by Laura Argiri
John Ezra had no idea how it had come about that God had given him Simion and often doubted that it had been God who was at fault in the matter. Other people did the deed that produced children and got children, who might be obnoxious and sinful and need plenteous whipping for their souls’ sakes, but who were recognizably human; they did not get little flaxen-headed elves who talked like college professors.
Moreover, today Simion looked worse than usual. Perhaps, John Ezra thought, he’d been unwise to make him help with the chicken, for it always did make him look green for days afterwards, which made people feel sorry for him.
Disgusting child, with his head eternally in a book, and spindly as a sickly girl! John Ezra could not abide girlishness, even in girls; he had chosen his wife, Anne, for her large strong bones and what he had thought her dependable, somber, neutral weight of character. Raising her child after her death, John Ezra began to think that he had never known her, that there were things in her of which he’d had no intimation—though he had had tiny suspicions of this sort while watching her ponder the lit clouds of sunset or dawn or reach up to caress a flowering branch as if it were a person. He remembered her pregnancy, how well she had looked; what a translucence and sudden beauty of hair and complexion it had brought, and her answer to his compliments: “I’m not, but what I carry is most beautiful.” A conception sometime in late March or early April. The occasion John Ezra could not recall. The shamefaced grapple in the dark, as always? Or had it been otherwise? He recalled his wife, awake in the night and unaware that he was too—sitting up in bed beside him and stroking her blooming belly. It was as if she were caressing her child through her skin and the cloth of her gown; she would smile as if she remembered something wonderful.
Despite prayer, John Ezra was often plagued by unbidden heretical thoughts concerning this uncanny child. If some creature of another god had ever come here on the breath of April, if something had put its beautiful inhuman head in at a window, mightn’t it have bypassed the casements of prettier women to beckon to Anne? Had a changeling been begotten in the April dark? Then he would catch himself and be appalled at his own thoughts. Drunk, he could not control his hands; sober, he could not rein in his deranged imagination.
Now he felt his temper tighten and rise, though he had seen Simion look and act vastly worse; he was quite subdued today, considering his ferment of curiosity—really, for himself, docile. But another terrible thought came to John Ezra as he unconsciously fisted and unfisted his hands: what his wife would have thought of his treatment of her child. “Death is real death, it must be. If there were an afterlife of any sort, she’d know what I’ve been to him, and she’d come against me.”
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Yet the meal went well, considering the possibilities, until halfway through dessert. After they had all finished the main courses, the dishes were removed except for the large and unwieldy silver tureen still half-full of turtle soup. John Ezra gave the huffing servant leave for it to remain on the table through the last course. Then she brought on promising desserts—blancmange, fried apple pies, gingerbread, and a bowl of clear lemon sauce.
“I love lemon sauce,” said the imp. “We bought the lemons a while back in Charlottesville, the man who sold them to us said they came all the way from Florida. We stored them down cellar to keep them good, for sauce in case we had company. I went down and smelled them sometimes, they smelled so good.” Adjured to silence, he served himself dessert and plenty of sauce, ate, and appeared to listen gravely as John Ezra told Simeon Lincoln the history of the Haliburton Elementary and Latin School. Indeed, all might have continued well had not the talk turned to Yale and John Ezra’s purposes in securing a Yale graduate for this post.
“I wanted you as our headmaster, sir, because you finished at a college that is renowned for theology, and you know the requirements for admission at such an institution. Now, my aspiration for the school is that it produce great preachers, great reformers, who will grow up with an iron vision that no influence of the world and the flesh and the devil can corrupt. I have not, as you said, matriculated anywhere, but I want to prepare our graduates to matriculate at the best colleges and go out to preach with the best available credentials. Of me, it’s easy enough to say, ‘He’s a sort of visionary fanatic,’ but I think no one will say that of our graduates if they have the education that I desire for them.”
“So,” thought Lincoln, “you want visionary fanatics with fancy credentials and a bit of credibility.” He didn’t say this, but broke John Ezra’s portentous pause with, “Pray, continue, sir.”
