Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  “We’re Yankees,” I said.

  He was kind and we needed him, but I was glad to have him go.

  A better guest came later, as I was settling my back into Sarah’s front to fall asleep. We heard a noise and sat up so fast we jarred the hemlock thatch. It was a dog, a big male pup almost grown, black and white and ruddy brown, with ears lopped over at the tips and a white plumed tail that curled over and rested on his back. He was about a foot and a half tall at the shoulder.

  We fed him stew. That’s when his tailed curled over.

  “I wonder whose he is,” I said.

  “He’s ours, because he came to us,” Sarah said. We named him George.

  In the night, George growled softly. Sarah crawled out and listened. “It’s just critters. They’ve had the run of the place so long they can’t get used to it we belong here now,” she said, in a voice clear and loudish to let them know they had to stay away. I built up the fire.

  George settled down again, so we did. “First thing the store opens, I’ll buy a gun,” Sarah said.

  I didn’t wholly like having George on our quilt, but he felt he had a natural right to it and perhaps he did. He was never an unmixed blessing, but there was reassurance in his weight and warmth on our feet that night, and in his animal alertness, and maybe even in his maleness. I wouldn’t rule it out.

  Sarah was still preoccupied with the roof. She nailed cleats to a pole to make a ladder and climbed up. She poked and tested and considered and came down, not disheartened, to say, “Well, she can’t be patched. There’s nothing sound to nail to. I’ve got to put new rafters in and boards and shingles and just make a new one, that’s all.”

  I’d taught my pupils that it takes several men to roof a cabin. I’d also taught them that the weight of the roof is what holds the gable-ends in place. I couldn’t swear any of it was true, but it was what I’d taught, and I did dread having our gables topple with everything else we had to do.

  “Sarah?”

  “Don’t stop me now,” she said. “This’ll take a while. I got to get right at it.”

  “Sarah, let’s hire it done?”

  “Hire it!”

  But I wore her down with kisses (which George wanted to get in on) and little pouts and by repeating that I knew she could do the roof. I said I only wanted to be humored, unreasonably, lovingly indulged, and when she walked into Greenville for the gun she spoke to the storekeeper about a carpenter. (We’re about halfway between Freehold and Greenville here, handy to both.) She wore a dress. I thought it best.

  The storekeeper himself was a part-time carpenter. That same day he brought out a helper and a wagonload of supplies. They set to with energy and practiced skill, but they were three days at it even so. I thought Sarah might pale a bit at the sight of what she almost undertook to do alone. I was ready to reassure her that she really could have, but the question never came up. She did complain that they’d taken down the ridgepole she’d made such a good prop for, but that was all. My darling does not lack for belief in herself. Even when I can’t easily share it, I’m glad she has it.

  Except for corn, our fields were already planted, growing oats and potatoes and hay. The cornfield was already prepared. Sarah walked to the red mill our road was named for and carried home a sack of seed corn over her shoulder.

  From the pole ladder where I was mortaring first the chimney and then the walls, I could look over the rise behind our house and see my Sarah planting corn, a sight so beautiful I hoped the roofers weren’t looking at her too. In her left hand she carried a stick, crossbarred to make a hole of the proper depth. With her right hand she tossed the kernel into the hole and then with a forward step both closed the hole and prepared a new one. Whenever her toss went wrong she bent and saved the kernel. She could go whole rows without having to bend, and even her bending was lovely. In all she planted four acres without an awkward movement and without strain. She said it was sport.

  The first cash product of our farm was a wolf. That was while we still slept outside. George sensed it first and woke us. Sarah saw its eyes reflecting our campfire and aimed and fired while I was still looking around for what had wakened George. Sarah is a very good shot, and she’d been practicing, but I think there was some plain good luck involved as well, because wolves are rare here now and such as escape the bounty hunters are careful and wise. And this wolf was at what it must have considered a safe distance. She got it neatly, I’m glad to say. She felt proud, but I was careful not to overpraise that side of her. I’m not really interested in shooting and blood. Next day she took the tail to the town clerk in Greenville and collected a forty-dollar bounty. It paid for our new roof, and I am interested in that.

