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  “Let’s take it straight back through the kitchen,” Mary said, “and leave it open in the yard. We’ll deal with it later.”

  When Mary hoisted up her side of the trunk, the sharp pain in her belly returned and she sucked in a breath between clenched teeth.

  Bridget looked at her with concern. “Ma’am?”

  “It’s fine, Bridget. Come, let us dispense with this task.”

  They hobbled down the hall and through three doors before they reached the backyard. Mary dropped her end.

  “What is it?” Bridget asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, fine. Just a little discomfort. Though I’m sure it is nothing compared to what that man went through. Do you think the trunk can be saved?”

  “I’ll have to rip the lining out,” Bridget said. “Then it can be scoured and aired.”

  “The lining can be replaced. I’ve a green silk gown I’m sure I’ll never have the shape or the occasion to wear again. We can use that. Be sure to remove the bottom panel. There is a hidden compartment beneath it for important papers. If you don’t clean it out, the smell will haunt the trunk forever. Draw the bath and fetch me some fresh water for the pitcher. Then you can start on this.”

  The girl ran off to gather supplies, and Mary crept back to the parlor, keeping one hand on the wall for balance. George was standing, two fingertips touching the very edge of a table to steady himself. They were snatched back up the moment he noticed her in the doorway. He clasped his hands and seemed to be awaiting instruction.

  She lowered herself onto the settee. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “No, ma’am. I’d soil it.”

  She nodded. Of course. The man’s clothes would have to be boiled.

  She was unsure what to say next. If she had previously thought that her first interaction with a fugitive slave was the most uncomfortable conversation of her life, she knew now that it was infinitely more difficult to find something appropriate to say to a man who had been delivered to her house in a trunk.

  “We’ll get a meal ready for you as soon as we can after you’ve had a chance to clean up. You can rest a bit and then be on your way tonight.”

  George nodded. “Thank you, ma’am.” He was silent a moment, then said, “Mr. Balsam say you have a man name of John Grouse can loan me a set of clothes. Said he about my height.”

  Mary gritted her teeth, still as angry as she ever was about John Grouse’s abandonment. “We did have a man here by that name, but he enlisted. I haven’t heard from him since. I’ll have Bridget fetch you something from Mr. Balsam’s wardrobe when she’s drawn the bath.”

  “Just you and the girl and the cook, then?”

  “No,” Mary admitted with a regretful tone. “Mrs. Maggin was dismissed in April.”

  “That ain’t no good. How you farmin’? You’s lucky I come when I did.”

  Mary was about to respond to this bold pronouncement when Bridget entered.

  “The bath is nearly ready.”

  “Then I think we shall all retire for a time. Bridget, please get a set of clothes for George and take his outside. I’ll be down to help with dinner once our guest has had a chance to clean up.”

  She walked out to the front hall and took a long look up the staircase. She grasped the banister and took the first step, then the next, then the next. Each was a study in self-control. She had hidden the pains from Bridget for a month, despite the fact that they had been building in frequency and intensity, and now she was determined to make it up those steps.

  “Mrs. Balsam!” Bridget exclaimed from behind her. “You’re bleeding!”

  Mary turned to look. Drops of blood led from her left foot down the stairs to the parlor door.

  “I just stepped in some of that straw, Bridget. I should have been more careful. Now you’ll be scrubbing blood out of the carpet here too. But not now. I could use your help. I’m very tired.”

  Bridget scrambled up the steps to her mistress. After a few steps more, she looked back. “If you’d stepped in something, there would be less and less of it as you walked, but the spots are getting bigger.”

  “Just a little further, Bridget.” But even as she said it, Mary felt her head swim. The heat, the climb, the trunk, the man, the blood. All of it circled around until it coalesced into a leaden weight.

  Then the world went black.

  ten

  Lapeer County, August

  Whoever had amassed the library in Aunt Nora’s house was certainly interested in horticulture—though not, it would seem, in organizing things in any discernible way. After scanning every spine in the bookshelves, I found more than a dozen volumes about plants and gardening. I was delivering this tower of tomes to my bedside as Nora was retiring for the night.

