Westminster West

by Jessie Haas

  They stopped by the kettle. “Well now, Susie, what a night of it you’ve had!” Patrick Drislane said.

  Jerome Holden said, “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I realized ’twas Susie Gorham out there! Didn’t know you was up and around.”

  Sue looked down at her feet. What was she supposed to say?

  Father, with just a glance at her, said, “She got you folks here, didn’t she?”

  “David,” Mother asked, looking skeptically into the kettle, “is this substance going to be drinkable?”

  “I drank it for four years,” Father said, “and when I couldn’t get it, I chewed dry grounds.”

  Jerome Holden chuckled. “If there’s one thing I hate, Gorham, it’s a man who drags a war story into every conversation!”

  The coffee was dreadfully bitter, even with cream. Father drank his black. He’d grown silent, staring into the flames with his hands wrapped around the tin cup. His eyes reminded Sue, a little uncomfortably, of Clare’s expression as she lay on the pillow. Father looked exalted. He had always known that violence lurked beneath the world’s order and quiet. He had been watching for it, braced against it, for twenty years. Could he help welcoming it when it finally arrived?

  As the fires began to die down, the big old timbers snapping and falling, there began to be cool spaces between them. A breeze came up briefly, and all the faces grew anxious and then relaxed again. The eastern sky became rosy, and the first rays of the sun caught the rising smoke.

  It was the first moment when you could really see that the barns were not there. Even more than their smoking, glowing heaps, what impressed Sue was the smooth slope of the big hayfield. All her life the barn had blocked view of that slope. Now she could see the top, just touched with gold.

  Men were gathering pails and pumps, reluctantly getting ready to go home. It seemed wrong and incomplete to have them leave, but they had stock to feed.

  Then the Campbells’ handsome new express wagon came around the corner, Minnie driving and Aunt Emma beside her on the seat. With them came an aroma that brought tears to Sue’s eyes and tears coursing down Mother’s smudged face. Pies! Doughnuts! Real coffee, dark and mellow, and hot biscuits, and on both Minnie’s and Aunt Emma’s faces the warm floury look of people who have worked hard in the kitchen. The sun leaped above the horizon, and high in the scorched maple tree the rooster crowed.

  23

  AFTER BREAKFAST EVERYONE left but Minnie, who’d been loaned by Aunt Emma to help get the house in order. Neighbors carrying their cups inside had made the kitchen even filthier than before. Still, Mother wanted Sue to go to bed.

  “I can’t,” Sue said. “I’ll set fast if I stop moving.”

  Mother stared at her, a wide-eyed stare that was more than exhausted. Mother was shaken to the core. When Father or the neighbors weren’t around, she just stared at something no one else could see.

  “Why don’t you take Clare some tea and a doughnut?” Sue suggested.

  “Oh,” Mother said. “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

  When she left the room, there was quiet in the kitchen, just the brisk stroke of the broom, the light chink of china plates as Sue stacked them away.

  Then Minnie burst out, “I could slap Clare!”

  Sue began folding the towels and tablecloths. Even in panic Mother had packed the good china carefully.

  “You’re not even mad, are you?” Minnie asked. “You all just accept this!”

  Sue turned to look at Minnie. The air between them seemed full of tiny, shifting particles. “I …” Well, how could she answer Minnie? Of course they accepted this. It had happened. They all had made it happen, among them, and they must undo it or live with it. Being angry seemed somehow childish.

  “None of my sisters would dream of a thing like this!” Minnie said, but her words had less force. She was studying Sue’s face, as if trying to understand something. Sue felt a sudden sense of dread. When Minnie did understand, would they still be friends?

  “No,” she said. “Your family isn’t like ours.”

  “You’re right,” Minnie said, sounding thoughtful and detached. “It isn’t.”

  Sometime during the endless morning Reverend Stevens called.

  “I have been admiring those old structures for forty years,” he said as he came into the kitchen with Father. “They are a loss.” He shook his head.

  “Yes,” Father said. His voice was hoarse and husky.

  “It is like losing our parents all over again, to lose the work of their hands,” Stevens said.

