Chapter 21

21

LUCILLE’S HANDS TREMBLED. EVER SINCE THE MORNING SHE HAD WOKEN UP TO discover that Ada was gone, they had been shaking while she sewed, and now the stitches she made were as uneven as teeth. Just the other day it had taken her a full ten minutes to slip the thread through the eye of her needle because one hand would not hold the needle steady and the other could not follow as the eye bobbed up and down. The trembling would not matter so much if she weren’t trying to make a dress so elaborate, so fine, that she could sell it for enough to help pay for the doctor to return to the house and perform the surgery he had talked about. The hospital, which the doctor had also talked about, was to her little more than a morgue. She would never send Millicent there. She had heard far too many horror stories about butchers’ aprons and large open wards where sick people huddled and patients went unfed. No, she would earn the money for the surgery the same way she did everything: by herself. She still had some time.

All night, Lucille sat by the hearth, guiding the needle, piecing together squares of bold blue and bright yellow with accents of black, pulling taut ruffles, forming gathers. She had made hundreds of dresses in the past, but this, she kept telling herself, was more important than any of them. Her mind wandered into worry as she sewed. One of her girls gone and the other seeming as though she was preparing to leave in a different way. The thought that she could well lose them both terrified her. Millicent and Ada were all she had in the world. They were her two bright stars in every dark sky. Her reasons for being. Once upon a time she had walked off the Camby grounds, the place where her parents and grandparents all lay in the earth. She had left her whole life behind, and Millicent and Ada were the reason why. Lucille herself could have handled Madam Camby’s suspicions, the way she ranged at the edge of the fields at times with her mouth pulled tight and her eyes narrowed, surveying every woman she saw, wondering who among them was causing her husband to leave their bed so many nights. Let that vile woman do what she wanted, say the worst things, spew all her hate. But to let the girls be subjected to that—no. So she had marched out into the world with the girls in her arms and rebuilt a whole new life where one had not existed before.

Hour after hour Lucille pricked the fabric with the tip of the needle and pulled the thread through. It was up to her to keep everything in her world stitched together, she thought. But amid her worry and exhaustion and the low light of the lantern, her hands trembled and her eyesight sometimes blurred with tears, and often the stitches would not come out straight. Even after she ripped the thread out and started again, sewing the sleeve to the bodice, then the bodice to the waistband, she could not get it right. Nerves had the best of her. She set everything down on her lap, took a deep breath, and listened for her mother’s voice, but as usual it did not come. It was up to her. Lucille lifted the garment from her lap, squeezed the needle between her fingertips, and tried again.

***

IN THE MORNING, Lucille walked out the front door of the house with the dress over her arm. It was not as expertly crafted as she would have liked, but it was finished at least. Quietly, she closed the door behind her. She hated to leave Millicent alone in the house, and she hesitated with her hand on the knob, but there were certain things that needed to be done. Millicent was sleeping. Lucille would not be long.

When she started down the steps, she saw the figure of a man walking up Aster Lane. By his limp, she recognized it was Willoughby. She was in no mood for Willoughby Dalton that day.

Lucille kept walking and when she neared Willoughby, he smiled at her and tipped his silly hat and said, “Good morning.” Then he opened his hand. “For you,” he said.

Lucille stopped to see. On Willoughby’s palm was a small bell, about the size of an ackee.

“I picked it up from the street,” he explained, “but it was missing its tongue. Couldn’t make no sound. I fitted it with a new piece so that now it can sing. Try it.”

Lucille picked up the small bell and shook it. It made a dull, tinny sound. He brought her such worthless things. The least he could have done was bring her something with enough value that she might be able to sell it, but no.

Lucille felt a thickness in her throat all of sudden. She had no interest in letting Willoughby see her cry. So without bothering to thank him as she always did and without even bothering to say goodbye, Lucille slipped the bell in her pocket and, clutching the dress hung over her arm, hurried past Willoughby, on up the lane toward town.

***

WILLOUGHBY STOOD IN the lane and watched Lucille go. He was disappointed that the bell had not worked better, but that failing did not diminish the happiness he always felt upon seeing her again. He knew what he wanted, and he would keep trying for it, pleasantly, calmly, with a patience that most people he knew did not possess. He just had to wait, he believed, and one day, by the grace of God, the things he wished for would come true.

He had no reason to think it. Willoughby had wished for his own horse to ride when he was a boy, a big horse with a glossy black coat, but a horse had never materialized and Willoughby had spent every day of his life getting places on his feet instead, so much walking that one of his good legs had worn out and gone crooked at the knee, so now he limped on the remaining good leg, which dragged the exhausted leg behind.

