Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  And then there was Judith. Judith, like Cissy, apparently had gone into hiding. Cissy might be with her Phillip, but Judith was definitely not with her Ben. So where was she? Was Jane supposed to sit around in some melancholy funk, waiting for Judith to make her next move? Jane wandered from window to window, paralyzed by a brooding sense of expectation, watching the driving rain turn the night into a sodden, muddy mess.

  Okay. Enough is enough. I'll build a fire and read a fun book; anything to take my mind off this.

  She threw on her oilslicker and plunged into the wild, windy night for some of the firewood that Billy had stacked neatly under a canvas tarp. She had to make three trips and got soaked in the process, but the very act of building a fire seemed to rally her. It was Jane's first fire in the house, and it took on ritualistic importance. Carefully she stacked the kindling, crisscrossed the logs, and bundled crushed paper under it all. She fully expected it to light with one match.

  And it did. A roaring, crackling, oversized fire began almost at once to warm the room and her spirits. Jane wrapped a towel around her rain-soaked hair, slipped into pajamas, brought out a bottle of apricot liqueur, and cracked into Grisham's latest. It was an effective escape, and she was absorbed for several hours.

  After that, her attention began to wander. Whether the fault was hers or the author's, Jane just couldn't concentrate. She felt restless, almost itchy. She threw another log on the fire, then circled the camcorder as if it were a crystal ball.

  Cissy was convinced she saw something fuzzy there, hovering over Jane. True, Cissy was a flake, but she was a young flake, with sharper eyes than Jane's. Feeling self-conscious, Jane turned down the already dim lamp and fast-forwarded the tape to the scene in question ... freeze- framed it ... adjusted the contrast ... and gasped. Her heart went rocketing through her breast; her head felt trapped in a vise of fear.

  How had she missed it before? Granted, the sun in the kitchen had been very bright, but still! She peered more closely at the tape. There, above her sleeping body, was a kind of a shape, a decided shape, not as clear as a vapor, yet more substantial, somehow, than fog. She rubbed her eyes ferociously, which only made everything blurry. After a while she was able to focus again, and there it was again, that pale promise of another world.

  She ran the tape a little ahead, but there was nothing. So she decided to start from the beginning, searching for other images of Judith. For two hours Jane sat there, strained to the breaking point. Outside the storm raged; she was hardly aware of it. And then, when she was nearly at the end of the tape, a particularly violent gust shook the house and the electricity went out.

  It was as if someone threw a switch in Jane's soul. She felt cast into oblivion without any warning. For a while she sat there, numb, bereft, completely at a loss. Eventually, when the electricity didn't come back on, she stumbled over to the window. There were no lights on anywhere that she could see — which around there proved nothing. For the first time in her life, Jane understood the meaning of the word "desolation." Nantucket had been a mistake for her, and now, finally, she was willing to admit it.

  She threw another log on the fire and sat huddled in a blanket, staring at the darkened camcorder, waiting for dawn. But the all-night vigil was not to be. Almost at once she fell into a troubled, disjointed sleep.

  ****

  It was a cold, rainy day. She was in the sitting room of her house, hers and Ben's, with her coal-skuttle bonnet still in her lap. Her shawl, of an exquisite pale gray weave, was folded across the rocking chair in which she sat. She loved the shawl because it was Ben's favorite. It was part of a shipment she had ordered from New York, the only one that wasn't black. She'd been advertising the black ones at a very good price, and they were nearly gone. But the gray one she kept, because it set off her blue-black hair.

  She felt quite calm. Today was First Day, and she should have gone to meeting. But there seemed no point, and at the last minute she decided to stay home. The Overseers had warned her sharply and ordered her to remove the rose from the mound that, after the recent rains, was scarcely recognizable as Ben's grave.

  She had refused.

  It was only a matter of time before they came. She had been under dealings from them before: when she'd bought the spinet, for example, and begun to teach herself to play; and when she'd planted the moon garden, so that she could wander among white flowers on a warm summer night; and when she'd come back from Boston with a tasseled vermilion chair for the sitting room.