  We’d been here a week when we moved inside. The corn was planted, the garden was planted. And now we too were planted, to see what grew of us. Our house had a fireplace safe for fire. The floor, though still jaggedy, was scrubbed and bare. Most of the walls were newly chinked. Everything else could wait for the slow quiet steady loving work we longed to give, now that we could pray for rain like other farmers. Let it come down.

  Nothing was urgent then except keeping George out. Sarah cleated three boards together and made a door which she cut and fit until the sagged-in doorframe could contain it. That should have been enough, but with a tall dog like George we needed windows too. He put his elbows on the window sill and walked his hind legs up the wall and burst in delighted with himself, as if to say, see, folks, you needn’t have worried.

  The window frames were as out-of-true as the door. By the sheerest grace of God the sashes we’d bought were too small, and Sarah was able to stuff wedges and scraps of wood around them and mortar them into place.

  And George was out, to stay. He couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t he practically bought our roof by telling Sarah about the wolf? Hadn’t he let us sleep with him? He barked imperiously. He whined forlornly. We swatted him, and Sarah had long talks with him, and I gave him the quilt I’d made at age thirteen. (He’d dirtied it anyway.) I don’t know which worked. Sarah thinks it was her talks. She thinks he was quick-witted and reasonable. I won’t go into that. But I think it was the swats. Somehow it got to him that there was not just some awful oversight, that we intended to do him as we did, and that we would not relent. He decided to forgive us and sleep on the quilt outside. In time Sarah made him a house of his own. We did need him. We did love him. Just not in the bodily way he thought at first. Some people claim to have dogs who consider themselves human. I claim of George that he thought we were dogs.

  So we were in and there was time for everything. I said, “What would I do, if the wash were done and the curtains made and the potatoes hoed and the walls plastered and the shelves made and the dishes on them? If everything were done, what would I do?” I thought a while. “If everything were done, I’d bake you a cake, sweetheart.”

  And I beat one together, quick as that, even without a table to set the bowl on. I used a trunk top. Sarah sat leaned against a wall watching me. I pretended to have forgotten her. I made little humming noises, all artless and unaware.

  She made me feel so beautiful and interesting and that I did everything just right, all the correct methods.

  She made me feel like the Lord’s High Priestess, the Channel of Holy Mysteries, the Eternal Mother, the Bringer of All Good Gifts.

  Ah, Sarah, in your eyes I see myself become what I always dreamed I could be.

  When the cake was in the oven, making beauty for the nose, I said, “Now what would I do, if everything were done? I’d make a special painting for our home.”

  “I’d build us a bed,” Sarah said, “if I could part from you.”

  “Why part?”

  “Outside the door. So far,” she said. “Where I can’t see you paint or smell the cake.”

  “Nothing to do but build it here beside me.”

  “You wouldn’t like the mess.”

  “Nothing to do but love the mess, if you make it.”

  Ti
me modified my feeling there, but that day I did love the sawdust and the chips she made. For materials she had the poles she’d cut to prop the roof, and some others she’d meant for firewood.

  I painted Boaz and Ruth and Naomi, Boaz distant, very small, his back turned, leaving. I call it, “Where Thou Lodgest, I Will Lodge.” I meant it to be the central ornament of our home, but it got a little out of hand. Even its basis in Scripture could not make the embrace of Ruth and Naomi spiritual enough for guests to see. Yet, although I soon saw that the painting would be unsuitable, I went ahead with it. The new colors I’d brought in New York were so exciting, rich and brilliant. I could hardly pause to have a piece of cake. The painting took me most of the day and I got a good do on it. It glows.

  Sarah finished the bedstead, a shaggy rectangular frame on shaggy cornerposts. A cabinetmaker would have frowned. The thought of his frown made us laugh. We made a web of ropes stretched tight. On went the lumpy tick. On went the bridal sheets of fine linen from my hope chest, the Tree of Life quilt that was my grandmother’s. Our bed was made. We stood holding hands admiring it. “O beautiful! O beautiful!” we said.

