Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (12 page)

“Sam, I wish I believed you were twenty-two.”

“I am. I was twenty-two on the thirty-first of July.”

“Will you swear it?”

I was sure puzzled but I said, “Yes, I swear it.”

“I’d like to stop sitting on my hands. I’ve very tired of sitting on my hands.”

“I though that was just your way.”

“Just lately.”

Had he guessed I was a woman? I took my leg back from pushing his, and slid over to my edge of the seat.

“Have you changed your mind?” he asked.

“What about?”

“About what we have.”

“No.”

He put his hand on my knee.

“Parson!”

“Are you going to pretend that you don’t care for me?”

“Not like that. Not that way. I can’t.”

“Can’t or not, you do, and I do.”

“Oh, no, Parson.”

I leaned so far away from him I started to fall off the seat. He caught me and then kept his arm across my shoulder even after I had my balance back.

“I suppose you think men don’t do this,” he said. “I assure you that men have loved and embraced each other since the beginning of time.”

I knew how he liked to tell whoppers about other lands, but he didn’t have a laughy way this time. I didn’t know what to believe or think or do. I kept remembering Pa’s last warning to me, but would it apply in a case like this? I decided to say no more and hope for the best.

Parson took his arm away and kept to his own side of the seat. I chanced a little look at him. “Ah, Sam,” he said, “be nothing but a good boy. Scatter bastards all the way to Genesee, like a real American.”

He’d never talked like that before, that backwards mean way. He even took a crack at Potiphar with the whip I’d always taken to be just an ornament. Potiphar was so surprised he looked around.

“Parson, don’t be riled,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

“Yes you can. You could help it very easily. You could consider that I might be telling you the truth. This is a common natural thing. Men love each other, Sam.”

“Stop calling me Sam. I’m Sarah.”

Chapter Four

I swear Parson was surprised, even if he did claim not. He stared so before he started laughing, about how you laugh when you drop something on your foot.

“Did you really take me in, for one single minute?” he said. “Didn’t I know? Somehow? Of course I must have. It’s so easy to see.”

I said, “Maybe it’s why you – had feeling?”

“No, no,” he said, like brushing off a skeeter. I was used to having him give a little thought to what I said. And even if I didn’t want him pestering me, it took me down some to think it would be plumb simple for him not to.

I said, “Maybe you won’t want me around now.”

“My dear – girl! Do you think I feel no responsibility towards you after taking you a hundred miles out of your way?”

“Well, don’t worry about that. I don’t regret. It’s just that we might not be easy together, now.”

“I feel completely comfortable. More so than before,” Parson said. It seemed to be true, and I mostly wanted it to be. How could he care for me as a woman when he already had a wife? So we stayed on our way together.

But differences came creeping in, like Parson started helping with the book boxes and he never said another cuss word in my hearing, and I think a little at a time he stopped educating me. I mean, he seemed to stop saying whatever came into his head. There’d be little waits, it seemed to me, while he thought out what it was fitting or useful for a woman to know. He didn’t leave me alone nights if there looked to be a fight coming up.

I thought, well, good and bad’ve come out of this. I liked the extra care and company he gave me, but then I began to see that he wasn’t getting the good of his summer if he didn’t feel free to have a dram and talk wherever he went, whenever he felt like it. I found that it’s worse than lonesome to be with somebody that would rather be someplace else, even when he keeps still about it and acts kind. I found that all the changes were bad. Not one was good.

I’m not faulting Parson nor blaming myself either. I’m just trying to tell how it went. You wouldn’t think just a word could change a whole friendship like that. I didn’t get weak and gal-ish. Nothing happened but a word. But we couldn’t fix it, and I knew I had to leave Parson. I knew he would never ask me to, and that I could take advantage of his kind heart for a long time, but I had my pride and my own life to make.

Summer being over, and Genesee further away than before, I decided I had to stay with him to New-York and work the winter there and hope to get started off early the next spring. I remember steering Potiphar along the Boston Post Road, along the Connecticut shore heading west for New-York, and making the plan while Parson slept. There’d be lots a boy could do in a city like that. Deliver wood, tend horses, carry messages. I didn’t worry I might have to turn to Parson and bother him in his home. I knew I wouldn’t.

I wonder if it was how Potiphar perked up because he knew he was going home, that put it on my mind how my home was off that way too. Every day took us closer, and I got nervous, afraid what I might do, because I was so excited. I said a little of it to Parson, because it was so much on my mind, and he told me a story about a sea captain that had his sailors stuff their ears with wax and tie him to the mast so he could liten to the marimaids without doing what they told him to. They wanted him to run his ship on the rocks.

I said that was it all right, that was just how I felt, just like that captain. “I sure wish you’d tie me to the whipple tree or lock the van door on me or something,” I said. Because I wouldn’t be able to leave home again as ignorant and hopeful as I was the first time, and there was the whole misery of Patience and how she didn’t mean what I did or feel what I did or else she could never’ve said what she did at the end.

I didn’t tell Parson much about Patience. I just said there was somebody there. I lost her for telling Rachel, and I was scared to tell again, even somebody that didn’t know her.

