Westminster West

by Jessie Haas

  But there was no evidence. Who could accuse them without doing a great injustice? They joined the groups of men, speculating along with everyone else. Johnny Coombs was absolutely the center of the knot of young men, eyes aglow, more important than he’d ever been in his life. Perhaps Henry had said nothing, but suspicion settled on Johnny anyway. The Harlow boys watched everyone, hot and hungry, waiting for a slip.

  Minnie came up and put her arm around Sue’s shoulders. “How is Clare?” she whispered.

  “The same.” Sue couldn’t take her eyes off the boys. Even Ed wore that warlike, wolfish look.

  Minnie said, “They love this.”

  Love this? Sue looked around at the pale, grim faces, the sober and watchful eyes. Yes. Somehow, deep down, everyone did love it. In danger they drew together, sensed one another, depended on one another. If only they knew who the enemy was … But we can’t know, Sue thought. Each person here was in some way a stranger.

  Yet each was also known. Each counted. Each changed things for everyone else, even Johnny Coombs beside his rotten old buggy, and Minnie’s five little sisters with the braids down their backs. If you could look down from above, you would see each person the center of the group, spreading a circle of influence that overlapped and underlay the other circles. Even the headstones on the hill spread influence, and the horses in the sheds, the church building itself, and the big maples that shaded it.

  “Minnie …”

  Minnie glanced at her. “Yes?”

  “Minnie, aren’t you glad you live here?”

  Minnie laughed aloud, making several people glance at her. “I’m glad you live here, Sue Gorham! And as I stand here looking ’em over, I’m kind of thankful for those Harlow boys, too. What do you think?”

  29

  THE JAR OF PRESERVES that had gone to Mrs. Coombs and come back again was bundled into a basket for Mrs. Harlow, along with a package of Mother’s special mixed mint tea and a sympathetic note.

  “It wasn’t their house that burned,” Sue said, teasing, and Mother gave her a look.

  But a week later it was the house—in broad daylight, eleven-thirty in the morning. The Harlows were able to save many of their possessions, including most of the furniture, but the house was completely destroyed. The two remaining barns were burned as well, so the hay and oats that had been saved before, and rejoiced over, were gone.

  “This is our fault,” Henry said when Charles Hall had come and gone with the news. “We have to do something!”

  “There’s nothing legal or decent we can do,” Father said.

  “We can watch him—”

  “We’ve sent for a detective,” Father said. “If you’ve been reading the papers, Henry, if you’ve paid attention to what’s going on down south, you know how ugly things can get when people take the law in their own hands.”

  “It’s pretty ugly when people lose their homes—”

  “Henry,” Father said, very sadly, and Henry shut his mouth hard and kept it shut.

  On Sunday Father asked him to stay home with Clare. As soon as the wagon was out of sight, Sue thought Henry probably got out the rifle.

  There was a stranger at church, a large man in a brown suit, with a beefy, red face and a city hat. Father said he was Jarvis, the Boston detective, and he watched everyone with hard, impersonal eyes. It was impossible to be natural. People lingered in the churchyard for only a short while before heading home.

  Monday was the first washday Sue could handle by herself. Last week she’d still been stiff, and Minnie had come.

  It would have been nice to have Minnie here now. But Sue enjoyed the feeling of returned strength and the knowledge that no one else was needed. The smell of starch and blueing, hot metal and wet wool, gentle slosh and heavy pull of lifting soaked garments: she felt that her eyes, her ears, all her senses were opened to it. If she were Ed, she would record washday with her pencil, catching the beautiful line and fall of fabric. But so much else would be left out: the way the lye soap stung and the water slopped on the floor, a word with Mother, and a few minutes later, another.

  Besides, was there any need to record washday? It would go on, week by week, forever. The need was simply to be here with open eyes and ears.

  Tuesday morning they were ironing when a buggy pulled into the yard. The sound of hammers stopped, they heard excited voices, and suddenly Ed was at the door, a rush of cold air sweeping in with him.

  “They’ve arrested Johnny Coombs! He’s out here in the buggy!”

