The Refuge

by Ann H. Gabhart

  And it was a fine thing they did taking in orphans without a place. But Leatrice wasn’t an orphan. She had a father. She had him.

  5

  I kept my baby a secret as long as I could. Sister Helene knew, of course, and one of the other women in my sleeping room guessed without being told. Sister Ellie said not only my morning nausea but also a certain inward look gave me away. Before she and her husband came to the Shakers six years ago, she had borne five children.

  “Coming here wasn’t to my liking, but my Albert was as sure as I was doubtful,” she told me. “Might be fine for those with no children to claim. But I did miss hearing my own call me ma after we came among the Shakers.”

  “What did they call you?” I asked.

  “Sister Ellie. Seemed the strangest thing. Children I’d birthed acting like we had no more connection than you and me.” Sister Ellie shook her head. “Nay, not seemed. ’Twas the strangest thing. The children thought it strange too. I could tell by their faces. After all, I knew those faces like my own.”

  When I asked if the children were in the village, she frowned. “Only one is still in the Shaker dress. Little Abby. She wasn’t but three when we came here. The others were all older. Soon’s they figured they could make their own way, they left this place for more natural living.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them? You could have, couldn’t you?”

  “I’m not bound here with chains, if that’s what you mean, but my man, he embraced the Shaker way full on. Stopped embracing me, if you want to think about it that way. But in my heart he is still my husband. That ceremony our preacher spoke over us had something about whither thou goeth, so must I go. He went here. And there’s little Abby too. I can’t exactly mother her, but I can keep my eye on her. The others, by the time they left, they didn’t really need my mothering. They come back and visit now and again. My eldest girl had a baby with her last time she came.”

  “Did they let you see her?” I asked.

  “Yea, the Shakers are not unkind. They do tell my daughter she should come back into the fold, which I can tell will never happen. Instead my daughter invites me to come away with her.” Sister Ellie paused a moment as sorrow mixed with a bit of despair showed in her eyes. She sighed and looked resigned. “I can’t go now even if I was willing to break my vows. They wouldn’t let my Abby go with me. It’s her father’s decision that rules on where she must be. I’m not sure she’d go with me if she could. She loves her Shaker sisters. As do I, but there are times . . .” She let her words die away.

  I heard the words she didn’t speak. I heard them even clearer, now that I carried a baby of my own.

  As my shape changed and the size of my midsection could no longer be hidden under my apron, I became something of a pariah among the Shakers. The brethren averted their eyes and sometimes changed direction when they saw me on the pathways. I wasn’t sure if I was an embarrassment to their society or a temptation to the memory of how they used to live. Eldress Maria forbade me from joining in at worship times. That was just as well. I had no energy for dancing after a day’s work.

  She had questioned me for two full hours when she realized my condition. “An example of sinful living,” she said.

  “I did not know I was with child when we came to the village.” I refused to cast my eyes downward as though ashamed of the child growing within me. “Even had I known, you would have surely welcomed one so innocent as an unborn child.”

  “We turn none away in need, but we do expect those among us to live the Shaker way.”

  “Yea. I have done so since sleeping under your roof.” I had no desire to upset Eldress Maria. Since I had no family to take me in, I needed that Shaker roof.

  Eldress Maria didn’t dispute my words. I had been diligent in my duties and respectful when she and others instructed me in the Shaker way, although I never gave any indication of belief in their way. Then again, since I had not spoken against their teachings, I suppose silence can be a cowardly way of agreeing. But I was not there to change the Shakers. I was there to escape death, which had run after and caught Walter at any rate.

  I kept Walter close in my thoughts as his baby grew within me. I imagined him walking with me, putting his hand on my midsection to feel the baby kick against my skin as though eager to push his way into the world. Him. I was that sure my baby would be a boy. A little Walter. I imagined him with Walter’s blue-gray eyes and my red hair. A sturdy little boy afraid of nothing, the same as Walter. The same as me.

