thus far. But we’re dug in pretty deep so this venture needs to succeed.
Debt has always been my father’s worst fear. He loves to tell detailed stories of great men, even celebrated ones, who find themselves falling into debt then watch everything they’ve built get dismantled brick by brick. Brick by sodding brick, he’d start repeating whenever he’d had one drink too many.
I remember being determined not to let debt happen to me. I made sure I was the main surveyor measuring every tract before I started buying and selling land myself. My father lobbied hard to secure me the federal commission to draw the Indian boundary line so I could steer it where we wanted it to go, keeping Memphis on our side instead of theirs. Then I had myself appointed tax collector and I still list myself short whenever possible.
I hear my father saying no need to tell everything you know and I see Wash’s book tucked in my liquor cabinet upstairs. I do record some income from it because everyone knows he’s my traveling negro, but no one else knows the true numbers except for Wash. I tuck most of that money straight into my pocket. My farm does not begin to pay my debts and nothing is cheap with ten children and six of them girls.
My wife Mary anchors the far end of my dinner table. She is an appropriate woman. Appropriate and capable. But my eyes don’t catch on her in a room full of people and I have never once gotten that drifting feeling I remember so well from Susannah. That feeling of falling. But Susannah is dead and buried. Now I work to remind myself that expecting love in marriage is a young man’s folly.
Mary gazes at me through luminous blue eyes set wide in her serene face, choosing all the while what she will notice and what she won’t. She’s the kind of person who can walk up to an overlook and not see a thing. By the time she’s near enough to the edge to attain the vista, her mind has already turned back to the picnic she has brought and how best to arrange the spread.
I can see now that, like many people to whom something truly severe has happened, Mary has always refused life at some level. It was late spring when she stood up from working in the field outside her family fort just in time to watch three Cherokee tomahawk her only brother and her father. She ran and hid until I went looking.
She was sixteen to my forty when I took her in and determined to become my wife. I was surprised to find myself drawn to anyone after the deadening that had settled on me in my twenties after the shocking loss of Susannah and our son. But it seemed wherever I turned that fall, there Mary was, eyes shining. Before long, she was pregnant and it was settled.
William and Livia were born before we ever got around to marrying. Back then, thank God, preachers were still scarce. Created a legitimacy problem but I was able to sort it out during one of my legislative terms. Wrote my first two children into law, changing their name from hers to mine.
As luminous as Mary was at sixteen, I can see now that she has always been oddly hard, closed somehow. I attributed this tendency to her trauma and thought it would melt away in the course of our life together, but it has gained ascendancy instead. She chooses not to look too deeply at whatever she feels she can do nothing about. It makes me want to shake her sometimes. Turn her face to the storm.
Especially since she has brought the Bible into all our days, leaning ever harder on it. I fail to see how people can hold that book between themselves and life as if to stave it off. That book with all its horror and lust and bloodshed. But I’ve decided this is not for me to understand. So while I have been Mary’s husband for more than thirty years and have no real complaints, I would not say I’ve had much company.
And yes, I have made family again and again with a woman I neither recognize nor understand anymore. Once the candle is out and I can no longer see that flat look in her
Debt has always been my father’s worst fear. He loves to tell detailed stories of great men, even celebrated ones, who find themselves falling into debt then watch everything they’ve built get dismantled brick by brick. Brick by sodding brick, he’d start repeating whenever he’d had one drink too many.
I remember being determined not to let debt happen to me. I made sure I was the main surveyor measuring every tract before I started buying and selling land myself. My father lobbied hard to secure me the federal commission to draw the Indian boundary line so I could steer it where we wanted it to go, keeping Memphis on our side instead of theirs. Then I had myself appointed tax collector and I still list myself short whenever possible.
I hear my father saying no need to tell everything you know and I see Wash’s book tucked in my liquor cabinet upstairs. I do record some income from it because everyone knows he’s my traveling negro, but no one else knows the true numbers except for Wash. I tuck most of that money straight into my pocket. My farm does not begin to pay my debts and nothing is cheap with ten children and six of them girls.
My wife Mary anchors the far end of my dinner table. She is an appropriate woman. Appropriate and capable. But my eyes don’t catch on her in a room full of people and I have never once gotten that drifting feeling I remember so well from Susannah. That feeling of falling. But Susannah is dead and buried. Now I work to remind myself that expecting love in marriage is a young man’s folly.
Mary gazes at me through luminous blue eyes set wide in her serene face, choosing all the while what she will notice and what she won’t. She’s the kind of person who can walk up to an overlook and not see a thing. By the time she’s near enough to the edge to attain the vista, her mind has already turned back to the picnic she has brought and how best to arrange the spread.
I can see now that, like many people to whom something truly severe has happened, Mary has always refused life at some level. It was late spring when she stood up from working in the field outside her family fort just in time to watch three Cherokee tomahawk her only brother and her father. She ran and hid until I went looking.
She was sixteen to my forty when I took her in and determined to become my wife. I was surprised to find myself drawn to anyone after the deadening that had settled on me in my twenties after the shocking loss of Susannah and our son. But it seemed wherever I turned that fall, there Mary was, eyes shining. Before long, she was pregnant and it was settled.
William and Livia were born before we ever got around to marrying. Back then, thank God, preachers were still scarce. Created a legitimacy problem but I was able to sort it out during one of my legislative terms. Wrote my first two children into law, changing their name from hers to mine.
As luminous as Mary was at sixteen, I can see now that she has always been oddly hard, closed somehow. I attributed this tendency to her trauma and thought it would melt away in the course of our life together, but it has gained ascendancy instead. She chooses not to look too deeply at whatever she feels she can do nothing about. It makes me want to shake her sometimes. Turn her face to the storm.
Especially since she has brought the Bible into all our days, leaning ever harder on it. I fail to see how people can hold that book between themselves and life as if to stave it off. That book with all its horror and lust and bloodshed. But I’ve decided this is not for me to understand. So while I have been Mary’s husband for more than thirty years and have no real complaints, I would not say I’ve had much company.
And yes, I have made family again and again with a woman I neither recognize nor understand anymore. Once the candle is out and I can no longer see that flat look in her
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