by Janet Benton
The closest church bell rang seven times to mark the hour when her spirit departed and death weighed her body down. It seemed she had been pulled into a sucking void, a void that drew my spirit swiftly after, rushing and pulling and stretching me forward but never bringing me nearer.
When Father returned from the dispensary, he found me curled about her stiffening body, my wet eyes and opened mouth pressed against her neck and cheek, calling, No, my dearest, come back, Mother. Father pulled me off and carried me before the main hearth. He set me up with a quilt, then left to find the doctor so the dreadful fellow could declare his patient dead.
My life’s order and beauty fell down flat—as if they had been nothing more than painted scenery.
* * *
Mother’s burial took place the next afternoon. Few of our kin remained in the region, having earlier sought land to the west and formed new Meetings. Yet after a silent Meeting for Worship, members swarmed the burying ground, along with dozens of neighbors and persons whom Mother had aided in her decades of charitable work. Old Hannah Purdes stood to my left. She’d been a lifelong friend to Mother’s mother and a ballast to Mother when others had called her too forthright. Hannah clasped my enfeebled body to her more solid one when the coffin bearers approached and laid the heavy box on the ground, and we stared into the gap in the earth that would soon devour Mother’s simple coffin. Reaching beneath my coat and shawl to my neck, I touched my gold locket, with its snippet of Mother’s hair and her tintype picture inside.
In the silence I recalled Lucretia Mott’s burial at Fairhill, when no one could speak until one mourner observed that the woman who’d spoken for us had died.
Two persons did speak at Mother’s burial. The first was Johan. He stood opposite the open grave from me and my family, the sun outlining his lanky frame, and said, “She was that rare human who loves and is loved by kin and stranger.”
This was a fitting tribute. A sigh passed through the crowd. The sun that glowed behind Johan seemed to come from within him.
Then I opened my mouth, and out came words of Lucretia Mott’s that Mother had admired: “If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?” A shiver passed along my spine.
The coffin was lowered; the men with shovels were at the ready. Soon Mother’s body would be covered by earth. All those present walked past the hole and streamed away. Some burst into speech as soon as they left the burying ground, but Father and Peter, Johan and I walked home in silence to face the gloom.
In my narrow bed I fell to staring into the air, and at nightfall I entered a nightmare-ridden sleep.
After passing most of another day in staring, I received a knock upon my door. It was Johan, suggesting that we go to the skating pond. Despite the weight of feeling that pressed me downward, I consented—for I had always loved immoderately to skate on ice.
My outlook remained dismal as we walked to the huge pond by Tulpehocken and Wayne and pulled on our skates—until I planted my feet on the ice, took one step, and sailed away. Oh, I relished that swiftness, the gathering of warmth under my clothes, the reddening of our eager faces in the glow of the lowering sun. Johan and I raced side by side across the pond, then followed its oval perimeter, panting whenever we spoke, our feet rising and gliding, rising and gliding, carrying our willing bodies through air that stung our cheeks and froze our eyelashes. Despite losing Mother, or even more because of it, I rejoiced in that vigorous and gladdening flight.
We stopped when the light grew dim enough to threaten our safe return homeward. As we changed into our boots, Johan held my mittened hand a moment and raised it to his mouth, exhaling heated breath to warm me. At his temples, from beneath his knitted cap, sweat trickled. His lips were wide and dry.
I wondered, Will I kiss those lips?
I thought, My husband.
And then, This foreknowledge can’t be rushed. I’ll live toward it till its prediction comes to pass, or doesn’t.
On that day Johan replaced Mother as my lodestar, the pinpoint of light by which I charted my path. It may be that the explanation for my unwise surrender to him lies herein, that I couldn’t perceive my own guiding star, or find it in the Light everlasting.
Yet something new did grow in me after Mother died—a capacity for cynicism. What was the sense in my mother’s death? Was heavenly justice no more than a fantasy? I kept my doubts and bitterness quiet in myself, but through the ensuing months I observed others to see if they held them, too. When, after silent waiting, people stood in Meeting to speak what came into their spirits, most gave forth consoling messages of love; yet others spoke of hardships, within or without, and the barriers to overcoming them. I no longer shrank from the words of these messengers.
