The Language of Paradise: A Novel (25 page)

It occurs to her for the first time that Papa and her mother may be reunited in Heaven, brother and sister looking down upon her as she does what she is about to do. She thinks it unlikely they’d be of one mind about it. Her mother would surely approve, even goad her on, but she has been quiet lately. A glance ceilingward reveals no cautionary words from the Reverend inscribed on the whitewash. Still, Sophy’s fingers fumble with her bonnet strings, and she moves nearer to the bulk of the woodstove.

She is dressed for a day of work, so, with no stays to unlace, it goes quickly. Shoes and stockings first. Her everyday cotton dress has few buttons; the stains on the bodice need not trouble her under the circumstances. She unties a single petticoat, limp from long use. Pulls the shift over her head, peels off her stockings. Her hair is the conundrum. Should she take it down, or leave it knotted and wait for him to command her again? She has imagined this scene over and over, trying one style, then the other, working herself into a state of shameful excitement, for, either way, Gideon’s response is dependably fervent. Now that she is acting out her plan, she isn’t so sure of her attractions, or of him.

She reaches up to remove the pins in her hair. The cape it makes over her shoulders and breasts is a shelter of sorts.

She feels shy at first—
naked
—but after a minute or two, natural to the point of pugnacity. She believes she could happily walk through the meadow and across the road wearing nothing but her ring, if only it wouldn’t cause a scandal. God sees us? Let Him. He made us! Clothes are the scandal—the care they take, the fuss some folks make about them. If Gideon’s Garden dispenses with cumbersome wrappings, she will go there without a second thought.

But when she hears him on the path, she shrinks into the murk behind the stove. He contends with the door, just as she did. The flood of light is briefly shocking—her arms cross over her breasts with a will of their own—but he doesn’t look in her direction. His eyes go straight to the desk, and before the door creaks shut he’s shuffling papers, muttering to himself, one hand harrowing his hair in a gesture she knows well. Too much to do.

She pads to the center of the room, her bare feet stirring dust. He glances over his shoulder, not sure what he heard.

“Sophy! What is this?” A pause. He seems to absorb her in stages.

She thinks he might be angry, but she doesn’t look down and he doesn’t look away. His eyes narrow, and it’s as though someone else is studying her, a stranger she’s glimpsed before, bent on taking by force what she freely offers. She walks to him slowly, keeping him at bay with steady, patient confrontation. She touches his shoulder to remind him who he is. Runs her fingers lightly down his body, tugs his shirt free of his trousers and lifts the hem to pull it over his head. The whiteness of his chest startles her. He is always pale compared to other men, but she sees now how brown his face and arms have turned, how hard the world has used him while this middle part, the heart of him, remains untouched. He raises his arms, docile as a child.

Naked, they are equals. It doesn’t matter that he is more beautiful than she. In every picture she’s seen of the Temptation, Adam is the handsome one, Eve mannish and muscled with rigid tresses flowing over stony breasts. Yet, there they stand on either side of the Tree, knowledge to be acquired between them. Sophy takes Gideon’s hand and leads him to the rug.

CHAPTER 21

____

EXILE

T
HE SERMON FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY IN THE NEW YEAR WAS
traditionally devoted to Job. The late parson never confided his reasons, but Gideon suspected that Hedge had meant to divert his parishioners from whatever small measure of frivolity they’d managed to wring from the festive season to the long, punishing winter ahead. In surrender to this convention, Gideon sat shivering in the study on a bitter evening in late December, hunched over the Reverend’s desk with a shawl over his shoulders, pondering the roots of endurance at an hour when he should have been in bed. A fallen word, if there ever was one, and it was fitting—all too bleakly suitable—that hardening was at the core of it. Hardening of the heart, the will, the back and brain. He shaped the syllables with his lips, feeling their effortful pull, the harnessed horse dragging its load over cobblestones.

An hour ago he and Sophy had made love in front of the stove. She often joined him here at the end of a long day, when he gathered what was left of his energy to work on his sermon. It was the time they stole for themselves. Tonight, tired as she was, she had played the coquette, dancing around the room, tossing her hair and swishing her skirts, collapsing breathless in his lap. “Did you see how full the moon is?” she said, nuzzling his ear. “I think it’s bewitched me, I can’t be still.” If a less onerous subject than Job awaited him, he might have been irritated at the distraction, but he was all too willing to be seduced. He scooped her up and carried her to the rug.

“Last year we only talked of Paradise,” Sophy whispered as they began, “and now we visit whenever we please. Isn’t it a wonder?”

“If this were Paradise,” he said sharply, “it wouldn’t end.”

Ashamed of himself—for being brusque with her, for succumbing in the first place—he fought too hard for his moment of rapture and proved his own words by finishing too soon. Then, compounding his sin, he’d turned his back as if the failure were hers. He knew her body well now. Too well, perhaps: he had explored its hidden niches with as much skill as he could muster, and still, the essence of Sophy eluded him. The girl who had danced in the field looked over her shoulder and darted, time after time, just out of his reach. When they made love, it was this wild, skittish creature he chased.

