Pansies are for Obstinate Skin

In my new life of study, I thought often of Mr. Ben. He lived in the back room of Culver’s now, a place I had never seen, only heard about. Culver himself had found him so waspish that he’d offered to pay Mr. Ben’s way across the river to Manhattan.

“To Mr. Ruggles’s place in Manhattan, on Golden Hill. Ruggles and his friends would help him.” This was Lenore, gossiping with Mama in the mornings while she banked the fire and I sat, head propped in my hands, reading the materia medica.

“And Mr. Ben refused?” Mama said.

Lenore nodded. “He said he’d die if he crossed the water. He said he’ll drown. Said he’s seen it in a dream. Says the water’s full of dead niggers calling his name, and he’d rather stay here, on land.”

“His sister can’t come soon enough,” Mama said.

But she did not come for another month, perhaps two. When I went into town sometimes, to bring a note to Culver or his son, I would see Mr. Ben wandering the crossroads, turning one way or another. He always had a smile for me. Weak, but he gave it. He never called me Libertie, though. Instead, he called me Black Gal.

“Hey there, Black Gal, and good morning to you.”

“What you doing for your mama, Black Gal?”

And it was with a sense of pity, which we both could feel between us, that I would return his greeting, show him what was in my bag, raise my hand back to him.

What I wanted to say each time was, How could you do that to Mama?

What I wanted to say each time was, Mama can be your friend.

What I wanted to say each time was, I wish I could be your friend, but this is too sad a start for friendship.

I was that age when I was not young enough to speak that frankly, yet I was not so old that I could pretend the sadness did not exist. So I raised my hand and smiled at him and then went home, to read the remedies and wonder what it meant to care. I had been so cavalier in my request to Mama, to be inducted into her world of secrets. It was overwhelming enough to care for bodies that had turned against themselves, that had sickened and soured on miasmas and disease, that had collapsed under the burden of fevers and chills.

It was still another thing to care for someone like Mr. Ben, who was of whole body, I knew, but of broken spirit.

But Mama said when the spirit broke like his had, it was not our realm.

I was not so sure.

Sometimes, I tried to talk to her about it. I would venture to her, as we sat side by side in her examination room, “What do you do with someone like a Mr. Ben?”

To which she would say quickly, “I do not know what you mean, Libertie.”

And we would be left in silence again.

Once, bored by the rows of flower names stretched out before me on a long night of study, I went out at night into the garden, to walk along the rows.

I absently rubbed my fingers along a yarrow bush’s leaves. After a few minutes, they began to swell and my tongue thickened. I looked down at my fattened fingertips in the moonlight and looked up and saw Mama through the window, sitting at her desk behind the muslin curtain, working through her ledger. As I watched her, I reached for the yarrow leaves and ripped five of them off the branch, stuffed them into my mouth, and chewed them. It did not take long before my cheeks and mouth began to itch. I ate three more leaves. Two more. And then I ran into the office, and finally Mama looked up from her ledger.

I had the satisfaction of seeing her startled, but she was not scared. She treated me as she would any other of her patients. I could not speak at that point, could barely breathe. I only held up the last few yarrow leaves that I clutched in my hand, and then she nodded and went to work.

She laid me down away from the fire. She went over to her shelves of medicine and reached for one glass jar—she didn’t even have to look at the label. She called for Lenore, her voice clear and strong, and when Lenore came in and saw my swollen face, she gasped.

“Keep her mouth open,” Mama said. “The danger here is losing air.”

Mama made my remedy and then came over and placed it under my tongue herself.

It was a kind of heaven, made dreamier because of my sick state—the room all hazy and warm, my mother’s face steady above me. I watched it as closely as I could, and saw her disappear again into her mind. But it was all right, because I knew, this time, when she went there she was thinking only of me. Of how to keep me alive. Of where my lungs and tongue connected, and how deeply I was taking in air, and what to do next to bring my body back. To be at the center of my mother’s work was a wonderful place to be. Mr. Ben had had that experience, and as I lay there, sick, I allowed myself to feel the full envy of it. I craved her care, even though I knew I should not.

I fell into a restless sleep. One of the times, when I surfaced from oblivion, I heard Mama whisper to Lenore as she gazed at my face, looking for signs of progress, “She looks just like …” And then there was nothing. She was gone again, into her mind.

I realize, now, where she was going. And I know, now, how cruel this all was. I should have known then. I’d seen her face stricken when Mr. Ben held up her dead sister’s hair. With the same unconscious cunning all young children possess around their mothers, I had devised the best way to get her attention—make her relive one of her most painful memories—the sick little-girl body, limp in bed, the small gasps for breath, the throat closing, the skin flushing from brown to a deep velvet and then emptying out into gray. What kind of daughter who loves her mother does something like that?

She worked on me all evening, and I would have been brought close to death all over again, from the sheer joy of that attention, if Lenore had not leaned over me while Mama was distracted and shook her head.

“Your mama is a saint,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she knew what I had done. Lenore, who knew and saw all, saw all that Mama, with her big heart and big brain, could not see. I had acted so small. Lenore, God bless her, could see petty a mile away.

I could not meet her eye.

Saints have big enough hearts that they can care for the whole world. Their hearts are so large they dwarf normal people’s—and their hearts aren’t dumb like human hearts. It is stupid and selfish to ask a saint to use such an extraordinary organ solely on you, even if you are the saint’s daughter.

I did not get away with anything like the yarrow trick again for a long time. Even though, in shame at my audacity, it still occurred to me, many times, to try.

ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. It was a too-warm spring that year. So hot we wished for the cold and gray of March. Our settlement was in a valley, not the fine, cooler tracts of land that the white people had reserved for themselves, and so it was always warmer in our town, we imagined, than elsewhere. Culver’s shop was even busier, with its pump out back, where we children liked to play at catching the final dribbles of cool, rusty water to rub on our tongues and splash behind our necks.

Mr. Ben liked the pump, too. He liked to sit out there, as the sun went down, before heading into Culver’s back room. By the pump, he was always mumbling that name, Daisy, turning it over and over in his mouth, a kind of lullaby he said to soothe himself, to encourage him to keep lifting one foot in front of another, without his woman by his side.

The boldest children used her name to rechristen him. I took this as a sign of hope—you knew a newcomer belonged to the town when they got a nickname. The children called the new name after him at dawn, as he made his way to the wharves downtown, as he left all of us at Culver’s. They called it to him as he stood on Front Street, palming a penny before passing it to the woman with a rush basket full of eels and taking the slinking black coil down beneath the wharves, to cook over an open fire, because, as he loudly cried to anyone who would listen, he had no Daisy to cook it for him. They called it to him as he emerged from under the docks in the dusk, to venture out along the board, and look out across the angry gray river to Manhattan and softly whisper to his love across the stinking, cold, and unforgiving waves.

So by the time his sister Hannah came at the end of May, no one bothered to call him Mr. Ben anymore. Everyone called him Ben Daisy.

Miss Hannah came to us in the same coffin Ben Daisy did. The first time I saw her was when Lucien and Madame Elizabeth performed the same sleight of hand they had with him—set down the coffin, pried off the lid. But instead of a lifeless body, there was Miss Hannah, eyes shining bright, looking avidly up at us, her hands clutching a small, irregular yarn handkerchief to her chest. She sat up in the light immediately, put her free hand to her back and winced, and stretched out her other hand to Madame Elizabeth, handing her the piece of cloth.