Seventeen
On the last day of October, in 1850, a girl of not-quite-eighteen stood at the loom in the front room of her father's house on a cleared ridge in north Mississippi and threw the shuttle across and caught it and threw it back, and she was, that morning, exactly what the world would shortly write her down to be, which was almost the only time in her long life that would ever be true.
Her name was Mary Jane Rorie. She had been born on the twenty-first of November of 1832, in Stewart County, Tennessee, in a house she did not remember, to Reuben Rorie and Mary Polly Hubbard Rorie, the seventh of the children her mother would carry; and she would turn eighteen in three weeks. She had come down into Mississippi as a girl of fourteen, in the removal that had brought the whole Rorie household off the Tennessee ground and onto this ridge three miles north of the post road, and she had grown the rest of the way up here, on this dirt, in this house, so that the Tennessee she had been born in was a thing she knew from her mother's telling and not from her own memory. She was seventeen years old. She was tall for a Rorie and brown-haired and steady-handed at the loom, and she had her mother's way of doing a thing all the way through before she set it down, and she was, on the last morning of October in 1850, a girl at the front edge of her life with the whole of it still folded up ahead of her and not one line of it written yet.
The loom was the cold-months' work. The cotton was in, the garden was down to the late greens and the root crops, and the long turn of the year had come round to the inside work — the wheel and the loom and the mending, the tasks a woman did by the fire while the weather did what it did outside. Mary Jane liked the loom. She liked the count of it, the way the pattern lived in the counting and came up true under her hands if she kept the count and went wrong the moment she lost it, so that the work asked something of her attention and gave it back as cloth. She was weaving a length of plain wool that would be a winter dress before Christmas — hers, or Nancy's, whichever of them the length best fit when it came off the loom — and she threw the shuttle and caught it and threw it back, and the morning went by her in the small steady sounds of a working house.
Her mother was across the room at the churn. Mary Polly Hubbard Rorie was forty-six that autumn — though the man who was coming up the road that morning would write her down at forty, six years short, for a reason no one ever recorded and Mary Jane never learned — and she stood at the churn and worked the dash up and down in the long even stroke she had used at it for thirty years, and she did not hurry it and she did not slow it, and the butter would come when the butter came. Her mother was the fixed center of that room the way she was the fixed center of the whole house. Whatever went on in it — the children crossing it, the fire wanting wood, a pot coming to the boil, a thing spilled or dropped or gone wrong — her mother's hands went to the next thing and the next thing and the house held its shape around her. Mary Jane had grown up watching those hands, not for the meaning of them but for the order of them, the way a child learns the rooms of a house by being inside them, until the order her mother kept was the ground Mary Jane stood on and did not think to notice she was standing on.
And in the corner of the front room, in the small bed by the warm wall where the chimney came through, was the third of the women in that house, and she was the oldest, and she was watching the other two.
Her name was Sarah, and she was Mary Polly's mother, and she was sixty-eight years old that autumn, and she had come down from Tennessee three years before, in 1847, when the last of the arrangements that had held her own household together had come apart and there had been nowhere left for her to go but to a daughter's house. She had been born in the Carolina piedmont before there was a country to be a citizen of. She had married a Hubbard and buried him young, and married again after him, and again after that, and had outlasted all of it, three husbands and a long hard traveling life, and had come at the end of it down the roads out of Tennessee to the bed in the corner of Mary Polly's front room, where she now spent the most of her days propped on the bolster with her white hair in the loose night-plait she never troubled to put up anymore, watching her daughter keep the house and her granddaughters do the work, and saying, most days, very little.
But she watched. She watched Mary Jane at the loom that morning with the particular attention old women give to the young ones doing the old work, and after a while she said, in the dry unhurried voice she still had, "You keep the count better than your mother did at your age."
Mary Jane did not stop the shuttle. "Mother says you say that to whichever of us is at the loom."
