by Wayne Grady
“I’ve seen it,” Rachel said happily. “My father took me to the museum when I was a girl. I was more fascinated by the stuffed birds than by any pile of old bones. I remember a pelican, and a bird with a name I shan’t forget: a blue-footed booby.”
He placed the sketch on the table and showed her the femur, explaining what Cuvier had said about extinction, that there were animals that had lived on Earth for eons and then vanished overnight.
“Thine was broken right here,” she said, pointing to where the mastodon’s femur fit into its hip socket. “This is the greater trochanter. I still don’t know if I got it turned properly, but it seems you’ll be able to walk.”
“Without hobbling?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.” She looked at the drawing. “Why would God create a creature this magnificent and then allow it to disappear?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Jefferson thought there were still some woolly mammoths out west, and told Lewis and Clark to look for them. They traveled all the way to the Pacific without seeing one, nor even any sign of one.”
“That’s because they were all in Texas,” she said. She was making fun of him.
“No, they weren’t,” he said, “at least not then. They weren’t anywhere. They’d already died out.”
“But how?” she asked. He admired the curve of her neck, the fine hairs that had escaped from the bun and were dancing in the sunlight. In the drawing, a man, possibly Charles Willson Peale himself, stood beside the reconstructed mastodon skeleton, his head barely reaching the monster’s knees.
“Mr. Cuvier,” Moody said, “thinks some kind of catastrophe killed them off.”
“What sort of catastrophe?”
“Something big. A volcano, maybe.”
“Would a single volcano be big enough to kill every mastodon on the face of the Earth, do you think?”
“Maybe there was a whole string of volcanoes.”
“Could it have been the Great Flood we are told about in the Bible?”
“Mr. Cuvier doesn’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the bones are too old, for one thing.”
“How old are they?”
“About ten thousand years.”
She shook her head. He knew that according to the church fathers, the Earth was a little under six thousand years old—some bishop had added up the ages of the patriarchs listed in the beatitudes—but she didn’t say that. Maybe Quakers didn’t believe in beatitude, maybe all their stories were secular. He remembered how easily Annie could slide from quoting the Bible to relaying a story her mother had told her from a dimly remembered past where the Bible had never been. Women as seeds from which elephants had sprouted. All the wisdom of the world hidden in a calabash squash. Rachel, too, had the capacity to step, however fearfully, outside the known, but she kept her other foot on firmer ground. She reached out and, with her forefinger, moved the sketch a fraction of an inch on the table.
“God gave us the ability to ask questions,” she said, as if arriving at the end of a long series of thoughts, “and therefore to doubt. He put the tree of knowledge in Eden to test us.”
“Six thousand years is a long test.”
“Because we keep failing.”
“But if God is all-knowing, he would have known we would fail.”
“Maybe we didn’t fail,” she said. “Maybe Adam was meant to eat that apple.”
8.
His thigh was taking God’s own time to heal. Summer passed and haying season was upon them. He felt he could ride, but not all day, day after day, and also that if he was well enough to ride he was well enough to stay and help with the haying. He owed her that much. If he stayed until the end of September, Lucas would have a two-month start on him. He chafed at the delay, cursed the two thieves who had shot him, but didn’t feel he could leave Rachel to scythe and fork hay by herself. And even if he could, he didn’t have a horse, or a gun, or money to buy either. Swinging the scythe hurt his hip, but also strengthened his thigh, and he liked the way Rachel’s eyes widened when she thought about something that frightened her, such as his leaving.
“If I were God and I wanted to make up new creatures,” he said to her one day in the hayfield, “how would I go about it?”
He had spent the week sharpening blades, sweeping out haylofts, repairing and greasing the hay wagon. Now, in the evening, the heat of the day subsided, he was leading the horses from rick to rick while Rachel forked hay onto the bed, the sun’s low light slanting through the wheels. Grasshoppers fled the onslaught of her fork. She was quiet, but he knew she had heard his question. She no doubt suspected another attack on her beliefs, and was wondering how to go about defending God.
“So, now you are going to assail the Creation?” she said, not stopping her work. The hay on the wagon was high, he would have to climb up to level it.
“If it were me,” he said, “I’d start with something close to my own image. What creatures did God make first?”
“Ocean dwellers,” she said. “Fish. You’re saying God looks like a fish.”
“He might, at that.”
“Very clever, Mr. Moody. You’re saying that God is not a man who made a fish, but a fish who made a man. Mightn’t God have started with something simpler than himself, like a fish, with no arms or legs or even a neck. And then with each successive creature he added more complex features, until he arrived at something as close to perfection as himself?”
“So God wasn’t always perfect? He had to learn how to make humans by practicing on simpler life forms?”
She stopped to consider, leaning on her pitchfork. “You are what Paul the Apostle called a ‘natural man,’ ” she said. “An unbeliever. ‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.’ ”
“As you say, God gave us the ability to question authority.”
“Is that what Annie did?”
“All the time.” He smiled.
“I think,” she said, “that by natural Paul meant a thing as yet unformed, or misbegotten. A thing like Caliban.”
