• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 245 0

question, the child had every right to ask it, the resemblance was still there even if Theo did not feel as if she even inhabited the same body as the woman above the hearth, though for weeks afterward she felt a niggling guilt. She’d meant to discuss with Whaley what to tell the children about her past, and his, but there were fish to catch and clean, a garden to tend to, old ornery Nora to retrieve from the marsh and milk of a morning. Had she ever managed five minutes free of pressing chore or needy child to discuss such a thing, Whaley was not good at discussing such. After all, she’d known the man over a year before he had spoken of his wife and children.

Some old island salt who claimed to have once walked across the inlet during a hard freeze said in her presence that the island stayed put but was always leaving. Every grain of sand underfoot different from the ground his father stood upon. And what of her? Her humors were the same, but the molecules that made up her scarred body were nearly all new. Why bring up the past? She understood, stinging from the innocent query of a child, that the portrait would only haunt her household. She’d taught her children not to put stock in tales of ghosts and haints their friends loved to tell in the dunes at night, passed down from their parents and beyond, some of them set in the fens and moors of another windswept island. Why hang a portrait of a ghost above the hearth?

But before she could put her mind to the task of disposing of the portrait—for it was not so simple a task as throwing it in the inlet, too much blood had been shed for it to be discarded among the dunes—her energy was taken up with the living.

The day that Whaley brought home Hezekiah Thornton was hot and windless. Theo remembered the conditions always as they seemed summoned by the vitriol of the words that passed between them. It was the worst fight they ever had, and the last one.

Hezekiah was dark, thin, and slightly stooped. He stood in the yard with his hands clasped in front of him as if he’d been towed to the house with a rope.

“This is Hezekiah,” said Whaley. “He’ll be helping us out with some chores.”

Hezekiah half-nodded when Theo glanced his way. He would not look Theo in the eye. They stood sweating in the merciless midmorning heat. Whaley brushed past her, disappeared inside the house.

“Where do you come from, Hezekiah?”

“Over across the sound, up around Somerset.”

“Oh yes,” she said, pretending to know the place he mentioned.

“Pardon me,” she said. Then, turning for the door, she invited him up on the porch, out of the sun. Another half nod.

Inside she found Whaley calmly eating his dinner.

“Who is that man?”

“Hezekiah. Like I said, he’ll be helping out for a time.”

“The children are perfectly capable of helping out.”

“You seem bound to keep them in school all day.”

“We cannot afford to keep that man.”

“He doesn’t appear to eat much.”

“Where’s he going to stay?”

“Shed for now. We’ll build him a cabin directly.”

“Where’d he come from?”

“I’d wager Africa.”

She was pouring water from a pitcher into a mug to take to Hezekiah. She slopped a good mugful on the floor as she slammed the pitcher on the table and turned to Whaley.

“You did not buy that man?”

Whaley chewed, swallowed. “How many slaves did the governor own?”

She knew the number: nearly three hundred, counting those who worked the rice farms, the various houses, the governor’s mansion.

“That has nothing to do with this man.”

“It’s got something to do with you, though. Let’s suppose I wanted to support my wife in the manner in which she was formerly accustomed.”

“I’m not your wife. And that man is not our slave.”

“You’ve not heard me call him such.”

“He’s standing out there like he expects to be horsewhipped for looking me in the eye.”

“I believe you might have scared him. Truth be told, you scare me sometimes.”

“You get rid of that man, Whaley. Take him back where you got him. Or I will take my children and leave here.”

“Leave?”

“Don’t doubt me.”

“Oh, I don’t. Just, where are you going to go? Home to Charleston?