“I think perhaps your prayer was heard without me,” Starbuck said modestly.
“A man can never be sure enough, though, can he? And God will soon be deafened with prayers. War does that, so I’m glad we put our word in before the battles start drowning his ears with words. Emily will have enjoyed hearing you pray. She always did like a good prayer. Now I want you to pray over Sally.”
Oh God, Starbuck thought, but this was going too far! “You want me to do what, Mister Truslow?”
“Pray over Sally. She’s been a disappointment to us.” Truslow climbed to his feet and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his hair. He stared at the grave as he went on with his tale. “She’s not like her mother, nor like me. I don’t know what bad wind brought her to us, but she came and I promised Emily as how I’d look after her, and I will. She’s bare fifteen now and going to have a child, you see.”
“Oh.” Starbuck did not know what else to say. Fifteen! That was the same age as his younger sister, Martha, and Starbuck still thought of Martha as a child. At fifteen, Starbuck thought, he had not even known where babies came from, assuming they were issued by the authorities in some secret, fuss-laden ceremony involving women, the church and doctors.
“She says it’s young Decker’s babe, and maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. You tell me Ridley was here last week? That worries me. He’s been sniffing round my Sally like she was on heat and him a dog. I was down the valley last week on business, so who knows where she was?”
Starbuck’s first impulse was to declare that Ridley was engaged to Anna Faulconer, so could not be responsible for Sally Truslow’s pregnancy, but some impulse told him that such a naive protest would be met with a bitter scorn and so, not knowing what else to say, he sensibly said nothing.
“She’s not like her mother,” Truslow spoke on, more to himself than to Starbuck. “There’s a wildness in her, see? Maybe it’s mine, but it weren’t Emily’s. But she says it’s Robert Decker’s babe, so let it be so. And he believes her and says he’ll marry her, so let that be so too.” Truslow stooped and plucked a weed from the grave. “That’s where Sally is now,” he explained to Starbuck, “with the Deckers. She said she couldn’t abide me, but it was her mother’s pain and dying she couldn’t abide. Now she’s pregnant, so she needs to be married with a home of her own, not living on charity. I promised Emily I’d look after Sally, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ll give Sally and her boy this homestead, and they can raise the child here. They won’t want me. Sally and me have never seen eye to eye, so she and young Decker can take this place and be proper together. And that’s what I want you to do, Mister Starbuck. I want you to marry them proper. They’re on their way here now.”
“But I can’t marry them!” Starbuck protested.
“If you can send my Emily’s soul to heaven, you can marry my daughter to Robert Decker.”
Starbuck wondered how in God’s name he was to correct Thomas Truslow’s egregious misunderstanding of both theology and the civil powers. “If she is to be married,” he insisted, “then she must go before a magistrate and—”
“God bears a bigger clout than a magistrate.” Truslow turned and walked away from the grave. “Sally will be married by a man of God, and that’s more important than being wed by some buzzard of a lawyer who just wants his fee.”
“But I’m not ordained!”
“Don’t start that excuse again. You’ll do for me. I’ve heard you, Mister Starbuck, and if God don’t listen to your words then he won’t listen to any man’s. And if my Sally is to be married, then I want her to be properly married by God’s law. I don’t want her roaming again. She’s been wild, but it’s time she was settled down. So you pray over her.”
Starbuck was not at all sure that prayer could stop a girl roaming, but he did not like to say as much to Thomas Truslow. “Why don’t you take her down to the valley? There must be proper ministers there who’ll marry them?”
“The ministers in the valley, mister”—Truslow had turned to stab a finger hard into Starbuck’s chest to emphasize his words—“were too high and goddamned mighty to bury my Emily, so believe me, mister, they are too high and goddamn mighty to wed my daughter to her boy. And are you now trying to tell me that you’re also too good for the likes of us?” His finger rammed one last time into Starbuck’s chest, then stayed there.
“I think it would be a privilege to perform the service for your daughter, sir,” Starbuck said hurriedly.
