Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

But through you, I learned to love our land. I saw you learn to walk, first on the floors my own father had cut and sanded, then on the land that he owned. I saw you learn to talk by calling back to the birds in our trees. I saw when you cried, and I held you close. You would look over my shoulder at the hills around us to soothe yourself. I saw the land, my land, through your eyes, and I learned to love it again. And it was not a burden. None of it was a burden. You told me once, in anger, that you must be such a burden to me, and I tell you, Libertie, caring for you has been the greatest honor of my life.

But I think even now I have failed you, and I am full of sorrow.

Love

Your

Mama

Ti Me had handed me the letter without any expression. I was sitting with Ella in the parlor, and I’d made the mistake of reading it in front of her. I felt her eyes on me, avidly watching, and I felt my skin become hot.

“Good news?” she said when I was done.

“My mother is well,” I said.

And then I crushed the letter into a ball and held my hand in a fist until I could go to my room, my husband’s and mine, and stuff it in the desk drawer there.

As if that could save me from it.

I will write her back tomorrow, I told myself.

But then I thought of what I would tell her.

The children here have made up a mocking song about me. Emmanuel’s father did not even know we were married. His sister hates the sight of me. I spend my days surrounded by people, alone. This is what I have chosen, instead of speaking honestly, “fleshly,” as you say, to you, Mama, and fighting to stay by your side.

“Emmanuel,” I whispered in his ear that night. “Take me away from here tomorrow.”

He was in my hand, his eyes were closed, he nodded his head back into the pillow, I thought that we still had this, at least, despite everything else, and I felt a little stab of pride.

But how do you list that triumph in a letter to your mother?

We rode on his father’s horse, across a wide, flat expanse of no-man’s-land that was full of puddles of water as large as very shallow lakes, that women and children and men walked and ran across and trod across on donkeys, going back and forth from their homes in the mountains to town.

I could feel the horse breathe beneath me. Every step up the mountain, he took in larger gulps of air. I could feel the ends of his lungs swell. The horse wheezed louder the higher we went. I felt my ears pop as we ascended.

A wife is like a horse. Laboring uphill with the weight of two people’s love on her back. My skirts were beginning to get damp with sweat. I thought of Madeline Grady, who had looked at me and said with confidence, “Grady reads for both of us.” Where did that surety come from? I should have watched her better, I thought.

It was one thing to fail as a student. I had told myself I simply did not have the aptitude to be a doctor. That I did not possess that piece of flint that existed in my mother’s soul, which was struck and made light when she had a patient before her. My anatomy was different. I was not built to alleviate the suffering of others.

But I was surely built to be a wife. Wasn’t every woman? Even Louisa and Experience were built for love. And I felt it for Emmanuel, sometimes so strongly it made me dizzy. I did not realize, though, that I could at the same time be so lonely.

I pressed my forehead into my husband’s back. “I wish the Graces were here.”

“Why? So they could make you laugh?”

“They would at least sing us love songs to cheer us, yes.”

“They do not sing love songs,” he said.

“But they do,” I said. “Every song the Graces sang was a love song.”

“No,” he said.

“They are. Love is freedom.”

His ribs shuddered beneath my arms. He was laughing. “You don’t know anything,” he said.

We got off the horse for the last bit. “Wouldn’t it be kinder to tie him to a tree and come back for him?” I said.

Emmanuel looked ahead, farther up the mountain, then back at me. “If you wish.”

We left the horse by a bush. I could hear him, even as we walked, behind me, eating leaves.

Every few twists in the road, we passed a house of one of the families that lived on the mountain. They were set back from the road and made of wood and stone. We could usually hear the family’s rooster as we approached, sometimes a goat in the yard. At each house, a person, usually a woman, would come to the door to watch us pass. If she saw me first, she would frown. If she saw Emmanuel first, she would smile and bow her head.

Emmanuel called to each, “Bonjou, madam.” Sometimes, a woman would call back, “Monsieur Emmanuel.” But every single one recognized me and called me by my new name, though I had never seen any of them before: Madame Chase, yon fanm ameriken.

“They know us here,” I said.

“I come here nearly every day. I have bragged about you so often they know you by my words.” He laughed. “Before I left for America, I used to come here to study.”

“You would bring your books here?”

“Sometimes I was studying books. But mostly, I was studying the plants.”

“You will get used to this walk,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand in his. “You will make it every day with me, once my office is set up again. We will learn this mountain together.”

“You have a lot of faith in me.”

“It is not faith,” he said. “I know you.”

We