by Abi Maxwell
When Elspeth left, her sister had sworn she would stay on forever with her parents, would care for them. “But what if you fall in love?” Elspeth had asked.
“I won’t.” And then, “Anyway, so what if I do?” This question, Elspeth had understood right then, had been what set them apart. It was like a line drawn in the sand. Her sister on the good side, she on the bad.
In some ways, Elspeth had always wished to be more like her sister, though even back then she understood that the personality she’d been born to had afforded her much, much more freedom. But once she had arrived in her new home, she wished with every bit of her being that she had been more like her sister. That she had understood that something—the shores of home, for example, that great wide ocean, even that small, dingy kitchen of theirs—really ought to have meant more to her than that hot desire she’d fallen into. Just the smell of her family’s linens, or the lilting voice of a person from her home—she would give anything, now, to get back there.
Anything but her boys, that is. It was harder at first, when they were just born. With each one of them, she had thought she’d go mad. Only because she didn’t have sleep, not a bit of it, but understanding that hadn’t made it easier. It had been especially hard with the first, because it had all been so new, and on top of that she wasn’t used to not having her mother and sister at her side.
But what good was it to think of any of it now? Better to think of the gentle look they each gave. The feel of their soft hands as they ran them down her face. Evan, the middle one, had gone through a spell of hitting her across the face when he was two. “No,” she remembered saying, and, “Please don’t do that.” Also, “That hurts. That hurts my body and my feelings.” But at a certain point when he was through hitting her, he would always take that soft little hand and run it down the length of her cheek, then back up and across her forehead, and then down her other cheek. Looking hard at her face the entire time. Testing, almost, if it would still be there, if she would still be there, whole and full of love even after such pain. And it was almost worth it, the hitting, to have him inspect her in this way when he was through.
When she was pregnant with the first she didn’t want a second, and when she was pregnant with the second she didn’t want a third, but she welcomed each one of them anyway, because what else could she do? But after the third she told her husband that she felt she would eclipse if she had one more. “What does that mean?” he had asked. “How can a person eclipse?”
She went to her only neighbor, who, by this time, had also become her only true friend. Mr. Bartlett was some twenty years her senior, and had been born in the very farmhouse he still lived in. Apparently, as a boy he had helped to build the barn, which back then had been filled to the brim with livestock. Now he kept only chickens, three horses, two milk cows, five sheep, and sometimes a few pigs for slaughter. His parents had long ago passed, and his five siblings had dispersed to the south and west.
During Elspeth’s first year on this new land, Mr. Bartlett had been the only person in the entire town to knock on her door in order to welcome her. The first time, he brought a small basket of apples from the tree in his field. Her eldest had been a newborn then, and had screamed and screamed in her arms while she stood in the doorway of her squat house to accept her neighbor’s gift. A week later, he returned with a jug of fresh milk. On and on this went, with scarcely a sentence exchanged between the two of them. It wasn’t until her first son was nearly a year old that she finally ventured out to knock on Mr. Bartlett’s door. That day, her husband had been at the mill and her son had suddenly been struck with a burning fever. By then, because of his frequent trips to visit her, Mr. Bartlett had carved a shortcut between their two houses. She ran that path through the woods, over the stone wall, and across his field, and knocked on his door while in her arms her child shivered and sweated.
“Elspeth,” he said, and drew her into the room.
Straightaway she saw what she had been missing. His entire sitting room, floor to ceiling, was lined with books. And there at the desk right by her side sat a stack of handwritten papers held down by a glass paperweight.
“You write, sir?” she asked him, then quickly remembered herself. She told him about her son’s fever, and without a moment’s hesitation he went to the barn and prepared his carriage to take them to the bigger town to the west, where, he said, his lifelong friend practiced medicine.
The ride took two hours, and they passed it mostly in silence, Elspeth terrified the entire way. Yet by the time they finally arrived, her boy’s fever seemed to have calmed. She visited the doctor anyway, who examined the boy and applied a white paste that smelled of mint to his forehead and temples, then looked at her gently and asked if she didn’t have any friends or family with children of their own. “Children get fevers, you understand,” he told her.
“Mr. Bartlett,” she said. She meant that he was her only friend. The doctor nodded and said goodbye. On the way home, lightened with relief, Elspeth and Mr. Bartlett talked and talked about the books they had read and, when she asked, the one he was writing. It was a history of the town, a lifelong project that his father had begun. When they returned to Middlewood that day, Elspeth went home with her tired child in her arms and a stack of books besides, and after that she walked the trail through her woods to her neighbor’s house nearly every day for company.
So it was that some four years later she sat at the table with Mr. Bartlett, another newborn in her arms and her two other children on the floor near her feet, and she whispered that she could not bear to have another. He understood. He suited up the carriage, and together they rode the two hours to the west, where once again she went into that doctor’s home. This time Mr. Bartlett left her there alone, and even insisted that he keep the children with him.
