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A little school for white children opens on the Bel Air Road. For most of its pupils, the shortest route cuts across the Booth property and Rosalie can see them from the kitchen window as she does her chores of washing up and churning or grinding the spices or slicing the onions; or from the lawn as she hangs out the wet laundry on sunny, windy days. The schoolchildren walk in clusters, with their slates and their books. In the winter, they pelt each other with snowballs. In the spring, they chase each other, the girls dashing, laughing, to the safety of other girls. This school will be a good thing for Edwin and Asia, Rosalie tells herself, and will relieve her from constant guardianship.
She herself is too old and too busy to think about school. She hardly remembers her time in the classroom in England. Henry Byron’s death eclipsed most memories. But she does remember Father being proud of her, an occurrence so rare as to never be forgotten.
One morning, June asks Rosalie to come out for a walk with him. She would rather not. Johnny is sleeping and can’t come with her. She’ll be very exposed.
But June is insistent. He coaxes her out to the creek in the forest where they once were knights and ladies, kings and queens. The wind is up. The loose strands of her hair sting her face as they whip about it. Twigs and leaves tumble in the current below, bubbling around the rocks or landing in the deadfall piled on the banks. Once Rosalie could cross this creek, dancing stone to stone. Her spine has begun to curve just slightly, throwing her weight off-center, making her too clumsy to try. Mother thinks this is from carrying Johnny around and is making Rosalie shift him to her other hip, which doesn’t work for Rosalie and she only does it if Mother is watching.
June pulls her into one of the fairy ballrooms, a bare patch of dirt ringed with trees and sheltered from the wind. “I’m leaving for Philadelphia tomorrow,” he says. “I’ve been offered a place in the company there.” And then, watching her face, “Oh, Rosie!”
Rosalie has long known this moment was coming, but now that it has arrived, it’s worse than she thought, as if June has reached down her throat and strangled her from the inside. She and June are not even close, only he’s all she has, the only sibling who doesn’t require her care. “Henry had no choice in his leaving,” she says. “They none of them had a choice.” She won’t beg for herself. “What about Edwin?” Edwin adores June.
“I’ll be nothing if I stay. Edwin has you.”
But why should this job fall to Rosalie? Maybe she, too, would rather not be nothing. “Take me with you.”
She sees how June is startled. He comes and puts his arms around her, tries to stop her seeing that he doesn’t want her, but he’s too slow and she does see. “Could you even come?” he asks. “Recollect how hard it was for me just to get you here.”
She realizes with an absolute clarity that if she doesn’t leave her mother now, she will never leave her mother. “I could,” she says. “I will.” She means it. Hie thee home to me, she thinks and marvels that she just might be the one to leave. She’s almost the same age Mother was when she ran away with Father. If Mother made it all the way to America, surely Rosalie can make it as far as Philadelphia.
Passing the graveyard on her way back to the cabin, she encounters opposition. The ghosts hiss and tangle her hair. We won’t let you, they say. We’ll tell Mother.
It does give her pause, the idea of leaving Mother at the mercy of her dead children. She puts this thought aside.
You won’t go anywhere, they call after her. Mother will stop you mother mother mother mother, they repeat so often the word becomes nonsense, babble.
Rosalie spends the rest of the day with excitement and terror and guilt and anger building in her breast like a scream. Late that night, Mother comes and beckons her from her bed, down the stairs so they can talk without waking Asia. “June is going,” Mother says in the voice of her dead children, her hand wrapped on Rosalie’s wrist so tightly it will leave fingerprints. “Stop him.”
So June has not told Mother that Rosalie is going, too. Clearly he never thought she would.
Rosalie will always believe that she would have gone if only June had said so. She herself can’t say it to her mother’s anguished eyes. And what would she have done all day in Philadelphia anyway? How would she have earned her way? It was never a feasible plan. It was no plan at all. She’ll feel the thought of it, that moment of possibility becoming impossible, as it leaves her body and drifts away. What remains is cold and hard.
“Things will be much easier when June and Father are both sending us money,” she says, loosening Mother’s grip with her own strong fingers. This statement will come from that same cold hardness. She’s angry to think that this might actually soothe Mother, angry that Mother just might trade June for money.
She expects that Father will be furious; she expects to hear many variations on the serpent’s tooth, but he takes the news more cheerfully than she did. He writes that June will be back, and sooner than they expect. He waxes lyrical about farming and the rhythms of seed and harvest, the goodness of a simple life. The stage leaves a man empty, he says. There’s a falseness right at its core.
And the hollow, fleeting camaraderie of the company is nothing compared to a family who loves you. June will see.
Months pass and he’ll continue to say these things, in letters, in person. “Is June home yet?” he writes. “It’s time for him to press the apples.”
“Remind him to check the shoes on the horses.”
“Time to plant the radishes.”
“The gate to the pasture was loose when I last looked. The cows rub against it. Tell June and Joe to check all the fencing.”
He’ll stop only when they learn, and not from June, that he has married. His wife, Clementina DeBar, is a comedienne, a famed dancer of the Highland fling, and thirteen years his senior. She sends them a breezy letter announcing the event only after it occurs. A daughter follows so quickly that, despite a strong family resemblance, June will always harbor doubts that she is his.
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