The Language of Paradise: A Novel (50 page)

No one has ever said so, but she doesn’t dispute him. Thank God she’s done one thing right. “Won’t you say hello to Gideon?” she says. “He has good days and bad days, but he was sitting up this morning.”

Sophy thinks she has never seen an expression alter so quickly. That haunted look he used to get when his pain was fresh, just before he went into a rage. She trades glances with Micah. What brought this on? James has surely been informed that Gideon survived the fire. If his spirit is too stingy to rejoice, he should at least be thankful that his sister wasn’t left a widow. She watches as he masters his unruly emotions, roping them in by force of will.

“No . . . not today,” he says. “I’ve hardly been home. I have a hundred things to see to. Cal Toomey’s been stopping by, but you know him, he will only do so much.” He darts a look at Micah. “I suppose you’ll all be coming back to stay. I had better get the rooms ready. Micah will tell you, I’ve let the housekeeping slide since Ma died.”

“If we stay, it will only be until Gideon is stronger and we have a place to go. We’re bound to be a burden on you, with the farm so small.” Micah has told Sophy that James has neglected more than the house—that some months the two of them have barely enough to get by. “I wouldn’t trouble you,” she adds, “but we can’t impose on Mr. Entwhistle any longer.”

“You’re family. Ma would have wanted it.” James sighs, his shoulders already slumping under the weight of them. “We will all do our part, and trust God to provide.”

He does not say, I’ll be glad of your company, or, The farm will always be your home, or, The place is too big for Micah and me, or, I’ll get to know my nephew better. He says none of these things, and their absence hangs heavy in the air. Sophy is torn between longing for the James she knew and anger at this sorry replacement, who sits like a lump of matter, twirling his hat in his hands, measuring the minutes until he can be alone with his misery. Micah is accurate: No joy.

“I think we should s-stay for a f-few days w-while you v-visit with James. W-we’ll go together. It’s time James got on with his life!” This last delivered in a rush, cutting into the silence with the force of a commandment.

Even James is startled. He blinks, an aperture in his stoical mask. “You’d leave home?”

“It’s n-not home anymore. You’re b-better off without me.”

“But Micah, where would we go?” Sophy asks. “How would we manage with the baby? With Gideon?”

“We won’t f-find out if we don’t start.”

CHAPTER 40

____

DASH

S
OPHY WILL LOOK BACK ON THIS TIME AS A SINGLE STROKE
separating the two parts of her life, but in truth, she leaves the old life in stages. Her brothers are stops along the road.

They stay a week with James: long enough to say a proper good-bye, not so long that he gets used to them. He has kept to his word and prepared a room for them, a refuge from encroaching squalor. Once Gideon is made comfortable there, James has little to do with him, spending most of his time in the fields with Micah. Gideon seems content to rest quietly and take his meals on a tray. He is still weak, unready for the strains of company. Sophy can’t rid herself of the feeling that he is half in another world, not wholly returned from his journey.

She passes the days cleaning as she has never cleaned, assailing floors and cobwebbed corners in a fury, punishing the blackened kitchen hearth and chastising the kettle that Mama used to shine every day. She never says a word to James, though each piece of furniture she polishes is a rebuke. Papa’s chair, how could you? Mama’s carved sideboard that she cherished. The clock has stopped. She wipes the glass on both sides and gently dusts the face, respecting the flowers she painted under duress, the gloomy Scripture that Papa chose. The innards she leaves to Micah, who should have set them right before.

James seems confounded by her efforts. He walks from room to room with a stunned air, as if cleanliness were a conjurer’s trick, accomplished with a wand instead of hours of patient labor. Sophy would like to believe he takes a message from it, but she can’t be sure. His eyes shift away whenever she looks at him. Aleph is the only one who warrants a full glance. James stares and stares at his nephew, and as he looks, his face loses its aspect of inward brooding and becomes open and clear.

Micah has been working at James’s side, keeping a farmhand’s hours, sunup to sundown. At supper on the fifth day, he asks James if he will lend them the coach fare to Lowell to visit with Sam and his family. The three of them are sitting at one end of the long table: the raveled remnant of Tribe Hedge. In the silence that follows, Sophy hears the ghostly clamor of family dinners past.

“O-only a l-l-loan,” Micah says. “P-p-payyou . . .” He leaves it there, ragged, a page torn in two.

James wipes his mouth. “Take Mercy and the wagon,” he says, as if he were offering the salt. “She isn’t much good to me, not worth the oats I feed her, but she’ll get you as far as Lowell. If I’m going to invest in a new horse, I might as well have a new buggy too.”

ON THE MORNING
of their departure, Gideon asks Sophy to bring him to the study. There is a throb of life in his voice, and such pleading in his eyes that she counts it worth the risk. He hasn’t walked any distance since the fire. It is a beautiful October day, the sky a brilliant blue, the trees in their glory. A year ago, on a day that could be a twin of this one, Gideon had put his arms around her in the glasshouse and they had shared a moment of perfect happiness, thinking of the child to come. As she helps him dress, it strikes her that he’s coming back to the world like a babe, new and naked, every stitch he puts on borrowed from James and the parson. He stands slowly, and she drapes his arm over her shoulders and clasps him around the back. Thin as he is, she has to lock her feet to the floor to keep from buckling under his weight. Papa’s crutches are long gone, but she wishes for them now.

