The Blessed (13 page)

The clock in the front room bonged out the hour. Ten strikes. She didn’t have time for woolgathering, but she didn’t bend back to her work at once. Instead she looked from the church roof down to the graveyard. The sun was bouncing off the headstones. Markers testifying to lives lived and lost. What marker would there be to show her time here? Would the echo of her footsteps on the stairs up to the attic room haunt the next people who lived here? Would her foolish dreams of someday knowing true love stay captured in the mirror where she’d watched her face go from a child to a woman? No need mourning those dreams now. They’d died the day she’d stood in that preacher’s parlor in the town and let them think she said “I do.”

She could see Miss Mona’s headstone. She wanted to just forget the packing chores and walk over there to see if Miss Mona might speak some wisdom out of the grave to her. Lacey stepped out on the porch where she could see the grave better. The yellow dandelion blooms had all turned to fluffs of white. Thousands of seeds waiting for the breeze to carry them away. Not caring where, but ready to take root and bloom wherever they found themselves next spring. Maybe that was Miss Mona’s wisdom to her. To be ready to take root and bloom no matter where the winds of life were blowing her.

Rachel came out the back door to lean against Lacey. “Can I dig my worms up out in the garden and take them with us?”

Lacey smiled down at her. “No, they wouldn’t want to leave their home dirt.”

“We don’t want to leave either.” Rachel looked up at Lacey. “Do we?”

“Think of it as an adventure. Something new.” Lacey kept the smile on her face and the worry out of her voice.

“Like in a Maddie story?” Rachel looked hopeful. “She has adventures.”

“She does.”

Rachel’s hopeful look faded. She stared down at her bare feet and worked her toes against the wooden porch. “I’m not as brave as Maddie.”

Lacey stooped down to look directly in Rachel’s face. “Neither am I, but we’ll be brave enough.”

“Will you help me be brave, Lacey? The way you did when Mama died?”

“I will. And the Lord will help us both. Your mama always said we could count on that.” Lacey touched Rachel’s cheek. “Another thing you can count on is that there’ll be worms in the gardens at the Shakers’ town. I’ve even heard tell that they have worms that make silk. Can you imagine that?”

Back in the house Lacey took the rose-patterned plates out of the packing crate and set them up on the kitchen shelf. Miss Sadie Rose would find them. It didn’t take long to pack up the rest of the kitchen things.

After she fed Rachel a slice of bread and honey at noon and the preacher finally ate his cold eggs, she sent Rachel out to the garden to tell her worms goodbye. Preacher Palmer went out to the horse shed and left Lacey alone in the house. She was looking through Miss Mona’s books when a man spoke behind her.

“You might as well leave those here. The Shakers don’t have any use for storybooks. They’ll let you keep the Bible maybe. Nothing else.”

13

When the young woman on the floor visibly jumped, Isaac wished his words back. He hadn’t meant to startle her. Or discourage her. From the look on her face as she jerked around to stare up at him, he’d done both.

Her wide brown eyes studied him with no hint of shyness. She was very pretty. He felt a flash of guilt for noting that, as if the thought made him unfaithful to his beautiful Ella with her light blue eyes and china-doll pale skin. This girl had no fear of the sun. The scattering of freckles across her nose was proof of that. She was sitting on a bright rag rug with her faded yellow skirt hiked up to reveal bare feet and a generous portion of leg. A fact she seemed totally unaware of, since she made no attempt to yank her skirt down to regain her modesty. Books lay all around her on the floor. Some in stacks. Some open so the words could spill out to her eyes. Isaac hadn’t seen that many books just tossed about since he’d left home after his father died.

His father had liked books. Carried one with him everywhere he went in case he had a quiet moment. When he was reading, no matter where that was, he would read snippets out loud to whoever was close by, as if the words were such a treasure they had to be shared. Isaac always watched his father’s face to decide if he should embrace the beauty of the words or chuckle at their cleverness.

At the McElroys’, books other than the Bible were considered a waste of time and money. Then at Ella’s house, books abounded again, but mostly law volumes lined up in handsome rows on the judge’s library shelves with no expectation of anybody other than the judge pulling them off. Ella’s thin volumes of poetry and weepy romance tales were stashed neatly away on a shelf in the morning room.

Isaac spotted a few of the same titles in the girl’s books in front of him. None of the stories of frontiers conquered that had fed Isaac’s imagination and led him down the sorry path that had caused so much grief. Perhaps it was better to read only the Bible as Mrs. McElroy had insisted and now the Shakers were telling him. The Bible and the teachings of their Mother Ann that would help him abide by the many Shaker rules.