  “I rarely manage to make it past eight o’clock these days,” she said. “You’ll be on your own at night. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  Upstairs I deposited the books on the bed, but reading would have to wait until I unpacked. I opened the armoire, ready to hang up my clothes, and a waterfall of fabric came pouring down at my feet. Of course.

  I dumped my clothes on the bed and transferred the fabric into my now empty suitcases. I hung up some clothes, tucked the camera bag in the back corner of the armoire, and faced the dresser. Drawer by drawer, I purged it of its contents. Most fit into the boxes that had transported my books, my laptop, and a few tokens of childhood I kept for nostalgia’s sake.

  I still had one drawer left to go when I ran out of boxes. I thought of the steep stairs I’d seen earlier that must lead to the attic. If Nora no longer sewed, I could just bring all of this up there. And if I was lucky, I might find another box.

  I pulled one suitcase, step by awkward step, up the attic stairs and ran my hands along the walls. No switch. A sudden tickle on my forehead had me ducking before I realized it was a light chain. My fingers found it swinging through the air and pulled. The light flickered on, throwing a weak yellow glow under the eaves to reveal—were those . . . beds?

  Yes, those were definitely beds. Perhaps a dozen or more narrow wood-framed cots topped with dusty mattresses were lined up on either side of me, all the way to the far wall, where a large window framed the sky. Beneath the window was a steamer trunk.

  Intense curiosity overriding any respect for Nora’s privacy, I knelt down and tried the lid. Locked. Disappointed, I tucked the suitcase neatly between two beds and went down for the rest. By the time I pushed the last box into place, my face and back were slicked with sweat. I reorganized some old Christmas decorations, freeing up one box for the last of the fabric.

  Piece by piece by piece, I emptied the last dresser drawer of its contents until my fingernails scraped the wood bottom. And then they scraped something else. Something metallic. I looked in the bottom of the drawer and there, to my great delight, was a key.

  With the last box in my hands and my heart in my throat, I climbed the narrow stairs to the attic. I shoved the box into place beside the others and knelt down before the trunk. Despite the duplicitous activities in which I’d recently taken part at the behest of the spineless Jack McKnight, I had never felt so like a spy. I pulled the key from my pocket and braced myself for the moment of revelation I knew was coming.

  But it didn’t fit.

  In fact, it wasn’t even close to fitting. One critical glance revealed why. The key I held was modern; the keyhole in the trunk was shaped for one of those old-timey lever lock keys you might see hanging from a medieval jailer’s comically oversized key ring.

  Disappointed and exhausted, I settled into bed and checked my phone out of habit. Oh yeah. No service. No Facebook. No Twitter. No news. No nothing. I experienced a brief moment of panic, akin, I imagine, to any other kind of addict realizing that he was out of cigarettes or booze or heroin. Then I turned my phone off for the first time since I’d bought it. I didn’t need the outside world. Not tonight. I had no schedule, no deadline, no responsibilities. I could rela
x. I just had to work at it.

  I flipped through the pages of an old herbal encyclopedia of various useful, if sometimes deadly, plants and imagined what I would find growing within that weathered picket fence out back. It didn’t take long for my eyes to get so heavy that I couldn’t focus. I shut the book, turned off the lamp, and was asleep within minutes.

  “William cuts the grass every couple weeks,” Nora said over oatmeal the next morning, “but the gardening tools haven’t been used in quite some time. I think the clippers are down in the cellar. And a shovel and a few other things. If you need something and can’t find it, just let me know. I’ll give you some money and you can go buy what you need.”

  “Is that a neighbor?”

  Nora looked out the window. “Who?”

  “The guy who cuts the grass.”

  “No. He works for a landscaping company.”

  That would explain why he did such a poor job “freshening up” my bedroom. Thoughts of my dusty room became thoughts of the dusty old cots in the attic.

