Dear America: Like the Willow Tree

by Lois Lowry

  I was accustomed to obeying, and so I began reluctantly to pull the ring from my finger. But I also began to cry. “Please,” I begged, through my tears, “could I wear it just this one night? And then could I keep it in my drawer, so I could touch it now and then?”

  She took it from me, and shook her head. “Nay,” she said.

  By now I was sobbing. I looked at her hand, her thin, undecorated hand, closed around my grandmother’s ring. And my voice came out of me angry, a voice I hardly recognized as my own. “Nay!” I screamed at her. “Neigh! Neigh! You sound like a horse! You are a stupid horse with a big ugly face! Neigh!”

  She didn’t reply. She simply stood and took my arm and led me out of the bathroom and up the stairs. I was sobbing and saying rude things to her, but she was silent until we got to the room where my bed was. “You’ll stay here until retiring time,” she told me firmly.

  She did one other thing before she left me there, seated on my bed. She took, from her pocket, a folded, ironed white handkerchief, and placed it in my lap. “Dry your tears, child,” she said in a soft voice.

  And I have. But my anger still burns in me, though it has lessened a bit as I have written and written — so many pages! — of these events.

  So I am a Shaker girl now. My grandmother’s ring is gone. And this is not my chosen land, and never will be.

  Sunday, October 27, 1918

  Five days have passed since I have written in my journal. It is difficult to find the time, for the days are so busy here. “Hands to work and hearts to God,” the Shakers say. I am not at all sure where my heart is, but my hands have certainly been to work!

  And to play, as well. Grace and Rebecca and Polly, the three who share the retiring room with me, have become my friends. Grace is full of energy and mischief. Polly, who wears glasses, is shy and scholarly. And Rebecca, with her blonde braids, reminds me a little of Emily Ann back in Portland, though Rebecca is quieter. Funny, but when it is dark, and we are in our beds, she talks a little more — exactly the time when we are not supposed to talk! We do whisper to each other a bit. Sometimes Sister Jennie has to come in and shush us. Isn’t it odd, though, that we don’t talk about the past? I know that Grace’s mother died. But what of the others? What brought them here?

  It is as if we are all starting fresh and new. But I suppose the other girls have sadnesses, too, and things they must put behind them, as I do. It seems those things must lie quiet within us all.

  We have time to play when our work is finished each day. We run up and down the road playing tag with the other girls. We jump into the piles of raked leaves. Grace, who came in March, tells me that summer is the best. There is much to be done, then, in the gardens, of course. But there is time for fun. We can go over to the island in the millpond — Brother Isaac built a bridge — and there are swings there, and we can have picnics. The girls also have created a secret little place, Grace says, under the big stand of lilacs behind the girls’ shop, and we will have tea parties there in summer.

  Today is Sunday, the Sabbath, when we rest from work, attend worship, and do not play games of any sort, just read quietly or write — and that is why this afternoon I am able to take up my journal once more.

  The weather is cool now, but not yet winter, of course. There are leaves everywhere on the ground, and we help to rake, though the boys do most of it. It must make them frustrated that we leap into their orderly piles and scatter leaves about. I have even seen Daniel at work with a rake! He never liked helping at home. But there are other boys here, and they work together. I’ve heard them laughing.

  He wears a hat outdoors. All the boys and brethren do. But at mealtime the men and boys hang their hats on pegs in the waiting space (their waiting room is different, and they come in through a separate door. The brethren and boys even have their own staircase in the big dwelling!). With their hats off I am able to see that Daniel has a haircut. His hair is cut like the brethren, straight across in front, and makes him look older.

  He looks at me now, sometimes. Just a glance. When it is my turn to help in the kitchen, perhaps I will serve at the boys’ table. I won’t speak, of course. Meals are very silent. But if I get close to him, I will give him a smile so that he knows I am all right.

