The Purchase (11 page)

“Take my arm,” commanded Daniel, and he saw that she was not looking a minute older.

“T
his must be Mister Dickinson with his daughter,” the pastor exclaimed, reaching out for Daniel’s hand. The pastor was tall and pink and nicely rumpled. He was a man who rode the circuit of his parish to preach in a different house or cabin every Sunday. He dropped Daniel’s hand and reached for Ruth’s and shook hers up and down as if she were a child, which she was, and a daughter, which she was not. Daniel let the pastor’s mistake stand uncorrected and began to back away, but the pastor grabbed hold of his sleeve and pulled him into the cabin where anyone who cared to pray – anyone but an Episcopalian – was welcome Sunday mornings. Daniel saw that Ruth should have brought a chair, except that they didn’t own one. He began to perspire. He looked toward the door and shuffled his feet, longing to escape. Unless he left the confines of this one-room cabin, he would be held hostage to scriptural dictates. He looked around nervously, saw that the altar was merely a box laid with a plain white cloth, and began to relax very slightly. The plainness was welcome to him who had been raised in the precinct of a bare Meeting House and who had only during his marriage to Rebecca become accustomed to worship in a place of polished maple beams and a floor of waxed oak. He stood next to Ruth without uncovering his head as the five or six people who were sitting in the cabin stood up bareheaded and began to sing.

The hat drew glances, but it stayed.

After the hymn, the pastor pointed to the narrow door, which was open to the summer breeze. “Here is the door to salvation,” he said with a lilt in his voice, “although each one of you has been found guilty and sentenced to death …” He leaned forward and moved his eyes from face to face. “Guilty,” he said again. “But I tell you now, God may withhold this penalty if you enter here.” The pastor next proclaimed himself a direct descendant of John the Baptist, and Daniel raised his sight to the window where the glass was thick and various and the natural world wavered. He thought of the warm silence of the Lancaster Quaker meeting. He remembered his father dozing in a corner, exhausted after a busy week. He remembered his brother kicking him repetitively in his shins, as if keeping beat to some secret music. He closed his eyes then and bowed his head, and when he clasped his blistered hands together, Ruth believed he must be praying. She had not attended the Friends Meeting House in Brandywine and had no idea how strange this public exhortation was to the man who had married her. “Not so long ago our brothers and sons and fathers were slain in battle,” the pastor reminded his listeners, “so that we can be free! And do we use that sacred freedom to serve one another, as Galatians has directed us to do? No, we do not, brothers and sisters. No, we do not.” He paused to wipe his brow, as if the facts he had stated were warming him past comfort. Pastor Dougherty was a small man with childlike hands that he waved as he spoke. His delicacy provided some fascination to his listeners, who were often spellbound by the waving of his hands and the rocking of his frame. Even so, his eyes blazed with religious passion. “We forget that Satan hopes to bring defeat and disgrace upon us. And we forget with zealousnous. Oh yes indeed, temptation is our daily bread, and as Jeremiah says, ‘The heart is deceitful
above all things and beyond cure.’ But if you would struggle against Satan, I tell you now to take him captive. Make him your slave. Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. Instead, you live under the freedom of God’s grace. Yea, brothers and sisters, you have escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare …” The pastor held his arms up and spread them wide and for an instant Daniel thought of rushing into them. He had heard the line intoned here and there since childhood, but hearing it here, among these strangers, he felt slightly faint. “Do you not know,” the pastor went on, “that Satan is the fowler and that you are the slaves of whom you obey, whether of sin that leads to death or of obedience that leads to righteousness? Have you deserved this great land that is opened for us by the blood of our fathers and brothers?” The pastor’s arms fell and he looked again at each of them as Ruth looked at Daniel, whose shoulders were stiffly drawn up. Just then she was thinking that he had come all this way to a Methodist Prayer Meeting and that this, in itself, was remarkable. She was pleased. With Daniel. With herself. They had come out together. She touched the brim of her hat, to see that it was straight.

Outside, the pastor shook Daniel’s hand again, and Ruth slipped away so that Daniel could explain that she was no child but a legal wife. She drifted over to the pastor’s missus and spoke to her, and when Daniel next saw her she was waiting quietly at the wagon, hands clasped at her waist. “We can stop at the pastor’s for a butter churn,” she said with a pleased intake of breath.

“Now then, what have you done, Ruth Boyd?”

The Doughertys lived in a frame house four miles east. From it, the pastor covered a circuit of some fifty miles in the course of a month. He and his wife had given up their cow. “I haven’t
the time these days,” Missus Dougherty had explained to Ruth, “and would be glad to buy butter.” At the kitchen door, she invited the Dickinsons in, but they stood in a kind of supplication until she pointed to a shed where she stored the unused churn. “I could take five pounds on a weekly basis,” she said proudly. “I so often send Mister Dougherty out on his travels with bread for the people who house him on his circuit and of course I like to bake for the church women.”

Daniel went to the shed, which was a jumble of broken tools, barrows, the churn, and a milking stool. He put his head out and asked if they might … and held up the stool while Missus Dougherty nodded vigorously.

“We have only the one cow,” Daniel reminded Ruth as they rode home with the churn rolling noisily in the wagon bed. “Although Tick is a fine Alderney, to be sure.”

