The Emancipation of Emily
by Dorothy Stephens
In 1890, Emily Ayers, an illiterate eighteen-year-old, is living on the edge of the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey.
She goes to a nearby town to care for the sick wife and three children of the Reverend Josiah Fairchild, a distant relative. When his wife, Retty dies, the Reverend marries Emily. As the wife of a prominent minister, Emily is faced with many challenges: coping with the disapproval of some of the church congregation; learning to be a wife and a stepmother to rebellious Jack and shy Noah; and finding a way to learn to read.
She is shamed by her father’s outrageous behavior that includes getting drunk and causing a disastrous fire, and worried about her mother alone back on the farm. With her friend Sarah she joins the exciting new Suffragist movement, and when Sarah’s brother Charles moves back to town, Emily’s life takes on a new direction.
Excerpt
Chapter One
January 1888
Emily shook the curly strands of hair from her eyes and straightened up. She rubbed her back and sighed. Not that cousin Retty was heavy, wasting away as she was. But with bending over, changing sheets, helping the dying woman into and out of bed to use the chamber pot, trying to get her to eat, Emily did get tired, though she hated to admit it. At nineteen, she was strong and healthy, and she’d been used to hard work on the farm where she grew up. She should be used to this too by now.
“Thank you, Emmy,” Retty gasped. “I’m sorry to be so much trouble.”
“It’s all right. It’s what I’m here for.” She smoothed Retty’s fair hair back from her forehead, remembering what her mother had said when the request came for Emily to go live with Reverend Fairchild and take care of his sick wife and three young sons.
“You’d be crazy, Em, not to grab this chance. Make the most of it, girl. There’s nothin’ here for you on this miserable farm.”
“But, Ma,” Emily had protested. “I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know nothing about children. Besides looking after the reverend’s wife.”
“Well, you been down in the barn since you was young, feeding kittens, helping birth the lambs when we still had sheep, nursing the calf that time it took sick. I reckon you’ll know what to do once you’re there. You got a natural gift with animals, and human babies and sick people ain’t so different.”
“But what about Reverend Fairchild? What if he don’t like me?”
“He’ll like you well enough if you behave yourself and don’t go actin’ sassy, like telling me when you was five years old that you ain’t going to collect the eggs in the barn no more ‘cause you don’t like the smell of manure.”
Emily was still not convinced. “But will you be all right, here alone?”
“Don’t you worry,” Ma said. “I’ve got my garden, and the chickens, and a little money from the hay.” Her lips clamped together in a thin line. “It’s plenty for me, long as your Pa stays away.”
Emily’s father, William Ayers, had undergone a spiritual conversion a few years back and had become a self-proclaimed itinerant preacher. He told Emily and her mother that the Lord had appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to carry the Word of God to the sinners in this world. From then on, he was seldom home. Instead, he had taken their only horse, old Dolly, and roamed the countryside, shouting out threats of fire and brimstone and the everlasting furies of hell to anyone who would listen, and promising salvation to those who repented. The few people who attended his evangelical meetings usually let the collection plate pass them by; there was little money for him or his family. He lived on the meager donations of food offered by some of his congregants and slept wherever he could find a bed.
Emily remembered the bitter arguments and recriminations she would overhear on her father’s rare visits home. He’d appear, long white hair flying, black cloak rusty with dust, empty-handed but with impassioned exhortations that his wife and daughter kneel down and be saved.
Esther, arms crossed, would stand before the door and answer with equal passion.
“I got no truck with your crazy notions, William. Like I’ve said before, the day you come back here and work the farm is the day you’ll be welcome, and not until then.”
The door would shut with a hinge-rattling bang. That, and Esther’s fierce expression and angry words were enough to drive William back on his horse, vanishing again until the next time he showed up. Emily wondered why he came at all. He was never going to convert her and her mother.
She thought wistfully about the times when she was little, and Pa would set her on his shoulders and jog down the path to the barn to show her a new lamb, or a litter of squealing piglets. Or lead her outside to marvel at a spectacular sunset, blazing streaks of red and orange over the pines. Where had that father gone? Her mother had been happier then too. Never demonstrative, always a little distant with her own thoughts buried deep, not to be shared. But not the bitter woman she had become.
Eventually, their farm had been reduced to Esther’s kitchen garden and one hay field mowed by their neighbor, Henry Wilkerson, who shared the harvest.
So, the year before, with prodding from her mother, Emily had come to Pinewood, seven miles from their South Jersey farm, to look after Henrietta and her children. She remembered her awe when she first saw the elegant Victorian houses that lined the streets. They were nothing like the tumbledown house on the farm, nothing like anything she’d ever seen before. It seemed like a miracle that she’d be living in one of them. She wondered if she’d know how to act in such surroundings.
