I Shall Be Near to You (6 page)

Jeremiah smiled and ducked to take the buckets. He pushed the jug back under the pump and then I stared after him walking, the weight of the buckets on his arms tilting him like a wind-crooked tree. He didn’t look back even once, and when he disappeared over the hill I was still standing at the well forgetting to even pump.

I
T HARDLY SEEMS
worth building a fire and setting breakfast oats to boil when there is only me to eat them. The rest of the day stretches out before me and there ain’t a thing in it that seems pressing with Jeremiah gone. But I know this feeling, I have seen it before with Mama, and the only thing for it is to keep moving.

The sun is full up when those first chores are done and breakfast eaten. I am drying the last dish when footsteps come loud across the front porch and then there is knocking. Maybe it is Jeremiah coming back to say good-bye like he should have, but when I fling open the door of course it is Jeremiah’s Ma calling, a basket in her arms, the cold rosy across her cheeks.

‘I came to see how you were faring,’ she says.

‘Come in,’ I say, even though she ain’t the company I want. ‘I’ve just been laying out plans for my day.’

‘Oh? And what are those?’ She moves past me to the middle of the kitchen, taking measure of the house I keep.

I say the first thing that comes to my mind. ‘Thought I might start making soap.’

‘Good. At least you keep a tidy house.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I try.’

‘I brought along some mending, needs doing,’ she says, and sets down her basket. Inside are chambray shirts and trousers and woolen socks.

‘I can do that,’ I say, even though there is nothing I hate more.

She gives me a pointed look and then acts like I ain’t said one word. ‘The men discussed it and Mr. Wakefield thought you might be of help with the sugaring.’

‘I’d like that better than mending,’ I say, thinking of being outside, tapping the maple trees and collecting the syrup. ‘I can drill taps—you only need tell me where the tools are kept—’

Jeremiah’s Ma frowns. ‘That’s work for James and Jesse. The mending needs doing. And it’s the sugarhouse tending you’d be best suited for, since you don’t have anyone else to mind.’

She wants me indoors, is what, sewing or else working over the sugarhouse stove, boiling sap down, keeping all hours. She is reminding me of Alice and Sarah with their homes full of children to watch and husbands to feed. All I have is an empty house and it ain’t enough.

‘I can tap the trees easy. I’d like doing it.’

Her mouth goes tight. ‘You’d do better to remember you’ve come up in the world and do what you’re asked.’

T
HE MENDING AIN
’
T
much. Split seams. A hem come undone. Socks rubbed threadbare at the heel. From the kitchen window the trees’ empty branches sway in the wind, and I try to prove myself with my smallest stitches. But I get tired of hearing my own breathing and the pull of thread through fabric.

Out on the porch, the weak sun feels nice, but that ain’t where I want to stay. I am down the steps and into the fallow cornfield, heading for the woodlot. I pass the tin-roofed sugarhouse, moving along the creek, walking where Jeremiah must’ve gone when he left, seeing things the way he saw them. Trees send out new tips to their branches, and ice crusts the banks of the creek. I tuck the hem of my skirt up in the waistband of my apron to keep it from dragging in the mud.

I am watching my boots mash their prints into the slushy mud, not paying any mind to where I am going, when a voice says, ‘Rosetta Edwards. You’re a ways from home yet, ain’t you?’

‘That ain’t my name no more,’ I say, my heart pounding to see Eli Snyder in the middle of the path.

I kick myself for walking this far when I’ve got other things to be doing. By avoiding one hurt, I have just brought myself a different kind of trouble.

‘That’s right. You’re a married woman now. What are you doing here then, Mrs. Wakefield?’

‘Going visiting,’ I say, and square my shoulders, meeting his look dead-on.

‘Your think your new family is going to get your Papa those water rights? That’s why you got married now, after hanging on Jeremiah all this time, ain’t it? And everybody knows Jeremiah only married you to get the bigger enlisting bounty.’

Eli steps closer, his hand stretching out, reaching for my skirt. I think how the boss mare in a herd don’t wait to kick, and I aim for his man parts. He catches my leg, twisting and shoving until I fall back into the slush. Then he bends over me as I scrabble backward, my feet slipping in the mud. He is panting now but he keeps coming. I can’t get my feet under me to stand and he lurches forward, pinning me and snatching my hem. My shriek is so loud I can’t hear my gathered skirt seam pulling free of the bodice, but I can feel the ripping fabric.

