A Gathering Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “Don’t have much of a choice, do I?” he grumbled. He pressed the ice to his lip, winced, then said, “Three more months, Matt. Just three more months and I’m gone from here. Once I get through Columbia, once I’m a lawyer, ain’t no one ever going to hand me a suitcase. Or call me boy or nigger or Sam. Or hit me. And if they do, I’ll make sure they go to jail.”

  “I know you will,” I said.

  “I’ll find myself a new place. A better place than this one, that’s for sure. We both will, won’t we, Matt?” he said, his eyes searching mine.

  “Yes, we will,” I said, busying myself with the witch hazel, for I could not meet his gaze.

  I’d already found myself a new place, one I’d never intended to find, but I was in it now all the same. It was a place for myself alone and one I couldn’t tell Weaver about, no more than I could tell Miss Wilcox. It was in Royal Loomis’s arms, this place, and I liked it there. Weaver would never understand that. Sometimes I barely did myself.

  I hear a loon calling from the lake. The tourists all say it’s a beautiful sound. I think it’s the loneliest sound I know. I am still reading. Still looking for a different answer. Another outcome. A happier ending. But I already know I’m not going to find it.

  South Otselic

  June 28, ’06

  My Dear Chester,

  . . . I think I shall die of joy when I see you, dear. I will tell you I am going to try and do a whole lot better, dear, I will try not to worry so much and I won’t believe horrid things the girls write. I presume they do stretch things, dear. I am about crazy or I could reason better than I do. I am awfully pleased you had such a jolly time at the lake, dear, and I wish I had been there, too. I am very fond of water, although I can’t swim. I am crying and can’t half write. Guess it’s because my sister is playing her mandolin and singing “Love’s Young Dream.” I am a little blue . . .

  It is a long letter and there are many more lines to read, but my eyes keep straying back to one line: I am very fond of water, although I can’t swim. A chill grips me. I throw it off and keep reading.

  . . . Chester, my silk dress is the prettiest dress I ever had, or at least that is what everyone says. Mamma don’t think I have taken much interest in it. I am frightened every time it is fitted. Mamma says she don’t see why I should cry every time they look at me . . . Chester dear, I hope you will have an awfully nice time the 4th. Really, dear, I don’t care where you go or who you go with if you only come for the 7th. You are so fond of boating and the water why don’t you go on a trip that will take you to some lake? . . .

  I can’t read any more. I try to stuff the letter back into its envelope, but my hands are shaking so hard, it takes me three tries.

  He knew she couldn’t swim. He knew it.

  I begin to weep then. I hold my hands over my face so that no noise gets out, and cry as though my heart is breaking. I think it is.

  There are a few more letters, but I can’t read them. I should never have read the first one, never mind nearly all of them. I stare into the darkness and I can see Grace’s face as she handed me the letters. I hear her saying, “Burn them. Please. Promise me you will. No one can ever see them.”

  I burrow down into my pillow and close my eyes. I feel so old and so tired. I desperately want to sleep. But the darkness swirls behind my eyelids, and all I can think about is the black water of the lake closing around me, filling my eyes and ears and mouth, pulling me down as I struggle against it.

  I am very fond of water, although I can’t swim. . .

  grav • id

  The last time I saw her, Miss Wilcox said that “A Country Burial” by Emily Dickinson was perfection in eight lines.

  Ample make this bed.

  Make this bed with awe;

  In it wait till judgment break

  Excellent and fair.

  Be its mattress straight,

  Be its pillow round;

  Let no sunrise’ yellow noise

  Interrupt this ground.

  These lines astounded me. They were as beautiful, as pure, as a prayer. I repeated the poem silently to myself as Royal told me about the new hybrid corn they had at Becker’s Farm and Feed.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had a half day off from the Glenmore. Royal was driving me to Minnie’s house on his way into Inlet. He’d come to fetch me at the hotel and Fran and Ada giggled and Weaver rolled his eyes and Cook smiled, but I ignored them all.