As she scooped up dirty sheets from the floor, a soft voice came from the open door. Eight-year-old Noah was standing there.
“Could I come in just for a minute? Just to say hello to Mama?”
“I’m sorry, Noah, but you know what Dr. Nichols said. No visitors except your father and me. Your mama needs to rest. And besides, he says sometimes people with consumption can give it to other people. We wouldn’t want you to catch it. Just give your mama a wave and blow her a kiss, that’s a good boy.”
Retty raised her head and returned a weak kiss, then fell back on the pillow, coughing. Noah whispered goodnight and turned to go. So much like his mother, blond and pale with that meek little smile, Retty submissive in the face of death, no fight in either of them. Her heart ached for the little boy; he was taking his mother’s illness harder than anyone.
She had no inkling what the Reverend Fairchild was feeling. He visited his wife’s bedroom twice a day and prayed over her, but any emotion was masked by his piercing dark eyes and heavy beard. Emily remembered hearing her mother say that Reverend Fairchild, like his wife, had had consumption too, as a young man, but after spending a year working outdoors on his uncle’s farm, he had recovered. Emily had wondered when she first came if somehow Retty had caught the disease from her husband. Could someone who recovered still infect others? She had no way of knowing.
Fifteen-year-old Stephen intercepted her as she left his mother’s room with her armful of laundry. “How is Mama today? Is she feeling any better?”
“I’m afraid not, Stephen. She’s pretty weak, and I couldn’t even get her to eat no—any—custard.”
Stephen shook his head, his face sad. “I put the milk in the ice box. The rest of the order is on the kitchen table.”
In spite of the January snow, he had made the daily trip on his bicycle to pick up the day’s groceries at the local general store. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
What would she do without Stephen? Four years younger than she, but he seemed older than that. He was like the brother she never had. He was also a big help with six-year-old Jack, an impudent little rebel who adored him. To Emily’s undying gratitude and relief, Stephen could often rein in some of Jack’s mischievous tricks, like kicking Noah under the table at dinner, or sliding Noah’s napkin out of his lap and tossing it on the floor behind him.
As her mother had predicted, Emily had found it relatively easy to slip into the role of nursemaid/substitute mother to the two younger boys. A quiet sensitive child, Noah had turned to her for affection and comfort during his mother’s illness. It had taken longer with Jack, until she figured out ways to distract him from getting into mischief, like bringing him a kitten from the farm after a visit to her mother. An impish little orange and white male with enormous green eyes, it was a cat version of Jack, who was immediately captivated. He named it Jillie.
“But Jack,” Emily had said. “That’s a girl’s name. The cat is a male.”
“I know, but I like the sound of it. Jack and Jillie. It’s like the nursery rhyme Mama used to read to us.”
Emily had to smile. “I guess. He’s your cat, after all.”
She put Jack in charge of feeding Jillie and cleaning up his messes until he was house-trained, and Jack happily did both—most of the time—for the privilege of having the cat sleep on his bed. For that she had received an energetic hug and a more cooperative Jack.
If she sometimes felt overwhelmed by the many things expected of her—nursing Retty, looking after the boys, cooking and cleaning, doing laundry—at least she had plenty to eat and a comfortable home, comfortable beyond anything she’d ever imagined. And though the reverend was intimidating, he was not unkind. When the invitation had come to help with his ill wife and children, Emily had worried that he might be a wild-eyed reformer like Pa. Her mother had assured her that was not the case.
“Reverend Fairchild may be a distant cousin of your Pa’s, but they ain’t nothing alike. The reverend is pastor of one of the bigger churches hereabouts and respected in the county. You got no reason to worry on his account.”
And it was true. The reverend, dignified and reserved, couldn’t have been more different from Pa.
Unfortunately, this couldn’t have become clearer shortly after Emily arrived in Pinewood. She was in the kitchen starting to prepare lunch when someone banged on the door. She opened it to find her pa standing there, wild-eyed and frowning.
“Pa! What are you doing here? Stop making such a racket!”
Pa pushed past her into the kitchen. “I’ve come once more to offer you salvation and save you from descending into hell, like your heathen mother.”
He took Emily by the shoulders and shook her to emphasize his words. Emily was struggling to free herself when the study door opened, and Reverend Fairchild came into the kitchen.
“Reverend Fairchild, I’m sorry,” she cried. “It’s my father. He…”
The reverend shook his head and held up his hand to stop her.
“Sir,” he said, “you have invaded my home uninvited, and although you are Emily’s father, I cannot permit you to treat her in this way. I must ask you to leave. I will pray to God to forgive you for your sins against your daughter. Now please go.”
