Stone Mirrors Page 5
I’ll ever have to go to school, at least one like this.
If something happens to Thomas,
I’ll be all alone and must earn a living.
Maybe you’ll see him in Boston.
Even if the regiment hasn’t left Massachusetts yet,
a soldier can’t leave the army
just because a girl wants to hold his hand.
I need to graduate. Teaching is the only way to rise.
You should teach, too.
You know I hate classrooms.
They must be different if you stand at the front.
Promise me you won’t clean kitchens.
Don’t tell me what to do. Edmonia can’t say No
enough. She’ll practice the word the way she memorizes
the rules of perspective. Her neck aches,
the way it had when waiting for the judge to speak.
I have to disappear. That’s what could happen
to girls behind mops and brooms.
I suppose this is a chance to leave the past behind you.
My past is all people see. And it’s not over.
They only admitted there wasn’t proof to jail me.
I have to show everyone I’m innocent.
How can you do that?
I don’t know. Or even remember exactly
what was said, who poured spices in the cider.
It wasn’t right that Hagar had to leave.
She did nothing wrong. What happened to her?
Didn’t I tell you? She found a safe place.
You’re lying.
The good book doesn’t say everything.
But Hagar made a new home.
She was in the desert,
but an angel brought her a cup of water.
Did she ever stop being angry?
Water wasn’t enough.
Was she ever happy?
You will be, Edmonia.
No one knows. She runs her hand
over her hair, dark, curling like smoke.
The Train
At the depot, Ruth steps forward, arms
stretched out with a carpetbag.
Edmonia can’t hear her words past the window,
pasted shut with ice and grime.
The train speeds ahead by fields and words
scattered like stones around tracks she can’t see.
She left behind even that packed carpetbag,
afraid someone might accuse her of stealing
something she kept on her lap or behind her feet.
She carries only bread and water.
With all Ruth’s talk about where she’s going,
Edmonia never asked where she came from.
What was she was going to tell that day
she asked Edmonia to listen? What chance was missed?
The unspoken words fit like tight sleeves
Edmonia can’t shrug off, even as she tells herself
they don’t matter. She won’t see Ruth again.
The locomotive shears past ancient stones,
hemlocks, swamp oaks, gooseberries, and milkweed.
Red birds fly to escape the shriek of skidding wheels.
Silently, she chants, Faster, faster,
wanting to move more swiftly than memory
or manitous who won’t stay under branches, stones,
or skin, but shift shape or disappear like shadows.
She has only the future now, a place her aunts
knew was necessary but dangerous,
as they stitched a slow way forward with thin thread,
making blankets and baskets too small to be used.
No one can steam straight ahead like the train,
for time buckles. The past insists on a chase.
Will she ever again see her aunts hunching over baskets?
Reeds bend when they’re damp, so her aunts lifted them
to their mouths, breathing in life. They held birchbark
over flames, just close enough for it to soften, then curved
it into small canoes they spread on blankets.
Tourists offered a few coins for swift
journeys to places where they’d never live.
The train rattles on, unsteady as cheers
that can turn in an instant to threats.
Edmonia’s arms ache as if pulling back the string
of a bow with no arrow to shoot forward.
She won’t look back through glass and smoke
to snowy woods where no boy will take her hand
in a promise or a lie. She won’t ever again stand
before a judge with the power to put her behind bars.
She won’t find herself alone in a dark field.
She won’t be like her aunts being chased out of the forests
or her father going north in the night
or Hagar heading into the wilderness.
She means to leave behind everything but the sky.
No place is safe. Danger is everywhere.
She is the clatter and drum on train tracks,
certain she’s going the wrong way
and that she can’t turn back.
Boston, Massachusetts
1863–1865
The Good House
Checkered curtains catch dust and sunlight,
keep the world from fading the tablecloth.
In the kitchen, Edmonia presses dough into a rough
circle, patches a tear, flutes the edges, wonders
if Mrs. Child scrubs the sink and sweeps floors
the way her aunts burned cedar branches
to keep their home safe. Could a row of jars
capturing currant jelly do the same?
Don’t roll the pin more than three times
or the crust will turn coarse, Mrs. Child warns.
Before filling the pail for the pig,
salvage scraps good enough for the grease pot.
And make sure nothing’s in the grease pot
that’s fit for the table.
Edmonia slides three pies in the oven,
two for needy neighbors, feels a surge of heat
before shutting the iron door. She must
make a home here where every scrap
of wool is turned into mittens or muffs,
every fallen feather fixed into a duster.
