Chapter 49 #2
Sarah seemed uncomfortable too. She rearranged the fire.
“I wish James were here to do this with me,” she sighed.
“But I know I cannot leave you in suspense.” She crouched down and gave her Dutch oven a quarter-turn.
“Twenty-two, nearly twenty-three years ago, James purchased me from a plantation outside Charleston.”
She was a slave. That was hardly surprising.
“Six years later, I gave birth to our first son.”
Despite the sudden dryness in his throat, Joseph lowered his mug to the table.
This was meant to inform Joseph’s decision about Tessa?
A man who forced himself on his slave so often there were children?
Wallace was not only her master, he was her Priest; she’d had no choice but to submit.
Joseph kept his eyes on the ginger water. “You must despise him.”
Sarah had been reaching toward one of the herb bundles hanging from the rafters. She paused. “‘Despise him’?” she echoed in confusion.
“Wallace—not your son.” The ability of violated women to love the products of their violation was one of God’s miracles.
Sarah laughed. “James did not force me! I understand how you could think that, viewing us from a distance. But it isn’t true.” She smiled and plucked down a sprig of rosemary. “What happened between me and James was a slow, gentle thing—and I began it, not him.”
Joseph frowned. Twenty-three years ago, she’d been seventeen? eighteen? “But when he purchased you, he must have done it with the intention of…”
“He purchased me to save me, Father.” Sarah used a hook to swing her cooking crane out of the fire.
“Me and the man I was with then, Marcus, we’d tried to run, even though we knew what would happen if they caught us: first our master whipped us, and then he sold us.
Master had meant to sell me and Marcus both ‘down the river.’ But James came to say Mass at our plantation that day.
He understood what ‘down the river’ meant, especially for a woman. ”
Joseph did too: in New Orleans, she would have been auctioned as a “fancy girl”—or worked to death in the cane fields.
Sarah added her rosemary to the pot. “The college in Columbia already wanted James to be their mathematics professor, and he needed a housekeeper. So he asked my master if he could buy me. I’d still be separated from Marcus and my mother, James argued—wasn’t that punishment enough?
It was your father who lent him the money he needed—your father who cared for my back till I was well enough to travel.
” Sarah returned the pot to the fire. “At first, I did despise James, like I despised all white men. I thought about running again. I even thought about killing myself. I assumed what you did: that he wanted me for more than cooking and cleaning.” She took up a pile of radishes fresh from the garden and crossed to her sink.
She had a hand pump right there in the kitchen.
“But James saw how frightened and unhappy I was. He started doing these little things for me, never expecting anything in return. Big things too: he taught me my letters. Through a Priest friend of his, I was able to write to my mother. James missed his mother too, you see. As the years passed, we got to know everything about each other—until it wasn’t enough.
We couldn’t say what we wanted to say with words anymore. ”
Joseph stood and stared out the open window toward the sinking sun. “He is still a Priest; he had no right to—”
“The Church says we cannot marry; the law says he cannot free me; the neighbors say our union is ‘unnatural.’ But none of that matters, Father. Once you close the door behind you, there is no white or black, master or slave, Priest or parishioner. There is only a man and a woman—two bodies and two souls who need each other. Slavery took my body away from me, but James gave it back to me. He saved my soul, too—not by being a good Priest, but by being a good man.”
A boyish shout drew Joseph’s attention to the road.
He saw a bespectacled white man approaching, riding alongside a young colored man of perhaps seventeen.
As her youngest son ran out to greet the riders, Sarah joined Joseph at the window.
“That’s Andrew, our eldest. He’s apprenticed to a bricklayer in Columbia.
It’s not often now I have him and James both home for supper!
” She poured another mug of switchel and hurried outside.
Joseph remained at the window, watching their reunion, wishing he hadn’t agreed to spend the night.
Wallace gulped half the switchel while he caressed Sarah’s back. “Thank you, princess.” Her name was Hebrew for princess, Joseph remembered. “How are you today?”
“I am well.” Without breaking their embrace, Sarah glanced back to Joseph. “I am not so sure about Father Lazare. I have been trying to explain our family to him.”
