Part 10 (2/2)

Burke I read it once, then again, mildly disoriented, as if the letter he'd slipped to me earlier had been swapped for this one that had nothing at all to do with me. He seemed entertained by my confusion. He said, ”Your parents will want you to wait and give your answer after you've consulted with them.”

”I accept your proposal,” I said, smiling at him, overwhelmed with a queer mixture of jubilation and relief. I would be married! I would not end up like Aunt Amelia Jane.

He was right, though, Mother would be horrified I'd answered without her say-so, but I didn't doubt my parents' response. After swallowing their disapproval, they would seize upon the miracle of Burke Williams' proposal like it was the cure for a dread disease.

We walked along the carriage way, my arm looped in his. A little tremor was running rib to rib to rib inside of me. Abruptly, he steered me off the path toward a camellia grove. We disappeared into the shadows that hung in swaths between the huge, flowering bushes, and without preamble, he kissed me full on the mouth. I reared back. ”. . . Why . . . why, you surprise me.”

”My Love, we're engaged now, such liberties are allowed.”

He drew me to him and kissed me again. His fingers moved along the edge of my decolletage, brus.h.i.+ng my skin. I didn't entirely surrender, but I allowed Burke Williams a great amount of freedom during that small peccadillo in the camellia grove. When I mustered myself finally, pulling from his embrace, he said he hoped I didn't hold his ardor against him. I did not. I adjusted my dress. I tucked vagrant pieces of hair back into my upswept coif. Such liberties are allowed now.

As we walked back to the house, I fixed my eyes on the path, how it was riddled with peac.o.c.k excrement and pebbles s.h.i.+ning in the moon's light. This marriage, it would be life-enough, wouldn't it? Surely. Burke was speaking about the necessity of a long engagement. A year, he said.

As we drew near the porch, a horse whinnied, and then a man stepped from the front door and lit his pipe. It was Mr. Drayton, Thomas' father-in-law.

”Sarah?” he said. ”Is that you?” His eyes s.h.i.+fted to Burke and back to me. A lock of my hair fluttered guiltily at my shoulder. ”Where've you been?” I heard the reproof, the alarm. ”Are you all right?”

”. . . I am . . . we are engaged.” My parents weren't yet informed, and I'd heralded the news to Mr. Drayton, whom I barely knew, hoping it would excuse whatever his mind imagined we were doing out there.

”We took a quick turn in the night air,” Burke said, trying, it seemed, to bring some normalcy to the moment.

Mr. Drayton was no fool. He gazed at me, plain Sarah, returning from a ”turn in the night” with a startlingly handsome man, looking flushed and slightly unkempt. ”Well, then, congratulations. Your happiness must be a welcome respite for your family given this recent trouble of your father's.”

Was Father's trouble common knowledge, then?

”Has some misfortune fallen upon Judge Grimke?” Burke asked.

”Sarah hasn't told you?”

”. . . I suppose I've been too distressed to speak of it,” I said. ”. . . But please, sir, inform him on my behalf. It would be a service to me.”

Mr. Drayton took a draught from his pipe and blew the spicy smoke into the night. ”I regret to say the judge's enemies seek to remove him from the court. Impeachment charges have been brought.”

I let my breath out. I couldn't imagine a greater humiliation for our father.

”On what grounds?” Burke asked, properly outraged.

”They say he has grown biased and overly righteous in his judgments.” He hesitated. ”They charge incompetence. Ah, but it is all politics.” He waved his hand dismissively, and I watched the bowl of his pipe flare in the small wind.

Any flicker of gladness I might've hoped for from my family about my engagement, any retribution I might've feared for accepting the proposal without permission, was swallowed by Father's trial. Mother's reaction to my announcement was simply, ”Well done, Sarah,” as if reviewing one of my embroidery samplers. Father did not respond at all.

Throughout the winter, he sequestered in the library day and night with Thomas, Frederick, and Mr. Daniel Huger, a lawyer friend of Father's who was known for legally eviscerating his opponents. My hearing was almost preternatural, cultivated by years of unsanctioned listening, and I caught sc.r.a.ps of conversation while sitting at the card table in the main pa.s.sage, pretending to read.

John, you've received no money, no favors. You are accused of nothing that rises to the level of high crimes.

Isn't a charge of incompetence bad enough? They accuse me of being biased! The streets and the papers are full of it. I'm ruined, regardless.

Father, you have friends in the legislative chamber!

Don't be a fool, Thomas, what I have are enemies. Scheming b.a.s.t.a.r.ds from the upcountry, seeking the bench for themselves.

They cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority.

Make meat of them, Daniel, do you hear me? Feed them to the dogs.

When the trial was heard that spring in the House of Representatives in Columbia, Mr. Huger a.s.sailed Father's enemies with a vengeance, laying bare their political conniving with such force Father was acquitted in a single day, but the vote was ominously close, and he returned to Charleston, vindicated, but dirtied.

At fifty-nine, Father was suddenly a very old man. His face had turned haggard and his clothes baggy as if he'd wilted inside them. A tremor appeared in his right hand.

As the months pa.s.sed, Burke paid courting calls to me weekly in the withdrawing room, where we were allowed unchaperoned visits. He filled these rendezvous with the same fever and excess we'd shared in the camellia grove, and I complied, drawing lines the best I could. I counted it G.o.d's miracle we weren't discovered, though I'm sure our invisibility was not due to G.o.d, but to the family's distraction. Father continued to shuffle and shrivel and tuck his hand in his pocket to hide its shake. He turned into a recluse of a man. And I, I turned into a Jezebel of a woman.

Handful.

Mauma couldn't sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual. She didn't know the meaning of the words quiet as a mouse.

I was laying in the straw bed we'd always slept in, wondering what was on her mind this time. I'd stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah's room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and n.o.body said a word about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was. .h.i.t and miss.

Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she sat there and studied it.

Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story quilt. She'd been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than two years. ”If there a fire and I ain't here, that's what you get,” she'd say. ”You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my bones.”

I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she'd finished, but she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.

The day before, she'd told me, ”You wait. I'm 'bout ready to roll down the frame and start quilting it all together.”

She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she'd dragged from the storeroom in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside we'd found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.

Last time I'd counted, she'd saved up four hundred dollars even.

Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head-we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.

I broke the quiet. ”Is this how you gonna be all night-sit in the dark and stare up at a hole in the wall?”

”It's something to do. Go on back to sleep.”

Go back to sleep-that was a lot of useless.

”Where do you keep the key to the chest?”

”Is that how you gon be? Lay there figurin' how to peek at my quilt? The key hid on the back of nowhere.”

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