by Jeffrey Lent
“Do you take me for a fool? In a way you’ve given an answer to your objection. It’s not what others think, be you under my roof or wasting time walking those miles each end of the day. It’s what makes life best for both of us, Becca. Whatever effort we extend in this life, and toward whatever ends, there will always be those who misunderstand, who see only what they wish, what their own hidden fears or desires allow to be placed upon you. Or myself. The only thing that matters is how we construct our lives under the eyes and within the heart of the Lord. He is our sole witness, come the end of Time.”
“Seems to me there are a host of witnesses quick and free with their tongues. Perhaps you was a woman you’d understand it not quite so lofty as you do.” She was looking off into the darkness as if those voices drifted even now among the scud of breeze filled of wild onion, the flare of fireflies stippling the grass of the orchard pasture, the slight scrape of apple limbs, the thud of a loosed fruit striking the ground. Watching her, he caught the faint echo of those selfsame murmurs.
“It’s true I’m only a man. A woman stands against another lot. But I’d offer if we stand together, we stand stronger.” He paused and sighed, then said, “No need to answer now, I only wanted the thought in your mind. It’s a good household we have, here. No one can accuse us otherwise.”
She jumped from her chair, said, “Oh, you don’t know,” then darted for the door before she stopped and turned. Her voice aboil she said, “You don’t know, you don’t understand. Women, women, some have outright said to me, others with only a glance or a smirk. They think I’ve set my cap for you. They do. With Harlan and all I felt all right being here, the emergency of it. But you just don’t see, do you?”
He stood and stepped toward her, hands open before him as if toward a skittish creature. “Why, Becca Davis, what are you saying? What are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you it can’t be one way, can’t be another. I don’t blame you. I only just seen it myself.”
Then she fled through the door and up the stairs, a frightened creature escaping. Only the scamper of her feet and then they too were gone. The soft sigh of a door carefully closed.
Now, riding home in the liquid warmth of night some hours after midnight, the big horse in ceaseless trot as if he might take the gig to the ends of the earth and off if August asked him to. August, tired as a man could be and yet joltingly awake, his mind a turmoil of thought, struck by the suicide of David Schofield and beginning to see that David had cast a pivot among the workings, the energies of his fellow men. Wondering if the act had been meant so, or simply a ravaged mind unable to endure what he might’ve seen as a greater, further and final mortification burdened upon him by his daughter. August could not imagine the madman he’d spoken with the week before as a being of such subtlety; but from his own brush with a mind set adrift, reasoned he had little experience to make a judgment of motive. But guessed it likely David, whatever the final impulse, had owned such fury: the burden splitting to clarity too great to bear and so jerked abrupt the door of Time. To step off the earth. Christ in His fathomless compassion enfolding the wretched soul, caring little for the rules man laid at the feet of the Lord. There remained Iris, living so many years within the fold of her husband’s bilious anger and loathing, if she might find freedom finally or be so swamped as to sink farther, and August, recalling her nigh-giddy reaches toward normalcy, wondered how Iris might fare once the worst of the summer was behind her. He knew the women up and down the valley of Jerusalem would do their own quiet work however was needed.
It came to him that the horse might not only be jogging homeward by memory but sleeping as he moved, the horse also caught out, missing rest between long days of work. He chirped once and the horse lifted stride, then he reined him back to the steady trot. Let the horse set the pace.
August rode along, the red nugget of the cigar a lodestone either cocked below his right eye or held time to time out over the offside high wheel of the gig. He’d come down the valley to the crossroad of Friend, half a dozen miles north of the Four Corners, and the horse made the turn without the least effort by August. Half an hour, no more, until home. They passed by the first farmhouse with a lamp lit in a kitchen window and the light thrown into the yard dimmed the star field overhead and the black shadow of a dog came out to watch him pass, standing there without giving voice of alarm. Then back out into the full night on a road narrowed by the corn growing either side, the stalks and broad leaves starkly dark against the moonlight as if so many scarecrows had been erected, the slight breeze here coming up the valley from the lake enough to scrape those rough-edged leaves one against another. He held the reins in one hand and rode down the valley holding the cigar and lifting it to smoke, then down again by his side. It was good tobacco, small constant triggers of thought spilling upward into his mind. For a moment he wondered if he should give up his cheroots and then knew the cigar was not only expensive but a gift given that fitted alone to this night.