Something else, too, was pressing to have its day. Many nights I couldn’t sleep, convinced that knowledge poured through me—all the knowing Mother had released into my body when she died; in vain I searched for words to give it shape. On other nights I slept excessively, as if this growing power required added rest.
Having always been a Friend and attended twice-weekly Meetings for Worship, I was raised on insights and revelations conveyed by God through willing humans. But the person receiving this wisdom and rising from a bench to convey it had never once been me. Now a newfound force gathered during our silent waiting, inciting me to stand. On every occasion I resisted, fearful to become a channel for God’s truths. The force brought on an elation so strong that I feared, if I surrendered, I might be called to the life of a traveling minister, might have to go from Meeting to Meeting to share what I was given. But what was I given? If I opened my mouth, I feared, it might emerge as an unformed ramble.
In any case, my chance expired. I never did find the words to stand and speak. Our lives were too far altered before my inner battle had its victor.
I last attended Meeting for Worship on a chilly spring morning four months after Mother’s death. Peter and I sat as always on opposite sides of the crowded meetinghouse, one side for women, the other, men. Perhaps Father knew what was planned, which might have explained his absence. But we were stunned when an esteemed elder rose from a facing bench and testified against our father. For soon after taking up with his first cousin, Father had begun drinking alcohol to excess. Then he’d married his cousin, who wasn’t a Friend and didn’t seek to become one, and married her two months after Mother’s death rather than waiting the required year. All of this was out of union with our Meeting’s Discipline. Father had been treated with privately, the elder told the assembly, raising his arms. He’d been counseled that he and Patience could acknowledge their errors in writing and that she could apply for membership. “Yet way did not open for Samuel de Jong,” the elder said sadly to those assembled. Father had failed to repent.
In shame I rose and left my seat; Peter met me at the doors. We crossed the broad porch of the meetinghouse and stepped toward home. I reached for his hand, as I had when he was small, and he let me hold his damp palm to my own. Above us spread a blank white sky, a page cleared of its story.
Some days later we learned that Father’s disownment had been approved, when old Hannah Purdes brought a letter stating his right to appeal. Hannah knew Father well; she’d even been a member of the Clearness Committee that had approved my parents’ marriage.
Father was in his workshop and Patience in the yard when Hannah knocked. I unlatched the thick wood door, and she reached her bony arms to embrace me. My face pressed into the long bill of her bonnet until she pulled my head down with gnarled, powerful hands. She kissed my forehead, leaving behind a hint of moisture and a coolness.
“Dear Lilli,” she said. “This is a dreadful shame. If Helen were alive, thee could have remained with us despite thy father’s doings.”
“Dear Hannah, these are trying times,” I replied, unsure of her full meaning. “If Mother were alive, they would not have come to pass. But please, come in.” I pointed to a chair before the hearth, where a fire burned hot. But she ventured only fa
r enough to let me close the door against the unseasonable wind behind her.
“We lost thy mother,” she said in her ringing voice, “a champion of the needy. Now we lose thee from our classrooms! Our most promising young instructor!” Her head shook side to side.
“What can thee mean?” My voice was quavering.
“The School Committee would like to offer thee a respite from thy duties. And we can offer thee a Clearness Committee, if thee desires it.” Hannah’s glittering eyes peered past me.
A respite? I wanted nothing less. And why a Clearness Committee? Why was I being judged as out of harmony with Friends’ ways, when all I’d done was be my father’s daughter?
“Is thy father in?” Hannah asked, just as the door of his workshop opened.
“Who’s come, Lilli?” Father stepped into the room, his work clothes stained and shabby. Seeing our visitor, he rubbed his callused hands together to clean them. “Come in, Hannah!” He reached toward her, his cheeks warming. “Won’t thee join us for tea? I’ll take thy cloak.”
