He doesn’t answer, and in the silence, they fix their attention on the glass. The words she spoke might be written there, the two of them rival scholars competing to decipher the text.
“Sophy.” Gideon is looking at her now. He clasps her face in his hands and draws her toward him. She is surprised how strong his hands are, how persuasive; the rest of her hangs back like a bashful child. “No one has ever seen you as I do,” he whispers. “No one ever will.” As if to seal what he has spoken, he bends and kisses the top of her head.
Days later, when she has an hour to call her own, she will wonder whether the awkwardness of his gesture might have made her bold. His lips planted, like an uncle’s, where her hair parts: an arid strip where nothing can grow. Whether she might have done as her mother prompted her and lifted her face to his, kissed him on the mouth. She will never know because the thunder at the door came first.
A blow that shakes the sturdy planks. She and Gideon stiffen and fall apart. Micah starts awake and scrambles to his feet, looking wildly around him.
“Snow sliding off the roof,” Gideon says, but he doesn’t believe it himself for he goes straight to the door.
Reuben stands back from the doorway, his boot poised for another kick. “I tried knocking. Have you all been struck deaf?” His face still registers a rising glee, which wanes as he delivers his news. The Reverend’s horse made it all the way back from Boston, intrepid through the storm, then bolted not three miles from home. A wheel came loose and the wagon overturned. If Driscoll hadn’t happened to be passing, in search of one of his dogs, Pa would have frozen to death where he lay. As luck would have it, he is alive, though badly hurt. James is off fetching the doctor, and Reuben must go after the horse. Did they think they could leave their studies long enough to give Ma some help?
He stomps in, tracking snow with each step, and seizes Micah by the arm, reclaiming the property they’ve purloined. Sophy warrants only a brusque swerve of his chin, his eyes shifting to the door. Gideon stands alone as the prodigal Hedges are herded into the storm.
“You come too, little preacher,” Reuben says. The scorn he gives off is so pungent that it hangs in the room like a smell. “You can pray.”
CHAPTER 13
____
CONSEQUENCES OF THE FALL
THE REVEREND LAY ON HIS BED, LOOKING, FOR ALL THE care taken in arranging him, like an abandoned puppet. His eyes, wide open, fixed their gaze on the ceiling. The left side of his body was rigid, his fingers clutching the sheet as if he would make himself plumb by virtue of grim will, but the opposing limbs were in casual disarray, twisted at odd angles. By the time the three of them entered, Mrs. Hedge had already cut the boot off the swollen foot and was wielding her scissors to free him from his sodden clothes. Without looking up, she dispatched Micah to get brandy from the cupboard, Sophy to gather blankets and set bricks to warming.
Gideon, useless in a corner, tried to perform silently the only office he was trained for, but his appeals for mercy and healing were sabotaged by a fundamental amazement. How could Hedge have splintered so easily? The man was all elastic sinew, springing out of chairs like a jack-in-the-box, stretching his neck to interrogate a student, practicing a stride that a man twice his height would envy. He had disciplined his small body to cover the greatest amount of ground in the least possible time. Such resilience ought to prevail, even in extremity. Gideon could hardly bear to look at the broken figure on the bed, swathed in blankets and packed in flannel-wrapped bricks. Instead, he focused on the beaver hat, deemed by Driscoll an essential part of the Reverend and returned along with its owner. Someone had set it on a child’s ladder-back chair that might have been made for it, from whence it emanated a battered dignity. Gideon half-expected to see a Scripture reference inscribed on one of the slats.
With effort, Mrs. Hedge managed to spoon some brandy down her husband’s throat; it was necessary, she said, to stimulate his heart. There was such tenderness in the hand she cupped beneath his chin that Gideon felt a quickening in his own chest. Now he understood why Sophy had been angry at him. The devotion he saw in this room was real. Their sham housekeeping in the study was only an elaborate game of pretend: two innocents—each come into the world uninvited—playing at life. What right had he to draw this young girl into his theories, to addle her with words and lure her with promises? Sophy stood at Fanny’s elbow, supporting the Reverend’s head. Her face was as contained as a grieving Madonna’s, her sorrow revealed only in the line between her eyebrows. Gideon wanted to kneel before her and ask forgiveness, but she never looked his way.