Willoughby had wished for a mother and father who loved him, and he had received only half of that equation. He’d had a mother who had loved him in the fiercest way imaginable until the moment of her death, and a father who had merely been fierce. His father whipped him and was in general unkind, and whether he loved his own son, Willoughby never could tell. For years and years, he had waited for his father to say that he did, but those particular words never passed his father’s lips.

Willoughby had waited to discover what his life was to be made of, whether there was any talent he had or a gift the good Lord might have bestowed upon him, a signal for what he should do with his days. But that never came, either, and Willoughby had spent the years since he was about twelve trying one thing and then another, waiting until something felt right. After carving furniture, stretching leather, hammering horseshoes, staking fences, and portering luggage for travelers at the wharf, he had not yet found the gift the good Lord might have given him, but if he kept waiting, he told himself, one day he would surely know what it was.

At some point, what Willoughby had begun wishing for was to be around Lucille Bunting, whom he knew from church. He did not know her well—although that was part of the wish. He wanted to be around her to know her better because what he did know was lovely. Besides, she did not have a man, and he thought that meant she might have room for him. With his tired leg and his rootlessness regarding work, though, Willoughby worried that he had little to offer her. He had tried to make up for that by bringing her things. A bunch of flowers, a pencil, a transparent dragonfly wing, a small clay bowl, breadfruit, a pair of black leather boots. Lucille took everything he brought, so Willoughby kept coming back bringing more. He always tried, when he came, to say a few words to her, too. Sometimes she allowed it and sometimes she did not, and he could not determine what swayed her from one visit to the next. He only knew he was grateful when they exchanged pleasantries. But of all the things he had offered her and she had taken, what he really wanted was to offer himself. Take me, Willoughby wanted to say. But of course he did not. He was patient. He waited, hoping and believing that it would happen one day.

***

THE MARKET WAS sparse, filled with only a dozen or so vendors and even fewer people wandering about. Years ago when Lucille used to sell clothing here, the market had been bustling with activity. When people had money to spend, Lucille had no trouble selling enough of her clothing each week to get by. Enough to purchase more fabric to make more garments for the week to come, and after that enough to pay for the girls’ schooling and for food. But with so little work to be found, so few people had money to spend that even to stand there in the market had not made sense. Lucille had started doing what other women did—knocking on people’s doors—and though at first people answered and at least listened to what Lucille had to say, more recently all the doors remained closed.

That day when Lucille arrived at the market with the dress, it had been with hope that things might be better than she remembered. Her heart sank when she saw they were not. A smattering of other women sat in the market, most of them seated behind trays of fruit or potatoes or greens, one next to an assortment of pottery lined up on the ground. A few people walked through, but none of them were stopping to buy. Outside, a man trundled past, rolling a syrup spider. Everyone, it seemed, had fallen on hard times. Still, Lucille walked to her old spot and held the dress up by the shoulders, calling out to any soul who came near: “For sale a dress! A beautiful dress!”

People turned. Some people smiled. Most people walked on. It used to be that there were regulars who sought out her clothes. Now she saw no one she knew, no one who knew her. Now she was just any woman standing in the market hawking a product that no one wanted to buy.

After forty minutes or so, a woman did stop and look admiringly at the dress. Encouraged, Lucille held the garment high. “You won’t find another like it anywhere, look.”

The woman nodded as she inspected it. Pinching the dress by the shoulders, Lucille spun it round so that the woman could see the row of cloth-covered buttons she had meticulously made herself with matching fabric so that they blended perfectly and did not interrupt the line of the dress. The woman nodded again, and that seemed a good sign. She touched the skirt with its copious gathers and stroked the fabric, and that seemed promising, too. Lucille watched as the woman lifted the skirt and ran her hand all the way down to the hem, which she flipped up. At that, Lucille cringed. Every jagged, irregular stitch was visible now, every knot, every pucker. The woman leaned closer to look.

“See the bright colors,” Lucille said, trying to shift the woman’s focus elsewhere.

The woman said nothing. She dropped the hem.

“The gathers all made by my own hand,” Lucille tried.

The woman looked at Lucille and sorrowfully shook her head. “Pretty dress on the outside, but—”

“My daughter sick,” Lucille blurted.

The woman dropped her shoulders as if pity alone might make her reconsider.

“She needs a surgery. I... It’s a fine dress. I...”

“Cuh-dear,” the woman said softly, to Lucille’s surprise. She put an arm around Lucille’s shoulders as Lucille started to cry.

Lucille lay her head on the woman’s breast. The dress hung down over her arms. She cried for a good minute while the woman held her and whispered, “Shhhhh, shhhhh.” Then Lucille wiped her face and lifted her head, and the woman smiled at her. “There now,” she said.

Lucille sniffled once and took a deep breath.

The woman reached into her purse and produced a coin that she held out. “I pray for you and your daughter.”

