by Joan Brady
An hour out of Denver, he was shaking with cold, lips and fingernails blue, teeth chattering: this is the first stage of malaria. An hour later, the fever hit him, and he rode most of the way to Sweetbrier aware of very little. By the time he arrived he could hardly focus his eyes. Laboriously putting one foot down in front of the other, he worked his way along streets he didn’t recognize until he found himself facing a store with buckets and brooms standing on display outside. He walked in.
A figure stood behind the counter. Jonathan maneuvered toward it.
‘You ain’t looking so good, Reverend,’ the figure said, its sharp little teeth showing in a smile and its hands rubbing together as Benbow Wikin’s hands had rubbed together twenty years before.
Jonathan squinted at him. Could it be? The man’s body zig-zagged from side to side, legs left, pouter pigeon chest right, head left again. Could this be Benbow Wikin himself? Jonathan could not bring himself to care.
‘New to town, ain’t you?’ The man cocked his head to the right, unbalancing his zig-zag body, and Jonathan staggered. ‘Hey, you look lousy and that’s official. You better—’
‘Where does Mr Finster live?’
‘Stationmaster Finster?’ Jonathan nodded. ‘Elm Street – big house – two blocks down. Turn left. Biggest house around. You can’t miss—’
Jonathan walked out.
Later, he remembered leaning against the gatepost outside a big house and suddenly finding Bessie beside him – stiff petticoats, a smell of baking and a tea towel flung over one shoulder. A girl stood behind her, a fair-skinned girl, who flushed so intense a pink at his glance that he felt a catch in his chest. What he remembered most of all was the concern on her face as she ran toward him to break his fall.
2
The girl appeared many times to Jonathan as the delirium took hold of him, but her features refused to resolve themselves. When he was a child he had whittled the hooks and joints from which Alvah made reins for the horse; he had carved the teeth for his own mouth. Later, living on the Columbia River, he had whittled for pleasure, carving out bowls and plates and even likenesses of his companions. So when he found he could not make out the girl’s face, he began to whittle a nose and mouth for her himself – light, arched brows, long eyelashes, freckles across the cheeks and a pert nose. He cut and carved and sanded; he hugged the work to him when George appeared at the outskirts of his mind, where chaos and uncertainty ruled.
George appeared there often. Think only about the girl, Jonathan would cry to himself. What about her hair? Blond? No, too harsh. Strawberry blond, red-blond – rich, soft – and pulled away from her forehead. Such a forehead! He worked and worked on it, and when at last he was satisfied with this lovely creature he’d made, the concern he saw on her face moved him so deeply that he fainted. In one lucid moment he reached out a hand to her; she took it and stroked it. He knew that she thought the fever still held him so he said nothing.
‘Jonathan? You hear me?’ Bessie said to him at last.
He nodded weakly.
‘I was terrible afraid you were going to die,’ Bessie said. ‘Could you handle a little broth?’
Jonathan pulled himself up a little ‘Who—?’ he began.
Bessie’s face widened into a smile. ‘Why, that’s my Sarah. She’s taken awful good care of you.’
When Jonathan was well enough to get out of bed Bessie baked a whole ham for Sunday dinner; she basted it with sugar and fruit juice so that its fat turned black outside. During the meal Mr Finster struggled to interest Jonathan in the new Janney coupler.
‘A dazzling exemplar of man’s inventive genius,’ Mr Finster said. Mr Finster was much as before, round and pleased, though his muttonchops were thinner and his hands trembled. ‘It employs, sir, the principle that lies behind the hooked fingers of the human hand.’
‘How does it work?’ Jonathan tried to listen, but his glance kept straying to Sarah’s face, to the set of her shoulders, to her hands as she used her knife and fork, and his mind kept wandering off to that first day at the railroad yard in Denver when College had talked about link-and-pin couplers in terms of love and marriage. Jonathan carved a piece of sugary black coating from the ham on his plate. Why did College’s blood look black? Why does the color of light change things so? But his attention made an abrupt leap back to Sarah’s hands – not hooked at all. Enfolded? Was there a word graceful enough?
After they’d eaten, Mr Finster left to attend a train due in at the station. Jonathan went into the parlor with Bessie and Sarah, who sat in a wing chair in the far corner of the room and worked on a sampler.
‘I knew you right away, Jonathan,’ Bessie said. ‘I looked out the window and I said to Sarah here, I said, “That preacher out there, he carries himself like Jonathan.” And then when you tried to open the gate . . .’
Whenever Bessie paused Jonathan found himself straining to hear Sarah breathe.
‘But I couldn’t rightly believe it myself,’ Bessie went on. ‘My, my, you have grown handsome again, too, ain’t you?’ She surveyed Jonathan with pleasure. ‘But you still don’t smile, do you? How’d you get to be a preacher? We been right worried about you for years.’
‘I was afraid you might have forgot me.’
‘Forget you? Never. You were such a sad little mite – and so spirited – isn’t anybody in town has forgotten our Jonathan.’ She reached out and patted his knee. ‘I’m going out to those dishes. No, Sarah, you stay setting there. You don’t want to leave our guest all to himself, do you? Play him something. She plays as pretty as she looks, Jonathan.’