Jeremiah’s voice says,
You’ve got to punch hard and not get punched
. I ball up my right hand, thinking of weak spots. Eli’s hand clamps my leg. The other grabs my left wrist, pushing it into the ground, digging each one of his fingers and every rock into my wrist. His fingers scratch and claw at my thigh, but I aim for his nose like Jeremiah taught me, hearing him say,
When you punch, you’ve got to move
, and then I smash my fist into Eli’s face.

Before I even see the blood, I am shoving up off the ground, quick, ready to punch again. Eli rolls away from me in the slush.

‘Don’t you touch me!’ I scream.

Eli keeps his eyes trained on me as he sits up off the ground, blood coming between the fingers of the hand he has clamped over his nose.

‘There’s something wrong with you,’ he says.

‘I ain’t the one who’s wrong,’ I yell. ‘You get away! Unless you want another crack to put downstairs with you.’

‘You know Jeremiah’s Ma won’t take up your part against mine, don’t you? This ain’t over,’ Eli says, and then he stalks off, his shoulders hunched forward, one arm hiding his bleeding nose.

By the time I can fill my lungs proper, Eli is down the path and through the trees. I stand there dumb, using what’s left of my skirt to wipe my nose. My knees shake and my hands and wrists and thigh burn. Right before Eli disappears, he turns back to look at me, making my teeth go to chattering.

W
ALKING UP THE
steps to my dark Little House, I start feeling shaky again, like somehow Eli could be here waiting for me, or maybe he has already made up some story about me and how his nose came to be bloody, but it is just as quiet inside as when I left. Safe in the bedroom, I get myself fixed up right and get hold of myself because my insides go to warbling again and no one can know a thing. I pluck my other dress out of the chest and a scrap of paper flutters to the ground.
I miss you already
, it says. And then I start crying.

E
VEN AFTER
I
wash myself and put on a fresh dress, my thoughts won’t quiet. I sit to mend my dress. I am fine. I am strong. Eli won’t bother me again. But everything would be better if Jeremiah was with me and none of this would have happened if he’d stayed. Only maybe that ain’t true.

But Eli ain’t the whole of it. Even Jeremiah himself, writing that letter, has been dreaming on how I might make something different of myself, how I might be a good wife.

I drag the woodpile ax back into our bedroom, leaning it against the wall. Laying there on our bed is Jeremiah’s work shirt where I left it, the map unfolded beside it. And then like a hornets’ nest in the hot dust that you almost don’t see until it’s too late, but once you have, you can’t not see it for the buzzing in and out of the crack in the dirt crust, the idea of it just comes to me.

CHAPTER
5

WAKEFIELD FARM: FEBRUARY 1862

I take the sturdy shears out from the bottom of my hope chest. I carry them through the hall to the kitchen hearth and I don’t stop to think; I sit in front of that woodstove, still throwing out heat from the morning’s cooking, and plait my hair into one thick braid hanging down my back. Then I push those shears to the base of my braid and force down, using both hands to make those scissors saw my hair bit by bit, cutting it all off. It falls to the floor with a heavy thump, a light brown snake coiled behind me.

I stare at it there and Betsy’s voice is in my head saying,
‘Why you got such pretty hair? All wasted on someone who don’t care none about it?’

Then I feel Jeremiah running his fingers through my hair, but I’ve got to stop that. I snatch that braid up, the top thick and splayed, the bottom curled to a tip, and fling it into the cinders. It almost chokes out the fire, but I breathe on it and use fresh kindling from the box to poke it down until the flames lick at the braid, filling the room with its awful smell.

In our bedroom, there’s a pair of Jeremiah’s old trousers, ones he’s got
the hems frayed and worn down on. I step into them, trying not to look at Eli’s fingerprints pressed into my thigh, turning up the legs to fit. I fold my apron and my mended dress and the petticoat and lay them in my chest, where they will be waiting when we come back. Those sheets Betsy worked at hemming so carefully tear easily into long strips. When I have rolled up all the strips but one, I hold it against my bosom with one hand, getting it under my arm and then wrapping it tight around myself. It’s hard at first but I keep pulling it tight and then it’s working. I cover myself with Jeremiah’s old shirt and roll the sleeves before getting Jeremiah’s straw hat from the hook by the door. In the looking glass that used to be Mama’s I make my face look like stone, with tight lips and my jaw pushed out. I tip the mirror down to see the shirt and trousers, how they fit loose enough to hide everything. I could do it so easy, earn a soldier’s pay instead of just a nurse’s or a laundress’s and stay with Jeremiah for as long as this war drags on.

