Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  There stood the Dowling sled, weathered to silver-gray like an old house without a trace of paint left on it, and two unmatched mongrel oxen breathing out clouds of steam. On top of the load of wood was a person. I took Martha’s word that it was a woman, but I think Martha was very clever to know in a flash like that, especially without looking. I had to study to see the femaleness. But it was Sarah Dowling, dressed just as her reputation claimed, in boots, breeches, jerkin, fur mittens, fur hat with a scarf tied over it to cover her ears. She was throwing wood off the load, fast, making a steady thunder of thumps.

  I thought she was snooting me, because she didn’t miss a thump when I walked up. I was feeling responsible for Martha and expecting to be snooted. But I only hadn’t been noticed. When I called up, “You could put your cattle in the barn,” the thumps stopped fast enough. Sarah straightened up and looked down at me.

  I like to remember that, how she looked down.

  She is tall, and standing on the load put her even higher above me.

  Her eyes are a clear bright hazel, and she looked down at me.

  She has a narrow longish face. Her hair is brown. I could see a little of it along her forehead, under her hat.

  I said again, “You could put your cattle in the barn. They shouldn’t have to stand in this for nothing.”

  She smiled a little, just the corner of her mouth up. “You’re not the one I talked to before.”

  “No,” I said. “That was my brother’s wife.” I had my chin tipped up. In a minute I noticed I had my mouth open a little. Gawking, I guess I was. To end that, I said, “I’m the old-maid aunt.”

  And that amazing girl up there smiled, a real one this time, both corners up, a big smile, a little too big maybe, a little out of proportion for such a narrow face. A smile like that could break a face in such weather.

  “This house has two ladies, so hop down. I’ll tell the hired man to take your cattle in and finish up this wood. You’re coming in with me to warm up.”

  She said, “He can take them in, but I got a job here.”

  She was set. “I cut this wood. This part’s easy,” she said.

  I couldn’t budge her. Tobe took her cattle to the barn. I told her which door to come in when the dinner horn blew, and went back to my kitchen.

  For dinner we had johnnycake and dried-apple applesauce and fried salt pork and tea. It pleased me very much to see her liking it all, eating fast but neatly. I thought of all the other foods I knew how to make, that she might like too. I wished to make them for her. She had so little the air of ever having been indulged. Surely a few small coddlings wouldn’t spoil her or undermine her capable ways.

  I was still eating when she finished. She put her cheek against her fist and watched me and smiled at me. I saw where any extended amount of that would give me trouble swallowing.

  Indoors, she looked womanly. Lots of women are tall. Her face is fine and sweet, crowned with a coiled braid. Her breeches didn’t hide how soft she is below. Maybe they even brought it out. She is also soft above.

  “I should admit something,” she said. My mind leaped to ideas I won’t tell, but all she admitted was that she could have finished stacking that firewood and been gone by dinnertime. “I wanted to see your place inside,” she said. “I never been in such a place before.”

  “Look around,” I said, and finished my meal more easily while she walked around my kitchen. She touched my pots, hefted my tools, stroked my plastered walls, sniffed my herbs, gave my spinning wheel a whirl, all with such darling curiosity.

  “This is fine,” she said, without any envy, so I showed her my parlor and bedchamber too, though they were cold as outdoors.

  I think I had more for myself alone than Sarah’s whole family had, but since she wasn’t envious I could take pleasure in showing things to her.

  My pictures were in the parlor, some on the wall, some in a stack. She was delighted with them. Though shivering almost as hard as I was, she couldn’t stop looking at them.

  Nobody since my father had been interested in them, and when Sarah was I found that I’d been lonesome.

  “Look at that!” she’d say, and point to some little part I’d taken pains over. She laughed at all the little jokes I’d painted in. It was hard to hide how vain that made me, and then I thought, why should I hide it, from her? I gathered up all of the pictures and we went back to the kitchen and sat on the bench together beside the fire. I watched her eyes moving to every part of a picture, and when she smiled or changed expression at all I’d say, “What’s that?” and demand that she point to the part that did it to her. Besides, I liked her hand, liked to make her point it.

