Chapter 1Henry
Two dead men walking up the road. That’s what we look like, Da and me trudging out to the work gang in rags and tatters. Da hitches his threadbare trousers up. With nothing left to cling to, they’ve taken to sliding down every few steps. The string I use to tie mine still holds.
The deep pit we pass is one of ours. We dig ditches one week that we fill in the next, or build roads to nowhere, earning just enough to keep us alive. The English answer to the Irish starving.
Da and me walk three miles over dirt roads running through green hills, but when we get to the relief works station there’s a grumbling crowd of surly men.
The relief works man, over from England, holds out his hands for quiet, but no one settles down, so he shouts over the noise, “In light of the fact that your harvest will be ready in a matter of weeks, the decision has been taken to suspend the relief works program. You should all go home and wait for the harvest.”
“Those bastards don’t know what they’re doing,” Da says.
“You can’t cut off the work gangs before the harvest comes in,” a man behind me says. “People’ve still got to eat.”
I grunt in agreement.
“That’s the English for you,” Paddy Murphy says, from beside Da. “They’re sending us home to watch plants grow.”
The grumbles turn into shouts as the landlord’s bailiff comes riding up.
He trots his horse right into the middle of the group and the men quiet down. “I need five men for a job.”
He’s barely got the words out before I say, “I’ll do it.”
It takes less than five seconds for him to get workers together. From the fifty men clamoring to do whatever it is he needs done, he picks Paddy, Killian, Liam, Seamus and me.
Da tugs at my arm. “Let me go for you, Henry. You don’t know what he wants you to do.” A heavy tiredness pulls at him, bending his back and pitching his body to the right where he struggles to hold his shovel. Five years ago, when he broke his arm, I watched him split kindling one-handed with a single swing.
“No, Da,” I tell him. “You go on home.”
“Aye,” says Paddy beside us. “You’ll want to make a start with your waiting for the harvest.”
The five of us follow the bailiff to the Doyles’ place, and I get a prickling in my gut. John Doyle died in the spring leaving Mary to struggle alone with her four little ones.
From a burlap sack tied to the back of his saddle, the bailiff takes out poles and clubs and hands them to us.
“You can’t mean for us to be tumbling Mary’s home,” I say.
“She’s not paid her rent,” he says. “She’s been warned.”
“Don’t the landlords have enough?” Paddy says. “They have to go after widows and orphans now too?” He throws his club in the dirt, his flaming red hair matching his fiery temperament.
“They’re not orphans, they have their mother,” the bailiff says. “Now, either you tumble it, or I’ll get five others.”
Tumbling is what the landlords do to us when we can’t pay the rent. Our houses are knocked together into a tumbled heap, stone on stone, so that the tenants can’t sneak back in again once they’re out. It’s happening more and more, so that now there’re hundreds of tumbled homes sprinkled around the countryside.
All five of us are shuffling our feet and feeling wrong about it. But if we don’t do it, it won’t save her. He’ll have another eviction gang here in the time it takes to ride out and come back again. This hut is coming down today, no mistake. We might as well get the money for it.
“Are they still in there?” I ask.
“Of course they’re in there, Henry. Where else are they going to be?” says Paddy. He turns to the bailiff. “The Devil take you,” he says, but he picks up his club. “We’ll not knock it down on their heads.”
“So, get them out,” the bailiff says.
None of us moves to do it.
He scowls down at the five of us from on top of his horse’s back. “The troublemaker can do it,” he says.
“Me?” Paddy blusters, gesticulating with his arms. “What do I tell her then? That even though she’s a poor, starving widow with four children to look after, her landlord isn’t rich enough yet and he needs to boot her out of her little hut here so he can sleep at night? Is that what you want me to go in there and say?” Paddy throws his club back into the dirt.
The bailiff runs his hand over his face. We can all see he’s regretting having chosen Paddy to come along. “The black-haired troublemaker can do it. And if you don’t stop throwing your club about, you’re off this gang and they’ll do the job without you.”
Killian, Liam and Seamus all have black hair too, but I’m the only other one who spoke out, which would make me the black-haired troublemaker.
“Off you go then, Henry,” Paddy says to me. “You’ll think of something to say.”
Mary’s hut is rocks and dirt walls. There’re no windows and I have to duck to get through the door. Inside it’s dark and damp and there’s a lingering scent of piss and shit from poor John who couldn’t get up in the end to relieve himself. I guess there’s only so much you can scrub out of a dirt floor.
Huddled in a pile of rags on the ground, Mary sits with her four children. The hunger’s hit her bad. Her arms are bone-thin and her skin hangs about her face with no padding to fill it out.
“There’s an eviction gang here, Mary.”
