He was sitting on the shaving horse smoothing hand-split cedar shingles. His trouser legs were covered with cedar shavings and there was a pile growing around his feet. It was not back-breaking work, but it required considerable effort, and he had quickly shed his coat.
It was his Grandpa Steed who had said it. Nathan had found the work of splitting short lengths of hickory logs into firewood hard work for a slender ten-year-old. He complained loudly that he was sweating too hard to see clearly. His grandfather’s old gray head had come up slowly, the eyes frowning their disapproval. “Wood warms you thrice, boy,” he had said gravely. “Once when you cut it, once when you burn it, and then the embers warm your soul.”
It was so like the old man, Nathan thought with fondness. He would sit quietly, the gnarled hands looking as knotted and grained as the wood they worked, the fingers moving with slow precision as he whittled out an apple-butter scoop from a piece of oak, or shaped a wooden pail from a hollow sycamore trunk. The acorn brown eyes would lift above the wire spectacles and peer briefly at his grandson. Then would come a sentence or two that would leave Nathan pondering for days. “Wood is like a good woman,” he’d say. “Treat her with love and gentleness and she’ll show you her best qualities.” Or once, when Nathan kept dawdling over the task of cleaning the chicken house, a task which he hated with all the passion a young boy could muster, his grandfather simply said, with the utmost gravity: “Son, if you’ve got to eat a toad, don’t look at it too long. And if you’ve got to eat two toads, you’d be smart not to eat the smallest one first.”
Nathan found himself chuckling at the memory of that day. It had taken him almost a week and a little help from his mother before he figured out what toads and chicken houses had in common. Still smiling, he picked up the drawknife again and reached for another shingle. Wood warms thrice. Actually this wood would warm him in another way. Once the shingles were in place, they would warm him every time the winter snows came. He shook his head, marveling at the simple but profound wisdom of his grandfather.
He looked around at the work he had accomplished in the last five or six months. The small two-room cabin now stood framed and complete except for the roof and the inside finishing work. A barn was enclosed enough to shelter stock. The well was dug and rocked in. A smokehouse also lacked only the shingles on the roof. Now that it was his cabin, his barn, his smokehouse that he was working on, he knew the deep satisfaction that came from meeting nature and shaping it to serve your needs.
“The preachers,” Grandpa had once snorted in disgust, “they say God cursed Adam by making him earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. I say it was the best thing the good Lord ever did for man. To conquer and subdue the earth is the joy of man.”
Now Nathan understood what he meant. To subdue meant watching the point of a plow turn over virgin earth for the first time. It meant seeing corn and squash and melons growing where only elderberry and birch had grown before. To conquer was to drive a spout into the heart of a sugar maple when the snow covered the forest floor, then boil the sap down into one of God’s sweetest gifts to mankind.
But those words had more subtle meanings too. Under his grandfather’s tutelage—teachings reinforced by his own father—Nathan learned that one subdued through little things as well. For example, he knew the cedar shingles he was making would not completely tolerate the square-headed nails Nathan had bought at the blacksmith’s shop. As the shingles cured in the hot suns of summer, they would begin to squeeze out the nails—not all the way, just enough so each head would show about a thumbnail’s width. But Nathan would not go up and hammer them down again, for come winter the roof’s porcupine surface would stop the snow from slipping down the pitched shingles, thus holding nature’s insulation in place and cutting down significantly on the amount of wood it would take to heat the cabin.
There were a hundred other examples. Hickory twigs tied in a bundle around a stick made a simple but efficient broom. Strips of birch bark could be woven around willows to make a fish trap. Cedar bark went into his mother’s big oak chest to ward off moths and other pests. Pitch pine, or “candlewood,” as it was called, made a dangerous fuel for the fireplace because it left a flammable resin in the chimney. But split the pine into thin strips and light it and one had a wonderful “candle” for moving around outside at night.
