by Becky Akers
“Richard, I heard Nathan and Alice talking today.”
He grunted. Where had Nathan found time to fool with Alice? He kept the boys jumping in a schedule that allowed no frivolity.
“They were—they were saying things—loving things—to each other, Richard.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward and prayed for patience, then turned to look at his wife. Her distress surprised him, for though this news was unexpected, it could hardly be serious with Nathan barely sixteen and two years from graduation. Most likely, Alice was jealous of the attention lavished on her betrothed sister and craved some herself.
“There, now, Abby, what’re these tears? They’re hardly more than children yet. It’s just puppy love—”
She shook her head, and the tears spilled down her cheeks. “Richard, please, don’t be angry at me. There’s something I never told you.”
He knew then, though she said not another word. At least, he didn’t think she spoke further. In a trance, he paced to the window and stared over his fields. Corn stretched to the trees, with both crop and forest gleaming silver in the night. The moon turned his workaday world into a mysterious and menacing moor, full of dark, furry creatures scurrying amidst the secrets of the whispering leaves.
He had known Abigail years ago, before he married her. They grew up together in Massachusetts and talked of marrying. But Abigail’s father disapproved of young Richard, and the Deacon, a rakehell in those days, now admitted the old man had been right. Had he been in Mr. Cobb’s place, he would have forbidden Abigail to see him, too.
Abigail was a peaceable young lady who would not disobey her father, however Richard pleaded. Soon after, Mr. Cobb moved south and escaped two problems: his farm, handed down in his family for a century and too exhausted to sustain another crop, and Richard Hale, who had become importunate in his courting.
Richard was young enough to suppose he would never recover but old enough to try. He left home for Boston and lived riotously, until the morning his own screams woke him from a nightmare. He had a headache but no purse: someone had robbed him as he lay sleeping off the night’s excess. He heard bells tolling and was sure they rang his death before he remembered that it was Sunday. He staggered to his feet and thence to a meetinghouse, where he made himself right with his God. That was the birth of the Deacon. He never forgot the degradation from which Providence had saved him, and he determined to live righteously thenceforth.
He worked hard over the next years. Eventually he wended his way to Connecticut and settled in Coventry, where he bought 240 acres of land. He also fell under the spell of Elizabeth Strong, smiling at him from the pew opposite his in Meeting. He wooed her away from one of Coventry’s swains and married her that May. Babies followed quickly, with the eldest born a week after their first anniversary. Before Richard knew it, he possessed a bountiful farm, a loving wife, five happy, thriving children, and a sixth, a feeble boy they called Nathan, over a year old now, despite the many times they had despaired of his life. The Deacon held his world in the palm of his hand, and he thanked Heaven every day for the blessings showered on him. Life was perfect but for his son’s poor health.
One morning that autumn of his thirty-ninth year, he bade farewell to Elizabeth, rocking a fretful Nathan in her arms, and mounted his horse. “Mind your mother now,” he admonished the children ranged around her. Samuel, the eldest at nine, choked back his tears as he remembered their chat about being the man of the family until his father returned. John and Joseph, eight and six years old, were sobbing. Little Elizabeth, almost four, would need some growth before she was as big as her name: until then, they’d call her Beth. She clutched three-year-old Enoch’s hand.
Waving goodbye, the Deacon rode out of his lane, his heart overflowing with gratitude, the sun a benediction on his back, the feel of good, solid horseflesh between his thighs completing his satisfaction. He was off to Norwich, thirty miles to the south, where a farmer had imported some flaxseed guaranteed to grow twice the usual number of fibers, according to a handbill posted in Coventry’s tavern.
The journey had been uneventful. At this point, the Deacon couldn’t even remember the farmer or his family, though he dined with them after buying the seed and a couple of laying hens to boot. He did recall the heat, oppressive at summer’s height let alone now. His sweat pooled in the saddle as he rode and dripped from his chin while he bargained in the barnyard.
