Bound (9 page)

T
he pattern of Alice’s life grew fixed; the homespun cloth continued to sell at Sears’s store, and the widow treated Alice as if she were become a permanent fixture at her wheel, but Alice felt only perched there like a migrating goose, watching, listening, waiting to be sent on her way with the next change in the weather.

Freeman had been in place at the widow’s for a solid spell, and the evening chatter had increased again; Alice listened each night on the stairs, expecting to hear some suspicion of her condition, but she heard nothing relating to herself at all. They talked of non-importation, and Otis, and this ship in and this one out, and the rising price of everything, until one night Freeman announced that the Verley advertisement had disappeared from the paper.

“So he found his Alice,” the widow said, “and ours is safe, then.”

The word
safe
floated up the stairs like a cruel joke. What could be safe for Alice now? Verley would ruin her life just the same whether she was returned to him or she wasn’t. The thought enraged her. Sparked her. Shook her out of a monthlong dullness. She hadn’t risked so much, traveled so far, just to crumble into ruin because of a thing not her making. Verley might yet hold the right to her labor, but he held no right to her womb, nor did his foul seed. She could, she would, do something, and she knew what to do.

Alice hadn’t spent all her fifteen years of life in ignorance. She’d heard talk, she’d seen advertisements in the papers, she knew there were ways to free herself of the thing festering in her belly; she knew about the medicines that could bring on a woman’s courses. And not only did she know of such medicines, she also knew where to get them in Satucket village. Alice had heard talk of a midwife named Granny Hall who lived along the south-side road in a cottage climbed all over with honeysuckle; with such direction, Alice believed she could find her. She must find her. She would do.

ALICE WAITED THREE
more days until the widow sent her to the smith with a broken ladle in need of repair. The day was as the days were in August, the sun hot, the road dry, the air wet, and a fine layer of dust had coated Alice’s moist skin by the time she reached the meetinghouse. The road Alice looked for stretched south from the meetinghouse, but the smith lay just beyond; Alice forced herself to push past the turn she wanted in favor of the task with which she’d been entrusted.

Alice had been to the smith before and disliked the place, not just for all the noise and soot but also for the look the smith gave her, and she disliked it more now, the pulsing fires and hot metal pushing the trapped August air to scorching. She further disliked the look of the black metal hanging everywhere: hooks, spades, hoes. Pokers. The smith was working the bellows chain as she walked in, and the roused flames lit his face as if he held the fire inside him. He looked at Alice and she thought she saw something new in the look, as if he might have guessed her condition; she left off the ladle and hurried as fast as the heat would let her back to the south-side road.

Alice hadn’t traveled the road before, and she took her time along it, pausing at every honeysuckle vine, straining her eyes for the midwife’s house as she’d heard it described. She’d walked a long way and determined she must have missed it, was already struggling to tamp the panic down, when she rounded a turn and got blinded by the gleam of sunlight off a large pond. She looked away from the glare, and there it sat across the road, a pretty little half-house nearly buried in the delicate, thickly sweet blooms. She allowed herself no pause but went straight to the door and knocked.

Everything about the woman who answered spoke of advanced age: the yellowed hair, the clawed hands, the clouded eyes. Part of Alice wanted to run away as she might run from a death ghost; part of her saw in the old woman her own life. She made her request as she had practiced. Pennyroyal. For worm. The woman too looked at her as if she knew her condition, but she turned away, retreated to a small pantry, and came back with a small cloth pouch.

She said, “Sixpence.”

Alice picked out three of the coins Freeman had given her and dropped them into the waiting hand, which closed around the money like one of the vines outside the door.

“The whole of it in the one teapot, steeped a quarter hour, no more. A cup three times a day for a week, hot or cold, and you’ll expel what ails you in a fortnight. Take it any longer than a week and you’ll start bleeding from every opening, blow up like an udder, and go comatose. Do you hear me, girl?”

Alice nodded.

The woman turned away, leaving Alice to step outside and shut the door on herself, as if she were the ghost. A sign? Alice didn’t care. She held her first hope in many months in her hand.

ALICE BREWED UP
her tea the first chance she found herself alone at the fire and drank one cup down in long, hot gulps; the rest she poured into a borrowed jug and took it cold and slimy where she could in the privacy of her room. She dosed herself just as instructed, three times a day every day for the week, and then she waited. Over the next several weeks she experienced a few days of sharp cramps, but there appeared no sign on her sheets or shift.

OFTEN WHEN ALICE
woke, before her condition left its own sleep state, before her stomach had begun to unsettle, she forgot the thing that grew in her. She smelled the rough salt air and heard the chuckling water and the old joy filled her; then her bile rose, and as she remembered, her spirits fell like an overtipped scale. The breakfast bread eased her; dinner unsettled her again; by supper she felt near to fine and might think the pennyroyal had at last set to work in her. She would go to bed and press and pound on her belly in hope of dislodging what grew there; in the morning she went out to the necessary house and jumped violently up and down. Nothing happened. To Alice’s amazement, life went on around her as before. Or almost as before.

One day the boy came to return the Otis pamphlet and surprised Alice by opening it up and reading back a passage to Freeman.

“Otis says here, sir, ‘Let Parliament lay what burdens they please on us, it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve us.’”

“Well, now, yes, they may make such
laws
as they please, but they may not tax us without our being represented in that body. Nor can Parliament alter a law of God, or one of human conscience, or logic.”

The logic of this escaped Alice, as she believed it escaped the boy; his eyes lifted and met hers in matching puzzlement, although he nodded at Freeman in agreement and accepted another book in exchange for the pamphlet:
The History of the Pleas of the Crown
by Matthew Hale.

Some time after the boy had left with his book Alice went outside to bring in a piece of shirting that had been bleaching in the sun and was startled when the boy stepped silently out of the woodlot like one of the foxes that lived there. He came up and helped her collect the cloth but said nothing, as usual.

“Do you make out all these books Mr. Freeman gives you?” Alice asked by way of easing him, and was startled a second time by his laugh: deep, like a man’s; boisterous, like a boy’s.

“Not by half,” he said. “Do you think I might take it as flattery that he thinks I should?”

“Oh, yes, indeed.”

He grinned, still holding his end of cloth. After a time he said, “Do you like living with my grandmother?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I liked it when I lived with her.”

Alice looked anew at the boy. Was it possible that here lay the answers to the questions Alice hadn’t dared to ask the widow? She said, “You lived with your grandmother?”

The boy began to talk, slowly at first, picking his way, growing more sure-footed as he went, the tale a patchy thing one person told another when he thought the biggest puzzle pieces were already laid down. A time or two Alice asked a question, but she didn’t risk too many; the boy seemed to think her in a certain degree of confidence, which she didn’t like to disprove. Out of the jumble Alice learned that the widow’s husband had drowned trying to drive a pod of whales onto the shore in a storm, that the widow had lived with the boy’s father and stepmother, the widow’s daughter, until a disagreement drove the widow to claim her dower right and return to her husband’s home, where she now lived. While making candles one day her dress had caught fire, and she would have died, the boy said, if there had been no one at hand to beat out the flaming cloth and carry her to safety. There he stopped, as if contemplating the way life turned, or didn’t turn.

“My father doesn’t allow any of us to visit here,” the boy said after a time, his face coloring in what Alice took to be half-embarrassment at the behavior of his relations, and half-pride at his own courage in defying them, but it also seemed to remind him of a limit beyond which he dared not travel. He stepped in to push his end of the cloth into Alice’s arms, stepped back. “I must go.”

Alice was so intent on folding up the cloth, so sure the boy had made the turn for home, that when he changed direction and lurched at her, reached for her, she cried out in alarm.

The boy stopped as he was, eyes wide.

The door to the house opened; Freeman stepped out into the yard. “Here, now, what goes on there?”

Alice turned and dashed past him into the house, all of her—knees, stomach, heart, hands—trembling.

THAT NIGHT ALICE
lay awake in a new kind of turmoil. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the boy’s hands reaching for her, couldn’t see the hands without seeing Verley, smiling behind them. But the boy hadn’t been smiling, and he had looked so shocked at her outcry. But what did it matter how he’d looked? It would be with him as it was with Verley; he would look at her as he pleased, and he would have done with her as he pleased if Freeman hadn’t come out and disrupted them.

Freeman.

