The Beloved Wild

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The Beloved Wild Page 9

by Melissa Ostrom


  Mr. Long was probably circling the pond by now. The pond, white and round, like Mama’s cheeks. She’d stood so pale and still while I’d ripped apart Matthew, spat my vicious resentment toward her family (no, no, my family, my family, too), then hurled the Winters against my rancor for good measure. Dear Lord, where had the bitterness been hiding itself all these years?

  A sob escaped me. I kept walking but glanced over my shoulder. Mr. Long had paused to gaze across the frozen water.

  Years ago, I’d recklessly tested the pond’s ice. My parents had forbidden me to walk on it that February. We’d experienced a mercurial stretch of weather, cold snaps and thaws taking turns for weeks on end. The ice had looked thick. I’d thought it would hold my weight. When the bottom fell out from under me, I plunged like a rock. Then, dazedly ignoring Gideon’s yells and the dead tree limb he extended in my direction, I made my situation worse by trying to heft my drenched self out, again and again breaking and widening the hole in gasping, sputtering foolishness. Not until Gideon swatted me in the head with the branch did I find the sense to seize it.

  I felt like that now. My anger, a dangerous pool, had held me for weeks. I’d practically dived into its deadly waters. And I was still drowning in it, making matters worse and worse. Mama’s tragic face, my scorn, my meanness to anyone who dared to take what I wanted, who dared, even unwittingly, to show me my inferiorities: These thoughts teemed and crashed in my head. The tears welled in a rush, tears of remorse but, still, as always, of anger, too: this time mostly directed at myself.

  Matthew wasn’t the biggest fool in the family.

  Dignity forgotten, I raced across the snow, floundering and slipping, all the way to the burial ground, and once at the fence, I clung to a post and sobbed into the rough grain. I hated myself. I wanted to throw my body onto the other side and bury myself alive.

  I knew Mr. Long was coming, but when he touched my shoulder, I gasped and jumped anyway.

  “Oh, Harriet,” he said quietly.

  It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to twist under his hand and shove my wet face against his chest, a hard surface but kinder than the wooden post and vibrantly beating against my ear. “Why, why didn’t you leave me alone?” I sobbed, even as I clutched his coat on either side of my face.

  He grunted. “Can’t tell you how often I ask myself that.” His hands rubbed my back. “I never know if you hate me or want me.” After a moment he added, “It’s uncomfortable, never knowing.”

  I shook my head and kept crying. I didn’t know, either.

  “Would you like to talk about what happened?”

  “No.”

  His chest rumbled a short laugh. “As you wish.”

  We stood that way for a while: me weeping, then just crying, then eventually sniffling and noisily breathing, a moist, shuddery inhaling and exhaling against Mr. Long’s shirt, and him easing his hands up and down my back, in a consoling but matter-of-fact manner. I’d always noticed Mr. Long’s strong hands, wondered how such a big man could fashion the smallest details into a piece of wood and whittle so finely. He had sensitive hands, and I felt a rare rush of warm gratefulness that he was letting me recover in his careful, caring hold.

  Minutes passed before I finally detached myself from his shirt.

  His gray eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them, more like a spring fog than a thundercloud.

  “I didn’t mean to get so angry.”

  “I know.” He shrugged. “You just have a hot temper.”

  His casual evaluation of my nature raised my hackles, which was unfortunate, since it proved his assertion true. Straightening, I made a face, then turned and rubbed my eyes. When I cleared my vision, I took in the burial ground, as always searching out my birth mother’s marker first: MRS. SUBMIT FAITHFUL WINTER, WIFE TO MR. DAVID WINTER, DEC’D OCT’R 10 1792 IN YE 18 OF HER AGE.

  “‘Mrs. Submit Faithful Winter,’” I read aloud. “Dead at eighteen.” I shot him a sideways glare. “That’s where submission lands you.”

  He snorted. “Then I expect you’ll live a long, healthy life, Harriet, because you’re the least submissive girl I know.”

  I folded my arms. “We can’t all be biddable Lydia Goodriches. Think how tedious the world would be.”