He passed the night at Norwich’s ordinary, sitting late on the porch, hoping for a breeze, before he withdrew to his room. He missed Elizabeth achingly, though he had been gone but one day. He longed for the morrow. Right about dinnertime, he should be turning into his lane—provided he could keep his horse moving apace, a hard trick in such weather.
He tossed and squirmed, trying for comfort on the cornshuck pallet. As the only man staying alone at the inn tonight, he had the room and the bed, such as it was, to himself. There was a married couple across the hall, according to the innkeeper, but he had neither seen nor heard them. Then the hall clock struck midnight—the witching hour, his grandmother had called it. It was years since he had been awake at such a ridiculous time, for he slept deeply when Elizabeth lay beside him.
He sat up, swung his legs to the floor. A walk to the stream out back of the ordinary, or even a dunk in it, might lull him. He stepped into the hall and down the stairs, careful lest he disturb the others.
A harvest moon glowed overhead, at odds with the warmth. Crickets chirped as though it were July instead of the beginning of October, and owls swooped across the clouds. He shrugged out of his waistcoat, boots, and stockings, left them on the porch, and headed for the river.
He heard the splashing before he could see through the screen of trees and smiled. Perhaps the tavern’s master or the husband of the couple was awake: they could keep company through the watches of the night. Anticipation lit his face as he shed his linen and breeches. He waded out of the brush and into the water.
For a moment, he was so shocked that he could not make sense of what he saw. A woman stood naked not ten feet from him. Soapsuds covered part of her. The moonlight showed him how enchanting was the rest, though he fought to look elsewhere.
“I beg your pardon...” he said after what seemed centuries but was scarcely long enough that she could have snared her towel, hanging from a branch overhead, had her own shock not rooted her. He dragged his gaze from its admiration of her nether regions to her face and received a second blow. Staring back at him were Abigail’s eyes, beneath Abigail’s luxuriant, powdered curls, over Abigail’s enticing lips.
He should have fled. He should have apologized in the morning, when she was dressed, with her husband and the innkeeper as unwitting chaperones. He should have stifled the lust swamping his brain and choking his conscience and skewering his eyes to that magnificent body.
Instead, he stepped toward her. “Abigail.”
Time stopped, and he was young again, his life spread before him, the moans she was pouring into his ear ecstatic confirmation of his manhood. He ceased to be the Deacon, responsible and sober. He was no longer anyone’s father. His baby’s life did not teeter from one day to the next. Even his wife receded until she was a shadow on the edge of his existence. He was Richard Hale and only Richard Hale again, with no cares, no worries (and he had counted so few until then, he grieved, and none of his own fault but those that had come from this wrongdoing), just an endless fascination for Abigail Cobb.
He had barely sated himself before guilt claimed him. Abigail apparently felt the same. She would not meet his eyes and only whispered, “Yes” and “No” to his hurried questions. Yes, her husband was asleep inside, and no, she didn’t know what had come over her, either. Yes, it would be best to forget about this; he needn’t worry that she would admit such doings to anyone. And so he crept to his chamber, burrowed into the pallet, and wept as he had not since childhood.
He still had to survive breakfast the next morning. He could have departed without eati
ng, but as he lay plotting before dawn how to bury his sin, he decided that leaving early would throw suspicion on him. Her husband would guess what he had done, and the innkeeper, too. Mayhap they would come after him. No, ’twas best to act normal and dine with them as he would have if nothing had happened.
He learned from her husband, a thin man whose cough bloodied Abigail’s handkerchief, that they lived in Canterbury and had traveled to Norwich for the same flaxseed he had. They had one child, a daughter, who was staying with her grandmother. Long as she was provided for, they might turn this trip into a week-long affair. “Enjoy ourselves a bit, eh, Abigail?” He chuckled at his wife, who ducked her head and nodded, eyes fixed on the table.