How quickly, now, he had gone from supposed enemy to proven savior! In truth, how unfair she had been to think he ever meant any harm to her. Hadn’t he come to her aid at Boston? Hadn’t he admitted he no longer wished to send her to the constable? She must add to his credit too the story the boy had told her. Alice imagined the widow in flames and crying out as Alice had cried out; she imagined Freeman leaping up from his chair and beating out the flames with a blanket or bed rug or perhaps even his own jacket. Yes, it would be his own jacket, Alice decided. He would beat out the flames and wrap the widow gently in a clean, white sheet, as clean and white as the handkerchief he’d handed Alice at Boston, and gently, gently, carry her to safety.

A
lice spun, and snuck pieces of bread to calm her stomach, and spun, until the garden came into its fullest season. Alice helped the widow pick the fruits and vegetables, but their textile manufacture could ill spare her for the rest; she returned to the wheel and left the widow to the preserving. The widow continued to weave in the early morning to get the most of the east light, but after putting up and serving dinner she stayed confined to the kitchen duties.

When the widow finished off nine yards of check, she sent Alice to Sears’s store while she drew in the web for the dimity. All the long walk to the store Alice looked out for the boy Nate; just as she passed his house by the mill she heard the clap of a door and whirled around, but it was his stepmother, the widow’s daughter, who stepped through it. She caught up to Alice just outside of the store and fingered Alice’s cloth.

“You made this?”

“The Widow Berry wove it, madam.”

“She can manage a loom?”

“Very well, madam.”

Alice stepped ahead of the woman into the store and carried her cloth to the counter.

Sears said, “How much?”

Alice answered as the widow had instructed: “Four pounds six shillings.”

Sears counted out the money and handed it to her.

Alice had a few things to purchase for the widow—a pint of salt, some shoe bindings, an ounce of indigo—when she approached the counter she saw the widow’s daughter with the length of check in her arms and heard her ask Sears to put it on her husband’s account, but to please mark it as a West India calico.

By the time Alice finished her own purchasing and left the store, Mehitable Clarke had disappeared; the boy was nowhere. Alice had gone three-quarters of the route home when she felt it like the edges of a storm; she turned to see him jogging down the road toward her. She clutched her purchases and ran.

WHEN ALICE TIPPED
the money into the widow’s hand it brought something to life in the woman’s face that Alice had missed before, something that to Alice’s mind made her all the more handsome. The widow went to the book, made a mark in it, and said, “I believe we might start you on a wage, now.” They agreed that after Alice’s keep and care were subtracted she was to be paid sixpence a day; the widow handed her the coins and made a note in the ledger.

Alice carried the coins up the stairs and added them to the others that lay in the bottom of the cloth pouch that had once held the pennyroyal; she bounced the pouch in her hand, taking the weight of it, wondering if the feel of the money had changed her look, too, as it had the widow’s. She went back down by the front stairs and through the hall to check her face in the small mirror that hung there.

If the money had changed Alice, it hadn’t changed her for the better: her eyes had grown hollow and dark, her cheeks pale and damp, her lips red and swollen. Besides the changes in her face her breasts swelled out the top of her bodice, her arms had plumped, her waist had straightened. It seemed to her that her condition must be plain to all, but as she listened to the widow and Freeman that night from her spot on the stairs she heard no mention of herself anywhere. Tax, trade, Otis, took up all.

THE BOY CAME
the next day. While he stood in supposed attention on Freeman he dashed his eyes at Alice so often he appeared to have a tic; when Freeman left the room to get a pamphlet or book or whatever it was he wished to feed the boy next the boy stepped closer to Alice and dropped his voice low. “Why do you run from me?”

“I don’t want you near me.”

“Why not? What have I done?”

“I don’t want you touching me.”

The boy blinked once, twice, three times. He said, “Very well, then I won’t.” He held up his hands for Alice to see, jammed them into his pockets, and said, “Now will you talk to me?”

Freeman returned; he studied the pair standing by the wheel; he would know there was something wrong with it; he beckoned the boy away from her corner.

