by Tanya Chris
Telling Ezekiel I loved him, hearing him say it back—that was new territory. I’d made him say it again into the recorder on my phone, so now as I rode Daffy into Salem, I carried his love with me. And I’d said phones weren’t magic.
I’d timed my arrival in Salem well. Court had just let out for the day, all the spectators streaming out of the meeting house and fanning across the street, heading for their horses or wagons or just walking. Lots of people didn’t own a horse or a wagon.
I gave Daffy an appreciative pat, remembering when I’d been nervous even standing next to her. Riding a horse felt familiar by now—the rolling gait, the reins loose in my hands. Daffy didn’t require much steering as there weren’t many places to go and she knew them all. It gave me time to think or just appreciate the growing greenness coming to life around us.
On the way into Salem, the blooming wildflowers had me thinking about how to turn a barn into a wedding chapel beautiful enough to be what Ezekiel deserved. I had a few pennies in my pocket now—enough probably to buy that beer we’d joked about—but there wasn’t anything like a Target where I could pick up streamers or a plastic tablecloth that spelled out Congratulations in crooked, multi-colored letters.
Isabel’s beau, John Miller, tipped his hat to me as he walked past, and I stopped and dismounted so we could chat at eye level. He’d watched the proceedings and was on his way to see Giles and some of our other co-conspirators at the Corey house. Corwin wasn’t wasting time, it sounded like. He’d managed to get both Sarahs convicted in a single day of trial.
“Was there a sentence?” I asked.
Miller nodded. “Hanging.”
Not that I’d been expecting anything different, but the speed was shocking. We’d been winning skirmishes here and there—getting Martha and Rebecca Nurse released, improving living conditions for those stuck in jail, holding off the goons who’d come to arrest Giles—but the greater battle still marched on towards its inevitable conclusion. My friends would be found guilty. People would be hanged.
We had to convert someone on the inside, someone with the power to halt this witch hunt, and that meant Hale. I’d been rehearsing my speech in between daydreams about saying “I do.” I’d tell Hale what I’d heard Corwin say about clearing out the poor and sick in order to keep costs down. I’d show him how Corwin had handfed names to Tituba and the other afflicted. Corwin’s manipulations were all recorded in black and white, thanks to yours truly. Primed with what to look for, Hale couldn’t miss it.
I wished I had more faith.
Hale had a methodical mind, but he wasn’t given to great leaps of logic. He hadn’t made friends with me, but he called me Mr. Johnson. He didn’t preach or quote scripture, but he added “God willing” to anything even vaguely resembling a pronouncement, as if he were afraid to take credit for his own thoughts. He carried that leather satchel full of our accumulated pages of testimony everywhere he went, cataloguing and curating them. I’d never heard him laugh.
That was Hale. A rescuer of papers, not of people. And our only hope.
I said goodbye to Miller, thinking as I did that we’d be brothers-in-law down the road, though he’d never know it, and tied Daffy up to her usual spot alongside the meeting house. Today my business was at the Ordinary where Hale was staying. I’d watched him cross the street as I’d talked to Miller, his walk unhurried and his face blank, as though he hadn’t just sentenced two people to death.
The interior of the Ordinary was dim. I hadn’t been in there before—didn’t want to spend all my earnings on a single round—so I hovered just inside the door until my eyes adjusted. Like most buildings in Salem, the inn appeared to consist primarily of a single large room.
There was a staircase towards the back which I presumed led up to the rooms that were rented, but most of the space was taken by a long bar, along which men huddled over shot glasses or beer steins, and a handful of round tables, several of which were occupied by ladies with tea cups. To my left, there was a counter. Behind it stood a young woman in an apron writing in a large book.
She raised her eyes to me as I approached.
“I’d like to see Reverend Hale.”
“You don’t belong in here, boy.” The voice came from behind me but I recognized it anyway. There was only one person in town that disrespectful.
“I’m here to see Mr. Hale,” I repeated to the woman behind the counter. Corwin and I were past the point of pretending to be friends.
“I don’t think you serve his kind in here, do you, Molly?”
“Well, no, sir.” She bobbed a curtsey at me almost apologetically. “Not generally serve as such, sir.”
“I’m not asking to be served. I’m asking to speak to Reverend Hale.”
“He come in a few minutes ago,” Molly said. “I seen him go on up to his room.”
“If you tell me which room he’s in, I’ll go up to him.”
Molly’s glance darted between me and Corwin. I still hadn’t turned to acknowledge him, but I could feel his malevolent bulk at my back and I could see how she checked for his approval. Corwin owned the town now. Everyone knew what crossing him meant.
“You don’t allow negroes upstairs with your guests, do you, Molly?”
“It never come up afore, to be fair. I s’pose as servants are allowed up, sir.”
“I wonder if ’twere best if your father should handle this.” Much like when he questioned witnesses, Corwin seeded his question with the answer.
“I do think as that’s best, sir.” She bobbed a curtsey at Corwin, then hastily made a second one towards me. I smiled at her like I wasn’t about to turn around and put my fist through Corwin’s nose.