The Deacon rode home, neither hurrying nor prodding his horse from its languor, the seed purchased at such tremendous cost lying forgotten in his saddlebags. How could he explain to Elizabeth? What would he say? There was no reason for what he had done, and that seemed the worst aspect of it. Elizabeth and he had not quarreled; he loved her more than anything; she had never been a breathtaking beauty (Abigail had her beat there, he must admit), but neither had she grown fat and vulgar with childbearing. He knew her first question to him would be, “Oh, Richard, why? How could you do that?” And he would have no answer. He knew how she would ask it, too, not with the revulsion he deserved, but with the patience and love that had anchored him all these years—and that he now dreaded as he would the pox.
By the time he reached the tulip tree marking the southernmost tip of his farm, he had determined to say nothing. Elizabeth and he were so happy together. Nothing should spoil that. It was not as though he would see Abigail again. He could not repeat his sin.
Somehow, he endured the reunion with his family. He felt unbearably dirty as he picked up his children and kissed them one by one. He half-expected to see the print of his fingers, black as Satan’s mark, on them when he set them down. He tried to bluff Elizabeth, but she knew something was wrong, and he flinched from the moment when they would be alone. He made sure that a child was beside him throughout supper. He kept Samuel and John up past bedtime, telling stories, until Elizabeth grew cross and insisted he allow them to get their sleep.
Finally, they were in their room, Nathan asleep in his cradle at the foot of the bed. Elizabeth’s compassion lured him as she plaited her hair and said, “Tell me, Richard, what’s bothering you? What happened that has you so troubled?”
He hesitated, tempted to pour forth his sordid soul and smash his wife’s world into so many pieces they could never put it together again. He longed to confess. He needed the comfort of her forgiveness, the assurance of her unchanged love. He opened his mouth to speak. His words surprised him.
“Think I paid too much for that flaxseed, Elizabeth. If it don’t produce as much as that fellow says, well...” He shrugged.
Elizabeth looked at him.
She knows I’m lying, he thought, terror tickling his breastbone.
But she laid aside her comb, sank into her pillows, and closed her eyes with a yawn. “I’m glad you’re home, Richard.”
He never told her, even when she birthed another son that February and named him for her husband, while the vigils at Nathan’s bedside continued until the boy grew strong as the others. He said nothing, though five more children blessed their home, even when two of those infants died, one a week, the other a month, after birth. The second death hit his wife especially hard. It had been a girl, after so many sons, and Elizabeth prayed long and fervently for her life. The child’s last breath stole something from her. She lay listless in their bed, misery warping her face. Still, he did not tell her.
The days dragged on, and she grew weaker. He refused to believe she was dying, though a surgeon, the nephew of Coventry’s minister, came all the way from Boston to examine her and shook his head and minced no words in the kitchen afterwards.
One night, a week before she died, he was spooning soup into her and mopping the rivulets that escaped her swallows when she said, “Richard, I don’t have much time, and there are things I’d have you know.”
He sat watching her, the bowl forgotten in his hand.
“The children, Richard. They need a mother. Beth’s fourteen, I know, but a family this size is too much for a girl like her to handle.” She panted while he struggled against his tears. “Also, promise you’ll send Nathan to college. He ought to be a scholar and a preacher, Richard. He’s got a brilliant mind. Enoch, too, if you can, they’ll keep each other company.
“And, Richard, honey, whatever you did that time when Nathan was a baby, I want you to know, it never made me love you less.”
He gaped. Then, wits returning, he wet his lips, but she feebly shook her head.
“No, I don’t want to know who she was or how it happened. You haven’t seen fit to tell me, and I’m not going to pry it out of you now. But after I’m gone—Richard, listen, this is important. After I’m gone, don’t torture yourself over it. I’ve always loved you, and I forgave you years ago.”
Sobs heaved him. He gathered her into his arms and held her through the night, murmuring how he loved her, how he couldn’t live without her. She smiled and fell asleep and seemed stronger the next morning. But a few days later, she was worse than ever, and the following Sabbath, he woke to find her dead.
