Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  Still she worked hard; Abigail was a good worker, a good wife; Seth would never say otherwise. The cabin was clean, not like some with dirt unswept on the floor and plates filthy, pots thick with grease. Their garden plot was neat; their chickens fat, their milk and cream made into good butter and cheese. And yet, her silence, which should have been a comfort, troubled him.

  It was as if something, Seth wasn’t sure what, had been turned inside out like a skinned rabbit. Even her announcement that she was pregnant again had not lifted his heart. He’d felt a momentary joy, then fear, then the uneasy sense of something wrong. One night he had incautiously remarked that her waist was still slim. After that Abigail no longer let him touch her.

  Lately she’d risen every morning ahead of him and once, waking early with the spring light, he’d seen her stuffing a little pillow down the front of her dress. He’d not been able to look at her thickened silhouette without dread since.

  As her pregnancy advanced, Abigail began to talk again. She spoke of the child, of the boy they’d have, the boy who would help in the fields and take over the farm. Seth tried not to pay any attention, but though he could ignore the words, he could not shut out the joy and terror and despair he sensed behind them. If he wasn’t careful, he might begin to wonder what would happen to Abigail and how they would manage if her mind went.

  At the end of mud time in their fourth year, they began to see folks going westering again and others fixing to settle down nearby. Clear mornings working on his crop, Seth could sometimes hear the ring of axes and the crash of trees toppling on new made farms. Ox carts occasionally passed their cabin, and tired men and women stopped to ask for buckets of water from the spring. Abigail always came out to talk to the women, to admire their children, to hint shyly that it was getting near her time. She would stand for a long time watching the wagons creak away into the forest on the trail that was slowly widening into a proper track.

  Sometimes she and Seth sold provisions to the travelers: eggs, butter, cheese, salad greens, a little smoked bacon. The money was handy, and the sales confirmed their prosperity and the rightness and luckiness of their decision to take up this raw western land. They were doing right, and plenty others were following in their footsteps.

  One cool, wet day they were both in the cabin, sitting close to a good fire. Abigail was knitting and Seth was making the frame of a chair, when they heard a wagon rumble to a stop. Outside, a pregnant woman stood beside a worn out pair of oxen with one hand on their collar. The other held a switch, and she was turning her head this way and that in the misty rain as though listening for something.

  “Morning,” Seth called from the doorway.

  She turned her head but did not look directly at him. Dampness had soaked her bonnet and stringed her long hair down around her shoulders. “Who’s there?” A note between hope and alarm. “Is that a house? I thought I smelled a barn.”

  Seth went out to her, and at the sound of his feet she turned large cloudy eyes toward him, and he realized that she was blind. “My husband’s took sick,” she said. “I’ve been following the oxen.”

  The animals were standing with their heads down, looking ready to drop. “They’re near finished,” Seth said. “You can’t take them much further the shape they’re in.”

  “I been following the oxen,” she repeated. Her voice held a stubborn querulousness, as if the state of the team had nothing to do with her.

  “They’ll need water,” Seth said. “We have a good spring.”

  “God will bless you,” the woman replied, but she did not move, and Seth saw that, like the oxen, she had reached the limit of her endurance. Just his luck. They had little enough fodder this time of year for their own oxen and the new pasture was still thin. It was bad luck for them to be landed with her and near her time, too, by the look of her. Seth called to Abigail.

  “It’s my husband needs help,” said the blind woman. She felt back along the ox cart and lifted the canvas flap. A tall, black bearded man was lying wrapped in a filthy blanket. His face had all gone to bone; his closed eyes were dark rimmed and sunken, and the whole wagon stank of fever. He lay so still that it crossed Seth’s mind the man might already be dead. “Haven’t been able to do much for him,” the woman said in a flat, detached voice. “It’s hard for me to find water.”