When I did turn around, I didn’t put my fist through his nose, but I got up close to him, closer than he’d dared to get to me. He was about twice as wide as Ezekiel but a good bit shorter than either one of us and I doubted his cane doubled as a fencing weapon. I stepped into him, grinning when he stepped back.
“They’re all watching you,” he warned.
I looked over his shoulder at the room behind him. He wasn’t wrong. The ladies had set down their tea cups and the men were turned from the bar to face the room. Both teetotalers and whisky drinkers watched us in rapt silence, like this was the O. K. Corral and Corwin and I were at nine paces.
“You think a negro can assault a white man in broad daylight and not hang for it?”
No, I didn’t think that. Nor did I think that assaulting one of the members of the tribunal was the best way to get another member of the tribunal to listen to my reasoned explanation about what was wrong with the tribunal.
I wanted Corwin to be afraid though, as afraid as the people he’d had arrested and jailed, as afraid as the two women who’d been sentenced to death today would be when the jailer slipped a noose around their necks. I wanted to be the reason Corwin was afraid, but more than that I wanted those two women not to swing, nor any of the others.
I stepped back.
“I just need to speak to Reverend Hale for a moment,” I said. “I can wait for him outside.”
“You can run on back to the Cheevers’ and be glad you aren’t in jail this night. You’ve no need or right to speak to Reverend Hale and I think you’ll find that you won’t be given the opportunity either. Good day, Mr. Johnson.”
The false civility at the end of Corwin’s pronouncement was put on for the man who approached us. Molly’s father, I assumed. He didn’t look any happier to be fielding a complaint from Corwin than Molly had been and I knew which way his ruling would go without hearing it. I nodded to him, glad I’d worn my hat so I could slam it down on my head as I let myself out.
A hat made a great prop for a dramatic exit, but outside the Ordinary, my portrayal of a seventeenth-century gentlemen who’d been wronged faded. I was just Luther, a Black guy trying to live in a bigoted time not his own, a guy who’d failed in his mission.
Daffy looked like she knew it too. She met my eyes with a challenge
and I nearly took her up on it. I should go back in there. I should take Corwin’s hateful face and—
I should go home and talk it over with Ezekiel. I should avoid getting locked up where I’d be no use to anyone. I shouldn’t stoop to Corwin’s level.
“I’m going high, Michelle” I told Daffy. She snorted at me. “Yeah, I know your name isn’t Michelle. Michelle was— or will be— you know what? Never mind. Let’s go see Ezekiel.”
I didn’t enjoy telling Ezekiel what had happened, but I enjoyed the way his face got red and his jaw got hard when I described some of the things Corwin had said to me. Ezekiel had no violence in him, but he could be protective of the people he loved. Which now included me.
“We shall speak to Reverend Hale after church on Sunday,” he said. “Corwin cannot keep you out of church, nor say us no do we approach Reverend Hale there.”
I didn’t like waiting until Sunday to make our next move, but it wasn’t like I had a better answer.
Over the next few days, I stayed away from Salem and from Corwin’s ugly face and entitled attitude and focused my attention on planning my wedding ceremony. Abigail was a pragmatic co-conspirator, as though she understood both our right to be married and the risks involved.
Tom was all enthusiasm, dangerously so. He’d taken to regaling the dinner table with declarations about which of his schoolmates—both male and female and frequently more than one at a time—he intended to marry. When his mother laughingly corrected him about the boys, Ezekiel and I held our breath and avoided meeting each other’s eyes across the table.
So far, Tom hadn’t cited his brother’s impending nuptials in defense of boys marrying boys, but we feared he was bound to let it slip at some point. He had no idea of the gravity of our situation. And yet, in some ways, I thought he understood what we were doing better than any of us. His vision of love was that unfettered. It was his certainty that he was right and his mother was wrong that kept him from arguing with her. He only gave her a patient look, as though he couldn’t expect grown-ups to understand, and continued his list.
Between the three of us, we made a plan for the Saturday afternoon ceremony. I didn’t share the details with Ezekiel. I wanted to do this thing for him. I wanted it to be special. If he ever surrendered to the pressure to marry a woman, he’d never be able to forget that he’d married me first.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust his love for me, or his ability to make a commitment, but I’d known I was gay since I was twelve. Connecticut had granted me the right to marry another man when I was fourteen. I’d had time to prepare for what we were about to do, though I hadn’t been sure I’d ever find the right man to do it with, but for Ezekiel, the idea was revolutionary, the act itself blasphemous, and our lives together would never be what he’d envisioned for himself. I kept cycling back to the fear that marrying him was an inherently selfish act.
That night before our big day, as we snuggled together with our nightdresses rucked up as high as we could get them and our bare legs tangled together beneath the sheets, as I held myself back from pawing at him so he could go into his wedding day feeling a little bit chaste, I tried to figure out how to work my way around to a topic we’d only brushed on once before.
If there was any way Ezekiel could make life work with a woman, I owed it to him to bow out, to let him find a life partner who could be a true partner to him, one who’d be recognized by his family and his church, who’d give him children to work the farm, who could never be removed from his side by bigotry or ignorance.
“I’ll bet you didn’t expect to be marrying a man,” I suggested.
“For certain I did not,” he agreed.