ALICE NEXT SAW
Nate Clarke at meeting, coming out of his family’s pew, looking up and spying Alice in the women’s gallery. He made a great display of hiding his hands in his pockets, lifting his eyebrows, and wagging his elbows at her; there was something so comical in the pantomime, like an angry chicken flapping around in the yard, that the corners of Alice’s mouth lifted, even as her face heated. Nate grinned back, a looser, freer thing than she’d yet seen in him, but he didn’t remove his hands from his pockets.

THAT NIGHT THE
talk Alice overheard from her spot on the stairs seemed stuck again on politics—Freeman’s Otis-says-this, Otis-says-that, the widow’s how-this, why-that—and Alice came near to dozing until she realized that somehow the talk had turned to frolicks. The Cobbs planned a watermeloning party at the midweek and had asked Freeman to pass an invitation to the widow; the widow had declined it. The discussion grew sharp.

“You might find yourself entertained.”

“I might find myself avoided like a pest house.”

“By some, perhaps—”

“By any who think like my son or think like the reverend. Too many for my liking.”

“You might turn them.”

“Into what, hypocrites? I don’t care to go, Mr. Freeman. You might take the girl, though. She looks dispirited, and I can’t make out the cause.”

“I can make it out well enough. Nate’s been bothering her. I told him to leave her be.”

“Did you, now! You can’t think he’d harm her.”

Silence. “As to this frolick—”

“I’m quite done with this frolick. Take Alice and your own advice: leave me be.”

FREEMAN AND ALICE
left the house together and walked along the landing road toward the water until it swung parallel to the shore along the path that Alice and Freeman took to meeting. They fell in behind several Myricks and a Howe making their way in the same direction; they turned in at the Cobb farm, where nearly a dozen young people milled around a pair of carts at the edge of the watermelon field. Along the far side of the field sat a long board set on stumps and covered with a cloth, the cloth covered with baskets like the one the widow had sent with Alice that held a full-to-brimming pie dish; at the farthest end sat a huge cask, around which a group of men had already congregated. Alice took her basket to one end of the table while Freeman veered toward the other; Alice placed her basket and looked around. She spied a handful of mulatto servants among the women setting up food, and a knot of young people her age around the carts; to which group did she belong? Freeman came up behind and pointed her toward the carts. He said, “The old folk may shirk; you, my dear, must work for your supper.”

Alice moved nearer the young group, but not into it. She recognized Nate’s sisters, Jane and Bethiah, but didn’t see Nate. She knew most of the rest of the group from seeing them around the village, but she felt no ease at the thought of joining them. She stood back and watched as two boys took up the cart handles and the group moved off down the rows, soon pairing up, or so it seemed, into boy-girl, boy-girl. The straight-backed Jane stood beside a young man; Joseph? James? Like her brother, she seemed to have little to say to him.

The melons were tweaked from their vines and hefted into the cart with much jostling and shouting and giggling all around. Alice felt suddenly old. She turned to go, and there was Nate. He said, “Will you partner with me if I promise to keep a melon between?”

Alice flushed. Nate grinned. It was the second time she’d seen such an easy display in him, and both times it had occurred in answer to her own discomposure. Did he only grow free as she shrank tighter? Was this the Verley in him? Or did he only wish to jolly her into a state of greater ease? But why should he want her easy with him? Or need she ask that question? But Nate had already stepped off toward the field, as if unconcerned whether she followed him or she didn’t. And after all, what harm could he do with all these people around them, with Freeman yet in hailing distance?

Alice trailed after Nate. He turned to make sure she came, and then set off down one of the emptier rows, finding his way to a plump melon, twisting it free, handing it to her to settle in the cart. They continued. After a time a strip of sweat appeared down the middle of Nate’s shirt, and his hair damped around the edges; he had the hard work of stooping and lifting. They finished the row and began another. More than once someone cast a curious eye at them; here and there a boy or girl would call out to Nate and he would answer back; but after a time even that died down, leaving Alice and Nate a quiet core at the center of the noise all around.

The day seemed timed almost to the last melon—the carts returned from the rows just as the sky had begun to shut down. The pickers rolled up to the tables with the carts, the first melons were split open, the bonfire was lit; wedges of cold meat pie, chunks of dripping pink fruit, and mugs of beer or cider were handed around. The pickers dropped into the grass around the fire, not too close to the heat, or the light—most of the pairings of earlier in the day had held.