  Seth felt a resentful fear at the thought of fever. How many farms had she passed? How many folks had told her to keep on going? If he’d had children, he’d have told her the same, Seth thought. As his fear struggled against his better nature, he saw that the woman’s bare arms and legs were scratched from twigs and brambles and bitten all over by flies and mosquitoes.

  His wife decided the matter by running out to tell the woman she must come inside. “For the sake of your child,” Abigail cried with an anxious, almost a hungry, look, as if, her husband thought, she feared these unwelcome strangers might decline hospitality.

  The woman allowed herself be led to the cabin, and Seth unhitched the team, took them to the barn, and hauled water for them. When he returned to the cart, half figuring and half hoping that things might be settled, he found the man returned from the dead, groaning and shivering, his whole body shaking. Seth fetched a clean piece of canvas from the house and wrapped the sick man up in it, leaving the filthy blankets in the wagon. He hauled the man, big but much lightened by his illness, into the cabin and laid him on the floor by the fire.

  The wife sat with a bowl of fresh milk and a piece of corn bread left from breakfast, eating like a starved thing. When she’d finished the last crumbs, she said that they were Connecticut people, who’d been traveling in a good big wagon train until the fever came. She began to count off names, her voice indifferent. Then they’d lost their only daughter and stopped a day to bury her. The woman’s face remained impassive, as if she were too exhausted even for grief, but her cloudy eyes filled with tears. Her husband had thought they could catch up easy, but he went off his head, yelling and singing, and she’d put him in the wagon and followed the oxen. “I find farms by the dogs and the smell of manure piles,” she said.

  Abigail patted her hand, but Seth turned away, his face dark. Fool oxen could have stopped miles away, he thought, instead of about walking themselves to death and bringing this trouble. It was bad luck, and bad luck came in threes. Everyone knew that.

  After lying some time by the fire, the man stopped shivering, and Abigail fed him a little hot water and whiskey which quieted him some. The woman fell asleep in her chair.

  “Those oxen can maybe pull by tomorrow,” Seth said. “Day after, sure, if I give them some oats.”

  Abigail’s face twisted with anxiety. “Oh, no, Seth! She is near her time. She can’t possibly travel.”

  “We could take her back a way. Get her some help. Jared Tompkins’s wife is skillful. We could take her to Goody Tompkins.”

  “Goody Tompkins is twenty miles or more,” Abigail said. “And Goody Tompkins will want to be paid.”

  Seth shrugged. He thought it would be worth Goody Tompkins fee to be rid of the sick man and the dazed, mole-like woman. And two more oxen to feed. Even if they’d had plenty, even if they’d had more than enough feed, Seth would have wanted them gone.

  “We will need to pay Goody Tompkins when our own child comes,” Abigail said. She had a shy, nervous smile.

  “That’s true,” said Seth, who understood that he must give in and felt sick at heart.

  They tended the dying man all day, while the blind woman slept in the chair. Seth stripped off the man’s filthy clothes and Abigail soaked them in a bucket and hung the stained trousers, shirt, and small clothes in front of the fire. Late that night, they were awakened by the sound of awkward steps in the cabin, of someone fumbling and bumping into things, before a high, keening wail raised the hair on Seth’s neck and told him that the man was dead.

  In the morning, Seth dug a grave at the edge of a clump of berry bushes adjoining the little patch of wild flowers where their last, s
ad infant was buried. The stranger’s clothes were dry, so his wife was able to dress the body. Abigail sewed up the canvas for a shroud, then together she and Seth carried the body out to the grave, and Seth shoveled the soft, damp, black earth over the gray bundle. Abigail brought out the family Bible, and Seth read “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” He told the woman that next time a preacher came through, he would ask him to say a prayer.

  “God has forgotten us,” the blind woman said simply.

  They both felt a kind of horror at this, Abigail at the great unwisdom of the idea, and Seth at its possible truth. She put her arm around the woman and hugged her, but Seth felt dismay. Now they had the woman with them permanent; there was no way she could go on alone. They’d have another mouth— maybe two— to feed and not a lick of work out of her. He could see that, for the blind woman sat by the fire on cool days and on the stoop out front when there was sun. Whenever he asked her plans, she said that she’d just followed the oxen, and those famished beasts seemed set to make up for long hunger and neglect by stripping his pasture and getting into his corn.

