The Vanishing Point

by Mary Sharratt

  She stopped short, trembling. What would Gabriel think if he knew she was groping around in his attic like a thief? She couldn't get down that ladder fast enough. Back in the main room, she snuffed out the candle and put it away.

  ***

  Hannah washed her hands. She took down the curtains from the other bed and stripped off the linens. Carrying them outside, she shook out the dust until her arms ached, then hung them over bushes to air. She swept and scrubbed the floor, finding only a chamber pot beneath the bed where she had slept. She carried the furs Gabriel slept in to the porch and shook them out, too, then put them back, careful to make them appear as if they had not been disturbed. The skins still had an animal scent clinging to them. Or maybe it was Gabriel's smell, the piny odor of male sweat. She ran to the river to fetch fresh water, scrubbing down the table and dresser. Then she swept the pantry and wiped down the shelves. Last she washed the windows, hung the bed curtains back up, and made her bed.

  When she had finished cleaning, she unpacked the bar of lye soap from her trunk, took the bucket, and headed for the river. In a sheltered place surrounded by bushes and pines, she filled the bucket, then stripped and soaped herself. The cold water ran in rivulets down her goose-pimpled skin. Joan would say she was courting sickness. Even Father would disapprove, but somehow, after seeing her sister's grave and the crack in the cradle, she felt dirty and had to be clean.

  She dried herself on the cloth she had brought with her, then dressed again as quickly as she could. The blinding sun descended toward the treetops. It was much later than she had thought. There were so many narrow paths cutting through the woods, she was afraid of losing her way in the twilight. The forest echoed with noises she could not identify. Creatures slithered in the fallen leaves. Things crashed through the underbrush. A blurry shape came toward her. The bucket fell from her hand as she screamed. The thing grunted and squealed, dashing across the path. Hannah let out a long breath. It was just a pig, left to forage in the woods. But it could have been a bear.

  If May were here, she would laugh at her for being so afraid. Hannah picked up the bucket. She should fill it up again. They would need water for cooking. Shoulders rigid, she forced herself back to the river.

  The full bucket was heavy and slowed her progress. When the handle cut into her palm, she switched to the other hand. May was made of tougher material than she was. Her sister was bigger, stronger. She was brave. But had her fearlessness been her downfall? Hannah wondered as she trudged up the path. If May had been a more timid, careful soul, would she still be alive? Setting the bucket down, she rubbed her sore palms on her skirt. Nonsense. May had died after giving birth. That had nothing to do with being brave or cowardly. Then Hannah considered. Gabriel hadn't actually told her how her sister had died. She would have to ask him. As May's sister, she had a right to know.

  ***

  A few yards from the house, she came to a halt, water sloshing from the bucket and wetting her skirt. Gabriel sat on the porch while his dogs watched him intently. When they tried to edge closer, he scolded them. Deep in concentration, he did not seem to know she was there. Even the dogs ignored her. Before she could announce her presence, she saw the knife in his hand.

  He was skinning a rabbit, slowly working the hide off the body. He had already gutted and beheaded the animal. Where its legs had been were only stumps. Blood seeped from the open belly, falling in the weeds at Gabriel's feet. The dogs strained, as though longing to lick up the blood, but he spoke firmly, keeping them back.

  A sick taste filled her mouth. Why did the sight disturb her? She had held the bowl to catch blood and pus when Father lanced his patients. She had cut into men's living flesh. This was just a rabbit.

  Gabriel dumped the skinned beast into a bowl and set it on the porch behind him, out of reach of the dogs. Balancing the skin on a plank, he worked over the hide with the blunt edge of his knife, scraping away the bloody pieces of flesh and tissue that stuck to the soft inside of the pelt.

  A dull pounding sounded inside her temples. She looked him over, from the worn soles of his buckskin boots, to his lean limbs and torso, to his young face with the shadowed eyes of someone much older. A wicked thing took hold of her as she pretended to look at him through her sister's eyes. In the golden evening light, she could not decide which shone more brightly, the blade in his hand or his long black hair. She imagined him holding her sister.

