by Tanya Chris
“I do respect him,” Ezekiel acknowledged. “You have been a fine example of a Godly man,” he said to his father as he allowed Mrs. Cheever to pry the plate from his hand. “But in this, I must defy you. It is wrong what Corwin does, and it is wrong to stand idly by and allow it.”
“Can you not trust the outcome, son? Must you involve yourself in defiance of our customs and our church? I don’t say as they are all witches what have been accused. Mayhap there is animosity involved where there ought only to be God.”
“I do think so.”
“But ’twill be corrected down the line, I must believe.”
For a moment, I felt sorry for Mr. Cheever. All he wanted was to be left alone, to further his business, to run his farm, to raise his family. It wasn’t like I couldn’t relate. I’d had my own interests in mind for too many years, congratulating myself on being better off than some, not willing to risk my neck for theirs.
“Tell me, Father, what would you do if they came for one of us?” Ezekiel’s gesture encompassed me. “Would you let them take your wife? Would you let them take me? Make no mistake, they’ll come for one of us soon.”
“And why ought it be so? Because you have summoned them to us, that is why. As did Martha Corey and her husband. Corwin would not tangle with the Elect, did not the Elect tangle with him first.”
“I’m not one of the chosen, Father.”
“But you say now as you are called to preach, so surely …”
Ezekiel shook his head. “Until we are all chosen, I’ll not be.” He crossed over to his father and knelt by his chair. “Forgive me, Father. Bless me?”
Mr. Cheever put his hand on his son’s head. They both closed their eyes and I saw the elder Ezekiel’s lips move, with what words I didn’t know. Mrs. Cheever had tears in her eyes and mine weren’t much drier. By the time Mr. Cheever had finished blessing his son, we were all four on the verge of a group cry.
As Ezekiel and I climbed the stairs to our sanctuary, I wondered how much longer I’d be allowed to stay. Fear that fate could separate us as easily as it had thrown us together made me hungry for him in a desperate way. I couldn’t stand and watch while he disrobed methodically. I needed to have my hands on his skin as it was unveiled to me. Piece by piece, inch by inch, I covered him as he uncovered himself until I knelt before him with his cock down my throat and his hands in the wild tangle of my hair.
Our sexual hijinks to that point had always been performed horizontally, with clothes or covers masking us from discovery but also, perhaps, masking the truth of what we were doing from Ezekiel’s conscience because after I’d made him come hard enough that I ended up supporting his weight, he shied quickly away from me, making a dash for the shelter of the bed though the nights were no longer cold.
I took my time replacing my day clothes with my cotton sack as I watched him from the corner of my eye, trying to gauge his mood in the unusual silence. He turned to me easily enough when I climbed into bed beside him, and his hand dropped down to my dick which had softened from concern, but I stilled it with my own, threading our fingers together and bringing his hand to my lips.
We were overdue a conversation. So much talk of witches and strategy, and Ezekiel was endlessly interested in what the future held and stories of what my life had been like in 2017, but we’d become lovers without discussing what that meant and we continued on from day to day as though there were no decisions to be made.
“This must be uncomfortable for you,” I suggested.
He raised his head from where it’d been resting on my chest with a questioning look.
“I don’t mean this moment,” I clarified. “I mean, you must feel that our relationship, the things we do, go against your church’s teachings.”
“That they do,” he agreed.
“And how do you feel about that?” I asked, doing my best Sigmund Freud.
He snuggled back into me with a shrug. “My church knows not the right of it.”
I let that settle for a moment. Could he really be OK with this? Long term? And what did long term even mean? The idea that he might take another lover someday made me want to wrap him up and drag him through a mirror to a place where we were the only two gay men in the world.
“Ezekiel, I don’t want to leave you.”
He sat up and gifted me with a rare scowl. “Do you leave me?”
“No. I hope not. I just don’t know …”
His irritation faded to sorrow and I saw I was getting to whatever was getting to him.