“No, Samuel,” she replied. “I’ve come to express our sincere desire for thy recovery and restoration, and to deliver this.” From the pocket of her plain gown she pulled an envelope of bone-white paper.
Father took it. On its face it read NOTICE OF DISOWNMENT. Unable to speak, he stared at his sawdust-covered boots.
In that quiet, Hannah and I beheld each other. Her wrinkled cheeks held no trace of gladness to uplift them; dark hairs poked forth above her upper lip. When I met her speckled eyes, I sensed her voice in me: Help him repent. For thy whole family’s sake, but especially for thine.
A hard knot formed in my throat. She turned, opened the heavy door herself, and picked her way down our brick path. Father shut the door and fastened it with an iron latch that his great-grandfather had forged. Then he gave out a moan.
Perhaps the full weight of his disownment was falling on him. It fell on me then, for I knew I might never again be considered free enough of his pernicious influence to teach young Friends at the Meeting school. My life’s ambitions had all been staged within that august building.
Holding the sealed envelope, Father paced the room, his lower teeth biting the lip above. His head was low, his black hair unkempt and falling over his eyes. He lowered himself into a wooden seat before the fire and stared without seeming to see. Then, with a flash of his wrist, he threw the envelope into the hearth. It smoked and burst into flame. I inhaled sharply.
“That’s done,” he said, “and I’m relieved. No one can make me feel badly for doing as I wish.” He wiped his outsized hands over his face and looked at me. “It’s deadly to be always aiming for perfection.”
“Especially when one falls so short of it.” My voice was quiet, but he heard. I stared defiantly and trembled as he glared in reply.
But he let his feeling go. A tiredness took its place. “I tried for thy mother’s sake,” he said. “I never was suited to be a dutiful Friend.”
Perhaps—neither was I.
* * *
When all else fell away, one shelter remained. I’ll call it now the house of Johan. I entered it gladly in spring last year, on a Fifth Month evening.
The two of us were traveling a footpath along the Wissahickon Creek, bathed in air redolent with pollens and perfumes. We strolled slowly in our cocoon of silence. My hand was ensconced in his, a signal of our increased closeness since Mother’s death. Children laughed and shoved and teased along the banks of the shallow creek. The sun was falling behind stands of thin trees on the opposite bank; as the air cooled, mosquitoes rose from the dirt, butting against our ankles in search of skin and blood. We came around a curve and saw a pair of lovers seated on a rock that stretched into the water. How earnestly they beheld one another. Perhaps it was this sight that spurred Johan to pull me to a stop beneath a blossoming magnolia. I stood wondering until he spoke.
“I have something to tell thee.” He clasped my hands in his large, callused ones, and his face paled against his locks of red hair. “I’ve decided to leave for Pittsburgh soon. Peter’s coming along.”
His words stunned me. He and Peter had spoken in my presence of leaving to work in steel; they seemed drawn to that new industry like prospectors were to the California gold rush. But I hadn’t been convinced they’d go. Johan had four years left on his commitment to Father’s workshop, and Peter had never spent so much as a night away from Germantown.
I stared at Johan’s broad-planed face. But what of me? I thought.
As if hearing this, he answered. “I want thee to be my wife.”
His words relieved me, almost. I dropped his hands. “Why does thee tell,” I said, “instead of asking?”
He flushed with an abandon more to my liking, then reached for the tree and snapped off a pinkish-white magnolia blossom. For the duration of several breaths, he beheld its display of petals, as if gathering courage. And then: “Nothing speaks so boldly as a flower.” He placed the effusive specimen in my hands, his brown eyes beseeching. “Will thee marry me?”
I wanted to say yes. Mother had thought us an ideal match; she’d bent my ear more than once to whisper hopes of a union. She’d seen the reddening of our cheeks at the family table, heard evidence of his fine mind, observed the growing sympathy between us. Several days before she died, she’d even received a leading that he should join our Meeting and we should marry. She’d reported it to me with radiant eyes, clasping my hand, much as he just had. Yet she’d had no chance to season the leading—to find if truly God had sent it, or if it was born merely of her wish to leave me settled.