  Mother set her flatiron on the stovetop. “Sue!” she said, and with a start Sue lifted her iron off the petticoat frill. The cloth smelled hot, but there was no scorch. She followed Mother to the door.

  A black buggy stood in the yard, a lean brown trotter between the shafts. A heavy man with a mustache held the reins, and on the seat beside him sat Johnny Coombs. He wore manacles on his wrists and a look of complacency, even pride on his face. His long, arching dark eyes glanced around the farmyard at the great heaps of ash, charred timbers, and debris. He seemed to be smiling. But he said nothing.

  “Jarvis and Reverend Stevens got him off by himself,” the fat man told Father, “and talked things over with him, showed him the picture of the track. And he said he might as well plead guilty. Takin’ him over to jail in B.F. now.”

  Mother’s hand reached back to her apron strings. “Has anyone gone to his mother?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Gorham,” the fat man said. “I’m Lovell, ma’am, deputy sheriff from Bellows Falls. Yes, Reverend Stevens is there right now.”

  Sue watched Johnny’s face. She could see no change when his mother was mentioned—no embarrassment, no shame. Johnny Coombs looked like a man well satisfied to be just where he was, as if he had achieved something important.

  Across the buggy from her Sue could read the bafflement on Father’s face. Not even Henry seemed triumphant. Johnny Coombs in chains seemed a trivial thing beside the heap of char and ash and the empty space in the air where the barn had been.

  “I’ll be gettin’ along,” Lovell said. “Just thought you’d want to know, and since I was passin’ …” He seemed disappointed, as if he’d expected a bigger reaction from them. “There’ll be a hearing tomorrow. Someone’ll let you know.” He set the horse in motion.

  “Do you suppose maybe he didn’t do it?” Ed asked as they stood watching the buggy turn around. “Is he fool enough to say he did just to be the center of attention?”

  Father shook his head slowly, mutely. The buggy rolled away up the road, past the buckhorn thicket where the track had been long since rained away, and the scars of Bright’s shy wiped out by passing wagons. The buggy top was up, so Sue couldn’t see if Johnny looked toward his hiding place.

  The buggy tilted to one side under the deputy’s weight. The brown horse’s hooves flashed and clopped between the wheels. A little lurch as the horse leaned into the collar to take the hill. Then they were around the corner and lost from sight.

  “David,” Mother said, “I’ve got to go up and see if I can help her. At least let her know we don’t blame her for what’s happened.”

  “Yes,” Father said, vaguely, as if he felt far away from everything. “Yes, that’s right. Henry, harness a horse for your mother.”

  Mother hurried into the house, taking off her apron as she went. “Sue, will you get me my coat? I wonder if I should take her a little something.…”

  Sue hugged herself tight. She was shivering deep inside, but she couldn’t help laughing. “I shouldn’t bother. Remember those poor preserves?”

  Mother turned blankly. “What? Oh, I suppose they got burned with the Harlows’ house, didn’t they? No, I won’t take anything. She won’t have the heart to eat. Let the fire go, Sue, and we’ll finish when I get back. You might tell your sister—” With her coat half on, she was already out the door.

  Sue went slowly back through the house to Clare’s room. Johnny Coombs … Of course it was Johnny Coombs. Like Clare’s going to bed,
Johnny’s arrest had that odd clarity of something foreordained. Yes, you thought, when such a thing occurred, but it was never clear enough beforehand.

  “They’ve arrested Johnny Coombs,” she said from the bedroom doorway.

  Clare looked up from the little book of poems she was reading. Her eyes widened, and she pressed her hand against the base of her throat in the way that had made Minnie so angry. The ruffles at her wrist, the lace at the yoke of her white nightgown made the gesture even more graceful and effective. “Then it’s all over?”

  “Probably,” Sue answered. In spite of everything, she found that she was smiling. How well Clare did it, after all! She herself had never been so good at it, had never made her sickroom a sanctuary and a realm: the soft afghan in the rocking chair, the dainty shade on the lamp, the letters and little gifts from friends, the small, prettily bound books, and the delicate embroidery within the round, dark hoop.