In another time, Lucille never would have accepted a handout from a stranger. But neither could she have imagined a time when she would stand out in public, crying on a stranger’s breast, and with her pride already in ruins, she raised her hand and let the woman press the coin into her palm.

“God be with you,” the woman said as she did.

After she walked away, Lucille looked down at the coin. It was a fisherman’s penny, worth 1⒈／⒋ pence. Lucille slipped it into her pocket and held the dress up again, shouting more desperately than before.

“For sale a dress! A true beautiful dress!”

After some minutes a man poked his head around the dress to have a look at Lucille behind it.

He grinned. “Beautiful dress and beautiful woman, I see.”

Lucille glimpsed only his face from around the side of the dress, which she was holding up between them like a curtain. She clenched her teeth before she replied. “Beautiful dress here for sale. Made brand new. Perfect for any occasion you can think.”

“The occasion I thinking of, you not wearing no dress.”

“Go on away,” Lucille said.

“Other things I might pay for.” The man puckered his lips in case she had not known what he meant.

Without breaking her gaze, Lucille stamped her bare foot down on his. The man jumped back and yelped. “You mash my foot!”

“Go on away, I tell you now.”

“Eh, you a wutless woman!” the man yelled as he walked off, shaking out the pain in his foot. “No one wish to buy such a dress in these times!”

Unfortunately, he was right. After standing in the market for longer than she would like and failing to attract any legitimate interest, Lucille reluctantly folded the dress back into a square and took a deep breath. She had labored over the dress, but if she could not sell it—well, then she could not. She would just have to find another way.

With the dress in her arms, Lucille left the market and walked south across the bridge to the almshouse on Beckles Road. She had resisted the idea of approaching the parish vestry for assistance, hop ing to earn her own money somehow without having to ask for it like a beggar. But after that morning, when even the boldest dress she had ever sewn attracted no one but a critical woman and a boorish man, she took a few more steps down into the valley of desperation.

***

THE VESTRYMAN HAD just poured his morning cup of black tea and had been about to sit down to drink it when he heard a knock at the door. He was an older white gentleman with overgrown white whiskers down to his jaw. He left the tea where it was and went to the door. When he opened it, he was greeted by a petite Negro woman with some item of clothing tucked up under one arm.

“Yes?” he said.

“My name is Lucille Bunting.”

The vestryman had lived in Bridgetown all of his days, and he took special pride in knowing the ins and outs of everyone’s lives. He had never seen Lucille Bunting before, but he had heard even before she arrived at his door that one of the Bunting girls was ill. It was a bit of information that he had dismissed as soon as it had come to him, for he knew, too, that the girls had been fathered by Henry Camby, which meant that they had access to money and therefore did not need what the almshouse had to give.

“Yes, and how may I be of assistance?” the vestryman asked. Although he already knew most things, he made a habit of pretending otherwise.

“I come to ask for aid, sir.”

“On what grounds?”

“Medical aid, sir. For my daughter who ill.”

“Ill with what?”

“Fluid in her lungs, sir.”

The two of them were still standing at the door. The vestryman told Lucille to step inside. He closed the door behind them, and when he walked back across the room he glanced at his tea, which sat steaming on its tray. When he turned to face her again, he struggled to remember the last thing she had said, and after some effort he cleared his throat and said, “Fluid, you say?”

“That’s what the doctor say. Some weeks back he come examine her and say she has fluid left over in her lungs.”

“Left over? From what?”

“Pneumonia, sir.”

“She has pneumonia?”

“Not anymore, sir.”

“So she is no longer ill.”

“She did recover from the worst of it, yes, but there fluid left over now, and she needs surgery to remove it, sir.”

The light in the vestryman’s office was dim, but it was enough to see how pretty the woman standing in front of him was. Probably even prettier some twenty years ago or however long it had been since Henry Camby had been with her. Certainly he could understand how she had caused Henry, whose family the vestryman had known for decades, to succumb to weakness. Then again, Henry had a reputation for weakness sometimes. Other planters thought he was far too lenient with his workers, far too kind, and truly the only reason he was accorded respect was because of his family name. But that was neither here nor there. The matter before him—quite literally before him—was this woman asking for aid.

“Many other people are ill,” the vestryman said. “And many with worse than a... leftover fluid. We cannot distribute aid for everyone, I’m afraid. We must reserve our funds for the neediest cases. God’s earth is bountiful, but our resources are not.”

“Please, sir,” Lucille said.

“You do have other means.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

He had to be careful not to bring up Henry’s name, more for Henry’s sake than for hers, since the vestryman assumed that Henry would not want the matter discussed. It was a bone that had been buried a long time ago, and the vestryman imagined Henry would not care to dig it up now. Besides, his wretched wife would have Henry’s head if the truth were ever confirmed. Maybe both of his heads. The vestryman chuckled at his own joke and then, realizing he had made a noise that Lucille could hear, gathered himself and said, “You do own your own home, is that not right?”

