In the autumn of 1764, at a seat on the south side of the James River drainage that Anton Tscharner DeGraffenreid had built a dozen years before, a daughter was born into a household of three living generations, and this chapter is hers.
The seat was the one the first volume of this history left a decade off and unbuilt. Tscharner had taken up the south-side ground in 1742 and put a rough first dwelling on it, and in the early 1750s, when the country had been worked into something to carry a seat, he had built the second house. It was the house with the lane running out to the road, the great oak standing at the head of the lane, the long table of oak in the hall, and, in the front room, the writing-desk on which the family’s Bible lay. The Bible was the one the line had carried since the New Bern venture: a leather-bound family Bible, eight inches by five and bound in dark calf, its fly-leaf carrying the family’s names in the keeper’s French since 1714. In 1764 it lay on the desk in Tscharner’s keeping, where it had lain since his father’s death in 1742 and would lie until his own in 1794.
The keeper was the grandfather. Tscharner DeGraffenreid, born at Williamsburg in November 1722, was a man of forty-one that autumn. His first wife — Mary Baker of Chowan, the Carolina colonel’s daughter he had married in July 1742 — had been some eight years dead; he had married twice since, and the wife at the seat in 1764 was the third, Eliza Allen Embry, whom he had married the year before. The record carries the marriages and the dates and little more, and this history carries them the same way: as the shape of a long life, named and not dwelt on.
The present master of the household was his son. Baker DeGraffenreid, born on the sixth of August 1744 and named for his mother’s father the colonel, was twenty that autumn, married to Sarah Vass, and the father of the seat’s children — a son, Vincent, not yet two, and now the daughter. She was christened Mary Baker, for the grandmother eight years in the ground whom she would never know.
The county was Lunenburg, cut from the older south-side country in 1746; the country was tobacco country; the household lived by the leaf and the land as its neighbours did. The chapter that opens here runs from that autumn to the autumn of 1775 — from the child’s birth to her eleventh year — across the years the colonies began to tilt toward the war that would take her father out of the house. But those are the grown world’s years, and this is the child’s chapter, and the years reach it the way they reached her: at the edges, as weather over a house she was learning from the floor up. It begins on that floor.
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She was born in the front room on the third of September, 1764, in the last of the year’s warmth, and for a long while the world came to her as the undersides of things.
The ceiling was a long way up. Morning light crossed it from the east window and left it by the middle of the day and came back low and red from the west, and between those hours the plaster was only itself, far and white and still. Under it she lay — in the cradle her father had set near the hearth where the warmth held, in her mother’s arms, on the bed in the back room through the heat of the afternoon with the shutters drawn to a slot. The ceiling was over all of it, the same far thing, and the light moved on it, and she followed the light.
The fire was the bright moving thing at the edge of the room. It rose and fell and threw its colour up the walls and onto the plaster, and its warmth came across the floor to where she lay, and when the warmth was on her she was easy and when it drew off she was not. The face came down into the light and went up out of it. It was the largest near thing in the world, and it came when the cold came into her or the hunger or the wet, and it stayed until those went out of her again, and then it went up and the ceiling came back.
The hands were the next thing. They came under her and lifted, and she rose, the whole far room tipping and sliding past, and then she was high against warm cloth and a steady beat under it and the one smell she came back to. A voice went with the face and the hands, low and close; and there were other voices that came from the height of the room and from the next room and from out in the yard; and when hers was off among the others she turned her head the way it was.
The house was loud from the floor. Feet came and went on the boards, heavy and light, quick and slow. There was the knock of wood set down and the long scrape of a chair drawn back and the clap of a door and the iron sound of the crane swung over the fire and the kettle climbing to its note, and under all of it through the day the dull knock of the churn from the next room. Before light in the early dark there were the first feet on the boards and the first split and drop of kindling and the catch and lift of the fire, and the room went from black to red to grey to the full white of the morning while she woke into it or slept on through it as the day took her.
She was carried between the warm places and the cold. Near the hearth the air was thick and red and good. By the window the cold came off the glass in a sheet. The back room in winter was cold to the floor and she was kept out of it; in the heat of summer it was the cool place, and she was laid there through the worst of the afternoon with the shutters to a slot and the one bar of light moving slow across the boards while the rest of the house went on beyond the door. The first winter shut the house in around the fire. Then the door stood open again to the green and the warm and the long light, and the year had come round once over the house.
The face and the hands and the close voice were the one center the rest of it turned on. When she was set down and the center went off across the room the world went wide and cool and loud; when it came back the world closed again to the near warm size she could bear. The hands were never still. It was the hands she fixed on before the face — the way they came under her, sure and quick, neither rough nor soft, and took her up out of wherever she had got to. She watched them from below, going and going — over the churn, over the table, folding cloth, banking the fire — and coming back to her between, to lift and turn and hold and set down.
