Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  I felt the sadness the children always made me feel, but something new too – something for Martha.

  I thought what it would be, to live her life.

  “Did you eat?” I asked her gently. And being gentle made me remember a dream from the night before. In the dream, Martha’s bosom was bare and I went, very afraid but full of longing, and put my mouth against it. I expected her to push me away, but instead I felt her hand on the back of my head, pressing me close, and she murmured, “Of course, of course.”

  I wonder if that dream would have changed me even if I hadn’t remembered it. Remembering it made the end of a time in my heart.

  Martha looked so puzzled, and I asked again, “Did you eat?” – ashamed that so simple a human thing from me could puzzle her.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she whispered, and I saw that her eyes were full. I knelt down on her pallet and held her face against my shoulder, wondering why this had stopped being possible and why it was easy now.

  I poached an egg in milk for her and watched her eat it. I remembered something I tended to forget, that Martha had been my friend first. She came to our house because she liked me, to see me, and then she saw Edward and liked him better. I think if I’d found words for how I felt when that happened, they would have been, “You chose him – now choke on him.”

  Strange not to have the words until they’re not true anymore.

  I wondered how much sooner there might have been a way to live our days, or if there was a rule that you can’t see the way until the end.

  Because Martha and I were ended. I was going with Sarah to feed her and hold her head against me when she was sad and knead her shoulder when it ached. From the beginning I was going to, unless there was a rule that you can’t until the end.

  Chapter Three

  I won’t claim that I’m fearless or that I disdain to lie at any cost, but I will say that I don’t bother to lie about every little thing. So when Edward asked me Sabbath morning after breakfast why I wasn’t readying myself for Meeting, I didn’t say I was sick; I said, “I’m not going. I’m expecting Sarah Dowling today.”

  I didn’t know what time Sarah might come. It wasn’t even certain that she had a way of telling time. I only knew that she didn’t go to Meeting.

  “Sarah Dowling?” Edward said.

  Martha said, “That – that – ” but her language was not equal to her thought. “Freak” is what she was groping for, I imagine. I allowed myself to feel a little flattered. If she slandered my friends, it could mean she liked me.

  “She’s a very fine person when you get to know her,” I said. I wanted to say “lovely” too, but reconsidered.

  “You shouldn’t miss Meeting,” Edward said. “It’s not a light matter to miss Meeting.”

  That may sound like something to impress children, but from Edward it was not. Even as a boy he was earnest and serious and afraid of being ill thought of. One time back in school, Edward’s grade was studying Heaven, and since I always paid attention to all the other grades, I was listening from my smaller, more lowly seat. “And there shall be no night there,” the teacher said. Edward’s grade, which means Edward and one other big boy, reacted with appropriate bafflement. “No night?” “No night,” the teacher said, smiling conceitedly. And then Edward stood up and asked, all solemnly, “But won’t there be a – period – of – lesser light?” I was so proud of him I could hardly contain myself. My big brother! Such wisdom! Such a question! So well put! The teacher said, “No. No. No indeed,” but I could see that he was taking some credit for Edward too.

  Well, that’s just a little childhood memory, but it shows that Edward probably really meant it when he said it was no light matter to miss Meeting. I have always felt somehow responsible for Edward’s taking religion so hard. Wasn’t it in an effort to reach the untrembling hearts of the likes of me that the preacher laid it on so? If all faces had shown Edward’s terror, wouldn’t the preacher have been eager to reassure? Wouldn’t he have said, “My children, my children, God means you no harm!”?

  “She’s not fit,” Martha said, meaning Sarah.

  I said, “She’s very fit, a very fine young woman who happens to have the gumption to help her family. I honor her for it.”

  “There’s fit ways and unfit ways,” Martha said. She was so agitated she forgot she was sick and she took the children away from me and dressed them herself.

  I didn’t mind. It’s trying to dress children, especially shoes. They deliberately hold their feet odd, and I don’t feel they should be slapped just for that.

  Edward was ready, dark-blue and white and stiff and dignified, standing by the fire. I went over to get some coals for my own fire.

  I said, “She’s coming to talk about our plans for going out to Genesee.” I squatted down and heaped some coals together.

  “That nonsense again?” he said, but he wasn’t surprised or even as gruff as he intended to be, so I knew he’d been thinking.

  “Can you lend me a map of York State?”

  “No sense in it.”

  “Please, Brother.”

  “What would folks think of me if I let you go off?”

  I laughed. “They’d think it couldn’t be so bad after all, if Edward White did it. Please lend me a map. Just for today.”

  He walked off. I felt the cold wind when he opened his parlor door. I had hopes for the map, but no certainty. Maybe he himself didn’t know until he handed it to me that he was going to. Besides the map, he handed me a small book entitled A Description of the Genesee Country, in the State of New York.

  “Edward!” I began, but then I could only smile.

  “Don’t carry these with coals,” he said. “They’re dear.”

  Sarah wore a dress. “Don’t say nothing,” she said. She would have looked all right in it except that it made her so miserable that she hung her head and scowled and stooped. She reminded me of a dog we’d clipped once to help him against the summer heat, and he hid until his coat grew back. I must admit we drove him to it by laughing at him. He did look so comical. And so did Sarah, but I had the memory of the dog to guide me and I pretended she looked just the same as always.