He was surely breaking some of those rules now as he stood above the girl near enough to touch if he reached toward her. Definitely a sin in the eyes of the Shakers who kept men and women forever at a distance for fear that even the incidental brush against a sister’s arm in passing on the stairs might plunge a brother into sin.

He supposed a proper Shaker novitiate would turn and go back out to the porch to wait as Brother Verne had told him to do. But instead he stayed where he was and waited for the young woman to say something. Since he’d had no way of knowing anyone was in the house when he stepped inside to find a drink of water, being near the young woman wasn’t an intended breach of the rules. Intended or not, he would have to confess his disobedience of not staying on the porch. Obedience was highly regarded among the Shakers. Especially by Brother Verne.

It wasn’t that Isaac didn’t want to keep the Shaker rules. In the time he’d been at Harmony Hill, he had surrendered his will in a dedicated attempt to live as they instructed. He no longer allowed himself to dream of the West and the adventures that had once beckoned him. He had destroyed enough people already with those foolish dreams. He had learned to kneel on his right knee first at the many prayer times. He had conditioned himself to begin every climb up the stairs with his right foot and to keep in mind the proper door for the brothers to enter the buildings. He rose without complaint at the sound of the rising bell and worked diligently at whatever task they set him to. He filled his stomach with the Shakers’ good food and thought it only right to expend his muscle power in payment. He even dutifully listened to their sermons and practiced their dances and confessed enough sins to satisfy Elder Homer. But he wasn’t a Shaker. Not the way Marian was.

The week before, he had talked with Marian in what the Shakers called a Union meeting. Six sisters across from six brothers in the brothers’ room, sitting in the plain straight chairs made by the brothers. The rows of chairs were placed far enough apart that there was no danger of the brothers and sisters touching. The sisters had shed their aprons but wore their caps and the wide white collars over their bosoms. Marian was the youngest among them, but in spite of the bloom of youth on her cheeks, she too looked plain as if that was part of the uniform costume. Beauty of the spirit was to be desired. Outward beauty meant nothing. Or so Brother Verne had told him more than once.

She was well satisfied with her life there, Marian assured Isaac before adding that she hoped he too would find the same satisfaction in time. After the other women nodded their approval of Marian’s words, they moved on to talk of the week’s planting and how the strawberries were beginning to ripen and who had received the gifts of the spirit. Some young sister at the Children’s House had claimed to be visited by angels and had neglected her chores to frolic in the meadow with these heavenly visitors, but none of the sisters or brothers seemed upset about that or to doubt the truth of the young sister’s vision.

Isaac said little. What was there for him to say? The questions he might have liked to put to Marian were not for the ears of any sister or brother other than his birth sister, and especially not for Brother Verne to hear. The man had a way of sifting and measuring each and every word out of Isaac’s mouth for signs of worldliness and improper thought.

Brother Verne would be sure to condemn him for speaking to the young woman in front of him instead of slipping unnoticed back out to the porch. He could have. With her head bent, she’d been totally absorbed in her books as she stroked their covers and opened one to run her finger across a line or two inside. He watched her a moment before he spoke, imagining his own hands holding those books, his own eyes receiving the gift of their words.

But it wasn’t only the books that held his eyes. The girl had too, even before he spoke and she looked up at him. She looked so vulnerable with her hair falling forward to reveal the delicate skin on her neck. He wanted to help her even before he knew what help she might need.

That didn’t mean he had forgotten Ella. It had only been six months since she died. Six years could pass and he wouldn’t forget her. Every night when he lay down on the narrow Shaker cot, he fought off sleep long enough to bring Ella’s face up in front of his eyes. While he had left her body in the cold grave on the Louisville hillside, he would never desert her memory. No matter how much time went by. Atonement demanded as much from him. He could never look at another woman in the same way he had looked at Ella.

And yet something about the girl sitting there on the floor staring up at him with sparkling brown eyes made him want to smile at her and see her smile back. He wanted to sit down beside her in the middle of the books and forget the Shakers. Forget everything and go back to a time before guilt weighed down his shoulders. A time when he could take joy in made-up stories.

“I can’t take any of them?” she asked. There was no rebellion in her voice, only disbelief.

“Could be I’m wrong,” Isaac said. Not because he believed he was, but because he didn’t want to be the reason for her unhappiness. “Maybe you should ask your father.”

“My father?” She looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your father. The preacher. Maybe Brother Forrest has told him what you can bring or not bring.”

