Ashes by Laurie Halse Anderson

ability to offer up cloth, so I opened my sister’s haversack, a treasure that she had closely guarded during our journey. Inside I found the rough-hewn birds that Curzon had carved, a few pinecones (these would have made for great fire starters, but I did not filch them), colorful pebbles, and a small handful of buttons that had been fashioned out of seashell. The buttons had been wrapped in a handkerchief that held clumsy girl-stitches; Ruth’s first sewing, I guessed.
    At the bottom of the bag, wrapped in a pair of stockings that were too small to fit her, I found a soft doll made of scraps of faded cloth that smelled faintly of clove and nutmeg. I buried my face in it and pictured Missus Serafina and Mister Walter, filled with so much love that they could send Ruth away from them. I tried to imagine what Aberdeen had described, the Ruth of five years earlier, weeks after she’d been taken from me in New York. She’d arrived at Riverbend in the hottest part of the summer. Her first friend had been a dog; her second, a boy as scared and lonely as she.
    I repacked her haversack, except for her half-embroidered kerchief, which I took outside to rinse in willow tea. When it had cooled, I took it into the hovel and sat next to Ruth’s still form.
    â€œI don’t know if you can hear me,” I said, “and I feel like a right fool talking to you this way, but at least I know you can’t cover your ears or storm away from me.” I wiped the sweat from her brow. “Let me tell you about the day you were born. . . .”
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    Every waking moment of the next two days and nights I told Ruth her stories. I told her about the colors of the quilt that Momma had wrapped her in and how happy Poppa had been when Ruth smiled at him for the first time. I reminded her of all the animals she had known in Rhode Island and the taste of Momma’s cooking. I tried to conjure the smells of the farm: the dirt after a spring rain, bluebells blooming in the July sun, ripe apples on a cold October breeze, and the smoke from the chimney as snow piled deep around the house.
    Some stories I told in order of when they happened; the day we buried Miss Mary Finch, followed by being sold to the Locktons, followed by the dreadful trip aboard the ship from Newport to New York, followed by our first encounter with Curzon.
    (I suffered an odd pain when I spoke his name, and changed the course of that tale.)
    Other stories grouped themselves together, like sorting peas from pebbles. Talking about our father led me to his stories about the country marks on his face, the scars he was given by his elders in a ceremony in the village over the sea where he’d been born. How he’d been kidnapped from his parents, his brothers and sisters, and all his friends. This spun itself into the telling of the few stories I knew of Momma’s mother, also born over the sea. She was stolen from her home when she was full grown and taken from her husband and children there. I told Ruth how our Momma carried Jesus in her heart always, and about the differences between our Congregational church and the Catholics and the Quakers, and the little I knew about the folk called Jews, and the folk called Mussulmans, who prayed five times a day. Why some people born over the sea paid special respect to springs of clean water, and how they greeted the sun with reverence each morning.
    I’d run down one thread of the stories that I wanted her to remember, then chase back up it so I could travel down another thread. Back to Momma; her songs, her kindness, her rules. Back to New York; the rooms of the Lockton house, the sunflowers that grew outside, and Becky Berry, who cooked there. Back to Rhode Island; how I tried to teach her the letters and numbers, how she’d fed chipmunks, how she’d woken afore anyone every morning of her child days.
    I took short breaks to eat the tiny fish that Aberdeen