The wheel that went nowhere
The town came up out of the north woods in the space of a few seasons, and it reached Mary Jane the way the wide world always reached her, which was late, and secondhand, and at the supper table.
She was twenty years old the year the surveyors went into the pinewoods thirteen miles north of the mill and began running a chain through ground that had grown nothing but timber in the whole memory of the county. Two railroads were to cross there, one laid the length of the state and one laid clean across the top of it, and where two railroads crossed a town would come, because freight must stop and be turned where the lines meet and men must be there to turn it. Her father had it off a man at Jacinto. Her brother brought pieces of it home from the road. It came into the house the way news came into the house, carried in of an evening and turned over above the plates and set down again — a town, up north, in the empty woods — and Mary Jane heard it the way she heard all of it, with half an ear, a niece asleep against her shoulder or a bowl in her two hands, and thought no more about it than she thought about weather in a county she would never stand in. It had nothing to do with her. Nothing up in the north woods had anything to do with a daughter in a mill-house thirteen miles south.
But it went up, and it went up faster than anything in that country had ever gone up, and even at thirteen miles she could not help but feel the strangeness of it — that a piece of ground could do the most remarkable thing a piece of ground can do, come into being out of nothing, take a name and then a better name and fill with people who had not been born there and would die calling it home, all in the few years a girl spends going from twenty to twenty-four; and that in the house where she lived, in those same few years, nothing came into being at all.
They called it Cross City first, for the plain fact of the crossing, and then somebody with a little learning put it that the town stood where a country's roads met the way the roads of the old Greek city had met on its neck of land between two seas, and the Greeks had called that place Corinth. So the town in the Tishomingo pinewoods was called Corinth after a city three thousand miles and three thousand years off that not one soul in her father's house would ever lay eyes on. Mary Jane, who had been entered in her mother's Bible under a name the family's own hand could never quite settle, lived thirteen miles from a town that had been named twice before it was even finished. She did not make anything of the likeness. She would not have thought to. But it was there — a place that got two names before it was done, and a girl down the road who could not reliably get one.
She was in her father's house the whole while it happened. That is the thing those years were made of, and it is the thing to hold, because it does not announce itself the way a wedding or a death announces itself; it is only a girl in a house, and the house going on, and the years going by. She was twenty, and then she was twenty-one, and then she was twenty-two, and each birthday she was exactly what she had been the birthday before — a daughter on her father's ground, carrying her father's name — and the count ran on quietly under the seasons the way the creek ran on under the mill, and nobody yet marked it.
The mill was the ground-note under every hour of her life. Reuben Rorie's wheel took the creek and gave back meal and sawn plank the whole of every day, and Mary Jane had grown up and was growing older inside the sound of it — the smell of wet stone and cut pine, the jolt when the gate came up and the wheel took the water, the long even turning that was there before she woke and there when she slept. She knew the mill the way you know a thing you have never once been asked whether you wanted. And there was a thought she had about the wheel, standing at the race of a morning with a bucket in her hand while it turned, that she never put into words and was never asked for and would not have spoken aloud if she had been: that the wheel was the busiest thing on the whole place and went nowhere. It labored from first light to last. It took the water and made the water into work. And at nightfall it stood exactly where it had stood at dawn, having traveled, for all its turning, not one step off its own axle.
She did not say to herself, I am like the wheel. A woman does not say such things to herself in so many words, and if the thought came near her she turned her hands to the next task and let it go by. But she was like the wheel, and some part of her knew it, and the knowing was one of the quiet weights she carried into her twenties. A daughter is in motion from the time she is big enough to carry a bucket. She is never once still. From the first light she is at the fire and the churn and the wash and the loom and the garden and the sick-bed and the cradle, and she does not stop, and she does not sit, and the work of her is the frame the whole house hangs on. And she does not move. The house turns her the way the creek turns the wheel, hard and steady and in one place, and the years go over her, and she is at nightfall where she was at dawn.
Thirteen miles north the world was laying down rails and raising depots and making a city where there had been trees. On the Rorie ridge the wheel turned and the creek ran and Mary Jane went from twenty to twenty-two doing everything and going nowhere, and there was nothing yet that anyone in the house would have called the matter.
· · ·
The house in the yard
The town was thirteen miles off, and she watched it come out of the woods the way you watch weather in a county you will never stand in. The other new thing of that decade stood in her own dooryard. It was not weather, and it was not thirteen miles off, and no one in the house spoke of it as a thing that had happened, because it was not a thing anyone in that house would have thought to call a happening at all.