  Royal talked a mile a minute as we rode. I nodded and did my best to listen, but I was thinking how much better Ample make this bed is than Make this bed amply, which is what I would have written. And I was thinking that Emily Dickinson was a dreadful woman. She flitted and hid prettily amongst her words like a butterfly in a garden. She lulled you into thinking she was only talking about a burial, or a bed, or roses, or sewing. She got your trust. Then she sneaked up behind you and whacked you over the head with a plank. In “Charlotte Brontë’s Grave.” In “The Chariot.” In “The Wife.” And “Apocalypse.”

  “. . . and Tom L’Esperance says the new seed gives ears that are twice as big as the seed we’ve been using and that . . .”

  Even after having had the book in my possession for several weeks, I would start a poem feeling that I was up to the task—girded—and then, before I even knew it, I was wiping tears off the pages lest the water pucker them. Sometimes I took her meaning in my head, and that was bad enough. Other times she was more veiled and I could only understand it with my heart, and that was even worse. She provoked so much feeling with her small, careful words. She did so much with so little. Like Emmie Hubbard, with the paints she made from berries and roots. And Minnie making filling dinners for Jim and the hired hands out of nothing. And Weaver’s mamma getting Weaver all the way from Eagle Bay to the Columbia University with her wash pot and chickens.

  “. . . which means you get more silage out of the same acreage. I can’t hardly believe it! It’s like planting twenty acres, but getting the sort of yield you’d expect from thirty . . .”

  Emily Dickinson riled me, but I never managed to be cross with her for long, because I knew she’d been fragile. Miss Wilcox said she had a hard time of it. Her pa was overbearing and hadn’t let her read any books that he didn’t like. She became a recluse, and toward the end of her life, she never ventured farther than the grounds of her father’s house. She had no husband, no children, no one to give her heart to. And that was sad. Anyone could see from her poems that she had a large and generous heart to give. I was glad that I had someone to give my heart to. Even if he didn’t know a poem from a potato and tended to go on and on about seed corn.

  “. . . the seed costs more, being that it’s brand-new and a hybrid and all, but Tom says you’ll make the money back a hundred times over. And you’ll spend less on fertilizer, too . . .”

  Why didn’t Emily Dickinson leave her father’s house? Why didn’t she marry? I wondered. Miss Wilcox had given me another book of poems to take with me to the Glenmore—April Twilight, by a Miss Willa Cather. And a novel—The Country of the Pointed Firs, by a Miss Sarah Orne Jewett. Why hadn’t Jane Austen married? Or Emily Brontë? Or Louisa May Alcott? Was it because no one wanted bookish girls, like my aunt Josie said? Mary Shelley married and Edith Wharton, too, but Miss Wilcox said both marriages were disasters. And then, of course, there was Miss Wilcox herself, with her thin-lipped bully of a husband.

  “. . . it’s really too late to plant, but Pa said to buy half a pound anyway, plant it and see what we get. Whoa! Whoa, there!” Royal said, stopping the horses at the bottom of the road that leads to Minnie’s. “Matt, I’m going to let you out right here. Jim’s drive is a bit narrow for this old wagon. I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours. I thought we could ride up and see Dan and Belinda’s land. Forty acres they’ve got. Just bought it from Clyde Wells with the money Belinda’s father give ’em.”

  Gave them, Royal, gave them, I thought. “All right,” I said, jumping down, careful not to hurt t
he posy I’d picked for Minnie.

  He turned the horses around, talking as he did. “Wells charged them good for it, but still, forty acres.”

  “Royal!” I suddenly said. Too loudly.

  “What?”

  “Just . . . don’t forget. Don’t forget to come back for me.”

  He frowned at me. “I said I’d be back in two hours. Didn’t you hear me?”

  I nodded. I did hear you, Royal, I thought, but I don’t believe you. I still don’t believe any of this. Not the boat ride on Big Moose Lake. Not the walks and buckboard rides since then. Not your promise of a ring. You’ll forget all about me and I’ll have to walk home from Minnie’s and I’ll see you on the way, riding with Martha Miller, and you’ll look right through me and I’ll wake up and realize that it was all a dream. Please come back for me, I said silently, watching him go. Please take me riding. Because I like how everyone looks at us when we pass by. And I like sitting next to you in the wagon with your leg pressed against mine. And I don’t even mind listening to all the characteristics of hybrid corn, because I want you to touch me and kiss me even if I am plain and bookish. Especially because I am those things.

