The Invention of Wings(121)

            “Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.

            Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.

            Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”

            Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.

            “She’s my sister,” I said.

            The room went silent.

            “Your sister?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”

            Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them see to her.”

            When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her old smile. She had a big ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”

            “I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”

            “All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.

            She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?”

            “I took a bad fall,” I whispered.

            Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of water by the door.

            The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way they floated down. Mauma’s here. The wonder of it hadn’t broken through to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do. She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her skin.

            When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash your feet.”

            She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her tongue poking out. She couldn’t be but thirteen. My sister.

            I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get here?”

            She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure. Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the fifth time we run, so we learn which-a-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”

            “Wait now. You and mauma ran off four times before this and got caught every time?”

            She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to the Combahee River. Another time to the Edisto.”

            I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.