The Believer (The Shakers 2)

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Now Elizabeth would have to be mother and father. She would have to see that there was food on the table, wood in the fireplace, fodder for the cow. They did not even own the cabin they slept in. After her mother's death, her father had lost all interest in any kind of commerce. In Springfield, he had hung out a shingle as a lawyer, but no one would walk a half day into the woods to seek legal help. So they had learned to subsist off the land, growing some vegetables and eating the fish her father and Payton pulled out of the Chaplin River that ran past their cabin down the bluff. She traded roots for their few store-bought necessities.

  The roof over their head was the charity of Colton Linley who lived in a big house a few miles away. He had delusions that someday Elizabeth would join him in that house. His first wife had died in childbirth, taking the child to heaven with her. His second wife had run back to Virginia after only three months of marriage.

  Elizabeth had not known either wife. That had all happened before they moved into his cabin. Colton surely could have married again. He owned land, seemed well-to-do if one could judge by a man's clothes and his horse. Whenever he came to see her father, his brown hair was slicked down with pomade and his shirt pressed. Not exactly a dandy, but a man well aware of his position in life. And if she made herself look at him with an unbiased eye, she had to admit he wasn't really bad looking in spite of a nose that was long and narrow. Or perhaps it wasn't the shape of his nose she found offensive, but the way Colton's flint gray eyes peered down it at others as if the Lord had formed the world for his sole benefit. Even so, he could have captured a third wife with ease.

  But if he had courted a woman since his second wife had left him, Elizabeth had no knowledge of it. She wished he had. She wished he had a wife. Instead it chilled her heart whenever she heard him tell her father he was waiting for the right woman-a strong woman in body and spirit who could carry a child without having the vapors. He sometimes added, "A woman like your Elizabeth promises to be"

  He was nearly as old as her father, but it wasn't his age that made Elizabeth avoid his very eye on her. It was those eyes and the way they sized her up as nothing more than a piece of property. How strong was her back? How broad her hips to carry his child? He looked at her as if he already owned her and it was only a matter of time before she had to satisfy the payment. She never noted the first hint of tenderness in his eyes.

  The year before, after Ralph had gone to Indiana and not returned for her, her father had asked if there could be any chance Elizabeth would ever look upon Colton favorably.

  "Colton has land and a fine house,' her father had said. "I realize he is old for you, but you would never want for anything."

  "Naught but love," Elizabeth answered. She had been building a fire in the cookstove to ready their breakfast, and she dropped the stove lid back in place with a clang before she looked over at her father who was filling the coffeepot. "Colton has no love in his heart for me. He wants to own me. I know not why, but I do know I could not bear his touch on me:" She couldn't suppress a shiver at the thought of it.

  "Why is he so repulsive to you?" Her father set the coffeepot on the stove before turning to Elizabeth with a slight frown as he tried to understand her aversion to Colton. "He seems decent enough. He lets us stay on here in his cabin without much in return except a few hours' labor now and again. He always says I can pay him later. The man has simply had bad luck with the women in his life'

  "Perhaps for a reason" Elizabeth's heart seemed afraid to beat inside her chest as she stared at her father. "Please, I beg of you, don't ask me to encourage his attentions"

  "Worry not, my daughter. I would never ask you to marry for any reason other than love:" When he reached over to touch her cheek with tenderness, Elizabeth's heart had started beating normally again. "I want you to know love as your mother and I did'

  Her father had understood. He had promised to find a way to pay for the cabin, to keep Colton at arm's length. But now her father was gone. Dead in one day. She'd thought to send Payton after the doctor at first light. Even the cholera didn't take its victims so quickly. Two days, three, but not overnight.

  Her father feared it was the cholera when he took sick. He'd been to Springfield where in the summer so many had sickened and died from the dreaded illness, but they'd heard of no cholera deaths for weeks. Still, he had vomited until blood mixed with the bile in the basin she held for him.

