The Invention of Wings(123)

            When I finally set her feet in the basin, I asked, “What happened to your teeth?”

            “They fell out one day,” she said.

            Sky made a sound like hmmmf. She said, “More like they got knocked out.”

            “You don’t need to be talking, you tell too many tales,” mauma told her.

            The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever knew. Before the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things. Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time set fire to the overseer’s privy house.

            Over in the corner, Sky wouldn’t let go of the story about mauma’s teeth. “It happen the second time we run. The overseer say, if she do it again, she be easy to spot with her teeth gone. He took a hammer—”

            “Hush up!” mauma cried.

            I squatted down and stared her in the eyes. “Don’t you spare me. I’ve seen my share. I know what the world is.”





Sarah


            Israel came to call on me wearing a short, freshly grown Quaker beard. We were seated side by side on the divan in the Motts’ parlor, and he stroked the whiskers constantly as he talked about the cost of wholesale wool and the marvels of the weather. The beard was thick as velvet brush-fringe and peppered with gray. He looked handsomer, sager, like a new incarnation of himself.

            When I’d returned to Philadelphia after my disastrous attempt to resume life in Charleston, I’d rented a room in the home of Lucretia Mott, determined to make some kind of life for myself, and I suppose I’d done that. Twice weekly, I traveled to Green Hill to tutor Becky, though my old foe, Catherine, had recently informed me that my little protégée would be going away to school next year and my tutoring would end at the first of the summer. If I was to stay useful, I would have to seek out another Quaker family in need of a teacher, but as yet, I hadn’t made the effort. Catherine was kinder to me now, though she still drew herself up tight as a bud when she saw Israel smile at me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the Motts’ parlor.

            I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded on this endless plateau of friendship. One heard all sorts of rumors about it. That Israel’s two eldest sons opposed his remarriage, not on general principle, mind you, but specifically to me. That he’d promised Rebecca on her deathbed he would love no one but her. That some of the elders had counseled him against taking a wife for reasons that ranged from his unreadiness to my unprovenness. I was not, after all, a birthright Quaker. In Charleston, it was being born into the planter class that mattered, here it was the Quakers. Some things were the same everywhere. “You’re the most patient of women,” Israel had told me once. It didn’t strike me as much of a virtue.

            Today, except for the newness of his beard, Israel’s visit gradually began to seem like all the rest. I twiddled with my napkin as he talked about merino sheep farms and wool dyes. There was the clink of teacups when the silence came, children’s voices overhead mingled with racing footsteps on creaking floors, and then, abruptly, without preface, he announced, “My son Israel is getting married.”

            The way he said it, quiet and apologetic, embarrassed me.

            “. . . Israel? . . . Little Israel?”

            “He’s not so little now. He’s twenty-two.” He sighed, as if something had passed him by, and I wondered absurdly if there was a Quaker law forbidding fathers to marry after their sons. I wondered if the beard was not so much a new incarnation as a concession.

            When it was time to say goodbye, he took my hand and pressed it against the dark whorls of hair on his cheek. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, I felt he was about to say something. I lifted my brows. But then, releasing my hand, he rose from the divan and whatever errant thought had wriggled from his heart returned to it, repentant and undeclared.