That startled him. He hadn’t thought of himself as a Caliban. He’d attended a performance of The Tempest in Savannah, in which both Caliban and Ariel had been white actors with burnt cork on their faces, playing the characters as slaves, Caliban a field slave and Ariel a more privileged house servant. “What is’t thou canst demand?” Prospero had asked, and Ariel said, “My liberty.” Ariel had gone over well with the audience, and they had laughed at Caliban’s misery—until he talked about how he would like to ravish Miranda, and then they had stood up and shouted him off the stage, threatening to tar and feather him if he so much as glanced her way. Moody had thought the whole thing clever at the time; it was before he’d met Annie. Now he didn’t know what to think.
But he liked the image of himself as a natural man, a thing as yet unformed. He would cry with Caliban: “Freedom, hey-day! Hey-day, Freedom!” He would hang on to that.
9.
“My father was killed by the British,” she said. It was a clear, mild evening, and they were sitting outside, wrapped in blankets and looking up at the stars. “I was a baby at the time. It was after the Battle of New Orleans,” she said, “when the British came up to take Fort Bowyer to cut off New Orleans’s supply route so they could attack it again. They didn’t know the war had been over for months.”
“No war is ever over,” he said.
“This one was supposed to be.”
“Annie and I went to New Orleans fifteen years after that, and the war was still talked about in the taverns, how brave Andrew Jackson had led his men into battle and kicked the British out of America. Jackson was the president then. That was a time when men died for no reason, yet somehow that didn’t diminish Jackson’s stature as a hero.”
“The British bombarded Fort Bowyer for two days,” she said. “My father was in it and was killed.”
“What was your father doing in Fort Bowyer?”
“We may not approve of soldiers, but we don’t just let them die. As you have seen. My father was treating the wounded.”
“We’re not supposed to fire on civilians.” But they did, all the time. Blowing up a supply train made a hungry army, and a hungry army made mistakes. They weren’t supposed to fire at a retreating army, either. Or bayonet prisoners.
“My mother and I came north to Huntsville after that and she opened a boardinghouse. I stayed with her until I met Robert.”
“You were married in Huntsville?”
“Quakers don’t marry, at least not in the sense you mean. We have no parsons or ministers, no church, as such. We express our commitment to each other before Friends, and henceforth we are considered man and wife.”
“And then you came here?”
“Robert heard there was gold in the rivers out here in the hill country,” she said. “Nuggets the size of walnuts, they said, and we thought that with gold we could do much good.” He imagined her smiling in the dark. “So we moved here and homesteaded, and Robert panned for gold in Blue Creek.”
“Did he find any?”
“Certainly nothing as big as walnuts, but enough to keep the farm running and to buy some cows and a half-dozen pigs. We liked the country,” she said. The sound of late-season frogs filled the darkness. “The land here is fertile and gentle, and Blue Creek will take you all the way down to Mobile if you have the patience for it. Alabama was a new state then, and it was growing like twitch grass. All those cotton mills in Huntsville were built since we arrived.”
“I didn’t know there were cotton mills in Huntsville.”
“Oh, yes. It’s a modern manufacturing town.”
“And slaves work in them?”
“Yes, Mr. Moody. It’s why we chose Huntsville after my father was killed.”
Lucas might still be in Huntsville, then, working in a cotton mill. Had he guessed Lucas’s route after all? Could he find him, with Rachel’s help? He tried to divine in her the rabid abolisher that most Southerners imagined Quakers to be, and saw a gentler version of it: headstrong, determined, as Annie had been, and undaunted by life, compelled by the rightness of the Quaker cause. She would be good at whatever she put her mind to.
They fell into a companionable silence. He imagined himself finding Lucas in Huntsville. When Rachel took him into town, he would look about. He would also keep an eye out for his two thieves.
“We were out here the night the stars fell from the sky,” Rachel said. “Have you ever seen stars falling out of the sky, Mr. Moody?”
“A few,” he said.
“This wasn’t a few, this was almost all of them, or so it seemed. We thought it was the end of the world. It was as though whatever held things together up there had just let go. We were told that people in Huntsville fell on their knees and prayed.”
“Is that what you did?”
“No, we don’t pray like that. We took our blankets and sat out on the porch, as you and I are, and watched the fireworks. Robert fell asleep, but I couldn’t stop watching. It wasn’t a meteor shower, more like a torrential downpour of heavenly bodies. They fell for two whole nights. Fire and brimstone, Mr. Moody. Perhaps it was something like that that killed thy mastodons? But what amazed me was that when the stars finally stopped falling, there were just as many of them in the sky as there had been before. Was that God, do you think, Mr. Moody, replacing fallen stars with new ones as fast as the old ones fell? Like creating new animals when the old ones become extinct?”
“Maybe he was replenishing his supply of ammunition.”
“That was what Robert said.”
“What was Robert like?” he asked.
“No, Mr. Moody,” she said gently, “I don’t think I can tell thee about Robert. Maybe one day, but not now. It’s like he’s here on this porch with us, sitting in that chair over there, and it would be rude to talk about him as if he weren’t.” Her voice sounded strained. “I know you can understand that,” she added, “because you haven’t really told me about Annie, have you?”
