We Hope for Better Things Page 12

  “Holler when the coffee’s done, Mama,” William said as the screen door closed behind him.

  The setting sun was warm, the slight breeze was cool, and the night was young. Nora settled herself in a creaky wicker chair and folded her arms across her stomach. She could make out movement and voices in the shadows of other porches. A laugh echoed down the street.

  “I thought you’d want to sit on the swing.” William settled himself on one end of the faded green swing hanging from the rafters. He patted the spot next to him and Nora joined him. Encircled by his arm, she felt more relaxed than she had in a very long time. In less than a minute, her eyes were closed, her head rested upon his shoulder, and their breathing fell into sync with the gentle movement of the swing.

  The sudden sound of footfalls tearing up the front porch steps startled Nora to attention.

  “J.J. here?” The voice was raspy and breathless.

  “He’s inside, Arnold,” William said.

  Arnold rapped at the door. “J.J.!”

  “Just go on inside.”

  The boy disappeared into the house. Nora’s heartbeat was just returning to normal when another voice drifted out of the shadows beyond the yew bushes.

  “Will Rich, how you been?”

  William extracted himself from Nora, leaving her side suddenly cold and empty. “Not bad, Derek. You?”

  The men exchanged a handshake. Then Derek looked toward the swing.

  “This is Nora,” William said.

  Nora stood and held out her hand.

  Derek shook it, but he was looking at William. “You must be outta your mind,” he said.

  “Oh?” William said. “And why’s that?”

  “You gonna get yourself in a heap a trouble, Will Rich. And not just you.”

  Nora shrank back a step, but William gripped her arm and pulled her to his side. “No trouble,” he said.

  “You watch,” Derek said. “You watch. You shouldn’t be messing around with no white girl.”

  “My girl ain’t none of your concern.”

  Nora’s tight muscles loosened a little.

  “Your girl is everyone’s concern,” Derek said. “Your girl is gonna get someone killed.”

  “Derek!” Mrs. Rich said as she came out the front door with the coffee tray. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. How’s your mother?”

  Derek’s no-nonsense demeanor changed instantly as he took the tray from her hands, set it down on a wicker table, and kissed her on the cheek. “She’s good, she’s good. She was asking about you the other day.”

  “I have to get up to see her soon. So busy with work, you know.”

  “I know it,” he said cheerfully.

  “Give her my love.”

  “Will do, will do.”

  Mrs. Rich went back into the house, and the smile melted from Derek’s face. He leaned in toward William. “Listen, man. I’m telling you this as a friend. You playin’ with fire.”

  At that moment, Arnold and J.J. burst through the door and hurried down the stairs.

  “J.J.!” Bianca shouted from the house. “Get back in here!”

  But the boys were gone. Derek drifted off into the night in the direction Arnold and J.J. had run.

  William squeezed Nora’s shoulders and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Never mind that.” He stirred cream and sugar into Nora’s coffee, and they sipped in tension-laden silence.

  “You called me your girl,” Nora finally said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I like that.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded behind her mug. Nora followed that “my girl” a few steps down the road. Dates, kisses, professions of love. Then she stopped. Where did they go from there? The path into the future with someone like Michael Kresge was wide, well marked, and lined with well-wishers. The path with William Rich was a gauntlet.

  “Should I stop coming here?” Nora said. “I mean, I don’t want to make trouble.”

  William took a moment to think. “Derek’s just watching out for me like a good friend should. In this neighborhood, the only white people you see are cops and landlords and people from the bank who are repossessing your car. He thinks it’s safer to stay separate. I get where he’s coming from.” He took a long gulp of coffee. “I just don’t think separate is the answer.”

  “What is the answer?”

  “If anyone knew that, don’t you think we’d a tried it by now?” William put his mug down on the tray and took her hand in his. “Actually, I think this here is the answer.”

  Nora smiled at him. “That’s easy to say.”

  “Folks just need to see it work.”

  He put a warm hand to her face, the same hand on which she had written her name and phone number two months before. He leaned in. She met him halfway. When their lips touched, nothing else mattered.

  “I want it to work,” she said when the kiss ended.

  “Well, that’s a start then.”

  eighteen

  Lapeer County, July 1863

  Mary stood at the door of her bedchamber and assessed the space. There would be room on her bed for Bridget, but didn’t the girl warrant her own? Perhaps George could make something for her. Now that the north chamber slept three men and the smallest one had to accommodate the entire Dixon family, the house was getting crowded and concessions would have to be made.

  Where they kept coming from was anyone’s guess. Mary began to suspect that Nathaniel was directing people her way. It would be just like him to tell liberated slaves trailing the Union Army that they would find shelter and provision at the house he had so blithely abandoned.

  After that first lesson with paper and ink, George had written Mary a letter most days. Mary kept each one safely tucked away, but the last one she had kept on her bedside table. She’d read it a dozen times and still wondered what to do with it. At the very bottom of the page, after his beautiful signature, George had added a postscript requesting a letter in response. It had now been a week with no further letters, and Mary realized with some consternation that if she did not respond to his request, he may not write her again. He certainly no longer needed the practice.

