Chapter Twenty-Three
At first, Addie’s absence did feel strange. I found myself pausing in doorways, listening for the rustle of her skirts, the
click of her knitting needles. It was odd not to hear her voice in the hall, not to know the minutiae of her days. I reached
for her reflexively—I must tell Addie; Addie will know what to do—before remembering she was not a few rooms away but forty miles down the road. The distance between us seemed to lengthen
by the day.
The house was newly quiet. After the children were asleep, the silence was so complete I could hear the pendulum of the grandfather
clock swinging in the parlor. At night I paced the empty rooms, my candle casting eerie shadows. I sat on the porch beneath
the wheeling stars, listening to the crickets’ steady pulse.
The children felt the separation more keenly than I had anticipated. For three years, cousins and siblings had been indistinguishable.
Now they asked daily about their missing playmates, perplexed by the sudden reshaping of their family. Katie wondered if Josie
was further along in the primer. Julia Ann saved stones and feathers for Christopher in a box beneath her bed. Stephen stood
at the window some afternoons, watching the road as if willing his cousins to appear.
But soon enough the strangeness gave way to something else.
The house felt larger. Even the air seemed different.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d been holding back, holding in.
Without Addie’s voice in my ear, without her certainty to anchor me, I had to decide for myself what I thought, what I wanted.
I’d measured my steps against hers for so long that walking alone felt strange.
My thoughts, unspooled from hers, went in new directions.
I began to recognize the pleasure of arriving at an idea or an opinion wholly on my own, not through the friction of argument but through the workings of my own mind.
I found I had a mind, after all—a keen, curious one.
During the three days that Eng was away, decisions that had been his alone rested with me. When milk fever took hold of our
best dairy cow, I gave the order to put her down. When lightning struck the oak beside the barn, I decided to fell it before
it damaged the roof. The brothers hired a man named Tillman to oversee the fields during Eng’s absences, directing the field
hands through the cycles of planting and harvest. Each morning, he appeared at the back steps to discuss the day’s priorities
with me; each evening, he left a detailed accounting of what had been done.
I started making changes, small ones at first. I cleaned out the cupboards, wiped every drawer, rearranged the cutlery and
crockery, moved the porch furniture. I loosened my corset strings. Wore the same work dress two days in a row. Unpinned my
hair and let it hang down my back while I weeded the flower beds. I read novels late into the night, letting the candle burn
to a nub. I pushed the spinning wheel near the window to catch the light, blocking the path to the brothers’ special chair.
The children and I took long, meandering walks through the woods, gathering mushrooms and daisies, matching birds to their
songs. I let their laughter ring out without shushing them. I could scold or indulge them without weighing every word against
others’ judgment. I let them eat when they were hungry and sleep where they pleased—often piling in my bed like puppies, something
Eng would never have allowed. Their play grew freer. Bedtime stories stretched past dusk, and the older ones stayed up later,
with no one to object.
Some evenings, we pushed back the parlor furniture and danced to tunes we clapped or hummed ourselves, jigs and reels from my childhood.
Eng knew how to dance, of course, but unless he was performing, he thought it frivolous.
A waste of energy better spent on useful tasks.
But my heart lifted as I watched my children skip and twirl in the firelight, their shadows flaring across the walls.
On the day of the brothers’ return, I aired Eng’s clothes, seasoned the stew the way he liked it, tracked down the pipe Stephen
played with in his absence. I moved the spinning wheel back to its corner. Out came the good dishes. The house returned to
its proper order, and I stepped back into my role as wife.
When the buggy wheels crunched up the drive, the children ran whooping to meet it, eager for stories about their cousins and
life in the other household. I, too, felt a flutter of anticipation as I waited by the door. My heart caught at the sight
of Eng’s shy smile as he and Chang climbed down. I noticed anew the set of his shoulders as he crossed the threshold, the
way he stretched the ache from his back, the cool press of his hands on mine, the light brush of his lips on my cheek. A spark
between us, unexpected but welcome.
Sometimes I visited Nora Owens, a widow who lived a few farms over, alone in a large clapboard house, unafraid to speak her mind.
Eng and Chang disapproved of her forthrightness, and of her steadfast refusal to own slaves, which they considered naive at best for a woman of her means.
But I admired her resolve. Over glasses of sherry, she spoke of the world beyond Wilkes County—the famine devastating Ireland, the recent abolition of slavery in the British colonies, the rising tide of antislavery sentiment in the North.
She had no patience for the president, James Polk, a fellow North Carolinian whose staunch defense of slavery she called not only morally bankrupt but ruinously shortsighted.
“Mark my words,” she said, wagging a finger, “this nation cannot sustain such a division for long.”
Nora’s views, like Joan’s, unsettled me. I had already begun to see more clearly what had always been true—that the field
hands were driven to exhaustion, their shoulders bent beneath baskets heavy with tobacco leaves that stained their fingers
black. That Grace and Phoebe worked without pause—chopping vegetables, hauling water, scrubbing, lifting—while I sat shelling
peas in the shade. It was becoming harder to ignore that the ease of my days was built on the weight of theirs.
