The Believer (4 page)

The day her father died was the worst day of Elizabeth Duncan's life. There'd been other bad days. The day they'd moved from the town to this old cabin in the middle of a wilderness of trees. The day four years past when her mother had died of a lung ailment. The day her brother had come home from a trip to town to relay the message from Ralph Melbourne's father that Ralph had married a girl up in Indiana instead of coming back to Kentucky to keep his promise to Elizabeth. Ralph's father wanted her to know she was free to marry another, Payton said. As if she could just turn to the next man in line.

But watching her father pull in one ragged breath after another and then no more was the worst, when the morning before he'd been laughing and talking with no hint of ill health. Elizabeth lifted the oil lamp to cast more light on the bed where he lay and stared at his chest, willing it to rise again. She was alone with her father in the deepest dark of the night. She'd sent Payton off to bed at midnight with no thought that their father might not make the morning light. A thought she'd been unable to imagine, even though she'd been in sickrooms with her mother and seen death come.

Her mother had learned of herbs and root medicines from her mother back in Virginia, and she'd passed that knowledge down to Elizabeth.

"I don't have the healing gift she had,' her mother had told Elizabeth as they walked through the woods in search of the proper roots. "She had an uncanny way of knowing which doses would work best for which symptoms and was much sought in our village back in the old settlement when someone took to their bed with this or that complaint. We had no doctor in the village:"

Her mother pointed out a plant of ginseng, and Elizabeth dug its root while her mother leaned against a tree and wheezed as she tried to pull in enough breath to continue on toward their cabin.

Elizabeth put the root in the sack tied to her waist and stood up. "Back in Springfield before we moved here into the woods, people came to you for your potions:"

Elizabeth's mother smiled a little sadly. "But now I cannot even heal myself."

"Perhaps the medicine in these roots will be stronger." Elizabeth lifted the sack of roots with dirt still clinging to them.

"Perhaps it will," her mother said as she touched Elizabeth's hair. A deep cough racked her body, and she spit into her handkerchief folding it quickly to hide the tinge of red, but Elizabeth saw it.

The medicine in the roots had not been stronger. Her mother had died before she saw another spring. And now Elizabeth's father lay on the bed in front of her under the last quilt her mother had pieced, and his chest did not rise.

"Father. Don't leave us, Father." Elizabeth spoke softly. She knew he had already gone beyond the sound of her voice, but she wasn't ready to accept it. She set down the lamp and made herself stand to go to him. She dreaded touching his body and feeling the heat of life leaving him. At the same time she wanted to grab hold of him and push her own body heat into him to keep him there with them.

She turned back the quilt to lay her ear on his chest as she sent up a wordless prayer. The Lord had brought the widow's son back to life and Lazarus after three days. She'd read those truths in the Bible many times. Perhaps he would yet breathe life back into her father. But of course, he did not. Death was not so easily cheated in this day and time.

"Oh my father, what will we do without you?" Tears flooded her eyes and she did not try to stop them. Here in the darkest hour of the night, the darkest moment of her twenty years was the time for tears. Come the sunrise, then she would of necessity push aside the tears.

She thought of waking Payton and Hannah, but what would be the use? Best to let them sleep. Payton would take it hardest. Since he first started toddling across the floor some fifteen years ago, he had followed after their father as oft as he could. As for Hannah, well, who knew what that wild child might do? Probably run off to one of her secret places in the woods.

Since their mother had died when Hannah was four, the woods had been her mother, her friend. Sometimes when Elizabeth went to seek her among the trees, she would find her high in an oak peering down at Elizabeth. Other times she would be dug back into a hole under a rocky ledge.

"You are not a wild animal, Hannah;' Elizabeth would admonish her. "You are a girl"

"But can I not be both?" Hannah had asked on one of those occasions. "Are we not animals, and am I not a girl?"

"We are human;' Elizabeth said. "Not animals:"

"But humans are animals. Father said so. He read to me from one of his books that we are mammals like the horse and the dog or the fox and the squirrel"

Their father told Elizabeth not to worry about Hannah. That she would surely outgrow her wildness. That lacking a mother had opened a window in her mind that not many flew through. He had sounded almost proud. Easy enough for him. He was not the one who had to comb her hair and make her wash her face and teach her to read and do her figures. There was no school anywhere nearby.

Now Elizabeth would have to be mother and father. She would have to see that there was food on the table, wood in the fireplace, fodder for the cow. They did not even own the cabin they slept in. After her mother's death, her father had lost all interest in any kind of commerce. In Springfield, he had hung out a shingle as a lawyer, but no one would walk a half day into the woods to seek legal help. So they had learned to subsist off the land, growing some vegetables and eating the fish her father and Payton pulled out of the Chaplin River that ran past their cabin down the bluff. She traded roots for their few store-bought necessities.

The roof over their head was the charity of Colton Linley who lived in a big house a few miles away. He had delusions that someday Elizabeth would join him in that house. His first wife had died in childbirth, taking the child to heaven with her. His second wife had run back to Virginia after only three months of marriage.

Elizabeth had not known either wife. That had all happened before they moved into his cabin. Colton surely could have married again. He owned land, seemed well-to-do if one could judge by a man's clothes and his horse. Whenever he came to see her father, his brown hair was slicked down with pomade and his shirt pressed. Not exactly a dandy, but a man well aware of his position in life. And if she made herself look at him with an unbiased eye, she had to admit he wasn't really bad looking in spite of a nose that was long and narrow. Or perhaps it wasn't the shape of his nose she found offensive, but the way Colton's flint gray eyes peered down it at others as if the Lord had formed the world for his sole benefit. Even so, he could have captured a third wife with ease.