“Ah!” Wallace peered through the window. He’d not let go of Sarah. “It’s quite safe to come out, son! If God were going to strike me down with a thunderbolt, He would have done it a long time ago!”
Joseph sighed and emerged from the kitchen.
Wallace gazed around him with obvious pride.
Little James was still hanging about his parents, while Andrew and George were leading the horses into the barn.
“On the contrary, God has blessed me with three handsome sons.” Wallace stroked the frizzly head of his namesake, then looked back to Joseph.
“And you are certainly the image of your father. Since he and I are of an age, I hope you will allow me to call you Joseph? You are welcome to call me James.”
Reluctantly, Joseph nodded.
Sarah asked the younger James to set the table, then returned to her kitchen.
Wallace—even in his head, Joseph could not use his Christian name—kept smiling at Joseph. He motioned him toward the porch. “I am sure you have questions. Begin!”
Joseph avoided his eyes. “What in Heaven’s name do you tell your confessor?”
“The truth.”
“But he cannot absolve you…”
“My confessor does not believe I am ‘living in mortal sin’ any more than I do. He was also in love once. Still is. She’s the reason they sent him across the Atlantic.”
“And your superior?”
“He knows.” Wallace shrugged. “He pretends not to. There is only one sin our Church cannot bear: the sin of scandal. You and I are hardly unique, Joseph. There are more of us than you realize. How many Priests are there in Charleston now?”
“Six.”
“Mark my words, Joseph: two, probably three of those men have, had, or will have a mistress. And I would wager all six of them have been in love.”
Impossible. Yet Joseph had to force himself not to speculate about his fellow Priests. Father O’Neil? Father Burke?
“The Church turns a blind eye because it has no other choice. If it excommunicated every Priest with a ‘concubine,’ it would lose half its clergy.” Wallace seated himself on the porch, and Joseph settled uneasily beside him.
“If the Church had any sense, it would return to its roots and allow us to take wives openly. Saint Peter—the only Pope chosen by Christ—was married! This cult of celibacy not only torments us Priests—it devastates the women and children we leave behind. I have been very fortunate, to remain with my family. Most Priests are moved from parish to parish to parish, especially if they’ve ‘fallen.’ That only encourages them to flit like honeybees from woman to woman, seeking the sympathy and encouragement they could have found in a wife.
We are with our parishioners during the most painful periods of their lives: Confessions and sick calls and Last Rites…
The work of a Priest is physically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausting.
We pour ourselves out again and again until we are empty.
We must find someone to fill us up again, or we collapse. ”
“God fills us.”
“He does—but He cannot fill us completely.”
That was heresy.
“The Priests who will not allow themselves to turn to a woman often find solace in a bottle. Others choose…” Wallace averted his eyes and did not finish.
Joseph suspected he knew what the man was implying, and he was grateful to let the alternative lie. “Do your parishioners know about Sarah and your sons?”
“Some of them do.”
“And they tolerate it?” Isolated as they were, Joseph supposed Wallace’s parishioners had no other choice.
“Those who object do so because of Sarah’s color.
If she were white, it would be easier. We wouldn’t have to worry about our boys’ futures.
No matter how much property I acquire, I cannot will it to my sons—because South Carolina considers them property.
Your father didn’t mention—the woman you love, she is white? ”
“Yes. She is also married.”
“I am sorry. That is a problem not even a mathematician can solve for you.”
At least the man did not stoop to condoning adultery—or murder.
“I can tell you this, Joseph: If you truly love this woman, if she truly loves you, and you turn away from her, she will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will always be empty. Carnal intercourse is the easiest way to still that longing inside you, but it is not the only way. Perhaps together, you and she can manage to be soul-mates without mingling your flesh. The path is narrow indeed, but others have found it before you: there are many precedents amongst our saints. Think of Saint Clare and Saint Francis of Assisi, or Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross.”
Sarah approached then, carrying a salad she’d made with the radishes. “We’re almost ready.”
Wallace opened the door for her, then called toward the barn: “Andrew! George! Come help your mother!”
The Priest’s sons obeyed their father promptly. The Church considered such children a special class of bastards, born “from a damned union.” The warnings of Saint Alphonsus rang through Joseph’s mind: “In a word, the Church regards as a monster the priest that does not lead a life of chastity.”