The largest of the far voices was her father’s. It came in from the yard with the cold on it and the smell of the horse and the outside, and it filled the room from above the way the others did not, and the boards gave more under his feet. He came down to her sometimes. The hand that came under her then was wider and harder than the other, and it held her against a chest that did not carry the steady close beat she came back to but a deeper, slower one, and she was lifted higher, up where the ceiling came near and the room ran away below her. Then she went down again to the warm cloth and the close beat, and he went up and out, and the door clapped, and the horse went off down the lane.
There was another nearer her own scale. He was not as far up as the rest, and he came down to the floor where she was, on his hands and knees, and put his face close to hers, and went off across the boards faster than she could follow, and came back. His voice was higher than the others and he used it often. He took things from her hands; she took them back, or did not, or made the sound that brought the center across the room to the two of them. He was the one already there. When she was set on the floor he was the thing on the floor with her.
The floor came to her by degrees. First she was only set on it, on a folded quilt near the hearth, and the room stood up out of reach all around — the legs of the long table going up into the dark underside of it, the legs of the chairs, the tall front of the press against the wall, the bright square of the doorway, the cool drift of air along the boards. Then her hands took her weight and the floor began to move under her, and the legs of the long table were a thing she went toward and came up against and held.
The underside of the long table was a low dark ceiling of its own, worn pale where years of knees had rubbed it, and she sat under it while the meal went on overhead — the plates set down, the voices crossing, the feet held still beneath the chairs — and a hand came down from the bright edge of the world with a crust or a rind, and she took it. The crust was hard and then it was soft and then it was gone. After the crust there were other things: a smear of something warm off a finger, a rind to gnaw, pap from a horn spoon that she pushed out with her tongue and then took. Then the hands came under her arms and drew her up out of the dark into the white room, and the table she had been under was a flat far country level with her eyes, and she could not see across it.
She came up the legs of things hand over hand. The lip of the long table stood as high as her chin, and she held on at it with both hands, the grain of the oak under her fingers — worn to a smooth band the width of her two hands where the household held it, rough beyond that — and the great top ran off away from her into the room above her sight. She let go with one hand and the room swung, and she took the edge again.
The yard came to her in sound before it came to her whole. There were the fowl going over in the morning and the dog’s one bark and the answer of another dog far off, and the cattle’s low and the creak and chime of the well-rope and bucket, and a voice carrying flat across the open from one end of the place to the other. The door was a bright cold square, and past it the world went up and out further than any room. She was carried through it on the hip into the open, and the light came down on her from everywhere at once and there was no ceiling anywhere, and the lane ran out from the house long and pale between the fields, and at the far head of it stood the one great dark thing taller than the house and taller than anything — the oak at the head of the lane — and she was carried down the long open toward it, and it grew as she came and did not stop growing, and then she was under it and it was the whole of the sky.
By the well the world stood open all around. The bucket came up dark and streaming on the rope, too far out over the stone rim to lean toward, and the hand kept her back from it, and the water went over and the cold came off the stone. She was held up to look down into the well, where a round of light lay far at the bottom — the sky come down into the ground — and then she was set on the stoop, the open held wide over her and the close voice come back at her ear, and the day went on around the two of them.
Later her own feet took her out into it. The ground of the lane was rutted and hard and her steps were short against the long of it, and a hand held hers from above, and the oak stayed where it was at the head of the lane and came no nearer for all her walking, and she stopped, and was lifted, and carried the rest.
In the evening the light went out of the room the way it had come, off the high plaster and down the west wall and gone, and the fire was the last bright thing, and the feet went quiet through the house one by one. She was carried up against the warm cloth with the close beat under it and the one smell, and the room went red and then dark, and the hands set her down in the warmth near the hearth, and the voice stayed a while above her in the dark and then it too went, and the house held its night sounds, and she slept.
The years turned over her this way — by the change in what her hands could reach and her feet could carry and her eyes could cross. She was set on the floor, and then she crossed it. The long table that had been a dark ceiling over her became an edge she stood at, and then a country she could see the near half of. The oak that had been the whole of the sky stood off at the end of the lane and let her walk a little of the way to it and no farther. The house went on over her and around her — the feet, the fire, the churn, the crossing voices, the cold square of the open door — and her mother was the near center of all of it, the hands and the close beat and the one voice that came down out of the rest; and she came back to it, and came back to it. That was the size of the world. It held her, and the years turned over her in it; and at the far edge of it the lane ran out to the oak, and past the oak the road went on out of sight, and she had not yet been carried that far.
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By the time she could cross the room with a thing in her hands and not drop it, the world had come up off the floor and stood at her own height, and she went through the days inside it.
She was on her own feet now, and the rooms that had stood up out of reach all around her had come down to where she could put her hands on them. The long table she had sat under was an edge she stood at and laid her two arms along; she could see the near half of the great top now, the plates and the bread and the cup, and the far half ran off past her sight the way it always had. The press against the wall was a tall front with a smell of cloth behind its doors when they were opened, and she came no higher than the second drawer. The hearth was the warm middle the whole front room turned toward, and she had learned the floor in front of it where it was safe to be and the iron and the heat where it was not, and she kept her distance from the one and stayed in the warm of the other.