“My home, sir?”

“That is but one idea.”

“To sell my home?”

“It is something you might consider.”

Lucille looked at him with horror, as though he had suggested she quarter an elephant and serve it for supper. The vestryman knew of course that Henry had given her that house, so he could concede that perhaps it had sentimental value to her, but the monetary value was what mattered right now. Selling the house struck him as a perfectly reasonable solution, although reasonableness and women did not always go hand in hand.

The vestryman glanced over his shoulder at the tea and was dismayed to see that the steam was gone. Was there anything worse than a lukewarm cup of tea? “Well, now...” He moved to usher her out.

“Sir?”

“I have offered you the only thing I can—my advice.”

“But, sir—” Lucille begged.

“Now if you will excuse me—”

“Please, sir. I have never come... I have never asked before. I have been on my own—”

He started toward the door himself, crowding Lucille back until she had no choice but to make her way toward it as well. “I do believe you can find a way,” he said before closing the door, and he hoped that Lucille Bunting knew what he meant.

***

LUCILLE WALKED HOME with the dress in her arms and a growing hopelessness in her throat. What was she going to do? Selling the house was not something she wanted to think about. She had taken a few steps down into the valley of desperation, but she was not yet at the base. Even her children did not understand what it meant to her to own that house, how miraculous it was to own anything at all. Lucille’s grandmother had owned nothing, not even herself. Lucille’s mother had owned nothing except for herself. And now Lucille owned herself and also a house. She did not want to contemplate letting it go. There was another option of course, one she had also not wanted to consider. If she could not sell the dress and would not sell the house and the vestryman had turned her away and the Lord was so fickle that He had not yet answered her prayers, then perhaps this is what it had come to. When Lucille had left the first time, sixteen years ago, it had taken all the courage and hope that she had. Returning there now would take more of the same. But if Ada could sail across the ocean for Millicent, Lucille told herself, then surely she could do this.

Not even a year after she had left the estate with the girls, a courier had arrived at their house one morning. Lucille had been out in the yard and she had seen the young man dismount his horse and walk toward the house. He had been carrying a silk pouch, and when he had come closer he said, as Lucille knew he would, “I come from Master Camby, ma’am. He ask me to bring you this.” He held the pouch aloft. Lucille had wiped the sweat from her forehead and stared at the bag dangling there in the air. “Don’t you want it?” the young man asked. He had a lazy eye that looked like it wanted to roll away out of his head. Lucille had reached up and grabbed the pouch. “Gift for Millicent Bunting, he say. On the occasion of her birthday.” It was cinched by a drawstring, and it had taken Lucille a good few seconds to loosen the knot. When she finally looked inside, she saw three gold crowns. Quickly, she had pulled taut the drawstring and tried to give the pouch back, but the courier, holding his hands up in the air, had said, “I supposed to give it to you, not take it back.” He started walking away. It was not the money that bothered her exactly; it was the intrusion into their lives. She had wanted, she had tried, to make a clean break. She did not appreciate that Henry had let the blood seep past the bone. She had kept the coins, and though there was a bank in town that served the free-colored population, she did not want to rely on the bank with something as precious as money, so she tucked the pouch up high on a shelf behind a tin canister and refused to touch it again. She wanted to prove to herself that she did not need his money. She was fine on her own. She did not need anything from him anymore. It had been surprisingly easy to let Henry go when she left the estate. By that point, his love was not something she wanted. She had wanted it once, had enjoyed his love on the nights they spent together, had even believed a few times that she could love him back, but by the time she left, that feeling had disappeared, and curiously and mercifully it had never returned. The coins displeased Lucille enough that she had sent word to Henry that he was not to contact them again. Ada’s birthday would be in a few months and Lucille did not want another gift showing up at their door. Leave us be , Lucille had written—nothing more, nothing less—and posted it to the estate. That was the last communication she had had with Henry, and on Ada’s birthday, when nothing arrived, Lucille was relieved.

Two weeks ago, Lucille had remembered those coins. She had slid the canister forward and reached behind it only to find that the pouch was gone. She had taken everything off the shelf, looking for it. Her first thought was that they had been robbed, but no burglar would come and take one single pouch and leave everything else that they had in the house, even though that everything else was not much. Her second thought was that Ada had taken the pouch, and if that was true, then Lucille was glad. At least Ada had traveled with some money in her pocket. At least Lucille had raised the child, however impetuous she was, to have some common sense. Now, though, as Lucille walked back from town, she found herself wishing she still had that money. It was not enough, not even close, but it would have helped.