  Or the way I was before. Now many worries came to mind with uneasy fear trailing after them. What to do? Our few resources had been given over to the Shakers when we came to their village. If I left, those would be returned to me, but I would hardly have enough for a new start. Then came the morning that cramps gripped me.

  Sister Ellie frowned when she heard me gasp. Her frown grew darker when she noted blood spots on my nightgown. “How many months did you say you were?”

  I counted in my head. July, August, September, October, November, December. “Six.”

  “Too soon. A baby can come weeks early and survive, but not months early.”

  “Can I stop it?” My hands clutched my stomach as though to hold the baby in.

  “A few early pangs are naught to worry over. If they go away. You should rest until they do. Go to the infirmary and do no work.”

  “But what of my duties?” I had been assigned to the kitchen where I peeled and chopped vegetables to fill the pots.

  “Sister Helene can make your excuses to Eldress Maria. Someone else will take your place.”

  Sister Ellie looked at Sister Helene, who stopped adjusting her cap to stare at me, her eyes wide with worry. As can be with natural sisters, the three of us had grown so close that the baby no longer seemed mine alone, but in some ways, theirs as well. They had watched him grow to push out my belly, but Sister Ellie was right. I remembered my mother’s size before my brothers and little sister were born. My baby needed more time.

  So I lay in bed until the pains faded away and no more blood leaked from me.

  Yet Sister Ellie continued to watch me with concern. “What has happened once can happen again,” she warned.

  Eldress Maria said the same, with even more direness. “It can be God’s will to take away sin. Our Mother Ann lost four children before the Lord revealed to her the sinfulness of marital life.”

  “Nay.” I sat across from the eldress and denied her words. “The Lord loves all babies.”

  “Yea, but he can love them even more in heaven where all is good. The babies do not suffer.” Eldress Maria narrowed her eyes on me. “Our Lord has many ways of teaching us the lessons we must learn.”

  Her words were harsh, but I did not protest them. It was near Christmas. A time for peace and for atonement. The Shakers even had a special day for such. A time to ask forgiveness of any they had wronged throughout the year. The mistreated person was to forgive unconditionally in order for the unity of the village to be restored.

  So even though I didn’t speak the words aloud, I forgave Eldress Maria. She had never carried a child. She could not know the way a baby lived in one’s heart long before the first life movements were felt.

  After the cramping pains, I was given lighter duty. I spent hours in the sewing room hemming dresses and aprons. I also hemmed small blankets and tiny nightshirts. Nobody said they were for my baby, but the sisters smiled when they handed them to me to do the finishing stitches. Many of them were mothers who remembered a baby growing under their hearts.

  January came with cold and snow. My middle grew larger while the rest of me seemed to shrink around it. I struggled to make it to the privy when the pathway was icy. Sister Helene often walked with me, ever ready to grab me if I slipped. She watched me with eyes of wonder, almost as if she could see the baby growing inside me.

  “How does it feel?” she continually asked.

  I tried to tell her. How the very thought of this baby made my bones soft
en and my arms eager to feel his weight as he suckled my breast. I did my best to share this journey with her since if she stayed with the Shakers as she thought was her lot in life, she would never know the joy of bearing a child or the sorrow of losing a husband. Both would be lost to her unless she left the village, and that seemed something far from her thoughts. Unlike mine.

  Without the baby to consider, I would have walked away from the village. Gone into the town and looked for a job perhaps as a nanny teacher. I could mind children. Hadn’t I the same as raised my little brothers while my mother carried little Rosie? But who would hire a woman so near to birthing a baby? None without the bonds of kinship.

  My Shaker sisters told me not to think on that. Even Sister Ellie, although a frown did crease her brow from time to time when we talked of spring after the baby came. I knew she was thinking of her Abby who lived in the Children’s House with others to watch over her. But surely a mother would be allowed to nurse her baby. I did not ask that question for fear of the answer.

