Chapter Twenty-Seven
Later that afternoon, I looked out the front window and saw a lone figure in a buggy approaching the house. It was Adelaide,
dressed all in black. I opened the front door as she came up the steps. She hurried toward me and took my swollen face in
her hands.
Her fingertips were cold against my cheeks, the tips of her ears red. She’d driven fast in the wind, she said. She came without
stopping.
“Oh, Sallie,” she whispered. “Poor thing.”
She pulled me into an embrace, and I collapsed in her arms.
She wanted to know the details, every last one, and somehow, though I’d believed that I could not speak of it, that saying
the words would only deepen the pain, I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. My words came in a rush, borne on my tears,
every awful piece of the story, each twist of emotion, all the anguish and regret that had pooled like stagnant water in my
gut.
She listened without speaking, without judgment. She held my hands and cried with me.
When I got to the part about Chang’s insistence that Eng leave on schedule—and Eng’s enraging compliance—she told me that
the moment she heard what happened, she walked outside, hitched Daisy to the buggy, and left the house, her children, and
both of our husbands, without a word.
That night, after the children were in bed, Addie and I sat for hours in the parlor, the fire low in the grate.
The house was still, its chaos tucked behind bedroom doors.
We sipped tea and talked easily in a way we hadn’t in years—about the quilt she was making, the flowers I hoped to plant come spring.
We compared notes on the chores our husbands did at each house, how they acted around each other’s children.
I laughed when she mimicked Eng’s maddening precision with the ledger, his insistence on recording every purchase to the half cent.
She rolled her eyes when I told her how Chang had insisted on cutting firewood shirtless last week, as if daring frostbite to touch him.
Then, without preamble, she began talking about Chang in a way she never had before. She told me that he refused to bend to
her; she had to bend to him. That he had no interest in opinions that threatened his own. “I know he loves me,” she said.
“But it’s a fixed kind of love. He wants me to stay who I was when we met—that flirtatious girl who knew nothing of life.”
I knew why she was telling me this now. It was her way of apologizing for what had happened—for Chang’s rigidity, for Eng’s
failure to resist it. An implicit acknowledgment of what had been taken from me.
I loaned her one of my nightdresses and a warm pair of socks, and we climbed into the marital bed, alone together in it for
the first time. The absence of our husbands was a strange and welcome relief.
I blew out the lamp, and for a while we lay there listening to the wind rattle the shutters. Then she reached for my hands.
“You don’t have to think about everything right now,” she said. “Only the next thing.”
“And then . . . the next,” I said.
She squeezed my hand. “Yes. And, after a while, the thing after that.”
The next morning was brittle with cold, the sky a washed-out gray. I stood on the porch with Addie, my arms wrapped tight around myself. Daisy was already hitched to the buggy and ready to go, her breath rising in white plumes, her leather harness creaking as the buggy shifted on the frozen ground.
The wind tugged at Addie’s bonnet ribbons. I reached out, smoothing them with clumsy, numb fingers.
“Well, I’d best get on,” she said.
“What if you stay here with me and our husbands live in the other house?” I said, only half joking.
She laughed, shaking her head. “What if I did?”
The hug she gave me was fierce, as if she were holding on for both of us. Then she climbed into the buggy without looking
back, and Daisy jerked forward, her hooves striking the hard earth.
I stayed on the porch long after the sound of the buggy wheels faded, arms crossed against the cold.
When Eng returned after three days in Mount Airy, he was contrite. But his voice was even when he asked if I’d eaten. If I’d
slept. As if he had not left me alone in a house gutted by grief, the crib still warm from Rosalyn’s body. As if he had not
left me alone to lower her casket into the frozen ground.
“I had no choice, Sallie, you know that,” he said as we stood on the back porch in the cold.
“No choice.” My voice was flat.
“It’s not as if I could’ve gone on my own, now, is it?” Chang said.
I looked at him, at both of them—Chang, irritated by my reproachful tone; Eng, hesitant, placating, waiting for me to absolve
him.
But part of me never would. He hadn’t left because he had no choice.