  He folded his arms likewise. “Yet how calm and peaceful, too.”

  “Ha.” I narrowed my eyes and, raising my chin in a dismissive way, returned my attention to my mother’s—my first mother’s—gravestone, with its winged skull and crossed bones. The thought of the mother waiting back home swamped me with guilt. I shook my head. “Did you hear”—I swallowed—“everything?”

  “Enough, anyway.”

  I winced. “I’m sorry I hurt Mama’s feelings. I—I don’t know why I said what I did.” Because it was true? Because I could have wielded so much more power and enjoyed so much more freedom if I’d been born a son? I sighed, my breath still quivering from the long cry. “But I’m not sorry I blasted Matthew. He’s a cocksure idiot.”

  “He’s just immature. I think all this trouble cured him of his gambling propensity.”

  “I should hope so. The fool: capering to town, his pockets stuffed with hard-earned money, and losing it all—for what? To impress the oh-so-mighty-and-important Mr. Goodrich?” I made a sound of disgust.

  “What do you have against the Goodrich family?”

  There was a dare in the question. I retorted curtly, “Nothing.”

  “Jealous?”

  “I am not jealous.”

  “I think you are. In fact, I think your disposition is inherently jealous.”

  “Ah. In addition to hot-tempered.”

  “Exactly.”

  I growled. For a suitor, the man could improve his lovemaking skills. “That’s a terrible thing to say about me.”

  “You were jealous of Rachel.”

  “Rachel’s my friend.”

  “She wasn’t at first.”

  “Well, if you want to go back to the beginning, I guess you’re right. I thought she was silly.”

  “You were jealous of her, jealous of how much Gideon liked her. I don’t think you started enjoying her company until you realized she didn’t return your brother’s feelings.”

  “Not true!”

  “Then there are the Goodrich girls. Remember, I heard how disdainfully you dismissed the trappings of their wealth.” He shook his head, as if sadly recollecting. “That speech positively smacked of jealousy.” Before I could sputter a rejoinder, he continued: “And of course, there’s what you said about Matthew, how unfair it is he gets the bulk of the land on account of being the eldest.” He shrugged and said simply, succinctly, “More jealousy.”

  I bristled. “Not just on account of his being the eldest—on account of his being the eldest son. You, Mr. Long, can’t appreciate what it’s like having this await you.” I waved an agitated hand to indicate the little graveyard.

  “We all have this waiting for us,” he answered dryly.

  “Not death. Submission. Following whatever rules your father, then your husband sets out for you, toiling without ever owning, obeying without ever deciding, having as much freedom and say as a broodmare,” I said wrathfully.

  “That’s only true if you set yourself up with someone who doesn’t care for your feelings and wants to knock you down.”

  “It’s true for every girl.”

  “Who marries poorly.”

  “Even the ones who marry well. It’s always a possibility, if the husband loses his tenderness, interest, or patience. The woman’s at his mercy.” I fisted my hands. “But who knows? Maybe she won’t live long enough to suffer his abuse. Chances are childbirth will kill her while she’s still in her prime. Then she can die with everyone vaguely and fondly remembering her as a biddable girl.” I breathed a wild cackle and shot my arm over the fence to point at my birth mother’s marker. “As a great beauty! What hopes and joys God promises the fairer sex.”

  Mr. Long took a step back
. “What are you trying to say, Harriet?”

  “That a woman’s fate, whichever direction it takes, fails her spirit and potential, that a woman’s options, no matter how I look at them, are offensive.”

  He stared at me silently for a moment, then said quietly, “Including the option of a loving marriage?”

  “Especially that option.” I was breathing fast, almost gasping. My hands sought out the fence post. The memory of the pond returned, the sluggish, cold water clawing at my cape and filling my gown, the way the icy edge of the opening I’d made with my body came apart in my struggling grasp. “So if you think, Mr. Long, that I’m just another object for sale, a little trinket for purchase, you’re wrong. I—” I panted and looked around me, feeling dizzy and sick. The sun had cut apart the clouds again and now streamed over the mountains and fields, spangling the scattering snow, turning the flakes into silky stitches tying up the afternoon.

