“My grandfather raised me as if I were his own daughter. He poured all the love and hope he had once given to Lydia into me. I had the best of everything—the best he could afford, at any rate—but as I grew older, we both came to understand that I would find small welcome among the upper crust of Saint Louis. You see, Samuel Grant had a brother, and that brother had distinguished himself in the war with Mexico.
“When I was born, Saint Louis was agog at the heroics of one Ulysses S. Grant. The Grant family had some business ties within the city, although they came from Ohio. That explains how Samuel found himself in Saint Louis, despoiling trustful young girls. And when I reached the age of fifteen and Grandfather deemed me old enough to debut, Ulysses Grant was considered an upstanding citizen—well respected, well liked. The Grant name soon became one to reckon with.
“Grandfather put it about that I was the niece of our own war hero, Ulysses. That was his biggest mistake, I suppose. Society didn’t take kindly to my grandfather’s story, though it was the truth. The general feeling was that old van Voorhees was trying to put a dark mark on the good Grant name, or trying to skim off some of their fortune. Grandfather knew the truth, though, and he persisted. He sent me to all the best parties and picnics, all the dances that spring and summer, and I was left alone, a girl of fifteen, to face the aspersions of my neighbors. Saint Louis society now knew me to be illegitimate, you see, and so they thought me to be grasping—reaching for a place in the world to which I was not entitled, or worse, trying to glean some of Ulysses Grant’s well-earned comfort for myself with these tall tales of being his natural niece.”
Cora paused. She braced her hands in the small of her back—always aching; it had ached for years, since moving out of the city—and stared down at the china, the stacks of delicate gilded things that had no business being here, twenty miles from Paintrock in the shadow of the Bighorns.
“Well?” Beulah prodded. “What happened then, Ma?”
What happened next was foolish—ridiculous. Cora’s face burned at the thought of recounting the rest of her story. But she could feel them all waiting, hanging on the unfinished tale—Beulah and Clyde, even the little children.
“I hardly think you’ll believe me if I tell the rest. But it is true. I was walking home from church one Sunday. Grandfather had been ill—the first signs of a sickness that would later kill him—so I’d gone alone that day. It was a beautiful, fine afternoon, and I decided to take the long way home, which led through a farmer’s back field and over a little brook. I liked to linger beside the brook, when time permitted, and pick flowers along its bank. There was a young man working in the back field, harvesting potatoes. He had black soil up to his knees and covering his hands. He called out to me, which was terribly bold—I should have turned away in scorn. A proper girl would have turned away. But I stopped and let him approach, for I was curious, and I felt as if nothing could go wrong that day. Everything had gone so dreadfully foul all that spring and summer—the girls at the dances and parties mocking me, the gentlemen turning away whenever I walked by. I felt as if I was owed a good turn, and somehow, I madly believed I was about to find something good, something I deserved, right there in that potato field. Well, the farm boy—he was a little older than me, but it wasn’t his farm—sauntered up to me grinning. He fell on his knees in the dirt before me. He was only jesting, but he said, ‘You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Won’t you take pity on my ailing heart and marry me?’”
Silence hung in the kitchen. Cora watched the firelight moving along the golden rims of the dishes. Stretch and flicker, glitter and fade. No one spoke, but still she could feel their waiting.
“I did marry him.” When she could speak again, her voice was very small. “I surprised him by saying yes, for I didn’t know his name—didn’t know a thing about him. He gawked at me and then climbed to his feet. He said it had only been a freak, a game. But it was no game to me. ‘Marry me,’ I said. ‘You told me you would, now make good and do it.’ I had grown so weary, you see—not yet sixteen years old, but already weary. Tired of being the girl whom gentlemen tried to avoid at the dances, and tired of weeping each night into my pillow. At least this farm boy, whoever he was, would look at me without pity or scorn. At least he spoke to me. I figured it was more than I could hope for from any other man in Saint Louis.”
“That’s how you met Father?” Beulah sounded delighted.
Cora nodded. She couldn’t meet her daughter’s eye.
“It’s late,” Clyde said at length. “I had best get home. My mother will be expecting me.”