  And each time, at Ben's urging, she had yielded to the Overseers' puritanical ultimatums. She sold the spinet and uprooted her perennials and tore the tassels off the chair, covering it in a drab and sickly green. Ben had kissed her and petted her and said that none of it mattered; that their love for one another brought all the music, light, and color to their lives that they needed. But each time it had been harder for her to conform, harder for her to comprehend why the orthodox Friends on Nantucket had twisted the lessons of simplicity taught by the original Quakers.

  And now, she didn't care. Ben was dead. The one man on earth who had the power to make her bend to the dour, petty demands of a group of oppressive old men was dead. Let them come. Let them expel her. She didn't care. Ben was dead.

  When she heard the knock on the door, she almost didn't bother to answer it, so loathesome had the thought of facing them become. But she wanted to put them behind her, and so she opened her home and her heart to their uncharitable scrutiny one last time.

  "I pray thee, gentlemen, come in," she said, her voice stripped of emotion.

  The four of them filed in one by one, led by Jabez Coffin. He was the group's senior, an unbending work of steel tempered by decades of self-denial. He paused in front of the fire and glanced around her pleasant sitting room with distaste, fixing his disapproval on an intricate silver frame adorning a small silhouette of Ben that sat on the mantle. She went up to the mantle, picked up the frame, and pressed the silhouette to her breast. If the innocently indulgent frame annoyed Jabez Coffin, so much the better. "Thee has something to say?" she said, sweeping them all up in one proud glance. The three who were with Jabez Coffin avoided her look.

  "Judith Brightman," said Jabez, "there is a concern upon our minds, and thou art fully aware what it be. On the twenty-sixth of twelfth month, thy husband's ship foundered and Benjamin Brightman perished seeking the safety of our shore. On the second of first month, thy husband was buried in the Friends' Burial Ground. Eight days ago this day, thou engaged in an act of ill-considered defiance: marking thy husband's grave in the manner of the world's people."

  Jabez paused and looked at the others to see whether they had any cause to challenge the facts so far. The three men, all of them past the half-century mark, seemed to wilt under his fiery gaze like schoolboys, as if the devil himself had dared them to contradict him. When no one spoke, he continued.

  "Is it the truth I have spoken thus far?" he said, focusing his fire-and-brimstone gaze directly on her now. When she said nothing, he said in a severe tone, "Thou wilt answer me ... Friend."

  "I planted a rose on Ben's grave, yes," she said, raising her chin. "So that I would know where to find him when I am old."

  "A rose. Thou didst plant a rose." Jabez glanced at his cohorts again, an unpleasant grin assuming control of his face. It seemed odd to her that for all his abstinent ways, he had bad teeth.

  "There are thousands of souls who have cast off their bodies and left them behind in the burial ground," Jabez said. "Is it not fair to say that they have left behind many thousands more who have loved and mourned them?"

  She nodded.

  "And of all the thousands who have mourned, has there been a single other one who has chosen to mark the gravesite of a loved one?"

  "Perhaps they never thought to do it," she said ironically.

  "Do not toy with me, child! I ask thee one last time: Wilt thou own to thy vanity and repent? Wilt thou remove the rose?"

  "I will not," she answere
d in a clear and calm voice. "I loved Ben, and I want to be able to visit his grave and to reflect on the life we shared, and to say a prayer for his soul. There is no vanity in that, only simple, human emotion."

  Jabez drew his white, bushy brows together in a searing scowl. His blue eyes burned bright with terrifying self-righteousness as he said, "Then, child, thou hast lost that which thou holdest most dear."

  He threw an imperious look at the other Overseers, willing them into a show of support. "We have much discussed this among us."

  They nodded timidly.

  Then he turned to her and intoned, "For this and other disregards of the way of truth, thou art to be set aside from the Society of Friends. Thou mayest no longer be present at Meeting, and thou mayest not set thy foot on the burial ground."

  Stunned, she watched the play of muscles in his jaw as he added, "We will remove the rose for thee."