Once, the journey across the side yard took two minutes door-to-door. When Gideon was too long at his books, she used to imagine taking a flying leap, landing on the windowsill near his desk and flapping her arms like an obstreperous crow. Now they hobble along like a pair of ancients, and with each shambling step he leans on her more heavily. She struggles to turn the key in the rusty lock.

Not a soul has been here since they left. Unlike the house, the study is orderly, everything in its place, preserved under a thick coat of dust. The atmosphere closes around them: paper and paste and moldering leather, the vapor that old books breathe out. Amber air, thick and somnolent, the past trapped in it. The books that Gideon left behind are stacked on Papa’s three-sided desk, his chair at an angle as if a weary scholar had just risen to stretch his legs. Off to the side, the table where Gideon labored on the Hebrew Lexicon in the days when he was Papa’s amanuensis. The woodstove where she brewed tea and warmed leftovers snatched from the pantry: make-believe mother of their pretend family. The mat in front of the stove, where she and Gideon made love. Made Aleph. Their whole history is in this room, and for a moment it seems no time has passed.

Gideon feels it too. The dust makes him cough, but he stands straighter, relieving her of some of his weight, his young self flowing back into him. She leads him to Papa’s chair. He sits with a deep sigh, as if he’s finally come home, and rests both hands on the desk. Sophy stands behind him, as she has so often before, gazing at the back of his head. His hair is as bright as the day she first saw him; gold, they say, is purified in fire. Where he is traveling she can’t follow, but she knows she must let him go.

THE HORSE IS NOT
as decrepit as James let on. She pulls them and their worldly goods along at a brisk trot and they arrive at Sam’s before supper. The two older girls answer the door, and greet them with squeals and hugs. Alice and Annie have sprouted up—improved with age, Sophy thinks; Alice has a pert profile and a glint in her eye that reminds her of Sam-That-Was. His present incarnation is fatter than ever, but welcoming in his way. He is a man who takes what life sends him, and if it happens to be three family members with a wailing infant, homeless and in need of basic necessities, so much the better.

As he leads them to the kitchen, Sophy realizes that they have left one chaos for another. The house is as cluttered and unkempt as it was during her last visit, but this disorder is, at least, the result of an excess of life. They find Lucy scraping potatoes, more or less, tossing them into the pot striped with peel as little Edith tugs at her skirts. She puts the knife aside to greet them, unruffled, maybe even relieved to see her old helper. Sophy remembers, belatedly, that on this visit there will be no escaping to the attic. No sooner does she surrender Aleph to be kissed than she is on duty, separating the toddler from the knife, diverting the child’s attention from the bubbling pot.

Lucy’s girth has also increased. “We are in danger of becoming a matriarchy,” Sam says, without resentment.

Aleph is the great attraction. Boys are a novelty in this house. The girls cluster around while she changes his diaper, giggling and pointing. “Look at his dear little handle!” Annie says. And then, as if this appendage endowed him with precocity, “Does he talk?” Aleph fixes his dark eyes on Sophy. She knows he is overwhelmed by all the changes, lost in this new world that is too much to learn. It will be all right, she tells him in their silent language.

By the time supper is finished, it’s apparent that it won’t be. Gideon could hardly eat for coughing; he is tense and exhausted, worn-out from the road. By parceling out the girls between the parental bedroom and a tiny spare room, Sam and Lucy manage to clear a space for the three of them to pass the night. Poor Micah is relegated to a chair and blanket in the parlor. The girls are already whining, fighting over toys and pillows. Nobody is in good humor.

“You ought to go to Reuben’s,” Sam tells her, weary over a pile of bedding. “He’s got more rooms than he knows what to do with, and no one to fill them. He’s as rich as Croesus.”

“How can we? James would take it as a betrayal. He gave me some money before we left.”

James had thrust the roll into her hand as she was saying her good-byes, about to step into the wagon. “For you and Micah,” he said. “Ma saved more than I thought.” He added, with an odd vehemence, meeting her eyes for once, “It’s owed you.” The words were ordinary enough, but she’d puzzled over them all the way to Lowell.

“It’s time he got over that foolishness. What’s past is past,” says Sam, ever the pragmatist. “Reuben is still our brother, even if James disowns him. Besides, if you’re going to make your way in the world, you’ll need all the help you can get.”

Sleepless in the narrow bed with the baby wedged between them, listening to Gideon’s labored breathing, Sophy recalls what Mr. Brown said about Boston, the day he came to tell Gideon he was no longer wanted at the church. How, in the city, he would be among people who would appreciate him. His own kind.

SOPHY’S FIRST THOUGHT
, upon approaching Reuben’s house on Beacon Street, is that no Hedge was ever meant to live this way. Papa would have scorned such extravagance as sinful; Mama would have clicked her tongue. The brick façade is intimidating enough, cloistered behind a filigreed iron gate. For those who have the temerity to breach this first barrier, stone lions guard the columned entrance. People on the street glance with disapproval at their road-worn horse and wagon, their looks saying plainly, Tradesman’s entrance is around the back. Sophy has girded herself for Caroline and her airs, but a maid in a starched cap and apron answers the door, her manner as crisp as her uniform. They wait in the hall while the Master and Madam are summoned. Yellow light floods the entry, though it is early evening, dusk outside. Sophy clasps Aleph to her; he is her protection from the grand staircase, the dwarfing height of the ceiling. She tries to connect this magnificence with the Reuben she carries in her mind: canny but rough, a sharp country boy. How did he propel himself from horse races at the fairground and card games in smoky taverns to such a state?