"I say it to whichever of you is keeping the count." The old woman shifted on the bolster. "Your mother lost it, at your age. Threw the pattern out three rows running one winter at Stewart and had to pick it all back. She has told you no such thing, I expect."
"She has not."
"No," Sarah said, and there was something in the dry voice that was almost a smile. "She would not." And she let it go, and watched, and Mary Jane threw the shuttle and caught it, and across the room the churn went up and down, and the three of them were in the room together on the last morning of October in the plain unremarkable way of a working forenoon, and none of them knew — there was no reason any of them should have known — that the morning was one the family would come back to.
Because the record was coming up the road. And the record, that once, was going to get her right.
· · ·
The house on the ridge
It is worth saying what kind of house it was, before the man with the book comes to it, because everything that the rest of this volume turns on begins from the fact that it was a good house and a rising one, and that the girl at the loom in it was not a poor man's daughter with nothing ahead of her but a landed man's daughter with, by every reckoning anyone could have made that morning, a great deal ahead of her.
Reuben Rorie was fifty-one that autumn, and he was a millwright, and he had made himself, out of the raw ground and his own two hands, a standing man. He had come off the Yadkin country in North Carolina as a young man, up into Stewart County in Tennessee, and down at last into Mississippi in the removal of the middle forties, and everywhere he had gone he had done the thing a millwright does, which is to find the water and read the fall of it and build the works that turn the fall of water into meal and money. He had built the mill on this ground the way he had built the house — deliberately, all the way through, in the slow sure way he did most things — and by the autumn of 1850 the mill was turning and the money was coming and the place was worth, by the figure that would go into the government's book that day, two thousand dollars. That was a great deal in that country. That was a front-of-the-meeting-house figure, a figure that made a man's daughters into matches and his opinion into something worth the asking. The Rories were not gentry and did not pretend to be. But they were a rising family on good ground with a trade behind them and money coming in, and the girl at the loom was the daughter of that house, and the world that autumn had every reason to expect that a daughter of that house would marry well and soon.
The house held, that autumn, a shifting number of Rories, the way such houses did — some grown and gone, some grown and near, some still under the loft. The oldest girls were married out and away. Louisa Adeline, the second daughter, had married Alexander Houston and was settled so close that her household was the very next place down the ridge, near enough that the two families' children ran between the dooryards and the two women called back and forth across the low ground of an evening. A grown son of one-and-twenty was reading his books at a place a few doors along, being made into whatever a rising millwright's eldest son was to be made into. And under Reuben and Mary Polly's own roof there were still the middle children and the young ones — Mary Jane at seventeen, and Nancy at fifteen, and the boys, and the grandmother in the corner — the loft not yet emptied, the table still long with children, the house at the full tide of its life.
And the keeping of it all — the record of who had come into that house and when, the births set down and the marriages set down, the line the family drew of itself through time — sat on a shelf in the front room in a worn black book, and it was Mary Polly's, and it was the still point at the middle of everything.
Mary Jane had grown up with the Bible the way a child grows up with the weather. It was simply there, on the shelf, the book her mother took down on the mornings of consequential days and opened to the family pages and laid the pen across, in the way her mother had been taught by the old woman now in the corner, and that old woman by her mother before her, back up a line of women that ran out of sight. The births were in it in Mary Polly's careful hand — the children set down one after another down the years, in the hand her mother had practiced for a year before she had had to use it, so that when the day came the wrist would not shake. Mary Jane's own line was there. She had read it, growing up, the way you read a thing so often the reading wears smooth: her name, in her mother's hand, and the day of her birth, the twenty-first of November, 1832. It did not, to her knowledge, get her name quite plainly — the family's records had a way of not getting anyone's name quite plainly, the surname wandering off the Carolina tongue, the given names coming out sideways in one hand or another — but it was there, she was in the book, she was one of the household the book held. She had not thought much about it. She was seventeen. The book held the household and the household held the book, and her business in the world was to grow up inside the keeping of it and, in her own time, to walk into the line that would be written for her when her own consequential day came.