  She considered putting her request for help with the sleeping space problem in a letter. But George had become a good friend in addition to a good farmhand, and his request warranted a more personal response than a work order. Indeed, Mary could think of page upon page of things she should like to tell him—how she could not have survived without his help, how she appreciated his attention to every detail of the household, how she believed him to be the most extraordinary and courageous man she had ever met. But to put pen to such personal musings, and to a man not her husband? The very thought of it shamed her.

  She heard footsteps behind her and turned to find George tucking in a clean shirt as he walked out of the bedroom he shared with Jacob and Thomas.

  He nodded her way. “Morning, Mrs. Balsam.”

  “Good morning, George. I wonder if I might ask a favor of you.” She waved him over to the doorway. “Could you make a slim bed for Bridget that we could put there under the window? I think we will need to make the back bedchamber the men’s room now that Mrs. Dixon is to have another child. They will need the larger room, and since you and Jacob and Thomas are always coming and going out the back door, I thought that would be a better place for you. Then the Dixons can have your room.”

  “Why not give Bridget the room the Dixons are in now?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? We’ve had a new arrival. Her name is Loretta and she has a baby just weeks old. I can’t imagine how she kept that child quiet on the journey, but miraculously, she has made it here.” She started down the stairs. “How are we on tomatoes now? I’ve a request from Mr. Hathaway for more. Seems everything anyone can do to keep up with the demand from the troops.”

  “I should have another few crates ready to go on the wagon today.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

 
Bridget emerged from the library with an armful of new shirts in blue checks, plaids, and stripes. “I got the buttons on all these. Who should get them?”

  “Just give them to me,” Mary said. “I’ll distribute them.”

  “I’ll get Loretta’s tray,” Bridget said as she handed them over, “then give you a hand in the kitchen.” She started up the steps.

  At the back door, Mary turned to George with a smile and a light touch on his arm. “You really have come a long way since you showed up in my parlor.”

  “I guess we both have.”

  Even after nearly two years under her roof, he still rarely looked her in the eye. Though Mary had noticed of late that every time she looked at him, he seemed to have already been looking at her. Always his eyes would snap away to some task. Now his eyes held hers steadily, and Mary saw something in them she had not noticed before.

  She dropped her hand and looked away. “Yes, I suppose we have.”

  Martha Dixon walked into the kitchen followed by her daughter Angelica and her husband John.

  “Good morning,” Mary greeted them, happy for the distraction.

  John nodded at her, grabbed a biscuit from the basket on the table, and followed George out the door.

  Mary laid the shirts across the back of a chair and tried not to look at Martha’s round belly. “Martha, shall we get started on the pies for tomorrow’s celebration?”

  “What’s tomorrow?” Angelica asked as she climbed onto a kitchen chair and plucked her own biscuit from the basket.

  “Independence Day,” Mary answered.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when we celebrate independence from Great Britain.”

  “What’s Great Britain?”

  “It’s a country across the ocean. Many years ago, people came to America from other places, and the king of England controlled this land and the people who lived here.”

  “What’s England?” Angelica interrupted.

  “Hush!” her mother admonished her. “You listen, you learn.”

  Mary gave a gentle laugh. “England is a part of Great Britain. I guess. It’s a bit confusing, I know.”

  The girl screwed up her face and looked about to question further, but a look from her mother silenced her.

  “Well,” Mary continued, “the people who lived in the American colonies wanted to be free. They didn’t want others to control their land and their destiny, to tell them how to live, and so they fought a war to win their independence.”

  Angelica looked thoughtful. “That the war going right now?”

  Mary shook her head. “No, child. This was almost one hundred years ago. It was a different war.”

  “Don’t seem different.”

  “Quiet, girl,” Martha said. “You get outside and let me and Mrs. Balsam get to work.”

  Angelica leapt to her bare feet and streaked out the door.

  “And you stay away from them chickens!” her mother shouted after her. Then she said in a quiet tone, “Sorry ’bout that.”

  Mary shook her head. “No need. I suppose she is right.”

  Martha poured herself a cup of coffee. “Same fight, different folk.” Then the women silently took up their tasks of making pie crusts, rinsing berries, and measuring out flour and sugar and cinnamon.

  “That baby is beautiful,” Bridget said as she came in with a tray.

  Mary was happy to see that the plate was scraped clean. “I see our new guest likes your biscuits, Bridget.”

  “I think she would have eaten twice as much.”

  The three women bustled about in the kitchen for much of the rest of the morning, leaving only to pump fresh water for the pot or go to the outhouse or check on Loretta and her baby.

  At lunchtime, every spot at Mary’s dining room table was filled. She marveled at the change from those first few months after Nathaniel enlisted, when it was just her and Bridget scraping by. Six months after George arrived, Jacob had appeared at the back door, terrified and frostbitten. He had lost two toes and part of an ear but had otherwise made a full recovery. The Dixons came the next spring, escaping from their plantation mere hours before the master planned to sell off Martha and Angelica to another owner. Thomas made it the previous fall, claiming to have covered the last three hundred miles clinging to the underside of a train car. Mary wasn’t sure she believed that, but the story of his escape had captivated them all.