The days had an order, and she came to follow it. In the early dark there were the first feet on the boards, and the split and drop of kindling, and the catch of the fire, and the room going from black to red to grey to the white of the morning while she came up out of sleep into it. Then the crane swung over and the kettle climbed to its note, and the churn began its dull knock in the next room, and the table was laid and the household came to it and rose from it and the table was cleared. The light crossed the high plaster from the east window and left it by the middle of the day and came back low and red from the west. The fire was banked and the feet went quiet through the house one by one, and she was carried up to the warm cloth and the close beat and set down near the hearth, and the day had gone round once more the way it went round. She did not have to be told what came after what. She had watched it come after what enough times that she went ahead of it — she turned toward the door before the feet reached it, and held up her face for the cloth before the cloth came, and was at the table’s edge before the bread was down.
She was given things to do. They were the part of the day she could carry: a spoon to bring from the dry-sink, a folded cloth to hold against her front and carry across to the press, a handful of kindling-splits to set down by the hearth one at a time. She could fetch what was named to her if it stood where she could reach it, and she would go and find it and bring it back, and a hand would take it from her, and the day would go on. The part was the size of her two hands and no more, and she did it, and the next day it came round to her again, and she did it again, and that was the shape of a day for her — the part that was hers come round and done and come round.
Her mother was the steady middle of all of it. The hands were never stopped; they went over the churn and the table and the cloth and the fire and the children and came back, sure and quick, neither rough nor soft, the way they had always come. What her mother did, her mother did in an order, the same things in the same turn, morning on morning, so that the day had its shape before the day began. The child did not watch her mother for the meaning of it. She watched the hands for what they did and where they went and what came after, and she came to know the order the way she knew the rooms — by being inside it, day on day, until it was the ground she stood on. When a thing went wrong — the milk soured, the fire would not take, a pot boiled over and hissed across the coals — there was no great noise made of it. The hands did the thing that came next, and then the thing after that, and the day went on, and the child took the order of that too without anyone naming it to her.
There was a name that turned her. Polly — it came across the room and over the yard and down the lane from the well, in her mother’s voice and her father’s and the higher one of her brother, and when it came she turned her head the way it came, the way she had turned toward the close voice before she had any name at all. It was her own sound. She knew it before she knew much else, and she came when it called her, or did not, and made them call it twice.
The higher voice was Vincent’s. He was the one already there, the one ahead of her in everything — taller by a head, faster across the yard, let to do the things she was kept from. He went out the cold square of the door into the open when she was held back from it; he carried the wood she could not lift; he was let to the well-rope and the gate-latch and to stand at his father’s side at the horse, where she watched from off. He went where she could not yet go and came back, and she followed him as far as she was let and stopped where she was stopped. He took things out of her hands still, and she took them back or made the sound that brought her mother across the room to the two of them; but he came down to her too, onto the floor where she was, and showed her the thing in his hand and let her hold it and took it back, and went off across the yard faster than she could follow, and came back.
Her father was the largest of the near things now. He had been the deeper, slower beat and the wider, harder hand and the voice that came in from the yard with the cold and the horse on it and filled the room from above; and he was still all of that, but now she went to him. When his voice came in from the open her feet were across the floor before she had chosen to cross it — she was up and going, and then she was against his leg with both arms around it, and the wide hand came down onto the top of her head and held there a moment, heavy and warm, and then it came under her arm and took her up.
Up there the room ran away below her and the ceiling came near, and she rode his hip out into the yard the way she had been carried before, only now she held on at his shoulder with her own hands and looked out from the height of him at the open she was let into so. He took her along. She went with him down the lane to where the cattle stood, and she watched his hands at the things he did about the place — at the gate, at the wood, at the post he set deeper into the ground with a maul, the dull sound of it going out flat across the open. His hands were slower than her mother’s and bigger, and they did one thing at a time and did it through to the end of it before they went to the next. She stood off at the length he set her down and watched, and when he had done the thing he picked her up again and they went on, and his voice went over her head to Vincent or to a man across the field and came down to her sometimes in a word she knew.
He came and he went. The horse went off down the lane with him on it and was gone, and the day went on without him in it, and then there was the sound of it coming back in the evening and her feet went toward the door again. There was no part of her that held the going against the coming, or the coming against the going; he went and he came, and when he was there she was near him, and when he was not she was at her mother’s side at the part of the day that was hers.
She had a bowl that was her own. It was wood, turned shallow and worn pale on the inside where the spoon had gone round it, and it was set down in front of her at the table and the warmed porridge went into it with a dab of butter in the middle, and she ate from it with the horn spoon and pushed the last of it to the low side and got it up. When it was rinsed and dried it went back on the long counter under the window with the others, and she knew it from the others. On the underside her mother had cut marks into the wood — she had seen them cut, the knife going slow and her mother’s head bent over it, and she had put her own finger into the fresh-cut grooves while they were new and pale and felt the edges of them. She could not read them. But she knew the shape of them was hers — her sound, Polly, cut into the wood under the bowl that was hers — and when she had the bowl she would turn it over and put her finger into the marks and turn it back.