Sally Truslow and her boy came just after dark. Roper brought them, leading Sally on the horse. She dismounted in front of her father’s porch where a lantern-shielded candle burned. She kept her face low, not daring to look up into her father’s face. She wore a black bonnet and a blue dress. She was slim waisted, not yet showing her pregnancy.
Beside her was a young man with a round and innocent face. He was clean-shaven, indeed he looked as if he could not grow a beard if he tried. He might have been sixteen, but Starbuck guessed he was younger. Robert Decker had sandy coarse hair, trusting blue eyes, and a quick smile, which he struggled to subdue as he nodded a cautious greeting to his future father-in-law. “Mister Truslow,” he said warily.
“Robert Decker,” Truslow said, “you’re to meet Nathaniel Starbuck. He’s a man of God and he’s agreed to marry you and Sally.”
Robert Decker, fidgeting with his round hat that he held in front of him with both hands, nodded cheerfully at Starbuck. “Right pleased to make your acquaintance, mister.”
“Look up, Sally!” Truslow growled.
“I ain’t sure I want to be married.” She whined the protest.
“You’ll do as you’re told to do,” her father growled.
“I want to be church married!” the girl insisted. “Like Laura Taylor was, by a proper preacherman!” Starbuck hardly heard what she said, or even cared what she said, because instead he was gazing at Sally Truslow and wondering why God ordained these mysteries. Why was some country girl, whelped off an adulteress to a hard-bitten man, born to make the very sun seem dim? For Sally Truslow was beautiful. Her eyes were blue as the sky over the Nantucket sea, her face sweet as honey, her lips as full and inviting as a man’s dreams could want. Her hair was a dark brown, streaked with lighter veins and rich in the lantern’s light. “A marriage should be proper,” she complained, “not like jumping over a broomstick.” Leaping a broomstick was the deep country way of wedlock, or the slave’s way of signifying a marriage.
“You planning on raising the child on your own, Sally?” Truslow demanded, “without marrying?”
“You can’t do that, Sally,” Robert Decker said with a pathetic anxiety. “You need a man to work for you, to look after you.”
“Maybe there won’t be any child,” she said petulantly.
Truslow’s hand moved like lightning, slashing hard and open across his daughter’s cheek. The sound of the blow was like a whip cracking. “You kill that baby,” he threatened, “and I’ll take a leather to your skin that will leave your bones like bed slats. You hear me?”
“I won’t do nothing.” She was crying, cringing from the vicious blow. Her face had reddened from the slap, but there was still a cunning belligerence in her eyes.
“You know what I do to a cow that won’t carry its young?” Truslow shouted at her. “I slaughter ’em. You think anyone would care if I put another aborting bitch under the dirt?”
“I ain’t going to do nothing! I told you! I’ll be a good girl!”
“She will, Mister Truslow,” Robert Decker said. “She won’t do anything.”
Roper, impassive, stood behind the couple as Truslow stared hard into Robert Decker’s eyes. “Why do you want to marry her, Robert?”
“I’m real fond of her, Mister Truslow.” He was embarrassed to make the admission, but grinned and looked sideways at Sally. “And it’s my baby. I just know how it is.”
“I’m going to have you married proper,” Truslow looked back to his daughter, “by Mister Starbuck, who knows how
to talk to God, and if you break your vows, Sally, then God will whip your hide till it bleeds dry. God won’t be mocked, girl. You offend him and you’ll end up like your mother, dead before your time and food to worms.”