He rode on. And then of a sudden knew his work for Becca Davis. Brought forth from her words the night before but also from the deep nudge of his own shared life.
He’d not so much forgotten this moment as his memory had set it aside some long time ago: Narcissa sitting cross-legged in the barley straw, a golden trampling hidden from anything but the noontime sun overhead. He on his back looking up toward that sun, three crows wheeling the fathomless sky. Both naked as the hour they first entered this world sixteen years before, an ancient passage of time. She held a straw between her teeth, both sweat-smote and languid. Grasshoppers leaped and scraped into the standing stalks.
She said, “I expect I’ll die before you. I don’t have it in me to stay, I wish I did. My soul yearns onward. You listen: I’m serious as death. When I’m gone I’ll haunt you all your life. There’s not another for you but me.” She leaned down then and kissed him. Every word she’d spoken was true. Her eyes so close upon his he’d seen three of them. She said, “God made us a package, didn’t he?”
And now he thought Of course the women speak or hint such things to Becca. It’s their nature to do so. Perhaps she feels somewhat that way also, would be natural as well, a young woman herself. There’s none to blame except perhaps myself for not grasping it sooner. But the answer to such is simple and the right thing to do, all ways. I stand up as a father would for her.
He saw it then unfolding as if it were already under way: Quietly he would seek out and speak with some of the older men, the ones with sons of an age to marry but not yet with prospects. Those men in turn would mention this to their wives and the women would understand the task better than the men informing them and, in the way of women, would look at Becca anew, not only for the comely and diligent girl that she was but one who, courtesy of August, would bring to such a union not only the experience of running a household and the general labor about the farm as needed, but also backed with the dowry of money and seed livestock that August would provide. It might well take some time because he knew Becca Davis would not undertake such actions lightly or of simple mind; he’d only have to speak quietly to her and assure her he’d rather she look long to make certain the match was the right one, to entertain a prospect and then reject, and wait to see who else might step forward, rather than rush into a marriage that would prove unhappy. Unless it was the passion of two souls smacked up against each other and he guessed he’d understand that. And take up his own reins and do the best he could to help such a thing thrive. Truly, now, the sky a wash of stars, the lacy-feather leaves of roadside elms batting by overhead between heaven and earth, such a match was what he wished and hoped for her.
And there it was: Harlan.
Young but a stalwart boy, a steady hand and what he didn’t know of farming he didn’t announce but watched and learned. And certainly of a large heart and uncommon soul. One who most surely would be returning to assist August through the remainder of the harvest year. For however it went with Malcolm Hopeton, the gift of free
dom dreamed by Enoch Stone as a gesture of grace and forgiveness would be denied by even the most sympathetic of juries. The man was prison bound and there, then, August saw it also, the judge would claim Hopeton’s farm in forfeit for damages to the court, perhaps an award of some sort to Iris Schofield—August determined to put that idea forth if no other did at the hearing, assuming there still would be one. Not today. He shook his head to clear it. No—not the day soon to lighten in the east but the one following. Unless the death of David stalled it all; seemed it might but there was still the need to press Stone about a judgment considering Iris.
He was put to mind how after a rainstorm the otherwise dull pebbles in the yard revealed themselves in a bright sparkling pattern—the works hidden by dust washed clean to light of day.
He could not align the future from this one spot of nightfall, this spring and summer of calamity and disaster but he could spot opportunity and walk forward toward that goal, long as the goal could shift shape and re-form as time passed. As all goals and hopes did in this life under the sun and stars, under the heavens.