The year came round over the house the way the day did. The first cold shut the house in around the fire, and the door stayed to, and the work drew in close to the hearth and the candle; and then the cold went off and the door stood open again to the green and the long light and the warm, and the household spilled back out into the yard and the lane and the field. There was the time the fowl went over thick in the mornings; the time the men were out in the field before light and the corn stood up taller than Vincent and then taller than her father; the time the great pot was out in the yard over its own fire and the smell of it came across the whole place. The work of each time was the work she watched that time, and the part of it that was hers came round when its time came round, and she did it, and the time went on into the next.
Her own feet took her farther into the open now than they had. The lane that had run out long and pale past her reach let her walk a good stretch of it before a hand came down for hers, and the oak at the head of it that had been the whole of the sky grew as she came the way it had always grown, and now her own walking brought her under it. She stood under the oak with her head back and the dark of it went up over her and out past the edges of her sight the way the ceiling had when she was on the floor, only there was no edge to it and no plaster, only the green and the moving light coming through and the great trunk her two arms would not have gone halfway round. Past the oak the lane ran on and went down out of sight where the road took it, and she had not walked that far; she was lifted, when she had stood long enough, and carried back the way she had come, down the long open toward the house with the smoke standing up off it, and her mother’s voice came down the lane to meet her with her sound in it, and she went in.
The house went on over her and around her — the feet, the fire, the churn, the crossing voices, the open door, her mother’s hands going and coming, her father in from the yard and out again, Vincent ahead of her and out of reach and back — and she was inside it now, no longer only carried through it but standing in it on her own feet, with the part of the day that was hers come round to her and done. That was the size of the world still, and it held her, and the year turned over her in it; and at the far head of it the oak stood where it stood, and past the oak the road went on down out of sight, and she had stood under the one and had not walked the other.
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There was a part of the house that was the grandfather’s, and she did not live in it.
Her own part was the back of it and the warm middle — the hearth, the kitchen, the room where she slept, the yard and the well and the lane that ran out from all of it. That was where the day was made and where she was in it, at her mother’s side and at the part of the day that was hers. But the front of the house had rooms she went into seldom, and the front room of all of them, the one with the good chairs and the long window and the floor that was kept bare and waxed, was the grandfather’s. He sat in it in the part of the day when her own part was busiest, and the door of it stood mostly open, and she came to the edge of it and looked in and did not always go further.
The grandfather was her father’s father. He was older than anyone, older than the oldest of the hands about the place, and she came to know him as a different kind of thing from her father — slower, and apart, and quiet in a way her father was not. His hands were her father’s hands grown old: the same wide shape and gone thin over the bones, the skin loose and spotted on the backs of them, and they did not do the work of the place the way her father’s did, at the gate and the wood and the horse. They did one thing, mostly, in the front room: they were folded on the table, or they turned the leaves of a book, or they were still in his lap while he looked out the long window at the lane. His voice was lower than her father’s and came slower, and when it came to her it came down a long way, and she stood at the edge of his room and gave it back her own sound when he said hers.
He was a fixed thing in her days. The back of the house moved all day — her mother’s hands and the feet and the fire and the round of the part that was hers — and the front room did not move, and the grandfather in it did not, and she came across to it the way she came back to the warm of the hearth, to look in at the still of it out of the busy of her own part. Sometimes he did not turn from the window or the book and she looked and went away again. Sometimes the slow voice came and said her sound, and she went in and stood by the arm of his chair, and the old hand came onto the top of her head the way her father’s did, only lighter and longer, and stayed there while he looked out at the lane. Sometimes he gave her a thing off the table to have a while — a smooth brown stone, a horn button, the cool weight of a watch that ticked against her palm — and took it back when she had had it. He was the still place at the front of the moving house, and she went to it and came away and went to it again.
There was a woman of his part of the house. She was not the grandfather’s daughter and she was not the child’s mother; she was the grandfather’s wife, and she kept the front rooms the way the child’s mother kept the back, and her hands were busy in them at the things that were done there. She was a steady figure in the front of the house, neither near nor far, and the child took her as she took the shape of the front rooms themselves — as a thing that was there, that belonged to the grandfather’s part, that was not hers to be at the center of. The front of the house was peopled and warm and kept; it was only not the part the child lived in.
On the table by the long window, where the grandfather’s hands went when they turned leaves, there was a book. It was not the only book in the front room, but it was the one his hands came back to, and it lay by itself when they were not on it, square and dark on the waxed wood. It was bound in dark leather worn pale and soft at the corners and along the spine where the hands had taken it up and set it down for longer than the child had been alive or her father had. It was no bigger than the span of two hands, and thick, and when the grandfather opened it the leaves were close-written in a brown ink gone faint, and the first of the leaves, the one he opened to oftenest, carried lines of it from the top down — marks cut into the page the way marks were cut, the child knew, into the underside of the bowl that was hers, only more of them, and older, and made with a pen and not a knife. She could not read them. She knew, from the bowl, that marks like that were names; and she knew that this book was the grandfather’s, the way the bowl was hers, and that his hands kept coming back to it.