Nate found Alice a spot on a nearby log, just outside the inner circle of young people. They ate in silence for a time; when Nate got up to refresh his cider mug Alice looked around. As soon as the small children had finished their food they’d leaped up and begun a kind of race around the fire; already couples here and there had snuck off into the darker reaches, some girls being dragged laughing, some doing the dragging, but all looking happy enough to go along. Alice saw Jane Clarke’s young man, but she didn’t see Jane, either within the circle or without; had she gone home? Or had she gone off into the dark with the other one? Alice felt oddly curious to know whether that straight spine had bent itself into the grass or no. She looked for Nate and saw that his younger sister had cut him off on his way back, hanging on his elbow again, trying to pull him into the race; she pestered until he tickled her off. Behind him, his cask-shaped father watched him all the way back to the log.

As Nate settled himself beside her Alice said, “Your father doesn’t like where you sit.”

“He doesn’t like many things,” Nate said. “But he likes not liking things. Were I to sit somewhere else it would make a dull evening for him.”

Alice turned from watching the father to watching the son. “What did your father and grandmother disagree about?”

“As my grandfather’s nearest male heir my father inherited title to the house my grandmother lives in. My grandmother held dower right to a third of the house as long as she remained widowed. My father wanted to sell the house, but she wouldn’t give up her third.”

“Couldn’t the law resolve it?”

“It resolved it. Mr. Freeman resolved it. She received life use of the house entire in exchange for releasing my father from the additional charge of her keep and care.”

“And yet they remain strange?”

“We were allowed to visit at first, until…until some other troubles came along.”

“Your stepmother, the widow’s daughter, even she doesn’t visit now.”

“She obeys my father’s law. She doesn’t ask herself why he makes it and by what right.”

Maybe not, thought Alice, but she purchased the widow’s cloth.

They fell silent, amplifying the growing noise around: the women picking up the empty plates and calling to their younger children, the men lifting their voices in reverse proportion to the lowering of the cider in the cask, the oldest Myrick boy spitting watermelon seeds at the youngest Winslow girl, the Winslow girl running, and then not running, the boy picking her up and whirling, stumbling—by accident or design—to the ground.

Alice got to her feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.” She set off in the direction of the road. Nate fell in step beside her, hands in pockets, but she didn’t know whether that was by accident or design either.

She said, “You’d best stay with your friends.”

“They’re naught but a bunch of children. They don’t have any idea. Not a single idea. I don’t care a thing about them. If I stayed I’d talk to Mr. Freeman.”

“You admire him so greatly, then?”

“I admire him above all.” Nate looked down at Alice. “But I wouldn’t talk to him if you stayed. If you stayed I’d talk to you.”

“And what if I’d leaped up to play with the children, as you call them?”

“You wouldn’t. I saw how you watched them. I see how you watch Mr. Freeman when he talks of politics. You have a seriousness in you that matches mine. That’s why I like you, Alice.”

The silence fell down, thick with Nate’s words, thick with the thoughts it stirred in Alice. He liked her. Or he liked the girl he thought she was. When he found out about the bastard she carried it would be the end of any liking; he wouldn’t wish to be seen within ten miles of her. But what did Alice care? What could this boy mean to the life that lay ahead of her?

For one dream minute Alice thought of another kind of life, of herself as a girl like the ones at the frolick, who might creep out into the dark with such a boy as this and welcome his touch on her. But then what? Oh, she knew well enough! No matter his cute pantomimes of chickens, once she let him near there would be no hands in pockets unless they were her pockets; he would touch what he wished to touch, put himself where he wished to put himself, and put her in even greater trouble. There Alice paused to correct herself; she could lie down in the road with the boy this minute and he couldn’t put her in any greater trouble than she already was; she couldn’t be twice got with child. Of course she might put him in trouble if his father chose to walk home by the same route and caught them thrashing in the dust, but how great a trouble would that be compared to hers? Unless she tried to put her unborn child to him…

Alice paused in her thinking again, a queer, cold thrill shooting through her. What if she did lie with this boy this minute? What if she did put her unborn child to him? The cold in her began to heat, her face to burn. Oh, so shameful a thing! But what if…what if!