  “Hey, what’s the deal with the beds in the attic? Was this place a hospital at some point?”

  Nora stared blankly at me for a moment, then the shutters on her eyes lifted. “Oh, the cots? I’d nearly forgotten about those. That’s a bit of a long story. Why don’t I tell you about it some evening after dinner? We both have work to do right now.”

  And without another word, she was gone.

  The cellar was cobwebby and damp, and I had to duck to clear the jerry-rigged network of pipes and ducts along the low ceiling. A dead light bulb stuck impotently out of its socket, and weak daylight struggled through small transom windows streaked with grime. The floor was nothing more than packed dirt, and the walls were just stones heaped upon each other and slathered with crumbling mortar. I had never been claustrophobic, but I was certain that prolonged time in this space had the potential to make me so.

  A rusty shovel and hoe rested against the wall near an old washer and dryer, hedge clippers and a trowel hung from nails in a joist. I rattled through an old gray toolbox and came up with a pair of pruning shears. Then I noticed a door beneath the stairs. Perhaps there might be something useful behind it.

  But the room was locked. With a padlock. Last night’s discovery of the key rushed back to the front of my mind. It was upstairs in the bedside table drawer. I filed this away for later and walked out into the gathering sunlight of late morning.

  I breathed in the clear blue sky, the dancing pollen, the dew-wet grass. It smelled invigorating, not at all like the fog of exhaust I was used to. When I tried the garden gate it stuck firm, kept in place by a rusty latch and drifted dirt and the spiny, grasping tendrils of some creeping vine. After some pounding and yanking, it opened just wide enough for me to slip through sideways.

  For the next hour I brought specimen after specimen over to the plant encyclopedia I’d been looking at the night before, flipping pages and setting them in piles of like things. Cooking herbs, medicinal herbs, herbs for tea. They rapidly all began to look the same, especially the largest pile: unidentifiable. With nothing else to go on, I decided these were the weeds that I’d need to eradicate. And though I didn’t know much about gardening, I did know that it wasn’t easy to get rid of weeds. Most would grow back if cut off at the surface. If I wanted to eliminate the weeds from this garden for good, I would have to dig deep.

  I thrust my spade down and pried up a section of earth at a time, shaking the soil from each uprooted weed and tossing it on an ever-growing pile to be destroyed. It was dirty, sweaty, backbreaking—perfect. Every weed removed felt like an accomplishment. Like cutting a bloated column from a thousand words to five hundred.

  While working at a particularly stubborn dandelion, my trowel hit a stone. I widened the hole to find the edge so I could pry it out, but it wouldn’t budge. The stone was flat and straight and seemed to have a right angle. Something man-made. A paving stone that had sunk into the soil after years of neglect?

  I made the hole bigger and bigger and finally dragged the stone out with bare hands that were now black with dirt. Wiping away the soil, I saw faint numbers. A one, then a six, then an eight, then a one. Then a comma. A date. I swiped and clawed to reveal the rest. August 5, 1861. The cornerstone of some long-forgotten building? No. It was far too thin. A gravestone. It must have broken and toppled long ago, then been reclaimed by the garden.

  I looked at the shovel stuck in the ground mere inches from where a casket might lie. What if I had disturbed the final resting place of a Civil War soldier who had died of gangrene due to a botched leg amputation? Visions of horror movies popped unbidden into my mind. I looked around the tangled mess of weeds that remained. Hadn’t Nora said something about a woman being buried in the backyard?

  I tiptoed out of the garden, shutting the gate behind me to keep the ghosts in.

  Inside, Nora was at her sewing machine.

  “Um . . . I have a question for you.”

  The whirring of the machine ceased.

  “I found something strange and I’m wondering if you could check it out.”

  “Something you can’t identify?” she said, getting to her feet.

  “There are plenty of those, but that’s not my problem. I think I found a headstone.”

  “Oh, yes. Mary Balsam is buried there. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “You did, but I don’t think that’s what I found.”

