The Purchase Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Linda Spalding

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Spalding, Linda

  The purchase / Linda Spalding.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-7937-5

  I. Title.

  PS8587.P215P87 2012 C813′.54 C2012-900962-8

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street, Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  In memory of my brother Skip, son of Jacob,

  who was son of Boyd, who was son of Martin,

  who was son of John, who was son of Daniel Dickinson.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Acknowledgements

  PART 1

  Daniel looked over at the daughter who sat where a wife should sit. Cold sun with a hint of snow. The new wife rode behind him like a stranger while the younger children huddled together, coughing and clenching their teeth. The wind shook them and the wagon wounded the road with its weight and the river gullied along to one side in its heartless way. It moved east and north while Daniel and all he had in the world went steadily the other way, praying for fair game and tree limbs to stack up for shelter. “We should make camp while it’s light,” said the daughter, who was thirteen years old and holding the reins. But Daniel wasn’t listening. He heard a wheel grating and the river gullying. He heard his father – the memory of that lost, admonishing voice – but he did not hear his daughter, who admonished in much the same way.

  Some time later the child pulled the two horses to a halt, saying again that they must make camp while the sky held its light. The new wife arranged dishes on the seat of the wagon, and the child, whose name was Mary, pulled salted meat out of a trunk at the back. It was their fifth day on the road and such habits were developing. By morning there would be snow on the ground, the fire would die, and the children would have to move on without warm food or drink. They would take up their places in the burdened wagon while Daniel’s fine Pennsylvania mares shied and balked and turned in their tracks. A man travelling on horseback might cover a hundred miles in three days, but with a wagon full of crying or coughing children, the mountainous roads of Virginia were a sorrow made of mud and felled trees and devilish still-growing pines.

  The children, being young and centred on their own thoughts, were only dimly aware of the hazards of the road and of the great forest hovering. They hardly noticed the mountains, which were first gentle and then fierce, because all of it came upon them as gradually as shapes in an unhappy dream. The mountains only interrupted a place between land and sky. The forest got thicker and darker on every side. They had, within a few weeks, watched their mother die, given up home and belongings, landscape and habits, school and friends. They had watched people become cold to them, shut and lock doors to deny them entrance. How were they to understand? There were other wagons leaving Pennsylvania and going south and west, but none were so laden with woe as the one that carried the five children and the widower and his new bride.

  Daniel spoke of the trees and told his children which were the yellow pine and which the white oak. He pointed to a deer standing still as vegetation in the bushes, but he made no effort to hunt or to fish for the beings that swam in the streams. As a Quaker, he did not own a gun and would depend on his store of food until he could raise his own crops. It was November, an ill-advised time for travel, but in spite of rain and cold winds and sore throats, he looked down at the rushing river and told himself that he had no choice. The Elders had cast him out. He had been disowned and now he was rudderless, homeless, alone on a crowded road. He did not count the new wife or the children as companions. They were plants uprooted before they had formed into shape or type. They were adrift on this high roa above a river that divided them from everything they had come to expect. “When I inherit we will have a good piece of land,” his dear Rebecca had said whenever he’d chafed at his dependence on her family. She had always said it and he had eventually decided there was no shame in having a wealthy wife. He had spent twelve years working for the tobacco firm owned by his father-in-law, but then Rebecca had sickened after her fifth childbirth. All so sudden, it had been, and everyone bewildered while Daniel stared into the flame of his wife’s bedside candle, trying to understand. Neglecting his work and forgetting to eat or wash, he gave over the details of the children’s daily care to a fifteen-year-old girl he had brought in from the almshouse, an orphan. Her name was Ruth Boyd.

  Mother Grube fussed in the kitchen while Rebecca lay in her four-poster bed holding her husband’s sleeve. The entire Grube family kept arriving and departing without announcement, but when Rebecca died, on the twenty-first day after Joseph’s birth, they seemed to evaporate. The sisters were married, with large families of their own, and the parents were elderly. Alone in his study, while neighbours brought food to the kitchen door, Daniel wept and prayed and waited to learn what was required of him.

  “Thee shall cause scandal by keeping the servant girl in thy house,” his father admonished. “Thee must find a proper mother for thy orphans.”

  “Ruth Boyd is also an orphan,” Daniel had replied. It was a listless argument nevertheless. He had taken her from the almshouse on a bond of indenture and did not feel he could return her. He said simply, “I cannot take her back there.” He thought of the way she had run out to his wagon wearing a torn plaid dress and boots so old they were split at the sides. Her cape was unmended, her felt hat unclean.

  “And when thee is written out of the meeting for keeping an unmarried girl?” his father had asked. “Then where will thee go?”

  “I will go to Virginia.” It was a muttering, a threat. “Land of tolerance.”

  “Land of slavery.” Daniel’s father had a mason’s heavy hands.

  “And does thee know what James Madison has done there?”

