“Of course not. Patience’s accusation was ridiculous. I can’t imagine why . . .” Rose frowned as her voice trailed off.
“What? Rose, what are you thinking?”
“I was just remembering the afternoon Hugo became ill. He came into the kitchen while we were talking. He had missed the noon meal and was looking for a snack.” Rose laid a comforting hand on Gertrude’s arm. “There was one item he ate that no one else has tried, as far as I know.”
“Oh dear,” Gertrude whimpered. “Not my lovely peppermint jelly.”
“I’m afraid so. But perhaps it’s just a coincidence,” she said as Gertrude’s eyes blurred with tears. “When we’ve finished, we’ll go get the jar and I’ll see if I can find someone to identify its contents. Just to rule it out, you understand. Now, what else do you need to confess to me about Patience? Tell me more about her accusations.”
Gertrude nodded and gulped. “She said I didn’t know how to use herbs properly. Imagine! I’ve been cooking for more than thirty years, and I’ve always used herbs, ever since I was a teen cooking for my papa, after my ma died. Why, I used to collect herbs from the hills, such like my ma did and her ma before her, down the line. We dried them ourselves and used them for tonics, too. Many’s the time we cured the ague with one of our herb tonics.”
“So of course you are familiar with all sorts of herbs and their uses,” Rose said, keeping her voice light and encouraging,
“Yea, of course. Patience had no call to say what she did about taking my herbs away from me. Who does she think she is! Was, I mean.” Gertrude sagged against an oak tree.
“Patience wanted to take the kitchen herbs?”
“She wanted to take them all, right then. Never mind we were cooking evening meal and baking bread for the whole week.”
Rose was puzzled. “What was Patience doing in the kitchen during the workday?” Ordinarily the kitchen was the domain of the kitchen sisters, and others were discouraged from dropping by without a mission.
Gertrude avoided Rose’s eyes. “Well,” she mumbled, “we weren’t exactly in the kitchen. We were just . . . out.”
Rose sensed that silence would bring the story out, so she did not prod. Gertrude grew agitated under her gaze. She pushed away from the tree trunk, walked to the bank of the creek. She yanked off a length of high grass and began to twist it.
“I followed her,” Gertrude said finally, tossing the shredded grass into the water. “She’d dropped off some basil at the kitchen and made that remark about my cooking being responsible for Hugo’s sickness, and then she just walked out, and I was furious, as you can just imagine, so I told the sisters I had a quick errand, and I just walked right out the door. She was heading off this direction, walking in the grass, mind you, so I followed her a ways. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. When I saw her go into the trees, I figured, well, that’s just the right place to have a private talk with that Sister Know-It-All, so I went right in after her.” Gertrude’s eyes looked inward at a memory that twisted her face in pain.
“Tell me what happened,” Rose said in a gentle command. “I promise, you will feel better.”
Gertrude nodded. “I followed her into the woods—you know, those trees back there.” She pointed to the area from which Rose had first watched Patience perform her solitary ritual. “I didn’t know about this being the holy hill, even though I’d heard about such things before, so I was mighty surprised when I peeked around the trees and saw Patience twirling around like she was in worship service. I was hopping mad, but I just watched her for a while because . . . well, because I figured there might be a chance of catching her with it. You know, catching her with one of her false spirits,” Gertrude explained in response to Rose’s puzzled frown. “I always believed she wasn’t a true chosen instrument, but she sure enough seemed chosen by something, so it had to be a false spirit.”
With great difficulty, Rose resisted pointing out the theological unlikelihood of actually sighting a recognizably false spirit communicating with Patience. Enough time had been wasted.
“Did you interrupt her trance?” Rose asked.
“Yea, she just twirled and twirled, and I got madder and madder, so finally I stepped out and called her name. She stopped right away, so it wasn’t much of a trance, anyway. I told her she’d no right to take my herbs and certainly no call to accuse my cooking of hurting Hugo. I said I’d go right to Andrew and insist we got our herbs in the kitchen. Oh, Rose, she was just terrible. A Believer shouldn’t be like that. She said I was a fool and a worthless Believer, and all sorts of horrible things, and . . .” Gertrude began to nibble on a thumbnail and curl in on herself like a child expecting punishment. Rose prepared herself to hear the true core of the confession.
