“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”
A bell rang down below and the jaws on the wheel stopped chewing. The overseers loosed the people’s wrists and they climbed down a ladder to the floor. Some of them were so used-up they had to be dragged off.
The overseer unlocked Mr. Vesey from the floor ring. “Get on your feet. It’s your turn.”
Sarah
Handful’s mangled foot was propped on a pillow, and Aunt-Sister was laying a plantain leaf across the wound. From the smell that drifted in the air, I knew her injury had been freshly plastered with potash and vinegar.
“Miss Sarah’s here now,” Aunt-Sister said. Handful’s head rolled side to side on the mattress, but her eyes stayed closed. She’d been heavily sedated with laudanum, the apothecary already come and gone.
I blinked to keep tears away—it was the sight of her lying there maimed, but some of my anguish came from guilt. I didn’t know she’d been arrested, that Mother had decided to let her suffer the consequences in the Work House. I hadn’t even missed Handful’s presence. This would never have happened if I hadn’t returned Handful’s ownership to Mother. I’d known Handful would be worse off with her, and I’d given her back anyway. That awful self-righteousness of mine.
Sabe had brought Handful home in the carriage while I’d been away at Bible study. Bible study. I felt shame to think of myself, probing verses in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians—Though I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing.
I forced myself to look across the bed at Aunt-Sister. “How bad is it?”
She answered by peeling back the green leaf so I could see for myself. Handful’s foot was twisted inward at an unnatural angle and there was a gash running from her ankle to the small toe, exposing raw flesh. A row of bright blood beaded through the poultice. Aunt-Sister dabbed it with a towel before smoothing the leaf back in position.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
“They put her on the treadmill, say she fell off and her foot went under the wheel.”
A sketch of the newly installed monstrosity had appeared in the Mercury recently with the caption, A More Resourceful Reprimand. The article speculated it would earn five hundred dollars profit for the city the first year.
“The apothecary say the foot ain’t broken,” Aunt-Sister said. “The cords that hold the bones are torn up, and she gon be cripple now, I can tell from looking at it.”
Handful moaned, then muttered something that came out slurred and indistinguishable. I took her hand in mine, startled by how slight it felt, wondering how her foot hadn’t crumbled to dust. She looked small lying there, but she was no longer childlike. Her hair was cut ragged an inch from her head. Little sags drooped beneath her eyes. Her forehead was pleated with frown-lines. She’d aged into a tiny crone.
Her lids fluttered, but didn’t open, as she attempted again to speak. I bent close to her lips.
“Go away,” she hissed. “Go. Away.”
Later I would tell myself her mind was addled with opiates. She couldn’t have known what she was saying. Or perhaps she’d been referring to her own desire to go away.
Handful didn’t leave her room for ten days. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe carried her meals and tended her foot, and Goodis always seemed to linger by the back steps, waiting for news, but I stayed away, fearing her words had been for me after all.
The ban on Father’s study had never been lifted and I rarely set foot there, but while Handful convalesced, I slipped in and took two books—Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a sea adventure I thought she would especially like—and left them at her door, knocking and hurrying away.