She was not let to touch it. It lay where his hands were, and hers were kept from it, the way they were kept from the iron at the hearth and the bucket at the well — not with a word always, but with the hand that came down and turned her from it, so that she came to leave it where it lay and to look at it from the floor by his chair without putting her hands up to it. Of all the things on the grandfather’s table it was the one she would most have put her hands to — the dark soft of it, the worn corners, the marks she could not read — and it was the one most kept from her, more than the watch and the stone and the button he gave her to hold and took back; the book he did not give her, and she came to know it as a thing to be looked at and not held. It was the grandfather’s, and it stayed his, on the table by the window, in the front room she did not live in.
Then there came a day he took her out to the ground.
It was a clear day with the cold not yet in it, and her mother put her in her good things and stood her at the front door, and the grandfather came out of his room with the dark book held against him in the crook of his arm the way she had not seen it carried before, off its table and out of the front room and into the open. He took her hand in his old one and they went out the door and down past the side of the house, not toward the lane and the oak but the other way, around to where the ground rose a little behind the house to a place set off by itself with a low rail around it and the grass let to grow long inside the rail and a few stones standing up out of the grass.
She had been by the place. She had not been into it. The grandfather lifted the rail’s bar and they went in, and the long grass was wet against her legs, and the stones stood up grey and leaning, some of them, and worn, and the day was quiet inside the rail in a way it was not outside it — the yard-sounds and the place-sounds come a long way off and gone thin, and the grass and the few grey stones and the old man and the child the only things inside. There were not many stones. They stood about in the long grass not in a row, some near and some off by the rail, and the child went by them at the grandfather’s hand without their meaning anything to her but that they were there and were old and were stones. He brought her to one of them, not the oldest-looking and not the newest, set a little apart, and he stood at it a while and did not say anything, and the child stood by him and looked at the stone, where there were marks cut into the grey face of it — cut deep, and large, larger than the marks in the book and the marks under her bowl, cut to last in the stone the way the others were cut to last in the wood and the page.
He went down then, slow, onto one knee in the wet grass, so that his face came nearer her own, and he took the dark book from the crook of his arm and held it out and let her take it.
It was heavier than she looked for. It came down into her two arms and she took the weight of it against her front the way she took the folded cloth she carried for her mother, only this was a denser, harder weight that wanted to go down, and the grandfather’s hands stayed under hers and under the book so that it did not. The leather was cool and soft-worn under her fingers, and the corners of it were round with handling, and she stood with it held against her at the stone with his hands holding her holding it.
He told her, then, in his low slow voice that came down to her, that the stone was her grandmother’s. He told her the grandmother’s name, and her finger went to the cut marks on the stone the way it went into the grooves under her bowl, and the name he said was her own name — the long name under the Polly they called her by, the name that was hers. The name on the stone was her name. She did not have it that the woman in the ground was gone, or how long gone, or that she herself had been given the dead woman’s name to carry, or what it was to be named for someone into the ground before you were born; those were the grandfather’s to hold, and he held them, kneeling in the wet grass with his hands under the child’s hands under the book. What the child had was the cut name under her finger and the name in her ears and the two of them being the one name, and the book heavy against her, and the old hands holding it all up.
Then he took the book back, and the weight went off her front, and he got up off his knee slow with a hand on the rail, and they went out of the place and let the bar down behind them and came back around to the front of the house in the clear cold day. Her mother had the door open. The grandfather went in to his own room with the book against him in the crook of his arm, and it went back onto the table by the long window where it lay, and he sat down by it, and the day went on in the front of the house and the back of it the way the day went on.
She went back to her own part. There was the part of the afternoon that was hers, and it had come round, and she did it. The book stayed on the table in the grandfather’s room, and his hands came back to it, and she came to the edge of his room and looked in and did not put her hands up to it; it was his, and it stayed his. She had held it the once, out at the ground, with his hands under hers — the dark soft weight of it, and the cut name on the stone that was her name too — and then it had gone back to where it lived, and she back to where she lived, in the warm middle and the back of the house, at her mother’s side, with the day going round; and the grandfather kept on in the front of the house with the book his hands came back to, the oldest thing in the house keeping the oldest thing in the house, and the child grew on in the other part of it, carried along in the round of the days, with the name she had been given waiting in her the way it waited cut in the stone and cut in the book — a thing that was hers and that she had not yet come into, the way the road past the oak was a thing that ran on and that she had not yet walked.
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She was big enough now to be of use, and the house used her.
The part of the day that was hers had grown past the carrying of a spoon and the holding of a folded cloth. She minded the fire when she was set to it, feeding it from the basket split by split and not too fast; she carried water from the stoop, not the full bucket but a good half of one in a smaller pail, and did not slop it crossing the floor; she watched the pot when her mother stepped out, and called when it wanted watching harder than she could give it; she had the keeping of the littlest when the hands that usually kept it were wanted elsewhere. She was not the equal of the grown hands and was not let to think she was, but she was a pair of hands the house could send, and it sent her, and she went.