“I hit her,” Gertrude said.
Rose struggled to hide her distress. She had expected to hear about harsh words or uncharitable thoughts, but not violence. Believers’ vows of pacifism were so central to their faith that they had refused to serve in the Civil War and in the great World War, earning them the contempt of many of their neighbors. And Gertrude was hardly young and impetuous.
Gertrude searched Rose’s face imploringly. “I didn’t mean to, Rose, truly, truly. I just got so angry I slapped her, right in the face, just like my ma used to slap my pa when he came home liquored up.” Her face brightened. “You don’t suppose it was her false spirits making me act that way, do you?”
Rose’s eyebrows shot up.
“Nay, I suppose not,” Gertrude said. “I take responsibility, Rose. I killed her. I slapped her and she fell backwards and tripped. She fell on that big rock and hit her head.”
“Why did you not come for help when you saw how badly she had hurt herself?”
“Well, I didn’t know, of course. Goodness, if I had thought she would die, of course I would have run for help. But I didn’t, truly I didn’t. She knocked her head and looked a little woozy, but she got up and spoke to me, and she was just as mean as ever, so how could I guess that she had really hurt herself?”
“Was she bleeding?”
“Honestly, I guess I didn’t look all that carefully, but I didn’t see any bleeding or I would have been more worried. I mean, she hit her head, but it didn’t seem hard enough to kill her, with all that padding.”
Gertrude began to chew on her little fingernail. Rose waited.
“There’s more I have to tell you,” Gertrude said. She moved on to another fingernail. “I shouldn’t have done it, I know, and even though it wasn’t exactly breaking my vows this time, I wasn’t exactly true to them, either.”
Rose nodded, keeping her expression neutral.
“Well, this wasn’t the first time Patience had talked about taking all the herbs away from the kitchen. I didn’t say anything at the time, and I know I should have, but right after she arrived I saw her wandering about in the kitchen garden just picking whatever she pleased! When I told her those herbs were needed for our cooking, she just smiled and said the Medicinal Herb Shop needed them more, and she was going to see about taking them away from us. Well, I told her we’d see about that! I told her to get back to her own work and leave those herbs with me, and she just smiled again and kept right on harvesting. She was taking all my peppermint!”
“It’s understandable that you lost your temper with Patience,” Rose said, patting Gertrude’s arm. “I wish you had come to me. I would have told her to stay away from the culinary herbs.”
Thinking the confession finished, and eager to move on, Rose squeezed Gertrude’s arm to convey forgiveness and turned to go.
“Well, I was so angry with her, you see,” Gertrude said, barely above a whisper. “It was a wretched thing to do, but I was so angry. I just pray it wasn’t what I did that . . .”
Rose turned back to Gertrude to see her features twisted in anguish.
“She had taken all my peppermint, you see, and I needed more to make my new herbal jellies. So one evening I sneaked over to the Medicinal Herb Sho
p. I went right after we’d served the evening meal, and I made sure Patience was in the dining room—she wasn’t fasting so much in those days, you know—and all the brethren were eating, too. Then I sneaked over to the shop to get some of my peppermint back.”
“Is that all you took?”
“I . . . Well, I tried not to take anything else, but, you see, sometimes it’s hard to recognize herbs once they’ve dried.”
“Peppermint is hard to recognize?” Rose asked in disbelief.
“Nay, not when it’s still hanging in bunches, and I found those right away, but I was still so angry, you see.” Gertrude attacked her other thumbnail. “I wanted to take all her peppermint, the way she took mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Some of it was already ground up,” Gertrude explained, “and sitting out on the worktables in tins and suchlike.” Gertrude stared at the ground as a flush spread over her face. “So I took pinches of everything and smelled it all, and I took parts of anything that smelled liked peppermint. I didn’t empty anything,” she said, as if hoping her consideration lessened her sin.