  She had expected to be disowned, had accepted the fact that she would have to come to terms with her Maker on her own; but she was not prepared for this. To be forbidden even to walk over the general ground where Ben lay — it was not to be borne.

  For one crushing moment, her spirit collapsed completely. She was overwhelmed with a sense of deprivation. "No!" she cried, her face contorted with grief. "How can you? Have you no heart? Have you no kindness?" Tears rolled down her cheeks as she clutched her hands in supplication.

  But she could see, even as she begged Jabez Coffin, that it was a waste of time. He was enjoying her distress, just as he would doubtless enjoy tearing out the rose from Ben's grave.

  Something died inside her then. She could feel it go, just as she could feel something else begin to stir, a superhuman determination not to let this withered soul come between Ben and her.

  "Go, then!" she cried. "Leave my house. Thee has made a mockery of Christ's teaching. There is no love in thy heart, only envy and meanness. Is it any wonder that the Society is splintered, that Elias Hicks draws away Friends from thy rigid, uncaring ways? Go!"

  She watched, trembling with fury, as Jabez Coffin drew in a sharp breath and held it. The veins in his temple pounded; his cheeks flamed. She thought that the heart in this hard-hearted man might be about to fail at last, but Jabez was stronger than that.

  He took one last, sweeping look around the little sitting room with its cheery rag rug, and its yellow export vase filled with pussy willows, and its bright curtains thrown open to the day's gray light, and in a low and deadly growl he quoted a passage from Scripture. "'Set thine house in order,'" he said with vicious irony. "'For thou shalt die, and not live.'"

  He swept out of her house with his deputies in tow. She slammed the door on their backs and only then did she understand that she had slammed the door forever on any possibility of being buried next to Ben. She had slammed the door on eternity.

  She let out a long, agonized scream and collapsed onto the floor. It was a cry of despair, a cry from the deepest part of her heart, a cry from hell.

  ****

  A horrible, shrill sound, the sound of harpies shrieking and tearing at entrails, jolted Jane awake from her agony. She opened her eyes, and she saw flames.

  Chapter 17

  The edge of the Oriental rug nearest the fireplace was covered with embers and on fire. Bounced into action by the din of the smoke detector, Jane ran for the fire extinguisher in the kitchen. But the lights were still out and she stumbled, first into a stool, then into Billy's stepladder, which crashed to the floor. She groped in the corner where the fire extinguisher was supposed to be — it wasn't there. She ended up crawling around on her hands and knees, feeling for the metal cylinder.

  It was on the floor beside the stove; she snatched it up and ran back to the fireplace room. Fighting panic, she sprayed a blanket of white chemicals on the aged and burning rug until the fire was extinguished. Then she took down the shrieking smoke alarm and collapsed on the Empire sofa, where she sat clutching the empty cylinder and staring at the mess by the fading light of the fireplace, watching for flareups. But it was over.

  For now. The thought bubbled up from some hidden depth, unnerving her. This was no accident, no renegade ember popping out of the flames and creating havoc. There were a whole bunch of embers on the floor, hurled there by — by what? Certainly not by any human being: the windows were locked, and so were the doors.

  Judith.

  The dream began coming back in fractured, incoherent pieces. Something about an Overseer ... and a picture frame. And a door; a door figured prominently in it.

  Jane went straight to the phone — which was still working, despite the power outage — and dialed Mac's number. "He's so s-smart," she said through chattering lips. "Let h-him figure it out."

  A sleepy voice answered at the other end. By now the reaction had set in; Jane was shivering violently, unable to control the chattering. "I j-just wanted you to know that we were b-both wrong. I thought she didn't mean me any h-harm. F-f-fat chance. And as f-for you — wake up and s-smell the coffee, would you?"

  She slammed the receiver down before Mac had a chance to say a word, then dragged herself back to the Empire sofa, where she wrapped herself in the blanket and prepared again to wait for dawn. It occurred to her that she should've done a better job explaining things to Mac. It just didn't occur to her how.

  Why did I bother at all? she wondered morosely, pulling the blanket up under her chin in an effort to warm up. He's no different from the rest of us: he sees what he wants to see. And he did not want to see Judith.