She doesn’t move or even look at me. She just stares at the wall of her hut.
“You have to go now.”
She doesn’t seem to recognize me or hear what I’m saying.
“The bailiff’s here and everything.”
She blinks a few times and lays her hand on her wee one’s head. “No,” she says to the wall.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But you haven’t paid your rent. They won’t let you stay.”
She sighs and settles further into the cluster of rags that serves as their bed. “No.”
The bailiff yells into the squat doorway, “Get them out, or we’ll tumble it on their heads.”
I hold out my hand to her. “Come on, Mary. You don’t want your children getting hurt.”
“What difference does it make if we die in here today, or out there in two weeks?” she says. “You know we won’t survive with John gone and no place to live.”
“We look after each other here,” I say. “You know that. You’ll be all right.”
I’m lying to a widow so I can tumble her home. This is what Da wanted to spare me. There was a time when we used to help each other. Now we just survive.
“You can stay with us,” I say, surprising myself.
We don’t have room for them, or food for them, and ever since Dermot and Emily died Ma’s been in a bad way. I’ve no idea how she’ll react when I show up with these five. I hold out my hand to her again, and she takes it.
We all come out and I breathe in deeply, clearing my nose of the stench of her hut. The air has a pre-harvest crispness to it that tastes cool and sweet against my tongue.
The bailiff’s off his horse, standing back to one side of the hut, and Mary and her children stand a ways off to the other side and watch us hack at her home. We wedge poles in the crevices between the stones, shifting and pushing until the walls crumble and the roof falls in.
Then the five of us pocket our wages. When the paying’s done, I wave Mary and her children over to me.
“Let’s go then,” I say.
“What are you doing with them?” the bailiff asks.
“I’m taking them home with me.” My stomach gives a little flip worrying about Ma.
“You can’t do that,” he says. “They’ve been evicted.”
Liam, Seamus and Killian slip away, but Paddy steps up to the bailiff waving his freckled arms. “Well, it’s nought to do with you, is it?” he says. “You’ve already knocked their home to bits. Your work here is done.”
“The law says you can’t take them in,” the bailiff says. “If you do, you’ll get evicted too. They have to get clear off Lord Edwards’s land.”
“All of it?” exclaims Paddy. “That greedy English bastard owns the whole damn hill. And the next.”
“It’s the law.”
“English law.”
“You watch your mouth there, laddie.”
“You watch my arse.” Paddy pulls his breeches down and we all get a good look at his scrawny white backside as he dashes away.
I tell Mary and her children to come on and we trudge off.
“It’s not worth it,” the bailiff calls after me. “It’ll be your place next.”
I can’t take them home. Instead, I take them to Father Michael. I don’t know what he’ll do with them, but at least they can stay in the church while he thinks it through. Nobody’ll tumble a church.
Father Michael used to be round and jolly. Now he’s saggy and solemn. He comes out to meet us in the churchyard like he’s walking in a funeral procession. I guess the last few years have put him in the habit.
“The bailiff says I can’t take them to mine, so I brought them to you,” I tell him.
He nods. He knows what I’ve been a part of, but I don’t think he judges me for it. He just looks sad and broken. “I’ll try to find a place for them at the poor house,” he says.
Mary looks stricken. “They’ll take my children.”
The poor house separates the men and the women and the children. I’m ashamed to look at her. For the thousandth time, I curse the English landlords for taking our healthy crops, our barley, wheat and rye, and shipping them away to sell. Lining their pockets while we starve. And I curse the rot that’s come like a plague out of the Old Testament to blacken our potatoes and famine us. I stop just short of cursing God for letting it happen.
Father Michael says our blessings are coming, and that it’s easier for a camel to get through a needle than for a rich man to get to Heaven. But no matter how much Bible he throws at us, I want to be rich. I want a warm house with glass in the windows, and a door with a knocker on it. And I want to eat my fill every day and never again feel this gnawing in my belly. People say it’s the disease and the hunger that’s killing us, but I say it’s the being poor.
Father Michael leads Mary and her children into the church.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her retreating back.
When I walk home through the valley where whirling fog clings to the land, I pass eight more tumbled homes scattered among the grasses and the heather. I knew every single tenant. If this keeps up, none of us will be left.
Coming up the path to our hut, I pass our potato patch, mercifully full of green stalks and leaves. Beth’s perched on the gray rock wall waiting for me.
“What’s for supper?” I ask.
“Roast lamb,” she says with a smile.
It’s a game we play. The Indian corn they shipped in for us to buy with our work-gang wages is bland and hard as rocks, no matter how long you boil it. Beth and I pretend we’re eating lamb or beef or some other impossible food. We tell each other our stomachs ache from overstuffing. It’s childish, for sure, but somehow it helps.