  Mary looked around the table and made a mental note to find a chair for Loretta for dinner. For now, the woman lay in Bridget’s room, hidden away while the terror of her escape left her little by little, breath by free breath. But she would soon be welcomed with open arms into this convocation of friends.

  After lunch, the wagon was loaded with vegetables and socks the women had knitted in the evenings. Mary handed George a list of necessary dry goods. “Please bring back the mail and the Free Press. Of course it will be nothing but bad news, but we must keep abreast of it nonetheless.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” George said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Call me ma’am.”

  “It’s a habit. You don’t object when Bridget says it.”

  Thomas walked in then.

  “Thinking of Bridget,” Mary said, “do you want her to go with you to town?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said at the exact moment George said, “No need.”

  Thomas gave George a look, which Mary read clearly. She would have to watch Thomas and Bridget. Now seventeen, the girl had become quite a beauty. It wouldn’t do to allow the two young people to develop any sort of attachment when it could only lead to heartache.

  “Mr. Hathaway knows me well enough,” George said. “We’ll do our business, pick up the mail and the paper, and come straight home. That time was just bad timing, is all.”

  Mary recalled her horror at George returning from town a few months prior with a black eye and a bloodied lip. His only offense had been the unfortunate coincidence of going to town when news was breaking of the draft riots in Detroit. After that, Mary went to town herself or sent Bridget along.

  “If you’re sure,” she said. “I feel silly for even asking as I’m sure there are none to be had, but do see if you can bring back some lemons for lemonade.”

  George and Thomas tipped their hats and with a snap of the reins were on the move. Mary watched them drive out past the low stone wall and down the dusty road. What could she write to George that would be true and yet safe?

  It was when she was sweeping flour from the counter into her hand that it dawned on her: she had lived with George longer than she had lived with Nathaniel. She felt disloyal even thinking it. But the fact of the matter was that while Nathaniel was tramping all over Virginia, the one who planted their crops and mended their fences and mucked out their stalls was George. He was the one who had been there for her at her darkest hour. He was the one who might soon walk into the kitchen with a crate of tangy lemons. He was the one she thought about upon waking and the last one on her mind as she drifted off to sleep.

  At the burbling sound of a baby, Mary turned to see Loretta standing at the door to the kitchen, tiny Simon in her thin arms.

  “Loretta! I’m so glad you feel well enough to come downstairs. Please sit down.” Mary pulled out a seat. “Can I get you a cup of water?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Mary put her hands on the woman’s shoulders and guided her to the chair. “Certainly not. Sit down here and I’ll fetch it for you.” She poured a cup of water from the pitcher and placed it on the table. “We’ll have supper soon, once George and Thomas have returned.”

  Mary gazed at the mother and child before her. How could she have looked at any of these individuals as undeserving of the sacrifice the Union was making on battlefields all over the South? It seemed to her now that the lives of the Negro and the lives of the white man were placed upon an enormous scale, and that soldiers would continue to die until the misery a
nd grief had been balanced.

  The baby gurgled again.

  “May I?” Mary asked, indicating the child.

  Loretta pulled back a bit.

  “I won’t hurt him, I promise. I just . . . I haven’t held a baby in a long time.”

  Loretta’s face remained suspicious, but she held out the boy to Mary’s waiting arms. The moment the baby changed hands, Loretta slumped, exhausted, in her chair.

  Mary gazed at Simon’s little round face and wide brown eyes and smiled despite the pain in her heart. She cooed and soothed the already content child. Then she looked at Loretta. The young mother seemed on the verge of collapse.

  “Loretta, you may stay here as long as you like. As you can see, several souls have joined my household to work the farm. Others have stopped for a night or two and moved on. If you stay and help around the house, I can offer little pay beyond a place to lay your head and food for your belly. I do manage to pay the men who work the farm, and I will see what I can do for you.”

  Loretta smiled weakly but said nothing.

  “Would you like me to take care of the baby for a little while so you can get some sleep?” Mary said. “I can wake you when he’s hungry.”

  Loretta nodded, finished her water, and drifted out the door. For the next hour, Mary marveled at Simon’s every detail—his wise eyes, his perfect bow of a mouth, his wavy hair that tended toward brown more than black, his silky light brown skin. She showed him the books in the library and tickled his nose with a quill pen. But the spell was broken when his empty belly made him call out for food, which she could not provide.

  Mary walked up the stairs and entered the back bedchamber after a soft knock. Loretta was already pushing herself upright in bed.

  Once Simon was suckling, Mary gathered enough courage to ask the question that had been plaguing her since Loretta arrived. “Where is his father?”

  “Back on the plantation.”

  Mary frowned. “I’m so sorry. It is a pity he couldn’t have come with you.”

  Loretta looked at her with confusion. “He the master.”

  Mary glanced at the child upon Loretta’s breast, as much white as he was black. And yet, if Loretta hadn’t escaped, he would be a slave in his own father’s household.