  We lay down to test it and to begin our feast of love. I kissed her and enfolded her, fully trusting our hearts to flood us and our toes to curl. It was time for our feast, to have all we wanted, to be wild and careless and noisy and free. I would shout my triumph when Sarah groaned. I would groan for her. We would make the bed gallop. The floor would ring like a drum.

  All that was to be, but not then. I watched her for the little pause, the little central stillness, the soft blurriness in her eyes, that would mean we were starting up. They didn’t come. I could not have been more surprised if my voice had failed me. I kept on kissing her. What was wrong? Had she set her will against me? No, her face was beautifully tender, full of love. I knew mine must be too.

  What was it? Had we forsaken all of our duties and passed the whirlpool at Hell Gate, and faced death by exploding steam, and slept on the ground in the rain, for a feeling not very pressing, not very important? I remembered what Edward had said about the length of woman’s love. I remembered Sarah’s fears that we would be only friends. Was this what we’d climbed the thorny mountain for?

  I was afraid. “Give! Give!” I said. “How can I feel when you won’t feel?” My kiss was harsh. Often she liked it harsh, but this time she turned her face away.

  “I can’t. Not right now,” she said. “And you can’t either.”

  “We can! We’ve got to! We’ve got to start our bed right!”

  She smiled and I listened to what I’d said and felt foolish but managed to smile too. She was full of laugh, but held back not to hurt me, but she let it roll when I began to laugh.

  I tried to get off her and couldn’t and we found that our weight had stretched our web of ropes into a sort of hanging pocket, very like the nest of a yellow robin.

  So what our bed first shook from was laughter. We laughed so hard we could hardly climb out.

  Finally, of course, we did get out, and we lifted off the bedclothes and tick and took a look at the ropes and fell to laughing again.

  Then Sarah said, “Nothing to do but do it right. I hoped I needn’t.”

  I should have known the web wouldn’t work. After all, I was the one who’d had a real bed before and a bedwrench to keep it taut. Sarah hadn’t. But I’d hoped too.

  We were so glad through that whole time to have no one around to see our mistakes. We were free to remember and invent with no one to say our ways would never do. Sometimes, indeed, our ways did fail. But often they did not.

  Sarah walked to Freehold to return Mr. More’s chisels and borrow his auger, and to buy bedcord.

  While she was gone I started making curtains. We worked through what remained of daylight, and then on and on by firelight. When we got hungry we finished off the cake. It felt so good to be naughty unwholesome children, eating what was tempting and not getting sensible rest. Sarah was boring holes and whittling pegs, stringing the bed up properly. Naturally she couldn’t bear to stop, any more than I could leave the curtrain-making. The first curtain was so bright and lovely against the brown logs of the wall. Making the others went more slowly, because I had to keep gazing up at what was already done.

  What a sweet night it was, of quiet work and talk. I loved it for itself and for being the pattern of all the time to come. Work is endless and we could never lack for topic: I had my whole life and every thought and fear and wish to tell, and hers to hear, and every day would bring more.

  We worked until our eyes felt small and gritty and we ached all over from sitting on the floor. Against our wishes we had to stop. Sarah so much wanted to finish the bed, but we had to bed down on the floor.

  Almost yawning, I leaned for our goodnight kiss, meant to be quick and soft. It was soft, but long. I have no way of knowing how long.

  Strange of our feeling, to refuse to be summoned when it would have been so welcome and appropriate, to dedicate our bed, and then to seize us by surprise, uninvited.

  It has so often been that way, our hearts cool at times when heat would have been ceremonially correct and then flaming up when we couldn’t really spare the time and strength. We have thought about that strangeness a lot and talked about it together. We needed words for it. I used to say, “It is though love holds us, not we it.” I used to say, “See how our blessing suits not our convenience but its own.”

  It was Sarah who finally found the words.