Even on the rare occasions when he caught her, it was never enough for him. She made her whinnying sound, and arched against him, and they locked together as one. For a single moment he wanted nothing else, knew nothing else, and then the fullness ebbed, and they came apart again. This seemed, each time, such a betrayal that he had to discipline himself to tolerate her head resting on his chest, her arm flung across him in that claiming way, the beatific look on her face as she gazed into his eyes—as though lovemaking had transported them to a higher plane, miles above the drudgery that filled their days. He didn’t doubt that Sophy felt an ecstasy he only feigned. For him, the act was a tease. Why, once the peak was reached, was there only subsidence and the longing for more? Perhaps, in the Beginning, it had been different: the unity more absolute, man and woman, once joined, never falling back into their separate selves.

Now, Gideon thought, the only hope for completion was making a child. But, for all their efforts, Sophy showed no signs of pregnancy. To his eye she appeared thinner than ever, spare and boyish from her added workload. Fanny had begun to set special broths before her at dinner-time, leaves and twigs floating ominously on the surface. To build the girl up, she said.

Sophy would have stayed with him tonight, however badly he’d behaved. She often kept him company when he worked late, curling up in a chair like a drowsy cat when her eyes got too heavy for reading or mending, offering her presence and asking nothing in return. Most nights he liked her company—needed it. Quiet as she was, the sense of her, the barely audible sound of her breathing, buffered him from his own despair. He never felt more married than on these evenings, when they were together in the room they still thought of as home and she was simply there, reminding him that he was no longer alone.

On this night, even such primal comfort was an impediment. As gently as he could, he sent her back to the house, pleading the rigors of his day: he had visited Mrs. Jennings, who lost her boy to whooping cough; he needed to be alone.

“I’ll call on the poor lady tomorrow and bring her some soup,” Sophy promised, already practiced in the role of pastor’s wife.

He stood on the stoop and watched as she picked her way along the path they’d stamped earlier in the snow, the lantern bobbing before her. The night was as clear and bright as it was cold, the stars like crystals of ice. Even without the lantern, he could have kept her in sight all the way to the door.

THE ROOM CLOSED AROUND HIM
, enfolding him in its soothing dusk. It seemed to him that the inside of his mind must look like this—a haven he had once occupied readily, a space so fundamental to him that he had assumed it was a state of nature and taken its riches for granted. He rarely took refuge there now. The demands of a clergyman’s life left little leisure for musing, less for meditation. A mere six months after his ordination, it was clear that he lacked Hedge’s vigor and his affinity for the work. He labored over his sermons for hours, earnestly circling around the Reverend’s favorite themes, and still they struck not a spark from his congregants, who occupied the pews impassively and filed past him with a cursory nod and a murmur as he bade them good-bye at the door. “If you could only
simplify
,” Sophy begged him. “These are laborers who want a little bread of Heaven to get them through the week. When you explain too much, they think you’re being superior.”

“I suppose I ought to lament my education,” he’d snapped at her. Sophy was too kind to point out that the Reverend had also been a learned man, but able to distill his knowledge into plain truths for ordinary folk.

With a sigh Gideon looked down at his notes. To be patient was to endure with calmness. Delve down to the Latin and the vein of suffering was struck: thus, the medical patient, bearing with fortitude the intimate agonies of the flesh. Gideon thought of Job, patron saint of loss, scraping at his oozing boils with a potsherd, and then of Mrs. Jennings, the bereaved mother he had visited that morning. “I could bear it if only he hadn’t had to suffer so,” she had said again and again. Her frayed gentility, the fineness of her worn face, reminded him of his mother. He suspected, from the humbleness of the house, that she had married beneath her. The boy had been her confidant, her consolation. “It’s one thing to lose an infant,” she said, “but to have had him for nine years, and him so promising . . . What was it all for, I keep wondering?” Gideon could not bring himself to offer the usual words of solace. Unable to meet her eyes, he bowed his head and watched her hands as they kneaded a damp, grayish handkerchief with purposeful efficiency, as if she were doing the weekly wash.

There were too many like her. The harsh cold of the last months had taken a toll on the village’s children; whooping cough and an outbreak of scarlet fever had robbed several families of their young. Gideon was constantly being pulled out of himself and made to address the raw needs of others, and—lacking Hedge’s conviction—he had nothing to offer them but the stock phrases and tired justifications of his trade. How could he preach about Job to those who had already suffered so much? Yet this, precisely, was what the elders expected of him. He was aware of their growing displeasure, their disappointment—had even overheard mild-mannered Mr. Brown defending him to Deacon Mendham after a church meeting. Once their loyalty to Hedge’s memory had run its course, he had no doubt that they would find a reason to replace him.

He shuffled through the papers strewn across the desk until he found the list of sermon notes he had started weeks ago, a practice he’d learned from the parson. He had marked the few items with Roman numerals as Hedge had done:
I.
The
Lord’s Loving Chastisement
, and
II. God’s Purposes Are Higher than Ours
. Under this he had written, in a cramped, uncertain hand,
fruits of affliction?
The phrases must have had some meaning to him when he wrote them down, but now they seemed as remote from Mrs. Jennings and her grief as fragments of an ancient Chinese text. Had he really intended to answer her anguish with these non sequiturs? Not that there wasn’t a precedent. When Job, broken and suffering, had asked why his life had been destroyed, God had waved a sea creature in his face.

For the first time that night, Gideon took up his pen. Where item
III
should have gone, he began to sketch a whale, realizing as he outlined its form that he wasn’t sure what, really, a whale looked like, or where the blowhole was located—was it nearer the tail or the mouth, or in between? After several botched tries, his marine monster resembled a bloated goldfish, spouts erupting along its back like leaks. A creature that would awe no one.