He watched Sarah spread her skirt over the piano stool. Her heavy braid fell forward as she bent over the keys and the light wool of her bodice stretched taut across the curve of her spine. ‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘Will you—?’
She turned to face him.
‘Will you—?’ he repeated. But his tongue seemed to get stuck in his embarrassed thoughts, so he gestured with his hands as he had years ago: would she please take a walk with him?
It was very cold, near to Christmas. Everything Jonathan could see from the front path of the Finster house was new to him. There hadn’t been any paved streets in Sweetbrier before. Even the trees were new; there’d not been a single tree in town when he was a boy, and yet the beech in Sarah’s front yard had a trunk thicker than a man’s waist. Fifteen years old at least, he thought, growing uneasy. They walked down the block.
‘There’s an awful lot you want to know, isn’t there?’ she said. He didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. ‘It’s difficult to know where to begin—’
‘What about at the beginning?’
A crease appeared between her brows. ‘But—’
‘Well, then, what about now?’ he said.
She took in her breath. ‘Right now,’ she said, ‘the whole Stoke family’s in Washington.’ Jonathan’s heart lurched sideways in his chest. ‘Old Mister Shockton – he’s the one with all the money – he’s had a stroke, and they’ll probably stay there until—’
‘I don’t want to hear about this,’ he interrupted angrily. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
Her startled look took him as much by surprise as his anger had taken her. ‘Isn’t that what – I’m sorry, sir. I thought—’
‘Why do you call me “sir”? Do I seem so fearfully old to you?’
‘Because – what should I call you? I’ll call you anything you want.’
They stood irresolute for a moment. He turned away from her, sighed irritably and turned back. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I talked a lot, didn’t I?’
‘People with fevers often do. You did say some things you must have had on your mind a long time. You talked special about George Stoke, a lot.’
‘I don’t remember,’ he snapped, the anger slipping out of control again. She reached out to him – almost involuntarily, or so it seemed – touched his arm, and as quickly drew her hand back. Jonathan studied the smooth skin of her cheeks, pink fr
om the cold air. What could he say to make sense to her, or to himself, either? But her expression, the concern in her eyes, and those gentle, protective movements – maybe sense had nothing to do with what was needed. It came to him then that what he needed was precisely what she was offering him. A gust of wind blew snowflakes into her hair, and because the day was so very cold, a second gust blew them away again. Why did the chicken cross the road? he thought suddenly. To defend? To attack?
‘I’ve lost my faith, Sarah,’ he said.
She bent her head over the fur muff she carried. ‘Everybody has doubts. A preacher has to have them, too.’
‘Did I babble on about this as well?’
‘It’s not important. What’s important is that you can’t really help anybody if you’re too sure—’
‘I can’t help anybody anyway.’
They walked on in silence a moment. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Is it blind faith you want? Like an ox?’
‘Loaves, fishes, bodies disappearing from caves. How can anybody believe such stupid stuff? How could I have been taken in? I? Of all people? And for years? I don’t trust anybody. I’ve never trusted anybody. If you believe it at all, you believe it like an ox.’
‘I believe it.’
‘Well, good for you. How old are you?’
‘I’m twenty in January,’ she said. ‘I doubt things, you see, things I shouldn’t doubt—’
‘You’ll grow out of it.’ She didn’t know whether he meant the faith or the doubts. ‘You look younger than twenty,’ he said then. ‘Twenty’s a good age. I liked being twenty.’ They were walking in the old area of town, the area that had been all of Sweetbrier when he was a child. He stopped suddenly, pointed to a small building with a picket fence in front of it, and the childlike delight that sometimes came to him, came to him now, taking her as much by surprise as his anger had only moments before. ‘Look, Sarah,’ he said, ‘that’s the old Sook Faris house.’
‘They still live there.’
‘Do they? Really? Is that Nannie Gander’s? It is, isn’t it? I wanted to ask you before: Benbow Wikin still owns the grocery store, doesn’t he? I did see him, didn’t I?’
Sarah laughed. ‘Of course you did. Lots of things are the same. Are you always so changeable?’
‘I never change,’ Jonathan said, humoring her – which she saw and which caught at her heart so painfully that she could not answer him. ‘Other things change,’ he went on. ‘I remain the same.’
The snow picked up; it began to grow dark. They turned back toward the house, and by the time they could see the lighted windows ahead of them, it was too dark for them to see each other, too dark even to make out the road beneath their feet.
‘How pretty you are under that crepe bow,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘You can’t see me now – or anything else.’
Out of the dark his voice said, ‘You’re wrong, you know. It’s an especially fetching hat. I can see you perfectly beneath it.’
She laughed once more, fuller this time and with a gaiety he hadn’t sensed in her before. ‘Then my hat’s a proof of your faith, Reverend. You can see for yourself it’s never left you at all. You can find faith if you only look for it – hats, anything at all, little things same as big.’