“I do not mind,” he said, “that the church do say it be unnatural, what we do, nor my father either, for I see clear that they are wrong. It cannot be a sin that I should join with you.”
I wanted so bad to kiss him then, but I wanted to hear the but that came after what he’d just said too, so I kept my hands to myself.
“But,” I prompted.
“But yet do you say you do not know if you shall leave me. That is not the way of it, Luther, that lovers should part. Not if God hath joined them together.”
“I won’t ever want to leave you, love.”
Truth was, Ezekiel would be a lot better off without me. I’d caused a rift between him and his father, between him and his town, between him and his church. I’d shaken his faith and I was nightly luring him into acts that conflicted with his morality. A less selfish man might leave him, but I was not that man.
“Would it feel better if we didn’t have sex?” I offered, not sure how I’d manage if he took me up on it.
He gave me a sly grin. “’Twould not feel better.” He giggled, a sound that never failed to fill my heart with love. “Do not fret so, Luther. We must do as we are able and let God sort the rest.”
I didn’t fret on my own account, of course. Though I’d love to marry Ezekiel if that were possible, I’d been raised in a time where marriage came after sex, if it came at all, and there was nothing in my morality that told me loving a man was wrong. I just couldn’t bear the possibility that he hated himself for loving me, but if that were true, he never visited his doubts on me directly.
My Ezekiel, my love, my stalwart little Puritan. I’d never leave him. I just needed a way to prove it.
Chapter 17
I gave Ezekiel a lingering kiss, then watched him walk up the hill to the house. We’d had a tense breakfast and everyone had scattered as fast as feasible afterward, we younger folk to our chores and Mr. Cheever to prepare for his ride to school. Ezekiel was heading back to the house now to try to make peace with his father, while I remained in the barn mucking out stalls. Which gave me the less dreadful chore.
I didn’t have anywhere else to be that morning. Later, I would head into Salem to catch Reverend Hale after the trial, but if I turned up during the trial I was too likely to find myself the one being tried. Better to stay out of Corwin’s sight as much as I could.
On the floor outside of Daffy’s stall, I found my wig where I’d dropped it the night before, covered in hay and no longer recognizable as anything like hair. No loss. I was done being a respectable man of court anyway.
“I prefer you without your wig,” Abigail said, appearing through the open barn door. She had an apron full of eggs and ought to have been getting ready for school, but she came in and sat down on a bale of hay as though I’d invited her into my parlor, Tom trailing like a shadow behind her. “You look more yourself in your own hair.”
I ran a hand over my afro. It wasn’t in much better shape than the wig. If I was sticking around, I was going to have to teach one of the Cheevers how to cut Black hair.
“I like your hair too,” I told her.
“And mine?” Tom asked.
“Sure.” I went and sat with them on the hay bale, pulling Tom into my lap so we all fit. Tom smelled like little boy, a smell that apparently transcended time. Abigail swung her good leg as she often did, as though enjoying the way it moved. Her heel kicked against the hay bale with each swing.
“We saw you kiss Ezekiel,” To
m said.
Oh, shit. I’d kissed him right there in the barn, as though there weren’t always people coming and going. We were lucky it was the kids who’d caught us, not Mr. Cheever.
“Does that mean you’re a-courting him, as Mr. Miller is a-courting Isabel?”
“Kissing doesn’t always mean courting,” I parried. “Sometimes you just kiss someone ’cause you like them.” I kissed the top of Tom’s head. “Like that.”
“You were kissing like you were a-courting,” Tom observed.
“Boys oughtn’t to kiss boys like that,” Abigail told me.
“Who says?” Tom asked her.
“The preachers. They say only that boys shall kiss girls.”
“I kiss everybody, and I don’t care what preachers say.” Tom pulled my cheek down to give it a kiss, then bussed his sister on her cheek. Not to leave anyone out, he hopped up and went over and gave Daffy’s right flank a kiss. She lowered her head and either head-butted him or kissed him back. It was hard to read her intentions.