“Before I came along, there must have been other ideas in your head.”
He ducked his head into my chest. “I did have impure thoughts atimes.”
Oh. This was going in a different direction than I’d intended, but my mind eagerly scrambled down the detour after him. It was rare enough that I could convince him to touch himself, he’d been so brainwashed into believing self-love was a sin. I’d certainly never been privy to his fantasies.
“Yeah?” I prompted. “Who were you having impure thoughts about?”
“I cannot tell you such a thing as that,” he mumbled against my neck.
“If you’re going to marry me, I guess you can tell me anything. I won’t be mad.” Maybe a little jealous, but not mad.
“Sometimes I did think on Miller.”
“John Miller. Your sister’s fiancé? Ooh, awkward.”
“I did not think on him often,” he rushed to explain, “nor any more since you have come. Only he’s a comely man and much around.”
“No worries, love.” It wasn’t like I’d never appreciated Miller’s form myself. The man had a fine seat on a horse, and looking wasn’t doing. “But I was wondering more about women.”
“You know I did not think on women, Luther.”
“I don’t mean as sexual partners. I just mean—how did you see your life going?”
He lay silent for a few moments before answering with slow words. “I did think as I would marry someday, for I knew naught else, and I hoped for children, perhaps for a farm of my own.”
“It takes sex to have children. Would you have been able to manage that?”
He grimaced. “I believed ’twould come out right somehow—that God would make it so—but I was not eager to begin on it.”
“Are you sure about marrying me, Zeke? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have that—the children and the farm? Are you just marrying me because you feel bad that we’ve had sex? Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“Luther,” he interrupted. “Do stop, for you prattle of nonsense. That I did not imagine such as our love does not mean I do not cherish it above all else, for God has sent me better than I envisioned.”
“I don’t know how you can be so OK with this.” I couldn’t see it as anything but a miracle, given when and how he’d been raised. “Haven’t you ever wondered if I was a witch myself?” Sorcery of some sort was the obvious assumption when someone appeared out of thin air and flashed around technology too advanced to be anything else.
“Witches come from Satan,” Ezekiel explained with measured patience, “and though I have not always known from whence you came, always have I known it was from God.”
I tightened my arms around him, undeserving of so much love, such unshakeable faith, but determined to spend the rest of my life giving it back to him.
Chapter 19
It might be Saturday, and our wedding day, but there were still chores to do. I spent the morning out in the field with Ezekiel, then slipped away after lunch to check on Abigail and Tom’s work in the barn. Abigail had braided garlands out of flowers and Tom had draped them through the rafters so that fragrant braids of purple and blue hung in gentle swoops over Daffy’s head.
Over the course of a few evenings, Abigail had taught me how to weave straw, and I’d used my new skills to make Daffy a hat. Abigail said only mules wore hats, not horses, but Tom said anyone might wear a hat. He added some flowers around the band and we all had to agree that Daffy looked more-than-usually fine.
We covered the workbench with one of Mrs. Cheever’s lace tablecloths to serve as an altar and formed an aisle out of two rows of hay bales, then I pulled all the shutters closed and lit a lantern so the light was soft and warm and the farther reaches of the barn were masked in shadows.
Ezekiel entered behind Abigail’s measured tread. He wouldn’t have minded, maybe, if the barn had just been the barn, but his reaction at seeing it transformed into a wedding chapel was worth every moment we’d put into it. He’d donned his Sunday best and scrubbed his face hard enough to make it red, and he glowed brighter than any bride as he walked down the aisle towards me.
Abigail and Tom sang a hymn. Their sweet voices were unaccompanied, but only the sweeter for it, and if Tom occasionally lapsed into some other tune, Abigail got him back on track again. The song was called O Pe
rfect Love and it went like this:
O perfect Love, all human thought transcending,
Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy throne,
That theirs may be the love which knows no ending,
Whom Thou forevermore dost join in one.
Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow;
Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to life’s day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life.
Which made it kind of perfect. When the last note faded, I blinked back the tears from my eyes and turned to find my fiancé similarly tearful. We knelt together in front of our altar and Abigail said a blessing, then we rose and took each other’s hands and made our pledge.
“I, Luther, take thee, Ezekiel, to be my husband. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, till death do us part.”
Ezekiel squeezed my hands, a shy blush washing over his cheeks. “I do not know it so well as you,” he confessed.
“That’s OK. Just say that you take me to be your husband, for better or worse, till death do us part.”
“I do.”
I leaned in, my eyes on the mouth that had made me that promise.
“Not yet,” Abigail corrected, stopping me mid-lean, “for we must have the proclamation first.” She gestured us back onto our knees and raised her hands over us in benediction. “In the presence of God and in the sight of these witnesses, have these two bound themselves in Holy wedlock. What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. “
Amen.
“Do you kiss now,” she added.
Ezekiel and I rose to our feet. I took his hands lightly in mine and kissed my husband, sealing our promise as we sealed our lips. And then, I couldn’t help myself—I gave a whoop of exuberant joy and grabbed him in a bear hug, lifting him half off his feet. I was laughing and crying at the same time and Ezekiel laughed back, his face tear-streaked but beaming.