Either Parson didn’t take me serious, or he halfway wanted me to go. Or maybe he thought I’d calm down once we crossed the Hooestennuc and it looked like I’d stay. I thought my throat would break when we crossed that river, but we bedded down for the night the same as always and next morning pushed on.

And just west of Stratford I left Potiphar in charge of himself, because I knew a stop would wake up Parson, and I got my clothes and gear out of the van, and wrote on my slate, “Gone home,” and looked at Parson asleep and felt sad. I went around and stopped Potiphar and weighted his lines with a rock, and gave his fine big round rump a pat.

Parson, as I kind of knew he would be, was looking out the window by then. He rapped so I went around back to the door. He opened it. “I’m going home,” I said.

“So I see. But without goodbye?”

“I just can’t hardly stand goodbyes.”

“How far will you be by dark?”

“All the way, if I step along.”

“I wonder if I should take you.”

“Potiphar wouldn’t stand for that, smelling home like he does. I’ll be just fine.”

“I’ll give you some food at least,” he said.

I waited in the doorway with my back to him, listening to him dig around.

When he came back he roughed my hair and said, “Here’s some dinner. And here’s the number of my house. And here’s something to remember me by.” It was the book he’d been hearing me read from,
Garvey’s Speller and Reader
. It gave me tears in my eyes, but just eyes – not enough to run down.

“I’ll never see your like again,” I said.

He said, “You know, I won’t see your like, either.” I think he just then knew that.

I stuffed his gifts inside my shirt and started back along the road. I needed the river to guide myself home.

Inland from the Sound there’d been hard frosts. The leaves had all turned bright, so pretty they made me sad. The air smelled cidery from windfall apples. I didn’t know where to turn my thoughts to get away from sadness and worry and guilt. Remembering Parson had its drawbacks just then, with parting so new. Thinking ahead to what Pa’d say about me coming back after the corn was cut and shocked, the year’s field work all but done, was bad too. Worst was the thought of Patience, but she’s what I mostly thought of, and the kiss she might give me, or might not. One of my feet knew she’d kiss me, and the other was sick because it knew she wouldn’t. I had no opinion of my own. All I knew was how dry my mouth was.

Chapter Five

I ached to go right straight to Patience, not go home first at all, but I was dirty from the day on the road, and my mouth tasted gluey from worrying and hoping all day, not fit to kiss. I didn’t dare make any more mistakes about Patience. She cared what people thought, and what would people think of a boy-girl that showed up scared and dusty at twilight like the soldier tired of war’s alarms? So I took myself in hand and went home.

The dogs heard me and trotted out meaning business, but then they knew me and started yelping and jumping on me and slobbering all over me and running in circles. Near knocked me down, but they made me feel better. Then out came my folks, not so spry as the dogs but in the same spirit. They hugged me, all that could, and hugged each other when there wasn’t hugging room left on me and called my name and laughed and cried. I was welcome. I had a place, just like Pa’d said.

We went inside. They’d been at supper. Rachel filled a plate for me. I played I didn’t see her take from others to do it. They wanted to give me something, so I couldn’t make a fuss. The food seemed odd, without the extra leaves and things Parson always put in them, just boiled and salted.

I couldn’t get over how small and dark and poor the house was, and how maybe it was up to me to make it better. Maybe I’d have to stay my whole life here, doing my part for them.

Their voices sounded odd. They said mine did. They wanted to hear everything. Who was this Daniel Peel that wrote to them? I talked and talked, because they expected me to. They knew me to be a talker, and I think I still was, but not with them. I mean, not natural like before. Because now I had secrets from them. Like, Pa said, “Did you let on you’re a gal?” and I said – “No.”

“I’m not plain thankful to that man,” Pa said. “Without him you’d’ve been back sooner. I’d’ve never let you go except I figured you’d be right back. Now you think it’s easy on the road. You didn’t learn a thing.”

“I learned to read, Pa. And I can teach you all. Parson gave me a book.”

“Learn to read and you want books,” Pa said. “One more fool thing to want and not get. I won’t have it.” His face was so mulish I quit for then. I was too tired to explain to him that he was perishing in darkness.

I went up to bed. Rachel came too. It was her first chance at me alone. She bundled up against me. I let her. I liked it. I found I didn’t hold it against her anymore, what she’d done. But all the same I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

I didn’t ask for news of Patience, but Rachel gave it anyhow, what she had. “Patience White kept school summer term,” she said. I hid that I was interested, but Rachel’s head was on my heart, which thumped. “When that letter come, from Daniel Peel, I took and showed it to her.”

“Is she who read it to you?”

“No. Pa got somebody in town. Afterwards I took it.”

I didn’t ask how Patience was, was she glad for news of me, was she healthy, was she happy? (Oh, let her not be happy till it’s me that makes me her be!)

Rachel said, “Did you find someone else to care for, on the road?”

“Parson. I care for Parson,” I said.

“But he’s married,” Rachel said.

“I can’t help that,” I said, chokey.

I don’t know why people think I can’t be sly. They think I’m simple like a white plate, but how was that for sly?

That chokiness made Rachel fancy a whole tale, of me caring more and more for Parson but trapped in my lie of being a boy, kept from speaking, suffering so much I finally had to leave him. I just laid there holding her and letting her tell it, and letting my thoughts go to Patience so Rachel would think the thump in my heart was for Parson.