  If it was the cholera, she might not have to worry about what the next weeks would bring. They might all die in the week to come. Cholera oft swept through a family with no pity.

  "You're not dead yet," Elizabeth whispered to herself. When she touched her father's cheek, the lifeblood had left it already. She pulled the quilt up over his face and went back to sit in the chair by the bed to wait for the morning light. A person couldn't just sit and wait for the death angel to come for her. She would have to do something. Plan a way to continue to live. She and Payton and Hannah.

  "Please, dear God, show me another way besides Colton Linley." She listened intently as if she expected a spoken reply. There was none. Only the dreadful silence of her father's still body under the quilt.

  At first light she built up the fire in the woodstove and fetched water from the spring to heat in order to prepare her father's body for burial. She had to wake Payton to help her, because her father was too heavy for her to lift and turn on her own.

  Tears streamed down Payton's face as he looked down on their father's body. "Why didn't you wake me so I could tell him goodbye?"

  "I'm sorry, but I had no warning. He just stopped breathing.

  "Then it was an easy passing:"

  She saw no purpose in telling Payton about the terrible heaving and ragged breathing. "He did not linger in pain"

  "Was it the cholera?" A touch of fear widened the boy's brown eyes that were so like their father's. Their mother used to laugh about how Elizabeth's father and Payton were the pretty ones in the family. They both had long lashes around their deep brown eyes and wavy dark hair falling over their foreheads. Elizabeth looked like her mother, straight brown hair, a no-nonsense square jaw, and green eyes flecked with gold.

  Elizabeth met Payton's eyes without wavering and told the truth. "I don't know." Sometimes the truth was all she had.

  Hannah came creeping into the room. When she saw their father's body, she shuddered, but she didn't cry. Hannah was not like anyone else in the family. Her almost-white hair sprang out in wild curls around her face, and her eyes were such a light shade of blue that sometimes they looked almost transparent. Elizabeth's mother had called Hannah her fairy child and said that if the midwife hadn't handed her the babe straight from her womb, she wouldn't have believed she was hers. She looked that much different. A throwback to an ancestor no one recalled now.

  "He's dead," Hannah said. "Like Mother." Her voice was flat, devoid of feeling. "I don't want him to be dead"

  "Nor do I." Elizabeth reached to hug Hannah, but the child backed away.

  "You let him die:" Hannah's voice was practically a scream now.

  "Death needs no permission to enter a house:" Elizabeth grabbed Hannah by the shoulders, but the girl jerked loose and ran out the front door.

  When Elizabeth started after her, Payton put a hand on her arm to stop her. "Let her go. She'll be sorry for her words and come back to you for comfort later. But it could be that now the only way she can bear it is to run from the truth:"

  "If only we could:" Elizabeth blinked back tears as she turned from the door back to the job at hand.

  "Don't we need a box for him?"

  "We have no way to buy one:"

  "Colton might help us"

  "No:" The word came out harsher than she intended. She pulled in a deep breath and held it a minute before she let it out. "I don't want to be beholden to Colton. Not more than we already are"

  "I can make one. I'm good with wood:' Payton's eyes went to the wooden dough board he had whittled for her in the summer.

>   "Where will you get the planks?"

  "Off the cowshed out back"

  'All right. First help me lay him out proper. Then I'll start digging a grave out by Mama while you build the box:'

  It wasn't easy digging. The ground was hard and there were plentiful rocks and roots to prise out of the way. Their dog, Aristotle, lay beside the grave with his black head on white paws and watched her with mournful eyes as if he knew why she was digging. Her father had brought the pup in after their mother died. For Hannah, he said, but he had given the dog its name and Elizabeth thought he had loved the animal most of all.