We eat our gruel around the rough plank table Da made years ago. Then we push the table aside and Ma, Da, me, Maggie and Beth all stretch out on the dirt floor waiting for sleep and morning.
We smell it when we wake. The stench of rot has climbed up out of the ground overnight and shoved its unwelcome way into our hut. Da looks at me. There’s a panic in his eyes that shoots right through me. We hurry outside, already knowing. The smell in the air is worse as we rush, panting, to the rim of our plot, sucking in stinking lungfuls.
Every leaf that was lush and green yesterday is spotted brown. Every stalk, wilting and blackening.
I sink to the ground and dig. Scratching at the dark soil, my thumb plunges into a potato, easily breaking through the skin to the sludge inside, so rotten it’s liquid. The foul stench catches in my nose, making me gag. I pull my thumb back, wiping it clean in the dirt. Da is gray as the fog. The pain clenching my gut is more than hunger. It’s fear for the days and months to come. It’s knowing we have to leave, or we’ll all be starved dead by winter’s end.
Chapter 2Sarah
Most of the afternoon, the slaver’s got us in the yard for showing. Singing, dancing, playing cards. Mister Maddox is as sly as they come. He’s got the white folks thinking we’re the cheerfullest bunch of slaves money can buy. Even shaved a man bald to hide his gray hair and sell him for younger.
When it’s time for the auction, he chains us up again and shuts us in a room behind the Planter’s Hotel, pulling us out one by one. The woman with the missing tooth. The tall man with the wide chest. The man with the notch in his ear. The man that tried to run. The woman with the long neck. Isaac.
The chain round my ankles digs at where my copper skin’s been rubbed clean away, but that ain’t nothing to the fear snaking in the pit of my belly. When the slaver tells me to get up, I don’t want to move, but I do. I seen him do things on the march from Charlottesville to Fredericksburg, chained to the man in front of me and the woman behind, so I jump up soon as he calls my name. A jet-black boy won’t look me in the face as he unhooks me from an iron ring in the floor. I take small shuffling steps ’cause of the ankle shackles, but I take them quick ’cause I see the look the slaver’s giving me.
Mister Maddox is a lizard of a man, all waxy skin and beady eyes. The few greasy hairs he’s got growing out the top of his head look like pig whiskers. I flinch when he reaches for me. He unfastens my chains and the shackles slip from my wrists and my bleeding ankles.
He sets me beside the hotel wall, and I grab on to the wood siding. The white paint flakes off as I worry the slats with my fingers. It’s almost my turn on the block. The sticky heat of summer’s eased off and it’ll be a spell before the biting cold of winter comes. There’s not one speck of white in the whole blue sky. From behind yellow-green leaves I can hear a dove coo.
I shut my eyes and breathe out long and slow.
Above the noise of the crowd, the voice of the auctioneer calls out. “I have seven hundred. Do I hear seven-fifty for this fine specimen? Strong as an ox and docile as a lamb.”
It’s Isaac he’s talking about, up there on the block. My brother. The auctioneer tells him to take off his shirt and show the people his muscles. I hate the auction man. I hate Mister Maddox. I hate them all. The bidding gets up to nine hundred dollars.
I don’t notice how I’m humming till Mister Maddox says, “Sing something cheerful or shut the hell up.”
It’s a Jesus-help-me church song I’m humming that Momma sometimes sings. I sink down to the ground, pull my legs up to my chest and lay my head on my knees. Momma. She’s got to be crawling out of her skin with worrying about us. Before this happened, she’d have sworn up and down that Master’d never sell us. Guess you never know.
The auctioneer shouts out, “Sold!” and I look up.
Mister Maddox’s got hold of Isaac by the arm. He pulls him down from the auction block and hands him over to a red-faced fat man with three chins. Isaac hangs his head as the fat man slips a rope round his neck.
“Isaac,” I call out. His eyes snap over to me. I touch the wooden carving I wear on a string round my neck and Isaac nods at me. He says my name and something else I can’t make out.
“Come on, boy. Don’t dawdle. I didn’t buy you to dawdle.” The fat man tugs on the rope and Isaac stumbles after, led away like an old cow.
My whole chest squeezes in tight. I want to scream out, but I know better than that. The tears creep down my cheeks and I rock back and forth, my arms hugging at my knees. Mister Maddox reaches down and jerks me to my feet.
“Wipe your face and perk up, girl. I won’t have you driving down your price looking like that.”
My stomach knots and my hands tremble, but I do like he says. The tears come back again.
“Look here,” he says, quiet in my ear. “If you want to stay a house slave, you better cut out all that crying. No one wants to hear you blubbering all day long.”