  “Yes, Father. But it is only a very mild law which holds …”

  “Which holds the constitution in contempt,” the old man spluttered, “although the Virginians are intent on breeding presidents and, in fear of justified reprisal by the Federalists, are building a militia.” Daniel’s father had taken his hat off and was fanning his face. “Next they will decide to leave the Union altogether.”

  “There is religious freedom …” In Brandywine, the Elders sat in judgment, measuring each person’s response to the voice of God within. Discipline. The sense of the Meeting.

  “And no paid labour to be had,” his father had stated gloomily.

  “I shall labour for myself.” This was said with a hint of sinful pride. “Thee once quoted John Woolman to me that if the leadings of the spirit were attended to, more people would be engaged in the sweet employment of husbandry.” Daniel had gone out to his horse then, remounted, and tried to imagine himself as different from the quiet, internalized person he had always been. He would make himself worthy of farm work, although he had so far never lifted a hand in such labour. He would find rolling land and a fast-running creek. He would drive his children through the Blue Ridge Mountains and by the time they found a homeplace none of them would look back. They had already crossed the Potom
ac at Evan Watkins’s ferry. They had pushed on into Virginia, the old Commonwealth. The children would see this as adventure instead of exile.

  When they passed the first plantation, Mary pulled hard at the reins. “There will surely be someone here to suckle poor baby,” she said, thinking of Luveen, who had raised her mother and then all of them but who would not come with them to Virginia, where she could be mistaken for a slave. There’s a betta world a’comin … It was something Luveen used to sing.

  But Daniel would not see his child nourished by slavery. He turned and lifted the baby from his cradle and put him into the stepmother’s empty arms.

  They spent a cold night in a roadside field with the children huddled in the wagon and Daniel on the hard ground underneath. He heard nine-year-old Isaac ask his brother if he was afraid of going where Indians might take his scalp. He heard Mary singing Luveen’s lullaby. He heard Ruth Boyd lift the baby from his cradle in order to feed him milk from the cow that had come along on this journey as unwillingly as the rest, and he turned on his side and covered his ears and thought about Joseph fleeing out of Egypt with a young, chaste wife. For twelve years he had made himself valuable by poring over deeds and other documents and he surely knew enough about land and its value to find the right location for a new home where he could bring his family back to respectability. These were his thoughts as he lay on the ground under an ill-equipped wagon, listening to his children complain.

  Shouting from the front of the wagon the next morning, Daniel asked Ruth what books she had brought to read in the wilderness. Only a few days before, he’d watched her shifting in her broken boots and running her hand along his sideboard’s polished grain. “I have three warrants for land,” he had said that day in the dining room to the girl who was not much older than his daughter. “If we take my children to Virginia, thee could travel as a wife.” It was possible, he supposed now, looking back at her unwashed face, that she had never had a book of her own. “Thee may borrow my Aeneid,” he called back to her, “with due care to its binding.” He turned to smile, but she had lowered her head and did not see.

  But I am reading it just now, Mary wanted to say. That book was the one thing she shared now with her father. It was theirs. She stayed silent.

  They were entering that earthly system of hills and gaps called the Shenandoah Valley, said to be ablaze with rhododendron and carpeted with blue grass in the summer but just now covered with early frost and air bitter to the hands and face. Daniel thought for a moment of his house, his table, his chair and his bed, the radiant life he had lost. “I have decided this day that we will give up our ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ ” he announced, speaking only to Mary, who sat tense at his side, “so that we do not set ourselves too much apart from our new neighbours.”

  “I have given up enough,” Mary replied, throwing a meaningful glance over her shoulder now at Ruth Boyd, who had come to them as a servant and stolen their name, causing them to lose home and friends. Ruth Boyd! She’d seen her fingering linens hand-cut and embroidered by Grandmother Grube. She’d seen her fingering the silver ladling spoon. She said sternly, “Jeptha, who was a judge in Israel, did thee and thou his daughter, and she did thee and thou her father the judge.” She had left her grandparents. She had left her school. She had left her mother in the ground of Brandywine. And Luveen, never to be seen again, never to listen to troubles or joke or sing about a better world. She had been shunned by the children she’d always known. Except for Taylor Corbett, they had turned their backs on her and refused to speak. Because her father had married Ruth Boyd. A Methodist. She thought of the things her father had sold, things she had known so dearly and touched so often, even the camphor trunk with its tropical smell. She had lost everything but her brothers and the babies, one of them thankfully female, but now that she thought of it, maybe the two of them were not fairly blessed. “Thee and me,” she said, pulling Jemima, who was almost two years old, up to the front of the wagon to sit on her lap, “are we heading into a bitter world?” She liked to mix up the two words: bitter and better. She did it now on purpose, but as a baby, first learning to talk, she had been teased by her parents for saying after scoldings, “I be bitter now.” She thought of her father making up his mind to move all of them away from home and family and friends. Would a mother make such a demand? And now he wanted to give up their way of speech. “What of that?” she asked, pointing at his big Quaker hat. “Is thee going to throw it away?”