“Thank you,” Cora said. “For bringing me the president’s gift, and for the firewood.”
“Think nothing of it, Mrs. Bemis. Good night.”
When Clyde had gone, Cora turned to her daughter. “You had best get Miranda washed up and dressed for bed. Charles, Benjamin, you run along and wash your faces, too. In the morning, you boys must move all that firewood young Mr. Webber gave us out to the barn. Otherwise it will never dry out again.”
The boys went off grumbling, and Beulah picked up her little sister, propping Miranda on one slender hip.
“I can take the ax and break up this crate tomorrow, too,” Beulah said. “It’ll make fine kindling, and so will all this straw.”
“No.” Cora rested her fingertips on the crate protectively. “No, don’t break it up just yet.”
“Why not?”
“It might prove useful.”
Beulah took Miranda away without another word. Cora was left alone in the kitchen, listening to the pop and crack of the fire, watching as the light played over the curves of teacups and slid along the rims of plates, those stacks of sudden, unlooked-for gold.
NETTIE MAE
Tangled root and broken branch. That was all Cora Bemis was. Nettie Mae shook her head at the news Clyde brought. She refused to believe. She turned the rumor aside as stubbornly as her dead husband had turned aside kindness or mercy or affection, all the marks of weakness Substance had despised.
“It’s true, Mother,” Clyde insisted. “I saw it all for myself. I read the letter, too.”
He was bolting down the stew Nettie Mae had dished up, and she never liked to see him talk while he ate; it was plumb uncivilized. Nettie Mae would rather have scolded him for his half-witted stunt. Imagine taking to the road—in the rain, no less!—after one has been sick in bed, after one has almost expired from fever.
Nettie Mae buttered a few slices of bread and cut a small wedge from the last remaining wheel of cheese. She set the whole lot on a plain pottery dish—no fancy president’s china for her—and slid the dish across the table toward her son. Clyde bit into the cheese at once. Nettie Mae hadn’t touched that damnable cheese since Substance’s death. She had got it from the Bemis woman earlier in the summer; traded good yarn for it, too. She would rather have had the yarn back now. It felt like some sort of bedevilment, an insidious, lurking witchcraft, to have anything the Bemis woman had made beneath her roof.
“Slow down,” Nettie Mae said. “You don’t want to take a stomachache from bolting your food. That would be all you need, on top of the fever.”
Clyde scarcely restrained himself. “The china is real pretty. Blue and gold—real gold. And I read the letter, like I said. It came straight from President Grant. Can you imagine such a thing? For anybody to get a gift from the president is plain unbelievable, but it’s our own neighbors—”
“You can’t call that woman a neighbor. She hasn’t got a neighborly bone in her body.”
Clyde slowed at that, finally. “Come now, Mother.” He let his spoon fall back into the stew and frowned across the table at Nettie Mae. “I know Mrs. Bemis did you wrong, but she is still our neighbor.”
“Don’t expect me to be giddy over her presidential china; that’s all.” She pulled the loaf of bread closer and cut herself a slice, buttered it slowly. Without looking at her son, she said with a casual air, “What did the letter say?”
&
nbsp; “It was short. I can’t remember every word exactly, but the general thrust was Here’s a gift to make amends for how the Grant family has wronged you.”
“Wronged her? That woman?”
“And her mother. The letter mentioned her mother, too. I remember that part.”
Nettie Mae laughed suddenly. Even to herself, it sounded like the bark of a wary dog. “You see! That explains everything.”
Clyde shook his head slowly, dunking his bread into the dregs of his stew. “I don’t see. What do you mean?”
“A wronged mother and a wronged daughter. Think about it, Clyde. Cora Bemis has no paternity.”
Clyde dropped his bread in the dish and stared at Nettie Mae. He had stilled his face carefully, thinking to hide his thoughts. Had the boy learned that trick from Substance, she wondered—or from Nettie Mae herself?