  When Elizabeth straightened up to rest her back, she looked at the dog. "I'm sorry, Aristotle. I am so very sorry. For all of us:"

  Payton finished the box before she got halfway deep enough. She stopped digging and helped Payton lift their father into the box on the porch. Hannah had come back from the woods with her skirt tail caught up full of red and gold leaves and some purple flowers she'd found down by the river. With tears flowing now and dripping off her chin, Hannah laid the leaves in the box on top of their father's body. She gave one of the purple flowers to Elizabeth to place inside the box. Elizabeth kissed the mass of curls on top of the child's head and felt a sorrow for the fatherless child that went far beyond tears.

  Payton brought a piece of cedar wood he'd whittled and polished. It had no particular shape, but he treasured it for the red and light tan whorls in the wood. He placed it beside their father's arm and looked up at Elizabeth. "Should we say words now? Out of the Good Book:"

  "We haven't got the grave ready."

  "We need to say the words now so I can nail the top on" Payton looked grim, like someone told he must swim an icy river and so wanting to plunge into the water at once to get the ordeal over and done.

  "Very well:"

  Elizabeth went inside to get the Bible off her father's desk. She found her scissors and some string before she went back out on the porch. With hands she could not keep from trembling, she tied off three locks of her father's hair and cut them from his head. She gave one to Payton and one to Hannah. The last she placed in the Bible beside the lock of her mother's hair she'd put in there four years earlier. She pulled a few strands of her mother's hair loose and laid them over her father's heart. Then she cut a lock of her own hair and Payton's and Hannah's to place on their father's chest alongside her mother's hair.

  "Oh, my father, we will miss you so," she whispered.

  Payton read 1 Corinthians 13, the same chapter their father had read when they buried their mother. Hannah read Psalm 23, stumbling over a few words that Elizabeth and Payton whispered along with her. Last, Elizabeth took the Bible and found 1 John 2:25. `And this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life'

  Aristotle jumped upon the side of the box and howled. The sound was like a knife in Elizabeth's heart. As she let the Bible fall shut to reach for the dog, a piece of paper fluttered out of the pages. After Elizabeth pulled the dog back and Hannah wrapped her arms around him to stop his howls, Elizabeth picked up the paper. It was the envelope for the bean seeds her father had bought from the Shakers last spring. He had stuck the empty packet in the Bible to remember the kind, for they had produced well.

  Elizabeth stuffed the paper in her pocket. Springtime seemed forever away.

  After Payton nailed the top onto the box, they left their father's body on the porch to finish digging the grave. Hannah sat down on the porch steps with Aristotle leaning against her legs and would not budge, even though Elizabeth pleaded with her to come with them and not stay alone with the body.

  Hannah crossed her arms tightly over her chest and lifted her chin. "I do not fear my dead father."

  So Elizabeth left her there and walked with Payton back to the graves behind the cabin just below their garden plot. They took turns with the shovel, one digging while the other used the grubbing hoe to break loose the roots. The sun climbed high in the sky and reflected off the red and golden trees all around them, but they had no eyes for the beauty of the day. Their eyes were on the dirt as they dreaded the sound of the shovel clanging into a new rock that might prove too big to dig around and heave up out of the grave.

  As the shadows started falling toward the east, they had the grave shoulder deep. Payton handed her the shovel and said, "I can't dig more without water. And food:"

  His face was streaked with sweat and dirt, and Elizabeth knew hers must be as well. She had given no thought to eating, and only after he spoke of it did she realize her thirst. "You're right. I'll keep digging while you go fix something for you and Hannah. There's bread and apple butter in the cupboard. Then you can bring me some water."

  Payton looked down at the hard clay dirt under his shoes and back at Elizabeth. "Do you think it might be deep enough already? We could pile these many rocks on top:" He waved his hand at the rocks they'd dug out of the grave.

  "It would be best to dig another foot:" Elizabeth pushed the shovel down into the dirt and shoved it deeper with her foot. She ached all over from the work, and her hands were swollen and red with blisters.

  "If it's the cholera, who will dig our graves?"

  "It wasn't the cholera. We would have begun to sicken by now if it had been" Elizabeth lifted the shovelful of dirt and threw it up and out onto the pile that loomed larger than the hole.