No one must mention how the basement can flood.
The pump may break, the well go dry,
the oven explode. Rats nest in rags under the sink.
The spitting iron scorches a shirt.
A teacup cracks, and glue
scores a line through a painted rose.
Rules
Edmonia tosses dust and ashes in buckets
she tucks behind the kitchen door. Every day
she sweeps away signs that anyone was here.
Mrs. Child looks up from the suspenders
she knits for soldiers. My back doesn’t bend
the way it did when I was young. I’m thankful
to have help, but now that you’ve been here a month,
I should point out that Mr. Child and I don’t make
so much work that we can’t spare you part of each day.
You’d be wise to earn something to put aside.
Girls your age think about little but weddings,
but every young lady should be prepared
to earn her own way. No one can tell what may happen.
I know. Memory traps and snares words
spoken over teacups, and warns
about the future she means to keep small,
like a stone in her hands.
I married a respected lawyer, but he takes only
virtuous clients, who often don’t have a dime to pay him.
I’m grateful I can write books and spin rhymes. But
we were talking about you. Mrs. Child’s knitting needles
clatter. Perhaps you could teach girls and boys their ABCs.
No one would trust me with their children.
Goodness, no one listens to old stories.
But perhaps you could work with dear Mrs. Bannister
who tends to the hair of distinguished colored women.
Her husband is quite an accomplished painter.
A colored man is an artist?
The girl Edmonia used to be catches
the scents of clay, plaster, and paint.
I believe he even makes a living at it, with the help
of his hardworking wife. A good Christian woman.
I might persuade her to take you on as an apprentice.
Maybe I could be a painter.
Mrs. Child clears her throat. Of course there should
be more than one colored artist, and why not women,
too, though I’m sure I’d be scolded for saying so.
But I’m afraid your future is uncertain enough.
Edmonia nods good-bye to the girl who mixed paints.
Back when I wove mats and beaded belts,
my aunts said I had clever hands and eyes.
In Oberlin, we stitched blue shirts for soldiers.
You can sew? Mrs. Child’s face brightens.
It’s a tragedy how many girls today are brought up
without learning how to use a needle.
I know ladies with dresses to repair.
It’s important to be useful.
Your work needn’t be glamorous. Useful rarely is.
The Art of Disappearance
Edmonia fetches clothes to be mended
from brick houses with little land between.
She carries baskets past ladies who are tight-belted,
buckled, buttoned, their necks straight below hats
burdened with flowers cut from cloth
and feathers taken from birds they can’t name.
Boys toss balls. Girls run behind sticks and hoops.
Boston’s curving streets aren’t courtrooms.
Here Edmonia doesn’t have to shove past staring,
but her story still follows her like a fox.
She returns to the parlor to stab a needle
through cloth, shorten sleeves, widen waistbands.
The bottoms of fashionably full gowns
take entire mornings to hem.
Memories won’t lie still, but stun, startle, dart
like her hand moving up and down, as if casting
a spell to hide the girl who holds a needle,
to make a world small as her stitches,
the needle’s brittle point
the blades of scissors
a wrist’s soft skin
coiled red thread.
Stains
Edmonia sews while Mrs. Child writes recipes
for pickles and puddings, directions for crocheting
penwipers and purses, remedies for stomachaches:
Steep tea in boiling milk and sprinkle in nutmeg.
She narrates ways to clean spots on gloves,
vanquish bedbugs, raise bees and silkworms,
and keep girls from turning vain. How close
to invisible can a girl get before she disappears?
Mrs. Child writes a letter to the president, then wipes
the steel nib of her pen and looks at Edmonia.
God’s war shouldn’t make us forget other injustices.
My first book was a romance between
a white woman and a Pequot Indian. I was charmed
by Mr. Longfellow’s poem about Hiawatha.
She takes a breath. I heard your mother comes from
people I’ve long admired. Can you tell me
about her and how you grew up?
She leans slightly forward
as Edmonia wishes she leaned toward Ruth,
back when Ruth asked her to listen.
Plain interest unlocks the cage inside,
but she doesn’t know where to begin.
Mrs. Child takes up her pen again, using
her third-best stationery now. She nibbles pie
left from breakfast, seals and stacks envelopes.
She says, I’m asking friends to send coins to a hardworking
but needy widow. Remember there’s always someone worse
off than you are. She offers a scrap of crust to the cat,
who earns room and board hunting mice.
I don’t mean to pry, but is there anyone who waits
for your letters? Or prays for you?