  She sat there shivering violently, wondering why it was she'd never read the instructions on the portable kerosene heater that was in the house when she arrived. A minute later she saw headlights flashing in the lane alongside. Almost before she could identify the truck as Mac's, she heard banging on the back door. She ran to open it and was pelted by the slashing torrent of rain that drove Mac inside into the darkness of her kitchen.

  "What." His voice was taut, anxious, illogically angry.

  He had a flashlight with him. He flipped it on and kept it trained on the floor to avoid blinding her. She saw his rain-spattered, beltless slacks, and his sweatshirt, but she could scarcely see his face. The scene was eerie — ghostly — and it set her off again.

  "She's back. She's back. I thought she was gone but ... first the ladder, now the fire. The ladder breaking, okay, that could've been an accident like Jeremy's gash, but the fire ... the fire's different, Mac, she's angry with me —"

  "Jane. Stop. Don't tell me about Judith. Tell me about the fire."

  "Yes, yes, the fire, that's what I mean. She's not what I thought, Mac. She's no grieving lover, she's, she's demented, she wants me to fix this thing with Ben but what can I do, I can't dig her up and put her next to him, I don't even know where he's buried and it, I don't know, it's probably illegal ... oh, God ... oh, God ...."

  She broke down into a series of bone-racking sobs, undone by the long and endless torment of her stay on Nantucket, unwilling and unable to hold herself together any longer simply out of pride.

  Mac laid the flashlight on the counter, with its light facing the wall. Then he turned and gathered her into the rock-solid security of his arms and held her while she sobbed away some of the night's terror.

  "Shhh ... it's over now," he whispered into her hair. "All over ... shhh. Hey now ...."

  Through it all she was piercingly aware of his warmth, his hand cradling her head close to him, his simple words of comfort, even the barely perceptible and still endearing scent of Old Spice. It seemed incredible to her that she was in the arms of the one man on earth she could not talk to for more than eleven seconds without coming to blows. And yet here he was, and here she was, and she felt absolutely, inviolably safe. No one — not even Judith — could touch her now. Not while she was in his arms.

  He held her for what seemed like a passing lifetime, until her sobs calmed down and she was able to hear the storm outside over the storm within. She drew in a deep lungful of air and le
t it out in a long, shuddering sigh. "I'm better now," she said at last, but she lifted her head from the sanctuary of his breast with reluctance. "You must think I'm an awful jerk."

  He didn't say yes, he didn't say no. But there was something in the way he let her go, some ever-so-slight hesitation on his part, that made her wonder whether he didn't need to protect her right now just as much as she needed his protection.

  He brushed back a heavy lock of her hair that had fallen over her cheek and said in a husky voice, "I ... ah ... the fire ... was in the library, it smells like. Let's take a look."

  He took up the flashlight again and led the way for her, pausing to stand the stepladder back up as they passed out of the kitchen. The embers in the fireplace were out. Mac swept his light across the floor of the room, highlighting the sticky white mess of chemicals on Aunt Sylvia's fragile, worn-out Oriental rug. There were burns in the wood floor, too; those looked permanent.

  "See?" Jane said, her voice unnaturally high and excited. "Look! Look at it!"

  "Yes, I see it," he said, shoving some charred bits with a poker into the back of the opening. "That's why people use fire screens, Jane," he added in a gentle rebuke.

  "Fire screens!" she said with a bitter laugh. "They're to protect against the odd ember, not a volcano!" She began shivering again, as if she knew there'd be a hard fight ahead to prove that Judith was behind this.

  "The chimney hasn't been used in years," Mac said slowly, as if Jane had only a middling grasp of English. "Did you have a chimney sweep clean it out?"

  "What am I, Mary P-Poppins? No, I didn't have a chimney sweep clean it out. Anyway, it worked fine at first."

  "But the wind's been picking up all evening. Listen to it, Jane. It's blowing a full gale." He tried again, with infinite, infuriating patience. "Do you know what a backdraft is?"