  And young women did fall ill, and who could discern the line between illness and intention? Who really knew anything about another person? There was a different version of this story, Clare’s version, and Sue didn’t know what it was. Perhaps there were many excellent reasons.

  “Can I bring you anything, Clary?”

  Clare’s eyes widened involuntarily, and she flushed. “No. No, thank you.” She hesitated. “Come sit on the bed a minute and I’ll rub your arm. I know how ironing makes you ache.”

  Sue’s arm did ache. She had been enjoying the feeling actually. That was strength coming back. But she sat on the bed, and Clare massaged her forearm, and she felt the knowing strength of Clare’s fingers. Tears stung her eyes for no reason that she could fathom.

  30

  ON WEDNESDAY JUSTICE LANE HELD COURT in the crowded chapel. Sue didn’t go. Someone had to stay home with Clare, and the prospect of seeing Johnny in chains, of hearing his slow mind twisted and exposed to the light by Justice Lane’s examination, was not pleasant.

  As it turned out, she missed nothing. Johnny waived examination and refused counsel. His course was all marked out, he said. “I might as well plead guilty, for you’ll prove it against me, although I am innocent.”

  But he had admitted knowing about slow matches, when questioned by Reverend Stevens, and that, combined with the track and other circumstances, left little doubt. Lacking bail of three thousand dollars, Johnny was taken to the county jail in Newfane, to await the convening of the grand jury in March. The Brattleboro Phoenix noted, “His bearing was that of a proud self-consciousness, as though he was the chief actor on an important occasion.”

  Father was prosecuting. Because of the strong evidence provided by the track, Johnny would be charged first with the Gorham fires. Sue could only guess what Father thought about that. He was silent and sighed often, perhaps remembering Johnny’s father. Everyone had loved Tolman Coombs. There was something so sweet about him, so quiet. He always seemed to be resting from pain, or resting between pain, in a kind of stunned passivity. Now his only son was Westminster West’s enemy.

  Mrs. Coombs was heard to be feeble, dazed, and shocked, but few people saw her. Even Mother was gently turned away after the first day, when a niece came up from Dummer-ston to take over. The shame was too great. She did not know how to face her neighbors. A week to the day after Johnny was arrested, the niece walked down the hill to Campbell’s to say that Mrs. Coombs was dead.

  The gray house was left empty, the livestock fed twice a day by a Campbell hired man. A week after Mrs. Coombs’s death the stock and feed were auctioned off.

  Father didn’t want to go. He didn’t say so, but Sue could sense his discomfort. He was willing to send Johnny Coombs to state prison, but it seemed a different matter to profit from the sale of his inheritance.

  “It’s one-thirty,” Mother reminded him, looking up from the ironing. Father sat at the table, unmoving. “It’s oats and hay, David, and only half a mile away. Wouldn’t it be silly not to go?”

  At that Father smiled wryly and reached for his hat. “Jane, you always put me right. Where would I be without you?”

  “I can’t imagine!” Mother said. Did they all think of the west? Sue wondered, licking her finger and touching it lightly to the bottom of her iron to test its heat. Did they all go on to reflect, for just a moment, on the war and a question asked at a front gate: “What do you think I am?” And did each of them assume that this thought was entirely private? She pressed the heavy iron across a breadth of dark calico skirt and watched the color seem to brighten as the wrinkles smoothed out.

  Father bought enough of Johnny Coombs’s hay and oats to take him well into the winter. He and the boys brought home a load of hay and stacked it by the new shed. Leaving Ed to finish topping the stack so it would shed water, Father and Henry went back with the big team for another load.

  When Ed was finished, the others hadn’t yet returned. He came in for the milk pails, and Sue went out with him to help do the chores.

  The sun was setting. Sue looked toward the place in midair where the barn roof would have caught the last red rays. Now the sunlight passed through, invisible. Ed sat on a stool with his head buried in the cow’s flank. Milk hissed into the pail.

  From the sack in the new shed, Sue measured out oats for the horses. Bright and Lucky jostled at the fence, and the young hogs dodged and squealed beneath their hooves. Sue dumped the oats into the wooden trough and watched the horses lay back their ears to menace each other, bite the hogs’ backs.