  Like a person who just can’t help herself, a person intent on drowning, I finished in a strangled voice I couldn’t even recognize as my own: “I won’t marry you.”

  His head snapped back. For a fraction of a second, something horrible and wounded seized Daniel Long’s expression.

  Then severity smoothed it away. Face hard, he nodded once, buttoned his coat, and with the sort of surgical precision with which he whittled dumb wood into things of loveliness, said softly yet clearly, “Dear Miss Winter, I don’t recall ever asking you to.”

  * * *

  That night, I raised my head from the kitchen table and gazed blurrily at Mama. A squint was all my swollen eyes could manage. “I have to go.”

  She slowly wagged her head, her forehead wrinkled, her cheeks damp from crying. “But the Genesee Valley, Harriet? That’s so far away. Why … I’ll never see you.”

  Her hurt added to my anguish. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t bear to witness her pain, so I stared over her shoulder. Firelight played against the rough-hewn wall. Gideon’s shadow interrupted the wavering display. Then Papa’s. The two men joined us at the table, my father beside my mother, his arm bracing her shoulders, my brother next to me. He gave my clasped hands on the table a pat.

  The house was silent. I didn’t know where my parents had shooed the rest of the family. Perhaps they’d left on their own accord. Probably hiding. Overwhelmed by Matt’s duplicity. Terrified of the crazy eldest sister.

  Gideon cleared his throat. “I was thinking, now that Betsy’s old enough to cover a good share of the inside chores, you wouldn’t mind Harry joining me. From what I hear, the land there is thick with endless woods. I’ll have to spend days clearing it just to hack out enough space to raise a shelter. It promises to be a tremendous amount of work for one person to endeavor. I aim to purchase two oxen and a wagon at auction next month, and between those expenses and the down payment on my parcel, I won’t have any money left to hire hands. Harry would be a great help to me.”

  My father’s hand came off the table, palm up, a bewildered, questioning hovering. “But you can’t really want to go, can you, kitten? You love it here. I know you do. Why do you want to leave?”

  I mutely stared at him. He was right. I didn’t just love it here; I adored it—the beauty of this area’s seasons, the comfort of its rituals, the way the land fed and fostered us, provided the conduit through which each of us communicated with the other, without having to say a word. Had I ever truly, in my heart, thought I’d leave?

  But now I would. Because I had to. Because I’d flayed someone who mattered to me with hurtful words. Because I’d mucked up my relationships here, burned my chances to the ground. Because I hurt. Because I was humiliated.

  Because I was sick of being what everyone expected me to be.

  I gratefully squeezed my brother’s hand and answered weakly, “Gid’s my best friend, Papa. He needs me.”

  Mama’s fingers had traveled to her cheeks. “What about Daniel?”

  I couldn’t talk about him. I just shook my head, squeezed my eyes shut, and admitted my despair with a wet whimper.

  We sat silently for a moment. Then Papa sighed. “I appreciate your wanting to be a help to your brother. But he’s got Robert and Ed to support him. Gid hasn’t been happy here for a long time. But you…” He dropped his gaze to the table and worried a gouge there with his thumb. “Perhaps you and Daniel had a tiff, and now you’re smarting.” He looked at me, and his eyes were stern. “Don’t throw away your future out of pride, Harriet. Don’t make a decision you’ll regret.”

  I bit my lip. I couldn’t explain what had happened. I could hardly explain it to myself. I only knew that, in the span of a half hour, I’d gone from falling into Daniel Long’s arms to shooting him down and getting a well-deserved cut in return.

  Whatever we’d had, whatever we might have had, was done: irrevocably severed.

  “I can’t marry Mr. Long.” I pulled away from Gideon’s clasp and dropped my head in my hands.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the first of March, the day of our departure, Gid and I, with the help of the family, packed the supplies so early that the sky hadn’t yet acknowledged morning. Behind the trees, stars pinned up a darkness that was one shade lighter than the black branches. Wood smoke wafted through the brittle air, while sporadic exchanges—in voices kept low, as if someone were sleeping, as if someone were dying—encircled the ox sled.

