The Immortal American

  ~*~

  It was at least a week before I felt fully aware of my surroundings again. I had been vaguely aware of the day Jonah introduced his new wife, Bethany. I thought she was so beautiful with her light brown skin and pale green blue eyes and long black curly hair, gleaming silver in the candlelight. She was a little younger than I, but not quite as young as Hannah. She didn’t utter a word when she arrived. She didn’t let out any noise for many days, in fact.

  I’d been in a numb stupor since that day in the woods, that day that Jacque left, and since he’d left the rains never ceased. Perhaps the weather was sympathetic to my mood and poured liquid gray down from the iron clouds, as if to say, I know. It hurts.

  I was playing the melancholy piece by Gregerio Allegri, “Miserere.” It was a piece I had been translating into pianoforte since I first heard it. Its intention was as a choral piece. But I never liked to hear my own voice, so for more than five years I had been working from my memory, trying to conduct my fingers to make the sounds of many voices in a solemn hymn for God to grant mercy.

  I paused in my work, sniffing my nose, then jumped in my seat as I saw Mrs. Bethany Jones staring at me beside the pianoforte.

  “He die on you?”

  I blinked, not sure what Mrs. Jones was referring to. Her voice was deep and earthy and rang of her Virginian roots and shook me in its beauty almost as much as her finally talking.

  “The music you make, it’s for a man you loved. He die on you?”

  I opened my mouth, but . . . in a way he had died. He was gone from my life. Gone, like a death. I was disturbed at my depression since Jacque’s leaving. After all, we both knew hurting ourselves was far better than the alternative. I should have been gladdened to have made my selfless decision, proud of myself for such a feat, but I felt more lost and resentful every day.

  “I see it on you. You got a broken heart, girl. You the color of blue.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  Mrs. Jones nodded too. “I knew it. You sad in your heart. My mama, she died when I was six years of age. I still miss her. That made my heart sad, still is when I think upon it.”

  Mrs. Jones scrutinized me with her intense jade and sky blue eyes. She nodded again. “That man you got now, he’s a good one—that Mr. Adams. He could mend your heart, ifn’ ye let him.”

  I held my breath as I thought about Mathew. The constant sting in my eyes grew, and I kept blinking to fight it away. I looked to the ceiling in the tiny lean-to library and music room my father had built to accommodate the pianoforte. Then, finally, with one tear falling I admitted, “I thought my heart would always be broken.”

  Mrs. Jones shook her head. “Nah, it’ll scar you, sure, but you’ll mend. You made of tough stuff, aye?”

  I tilted my head. “I am a Massachusetts woman.” I smiled at my joke, while Mrs. Jones nodded and carefully watched me like one might study the town’s crazies.

  And for the first time in several days, I laughed.