  “The People called Quakers will not put off their Hats, nor bow, nor give flattering Titles to People.” Daniel could quote the old Catechism as well as Mary. “You,” he said, turning to try out the new word on Ruth Boyd. It was a simple word, but it stung his lips. “I asked, what books did you bring?”

  Ruth bowed her head and said nothing. She sat on the floor of the wagon and her muscles ached and she longed to stretch but she could not run alongside the wagon like the other children. She was married now. All day the road had been muddy and rutted or icy and slick, and even when the children stayed under the canvas, crammed together for warmth, she sat behind the riding board in the wind. She slept with the children on the bed tick Mary put down in the wagon while Daniel lay on the ground underneath, but she was apart from the others all the same. “My mother stirs just this way,” Mary would say when they prepared a meal. Or “My mother picks those dark kernels out and throws them away.” Mary would not speak of her mother as a person who had passed on to Heaven, which Ruth knew to be fact. She would not seem to realize that Rebecca Grube Dickinson was no more part of this earthly life and that Ruth had taken her place as Daniel’s wife. In a family, everyone thought alike and ate alike and prayed alike. She had never been part of a family, but she could imagine the narrowness of belief it must require. In this one they were Quakers, so-called, who did not have a preacher and dressed in an old-fashioned way, the men in long coats and short breeches and wide-brimmed beaver hats, the women in gowns without pattern, without colour, without lace. And if any person’s thinking or praying got a little different, the different person could not send his children to the school or visit with a neighbour in the street. No one would employ him or give him trade. “Is it myself here in your house that makes trouble?” she had asked one day in Brandywine when she’d stood across from her employer. She’d wanted to say, I am nothing but what God made me, but his thin face had darkened and his eyebrows had come together and she would not defend herself. She could not read, but she could think and see! She had stood by the sideboard, running her hand along the ribbony grain while her employer had stared at her uncombed hair and soiled dress. He was sitting at the table and had one boot braced against his knee. This was the way he liked to sit and now he put his hand on his heart and laid out his plan, as if speaking to himself and never to her. “I shall travel and settle where land is nearly free.” She had listened and felt the smooth wood and looked at his face and then looked away. She had felt sorry for the widower. Then the clock in the dining room had started to chime and he’d said softly, “Thee could travel as a wife.” How could she ignore the defeat in his voice? But she could count enough to tell the hour and she counted while outside in the street a donkey was braying and upstairs Luveen was rocking a baby whose mother was cold in the grave. One … two … three … four … The clock had not finished its chiming when Ruth said, Yes.

  What had he told his children? He’d said that this road had been there since the Creation. Indians and herds of buffalo had used it. The boys sometimes listened. The newborn cried. Benjamin and Isaac got out of the wagon and ran alongside as the ancient trail pulled them up through a gap or across a creek. Fording, they climbed back in and held on and shrieked, sometimes getting soaked by icy water. On the road, they listened to Mary’s stories about a flying horse named Pegasus. Borne through space, what would the road below look like? How small would the wagons and travellers be? Pegasus was white, and he had great feathery wings.

  In Harrisonburg they stopped for a night in
the company of several Mennonite families who were going to make a settlement there. Mary said Tick’s milk should be shared and the strangers were glad of it. “Papa, please,” said the tired children. “Let us stay here.”

  But Daniel shook his head, wanting no part of another pious sect. He watched his boys run with the other children as clouds began to gather and the wives covered their cook fires with their capes. He watched the men unhitching their horses and putting them to grass. He untied Tick from the back of the wagon and let her wander at will and watched as his family melted in with the others so easily. Men he had known for years had turned away from him in Brandywine. The Elders had so quickly condemned him that the door to the Meeting House had been locked when he arrived to pray. I will go into the wilderness, he had told his father, and labour for myself. His mother had said something about locusts and honey.

  “Papa, there is a boy standing there all bare to the skin.” Mary pulled at her father’s sleeve.

  Daniel studied the naked child, who stood on the far side of a creek that ran through the stopping place. The Mennonite men had gathered in a cluster of concern near their wives.

  “He must be cold,” Mary whispered.

  “Will he scalp us?” asked Benjamin.

  Daniel climbed into the wagon and came out with a quilt. Mary bit her lip hard to stop herself from crying out that it was her mother’s best. She felt a twist in her heart that was both pleasure and pain. A moment later, her father was sloshing across the creek in his boots and putting the quilt around the boy’s thin shoulders while everyone stood still and watched. “Bring him to me,” Mary whispered, wanting the boy, but Daniel returned alone and spoke quietly to the waiting Mennonite men. “He says Shawnee are coming. He says it is dangerous for us here. He is Cherokee.”

  “Wants to be rid of us,” said one.