“I’ll be a good girl,” Sally whined, and she looked straight at Starbuck for the first time, and Starbuck’s breath checked in his throat as he stared back. Once, when Starbuck had been a small child, his Uncle Matthew had taken him to Faneuil Hall to see a demonstration of the electrical force, and Starbuck had held hands in a ring of onlookers as the lecturer fed a current through their linked bodies. He felt then something of what he experienced now, a tingling thrill that momentarily made the rest of the world seem unimportant. Then, as soon as he recognized the excitement, he felt a kind of desperation. This feeling was sin. It was the devil’s work. Surely he must be soul sick? For surely no ordinary, decent man would be so entranced by every girl who had a pretty face? Then, jealously, he wondered whether Thomas Truslow’s suspicions were right and that Ethan Ridley had been this girl’s sweetheart, and Starbuck felt a stab of corrosive jealousy as sharp as a blade, then a fierce anger that Ridley could deceive Washington and Anna Faulconer. “Are you a proper preacherman?” Sally cuffed her nose and asked Starbuck.
“I wouldn’t ask him to wed you otherwise,” her father insisted.
“I was asking him myself,” she said defiantly, keeping her eyes on Starbuck, and he knew she had seen clean into his soul. She was seeing his lust and his weakness, his sinfulness and his fear. Starbuck’s father had often warned him against the powers of women, and Starbuck had thought he had met those powers at their most devilish in Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest, but Dominique had possessed nothing to compare with this girl’s intensity. “And if a girl can’t ask a preacherman who’s marrying her just what kind of a preacherman he is,” Sally insisted, “then what can she ask?” Her voice was low, like her father’s, but where his generated fear, hers suggested something infinitely more dangerous. “So are you a proper preacherman, mister?” she demanded of Starbuck again.
“Yes.” Starbuck told the lie for the sake of Thomas Truslow, and because he dared not let the truth enslave him to this girl.
“I guess we’re all ready, then,” Sally said defiantly. She did not want to be married, but neither did she want to appear browbeaten. “You got a ring for us, Pa?”
The question appeared casual, but Starbuck was immediately aware that it carried a heavy freight of emotion. Truslow stared defiantly at his daughter, the mark of his hand still across her cheek, but she matched his defiance. Robert Decker looked from daughter to father, then back to the daughter and had the sense to keep his mouth shut.
“The ring’s special,” Truslow said.
“You holding it for another woman, is that it?” Sally sneered the question, and for a second Starbuck thought Truslow would hit her again, but instead he pushed a hand into a pocket of his coat and brought out a small leather bag. He untied the drawstrings and took out a scrap of blue cloth, which he unwrapped to reveal a ring. It glinted in the darkness, a ring of silver, etched with some design that Starbuck could not decipher.
“This was your mother’s ring,” Truslow said.
“And Ma always said it should be mine,” Sally insisted.
“I should have buried it with her.” Truslow gazed down at the ring, which was clearly a relic of great power for him, but then, impulsively, as though he knew he would regret the decision, he shoved the ring toward Starbuck. “Say the words,” Truslow snapped.
Roper snatched off his hat while young Decker composed his face into a serious expression. Sally licked her lips and smiled at Starbuck, who looked down at the silver ring laying on the ragged Bible. He saw the ring was engraved with words, but, in the dim light, he could not make them out. My God, he thought, but just what words was he to find for this travesty of a marriage act? This was a worse ordeal than the saw pit.
“Speak up, mister,” Truslow growled.
“God has ordained marriage,” Starbuck heard himself saying as he desperately tried to remember the marriage services he had attended in Boston, “to be an instrument of his love, and an institution in which we can bring our children into this world to be his servants. The commandments of marriage are simple, that you love one another.” He had been looking at Robert Decker as he spoke, and the young man nodded eagerly, as though Starbuck needed the reassurance, and Starbuck felt a terrible sob of pity for this honest fool who was being yoked to a temptress, then he glanced at Sally. “And that you are faithful to each other until death do you part.”
She smiled at Starbuck, and whatever words he had been about to say vanished like mist under a midday sun. He opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, so closed it.
“You hear the man, Sally Truslow?” her father demanded.
“Hell, yes, I ain’t deaf.”