He had five children under the age of twelve, with the youngest barely past her second birthday, older boys he must prepare for college, crops to plant, livestock to water and feed. He welcomed every task, every difficulty, for they kept his mind from the raw grave beside the Meetinghouse. He forced himself to sit before the hearth at night long after the rest of the family were abed, so that when at last he stumbled to his piercingly empty chamber, he collapsed into unconsciousness.
Six months passed in this fashion. Then one day, when there was only burnt corncake for dinner, with Beth stamping her foot and telling John and Samuel they could cook for themselves if they didn’t like her victuals, his wife’s words came back to him. They did need a mother, though trying to replace Elizabeth was blasphemy to him.
He considered the ladies in town who were widowed or had never married. He dismissed the latter. There were only two single women, anyway, and one was mad while the other wasn’t far from it. The widows he appraised more carefully. Mrs. Abbott was too old, as was Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Dawes had had no children with her late husband and seemed unsuited for motherhood, with her hard, angular body and fanatically clean house. That left the Widow Thatcher, and he determined to approach her next Sunday at worship. With the matter settled, he put it out of his mind until then.
But somehow, after Meeting, with friends greeting him and ladies surrounding Mrs. Thatcher, what had seemed logical and ordinary at home before his fire became monstrous. He did not approach her that day, nor any thereafter, though he cursed himself for a fool as the weeks passed and his boys grew gaunt on Beth’s cooking.
One evening at supper, Beth set some gingerbread on the table. The cookies were still steaming, and though she had not burned them this time, and they looked like gingerbread, they smelled unlike any such delicacy in his experience. Samuel eyed them dubiously, John suggested they feed them to the pigs first and see whether they survived, while Nathan, thirteen years old and brave enough to do his father proud, broke a piece and nibbled at it. Beth scowled as peculiar expressions chased themselves over Nathan’s face.
“Excuse me, please.” Nathan jumped up from the table, and the Deacon went back thirty years, to a wintry afternoon, when he had stopped to visit Abigail Cobb and found her making gingerbread with her mother. Their kitchen was warm and fragrant with spice, with love and comfort, and the cookies had tasted better than any he remembered.
Enoch’s complaining jolted him into the present. “Beth, these stink like a mustard plaster. I bet you put mustard in them instead of ginger.”
“I did not.”
“Bet you did. I helped Mama make a mustard plaster for Joanna afore she died, and she told me to be sure
I got mustard, and not ginger, ’cause she kept them in two jars that look alike.”
“Just ’cause you’re a dumb boy—”
“I am not!”
“—doesn’t mean I don’t know the difference between ginger and mustard.”
“All right, children, that’s enough.” The Deacon spoke from duty more than irritation. He had come to like their quarreling, something that had annoyed him unbearably before Elizabeth’s death, for it filled the house with life.
He swiveled on the bench and stared into the fire as Beth and Enoch continued arguing in whispers. He thought again of Abigail. Her consumptive husband must be dead by now. Had she remarried? Was she still living in Canterbury? Of all the women in the world, he would feel comfortable with her alone. And there was justice in making his wife the one person besides Elizabeth he had known carnally.
He spent the next day preparing for his trip to Canterbury. He had no qualms about leaving his children while he went courting. Samuel was nearly twenty-one, and they all had good sense. Withal, he would assign them so many chores they could spare no time for mischief.
He slept poorly that night and rose before cockcrow. He left without breakfast, Beth’s pinched loaves of bread and salty butter better left uneaten. Then, too, his nervous stomach would tolerate nothing but tea, even if by some miracle a stack of his late wife’s irresistible pancakes appeared before him.
He reached Canterbury at noon and went straight to its tavern. Over a mug of flip, he gleaned several facts from his host. Abigail was indeed a widow, with two daughters “purty as pictures, though they’s different as night and day,” and she lived on the first farm east of town.