  “I have a map of York State,” I said. “I’m copying it for us. And wait till you see what else.”

  “Ma said it would look better for Sunday,” Sarah said.

  “Listen to me!”

  “I can’t. I’ve got this cussed dress on.”

  Since I’d been wanting to laugh anyway, that set me off, and her too, not very happily at first but she warmed into it.

  “Why, I just don’t see how you stand it. My skirt’s all chunks of snow where it dragged. Like a sheep full of burrs. And where do you put your hands?”

  “Here,” I said, holding mine out to her. “Now that you’re a woman I can treat you like one.”

  She looked at my hands and then my face and then in confusion everywhere but at me, groping all the while for her breeches-top to hook her thumbs in.

  I reached out and firmly took her hand. “Now,” I said, “would you rather get warmed up or see the map or see the book? Everything at once, I think.” I led her to the bench by the fire and then went over to the table where the treasures were. She began to pick snow pellets off the hem of her skirt and toss them slowly, one at a time, into the fire. They hissed and sputtered.

  “There’s several things to say,” she said.

  “Hundreds of things.”

  “I told Pa I’m going.”

  She stopped. To help her, I said, “I told Edward. He wants me to go. So much so that he feels duty-bound to stop me. He can’t help feeling that anything that tempts him so much must be wrong. I suppose your father feels he can’t spare you.”

  “Well, but he won’t stop me. He can make another boy. The trouble is, when Rachel heard, she wanted to come too.”

  “Who’s Rachel?” I shouted, and heard myself, and said again (fair decently), “Who’s Rachel?”

 
“My sister. You seen her.”

  “I saw dozens of identical girls. How should I know which one was Rachel?”

  “She looked growed. Some of ’em don’t.” Sarah tossed a pellet into the fire. “She’s set her heart on coming.”

  “You told her no.”

  “I told her I’d see.”

  “You told her I’m going?”

  “I told her you was thinking on it.”

  “I have told you and told you and told you. How can I be more definite?” I was being a little rough with the map, I noticed, so I took it back to the table. I stood there by the table trying to collect myself, looking at Sarah’s back. She was bending to her hem again.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  Still bent, she mumbled something. To hear, I moved over and stood behind her. She said, “Rachel’s just like me. She never had things fine. She wouldn’t fret.”

  “Would you leave me in this life I can’t stand because I’ve had things fine?”

  “This might be just play for you. You even said you might not stay.”

  “Did Rachel say she’d stay? Did she say, ‘I’ll stay, though I hate it and die of it!’? All right, I’ll say that. I’ll stay. Whatever happens.”

  “There’s something else.”

  I groaned.

  “There’s what I feel,” she said. “You might not like it.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “I care for you.”

  “I want you to. I care for you.”

  “If it bothers you or anything I can stop. So tell me if you don’t want me to.”

  “I don’t want you to stop.”

  She straightened up and turned her head and looked up at me.

  “Is it really all right?” she asked.

  “Of course it’s all right.”

  She leaned back against me then. “I think about you,” she said. “Every day in the clearing I expect to see you again because I did once. That one time.”

  “I think about you too,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders. She bent her left cheek down until it touched my hand.

  “I keep thinking every shadow is you. Because when you came that day, there was this shadow in the corner of my eye that when I looked was you.”

  “I’ll come often. And then we’ll go together.”

  “I know it sounds like just talk, so soon, when I don’t even know you yet.” She pressed her lips against my hand. “I’d’ve waited, but I had to know what to tell Rachel.” She kissed each knuckle and reached the edge of my hand and kissed it. I felt her waiting there for me to turn my palm up. I could feel her wish, and wondered why she couldn’t feel mine, that she butt it up like a calf going for milk.

  She shouldn’t have been afraid. She should have felt my wish. To punish her, I said, “I’m wasting daylight, standing here.”

  She flung herself up. “Oh, don’t waste daylight! Where’s my jerkin?” She rushed around blindly, looking for her jerkin. It was somewhere there. I myself couldn’t see or remember.

  “You didn’t mean what I meant. It wasn’t all right at all. Now what’ll I do? Oh God, where’s my jerkin?” She found it and thrust her arms into the sleeves. “Well, Miss White,” she said, “you get on with your daylight and I’ll get on – ”

  I stayed as she’d left me, looking down at the bench. I felt her gaze. She was trying by the strength of her wish to make me turn. I made her say it: “Won’t you look at me?”

  “Oh, wasn’t I?” (My politest voice.) “I’m sorry. Are you leaving? Must you?”

  “Oh, I can’t go away without kissing you!”

  And I felt her lips on my cheek, nibbling towards my mouth, and getting there, and staying; and I knew why she’d been afraid and wondered why I hadn’t been, why I had lured this mighty mystery and astonishment into the room, into our lives.

  I turned my head to save my life.

  “Did I hold you too hard? Did I hurt you?”

  “Oh no!” I said. I pressed her even closer, to show.

  “Was that a feeling I felt in you?”

  I hesitated and then told true: “Yes.”

  She turned her face up, with the look of Jacob granted the Angel’s blessing.

  Her fear was over. Mine not. “That’s something powerful, girl,” I said.

  She nodded, breathing through her mouth because she’d just come up from deep water. Then she looked down at me, all seriousness except a little turning-up of the right corner of her mouth. I looked back, serious entirely, because it was up to me to save us from a thirst we could never come to a pause in or rest from. I was older. It was up to me.

  She wouldn’t look away. She wanted the corner of my mouth up too, and when at last I gave her that, she kissed me again.

  Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.

  And that thought, that whatever this was I would live it, made it containable. I can’t explain why. I only know it happened.

  Once I’d dreamed that a fierce wildcat was attacking me. I was very afraid, and then I thought, why, it’s hungry, and I offered it my hands to eat. It didn’t eat them. It became immediately gentle, a friend.

  So when I let my head fall back under Sarah’s kiss, the frenzy I trembled at just wasn’t there. Instead, comfort and joy and simplicity and order and answers to questions I’d always supposed unanswerable, such as, why was I born? why a woman? why here? why now?

  A wonderful glowing spacious peacefulness came to us. There was so much time. I took her jerkin off and kissed it and laid it down. All afternoon we leaned against each other at the table, and in the light from the frosty window I read to her about Genesee – the price of salt (one dollar a bushel), the wages of a laborer (ten to fifteen dollars a month, and board), the number of republicans, the number of federalists. On and on, and then repeat. That the mail stage ran out from Albany twice a week. That unimproved land west of the Genesee River sold for a dollar and a half an acre.

  “That’s where we’ll go, west of the river,” Sarah said. “I’ll cut my hair and be a laborer. We can buy near seven acres for a month of work.” She couldn’t read, but she could deal with figures in her head. I’ve always choked up at the thought of figures myself.

  “We’ll have other money, and you won’t cut your hair,” I said, very firmly, something like a man. I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other. Provided always that she didn’t cut her hair.

  At the end of the afternoon I bundled her up to go home, giving little kisses at every stage, and then more, and sent her off. Her face showed glory so bright I might have worried, except that I was sure no one else had any basis in experience for recognizing it, and I didn’t think it would hold up through her long cold walk home anyway. Surely she’d get home red, frowning, and miserable like an ordinary person.

  What Sarah wanted was to get aside by herself and imagine every detail about me, but a family that’s spent a winter Sabbath crowded up in a country kitchen isn’t likely to let a returned traveler hold back. They wanted news, and they’d learned to expect it from Sarah, who knew how to notice and remember. She always had some little thing to tell from going somewhere.

  The little girls (her older sister was married and gone) tagged her up the ladder to the loft where she got out of her mother’s dress and into her own breeches, and then back down again where she sat beside the fire and tried to dream. They were asking to be told, again, what my house was like, and what I was like, and whether I had jewels, and about Edward’s children, and what color our dogs were, and how tall our woodpile. “No, no, I’m tired,” she’d say, or, “I already told you that,” laughing and trying to push them off. They were supposed to be knitting, or learning to.

  She thought how pretty they were and that she loved them, and in the midst of being happy on this happiest of her days, she felt a completely unexpected grief because it was not certai
n that something wonderful would happen to them too. If she hadn’t studied so long to be manly, she’d have wept. But all through, she stayed happy too.

  Rachel was squatting beside the coals tending supper. She said nothing, asked nothing, but she kept looking up at Sarah’s face.

  “What’s that burning?” Sarah’s mother asked. “Why, you ninny, you’ve burnt the supper. Stayed right there by it and let it burn!”

  It wasn’t really burned, just beginning to be. The men (Sarah and her father) ate first. Sarah really didn’t. She wasn’t hungry, and then, unwisely, she remembered our kisses and her throat got big – it felt as big as a singing frog’s – and she couldn’t swallow.

  Her father said, “Well, you’ve got yourself a nice job, waiting on that Patience White while she sets on a silken pillow. I expect you spent the day studying where to get a carriage for her to ride in. She’ll ride out in a carriage and you’ll walk out and meet her there.”

  Fathers, I think, are rather alike in the kinds of things they say when someone has a hope.

  Sarah didn’t answer. Couldn’t, actually.

  “Well, is that the plan?”

  She shook her head and kept looking down.

  “Oh, she’s got to have a carriage. And you better figure on about a hundred pairs of them silken slippers. They won’t hold up long in the woods, and she couldn’t wear no ordinary boots like no ordinary girl.”

  I suspect that a Chinese father would have said about the same, or English, or Esquimau.

  Her father ate quickly, being spared Sarah’s impediment – perhaps never having known it – and left the table. Then Sarah could leave it too.

  She went directly to the loft and laid aside her clothes. She lay down on her cornhusk pallet and pulled the quilt over herself and folded her arms under her head and let loose the thought of me.

  “With all that blue blood in her feet, she can’t hardly,” her father shouted, somewhere way off down there. He didn’t interrupt Sarah’s thoughts.