And still she didn’t move, her mind now going back to Silas’s words about heathen whores. What had happened to the young Indian woman who had walked back and forth to Cowett’s every day, and then had not walked back and forth so very much at all? When Lyddie had first returned to Cowett’s house it had seemed well kept, much better kept than Sam Cowett’s efforts alone might have accounted for. Was Lyddie nothing but the white replacement of that heathen whore? Or had Silas’s heathen whore been Lyddie all along? She’d been long absent from church; she’d believed Nathan Clarke’s old rumors to have been squelched by Nathan Clarke, but what rumor was ever completely squelched? Hadn’t Silas said the day before, “Do you not hear what they say?” Was everything ever said about Lyddie and Sam Cowett still alive and seething underground?
But what did Lyddie care about a drunken Silas Clarke’s ramblings? He’d made little enough sense, his talk ranging from oars to whores. Yet Lyddie did not want to be found in the middle of the road pressed up against Cowett’s body, and for him to do such a thing without thought to Lyddie’s position took away some of this new idea of the great caring she’d been ready to lay at his door.
She would not go to him. Lyddie took off her skirt and shoes and stockings, got under the sheets, and fell into what she would have called a dreamless sleep, but when she woke it was as if she’d just wakened from the old dream, full of the conviction that she could not believe Sam Cowett.
Lyddie got up and dressed with impatience. There was no room for any doubt of Edward’s death; Lyddie had laid out his cold, flaccid body with her own hands; she had watched his coffin go into the ground.
Lyddie breakfasted in her room again, tended her night jar, and left for Cowett’s.
This time Cowett had waited for her, his mood no great improvement from the day before.
“What’s took you? A half hour and I lose the tide.”
“And what need you of a half hour?”
He pulled her into his chamber and would not be put off by her stiff flesh; he stroked her and stroked her till she softened, only easing into her at the last minute and then rushing his clothes so fast he ripped the tape off his shirt and had to find another.
After he’d gone Lyddie sat in his bed among the sheets that smelled of dark and light sweat together and mended Sam Cowett’s shirt with Rebecca Cowett’s needle. She couldn’t have said the minute the old unease of the dream began, but it did begin, and stayed, and grew until at last, looking at the torn cloth, it came to her why she shouldn’t believe Sam Cowett, what her dream had really been trying to tell her.
Sam Cowett had told her Edward’s coat had torn in the attempted rescue, but she’d seen it herself, in real life and in the dream, over and over: Edward’s sturdy work coat had survived whole.
During the day, as Lyddie put Sam Cowett’s house in order and then returned to do the same to her own, sidestepping as best she could the many Clarkes, Edward’s untorn coat meant only one thing to Lyddie: Sam Cowett had wished an excuse to offer Lyddie for his failure to save her husband, or, put even more simply, he had wished to salvage his pride. But that night, after she’d slid the bolt and thought with some irony that she did nothing but bolt the danger in, as Silas Clarke had obeyed her instruction and come back by dark, the matter of the untorn coat returned to disturb her sleep. The coat tore, Cowett had said. Could there be another motive for Sam Cowett saying Edward’s coat had torn? What might have happened out there on the water that would make Cowett lie about it? Lyddie cast her mind back to every conversation she’d ever had about Edward’s death, starting with Shubael’s. ’Twas Sam Cowett got there first. Shubael had had little to say about the drowning, and according to the later overheard conversation that Lyddie had somehow forgotten in all the confusion in her own life, he had feared Lyddie’s questions. He had feared the Indian. But why? Because Shubael had seen something that implicated the Indian somehow, and if the Indian knew it, he wouldn’t hesitate to protect himself at Shubael’s expense? At the expense of Shubael’s life?
