Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

“You know this place is temperate,” I said.

“Not over there it’s not.” He pointed behind the trees, where a man was making his way gingerly out of the underbrush, passing another who was stepping in. “They have one barrel there, not too much, just enough to keep us all toasty.”

“You disrespect our mothers.”

“You keep acting so sour, Dr. Chase will never look your way,” he said, and then began to laugh.

“You should leave, Lucien, before your mother discovers you.”

“You never leave their skirts.”

“You do not seem too interested in that either.”

“You shouldn’t run after the first man who makes your blood roll like a river, Libertie.”

“I will see you this evening, when you’ve sobered up a bit,” I said.

I did not like to admit it, but Lucien had troubled me. I walked through the rest of the bazaar, stopping to look at the tables with things for sale. Some of the younger girls had knitted a set of fingerless gloves, and I spent time pulling them on and off my hands, becoming angrier and angrier at Lucien’s presumption. My feelings toward Emmanuel could not be so obvious as he wished to imply. I was not anything that a person like that could easily know—a man who looked to make his mother laugh first, a man who couldn’t hold his own after one mug of beer drunk under the trees.

I opened my purse and took the piece of paper out of it again. There was my own hand, writing out the events of this day. And on the back, the other script, the one I’d seen that morning.

To My Libertie

This is a note to declare my undying affection for you. I wish, above all, for you to become my wife. I think, if you are being honest with yourself, you would wish it, too.

Yours,

Emmanuel Chase

Not even a bit of poetry, I thought. I admired him for that. For speaking plainly. For avoiding some terrible simile about my eyes, as someone as low as Lucien would have done.

“You are back,” I heard, and then I turned and saw it was Miss Hannah, standing with Miss Annie, both of them looking at me with a friendly weariness.

“Yes,” was all I could say.

In the years since her brother left us for the water, Miss Hannah had grown smaller, so that now she stood at Miss Annie’s shoulder, Her back was still straight, but her eyes were nearly colorless. I had thought her old when I was a girl, but more or less the same age as my mother. Now, I saw she was much older.

“Studies suit you well,” Miss Hannah said, and I reached out to grab her hand.

“I have thought of you and Mr. Ben often,” I said.

It was the wrong thing. Miss Hannah’s face broke, and she lowered her eyes, and Miss Annie looked at me, exasperated. But Miss Hannah held my hand in hers so tight that my fingers tingled, and she would not let go.

“Have you seen?” she said. “He’s here, with us.”

She would not let go. I put my other hand on top of hers, and she clasped her other hand over that, so that we were bound together. She led me away from the table before I could snatch up again my slip of paper from where I’d stuffed it, underneath the pile of empty gloves.

“Here,” she said.

It was a wooden marker. It was painted with the name benjamin smith—the name Miss Hannah had chosen for him and herself. Someone had painted wings on either side, but they were so clumsy they looked like crescent moons.

The church, at least, had given him a prized space, in the middle of the yard between two larger stones. Miss Hannah gazed at the plot as if her brother’s body was really underneath it, as if he could rise up through the grass to be with us.

“I am saving up for stone,” she said. “I had this put up last year.”

She still held my hands in hers. “You are a good sister,” was all I could manage to say, but she did not seem to wish for more. She only wanted me to stand in her fifteen years of grief, beside the play grave of her brother.

It was colder and almost dusk by the time Miss Hannah let my hand go and I could leave the graveyard. By then, the celebration had quieted. Some men and women lingered, eating the last of strawberries that had been set out. A few children, waiting for their parents, slept in a pile underneath one of the tables.

There was no sign of Emmanuel Chase. When I went back to the table to try and find his letter, it was gone. I told myself, even though I knew it wasn’t true, that maybe someone had swept it away with the dirty rushes or packed it with their extra pairs of gloves. I tried to find Louisa or Experience to help, but I was told they had already headed back to my mother’s house. So I started the walk from the church alone, my hands still pressed from Miss Hannah’s grip.

The lightning bugs were out already. They darted all around me, sometimes deep into the fields, sometimes just a few steps ahead. The light was almost purple, and it made me wish that Emmanuel was beside me—if only to be able to remark on how strange and beautiful it was, if only to have a testimony. I slowed, as if I was walking arm in arm with a companion. It did not seem fair that this whole night was stretched before me and I was its lone witness.

I was thinking about this, about the ghost of Emmanuel beside me, when I came to my mother’s house and I saw her, standing in the open doorway, the light from inside blazing behind her.

“Hello,” I said, startled.

And she said, “You’re lying to me, Libertie.”

“It’s not enough,” she said, “that my