Everyone in that house that autumn believed her consequential day was near. That is the thing to hold, going into the rest of this book, because it is the thing the rest of this book spends seventy years disproving. A landed millwright's daughter of seventeen, steady-handed and well-grown, in a rising house on good ground — of course she would marry, and marry well, and soon, and her mother would take the Bible down of a morning and lay the pen across the marriages page and write her onto it in the careful hand the way she had written Elizabeth and Louisa Adeline, and the line would go on. Everyone believed it. There was no reason on the last morning of October in 1850 not to believe it. It was the most ordinary expectation in the world, and it was wrong, and no one in the house would find out how wrong for a very long time.
· · ·
Scruggs
He came up the ridge road a little before noon, a man on a horse with a satchel of papers, and he was the assistant marshal for the fourth district of the northern division of Tishomingo County, and his name was Wm. Scruggs, and he was taking the census of 1850.
Mary Jane saw him from the loom, through the front window, the way she saw anyone come up the road — a rider she did not know, at a stranger's easy pace, with the look of a man on an errand rather than a man coming to call. Her mother had heard, the week before, that the counting was working its way through the district; the Houstons next door had been done, and the families down toward the post road; and so when the rider turned in at the Rorie lane there was no alarm in the house, only the small rearrangement a working house makes when a stranger comes to the door on business. Reuben came in from the mill-lot. Mary Polly set down the churn-dash and wiped her hands and put the room to rights with three or four motions the way she put any room to rights. Mary Jane stopped the loom and stood up from the bench. The grandmother, in the corner, stayed where she was and watched.
It was the head of the house the marshal wanted, and Reuben sat down with him at the front-room table, and the two men did the business of the counting while the house went quietly on around them. Scruggs opened the great ruled ledger and dipped his pen and began to ask his questions in the flat working way of a man who has asked them at a hundred doors that season and will ask them at a hundred more, and Reuben answered them in the unhurried way he answered anything, and the pen went, and the family of Reuben Rorie began to go down into the permanent record of the United States a line at a time.
Mary Jane did not have much to do with it. She stood a little off, by the cold loom, and half-listened the way you half-listen to grown men doing business at the table, and she heard the questions come and her father's answers go, and she heard the pen. She heard the marshal take down the name — and get it wrong, of course, the way it was always got wrong, some spelling of Rora that was not Rorie, and her father not troubling to correct it, because you did not spend the marshal's time and your own teaching a government man to spell a name he would never say again. She heard the trade set down: millwright. She heard the value of the place named — two thousand dollars — and heard it go into the book, the figure that said what the Rories were. She heard her father's own age given, and her mother's, and the ages of the children as the marshal came to them one by one.
And then the marshal came to her.
He asked, and her father answered, and the answer was the plain true one, because there was no reason that autumn for it to be anything else. She was seventeen. She was seventeen years old, three weeks short of eighteen, and her father said seventeen, and the marshal wrote seventeen, and it went into the book true. There was no shame in it and nothing to manage and no two years to be quietly taken off, because seventeen was a girl and a girl was only a girl and the whole world expected a girl of seventeen to be exactly what she was, which was a young woman at the front of her life with everything still ahead. The record asked how old she was and was told the truth and wrote the truth down.
She did not mark it, that morning. Why would she have? A girl of seventeen does not stand by a cold loom and think, the record has told the truth about me, because a girl of seventeen has never yet been in a room where the record did anything else. She heard her age go into the book the way she heard her brothers' and her sister's ages go into it, as one more plain fact of a working forenoon, and she thought nothing of it, and went back, when the marshal had passed on to Nancy, to looking at the cold loom and thinking about the length of wool and whether it would come off long enough to be her dress or Nancy's.
But it was, though she could not have known it, the one clean true thing the record would ever set down about her that she would live to see. She was seventeen in the book of 1850 and she was seventeen in fact, and the two agreed. There would be another man with another book in ten years, and another after him, on and on down her life at the ten-year turn the government kept; and each of them in his turn would get her a little more wrong than the last, until the getting-wrong was the whole of what the record had to say about her. But that was all ahead, and unimaginable, and none of it was in the front room that morning. The record asked how old she was, and was told the truth, and wrote the truth down, and closed its book and rode away up the ridge. It would not do her that plain kindness again.