“I have a plan toward those aims. It is my hope that you can start with our present schoolchildren and give them, at least the boys, a proper education. You will pick out the quickest of them and give them a grounding like that they’d get in the best academies in New England, minus the pernicious Unitarian ideas. I plan on doing the Scripture instruction; your part of the theology studies will be Latin and Greek and suchlike. You will also take Simion in hand and see that by the time he’s eighteen, he’ll be prepared to take over from you. He must learn everything that a boy needs to pass the examinations for Yale or Harvard easily. He’s an apt student, it shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Take over, sir? At the age when he’d be going away to college?”
“He needn’t go to college, just have a full command of the studies necessary to prepare others to go to college. That’s what I intend.”
“You’re serious, sir?”
“I could not be more serious.”
“Your other students would have to be more than miraculous to have more claim on a higher education than your son does,” said Lincoln boldly, in the grip of courage as one might be in the grip of fear.
“Yes, that’s right, and I don’t want to stay here all my life,” Simion inserted unwisely. “In fact, I don’t want to stay here a minute more than I have to. I’d like to go to Yale just like Mr. Lincoln.”
“It is immaterial to me what someone of your age and inexperience wants, or fancies he wants,” said John Ezra. “The Lord certainly won’t call you to preach unless you improve more than I could imagine, and you’re very much mistaken if you think you’re going to grow up idle and useless and make no contribution to our mission here. You’re too wicked to preach and too puny to farm or build, so what does that leave you but teaching school? And didn’t I already tell you to be quiet?”
“Are funds a problem?” Lincoln asked. “Because…there are scholarships. Money needn’t be an impediment.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know it from this house, but Father’s really quite rich. He makes it off the tracts we put out,” said the reckless child.
“Simion, be still this instant!” John Ezra cut in, a lump of pie and choler applying uncomfortable pressure to his windpipe.
“Tracts?” asked Lincoln, noting the storm arising on John Ezra’s brow.
“We do publish tracts, but not for the purpose of monetary gain, Mr. Lincoln. Perhaps I forgot to mention it, but one of your duties will be proofreading these tracts until Simion is old enough to do it,” John Ezra said darkly.
“I don’t want to proofread your old tracts, they’re horrible,” said the child. “I won’t look at them, they give me nightmares, they have pictures of people naked and being pulled apart, with their insides falling out. I bet Mr. Lincoln doesn’t want to look at the ugly old things either. And I don’t want to teach your dull old school. Mr. Lincoln, would they let me in at Yale?”
“I’m certain they will, in a few years’ time,” said Lincoln, feeling his lungs tighten. “Meanwhile, you must be quiet, because you’re aggravating your father. Please,” he added in a whisper, hoping to cut through something desperate he heard in the child’s importunings and get him to hush for his own sake.
“Have they got pretty horses and parties and music in New Haven? Do they have dessert every day? I want to go somewhere where there’s—”
“Simion!”
How this argument
might have come out, Lincoln was left to guess for himself. John Ezra seized his son by the wrist, jerked him sidewise from his chair, and began to flail madly at him. John Ezra later admitted, if only to himself, that he’d been completely out of control at the time. But that he was forced to admit, for he could remember the small hhhk! of the child’s breath, knocked out of him with every blow. He did not know how hard he’d been hitting, though he must have struck ferociously toward the end. Simion fought like a mad thing, and John Ezra wrenched him around and stuck out his foot to make him trip forward. He fell and was arrested in mid-fall by John Ezra’s grip on his arm. He shrieked. That sound broke Lincoln out of his shock, and he sprang up out of his chair and seized John Ezra’s arm with both hands: “Stop it, stop it!” he cried. He got John Ezra’s elbow in his midriff—it was like being kicked by a mule—and found himself on the floor, a white fire of pain blazing at the pit of his diaphragm. For a few seconds, he could neither exhale nor inhale, and his entire attention was focused on his locked lungs. He began to gray out, and in nearly fainting he relaxed enough to release the spasm. The pain!…
As his vision came back into focus, however, Lincoln saw a small miracle that won him to Simion utterly; he saw the child’s free hand shoot out toward the tablecloth and seize onto it, then heard John Ezra yelp. He forgot all about Simion and frankly yelled with pain. The turtle soup, as hot as it had come from the kettle, had leapt up with the tureen and hit his midriff in a blistering splash. John Ezra clawed at his steaming trousers and indulged in a colorful blasphemy or two before he thought of the water pitcher and doused himself. Simeon Lincoln felt something wet on his shirtfront and saw that his nose was bleeding a small red river, but he had no time to worry about this.
