I think of our talk in the barn. All those years, and I was the girl on your mind? I suppose it’s best that I never knew. Only a few days ago, any sign from you would have melted me. I have surprised myself tonight.
I think of your parting words. What was it you wanted to tell me?
XLI.
The next morning I wake well before dawn. I dress, and go out to tend to Phantom, Io, and the chickens. Io moos at me. She’s still asleep and not ready for my attentions yet.
So instead I take the pail to the stream and dip it into the dark water to refill their trough. I have only turned back toward the house when I hear Jip bark and look up to see your shadow approaching through the predawn dark.
I set my bucket down.
“It’s only me, Judith,” you call out softly.
“I know.”
You stand before me, and I wait for you to tell me why
you’ve come. I know I have been wise to pull my heart back from you, but when you stand so close to me, you do not make it easy.
“You’re up early,” I say, to make conversation. You remove your hat and crush the brim in both hands. “I hoped I’d find you. I needed to tell you something.”
I wait and watch. The palest light begins to appear in the eastern sky. You have trouble starting. You seem torn by indecision.
“A group of men from the village are organizing an expedition,” you say at last. “They’ll leave in a few days to go find my father’s ‘lair.’” Your voice is bitter. “They hope to find the rest of the arsenal, and . . .” Your eyes have closed. “. . . and evidence that he was responsible for your captivity and Lottie Pratt’s death.”
I leave my bucket where it sits and begin to walk. I don’t know what else to do. You turn and follow. My skirts swish through tall, dry grass.
“I wanted to warn you,” you say. “Who knows if they’ll find his home, or what they’ll find if they do?”
His home. If they find his cabin, they’ll take it from me. They may destroy it. But whether they do or not, it will no longer be a hidden sanctuary. As for what they might find, I can’t think of anything besides some pans and utensils and clothes, and whatever remains of the arsenal’s stores.
I press on toward the woods.
Without my cabin to flee to in the spring, what remains for me?
The rising sun gives enough light for me to find my singing rock in the clearing. I sit down upon it. It is bitterly cold against my legs.
So I will live out my days with my mother and Darrel. There is nowhere else I can go. We three belong together. Our lives have left each of us ruined for anyone else.
You stand and watch my face with concern written across yours.
I comprehend your worry, besides my own. “Don’t worry,” I say. “There’s nothing there that would accuse him.”
And now I have told you.
You nod your head and press your lips together. Yes. Now you know. But you already did.
XLII.
You sit down beside me on the rock. It is so very cold on us both. We huddle together, our arms pressing against each other, for some bit of warmth.“I volunteered to join them,” you say, “but they refused me. They think I’d steer them astray. As if I knew where my father was all this time! If I had, I’d have . . .” Gone to him? Tried to persuade him to come back home? Your face is so close to mine that my eyes can’t focus on all of you, only your moving lips.
“I tried to find him. Lord knows I did, dozens of times.”
This is a new thought for me. I picture you, the lean youth as I remember you then, searching the forest for your father. “After he disappearedh?”
“No. After you disappeared.”
It makes no sense. I look up in confusion. I can feel the warmth of your breath reaching through this frigid wind.
“When he went away, I believed he was dead. When Lottie disappeared, I began to wonder. When you did, I began to search.”
I think of the nights I dreamed of you rescuing me, and I wonder how close you came. Near misses are our lot.
My teeth start to chatter. You shift your weight, and before I realize what is happening, I am tucked in closer to your side, and your arm is now wrapped behind me. Your cheek rests on the crown of my head.
I should object, but you are warm. And we have known each other for a long time.
“Forgive me, Judith.” I can feel your words more than hear them. “I’ve been a fool.”
My cap slides backward off my head. You pull it away and toss it onto your own abandoned hat. You take my face in both your hands, cradling my head and gazing into my eyes. I look for doubt in you, and find none. Nor do I find protest within me.
You rest your forehead against mine. Then you kiss the crown of my head. Your mouth is buried inside my hair.
“Give me one more try,” I hear you say. “Let me hear your voice, Ladybird. Always.”
Tears fill my eyes and begin to drip into my lap. I am a child, digging you worms, watching you fish. I am a girl on the verge of growing up, dreaming of holding your hand. I am a young lady, taken away and maimed in more than my mouth. I am a grown young woman, cursed and cast aside, watching you walk beyond my reach forever.
And now I am here, past the end of hope, on a cold rock hearing you tell me—what is it that you are trying to tell me?
Through my tears you have gathered me into your arms and onto your lap. You are wrapped around me, pressed against me, once again, in these woods, this time awake. The weight of your arms around me could almost be enough for me.
What were all those years? Were they wasted desire?
I must say this. “I have loved you too long, Lucass.”
You kiss my cheek, my temple, my chin.
“Too long?” you say. “No such thing.”
I pull back and look at you. “What?”
“No such thing as too long,” you say. You’re smiling into my face, looking into my eyes. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen you this happy. Not since you were very young.
“It’s new as morning, for me, waking up to find I’ve been loving you for years.”
