A Reckoning: A Novel - Hardcover

LINDA SPALDING was born in Kansas and lived in Mexico and Hawaii before immigrating to Canada in 1982. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, The Purchase (awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award), Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, and (with her daughter Esta) Mere. Her nonfiction includes A Dark Place in the Jungle, Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood, and Who Named the Knife. In 2003 Spalding received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community. She lives in Toronto, where she is an editor at Brick magazine.

It was Sabbath and my father was preaching on an angel coming to our town. Said we would beg it hard to bless us, hold on hard to do that. Hold on and beg! Pa kept on shouting, and I was watching him jab the air with his hand when a stranger leaned upright against my tree and took off a hat full of colored feathers and wiped his brow as if he’d been walking for days. I said: Good timing, mister, and gave over the shade as I was just then wondering if angels could sweat. He’d walked twenty miles on the lookout for loggerhead shrike, which meant nothing to me but I told him we had some and later I made my way home through the woods. I’d be in trouble for that detour but I’d take my beating in order to earn some time to think about an angel come among us. What I should do.
1

The stranger carried a leather bag with his drawing pencils, a book of rag paper, a pair of trousers folded small, spare col­lar, neck scarf, stockings. Other ingredients were weightier—bowie knives, hand-drawn maps, a packet of compasses, the dials of which rotated as he traveled first by coach and then on foot. A pair of field glasses, unusual in 1855, hung on a strap that crossed his chest. Boots laced up to the knees with treads enough for slippery banks. He was going to tour Virginia but he had lamed himself after removing the boots to cross a creek and he needed to rest. When he paused at the edge of a campground, what he heard behind the noise of shuffling, coughing adults and crying, whimpering children was the hectoring diatribe of a shouting preacher. Coming from a pavilion open on all sides, the voice was first trumpet then flute, describing an angel that Jacob had refused to release from his des­perate grip. I will not let thee go! Unless thee bless me! howled the preacher. And now the angel is come amongst us! Do you hear? Do you see? Hallelujah! Amen and Glory! Each and every one of you will be tested in the coming days! You will beg for the angel’s bless­ing. Beg! But deserve it!
 
Limping slightly, the stranger made his way to a sycamore tree, large and cool, that sheltered a boy who was whittling at a stick.
 
An angel! shouted the preacher again, and the boy rolled his eyes. Good timing, mister.
 
Who’s the preacher?
 
My pa. The tone betrayed nothing.
 
It was early spring and the boots of the stranger, whose name was Ross, left moist dents under the sycamore tree. The boy studied them. I never saw him labor with more zeal, he said, as if thinking it over. Then he grinned, showing crooked teeth.
 
Ross edged in closer to the pavilion, peering past a column to see the preacher clothed in black with arms raised like branches over his head. I do so desire your company as we wrestle this angel together, the preacher cried, and the mortals in the pavilion began to fall on their knees or dance on their feet. Ross had given his life to a naturalist’s logic. He was a believer in the evidence offered by rocks and bones but the moaning and praying unhinged him and he clung to his post as if some alien being might really descend and take hold of him. Good timing, the boy had said. Zeal, he had said. And that grin. Meanwhile, a girl began to turn in circles until her hair came unpinned and people grabbed one another shouting, Glory, glory! Heal me, Jesus! and the preacher moved among them, stepping around outflung arms and legs. Hold fast to the angel!
 
The pavilion was swaying as if a storm had hit. Cries of Save me and Bless me. Ross went back to the tree, unpacked his scarf, and mopped his face. He had given little thought to salvation. His desire to free slaves was about justice rather than virtue; he hated the slaver more than he loved the slave. The boy said: You never been at a revival?
 
Ross said: Not to this day.
 
I knew you was a Northern.
 
I’d like to meet your father.
 
Easy as pie. Just cross that field is our place. But pass on by the big house ’cause it’s the day off and my uncle’s none too friendly when his people play.
 
His people. So, Ross had found his battleground after walking for three days. He had been hoping for this and waiting since the first abolitionist meeting he’d attended the previous winter in New York, where his professor, a hydrotherapist, had made a fervent speech. Ross took a breath of clean spring air. He looked around, gauging his adversaries, and decided to leave the Christians to find their angel among the wagons and tents. Rectify. It was a word inscribed in his mind, his professor’s word. He walked away from the campground with his leather bag and the field glasses favor­ing his sore left foot. There were huts scattered around and these would soon have fires lit for the warming of basket-brought food. Having trudged twenty miles that day, Ross was ready for his own small fire and the comfort of his bedroll, but first he would learn what he could about the lay of the land. Scripture say knowledge increaseth sorra, an old Negro man had told him a day or two before, but Ross had picked his way very slowly down the western side of the Commonwealth of Virginia and he had seen few signs of knowledge anywhere, although he’d been keenly observant of sorrow. He took note of the trees and the lack of them. Dirth, he called it, seeing man as the ruination of the natural world. Once, the whole continent had been as balanced as a pendulum. Swinging here to there to here again. Even the ancient fires brought growth. Clouds of birds had filled the sky, whole races of birds that knew the vagaries of weather and migration and yet there were fewer trees and fewer birds and where would it end?
 
