The Language of Paradise: A Novel (16 page)

“What is it, then? Please tell me.”

She directs her answer to the window. “How can we talk of family when we don’t belong to each other? Not in any way that matters outside this room.” Impossible for her to speak such brash truths and meet his eyes. It’s easier to sketch swirling arabesques and figure eights on the flawless white, to skim the surface like a skater, never sinking in. “You make me feel I’m part of some grand plan, but I don’t know what we’re to be. I don’t know what we
are
.”

Gideon breathes in sharply, but seconds pass before any words come, and when they do, he surrenders them as haltingly as Micah. “I don’t—we can’t—understand everything now. It’s too soon. We have no resources, and my . . . explorations have just begun. There is a bond between us—that much is certain—and we must trust that more will be revealed when we are ready. Meanwhile, we have our sanctuary.”

“We have it once a week, and Papa will reclaim it soon. Where will we go then?”

“What is the matter with you today?” He spins on his heels, paces a few steps, turns to her again. “You seem to delight in making difficulties. Must you ruin the few hours we have? It isn’t like you, Sophy! You’re always so cheerful.”

His voice breaks on “cheerful,” which is oddly consoling. His reflection in the window is as wraithlike as hers, but the ghost-face reveals how young he appears when discomposed, how temper has quelled the angel in him and brought out the boy. She never thinks of his mother—it still seems an aberration that he had one—but it strikes her now that this is the face his mother must have seen.

“If you looked at me more often, you would know what I’m like,” she says evenly. “All day you lose yourself in your work, and when you finally come back to Micah and me, you don’t see us—only a couple of ideas you haven’t written down yet. I wonder if you’ve ever really seen me at all.”

He doesn’t answer, and in the silence, they fix their attention on the glass. The words she spoke might be written there, the two of them rival scholars competing to decipher the text.

“Sophy.” Gideon is looking at her now. He clasps her face in his hands and draws her toward him. She is surprised how strong his hands are, how persuasive; the rest of her hangs back like a bashful child. “No one has ever seen you as I do,” he whispers. “No one ever will.” As if to seal what he has spoken, he bends and kisses the top of her head.

Days later, when she has an hour to call her own, she will wonder whether the awkwardness of his gesture might have made her bold. His lips planted, like an uncle’s, where her hair parts: an arid strip where nothing can grow. Whether she might have done as her mother prompted her and lifted her face to his, kissed him on the mouth. She will never know because the thunder at the door came first.

A blow that shakes the sturdy planks. She and Gideon stiffen and fall apart. Micah starts awake and scrambles to his feet, looking wildly around him.

“Snow sliding off the roof,” Gideon says, but he doesn’t believe it himself for he goes straight to the door.

Reuben stands back from the doorway, his boot poised for another kick. “I tried knocking. Have you all been struck deaf?” His face still registers a rising glee, which wanes as he delivers his news. The Reverend’s horse made it all the way back from Boston, intrepid through the storm, then bolted not three miles from home. A wheel came loose and the wagon overturned. If Driscoll hadn’t happened to be passing, in search of one of his dogs, Pa would have frozen to death where he lay. As luck would have it, he is alive, though badly hurt. James is off fetching the doctor, and Reuben must go after the horse. Did they think they could leave their studies long enough to give Ma some help?

He stomps in, tracking snow with each step, and seizes Micah by the arm, reclaiming the property they’ve purloined. Sophy warrants only a brusque swerve of his chin, his eyes shifting to the door. Gideon stands alone as the prodigal Hedges are herded into the storm.

“You come too, little preacher,” Reuben says. The scorn he gives off is so pungent that it hangs in the room like a smell. “You can pray.”

CHAPTER 13

____

CONSEQUENCES OF THE FALL

T
HE REVEREND LAY ON HIS BED, LOOKING, FOR ALL THE
care taken in arranging him, like an abandoned puppet. His eyes, wide open, fixed their gaze on the ceiling. The left side of his body was rigid, his fingers clutching the sheet as if he would make himself plumb by virtue of grim will, but the opposing limbs were in casual disarray, twisted at odd angles. By the time the three of them entered, Mrs. Hedge had already cut the boot off the swollen foot and was wielding her scissors to free him from his sodden clothes. Without looking up, she dispatched Micah to get brandy from the cupboard, Sophy to gather blankets and set bricks to warming.

Gideon, useless in a corner, tried to perform silently the only office he was trained for, but his appeals for mercy and healing were sabotaged by a fundamental amazement. How could Hedge have splintered so easily? The man was all elastic sinew, springing out of chairs like a jack-in-the-box, stretching his neck to interrogate a student, practicing a stride that a man twice his height would envy. He had disciplined his small body to cover the greatest amount of ground in the least possible time. Such resilience ought to prevail, even in extremity. Gideon could hardly bear to look at the broken figure on the bed, swathed in blankets and packed in flannel-wrapped bricks. Instead, he focused on the beaver hat, deemed by Driscoll an essential part of the Reverend and returned along with its owner. Someone had set it on a child’s ladder-back chair that might have been made for it, from whence it emanated a battered dignity. Gideon half-expected to see a Scripture reference inscribed on one of the slats.