“Cora Bemis’s mother was unmarried,” Nettie Mae insisted, all but crowing with excitement, with vindication. “It’s obvious now. I should have guessed before, since only a person made in the worst kind of sin would think to inflict such a shame upon others. So, was it the president who occupied himself with that woman’s mother, I wonder?” Nettie Mae shrugged, answering her own question before Clyde had a chance to speak. “No, I suppose not. If he had, he would hardly have sent the china himself. He would have instructed someone else to do it on his behalf. I suppose presidents have no end of servants and employees who might handle such distasteful business for them.”
“I don’t guess it makes a lot of difference who did the sending,” Clyde began.
Nettie Mae didn’t allow him to finish that thought. “But make no mistake, that woman will lord her treasure over us. You see if she doesn’t.”
“How can she lord anything, Mother, when you won’t even look at her, let alone speak to her?”
“Why should I look at that woman, or speak to her? God knows, I see visions of her in my head every time I close my eyes. Sights I’d rather be spared.”
The boy sighed deeply, resuming his supper. Nettie Mae watched him with a new flush of intensity, a sharpness of fear. Clyde had grown too thin this fall, too pale, and the sickness had been far worse than he knew. Shadows lay heavily around his eyes. He had acquired a droop to his shoulders that had no business on the frame of a sixteen-year-old boy. She remembered, with a cruel and sudden vividness, the way her third boy, Luther, had looked just hours before his death. Luther had succumbed to his fever—carried off to his grave at ten brief years of age. And hadn’t Luther looked just this way, with darkness like bruises circling his eyes, the young body sagging like an old man’s?
No, she told herself. No, it won’t happen again. God spared Clyde from that fate. He wouldn’t be so cruel as to strike my son ill again. He can’t be cruel enough to take them all—my little children, and Substance, and my last remaining son, my good, strong Clyde. It cannot happen. It won’t.
Clyde was only tuckered out from a long day. And all that extra labor he’d performed, this nonsense of carrying a heavy crate full of dishes for that woman. That creature born of sin, that Jezebel.
“The gift must be intended to buy her silence,” Nettie Mae said.
Clyde looked up from his supper, dull and confused. “What now, Mother?”
“The china. President Grant sent it to keep that woman quiet. It’s payment for a service, and her service will be to keep her mouth well and truly closed. She must have been rutted into existence by some brother or cousin of the president.”
Clyde gaped at Nettie Mae’s coarse language. “Mother!”
“Don’t pretend shock. You’ve lived on a farm your whole life. You know how animals are born.”
“Mrs. Bemis isn’t an animal, however you may hate her. And you’ll only do your own soul harm by saying such things.”
“Planning to become a minister?” Nettie Mae said dryly.
“Don’t make me cross, Mother. I work hard to keep you; you know I do.”
Rebuked by the weariness that still clung to her son, Nettie Mae subsided. “I know it,” she said quietly, almost remorsefully. A strained silence filled the house. She could hear the wind moaning across the top of the chimney. After a moment, she added, “I’d be real proud of you, though, if you were to become a minister someday.”
Clyde’s laugh was short and bitter. “God knows, I got no plans to be a preacher.” After another pause, he added rather meekly, “But can’t you see your way to mending things with Mrs. Bemis—just a little? The girl who lives over yonder, Beulah, has been real grateful for the help I’ve given. She wants to come and work our land in exchange, Mother—help me with the chores over here, and help you with your work, too. I could use her. She’s stronger than she looks, and she works steady without no complaints.”
“You mustn’t even think such a thing.” A fresh, new fear pricked at Nettie Mae. “Now we can all see what sort of stock that child was bred from. There are generations of sinners in her family.”
“You can’t blame Cora for the way she was brought into this world. She had no say in the matter.”
Nettie Mae folded her arms, sat back rigidly in her chair. “Like mother, like daughter.” Then, thinking of the strange, eerily detached Bemis girl—her too-calm face, her habit of drifting from place to place like a spirit caught half in, half out of a dream—she leaned forward and repeated with emphasis, “Like mother, like daughter. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep yourself well away from that little sinner, Clyde.”
“Beulah never sinned in her life.”
