She’s grown used to his company, to hours spent before the fire, reading poetry and imagining grand futures for him, palaces of fame. Like so many boys of his generation, he’d read and reread the adventures of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. He wants to be a soldier, to be tested, to see himself fired like clay in the great kiln of battle. Instead here he is, only just sixteen, grimly torturing grain from barren ground.
Like Asia, Brother John has a great emotional range. He has a temper. He weeps for his losses. In fits of joy, he throws himself onto the dirt, smelling, tasting, inhaling the ecstatic world. Farmer John lives in a narrow box of miserable responsibility. Asia hardly sees him and hardly recognizes him when she does.
A new crew of men are hired to help with the harvest, the cheapest help available, Irish immigrants. These white men won’t take instruction from Joe Hall. John must manage them. This he’s unable to do.
It’s customary for white hands to share the noontime meal with their employer and his family. It’s customary for the ladies of the household to join them at table. But John feels a great distaste for these men, distaste they quickly reflect back. They dislike him for his British blood. They dislike him for the free and familiar way he deals with the local blacks. They’ve heard that he was bastard-born. Who is he to feel superior to them? Most of them are his elders, some by decades.
John refuses to let Mother, Rosalie, and Asia anywhere near these men. By noon, they’re often stripped down, dirty, smelly, and sweaty, not delightsome, Asia observes primly. Their accents are thick, their conversation uneducated. Dining with such would be an insult to the Booth women, John decides. He makes them keep to the upstairs during the noon meal.
Asia sees in this a beautiful, knightly chivalry. Her own Ivanhoe of the fields. Rosalie is more concerned. She loves and admires John as much as anyone. And she understands that if they ask of him the sacrifice of supporting them, then he must be left in charge, his judgment trusted. A meal with a tableful of male strangers would be a torment to her. Still she worries he’s made a mistake and would force herself to dine downstairs if the choice were hers.
The men gather at the kitchen table in the sweltering house. The women huddle in the even more sweltering bedroom upstairs, eating from plates held on their laps. The butter sweats in its bowl, the women sweat in their dresses. Eggs dry from the edges in as quickly as they can eat them. “Father would have made friends with these men,” Rosalie says in her whisper. “He would have shared a bottle and a story, played the pirate. And so they would have worked hard for him.” She’s not criticizing John. She’s only anxious that he make a success of this and for his own sake. Rosalie recently returned from town with a new saddle as a surprise for him. “When do you imagine I’ll have time to ride?” John had asked her listlessly.
The butter is now completely melted. Mother spoons it onto her bread. Asia watches as Rosalie lifts her hair, wipes her damp neck, and lets it fall again. A single drop of sweat runs along Asia’s spine, stopping at the band at her waist.
“Your father had a Northern spirit,” Mother says, red-faced in all her widow’s black. “A democratic spirit. No man in the North would ask to be called Master in his own house.”
However much he might like it, Asia thinks.
“John,” says Mother, “has a more delicate sensibility.”
Asia is a Northerner herself, which means that John must be one as well, but there is a transactional nature to Northern manners, a mercantilism that she dislikes and he finds abhorrent. It’s the Yankee way, she thinks, to value a thing only for the money it might make.
John’s own manners and opinions were formed by his classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. Brief as his time at that school was, it marked him for the South forever. He thinks he knows a superior sort of person when he sees one and to pretend otherwise is to dissemble.
Asia hears a man singing downstairs. He has a tenor voice, a voice so beautiful, she forgets everything else and sits, spoon in the air, listening.
In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone
They have fitted a slab of granite so gray
And sweet Alice lies under the stone.
Asia thinks if there were a face to match that voice, a woman might fall in love. Not her, of course, but some other woman. Asia can imagine it perfectly.
“Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?”
Asia is struck by this observation. She repeats it to John when he comes in, late that night. He’s seated in a parlor chair, drinking a glass of their own cider. She’s holding his bare foot in her lap, puncturing a nasty blister on his heel with her embroidery needle, draining it into a rag.
John takes from it a lesson she didn’t intend. “Of course, the Irish understand nothing about the black race,” he says. It infuriates him, how they come to this country and vow to liberate the Negroes before they’ve even seen a black face. “Patrick in all his meddling ignorance. Nothing will destroy the American black faster than freedom.” He was exhausted when he came in. Now he’s agitated.
He empties his glass and stares into the fire. Asia wonders if he thinks of the prophecy Mother once saw in the flames as often as she does.
“You’re right,” she says. “The Irish don’t really understand what freedom means. They don’t grow up democratic.” And maybe she believes this, but maybe she’s just placating John, she’s not even sure.
“The song was my idea,” he says. “They were so angry about you ladies being too high and mighty to join the table, they threatened to express their opinions on the tablecloth in jam and butter. How I wish we could be rid of these men.
“Oh, Asia,” he says as she cleans and wraps his foot. “I do feel so desperate. Surely I have talents beyond this.”
* * *
—
The hired men work too slowly. One day, John and Asia walk together out to the fields and find crowds of birds—turkey buzzards, crows, and magpies—feasting joyously on the unharvested grain. John has his rifle and he brings one of the largest down, the sound of the shot scattering the rest into the air. To Asia’s dismay, what John has killed is not a turkey buzzard, but an actual turkey, full-grown and eatable. This turkey has wandered over from the Woolseys’ who have never been neighborly. Mr. Woolsey will surely take Mother all the way to court. Asia and John stare aghast at each other over the bleeding body. Asia was planning to pick some squash. She’s brought a bag. She opens it and John lifts the dead bird in. The bag is heavy in her hands. She might as well be carrying rocks. They start for home together. Gloom overwhelms them.
“Nothing for it,” John says at last. “We’ll take it to Mother and then, if she says so, I’ll take the horrid thing to Woolsey.”