But if he had courted a woman since his second wife had left him, Elizabeth had no knowledge of it. She wished he had. She wished he had a wife. Instead it chilled her heart whenever she heard him tell her father he was waiting for the right woman-a strong woman in body and spirit who could carry a child without having the vapors. He sometimes added, "A woman like your Elizabeth promises to be"

He was nearly as old as her father, but it wasn't his age that made Elizabeth avoid his very eye on her. It was those eyes and the way they sized her up as nothing more than a piece of property. How strong was her back? How broad her hips to carry his child? He looked at her as if he already owned her and it was only a matter of time before she had to satisfy the payment. She never noted the first hint of tenderness in his eyes.

The year before, after Ralph had gone to Indiana and not returned for her, her father had asked if there could be any chance Elizabeth would ever look upon Colton favorably.

"Colton has land and a fine house,' her father had said. "I realize he is old for you, but you would never want for anything."

"Naught but love," Elizabeth answered. She had been building a fire in the cookstove to ready their breakfast, and she dropped the stove lid back in place with a clang before she looked over at her father who was filling the coffeepot. "Colton has no love in his heart for me. He wants to own me. I know not why, but I do know I could not bear his touch on me:" She couldn't suppress a shiver at the thought of it.

"Why is he so repulsive to you?" Her father set the coffeepot on the stove before turning to Elizabeth with a slight frown as he tried to understand her aversion to Colton. "He seems decent enough. He lets us stay on here in his cabin without much in return except a few hours' labor now and again. He always says I can pay him later. The man has simply had bad luck with the women in his life'

"Perhaps for a reason" Elizabeth's heart seemed afraid to beat inside her chest as she stared at her father. "Please, I beg of you, don't ask me to encourage his attentions"

"Worry not, my daughter. I would never ask you to marry for any reason other than love:" When he reached over to touch her cheek with tenderness, Elizabeth's heart had started beating normally again. "I want you to know love as your mother and I did'

Her father had understood. He had promised to find a way to pay for the cabin, to keep Colton at arm's length. But now her father was gone. Dead in one day. She'd thought to send Payton after the doctor at first light. Even the cholera didn't take its victims so quickly. Two days, three, but not overnight.

Her father feared it was the cholera when he took sick. He'd been to Springfield where in the summer so many had sickened and died from the dreaded illness, but they'd heard of no cholera deaths for weeks. Still, he had vomited until blood mixed with the bile in the basin she held for him.

If it was the cholera, she might not have to worry about what the next weeks would bring. They might all die in the week to come. Cholera oft swept through a family with no pity.

"You're not dead yet," Elizabeth whispered to herself. When she touched her father's cheek, the lifeblood had left it already. She pulled the quilt up over his face and went back to sit in the chair by the bed to wait for the morning light. A person couldn't just sit and wait for the death angel to come for her. She would have to do something. Plan a way to continue to live. She and Payton and Hannah.

"Please, dear God, show me another way besides Colton Linley." She listened intently as if she expected a spoken reply. There was none. Only the dreadful silence of her father's still body under the quilt.

At first light she built up the fire in the woodstove and fetched water from the spring to heat in order to prepare her father's body for burial. She had to wake Payton to help her, because her father was too heavy for her to lift and turn on her own.

Tears streamed down Payton's face as he looked down on their father's body. "Why didn't you wake me so I could tell him goodbye?"

"I'm sorry, but I had no warning. He just stopped breathing.

"Then it was an easy passing:"

She saw no purpose in telling Payton about the terrible heaving and ragged breathing. "He did not linger in pain"

"Was it the cholera?" A touch of fear widened the boy's brown eyes that were so like their father's. Their mother used to laugh about how Elizabeth's father and Payton were the pretty ones in the family. They both had long lashes around their deep brown eyes and wavy dark hair falling over their foreheads. Elizabeth looked like her mother, straight brown hair, a no-nonsense square jaw, and green eyes flecked with gold.

Elizabeth met Payton's eyes without wavering and told the truth. "I don't know." Sometimes the truth was all she had.

Hannah came creeping into the room. When she saw their father's body, she shuddered, but she didn't cry. Hannah was not like anyone else in the family. Her almost-white hair sprang out in wild curls around her face, and her eyes were such a light shade of blue that sometimes they looked almost transparent. Elizabeth's mother had called Hannah her fairy child and said that if the midwife hadn't handed her the babe straight from her womb, she wouldn't have believed she was hers. She looked that much different. A throwback to an ancestor no one recalled now.

"He's dead," Hannah said. "Like Mother." Her voice was flat, devoid of feeling. "I don't want him to be dead"

"Nor do I." Elizabeth reached to hug Hannah, but the child backed away.

"You let him die:" Hannah's voice was practically a scream now.

"Death needs no permission to enter a house:" Elizabeth grabbed Hannah by the shoulders, but the girl jerked loose and ran out the front door.

When Elizabeth started after her, Payton put a hand on her arm to stop her. "Let her go. She'll be sorry for her words and come back to you for comfort later. But it could be that now the only way she can bear it is to run from the truth:"

"If only we could:" Elizabeth blinked back tears as she turned from the door back to the job at hand.

"Don't we need a box for him?"

"We have no way to buy one:"

"Colton might help us"

"No:" The word came out harsher than she intended. She pulled in a deep breath and held it a minute before she let it out. "I don't want to be beholden to Colton. Not more than we already are"

"I can make one. I'm good with wood:' Payton's eyes went to the wooden dough board he had whittled for her in the summer.