by Van Reid
“Ah, well,” said the grandmother, softly now. “He’s never raised a hand to any of us, has he? We must take the good with the bad, you know.”
Peter wondered if his father and Samuel Gray were a bit alike.
“You still haven’t told me why he was arrested,” said the parson.
“Charles Trail,” said Elspeth, her arms still crossed before her. “He has his eye on this bottom land, now it’s cleared and plowed, and a cabin and barn are raised.”
“Surrounded him and the little boy and girl, up in the high field,” said the elderly woman, nodding in her chair by the fire. “Set upon them, and put him in chains, so the children said.”
“Charles Trail? The man who led the sheriff up here?” said the parson.
“Yes,” said Elspeth, “and John Trueman, his cousin.”
“The sheriff might have suspected . . .” began the clergyman, but the very silence that greeted this thought cut it short as well.
Supper began as a fairly silent affair. It was a late hour for farm life, and though the children had eaten, they sat down as well and watched the guests avidly, and listened to the parson’s talk, which was pointedly meant to entertain. The elderly Mrs. Gray stayed by the fire and fell asleep.
The fare was plain pork and potatoes and beans, and Peter felt he was back home again. He tucked in with some appetite, despite the discomfort that he sensed hovering over the table. Twice he found Elspeth watching him, and after the parson regaled them with the tale of Nora Tillage’s rescue–told in such a way that Peter seemed to have accomplished the business entirely on his own–Elspeth’s stare came more often and became more insistent. Peter tried his best to deflect the parson’s hero-making, but managed only to sound modest.
There were five living children to the Gray family, besides Elspeth, and besides the sister in the room behind the curtain, they were much younger than she; an influenza had raged through New Milford some years ago and taken several other brothers and a sister between. After supper, when Elspeth led the guests out to the barn, Peter saw the shadows of wooden crosses in the little yard on the slope above and behind the house.
The barn was dark and close with stacks of hay on two floors and the remnant heat of the day. There were two cows and a goat that stirred when the parson and Peter followed Elspeth inside. Peter found Beam’s saddle and untied his father’s hat and coat.
“I want you to stay with the Grays tomorrow, Peter,” said Parson Leach. He glanced from the young man to Elspeth Gray when he said this. Something flashed in Elspeth’s eyes, and Peter looked ready to speak, but the clergyman added, “They could, perhaps, use an extra hand while Mr. Gray is gone,” which seemed to arrest any discussion on the matter. “I’ll be back, the day after, or the day after that, perhaps, and we will go looking for your uncle.”
Peter had expected to go with the parson on the morrow, not because he thought of himself as part of the discord in New Milford, but because he felt far from home and separate from his entire life and Parson Leach was his only landmark–steady, if yet unfamiliar. Peter thought he might say something, but a yawn overtook him.
“There’s a place in the corner over there,” said Elspeth, holding her lantern up and pointing. “And there’s the loft, where you’ve slept before, I think, Mr. Leach.”
The parson was already crossing to the rude ladder pegged to the end of the loft. Peter heard him yawn, as well, then the man muttered a good night blessing and climbed into the shadows.
Elspeth stood and watched Peter, as if she required something from him. He thanked her, for perhaps the fifth time, for supper and the place to sleep, but this did not appear to satisfy her expectations. She looked away from him, after a moment. Peter thought he could hear the parson’s breath, rumbling in sleep above them. “Will you go with Mr. Leach to Wiscasset?” she asked.
Peter was startled. “He’s told me not to,” he said, and looked as if he might have heard wrong–either the parson’s directive or her question. He hadn’t thought of going to Wiscasset, really, where Elspeth’s father was in jail; his imagination had taken him no further than New Milford. “I don’t know that he’s going to Wiscasset,” he said, hardly moving his lips.
She looked at him some more, and particularly at the scar on his head, as if it indicated more than his words. She said “Good night,” and Peter scrambled into the corner before the only light was gone with her.