  “She may have folks in the east,” he told Abigail. “A woman alone, a blind woman alone, half-witted, too, by the look of it: tell me how she’s going to manage to farm.”

  “She’s going to have a child,” said Abigail, as if this answered all things. On anything to do with the blind woman, his usually mild and agreeable wife was unyielding. “And,” she added, “when my time comes, I’ll have a woman to help me. We won’t have to send for Goody Tompkins.”

  It was on Seth’s tongue to say, “The wilderness has turned your mind,” but he could not do it. The blind woman grew swollen to enormous size, and Abigail, too. They padded around the cabin, swaying on their enlarged hips, stretching their tired backs, grunting when they brought up water from the well.

  The blind woman now followed Abigail everywhere, learning the house and garden, finding her way to the chickens and the young pigs. And in another way, Seth saw, Abigail was following her, copying, he was sure, every movement, every adjustment of the woman’s heavy body. So though his wife seemed happy, almost as happy as she used to be when they were young and hopeful back east on her father’s farm, Seth began to stay out of the cabin. He lingered in his fields during the day and sat out on the stoop after dinner with his pipe.

  In the evenings, Abigail knit garments for the children who were to be born. She would need flannel, too, she told Seth, and some new muslin and calico. Her dresses were just about ruined with letting out and the baby, the babies, would need clothes. At first, Seth shut his ears to all this. The blind woman’s baby was not his concern; he’d fed her and sheltered her and her team, too, and risked fever for himself and Abigail to do it. But then he looked at the woman’s oxen, growing sleek and fat again and thought he might make up some of their losses and solve two problems at once.

  Seth proposed selling the team for her in the nearest village. With the money, she could get a trader to take her back east. The blind woman’s cloudy eyes gazed just to the left of his face, and she sighed and nodded. Abigail made out a list of household necessities, and early one morning Seth made ready to leave. He brought in a heap of extra wood for the fire and left his great woodsman’s ax by the door in case of trouble. Abigail could swing an ax about as well as any man he’d seen.

  But now she said it was too big and heavy. “I couldn’t hardly lift it now,” she reminded him, her expression half coy, half annoyed, the way it always was when she had to remind him of her condition, the “pregnancy” which half broke his heart. Seth took the big ax out to the oxcart and returned with the little hatchet he usually carried when he traveled. He’d already hitched up the oxen, both his own and the blind woman’s, before he had misgivings.

  “Suppose her time comes,” he told his wife. “Or yours. There will be no one.”

  Abigail said that they would manage, that they would hardly deliver the same day. She laughed at the idea, the first time she’d laughed in Seth did not know how long, and he said that he’d make all the time he could. “Three days,” he said, “if I can find buyer right away. They’re good looking beasts, I think they’ll go quick.”

  Abigail kissed him, her face alight. “We’ll be all right,” she said.

  Still, he wasn’t sure, but though he could see plenty reasons not to go, Abigail was insistent. The longer he waited the more dangerous it would be to go, for suppose he was gone when one or both did deliver? And the babies would need clothes, flannel, some soft plain cotton. It would not do to lose a child to cold. The very thought set her trembling. Seth picked up his switch and told the team to walk on.

  As it turned out, he was gone a full week. When he got to the village Seth found that a wagon train was expected soon. He waited three full days for it, and then another to dicker back and forth with the farmer who eventually bought the blind woman’s team. Finally, Seth started for home, pushing his oxen as hard as he dared and thinking all the way that anything could have happened, but also, because it was a radiant early June day, that all would be well. He knew that he’d been right to wait for the wagon train, because he’d gotten a good price for the blind woman’s oxen. As soon as she could travel, he’d take her into the village and one of the traders going east with furs and skins would see her back home. Seth carefully did not think of his own wife or of their child.