  She looked perplexed. “Hers is the only grave out there.”

  “Well, this stone said 1861 on it. And I think you told me she died in the 1870s, didn’t you?”

  She nodded. “In 1875. I’m certain of it. I’ve seen her stone. Not for years, but when William was first working in the garden, he found the grave and called me out to see it.”

  I led Nora to the stone resting at the edge of the hole. She adjusted her glasses. “One date,” she muttered.

  “I don’t know if I should keep working out here,” I said. “What if I damage something? Or . . . unearth somebody?”

  “Nonsense. I’ll show you where Mary’s grave is. Then you’ll know to be careful there.” She started to pick her way across the weeds. “Let’s see.”

  “Watch your step.”

  “It’s just right here.” She pushed at a clump of mint, releasing its fresh scent into the air and revealing the top half of a larger, more ornate stone. “You used to be able to see the whole thing. It’s sunk over the years.”

  Mary Elizabeth Balsam. Born October 15, 1840. Died June 23, 1875. Thirty-four years old.

  “Mary Elizabeth,” I said. “Am I named after her?”

  “I don’t know, dear.”

  “I have to say I’m a little spooked. What if there’s something else out here? Her husband maybe?”

  Her expression darkened just a bit. “He’s buried in Detroit.”

  “Why not here?”

  Nora took a slow breath. “It just so happens, for good or ill, that parents have only so much influence over their children. I can see yours did a fine job with you, but sometimes kids just don’t turn out the way their parents hoped they would.”

  “My parents tried,” I said, unsure of how that answered my question at all. “But I don’t think I turned out as they hoped. I certainly haven’t turned out how I hoped, in any case.”

  “I’m sure you are quite a bit closer to the mark than Mary and Nathaniel’s eldest son was . . . Or than I was, frankly.”

  Then, as if she knew she’d opened a door she’d meant to keep closed, Nora turned and walked back to the house, leaving me kneeling in the dirt with the mystery grave and all of my unanswered questions.

  eleven

  Detroit, April 1963

  Nora hoped her nerves didn’t show as she walked into a diner on Twelfth Street. It had been her suggestion to meet in William’s neighborhood to avoid running into anyone she knew. Now as the bell overhead rang and patrons looked up from their meals, she felt like an exhibit at the zoo. Most turned their att
ention back to their food or their companions, but a few kept their eyes on the white girl in the doorway.

  She scanned the room, hoping to spot the winsome photographer she’d met at the art exhibition. It had been a month, and she worried she wouldn’t recognize him at all. When she didn’t see any familiar faces, she lost her nerve and pushed back through the diner door, slamming it into a man on his way in.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  The man recovered and smiled. “I know I’m a little late, but there’s no call for that.”

  “William! I’m sorry! I didn’t see you and then I didn’t know what to do.”

  He knit his brow in confusion. “It’s a restaurant. You just sit down at a table.”

  She laughed to cover her discomfort.

  He sighed as he eased past her and headed for a booth in the back corner. “You’d be happier back here than by the windows, am I right?”

  Nora felt shame rising but slid into the secluded booth without a word. She thought she detected a hum of whispers filtering through the room. William nodded at a couple people who nodded back. But Nora couldn’t tell if they were friends of his. They were watching her like one might watch a strange dog that had wandered into the neighborhood, waiting to see if it was friendly or not.

  “That’s a pretty dress,” William said.

  Nora shook off her paranoia. “Thank you. I was hoping it would be done by Easter, but I ran out of time.”

  “You made it? Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “You make all your clothes?”

  “Some, why?”

  “I dunno. You don’t strike me as the frugal type.” William handed her a menu.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I’ll just have a Coke.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock. You already ate lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Then eat. It’s on me.”

  “I had a big breakfast.”

  “No girl your size ever had a big breakfast. Just order something.”

  She read the menu in silence as the waitress approached the table. Once they had ordered, Nora studied the salt and pepper shakers and searched for something to say.