  She said, “You can’t tell a gift how to come.”

  Afterword

  This story was suggested by the life of the painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion Miss Brundidge, who lived and farmed together for many years on Red Mill Road, Greenville Town, Greene County, New York State, in the early part of the nineteenth century.

  Not much is left of them. Even their hill – still called Brundidge – is partly gone, bulldozed for road improvement. I couldn’t find them in any Greene County census, or in the records of land transactions in the Catskill courthouse.

  Still, something is left. The bright playful watercolors are left. And “Admirer of Art,” a friend, wrote a note about Miss Willson and Miss Brundidge. It’s safe in a book.1 What looks to be Admirer of Art’s first draft is safe in the Vedder Library of the Greene County Historical Society at Coxsackie, New York. There is another account in a book called Picturesque Catskills.2 So we know about their “romantic attachment” to each other, their quiet peaceful life, the respect and help of their neighbors, their dooryard full of flowers, their plowing and haying, their cow, the improvised paints – berries and brick dust – the paintings sold for twenty-five cents to neighbors or bartered to peddlers who carried them all over eastern North America, from Canada to Mobile. And we know our own response. We are provoked to tender dreams by a hint. Any stone from their hill is a crystal ball.

  – Isabel Miller

  1. Lipman, Jean, and Black, Mary C. American Folk Painting. New York: C.N. Potter, 1966.

  2. Delisser, R. Lionel. Picturesque Catskills. Northampton, Mass: Picturesque Publishing Co., 1894. Reprinted 1967 by Hope Farm Press, Cornwallville, N.Y.

  Appendices

  Patience & Sarah Come to Life

  by Elisabeth Deran, partner (1962–1971) and longtime friend of Alma Routsong

  Alma delighted in quoting the prophetic words of the dowager who introduced us at the Unitarian Church coffee hour: “I just know you two ladies are going to love each other!”

  I doubted it. A faculty wife was not my idea of good company, and I barely remember our first encounter. After a few words of cautious verbal parry, I moved on to another conversational group. By the next Sunday, however, I had accumulated some background data that made “Mrs. Brodie” seem more interesting. When I encountered her on a narrow church stairwell, she seemed eager to talk, despite the need to squeeze against the wall to let other parishioners pass.

  “You didn’t tell me that you’re a novelist,” I said. �
�But we don’t seem to have anything by you in the church bookstore.”

  “My latest book’s not exactly going like hotcakes,” she acknowledged, grimacing. “Probably they ordered one copy, and it took so long to sell they didn’t reorder.”

  “What sort of books do you write?”

  “Will you still speak to me if I admit they’re romantic novels?”

  “I have nothing against romantic novels, since I’ve never read one,” I replied. “I’m more of a science fiction person, but I’d find it interesting to read your novel. I’ve never met a fiction writer before.” “I’ll lend you a copy.”

  “No, you should have your royalty. Just give me your titles and I’ll order one.”

  She mentioned A Gradual Joy and Round Shape, adding, “You do know I write under my maiden name, Routsong?”

  “No, I didn’t. Why not Brodie?”

  “So my children won’t be embarrassed by my work.”

  “Oh? That does pique my interest. Are your book full of lurid sensuality?”

  “Not at all. But children are so cruel, and even using Routsong, my girls get a certain amount of teasing at school.”

  “So how old are they?”

  “They range from three to twelve.”

  “Range? Just how many do you have?”

  “Four.”

  The information shocked me. As an economist, I considered overpopulation a grave issue, at the root of almost every social problem. How could an intelligent woman, not Catholic, act so irresponsibly?

  “Why so many?” The question popped out before I could remember to be polite.

  “I guess I was trying to prove I’m a real woman,” she said. Her tone suggested that she would say much more if she dared, if the surroundings were more private.

  Given her pen name, I easily found her latest novel in the church book store. In contrast to sci-fi, the plot seemed tenuous and trivial. But her writing! I could only call it lyrical, almost poetic in the images it evoked and the song-like cadence of passage after passage.