  He looked up and caught her staring. Her skin burned. Remembering how harshly she had spoken to him that morning, she didn't know what to say.

  "Did you go in the river?" he asked. "Your hair is wet."

  Hannah fingered her damp red locks, now frizzing like wool. How immodest she had become, wandering around with her bare wet head. She would have to search her trunk for a new linen cap to cover her hair.

  "You court the grippe." His eyes did not leave her face. "Bathing in the river so late in the year. You risk peril, too. A public waterway, it is, and you know not who travels there."

  Hannah set the bucket down at her feet. "I fetched water."

  "I only take water from the creek out back. Mayhap you have not yet seen the creek, but the water there is purer."

  She nodded, feeling like a child.

  His face softened. "Go in the house and sit by the fire until your hair is dry."

  She carried the bucket inside. He had already built the hearth fire. Onions and white chunks of tuber simmered in the pot. The steam was fragrant with rosemary and thyme. Fetching her comb from her trunk, she sat on a bench and worked through her tangled hair.

  A while later he came in and melted grease in the skillet. Then he chopped the rabbit into pieces and tossed them in. She had eaten nothing since breakfast, and her hunger left her faint. Gabriel stirred the pot of steaming vegetables with a wooden spoon.

  Hannah looked at him shyly before turning to the fire again. "I quite forgot myself today. I had no right to speak to you the way I did this morning." She took a deep breath. "This has been so strange for me."

  "You are in a strange land," he said. "Nothing is as you thought it would be."

  She wondered if he noticed that she had cleaned the house. Or if he resented the liberty she had taken in doing so. This was his domain.

  Moving away from the fire, Gabriel cleaned his knife blade, then sat down and began to sharpen it with a stone. Each movement was practiced. Hannah thought he must take great pride in his knife, the way he carried it with him everywhere. Such a sharp blade must be a treasure out here in the wilderness. It could make a difference, she thought, whether or not he had meat in his pot or skins to keep him warm in winter.

  How far I have come, but to what end? The months of her passage seemed like years. England was a lifetime away. The girl she had been in her father's house didn't exist anymore. But she was still unsure who the new Hannah was. What shape would her life take now? Looking at Gabriel, she summoned her courage and will.

  "Could you please forgive me one more intrusion? I must ask you how it happened." She clasped her hands in her lap. "How did my sister die?"

  He put his knife away. "Two years ago she did go into childbirth. A midwife was sent for, but the child was sickly and died before it could be christened."

  Despair closed her in its fist. She was a girl on the Bristol pier, holding on to her sister with all her strength, begging her not to go.

  "This land does destroy people," he said. "It does demand blood like heathen sacrifice. I told you so this morning."

  "The child lived only seven days." Hannah tried to picture the doomed baby. "But what of my sister? What became of her?" She leaned so close to the hearth that the heat blasted her like the flames of hell. If she got any nearer, a spark would catch her skirt and she would burn to cinders.

  "She was sorely grieved to lose the child." He stood up and paced to the dresser. "Then she did perish, too."

  Hannah fidgeted on the bench. "How, Gabriel?"

  "What questions you ask."

&nb
sp; "She was my only sister. I must know."

  He stood frozen, his back to her. "The childbed fever."

  "Were I only there." Hannah covered her face. "I know something of physick. I might have saved her. Did the midwife not give her medicine?"

  Something came out of his throat. "By then the midwife was gone." He spoke as though each word had to be dredged from the bottom of his misery. "Midwives are scarce on this shore. They do not linger. Please," he begged her, his voice stretched painfully tight, "let's speak no more of it."

  Hannah wept in silence. How had her May lost the will to live? "What will you do now?" she asked him.

  "What can I do?" He turned at the noise of the hissing pot.

  "It will boil over." Hannah covered her hand with a rag and moved the hook so that the pot got less fire. "How can you go on like this?" She stirred the pot of vegetables, then the chunks of rabbit meat frying in the skillet. "Alone?"