The littlest was below her the way Vincent was above. It had come into the house the way she had once come into it, and lain in the cradle by the hearth where she had lain, and been the near light weight her mother carried and the others learned to carry after. She had carried it herself, sat on the floor with her back to the wall and the weight of it in her lap and her arm where she had been shown to put it, and it had taken her finger in its hand and held. It was the one below her, the one she was set to mind, the one she was ahead of now the way her brother was ahead of her.
Then it took sick, and the house changed around it.
She knew the change before she knew the cause of it, the way she knew a change of weather coming in off the open before the rain. The order of the day bent. Her mother did not leave the back room as she had, and the door of it that had stood open stood mostly to, and the voices behind it were low and went on at hours they did not used to go on. A fire was kept in the back room that was not kept there in that season, and the heat of it came under the door, and there was a smell that came with it, sharp and close, that had not been in the house before. The night candle burned later and later and then did not go out at all, and she woke in the dark and saw the line of its light under the door and the shapes that crossed it, and slept, and woke, and the line was still there.
She was kept back from it. She was not let into the back room except to the door of it, and at the door a hand turned her, gently, the way her hand had been turned from the iron and the well and the grandfather’s book — not unkindly and not with much said, only turned, and given a thing to do instead. And there were more things to do than there had been, because the hands that did them were fewer now, drawn off behind the back-room door, so that the part of the day that was hers grew of itself: she had the fire to mind longer, and the fetching to do oftener, and the watching of the pot, and the keeping out from underfoot, and the being quiet, which was a thing to do as much as the fetching was. The house had bent its whole order toward the back room, and what was left of the order it gave to the hands it had left, and she was one of them, and she did her part of it because there was no one with the time to do it for her and because the doing of it was wanted.
And there came a point in the strained days when she did not wait to be set to a thing. She saw the fire low and went to it with the basket before a voice sent her; she saw the water-pail dry and took it to the stoop; she saw a thing wanting doing and her feet were already at it, her hands already in it, before the thought of being told had come and gone. There was no choosing in it. The thing wanted doing and the hands to do it were behind the door and she was a pair of hands and the doing was wanted, and her body went to it the way the grown hands went to the next thing, without a word, because that was what was done. No one praised her for it. The hands were wanted behind the door, and a thing wanted doing, and she did it, and the day took it and went on.
She did not have it that the littlest was dying. What she had was that the house had gone to the back room, the whole house, all its hands and its hours, and that her part was to do the things that kept the rest of it standing while it did. She took that in the way she had taken in the order of an ordinary day — by being inside it — only this was the order under a weight, the same hands doing the same things in a changed and heavier turn, the next thing done and then the next, the fire fed and the water carried and the pot watched and the littlest’s washing boiled and hung, all of it going on, all of it held, while behind the door the thing the house had gone to went on toward whatever it went toward.
It went toward the littlest’s death. There came a night the line of candlelight under the door did not have the crossing shapes in it for a long while, and then it did, slower, and in the morning the back room was opened and aired and the sharp close smell was let out of it on the cold air through the house, and the cradle by the hearth was not put back. The house was quiet in a way it had not been even at its quietest — not the quiet of the night with the fire banked, but a quiet with a held breath in it, a quiet the grown people moved through carefully as though it could be knocked over. Her mother came out of the back room, and her face was her face, and her hands were her hands, and they took up the morning — the fire, the kettle, the table — and did it. They did it slower and they did it with the held quiet around them, but they did it, the same things in the same turn, and the child watched the hands take up the order again, and did not have what it was, and took it in.
There was activity then, of a kind the house did not have in its ordinary days, and it filled the house for a day and a night and a part of the next day. Women came up the lane — neighbour-women, and a woman or two of the grandfather’s kin from along the river — and they came in and were not company in the way company was; they put off their cloaks at the door and took up work. Some were with her mother behind the closed back-room door, where the littlest was washed and made ready, and the child was kept from that and did not see it and had only the knowing that it was being done, by the going in and the coming out, the basin carried in full and carried out, the clean linen taken in. Some were in the kitchen and the front, and they had brought food with them and set more to cook, so that there was always something at the fire and something on the table, and the child was set to the fetching and the carrying of it among them, in and out, a pair of hands they sent. The men came too and stood about the yard and the front of the place, the father among them and the grandfather, in their good coats, not at the work of the place that day, talking low or not talking at all. And through the night there were people sitting up in the front room with the candles lit and the low talk going on under the held quiet, and the child was put to bed and woke to the light of it under the door and the murmur of it through the wall and slept again — the house full and lit and quiet and busy in the dark in a way it had never been.
In the part of the next day the littlest was carried out behind the house, washed and wrapped and no longer than the wrapping of it, to the ground inside the low rail where the grandmother’s stone leaned in the long grass. The child was taken out to it, held at her mother’s side, and she stood at the rail and saw the place opened in the ground, short among the older places, and the wrapped weight set down into it, and the grandfather said the words he said over it, low and slow the way his voice came. The men put the ground back over it with the spades, and the sound of the earth going down was a sound she had not heard before and did not hear again for a long while after and did not lose. There was no stone cut for it — only the turned earth, and the long grass, and the grey leaning stones of the older dead standing off in the quiet of the place she had been into once before, with her grandfather and the book, and was into now again.