  “I haven’t had anyone to look at them,” I said, to excuse my vanity, but I didn’t need to because she didn’t hold it against me. In fact, she seemed vain in my behalf, as though anything good I did was to her credit, and I began to wonder how I’d been keeping on without her and without even knowing that she would someday come.

  Reluctantly she put the pictures aside. “I got to get along,” she said. “I can’t gab all afternoon, like womenfolk.” She stood up and looked down at me. “I never wanted to till now,” she said.

  “Do you always work like this?” I asked, carefully. I didn’t want to say what other people said. I supposed she was touchy.

  She was far from touchy. “Yup. I’m Pa’s boy. He couldn’t get a boy the regular way. Kept getting girls. So he picked me out to be boy because I was biggest.” Her voice was so cheerful it made me think perhaps she didn’t even know that she was outrageous.

  “Oldest?” I asked.

  “No. Biggest.”

  Cautiously I asked, “Do you like it?”

  “Being biggest? There’s not much I can do about it.”

  “Being boy.”

  “Well, all told, it’s best, I expect. Anyhow it seems natural now. I been at it twelve years. I’m twenty-one now. I like being outside. I couldn’t’ve fetched the wood today if I wasn’t a boy. I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “You’ll have to change when you get married,” I said, thinking how everyone must say that to her and how she must hate it.

  She didn’t seem to. She just said, “Don’t figure to get married,” which was what I wanted her to say because I didn’t want that long light step made heavy with child and that strong neck bent.

  “But unless your father’s well-to-do –” I began, knowing her father wasn’t at all, of course.

  “I figure to take up land and make me a place,” she said.

  “Alone?” I asked.

  Her face got a stubborn look. “I’m strong,” she said, and pushed up her sleeve and hardened her muscle for me. I reached up and touched, just a touch. A strong arm, but not a man’s.

  “Very good,” I said, but she saw my doubts and they hurt her.

  “I think on going but I never told it before. I was scared people would say I couldn’t. Do you think I can’t?”

  Let somebody else tell her. I wouldn’t.

  “No, I think you can,” I said, working hard to make my face and voice sincere.

  Her smile made my lie worthwhile. “I want to live nice, and free, and snug. I think on it.”

  Chapter Two

  I couldn’t get Sarah Dowling off my mind, or even try very hard to. Not even a picture partway done had ever held my imagination the way she did.

  I kept wishing I had rubbed grease into her chapped hands. I wanted to even up her rough-cut nails with my little bright scissors.

  I imagined her starting west alone with her face all stubborn, walking, carrying a little pack and an ax. She’d go and go. I saw her narrow stumpy road wind up and down. She was too friendly and innocent and natural and pure. She didn’t even know that she shocked people. Men might touch her. Women might peck her with their sharp mean noses. Rain might wet her, animals might leap on her. She would have no kettle and no bed. No thread, no needle, no cow, no cart, no ox, no money. Oh, Sarah Dowling! Idiot girl, stay home, s
tay here! Why didn’t I tell you? You would have listened, to me.

  After two days of that I dressed myself warm and started for her. There was no wind. The morning was icy-bright. I liked it. My face wanted to freeze, and when I covered it my breath turned to ice on the wool, so there was that as a problem. But all told I liked that day. It was good to be out, walking along at a good strong pace, breathing the cold air, rescuing Sarah Dowling.

  In an hour’s fast walk I saw the Dowling place, a small plain unpainted house with a curl of smoke rising. It looked peaceful, but then two dogs came rushing out in full cry. Not mean or anything, just taking care of their place, but that was the end of peace. I may have been their first female visitor. The door opened. A tall woman crowded by girls looked out at me. Her arms were folded across her front. She nodded cautiously. The girls just stared. Bright Dowling eyes, hazel, none Sarah’s. It seemed dimly presumptuous of those girls to look so much like Sarah.

