Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  Midstream, the boat set to in earnest, so fast. A horse can gallop that fast, or seem to. It can make the wind whistle past your ears that way, for a little while. But a horse gets tired, and our wonderful big paddle wheels never did, and the tide behind us gave us the whole weight of the sea as a shove. I held Sarah’s hand and felt the ancient sea and the new wheels carry us to a life we had no pattern for, that no one we knew of had ever lived, that we must invent for ourselves on a razor’s edge, and I tipped my head back and sang three hallelujahs.

  Sarah, in a little time, grew accustomed, like anyone else who farms a volcano, but I held her hand until the other ladies calmed down too and ceased to cling together.

  It was not possible to talk, so much surrounded. I could not think of a single thing to say that was fit for a lady to overhear, and Sarah was still under my command to be silent.

  It was a strange day, silently riding that tall rushing house between the miles of cliffs and mountains and villages, eagles and mansions and waving children. I thought it would come back in my dreams. It was so much like a dream already. I found my head full of vast meaningless truths, such as life is a river, which I am grateful not to have had an opportunity to express. That’s the kind of day it was, unreal, and at sunset the hills to the right – the Berkshire Hills – caught the yellow light and were very beautiful. Night came fully dark, but we kept on, steering perhaps by farmhouse windows, and at a little after eight Sarah and I and our three trunks and our one handbox were deposited at the steamboat landing of the city of Hudson, New York State.

  We took a room in Hudson and slept as though we’d walked those miles, and in the morning a ferryboat rowed by many slaves took us across and down to Kaatskill. We left the trunks and all at the ferry landing and walked around.

  Kaatskill was so busy then, full of drovers and wagons, a turnpike town with goods to store and travelers to feed. I couldn’t believe it was dying, but Sarah had Parson Peel’s word for it, and the banker had said the same, and in eight more years, yes, the turnstiles stopped turning and the pikes grew grass.

  To buy land you know will drop in value! But the bigmouths at the boarding house in New-York had scared my Sarah, and Parson Peel had scared her, and we’d come to a stopping place, and what did we want, as Sarah said, but to live? Didn’t Columbus himself aim for India and find America as something of a letdown?

  “Shall we stay?” I asked.

  “I believe we ought,” she said.

  It was March 27, 1817.

  We took a pleasant room in a Kaatskill lodging house, and then began the process of finding a farm, a matter neither simple nor swift.

  Even letting our intention be known was not simple because it was not feminine. I did not know how. As Edward had said, men make the world go. How does a woman go up to a strange man and announce that she wants to buy a bit of it? Can a woman approach the courthouse loiterers or the tavern or the docks and ask for news of real estate? The problem was peculiarly vexing because we had not anticipated it. There would be a public list, there would be a land office, there would be notices in the newspaper. There would be anything except this staring dry-mouthed at each other and wondering how to begin.

  Sarah even offered to cut her hair again and be our man, if a man was so much needed, and the thought rallied my womanly pride enough to make it possible, after all, to speak to the banker when I deposited our money, and to the drayman who brought our trunks up from the landing, and to the postmaster when I posted a letter to tell Edward where we were. And the storekeeper, and the farmer’s boy who brought eggs to our landlady, and the stablekeeper where I asked after livery rates, and in a day or two the word was around that two eccentric Yankee females with more money than sense were in the market for a farm. We liked that description of ourselves so well that we decided it was time to let Sarah speak again.

  We began to hear about farms. So many farmers wanted to move on. Only we wanted a farm in Greene County. Soon I could no longer remember just why we did. Sarah claimed that she still knew why.

  Each farm had to be gone to, by hired horse and buggy, looked at, walked around on, thought about, judged, compared with the others. We told each other we would not be hasty in a choice that meant comfort or ruin for the rest of our days. We needn’t stay in Greene County at all, we said, unless it really pleased us. Even as we said that, we must have known we had to stay. We’d spent too much for lodging and hiring a horse to start the same long business again somewhere else.