In the complete darkness of the barn he was conscious of the heat rising from the hay, the sound of the parson’s soft snore above him, and the movement of the animals in the stables close by. A bird of some sort called mournfully. A fly was buzzing. Peter patted down a mound of straw, sneezed at the dust he raised, and made himself as comfortable as possible–more so than at home, actually, where he shared a short trundle bed with his brother, though less so than his single night at the Clayden’s. He used his father’s coat and hat for a pillow.
He woke and was conscious of a soft light in the barn. He barely opened his eyes, watching from beneath his lashes as Elspeth Gray stood over him with the lantern. She was dressed in her nightclothes; her bonnet was off and her hair spilled over her shoulders. Peter did his best to feign sleep. He watched her till he feared the lamplight would catch a telltale reflection in his slitted eyes. The blemish on her cheek was invisible in the lantern-glow, and if her form was hidden behind the loose gown she wore, the cut of her shoulders and the length of her neck were all that were needed to mark her as a woman.
Peter imagined that if he opened his eyes and stood up, she might kiss him, or that if he simply put his arms out, she would lay down beside him. He was a farm boy and had some notion about the merging of male and female. The thought was pleasing and frightening at once; then the recollection of Nora Tillage, trembling beneath him, shaking into a helpless fit, gripped his heart, and he closed his eyes and wished Elspeth Gray away from him.
Later, perhaps after he had slept again, he opened his eyes in the dark, wondering if he had dreamed her.
20
How the Parson Was Accused by — and Peter Attached to — Nathan Barrow
ELSPETH GRAY WAS WALKING FROM THE HOUSE WHEN PETER CAME out of the barn. “You’re not going with him to Wiscasset, if you don’t catch him up,” she said, contrary to everything discussed the night before. It was barely light out, and an ash colored mist rose off the river in the pre-dawn; nothing else moved besides them–not a crow called or a twig of brush shifted. Peter had known mornings like this, when a conscious body might seem to be stirring separately from the air and life around it.
The intuition he had known regarding her willingness toward him returned, and it was like being struck in the face, so that he wondered she hadn’t heard the thought hit him.
She was dressed in men’s clothes, and her hair was tied back in a kerchief. She had a hat in hand that a young man might have worn at work. “They’re my brother Samuel’s,” she said, mistaking his expression. “He would have gone with Mr. Leach, if he were alive.” Peter heard a clattering and one of Elspeth’s younger brothers came around the corner of the cabin with a milk pail.
Elspeth turned away from the barn and walked toward the river. “Mother has biscuits and bacon,” she said to Peter. “Eat and get your horse. I’ll be along.” She had a length of rope and a blanket in her hands.
Peter wondered what to say when he went into the cabin. The ancient Mrs. Gray sat by the fire, as if she had never moved all night. Her daughter-in-law appeared from behind the curtain to the back room. A face peered down at Peter from the loft.
“Mr. Leach said you were to stay,” said Elspeth’s mother, though the ratio between information and accusation that was intended in the statement was difficult for Peter to judge. “He left two hours ago. There’s a fork on the table,” she said. “You can hang the bacon over the fire if you want it hot.”
“It’s fine,” he said, but his voice hardly worked. It was the first time he had used it since rising. He coughed as he c
rossed the room, and resolved to eat Mrs. Gray’s biscuits and bacon without compunction. His boots sounded loudly on the plank floor.
“Are you one of Mr. Leach’s sinners?” asked the elderly woman while Peter ate. She peered at him with sightless eyes.
“No,” he, said, which sounded lame as the ensuing silence seemed to echo with the word. “But I don’t find any fault in him,” he added, finally.
“Don’t you?” said the old woman with a laugh. “He has a simple way of seeing things that would appeal to most folk, I suppose. The world would be a pleasant place, if it worked the way he saw fit.”
“I don’t find fault in that, either,” said Peter, wondering how she could.
