On the morning Handful emerged, we Grimkés were having breakfast in the dining room. There were only four children who hadn’t yet married or gone off to school: Charles, Henry, Nina, and of course myself, the red-headed maiden aunt of the family. Mother was seated at the head of the table with the hinged silk screen directly behind her, its hand-painted jasmine all but haloing her head. She turned to the window, and I saw her mouth part in surprise. There was Handful. She was crossing the work yard toward the oak, using a wooden cane too tall for her. She maneuvered awkwardly, thrusting herself forward, dragging her right foot.
“She’s walking!” cried Nina.
I pushed back my chair and left the table with Nina chasing after me.
“You’re not excused!” Mother called.
We didn’t so much as turn our heads in her direction.
Handful stood beneath the budding tree on a patch of emerald moss. There were drag marks in the dirt from her foot, and I found myself stepping over them as if they were sacrosanct. As we approached, she began to wind fresh red thread around the trunk. I couldn’t imagine what this odd practice meant. It’d been going on, though, for years.
Nina and I waited while she pulled a pair of shears from her pocket and cut away the faded old thread. Several pink strands clung to the bark, and as she plucked at them, her cane slipped and she grabbed the tree to catch herself.
Nina picked up the cane and handed it to her. “Does it hurt?”
Handful looked past Nina at me. “Not all that much now.”
Nina squatted unselfconsciously to inspect the way Handful’s foot pigeoned inward, the odd hump that had formed across the top of it, how she’d fitted a shoe over it by trimming the opening and leaving off the lace.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I read what I could of the books you brought. They gave me something to do beside lay there.”
“Can I touch your foot?” Nina asked.
“Nina,” I said, then suddenly understood—here was the nightmare she’d dreamed about since she was a child, here was the hidden horror of the Work House.
Maybe Handful understood, too, her need to confront it. “I don’t mind,” she said.
Nina traced her finger along a crusting scar that flamed across Handful’s skin. Silence jelled around us, and I looked up at the leaves feathering on the branches like little ferns. I could feel Handful looking at me.
“Is there anything you need?” I asked.
She laughed. “There anything I need? Well, let’s see now.” Her eyes were hard as glass, burning yellow.
She’d borne a cruelty I couldn’t imagine, and she’d come through it scathed, the scar much deeper than her disfigured foot. What I’d heard in her ruthless laugh was a kind of radicalizing. She seemed suddenly dangerous, the way her mother had been dangerous. But Handful was more considering and methodical than her mother ever was, and warier, too, which made it more worrying. A wave of prescience washed over me, a hint of darkness coming, and then it was gone. I said to her, “I just meant—”
“I know what it is you meant,” she said, and her tone had mellowed. The anger in her face left, and I thought for a moment she might cry, a sight I’d never witnessed, not even when her mother disappeared.
Instead, she turned and made her way toward the kitchen house, her body listing heavily to the left. The determination in her pained me almost as much as her lameness, and it wasn’t until Nina wrapped her arm around my waist and tugged that I realized I was listing with her.