No, no, no. Lyddie wouldn’t think it. But Silas would. Had not Cowett threatened Silas’s life the previous night? And what if Lyddie now put another interpretation on the Indian’s little speech, put him not attempting to protect Lyddie, but attempting to protect himself? What else might Cowett wish Silas to keep off, if not Lyddie herself? What if the thing he wished Silas to keep off was not Lyddie at all, but the subject of Edward’s death? The one man’s experience with spirits would have told him what might come out of the other man’s mouth. And things had come out of Silas’s mouth. His words hammered at Lyddie’s head. Him who widows you supports you…Do you not hear what they say?…Bloody murdering Indian…skill with an oar…
Lyddie threw back her covering and sat up, the bile rising in her chest, thinking of the gash in Edward’s head, a gash the shape of an oar’s blade. Oh, yes, things had come out of Silas Clarke’s mouth, and Lyddie had only half heard them, and what she’d heard she’d dismissed as drunken nonsense, but now, sitting there sick, in the dark, she wondered if she mightn’t have dismissed them too quickly. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what Jabez Gray had told her about Edward’s drowning: the boat going over, the line and block tossed to the other men to bring them safe aboard, Sam Cowett finally going after Edward himself, with his oar … Good God, Jabez Gray had said it himself: Sam Cowett went after him with his oar. In that dark, churning water who could say what blow might have been struck with it? Perhaps confident of a fatal blow he’d then gone through the rest of the act, taking hold of Edward’s coat and pulling him in, but once he’d seen that Edward breathed, that Edward lived…oh, hadn’t Jabez Gray said it in just those words? I saw your husband breathing, I saw his chest heaving…he was alive…
But then what? Lyddie didn’t know. Jabez Gray had not seen, he’d turned away to tend Shubael’s boat, and when he’d turned back Edward was gone. That’s all I can tell you. Gone.
No, no, no. It was not true. It was another trick of the night. Lyddie would wake in the morning and remember something else someone had said that would make nonsense of all of it. To begin, why would Sam Cowett wish Edward Berry dead? In all their years communing over the woodlot Lyddie had never heard a wrong word between the two men. But even as the forepart of her mind formed that thought, her memory dredged up something else, some words battered about in the wind between the Gray brothers one day after meeting as they discussed Sam Cowett:…I guess I’ll not quarrel with him…No? Then I guess you’re not Edward Berry…
But why would they quarrel? There was nothing, nothing…but there was. Of course there was. If Lyddie looked through the window behind her she might stare at it in the moonlight. The land. A valuable piece of land, passing from Cowett hands to Berry hands without a thing given in compensation for it. Lyddie had seen the deed of gift herself and hadn’t missed the fact that no Indian who signed with a primitive V could have written such formal English. What made her think he would even understand such language? Say, then, that something underhanded had gone on to move the land from Cowett to Berry; say this history had festered over two generations to leave Sam Cowett with an aching grudge. Had not Eben Freeman called him “a man with many grudges to feed, old and new”? Had not Sam Cowett himself referred to God’s scales as balancing land with water? Would Sam Cowett take it on himself, when the opportunity presented itself, to right an old theft of land with a death by water?
Lyddie wished to say no, she tried to say no, but interrupting her were more questions of her own role in it. If Sam Cowett had a grudge against Edward, if Edward’s death were not enough, what else might he do to hurt the Berrys? He might attempt to stymie the house sale, but once he saw the wife and read a certain rebellion in her, he might have fixed on another path. How easy it had been for him to lure her, first from her faith, and then from her family, and next from her community, in the last gasp putting her at odds with the one man who might right her with all.
But had Sam Cowett reall
y done all that? Lyddie didn’t need the clear light of morning to tell her that no, of course, he hadn’t. She couldn’t blame him for herself. But he had helped. Lyddie had leaned so far toward each of those things that a push by any little feather might have toppled her, and Sam Cowett had been more than a little feather. All that talk of Indian gods and Indian morals, had it all been toward one end, Lyddie disgraced and dependent and his to save or destroy as the spirit moved him?
