Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  What did the Father or the vine or the branches or any of them know about passing a dead baby between your legs? she might have asked if she had ever chosen to respond to her husband when he talked to her that way. Seeing your brother’s burned body hanging from a tree?

  At times, as her baby girl grew older, Sarah came dangerously close to laughing out loud during one of George’s sermons. When Mary Elizabeth was old enough to stay for Sunday school on her own, Sarah started staying home. When George tried to talk to her about it, she stared at the floor and spoke her own language under her breath, to tune him out.

  Eventually he stopped trying. The whispering started again at church, the old women telling her, “You need to build up your husband better than that.” Black and white both crossing the road to avoid meeting up with her then.

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1962

  She couldn’t be at home, Mary Elizabeth knew. Home was something misnamed, or misplaced maybe. But of course a person needed one. What was hers now? Not her mother and father’s house, where now she couldn’t do the taking care. Too exhausted, too ashamed—but she could never let her mama see that. Think what that might do.

  “Come stay with us for a while,” Maze said. “Come to Pleasant Hill.”

  She still had money from her Christmastime housecleaning. She bought a bus ticket, and she went.

  The three women lived in a little stone house, the building that had been the Shaker Sisters’ Shop. Half the living space, just off the kitchen, was taken up with Sister Georgia’s loom. But then, they hardly ever seemed to be there—Vista always off at one job or church meeting or another, Maze and Sister Georgia always roaming, seeming almost to vaporize somehow, part of the clear air of the place.

  Upstairs were their beds. Maze had set up a fourth one, a cot covered with an old quilt. Each had her own tiny room, Mary Elizabeth now, too.

  “You can rest here all you need to,” Maze said when she showed Mary Elizabeth her room. Mary Elizabeth nodded and tried to smile. No touch now, then, no dark tent of pleasure. How might it all have turned out if she’d agreed to more touching, more time? With Maze, but with others, too? With that boy Daniel? Pointless to think of it now.

  “I think this place will revive you, M. E.” Maze called her that again. “You know, for those last weeks of the term, you were like a walking ghost.”

  She wouldn’t go to dances. She wouldn’t walk up into the hills in the sweet, cool air of early April, when the white blossoms of bloodroot poked up on the floor of the woods like a miracle. She needed to practice. Hours on pieces she would never play in public, for anyone.

  “Why are you doing this?” Maze cried one night at the beginning of May, at midnight in their room, watching Mary Elizabeth wrap her aching hands and wrists in tight bandages before she went to bed for only four or five hours.

  “I don’t expect you to understand, Maze,” she said, then turned off her light.

  But now, Maze said, they would revive her. Heal her with Shaker potions and Shaker teas, fill her up with pies and breads and cookies. She took Mary Elizabeth to the Shawnee Run and made her take off her shoes and get in. They sneaked up the hill behind the Sisters’ Shop at night, packs of cigarettes in their pockets or a bag filled with cans of beer purchased for them by Shade Nixon—good old coughing, complaining, and, these days, usually drunk Uncle Shade.

  “But how are your mama and Sister Georgia gonna feel about having me here?” Mary Elizabeth asked when she arrived.

  “Just glad you aren’t Harris Whitman,” Maze said. He had visited a few times by then, admiring the Shaker craftsmanship in the old buildings, the beautifully carved staircase in one, the simple, perfectly made chairs and tables in others. Mostly he avoided the other two women in the Sisters’ Shop, Maze said. He hadn’t stayed long either time, and now he was traveling for most of the summer, carting his own tables and chairs, wood boxes and turn-handle brooms, as far away as New England to sell at festivals and fairs. Maze longed for him, she said, but kept quiet about it. Life with Vista and Georgia was easier that way.

  Tuesday, the day after Mary Elizabeth arrived, was a wash day, and she and Maze helped Vista with the laundry she took in three times a week from the Beau Rive Hotel. Their arms buried deep in pots of scalding water, they rubbed their watery eyes, burning from the bleach, against their shoulders while they scrubbed.

  “Get a good taste of this and understand why you need to stay in school and finish your degree,” Vista said to Maze. “No good countin’ on Harris Whitman or any other man. Better to set yourself up so you can work as a teacher. Just go to class and do your work and get the damn degree.”