I nod and he waits for me to stop, but I can’t.
Nostrils flaring, he says, “You’re going to cost me money, girl. I’ll be damned if I let you get yourself sold as a field slave.”
I cringe from him, but I also wipe my face and stretch my mouth to a smile, trying to look like I won’t be no trouble to nobody. I don’t know what he paid for me, but I know Master George wouldn’t let me go for no field slave price. And I know field slave work would break me in two.
I can tell my smile don’t sit right ’cause Mister Maddox looks me up and down, scratching his chin-stubble and frowning. He pulls at my clothes and pushes at my breasts till he’s got me just about popping out of the top of my dress. I want to slap his hands away. Instead, I blink back my tears before they spill out and he sees them. He looks me over again and nods, and then he pulls me to the block and orders me up.
The auction block is as high as a table with just one step for climbing up. I grip the rough edges with both hands to keep me steady as I struggle on.
Beside me, the auctioneer points with his cane, calling me a prime house girl. He makes me turn in a circle while he boasts about how quick I clean, and how I never been a day sick, which is a bold-faced lie. He don’t say a thing about knowing the healing herbs. Guess white folks don’t care about that. Guess quick-cleaning-slave-who-don’t-get-sick is about all they need to hear.
Then they start in with the money.
There’s near on twenty men crowded round, but only four of them that’s bidding. Right in front of me stands a raggedy man with caterpillar eyebrows who looks like the liquor got hold of him. He’s staring at what Mister Maddox done to my breasts. He don’t put his eyes nowhere but there, and I’m some kind of glad he ain’t bidding. It gets up to seven hundred and they start to slowing down. Then the raggedy man says seven hundred and ten and my heart takes a panic jump right up to my throat. I start praying, not him, Lord, not him. Someone else bids and it all starts up again, but this time that man is hollering out prices with the rest of them. Ain’t no secret what he’s after me for.
A dark-haired woman in a fancy blue dress comes out of a dry goods store across the street and walks right on over to the crowd of men. She links arms with a man in a brown suit who’s bidding off to the right of the auction block I’m perched on.
“A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep slaves,” she mutters when the raggedy man outbids him again. “It’s shameful.” She wrinkles up her high forehead and stares at me with small, close eyes.
The auction’s up to seven hundred and ninety.
“I have seven-ninety. Do I hear eight hundred?” The auctioneer looks round the crowd of men, but not a one speaks up. “Going once to the man in the red vest.”
I look over, and it’s the raggedy man he means. My whole body goes to ice. I’ve seen his kind. No-account men who can barely afford to feed their slaves, working them half to death in the day and never letting them alone in the night.
“Going twice,” the auctioneer shouts. “Last chance, gentlemen.”
Some of the men shake their heads. The auctioneer takes off his hat and fans himself with it.
I clasp my hands and get to praying something fierce, just begging God not to let that man take me.
“Sold.”
I can’t hardly breathe.
Mister Maddox pulls me down and I trip over my own feet, smashing my knees and elbows on the ground. Behind me, the men laugh. I bite the inside of my mouth to keep from howling and pick myself up. As Mister Maddox leads me off to the side, I tremble so hard I have to fist my hands in my skirts.
The raggedy man comes up to take me, but Mister Maddox keeps hold of my arm.
“She’s yours when you’ve paid for her.”
My new master looks me over and licks his lips. He will own my days and my nights, and every drop of blood and every bead of sweat. The eagerness I see in him to explore what all that could mean for the two of us terrifies me.
An official man with a money pouch steps up to take the payment.
“I got six hundred and fifty with me now,” my new master says to the money pouch man. “I’ll get you the rest next week.”
“Hell and tarnation, Jeb, you know that’s not how this works,” the man says. “This is the third time you’ve bid for a slave you can’t afford to buy.”
Jeb looks at my breasts and sets his jaw. “I can afford her,” he says. “You let me take her back home tonight and I’ll have the money to you tomorrow.”
The official man spits on the ground between them. “I’m not fool enough to let you take a slave you haven’t paid for.” Tucking the money pouch into his vest, he steps back through the auction crowd to the brown-suit man, whose arm’s still linked with the blue-dress woman. They talk a spell and then he leads them to where Mister Maddox has me by the arm.
“This gentleman had the last bid at seven hundred and eighty,” the official tells the slaver. “Since Jeb can’t pay, that’s the price you get.”
Mister Maddox nods, throwing evil looks at Jeb.
The woman lowers her eyebrows, making her forehead even higher and her eyes even smaller. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says.
Jeb’s red face turns redder. He hunches his shoulders and strikes off for the tavern.
The woman’s husband counts out seven hundred and eighty dollars, and I am his.
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