Then they came back around to the front of the house, and the people went down the lane through the afternoon one and two at a time, and the food was put away or sent on, and the good coat was hung up, and the night came, and the fire was banked, and the house slept.
And in the morning the order took her up again. There was the fire to be fed before light, and the kettle to climb to its note, and the table to be laid and cleared, and the water to be carried, and the churn’s dull knock to start in the next room, and all of it came round at its hour the way it came round, and her part of it came round to her, and she did it. The cradle was not by the hearth and the littlest was not in the house and her mother did not leave the back room any more than she left the others now, and the held quiet thinned day by day back toward the ordinary quiet, and the order went on. It went on the way it had gone on under the weight, the same hands and the same turns, only the weight was off it now in the way a weight goes off — not lifted all at once but carried until it weighed less — and the house did the next thing and the next thing and the day went round, and the child was inside it doing her part, and she did not have a word for what she had been inside of and did not look for one. She had it the way she had the order of the day and the way she had her name: not as a thing told her but as a thing she was made of. The house had gone to a hard thing with its whole self and had done the next thing through it and come out the other side of it still doing the next thing, and she had been one of its hands while it did, and that was in her now, under the having of it, the way the turned place was in the ground behind the house among the older places, not marked yet and not gone.
The littlest was in the ground with the grandmother whose name was her own name, behind the house, inside the rail, and the house was in front of it going on, and the child grew on in the house, older by the measure of what she could now be set to and what she had now been inside of; and at the far head of the lane the oak stood where it stood, and past the oak the road went on out of sight, and she had not walked it, and the days came round and were done and came round.
· · ·
She was old enough now to catch what was not said to her.
She caught it the way she had once caught the weather coming, or her father’s step among the others, or the change in the house when the littlest took sick — not by being told but by the thing being there to be caught. And what was there to be caught, across these years, was a change in the grown world that she could not have named and did not try to, a change she took in at the edges of the household’s days the way she took in everything: by being inside a house that was inside it.
The men gathered more than they had. Riders came up the lane oftener, and were taken in, and the low talk in the front room ran later into the night and started up again in the morning, and there were more of the men at it — her father, and the grandfather sometimes, and neighbour-men who came and tied their horses at the rail and went in with their faces set in a way she had a name for, the way her father’s face was set when a thing about the place had gone wrong, only it was not the place. The talk had a different sound from the ordinary talk of the place. It ran low and it ran on and it did not have the easy turns in it that the ordinary talk had, the bits that made the men laugh; it was talk with something held under it, and the something under it did not let up across the seasons but grew, so that the gatherings came oftener and the faces stayed set.
She caught words out of it without the meaning of them. There were names that came up in the low talk that were not the names of anyone she knew or any place along the river — hard short words and long ones, said in the grown voices with the held thing under them, said again on another night and another, so that she came to know them as the words the trouble was made of without knowing what they stood for. She turned them over the way she had once turned the smooth stone and the horn button the grandfather gave her, not for what they were but because they were the things the grown world had its hands on now, the way she had once had her hands on the things off his table. The men said them and set their faces and the talk ran on, and the child carried the dishes in among them and carried the empties out and was not spoken to in it and did not look to be, and caught what she caught, and let the rest go over her the way the high talk had gone over her when she was little enough to be under the table.
Court-day came back changed too. Her father went to it the way he always had, and the grandfather, and they came back from it the way they always had — but they came back with more of the held thing on them now, and the talk that started up the evening after court-day ran later than it used to, and there were more riders in the days after it. The world beyond the lane, which had always been a thing the men went out to and came back from, was reaching in now, up the lane and into the front room, oftener and with the held thing under it, and the child at the edge of it caught the reaching-in without the thing that reached.
And the road itself was busier than it had been. The road past the oak at the head of the lane — the road the grown world had always gone out to and come back from — carried more on it now than it used to, more riders and more going, so that a child sent up the lane on an errand saw more pass along it in an hour than she would once have seen in a day: men she did not know, going the one way and the other with the cold on them and somewhere to be, raising their hands to her or not seeing her at all. The stir of the world out past the oak came up the lane to the house in the riders that turned in at it, and went back down the lane to the road in the men who rode out to the gatherings, and the child saw the going and the coming of it the way she saw the fowl cross over in the mornings — as a thing the season was doing — without the thing that set it going.
And in among it the ordinary world held, because the ordinary world was what the house was made of and the house went on making it. The fire was fed and the table was laid and the churn knocked in the next room and the year came round over the place — the fowl over in the mornings, the corn up past the men’s heads, the great pot in the yard, the door shut early against the cold — and her part of it came round to her and she did it, larger now than it had been, a true part of the work and not the edge of it. The held thing was in the grown talk at night and the ordinary day was in her hands by day, and both of them went on, the one over the other, and she was inside the house where they both were.
