Read Online The Purchase by Linda Spalding - Free Book Online Page A

had offered the only help in sight. “What do we do now?” she asked him as he sat with his head in his hands, but it was that part of afternoon when birds and animals and men have nothing to say.
    “Read to me from the manual,” Ruth told him, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear and picking up the axe. “Tell me how to start.”
    “You cannot build a house, Ruth Boyd.”
    “You will have the good of four hands and one head.”
    “You don’t credit yourself with a brain?”
    “I didn’t name whose head, did I?” Ruth looked at the bare ground where their boots – two large and two small – weremoored side by side. Her stockings were torn inside her boots and there was skin visible, but she tucked her feet back and watched a beetle crawl up the pile of thin rocks that held the house frame. She thought what a long way it was for the beetle and yet to her it was nothing. She thought then that there was no one single truth, even in size. Daniel handed her the book. She said, “You read while I cut notches.”
    “Only to cut off your hand.”
    “Or my nose to spite my face.” Ruth laughed a little and even nudged him gently.
    Daniel began with the words that described the hewing of notches. He said she could try to do that while he went to check on the boy. Ruth did not like the boy and would not venture close to him. Ruth picked up the axe, which was not very big, and Daniel went to the clearing, where he found Mary and Simus squeezed inside a shelter of sticks. “Mary Amelia, what business has thee … have
you
 … down here? Take yourself up to the house this minute!”
    “We have no house,” said Mary. “Not anymore.”
    Daniel kicked at the flimsy shelter and the boy covered his head with an arm while the sticks came tumbling down on him and Mary scrambled out of the way. “I gathered all of that,” she said crossly.
    Daniel thought for just a moment. “And who do you suppose is looking after your little brothers and your sister? Where is Jemima just now, and that rascal Benjamin? It is your job to keep track of them all. The boys are to keep the fire and you must watch them to be sure they manage. They are not … country lads … after all.” He was watching Mary and, out of the side of one eye, seeing the boy on the ground surrounded by sticks. This was no place for his Mary to be loitering. He turned to look straight at Simus, who was staring up at him,frightened. “Isaac is to gather the wood …” Daniel muttered, feeling sorry he had frightened the boy and a little ashamed of himself. “Benjamin, the kindling …” his words trailed off.
    Mary got up, brushed twigs and sticks off her dress, and began walking away without a glance back. Always, he left her in charge of the others, and she continually failed to satisfy him. Now she would not let him see that she felt the sting of his words. She would not remind him of the way she had run to the Fox place to save a boy who was lying alone on the dirt with a leg snapped off. In order to show that she would never hurry – not for little children who were healthy and fine when here was a boy who had nearly died – her walk was slow and indignant, almost a trudge. Nobody to look after poor Simus and his brother lost forever to a Tennessee slave trader while he was stuck in the frightening woods like bait and where was Ruth Boyd? Wasn’t she hired to look after the little ones? Wasn’t she the reason they had come to this nasty place where boys were made into slaves?
    “Father,” she said that evening when the younger children were in bed with Ruth and she and her father were sitting close to the outside fire. Father. It was the name she rarely used, preferring Papa, which was affectionate. “Who made Simus a slave?” She was mending her hem with white thread and the stitches were crooked because of the lack of light and she kept her voice low although she was once again furious.
    “The institution is as old as time, Mary