Pa started to protest, but at Reverend Fairchild’s forbidding look as he towered over him, Pa turned and left, muttering angrily as he stomped out.
Emily closed her eyes for a moment and took hold of the back of a chair to steady herself. When she opened her eyes, the reverend was looking at her kindly. He spoke before she could say anything.
“I shall pray for your father, Emily, with the hope that God will guide him onto the right Christian path.”
He turned to go back into the study, but stopped when Emily burst out, “Oh, Reverend Fairchild, I’m so sorry. Pa didn’t used to be like this. I’m so ashamed.” She found it hard to look at him.
“Do not blame yourself for your father’s actions. Ezekiel says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. Be comforted by these words and pray for your father.”
He did something then quite out of the ordinary. He gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder before going back into the study.
Emily’s heart finally calmed down, and she sent a prayer of thanks heavenward for Reverend Fairchild’s presence. She just hoped Pa would stay away in the future.
As she heated a kettle of soup for lunch, she thought she was lucky that at least preparing meals for the Fairchild family was not a problem. Her mother had left much of the cooking to Emily from the time she was ten.
“I ain’t never been much good around the kitchen,” her mother had said. She was a careless cook, often letting things burn, or serving them half-cooked, so Emily had taken over in self- defense. Now she was grateful she’d had some experience.
Another thing she was grateful for was the way Stephen had helped with how she talked. Her mother was illiterate, having had no schooling on the remote farm where she was born, and Emily was aware that she had been influenced by her mother’s ungrammatical speech. Her father, on the other hand, was the son of a local farmer and being a boy, had gone to school through the 8th grade. He may have become a wild-eyed evangelical, but he was not illiterate, and Emily had also absorbed some of his ways of speaking. With Stephen to guide her, and the example of the reverend’s beautifully articulated sermons, she had attempted during the past year to mold her speech after theirs.
But she still hadn’t really learned to read. Before he got the call to preach, her father had taught her the alphabet and the numbers to one hundred, to write her name and read a handful of words. She had lapped it all up eagerly and yearned to learn more. Her father told her she was a quick student and that when she was seven, she could attend the little one-room schoolhouse down at the crossroads.
But then he took off on his erratic ministry, and Emily had to stay home and help her mother on the farm. She could still feel the pull of her hunger for learning, for knowing more about the world beyond the farm. She’d wandered into the nearby pine barrens to pick huckleberries a few times, but that hardly counted as seeing the world.
Shortly after Emily had arrived the year before, Retty asked her to read something from the Bible. Emily’s face had burned, as she admitted she didn’t know how.
“Í’ll ask Stephen to read to you, Retty. I’m sure he’ll be glad to.”
“All right, dear. But don’t feel badly about not knowing how to read.” She stopped to catch a breath. “Too many of us women...” She slumped back into her pillow, sucking in shallow scoops of air. “Too many aren’t taught to read or get an education. It’s not right.”
Emily took Retty’s hand in both of hers and squeezed it lightly. “I know, Retty. It’s true. I do so wish I knew how.”
Not long after that, Stephen found Emily in the kitchen alone.
“I want to ask you something, Em. Mama says you never learned to read. I hope you don’t mind that she told me.”
“No...it’s all right. I’m just so embarrassed when people find out, like it’s my fault somehow. I wish there was some way I could learn, but I’m afraid it’s too late, and how would I do it anyway?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I can help you if you like. We could sit here in the kitchen in the evenings and have reading lessons. What about it?”
Emily was stunned by his offer. If I like? Of course I like!
Many evenings since that night, Emily and Stephen had pored over the books that Stephen provided. Like all three Fairchild boys, they started with The New England Primer for beginner readers, and progressed from there. Emily, as her father had said, was quick to learn, and soaked up everything Stephen taught her in record time. She had even mastered some of the Biblical language and had been able to read some of Retty’s favorite Psalms to her.
Back downstairs, Emily went into the kitchen and put the rest of the groceries away, peeled some potatoes and set them on the stove to boil, and got out some pickled beets and the rest of the Sunday ham. The ice in the icebox had almost melted, she noted absently, but the iceman would come tomorrow.
While the potatoes cooked, she went back up to check on Henrietta. As soon as she entered the room, she knew something was terribly wrong. Retty still lay on her back, in a paroxysm of coughing, gasping for breath, with blood spraying across the white pillow.
Emily ran to her side and grasped her hand. “I’m going to get help, Retty. Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
Retty made no response, just continued to cough uncontrollably.
Emily ran downstairs and pounded on the reverend’s study door.
“Reverend Fairchild, please come!” she cried. “Henrietta has taken a turn for the worse.”
The door was thrown open immediately. “Send Stephen for Dr. Nichols.” The reverend’s voice was even. “I’ll see to Henrietta.”