With effort, Mrs. Hedge managed to spoon some brandy down her husband’s throat; it was necessary, she said, to stimulate his heart. There was such tenderness in the hand she cupped beneath his chin that Gideon felt a quickening in his own chest. Now he understood why Sophy had been angry at him. The devotion he saw in this room was real. Their sham housekeeping in the study was only an elaborate game of pretend: two innocents—each come into the world uninvited—playing at life. What right had he to draw this young girl into his theories, to addle her with words and lure her with promises? Sophy stood at Fanny’s elbow, supporting the Reverend’s head. Her face was as contained as a grieving Madonna’s, her sorrow revealed only in the line between her eyebrows. Gideon wanted to kneel before her and ask forgiveness, but she never looked his way.

James arrived with Dr. Craddock; the snow had finally stopped, leaving a dry, powdery surface good for traveling. Craddock had just presided at the deathbed of a farmer’s wife, a mother of many children who had sunk with the strain of birthing the last, but the weeping and wailing hadn’t dulled his countenance. He was one of those men who always looked jovial, his cheeks round and gleaming, his red sideburns adding a clownish touch to the dourest proceedings. Though rumor had it that he was a secret drinker, the gossip failed to diminish his status in the community. He was the town’s only physician, and revered as such. Fanny alone regarded him as a practitioner of the dark arts, an attitude he didn’t appear to hold against her.

“A bad business,” he said amiably after taking a quick look at Hedge. “But the Reverend has strength to spare. I never saw a man with more bounce in him. With a little luck we’ll have him on his feet again.” His benevolent glance swept over the room as if it were a scenic landscape, lighting at last on Gideon. “And look at this flourishing fella, much improved since I last saw him! Very good, sir! You can return the favor by helping with the setting.”

Gideon wasn’t sure, at first, what sort of assistance would be required of him. The word seemed benign, a coming-to-rest that his frayed nerves magicked into a soothing image of a hen roosting on eggs. Reason took hold soon enough, but before he could protest his lack of experience, he was waved out of the room, along with Sophy and Micah. Mrs. Hedge was about to remove the blankets, and only James, the parson’s second-born son and likely surrogate, was permitted to look upon his father’s nakedness.

In the kitchen, Sophy took out bread and cold meat to slice in case the doctor was hungry. Her movements were sure, but Gideon thought she was cutting far more than one hungry man could eat. Micah sat on a stool by the fireplace, his shoulders hunched and his big hands dangling between his knees. Gideon was lost in his own misery. Craddock’s request had put a fear in him that was larger than his unfitness for the task. The life of the body struck him as a monstrous fraud. No one asked to be born; yet each packet of flesh pulled squalling into the world carried the seeds of its own doom. The nature of that doom—illness or accident, dissipation or decrepitude—was a matter of chance, the only certainty being its outworking in pain and loss.

And what did this make of marriage, the mystical union he’d anticipated for so long? Sophy had begun to weep, tears sliding slowly down her cheeks as her wrists and hands went on performing their rote task. He knew that he should go to her, gently lead her to a chair and speak comfort to her, but he could not. He wanted only to run away—not just from the Hedges, but from the whole fatal round of love and birth and death. He would retreat to some remote hamlet in the mountains, and find a monastic order where the rule of silence was practiced, and live out his days doing bracing physical tasks in the pure air. He saw himself leaning on a tall crook and contemplating the cloud-crowned peaks as sheep munched tender grasses all around him. The impression was so vivid that he could feel the release in his muscles as he sat with the other monks at the end of the day, dipping a hunk of coarse bread into thick soup.

Dr. Craddock intruded on his ruminations. The news was partially good. The Reverend’s shoulder was dislocated, not broken as he had feared, and needed only to be worked back into place. But his right leg was fractured in two places; his ankle must have caught in the footrest as he struggled to keep control of the tipping wagon, and that limb had borne the brunt of its weight when it overturned. There was some splintering below the knee, and by rights he should cut, but he knew where the parson would consign him if he didn’t do his best to keep him in one piece. Craddock gave a wistful glance at the food on the table, then clapped his hands briskly as though a better meal awaited him. “We are ready for you now,” he said to Gideon. “Young man”—he raised his voice for Micah’s benefit, apparently assuming that the boy’s hearing was as limited as his speech—“I must ask you to be Abraham and sacrifice one of these fine chairs for splints. The legs should be about the right length. And you, miss—if you’ve an old sheet to spare, we’ll be needing linen for bandages.”

As he waited in the kitchen, Gideon had hoped—believed even—that Reuben would return and take his place. Surely the Reverend would rather have family with him at such a time. What about Micah, whose hands were steady—did Craddock assume he was incapable because he stuttered? Yet he said nothing as he followed the doctor to the bedroom. Inevitability had brought a kind of calm, a paralysis of feeling that approached numbness. He was aware that his fingers were cold, and wondered in a detached way whether his touch would disturb the patient.

The bedchamber, dim even in full day, had been illuminated by a candle in each corner, lending the small, Spartan room the hushed sanctimony of a chapel. Mrs. Hedge stood ready beside the bed with a lamp in one hand, while James, stoical as ever, waited across from her. Both looked up when Gideon and the doctor entered, then returned their attention to the parson, who had been stripped of his clerical authority along with his clothes, and was now simply a damaged body, draped in blankets and awaiting the ministrations of a priest with greater powers. Hedge’s eyes had closed; his face was set and pale. Gideon could not banish the sense that he was about to partake in some savage rite: the old leader offered up to the gods for the good of the tribe. The close atmosphere reminded him of the sickroom he’d vacated so recently. He thought he might faint.