James arrived with Dr. Craddock; the snow had finally stopped, leaving a dry, powdery surface good for traveling. Craddock had just presided at the deathbed of a farmer’s wife, a mother of many children who had sunk with the strain of birthing the last, but the weeping and wailing hadn’t dulled his countenance. He was one of those men who always looked jovial, his cheeks round and gleaming, his red sideburns adding a clownish touch to the dourest proceedings. Though rumor had it that he was a secret drinker, the gossip failed to diminish his status in the community. He was the town’s only physician, and revered as such. Fanny alone regarded him as a practitioner of the dark arts, an attitude he didn’t appear to hold against her.
“A bad business,” he said amiably after taking a quick look at Hedge. “But the Reverend has strength to spare. I never saw a man with more bounce in him. With a little luck we’ll have him on his feet again.” His benevolent glance swept over the room as if it were a scenic landscape, lighting at last on Gideon. “And look at this flourishing fella, much improved since I last saw him! Very good, sir! You can return the favor by helping with the setting.”
Gideon wasn’t sure, at first, what sort of assistance would be required of him. The word seemed benign, a coming-to-rest that his frayed nerves magicked into a soothing image of a hen roosting on eggs. Reason took hold soon enough, but before he could protest his lack of experience, he was waved out of the room, along with Sophy and Micah. Mrs. Hedge was about to remove the blankets, and only James, the parson’s second-born son and likely surrogate, was permitted to look upon his father’s nakedness.
In the kitchen, Sophy took out bread and cold meat to slice in case the doctor was hungry. Her movements were sure, but Gideon thought she was cutting far more than one hungry man could eat. Micah sat on a stool by the fireplace, his shoulders hunched and his big hands dangling between his knees. Gideon was lost in his own misery. Craddock’s request had put a fear in him that was larger than his unfitness for the task. The life of the body struck him as a monstrous fraud. No one asked to be born; yet each packet of flesh pulled squalling into the world carried the seeds of its own doom. The nature of that doom—illness or accident, dissipation or decrepitude—was a matter of chance, the only certainty being its outworking in pain and loss.
And what did this make of marriage, the mystical union he’d anticipated for so long? Sophy had begun to weep, tears sliding slowly down her cheeks as her wrists and hands went on performing their rote task. He knew that he should go to her, gently lead her to a chair and speak comfort to her, but he could not. He wanted only to run away—not just from the Hedges, but from the whole fatal round of love and birth and death. He would retreat to some remote hamlet in the mountains, and find a monastic order where the rule of silence was practiced, and live out his days doing bracing physical tasks in the pure air. He saw himself leaning on a tall crook and contemplating the cloud-crowned peaks as sheep munched tender grasses all around him. The impression was so vivid that he could feel the release in his muscles as he sat with the other monks at the end of the day, dipping a hunk of coarse bread into thick soup.
Dr. Craddock intruded on his ruminations. The news was partially good. The Reverend’s shoulder was dislocated, not broken as he had feared, and needed only to be worked back into place. But his right leg was fractured in two places; his ankle must have caught in the footrest as he struggled to keep control of t
he tipping wagon, and that limb had borne the brunt of its weight when it overturned. There was some splintering below the knee, and by rights he should cut, but he knew where the parson would consign him if he didn’t do his best to keep him in one piece. Craddock gave a wistful glance at the food on the table, then clapped his hands briskly as though a better meal awaited him. “We are ready for you now,” he said to Gideon. “Young man”—he raised his voice for Micah’s benefit, apparently assuming that the boy’s hearing was as limited as his speech—“I must ask you to be Abraham and sacrifice one of these fine chairs for splints. The legs should be about the right length. And you, miss—if you’ve an old sheet to spare, we’ll be needing linen for bandages.”
As he waited in the kitchen, Gideon had hoped—believed even—that Reuben would return and take his place. Surely the Reverend would rather have family with him at such a time. What about Micah, whose hands were steady—did Craddock assume he was incapable because he stuttered? Yet he said nothing as he followed the doctor to the bedroom. Inevitability had brought a kind of calm, a paralysis of feeling that approached numbness. He was aware that his fingers were cold, and wondered in a detached way whether his touch would disturb the patient.