“It doesn’t work that way, lad,” she said, almost affectionately, “that’s all. It isn’t meant to.”
It occurred to Peter, then, that Elspeth’s mother, and probably Elspeth herself thought the same. He wondered why he didn’t. He didn’t live so very different from these folk. His parents had known much the same hardship and, if truth be known, they didn’t look out upon so pleasant a scene when they got up in the morning.
Peter was hungry, and his hand hovered over another biscuit. He was thinking of his mother, his dead father, and his brothers and sisters. He tried to count the days he had been gone, and wondered how they fared, without his father and without the oldest son. People thought his mother mad, he knew, but she often said something, now and again, around this time of year.
“The leaves fall,” he said, directing his mother’s words to the elderly woman, and to Elspeth’s mother who had disappeared into the back room, and to Elspeth who was outside and long out of earshot. “The leaves fall, and winter’s cruel. But nothing says the leaves have to be so pretty before they come down.” He rose from the table and snatched up his father’s hat. “Thank you, Mrs. Gray,” and he nodded to the back room, then to the elderly woman by the fire. “Mrs. Gray.” He left the cabin without first seeing the mother, but the door opened behind him and she called to him.
“You watch out for my Elspeth, Mr. Loon.” She stood, just as her daughter had the night before, her arms folded, but she was without expression.
Peter simply wanted to catch up with Parson Leach, despite what the man had told him.
When he came out of the barn with Beam, Elspeth rode up on a brown horse. “He’s meant for plowing, mostly,” she said about the animal. “He’s usually frisky, but I guess he knew better than to cross me this morning.” She had no saddle but the blanket, and she rode like a boy. She wore her brother’s hat and in his clothes she might have fooled someone who didn’t know her into thinking she was a young man. The roughness of her cheek, however, gave her away to anyone who had seen her before. She needed to pull her collar up around her slender neck.
“You look too much like a woman,” Peter said, as he fixed his father’s clothes, as before, to the back of Beam’s saddle.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Elspeth said grimly. “There’s a man on the farm north of here who’s asked me to marry him twice already, and if he asks me a third time, I might say yes.”
“Pull your collar up,” he said.
She reached up to her neck, as if she had revealed something vulnerable to him. “We’ll see if there are any other women with us,” she said.
Peter couldn’t guess her meaning, but she nudged her horse forward and he swung onto Beam and hurried after.
The landscape that had been hemmed in by night on their journey to Gray farm was now closed to the far-reaching eye by fog that lifted out of the valleys and bottomland. A diffused light radiated from above where higher vapors caught the first beams of the sun. Peter trusted to Elspeth’s knowledge of the way and stayed a length or two behind her. When they came out of the mists briefly, ascending a steep slope, a voice called out and along the next ridge to their right they saw a backcountry fellow on foot and hailing to them.
Elspeth pulled her horse up for a moment, then let out an unhappy sound and kicked the animal into some speed. With a wave to the man, who was staring intently after them, Peter righted Beam’s head and followed. They hurried down the far slope and into the fog, with another cry at their back. She trotted ahead some yards before she pulled up again and veered away from a granite escarpment that loomed out of the cloud. Peter came up beside her, but she would not explain herself, or even look at him, though they proceeded with less haste. Peter wondered if the man had been Elspeth’s suitor, and was it her brother’s clothes or Peter’s company that caused her to hurry off?
For a while, the fog blew in thick patches, like tattered clothes in the wind, though it exhibited new resolve as they neared the trough of the river valley. Elspeth dismounted at one point so as not to lose sight of the trail. Her horse balked as she tried to lead it, and Peter got down himself and took both animals, but soon she snatched the reins from him, and before he would have chosen to mount again, she rode into the deepening fog.
Only once after that did she slow her pace, and that was when some large creature passed before them. Her horse shied to one side and Peter had only the glimpse of a dark form moving from fog to fog–a deer perhaps, as uncertain as they in the white murk. Almost immediately, a building shouldered itself from the fog and watched them from two pale reflecting windows as they passed.