Becca Davis might meet love with a man settled upon his own inheritance. She might also meet love with a landless younger son of a younger son. She might leave August and Harlan to fend for themselves as she built her new life a dozen miles, three miles, away. He might hire a new housekeeper, this time a widow woman, to clean and launder and keep food on the table for those years as he and Harlan labored upon the farm and Harlan grew and learned this land. And as young women placed eyes upon him and he did the same until that one caught his eye.
August aware that the peculiar circumstances of Harlan’s life, these past months especially, would bring him into a certain vantage of interest among young women.
Details. Worthy of thought, of holding in mind but only details. Not a one of which he knew he could guess correct. Only vague and general forms as the looping shadows of the trees passed this night, glimpsed ahead, then changing upon approach, the short passage underneath where the tree was most and least substantial all at once, then receding behind. Then another farther down the road.
But most large was a single wondrous thought:
Life has brought these children back to me and I’ll do my best right down to the hard ground to honor that gift. Because they are not my children, they are not substitutes for my children. They are of a larger cycle, of a greater charge upon not only me but themselves as well. And so I see myself more clearly in this vale of Time, so short in passage. But a caretaker, only a steward, is what I am. As they are, also. Of this spot of earth we inhabit.
For, truly, hadn’t Becca and Harlan Davis come home?
Crossing the bridge over Kedron Brook and pulling uphill toward home, gliding along now in the dark broken by the few stars glimpsed above the tree canopy, the ripples of fireflies off in the meadows making siren trails, the small sparks thrown as the iron bands on the wheels glanced against stones of the roadbed. Then swift hoofbeats and Ogden’s rig came alongside him. The doctor calling over to him, “Have you fallen asleep, man? Your horse is plodding.”
A lamp burned low on the kitchen table. Becca and August sat across from each other, talking.
Not half an hour had passed since the doctor and August had entered the house to find Becca at the very spot she now sat, with Iris Schofield bent over in the old rocker set back fireside in the corner, keening, her chin upon her breastbone but her hands in furious counterpoint upon her thighs, her voice lost but for the wracking wet sobs coming from her, short intervals when she’d arrest her moans and cry her daughter’s name before slumping again. Becca had not looked at August but addressed Doctor Ogden, her own voice calm and matter-of-fact, low as if she’d not have the stricken woman hear her account.
“This is how it’s been,” she said. “When first I got to her here she was almost sensible but while I was making tea as my mother showed me—chamomile, lemon balm, geranium leaves—to ease her—”
“None of that does a thing,” Ogden said. “Old wives’ nonsense.”
She’d nodded and gone on. “They helped my mother and she had reason to know. But as I was making the tea, Sister Schofield commenced wailing and crying and calling out, to her daughter mostly as I could make out, also her husband time to time. Raising her head up to the roof beams then dropping it into her lap, pummeling her legs or breastbone as if she’d drive out the pain from those spots, but only seemed to make it worse. I don’t know if she heard a word I spoke but I done my best, moving about and getting her honey for her tea, fetching a shawl to drape over her shoulders which she balled up and buried her face in as she cried out most terrible. Then she went silent and gazed off, at the fire, the lamp, all about as if trying to place where she was, but was quieted. I took that as a good sign and got the long fork, cut a slice from a loaf and toasted it over the fire just so. I guessed she hadn’t had a bite to eat in I don’t know how long and thought that might help, but time it was done and I got the crock of butter down she was wailing again. Then after a bit it seemed to take the starch out of her and she slumped down much as she is now and I didn’t dare try a thing but pray you two would roll in soon.”
“And here I am,” Ogden said. He’d approached where Iris sat and knelt down and took her hand and turned it over to count the pulse of her veins. The woman keened on, bent over upon herself, an exhausted grief that could not allow cessation as if to cease would bring dishonor upon what she grieved. Ogden dug in the pocket of his coat and lifted out a phial and undid the stopper, ran out a white paste upon his index finger, and then slipped the finger into her mouth, between her cheek and jaw. As if administering chewing tobacco. He withdrew the finger and wiped it clean upon his britches and stood, turning to August.