The bedchamber, dim even in full day, had been illuminated by a candle in each corner, lending the small, Spartan room the hushed sanctimony of a chapel. Mrs. Hedge stood ready beside the bed with a lamp in one hand, while James, stoical as ever, waited across from her. Both looked up when Gideon and the doctor entered, then returned their attention to the parson, who had been stripped of his clerical authority along with his clothes, and was now simply a damaged body, draped in blankets and awaiting the ministrations of a priest with greater powers. Hedge’s eyes had closed; his face was set and pale. Gideon could not banish the sense that he was about to partake in some savage rite: the old leader offered up to the gods for the good of the tribe. The close atmosphere reminded him of the sickroom he’d vacated so recently. He thought he might faint.
Dr. Craddock reached into his bag and brought out a vial and a small bottle of rust-colored liquid.
“What is that you’re giving him?” Mrs. Hedge asked, instantly vigilant.
“Only a little something to dull his senses.” Craddock tapped a few drops into the vial and raised the Reverend’s head. “Here, open up now, this will make you more comfortable,” he crooned.
Hedge had come awake. His eyes burned into the doctor’s. He turned his head aside with such vehemence that a drop of the offered medicine spilled on his jaw. “I will not be deprived of my chastisement!”
“There’ll be enough of that left over, no need to worry.” Craddock, speaking in the same light, lulling monotone, dabbed at Hedge’s face with his little finger. “Never a shortage of that particular quantity. Not in my experience.” When the rigid jaw relaxed, he seized Hedge’s hair, forced his head back, and poured the contents of the vial down his throat. The parson, unmanned by the doctor’s sleight-of-hand, swallowed. Although the maneuver had taken a mere fraction of a second, its effect was to render the whole company, even Mrs. Hedge, as docile as the patient, who was resting again on his pillow, grimacing at the bitter taste. Shaman indeed, Gideon thought. He had seen in the Reverend’s eyes a foreign body that had never lodged there before: the unmistakable glint of fear.
The shoulder was to be dealt with first, because, Craddock said, it was quickly done. “Stability is all,” he instructed them. Gideon understood that he and James were to be anchors. Craddock positioned James behind his father and showed him how to lay the flat of one hand on the forehead and grasp the good shoulder with the other. Gideon was to immobilize the legs, holding them firmly above the knee. He tried to fix his eyes on his own chapped knuckles, the familiar shape of his thumb, and avoid the sight of the white bone poking through Hedge’s flesh a few inches below.
The doctor began to work the injured joint with a kneading motion, rolling his hands as if molding dough or clay. “Come now,” he coaxed. “Come along, you rapscallion, that’s the way, that’s the way,” singing to the bone under his breath, wooing it. Gideon was so mesmerized by the performance that he almost forgot his own unease. When the click came—hollow and dull, a chillingly mechanical sound—his grip loosened and his muscles jumped along with the patient’s. Craddock did not seem to notice his weakness. He was already fashioning a sling from the strips of sheet that Sophy had brought in.
But the doctor had seen enough to ask his helpers to change places. James would assist with the crucial positioning of the leg, and Gideon had the lesser task of securing the upper body. He looked down upon the Reverend’s face, which was covered with a film of sweat. Hedge breathed shallowly though lips that were dry and cracked. His eyes sought Gideon’s with a roving intensity, as if something he’d lost might be found there.
“Talk to him,” Craddock said. “Give him a Psalm or a bit of Scripture. It will distract him, and might do you some good, too.”
From early childhood, Gideon had been called upon to recite—like a parrot, he’d complained to his mother—but at times his mind rebelled, presenting only a white sheet instead of the text he’d mastered to perfection. This had happened, on rare occasions, in Hedge’s presence. It was happening now. The entire Bible fled from him, leaving not one line he could grab hold of and use as a lure to draw others. Everyone seemed to be waiting on him: James with his hands in position, tensed as if for a starting shot; Mrs. Hedge, her lamp at half-mast; even the doctor, who was rummaging in his bag, puncturing the silence with the utilitarian clink of his instruments. Sophy and Micah had come in and were hovering by the door. Gideon took a deep breath, and opened his mouth in the hope of dredging up some embedded singsong from his infancy: Our Father. Now I lay me down to sleep. He breathed out Hebrew.