Simion was sitting shakily with his little hand in a pool of lemon sauce, some of which had also gotten into his hair. One of his shoes was off, and his nose was bleeding too.
“I will go to Yale if I want to!” he pronounced with hysterical courage. “You won’t make me teach your old school like some kind of a slave until I’m old!” At this suicidal utterance, Lincoln interposed himself again between John Ezra and his son. John Ezra could only wipe the soup from his eyes, where it had somehow also gotten, and gaggle at them. Then he took a step in their direction.
“You get away from me,” gasped Lincoln.
“You’re bleeding—”
“You hurt me. You’ve done God knows what to him. Stay away!”
“In my own house—” began the Reverend.
“Assault is assault, and murder is murder, in your own house or anywhere else! Now, get back!”
That seemed to give John Ezra pause. He looked suddenly disoriented, as if listening to some voice no one else could hear. While he stood there, vacant, Simeon Lincoln snatched up the child and bolted up the stairs of the dark house.
After several fumbles, he found the screened bedroom corner with the washbasin, which he’d been shown before supper. He put the child down on the bed, groped around until he found towels, and hastily wet two of them. One he clenched to his pouring nose, the other he put on the child’s head. He was in shock himself, but he peered around until he saw the outline of a lamp chimney on a table. He staggered over to it and felt around until his hand found a box of matches. After several misses, he managed to strike one and lit the lamp, which threw a dim gold light of incongruous beauty over the unholy scene.
He bent over the undone child and charily felt him over for broken bones, especially the vulnerable cradle of his skull. Then he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and turned to see the dark outline of John Ezra against the lesser darkness of the hall. He held out the already colorful towel for extra persuasion and said, as calmly as he could, “Reverend, please go and get a doctor for your son and for me. I’m having a hemorrhage, and it would not look well for people to find a perfect stranger dead and bled white on your floor.” He thought it politic to make as little allusion to the child as possible, hoping not to rouse the madman’s opposition. He had to do this right—he had a full sense of his own appalling helplessness, a consumptive scholar with minimal experience in physical violence, unarmed, stranded in a wilderness, bleeding like a stuck pig, and the sole defense of a child whose skull might have some deadly crack he hadn’t felt with his fingers. “Go, go,” he thought, pushing the thought with his whole will. Miraculously, John Ezra turned, still unspeaking, and went downstairs. Shortly thereafter, Lincoln heard the noise of departing hooves.
“This is how people used to feel after seeing demons,” thought Lincoln, once he couldn’t hear the horse any more. He could finally let breath down to the bottoms of his lungs, painful though it was; it was as though some fetid icy air had withdrawn. Simion blinked up and cried, but not for long.
“Does this happen often?” Lincoln whispered.
Simion nodded. “Sometimes.” That was all he would say. At least he was making sense; perhaps his head was all right. After a few long shocked sobs, he was draped over Lincoln’s shoulder fast asleep. Lincoln thought of little Jane Grey, a creature as fragile and rare as this one, telling the scholar Roger Ascham what her monstrous parents did to her, voicing the unspeakable and refusing to elaborate “for the honor she bore them.” He thought of that sacrificial life and shuddered. Then he tried to chill his thoughts and calm his body, will his heart to slow. His nosebleed had slackened to a trickle by the time he heard hooves, this time two horses, and feet up the stairs. He heard a new voice.
