Authors: Karl Iagnemma
Reverend Stone said nothing. He mounted the steps then glanced back at the waiting buggy. “Are you not unloading your trunks?”
“We’re staying farther up toward the falls. This lodge will do you just fine but it’s a mite characterful for my daughter.”
The minister raised a hand in farewell as the carriage rattled away. He knocked softly at the door; eventually it opened on a man holding a lantern that threw just enough light to shadow his eyes. He led Reverend Stone up a back stairway and pushed open a room door, dipped a rush into the lantern and passed it wordlessly. Reverend Stone said, “Obliged,” and closed the door, tossed his hat on the floor and shucked his jacket and trousers. The rope bed-frame sagged as he crawled beneath the quilt.
Wind rose from the street and howled through the loose window frame, the sound holding a vaguely human quality. As he listened the howl coalesced to a moan, emanating from the room next door. The moan repeated: a sweetly falling note, an aria of loss. He wondered about the nature of the woman’s grief.
For some months after his wife’s death Reverend Stone had found himself contemplating the sorrow of others. Grief, it suddenly seemed, was all around him: in his bedroom, on Newell’s green, in the fallow tobacco fields, each stone and sapling shadowed by loss. He found himself wondering at the depth of other folks’ grief, his thoughts accompanied by startling rushes of affection for his fellow sufferers. It seemed natural that grief should marry folks in shared misery. But instead the minister felt terrifyingly alone.
She had fallen ill on the third Sunday in March: her first coughs echoed through the meetinghouse during his sermon, and he’d shot a quick, irritated glance from the pulpit. That evening at supper the cough slid from her throat down to her lungs, bringing a liquidy rasp and bright, spidery threads of blood. Reverend Stone’s thoughts crumbled at the sight; he was stricken by the memory of his meetinghouse scowl. Ellen’s expression was one of shame, and poorly concealed horror.
He prepared her bedroom as if for a wedding-week stay, a pyramid of songbooks and novels and literary journals beside the bed and a platter of sugared bannock cakes on the side table. Beside the platter lay a wadded handkerchief stained with rust-colored sputum. Reverend Stone pulled a rocker alongside the bed and read Scripture interspersed with Dickens and Irving, unable to look at the handkerchief. The room’s air tasted foul, poisoned. He felt as muddled and removed as a man in a dream.
To distract themselves they compared memories of the first Sunday she’d appeared in Newell, sitting straight-backed in Lemuel Butler’s pew, her lace-collared dress drawing flinty stares from the congregation’s women. Everyone in Newell knew she was a Boston girl, sent to board with her father’s family. The minister’s sermon that morning seemed directed only to her, so often did he glance her way. She recalled that his words had concerned Luke’s description of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, and the vigorous force of temptation in everyday life, and at this they both smiled, Ellen pressing a hand to her lips to keep from raising a laugh.
Temptation. After the service, in the sodden meetinghouse yard, he’d moved among other members of the congregation, avoiding Lemuel Butler’s clan. They stood patiently in the chilly rain, waiting to introduce this young woman, Ellen Butler. She was just nineteen years old, to his forty-two. Finally there was no one left but himself and the Butlers and a pair of stray hogs snuffling along the road edge. When she was presented to Reverend Stone he said, “Next Sunday I may ask you up to the pulpit beside me, so folks won’t have to crane their necks.”
She offered an exasperated grin. “I pray by next Sunday the novelty will have worn thin.”
“You underestimate the regularity of town life.”
“In Boston I was told that wasn’t possible.”
Lemuel Butler introduced himself uneasily into the conversation, commenting on the stoutness of the stray hogs and his fine early crop of sweet corn, a notice in the Springfield
Intelligencer
about a new moral primer available at the print shop, and did the minister recommend this new text or should they remain reading the old to their children? Reverend Stone paused, his thoughts aswirl. He said, “Yes, both.”
What did we know? Reverend Stone wondered now, half asleep. The view from the belfry of faraway thunderheads. The taste of blackberry preserves passed from Ellen’s lips to his own. The words to “The Girl in the Homespun Dress.” He mumbled a scrap of half-remembered lyrics:
Across the slippery river rocks, a blue-eyed girl with auburn locks.