  He spotted the thin blue plume of their kitchen fire long before he could see the cabin, and smelling the good, familiar, faintly sour smell of a wood fire, Seth told himself again that the blind woman would leave and that Abigail would be all right. They might even have a child eventually. If not, Seth was beginning to think of asking the minister back in the village to look out for a likely orphan, strong and bright. The wagon trains always seemed to wind up with one or two who’d be glad of a home.

  The cabin door stood open to the sun, and white squares of stained cloth were drying on the line that ran from the corner of the cabin to the big elm that reminded Abigail of home. Seth heard an infant crying, briefly, as if shushed and comforted, and felt his heart clench. It was not fair that the blind woman should have a child and not his poor, hopeful, deluded wife. Seth felt how small, how pathetically inadequate, were the few ribbons and the fancy comb he’d bought as compensation; what were such little trinkets to a child, to a future?

  This dark thought kept Seth from halooing as he usually did at the first sight of the cabin. Instead, he brought the cart into the yard, and he’d have gone on to the barn with the now eager team, if Abigail had not stepped out on the stoop with a bundle in her arms. Seth stopped in his tracks. Her face was glowing, exalted; her belly, as flat and thin as the day they’d wed. The child stirred in her arms. “This is Adam,” she said. “Our son.”

  “And—,” he asked and stopped. He could not name the blind woman thought she suddenly filled his thoughts.

  Abigail’s face took on a flat impassivity very like their guest’s. “She died,” said Abigail. “Her time came first, and she died and her child, too. You were right; we should have taken her to Goody Tompkins.”

  Seth felt a kind of horror mingling with hope, or perhaps it was a hope mingling with horror; he did not know what he felt, what he doubted, what he feared. “And where is she? This weather, we’ll have to bury her quick.”

  “The ground was still soft over her husband’s grave,” Abigail said. “It was hot and I figured you’d been delayed on the road. I dug down as far as I could before my pains came on.”

  “Be a nasty job to rebury her.” Seth watched his wife’s face closely.

  “I’ve been thinking we should put a little porch on the cabin,” Abigail said. “We could haul this old stoop over and put it on top of the grave. It’d keep the animals out and be a monument to them.”

  First thing the next morning, Seth set out to trim up some logs for the floor of the new porch. He got his wedges and split some good pine logs, then shouted for Abigail to find his hatchet.

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p; She stood, wary and puzzled, then pointed to the barn. One of the chickens had gotten egg bound, she said, and had to be killed. Seth found the ax flung carelessly in the back of the barn, its usually gleaming blade discolored and threatening to rust. He had to put it back in order with his sharpening stone before he could trim up the planks.

  When he was finished, Seth hitched the oxen to the stoop and dragged the big stone across the yard and past the barn to the grave. He didn’t like the way the oxen’s cloven hooves sank into the grave, nor the way the thick, flat stone plowed up the soft soil. But Abigail was right: the stone covered nicely. If it were carved, it would be as good as the big fancy stones back home, and by rights it should have been one of the family lying there. He wondered if Abigail had read something over the grave, but decided he did not want to ask her.

  “It looks nice,” she said. “Nice as you can get out here.” She was holding the baby in her arms, rocking it back and forth with a smile on her face. She carried the infant everywhere like a Mohawk squaw, and the baby seemed healthy, though it cried a lot, and Seth wondered how she’d nurse it. He’d seen her dripping milk from Bess, their cow, into its mouth.

  A day after he’d moved the stone, Seth was laying the floor of the new porch when Abigail cried his name with a strange, high sound. He dropped his tools and ran into the cabin. She was standing holding the child at her breast, her face filled with a surprise so intense it was almost fear. “My milk has come in,” she cried. “It’s true what they say. Sometimes it can take a few days.”

  Seth touched her shoulder and dared for the first time to really look at the child with its matted dark hair and tiny hands and voracious mouth. “Adam,” he said. And felt hope.