“Take the ring, Robert,” Starbuck ordered, and was amazed at his temerity. He had been taught in seminary that the sacraments were solemn rituals offered to God by special men, the most Godly of men, yet here he was, a sinner, inventing this tawdry service in the flickering light of a moth-haunted lantern under a nascent Virginia moon. “Put your right hand on the Bible,” he told Robert, who lay his work-stained hand on the broken-spined family Bible that Starbuck was still holding. “Say after me,” Starbuck said, and somehow he invented a marriage oath that he administered to each in turn, and afterward he told Robert to put the ring on Sally’s finger, and then he declared them man and wife, and closed his eyes and raised his shut eyelids to the starry heaven. “May the blessing of Almighty God,” Starbuck said, “and his love, and his protection, be with you each, and keep you both from harm from this time on until the world’s ending. We ask it in the name of him who loved us so much that he gave his only son for our redemption. Amen.”
“Amen to that,” Thomas Truslow said, “and amen.”
“Praise be, amen,” Roper spoke from behind the couple.
“Amen and amen.” Robert Decker’s face was suffused with happiness.
“Is that all there is?” Sally Decker asked.
“The rest of your life is all there is,” her father snapped, “and you’ve made a promise to be faithful, and you keep that promise, girl, or you’ll suffer.” He snatched at her left hand and, though Sally tried to shrink back, he dragged her hard toward him. He looked down at the silver ring on her finger. “And you look after that ring, girl.”
Sally said nothing and Starbuck got the impression that by gaining the ring from her father she had won a victory over him, and the victory was far more important to her than the fact of the wedding.
Truslow let her hand go. “You’ll write their names in the Bible?” he asked Starbuck. “To make it proper?”
“Of course,” Starbuck said.
“There’s a table in the house,” Truslow said, “and a pencil in the jar on the mantel. Kick the dog if he troubles you.”
Starbuck carried the lantern and the Bible into the house that comprised one simply furnished room. There was a box bed, a table, a chair, two trunks, a fireplace with a pothook, a bench, a spinning wheel, a meal sifter, a rack of guns, a scythe and a framed portrait of Andrew Jackson. Starbuck sat at the table, opened the Bible and found the family register. He wished he had ink to write the entry, but Thomas Truslow’s pencil would have to suffice. He looked at the names in the register, which stretched back to when the first Truslows had come to the New World in 1710, and saw that someone had written the fact of Emily Truslow’s death on the last filled line of the register, writing her name in ill-formed block capitals and adding Mallory afterward in square brackets in case God did not know who Emily Truslow really was. Above that was the simple record of Sally Emily Truslow’s birth in May 1846, and Starbuck realized the girl was just two days over her fifteenth birthday.
“Sunday, May 26, 1861” he wrote with difficulty, hampered by the pain in his blistered hands. “Sally Truslow to Robert Decker, united in holy mat
rimony.” There was a column where the officiating minister was supposed to write his name. Starbuck hesitated, then put his name there: Nathaniel Joseph Starbuck.
“You ain’t a real preacherman, are you?” Sally had come into the house and challenged him with her stare.
“God makes us what we are, and what God has made me is not for you to question,” Starbuck said as sternly as he could, and felt horribly pompous, but he feared this girl’s effect on him and so retreated into pomposity.
She laughed, knowing he had lied. “You got a real nice voice, I will say that.” She came to the table and looked down at the open Bible. “I can’t read. A man promised to teach me, but he ain’t had time yet.”
Starbuck feared he knew who the man was, and though one part of him did not want confirmation, another part wanted the suspicion given solidity. “Did Ethan Ridley promise you that?” he asked her.
“You know Ethan?” Sally sounded surprised, then she nodded. “Ethan promised he’d teach me to read,” she said, “he promised me a lot, but he hasn’t kept a one of the promises. Not yet, anyways, but there’s still time, isn’t there?”
“Is there?” Starbuck asked. He told himself he was shocked by Ridley’s betrayal of the gentle Anna Faulconer, but he also knew that he was horribly jealous of Ethan Ridley.
“I like Ethan.” Sally was provoking Starbuck now. “He drew my picture. It was real good.”