“You took ground herbs from the worktables of the Medicinal Herb Shop and used them to make the jelly that Hugo ate?”
Gertrude nodded miserably.
“Didn’t you know that peppermint is often used to make medicinal herbs more palatable?”
Gertrude gulped back a sob. “We used to do that back when I was growing up, but I just didn’t think about it until . . . until Hugo got sick and Patience started accusing me. She’d guessed I’d taken the peppermint. The brethren in the shop just figured they’d suddenly used it all up, and Patience didn’t tell them different.”
“Why not?”
“She was saving the information,” Gertrude said. “She was going to use it against me.”
“Oh, Gertrude. You know how this will look, don’t you?”
Gertrude’s misery shifted to horror. “Rose, I know I did wrong, and slapping her was a terrible, terrible deed, but I never thought that it would kill her.”
“I believe you, Gertrude, but here’s what you must do—you must stop crying around the others, and you must never again say that you are responsible for Patience’s death, or Hugo’s. Let me handle this from now on. Do you understand?”
Gertrude nodded. The breakfast bell rang in the distance, and both women began to walk toward the eastern edge of the woods.
“I’ll eat at the Ministry House today,” Rose said, as they emerged from the trees. They separated and had walked a few feet when Rose turned.
“Gertrude,” she called out, “just one more question. You said earlier you were surprised Patience was so injured by her fall, and you said it was because of ‘all that padding.’ What did you mean by that?”
Gertrude hesitated, her mouth half open. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, she had all that hair pinned up under her cap.”
“She was wearing her cap? You’re absolutely certain you remember it that way?”
“Yea, I’m quite certain,” Gertrude said.
“I see.”
NINETEEN
AFTER A BUSY BUT UNEVENTFUL DAY AND A NIGHT OF MUCH-NEEDED sleep, Rose awakened before the bell and hurried through her cleaning chores. Guilt pricked at her conscience because she had done so little work lately. In the United Society of Believers, all were equal, male and female, from the Ministry to the newest members of the family. And all worked, if they were able. Wilhelm labored in the fields. Rose tried to help wherever the sisters were especially shorthanded. She ought to check on the Laundry or the kitchen to see if she was needed, but her mind brimmed with ideas, and she wanted to sort them out on paper.
Before the breakfast bell, Rose made a quick call to the Center Family Dwelling House and asked Gennie to meet her in the Ministry library as soon as the sisters filed out of the dining room. With Patience gone, Gennie could no longer work in the Medicinal Herb Shop, but she could still be very helpful.
Rose was out of breath as she slid into her chair at the trestle table in the Ministry dining room. Wilhelm arched one white eyebrow at her.
“Perhaps the awakening bell should be moved earlier for thee,” he said. “Thy morning work seems too burdensome for the normal allotted time.”
“Good morning to you, too, Wilhelm.” Rose silently congratulated herself on her growing ability to keep Wilhelm’s barbs from piercing her composure.
“We must discuss our plans for Patience’s burial service,” he continued.
“I assumed it would be a normal one,” Rose said. “Simple and private. Perhaps combined with the service for Hugo.”
“Thy assumptions are wrong. Patience died to send us a special message.”
Rose smoothed the creases from her white linen napkin, biding her time. Finally she looked across at Wilhelm. “And what message would that be?” she asked.
“She told us during the sweeping gift,” Wilhelm said. “There are evil secrets in our Society. They have been piling up while we twiddled our thumbs. Now we must pay the price. We must purge ourselves of this evil.” He took a serving-spoonful of applesauce and plopped it on his plate as if personally smashing the wickedness.
Despite the heat, the fine hairs on the back of Rose’s neck bristled. She leaned over the table, her food forgotten. “Wilhelm, we mustn’t have a public burial service,” she said. “It could be dangerous. We can’t risk it.” Public worship services had a history of turning nasty when unexplained death had aroused suspicion among North Homage’s neighbors.