  Sue leaned against the pantry wall, folding the damp dish towel and listening.

  “Ah, well,” Stevens said. “You and Henry will build a new barn, I suppose, and a hundred years from now that will be a revered old building. What is less easily mended is the hurt to this community. It will be like last winter, I’m afraid, everyone suspecting someone, ugly rumors flying—”

  “Someone did do it,” Mother said, in her new, faraway-sounding voice.

  Reverend Stevens sighed. “Yes. Someone did.” He took the chair Father drew out for him and sat musing. “It’s very sad. We have had so little crime in this valley. Not enough charity, not enough giving, but hardly any active evil. I confess I had taken some pride in that.”

  The kettle boiled. Minnie went to make tea, and Reverend Stevens looked up. “Minnie! Well, you couldn’t have better help. And … yes, there’s our Susan.” His eyes warmed on her as she came out of the pantry. “I was told you had ridden out. I thought it must be one of the rumors that an event like this generates.”

  “No.” It was all she could think to say.

  “You managed to catch a horse and ride, with all that going on.… Which one? That black Morgan?”

  “Not for sale at any price!” Father said.

  “I should think not, David,” Stevens said, but wistfully. “I’ve long admired him. Very like the colt that overturned my buggy one day many years ago, when I was driving a young lady out. You’ve heard me tell this, of course. She landed ‘where the cow her kindly cushion laid,’ and she didn’t think enough of my horse jockeying to take the plunge and marry me. But the colt turned out very well, as I recall.”

  For a moment he seemed to gaze back fondly though the years. Then his eyes focused on Sue again. “Well, I’m delighted. You’ll take my advice, I hope, and not let yourself overwork?”

  “She won’t be allowed,” Mother said.

  Sue kept her gaze on her folded hands, red and wrinkled from scrubbing. Mother’s words sounded staunch, but Sue was already feeling the weight of her reliance, familiar, even welcome.

  “And where is Clare? I saw Ed and Henry outdoors, but—”

  “Clare is in bed,” Mother said in a carefully neutral voice. She hesitated, then went on. “The excitement was too much for her.”

  “Oh?” Stevens looked from Mother’s face to Sue’s.

  The fire had brought half the town down the long farm road to scrutinize their family life. “Sue Gorham got up from her sickbed, and Clare laid down in it!” She could hear the exact intonation of the words as the news rippled through the households of Westminster West. And the speculations: Was Sue ever really sick? Is Clare sick now? Questions that could not be satisfied except by the early death of one of them. Questions that would linger their whole lives long …

  “Sue, you’re falling asleep!” Mother’s voice.

  “I’ll put her to bed, Mrs. Gorham.” Minnie’s strong arm around her, gently leading her upstairs, helping her unhook and slip out of her horse-reeking skirt and jersey. Then the nightgown, still in a crumpled heap before the closet door, smooth sheets, pillow beneath her head.

  “Minnie?”

  “Go to sleep.” Suddenly Minnie’s strong arms were around Sue, and Sue’s cheek was pressed against Minnie’s calico shoulder. “I love you, Susie!”

  24

  WHEN SUE AWOKE, the light was coming in differently, and a feeling like dread weighed on her hea
rt. Was something bad about to happen? She stretched her legs, the ache began, and she realized the bad thing had happened already.

  She got up, pushing against pain in her hips, pain all down her legs, and put on a dress. Leaning hard on the banister, she went downstairs.

  Minnie was gone, but a plate of her sand cookies lay on the table. Father sat there with his spectacles on, reading over his insurance policy. His early-morning look of exaltation was gone. He seemed older and very tired.

  Henry had a bright red burn on his cheek and a defeated slump to his shoulders. Even Ed seemed less shining than usual: thoughtful, turned inward. Mother was briskly cooking them a meal—impossible to tell, in this mixed-up day, what meal it was—and speaking in a sensible, matter-of-fact voice.

  “That’s just a notion, David! Now I want you to think. Didn’t you house a lot of Fred’s sheep last winter, after their barn burned? And didn’t you let them have some hay and even oats? It’s just foolish, sinful pride not to let yourself be helped!”