“A
fine
Alderney, to be
sure
,” Ruth sniffed because even at the pastor’s house Daniel had not seen fit to clarify her position. Miss Dickinson, she had been called, and again Daniel had not bothered to correct that mistaken impression.

At home Mary had been making a meal of pancakes. She had tried to make burnt sugar syrup and had succeeded well enough that the boys thought the churn must be something to celebrate. The family sat around the outdoor fire on this Sunday afternoon and ate pancakes and felt the sun bright and warm on their faces. Daniel leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs. He was growing accustomed to life on the ground, but he thought of Rebecca’s way of sitting so very straight on a chair and that led him to a memory of her graceful, sliding walk and the way she had handed him his china plate and silver fork the day they met. Then he remembered that it was Luveen who had
brought the plate and wondered why had he changed the truth of it. He must be careful about his memories and keep them pure. He must remember the lurch of pleasure he had felt in his breast, sitting across from Rebecca on her painted chair, and the way his gaze had travelled up her arm from wrist to shoulder and then to blue-eyed face. Their eyes had met and she had winked and all of it had happened in the space of the longest minute of his life. Whether cake or lace had been served, it had been done with a sly, teasing manner that had made him lonely for her before he had left her presence. For weeks after that, he had been in an agony that he had no name for, calling to mind her voice and gestures and a certain weather that seemed to encircle her. He believed that he had courted her diligently, and finally won her hand, having no idea that she had set her cap for him from the start or that her father had never been averse to the union. Daniel, younger than Rebecca by three years, was a second cousin to John Dickinson, who had signed the constitution and helped compose the first amendment. John Dickinson was now president of Pennsylvania and a worthy relation in any case. In terms of the family business, Daniel could be moulded. He would raise the children as living parts of God. But look at them, Daniel thought, sitting around a fire like Red Indians. He thought that if Rebecca were among them, she would be mortified by their sudden lack of station. Eating from their hands. Chewing with mouths open. And they had forgotten to pray. He looked at Ruth in her straw hat. All the way home, she hadn’t spoken to him. Now she was sitting on a log with her legs stuck out in front of her laughing at something Benjamin was saying. He tried to imagine his beautiful wife – his
other
wife – in such a place as this. Sitting on a log … Then he saw the purple ribbon on Ruth’s straw hat blow across her laughing face and felt a pang of surprising desire.

M
ade of cedar staves and bound with smooth brass hoops, the churn was Ruth’s first true possession and she carried it down to the creek and scrubbed it with sand, studying the lid with its hole in the centre and the smooth, round dash with its crossed wood staves. She filled the churn with water, seized the dash, and jolted it up and down, imagining all the gold that was to come. Gold to be turned into nails. Gold for Miss Patch. And a plow. The afternoon was warm and Ruth unbuttoned her dress and patted the creek water on her face and neck. The water was pleasure. The solitude was luxury. Looking around, she pulled the dress over her head, unbuttoned her boots, and took off her woollen stockings. Now, wearing only a shift and bloomers, she left the churn behind on the bank and stepped into the water, which was cold even in summer.

Never having been in a body of water larger than a tub, Ruth moved cautiously, feeling the chill move up her legs and numb them strangely. Under her bare feet the rocks of a thousand years rolled and she slipped and yelped as she lost her footing and went in up to her neck. The water was not very deep and she began to trust it slightly, feet still on the ground and moving upstream. Taking tiny steps, heart racing, feet clinging, she let the water push her back a little, then grabbed at the sand and stones with her toes and moved ahead slowly, hearing the rapids
in the distance, pushing and gliding farther and farther from known safety.

A picture came to her for no reason. The poorhouse. Matron. Such a tall woman she had seemed to Ruth, with furrowed brow and pointing fingers. Yet Ruth had admired her. She bore herself from one place to another with such authority, making everyone around her seem small by contrast. Ruth would never be such a woman, as she had no height, no bravery. She put her mouth in the rushing water to drink and pretended she was a bird. Birds made ferocious melody. She listened, heard a mockingbird, and drank again. What song was he singing? Clouds flitted. Leaves trembled. The water was solid, hard as a wall. She moved along carefully, pushing against the current. It might have sent her shooting back to the beginning of everything except that she clung to the bed of the creek with her toes, amphibious. Holding time, holding place. I will never see Matron again, she thought. There was a pool under the rapids but she could not move against the rush of water to enter it. The rapids were becoming more and more decisive. Using her arms and feet, she tried to push, inch by inch, as if the destination mattered, cresting an underwater mound of rock where the water was speaking its multitudinous language.
Speak out
, she heard as she closed her eyes. The voice was whispery but clear in its meaning. She let her feet and legs float up to the surface outstretched. She lay back and opened her eyes, floating backward, staring at overhanging cottonwoods that doubled and tripled themselves on the water’s surface. One bent branch held a shivering shape that made the leaves dance and Ruth studied that shape with a jangle of nerves almost ecstatic.

Speak out
.

“There was someone in a tree talkin at me from above,” she reported to Daniel when she had floated back to her skirt and
shoes and bodice and cap and apron and dressed by the water’s edge on the marshy bank. “Talkin and I never said a thing.” She’d found Daniel in the company of Simus, looking at the four growing-up pigs.