“Asia,” Mother calls. “Will you please come here?”
Asia misses a step on her way to the door and narrowly avoids a fall. The hidden scratch on her arm is hot and painful. She suspects that her face has gone white, and she worries that the wrong expression or a sudden tremble will give her away.
“Good morning, Mr. Woolsey,” she says, her voice false in her own ears. Mr. Woolsey’s thick shock of hair, freed from his hat, is sticking up from his forehead. He has narrow-set eyes. When he looks intently at her, she feels like a bug pinned to a screen. Somewhere far off, Asia hears the little Hall children playing blindman’s wand.
“I think your mother is an honest woman,” Woolsey says, “despite her criminal offspring. You tell her what happened to my turkey. I think she’ll want to make it right.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Asia says. She feels low and common. She feels criminal. She feels the tick of her guilty pulse in her temple. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done, she thinks.
But Guilt was my grim Chamberlain: That lighted me to bed,
And drew my midnight curtains round, With fingers bloody red!
She makes sure to catch John before he comes home. John is a natural confessor. He has to be stopped.
She meets him in the lane. His shoulders are slumped, his footsteps a trudge. But when she tells him what has happened, his reaction is not what she expects. “Life is so short,” he says. “Don’t let us be sad. It’s a beautiful, beautiful world.”
* * *
—
Mother, with a sharp eye at both of them, meets Woolsey’s price.
* * *
—
The next thing John shoots is Woolsey’s pig. He does this while seated in the window of his bedroom, his legs dangling, the sun high overhead. There is no attempted cover-up. “Your pig was trespassing,” he tells Mr. Woolsey. “You all seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out which land is yours and which is mine.”
A week later, from that same window, he shoots Stephen Hooper’s dog. Stephen Hooper is a free black man, the father of several half black children, all of whom live with their mother. His cabin is about half a mile off from the farm. John has no particular gripe against Hooper. He just likes shooting things.
Long gone the days when the farm was a sanctuary for all God’s creatures. No squirrel, no rabbit is safe here now. “Trespassing,” John says again when Hooper comes to ask about his dog.
And yet, John’s capable of great tenderness towards anything he can’t shoot—flowers, insects, butterflies. He rescues a katydid from Asia who’d planned to pin her under glass. “You’re so bloodthirsty,” he says. “I won’t have it. Katy shall go free and sing in the sycamores tonight.”
viii
The harvest is a poor one. As a precaution against this, Mother leased some of the fields to a neighbor, Mr. Hagan, but that also ends badly. Hagan, ambitious and industrious, spends enormous sums on fertilizers and sends Mother the bills. He works the men and the horses to the point of exhaustion. After several weeks of this, Mother can bear no more. She meets him in the field to insist that the working day not start before sunup nor end after sundown. He is driving everyone most cruelly, she says.
“Mind your own business,” Mr. Hagan tells her sharply. “If I glean a profit from this worthless land, it will be through hard work and a miracle.” His anger grows the more he speaks. He calls Mother a series of names, lewd names, names intended to remind her that she lived for years with Father unmarried, names she hasn’t heard since Adelaide stopped following her about.
Mother returns to the house in shock. She tries to tell Rosalie and Asia, but the story is frequently interrupted by her sobbing. When John comes home to dinner, Mother and Rosalie are sequestered in Mother’s bedroom. Asia gives him the full and furious report.
He goes immediately out to confront Hagan, then returns more quickly than Asia anticipated. “He said you were a liar,” John tells her. “You know he’s a friend of Woolsey’s.” Asia feels her face growing hot. She did lie about the turkey, of course. But does that make her a liar? She doesn’t think so.
John doesn’t appear at suppertime nor in the dark that follows. A red moon rises over the treetops. The house is hushed, only the fire crackling and whispering in the night. Mother seems to have recovered. She sits with her sewing while Rosalie reads in the yellow lamplight. They appear calm, but, like Asia, they’re drawn tight, waiting for the release of hearing John coming home. “I expect he’s gone to Bel Air for the evening,” Mother says finally, but it can’t be true as Cola remains in the stables.
The women put out the lights and go to bed. I won’t sleep at all, Asia thinks, but then she does. She dreams of riding into a river, thinking she can cross, but feeling Fanny’s feet lose purchase. She dreams she’s being swept away, one of a great many unlikely things bobbing in the current—books, cats, hats, chairs, a cow, and a banjo.
In the morning, Asia finds the evidence of John’s breakfast, but he’d gone out again before she woke. The sun is high and the dew gone when Hagan arrives in a cariole with Mr. Woolsey and the sheriff. Hagan’s head is heavily bandaged. One eye is red with burst blood vessels, the skin around it black. The other is covered by the dressing. Woolsey helps him out of the cariole. The sheriff has a warrant, charging John with assault and battery.
“He near to murdered me,” Mr. Hagan says. “And no doubt would have, if he weren’t stopped.”
* * *
—
The trial takes place in the Booth parlor. Mother sits by the window, the brooch of Byron pinned magnificently to her collar. Rosalie takes the chair beside her. The Hall children crowd the doorway between parlor and kitchen, telling each other to shush.
Asia thinks that John looks splendidly defiant, his black eyes shining. He speaks passionately of the insult to the Booth women. He notes that there is only him to defend them, that his mother is widowed and his sisters otherwise unprotected.
In response, Hagan produces the stick with which he was beaten. It has a serious heft. To Asia’s astonishment and fury, John is found guilty, given a fine of fifty dollars, and bound over to keep the peace. Apparently Woolsey has gotten to the judge. Apparently calling a respectable lady a whore is only a trifling matter nowadays.
For weeks afterwards, the Hall children can be heard about the place, singing a song of their own creation. The chorus: “Oh, we’s bound over to keep the peace, glory, glory, we’s bound over to keep the peace.”
Magnanimous in victory, Hagan sends Mother a letter, committing to a shorter, kinder working day. His spelling is atrocious. But then, so is John’s. Although Asia argues that Hagan was barely scratched, in a letter to his friend William, John boasts that he beat Hagan until “he bled like a butchr.”
ix
Suitors and visitors:
The weather cools, the leaves begin to turn, coins of gold amongst the green. Asia wanders through the woods, her thoughts autumnal. She wonders idly why this leaf is still green, when the one next to it is not. Why does God put his finger on one leaf, yet not another? Why are good people struck down and the wicked sometimes spared?