“Some,” he said, “but not all, no.”
“The dead are hard to speak of,” she said. “We know so little about them.”
10.
He had to consider not only when but also how he would leave. Would he stand up after breakfast one morning, wash the dishes, wipe off the table and announce that he was taking a horse and leaving when the chores were done? Would he tell her one day that he would be gone the next? Or would he just not be here one morning when she got up, leave a note on the kitchen table? There had been some talk of taking him into Huntsville to show his leg to a proper doctor; maybe he would just keep going from there. It was the end of October. He would have to decide. If he didn’t leave soon, Lucas would be God knows where, too far ahead for Moody to catch up. The thought of not finding Lucas because he was unable to decide how to leave Rachel threatened to make him resent Rachel, and he didn’t want that—another reason to leave soon. He wanted to leave her, but he also wanted to remember her fondly.
It had become his custom at night to wait until the thin strip of light under her bedroom door went out before he retired to his cot. Rachel’s father had brought a crate of books from Philadelphia, and she had kept them. She read each night before going to sleep. She must have read each one many times, because there weren’t that many of them. They were mostly medical texts, some philosophical and religious books, and there was some poetry, which he borrowed and read, and which seemed to feed his growing sense of urgency. He read John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, “The Fair Quakeress”:
There are springs
Of deep and pure affection, hidden now,
Within that quiet bosom, which but wait
The thrilling of some kindly touch, to flow
Like waters from the desert-rocks of old.
“That quiet bosom.” He lay on his cot imagining Rachel reading, wondered if it were her deep and pure affection that was preventing her from sleeping, or something darker. Loneliness, the temptation to dwell on the deaths of her husband and her father. He felt the kind of protectiveness toward her he had toward Annie. When he could be still no longer he would slip quietly outside, look up at the stars and listen to the sounds of the night, at first for danger but then for the simple pleasure of listening. Owls and bats in the trees, coyotes on the ridge above the house, aware of him yet unconcerned by his presence. Reassured, he would go back in, stoke the fire and blow out all but the stub of the candle he kept beside his cot, resting on a chair atop the Cuvier paper, worn and tattered from many readings. He didn’t like to undress in the dark, he wanted to see where his clothes were, especially his boots, in case he had to jump up in the night and feel for them in the dark. If he’d had his pistol it would have been the last thing he looked at before blowing out the candle. He hadn’t lost the habit of that from the war.
One night, not long after their starry vigil on the porch, when the light had faded from beneath Rachel’s door, he was awakened by a movement on the cot: she had joined him. He couldn’t deny it had occurred to him that she might, that they might. He had often thought about it, but hadn’t let it build up into anything like an expectation. They hadn’t so much as brushed against each other in the months he’d been there, except now and then, by accident, as two people must who live together in a confined space. Sometimes they said “Excuse me,” at others they pretended it hadn’t happened. Occasionally, as they sat up evenings after dinner, he’d caught her looking at him over her needlework with a peculiar, speculative intensity, and he had no doubt he’d looked at her the same way. But they had settled into a cautiousness that had come to feel comfortable. They’d been close, but it was not a closeness based on touching. He supposed they both knew that the kind of accord they were developing couldn’t last on its own, that sooner or later it would reveal itself as a prelude to a more tangible intimacy, as a stone vault might be built to support a more elaborate structure on top of it, and after living
in that stone vault for a while a person might want to move upstairs. But if they had seen their situation that way, neither of them had let on.
He didn’t turn right away. He gave her time to change her mind, or to just go to sleep herself, if all she wanted was his company. As he had that first night with Annie. But when she put her arm around him and pressed herself against his back, he turned, put his left hand behind her head, and held her to him as delicately yet as fervently as he dared. Moonlight sifted through the window, enough that he could see that her eyes were open. Her hair was unfastened and smelled of lavender. There followed a bit of awkwardness with his hip, and when finally everything was lined up nicely they paused, as swimmers do before jumping in.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being too aggressive,” she said.
“Not at all,” he said. “I hope you don’t think I’m offering too much resistance.”
“No, none that I can see. We’ll make a Quaker of thee yet.”
There was no frenzy, as there had often been with Annie, but rather a kind of concentration. They had waited long enough to know exactly what the other wanted and to give it. He hadn’t missed the “we” in her sentence, meaning, he supposed, she and Robert, but it didn’t bother him. There were things she didn’t want to forget, and things he didn’t want to remember.
Eventually frenzy set in, and neither of them slept much after that. His hip throbbed. At midnight, he lay looking up into the darkness, she with her head on his left shoulder, the cot barely wide enough for both of them.
“You may come to my bed from now on, Mr. Moody. That is, if you want to.”
“I do,” he said. “Although I fear for your soul.”
“We don’t believe in souls.”
“No souls? No sin, then, either? Nothing to lose?”
“The only sin is causing pain and suffering in others. This would be a sin if Robert were yet alive, but he is not. Nor is Annie. We are harming no one, and only giving pleasure to each other.”