Our new arrangement wore more heavily on Eng than it did on me. The brothers usually arrived late at night, tetchy and sore,
exhausted from the long drive. The one who’d left his home had to surrender his authority, the privilege of his position as
head of the household. Eng complained about how frustrating that was. But there was a freedom in it too. Every three days,
one of them got to leave the complications of his own farm and become a guest. In Addie’s house, Eng was unburdened. No decisions
to make, no pressing responsibilities. If I was resentful about something, if I asked for more, if we disagreed, he could
simply wait. Soon enough, he’d abscond to a place where nothing was required of him, with an ally who was witness to his grievances,
and a woman with whom he could commiserate about his wife’s faults.
I wondered about the small domestic moments Addie shared with my husband, what they talked about during those long hours in her tidy parlor.
Did he leave peanut dust and broken shells around her house, as he did at mine?
Did he make himself useful, playing with her children?
Or did he behave like a guest she had to attend to?
I imagined Addie pouring his tea just the way he liked it—strong, with three teaspoons of sugar—while the three of them dissected my stubborn ways, my unruly children, our small disputes.
Chang nodding in agreement. Addie clucking sympathetically.
Certainly, evenings with the brothers were different now at Traphill. They stayed longer at the table after supper, Eng turning
his coffee cup in slow circles while we chatted about the day. When Addie was present, I’d often felt I was on the losing
end of an unspoken battle for our husbands’ notice. She demanded more, and she got it: their amusement, their frustration,
their indulgence. I tended to measure my words against hers, glancing sideways to gauge her reactions, afraid of being talked
over or contradicted. Now, with no one to overshadow me, I began to speak more freely. I paid closer attention to their conversations,
learning about the calculations behind their dealings, the currents that shaped their choices. Noticing how Eng would weigh
a problem carefully before revealing his hand.
It is strange to be watched in your own home by an indifferent observer. I’ve often thought that must be what jail is like.
When we all lived in the same house, intimacy with Eng often felt like one more task in a day crowded with them. Something
to get through between tending the children, managing the household, and conserving what little energy I had left. On nights
when I was bone-tired and wanted nothing more than sleep, refusing my husband became fraught, edged with humiliation. I felt
Chang watching, keeping track. When I turned away, I sensed his silent tally. I grew to crave the days when I could fall asleep
alone in my own bed, free of expectation.
Now, with Eng away for three nights at a time, a space opened where longing could grow, unbound from the daily frictions of
shared life. On those nights of his return, I could turn to him with true ardor—not out of duty, or routine, but because I
wanted to. I didn’t have to feign pleasure; it rose in me without effort.
I had forgotten what it felt like to ache for him. It was a surprise to us both when it happened.
The day before Easter, Addie drove the forty miles back to my farm in Wilkes County in a carriage with her children and a
house girl, following behind Eng and Chang’s buggy.
When she stepped inside, the house felt full again—her familiar voice in the hallway, children darting through rooms, their
shrieks echoing up the stairs.
I met her just inside the parlor and gave her a hug. She looked as beautiful as ever. “You look well,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “And you—you’re expecting again?”
I rested a hand on my belly. “Late fall, if all goes well.”
She gave a warm nod. “A good time of year for a baby.”
“It is.”
She looked around the room, her gaze sweeping across the furniture, the hearth, the view through the front window. “Oh, Sallie.
It’s so strange to be back.”
“Strange good or strange bad?”
She hesitated. “Just . . . strange.”
“Well, it’s strange to have you here. But I’m glad you came.”
“I am too. I’m starving—isn’t it time for supper?”
“It’s ready. I was just about to set the table.”
“Let’s do that, then.”
We moved side by side in the dining room, setting out dishes, navigating around each other in a way that was both familiar and oddly careful, like dancers returning to a routine they once knew by heart.
We chatted about small things—the long drive, the hens laying again, the way her new dog kept stealing food off the table.
But the easy rapport we once shared was gone.
There were edges to our banter now, gaps where our thoughts no longer aligned.
It frightened me a bit, this separateness.
I caught myself studying her as if from a distance, noting the confidence in her voice when she spoke of things I’d begun to question, the way she nudged our conversations toward the topics that interested her most.
After supper, we settled into the parlor with our needlework.
Addie glanced down at the hoop in my lap. “Leah, still? You’ve been working on that for years.”
“I know, it’s silly. I keep coming back to it. I don’t know why.”
“It’s an obsession.”
“Maybe so.”
She peered at it. “She seems to be stepping forward.”
It was true. Leah’s figure now stood slightly ahead of where I’d originally sketched her, nearer to the center of the frame.
I dipped my needle and pulled it through the cloth, adding a gleam of gold thread to her hair.
Addie and her children stayed for three nights, then returned to Mount Airy in their buggy behind Eng and Chang, who would
spend the next stretch with her.
Throughout the visit, we maintained a careful silence about our separate lives, a pretense that our marriages were private.
But an unspoken truth lingered between us. We knew each other’s husbands in ways we couldn’t even know our own. She observed
Eng’s behavior when he believed himself free of my scrutiny; I knew Chang in moments of unguarded ease that Addie rarely saw.
It was an intimacy both of us possessed and neither of us wanted.