Deliveries done at last, I run to my willow.
There was never a hope. I’m entitled to nothing. There is no one to tell, and no way to tell it, as I am now. I couldn’t find words even if I was able. No words could ease this unbearable weight.
I cry to my willow tree: robbed of years, robbed of dignity, language, tranquillity.
Last of all, cruelest, robbed of you.
XX.
Housewives and daughters, like chattering squirrels, revel in news: a wedding soon! The bride, so beautiful, the groom so tall, the pick of the village. Their marriage will be a festival day. Maria’s relations will steal daylight to crochet her laces.
All the other little broken hearts—and there are bound to be many—will burn on the altar to youthful beauty and love. It’s thin comfort to think I’m not alone in my woe.
XXI.
The sun still rises; roosters still crow and the cow still makes mud. Dunging out her stall was once Darrel’s job. Nothing like fresh manure to season a heartache and show me what my fancies are worth.
Uptown, during errands, I see you on the street, surrounded by well-wishers who heap their congratulations on you. A few men harangue you with jokes. Your smiling face is apple red.
Standing near me are some who whisper about your father’s slide into his pit of drink. They whisper that you’ll do the same, but whisper only. When you approach, they smile and clap your back and say, What a fine farm, Lucas. What a fine wife she’ll be, Lucas. You’ve got a man’s shoulders now, Lucas. Just like—
They stop, they stammer. They remember some other errand.
For all they know of your father, they should pity him. They should mourn.
Only one person knows a reason to fear him.
And she has no daggers in her tongue for you.
XXII.
There is much I don’t remember.
Sometimes in my dreams the memories return and I cry out. Or I wake and feel caged by the darkness, and forget I’m no longer with him.
Mother yanks my hair then, and orders me to stop my devilish wailing.
XXIII.
Today I took Mother’s basket of eggs and a jug of cider into town. Walking toward Abe Duddy’s shop, I saw Leon Cartwright cross the street to catch Maria. She was on her way somewhere, and from the looks of it, couldn’t get there fast enough. I was only ten paces behind them, but neither of them heeded me.“Marry him, will you,” says he, right in her face.
“I’ll marry him if I choose to,” says she, walking on as if he’s not there, so fast he has to trot to keep up with her.
“You don’t love him,” says he.
She stops. “I’ll love him if I choose to.”
“Pah.”
She walks again. He grabs her arm. “You only want his farm,” he says. “He’ll never have your heart.”
That’s when I took an egg from my basket and whipped it as hard as I could at Leon. The shell smashed, and the yolk soaked into his curly head.
He turned, shouting, then saw that it was me. That made him stop. Years ago it wouldn’t have.
I glared at him. He plucked the shells from his hair and cursed but did nothing more.
Maria regarded me. Those dark eyes that drive you wild looked me up and down as though she was seeing me for the first time. She almost smiled. She almost nodded. Then she turned and walked on, leaving Leon to go home and dunk his head.
XXIV.
I realized how easy it would have been to miss and hit her with my egg instead.I wondered if that was what I should have done.
XXV.
Tobias Salt, the miller’s freckle-faced son, trudges back into town from a long night’s lookout. His eyes are puffy and his footsteps slow.
“See anything, Toby?” Abe Duddy calls from his shop. “Never do,” says Tobias, and he rubs his eyes. “That’s what I call a good watch,” says the old storekeeper.
XXVI.
How busy you are now. Harvest, and a wedding. A new room on the cabin to please your bride. Timber to cut, along with winter wood. Corn to reap and potatoes to dig. If only there was someone to help you. No father, no kin, and your friends are busy with their own harvesting.
Rocks to gather, vegetables to pick and bottle.
You work like a plow horse, but you whistle. Soon there’ll be a wife to help, to tend your nest, to weed the garden, to mend your trousers and stuff your mattress, to serve something warm when you come in each night.
Will she? Will her soft hands spin your wool, and bind your wheat into sheaves, and pluck the grubs off your potatoes? Will her china face turn bronze beside you as you labor in your fields?
XXVII.
No one calls me by my name. No one calls me anything, save Darrel, who calls me Worm. Mother never really tried to stop him. When she calls me, it’s “You, shuck these,” “You, card that sack,” “You, grease this down,” “You, watch the tallow pot.”“You. Keep still.”
The warmth I remember in her eyes is gone, replaced with iron. Father is long since dead, and the daughter she remembers is dead to her. She buries the name with the memory.
No one calls me by my name.
Younger children do not know it.
I remind myself each day at sunrise, lest one day I forget. Judith is my name.
XXVIII.
I hung the posies you left me upside down in the barn rafters to dry, to preserve them forever and gaze upon them always.
I was gone before they’d finished drying. When I returned home after my years away, they still hung there—brown and shriveled stalks no one took enough notice of to sweep away.
They are there still, so wrapped in spiderwebs that only I can tell they once were a young sweetheart’s nosegay.
I take them down now, and outside, where I fling them high into the autumn sky, like a bride who tosses her bouquet.