  He said nothing.

  "And what of your tobacco harvest?"

  "There is no harvest." He laughed curtly. "Do you know how many hands it takes to raise tobacco? We barely pulled in a good crop when there were eight of us working in the fields from sunrise to dusk. After your sister died, they all fled."

  "How will you keep your leasehold?"

  "I will lose it." He spoke plainly. "There are many things that Paul Banham covets. And he does covet my land. When the news goes round that there is no more tobacco here, he will drive me away."

  "It is true, he covets much." Hannah winced and thought about Mrs. Gardiner. "But to rob you of your land? When the ship anchored at Gardiner's Landing, he offered to deliver to you any goods you had ordered from the ship. He offered to give you credit in his own name."

  "He would have me beholden to him. Credit would turn to debt, and then he would relieve me of my land and make me at best a tenant farmer."

  He emptied the skillet of rabbit meat into the simmering pot of vegetable stew. The meat bobbed on the surface, the bloody red now brown.

  "To survive here you must be either master or servant." Gabriel spoke bitterly. "My father was all for being master. He ruled his servants with a bullwhip. He didn't spare me, either." He broke off, nearly losing his grip on the spoon as he stirred.

  "Then he did die, and that was the first breakdown of rule. Then your sister. She was so proud." He looked away. "Adele obeyed her, and the manservants, too, in the beginning. She knew how to work her will. But after she died, all was undone. I could be no master. The manservants had seen how my father had whipped me just as he had whipped them. They saw no difference between our stations. To be their master, I would have to show them. I would have to pick up the whip and do my will with them, as my father had done, but I could not."

  The rising steam glazed his face. "My curse is that I can be no master," he said in a tired voice. "But neither will I have a master ruling me. I aim to be a free man, left in peace, with none but God above me."

  "My father taught me the history of the Civil War," Hannah said. "Once there were many who thought as you do. The Diggers and the Levelers would have no masters over them and refused to pay rent to their lords. They thought the land itself was a commonwealth to be shared by all. The Quakers refuse to bow to any man, even the King." She stopped short, feeling foolish. He was so quiet, it was as though she were talking to herself.

  She cleared her throat. "I will lay the table." Crossing to the dresser, she took out the wooden trenchers and the horn spoons.

  "You are very different from your sister." The hearth flames caught his face and threw his shadow on the wall.

  "In our village," she told him, "they used to jest that one of us must be a changeling."

  He did not laugh but regarded her solemnly. "You have had an uncommon education, I think."

  "Aye. It hardly mattered to Father that I was a girl. He taught me everything he knew, and he was a very wise man." Regret flared when the words had left her mouth. She hoped she hadn't caused Gabriel any more pain. If her father had been kind, Gabriel's had whipped him like a slave.

  "You were fortunate indeed," he said. "My father taught me letters and sums and the art of surveying—that was his profession until we came here. But I fear he never knew what to do with me. My mother died when I was only small. He was left to rear me on his own. He thought he could make a man of me, but the harder he was on me, the more I resisted him."

  "Can you remember your mother?" Hannah asked him softly. "I can't remember mine. She died when I was born." The family curse, she thought. To think May had come to the same end.

  "She was a Welshwoman. Name of Olwen. Full of fire." A smile spread across his face, making him look for once like an unburdened young man. "Everyone who knew us in Anne Arundel Town said I was the spit of her. I inherited her stubbornness." He laughed. "She used to tell me stories about the faery ointment and the glamoury eye."

  "The what?" Hannah leaned closer to him.

  "Oh, it's just an old wives' tale, but it was my favorite." He gave the stew another stir. "Once there was a servant girl who could do the spinning of ten others. She worked so fast because the faeries were spinning for her."

  Hannah bit her lip, remembering May at the spinning wheel, how swiftly she had pumped the treadle.

  "Well, one night the servant girl wandered out to take the air and never came back. You see, she had struck a bargain with the faery folk. In exchange for their help with the spinning, she had agreed to marry one of their number. Her old mistress heard not a word from her until a year later, when the faery man came riding to her door. You see, the woman was a midwife and the girl about to deliver her firstborn."