  But how judge a winter field? How weigh what a farmer who wants to sell out may assert about the yield per acre? How prefer one slaty hillside to another? I was not a good companion night or day. I was too nervous. Sarah claimed she wasn’t nervous. It was not hard to tell a good farm from a bad one in any season, she claimed. Something about the kind of trees and the growth they’d made. Something about the kind of ball the soil made in her hand. I didn’t question her very hard. One of us had to know, and it could not be I. If she didn’t, I didn’t want to be told so.

  All I knew was the price we should pay, because the banker in New-York had told us; we could go to eight hundred for forty acres, but it must be soon while there was that much left.

  At the end of April, we were still looking. That is, Sarah was. To cut the livery charges we’d given up the buggy. Sarah rode out alone on horseback. I stayed at our lodging and sewed for her. I was glad not to go, not to be party to the endless solemn tedious country dickering, so full of pauses, so reluctant to name a figure. Sarah enjoyed it. Let her do it, I thought.

  But some evenings she didn’t get back to Kaatskill until after dark and I could not endure many of those. By day I could sew almost peacefully, but come dark I had to have her by me. At first she couldn’t even see why. Didn’t I trust her?

  The lodging was no place to discuss it, so we walked down to the Hudson and sat, a little apart, on the fresh spring grass. It was a moonlit night.

  Sarah said, “When I do get back, you hardly ever love me. So what does it matter?”

  “I worry when you’re out after dark.”

  “You didn’t worry back home. You made me be out, back home.”

  “That was different,” I said.

  “To me it seems no different, except now I’m on a horse and then I was afoot.”

  “It’s different,” I repeated, to keep my position simple and unassailable.

  She said, “I’m looking for a place for us. Should I look just nearby and miss the faraway that might be better, to hurry back to you, when you won’t love me?”

  “Stop saying that. You know I love you.”

  “Oh, Patience, I get scared. Like what if you just want to be friends after all, and what if you don’t need what I do? I get so scared.”

  “I love you. I need what you need.” I took her hand.

  “Then you should kiss me. You should hold me.”

  “You get excited. I don’t dare.”

  “Well, sure I do. But we got something to do for that. When did you start figuring it was a bad thing?”

  “Not bad. Unwise. When you started being noisy, darling.”

  “Am I?”

  “Don’t you hear yourself?”

  “Just some hard breathing. Maybe a sigh.”

  “You groan like a woman in childbed, sweetheart. I don’t want people to think I’m beating you. I’d been saying you have nightmares.”

  “Who to?” she asked, much offended.

  “To the ladies. The lodgers. First time they asked, ‘Why, what was that noise in your room last night?’ Since then they’ve said, ‘Oh, poor Miss Dowling had another dream last night and you took so long to wake her from it I near came in myself.’ I think we should be sparing, don’t you?”

  Sarah said, embarrassed, “All right. But you might’ve told me before stead of letting me get so scared.” She was silent and then she laughed. She said, “I feel foolish about it, and yet somehow – vain too. I can be sparing, now I know you still want me. I can w
ait.”

  “Well, hurry with our place. Because I can’t wait.” I kissed her hand and pressed it to my bosom. I said, “When we have our place, I think you’ll find me ardent enough. We haven’t begun to use our ardor. I long to give you all of mine.”

  “You’d better kiss me before we go back.”

  “I’d better not,” I said.

  We walked back along the main street, past the taverns and inns loud with rivermen and drovers and teamsters. I remembered how once I had envied men because they could have what I needed but could not have. But they couldn’t, after all, have what I needed.

  After all my explanation, in bed Sarah wanted to kiss me. I wouldn’t let my toes tingle for her and she got discouraged and stopped. She whispered, “I’m putty in your hands, but you can always say no to me. Why is that?”

  “Because I’m older than you. Be back every day by dark, and find us our place, and someday you may be older than I.”