  Slowly Father nodded, as if the force of her argument had reached him through a haze.

  Once again Mother was the center pole of the family tent. Her lined, pale, weary face showed discomfort with the role, Sue thought, but Mother must take it up again. She was needed.

  “Hey there! How’s our Paul Revere?” Ed pulled out a chair.

  Sue sat down and groaned. “Sore!”

  Father’s bloodshot eyes focused on her. After a moment he said, “Bright was good for you?”

  “He was so good!” Tears stung Sue’s eyes. “He didn’t even shy at Campbell’s barn.”

  Father nodded gravely. “A good horse knows when you’re counting on him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Eating grass,” Father said, and a faint smile lit his face, just for a moment. “Gave that Holden kid quite a time when the south wall fell.”

  “He only shied once—” Sue started to say. But Mother was making up a plate for Clare, and a stricken silence seemed to fall on the kitchen. Had it been this way when she had been in bed? She had not imagined the quality of her own absence until just this moment.

  Over the meal the shape of the future began to come clear. The sheep and sow would winter at Campbell’s. Father and the boys would throw up a lean-to and buy some hay for the cows and horses.

  The plows and cultivators, the mowing machine and other farm tools had been burned. The whole year’s work of shearing, haying, raising oats was lost. But they would not be bankrupt, and already Father and Henry were talking over the new barn they would build. Cut and haul timber this winter, that was agreed on, and they were heading toward strong differences about the barn’s design when George Met-calf, the constable, and Daniel Wright, first selectman, arrived. A few minutes later Mr. Cutting, the state senator, drove into the yard.

  “A bad business, David,” Mr. Wright said, gripping Father’s hand.

  But they hadn’t come to console. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the greatest threat our town has ever faced,” said Senator Cutting. “We must consider our course of action.”

  The men retired to the parlor. Sue helped wash dishes. Then she went outdoors.

  The sun was setting behind bars of cloud, its rays golden across the ugly, smoking heap of the big barn. The barn was gone. It had burned, and she had seen it burning. But her eyes still expected it to be there. The hill beyond still came as a surprise.

  Henry poked through the rubble with a half-burned board, looking for anything useful. Ed sat on the trampled lawn, sketching. “Once Henry gets his new barn built, we’ll want to remember what this looks like,” he said.

  “I’ll remember.” The whole yard seemed strange, full of light that used to be blocked, too open. It made Sue feel uneasy. She went down to the barway and ducked through, out into the pasture where nothing had changed.

  Bright watched her approach and then came to meet her. His coat was streaked with mud, and there was mud in his wavy mane, but his step was light and bouncy. He pressed his muzzle into Sue’s palm and sighed.

  “Bright,” Sue said. Her heart swelled, smothering further words. She put an arm over Bright’s shoulder and pressed her face against his warm neck. Together they had done the impossible. Gallop bareback all the way to the Campbells’? In the daylight, with nothing at stake, she could never do it.

  This was what it must be like after battle, she thought. Your surviving friends must mean more to you than anything. And the men who’d risked you to gain their ends—the generals, President Lincoln, Father last night—must feel the way she felt about Bright: so moved, so proud, so humble.

  Did Bright feel at all the way she did? Expanded beyond anything she’d ever expected of herself, sore and astonished, and able, ready for anything? Could a horse have feelings like that? Bright shook off a fly, dropped his head to graze again. If all his thoughts were innocent and simple, of food and company and comfort, then the events of last night were even more extraordinary. He had taken such care of her. Only once …

  Once …

  Sue found herself staring across the pasture, at the buck-horn thicket near the road. Right there. That was where he had shied.

  Why? It had taken her this long to wonder, but now it seemed like the obvious question. In all that terrifying night, why did Bright shy just there?

  Where was the firebug while everything was happening? Did he stay and watch? A chill spread down Sue’s spine. So much had happened, there was so much to adjust to that she hadn’t spared a thought for the person who had caused it. Had he been right there while she was riding past?