No, no, no. Lyddie wouldn’t believe it. She closed her eyes and thought of his hands on her willing body, but even in that she now saw a manipulation of the flesh that paralleled a manipulation of the mind. How else could Lydia Berry, descended of the very religious elders who had formed the moral laws that ruled the colony, come to such a place where she could find no sin in such acts as she had committed? How had it come to pass that this man of all others had been allowed to strip away her beliefs along with her dress? And there Lyddie remembered something else almost more painful than all the rest. Sam Cowett had stripped away Lyddie’s dress many a time, but that first day, that first time, he had made no move to discard Rebecca’s. The man who had worked so hard to cut every last thread that bound her to Edward had kept Rebecca’s dress between them like a shield.
Morning did not deliver Lyddie her usual reprieve from the night’s thoughts, but it did leave them in greater confusion. Where the night before every last piece of information had marched along one behind the other like a neat row of ants, now that line stood broken and scattered as if a hungry bird had dropped down in its midst. While Lyddie wasn’t ready to deny outright the night’s conclusion, she had some trouble finding her way over the old track.
But where the ants wouldn’t line up for her, the stars did; having risen late she was just coming from the necessary when Jabez Gray came by on his way to the landing. Lyddie hurried into the road after him.
“Widow Berry!” he greeted her. “Is all well?”
“An ill night,” she said. “Would you be so kind as to tell Mr. Cowett I’ll not be there to clean this morning?”
“I’ll tell him. What’s got you, a stomach? I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got the color of it. I lost three days to it last month and nothing settled me till I took a good purge and followed it with a tonic of warm wine and skunk cabbage.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gray, I’ll try that.”
“You’ll hear them say mint, or gentian, or chamomile, but I tell you, Widow, ’tis the skunk cabbage cures it. Mind you, once you go to bile, you’ve got to get in something yellow. Gold thread, perhaps, or goldenseal—”
“I thank you, Mr. Gray, for taking my message.”
“All right, then, I’m happy to do it. Now is there anything else I might do for you?”
Lyddie paused, considered, leaped. “I do have one thing more. A question that’s long been troubling me. If you won’t mind going back to the subject.”
“No, no, no, we have to keep our health. After that—”
“I don’t mean my health, Mr. Gray. I mean my husband, Edward.”
“Oh. Aye.” His jaw slacked. He stood silent.
“I dream of it yet. Of Edward alive in the water, still breathing.”
“Good Lord, I should not have—”
“No, no, I need to know all of it. You said to me, if I remember, that Mr. Cowett had him in his hands while he yet breathed, and then something happened.”
“Damnedest thing. I’d just heard this great huzzah from the men because we’d got him. And then I turned around and…nothing.” He shook his head.
“And Mr. Cowett?”
“What of him?”
“He said nothing? No word of explanation?”
“A few words I’d not tell a lady, if I may say that much to you. A ruddy great streak of them. And something about his coat. His coat tearing out of his hands. But he wouldn’t give him up. He kept flailing around in the water with the oar until we almost went over ourselves and we had to put to in a hurry. After that we were too far off the spot. He went back, though. Kept going back. Set me at the stern and stood up in the bow, yelling at us to peel our eyeballs, but we saw nothing. Nothing. I’ll tell you this, Widow Berry, no men tried harder, but there comes a time when you say, all right, then, we’ve lost him. A hard thing to say to yourself, but it comes down to it sometimes: you’ve got to say to yourself, ’Tis over. We’ve lost him.” He said the words so gently Lyddie couldn’t mistake the direction of the message.
She’d taken the coward’s way; she was sensible of it and yet didn’t regret it for a minute. She needed the day to think. She could see two versions: a Sam Cowett in honest distress over the loss of his friend, shouting out curses, jabbing at the water that hid him long past the point of reason, but what of the coat? The thought of the coat took Lyddie to the second version, in which a Sam Cowett in grudging fury tinged with fear of being caught strikes Edward down with the oar, but as Edward still rises Cowett must pretend a rescue, only letting go when he feels no one is looking, blaming a torn coat, continuing to jab the water to make sure Edward is under, crisscrossing the black water to make sure he hasn’t surfaced somewhere farther along.