“Get out of my sight, go in your study and read about the Whore of Babylon and drink you some white lightning! I don’t need to hear you talk your rot, I’ve done heard it before! Go on!” A door closed: the study door? And a rumpled man with a shock of pure white hair flung into the room and stared Lincoln over.
“I’m the new schoolmaster,” said Lincoln, washed over by some sudden faintness from relief at not being alone. “Reverend Satterwhite, he…he hurt his child. Me too, but I think he…he might have a fracture,” he added, gesturing in Simion’s direction. Without preamble, the medical man bent over Simion and, with his reddened countryman’s hands, felt the child’s head over. Then he said, “Eyes,” and Simion opened them. “Pupils equal, thank God,” noted the medical gentleman. They both seem very used to this, Lincoln thought.
“Well, the worst hasn’t come to pass yet,” was the visitor’s conclusion. “I come up here all the time expecting to find him with a broken brainpan.” Then he gave Lincoln his full attention: “The name’s Mark Vickers,” he said, thrusting out his hand for a hasty shake. “I’m the doctor for these parts, but I’m not from Haliburton. I like to tell strangers that first thing to establish some credibility.”
“Simeon Lincoln.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Vickers.
“Same. It might… I saw…it’s possible that it’s something other than his head.”
“You mean the Rev’rend worked him over all over,” said Vickers, and indulged in a vile oath or two at John Ezra’s expense. Simion, for his part, made no sound until the old doctor’s hand alighted on the shoulder of the arm he’d been wrenched by, then he yelped. “Little man, you ain’t going to have a sound bone in you if you don’t stop talking back to that crazy man,” said Vickers. “That’s not broken, but it’s sure mauled. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cartilage is torn to shreds. It’s going to hurt like Hell for a month at least.” He sat the child up, put a sling on him, and gave him a dose of laudanum. Very soon Simion curled up, the hurt arm folded to his side, and fell into a deep, drugged sleep. “Your turn,” said Vickers to Lincoln. He put something that felt cold and astringent upon a wad of cotton wool and stuffed Lincoln’s left nostril, where a vein had broken; he then surveyed the nascent bruises on his thin chest. His conclusion: “Well, I bet a scholar like you ain’t never been in a barroom brawl. When these bruises have time to come out good, you’ll know what it feels like.”
“No, I have never been in a tavern brawl, and if this is how it feels,
I don’t think I’ve missed a thing. What I want to know is what’s wrong with these people! The man who suggested this position to me said that they were peaceful Protestants…like Mennonites. Unworldly, friendly types who wanted a good education for their sons.”
“Hah! Ain’t nothin’ friendly about Haliburton. They ain’t no Mennonites, they’re crazy white trash, and they made up their religion as they went along, if you take my meaning, with a lot of help from that bedlam case in there. Now they’ve taken to messin’ with rattlers, and they get their damn stupid selves snake-bit and think I ought to be able to do miracles. Serves ’em right, is my way of thinking. They’re so crazy they can’t get any medical man to live here, so when John Ezra rattles this one’s brains, he has to ride all the way to Mint Springs for me. Someday…”
“How long has this been going on?” asked Simeon Lincoln. “And where did that creature in there get this child?”
He and Vickers sat up most of that night watching Simion breathe. At first they talked, and then, as the child began to float up toward sentience and make little sounds of pain in his sleep, they fell silent. Lincoln thought about the history of the town that Vickers had related to him. Vickers was a good storyteller, colloquial but observant, psychologically aware.
Haliburton had never been an ordinary Virginia mountain town. Its original settlers were a generation of zealots. There in the mountains, severed from the current of history, they had fed and re-fed on the old martyrdoms and barbarities their little sect had endured in England and grown strange. By the beginning of the Civil War, the villagers were generations removed from the mainstream of life; they liked hysteria and wanted to see visions. They were as ready for some intelligent and persuasive man’s madness as tinder, at the end of a rainless summer, is ready for fire. John Ezra was the best-educated and most capable man there and could speak eloquently before groups when moved: a natural as Christ’s Vicar in Haliburton.