little more work on your shawls and Lizzy’s—Elizabeth’s buttons left.”

Mrs. Kelly stared at her. A most indifferent woman. Although she often spoke words of concern, the weight of them carried no emotion, as if they lay dead deep inside, buried like Beatrice. She nodded and returned to the dining room.

Lydia and Cora whipped around Lizzy, setting each dish of grits, eggs, ham, and biscuits on a silver platter.

“Fix your scarf.” Cora tapped her own yellow handkerchief and pointed at her head just before she stepped out of the room.

Lydia smiled her thanks, ran her hand over the single braid down her back, and adjusted the faded brown gingham over her scar. She hated that thing. That awful, ugly keepsake of a lost dream. It teased her endlessly, peeking out from its cover unashamed, reminding her of her state in the world. Grabbing the tray off the counter, she walked into the dining room, set the food on the cherrywood table, and drew the drapes.

Sun rays spilled onto a stew of pink and yellow as Mrs. Kelly mashed her ham and eggs together and drummed her fork between small breaths that caved her chest, rounded her shoulders.

When the missus dismissed Lizzy, Lydia cleared the half moon of bread her friend left and waited. Minutes later, Mrs. Kelly frowned and tossed a rumpled napkin over her full plate and screeched it away, across the table, until it clanked against her husband’s breakfast. The congealed grits jiggled, untouched.

“You may go and see to the field.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Out on the front porch, Lydia squinted against the sunlight and waddled out to the field workers under the weight of a bucket she held against the slightest curve of her hip.

She searched the rows of tobacco for the one she wanted to serve first. She smiled when she saw him, his back to her, his overalls torn on the back left pocket. She would mend them when she had the chance. Her father turned when she grabbed his arm.

He squeezed her with his gloved hand into his shoulder, reeking of nicotine and tar, and kissed the top of her head.

“Good to see you out here. On your feet again.”

She looked up at the tall shadow of a man. His right-sided grin usually made her smile, but today it pierced. Sadness crinkled his eyes. He was thinking of how she had been.

“I’m all right, Daddy. Doing fine now. Here.” She offered him the gourd. “You thirsty?”

He stooped over the bucket and drank for several seconds. “You almost done out here? I want you to hurry up and get on back inside. Don’t want the sun making you weak.”

Lydia laughed. She hadn’t seen the sun for nearly a month. Couldn’t make her weak if it tried.

She watched him work, breaking the flowers off the top of the plant, gleaning tiny shoots from the leaves. His drenched skin, high yellow like the white corn she shucked for dinner most nights, blazed against the other men and women on his row. All the shades of her people. The beauty of butter cream to the darkest shade of midnight.

Lydia froze.

Midnight. That space when all the world was still and she felt alone with the thoughts she wouldn’t dare think in the day. Those same thoughts came the first time she saw him.

John was as beautiful as midnight.

“Water?” she asked, bending a tobacco leaf from her view. When he saw her staring, his dark face lit with the kindest smile and the deepest dimples. She lowered her gaze.

“Sure.”

Gently, he clutched the gourd, his fingertips grazing hers. She watched him. His eyes close. His lips part. He was not a boy.

Three or four years her elder, she reckoned. This was a man. When he opened his eyes, she blushed. His gaze met hers then traveled higher to her brows, her forehead. Lydia’s stomach flipped when her fingers found her scar uncovered. She tugged her scarf over it and looked away.

“I’m glad you’re better. Your father speaks of you often.”

How much did he know? “But you’re new here, right?”

“Somewhat. Yes.” He wiped the water from his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Lydia watched the sweat gather across his forehead and sweep down his temple, his cheek, the square of his jaw. A hard worker. She glanced at the other men and women in the field. She supposed they were all hard at work. She was just close enough to see him dripping, hear him breathing, sipping.

“More?”

He nodded.

Lydia dipped the gourd into the wooden bucket and handed it to him.

“Lydia right?”

“Yes…” He knew her name.

“I’m sorry. I’m John.”

John. John. How many times would that name play in her head tonight? More than she could count.

Lydia slipped through death’s door.

Inside, orange rays shone through the cracks of the tiny log house and bronzed the smooth chocolate cheek of the old woman at the loom.

“Baby, is that you?” Ruth turned her head toward the door when it shut but her eyes stared ahead.

“It’s me.” Lydia smiled at the couple sitting in the center of the room waist-deep in a colorful sea of fabric.

Spun cuts of cotton draped over the low three-legged table in the corner like clouds over a rainbow of material in lavender, gold, crimson, slate. Colors Lydia had only seen on the petals of roses and in the deepest of dreams, and yet sadness prevailed in the mosquito-ridden cabin. The three knew as well as she, this was it for them. They would not leave this place. Life as they knew it would soon be over. Their cooling board prepared. Their cloth, their winding sheets.

She moved toward the table and allowed her fingers to touch the yarn of the spinning wheel and wealth of cloth surrounding her, showering them. She ran her hands down the length of rough wool and let them slide over a small patch of slippery silver. Bolts of cloth lay in each corner of the room, like barricades, like borders.

Abram leaned against the hunched shoulder of his wife and held a cloudy silver spoon of stew to his lips. Lydia stared at the scar in the middle of his palm, the back of his hand, his arm ashen brown and dull, as shriveled as dry wood. He paused when he saw her and nodded his smooth head. The corners of his white moustache and half-moon beard curved around the slightest of smiles.

Lydia acknowledged the wise one with a bowed head and a reverent utterance of his name. Old Abram. A chief, a sage, a spiritual warrior among her people, her father had shared. Respected and sought after for his wisdom and his knowledge of the Great One and His ways, he was father of the young and the old. For years, ailing children were sent to his side, draped in his arms, laid in his lap. Word had it, Abram would mumble, sometimes for minutes, at others near an hour, until his lids fluttered, his palms trembled, and power soared through him to little limp bodies that would rise, their eyes opening and blinking wide and round at the gathered worshippers on their knees. When the praise turned to him, he was quick to correct, “It is God who heals.” And heal He did through him countless times, but only for the young. For the older folk, there was no hope. The moment a boy’s voice deepened or a girl’s body curved, Abram was helpless to aid, as impotent as the rest. Too much time away from the source of life, too many tainted, tired years, he reasoned. For them, all he could offer were words that healed on the inside, and these verbal morsels men and women savored eagerly, sitting silently at his feet to listen to words deep in tone and nature, hoping to glean guidance that could carry them one step farther down the road of life.