Edmonia hears a train whistle,
an echo of wheels scraping tracks,
sees smoke and an iced-over window
between her and Ruth holding out her arms.
There’s no one, she says. She won’t pen a letter
until she’s certain of her address and how to sign it.
Sincerely is not a word she uses. Neither is Love.
Small
Everything she left, the wisps of smoke curling
from the stove, stinging her eyes, the stench of ashes,
is beautiful. She couldn’t see that the day
she asked Ruth to burn her old moccasins.
Could she disappear, like those deerskin shoes
or the canoes and bark houses her aunts shaped into toys
to barter to people who wanted a past
fit for children’s eyes?
Delivery
Edmonia folds mended clothes into a wicker basket,
winds a shawl over her shoulders, and tugs on her mittens.
She walks past bookshops, taverns, walls plastered
with handbills for lost dogs or lectures on Nature and Faith.
Here trees grow in rows, not from seeds snagged
in the paws or tails of foxes, dropped by birds, swept by rain.
All were planted by human design, in a city
determined as she is to forget what came before.
A wrought iron fence corrals elm and beech trees
on the Common, where men scoop hot chestnuts
into paper cones. An organ grinder tosses peanuts to a monkey
wearing a red cap. Soldiers in blue jackets and trousers muster,
practicing marching in step, firing muskets,
swinging bayonets, and running like the devil.
A thin man with an empty sleeve pinned up
uses his one hand to hold out a Union Army cap for coins.
People say the veteran can feel the arm he lost.
She’s glad to be outside, even if not in the woods.
Thoughts come from trees as much as books,
whirl into the shapes of clouds. She watches
strangers. Mouths can lie. Eyes can hide.
But she has learned to read backs.
She passes shops carved into slopes so she can look down
into windows displaying rows of currant cakes, gingerbread,
red-and-white peppermints, gloves, lace-edged parasols,
and rows of gold rings set with garnets and jade,
strings of pearls, looped like the sun’s path. She climbs
a street of brick townhouses on Beacon Hill.
Not one dried leaf appears on potted geraniums behind sparkling
windows. Edmonia considers that a seamstress isn’t a servant,
but she’s not a guest either. She chooses the back steps.
A girl with skin the same shade of brown as hers
opens the door and takes the folded clothing.
She offers Edmonia a peek into the parlor that smells
of lemon balm and beeswax, stale tea, an antique rug.
She shows off what she dusted: the crystals on a chandelier,
leather-bound books, portraits of grim ancestors,
a white bust atop a shiny black piano.
Edmonia hurries out. The basket she brought,
now empty, feels heavy with the girl’s pride
in what she’ll never own, not even the shine she created.
Still
Sleet starts to fall as she heads down Joy Street,
where children choose cold over crowded homes.
Girls jump rope, rock rag dolls.
Boys shoot marbles, chase dogs.
A woman with a baby on her hip,
her dress loosely tied around her ankles
to keep it from blowing in a delirium of wind,
pulls snapping shirts off a clothesline.
A ball skids across the street.
Checking for horses and wagons,
Edmonia kicks it back. A boy catches the ball,
then throws it to a friend without a nod to her.
She tucks her chin, insists there’s no need
for the ordinary life that can’t be hers.
She climbs a hill past the old burying ground,
where slate stones are carved
with skulls, hourglasses, and angels.
A man touches her arm. Wings press her chest.
A beak nips her throat. She pulls away,
skids through a puddle, meaning to escape
Memory, who creeps through the dark,
but pounces in broad daylight, too.
Her breath turns choppy as a river under a cold wind.
She ducks under brown birds who dart and swoop
for broken bread in the shapes of small fists.
Sleet melts in their small footprints
and on the dark metal of a larger-than-life
figure with a high forehead. The statue
is shown in a coat and vest pulled over
a plump belly and breeches of an earlier era.
She’s seen busts of famous men, but never a statue
of a whole person. Alone on a pedestal, he can’t break.
She runs her palms over the cold
curves of his boot. She must forever be content
with metal and not skin. Tears are stronger
than her effort to hold them back. She can’t
ever again gaze into the eyes of an uncaged deer or a boy.
But perhaps she was wrong to wish
for smallness. Memory can find her anywhere.
Chance
Edmonia carries in logs for the woodstove,
then tells Mrs. Child some of what she saw.
Ah, that statue of Benjamin Franklin? He was right:
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
Though I think these days money could have been better
spent feeding the hungry than on decorations for a park.
Edmonia runs her hands over books she dusted
but never opened, framed tintypes of people