“You have to care what preachers say,” Abigail told Tom, “else it’s blasphemy and that’s why Father is angry today, because Ezekiel be blasphemous when he say there are not witches.”
“If he heard I was kissing Ezekiel, it might make him even angrier,” I suggested.
“Then don’t nobody tell him,” Tom said, “for he be fierce mad already.”
Abigail nodded her agreement. Mr. Cheever’s mood was the reason I had two kids hiding out in the barn with me. I tried to be hopeful that they’d keep their mouths shut about that kiss or better yet forget what they’d seen entirely.
Tom had already forgotten it. He was busy trying to hang upside down from the rafters, something which I’d probably stop him from doing if it was 2017 but which seemed normal enough for 1692. In 1692, boys could hang by their knees eight feet over a barn floor with their skirts around their ears, but they couldn’t marry another boy, not even if they really, really loved him and he was being torn apart by the things you did with him at night.
Abigail hadn’t forgotten anything. That girl was tenacious.
“I do not know why you kiss him like that when you cannot marry him,” she said.
“Well, maybe I don’t know why I can’t marry him,” I retorted grumpily, if not wisely.
“Because the preachers say you can’t.”
“Yeah, preachers say we can’t.” We couldn’t because preachers said we couldn’t. It was a logical circle jerk.
“Preachers are silly,” Tom said, still upside down.
“Sometimes preachers are silly,” Abigail agreed. “Only don’t say it so to Father.”
“I won’t.” I got up off my scratchy perch on the hay bale and went back to mucking out the stall next to Daffy’s where Mr. Cheever’s stallion spent his nights. Tom dangled overhead, now sprawled across the top of a rafter, now hanging from one.
“A preacher once said as how God made me lame to punish me for my sins,” Abigail said, her voice uncertain.
“That’s—” What was wrong with people? “You didn’t believe him, did you?”
“I did for a time, because he were a preacher.”
“Well, preachers are just people, and people can be wrong. Sometimes they realize it later and then they’re sorry.”
And sometimes they never realized it. Sometimes people went to their graves ignorant enough to think that telling a little girl God wanted to punish her was a righteous thing to do.
“Mayhap sometimes Father is wrong too,” Abigail said. “I think if you shall marry Ezekiel you had best do it without you wait for Father to change his mind, for he do not often change his mind.”
“Abigail, you understand that talking about me and Ezekiel getting married is dangerous, right? Of all the things that would make your father angry, that would make him the angriest.”
“Why?” That was Tom. Always with the why.
“Because—” Because why? “Because it’s not current social convention.”
“What does current social convention mean?”
“It means the preachers do not allow it,” Abigail told him. “Don’t need a preacher to get married, though,” she observed to me. “Out on the frontier, they be miles and miles from any preacher, yet do they still get married.”
“How?” I asked, ready to grab at any loophole.
“They pledge their troth to each other in front of a witness, same as if there be a preacher.”
“Then who marries them? God?”
Sarcastic eyerolls might not have been invented yet, but Abigail was already perfecting her technique. “God always marries them,” she informed me. “Preachers do but say words.”
Interesting. Maybe Ezekiel and I couldn’t ever be married in the eyes of man, but we could be married in the eyes of God. We could pledge our troth, whatever the fuck that meant.
“Don’t forget as you need a witness,” Abigail said, as if she’d been following along in my mind.
Tom dropped down to the ground, having made a full circuit of the rafters. “When I grow up, I shall get married to everybody.” The little pansexual polygamist followed that declaration with another round of kisses, ending with Daffy who only huffed this time, declining to kiss him back.
If we needed a witness, it would have to be Daffy. She’d been there the night Ezekiel and I met; she could be there the night we joined ourselves together.
Ezekiel himself appeared in the open door of the barn, flustered and hot. He looked at me and the kids, then at Daffy’s stall, no doubt wondering how three people could fail to muck out two stalls in an hour.
“I tied your father’s horse out front,” I told him.
