Chapter Thirty-One
I retreated to my bedroom and reached for the needlework of Leah at the well. How many times had I returned to this cloth
in moments of distress? The figures had shifted so many times that the original pattern was nearly obscured.
She is my property, Sallie.
I chose a spool of glossy thread and bent over the frame. As I jabbed the needle through the linen, a bird began to take shape:
a tree swallow, white-bellied, metallic-winged. I used verdigris for the shimmer, a blue dark as storm clouds to give the
wings weight.
When I was finished, the swallow perched on Leah’s outstretched hand, wings stretched wide, poised for flight.
That afternoon I hitched Stella to the buggy and went to visit Adelaide.
She took one look at my face and grabbed her bonnet off a hook, tying it under her chin as we made our way down a path to
the pond.
It was a mild afternoon. Men in the distance hauled hay from the meadows, walked the furrows behind the plows. Crows flapped
and shrieked, swooping for seed. The normalcy of it felt like a mockery.
I burned with the heat of my news.
“What is it?” Addie asked once we were some distance from the house.
“I found peanut shells. Outside Grace’s bedroom.”
She barely reacted. “And?”
I stared at her. “And?”
Her expression was inscrutable.
“Well, obviously—obviously, I’m devastated,” I stammered.
She let out a slow breath. “Ah.” A small nod. “I thought you knew.”
The words landed like a slap. “What do you mean?” I wheeled on her. “Did you know?”
She hesitated a little. “I suspected.”
“Well, I did not. Why would I?”
She bit her lip.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Adelaide?”
“I wasn’t sure. But . . . it’s not uncommon, Sallie,” she said gently, as if speaking to a child.
Of course we’d heard the stories. Wives who turned their fury on their house slaves, accusing them of seduction. Beating them.
Casting them out. Wives who looked the other way when light-skinned babies were born.
Wives who simply endured it.
“Remember the girl the Walkers used to have?” Addie continued. “Her children looked just like him. That reddish hair.”
“Scott Walker is an odious man.”
“Nevertheless. There are certain . . . liberties—”
“This is Grace we’re talking about.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Your husband may be part of this too. You don’t care?”
We walked in silence. The trees swayed above us, dappling the ground with shadow. Ivy and clover crept through the fence rails.
I could feel Addie gathering herself.
“Maybe she seduced him,” she said. “Or them. You don’t know.”
“God, Addie. Please. Never.”
She let out a sigh. “Oh, Sallie. You’ve always been a bit . . . innocent, haven’t you?”
We passed a thicket of goldenrod. A cluster of grapes, purpling in the sun.
“Can I give you a little advice?” she asked.
I kept walking, eyes fixed on the path ahead. I stepped over a twisted vine. Felt the brush of clover against my ankle. “I
know you’re going to.”
“Sometimes it’s best to stay silent. Not to . . . dredge things up,” she said. “Once you put something into words, it can
be harder to live with.”
Grace was in the yard beside the kitchen house, pinning laundry to the clothesline. I hesitated at the corner of the house,
unsure how to begin, or even what I meant to say. Only that I needed to try.
When I reached her, I bent down and plucked a damp cotton skirt from the basket. I shook it out to smooth the wrinkles and
clipped it to the line with a wooden peg.
She nodded at me. “Afternoon, Miss Sarah. You don’t have to—”
“I have a little time.”
My presence was nothing unusual. I often lent a hand when she was canning or mending or folding clothes.
“This is the last of the laundry for the week,” she said.
“Oh, good.” I picked up a dress shirt and shook it out. My hands were unsteady. “Listen, Grace—I didn’t know,” I said. “Or
even suspect.”
She stopped moving. “Excuse me?”
“I found out about—about Eng. And you.”
She turned away. “How did you—”
“I saw peanut shells. In the kitchen house. On the stairs.”
She reached into the basket and pulled out a child’s pair of breeches. Pinned it to the line.
“I had no idea, Grace.”
She smiled wearily. “You sure about that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Anyway,” she said, shaking out a dress, “it doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.”
She shrugged. “Men do what they like.”