  Mary Elizabeth watched Maze’s mama warily, wondering what she was really thinking. About her. Was this lecture really just for Maze, or was it somehow on her behalf, too? She hardly needed to hear it—she knew this story, and believed it, too. She certainly wasn’t counting on any man. And yes, she was planning to become a teacher, as her daddy had always planned for her. “Music’s fine,” he told her. “But train to be a schoolteacher first, unless you want to play the piano and clean other women’s houses for the rest of your life.”

  A few nights later Vista caught Maze and Mary Elizabeth drinking their smuggled beers in the moonlight on a blanket they’d spread out behind the old Shaker Inn. This is it, Mary Elizabeth thought then; now she’ll send the colored girl packing. But instead Vista took a beer for herself and lit a cigarette of her own, then offered the pack to Mary Elizabeth.

  Shocked, Mary Elizabeth shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. Then, “Ma’am,” she added as an afterthought. Maze laughed, and Vista smiled over at her daughter, then turned to Mary Elizabeth. “You don’t have to call me that,” she said. “We don’t stand on much ceremony around here.

  “I hear you play the piano,” she said then, and pulled a key out of her pocket. “I grabbed Georgia’s key to the meetinghouse before I came looking for you two. I thought maybe you could play for us a bit.”

  Maze sat up quickly on the blanket, worry on her face. “Mama, Mary Elizabeth needs to take a rest from the piano for a while.”

  But “It’s all right,” Mary Elizabeth said to Maze, then turned to Vista. “I can play some hymns for you both, if you’d like. I believe that’s all I’d like to play, though, just a few of the old church songs.”

  “That’s all I’d care to hear,” Vista said, standing up and reaching out to pull the two girls up.

  It was a dusty old upright, enough out of tune that Mary Elizabeth just tried to forget that she was playing. With hymns she could do that—just turn off the sound in her head and let her fingers go through the motions of “Amazing Grace” or “In the Sweet By and By.” But when Maze asked her, tentatively, about those pieces she’d played on their second night at Berea—”That Debussy, the Children’s Hour or whatever it was called”—Mary Elizabeth shook her head. It was only because the thing was so badly out of tune, she told herself, ignoring the stabbing pain between her shoulders.

  “You aren’t sleepin’ well, are you, M. E.?” Maze said the next day. Each night that Mary Elizabeth had been at Pleasant Hill, Maze said, she’d woken to the sound of her friend’s grinding teeth in the room next door, a sound tortured and loud enough for Maze to hear it through the solidly built wall. That morning she asked Sister Georgia about a tea she’d made in years past for Vista, who also slept poorly.

  Sister Georgia pulled a dusty old book out of a trunk behind her loom. “The Sisters’ ledger book,” she said, smiling. “Sister Mary passed it along to me before she died.”

  Such a puzzle of a woman. At times, like that morning, she could look sweet and grandmotherly, like one of the old women Mary Elizabeth cleaned for back in Richmond, except for the laced-up boots and the peculiar bonnet on her head. Other times there was a fierceness to her, a fire in her eyes that looked to Mary Elizabeth like anger, though Maze said she didn’t think Sister Georgia was angry anymore. She had been, once, Maz
e said. But not now.

  That morning, all gentle sweetness, the old woman invited the girls to sit next to her at the table while she turned the pages of the Sisters’ ledger book. Inside were lists of weekly duties and notes on what was planted where from a century before, along with pages of recipes and herbal remedies, all written in fading ink and in a crabbed handwriting that was barely legible.

  But Sister Georgia had no trouble reading it. “Quince preserves,” she read out. “Sarsaparilla tea. Remember a few drops of rosewater in apple pies and also to bathe an aching head. A poultice of calendula and parsley for hives, wounds, or palsy. The dried tops of thyme for the croup.” She stopped abruptly and quickly turned the page after reading only the words “For Sisters who have erred.”

  “Wait a minute,” Maze called out then, turning the page back. “What was that?”

  She pulled the book closer and peered closely at the page. “For sisters who have erred, try this tea before retiring.” She looked up at Sister Georgia quizzically for a moment, then turned back to the page.