3
The wedding took place in mid-February in the Methodist church in town. Sarah wore Bessie’s wedding dress with French lace on it, and tears rolled down Mr Finster’s cheeks as he gave her away. Jonathan hardly heard the ceremony; his ears rang and his heart knocked at his ribs. Benbow Wikin himself supplied the feast that followed. That night in a sagging double bed of the best room in the only hotel in Sweetbrier, Jonathan was so terrified of hurting Sarah and she was so terrified of she knew not what that they didn’t even touch hands. They left town the next morning on the first leg of the trip to the Pacific Northwest, where he had got the Methodists to assign him a circuit: the lie was to be institutionalized.
It all came down to money and sex. What doesn’t? The Finsters had listened respectfully to him but Bessie, always practical, ended up with, ‘Well, Jonathan, if you give up preaching, how are you going to support a wife? You need money for a farm.’
Sarah said, ‘We’re going west. You can start again. Your faith will come back. Just wait and see. Think about my hat.’ But it was the curve of her back and the way her hair hung in the braid that convinced him. If preaching was what it took to get them, then preaching was what he’d do.
Before the wedding, he hired a horse and rode out through the frozen landscape to the old Stoke homestead. Nothing remained of it; it had disappeared as surely as Mogul had and even more thoroughly. Acres of corn-land – dark, tilled earth showing in scrubby patches through a largely evaporated layer of snow – stretched from horizon to horizon: not even the slightest change in the contour of the land indicated where all those passions had taken place. Jonathan spent hours with Benbow Wikin. It was in fact from Benbow that he bought that first horsehide-bound volume, a ledger rather than a diary, that sits on my desk this very day; he made up the code (a simple rearrangement of the alphabet) as he made the purchase itself, and with the information Benbow gave him, he wrote in the first entries about the Stokes and about himself. ‘Wify and Alvah got the fever,’ Benbow told him. ‘Dead within a week of each other. Alyoshus sold up. Went west. Cathern married Garley Ashton. Remember him? Skinny kid. Bookkeeper. They went west, too. Out California way—’
‘Red pigtails and all?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Red pigtails and all,’ Benbow said.
Jonathan and Sarah hardly spoke to each other on their honeymoon trip to Washington state. She stared out the window of the train as though she were afraid to look at him. At night she slept perched on the far edge of the bed while he held himself rigid on the opposite side. Like the old fairy tale about the man who experienced fear only in love despite all the terrors that had preceded it, Jonathan was afraid now, too – afraid of her fear and even more afraid of the intensity of his own feelings. He’d survived slavery. He’d survived friendship and its betrayal by death. He’d survived George dead and George alive again. He’d survived God, education and malaria. But this? Already – because of her – he’d committed himself to the life of an impostor, which is to say that already – because of her – he’d given up a crucial part of his search for whatever bedrock it is that he and I share a passion for: truth or meaning or first causes: it doesn’t matter what you call it. Already, though he didn’t know it himself, didn’t even suspect it, already an element of him hated her for these things and for the mortal weakness of the flank she’d exposed in him. By the time they arrived in Seattle, both of them were exhausted.
Seattle’s Western Star Hotel gave them a double room that looked out to sea; they fell asleep that night because they were too tired not to. About midnight Jonathan woke abruptly to find his hands plucking at the quilt. He sat upright in the moonlight and Sarah threw her arms around him.
‘It’s all right, Johnny,’ she said. ‘You’re awake now – you’re all right.’ He dropped his head on her shoulder and let out his breath. ‘Can you tell me about it?’ He shook his head. ‘You have this same dream often, don’t you? I want to hear. Please tell me.’
What happened then? Well, talk about an egg’s way of producing another egg! This wholly ruthless, madly comic act: this is how our genes go about producing genes: we’re no more than DNA’s way of producing another string of DNA: an instinct in us as blind as the migrations of a locust or the metamorphosis of a tobacco worm – the joke heightened by an illusion of control as idiotic as the humping itself. What difference does it make whether such stuff is carried out in the marital bed or in the whorehouse? But then how would I know? It’s not seemly for a cripple to dabble in sex. I do know he didn’t tell her about the dream, though. The diaries are clear: he and I are the only ones who know about that. But I know that a man with looks like his can get a woman to do what he wants without her being aware of her own resistan
ce. Even in the depths of his illness, the anger had flickered at the edges of his face like a will-o’-the-wisp in the marshes; she’d watched it, fascinated, and legend has it that people who follow the will-o’-the-wisp lose their souls. Jonathan himself says in his diaries, in one of those flashes of humor, half mordant, half charming, that punctuate what you keep assuming is an unrelieved darkness of temperament: in one of these flashes he reports that he quoted to her from their marriage ceremony, saying, voice grave, demeanor profound, that ‘a man shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be as one flesh’.
At this, he says, she frowned, trying to understand. ‘This cleaving: you learned about it’ – her earnestness was absolute – ‘when you were studying how to preach?’
He dared not risk an answer. ‘All right?’ he said.
She nodded quickly, eyes on his eyes while he unbuttoned her gown. ‘I don’t think I agreed to anything like this,’ she said. ‘Nobody told me—’
She broke off to study the movement of his hands, and toward morning, an hour or so before dawn, he awoke again to find her staring down at him. He could see the outline of her face in the moonlight that came through the window, but he could not make out her expression.
