All the Truth That's in Me (2 page)

XII.

Lookout duty is yours tonight, so your bed will lie cold while you sit in a cabin perched on a hillside miles away and watch the sea. Clouds and storms you’ll see, for the ocean is a restless neighbor, but it is the threat of lights by night and sails by day that takes farmers from their fields and beds. The homelanders will not forget the welcome we gave their first expedition when their ships found our river, and they looked upon our farms with lustful eyes. Long years we’ve braced ourselves for their angry retribution.

I’ll sleep poorly knowing you’re so far down the track and suffering to stay awake.
This is the silent price of vigilance.
At least you’ll have Jip to keep you company.

XIII.

Darrel will have no more of schooling, he said when he came home this afternoon. The new schoolmaster’s tedious, and he’s introducing Latin. What use is Latin? If English is good enough for the Bible, it’s good enough for Darrel. So reasons my brother, the philosopher, and he cracks his slate over the hearth to clinch his argument.

Man of the house, he calls himself! The orator dreams of soldiering. He takes Father’s pistol to train his aim on rabbits. The rabbits need not fear, but Darrel would fear for his own hide if he had any sense.

Father wouldn’t have stood for Darrel leaving school— and Darrel head of his class, no less!—but Father isn’t here anymore, and Mother needs an extra hand at harvesting.

Father wouldn’t have liked to see us earn our living brewing spirits, either.

XIV.

I kneel in the garden to pull the beets. They burst free on the first tug, fat and voluptuous, and my basket soon fills. I shake the beets in clumps and dirt rains down.

Father loved this soil. Mother was the only thing he loved more, and he loved her fiercely. He made this farm fruitful and beautiful. While he lived, few farmers in Roswell Station were as admired.

I feel closest to my father when my arms are caked with good brown earth. And so I stay to help my mother, as he would want me to.

XV.

You were not in search of an ox team when you sought to visit Mr. Johnson. You had a deeper favor to ask.

I heard Maria talking to Eunice Robinson at the well on the green. They all forget that I have ears. Or they don’t care. Maria boasts, but her eyes don’t.
You will marry her at the next full moon.

XVI.

Are you proud to wed the village prize? Satisfied to beat out Leon Cartwright and Jud Mathis?

Do you do this for love, or money? To erase the stain of your father’s fall?
Or to be rid of me?

XVII.

I flee to my rock in the woods, the place where Father and I would go to sing. I watch the sun set, the slim moon rise and fall.

Mother will murder me.
You are to marry.
Night is cold, like the river, who beckons me with her song. I came back from two years with him as if from the grave,

to a new day among the living, and thought myself happy to return. But the night and the cold, the dark and dead feel more like home to me now.

Only the thought of you dispels my darkness. You are the sun in my world, and how can I endure to watch you set into another woman’s arms?

XVIII.

Come morning, I enter the house and Mother slaps me so hard even Darrel pities me.

“You of all people should know better than this,” she says. “After all the sleepless nights you gave me before! You’ve got no proper feelings!”

XIX.

I rake the coop and gather the eggs, milk the cow, and dump the ashes. Water from the stream, and wood from the pile, then I wash up and wheel the cart to town.

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 would 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.