  Lanterns traveled across the yard like roving moons. By their glow, I was allowed windows of gilded clarity: Papa’s somber face as he tightened the canvas covering, a wet gleam on my mother’s cheek, Betsy comforting Mama with a pat on the hand, Gideon and Luke’s muttered exchange in front of the yoke of oxen, Matthew’s approach as he led the cow by its rope, and Grace, uncertain and peering around in wonder.

  I understood the littlest one’s feelings. Outside was different. The hour of activity, usually an hour of rest that passed unnoticed, made this most familiar place, our very own yard, strikingly foreign.

  The spaniel Papa gave Gid and me as a parting present raised her head, gazed across the inky yard, and barked once before resettling on my boots, warming my feet more thoroughly than a down-filled pillow.

  Leaning into the sled, Betsy inspected the contents of the basket Mama had packed, then demanded over her shoulder, “Did you have to give them all the cakes?”

  “Don’t be so greedy.” My mother nudged her aside and reached across my lap to tuck in the loose corner of the blanket. “You wearing your flannel longies, dear?”

  The question tugged up a corner of my mouth. Only a mother got away with asking about a person’s undergarments. “Yes, Mama.”

  “Where’d you stow the tonic?” She felt my forehead. I had been sick, maybe sicker than I’d ever been, but the fever had disappeared after the first three days of my cold. Regardless, for the last six weeks she had continued to prod my brow as if convinced I was teetering toward a relapse.

  “Under the seat.” I’d tucked it there between our dinner and a jug of cider. I didn’t want to have to search in the crammed back for the supplies I would be needing soon. Gid had his new vehicle organized just so. He’d purchased it along with the oxen. Though essentially nothing more than a canvas-tented farm wagon, it sported storage chests that fitted snugly inside the box, and its runners, secured to the chain-locked wheels, could be easily removed after winter passed. The vehicle would serve him well year-round.

  Grace pitched herself half into the sled to pet the silky head of the dog. “Good girl,” she murmured. “Sweet doggie.” My sister gazed hopefully at me. “Will you keep her name, Harry?”

  “Fancy Gloves? Certainly. It’s an excellent name.” One that Gideon happened to despise. I smiled slightly, remembering his grumbled “I can live with Gloves, but I’m dropping the Fancy.”

  I called the pet Fancy for short, just to tease him.

  Mama was pulling my coat sleeves over my red mittens. “I can see your wrists,” she muttered. “Do you want the frostbite? There.�
�� She patted my arm. “You ate the onion I toasted for your breakfast?”

  I grimaced. “Most of it.” Some of it, anyway, and washed down with plenty of coffee.

  “And you have the almanac handy?”

  I nodded. The almanac was her parting gift to me. It would provide the exact information on the sun, moon, and tides to let us set our clock. It’d give us the brightest nights to plan our most difficult stretches of travel. It’d tell us when to plant the above-and belowground crops.

  In Mama’s mind, the almanac was a talisman. With every turn of the moon and shift of the stars articulated in the pages, it would aid and protect us.

  “I added peppermint tea to the caddy to help with Gideon’s indigestion.”

  Gid’s bellyache was all nerves, but I merely said, “I’ll fix it for him nightly.”

  She rattled off a few more directions, fretted about the packed supplies, then finally sighed, “So you have everything you need?”

  “Everything.” Even a few items no one knew about, not even Gideon. I hadn’t spent my convalescence simply sitting around doing nothing. I’d been wily, concocting a plan and executing it furtively enough that not even watchful Betsy knew about it.

  My mother nodded, her whole face creased in a severe frown, like she was concentrating on not crying. After a moment she said in a near whisper, “You can always come home.”

  My gaze drifted in the direction of our closest neighbor’s land, still steeped in darkness except for the start of morning rimming the east. Along the black backs of the mountains, dawn was just a scant redness, as thin as a fresh wound the second before the blood flows.

 

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