  “Root of liverwort,” she read slowly, gradually deciphering the letters. “Boiling water. Castor oil. Night … nightshade. Nightshade! That’s deadly, isn’t it, Georgia? Didn’t you tell me nightshade’s poisonous?”

  Slowly something dawned on them, on both Maze and Mary Elizabeth. They looked at each other, and their eyes grew wide. What else could it mean for a celibate sister to have “erred”?

  Maze sat back in her chair and looked at Sister Georgia. “You mean they drank this tea to try to kill themselves?”

  Sister Georgia pulled the book back in front of her at the table, turning a few more pages with her big, stiff fingers. “Well, not themselves, I imagine, no.”

  Over in the kitchen, where she was shelling peas, Vista gave a nasty little laugh. “All kinds of goin’s-on here that you won’t find in the official history books,” she said, shaking her head.

  The two girls stared at each other, openmouthed. But Georgia had gone back to reading recipes, seemingly unperturbed. “Here it is,” she said, pulling her little wire glasses up on her nose and leaning closer. “‘To aid digestion, and sleep.’ I’d forgotten we used valerian, Vista. There’s some growing in the old kitchen garden.” With that she stood up from the table and picked up a basket and a knife in the kitchen.

  Ready to vanish again, Mary Elizabeth thought, and she rose to follow Maze, who was already out the door behind Sister Georgia.

  “So that was a tea for getting rid of pregnancies?” Maze was calling after Sister Georgia. She practically had to run to keep up with her.

  “So you mean some of the sisters were …?”

  Here Sister Georgia stopped and looked at Maze. The look on her face was inscrutable, at least to Mary Elizabeth. After that they walked more slowly, and Maze asked no more questions.

  But then everything about Sister Georgia seemed inscrutable to Mary Elizabeth. When she wasn’t out wandering or roaming or worshipping, or whatever it was she did, and when Vista was actually home in the Sisters’ Shop “caring for” Georgia—though all that seemed to mean was cooking an evening meal that the old woman only picked at—the two women seemed to spend most of their time arguing.

  Constantly, and about everything, Maze said. When to plant peas and potatoes, for instance; Vista still went by what she called holler logic: aboveground plants at the new moon, root crops when the moon was on the wane. And furthermore, one should always plant, she said, by the signs of the zodiac, sowing when the signs were in the neck, breast, loins, or feet. Thunder in February meant frost in May. The first call of the katydid meant a killing frost in exactly three months.

  Georgia called those ideas mountain nonsense, even though Vista’s gardens always did well, as well as Sister Mary’s, she had to admit. Vista’s answer was to remind Georgia that she talked regularly with the spirits of dead Shakers—Mother Ann, Sister Mary, and Brother Benjamin, dead nearly forty years now, and also the mysterious Sister Daphna, “black as coal,” whom she’d read about in the early Pleasant Hill Shakers’ Spiritual Journals.

  “Why do you reckon they’ve all decided to come back here and talk to you?” Vista would ask, and Sister Georgia would only smile, saying nothing.

  Late one morning Maze dragged Mary Elizabeth along an overgrown path up a hill at the other edge of town, to a clearing she called Holy Sinai’s Plain, to see what Vista was talking about.

  “She comes here every day at noon,” Maze said, “to have her Shaker worship. When it’s cold or raining she’ll go into the meetinghouse, but there’s hardly room in there anymore, now that the Goodwill’s usin’ it for storage.”

  “How much room does one person need to worship in?” Mary Elizabeth asked. And how do you go about doing it by yourself, without a preacher? she thought besides.

  “Just wait,” Maze said. “You’ll see.”

  It was unlike any other version of getting the spirit Mary Elizabeth had ever seen or heard about. Certainly unlike anything she’d seen at her daddy’s church. As she and Maze reached the top of the hill that day, they heard Sister Georgia before they saw her—her feet, in those high, tightly laced boots from a different century, pounding out a rhythm to go along with the clapping of her hands.

