hoped for from my family about my engagement, any retribution I might’ve feared for accepting the proposal without permission, was swallowed by Father’s trial. Mother’s reaction to my announcement was simply, “Well done, Sarah,” as if reviewing one of my embroidery samplers. Father did not respond at all.
Throughout the winter, he sequestered in the library day and night with Thomas, Frederick, and Mr. Daniel Huger, a lawyer friend of Father’s who was known for legally eviscerating his opponents. My hearing was almost preternatural, cultivated by years of unsanctioned listening, and I caught scraps of conversation while sitting at the card table in the main passage, pretending to read.
John, you’ve received no money, no favors. You are accused of nothing that rises to the level of high crimes.
Isn’t a charge of incompetence bad enough? They accuse me of being biased! The streets and the papers are full of it. I’m ruined, regardless.
Father, you have friends in the legislative chamber!
Don’t be a fool, Thomas, what I have are enemies. Scheming bastards from the upcountry, seeking the bench for themselves.
They cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority.
Make meat of them, Daniel, do you hear me? Feed them to the dogs.
When the trial was heard that spring in the House of Representatives in Columbia, Mr. Huger assailed Father’s enemies with a vengeance, laying bare their political conniving with such force Father was acquitted in a single day, but the vote was ominously close, and he returned to Charleston, vindicated, but dirtied.
At fifty-nine, Father was suddenly a very old man. His face had turned haggard and his clothes baggy as if he’d wilted inside them. A tremor appeared in his right hand.
As the months passed, Burke paid courting calls to me weekly in the withdrawing room, where we were allowed unchaperoned visits. He filled these rendezvous with the same fever and excess we’d shared in the camellia grove, and I complied, drawing lines the best I could. I counted it God’s miracle we weren’t discovered, though I’m sure our invisibility was not due to God, but to the family’s distraction. Father continued to shuffle and shrivel and tuck his hand in his pocket to hide its shake. He turned into a recluse of a man. And I, I turned into a Jezebel of a woman.
Handful
Mauma couldn’t sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual. She didn’t know the meaning of the words quiet as a mouse.
I was laying in the straw bed we’d always slept in, wondering what was on her mind this time. I’d stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah’s room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and nobody said a word about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was hit and miss.
Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she sat there and studied it.
Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story quilt. She’d been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than two years. “If there a fire and I ain’t here, that’s what you get,” she’d say. “You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my bones.”
I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she’d finished, but she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.
The day before, she’d told me, “You wait. I’m ’bout ready to roll down the frame and start quilting it all together.”
She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she’d dragged from the storeroom in the basement. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside we’d found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.
Last time I’d counted, she’d saved up four hundred dollars even.
Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.
I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark and stare up at a