They came into the settlement of New Milford on the gathering presence of smoke and the note of a single voice that rang like metal from a distance. Peter did not consciously recognize the voice, sound was so altered in the fog, but it made his hackles rise, so that he guessed that he was hearing the declamations of Nathan Barrow.
Elspeth took them past the expired bonfire, now roiling smoke and steam into the mist, but barely glowing beneath the ash and char. Rather unwillingly Peter followed her as she followed the sound of the voice in the direction of the river. A disembodied head was the first to startle him; it turned toward Peter and Elspeth, even as its associate form materialized beneath it and still other shadowy men rose out of the fog.
The voice, which Peter definitely knew to be Barrow’s now, rose up in a declaration about the devil and the designs of Hell. There was a small grove of birch and scores of men, some still in their White Indian garb, or with their hideous masks in hand, standing in the fog where the sound of moving water was near. They were a daunting sight to Peter, and he had the inkling that he had veered too close to a nest of barely dormant hornets. The sun had gained prominence just over the eastern ridge, and its reflective strength was enough to make further shadows of more men standing in the shoals of the upper Sheepscott.
“And seeing Heaven, I returned,” came the voice in a loud cry, “to lead you against oppressive men and to complete the revolution started twenty-five years past!” Peter could see Barrow standing knee deep in the current, his bearded face lifted, his arms raised.
Murmurs ran through the crowd of men on shore, and every extreme and mixture of opinion was to be heard therein. Some watched with awe, and some with something like disapproval; some expressed amusement or simple patience.
“Do you accept this vision of Christ?” called Barrow, as if to the entire congregation, though he was speaking to the first man before him.
“Yes,” wavered the fellow, who may have been daunted by Barrow’s fierce revelations, or simply unsure of being dunked in the cold water in a state of partial drunkenness.
“In the name of Christ, then!” shouted Barrow, and he took hold of the man’s collar and proceeded to half-drown him. Barrow’s shaggy countenance was already glaring at the next man to be baptized as he jerked the first man’s head from the water and set him on a course to the shore.
“Yes, yes!” shouted the second man, even before Barrow could question him.
“Death to Great Men!” shouted the third and Barrow never leveled his query but plunged him into the river like a piece of laundry.
Some of the men on the bank seemed to think this was poor entertainment after all, and while the first of the we
t men clambered onto the bank and hurried for cover or another pot of rum, these less convinced fellows broke away as with a single thought. “This is Mr. Leach’s friend,” said one man and several of them gathered round Peter and Beam. Elspeth let herself be brushed aside and in the lifting fog and the distraction of Barrow’s baptizing, there were none who looked close enough to tell her apart from a boy.
“So, you sprung from a dead buck, did you, lad?” said another man.
Peter couldn’t guess where they had gotten that tale if not from Manasseh Cutts or Crispin Moss, but he was disconcerted by the attention that this report lent him. Nathan Barrow continued to baptize as the line of men advanced, and while Peter talked with those disinterested in the ceremony, dripping men continued to race past.
“How from a dead, buck?” wondered someone and the fellow told a barely recognizable variant of the tale, that went a long way toward suggesting that Peter was something other than he seemed.
“That was a trick,” said the first fellow.
“I was asleep behind the deer when it was shot,” said Peter, though he shifted on Beam and his eye did not light on anyone; he had a culpable look about him, and there were those watching him who might have believed the wilder tale, though they hadn’t till now.
“That’s a fine horse,” said someone.
“I was given the use of it,” said Peter.
Barrow had paused now in his labor to venture more thoughts on the nature of paradise and the evil of men who claimed land without settling it. The fog was rising.
“Were you and Mr. Leach down in Newcastle, then, at Captain Clayden’s?” asked the first man.
Peter was concerned to answer this, but did so with a simple “Yes.”
“Where is the parson?” wondered his questioner.