  They sat on a big flat rock to watch her. “I’ve been comin’ here to watch her since I was a kid,” Maze whispered. “Since before Vista and I moved in with her. All the kids in Shakertown used to come and watch. You’d think they’d’ve laughed at her, but they didn’t. It’s funny how she had that effect on everybody. Nobody ever laughed, nobody even made a sound. We all just watched, and when she was finished she’d come over and give us all hugs, and then she’d pull candy or cookies out of her pockets for all of us.”

  Now Sister Georgia was twirling in wider and wider circles, her arms extended. She hummed a strange little tune, stamping her foot at regular intervals, and she looked far younger than her nearly ninety years. Her face glowed with a kind of happiness that felt intimate and strange—almost uncomfortable to watch. Mary Elizabeth felt she had to look away, but when she glanced over at Maze she saw that she was smiling, her own eyes closed now, her face glowing, too, from sweat maybe, but also with what looked like joy.

  Maze opened her eyes to see Mary Elizabeth watching her. “You know, M. E.,” she said, her voice urgent, startlingly clear and close, “for a long time I thought about signing that covenant, too. I know you’ll think it’s strange, but if I hadn’t met Harris, I believe I might have done it.” She looked back at Sister Georgia. “When I got a little older, I started comin’ up here to worship with her sometimes. There really are spirits up here, M. E. There’ve been times when I’ve heard the voice of Mother Ann.”

  Maze told her more about the Shakers that week—about their founder, Mother Ann Lee, who’d joined with a group of former Quakers back in England in the 1700s. They shook and danced when they worshipped, and people took to calling them “shaking Quakers,” and eventually just Shakers. They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.

  Mother Ann had visions, Maze said. She discovered, in one of those visions, that Christ would come again, this time in female form. Eventually her followers would claim that female form was Mother Ann’s.

  A group of them came from England and settled in upstate New York. Their missionaries headed west, bringing in converts and setting up more Shaker communities, including the one at Pleasant Hill. At its peak, around 1830, there were nearly five hundred Shakers living there. They opposed slavery and were pacifists. They gave up all their worldly goods. They continued to dance as part of their worship. And they were celibate, living together as brothers and sisters.

  By the time Sister Georgia signed the covenant, in 1911, there were only a handful of Shakers left at Pleasant Hill. “But just imagine,” Georgia often said to Maze, “how it was back then—five hundred of us! Singing, worshipping, living in peace, free from the greed and violence of the wider
world.”

  And Maze had imagined it. She’d imagined it happening then, in 1830. And she’d imagined it happening, somehow, again. She’d even heard the voice of Mother Ann.

  “Good Lord, Maze,” Mary Elizabeth said when Maze told her that; she couldn’t stop herself. “What did Mother Ann have to tell you? And how in the world did you know it was her?” She was sweating heavily now, too. Was it the heat, she wondered, that was making her feel light-headed, almost sick?

  “It’s hard to explain,” Maze said, and she closed her eyes again. “She told me to listen for a true voice. And somehow I just knew it was her.”

  Listen for a true voice? What in the world did that mean? It was all too much, Mary Elizabeth felt, too foreign and too strange, and soon she felt not just sick but angry. Did she even know this girl who’d brought her here? This girl who’d lived with her for nearly a year, made her think she was a normal girl, brushed away her tears and touched her like a lover, then given herself completely to a man who was not her husband, a man she’d only just met.

  “And anyway, aren’t you too far gone now to ever be a pure Shaker sister?” Mary Elizabeth said then. It came out like a cough, or a growl. “Or were you planning on being one of those ‘sisters who have erred’?”

  Maze looked at her, her eyes filled with something that looked to Mary Elizabeth like pity. That made her angrier still.

  “Well I’m not plannin’ to get pregnant anytime soon, M. E., if that’s what you mean,” Maze said. “We’re bein’ careful about that. But I don’t know if I’m too much of a sinner now or not. Sometimes I think Georgia’s about done with all those old rules.” She looked back at the old woman, who had lowered her arms and stopped her spinning. “And anyway, Mary Elizabeth, I’m not sure why you’re so eager to tell me what a sinner I am. All that godly Berea talk about sin and bein’ true to the will of God and all—are you gonna try and tell me you still go along with all that?”