  And I will be curious to see how he eats! At home, there were many vegetables that Daniel refused to eat. Parsnips were one. But here, vegetables are the main part of every dinner. And many parsnips! We are all supposed to “Shaker our plate,” which means to eat everything and leave it perfectly clean. I don’t find it difficult. I am always hungry at mealtime and the food is always good. But I am curious to see what Daniel does about parsnips!

  I do notice that he kneels properly before meals, when we pray silently until Elder William says, “Amen.” (All of us kneel, except the very elderly, who remain standing behind their chairs.) What Daniel says in prayer, of course, I cannot know. I myself have had a problem, not knowing what or how to pray here, and so I have just closed my eyes and knelt in silence. But Sister Jennie helped me with this when I opened my mind to her yesterday.

  Now I must explain about opening one’s mind.

  It surprised me on Friday when Sister Jennie told me that confession was an important part of being a Shaker. I thought confession was only for Catholics, and I had finally figured out that Shakers weren’t Catholics and Shaker sisters not nuns. But Friday night, when we girls were preparing to retire, Sister Jennie told me that I would be attending confession the next day.

  “Is there a priest?” I asked, for I had not seen one anywhere.

  But she laughed. “Nay,” she said. “We Shakers have no priests, no pastors. We are all equal in our worship.”

  “My friend Marjorie always goes to her priest for confession,” I told her. “She showed me how she crossed herself and said, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’ ”

  Sister Jennie nodded. “Yea, we have all sinned,” she told me, “and so we open our minds to one another. You will come to talk to me tomorrow, in the good room, after dinner.”

  The good room is across the front hall, in the girls’ shop. There is a piano in it. I had peeked inside at the piano, for I have always wanted to learn to play the piano, but I had not yet been in the good room. And I was not sure I wanted to go there to talk to Sister Jennie, for although she had been kind to me all week, and treated me just as she treats the other girls, still there was the memory of the terrible night not long ago when I had screamed at her that she looked like a horse.

  But I had no choice. One doesn’t have a choice here. There are rules, and everyone follows them.

  So yesterday, I went to her in the good room after the noon dinner. I’d rehearsed what I would say at confession. I planned to say very politely, “I am very sorry that I was so rude to you on my first night here, Sister Jennie. It will not happen again, I promise.” I would get that over with first thing, and then I would change the subject and go on to my other sins, and there were many. I had spoken to Daniel because I didn’t know the rule about boys and girls staying so separate. I had not finished my eggs at breakfast because the whites were too runny. And when we all knelt before meals to pray, I couldn’t think what to say, so I sometimes just recited a nursery rhyme in my mind. I was quite sure that was a pretty serious sin, to be saying “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick” before the time came for “Amen.”

  Sister Jennie gestured to me to sit down in a chair in the good room, and she took her place on the sofa, facing me. I looked at the floor, took a deep breath, and was about to begin my confession with “I am very sorry —” but to my surprise, Sister Jennie spoke first.

  “I am happy to have you in our family, Lydia,” she said.

  I looked up at her. How could she be happy to have someone as rude and ungrateful as me? But I could see she was not just being polite. She really felt it.

  “Do you know,” she went on, “we have forty-eight head of cattle here at Sabbathday Lake?”

  I shook my head. “
Sometimes I see my brother, Daniel, out in the field with the cows,” I told her. “But I didn’t know there were forty-eight.”

  “Ten swine,” she went on, “and a pair of mules.”

  “Oh,” I replied. Who would have guessed that confession consisted of a listing of the farm animals?

  “Two draft horses. Those are the very big, sturdy ones. Two driving horses. Eldress Lizzie, elderly as she is, can drive the team — imagine! She’s the only sister who can do that.

  “And then,” Sister Jennie added, “we have one very old horse.” She smiled. “I’ve always been fond of horses. They have sweet faces, I think.”