  The buckboard disappeared around the bend, and I turned and headed up the road toward Minnie’s house. As I walked, I waved to the hired hands. They were building split-rail fences from the trees they’d felled to enclose Jim’s land. I saw Thistle, one of the cows, grazing nearby. She was huge and would calve any day now. Gravid was my word of the day. It means pregnant. When I read it that morning, I thought it was the strangest-sounding word for pregnant. Until I’d read on and learned that it also means burdened or loaded down. Looking at Thistle, with her heavy belly and her tired eyes, it made perfect sense.

  I smelled the flowers I’d picked for Minnie. I hoped she would like them. It had been so long since I’d seen her—weeks—and I had so much to tell her. Last time I went to visit, I’d just received the letter from Barnard, but I never got the chance to show it to her, because she’d been laboring with her twins. And then I was busy with the farm and Miss Wilcox’s library, and then I’d gone to the Glenmore, and it seemed like ages since I’d really been able to talk to her. I still wanted to tell her about the letter, even if I wasn’t going. I wanted to tell her about Royal, too, and the ring he was going to give me. I wanted to see if maybe she could help me figure a way to both be married to Royal and still be a writer, to be two things at once—like one of those fancy coats they have in the Sears and Roebuck catalog that you can change into a whole different coat just by turning it inside out.

  When I got to her porch, the front door banged open. Jim greeted me sullenly, stuffed the remains of a sandwich in his mouth, and trotted down the steps to join the hired hands.

  “Minnie?” I called, stepping inside. A nasty smell hit me. A sour reek of old food and dirty diapers.

  “Matt, is that you?” a tired voice asked. Minnie was sitting on her bed, nursing her twins. She looked so thin and drawn that I barely recognized her. Her blond hair was greasy. Her clothing was stained. The babies were sucking at her hungrily, making greedy grunting noises. Her eyes darted around the room. She looked anxious and embarrassed.

  “Yes, it’s me. I brought you these,” I said, holding out the flowers.

  “They’re so pretty, Mattie. Thank you. Will you put them in something?”

  I went to find a glass or a jar, and it was then I noticed how filthy the place was. Plates and glasses crusted with food littered the table and counters, cutlery filled the sink. Dirty pots covered the stove top. The floor looked like it hadn’t been swept in ages.

  “I apologize for the state of things,” Minnie said. “Jim’s had four men helping him all week. Seems I just get one meal cooked and it’s time for the next one. The babies are always hungry, too. Here, take them for a minute, will you? I’ll make us a cup of tea.”

  She handed one of the babies to me, wincing as she pulled him off her swollen, blue-veined breast. Her skin, where the baby’s mouth had been, was livid. Tiny droplets of blood seeped from a crack in it. She saw me staring and covered herself. She handed me the other baby, and in no time flat, they were both screaming. They twisted and kicked. They screwed up their tiny faces and opened their little pink mouths like two screeching baby birds. Their diapers were soggy. Their cheeks were rashy. Their scalps were crusty. They stank of milk and piss. I was trying to settle them, so they’d stop screaming, so the wet from the diapers wouldn’t soak into my skirt, when the next thing I knew, Minnie was standing over me, her arms at her side, her hands clenched.

  “Give them to me! Give them back! Don’t look at them like that! Don’t look at me! Just get out! Go! Get out of here!” she shouted.

  “Min . . . I . . . I’m sorry! I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  But it was too late. Minnie was hysterical. She crushed the babies to her and started to cry. “You hate them, don’t you, Mattie? Don’t you?”

  “Minnie! What are you saying?”

  “I know you do. I hate them, too. Sometimes. I do.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Her eyes were tormented.

  “You hush right now! You don’t mean that!”

