The Endless Forest
Page 73

We got through the winter, spinning and weaving and grinding corn, baking and cleaning. Sewing and mending. The men spent most of the time out of doors, hunting or hauling wood, doing what men do. In the evening folks would stop by sometimes. I would have gone off to the little cabin me and Galileo had for ourselves, but Maddie wouldn’t allow it. Not everybody was willing to take tea with a freed slave, but not even Mrs. Todd was brave enough to say so to Maddie. She had a way of looking at you when you disappointed her, went straight to the heart like a thorn. She was stubborn and righteous both, which suited me just fine but didn’t sit so well with other folks.
Alfred Middleton wan’t a bad man, really. He could get on my nerves quicker than any man born of woman, but with her he was always kind and gentle and he never touched hard drink, which is more than some women can say. I think it surprised him new every day to remember how well he had married. But newly wed only last so long, and by March of that winter he had backslid into some of his old ways. You see, the problem was, he couldn’t ever stick to one thing. Ever’ day he had some new scheme, grand plans he didn’t ever see through. He would spend weeks explaining to anybody who’d listen how things just went wrong and it wan’t his fault, no sir, it never was.
Maddie never said a word to me about all that. She went pale when he started talking that way but she never gainsaid him, not in my hearing. But as spring come along, she got quieter and more thoughtful and sometime it seem she wan’t sleeping hardly at all, she had such dark circles under her eyes. If I asked her was she feeling poorly, she’d brighten right up and turn the talk to something else. But I saw it.
Later on after things took such a turn, I looked back and saw it clear, how she was disappointed not so much in him—though she had a right, if you ask me—but in herself. I been thinking it over many years now and I come to believe that Maddie married Alfred Middleton knowing full well that he was a leaky vessel, but thinking she could fix him which, let me say this clear, Birdie, and you hear me: Don’ ever take a man on because you got the idea you can change him into something you might could love some day. Tears will follow, that I promise you.
But Maddie was young and her mama never taught her what a girl need to understand about men. All she saw when Alfred come along was a man who had traveled far and wide and had stories to tell. And he was a good storyteller, that much is true.
So now here Maddie was, just about two years later, in a cabin on the marsh way at the back of beyond, with a husband she couldn’t depend on except not to be there when she needed him. It was a hard lesson, but she didn’t shirk it. That wan’t in her nature. She didn’t blame nobody but her own self. Marry in haste, repent in leisure, so the Bible say.
And then that spring when me and Leo been here a year, Alfred got the idea in his head that he had to go off to Albany to talk to some banker. I cain’t hardly remember any more what the scheme was he cooked up but the idea was always the same: He promised her he’d come home a rich man and buy her a thousand acres and build a big house right in the middle of it. And she said—she always said—that she didn’t need no thousand acres and that the house she had suited her just fine. But did he take heed? Of course not.
That was the judge in a nutshell, always sure he had more coming to him, and overlooking what was right there for the taking. So off he went, leaving Galileo behind to look after us and see to it we had meat on the table.
For the first week or so Maddie was quiet. Now, it wan’t an unusual thing for her to keep her thoughts to herself. She had that Quaker habit. Quiet contemplation, she call it. I got to like it myself, listening to the world without making any noise to add to it. Sometimes I wonder if maybe she was thinking she might go back home again to her people, stand up in front of the meeting to say she had made a mistake. I admit I was afraid she’d do just that, and then what was to happen to me and Galileo? We’d have to find work someplace, and that had to mean going out to Johnstown or Albany or even farther, with no cash money. The judge didn’t have nothing to pay us, you see. So there we’d be, two freed slaves with nobody to say a good word for us. Scared me half blind, that idea.
Whatever it was Maddie had in mind, it all changed on a morning in late May, when Gabriel Oak and Cornelius Bump come to Paradise.
The sun has warmed the earth enough to sow the seeds she put away so carefully, each in a folded paper labeled in her careful hand: love-in-a-mist, black-eyed Susan, columbine, sweet william.
It’s not so much a garden as a smallhold where they will plant corn and squash and beans. She and Curiosity will spend the summer tending the crops that will sustain them through the winter: cabbage and corn and lima beans, potatoes and carrots and turnips, onions and leeks.
But one corner she has put aside for the flowers she loves. This morning she has dug the plot once and then again until the earth, dark and damp, is loose and the sweet smell of it soaks everything. She will have morning glories trained up the fence and in August the sunflowers will raise their round faces up to the sun. The flowers are what make the long hours hoeing corn pleasant. A simple pleasure, one even her mother could not fault.
She is so focused on her work that she doesn’t notice that a shadow has fallen. The shape of a man, stretched out so that it reaches across the entire expanse of the garden. A prickling on the back of her neck makes her pause, but the things she fears are nonsensical. If the Mohawk raid, they will not come like this, so quiet. She raises her head and considers the man standing on the other side of her fence. The men, she sees now. There are two of them. One very tall and straight, and the other only half his height because his back is twisted into an oxbow. His head is canted sideways, and lies against one lumpen shoulder.