  I began to cry suddenly. “I’m so sorry,” I said through my tears. “So, so sorry! I didn’t mean it, Sister Jennie! Really I didn’t! Truly I don’t think you look like a horse! I was just so scared, and feeling so sorry for myself! And then you took my grandmother’s ring! And —”

  “I understand,” she said. “And the time will come when you’ll understand, too, Lydia. You’ll begin Sunday School tomorrow, here in this room, with the other girls. You’ll learn about our beliefs. Simplicity is one of our very important values. We don’t ornament ourselves.”

  I looked at her, at her dark, long-sleeved dress, her unrouged face, her hair pulled back beneath the net cap. I could see the goodness in her because it shone through the plainness. I stopped crying, and once again she passed me a handkerchief.

  She chuckled. “You know each of our girls learns the various jobs in the community. ‘Hands to work and hearts to God,’ we say. I think we’ll start you helping in the laundry,” she said. “Then you’ll think twice about using so many handkerchiefs!”

  I laughed with her as I wiped my eyes. “Sister Jennie?” I said.

  “Yea?”

  “This is really, truly a confession. When we kneel in the dining room, I don’t know what to pray.”

  “You can use the words that Mother Ann taught. ‘I pray God bless me, and give me grace, and make me a good child.’ ”

  I repeated the words, then said, “That’s all?” Sister Jennie smiled. “Amen,” she said. “Ah, child, that’s everything.”

  She rose, and I knew confession was over. Or, as she called it, opening one’s mind.

  Monday, October 28, 1918

  School has reopened. The teacher is Sister Cora Soule, who is quite stern.

  We girls all walked together across the road to the schoolhouse. I was wearing a new dress that Sister Jennie had made for me! She has a sewing machine at her end of the large room in the girls’ shop, and she sews when we are gathered there working on our own handwork. She even asked me which color I would like, from her collection of fabrics, and I chose blue. I wore it with a knitted blue sweater from the closet. I wondered who else had worn that sweater. Nothing seems to belong just to us — even my bed, as they told me when I arrived, had been Eliza’s bed. I do not know what happened to Eliza, but perhaps she ran away, or died. And maybe this was her sweater!

  At Sunday School, studying Mother Ann’s teachings, we learn that everything belongs to all of us. It is why, that first day, Sister Jennie took The Secret Garden from me and put it on the shelf with the other books. “Community of goods,” it is called, and it is one of our beliefs.

  (Well, it is one of the Shaker beliefs. I am not at all sure that it is mine.)

  But the blue dress, with its white collar, is mine. Sister Jennie made it just for me.

  To my amazement, the boys also came to school! In the old days, boys went to school in winter and girls in summer. But now we all go together, though we don’t speak to each other, and we sit on different sides of the room — the boys’ desks are on the south side of the huge woodstove, and the girls’ on the north. We have different recess times. We have different bookshelves, boys and girls. The girls’ shelf has Little Women, I can see. I do not know what books the boys’ shelf has, but I know one boy who will not be reading them. That is Daniel, my brother. Daniel does not like to read.

  There were other children. I had never seen them before. They were dressed differently, and one of the girls had a fancy hair ribbon. At the beginning of the school day, after we said the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance (there is a large flag in the schoolroom, and another outside), Sister Cora introduced me because I was new. She said each child’s name and explained that Louise and Marian (the one with the hair ribbon) and Gloria were from the world. One of the boys was, too.

  I was from the world such a very short time ago, and already it seems like a foreign place!

  “Lydia, what grade were you in before you came here?” the teacher asked.

  “Sixth,” I said. “I had just started sixth.”

  “You’ll sit here with Polly, then,” she said. Each desk had room for two, so I took my place beside Polly. Of course I already knew her because she shares the retiring room with Grace and Rebecca and me. She smiled at me when I sat down beside her.

  I whispered, “There’s my brother, Daniel, over there.” I pointed. Polly looked confused. Sister Cora glared at me for whispering, and Daniel glared at me for calling attention to him. So I simply stared at the maps on the wall and pretended to be very, very interested in ancient Greece.