When the first man with the first book had come up the ridge in 1850 and counted the Rories, he had carried, as every marshal did, a second book beside the one he wrote the family into — the one the government kept for the people it counted as property — and on that second book, against her father's name, he had written nothing, because in 1850 there was no one on the Rorie place to write. Reuben Rorie held no one. Mary Jane was seventeen that year, at the loom, in a house that owned its land and its mill and its stock and not one human being.
By the time the second man with the second book came, ten years on, that had changed. When the marshal of 1860 filled the government's second book against her father's name, he wrote three people onto it — a woman well into her sixties, a man in the strength of his thirties, and a girl of seven — and, in the column the book kept for such things, one house. A slave house, standing in the Rorie yard. It had not been there when Mary Jane was a girl. Somebody had built it in the years between the two books, in the same decade the town rose in the north and the brothers married and the babies came and were given back; and Mary Jane, who was in the house the whole while, going from seventeen to twenty-seven, had seen it built, or seen it standing where nothing had stood, and had watched the three come onto the place who had not been there before.
She did not grow up alongside this, and the two books are what tell it, set side by side. A child born into a slaveholding house grows up never having known the place without the people held in it; they are part of the given world, like the mill and the weather, and a child does not question the given world. Mary Jane was not that child. She had been seventeen and grown when there was no one, and she was twenty-seven and grown when there were three and a house, and the whole of the arrival happened in front of her, across her young womanhood, in the yard she crossed a dozen times a day. Whatever she made of it — and the record does not say, and this book will not put into her a feeling she left no trace of — she did not make it as a thing she had always known. She made it as a thing that had come.
Who they were, the record scarcely says, and this book will not invent past it: a woman born around the turn of the old century, old already by the time she came; a man born around 1824, in his prime; and a child, born around 1853, in the middle of the decade, on that ground or brought to it small. They had names — of course they had names, said in that house in the yard a thousand times in the ordinary run of three lives — and the books that counted them kept only the ages and the sex and the one word for the color, and the names did not come down. How the three came onto the Rorie place — bought with the mill's money, or come down through her mother's people, or by some other road entirely — the record does not say either, and it will not be guessed here, because guessing is the one thing the discipline of this book forbids most where these three are concerned.
What became of them — the years they were held on that ground, the war that came over it, the freedom that reached them at the end of it, and the accounting this book owes them in their own right — belongs to a later chapter, on the far side of the war, where it can be given the room it is owed. Here, in the decade of the town and the marriages and the given-back children, the fact is only the plainest one, and the book sets it down and goes on the way the household went on: that across the same ten years in which nothing at all happened to Mary Jane, three people came onto her father's ground who had not been there before, and a house went up in the yard to hold them, and she was there for the whole of it, grown, and watching.
· · ·
Everyone's beginnings
The town thirteen miles off filled up with strangers. The road at home filled up with kin. And Mary Jane, who was the reason for none of it, was somehow in the middle of all of it, with her arms full of other women's children.
For the same years Corinth was making itself out of the woods, the Rorie place and the places around it were doing the older, quieter building — not depots but marriages, not boarding-houses but new households struck off the old one and set down within a mile of it, the way a family that means to stay puts its young down close. Her sister had gone that way years back; Louisa Adeline had married at fifteen and set up one door up the same road, near enough that the two households' children ran between the dooryards. Now, through the middle of the decade, it was the brothers' turn, and one by one they took it.
Ezekiah went first — the brother nearest her in age, the boy of seventeen the first marshal had counted in the house, grown now into a man with a plan and his father's mill money under it. He married in those years and did the whole of what a landed man's son was raised to do: took a wife, took ground, and began to put children into a house of his own, so that before the decade closed he had a young family and a farm and something near two thousand dollars of land — his father's own figure of ten years back, reached by the son in half the time. William followed, the one the first book had marked with that uncommon word, Student — whatever the reading had been meant to make of him, the decade made him a married farmer like the rest, a wife and a household and his own ground. The two of them went, out of the father's house and into houses of their own, and the road past the mill took on in a few years two more Rorie roofs with Rorie children under them, and the family thickened on its ground the way it liked to, everyone within a morning's walk.
What Mary Jane did, in all that arriving, was hold the children.
That was the work the daughter who stays is given, and she was given it in full. When her sister's babies came she was in the house, and when her brothers' babies came she was in the house, and one after another the whole crop of nieces and nephews the decade brought was put into her arms to be hushed while the mother rested — the new weight of a thing a few days old, the hot heavy head against the inside of her elbow, the small blind mouth working at nothing, the particular ache in the forearm that comes of holding a sleeping infant still past the point your arm would like to set it down. She knew that ache well. She had it a hundred times over those years. She was good with them and they quieted for her and she gave them back, and she was there for the next one, and the next; and every one of them was somebody else's beginning, put into her arms warm and given back, and none of them was hers.