Lyddie’s stomach began to churn for real. She lay down on the bed and pulled up the coverlet. She might actually have slept; she roused to the sound of voices in the keeping room and a strong sense of living an old day over.
Sam Cowett: “I’ve come to see the Widow Berry.”
Patience Clarke: “I’m sorry, sir, she’s not well today.”
Sam Cowett: “I’ll see her.”
Patience Clarke: “Sir! Sir!”
But Lyddie had no hope of someone like Patience waylaying someone like Cowett; boots clipped across the floor and Lyddie’s chamber door flew open, snapping hard shut behind him. He took a knife out of its sheath and jammed the latch with it.
Lyddie tossed back her coverlet and got up.
“Gray says you’re ill.”
“I’m a good deal better, thank you.”
“I had you dead. Again.”
“I’m not dead or anything near it. And you’ll give us away with all this visiting, especially behind closed doors. Please, open it.”
He didn’t move. “You asked Gray about your husband.”
“I did, yes. He happened by at a troubled moment.”
“What troubled it, Clarke?”
“No one. A dream.”
“What of?”
Lyddie stayed silent.
Cowett stepped toward her. Lyddie stepped backward. Cowett stopped still.
“So. You listen to this fool in his drink and are afraid of me now.”
“No.” But she looked at the door, and he saw her looking. He crossed the room, pulled out the knife, sheathed it, and banged out, one door, two doors. The end of it.
38
A lone sail swept into the bay and moored at the landing. The first time the carts rumbled by Lyddie paid no notice. The second time she noticed but said nothing. The third time she asked the oldest Clarke boy, who stood at the window, “What’s all this traffic?”
“Some Indians. With barrels.”
The fourth time the boy ran right out into the road, and when he came back in he had a biscuit and the story. Scotto Hallet had landed to take on supplies and crew to make a last trip north after whales, and the big Indian was shipping out with him. They were traveling back and forth with the cart, refitting and provisioning from Bangs’s chandlery.
The boy ran up and down the road for two days, happily reporting on progress: the big Indian had replaced some shingles on the roof; the livestock had been carted off to Mrs. Gray’s; an Indian woman had picked over the garden; the fire had gone out; and, finally, the sloop had sailed. Lyddie walked down the road past the lifeless house as far as the rise and saw the dirty white triangle of sail just piercing the horizon. She watched until it disappeared, then continued down the road to the landing, thinking to recapture her old habit of walking the shore, but as she stepped onto the flat s
he saw a fresh-painted sloop in the channel ahead, several men swarming her deck, and Shubael Hopkins standing on the sand talking to Seth Cobb. He saw Lyddie and his hand shot in the air in greeting. Seth Cobb tipped his head in a bow, and Lyddie felt she had little choice but to join them.
Shubael greeted her with, “And what do you think of our vessel, Cousin?”
“She’s lovely,” Lyddie answered truthfully.
Shubael elbowed Seth Cobb. “You see? All fall in love with her at first sight.” He turned back to Lyddie, his old reticence around her forgotten in the glow of this newfound love. “As soon as she’s fitted we take our first run to Barnstable. Did I tell you, Cobb, how tight to the wind she sails?”
“Aye, aye, a dozen times now. Widow Berry, I warn you, walk away now or you’ll spend the next hour telling your cousin how tight and trim and perfect his vessel looks. Hopkins, you’ve done well. In truth, I’m quite jealous of you.”
He set off.
Alone with Lyddie, Shubael grew solemn, but Lyddie no longer detected any apprehension over her presence. She could understand the change in him; he would have heard Silas Clarke’s tavern babble and would know that another had done his dirty work for him; besides, Cowett was no longer at hand to trouble him.
As for Lyddie, she held no grudge against Shubael; one person afraid could not blame another for being so. “She’s truly a pretty thing, Cousin,” she said. “I fear she’ll tempt you away from us too often.”
Shubael turned on her eagerly. “And who would not be tempted? Are you not tempted? Have you no business at Barnstable? It would be my great pleasure to carry you there. If we have such wind as—”
The widow's war Page 20
