The butter is now completely melted. Mother spoons it onto her bread. Asia watches as Rosalie lifts her hair, wipes her damp neck, and lets it fall again. A single drop of sweat runs along Asia’s spine, stopping at the band at her waist.
“Your father had a Northern spirit,” Mother says, red-faced in all her widow’s black. “A democratic spirit. No man in the North would ask to be called Master in his own house.”
However much he might like it, Asia thinks.
“John,” says Mother, “has a more delicate sensibility.”
Asia is a Northerner herself, which means that John must be one as well, but there is a transactional nature to Northern manners, a mercantilism that she dislikes and he finds abhorrent. It’s the Yankee way, she thinks, to value a thing only for the money it might make.
John’s own manners and opinions were formed by his classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. Brief as his time at that school was, it marked him for the South forever. He thinks he knows a superior sort of person when he sees one and to pretend otherwise is to dissemble.
Asia hears a man singing downstairs. He has a tenor voice, a voice so beautiful, she forgets everything else and sits, spoon in the air, listening.
In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone
They have fitted a slab of granite so gray
And sweet Alice lies under the stone.
Asia thinks if there were a face to match that voice, a woman might fall in love. Not her, of course, but some other woman. Asia can imagine it perfectly.
“Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?”
Asia is struck by this observation. She repeats it to John when he comes in, late that night. He’s seated in a parlor chair, drinking a glass of their own cider. She’s holding his bare foot in her lap, puncturing a nasty blister on his heel with her embroidery needle, draining it into a rag.
John takes from it a lesson she didn’t intend. “Of course, the Irish understand nothing about the black race,” he says. It infuriates him, how they come to this country and vow to liberate the Negroes before they’ve even seen a black face. “Patrick in all his meddling ignorance. Nothing will destroy the American black faster than freedom.” He was exhausted when he came in. Now he’s agitated.
He empties his glass and stares into the fire. Asia wonders if he thinks of the prophecy Mother once saw in the flames as often as she does.
“You’re right,” she says. “The Irish don’t really understand what freedom means. They don’t grow up democratic.” And maybe she believes this, but maybe she’s just placating John, she’s not even sure.
“The song was my idea,” he says. “They were so angry about you ladies being too high and mighty to join the table, they threatened to express their opinions on the tablecloth in jam and butter. How I wish we could be rid of these men.
“Oh, Asia,” he says as she cleans and wraps his foot. “I do feel so desperate. Surely I have talents beyond this.”
* * *
—
The hired men work too slowly. One day, John and Asia walk together out to the fields and find crowds of birds—turkey buzzards, crows, and magpies—feasting joyously on the unharvested grain. John has his rifle and he brings one of the largest down, the sound of the shot scattering the rest into the air. To Asia’s dismay, what John has killed is not a turkey buzzard, but an actual turkey, full-grown and eatable. This turkey has wandered over from the Woolseys’ who have never been neighborly. Mr. Woolsey will surely take Mother all the way to court. Asia and John stare aghast at each other over the bleeding body. Asia was planning to pick some squash. She’s brought a bag. She opens it and John lifts the dead bird in. The bag is heavy in her hands. She might as well be carrying rocks. They start for home together. Gloom overwhelms them.
“Nothing for it,” John says at last. “We’ll take it to Mother and then, if she says so, I’ll take the horrid thing to Woolsey.”
“No,” says Asia. “We’ll take it into the woods and dump it there.”
She doesn’t wait to hear him agree. She leaves the path immediately, stepping and sliding into a small ravine with a rattle of pebbles. She walks along the bottom, picking her way past stones, logs, protruding roots, twists of brambles. She steps in a shallow puddle and mud sticks to the bottom of her right shoe.
She needs both hands to scramble up from the ravine, so she sets the bag down, her skirts catching on one tree root, another tearing her sleeve and leaving a stinging red welt on her arm. John hands the bag up to her and follows more gracefully. When they are deep into the woods, far from the usual paths, they hide the body in some brush, and, carrying the empty bag, make their circuitous, surreptitious way home.
Asia’s having second thoughts. John’s first impulse was honest and forthright. She’s ashamed of having talked him out of it. She’s been rereading Thomas Hood’s poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” and she says to John that now, like Aram, they’ve done a murder and hidden the body. “I hope it’s not the gallows for us,” she says. She’s trying for a light touch, but guilt is pressing upon her. John is silent.
Once home, she goes to her room, shoves the bloody bag under her bed to be washed later. She scrapes the mud from her shoe, picks the leaves from her hair, covers her torn sleeve with a shawl the day is much too warm for. She cleans her face. When she goes downstairs, no one seems to notice anything amiss.
Mr. Woolsey arrives the next morning. John has already left for the fields. Mother opens the door while Mr. Woolsey is still on the porch steps, beating the dust from his hat against his leg. He’s a vigorous, prosperous man of middle age. “I expect to be recompensed for my turkey,” he says without preamble and without entering the house. He names a price, twice what the turkey was worth.
“What turkey?” Mother asks. Asia listens from a hidden place halfway down the stairs. She has no trouble hearing him—he’s speaking loudly and in anger. Rosalie comes down the stairs, thumping and creaking the wood. She pauses to give Asia a puzzled look, then continues towards the parlor.
“You ask your boy what turkey,” Mr. Woolsey says. “Your boy that the whole neighborhood thinks is possessed by the devil. You ask your rude, impertinent girl. They’ve poached my bird, the two of them. I expect if I look in your midden, I’ll find the bones.”
Asia feels the widening gap between the person she wants to be and the person she is. How could she have been so cruel to poor Henry Lee, accepting a ring, allowing him to wax on about a life together in an ivy-covered cottage she’d never meant to live in? He hates her now and rightfully so. She’s spread gossip about Kate O’Laughlen in retaliation for the stories Kate has spread about her. Although her outward behavior towards her mother has lately improved, that anger still lives in her heart, like the stone in a cherry. And now she’s a thief and a liar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mother tells him.
“I’m talking about your low common children. I’m talking about theft.”