A fountain of it. Effortless, gushing from some well he didn’t know was there. At seminary he had been required to learn a few of the Psalms as they were written, but he couldn’t stop the flow to identify them now. The words were tactile, spelling out their shapes on his palate as they passed out of him and into Hedge. Gideon remembered what the Reverend had said about the solidity of the language he loved, how it filled the mouth and left a sweetness on the tongue. He was only a conduit—yet he was conscious of an exhilarating force in him whose depths he had only skimmed. This, surely, was a small taste of what he’d stumbled on in his first bungling efforts at translation, what he had sought, laboriously and to so little effect, in his research. Whatever the source, he wasn’t meant to hoard its bounty but to dip into the well and offer a healing draught to his teacher. The parson’s lips had begun to move along with his. No sound emerged at first, but soon Gideon heard a thin vibrato, a wavering line under his own voice. Hedge was chanting along with him, as best he could.
In what might have been another country, Craddock and James huddled over the fractured leg. Gideon’s view of the procedure was obscured, but he could see in the light of the lamp that the doctor’s brow shone with sweat. To an outsider’s eye, the setting appeared to be an athletic feat—a contest even—arduous enough to tax the strength of two strong men.
“Damn if his muscles don’t resist me all on their own,” the doctor muttered, “laudanum or no.” His orders to James were terse. The broken bones must be pulled apart in order to be made straight.
Each time they shifted the leg, Hedge moaned, a throttled noise wrung from him against his will. For a few seconds Gideon sang alone, but always Hedge’s voice rejoined his. His pain seemed woven into the prayer. Gideon had long considered the Psalms a relic of a more credulous age—for who in modern times would expend such urgent emotion on the Ineffable?—but never again would he find it difficult to imagine David beating his chest or grinding his forehead in the dust, pleading with his God for victory, forgiveness, salvation, revenge.
Craddock mopped his face with one sleeve. “Steady now,” he said, and he and James leaned into each other. Hedge let out a cry so piercing that Gideon’s Hebrew froze in
his throat, cut off in midstream. The lamp shook and slanted downward, casting them all into momentary darkness as Fanny bent to her husband. Gideon had hardly given her a thought since the procedure began. Her face was a mirror of Hedge’s pain, alive with it, filled with feeling that had been absent for weeks. “Almost done, my lamb,” she said, stroking his cheek. “I am here to bear it with you.” But the Reverend was gazing into the eyes of his pupil, and all through the stitching and splinting and binding, he never looked away.
CHAPTER 14
____
KNIT
MICAH MADE THE CRUTCHES HIMSELF. FORAGING IN THE workshop, he chose some pieces from a pile of white oak set aside for seasoning, and lavished on them all the care he would have devoted to a chest or chair, with a measure of his father’s ingenuity mixed in. The usual crude T-shape, an unforgiving bar atop a tapered stick, would have been quick work, but the Reverend’s condition gave him time. He constructed models out of chips and scraps, lining them up along the windows—a new species of fauna for his menagerie—and walking them with his fingers up and down the sill until he arrived at an elegantly simple split-stick design that pleased him. Once the sticks were cut and turned, he drove a wedge between them to bend the wood to the S-curves he wanted. His effort was well spent: the cross-pieces fit inside the splits with just the right tension, like Samson braced between the temple pillars. Then he polished them to bring out the pattern of the oak, oiled them until they shone, and covered the arm-cradles with sheepskin.
The crutches had been propped against the bedroom wall for a month, stirring the admiration of all the Reverend’s visitors. Dr. Craddock called them “the handsome twins”; he praised their flexibility and said he’d never seen a prettier pair. As days turned to weeks, Gideon began to think of them as sculpture, for Hedge was still in bed and showed no sign of leaving, his leg, trussed now in proper splints, stretched out and elevated on a pillow. The wound from the protruding bone continued red and angry, oozing pus through the stitches. Twice a week Fanny undid the bindings herself to apply a special poultice. Craddock marveled that no fever had developed but refused to credit her potions, attributing the phenomenon to the parson’s strong character and innate resistance to corruption. Craddock’s optimism had lately been tempered with caution. “I haven’t lost hope that he will knit,” he told them at the door one afternoon, hat in hand. “But, you understand, I can’t guarantee he will knit straight.” He smiled at Micah. “It’s good sense to keep those fine crutches in plain sight. That way he’ll get used to ’em before he ever has to lean on ’em.”
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