“Father’s gone. He left a few minutes ago.”
“Do you want me to saddle Daffy?” I knew how to do that now. “Or were you planning to plow? I can rig her up.”
“Didn’t come for naught in particular.” The quick flicker of his eyes toward Abigail told me why he’d come. He needed comfort after arguing with his father again, but I couldn’t give him comfort in public, not much.
I dropped the pitchfork, then remembered that the pitchfork-in-the-face gag was nowhere near as funny as it looked in cartoons. I picked it up and leaned it against the edge of the stall instead. Ezekiel watched me with a smirk that suggested I’d already brightened his mood just by being my twenty-first-century incompetent self.
I went over and hooked an arm around his shoulder and rubbed at it. That much I could do. He curled towards me but stopped short of putting his head down on my chest like I thought he’d like to.
“I shall be a witness at your wedding,” Tom called over as he swung back and forth on the door to one of the stalls.
“I’m not like to be married,” Ezekiel told him, “but do I get married, you shall be a witness, Tom.” He moved away from me to pull Tom off the door and set him on his feet.
Abigail caught my eye meaningfully. “Tom be not old enough for a witness,” she told me.
I took a deep breath and went for it. “How would Saturday suit you?”
“Suit me for what?” Ezekiel had already picked up the pitchfork I’d abandoned and gotten to work on the chore I’d been shirking.
“For getting married. Abigail’s ready to be a witness too, and Daffy wouldn’t miss it.”
“Luther.” He pitched his voice low in warning.
It was a conversation best had in private. I jerked my head at Abigail and she collected her eggs and her brother and took them out of the barn. I pulled the door shut behind them.
“Abigail says we don’t need a preacher to get married, that all we need is a witness and each other and God’s blessing.”
“Luther? Do not be joking on such a subject.”
I took the pitchfork from him and enveloped his calloused hands in mine. Should I get down on one knee? Did they have that in 1692? I didn’t want to alarm him any more than I already had. His already-pale skin was ashy and his eyes had a hopeful, hurt look.
> “I wish I could bring you to my time,” I told him, “so I could marry you in a church with a license and a state seal, but I wouldn’t love you any more for it.” I went ahead and got down on one knee. The situation warranted it. “Ezekiel Cheever, would you do me the very great honor of uniting your life with mine and marrying me before God and two children and a horse? Will you be my husband?”
I wasn’t down on my knee for more than a moment before he was down there with me.
“I’d not thought of it,” he said. “That we could be married.”
“But do you want it?”
“Do you mean to be married for real, not as play-acting for the children?”
“Not play-acting. As real as any marriage. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, till death do us part.”
“Then I want it, Luther. I want it with all my heart.”
Then he would have it. I didn’t know how our marriage would work in this world where the color of my skin would always be an issue, where Ezekiel would be expected to marry a woman and give her children, where we might spend the rest of our lives in a room in his father’s house, where I wasn’t even free to comfort him when he needed comfort. I didn’t know how any of that worked, but that was what “for better or worse” meant. It meant we were going to figure it out together.
Chapter 18
Didn’t seem like a man should have to schlep into town to see a Reverend about a witch on the day he’d gotten engaged, but nothing had changed outside the walls of that barn. The world didn’t stop because Ezekiel loved me.
I’d told Ezekiel I loved him a time or two before, but he’d never said it back, not flat-out “I love you, too.” Maybe people in the seventeenth century didn’t have that custom, but there, kneeling on the floor of a barn, he’d finally said what I’d been hoping to hear, and now that the dam had broken, I’d be needing him to give me a daily dose of that, because wow.
I’d never had anyone tell me they loved me, not outside of my father and grandmother, not a man. And I’d never said it to anyone either, never even come close except maybe in eighth grade after my first-ever kiss. I’d been about ready to marry that boy for the two whole weeks we dated before he decided that thirteen was too young to be gay. After him, I got cautious, kept my heart inside my chest, let my dick do the mileage.