“She will, soon enough. She will when the time comes. And it’s coming soon, you mark my words.”
Clyde’s face and neck flushed. He pushed back his chair, rose slowly from the table. “Time I was for bed. Got a terrible lot of work to do in the morning. Pity I can’t call on that little sinner across the pasture to lend me a hand. Might make the work go easier on me.”
With that, he turned away, shuffling toward the stairs and his bed.
Nettie Mae watched him go, fighting down the pressure of fear that struggled to rise up from her middle. Clyde moved with the wincing tenderness of an old man, her young and healthy son. She remembered the smallness of Luther’s hand in her own, the darkened skin around his closed eyes—skin that glistened with the damp of fever. Luther’s hand going cold and colder by the minute.
Better to go to your grave untouched by sin than to die tangled in a web of corruption, she told herself.
But then Nettie Mae shuddered, though the fire blazed in the hearth and the kitchen was warm enough. She couldn’t help feeling as if God had heard the private thought, and was even now calculating, working out the time and specifics of Clyde Webber’s death.
5
THE WARP AND WEFT
Even after Clyde was back on his feet, I couldn’t help but worry. He was pale and moved a little slower than he ever had before, tending to his work with a strange deliberation, a careful placement of foot and hand that put me in mind of the old men I’d seen lingering on crates outside the Paintrock general store. Long past their strength, trembling with palsy, sinking day by day into the quiet inutility of age. Apples still remained on the branches of the Webber orchard, and the garden hadn’t yet been tilled under. The far corner of the horse-pasture fence was sagging, the boards loose and rotted with rain. I knew this bout of weakness wouldn’t hamper Clyde for good. I also knew a body couldn’t rush itself through healing—and the harder Clyde worked, the longer his recovery would surely take. Before his fever, Clyde would have had the whole farm buttoned up and ready for winter in a week’s time. Now I wondered whether snow would take the Webbers unprepared and mire them in hardship—or worse, condemn them to near starvation.
I couldn’t help but feel guilty. Clyde had worked himself to the bone for my family’s sake, even fetching our firewood from town. I didn’t like the sensation of guilt. It crawled like a chigger under the skin, an itch that could never be satisfied. I would have lent my own strength to th
e Webber farm, for the president’s china had brought a steadiness or purpose to my mother, steeling her to every task. I knew I could safely slip across the pasture and work for Nettie Mae without Ma or the little ones sliding into trouble. But Nettie Mae wouldn’t have me. She was hard as granite and every bit as unmovable, resolved to go on hating the Bemis clan till her dying day.
I didn’t mind the hate so much. But if the fences fell down and her stock ran away, or if her garden failed come the spring, I fretted that Nettie Mae’s dying day would come much sooner than she expected.
On a blue-gray morning, windy enough to drive away the clouds and cold enough to make my nose run, I set out from the gray house bundled up tight in my shawl and followed the muddy trail out toward the riverbed. The pasture was empty; Clyde hadn’t turned the sheep out of their fold. I could hear them calling from the Webber farm, a distant chorus of distress. For a moment, I worried that Clyde had fallen sick again. But then I spotted him away in the corner of the horse corral, busy with the sagging fence. He hadn’t yet gotten to the sheep—that was all. But the days were growing shorter, the nights long and harsh. Those sheep needed their grass while the grass was still green for the taking.
When I arrived at the grave, I took the offering from my apron pocket and set it in its place. I had brought Substance a gnarled piece of pine root, little bigger than my thumb—a scrap I’d salvaged from the great stack of firewood Clyde had carted down from Paintrock. I pressed the chunk of pine into the wet red soil of the mound and waited for Substance to collect himself, to gather the separate currents of rage and affront and disbelief.
I felt the drifting parts of him converge, felt his unseen eye focus on me. Then he said, What do you want from me, you pest, you gnat of a girl?
Clyde is safe, I told him. He was down with a fever, but he’s up again. He’ll survive.
Substance said nothing, but something lifted a little inside my chest—a weight I hadn’t known I carried. It was Substance’s fear, settled deep down in my own spirit since the last time we’d spoken.
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