  “I do mean it. I wish I’d never had them. I wish I’d never gotten married.” The babies struggled and howled against her. She sat down on the bed, opened her blouse, and grimaced as they latched on to her. She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. Tears leaked out from under her pale lashes and I was suddenly reminded of a story Lawton once told me, after he’d come home from walking a trapline with French Louis Seymour. Louis had caught a bear in one of his steel traps. A mother bear that had two cubs. The trap had broken her front leg. By the time Louis and Lawton got to her, she was mad with fear and pain. She lay on her side, keening. Her other side was gone. There was no fur there, no meat, only a livid mass of gore and bones. Her frantic, starving cubs had eaten her flesh away.

  “You’re just weary, Min,” I said, stroking her hand. “That’s all.”

  She opened her eyes. “I don’t know, Matt. It all seemed so exciting when we were sparking, and then just married, but it isn’t now. Jim’s always at me . . .”

  “He’s probably just worn down, too. It’s hard work clearing—”

  “Oh, don’t be dense, Mattie! I mean at me. But I can’t. I’m so sore down there. And I just can’t have another baby. Not right after the twins. I can’t go through it again. Mrs. Crego said that nursing will keep me from quickening, but it hurts so, I think I’ll go crazy with the pain. I’m sorry, Matt . . . I’m sorry I shouted at you. I’m glad you came . . . I didn’t want to tell you all these things . . . I’m just so tired . . .”

  “I know you are. You lie there for a minute and rest. Let me make the tea.”

  Within minutes Minnie had fallen asleep and the babies with her. I got busy. I boiled water and washed all the pots and pans and dishes. I boiled some more and set the dirty dishrags and aprons to soaking. I filled the big black washing kettle with water, threw in a pailful of dirty diapers I’d found in the kitchen, and started a fire under it in the backyard. It wouldn’t reach a boil for some time, but at least she wouldn’t have to haul the water. Then I scrubbed the table and swept the floor. I set the table, too, thinking the men would be back in for supper before long, and put my flowers in the middle of it. When I’d finished, the house looked and smelled much better, and I looked and smelled much worse. Then I heard wagon wheels at the bottom of the drive. I looked out the window and saw Royal. Already. He and Jim were talking, but he’d expect me momentarily. I’d never even had the chance to tell Minnie about him.

  As I quickly patted my hair back into place, it hit me: Emily Dickinson was a damned sneaky genius.

  Holing up in her father’s house, never marrying, becoming a recluse—that had sounded like giving up to me, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed she fought by not fighting. And knowing her poems as I do, I would not put such underhanded behavior past her. Oh
, maybe she was lonely at times, and cowed by her pa, but I bet at midnight, when the lights were out and her father was asleep, she went sliding down the banister and swinging from the chandelier. I bet she was just dizzy with freedom.

  I have read almost a hundred of Emily’s poems and memorized ten. Miss Wilcox says she wrote nearly eighteen hundred. I looked at my friend Minnie, sleeping still. A year ago she was a girl, like me, and we were in my mamma’s kitchen giggling and fooling and throwing apple peels over our shoulders to see if they’d make the initial of our true loves. I couldn’t even see that girl anymore. She was gone. And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have written even one poem if she’d had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for.

  I knew then why they didn’t marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn’t want to be lonely my whole life. I didn’t want to give up my words. I didn’t want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn’t have to. Charles Dickens didn’t. And John Milton didn’t, either, though he might have made life easier for untold generations of schoolkids if he had.

  Then Royal hollered for me and I had to wake Minnie to tell her good-bye. When I got outside, the afternoon was bright and sunny, and Royal took my hand as we rode to his brother’s land, and he told me we would have land, too, and a house and cows and chickens and an old oak bureau his grandmother had promised him, and a pine bed, too. He said he had some money saved up, and I proudly told him I had ten dollars and sixty cents saved up between money I’d had before I went to the Glenmore and two weeks’ wages (minus the four dollars I’d given Pa), and tips. He said that was almost enough to pay for a good stove. Or maybe a calf instead. He pleased himself so much just talking about these things that he smiled and put his arm around me. It was the nicest feeling. Lucky and safe. Like getting all your animals inside the barn just before a bad storm hits. I nestled against him and imagined what it would feel like to lie next to him in a pine bed in the dark, and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter.