Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  The Parson laughed. I was kind of relieved, because the picture did begin to seem kind of not-laughable, at least the way I told it. “That’s Judith and Holofernes,” he said. “They’re in the Bible. I don’t seem to be able to stop teaching you. Indians, the Bible – I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, I like it. Judith and who? No, never mind. There’s not time. Tell me about York State. Where would you leave this valley if you was me?”

  “I’d have left it at Egremont, which is now behind us. It’s where I came in.”

  “Oh,” I groaned.

  “The next good break in the hills, I’d say, is Stockbridge. A little easier to get lost from there is all.”

  “Stockbridge,” I said, to fix it in my mind.

  “Sam – ” he said. His voice was different, about to ask me something. “ – Sam, sometimes I have to carry a lot of money, and I must confess it makes me nervous, being alone then. And there’s a lot of hefting book boxes around whenever I reach a town. I can usually hire some boy that’s watching, you know, but – ”

  His voice faded out and we rode along with just the clanking. I thought about the things that happened to you when everybody thinks you’re a runaway, and, I admit, how good it felt to be riding instead of walking, and how after a little while with Parson Peel I’d have a head full of thoughts to think. He might even teach me to read. It began to seem there was no real hurry about Genesee, especially since everybody I met stood in the way, and I’d missed Egremont.

  “Where do you go winters?” I asked.

  “To New-York City. To my wife and children and my study. Desk. Foolscap. Ink. Pen. I have some books by Parson Peel up in those boxes too.”

  I tried to picture myself in New-York City. I couldn’t. I only knew it was a place I’d better see before I went so far I’d never get back.

  “What say, Sam?”

  “I want to learn to read,” I said.

  Chapter Three

  He set me to making letters on a slate, not in order like the alphabet but haphazard, like to spell out Sam and horse and road and tree, the things we saw. River, pan, meat, cloud, sky, hill. I pictured letters to put myself to sleep. Before long I could read most anything, and every day, with Parson hearing me, correcting or saying, “That’s good,” I got better and better at it. I was surprised how fast I learned. I’d always thought folks that could read must have some special gift, like for pretty singing or straight throwing. Parson said I was quick.

  Nights we stopped by the road. Parson said he wouldn’t sleep at an inn if paid to, and catch fleas and be snored on by ruffians three in a bed. The two of us, he said, could stand against anything that happened. He had a fine gun, all rubbed and fixed up with designs. I loaded and fired it a few times, to learn its quirks, and then I knew, too, we could face down any danger.

  If there was no house handy to ask fire of, he could make it in a hurry. His trick was to rub gunpowder into his tinder, and the first strike of the flint would bring fire most every time. I suppose Pa knew that trick too, but couldn’t spare the powder.

  Then we’d cook supper, twice what we thought we’d want, to have the rest for next day’s dinner. We didn’t have just stews, but spitted meats as well, and he could make firebread as neat as Ma. One thing I drew the line at was unboiled salad. He claimed it’s eaten unboiled in other lands, but he had such laughy eyes I knew he was just seeing how much he could push off on me. I sure didn’t want us taking sick, and he as much as admitted he was relieved when I wouldn’t go along with his nonsense.

  While Parson cooked, I’d rub and curry the horse, which was a bay gelding named Potiphar, the first horse I ever had dealings with, being as Pa always kept cattle for draft. Parson wanted Potiphar treated very sweet and tender, to make it up to him for not having his own barn to hurry to and his own horse to be friends with. So I always took a good long time with Potiphar, rubbing and talking while he chomped his oats.

  At first I worried Parson would find out I was a girl, living so close, sleeping so close, but he was a private man. He didn’t show himself, or offer to look at me. I didn’t see him without a shirt, and he took care of his bathing and other things by himself. I did the same. (I washed myself and my clothes a lot oftener than was healthy, for the sake of smelling as pleasant to sit next to as Parson did.) Many days, with me to drive, he went back to his bed and read or napped, which made it all right for me to go back some days too when I thought I’d better. As to shaving, it might’ve looked bad, me never needing to, but if Parson noticed he never mentioned. I sort of hoped he thought I shaved before he got up.

  He did like his morning sleep, and from how late he stayed up he needed it. I’d fall off to sleep up on that top bed, tucked in all cozy, while he was still turning pages or writing. He wrote a letter to my folks, and great numbers to his wife, and even more to his printer saying the nation was perishing in darkness which only books could enlighten, or that he should have a higher percentage in commission, or why was his shipment not waiting for him at Adams? When he was writing his best he muttered it all as he went, so I kept track.

  That cold summer may have been poor for ripening corn, but it was very good for burrowing deep into my bed and kissing my hands, which I named Patience, and dozing off to the little writing noises Parson made and the whale-oil smell of his lamp. I felt very near to happy, I think. I never knew how late he lasted.

  “How did you do before you had me?” I asked.

  “I had to keep farmer hours. I’ve needed this.”

  I won’t say I understand why he liked lamplight better than the good light of the sun. He just did. I guess there was no harm in it except the expense, but he truly didn’t belong in New England. By the time I felt free enough to give an opinion, I’d started thinking it was just one more lovable thing about him, and anyway handy for keeping it secret you’re a girl.

  Many a morning it was a good nine o’clock and I’d have us three hours along the road before I’d hear the van door slam and see Parson coming running around to climb up beside me on the seat. I learned to have some coffee and bread there for him, and to keep my mouth shut till his eyes stopped watering and he felt like talking.

  Usually the sign was he’d start to sing. There was one song he favored for morning that went:

  Whither goest thou, pilgrim stranger,

  Wandering through this lowly vale?

  Knowest thou not ’tis full of danger?

  And will not thy courage fail?

  That part in a little high mean worried voice, all weak and wa–very and trying to make trouble while pretending to do good. Then the next part, Parson would stretch up and sing out all strong and happy and lots louder and faster:

  No, I’m bound for the kingdom!

  Will you go to glory with me?

  Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

  Some days it made the hairs on my neck stand up. Not every day, of course. That would’ve been a good song to know when I was trudging alone up the Hooestennuc Valley.

  He taught me lots of songs, or not exactly taught – sang them until I learned them, a little at a time. Lots were church songs, and some were just people songs, like “The Soldier Tired of War’s Alarms” and “Sweet Nan of Hampton Green.” One called “Water Parted from the Sea” made me so sad for Patience I almost didn’t like to hear it, and yet something made me ask him to sing it oftener than any other song.

  On the road that’s how it was. It kind of hurt me that our time alone together on the road wasn’t something he liked like I did. One time we were stopped in a little grove for the night and I felt sort of soppy because Parson was giving me a haircut and it reminded me of Ma and all, so I said, “I like it best like this, just the two of us.” He kept quiet, just snipped.

  “I know you like town best. All them clever folks. Your own kind.” (He kept on snipping.) “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes. Everything.”

  Then he whisked and huffed the snippets off my neck, and gave me a l
ittle hit on the shoulder and went into the van and stayed there. When I went in to go to bed, quite a bit later, he was writing. Like always, he had his back to me and didn’t look around. I knew he wasn’t mad at me, but something made me want to play I thought so. After I was under the covers, I said, “Parson?”

  “Uh?”

  “You like me all right?”

  “Of course I do. You know I do. Too much.”

  I laid there smiling to myself.

  “Embarrassingly much,” he said, and pretty soon I heard his pen start going again.

  It makes me happy to remember the times on the road. I liked towns less, though they had some good things. I liked how the boys and dogs ran after our van, excited like over militia on Training Day, and looked up like they had an ambition to be me. I liked the stores that smelled of tea and spices and cloth and oil, and the few coins Parson gave me saying he’d come to feel he should, even though at first he’d felt the education he gave me was a fair exchange for my work. “I can’t see you sniffing in a store without a coin to your name,” he said, and somehow that didn’t hurt my pride and I was glad to take the money. I liked seeing the fine houses and the tall churches, the streets that Potiphar made such a cloppety racket on, and that didn’t get boggy even in the rain.

  Since we couldn’t well cook in courthouse squares, we ate at inns, and I liked that too, though Parson didn’t. I’d never supposed there could be so many good things to eat, not all at one meal anyway. Like five or six kinds of meat, and all kinds of hot breads, and fruit, and honey and butter and cheese. All of it was made ready three times a day, even in midsummer, by gangs of blacks sweating away at a huge blazing fireplace in a kitchen I could no more hold my head in than if it was an oven, and couldn’t take a breath in. I’d never seen blacks before, and even though I tried I couldn’t get to know one. They worked too hard.

  Parson said slavery was an abomination and would be the downfall of the United States, not only for the sin of it, but for how it kept boys like me from having the bottom to start at. The blacks could have the bottom if that was it. I knew I couldn’t’ve faced that fire and done what they did.

  They’d load the food in heaps on the big long tables, and then a bell would ring and the crowd – us too – would rush in, like starving, and hack and pull and stuff their mouths, till in fifteen minutes the platters would be bare and the floor covered with grease and bones. “Animals, we’re animals,” Parson would say, but I couldn’t think of any animal that acted so bad. Maybe animals in strange lands do. Still I did like eating at inns, even though I wouldn’t want it steady. I could hold my own and get my share. I’d bought myself a jackknife.

  I got glum, a little, in towns. It wasn’t the work that did it, though the work got heavy then, taking boxes of heavy books down from the top of the van and toting them to courthouse steps and all. I never would’ve noticed, I expect, except for that how likely a courthouse is to be built on a hill. It wasn’t the work I minded, but the change that came over Parson Peel.

  To be fair, I should take that back. He didn’t change, except that he’d have on a ruffled shirt and a weskit with two rows of buttons and all to match. Inside himself he was just the same only to more people. He looked his kind interested look at lots of people, and listened as close to them as he ever did to me, leaning forward from the box he sat on, saying, “Tell me!” He taught and explained and smiled at everybody just like at me, and made them laugh like he did me, and it somehow, yes, I admit, took me down. I didn’t like it.

  In town he’d get asked to people’s houses too, and it never crossed his mind I might like to go along, or at least might like to be asked if only so I could say no. People who’d read the book he wrote would get to talking about one or another idea with him and then say, “Let’s finish this up over a dram at home,” and off Parson would go, saying, “Mind the shop, Sam,” over his shoulder. Or he’d go off with a jag of dirty shirts and bedclothes to find someone to do them up for him, and it’d be hours before he came whistling back with a tale to tell, of what the washerwoman’s life was like and if she prayed or sang or wept or had a friend or hoped for Heaven. He always wanted to know the ways people kept going. No matter how much the same the ways might be, he was always interested. If it hadn’t been I didn’t want to be like Pa or Edward White, I might’ve thought Parson should take some of that interest in his business.

  Sometimes I felt tempted to mess up the business, but I never did because I was proud, too, that I could read enough to give people the book they asked for, and change money, and that Parson trusted me. Business was good. I wouldn’t’ve believed, especially in a hard summer, that people would turn over their hard-earned money for what couldn’t feed or clothe or shelter them, for just words such as they could set down themselves if their arm could stand the strain. Ma always said, “Talk’s free,” and what’s writing but just another form of talk? As well try to sell air, I would’ve thought, except I could see for myself the hunger people felt for our wares – not just Bard’s Compendium of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, or guides to the wilderness, which made some sense, but history and biography and made-up stories and rhymes, Bibles and dictionaries and thoughts. All these were brought by plain sensible people, as well as fine folk.

  I’ve been putting-off telling it, but there was a problem about fights too. I mean, in town I’d get in fights. Back where I said how boys ran after us? It wasn’t only that, which I liked. They hung around the van too, as I guess they couldn’t help, and sometimes I let myself be drawn into a little bragging about Parson, and one thing would lead to another, and anyway it’s touchy business being envied, so oftener than I care to recollect, there’d be the boys drawing back to make room for a fair fight, just a solid circle with me and somebody else blocked up in it and everybody yelling, “Hit ’im! Git ’im!” It was just sport for them, no real hard feelings, just exercise, but it was hard on me. I learned not to keep getting up as soon as I could for as long as I could, so I didn’t get hurt much. And little as I thought he could, Parson taught me a few ways to make a throw so I didn’t even necessarily lose. But I didn’t like fighting. It wasn’t just how me being female might come out. I didn’t like to fight. I never really knew for sure till then how much I had the feelings of a woman, and not only that but I rated a woman’s feelings higher.

  We were zigzagging across Massachusetts, no rush, just tending generally east with the idea of finally hitting the Boston Post Road back to New-York City in the fall. I was always ready to push on before Parson was, and get him to myself again. He seemed glad enough to linger three or four days, to sell a little more, or talk, or wait for the stage to bring him letters and more stock.

  After a town he’d have things to think over and write down. I’d keep quiet and stay out of his way until he was ready to look at me and talk again.

  When he would talk, it was wonderful. His mind was so full but still easy, and I doubt there was anything he didn’t know something about. The littlest thing reminded him, like Potiphar would shrug off a fly and Parson would tell me about the Hindoos who wouldn’t kill a fly, and from that to India, to how Columbus was looking for India when he found us, to how Columbus went home from his second voyage a prisoner in chains, to how up until Christianity everybody knew the earth was round, to how the planets swim around the sun, to how some people think the places the planets are when you’re born make a mark on you that you never get over. Like I was born when the sun was in a place called Leo and I have more in common with other people of Leo than with my own family. All from a fly on Potiphar’s hide. Patience was born when the sun was at Aquarius. Parson’s sun was in Gemini.

  I loved his talk, but one day when I clapped him on the back and said so, plain out, “I love your talk,” he climbed down and stayed in the van all day. I hardly got a glimpse of him all that day, though he claimed he wasn’t sick.

  Next day it was midmorning before he got up beside me and yet he still acted sleepy. He never
did sing or play his flute, all that day. I read my lesson to him, but I doubt he listened. He was in some kind of deep sad thought, so I pushed my leg over closer, like a dog will put its head in your lap when it sees you need comfort.

  “Sam, I wish I believed you were twenty-two.”

  “I am. I was twenty-two on the thirty-first of July.”

  “Will you swear it?”

  I was sure puzzled but I said, “Yes, I swear it.”

  “I’d like to stop sitting on my hands. I’ve very tired of sitting on my hands.”

  “I though that was just your way.”

  “Just lately.”

  Had he guessed I was a woman? I took my leg back from pushing his, and slid over to my edge of the seat.

  “Have you changed your mind?” he asked.

  “What about?”

  “About what we have.”

  “No.”

  He put his hand on my knee.

  “Parson!”

  “Are you going to pretend that you don’t care for me?”

  “Not like that. Not that way. I can’t.”

  “Can’t or not, you do, and I do.”

  “Oh, no, Parson.”

  I leaned so far away from him I started to fall off the seat. He caught me and then kept his arm across my shoulder even after I had my balance back.

  “I suppose you think men don’t do this,” he said. “I assure you that men have loved and embraced each other since the beginning of time.”

  I knew how he liked to tell whoppers about other lands, but he didn’t have a laughy way this time. I didn’t know what to believe or think or do. I kept remembering Pa’s last warning to me, but would it apply in a case like this? I decided to say no more and hope for the best.

  Parson took his arm away and kept to his own side of the seat. I chanced a little look at him. “Ah, Sam,” he said, “be nothing but a good boy. Scatter bastards all the way to Genesee, like a real American.”