  The state of Sarah’s wardrobe made another urgency. She had worn the same dress every day since we left Connecticut, and though her own sweet body could never soil it, the smell of horse began to be powerful before I had her new dress finished. The new one was made of the same almond wool as the other. My thought was to make it seem she had a dozen dresses, all the same. Not just from pride, though pride was part of it, but as a protection; I was willing for us to seem eccentric or subject to an occasional nightmare, but never piteous or helpless or poor.

  Those could have been somewhat pleasant days, if I hadn’t been so generally nervous. I sat in the parlor with the other ladies, merchants’ wives whose husbands were inland, up the turnpike, on business. It was eccentric too, of course, to be making something so large and useful as a dress while the ladies worked at needlepoint and satin stitch, but they did not too severely frown on me. Loving Sarah had freed all my tender feelings for women. I could always find in my heart an excuse for anything any woman did, and how could they earnestly disapprove of anyone who felt that way?

  They put in many an hour of mystified speculation about Sarah and me, while I stitched away and was pleasant and evasive. Where did we come from? “The East,” I said. But where in the East? “Just – East,” I said. They devised, a bit at a time, beautiful tales of blighted love for both of us, which I looked mysteriously pensive over. Two heartsore maidens seeking solace from mutual misfortune through mutual sympathy, and fleeing the scene of their dispair, a place so painful that even its name could not be uttered. Somewhere in that tear-drenched country, the men we loved lay – buried? Or strolled unfeelingly with the wives we could only hate and envy? I couldn’t choose my favorite speculation, and by my silence let them all seem possible.

  The ladies found me odd but lovable, and I admired their needle–work. However it came out, the aim was beauty. To show them that I aimed for beauty sometimes too, I showed them my paintings which I got out of the trunk the day I put the scraps of almond wool back into it. And since she really liked it and could afford it, and since I didn’t much like it anymore, I let the fiercest lady – the most unhappy one – buy “Moses Destroying the Golden Calf.” She needed it and I didn’t; I didn’t feel fierce anymore.

  She offered me a dollar for it. That was the first money I ever made as a painter, and I’m glad it was from a merchant’s wife. To merchants and their families the giving and taking of money seems quite natural, not at all awkward.

  She helped me get off on the right foot about selling. It paid a fourth of a week’s lodging and made me see that there was more to be had from painting than the pleasure and relief of doing it. I gave Sarah shelter and food for half a week with that picture. The joy of giving to her from my inheritance had not prepared me for the joy of giving her what I earned. There was no comparison.

  While I have Sarah’s lap to drop my money into, I can never tire of selling.

  One morning in mid-May Sarah asked me to come with her. She had made, if I would agree, a choice. “The house needs work,” she said. “I don’t know you’ll like it.”

  I thought I’d made it clear that I’d agree to any place by then, especially with so much of our money spent and both her dresses somewhat horsey however much I aired them. But she said, no, I had to see the place before she could be definite.

  We hired a horse and buggy and drove out the turnpike to Freehold, which was fifteen miles. Oh what a lovely bright pure young green morning it was. Even our tired livery horse could feel the hope of such a morning and clip along. The mountains were like lady giants lying together, vast hips and breasts. The fruit trees were in flower.

  At Freehold we stopped for the owner of the farm. His name was Mr. More and he owned several farms. He and his sons farmed ours and pastured here in summer, but nobody lived here.

  We drove a short way up the narrow rutty spur called Red Mill Road, and here we were.

  Sarah had not exaggerated. Yes, the house needed work.

  “I didn’t mention, it’s logs,” she said.

  “So I see.”