  `Are you sure?"

  Elizabeth leaned on the shovel and looked at Payton standing above her. "I am sure. Now go get water."

  She was bent over working out yet another rock when she heard footsteps coming back. He had only been gone a few minutes, so she thought he must have decided to bring her the water first. It wasn't until the man jumped into the grave behind her and landed heavily that she realized it wasn't Payton, who was always light as a cat on his feet.

  She straightened and whirled around. "Colton. What are you doing here?"

  She backed away from him until the cool dirt on the side of the grave stopped her. Her skin started crawling even before he stepped closer and put his hand on her shoulder. She made herself not shrug it off as she breathed in and out slowly.

  "You should have sent Payton to get me. Grave digging is not woman's work:"

  He sounded cross that she had not asked him for help, but she did not want his help. She wanted nothing from him.

  "Payton is helping me;' she said briskly. She stared at his face and wondered what about it awoke such dread within her or why his hand on her shoulder was so frightening. Her heart began pounding in her ears. "How did you know of our father?"

  "I didn't:' He tightened his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of sympathy. "Hannah told me moments ago. I was just coming to talk with him. He stopped by my house yesterday morning about the money he owes me. You did realize he owed me money, didn't you?" He looked pleased by that fact.

  "Father rarely discussed his business with me:" Elizabeth avoided the answer to his question.

  "That's too bad. It might have been something you should know." He moved a step closer to Elizabeth until she could smell the pomade on his hair and feel the heat of his body. "We were working out a way for him to eliminate his debt. And he seemed hale and hearty then. Only yesterday. We shared some fresh cider."

  "The sickness came on him suddenly. He died in the night."

  "So Hannah told me" He put his other hand on her other shoulder and let his eyes drift from her face down her body.

  "It might be the cholera:" Elizabeth hoped to scare him back from her. "You best keep your distance:"

  He actually laughed, the sound as grating as the scrape of the shovel point across rock. "I think not. I think I will never have to keep my distance from you ever again:"

  She put her hands against his chest and tried to push him back from her, but it was like pushing against a stone wall.

  "Get away from me!" She put all the force she could into her voice.

  Again he laughed. He lifted one of his hands and rubbed the hard tips of his fingers across her cheek
. "You might as well learn to like my touch upon you because you are mine now. You no longer have any other choice. You are the payment of your father's debt:"

  "He made no such contract with you"

  "Oh, but he did. He had no other options. And neither do you. Not if you want a roof over your head and food on the table for your brother and sister." Colton's eyes bore into her.

  "We can get by."

  "But have you forgotten the debt you owe me? What a shame that the debts of the father can be passed down to the daughter." He pushed his body up against her and shoved her harder against the side of the grave. A root poked into her back. There was no escape.

  Elizabeth stayed stiff against him and made her voice icy as she said, "Would you dare violate me in my father's grave? Have you no honor?"

  "There is too much weight given to honor in this world," he said, but he stepped back from her. "But perhaps you are right. You need to bury the dead before you can begin your new life with me"

  She saw a chance. "Give me a week to grieve my father."

  "You don't need a week:" His eyes narrowed on her as he considered her words. He might have been making a deal for a horse. "Two days. And when I return you will marry me willingly, without resistance:"

  She did not nod or say yes, but neither did she say no.

  He smiled, taking her silence as consent. "Then it is settled," he said. "Now give me the shovel and I will finish your digging"

  It didn't seem right to surrender the job to him, but she could not bear another second so close to him. She handed him the shovel and began to climb out of the grave. He put his hand on her backside and pushed her up, groping her with his fingers as he did. It was all she could do not to kick him in the face.

  Payton reached down to help her up. "Are you all right, Elizabeth?"

  She had no idea how long he'd been standing there or how much he'd heard, but it would do little good to talk of it with him. He was just a boy yet and no match for a man such as Colton Linley.