The thinking part of me knows it can’t be Mulch, but I spin around, fists up, ready to fight him just the same. It’s Maple that’s standing there, scowling at us with fire in her eyes, looking like she’d like to take a lash to the both of us. She sucks her teeth and shakes her head and marches on.

“Are you going to be in trouble with her?” I ask.

“She can’t do much except set me to cleaning the privy,” Sarah says.

“Does that mean you don’t mind if I stay with you a while longer up here?”

“I don’t mind, but I got to get this done,” she says, lifting her rag and her broom.

“Then I’ll just keep you company.”

She nods and takes my hand and leads me to the room next door with the yellow and blue flowers. She talks to me as she sweeps, and the more she relaxes the more she talks. She tells me about how her ma hated sweeping because the dust stuck in her nose and made her eyes water. Her ma’s talent, she says, was healing. And her ma’s ma could smell what a plant could do for you. She tells me how her ma’s ma had been a midwife in Africa and, in her hands, even the backward-facing babies all came out breathing.

“That’s how she got taken,” Sarah tells me, as she sweeps under the bed. “Everybody knew about staying in at night, away from the snatchers. But a baby ain’t gonna wait for morning, so she went. Snatchers got her on her way. The whole boat ride over she kept wondering if that baby came out alive without her.”

I guess I thought the African slaves crossed the Atlantic in the stinking hold of a coffin ship like the Irish did, but they didn’t. Sarah’s grandma was put in a stinking hold, true enough, but the slavers stacked them like books on a shelf, with rows of human cargo above and below, to piss and puke and shit where they lay, chained to captives from other tribes with other languages they couldn’t understand. They were force-fed when they wouldn’t eat and exercised now and again to keep the dying to a minimum.

I can’t imagine surviving it.

By the time the Johnsons turn into the driveway, with Red coaxing the horses on with the rhythm of his voice, the house is swept and dusted and the windows have been shined with vinegar and water. I squeeze Sarah’s hand and dart down into the carry-through and out the back. I build the fire again, take up the cold shapeless iron from the water bucket and thrust it into the hot coals. And wait for the reckoning.

Chapter 40

Sarah

Master, Missus and Master Thomas are all tired from their trip and wanting an early supper. Maple doesn’t want me near her, so it’s Willa who has to help her in the kitchen house. She has me unpack the travel cases and then go get the dining room ready.