  “What was the auction like?” she asked, pausing to lean on the cow’s back and breathe in her sweet scent.

  Ed shrugged. “Short. Cold.” He stripped out the last milk and stood up. “Like butchering, you know? When you forget the critter was ever alive and start cutting up the pieces? All the work poor Johnny did all summer—”

  “He burned your work,” Sue said.

  “Yes, well, we all come out ahead somehow. Everybody gets a big new barn out of it, and Johnny’s sitting in jail with not a soul left on earth who cares for him.” Ed’s mouth closed in a thin, bitter line, and he stood for a moment looking up the frozen farm road.

  Sue followed him in her mind, left at the main road and downhill to the corner of Westminster West road. There Ed was turning south, away from the village, toward Putney and Brattleboro and the wide world.

  “Why do you think Johnny did it?” she asked, mainly to keep Ed here a moment longer.

  Ed turned impatiently. “It made him important! He’s somebody now! I keep thinking if we’d tried harder to like him, none of it would have happened.”

  No, Sue thought. For none of it to happen, the whole fabric of the world would have to be unraveled, such a long way back. To keep Johnny from going to the camp, from catching the fever that damaged his mind, there would have had to be no war, no slavery, and what could have prevented that?

  If there’d been no war, if Father’s mind had never been shaken, if Mother had not needed to become the pole to which he and all of them clung, what else would be different? Who would they be, she and Clare, Ed, and Henry?

  A hog squealed under Bright’s teeth. Father and Henry were coming down the road now, wagon wheels loud in the frozen ruts. The oven door banged. Sue took the milk pails from Ed, their cold fingers brushing, and went inside.

  A wave of heat struck her. She stopped in her tracks. The door slammed behind her, and Mother turned from the stove. “Sue, will you—” She stopped. They stared at each other. Sue felt her heart swell and ache with a sorrow she couldn’t name.

  “You look like a wild thing,” Mother said quietly. She came and took the milk pails, bringing with her a cloud of warmth and cooking smells. “Go outside while there’s still light. Go on, I can get supper without you.”

  “Thank you!” Sue said, bringing a funny little smile to Mother’s face. Then she was out the door and almost running up the long slope of the big hill.

  The last time she’d been here was to pick wild strawberries. Now the fields were yellow-green, the
ground was frozen, and the grass gave and crunched beneath her feet.

  At the top of the hill Sue swept the folds of her skirt beneath her and sat. The last sunlight turned the eastern ridges a soft mauve. She watched until it was gone and the sky had turned lavender with coming night, the bare trees standing in black silhouette.

  She leaned back on her elbows. The field stretched down away from her, as if she were lying on an enormous overturned bowl that held her up near the sky. She chewed a short stem of grass, sweetened by frost, and watched the first star come out.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Thank you for the field and the sky and the branches of trees. Thank you for this world. Thank you because no one was hurt in any of the fires, and because Bright came out of the dark pasture in answer to her call.

  Thank you—did she dare think this?

  Yes. Only here, close to the sky, and alone, she could be thankful that she had seen Mother collapse at the kitchen table, that she’d seen Father fight the fire. Here she could be thankful for her illness, glad that she’d done such wrong, dared to lie and fake. It had done no real harm to anyone else, and in the end it had done her good.

  And here, thank you, thank you, to Johnny Coombs. Thank you because she was out here on this beautiful evening with the first star just appearing, because he had gotten her down the stairs in a way there was no going back from. How hard it would have been to get herself down, admit to being better, and come back to everyday things.

  Now it was done. Johnny had lost everything, Clare lay in bed, and the barns were gone. Much harm done. But good had resulted, too, great good, and she was thankful.

  She sat up again. She could see the ridges that defined Westminster West, darkly shouldering the sky. Between them the land lay in velvet blackness. Vast fields might be concealed there, or deep abysses, wilderness—or simply a narrow valley, a few farms, and a little village where lamps were being lit and everyone was sitting down to supper.