Mother has opened the trunks and Charlotte is already wearing Elizabeth’s little gingham. It feels as much like a ghost to Rosalie as the ghosts do, seeing Elizabeth’s dress toddling around without her. Next will be Mary Ann’s apron that she so loved because it had birds on it. She was supposed to remove it when company came, but she never would. She’d made Rosalie tell her the names of the different birds cross-stitched on it—the robin, the cardinal, the wren, the blackbird—with the same diligence she’d applied to learning her letters and then, on seeing wings in the yard, would call out Apron Bird, because the issue of whether or not a bird was on her apron was more important than the name she’d taken such pains to learn. Rosalie had always known she’d see that apron on Asia someday. But to see it on Maria Mitchell . . . that would be unbearable. Surely Mother, biting off the end of her thread with her teeth, shaking out the finished dress, must feel the same.
It rains for two days and they all have to stay inside, knocking against each other. By the time Father returns, the house is crowded with resentments and deprivations. But instead of making the Mitchells leave, as both Rosalie and June assumed he would, Father gives them the carriage house. Joe Hall, who lives there like a bachelor in spite of having a wife and children—four, if you count the two dead ones, which Rosalie always does—is moved to the slave cabins.
The additional work falls hard on Rosalie, but hardest on Joe and Ann. They no longer have time for their extra jobs. The day on which Ann will be free recedes into the future. Even worse, the money they’ve been saving is secreted in the sill along the back wall of the carriage house and the move happens so quickly, they’re unable to retrieve it. They can’t recover their savings while the Mitchells live there. And the longer Uncle Mitchell spends in those rooms, the more likely he is to find it.
viii
In May of 1838, one month after the arrival of the Mitchells, the family’s ninth child is born. The birth progresses easily and no doctor is needed. No stars fall from the sky. No caul sheathes the baby’s face. It’s a boy.
There’s no two-year wait to name him. Grandfather is given the honors and he chooses the name John Wilkes. Grandfather’s translation of The Aeneid will never be finished. This naming will be his last mark on the world.
When he was a young man, Grandfather had fled to France on his way to America to join the revolutionaries. He applied to John Wilkes, the radical parliamentarian and scandalous libertine, for a letter of support though he’d never met the man. Wilkes immediately informed his family, who had him arrested and returned home for the sedate life of the law. Grandfather’s father was a silversmith who’d come to England through Spain. He sent Wilkes an intricate silver presentation as a thank-you for the return of his wayward son.
Grandfather’s admiration was undiminished by this betrayal. Eventually he married John Wilkes’ niece, who died giving birth to their third child. Back in Britain, there are other relatives also named John Wilkes. The name has revolutionary and familial significance. It’s an ordination.
When Mother’s labor begins, Father hastily takes himself off to the Bel Air saloon. He returns as soon as Joe brings him word of the safe passage. Father is rarely home for the birth of a child, but Johnny is only three hours old when Father first meets him.
He takes an unusual interest in the baby, in whom he finds, like poor lost Henry Byron, the best possible combination of his wife’s beauty and his own brilliance. These things are being talked of even when Rosalie can only see a baby, no more exceptional than any other.
Edwin’s caul and stars are quickly forgotten. He’s not the only boy in the family now with a destiny. Johnny has one, too. It arrived on a colicky night, the whole house asleep except for Mother and Baby, sitting downstairs by the dying fire. They were wrapped together in a single blanket, John’s little body hot against Mother’s breasts. She was looking down into his flushed and fretful face, when on sudden impulse she’d said a prayer asking to know what his fate would be.
Instantly a flame rose from the ashes and, shaping itself into an arm, stretched toward the baby as if to knight him. In that flame, Mother said, she could read the word Country, followed by Johnny’s name. And then the arm fell back and faded away. This strange, unfirelike behavior taking place on their own little hearth has the whole family excited. It may be an ambiguous fate, but it’s clearly a glorious one, a narrative of such power that Asia will write a poem about it one day, forgetting how angry she once was not to have been given a glorious fate of her own. She was less upset by her own lack of a destiny than by the fact that nobody had ever even bothered to ask the fire if she had one.
* * *
—
The impact of Johnny’s birth on Rosalie is profound. He’s such a happy child. He calms her down; he bucks her up. One day, she is passing the graveyard, carrying him against her shoulder. Oh, pretty! the ghosts say. Little pretty. Little darling. They curl about him, blow gently to close his eyes, cool his cheeks. They suck at his milky breath. They whisper about the way he smells. Clover, they say. Butter. Kittens, but they are only being nostalgic. He smells like nothing of the sort. Still Rosalie takes note of how uninterested in her the dead children are while Johnny is in her arms. She notes the absence of their customary menacing clinging. They are all love.
Rosalie begins to take Johnny everywhere she goes and, with Johnny on her hip, she finds that she can go everywhere. She takes him to church and feels that her feud with God is ended. She takes him to the creek to see the fish and the snapping turtles, and the dairy to see the cows, to the cabins to see Ann and Joe, to the neighbors to see Aunty Rogers. Everyone is entranced with him.
A year passes. He’s growing into a beautiful, charming, affectionate boy. He loves Ann in particular and can often be found in her lap or gripping her skirt in his fist, letting her drag him about the kitchen as she cooks. The farmhands tease Ann about her new white son.
Even envious Asia is besotted. She insists on holding him, sobs and screams if he crawls away. When Mother looks at Johnny, Rosalie sees in her face a desperate, hungering love. Father begins to make plans for him, the sort of plans they haven’t heard since Henry died. And Rosalie allows herself to think that maybe, just maybe, the child who can heal her broken family has been born at last.
ix
Grandfather has had enough of the Mitchells. He packs his trunks and moves angrily out, freeing up another bed. He lets a small room in Baltimore and never sets foot on the farm again.
Six months later, he quietly dies, just after Christmas, alone in the night, of unknown cause. Father is off on tour, so an undertaker with offices near the Front Street Theatre takes charge of the body until Father’s return. Father doesn’t bring Grandfather back to the family graveyard, because Grandfather left the farm of his own free will and Father believes in freedom.
Instead he chooses a grave in Baltimore, puts up a stone with an epitaph in Hebrew that translates to—
I take my departure from life as from an inn—
Thee I follow to the infernal kingdom
Of the most renowned ruler
Thence to the stars.
Rosalie thinks that Grandfather probably likes having an epitaph only the highly educated can read.
Father plays Hamlet around the house for a few days, the bereaved and guilty son, but this doesn’t last long. “It’s a terrible thing,” he’ll tell June one night at the table, “to lose a father. But a father’s death must be expected in the natural course of things. That’s not the ghastly unnatural fiend who comes and steals your child.”
* * *