I want to protest impossibility; I can’t let myself believe you. But I can. A certainty envelops me. I can believe you.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t exact a price from you. I struggle to disentangle myself from your embrace and give you a stern look. “You have a fine way of shhowing it.”
You laugh and tighten your hold.
“Did you know I used to watch you sing on this very rock with your father?” you say. “You must have seen me.”
I sit up taller. “Never!”
You point to a large elm some distance away. “I’d hide over there and listen. I’ll bet I spied on you dozens of times.”
I look at the tree and wonder at it. How could I never have seen? I shake my head. “Oddh of you.”
You raise your eyebrows. I smile. Yes, I am a fine one to call you odd for spying.
“Can you love me just a little longer, Judith?” you ask. “Long enough for me to speak to your mother?”
The thought of Mother startles me back into my skin, in the cold morning air.
“May I ask her permission to call on you?”
To call on me. I picture us sitting stiffly at Mother’s table, and laugh out loud.
I pull away again to see your face. There, once more, I see your promise enfolding me, your offered heart, so longed for, and so new. Is this what love looks like? And do you really want to come courting me? This is real, and I know it, so why now do I cry?
“She won’t believe you.”
You smile. “Leave that to me.”
You’re laughing. You’re covering me with kisses. Your arms are crushing me close to you. My tears drip all over your jacket. You stand up and twirl me around in a circle until I order you to put me down.
The sun is up now, and the autumn woods are bright with eastern light on melting frost. Morning shadows of skeletal tree limbs stretch across
your face.
You take both my hands in yours. “My father took you away from me once. I will never let him do it again.”
It’s terribly cold, even in the sunlight. My nose is turning numb. I reach for you and pull your head close to mine. I kiss your mouth. I feel your intake of breath as you receive my kiss, and return it.
I feel no more cold. Only this. Only you.
When it ends, I bury my face in your neck, and feel your arms wrap tighter around me. How can I let go?
“Don’t worry about the menh,” I whisper into your ear. “I doubt they’ll find your father’s cabin. If they do, there’s nothing there to harm you.”
You’re not as convinced.
“Tell me how to find it, so I can go first and make sure?”
There seems little harm in that. “Phanttom could take you,” I say. “She knows the trail.” I describe the path and the blind crevice that leads to the colonel’s valley.
“I’ll go today,” you say. “After I take you to school. Don’t tell anyone.”
It is your turn to kiss me now, and this time, I don’t need to hide afterward. You smile.
“Look after Jip for me? I’ll tie him in the barn.”
XLIII.
Somehow you leave me and head for home, so that you can arrive later in the morning with your mule cart, just as I’m leading Phantom out of the barn on a rope. We can take her to your stable on our way to school. It is impossible to be calm and pretend this morning never happened. Only years of being mute keep me from saying something stupid.
Jip squirms on the seat board beside you, flicking his tail in your face. Darrel climbs into the back. You jump down from the cart and tether Phantom to the back of it, then climb in and off we go. In no time, we’re at your home. I wait in the cart while you lead Phantom into your barn.
“Phanttom will be happy, I think,” I tell Darrel as if he’d been worried.
“If you say so,” Darrel says with a shrug.
You climb back into the cart with a spring that sets it bouncing, and we set off. For the rest of the ride to town, you and Darrel keep up a running conversation about school, the weather, the season’s hunting. I wonder if Darrel suspects anything. I wave in passing to Goody Pruett, whom we overtake on our way to town. She declines your offer of a ride. “Goody Pruett still has legs that can carry her, thank you kindly.”
Saints preserve us from her prying eyes! What does she know? Nothing would surprise me from Goody.
I wish you weren’t leaving today.
You must have read my thoughts, for you say, “I’m sorry I won’t be able to pick you up after school today.”
“No matter,” I say. “Roads are clear enough.”
In the center of town, alongside the square where the school and church stand, an assembly of men stands. Reverend Frye, dressed in clerical garb, stands atop the platform, addressing them.
They turn like a wall of accusing eyes to watch us as we come. Me, the mute girl who was taken and returned, and you, the son of the dragon. Together in a cart. Suspicion is written plainly on Abijah Pratt’s whiskered face. I look to you and see your mouth set in a hard line, a vein throbbing in your neck.
XLIV.
An unendurable school morning, and not, this time, because of anything Rupert Gillis does. The blonde Robinson girls sitting beside me are taking lessons in kindness from their mother. I slip into my seat and hear a squelch, and smell something like cider. They’ve found an oozing, rotten apple and brought it to share with me. I feel the wetness soak through the seat of my skirt. For the rest of the day I smell foul, and the other students don’t hide their laughter. Never mind, I tell myself. I am used to this. I can bear it. I can bear anything today. Their cruelty can’t touch me. Besides, I am well into the fourth section of my primer. Darrel is back at the head of his class after less than a week of lessons. These are the reasons we come.
I realize that I never told you about the man outside my house. No matter, I think. I’ll tell you when you return tonight.