The doctor’s home was dark and smelled of fresh-cut wood. On her first visit, she’d scarcely noticed a thing, other than the baby in her arms, but now she saw that dried plants hung in bouquets from the ceiling and that jars of dried plants lined the walls. The doctor sat down heavily and asked her if she was already with child again.
“No, sir,” she said.
“That’s a relief,” he told her, and he crossed the room. He opened a drawer in the wall, withdrew a long slip of paper, and brought it to her.
“Pessary,” he said, and pointed to the word. “Used to kill the sperm or block their passage through your cervix,” he said. “You do know what that means?”
“Sir,” she said.
“Do not be shy,” he told her. “This is no place for that.” He pointed again to the paper and showed her that she had a choice: a suppository made of honey and sodium carbonate, which would melt at body temperature to form a shield; or a sea sponge wrapped in silk and attached to a string.
“The cost, sir?”
“Mr. Bartlett has paid,” he said.
“No,” she said, her face burning. To have her friend pay so that she might feel some pleasure. But then maybe it was solely protection against her husband’s pleasure that Mr. Bartlett thought he was paying for? She had changed, she knew, had become reticent in their bed, the fear of another baby overpowering every cell. But as she listened to the doctor an image of the abandon she’d once experienced with her husband passed quickly through her mind. Elspeth understood that what she had previously felt in bed was not what she had been taught to feel; that she did not simply endure; that since childhood she had wanted. She left the doctor’s home with both options in her purse. When she stepped out into the blinding sun she had expected to see Mr. Bartlett and her children waiting for her, but the carriage was not in sight, so she walked across the street, to the small park above the river. There she sat down on the stone bench, and just as she let out a long, relieved sigh, a man sat next to her.
“Lovely day,” he said. “My name’s James Baillie. Pleased to meet you.”
He
extended his hand. Inside her purse, the small package from the doctor pulsated. Should work every time! the doctor had said, and to her shame she had lit right up.
Now, on the bench above the river, she took James Baillie’s hand, then dropped it quickly. She felt there was a certain way he had of looking at her. Just the way the man in her pages, the lover, would have looked at his love. How to describe it? She knew when she saw him that she hadn’t gotten it quite right in her story. She stared. Shining black eyes, that was part of it. Full attention paid to her face, her being. She would have to remember this, write it down. Something hidden behind that attention. But what was she doing, looking straight at this man? And with that medicine in her purse?
“Excuse me,” she said to him, and stood abruptly to walk closer toward the river.
“Let me walk with you,” the man said. She meant to say no, certainly not, but to her surprise he said, “You are from my home, I can tell it in your voice.”
And it was true. He had come from not ten miles north of her Scottish home. Since he’d left, he’d been back and forth across the ocean four times in counting.
“How do you get the money?” she asked. They were walking now, no longer staring at each other, and she was thankful for that. She wouldn’t have asked such a question had he been looking at her.
But he didn’t seem bothered by her forward manner. He told her that he went up and down the river far to the west, the Mississippi. “Spell it aloud,” he said. “Teach your boys to spell it, it’s a joy.”
“But your voice,” she said to him. “There’s nothing to it.” She meant of course that it did not sound the least bit Scottish, but the way the words came out made sense to her, too. Empty. That’s how the voices of this land, the ones that didn’t sound like their old homes, so often sounded to her.
“Practice,” he said. “There’s more money for me if I have been here for at least a generation.”
“So you lie?”
“I fool,” he said.
Anyway, it led to nothing. She had of course told him about her husband, her boys, right at the start. They said goodbye and she returned to the street, found Mr. Bartlett and her children, and that was that. The baby was sleeping in the carriage and the other two were delighting in the hard candy Mr. Bartlett had bought for them. She climbed in and they rode home, crossing through the most beautiful country she had seen, on this side of the ocean anyway. Her boys surrounded her and she was content.
But the thrill of that short meeting! When she woke in her home the following day she thought suddenly of that other trip, that other man she had met. John Smith. She thought of the feel of his hands on her hips. The next time she sat down to work on her pages, she found herself writing a letter instead. A letter to him, that first man, but to this new one, too. Some fictional version of both of them combined. Dear Lover, she wrote. It would be a part of her book. She didn’t yet know where it would fit in, but it would belong somewhere.
* * *
—
As Elspeth’s boys grew, Mr. Bartlett began to hire them, giving them a small sum of money in trade for feeding and watering the chickens, mucking out the pigpen, weeding the vegetable beds. He also dug up chunks of his perennials that fared well in the shade and gave them to Elspeth so that she might surround her little house in the woods with them. He had taught her to collect seeds from his vegetables so that she might plant herself a garden at no cost.
“But my house is so deep in the woods,” she had said. “There’s scarcely any sun.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” he had said, and set to work digging up a plot for her on his own property.
