Pillar of Light

by Gerald N. Lund

  She felt her heart plummet. “What are you saying, Ben?”

  “There’ll be no more going to Fayette, no more talk of Joseph Smith and his gold plates in this house—whether I’m present or not—and there’ll be no more chasing after this deviltry. Not from you. Not from Nathan.”

  “And if Nathan refuses to accept that?”

  “He’d better not.”

  “Will you slap his face too?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath, and she instantly regretted having said it.

  Finally he spoke, his voice thin and trembling with anger. “Nathan has his own land now. If he doesn’t want to live by the rules of this house, then let him go his own way. I can’t speak for him anymore.”

  He lay back down on his pillow. “But so help me, you are my wife. I can and will speak for you. And if you don’t like it, then maybe you’d better think about moving in with Nathan.”

  And with that he turned his back to her, leaving her to stare upward at nothing in the darkness.

  “Bring this man another beer!” Joshua hollered over his shoulder at the young man behind the bar, then he turned back to face the ferret of a man sitting across the table from him. He had never particularly liked Caleb Jackson when they had worked the docks of Palmyra together. He had been shifty, always quick to select the lightest bale or crate, and Joshua more than once had suspected him of pilfering materials from the warehouse.

  But all of that was brushed aside now. Here was someone from home. And recently so. In the twenty or so months since he had left, Joshua had talked with numerous people who had been in Palmyra, but they had merely been passing through, making no more than an overnight stop as they journeyed westward along the Erie Canal. Six months earlier a family from down Canandaigua way had come to Independence, but that was twenty-some miles south of Palmyra. They had never heard of his family, and the news was pretty thin.

  He leaned forward eagerly. “So, Caleb, what brings you this far west?”

  Caleb was a small man with a thin face dominated by a huge misshapen nose. Joshua had always wondered if someone had broken it for him, but had never felt it his business to ask. He had clear blue eyes, but they were always moving, never quite meeting one’s direct gaze. It was this characteristic which made Joshua think of him as a ferret. In Palmyra he had worn a beard, an unkempt tangle of black, but now he was clean shaven, although a day’s stubble darkened his chin.

  The tavern boy brought two more beers, and Caleb grabbed the nearest one and downed the top quarter in one gulp. He wiped at the residue of foam with the back of his sleeve. “I heard there’s money to be made out here.”

  The quick furtive glance around as he spoke told Joshua as much as the answer itself. Joshua guessed that, like many other residents of Independence, Caleb Jackson was in trouble with the law somewhere. Indian Territory was close enough to provide an attractive alternative for those looking over their shoulders. Well, that was all right. There was a constable in Cincinnati whom Joshua Steed would happily avoid, for that matter.

  “Hear tell you haven’t done so badly,” Caleb went on, his eyes quickly surveying Joshua’s clothes. The shirt was obviously a manufactured one from back east, the pants well tailored, the boots made of fine leather and hand tooled.

  Joshua nodded, not trying to hide his pleasure. Let them know Joshua Steed could make his own way in the world. In a way, he wished Caleb was going back and could take the word with him. “I’ve done all right.” He paused just long enough, then asked, “So, how are things back home?”

  Caleb shrugged and took another deep drink from his mug. “Same as ever. Old man Benson is still bossing the crew at the warehouse like he was a general in some highfalutin army or something. I finally had enough of his mouth and just walked away.”

  Meaning you were fired, Joshua thought. And probably for drinking. But he merely smiled sympathetically. “Did you ever get to see any of my family?” he asked casually.

  Caleb nodded. “Saw your pa at Phelps’s tavern a month or so ago. He broke his arm cutting down trees.”

  Joshua didn’t respond, just waited.

  “Haven’t been out there, but they say he and your brother are really making quite a farm out north of town.” He grinned, an evil, leering expression. “I saw your sister at a town picnic—the one just younger than you. She’s getting to be a real looker.”

  The look in Joshua’s eye wiped the grin away instantly. He shrugged, turning his attention to the beer. “That’s about it.”

  Joshua leaned back in his chair, watching him. “Ever see that storekeeper’s daughter, Lydia McBride?” he asked evenly.

  Caleb’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah! Talk about a looker. I used to go into the store just to stand and gawk at her.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  Caleb was suddenly wary. “Fine, I guess,” he hedged. “I never said nothin’ to her. Besides, she was in Boston for nigh on a year.”