At the end of the day, the schoolmaster calls all the fifthlevel students to the front of the room to be tested on their spelling words. This time I have memorized the spellings, so I bring my slate with me to write my words down and show that I know them. But he orders me to put my slate back. When I won’t spell harridan aloud, Rupert Gillis brings his ruler whistling down repeatedly upon my hand, and says, before the whole class, “I’ve told you before that if you wish to remain a student in my class, you must come to me for extra tutoring to catch up. I can’t leave you here to drag the rest of your class down. Come for tutoring this evening, or I shall be forced to speak to your mother.”
Now he propositions me publicly.
XLV.
After school I take Darrel’s elbow and lead him toward the street. I can’t bear Rupert Gillis leering at us out the window and enjoying our abandonment. A walk this long will be hard on Darrel. It will surely aggravate the bruises that his crutch has already stamped on his tender armpit. But we have to get home, and perhaps this will toughen him. We stop to rest many times along the way. When we arrive home from school, Darrel heaves himself into a chair and massages his underarm.
Goody Pruett is there, sharing a cup of bark coffee with Mother.
“Come to meeting, Eliza,” she tells my mother. “If your boy is well enough to go t’school, he’s well enough to come to meeting, and you alongside him. Goody Pruett’s warning you, they’ll slap a sentence on you if you don’t. Goody’s got ears. She hears what goes around.”
Mother’s face is grim, but she nods her head. The last thing she needs is an hour in the pillory for failing to go to church. She doesn’t need any more public humiliation than I’ve already caused her.
I head outdoors to the barn to say hello to Person. That is, Io. I imagine she misses Phantom, but in truth I’m the one who’s bereft. On my way, I think of Darrel’s words to me on the slow walk home.
“Why are you still coming to school, Judy?”
I didn’t answer right away.
“I know Hettie Robinson left that apple there.”
I shrugged.
“And I see how Gillis treats you. If I had my foot back, I’d give him a lesson. In manners.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Get your learning while you canh.”
Darrel paused to shift his weight off his crutch for a few seconds’ rest.
“I will,” he said, charging forward again. “For as long as I have to. But you don’t have to keep going for my sake. If Lucas will keep driving me, you don’t need to go.”
“I wantt to learn,” I reminded him.
He gave me a sly look, his freckled imp’s face smiling like it once did more often.
“Don’t see why it matters so much now,” he said, poking me with his crutch. “What does a housewife need with reading?”
And he took off hop-stepping before I could wallop him.
XLVI.
All afternoon I fret and pace, worrying about you, until even Mother remarks upon it. She says aloud, repeatedly, what a relief it is to have that horse and its big mouth gone. I wonder what she’d say if she could find another place to stable me. At last I can’t bear it and I go outside. I gather fallen limbs from the woods to replenish the woodpile. The heavy snow brought down plenty of branches. After half an hour of hauling, I’ve rebuilt the pile well, and I let my gathering take me in the direction of your house. Jip and your mule and sheep need tending.
I linger there as long as I dare, in hopes you may return tonight. But at length, the cold and the falling dark chase me home. Perhaps you intend to stay the night at your father’s cabin. I fear that’s unwise, though. Your absence could attract attention.
XLVII.
Back home I open the door and see Rupert Gillis seated at our table, nursing a cup of ale and trying to engage Darrel in conversation. Mother ignores him, of course, and goes about her supper chores. It’s too late for me to pretend I didn’t see him. I go in. Mother’s
expression changes. “Ah! Daughter,” Mother says. Darrel and I both look at her strangely. “Just in from your chores. What a hard worker you are.”
Still in my coat, I sink into a chair, utterly bewildered. “Come, Darrel,” Mother says. “It’s time you took a bit of exercise outdoors. Let me help you to the barn. There’s something there I would show you.”
Darrel protests but Mother drowns him out and propels him toward the door. He meets my gaze.
Don’t leave me!
He has no choice.
The door shuts behind them.
“A tender and beautiful thing, is a mother’s love for her daughter,” Gillis says.
I refuse to look at him.
“Her love makes her hope against all reason that I might become your suitor.”
Suitor indeed.
The silence stretches out like cold molasses.
The schoolmaster moves his chair so he sits directly in front of me. I look at my lap.
“But I imagine you have hopes of another suitor,” he says. “Hopes that are even more absurd than your mother’s hopes for you.”
He bends low so his jeering face is beneath my own. I close my eyes. “Lucas Whiting would never take you for his own.” He laughs. Then he grows serious. “I would make an honest woman out of you. I always did think silence was a womanly virtue.”
My teeth are clenched. I will not look at him.
“My home is comfortable. You should not let foolish hopes deny you your one chance of respectability.”
He waits for me to reconsider. I rise from my seat and stand by the fire with my back toward him.
His breathing is angry now. He rises from his seat and yanks my arm so that I must face him.
“If you think our war hero would ever settle for a used mute, you are a fool.”
His words sting, and my eyes grow wet. Please, dim light, hide me, let me yield nothing to this fiend.
“Not that it matters now. The war hero is soon to fall.” I open my eyes.