She laughed. She seemed as surprised by the sound as he was. She put her hand over her mouth to smother the laugh, but still it worked its way out between her fingers. It wasn’t a good laugh. Not the kind that cleared sorrow and cheered a person. And then with no pause between, she had her hands over her face, and a sob choked out the laughter. She was better at stopping the tears than the laughter. The one sob was all that escaped her as she rubbed her hands across her eyes and down over her face before picking up the book again.

She closed the book with a snap before laying it on top of one of the piles. He thought to offer her a hand to help her up, but she was already on her feet before he reached out to her. She was nearly a head shorter than he was, but with a sturdy strength in the set of her shoulders. Again nothing like Ella, whose shoulders had curved forward almost begging for an arm around her to support and hold her. To protect her from the dangers of life. This woman looked capable and ready to knock such dangers aside on her own.

It was a look he admired and then as quickly felt shame, as if he was betraying Ella’s memory with the comparison. He shouldn’t be making such comparisons. This woman was nothing to him. He didn’t even know her name. Ella was everything.

“Are you one of them?” the woman asked. “I guess that’s a silly question when it’s clear as day you are. Dressed how you are.”

“I live with the Shakers,” Isaac admitted.

“You don’t say that like you’re all that sure you want to.” She looked down at the books scattered across the floor and didn’t wait for him to answer. “But then plenty of us have to do things we aren’t all that sure we want to. Our feet can get set on some strange roads in this life.” She glanced up at him with a little frown of worry. “None of the books? Do they not believe in books?”

“They believe in their own books. The ones that teach you about the Believers and Mother Ann. Not storybooks.”

She let out a sigh and dropped her head as though his words were blows. “How can they not like storybooks? They dance when they worship.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he kept quiet.

She looked up again. “Do you dance with them?”

“Sometimes. If I’ve learned the dance well enough not to take a wrong step and mess up the union of the dancers.”

“A wrong step. I’ve taken plenty of those. And I’m thinking I’m about to take another one.” She breathed out another sigh before she straightened her shoulders. “But I shouldn’t be burdening your ears with my sorrows.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You’re being polite. Something I fear I’m neglecting.” She smoothed down her apron and pushed a little smile out on her face. “I’m Lacey Bishop.” The smile wavered a little, but she didn’t let it disappear. “Lacey Palmer now. The preacher and me, we got married six weeks ago today.”

“The preacher? The one outside?” Isaac thought of the older man who had come out of the shed to speak to Brother Forrest. The man had to be more than twice as old as the girl in front of him.

She laughed again. A short sound that held little humor. “The very one. No storybook romances around here.” She looked down at the books. “Even in the Bible there are storybook romances. Did you know that? Jacob working fourteen years for Rachel. Ruth and Boaz. Of course he was older than her or at least I always imagine that to be so when I think on the story of her out gleaning the grain, but then again she was a widow. At least I’m not that. A widow. The preacher is. Not a widow, but a widower.”

With color rising in his cheeks, Isaac tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t make what he’d already said worse. He should have stayed on the porch. “I’m sorry,” he finally stammered.

“Me too,” she said as she reached down to pick up a Bible from among the books. “Very sorry.”

He had the feeling she thought he was expressing sympathy for the preacher’s loss and not for his careless words, but he didn’t know how to change that.

She looked up at him then and noticed his flush. She pushed out her lower lip and blew air up across her face to ruffle the stray strands of hair falling down on her forehead. “I’ve embarrassed you with all my talking. And about things you being a Shaker would rather not hear. Talk of marriage and such. I can’t see how I’ll make much of a Shaker.”

“I was married.”

“Married before you went to the Shakers but not now?”

“I wouldn’t be at the Shakers if I was still married. My wife died.”

“Oh.” She studied his face. “Now I’m the one who’s sorry. I can see you’re still sorrowful. The preacher is too in his way. For sure I’m thinking he’s sorry we got married. That’s how come your Shaker talk fell on such willing ears.”

“Your ears weren’t so willing?”

“Willing in some ways. Not so willing in others.” She didn’t wait for him to respond to that. “Do you like it there? With the Shakers?”

“There’s plentiful food.”

“You have to work for it though, don’t you?”

“You don’t look afraid of work.”

“That’s true enough.”

“But you’re not sure you want to go.” Isaac didn’t make it a question. Her reluctance was plain to see. He’d seen the same look on Ella’s face when he’d told her they were going west. So now he said the words to this woman that he should have said to Ella. “If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”

“A married woman has to do what her husband says.”

“You won’t be married among the Shakers,” Isaac said.

She frowned again. “How can all those men and women be together and none of them think on marrying?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She didn’t expect an answer. “It’s a puzzle for sure.”

“Romantic love is forbidden.” Isaac wasn’t sure why he said that. Again it would have been better to stay silent.