A Deadly Shaker Spring
Read A Deadly Shaker Spring Online
Authors: Deborah Woodworth
AN UNGODLY VISIT
“Great God in Heaven!” Rose said, barely above a whisper.
She had heard the screams of terrified children and had come running. She arrived at the schoolhouse door at the same time as Brother Samuel. They saw Charlotte clutching sobbing children before a room full of swarming rats.
Rose wasn't afraid of rodents, or most small animals in small enough numbers. But rats were not her favorite, and these were far too many. Three scrawny gray rats scurried past and fled outdoors. What looked like at least a dozen more scrambled around the classroom. Their fur was matted and streaked with dirt, their eyes feverish with God knew what diseases. Rose shuddered. She dared not think where they'd come from. A wrinkled and dirty burlap sack lay just inside the inner door, its open end faced toward the classroom . . .
To my father, James R. Woodworth, with love
For their skill and friendship, I am grateful to my writers' group: Mary Logue, Marilyn Bos, Becky Bohan, Peter Hautman, and Tom Rucker. I also want to thank my editor, Patricia Lande Grader, and my agent, Barbara Gislason, for their insight and support. Always and forever, I am grateful to and for my familyâmost especially, Norm.
The North Homage Shaker village, the town and the county of Languor, Kentucky, and all their inhabitants are figments of the author's imagination. The characters live only in this book and represent no one, living or dead. By 1937, the period in which this story is told, no Shaker villages remained in Kentucky or anywhere else outside the northeastern United States. Today one small Shaker community survives, Sabbathday Lake, near Poland Springs, Maine.
Deborah Woodworth
1997
CONTENTS
We buried her this afternoon, my sister, my heart. Mother Ann opened her arms wide to carry her to God, and the angels appeared, crowds of angels, sparkling and chanting. They swooped down to reclaim one of their own. They knew she was pure in her soul, even if the brethren doubted. I watched them today. I saw the smug looks on her sisters' faces, the vengeful gloating. The vipers break their vows with every thought. The brethren are no better, with their secret faces like judgment carved in cold stone. Mother Ann knows the soul of her child. They do not. Especially him. He tried not to show anything, but I could see. He killed her as surely as if he stopped her breath with his own hand
.
S
ISTER
S
ARAH
B
AKER SMOOTHED THE DOG-EARED
paper and skimmed the passage again. Bold handwriting slashed across the page. She'd lost count of how many times she had read it. Creases had already cut into the yellowed paper since Caleb had slipped it to her a few days earlier.
With a tired sigh, Sarah edged her plump body off
her bed. She had done what she'd been instructed to do, even though it took the better part of the night to find the right moment, when everyone was deeply asleep so she wouldn't be missed from her retiring room or caught in the act.
Sarah glanced in the small mirror hanging from a wall peg and straightened her stiff sugar-scoop bonnet over the cap that hid her hair. She didn't bother to primp before her reflection. She knew she wasn't pretty, not the way she remembered her mother looking during those first blissful six years of Sarah's life. She frowned at herself. It was a wonder Caleb had even noticed her.
No time for self-pity right now. Dawn would arrive soon. She had kept the journal page with her during the trying night to remind her of why she had agreed to do what she was doing, but now she needed to return it to its hiding place in the sewing room. Her simply furnished retiring room held no private spaces. She was afraid someone might find the paper, even hidden in her own little-used journal.
Sarah folded the page into quarters, then slid it under the kerchief that crossed over the bodice of her long, loose work dress. She heard it crinkle as she slipped into her long Dorothy cloak. The sound was somehow soothing. Sarah hadn't even asked Caleb where it came from, just some old Shaker journal, that was enough for her. The passage had the ring of truth. It was written by someone who had been there. Someone who knew who had killed her mother.
Sarah slipped through the always unlocked door to the Sisters' Shop. The weak dawn light barely penetrated
the curtains covering the large windows. The ground floor was divided into two rooms opening to a central corridor, which led to a staircase. After breakfast, other sisters would arrive to work in these rooms, if their hands were not needed for kitchen or laundry rotation or for planting. At this early hour it should be empty.
As the nervous knots in Sarah's stomach loosened, exhaustion dragged at her like sacks of flour tied to her ankles. She pulled herself up the staircase, sliding her hand along the smooth oak bannister to propel herself along in the dark. She cried out as she tripped and her shin hit the sharp edge of a step. With a flash of temper, she grabbed her long skirt and yanked it well above her feet. No need to worry, at this hour, about brethren coming along and catching a forbidden glimpse of her legs, and she was tired enough to fall and break one of them.
Sarah reached her personal domain, the sewing room, which occupied the entire top story of the Sisters' Shop. She felt safest in this room, with its piles of soft, finely woven fabric surrounding her like comforting blankets. On the way to her own sewing table, she smoothed her hand over a length of dark blue wool spread out on the cutting table. She sank into her work chair and flipped on her small lamp.
The sewing tables had deep drawers built into their side, rather than their front, so that sewing sisters could open them without bumping their knees or crawling under the pull-out workboard. Sarah dropped to the floor facing the drawers. She pulled out the second drawer, held it on her lap, and drew the journal page from behind her kerchief. The comfort of habit
made her unfold it one more time and begin to read.
A click, like the opening of a door, jerked her head upright. She held her breath and listened. A soft creaking sound reached her, followed by another click. A door opening, then closing again.
Feeling underneath the drawer in her lap, Sarah pried two tacks from the wooden bottom. With shaking hands, she tacked the journal page to the drawer bottom, then shoved the drawer back into its slot. She sat unmoving, alert. No steps creaked. If someone had entered the Sisters' Shop at this early hour, sheâor heâmust have stayed downstairs. It was probably just a sister arriving early for work. Still, it would be best to check. As sewing-room deaconess, she felt a responsibility for the whole building. She picked her way down the familiar staircase, avoiding the areas that squeaked.
She squinted into the open doorway to the weaving room. Old Sister Viola sometimes couldn't sleep, so she would trudge over in the dark to weave or simply to card wool by lamplight. But nay, the looms were still. Silhouetted against the curtains, they looked to Sarah's overheated imagination like those medieval implements of torture she used to scare herself silly by reading about as a kid.
Quashing old memories, she checked the opposite room, where the sisters spun and dyed their wool. Ever since Wilhelm got his brainstorm about going back to the old ways and being self-sufficient, the decades-old spinning wheels had been dragged out of storage one by one, dusted off, and repaired.
Skeins of freshly dyed yarns looped over pegs on a strip of wood which encircled the quiet room. In the
gloom the skeins all looked to be shades of brown, but Sarah knew there were soft yellows and rusts and even some bright colors to please the Shakers' customers in the world. There was no one in that room, either. If her heart ever stopped clattering like a sewing machine, maybe she could still return to her retiring room and catch a short nap before breakfast.
Maybe she could even skip breakfast, if Eldress Rose didn't . . . A floorboard creaked inside the spinning room.
“Who is it? Who is here?” Sarah barely had breath to get the words out. She strained to see into the dim room.
I'm overtired, imagining things
, she thought, steadying herself on the doorjamb. She turned to leave.
The blow struck the back of Sarah's head a split second after she registered a footfall behind her. The impact did not fell her. She twisted toward the source of the attack as black confusion spread its fingers through her brain. She felt no pain. If there was no pain, could it be a dream?
The second blow caught her in the stomach. She called out Caleb's name, or thought she did. All she heard was a buzzing monotone. Whether it came from the room or from inside her own head, she couldn't tell. She couldn't even gasp. Her lungs refused to take in air. In her last moments of awareness, Sarah felt arms fumbling to break her fall to the floor.