I wanted to say yes to Johan, yet I hesitated; this was likely the most influential decision of my life. Any marriage would lead to both misery and joy. How could I know which might dominate ours in years to come? I examined the magnolia’s veined petals, its many glistening and sticky pistils surrounded by stamens laden with pollen. Truly, a flower is a bold thing, exposing all its offerings to its insect lovers.
My answer burst from me. “I will.” Warmth traveled outward from my heart till my body seemed to swell.
The pleased look on Johan’s face grew ever more daffy, until I craved to touch him. I stepped forward, and he opened his arms to me. With my head for the first time against his muscled chest, my ear pressed to his heartbeat, my body feeling his limbs through the linen of his shirt and pants, I came to understand the meaning of that strange word swoon. I leaned into the cave of his body, which emitted a compelling odor that I decided must be that of a man’s desire. I pressed my nose forward and inhaled deeply at his chest. He let out an involuntary moan.
I stepped away to regain rational capacity, then said, “How are we going to make a marriage happen?” I’d stopped attending our family’s Meeting out of shame over Father and hurt at my unwanted furlough from teaching. And Johan hadn’t joined another Meeting after he’d left New Jersey and come to work for Father. This meant there’d be no committee to assess our readiness, no elders to approve or disapprove our union, no worshipping assembly to house it.
“We could marry with a justice of the peace,” offered Johan.
I agreed, though that might require taking an oath; this was how Father and Patience had achieved their marriage. Yet I wanted Father, at the least, to see the rightness in our union.
“Has my father approved?” I bruised a petal of the magnolia and inhaled its honeyed scent, perhaps more like a woman’s desire.
Johan looked down and scuffed the dust with his boot. “He dislikes me.”
This was true. Father was a less aesthetic man than Johan; he would consider anyone deficient who wrote poetry, as Johan did, and took time to marvel at a flower. I tried to keep the dismay from my tone. “Has thee asked?”
“The answer was no.”
He watched for my response. And Father’s refusal did cause the hot-air balloon of my happiness to sink a bit. But then I cut the ropes that were holding that buoyant balloon near the ground. I let it rise and float.
“I’ll do it anyway!” I cried, elated. “In Pittsburgh!” Excitement swirled through me. I’d build my own life, away from the disgrace and gloom of Father’s.
Johan stood to full height, radiating what I see now as impetuousness but saw then as an admirable power in a man several years my senior. “I’ll do well for us,” he said. “There’s so much growth in steel! But I need time to find a position. I’ll send money for the train as soon as I can.”
What was this? He and Peter would leave me behind? I pulled his arm. “No! I’m coming, too! We can marry as soon as we get there, or even before we go.”
He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I don’t want us to start our life together in a rush. Give me a chance to find us a decent place to live and save up some money. I’ve barely got enough for my own fare and a few weeks’ food and rent.”
I had but little money myself. Regardless, I ought to have refused to stay. With the sharp voices of Father and Patience rising to my room each night, the old stone house held little comfort. And without my teaching work, no purpose filled my days. Standing beneath that flowering tree with Johan, I ought to have told him, “I’ll borrow to pay my way. I don’t care if we sleep in an alley. I want to leave as badly as thee does.”
Instead, I agreed to meet the two of them in an undetermined span of weeks or months, dependent on their luck. I gave Johan and Peter the right of their sex to travel at will, and accepted the confines of mine.
All that remained was for Father to learn of the young men’s plan.
* * *
Peter had long disliked our family’s simple ways. Our parents hadn’t even brought gas lighting or water pipes into our house, and this separated us from the general crowd of forward-thinking Philadelphians; it even separated us from those many Friends who didn’t hold the testimony of simplicity as near to their hearts. And Peter didn’t intend to spend his life making furniture, as had our father and grandfather. But Peter had always been quiet, so Father had little inkling of his opinions until shortly before his departure, when the two of them were attempting to remove an oversized rolltop desk from our wagon.