She felt it most, she found, in the giving-back. The holding was only holding; any pair of arms will hold a baby. It was the moment the mother reached to take the child again — reached from her childbed or her chair with the plain unthinking certainty of a woman taking back her own — that Mary Jane felt the exact shape of what she did not have, and handed the warm weight over, and stood up, and went to see about the supper. She did not weep about it. There was nothing to weep about that she could have named to anyone. She was a great help to her mother and a favorite of the children and a fixed useful presence at every birth and every wedding and every laying-out the family had, fully inside the life of her people and nowhere near the middle of one of her own; and she carried the ache the way she carried the baby, quietly, in the arm, until it was time to set it down and turn to the next thing.
And beside her, all the while, was Nancy.
Nancy Ann was four years back down the line from her and unmarried too, and that was the fact that turned the thing from a girl's private matter into a shape the house had taken. One daughter past the usual age might be a girl who simply had not been asked. Two daughters kept at home began to look like a household arranged around something — around a father who liked his girls where he could see them, or a place that wanted their hands, or only the plain drift of years in a house too busy to notice a life not starting. Mary Jane never knew which, and it was likely no single one. But there the two of them were, the elder past the family's fast clock and the younger coming up on it, and no wedding in prospect for either; and the two of them knew it about each other in the wordless way of sisters, and did not speak of it, and went on doing between them the endless work of a house full of everyone's children but their own.
For the clock had always run fast in that line. Her mother had married at fifteen. Her grandmother near it. Louisa at fifteen. There had not been, in anyone's memory, a Rorie woman who came to her middle twenties with the crossing from daughter to wife still unmade — and Mary Jane was making no crossing at all. She was twenty-three, and then twenty-four, and then twenty-five, and twenty-three is not late and twenty-four is not late, and even twenty-five is only a number a house does not yet say out loud; but the number climbed, and the silence around it thickened, and the not-saying settled over the house the way dust settles in a room nobody has decided to close up. Nobody was unkind. There was no word spoken and regretted. There was only the absence of the word — the thing everyone could see and no one named — and the years going by, and the house staying full of everybody's life but hers.
It was the fullest that house would ever be, those middle years of the decade — the mill at its height, the sons setting up, the grandchildren coming, the two daughters at home, and the old grandmother still in her corner by the fire. Mary Jane stood in the thick of all of it and off to the side of all of it at once, her arms full and her hands never idle and her own life not yet begun, and she held the whole fullness of that house the way she held its babies: warm against her, and not hers, and waiting to be given back.
And then, toward the end of the decade, the fullness began to go — not the way she had half-stopped letting herself expect her own life to begin, by someone arriving, but the other way, by someone leaving. The first to go would be the oldest. She would go from the corner by the fire.
· · ·
What she learned over the body
Grandmother Sarah died in the fall of 1857, in her own bed in the warm corner, with her daughter's household around her and her work long behind her; and it was Mary Jane, among the women, who washed her and dressed her and made her ready for the ground.
She was twenty-four that fall. She had known the old woman all her life — the hand on the cheek, cool and very dry, that was the grandmother's way of saying yes, you, yes here; the dry unhurried voice from the bed in the corner; the white hair in the loose night-plait; the ten years the old woman had spent in that corner since she had come down the roads out of Tennessee with three husbands buried behind her and one daughter's roof still open. Sarah had been born in the Carolina piedmont in 1780, before there was a country for her to belong to, and she had outlasted nearly everything a long life can ask a woman to outlast, and at the end of it she had done what the very old did in that country: she had let go of her own house and been taken into a child's, given the warm place out of the draft, and she had died there, counted at the last under a younger woman's roof.
They laid her out in the house, the way it was done before there was a trade to do it. Mary Jane's hands were among the hands that did it. She helped lift and wash the old body — lighter than she had braced for, the way the very old go light — and she worked with a steadiness that surprised her a little even as she found it in herself, because someone had to and because she could. She folded the dry hands she had felt on her own cheek so many times. She dressed her grandmother in the good dress and smoothed it and set the white hair right. And she did not weep more than the work allowed, and she did not know, doing it, that she was serving the first apprenticeship of a long calling.