Nathan stopped, suddenly angry with himself. He knew what he was doing. He had done it many times before. He was deliberately forcing his mind to concentrate on the ordinary, on the humdrum, so it would not turn to Lydia McBride. It was a battle he had fought many times before in the last eight months. Eight months! They had spoken only three times since. Twice there had been accidental, painfully brief encounters in the village. The only satisfaction he had found in them was the pain in her eyes which told him she found no more joy in the separation than he did. A third time he had gone to her home, determined to talk it through, to find some kind of resolution. Her father had left them alone in the parlor, but only to go into the kitchen where he kept the door open and sat within easy hearing, rigid as an ice sculpture.
Dismal and without hope, Nathan had made no further attempts to see her. Instead he threw himself into the work of turning virgin land into a working farm. There was joy in that—in the mind-numbing work of clearing trees, of cutting and curing lumber, of building rock walls and cabins and outbuildings. There was joy and there was also sadness. By now she could have been carrying their first child; she could have been directing the finishing work inside the cabin or spading the patch of ground he had cleared for a garden on the south side of the cabin.
He shook his head impatiently. He thought he had dulled the pain to the point of bearability, but just an hour ago Melissa had come to see him. She and Mama had been to the village. In a dress shop they overheard two young women talking. Lydia would be returning to Boston to live with her aunt. She would be leaving around the first of May. The sharpness of the pain surprised him. It lanced through him like a needle of fire. But he knew why. Boston dashed any hopes. Boston was finality. Boston meant it was truly over.
He began to pull the drawknife with savage intensity across the shingles, making the shavings fairly fly. He worked that way for almost ten minutes, bending his mind to the task as fiercely as he bent his back to the work.
Suddenly he stopped, staring at his hands, his breath filling the air in front of him with mist. He slammed the drawknife down, startled by the vehemence he was feeling. Lydia was going to Boston and here he sat, wallowing up to his withers in self-pity. Why didn’t he just take out a white hanky and wave good-bye to her from the top of some far-off hill?
With sudden determination he gathered up his tools and carried them into the barn. He came back out, picked up his coat, jammed his hat on his head, and strode across the yard, headed for the road that led south to Palmyra Village.
Mary Ann stood at the small table pushed up against the kitchen window, humming softly as she peeled potatoes for the supper stew. Outside, the day was gloomy and darkening, but she didn’t mind. This was now her favorite spot in the house. The kitchen had been her husband’s winter project. It was a one-level addition to the main room of the cabin, and it had expanded their living space on the main floor by almost a third. Then, with a reckless surrender to luxury—they had had their second good year with the crops—Benjamin had ordered eight glass windowpanes and enough slate to build a large sink next to the window. Just two weeks earlier he had completed the sluice from the creek which brought water to the house. Now all she had to do to get water inside the kitchen was tug on a rope and lift the sluice gate. Within moments the sink was filled. Of all the things she had missed about their home in Vermont, the running water to the kitchen had been most dearly given up.
The view was to the east, toward the road that passed their farm on its way to the village. Once the foliage came on the trees, her view would be limited, but now she could catch an occasional glimpse of any traffic moving north or south. It made her feel as though she were in touch with the outside world, a feeling which was exhilarating after four months of winter lockup.
The door opened and Benjamin stood at the entrance. He stomped his feet a couple of times, then brushed at the straw on his pants.
“Did you get finished?”
He nodded, then came in. He had been out in the icehouse, helping the men from Canandaigua unload the huge slabs of ice cut earlier in the season from the lakes that dotted the region. They had left nearly an hour before, but Ben had then taken forkful after forkful of straw from the barn and layered it carefully over the ice so it would last them through the summer.
He came to the sink and washed his hands in the pail set aside for that purpose. He looked around, then reached out and picked up one of the potatoes she had peeled and bit into it. It crunched solidly. He chewed a couple of times, seemed satisfied, and turned to the cupboard where there was a small bowl of salt. He took a pinch and sprinkled it on the potato and took another bite.
Something out on the road caught Mary Ann’s eye. She leaned forward, peering out of the window. A figure was walking south, a man. For a moment she thought it was Nathan, but before she could be sure, he disappeared behind a stand of trees. She frowned slightly. Had the news of Lydia shaken him as deeply as Mary Ann feared it would?