“It makes me sick.”
Even as I said it, I knew my words were useless. Empty. They could not fix anything.
For a long moment we worked in silence, the only sounds the snap of linen, the creak of wooden pegs. Then she said, “Sometimes
I dream about leaving this place forever. Walking down that drive to the road and never coming back.”
“I would not blame you.”
She made a small, dismissive sound—almost a laugh. “I’m free then, am I? That’s good to know.”
For years, I had willfully ignored the injustice of Grace’s life, telling myself she was content, that we treated her fairly.
But the stark truth was this: Grace lived knowing she could be sold at any moment, for any reason. She was not my husband’s
employee, as I had wanted to pretend. She was his captive.
What did I do? I went on. What else could I have done?
Alston was the beneficiary of our parents’ estate. I had nothing of my own. In my thirties, with a house full of children,
I could not simply walk away. And if I did, where would I go?
So I stayed.
I buried what I felt, what I knew, beneath the details of daily life, the demands of the household, the constant needs of
the children.
Eng and I moved around each other cautiously, speaking when we had to, silent when we didn’t.
I learned to prepare myself for the three days he and Chang would be at mine.
I felt my apprehension brewing like a storm—first a distant awareness, then mounting tension as the hour approached.
By the time their carriage appeared on the drive, something in me had already retreated, folding inward like a tulip at dusk.
At night I did my wifely duty, compliant but detached. This was the impossible contradiction of my life: to despise what he
had done and still lie beside him. To embrace the children that came from a union that had become poison to me.
Long before this, Eng and I had been drifting apart. The physical distance between us every three days was more than geographical;
it had become an emotional gulf neither of us had the will to bridge. Small disagreements, once smoothed over with affection,
had hardened into silence. Questions I couldn’t ask. Answers he wouldn’t give. Even in the same room, we had learned to look
past and around each other.
There was a time when I couldn’t avoid the evidence of his presence—peanut shells scattered across tabletops, tucked into
corners, crunching underfoot. He was always leaving a trail like a careless guest. For years it irritated me. But after I
learned about Grace, I realized I hadn’t seen the shells in some time. I wondered if he’d stopped eating peanuts or if he’d
simply grown more careful—sweeping up the remnants before I could see them. Concealing his habit the way he concealed so much
else.
In small ways, he tried to make amends. A gold necklace in a red-velvet-lined box appeared on my dresser. A shawl draped silently
over my shoulders when the house was cold. A basket of fresh-picked blackberries—my favorite—on the hall table that no one
claimed to know about.
He did not speak of what lay between us. And I could not bring myself to acknowledge it.
I thought of the book Eng had given me to read all those years ago.
Frankenstein. At the time I’d seen only the surface parallels—the brothers’ isolation, their longing for companionship.
Now I understood something darker. The creature’s pain and rejection had twisted him, turning reaching into grasping, desire into violence.
I had felt compassion for Eng for so long, seeing only his vulnerability. I hadn’t understood how pain can calcify into cruelty.
How those who have suffered might go on to inflict suffering themselves.
It was different between Grace and me now too.
We worked together, tended to the children, moved through the same rooms, kept to the usual routines—but with this terrible
awareness between us.
I did not, could not, acknowledge it aloud, but I found myself observing her children differently. I traced the features I’d
somehow been blind to before: the curve of a cheek, the tilt of an eye, the texture of their hair. The resemblance speaking
truth.
My children’s half brothers. Eng’s boys. Noah. Daniel. Isaac.
Several days after I found out, I told Eng that if he ever touched her again, I would find a way to leave, no matter what
it would do to the family or how impossible it seemed.
He stared at me for a long time before saying, “All right.”
When I told Grace what I’d said to Eng, she gave a grim nod. I saw something in her eyes—not gratitude, as I might have expected,
but a cold assessment. How would I protect her now, when I had failed to protect her all along?
We rarely spoke of it again, but we carried the knowledge of it.
It wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. But it was something.
We were, both of us, bound to that life, doing the best we could within it. Her burden far heavier than mine.