  I managed to outshout the dogs and make Mrs Dowling understand that I’d come to see Sarah. A lull in the barking let me hear “She’s in the clearing.”

  All five girls wanted to lead me to her. It wasn’t easy to convince them that I could see tracks in snow as well as anyone, but at last they pointed me right and left the rest to me.

  I found Sarah’s trail with no trouble and set my feet in her big tracks. I had to stretch to step from one to the next. Pretty soon I began to hear her ax, but I didn’t look up because I was working at my walking, and whispering, “No plow, no scissors, no basket, no rake, you can’t, you can’t.”

  The ax stopped and I looked up and there she was, surprised and smiling, leaning on her hand against a tree. The sight of her rocked me some, because nobody really looked like her after all, and I was a little tired anyway, so I leaned back against a different tree, nearby.

  “Patience White!” she said, with a face so glad I didn’t see how I could say my piece even though it was for her good. How be flat and sensible when someone’s so glad to see you?

  She left her ax hanging by its blade in the good big beech she was girdling, and went to brush the snow off a log to make me a seat. Hard snow still clung in the ridges of the bark, so she took her mittens off and laid them together there.

  “Here,” she said, but I didn’t like to sit when she didn’t, or see her go barehanded for my sake, so I stayed standing.

  I picked up her mittens, which were fur on the backs but plain leather on the palms. “Did you wear it off or did they start this way?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I came to notice that I was pressing them to my face. She watched me, and I felt I had to explain. “They feel good,” I said. “Like a kitten,” which was only partly true – they were bearskin and very coarse, but they did feel good. “Here, put them back on.”

  “They started this way,” she said, slipping them over her red hands. “You can’t grip an ax with fur.”

  That gave me what I chose to consider a natural opportunity to say what I’d come for. “Is that your ax?” I asked. “Your own ax?”

  “Why, I don’t know. It’s one of our axes. I guess it’s mine. It’s the one I use.”

  “But could you take it pioneering with you?”

  “I should think Pa’d give me that much,” she said, uncertain already.

  I should have been glad that my task was easy, but I was unexpectedly sad. I would have felt better for both our sakes if I could have hugged her in the commonplace way of women together, but something about her made me unable even to hold her hand to comfort us. She didn’t do woman things. I kept my distance.

  “Sarah Dowling, dear,” I said. “Dear Sarah Dowling. How reasonable are you being? How many details have you thought out?”

  “I won’t tell you.” Her tone reminded me that she was six years younger than I. “You’d just say I couldn’t.”

  “I feel you must say it, dear.”

  “I thought you was my friend,” she said. So young.

  “I am your friend. That’s why I feel I have to. You might not heed anyone else.”

  She scowled at me. “I won’t heed you, neither.” Her uncertainty departed. She strode furiously around her little clearing of trampled snow and chips. “I’m going. I’m going. I’m strong. I can do it.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “You’re not my friend when you want me to stay here. Where even my ax ain’t mine. Look!” She seized the ax and with two strokes broke a big chip from the beech. “It’s mine because I can do that with it. That makes it mine.” She was breathing hard. “You want me to get married.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  As though I hadn’t spoken, she said, “Well, I won’t. I don’t have to. I won’t. I’m going.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “I’ll buy my land like Pa’s buying his. Land buys itself, with wood and ashes and oats and corn.”

  “Do you think – dear – that anyone would let a woman alone, with no money, take an indenture on this land?”

  “They don’t have to know I’m a woman.”

  I bowed my head to take that in. When I looked again she had her back to me. “Well, what’d you think?” she asked without turning. “That I was going to drag out there in a skirt? What’d you think?”

  If only she’d been like other girls so I could have gone up to her and put my arms around her!

  I said, “I doubt anyone would let a man alone do it, either. One alone’s not enough. You haven’t thought.”

