Bronwyn Williams - Longshadow's Woman

“You might have noticed, I’ve been raking up leaves and piling them up out behind the chicken house.” She had fallen into the habit of conversing with him as if he were an ordinary, reasonably intelligent man. He had already learned two things about her. She was kind-hearted…and she was lonely. “Emma says if I can get me some oyster shells and dump them on the heap and then set it afire with some trash wood on top, it’ll make the sweetest kind of fertilizer. She says the land hereabouts is sour. It needs shelling, if I can find a Currituck fisherman willing to trade me a load of shells for corn or a few jars of wild honey.”

She chattered the way he sometimes talked to his horses, only he rarely used words. His horses understood his thoughts, and he theirs. It was a gift he’d been given as if to make up for being two halves and never a whole.

Soon he must leave, he promised himself, not for the first time. The hardest work was finished. She would use a planting stick in the month of the dogwood, and her corn would flourish. The land was rich, some of it was boggy, but all was fertile. He had read books on such matters once he had decided what he would do with his life.

“Lordy, I’m starvin’, aren’t you?” she said, mopping her damp, sunburned face.

“Lordy,” Jonah echoed solemnly, wondering why it was the white man called Indians redskins, when it was the white men themselves who turned red as his old Koitsenga sash from sunlight and whiskey. His own skin was more the color of a freshly tanned hide. Sun only deepened the color. Whiskey, he never touched, having seen what it did to his shipmates and too many of his own people.

They had taken to sharing the evening meal. She had not allowed him inside her house again since treating his ankles, but when she came outside to lock up her chickens and bring him his supper, she would often bring her own and join him, sitting on a plank bench outside the barn while he squatted on the ground nearby. Now and then she would speak, and he would nod and grunt in response, or lift his shoulders as if he didn’t understand, and she would shake her head and sigh her impatience with him. He had come to enjoy the game, even though he was beginning to feel guilty, yet how could he break the silence now? It had gone on too long. She would be angry with him for tricking her.

Angry enough to shoot him? He was all but certain the rifle was not loaded. Even loaded, it wasn’t much of a threat, for the barrel was so heavy she could hardly support it with her one good hand. She might shoot out one of her precious glass windows, but he no longer feared she would kill him, no matter what he did.

So why didn’t he simply walk away?

Jonah couldn’t answer. It was not the accommodations. The barracks in St. Augustine had been newer, cleaner and more comfortable, except for the mosquitoes. The food she provided, usually beans, sometimes greens, sometimes only cornbread soaked with bacon grease or honey, and on special occasions, a strip of fried side meat, was obviously the best she could offer, for she ate the same thing. It was filling and satisfying, but he would have enjoyed a meal of buffalo or venison, or even fish.

“Moon. See, coming up over yonder woods? It’s called a moon.”

The woman was not an idiot. Why did she insist on sounding like one?

But he knew why, of course. It was because she thought he had less intelligence than one of those stumps he had cut free of the earth and burned. It made him angry, and that very anger was a reminder that he had stayed too long. He had given the woman her money’s worth. The sooner he retrieved his papers, the sooner he could clear his name and get back to his own land.

And perhaps someday before he was too old, the gods willing, he could find a woman of his own. Another outcast, perhaps, who would not look down on him for his mixed blood.

The Adams woman had not gone to a church-house since he had been with her, yet he knew she had a day of the week when work was forbidden. A day to rest, according to the Jesus Rules. She had used her last Rest Day to pull up the withered bean vines outside her door and scrub the privy. While she raked the dirt around her house, with the chickens following after to peck at any bugs uncovered, Jonah had worked on repairing the barn and enlarging the fenced paddock. Then he had propped his feet on a tussock under a giant oak tree and allowed the warm, sweet air to flow over his body. Freedom had a taste—a flavor and a scent all its own.

Increasingly worried about his horses, Jonah knew he could not wait much longer. The mystery was why he had waited this long. He made up his mind to go on her next Jesus Day. He had fallen out of the habit of running since his imprisonment and his sailing days, but his ankles were nearly healed now. He was fairly certain he could run at least half a day, maybe longer, without needing to stop. He could take the mule, but stealing a mule was a hanging offense.

On the other hand, he would rather hang for something he did than for something he didn’t. Either way, he concluded, he would be back with his papers before she brought his supper.

When her Jesus Day came around, the woman was up before sunrise, harnessing Sorry to the cart. She set a napkin-covered basket in the cart, handed him a plate of bread, side meat and greens, and explained that she was going to visit her friend. “I’m going to trust you,” she said, her small, pink face so earnest he wanted to take it between his hands and reassure her. “I’m not going to lock you up, because I can’t think of a way to do it without using those miserable old irons, and I wouldn’t do that to a mad dog. But I cooked you some greens last night because a body needs greens to stay healthy, and I’ll bring back a jar of Emma’s peach preserves. You can have that to look forward to.”

Wearing a different dress from the one she wore every day—a faded yellow that bared her arms and throat, she stared at him as if waiting for a response.

He was tempted. By Daw-k’hee, the good mother earth, he was tempted.

But he only nodded his agreement. Watching her drive away a few minutes later, he set aside his conflicted feelings and concentrated on fixing directions in his mind. He had noted certain landmarks on his way north from the jailhouse. His sense of direction was well honed, both from instinct and from experience, but he had never traveled from this place to his own land. Asking directions would be risky.

Carrie’s hand was not healing. “Honey, I’m going to have to open it up again,” the old woman said, shaking her head. Carrie knew the procedure. Dreaded it like a bad toothache, but she knew it had to be done. So she washed Emma’s butcher knife, sharpened it on the stone, then held it in the candle flame until the edge glowed red.

She cried. Couldn’t help herself, and with Emma, she didn’t even try to pretend. She cried not only from the pain, but for what her life had become, for what it had been before, which was both better and worse—and for the glimpse of something more wonderful than anything she could have imagined.

Something she would never have.

While she sat with the basin on her lap, allowing the blood and pus to flow from her ragged hatchet wound, she told the old woman about her prisoner. “I know it’s only because I’m there alone so much, but it’s almost like having another friend. I don’t even know his name, but he’s got the clearest gray eyes. I’ve seen him smile, mostly when he doesn’t know I’m watching. And Emma, he’s got the whitest teeth.”

“Mmm-hmm. A woman can’t help but think, as long as that’s as far as it goes.” It was clearly a warning, and Carrie took it in the spirit in which it had been offered. Her own mother would have probably done the same.