XXIX.
I came across the schoolmaster near the forest’s edge. I was picking pears. Two weeks new to Roswell Station from the academy up at Newkirk, he was out strolling in autumn dusk, and he came around a corner in the path. I pulled back and hid behind my tree, but he’d seen me, and he took off his hat. Longshanks, I named him. Slim as a hoe, with a face the color of new cheese and wayward dark hair that hangs before his eyes, so that he must always be pushing it back. So this was the teacher Darrel was rid of. Which of them was the luckier?
His eyes searched me as if I was a piece of Latin, ready for translation.
“Good evening.”
He spoke to me.
I left, dropping the pears.
He pursued me. “Stop! Young lady! I beg your pardon!” He was quick for one so spindly, and he caught me by the wrist. His touch astonished me, sent me a warning. I felt myself shrinking, compressing, coiling ready to spring. Yet even so, his hand was living flesh. Would that he were you, out walking on a balmy night and wishing for a word with me.
“I do so plead your forgiveness,” he said, staring down at me. His voice turned my stomach sour. He didn’t relinquish my wrist, even though I tugged. His forehead was high, and moist. “My name is Rupert Gillis.”
I yanked my hand away and fled.
I could have answered him, in my way, and put an end to all future attempts at conversation from Rupert Gillis.
Village folk will make him wiser soon enough.
XXX.
Roswell Station has seen its share of sorrow.
Sickness is a regular guest. Babies ail in the damp ocean air. Winters are cruel and last too long. Frost can destroy a whole year’s crops.
We fought a battle against land-grabbing homelanders. Your father was our hero then.
Fire swept through one dry summer, claiming a third of the homes in town.
One year the arsenal blew up, taking with it most of our defenses.
Scandal reared her head upon your family.
And one summer, two young girls went missing within days of each other.
XXXI.
Unfaithful woman, he w
ould say, plunging his knife into the cabin wall, drove him to it.
That’s all he would say. The rest, I knew.
His wife and her lover crept away to Pinkerton or maybe Williamsborough. Perhaps they now live in lovers’ bliss or shared contempt in a solitary cabin, miles west.
They left. And he, the bonny man, the militia colonel, prosperous farmer, deacon, could not satisfy his thirst. No Widow Michaelson for him, no, though she be blushing, skilled with bread, childless, and under thirty.
A pity.
For him it was years of gnawing.
Till he found himself a maiden.
XXXII.
To the village, his wife’s inconstancy drove him to drink away his mind, until like a beast, he set fire to his home and let the inferno consume him.
To the village, he died a sad disgrace. Not a menace. Not a recluse living miles north across the river. Not the reason Lottie Pratt’s naked body washed up in
the river.
Not the reason Judith Finch came home after two years, out of her head, left for dead, half her tongue cut out.
XXXIII.
The widower Abijah Pratt, Lottie’s father, lacks all his teeth, and half his wits. Lottie was all he had left after a bad crossing from the homeland. She was a docile girl who did his bidding. Now, as Preacher Frye would say, he’s withered, root and branch.He’ll never meet my eye on the street or at Sunday meeting. I came back, and Abijah Pratt despises me for living.
XXXIV.
The colonel was last seen alive the night his farmhouse burned like never a house should burn, with a bang and a roar and the walls turned to ashes before anyone could get there. All his things destroyed, he fled to where no one could find him.
You weren’t there that night. It was spring, fishing season, and you and your puppy were out searching for night crawlers.
The whole village ran in their nightclothes to see the cause of the noise. Like Hell itself had wrenched a hole in the soil for wayward man to jump through.
You ran back with your bucket and dropped it when you saw where your house had been. The lanterns the townspeople carried shone on your wriggling, escaping worms.
XXXV.
My mother and father brought you home that night and gave you Darrel’s bed.
You couldn’t sleep. Nor could any of us.
Father fed the fire long into the night. You slumped in achair before the hearth with my father’s leather hand resting upon your shoulder, and Jip curled around your ankles.
And so you stayed with us for a season, until Father organized a crew of men to help you rebuild a small cabin where your old home had stood. He helped you plow and plant your spring wheat. He persuaded the aldermen to erect a tombstone for your father in the churchyard. You loved my father for all he did for you.
But still, I would find you sometimes that summer, sitting with your feet dangling in the stream, staring at the water with hollow eyes. I would sit beside you, and we would watch the stream together.
I was twelve then, and you, a skinny, under-grown sixteen.
XXXVI.
The evening I stumbled home, it was midsummer twilight, soft and blue over the split-log fence, the fields, the hills beyond. A sight I never thought I’d see again.
Darrel, still a boy, though bigger, saw me first and yelled. Mother burst out the door, wiping her hands on her dress, then hitched up her skirts and ran to me, calling my name.
We collided. She clasped me to her, rubbing her hands over every part of me.
Then she stopped and took my head in both hands.
Her mouth contorted with weeping. “You came back. Sweet Lord above. You came back.”