  “I have thought,” she said, still not turning, but tipping her head back, looking up into the treetops. “I’ll tell you what I’ve thought. I’ve thought I’d rather die than not go.” She turned around then and let me see her face. “I have to try,” she said.

  And I knew that Columbus looked like that and said that.

  “Then take me with you,” I said.

  As soon as I said it, I knew it was what I’d intended, unknown to myself, all along. My words stayed in the air and I listened to them again. They sounded even more reasonable and natural.

  But Sarah said, “You better think it over.”

  “I’ve been thinking. I just didn’t know it. I’ve thought of all the things we’ll need, that I can bring. I’ve got two cows. Don’t you need my cows?”

  “Course I do. But you think some more.”

  I knew she’d let me go with her, and that she was only trying to play man, all slow and steady, not impulsive, weighing carefully. I was amused but didn’t say so. Time enough later to teach her that it’s better to be a real woman than an imitation man, and that when someone chooses a woman to go away with it’s because a woman is what’s preferred.

  I said, “I want to make pictures where nobody’s angry at me for it.” I thought if I put it in terms of my own needs, she’d give in easier.

  “I wouldn’t be angry,” she said. “I’d be proud.”

  “Yes, I know you would.”

  There was quiet then. I can’t tell what she did or how she looked because I was watching my toe push chips into a pattern.

  Then she said, “I’ll come by your place Sunday and you tell me if you haven’t changed your mind.”

  “I won’t have.”

  “I wanted to start at the end of March, but if we’re taking cattle we’ve got to wait for grass. That puts it off a month.”

  “Sarah Dowling, you act like I’ve made you a problem. You could act a little glad.”

  “Well, you might not like it out there. You don’t know what it is to live hard.”

  “If I don’t like it, I won’t stay.”

  “That’s what I’m scared of.”

  “If I don’t stay, you’ll be alone, just as you would have been anyway. Where are we going?”

  “York Sate.”

  “Yes, but where there?”

  “Genesee. The Genesee country.”

  “So far?”

  “There�
�s a good road.”

  “A toll road. But I’ll have money.”

  “Pa’s got brothers out there. They’ll help us.”

  My spirit dropped at the thought of any help except what we would give each other. “Let’s go somewhere else then,” I said.

  “Everybody goes where they’ve got kin. Who’ll shelter us but kin while we build our house? Who’ll roll up the logs for our house? Who’ll help us raise our roof? Who’ll feed us while we wait for our crops?”

  “I guess I just don’t like kin much,” I said, sulking. “I thought we’d do everything ourselves.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, it’ll be hard enough. It’ll exercise us. If you still say the same thing Sunday.”

  I was so put-off I came near to telling her that I was raised to call that day Sabbath.

  Along about Friday, Martha took sick. Edward came by to tell me so and ask me back. I was working on Lot’s Wife, enjoying myself, but for the first time I didn’t mind going back because I knew it wasn’t my fate anymore. Edward was expecting me to mind, though, so he didn’t notice that I didn’t. He was grumpy, at Martha for being sick (as she was carrying a child), at me for not doing my part, at the general make and trend of the world.

  “Pa didn’t mean you to do nothing,” he said.

  “Brother, what would you give to be rid of me?”

  “Don’t talk looney. Just come on.”

  “I will sell out reasonable and be on my way to Genesee,” I said. I was corking my color bottles carefully, acting mostly interested in them. The main thing was to set him thinking.

  “You could get Martha some steady help. A man of your means should anyway. And the whole house would be yours.”

  “Just come on,” he said.

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He should have left then, but I had his attention. He didn’t want to show that I did, so he didn’t ask any questions.

  I laughed. “Run along, Brother. I’ll be there.”

  He frowned and stomped off.

  Martha was on a pallet in the kitchen where she could keep watch. She looked away when I went in. The children were clustered timidly around her, so quiet and good. Afraid their mother was dying, I think. Afraid of something as big and terrible as that. And of course it was certain that one such time she would be. If not this time, the twelfth or twentieth; Edward would fill her as often as necessary.