“That will give her peace in a few short minutes. Then I’d ask your help loading her into my buggy. I have a strap to hold her in place and a lap robe against any chill but she’s best with me, as we discussed. Tell me, did you enjoy the cigar?”
“About our conversation last evening,” August said. “I’ve had some fresh thoughts.” Both with cups of the tea before them.
“Not now, please,” Becca said. Bent over her cup as if to read the swirl of leaves. “That will wait. Tell me, is the hearing today?”
“No,” he said. “The next.”
“Then you cut oats today?”
“Barley,” he said. “We start on the barley.” Then, needless, he said, “We finished the oats.”
“Drink that tea and get on to bed. You need what sleep you can get.”
“I don’t know that I can.” He was painfully tired and the headache was back.
“Try. Drink that tea.”
He did. It was both sharp and sweet going down. He said, “I’ve found a solution that you’ll likely resist at first but makes all the sense in the world. Iris Schofield opened my eyes.” Becca stood and looked at him.
He said, “Let’s get through these hard days ahead—then we can talk as you need. But I’m tougher than whatever people may say or think. At the least I’ll be happy to hear you out.”
She tipped the crane with the kettle over the low heap of coals the faster to boil water come dawn, then turned and walked out the hall to the stairs. He watched her go and then walked out the door to the stoop and down into the yard, where he stood and made water, head tilted back to look upon the stars. What could be seen of heaven.
He then went in and up to his own bed. Where he lay on his back under the linen made soft by use, certain he’d not sleep this morning, his mind in turmoil, his head throbbing.
Then he rolled onto his side and drew his legs up, pushed the linen down about his waist for the cool air floating through the windows lifted by their sash-weights. His breathing fallen slow.
When he woke the sun was hard upon him.
Thirteen
Mid-morning and the heat had not yet penetrated the chestnut grove.
The door and glassless windows stood open, though no air moved through them
or the woods either but the faint cool of night and dew, of ever-shaded earth held tight as the moss on the cedar shakes of the roof. It would not be until late afternoon and the evening stretching toward and beyond dark that the heat would beat through the grove, pressing down and holding until the early hours. But for the time at hand the room was pleasant, easy to lie idle in. Only the morning of his second full day there and already he knew this much.
He knew also the heat of late afternoon and dusk was not unpleasant if free of the dust and grime of labor but made instead a slippery grease for skin upon skin of a newfound labor where sweat might burn his eyes but was easy blinked away.
He lay spraddle-legged on his back, the thick feather-stuffed mattress and blankets an uncommon daytime luxury beneath him that he’d grown used to, as much else. The woman on her side beside him, head propped on an elbow as she looked off, her eyes lazed and sleepy, as he’d first noticed the afternoon before. Careless of his looking, allowing him to study her. A wonderment laid bare before him and not only her wondrous body, which she’d made available to him over and again and not even all the rest of the sweet labor both performed when he lay joined with her, but also the long hours before and after their couplings. Times one or the other slept, times both slept. She moved about the cabin wearing a shift that informed him further of her, which was what he was studying, not only in this morning moment while the air was still cool but ongoing.
The night of his arrival she held him pinned to the floor and kissed him slow while without thought he began to kiss her back as the world collapsed to nothing beyond where he was, engaged rapturous and thoughtless. She helped him from the floor and guided him toward the bed, peeling away her clothes and gently his own as he’d stood mute and motionless, and then pressing him down into the mattress and lifting herself above to straddle him again. Her hands on his shoulders as she worked, her eyes intent upon him throughout and then his sudden oblivion and abrupt descent into sleep. The enormity of the day rolling over him and taking him down as if to allow his mind escape, not from her, not only from her, but all of that long and strangely twisting day.