Ellen’s eyes were cornflower blue, her hair an oaky auburn. He closed his eyes, intoxicated by the memory. She wore lilac water on her throat and breastbone. Her nose was marked crosswise by a thin white scar. Her feet canted outward when she walked, giving her a broad, boyish gait. She’d told him during their courtship that it was one of her several mannish qualities.
One morning seven months after the wedding he had awoken to a hail storm’s thrum on the roof, and then she had appeared in the bedroom doorway, nightclothes gathered around her waist, a heaviness about her lips. The light held a rounded, silvery cast, lending her sight an ethereal quality. Her warmth had covered him; then she’d murmured in his ear, “Wake wake wake my dear husband wake.” He’d feigned sleep, savoring the moment. She whispered, “When you awaken I will drain you dry.”
We loved too much, Reverend Stone thought now. Not connubial love, or chaste love: they’d loved urge and sensation and pleasure, beyond the point of modesty. Surely it was sinful to love so much. At crucial moments he’d been reduced to a bare outline of himself, his mind overwhelmed by touch and sight and smell. When he woke the next morning he felt choked with guilt, shocked and embarrassed by the memory of his ardor. As Adam must have felt, the morning after the fall.
Reverend Stone’s mind lingered over the memories, like fingertips drawn to a bruise. Her fierce brow and tugged-down frown at moments of severe pleasure. Her sighing laughter breaking the bedroom’s silence. The pepper-rich smell of her hands, her long fingers. Her patient grin as she watched him shed his trousers.
That last evening he had returned from an errand at the apothecary to find Ellen’s bed empty, her nightclothes crumpled on the floor. She was in the kitchen, dressed in housecoat and bonnet, scrubbing the floor with a soapy rag. He smiled, attempting to mask his surprise. “I figured you were saving your strength for pickling season. You’re yet two weeks early.”
“If I laid there one more moment I would’ve died of tedium.”
He thought to make a joke then held his tongue. He took the rag from her hand and said, “Sit. Leave it for Corletta.”
That night she sat across from him at the supper table, picking at potato and broiled pork while Reverend Stone talked about the creek’s parched state, about a new milliner opening shop in town, about a notice posted for a runaway slave with six toes on each foot. He ate with strained heartiness, clattering his fork against the plate to obscure the sound of Ellen’s shallow breathing. She stood abruptly, a crust of bread in her mouth. She stepped toward the bedroom, then with a look of shocked discomfort sat heavily on the floor.
He laid her on the bed and covered her legs with a quilt. Her jaw had slackened, the skin clinging to her cheekbones like wet cotton draped over rocks. A thread of saliva slid down her chin. She coughed, a ragged jag, and when the worst of it ended he kissed her, his tongue sliding between her cracked lips. She tasted of sour blood. Of death. Reverend Stone’s heart surged with panic. Love is as strong as death—how often had he counseled a member of the congregation with those words? Each occasion, he realized, had been a lie. He hurried to Corletta’s quarters and sent her to fetch Dr. Powell, and when he returned to the bedroom Ellen’s eyes were fixed on the open window.
He stood motionless in the bedroom’s thick silence. A breeze lifted the curtain edges. He found himself holding his breath, then realized he didn’t want to fill his lungs—as though breathing might force time forward, and not breathing might somehow hold it back.
Now Reverend Stone jerked awake to a moan from the room next door. He closed his eyes, grasping after the fading images. Where was Elisha in his memories? The boy had disappeared some three months earlier, but still Ellen had set a plate and knife and fork at supper every night, as if expecting him to rush through the door, his hair smelling of pollen and knuckles creased with dirt. Reverend Stone remembered praying for the boy, his thoughts clouded by anger. He wondered if his son could sense, wherever he was, that his mother was gone. Surely a person could feel such a thing. Surely he didn’t need to be told.
The moan rose again, and with a shiver the minister realized it wasn’t a cry of sadness. It was a man and woman, together. Mumbled voices rose then trailed to a harmony of laughter; then a man’s heavy footsteps crossed the floor. Reverend Stone stiffened toward the sound. A trunk lid thumped shut. A bed frame groaned. The minister’s heart was smothered by tenderness, for these blissful strangers. Go forth in ignorance, he thought. You have my blessing.
He had stepped into trousers and laced his brogans the next morning when he noticed the yellow stains covering the bed quilt. He surveyed the small hotel room: gaps between the scuffed floorboards were packed with clay and pebbles. The ceiling was cratered and split. The window was smeared with greasy handprints, so that the sun’s light held a filmy, liquid cast. Reverend Stone scratched a row of bumps along his wrist, a reminder of the bedbugs in the filthy pallet.