  The Shakers had their rules. If they disallowed the relationship between a man and woman, then might they also refuse to recognize the natural bonds of mother and infant? It did not bear thinking upon. At least not during the day when I could keep my hands busy. At night, lying in the narrow bed with my back aching from sitting in a straight chair, plying my needle all through the day, the worry poked at me as I counted the weeks before my baby would come into the world to good or bad. I prayed, silently and fervently. Often I had no words. The Lord knew my need of a place to raise my child.

  Sometimes I blocked the truth that he had already given me this place with shelter and food among the Shakers. But I thought of the future and could not help recalling sight of the Shaker children lined up with sisters who weren’t their mothers. I prayed for another way.

  Sister Ellie understood without my speaking aloud my concerns. She would touch my arm and look into my eyes as Granny Hatchell used to when she was explaining something about life. “Worry not, dear sister. You’ll only make yourself ill. Take each day as it comes with the blessings and trials it brings, for the Lord only promises us this day. We can do naught to turn yesterday into a different day, and we know not what the morrow might hold. Simply step out on the day’s path with your trust in the one who holds all our days in his hands.”

  Her words were wise. I did my best to listen. At times, when the baby moved within me, I could embrace the moment and not worry about tomorrow. Other times I was so overcome with grief and anxiety, I could not think of anything except the cradles I’d seen in the Children’s House. No cradles were in the Gathering Family House, where I slept surrounded by women ready to learn the Shaker way or perhaps as trapped as I.

  Sister Helene was not trapped. Nothing seemed to truly trouble her. The peace of the Shaker life, she said. Troubles were locked outside the village in the world. All was good here, as much like heaven as humans could make it. She noted my uneasy spirit, but she seemed to float along above it all, much like a fluffy white cloud pushed across the sky by dark thunderclouds. Oblivious to any kind of storm. She would say there was no storm. Not if a person embraced the Shaker way.

  Eldress Maria, the leader of the sisters in the Gathering Family house, said the same on the days she heard my required confession of sins. During the week, I gathered these wrongs into a sin sack so I would have something to tell her, even though what I said little mattered. She looked at me and saw worldly sin. The evidence could not be hidden.

  Sister Helene had too gentle a soul to see sin in any of her sisters. That was why she was assigned to those of us yet resisting the Shaker teaching. Her kindness and patience made her a perfect teacher. I listened to her words, did my best to abide by the rules she claimed would keep unity in our family. Always step up on the first stair step with one’s right foot. Shaker your plate. That meant to eat every morsel you dipped out onto that plate, whether your stomach suddenly rebelled or not. The Shakers probably even had rules on the proper way to lose one’s supper, but if so, Sister Helene never shared that one with me.

  The Shakers were firm about the need to care for one’s body by taking proper nourishment. After all, each person was expected to work. Every day. Except Sunday. Even then there were chores and the dancing worship. The Shakers claimed they were exercising or laboring the songs.

  Before I was banned from the services due to my worldly condition, I had seen Sister Helene in the marches stepping to and fro, bowing and bending to the music of the singers. They had no instruments other than their voices. They sang all on the same note for unity and danced the steps practiced in the family houses on evenings during the week. I had practiced the dances, but I never took part in the Sunday worship times.

  That suited me. I could do the steps. Small as I was, I had always been light on my feet, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around dancing as a way of worship. Never mind that I had read in the Bible about how King David danced in front of the Ark of the Covenant when it was brought to Jerusalem. Those were different times. And a man after the Lord’s own heart.

  Perhaps I was wrong to judge. Sister Helene did have a glow about her as she danced in the worship times. Others shared that look, but some merely seemed to go through the motions while peering over their shoulders, perhaps for a glimpse of a loved one now separated from them. A few like me checked the little window door where the eyes of those of the Ministry could be seen watching. Ever watching.