Sometimes the two of them would sit in his parlor and read over his manuscript, which, nearly fifteen years into their friendship, he was still writing. There was a time, a handful of years ago, when he had been shunned by the town for speaking out against the church’s support of slavery, but now it seemed his project had won him their favor once more. In addition to combing property records and the like, Mr. Bartlett had also interviewed every willing resident and written down their stories, no matter the topic, and the town’s newspaper had begun to publish bits and pieces of it. Sometimes the stories were so strange that he could not help but laugh with Elspeth about them. Stories of a man’s oxen cart being upturned and broken on account of witchcraft; another of a mysterious body rising from the lake on a particular July 4 celebration long ago.
“ ‘Incidences and Odd Occurrences,’ ” he told her. “It is my favorite chapter.”
“But those stories can’t be true.”
“And yet they are believed by so many,” he said. “Surely that makes them a part of the town’s history?”
“So you believe them?” she asked.
“I believe it is my job to accurately record the impressions of our residents.”
“And what if I told you I’d seen a ghost? Would that become a part of our town’s history?”
“But you haven’t, my dear,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Your place in this chapter shall be added as soon as you have something to add.”
II
ABOUT A quarter of a mile up the hill from Josiah Bartlett’s was a house that carpenters had been building for more than a year. There was a lot of talk about it. The owner was not a man of their town, and no one seemed to even know his name. The house was not like the other houses around, either. “The style of the queen” is what some people said. High, gabled windows, elegantly carved trim. Elspeth and her boys had liked to go and watch the construction, as had many others throughout town. When the work was complete, it was as though the town itself held its breath, watching that darkly painted house. It was well known that the current mill owner was sick and that he had no heir. Elspeth’s husband, along with the other mill workers, worried almost daily over the fate of the mill. Finally, though, Thomas returned from work one day with news that the owner of that mysterious new home had arrived, that he had bought the mill, and that he would take over within a month’s time.
“This man will make the mill big,” Thomas told his wife. “He has bought up all the water rights and all the surrounding land. He wants to change our operations, Elspeth. To double our machinery and our power. Elspeth, he wants to open a foundry for the mill. He intends to carry us all into the next century.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The best part is that he is from our country! He will understand us.”
“Fine,” she said. What did she care? She had never worried over Thomas’s job; it had always seemed obvious to her that the mill would run and the workers at the top would tire those at the bottom right out.
Anyway, she was busy enough with her children. Her youngest had just turned ten, and Mr. Bartlett had gifted them with snowshoes for the whole family. There had been an early November snowstorm, and the snow had stuck, and now in their spare time she and the boys spent long, glorious afternoons tramping through the woods, following rabbit and deer tracks. Once they saw the tracks of a wolf. They were sure of it, despite the fact that in their town it was said that the wolves had been killed off years ago. She and her boys kept a fold of paper as they hiked, and when they saw a new kind of track they would draw it down, and then—thanks to Mr. Bartlett’s books—look it up. So they were sure it was a wolf. Such a rare and wild discovery! They were all excited to tell their father. But when the night bell rang and he came home for supper, he said that Mr. Eldridge from down at the mill had seen a wolf and was working on trapping it.
“For meat?” Elspeth asked.
“For kill,” her husband said. He told her that an entire flock of sheep had been mutilated by a wolf.
“No,” she said. “One sheep. One.” It had been Mr. Bartlett’s. She told her husband so.
“Elspeth,” he said back, and she and her boys had all understood right then to not speak of the t
racks they had seen.
But the four of them saw more. There must have been a pack, and they must have been living close to their house. Elspeth didn’t say a word, but it made no difference. Soon enough the town was in an uproar over the animals. She and her children listened to Thomas tell about the pits the farmers were digging, covered with sticks and brush, filled with bait. Yet despite the traps, they continued to see multiple tracks day after day, until one terrible day when they couldn’t find even one. Two days later her husband came home to say that Mr. Eldridge and some boys had finally trapped a wolf in a hole and shot it dead. Not straight in the head, either. First they shot it in the legs, just to watch it strain and fail to get away. Then they shot it in the chest. They let it bleed and twist in return for the death to that livestock. The pelt, pockmarked with bullets but scrubbed free of blood, now hung right in the center of town. “Scare off the whole lot of them, that’s what for,” her husband said when she asked why anyone would do such a thing.
“What’s happened to you?” Elspeth asked him.
“I don’t know your meaning.”
“You sound like one of them,” she said.
“One of whom?”
She couldn’t say, didn’t know how to. It didn’t sound real coming from him anyway, this aggression. She felt she could see right through it, could see clearly his need to fit in with the men who ran the mill. Also with the men of this country. His voice, she had noticed, had even begun to change, his sounds beginning to be cut off roughly from their own edges.
Her middle boy cried a little when he saw the first pelt hung in town.
“Do not be like them,” she whispered to him. She repeated it as the madness went on, as the signs went up: VOTED, TO GIVE TEN DOLLARS’ BOUNTY FOR A GROWN WOLF’S HEAD, AND FIVE DOLLARS FOR A WOLF’S WHELP, FOR ALL THAT SHALL BE KILLED IN THIS TOWN. Soon, one wolf after another hung from a beam in the center of the street.