He descended to the parlor to find the hotel’s proprietor reclined on a settee in a soiled linen shirt, reading an almanac. Without looking at Reverend Stone he said, “Ninety cents. Specie, if you please. I apologize for the lack of washing water.”
“Your establishment is filthy.”
The man looked up with an expression of cautious disbelief. He laid the book over a knee. “I aim to clean the rooms regular. It ain’t no one else but me.”
“Then you might consider taking on assistance. Your rooms are filthy. Your patrons are inconsiderate—I was kept awake much of the night by their carryings-on.”
The proprietor stared at Reverend Stone as if probing for a hint of levity. “I can’t always vouch for other folks’ decency. And I can’t afford to turn folks away on account of their inconsideracy—I’d be worse off even than I am, if I did.”
“You should be less concerned with money if it means forfeiting your respectability.”
“I wish respectability filled my stomach. It don’t.”
“That logic might someday cost you dearly.”
The man offered a wan smile. “I’m waiting on the day I can afford to improve my logic. I would like that mightily.”
The door creaked open and a woman in a red pelisse and pink poke bonnet stepped into the parlor, followed by a man in a dusty teamster’s coat. She arched her eyebrows at the proprietor as they passed through the room. Reverend Stone listened to their footsteps rise on the staircase, the man’s mutterings answered by a girlish giggle. With a mortified start the minister realized he was in a house of low repute.
“It’s a hard location for a hotel, what with all the competition. I can’t afford to turn away paying customers. I pray you can sympathize.”
Reverend Stone fumbled ninety cents from his trouser pocket and laid the coins on a lamp stand. He supposed he was a laughable sight: a minister in the parlor of a grimy bordello, complaining about the quality of his night’s sleep. He said, “I will leave you to your reading.”
The proprietor took up the almanac and stared miserably at its pages. “I thank you for that. Have a grand time in Buffalo.”
The
Lake Zephyr
was an elegant side-wheel steamer with a long, low bow and slender smokestack, a wheel-box painted with yellow stars. Faded burgundy streamers wound around its railings. An American flag hung limply from the bowsprit. Reverend Stone purchased a steerage ticket to Detroit via Ashtabula and Cleveland for four dollars, then walked to the pier end, watching herring gulls wheel about the hurricane deck. It was nine o’clock; the steamer would depart at three-fifteen. He felt pleasantly bemused at the prospect of empty hours in a strange city. The
Lake Zephyr,
he noted, smelled faintly of yeast.
He strolled to the frontage road and hired a carriage, told the driver to stop at an apothecary then run a scenic course up to the falls. The buggy jerked forward. At the druggist’s Reverend Stone purchased five tins of medication, then hurried back to the carriage and placed two tablets beneath his tongue and slumped against the cracked leather upholstery. He considered stopping at a meetinghouse to inquire about the Baptists’ progress in Buffalo, then decided he would rather remain ignorant. Shopfronts and drays and merry yellow omnibuses swam before his eyes.
Some time later he noticed a thrum rising around the horses’ hoofbeats. The carriage stopped, and the sound enveloped him like thunder. He stepped from the buggy into a moist breeze and started toward the crowded prospect. He recalled a description of the falls, from a newspaper report of a marriage tour to Buffalo: an infinitude of water, the earth’s purest display of His awesome hand. Reverend Stone quickened his pace. The thrum swelled to a roar.
From the prospect, the falls curved away in a great arc, wisps of spray peeling from the cascade as it sluiced downward, the water the color of an old woman’s hair. Far below, mist billowed over shadowy black rocks. From a distance the water appeared barely to move, like draperies ruffled by a breeze. Reverend Stone leaned out over the wooden railing. On the lower river, a miniature steamer churned toward the falls’ base then vanished into the mist.
He stepped back from the prospect feeling vaguely disappointed. One of creation’s great marvels, he thought, and I’m unhappy it is not greater. He dismissed the notion but a haze of displeasure remained. Beside him, young couples stood arm in arm, grinning at the falls or whispering in each other’s ears or giggling with delight. For a moment Reverend Stone wished he could follow Jonah Crawley’s blithe advice and temper his expectations. It seemed a simple enough route to happiness.