  So I was happy to have a time of quiet while the others went to the meetinghouse. Even with the windows closed against the winter air, I could hear them singing as they marched in order to church. Two by two. Brethren, then sisters. At the church the men would enter through one door and the women the other. Such was the same at the churches I attended with my mother and then with Granny Hatchell when she felt up to going. But nothing was the same once the Shakers entered those doors to seek spiritual blessings in a different way, with dancing and whirling. So very different than at my mother’s and Granny Hatchell’s churches a person sat and quietly waited for the preacher to summon the spirit.

  Once I knew the Shakers were inside, I took a chair from the railing where it hung upside down to keep dust from collecting on the seat. The chairs, along with brooms and candles in tin holders and sundry other things, hung out of the way on the railing pegs to make sweeping easier. The Shakers made war on dirt. They even fashioned small brooms with a perfect shape for cleaning corners. They believed good spirits would not live where there was dirt.

  I sat in the sunlight, warmed by its trip through the window beside me, and rested my hand on Granny Hatchell’s Bible. I had often read to her before the fireplace with its ashes spilling out on the hearth. Pap Hatchell and then later Walter brought in dirt from the fields that had a way of settling into the cracks of the wooden floor. But good spirits abounded in our little cabin. How I wished for a return to that place where order didn’t matter as much as love.

  Granny Hatchell did love me. I smiled as I remembered her sometimes saying I wasn’t big as a minute, but then she’d tell me how I was wonderfully made. That the Lord’s hand covered me in my mother’s womb. She showed me where it said that in Psalms. I leafed through the thin Bible pages until I found the verse in Psalm 139.

  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

  I laid my hand flat on the Scripture, shut my eyes, and dwelled on how my own baby was being fearfully and wonderfully made inside me.

  And so I waited.

  6

  FEBRUARY 1850

  Icy snow stung Flynn’s face and the raw wind sliced right through him as he walked to the barn. He hated winter. Had ever since he was a boy.

  He’d heard tell of places where it stayed warm year around. No snow. No ice. Said a man near died of the heat in the high summer, but as Flynn clutched his coat closer, he thought maybe he wouldn’t mind that trade-off. A fellow could always jump in a p
ond or river to cool off.

  Nobody was going to jump into any ponds around here. They were all frozen over. Another problem. He’d have to break the ice on the pond behind the barn so the cows Silas insisted on keeping would have water. A man needed a milk cow but not a whole field full. Flynn had never taken to cows that gave him blank stares and dug in their hooves and refused to move or threw up their tails to run the wrong way whenever a man needed them to go from here to there. At least a horse could be trained to do what needed doing. But he didn’t guess there was any way to train horses to fill their own water and feed buckets.

  Flynn looked back toward the house. Through the blowing snow, he could barely see the glow of the lamp he’d left burning on the kitchen table. Surely Leatrice would do as she was told and stay inside. Silas was there with her, but he was showing his age. Yesterday he had nodded off right in the middle of Flynn telling him about the horse the Shakers were coming to get on the morrow.

  At least the man hadn’t started in again on how Flynn should take Leatrice to the Shakers. The child was nigh on seven. Plenty old enough to do what he said, whether or not he was watching her every minute. By the time Flynn was seven, he was already working with his pa every day, with no time to get into mischief. He had even less time after his pa rode off to town one day when Flynn was twelve and never rode back home.

  Nobody knew exactly what happened to him. Flynn figured he just kept riding west. He’d been twitchy for a while, ready to cuff whoever was closest if the least thing went wrong. Flynn, his ma, his sister and little brothers had been staying out of his way when they could, but none of them expected him to just ride off without the first goodbye.

  His mother hung onto the farm for a while, but then the cholera came in. Took Flynn’s sister in two days. Lillie was a year younger than Flynn and as pretty as her name. Losing her broke Flynn’s ma. Turned her eyes back toward Virginia. Flynn refused to go with her. By then, he was as strong as most men, and he intended to be where his pa could find him if he ever came back to Mercer County. That was so he could beat the living daylights out of the scoundrel the next time he laid eyes on him.