  “Boston?” He felt a surge of relief. No wonder there had been no answer to his letters.

  “Heard she got back again just a day or two before I left, but can’t say for sure. I didn’t see her.”

  “She have a beau yet?”

  A startled look flashed across his face, then Caleb looked down, staring into what was left of his beer.

  “Well, does she?” Joshua pressed. Then he laughed, as though it didn’t matter. “I was thinking of going back there next spring. To see the family,” he added hastily. “Thought I’d call and pay my respects to Miss Lydia if she isn’t hitched by then.”

  Caleb finally looked up. “You mean you haven’t heard?”

  Joshua kept his face expressionless. “Heard what?”

  “She and your brother—” He stopped as Joshua came forward, the chair legs hitting the floor with a sharp crack.

  “You mean Nathan?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s his name.” Caleb was squirming like a rat cornered by a tomcat.

  “What about them?”

  The ferret’s head turned this way and that, trying to avoid the skewering hardness of Joshua’s face. Joshua’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm, pinning it to the table and causing him to wince with pain. “What about them?” he roared. A sudden silence swept the room as several men jerked around in surprise. The boy behind the bar was wide-eyed and staring.

  Caleb swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing once in fright. “They’re engaged to be married.”

  Joshua released his grip, sagging backwards. “When?”

  Caleb shrugged, licking his lips. “Everybody in town was talking ‘bout it. She came home from Boston to get hitched. I reckon they’re probably married by now.”

  “Mr. Steed, I ain’t sure this is such a good idea.”

  Joshua whirled, swinging the bottle angrily at the man standing next to him. The man easily sidestepped the blow, then had to step forward quickly to stop Joshua from falling off the step.

  “You’re being paid, Parson,” Joshua shouted, his voice slurring heavily. “Now stand there and shut up.”

  He turned back to the door and battered at it with his fist. “Roundy! Blast you! Open this door.”

  There was a muffled sound inside, and then lamplight glowed in the window. Joshua stepped back. Suddenly some sense of decorum gripped him, and he hastily tossed the whiskey bottle aside and tugged at the bottom of his jacket. Not that it mattered. Jessie Roundy was one woman that if there was manure on your boots, it wouldn’t make no never mind with her.

  The door opened and Jessica Roundy stood there, clutching at the shawl around the shoulders of her nightshirt, blinking at them in dazed bewilderment. “Joshua?”

  “Who is it, Jessie?” It was a muffled call. There was the crash of a chair being overturned, then Clinton Roundy stumbled out, dressed in red long johns and clutching a shotgun. He stopped, likewise staring at the men at the door. “Steed! What—do you know what time it is?”

  Joshua stepped back and bowed low. “I’ve come to as
k you for the hand of your lovely daughter in marriage.”

  Jessica fell back a step, her eyes wide and suddenly dazed.

  “You’re drunk,” Roundy said in disgust, coming to the door and opening it wider.

  “I’m not that drunk,” Joshua protested. He stepped inside, swayed dangerously for a moment, then remembered his companion. “Parson, get yourself in here.”

  The man removed his hat and came inside. He looked first at Jessica, then at her father. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roundy. He got me out of bed. I tried to tell him this ought to wait until morning, but—”

  “Mornin’ nothin! I want to get married, and I want to do it now.” Joshua swung around and groped for Jessica’s hand. She was still staring at him as though she had been struck by one of his wagons.

  “Look, Joshua,” Roundy said, forcing a smile, “I think you’d better go on home and sleep this off. Then we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  Joshua ignored him. Suddenly he seemed cold sober as he leaned forward, peering into Jessica’s eyes. “I came to marry you, woman. It’s now or not at all. Will you have me to be your husband?”

  For several moments, the soft doe eyes of Jessica Roundy searched Joshua’s face. They were filled with an infinite sadness, but finally she nodded. “Yes, Joshua, I will.”

  She turned to the minister. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Good wood always warms you thrice.”

  Nathan put down the drawknife and wiped at the sweat on his brow with the back of his sleeve. It was mid-March, and there was a strong chill in the air. The sky was slate gray and lowering, and there’d be rain, if not snow, for sure by nightfall. His breath came in little puffs of white, disappearing almost as quickly as they formed. Yet in spite of the cold, Nathan was sweating.

  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.