  Hannah wondered how, given everything that had happened, he could sit there and tell that tale. A look of pain crossed his face, but then it was gone and his eyes were far away, as though lost in memories of childhood.

  "So the midwife went into the dank cave where the girl lived with the faery man. 'Ach, the wench has come down in the world,' the woman thought. The new mother had no bed but a pile of dead leaves, yet she seemed content enough, and the baby was bonny and strong. The faery man gave the midwife a jar of the faery ointment and told her to put it on the infant's eyelids. She did as she was told, but couldn't resist rubbing a little of the stuff on her own left eyelid. That's how she got gifted with the glamoury eye. With her right eye, she still saw the same cave with the new mother and baby lying on the dead leaves, but her left eye saw that the cave was a palace with golden ceilings. The mother and baby lay on a high, rich bed with silk draperies. The midwife had always thought the faery man a rough-looking fellow, but now he was as wondrous to look upon as the sun itself."

  Hannah smiled. "I should like to see with the glamoury eye, too."

  "When I was small," he said, "I dipped into my mother's jar of bear grease. I pretended it was the faery ointment and rubbed it on my eyelids."

  "Bear grease?" Hannah thought of the mysterious fat he had used for cooking. "Did it give you the glamoury eye?"

  "It might have done." He offered her a half-smile. "Sometimes when my father was at his wit's end with me, he used to say I wasn't real at all, but fey, like one of the creatures in my mother's tales." He leaned over the pot. "The stew is ready."

  While they ate, she noted how lean he was, how he wolfed down his portion as though he had been famished for days. He ladled more stew on his trencher.

  "What will you do," she asked, "if they take away your leasehold?"

  He shrugged. "I always knew my father's house was only a way station. I am no planter, but I know enough of the forest. If this country is brutal, then it is also big. When they come to take the land, I will vanish into the forest."

  Hannah shook her head. "You cannot live alone all your life. There must be some settlement, a village of Quakers mayhap..."

  "I have spent too long with the dead," he said, "to go back into the world of the living."

  Hannah shivered. "You cannot mean what you say. What of the Indians? I
have heard of massacres."

  "They only kill those who take their land. I told you I am no planter, just one lone hunter. I don't think they would trouble me. I am no harm to them or anyone." The fire leapt and the shadow of his hand lifting the spoon darted across the wall. "But I think I will be left in peace through the winter. Banham won't come upriver until his men clear the logs and beaver dams away." He glanced at her. "But you have more pressing troubles, I think. What will you do?"

  "I will go downriver." There was no enthusiasm in her voice.

  "It is better for you," he said, "to rejoin society. I will take you to Banham's as soon as I can build a canoe."

  ***

  Asleep in the curtained bed, Hannah whimpered, dreaming of skinned rabbits hopping through the forest. They left behind a trail of blood, which seeped into the river, staining the water wine-red. The trees in the forest screeched and moaned, the clamor so great that she lurched awake, clutching the bedclothes to her chest. The wailing wound around her, a tightening cord. The noise came from the corner by the hearth, where Gabriel slept in his bed of skins.

  Swinging her legs off the bed, she planted them on the cold floor. A few glowing embers in the hearth guided her path across the room. He cried and thrashed like a haunted man, so loudly that his pain took shape and substance. In the darkness, Hannah saw her sister's face, her sister's cold body in his arms as he carried her to the river to bury. Grief has undone him. He's just as lost for her as I am. Men were confounding creatures, as different from women as the sun was from the moon. She remembered how her father had shriveled up and withered away after May had left. Men didn't weep openly but held their sorrow inside, where it festered and poisoned them.

  "Gabriel!" she cried hoarsely. "Wake up." She found his shoulder and gave it a shake before backing away.

  He sat up with a gasp.

  "You were dreaming, Gabriel." She hurried to her bed.

  ***

  The next morning his face was gray. He couldn't seem to look her in the eye.