  She loosened her fingers from Bright’s mane and started toward the place.

  The thicket was still green. The maple leaves were dropping fast, and the oaks turning color, but the slender, shrubby buckhorn kept its leaves a long time. They drooped and turned yellowish but did not fall.

  In the dusk the thicket looked dark and deep enough to hide someone. But it was empty now. Only a chickadee hopped from branch to branch, singing dee-dee-dee in its tiny voice. The grass was trampled, perhaps by the stock. Maybe Bright had shied at the thicket itself, a black bulk in the moonlight.

  Too dark. I’ll come back in the morning, Sue thought, and just then a mark seemed to take shape in the damp bare earth. A track.

  The back of her neck prickled. Someone had been here. Bright must have smelled him, seen him. What if she’d fallen off? What if she’d landed in the road, right here in front of him? She wanted to run.

  Instead she made herself bend and look more closely. There were many footprints, overlaid and blurred. Only one was clear: a big boot track with the mark of a patch on the heel.

  Show someone! Quickly! Sue hobbled across the field, aching more with every step but loosening up, too. By the time she reached the barway she was actually running.

  “Ed! Henry! I found a track!”

  25

  IT WAS HENRY WHO THOUGHT of using a bucket to cover the track and Henry who almost broke down when there wasn’t a bucket to be found. It was obvious when a barn was gone. Only later did you discover that you were missing a hundred other things, from buckets to pitchforks to the bottle of horse liniment.

  There were plenty of half-burned boards, though, and Henry carried one across the pasture, while Ed went to get Father and a lantern.

  While they waited, Sue and Henry climbed over the stone wall and up onto the road. The light was even dimmer here, and many horses and wagons had passed over the surface. But the story of Bright’s shy was still written plainly on the gravel, in a arc of deep-gouged tracks.

  “How did you stay on?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know.” Sue felt again the way her leg had seemed to stretch, the right leg, which hurt the most now. She had almost fallen. She had felt empty air between her and Bright. “I’m glad I did,” she said with a shiver.

  “My God. Yes.” Henry put his arm around her, something he hadn’t done in years. Sue felt the trembl
e of his hand, smelled the sharp scent of his sweat. In some ways it was Henry she felt most sorry for. Henry had known his future so securely, and now it was changed overnight. She slid her arm around his waist and gave him a hug, and they turned to watch the lanterns coming across the field.

  The lanterns cast a difficult light, and the men had to stand well back, in case there were other tracks that Sue hadn’t seen. “Can’t tell much tonight,” George Metcalf said, and cast a worried look over his shoulder at the sky. The moon was rising, veiled in a soft haze.

  “Don’t think it’ll rain,” Father said, “but we’ll put this over it.” He had brought Mother’s preserving kettle with him, and he placed it over the track. Metcalf put a heavy rock on top to hold the kettle down.

  “Captain,” Henry said over the fence, “here’s proof he was here last night. Bright gave an almighty shy, right here. You know, we’re damned lucky the son of a gun didn’t end up killing Susie!”

  The lanterns lifted and the hatbrims turned as everyone looked at Sue. Constable, senator, selectmen.

  “Well, David,” Daniel Wright said, “I’m in favor of putting up a reward, just as soon as we can hold a vote. This has to come to an end.”

  “I’ll put up a few dollars myself,” Senator Cutting said as they turned back toward the house. “It’s our kind this fellow’s after, you will have noticed. Those with something worth having.”

  “I’ll stay this side of the hill tonight,” George Metcalf decided, “if somebody’ll loan me a bed. I’ll look at that track again in the morning, and if you’ll draw me a picture of it, young Ed, I’ll take that down to Putney to show Jo Harris. Most of you do your cobblin’ in Putney, don’t you?”

  “A lot of folks go to Otis Buxton,” Senator Cutting said. “He does some cobbling work right there at the farm.”

  Father let them all through the barway, and they walked up the slope past the sheep barn. Coals still glowed within the heap of blackened timbers, and there was heat in the air. Ed and Henry would stay up all night, to make sure the wind didn’t fan the coals to life.