She had a place at the grown world’s edge now that she had not had. She was let to the table when the men were at it, not under it; she carried the cups and the plates in among them and was trusted not to spill them and not to want talking-to; she was sent on errands a girl her size could be sent on, up the lane and to the well-house and to the grandfather’s room, and was counted on to do them and to come back. She was not grown and was not let to think she was, but she was well past the size she had been, and the household used her past it — a hand it could count, a head it could give a thing to keep and have the thing kept. She was coming up in the house the way the corn came up in the field: by a measure you did not catch in the watching, but saw when you set the one year against the year before it.
Her father was in the middle of the grown world’s change the way he was in the middle of the place. He was the one the riders came to as much as any, and the talk in the front room was as often his as anyone’s, and he went out to the court-days and the gatherings and came back with the held thing on him; and he was still her father, in from the yard with the cold and the horse on him, the wide hand on the top of her head, the deep slow beat she had been carried against, going and coming the way he went and came. The going-out and the coming-back were the oldest thing she knew of him. He had gone off down the lane on the horse and come back up it in the evening her whole life, more times than there was any counting, so that the shape of him going was as ordinary to her as the shape of him at the table, and she no more marked one of his goings than she marked the fowl going over in the morning.
So when he made ready to go over the line into the Carolina country on the place’s business, in the cold coming-on of the year, she marked it no more than the others.
It was a going of more days than his short goings, and the house made it ready the way it made ready the things it had done before: the bags were packed and the good coat and the other things a man took for a going of some days were seen to, and there was the talk of it among the grown people, where he was going and what for and how long he would be, the land over the line and the men he would see and the papers to be done — talk she caught the edges of, the Carolina country and the days he would be gone, and let go the way she let the rest go. There was bread baked for the going and the saddle-bags filled, and on the morning of it the horse was brought round and stood at the rail blowing in the cold, and her father was out at it in his coat seeing to the girths and the bags, and the grown people were about him with the last of the talk and the last of the things to be handed up.
She was at her part of the morning while it went on, the fire and the fetching, and she came out into the cold of the yard the way she came out into it any morning, and her father was up on the horse by then, seated and gathered with the bags behind him, and he looked down at her from the height of him the way he had looked down at her from the height of him all her life, and the wide hand came down once onto the top of her head and stayed its moment, heavy and warm, and then it took the rein. He said the thing to her mother that a man says going, and the thing to the grandfather, and a word came down to her in it that she had her own sound in, and then the horse turned and went, down the lane in the cold morning, the way the horse had gone down the lane more times than there was counting, getting smaller against the long pale run of it, and at the head of the lane it went under the oak and past it and out where the lane gave onto the road, and was gone out of sight the way it had gone out of sight before.
The house took up the day behind her. There was the fire to be kept and the water to be carried and the dinner to be got and the whole of the round to be done, fewer hands at it now by the one that had ridden out, and the round closed over the gap of him the way it closed over any gap, and went on. It was quieter with him gone, the way it was always quieter with him gone, and the grown talk at night was the women’s now and lower, and the days went on one into the next the way they went, and the child was inside them at her part, and did the next thing and the next, and looked for him up the lane in the evenings the way she had always looked for him up the lane in the evenings, in the ordinary way, without thinking about it, because that was what was done.
And the year turned over the house the way it turned, and the lane ran out pale to the oak at the head of it, and the oak stood where it stood, and past the oak the road went on out of sight the way it always had; and she had grown up the whole length of the lane she could see, and the road past the oak was still the road she had not walked, and her father had gone out along it on the place’s business in the cold of the year, and the house went on, and the child went on in it, and the days came round and were done and came round.
The leaving the child marked no more than the others was, at the distance the record keeps, the last the record holds of Baker DeGraffenreid alive.
He had gone over the line into Guilford County, North Carolina, on the place’s business, and there, on the twentieth of October 1775, he put his hand to a deed of trust. That document is the last to set him among the living. After it the record on him goes quiet, and the next time the sources speak to his place in the household it is to mark his absence from it: by the tenth of September 1779, Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid was acting as administratrix of his estate at Lunenburg. Between the deed in Guilford and the appointment at the county court lies a silence of nearly four years that the surviving sources do not fill. Where Baker DeGraffenreid died, and when, and by what, the record does not give back. Family tradition holds that he was killed at the outset of the Revolutionary War; this history carries the tradition and has not found the proof, and names the gap rather than building across it.
So the household this chapter has kept at the child’s scale — three living generations at the one seat, the grandfather and his Bible, the present father, the mother who was its steady center, and the boy and the girl growing up in it — stood whole on the cold morning the horse went down the lane, and did not stand whole long. The years that came after were the years it learned to be a thing it had not been: a household that did not know. Those years belong to the chapter that follows. This one ends where the child’s knowing ended — at the head of the lane, the road running on past the oak out of sight, the father gone along it on an ordinary errand, and the house behind her taking up the day.
She was eleven. The keeping the line had carried since 1714 — the Bible that lay on the desk in her grandfather’s room, that she had held once at her grandmother’s stone — was not yet hers, and would not be for a long while yet. But it was in the house she was made in, and she was the child it would come to.