Under Water Excerpt - Rachel's Fiction

1863 Thomas:

Looking across the field toward the house, Thomas shook his head slowly, unconsciously imitating the movement of the oxen he drove. The missus, Aoife, was slow getting to her chores. Mr. William must have kept her up in the night.

He still couldn’t call him “William,” for all that they’d once worked side by side. That was too familiar to feel safe, not while the memory of the Philadelphia riots lingered in peoples’ minds.

He still couldn’t call him “William,” for all that they’d once worked side by side. That was too familiar to feel safe, not while the memory of the Philadelphia riots lingered in peoples’ minds. And not while there was resentment of the war, what with so many men dead or crippled like Mr. William, but one like Thomas safe, working for the farmland he’d been promised for his labors.

The gate opened and the cows came out into new pasture at the far end of the field, Thomas’ dog Hero nipping at their heels. Aoife drove them with a pole, her work dress hanging loose in the still morning air. Caring for her husband through his restless nights wore the flesh off her.

Longing for a place of his own, a place to escape the seething mass of the city, was why Thomas had taken the work. A few acres, enough to farm, enough to raise a family with his Lettie. Fresh vegetables to live on in the summer and fruit in the fall, all sufficient to put up sealed with wax for the winter. A cow or two for when the babies came and a spring house to hang the bacon.

He had roamed north of the city, looking for likely property, and spied a piece close by Mill Creek, a bit uphill to be spared all but the worst flooding. At one end, there was an apple tree, old, but still producing. A cherry, too—someone must have had a cabin there long before. That parcel is as sweet a piece of land as can be found on God’s Earth.

“Call me William,” the land’s owner had said.

Thomas shook his head. That was too familiar to feel safe, though it was more than a decade since the fighting in the streets of Philadelphia. He’d been a boy in ’42, not even six years old, but he still saw, in the faint light between sleep and wakefulness, the fearful vision of his trembling mother barricading their door.

“Get down on your knees, son,” she’d said. “Stay below the window ledge and pray your daddy gets home safely.”

“Get down on your knees, son,” she’d said. “Stay below the window ledge and pray your daddy gets home safely.”

The softness of her voice alarmed him, so used to her usual gruffness. He snuggled against her large and powerful back, believing her bulk, as great as most workmen’s, would keep him safer from the crowds roaring back and forth in the street—from the thunk of wood against shanty walls and the clang of iron against metal, of fists against flesh—than the old dresser she’d shoved up against their door.

That time of hiding behind her body, cowering against the cold plaster wall of their kitchen, had been easily the most frightening experience he’d ever known.

The city had been quiet since then, but what had come before and come again, could repeat a third time. And so, despite moving to this peaceful rural community, he’d decided, no, no Christian name, baldly and disrespectfully spoken. Thomas called his employer “Mr. William.”

The Sprigett family’s property had been granted more than 150 years before. Folk in the city listed them among Penn’s aristocracy, once persecuted Quaker stock. Though no longer one of the Society of Friends, William Sprigett still thought in their brotherly way enough to hire Thomas on and treat him well.

For several years, Thomas had worked side by side with Mr. William, teaching him respectfully as Thomas could, though his employer’s impulsive ignorance was a challenge—Mr. William had been bound for the law until his older brother died of diphtheria and there was no one else to inherit the Sprigett land.

That kindness, that decency, made Thomas half ashamed, since, being ignorant of farming, Mr. William didn’t realize the worth of the parcel and was letting it go easy. Or, Thomas pondered, maybe he just has so damn much land, it doesn’t matter to him.

Each noontime, Mr. William’s wife Aoife would walk out from the house, carrying a basket with their midday meal. She hadn’t been much of a cook, truth be told, her chicken dry and bread hard, but what she brought had more thought to it than Lettie’s. She tended her garden well and so they might find biscuits with a dollop of jam in the spring, before fruiting season, or fresh berries in the summer with cream from the cows she milked.

Coming up through the field, she surely had been something to see, though, with her red-gold hair shining in the sun, her long skirt billowing in the wind, and a colorful cloth over that basket. Thomas looked away from the sight of her. She was Mr. William’s and so Thomas kept her a stranger.

Since the war, she now had Mr. William—just as Thomas had his Lettie—as a yoke about her neck. And yet, still beloved. Thomas sighed and ordered the oxen to pull. Goliath, the boss of smaller Hercules, shook his head and bellowed, leaned into the weight of the plow behind, and started off again.

She’d spent her childhood sleeping on one pallet with her brothers and sisters, curled naked against each other like rabbit kits down a hole, depending on each other for warmth.

He’d be with Lettie on Sunday, after a few morning chores. Lettie had never settled well in the North; she was lonely without family. Thomas understood—she’d spent her childhood sleeping on one pallet with her brothers and sisters, curled naked against each other like rabbit kits down a hole, depending on each other for warmth. In some ways, in her mind, she was forever unsafe, as if still hiding from the fierceness of their mother. Their fathers had been scattered hither and yon, some wolfishly mean as the mother, some just gone, and all as defenseless as that mother was from the greater wolves of the world.

And those greater wolves had done their damage, pursuing Lettie and her sister Sary when they fled the South. How could Thomas not love her? Not help her? He had been born free and so owed a debt to those who’d been enslaved.

He’d plowed this field for years. Season followed season, unchanging, time going slowly by, until, from far to the west, from wild Illinois, came a long lanky man, a man they called rough and unshapely, a callused-hand rail splitter, and Thomas wished his father had waited to name him so he could have been Abraham, in his honor. For what he did for Thomas’ people.