  She stayed in the buggy with Mr. More while I looked around the house. It was simply an old abandoned log cabin left from the time when the frontier was here. So many times I’d described log cabins and how to build them to my pupils, but this was the first one I ever actually saw. It was the size I’d told my pupils was usual – twenty by sixteen, roughly. Poor old relic, easing its way back to earth. The ridgepole sagged like a rope between the gables. Someone had long since taken the door for its boards. The windows were empty holes, without even sashes. The chimney was at least stone, not mud and sticks, but it was cracked and partly fallen.

  I went inside. All the leaves and dust from forty acres were blown into the corners. There were even a few weeds growing in the deepest parts. The floor was split logs – puncheons – flat side up, laid none too fussily. There was evidence that Mr. More’s cattle had found shelter here. I saw sunbeams coming through the roof and between most of the logs.

  I went back to the buggy.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Just what I told your sister: six-forty,” Mr. More said.

  I looked at Sarah. “Can you make something of the fields?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  Mr. More said, “A little chinking – some quarrels in the windows – some jacking – ”

  I turned my back and walked away. How dared he tell me what to do? I knew what to do. Nobody had to tell me how to run my home.

  We all three drove back to Kaatskill and did the legal things at bank and courthouse. Six hundred and forty, when we’d been ready to go to eight! It was like a gift of a hundred and sixty dollars.

  By two in the afternoon we had our indenture, and our earnest paid, and Edward written to for more, and our lodging dismissed. We were on a dray with our trunks, heading home along the turnpike. We had broom and hoe and scrubbing brush and pail and mortar and ax and saw and boards and nails and windows, and a great marvelous mess to use them on. Food too. Lots of things. Twine, curtain cloth, rope, a ton of wonders.

  Mr. More said, “I don’t know how I’ll find time to help you. Me and the boys’ve got our own cornland to work up. It’s a poor time for a bee.”

  “Don’t think of it, Mr. More,” I said.

  But with what guilt they set us down and left us here alone, our drayman and Mr. More. The more we said we’d be just fine, the more it proved we didn’t know. They kept looking back doubtfully. We waved and smiled each time.

  Then they were out of sight, and the world was out of sight, and right there in the wide-open of our yard Sarah held me close and kissed me.

  We had to begin with a kiss, of course. Anything else would have been improper. But we made it a short one. Our new home was more exciting.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “Let me out of this dress,” Sarah said.

  We had about three hours of daylight left. There was no really correct place to begin. Anywhere would do, but Sarah decided the roof was most important.r />
  She cut and trimmed a small pine tree to prop the ridgepole. In fact, she cut two; the first she cut too short. The second was too long, but she shopped bits off until it could be jammed and clouted and pried into place, upright in the middle of the floor. It gave us, so to speak, a four-room house. The ridgepole seemed to consider crumbling into dust at the shock, but it settled down still in place. I knew that was a good omen.

  Sarah seemed to think it meant we could sleep inside the house right away, but I went ahead with making our first home in the neat orderly out-of-doors.

  I gathered dry leaves and pine needles and some last year’s cornhusks and stuffed the empty tick I’d brought from Connecticut. Our trunks made an open-sided square around our camp, and then I roofed them with hemlock branches arranged more or less like thatch. I kindled fire with flint and steel, though it would have been quicker to walk to Freehold after coals. It was important that our first fire be original. Our own pure creek was handy-by to give me water for a stew. While it cooked I went to work scraping the cabin floor with our new hoe. Sarah had to rest awhile and gaze at her pole. “Just can’t take my eyes off it,” she admitted.

  Mr. More came by when he’d finished his supper. He seemed disappointed to find us so cozy and cheerful, sitting on our tick and quilts and eating our good-smelling supper from two pretty plates and cups with two silver spoons. What a beautiful word “two” is.

  “Where’d you get that fire?” he asked. “I fetched you some.”

  “How kind of you,” I said.

  “And my wife sends you bread and salt. I’ll make you the loan of any tool I’m not using myself. You ladies sisters?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You kin at all?”

  “In a way.”

  “Where be ye from?”

  I had no reason not to tell. I just didn’t like being questioned.