She did not know that. She stood by the loom. The marshal wrote down Nancy, fifteen, and the boys, and closed off the Rorie household and thanked Reuben and gathered his papers, and Mary Polly gave him a cup of something warm at the door the way you did, and he got back on his horse and rode on up the ridge to the next house, carrying the Rories with him in the ledger, seventeen-year-old Mary Jane and all, on his long slow walk through the counting of the county.
· · ·
Nine doors
There is one more thing in the book of 1850, and Mary Jane had no knowledge of it that day, and it is the thing the whole of the rest of her life would turn on, and so it belongs at the end of this chapter even though she was blind to it, the way the beginning of a life is always blind to itself.
Scruggs, riding on up the ridge from the Rorie place that afternoon, went on counting — house after house along the road, the near families and then the ones a little farther, the way the counting went — and nine dwellings on from Reuben Rorie's door he came to another house, and he stopped, and he took it down the same way he had taken the Rories: the head of the house, the trade, the value of the place, the ages of the people in it. The head of this house was a man named Aaron Searcy. He was fifty-three, a farmer, born in North Carolina like Reuben, come down through Georgia and Alabama into Mississippi by another road than the Rories had taken but into the same neighborhood at nearly the same time. His place was worth a good deal less than Reuben's — a farmer's holding, not a millwright's — but it was a household of its own on its own ground, a man and his wife Martha and a houseful of children, the ordinary substantial family of the ridge. And among the children Scruggs wrote down that afternoon, one of the sons, was a young man of twenty named Freeman.
That was all. A young man of twenty, nine doors up the ridge, in a farmer's house, written into the same book on the same afternoon as the girl of seventeen at the loom. Neither house knew the other was on the page. There was no reason either should have. They were neighbors on a ridge where everyone was a neighbor, the Rories and the Searcys and the Houstons and the rest, and the young man of twenty and the girl of seventeen had very likely seen each other at the meeting-house or the crossroads store the way everyone on that ridge had seen everyone, by sight and by name and by nothing more; and there was nothing between them, and nothing was going to be between them for a very long time. He was a farmer's son of twenty. She was a millwright's daughter of seventeen, expected to marry well and soon. The book set them down nine doors apart on the last day of October in 1850 and moved on, and the two of them went back to their two houses and their two forenoons and their two lives, which did not touch.
They would touch. Seventeen years on, in a county that would by then have changed its name, in a world that would by then have broken and been half-remade by a war neither of them could imagine that autumn, the girl of seventeen and the young man of twenty would stand up together at last and marry — she thirty-four by then and he thirty-six, the both of them long past the age the ridge had expected it of them, come together at the far end of everything by a road so plain that no one that autumn would have called it a road. But that was seventeen years off, and a war off, and a lifetime of waiting off, and none of it was in the book of 1850. In the book of 1850 there were only the two households nine doors apart, and the girl at the loom in the one, seventeen and rightly recorded and expecting her life to start at any moment, and the young man in the other, twenty and landless-to-be, and the whole long strange distance between that morning and the morning they would finally marry lying ahead of them both, unwritten, unimagined, and not to be hurried.
Nine doors. Seventeen and twenty. The last day of October, 1850.
Nothing happened for seventeen years.
That is the pole this book opens on, and it is the truest thing the record ever gave her — a girl of seventeen at a loom in a rising house, set down plainly and correctly in the government's book on an ordinary autumn forenoon, with her whole life ahead of her and everyone she loved expecting it to begin, and a young man she barely knew nine doors up the same ridge in the same book on the same day; and then the book closing, and the marshal riding on, and the years beginning to turn over her the slow way they turn, carrying her out of the one true morning the record ever gave her and into all the years it would spend getting her wrong.