“It weren’t no whale,” said Ruth, who’d been standing just outside the door, listening to Judy’s report. Judy jumped up from her seat, startled at the African woman’s sudden
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appearance. Easter smiled, “You sure you ain’t making this up for fun? You seen it?”
“I seen it,” said Ruth. “Longer and thinner, like a kind of snake, but a snake the like of which you didn’t see before.” Ruth’s speech was marked by extra syllables in the most unlikely words, so that “snake” came out sounding like sa-nake, echoing a voice from her past.
“In Ah-frica, they see such quite common,” Ruth
went on.
“You don’t say?” Judy said, trying not to sound like she was bursting with questions for the last black woman on Cape Ann. When Ruth had arrived and the secret of her sex had been revealed, people had stared and debated the weird and oddly threatening presence of an African woman who wore men’s clothing, took a man’s name, and practiced a man’s trade. But over the years, her reticence had worn down all objections so that eventually the minor discrepancy of “John Woodman’s” gender was more or less forgotten.
“I thought you came from Rhode Island,” Judy said, studying Ruth’s long, impassive face and trying to catch her downcast eye.
“African woman there, she told it to me. She
remembered things from over there, like horses with necks to the treetops and birds with colors like a rainbow. Sea creatures like the size of a house. But no whales. She never seen no whales before America.”
It was the longest speech either Judy or Easter had ever heard her deliver. Easter grinned and said, “Well, well, well.”
Embarrassed, Ruth hurried up the narrow stairs, ducking her head on the way up. Judy realized she’d never once seen Ruth sit down, not in Easter’s house or anywhere else.
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Judy dropped her voice. “She ever eat with you?”
“Mostly not. She takes it outside or upstairs,” Easter said. “When I had the miseries last winter and we got snowed in, she did me a load of favors. Hauled water and brought in a clutch of eggs for supper. Ruined a nice piece of ham, though. She put enough pepper on the meat to make it get up and gallop right out of the pan. It was good of her, all the same.”
“You never did tell me how she came to be here from Narragansett,” said Judy.
“Well, I ain’t sure I got the whole story to tell.”
Ruth listened to their conversation from her pallet above stairs. The eaves seemed to collect words and drop them directly into her ears, so she didn’t miss a whisper that was spoken below. She’d heard all manner of secrets and scandals confided in that parlor, and she’d learned that Easter repeated nothing except what was light and harmless, and already well-known.
Mimba had been right about white people. The best thing was to treat them like ghosts and cannibals, not to be trusted. But sometimes, a white ghost would look at you straight on, with a full smile, eye to eye. The smile of the eye was the secret, Mimba had taught her. You had to be careful always, but every now and again you could act as though they had souls, too. Easter was one like that.
Easter hadn’t been fooled by Ruth’s clothes, not from the moment, fourteen summers back, when she first walked up the path. But Easter had been just about the only one.
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Ruth was surprised by how easy it had been to escape suspicion. During the long journey from Rhode Island, over country roads and through city streets, no one noticed the woman’s face between the coat and the cap. The breeches alone would have been disguise enough.
When she first arrived in Gloucester, Ruth had asked a boy how to get to Brimfield farm. Following his directions, she’d taken an old walled road, past weedy fields and stunted trees and through a swamp that seemed to suck the color out of the sky and the song out of the birds. The air was so hot and thick, Ruth felt like she’d stepped into an oven.
A parched, abandoned landscape where lightning or carelessness had scorched the trees and only the grasses seemed confident of the future, it was the most desolate place she’d ever seen.