He will be happy to see me, his face lighting up like our wedding day, all the more handsome in his uniform. He will tell me he is sorry for going like he did, that he never should have done it, how it was the boys that made him leave, that he was wrong to tell me I couldn’t come along.

Only maybe it won’t be like that. Once Jeremiah blacked Henry’s eye after school, all because Henry whispered ‘son of a whore’ after Jeremiah’s name at roll call and the whole class snickered. Jeremiah simmered for hours, the heat of his anger enough that Henry broke for the outhouse as soon as Miss Riggs’ bell tinkled.

I ain’t ever made Jeremiah mad like that. We ain’t ever argued for real. Not even once.

But I have to do it now, I have to go, because I can’t show my face to Jeremiah’s Ma with my hair like this. Jeremiah won’t care that it don’t look good, it won’t matter with a cap on, covering it. Plenty of people don’t have nice hair.

Back in my own clothes, I sit myself down to work, staying up past the moon’s rising, making neat hems on Jeremiah’s old trousers and cutting down the sleeves on two of his shirts.

I wake at dawn, my neck cricked, still sitting in the chair by the fire, the last of the hemming just a few stitches from finished.

In the kitchen I dig for a burlap sack. There is hardly a thing for me to pack. The map. Jeremiah’s letter. Flannel rags for my woman’s time, extra socks, a wool blanket rolled up tight, two boiled eggs, two thick slices of bread, and some side meat, all wrapped in cheesecloth. I wind a scarf around my neck and tug Jeremiah’s hat down over what’s left of my hair. I am just about to go through the door, when I remember the mending for Jeremiah’s Ma. I scratch out a note saying
Gone Visiting
and leave that with the basket on the porch. Then I lift my sack and sling the canteen across my chest and walk out under the gray sky, bracing myself for what is a day’s hard ride on horseback. I look back once at the Little House, a thin trail of smoke still drifting up from the stovepipe. I think on Papa and Mama and Betsy reading every night around the fire. Words from Preacher Bowers’ sermon come back to me, about Adam and Eve being cast out in sorrow. Only I don’t feel sad to be leaving when that place ain’t my home no more, and without Jeremiah, this place ain’t my home neither.

CHAPTER
6

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, NEW YORK: FEBRUARY 1862

I don’t even make it to the church before I start thinking on the first casualty list Preacher posted on the door, back when the little boys, Tommy O’Malley, Phin Cameron, and John Lewis, were still lining up to march back and forth with Lars Nilsson yelling orders. Back before those little boys’ mamas made them quit playing soldier on Sundays.

The only good thing about that list was how it made Jeremiah get around to making things official, him coming to Papa, his hat in his hands, saying, ‘Good morning, Sir,’ and then his eyes flicking toward mine before adding, ‘I was coming to ask permission to walk Rosetta home, Sir.’

All those weeks he walked me home from school, he ain’t never asked permission.

I wish I were walking down Carlisle Road like that now, with Jeremiah crooking his elbow like he is a fine gentleman and I am a lady, feeling the heat coming off him through his cotton shirt, my steps matching his. Leaving Jeremiah’s Ma standing straight in her lace collar, her two daughters-in-law and Mrs. Snyder beside her, prying after us.

Back then the first thing he said was, ‘You look real nice in that dress,’ and when I told him, ‘It’s the same dress I always wear to church,’ he pushed me with his elbow, laughing as I staggered sideways.

‘Maybe you always look nice,’ he said.

I wonder if he’ll think that now.

At the old oak, where the path veers off from the road, I can almost see Jeremiah shuffling down the slope to the creek before me, down into the ferns, and holding out his hand, smiling at me with his head cocked to one side like it is a question or a test. I took his hand that day and ain’t ever felt anything so nice, even when our hands got to sweating.

Down by the creek, Jeremiah’s look made me get to feeling nervous, like there was something different between us, the way the air changes before a storm.