Last night Parnell’s oldest three boys had dug a bowl-shaped hole in the ground, round and wide enough for Yoshi’s four-month-old pregnant belly. They had carried her away from the main field and closer to where the stud Hind stayed, both so he could see and so no one else could hear. They had placed her belly in the hole, her face in the dirt, one of their hands on the back of her head, and delivered the twenty cowlicks Parnell had ordered. For theft, he explained, though all she had stolen was the letter that told her she was about to be sent far away from her family. This morning, Yoshi had suddenly stopped moaning as the women (not one her mother, who couldn’t stand to see) dressed her wounds. The seamstress Ethel reported how much of Yoshi’s blood was splashed throughout the cypress trees and sawgrass near Hind’s cabin; she had not seen that much blood since the day in 1829 when a couple mares, unexpectedly wild from the scent of thirty women’s moon-synchronized cycles, had stomped to death the babies the working women housed in a shallow trough dug around their part of the sweet potato field. Just three years old, Yoshi had been the only baby spared, though she often dreamed the nightmare but didn’t know its origins. This was long before Helene had sat down to watch over the babies. Remembering that day, that blood, and finally Yoshi, Helene could not stop crying.

Her eyesight has faded to a distorted and cloudy gray, so trying to recognize even one word was futile. But she thought she exactly remembered Yoshi’s tearful reading, first aloud, then in silence as the reality of the words spilling from her mouth stole her voice. So by the end Yoshi was only moving her mouth, manipulating her lips, but she made no sound. She had arrived barefoot and trembling at exactly 5:00 A.M., the hour whispering women had spread to Helene that she must wait under the oak in order to learn what the young girl had claimed, “I just can’t keep to myself.” Staring at the swirling characters today, Helene heard the memory of Yoshi sounding out the same words she could not stop crying over:

October 11, 1842

Sir Hale: