“Did they take care of you all right in Providence?”
asked Easter. “She sent you there, to some cousins she never met. Anne wondered after you all her days. She never quite trusted that Henry would do what she’d told him.”
“He did,” Ruth said.
“Well, that would have given her a measure of
comfort,” said Easter. “Knowing you grew up with them, free and all.”
Ruth turned her face to the wall. She was too tired to talk, and besides, there was no point in burdening Easter with that bundle of sorrows.
Mimba would have told Easter the whole of Ruth’s sto
ry, accompanied by sighs, and tongue-clucking, and tears.
Easter would have listened, keen and respectful, and then she would have filled Mimba in on what had happened to Ruth since she’d arrived in Massachusetts. Easter would talk about the fine walls that she had built and about her stubborn silence, which was just as hard on the shins as granite.
They would get a laugh out of that. Indeed, the two of them had the same kind of laugh: a high and girlish hee-hee-hee. Easter would ask Mimba if there really were sea monsters off the coast of Africa. They would look Ruth
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in the eyes and, with a single voice, tell her that it was time to rest.
Easter put her hand on the sleeping woman’s back.
“This is your home, Ruth,” she said. “Long as you want it.
Long as I’ve got breath, anyway. You got that, at least.”
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Stanwood Reformed
Sammy Stanley perched on the branch of a beech
tree and stared at the sea. The timid child of six who’d trembled at the thought of Abraham Wharf’s corpse had grown into an eleven-year-old who would climb thirty feet up without a moment’s hesitation. Sammy scanned the horizon north to south, wondering if this might be the color
“sapphire,” a word he knew from the Bible. Under a milky sky, the water looked like a whole summer’s worth of blue had been collected before him. But then, quick as a blink, a gust of wind changed everything, sapphire turned to ink, and a ruffle of white lace foamed across the waves. The air in the forest turned over, too, and fall arrived for good.
Until then, the day had felt more like April than October, though there was no mistaking the autumn smell.
A yeasty mulch of oak leaves carpeted the forest floor and quieted the woods to a dry hush.
Sammy rolled down his sleeves and gathered the white apron over his shoulders for a little extra warmth. He reached for the five new dimes in his pocket, a sensation that soothed him more than anything. The night before, when everyone else was fast asleep, he’d counted seventy-eight dollars in the old strongbox hidden under the floorboards beneath his bed. Some of it he’d earned doing odd jobs for
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the widows of Sandy Bay, who doted on his good looks and nice manners. But much of it was stolen from the men who passed through the whorehouse that was his home.