  The dinner bell rang just before noon. Sister Cora’s meal was delivered to her by one of the kitchen sisters so that she could stay with the children from the world while they ate the lunches they had brought from home. The rest of us all walked back across the road to the dwelling house for our dinner. This time, when we knelt, I remembered the words of Mother Ann Lee’s prayer that Sister Jennie had taught me. I pray God bless me, and give me grace, and make me a good child.

  Monday is always laundry day. The laundry is on the ground floor of the sisters’ shop, behind the house where I live with the other girls. The sisters stand facing each other at big tubs and scrub the clothing on washboards, but the larger things, like sheets, are all washed in an amazing huge machine, which is filled with water and contains wooden slats that move back and forth by an electric motor. They tell me that the Shakers invented this machine and that they have invented many things — even clothespins!

  After the washing, the large things had to be rinsed, and Rebecca and I had the task of swishing them in clear water with wooden poles. From there they went through a wringer and into a basket to be hung to dry. We worked, hanging things, after breakfast until time for school. From the schoolhouse windows, and when I walked to the dining room for dinner, I could see the sheets billowing in the cold breeze. After school, in the late afternoon, Rebecca and I went back to take things from the line and fold them. Grace came along to help.

  This was my first job in the Shaker village: laundry. But it would not last long, I was told. All jobs change often, so that one never becomes disheartened by doing something too long, and so that we learn to do everything.

  I am looking forward to helping the sisters make candy! They do it in a special room in the sisters’ shop, and pack it into lovely boxes to sell. I suppose that those who work there have a chance to nibble.

  But for now, my job is laundry. Tomorrow is Tuesday. On Tuesday, they tell me, we iron.

  Tuesday, October 29, 1918

  I hate ironing.

  I suppose at my next confession, when I open my mind to Sister Jennie, I will have to tell her that I hate something. Shakers don’t hate.

  And she will explain to me once more about the Shaker way, how our work is a way of creating heaven here on earth. That is why we make everything spotlessly clean, and take joy in doing it. But do we have to make everything perfectly flat, as well? Think of all the ways we use handkerchiefs! They end up damp and crumpled. Why should we iron them at the start?

  That is my job. Ironing handkerchiefs. It is how young girls start learning.

  I burned myself twice today. In a room above the laundry, we iron at big tables that have been covered over with cloth. The irons are all inside the enormous oven, which is heated by the fire below. We chan
ge them, taking new hot ones as the ones we are using turn cool. The older sisters do it so easily, so quickly — they are working on the larger things, sheets mostly, and the brethren’s shirts — that I did not see a single sister burn herself. But I did, twice! A very nice sister named Hazel went and got me some cooling salve for my burned hand. But no one seemed to feel very sorry for me, even though I cried a little from the pain. It is part of learning, they told me; they have all been through it, and soon it will be easier for me.

  Rebecca, who is helping in the laundry with me this week, will soon be moving on to a different job, probably in the kitchen. I like Rebecca, though not as much as I like Grace, because Rebecca is very serious. She answers questions in school very seriously, and walks to dinner very seriously, and she even irons as if it were a very serious job. I know that Rebecca has never said a nursery rhyme in place of a prayer. Grace is more fun. Grace giggles and causes mischief. She can make her eyes cross toward her nose without even holding a finger up for them to aim at. She does it in the schoolroom when the teacher’s back is turned.

  Here is one good thing about working in the laundry. I can listen to the other sisters talking to each other. They forget that I am there, I think.

  That is how I learned about Pearl and Lillian Beckwith, two of the younger girls in the girls’ shop. Their mother brought them to the Shakers a year ago because she couldn’t care for them. Imagine that! How sad they must have been! But then, a few months later, she came and asked for them back.

  “Couldn’t live without them,” I heard one of the sisters explain. “Or so she said.”

  So off they went again, with their mother, those two little girls. I felt happy for them when I heard that. My mother can never come back for me. But I wondered: Why are they here, then, living in the girls’ shop, sleeping in the room next to mine (the little one wets her bed! Sister Jennie is trying to help her get over that affliction) if their mother couldn’t live without them, if she came and got them?