“A purging need not be witnessed by non-Believers,” Wilhelm said. “But all Believers must participate.”
“I’ve never heard of a purging ceremony.”
“We have always created rituals as we need them,” Wilhelm said. “And we need one now. More than a confession. It must reach deeper into our souls to root out the sources of evil within each of us. We will debase ourselves, beat our breasts, and beg for forgiveness.” Wilhelm waved his bread in the air, and crumbs flicked onto Rose’s plate. “And then we will, each of us, announce our sins to the entire community. We will finally cleanse our hearts, as Mother Ann told us we must.”
“Wilhelm, I understand the importance of public confession, but what you are proposing is something even more profound. It would be unwise to link such a service to Patience’s burial, surely. Word would spread to the world.”
“Let it.”
“But it would give the impression that we Shakers have some terrible guilt to purge. The world might decide that we had something to do with Patience’s death, perhaps even that we killed her.”
“And didn’t we?”
“What are you saying? Do you believe that one of us . . . ?”
“Nay, not one of us. All of us. We ignored the message she brought us. We should have stopped all work and purged ourselves instantly.” He applied himself to his plate as if his argument had now been proven.
Rose stared at him for several moments as she considered her own position. She had no objections to new forms of worship, nor to confession in general, but Wilhelm’s idea made her squirm. It didn’t seem to make sense. Was he keeping some part of his plan to himself?
“I’m confused, Wilhelm,” she said, ignoring the glint in his eye when she admitted a weakness. “How could instant and intense public confession have saved Patience’s life?”
Wilhelm planted his fists, still holding his knife and fork, on either side of his plate. Sadness flashed across his wind-and-age-roughened face before it hardened again. “Patience wanted to save us,” he said. “Nay, even more, she was sent to save us. She labored relentlessly at her task. Day and night, she prayed and fasted and worshiped alone. If we had listened to her, taken action at once, she would have fulfilled her purpose. She could have rested, gone back to work and been restored. She would not have been on that hill, trying once again to intervene for us.”
Rose sank back in her chair. “Wilhelm, Patience may have bee
n killed by a human being,” she said. “If she was, and it was purposeful, the end would have been no different had she been elsewhere than the Empyrean Mount. Her killer would have found a way.”
“Nay!” Wilhelm slapped his hand on the table, which took the assault with only a slight shudder. “Not if we had purged ourselves first. It makes no difference how she died. It is we who are responsible for her death. By neglecting to purge ourselves, we allowed false spirits free rein. We left Patience to fight them alone until they killed her.”
A stab of pain shot through Rose’s head, signaling the onset of a Wilhelm-induced headache. She had lost her appetite, but she nibbled her food rather than continue such a fruitless discussion. For the remainder of the meal, Rose and Wilhelm were silent, as if they were dining with the rest of the family.
Wilhelm crossed his utensils on his empty plate and scraped back his chair. “I believe we should do the purging ritual in two days,” he said. “In the evening, in place of our Union Meeting. That should give both of us time to prepare the others. And ourselves.”
Wilhelm stood and leaned with his fists on the table. Rose watched him, another warning pain shooting through her head.
“I have noted thy loss of influence among some of the sisters,” he said. “Therefore, I think it best if thy confession be made first.” He straightened and left before Rose could even formulate her objections.
Rose tried to put the purging ritual out of her mind as she flipped apart the light curtains in the Ministry library and opened windows to exchange stuffy indoor for steamy outdoor air. She had already decided that she would try to find a way to prevent the ritual, even if it meant a battle with Wilhelm. She would go only so far as to concede a voluntary confession during Sabbathday worship. But no purging ritual. Too risky. Her greatest concern was that Gertrude would feel compelled to confess her meeting with Patience and be accused of murder. Rose pulled paper and pens out of desk drawers in preparation for her meeting with Gennie in a few minutes. The sooner they solved the riddle of Patience’s death, the better able she would be to argue that the community-wide purging was unnecessary.
Sins of a Shaker Summer Page 16