He left because it was easier to follow the path laid out for him than to deviate from it.
He left because he let himself be led. By Chang, by circumstance, by duty for duty’s sake.
By a fear of disruption. A terror of being the one to say no.
I had always known this about him, but now I saw it clearly.
His need for order, his careful reserve, the way he bowed to Chang’s will—it wasn’t principle. It was weakness.
He must have read something in my face, because he reached for my hand, hesitated, then let it drop.
I turned toward the porch railing, gripping the wood with cold fingers, staring out over the bleak fields. Behind me, Eng
and Chang lingered for a moment. Then, wordlessly, they went inside.
For weeks, months, I lived in a strange, altered state. I woke in the morning and heaved myself out of bed. Sat numbly at
the breakfast table and spoke of mundane things. Passed the toast, cracked a hard-boiled egg, remarked on the state of the
sky. Parceled out the day’s tasks one after the other: first this, then that. First plan the meals, then make a list. Work
on your embroidery, sweep the porch.
And always, the children—tugging at my skirts, asking questions, whining. Reaching for me, needing me. I wiped noses and tied
shoes, calmed their cries, soothed their quarrels, lifted them to my hip, pressed their warm, living bodies to mine. Five
children, where there had been six.
Who would notice one small body missing in a house so full of noise, of need?
But the space Rosalyn left was vast. It hollowed me out from the inside. I went to sleep to forget, only to wake and remember.
I could not forgive Eng for leaving before her funeral. I could not forget that when I needed him most, he turned away.
My anger settled in the place where grief already lived, souring everything. I questioned what I believed about him. About
us. Had I mistaken steadiness for devotion? Had I told myself a story about our marriage, about our bond, that had never been
true? He was kind to me, yes. But kindness is not the same as loyalty.
I thought of Eng’s childhood—how he’d lost his father and siblings so young, and later, how he and Chang had left their mother and village, never to return.
How his world had narrowed to Chang. I saw then what I should have understood all along: their bond was a survival pact, forged in loss and sealed in blood.
No matter how much I loved him, no matter how many children we had, I could never rival that.
Eng would always choose Chang. Not just because they were bound in flesh, but because every choice they’d ever made had been
made together.
Seeking solace, I went to a Quaker meeting.
In the meeting house there was no minister, no sermon, only silent waiting. When moved by the Spirit, congregants stood to
share thoughts or lead prayer. Though I wasn’t a member, this Wilkes County congregation had known my father and, hearing
of Rosalyn’s death, granted me the mercy of their attention.
A man I knew only in passing, a neighboring farmer, stood. Elder Ryder, they called him. He spoke of how each of us carries
an inner light, a divine spark that endures beyond physical existence. Life and death are part of God’s plan, he said, even
if that plan is difficult to accept. Loved ones will be reunited in the spiritual realm. He read from Matthew 5:4: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Another elder read from a Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier:
I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.
And if my heart and flesh are weak
To bear an untried pain,
The bruised reed He will not break,
But strengthen and sustain.
At first, the words moved through me like wind through grass. I sat on the wooden bench, hands folded in my lap, listening
without hearing. A divine spark. A plan. A promise of reunion. They were words meant to comfort, but comfort was a foreign thing to me.
Yet something in the stillness of the room held me. The hush of gathered bodies, the weight of their listening.
Space for sorrow. Space for breath.
It felt like a mercy.
Without even telling me, Eng returned Phoebe and Cato and their son, Peter, to the neighbor who had rented them out.
He had done it for me. Or that’s what he must have told himself, what he would have told me if I’d asked. To spare me the
sight of her, to erase the reminder. But it was a coward’s kindness. He made the decision before I could object.
Phoebe had been there when each of my six children took their first breaths. She showed me how to swaddle them just so, how
to bathe a newborn without fear. She stood beside me while I keened over Rosalyn’s body.
Now her bundles of thyme and yarrow hung from the rafters in the kitchen house, drying to dust.
I found Peter’s carved wooden horse under the table.
“It’s just as well,” Grace said. “I don’t know how she could’ve gone back into that kitchen, seeing what she’s seen.”