As he walked, he thought of the slaves he planned to free. For those who could read, a map. For the rest, quilts askew on laundry lines or nails pounded into crossroad trees. He stumbled, as the road was rutted, and he kept to the edge, where sprouted grass pushed up through pounded earth. He remembered walking along the dunes in childhood by the never-ending lake at the edge of Ontario, scuffling feet and ruffling plants without a thought until Eva Nell pointed out the error of this, saying all things were bound together, even including the tiny biters that plagued them and must not be swat­ted. Bugs and ruts, trees, birds . . . I can’t say how it all connects, she’d said, but each of us is bound to all the rest. It was the start of his education. As a newborn, she had been carried to Canada from Virginia by her mother and a runaway slave. Mary Jones, Eva Nell’s mother, explained it as a rescue mission. But Eva Nell thought there was more to it than the saving of old Mama Bett. Why would her mother risk such a trip with a baby? Why did the family in Vir­ginia never contact any of them? Who is my father? she had asked a thousand times. And always she had been told not to question the past, which was left behind for good and all, her mother had said. Once, Mary Jones had said: Your father was lost in the war up here. I mean, he never came back. Another time she had said: Bett was enslaved. What choice did I have? Usually she had said nothing and Bett, who was Eva Nell’s nanny or Mary’s servant, was equally silent about the past. They had come out of Virginia together. That was all Eva Nell needed to know. Bett lived in the city called York now, helping other runaways and immigrants. Ross had gone to her for advice. Where should he start? What words should he use to convince a slave that the risk was worthwhile? Bett knew about the Underground Railroad, which had helped her avoid capture years before. Warn them of the catchers, she told Ross. Catchers everywhere these days now. But Ross thought such warning might imperil a man’s enthusiasm for escape. He would focus on pride when he talked to slaves.
 
He began with the same stretch of wilderness Eva Nell had trav­eled as a newborn child moving in the opposite direction. She, who had attended his mother’s school in Belleville, where girls learned to spin and weave, but also to read and use well-formed cursive script. It was more trade school than academy, but it rose in the estimation of Belleville residents as the children grew up and became usefully employed. He could almost see Eva Nell now, with her hands on her hips and her dark eyes squinted, defying him to make sense of her unexplained life. So he went on walking while his foot went on swelling from the twist it had taken, and the sun was uncertain, casting shadows that he moved through time and again. Time and again he looked for some mark of house or plowed field or even a fence until he noticed a wood grouse fluttering in the sticky under­brush. Getting down on his hands and knees, he called, chick-chick and crawled along in order to capture the grouse, his clothes pick­ing up seeds and burrs so that when he rose up with the bird in his hands he was a mess of scratches and torn trousers and shirt. The bird’s wing was apparently injured. She had set her eyes into slits of no mind to find her reserves, if there were any to be found. Then, upright again and tucking the grouse into a soft canvas bag he kept inside the leather one, Ross saw a gleam of window glass through a stand of elms, a fine brick house with four white columns reaching all the way up to the roofline. He studied the sweep of grass where a child was squatted, clipping at it with a long curved blade. In Canada, Ross had studied to be a naturalist. Then he went down to New York to take a medical degree and now he stood on a back road in Virginia watching a child wield a lethal blade. It was a sight that went to his heart and he turned onto the clipped lawn and went up the walkway to the door of the red-brick house with its sunbit­ten windows even though he’d been warned by the boy to walk past. Day off, the boy had informed him, and that meant there were slaves on the property who were not required to work on the Sab­bath other than to wash their own clothing and cut the sweet grass.
 
I want the master, were his words at the door when it was opened by a girl of ten or eleven years. She was wearing only a shirt that barely covered her knees and when she didn’t speak, he said: Child, tell me, what is your name?
 
There was a muttered answer, Lou, and then the door was closed firmly. He heard a bolt slide into place.
 
Ross knocked again and stroked the bird through the canvas bag. I shall wait! he called in warning, and he sat down on the wide porch steps and took the bird out and looked closely at the wing, absorbed in the set of the hollow bones and the blank staring eyes in the fading light that was making it hard to see. He was a medical student and any focus on healing calmed him so he stroked feathers and bones and sat on the steps as the sun sank behind the elms. The fields around him were soon drained of color, and he thought about the two children again. Usually slaves live in quarters, he thought, and he wondered where their mother was and where the quarters were on this gray property. When he heard hooves on the road and the snort of a horse, he covered the grouse with his hands and watched the long path leading up to the house, where a dark shape was approaching on a horse apparently homeward bound. At the base of the steps, the horse swerved, the man pulling too hard on the reins, and Ross looked directly up at the glowing, ruddy face of a man in his middle years. I waited a long while out here, he said, while far below on the road he saw another rider streak by on a dappled mare. It was the long-armed preacher fully bent over the neck of his horse. Ross introduced himself and said: I am here in your county studying birds.
 
The landowner rolled the whip handle in his hands and jumped down from his mount. From whence do you hail? He regarded his guest’s torn clothes and muddy knees with a look of slight scorn.
 
New York, said Ross, thinking it was safer than the truer fact of Canada.
 
You trap our birds? He looked at the grouse.
 
This one is injured.
 
And my fields must not be; they are newly planted, the land­owner said as he turned back to his horse and loosened the cinch of the saddle. Stay off my land.
 
Ross held the grouse, running a finger across her beak, as the young grass cutter came around the corner of the house keeping his head down and his face averted from the master’s gaze.
 
The homeowner handed the reins to the boy and mounted the steps of his house, roughly grazing the shoulder of his unwanted guest. Stay away from my fields.
 
Ross took his leave, heading for the road and being careful not to limp.