“Anything interesting in town?”
She whirled around, startled. But her husband was reaching for another pinch of salt and seemed to be making no more than idle conversation.
She felt herself relax a little. “I told you what Melissa heard in the dress shop about Lydia McBride.”
“Yes.” He finished the potato and licked absently at the salt on his fingers. “Probably just as well. As long as she’s in town and unmarried, he’s gonna find it hard to get her out of his head.”
Mary Ann sighed. It was so like him. He was right, of course. But was he really so oblivious to the hurt his son was enduring? If he made comments like these to Nathan it would not help their relationship, which since Nathan’s baptism had already become strained.
He came back to her side and picked up another potato, this time a smaller one. As he bit into it he looked around. “Where are the children?”
“Remember? Mrs. Harris asked them to help her empty the mattresses and restraw them today.”
“That’s right.” He looked around again. “Matthew and Becca go too?”
“Yes. They were excited, and Melissa said she could use their help in holding the mattress covers.”
“Hmmm.”
She gave him a quick look, then continued with her peeling. He finished his potato, wiped his hands on his trousers. “If I’m going to help Nathan with his planking, I’ve got to have a new broad ax. Maybe I’ll go into town.”
“Oh. You should have said something. Melissa and I could have got it for you.”
He hesitated for a moment. “I might stop at the tavern for a while.”
So that was it. She turned back to the potatoes, feeling a quick burst of resentment. Since his ultimatum eight months previously, Mary Ann’s relationship with her husband had stabilized. She never spoke of Joseph or his work of translation. She also honored his request—demand!—that the subject never be spoken about in the house. The only time she and Nathan talked now of Joseph and the Book of Mormon was when they were at Nathan’s home. She felt a quick stab of irritation. The relationship had stabilized, but only because she had given in to his wishes and sacrificed her own personal feelings. In his mind, everything was back to normal between them. But the bitterness in her was growing a little with each day. The fact that he sensed none of it, that he could go off to drink with his friends at the tavern and boast about the goodness of his marriage, really galled her. And today, of all days, her emotions were close to the surface.
As he turned to walk away, she spoke. “I saw Joseph Smith in town today.” He stopped in midstride and she could sense him stiffen. “He said the Book of Mormon should be finished in about a week.”
He turned around slowly, his brows lowering. Suddenly her eyes were moist and filled with pleading. “Ben, I know how you feel. And I’ve honored those feelings.”
He looked away, his mouth tight.
“Ben, please.” She took his hand. “I’m not asking you to believe. I’m not asking that you do anything. But you always said if I chose to join myself to one of the churches, you wouldn’t be stopping me.”
“You want to join a church, I won’t be stopping you,” he said evenly. “But I won’t be having you part of no devil’s work.”
“Ben, all I’m asking is that you let me buy a copy of the Book of Mormon. It’s—”
“No.”
“Ben, I’ll use what little I’ve been saving from—”
“I said no!” It was flat, brutal in its finality.
She stared at him for several seconds, trying to penetrate the coldness of his eyes. But there was nothing, just an implacable hardness that left her empty inside. She turned away. “Then I’ll not be holding supper for you.” It was not a question but a flat statement, her way of striking back.
For a long moment there was silence, then his feet scraped on the planks of the flooring. “You have it your way,” she heard him mutter under his breath as he moved away from her, “but I ain’t bending on this.”
For a moment Nathan was afraid Lydia was not in the store. Then he saw her in the back, helping a man near the rack of tools. At the same time, Lydia’s father, behind the main counter, saw Nathan. His jaw instantly tightened and he shot Nathan a wintry look. Nathan simply smiled briefly at him, then turned away and ignored him.
As though sensing a new tension in the store, Lydia turned around. There was a quick widening of the eyes, a sudden tautness in her posture. For several seconds their eyes locked, then she murmured something to the man. He looked at her in surprise, but she was already moving toward Nathan.