I drank in her face, the damp summer smell of her.
“Where have you been, child?”
In spite of my plans my lips parted. I pressed them shut again.
“Speak to me.”
“I ghanh.”
Her weeping eyes froze. She grasped my face and tilted back my head. She pushed down my protesting jaw with her strong thumbs.
She cried out and released me. My head fell back for an instant, then I righted myself.
She stood with both hands clasped over her mouth, her eyes as round as the midsummer moon.
XXXVII.
I don’t believe in miracles. The Blessed Virgin, he said, appeared to him and told him not to do this thing, nor take my life.Mother would have called it a shameful papist remark. And that was when he cut me.
XXXVIII.
Once, toward the end of the summer when you lived with us, I sat by the stream, plucking petals off a flower and dropping them one by one into the swirling water.
I’d flung the empty stem into the water and had nothing left to toss but grass when you appeared with a handful of posies.
“You looked like you were running out,” you said.
I laughed and buried my nose in the bouquet. “You can join me, if you like,” I said. “You brought enough flowers for both of us.”
You smiled then. Green sunlight filtering through my willow boughs moved across your face. I realized it was the first I’d seen you smile since the night your house burned, leaving you alone in the world.
I watched the light on your face too long. Your cheeks grew red. You sat down and took a flower, plucked a petal, and dropped it in the stream.
When we’d stripped all the blossoms, we watched the water. You took my hand and held it. It occurred to me that I should feel startled, but it was only peaceful, there with you, with willow boughs brushing us like feathers, and the stream moving ever and ever past us toward the sea.
XXXIX.
I pick wild grapes, east of town. My knife slices through the woody stems and almost cuts my finger. Mother wants two bucketsful for wine. You’re not Maria’s yet, and so I make a plan to leave you some, in a bowl on your porch. No, I’ll be daring and bring them inside, fill your pan with them. A farewell gift while I still may, and a mystery to make you wonder.
What do I care if it’s shocking? I am shocking. What was done to me was shocking. I am outside the boundaries forever, no longer decent. I will leave grapes for you in your own home.
Galloping hoofbeats on the track shorten my plans. I duck in the bushes. Peeping through, I see Clyde Aldrus riding the horse that’s kept pastured at the lookout. He’s bent low in the saddle, urging the horse on with a face full of fear.
XL.
The church bell sounds its strident warning, a summons for all in the village to drop what they’re doing and come. I arrive in town, panting, my pail banging my shin.
A huddle of villagers surrounds the pillory on the common. This is where we shame our sinners, but now Clyde Aldrus stands upon its platform, repeating his news.
There are ships on the horizon, twenty miles east. So the scout tells Captain Rush.
Three ships that don’t appear to be carrying calico.
XLI.
The men in town are silent now. The women buzz with talk of war. Goody Pruett passes our gate on her way to town and tells Mother what she’s heard. This time she does not even extract her usual exchange of a cup of bark coffee. The homelanders and their ships can travel almost all the way to us up the river, until they’re forced to disembark at Roswell Landing. From there, it’s not a long march to Roswell Station and our fruitful farms.
They’ll take it all, for a price in our blood. We know they haven’t forgotten their brothers from ’37.
Ever since the arsenal was lost, all we have are private arms. Blunderbusses, flintlocks, fowling pieces, pistols. Ninety guns with which to face their hundreds. Ninety men with ball and powder, and blood for spilling. Ninety necks that will turn to face destruction, and hold it back for half an hour.
Roswell Station will not see nightfall tomorrow. Neither cloud-eyed widow, nor grizzled elder, nor fat-legged infant will survive. They may spare the younger women. The whole and healthy ones, at least.
You will not take Maria for your own.
Even I ca
n find no joy in that.
Someone else will have her instead.
XLII.
Men look to Captain Rush, who sweats, and then they look to you. Unspoken on their lips is the fear: who will lead us with Colonel Whiting gone? He was our confidence, our miracle. Remember ’37, when he rousted the homelanders?So they look to you, the son and heir, who never shot more than autumn deer.
XLIII.
There is talk of fleeing to the woods. Of wagons and frantic harvesting, women loading clothes and tools and only the most needed dishes into wagons and carts, and vanishing into the great expanse of forest west of here. But what about the old, the infants and children, the wives soon to deliver? Others talk of sending riders out, to Pinkerton and Chester and Codwall’s Landing and Fermot, to marshal a resistance. How many fighters would return from other towns? Would they not rather hold them here than face overseas invaders in their own harvest fields?
Would they get here in time?
I drift from house to house, delivering eggs and bottles and written messages, until my errands are done, and still I drift and listen, for no one thinks to curb their tongues near me.
I drift back home and see the lust in Mother’s eyes—if only I could tell her what I see and know and hear. But not even for that knowledge will she bend her iron rule that keeps my lips closed.
I find Darrel in the barn, sharpening the blade of Father’s ancient bayonet. He doesn’t call me Worm today. He doesn’t say a word at all.