But she was. These were the first hands she would ever lay a dead person's clothes on, and they would by no means be the last. She was learning, at twenty-four, over the body of the grandmother who had come down from Tennessee, the plain necessary office she would go on performing for nearly everyone she loved across the sixty years still ahead of her — the washing and the dressing and the folding of the hands, the steadiness a family needs from the one woman in it who can give the dead their due without going to pieces. It would fall to her again and again. It fell to her first here, with the wash-cloth in her hand and the fall light coming in low, and she did it well, and she went afterward back into the house that was one person emptier than it had been.
She could not have said, and did not try to, that she had just watched the whole shape of a woman's life laid out in front of her from the far end. But she had. Sarah had kept her own people and her own ground as long as her body would allow, and then had been taken in, folded into a daughter's house, given the corner, counted under a younger roof — and now had been carried out of it, made ready by younger hands. It was the shape the house would make of its women one after another down the years, and Mary Jane was standing inside the first turn of it with the cloth still in her hand and no way to see the others coming. She would be one of the younger hands a long time yet. And then, at the very far end, in another county, under a name the record would have spent her whole life mislaying, she would be the old woman herself, made ready by hands not yet born, gentle the way hers were gentle now.
That was one of the decade's leavings. The other came from the far end of the road.
Nine doors up — in the house the first marshal had reached after nine dwellings of other people's lives, the house of the old farmer and his wife and their houseful of near-grown children — the old man died too, somewhere in those same years, and the record does not fix the day and this account will not pretend to one. Aaron Searcy had been an old man already when the first book counted him, and he did not see the decade out. Mary Jane barely knew him. He was the old man up the road, a name at the meeting-house, a face at the store — one of the older generation of the ridge, come from Carolina by a longer road than her own people, who had been a soldier once in his youth, they said, in a war fought before Mississippi was a place anyone here had heard of; but that was the kind of thing the young know about the old only vaguely, as a rumor of a life lived before their own began, and Mary Jane had never had it from the man himself and could not have told you the war or the year. What she knew of the Searcys was what a neighbor knows: that they were up the road, that they were poorer than her own people, that the old man was failing. When he died, the ridge lost one of its old men, and that was all it was to her — an old veteran gone quiet in his bed nine doors up from a girl who had never once been told his name, and never once thought to ask it.
His dying left his children with next to nothing. Whatever small holding the old man had put together had not outlasted him, and what he left his sons and daughters was little enough; and one of those sons was a man in his middle twenties named Freeman, who had nothing of his own to begin with and now had nothing from his father either, and who stayed on after in other men's fields, a hired pair of hands, the poorest grown man on a road of landed families. He was nine doors, still, from the girl in the mill-house. The two of them had been written into the same book once, years back, a boy of twenty and a girl of seventeen, and neither of them knew it, and neither of them knew the other was alive to be waited for. He was only a poor man made poorer, at the far end of the road, in the same few years that took the old woman from the Rorie fire.
So the decade that had built a town out of the north woods took, at its own end, an old woman and an old man, and left the two houses at the two ends of the road each one person lighter and each one turn further along. And Mary Jane came out of it twenty-seven years old.
Something had happened in those ten years, if anyone had asked her to weigh them, and no one did. A town had risen out of nothing thirteen miles off and been given the name of a city on the other side of the world. Her brothers had married and gone to their own roofs; her sister's children and her brothers' children had come up around her, and she had held every one of them and given every one of them back. The grandmother had died in the corner and been washed and dressed by her own hands. The house was not the house the first marshal had counted, not quite, not anymore. The world had done a great deal of moving in ten years.
But none of it had moved her. She was twenty-seven and unmarried in her father's house, on her father's ground, carrying her father's name, exactly as she had been at seventeen at the loom — only older now, and more useful, and more plainly past the hour the county set for a woman; and the ache she carried in the arm when she gave the babies back had had ten years to deepen, and the silence in the house around the fact of her had had ten years to set. She did not know what was to become of her. She had stopped being able to say, even to herself in the dark, that her own life was surely about to begin, because she had been saying it a long time and it had not, and a woman can only tell herself a thing so many years running before she quietly lets go of saying it.
And already, though she did not know it, the ten-year turn had come round again, and a second man with a second book was somewhere on the roads of the county, working his way toward the ridge; and when he reached the mill-house he would set the household down in his ruled columns the way the first one had, and he would come to the daughter, and this time the house would not give him the truth.
But that belonged to the next year, and the next chapter, and Mary Jane at twenty-seven could not see it coming any more than she could see the war that was coming behind it. She only came out of the decade the way she had gone into it — in the house, on the ground, her hands full and her own life not yet begun — while thirteen miles north the town that had come out of the woods went on getting bigger, and the wheel at her father's race went on turning, and stood at nightfall where it had stood at dawn.