Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  She handed Georgia the open ledger book, with Mary Elizabeth’s letter on top of it. Two days later, Sister Georgia handed her a packet made from waxed paper, full of the tea.

  “Use it all and brew one big pot,” she said. “Have her drink just one big cupful first.”

  Maze had it, and she knew how to use it. But that didn’t mean she planned to.

  While she sat talking, about everything she could think of, the light in the crowded living room of that big old house turned dim. Neither Mary Elizabeth nor Maze stood to turn on a light. Before long the kitchen door opened, and in walked Octavia Price, in a blaze of light and color. She took one look at Maze and invited her and Mary Elizabeth into the kitchen for some soup and bread, which Maze accepted gratefully. She’d brought plenty of food on the bus—that, the tea, and one change of clothes were the only things in her suitcase. But now she was starving again, and tired, and happy for the interruption.

  Halfway through her bowl of soup, Mary Elizabeth excused herself and ran upstairs. When she returned to the table a moment later, she pushed her bowl away weakly; her hand shook as she took a sip of water.

  Octavia took a long drink of water from her own glass, looking over its rim from one girl to the other as she drank. Then she set the glass down slowly and held her hand on it for a while before looking over at Mary Elizabeth.

  “I know someone to call if you’d like me to,” she said, her voice measured and clear. “I can make the call first thing tomorrow and get you scheduled as soon as he can see you.” Then she stood up from the table, gathered the bowls in one pile, and put them into the sink. “Your friend can sleep in the room next to yours,” she said on her way out of the kitchen.

  Mary Elizabeth seemed lighter after that. Still sick, but lighter. But as Maze gathered ice water and a cloth for bathing Mary Elizabeth’s head, Octavia’s words slowly sank in, and she shivered with cold terror.

  Up in Mary Elizabeth’s room, she tried small talk again, at first. Then that “It’ll get better”—the wrong thing to say, of course. She couldn’t stand to see Mary Elizabeth looking at her that way. She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at her friend and said it.

  “You could have this baby with us, at Pleasant Hill.”

  Still Mary Elizabeth stared at her, her eyes grown even wider.

  “I know Sister Georgia would welcome you, and we’d all be there to help. You’d be part of what we’re tryin’ to do there, Mary Elizabeth, what we’re tryin’ to build.” This she was less certain of, but she said it anyway. The truth was that Phil and Sarabeth were already talking about leaving, and Daniel was more distant and secretive than ever.

  Mary Elizabeth closed her own eyes then and shook her head. “Maze,” she said, “please don’t start.” But she did start, both of them started, and then it was like they were right back at Berea, climbing the Devil’s Slide or Fat Man’s Misery, breathing hard around their words.

  It’s different at Pleasant Hill, M. E. It’s nothing like Berea, and what we’re makin’ there won’t be like anything else in the state of Kentucky.

  Stop it, Maze.

  You never even gave Daniel a chance, M. E.

  A sharp, short laugh then, and a roll of her eyes. And I suppose Daniel’s ready and waiting down there at Pleasant Hill for me and this black baby of mine to show up.

  Is that what you think? You think you and your baby wouldn’t be welcome there because you’re black?

  Stop it now, Maze. Stop. I have classes to finish, don’t you see that? I have plans, and they aren’t the same as yours. Why can’t you understand that? Why haven’t you ever been able to understand that? ‘Wishing you were here with us’ at the end of all your letters … when did I ever give you any idea that I wanted to be there in your little utopian homestead with you?

  That silenced Maze. She heard Mary Elizabeth then, heard the resolve in her voice, the anger. Maze knew it was pointless to argue with her friend, had known it all along, really.

  “All right, then,” she said. “All right, M. E.” She got up from the edge of the bed to hide her tears.

  “I’m sorry, Maze,” she heard Mary Elizabeth say, though she didn’t sound particularly sorry. “It’s just that I’m tired, I’m sick and tired and scared to death, and I have a lot I need to do.” She sat up from the bed, steadying herself for just a moment before gathering a pile of books and notebooks from the floor.

  “I’m going downstairs to study,” she said. On her way to the stairs, she pointed to the room next door. “There’s a bed for you in there,” she said. “I believe it’s all made up.”

  “M. E.? Just one more thing.”

  “Yes, Maze. What?” Like she was talking to a bothersome child.

  “I saw Miz Price has a piano. Would you play the piano for me sometime before I go? Even just a few hymns?”

  “I don’t play the piano anymore, Maze. I don’t have time. I don’t even remember any of those old hymns.” Mary Elizabeth started down the stairs, loaded down with books and papers, holding the rail to steady herself.

  Later, while Mary Elizabeth studied, Maze took a pillow and blanket out of the room next door and arranged a place to sleep on the floor of Mary Elizabeth’s room. She hadn’t been able to sleep comfortably on a bed for weeks. In the morning she woke to the sound of a piece of paper being slid beneath Mary Elizabeth’s door, inches from her face.

  “Wednesday, 9 A.M.,” it said. “Unmarked office on Halsted Street. I can take you there.”

  Maze sat up, the prickling fear moving up her sore neck. When Mary Elizabeth opened her eyes a few minutes later, Maze handed her the note.

  “Don’t do this, M. E.,” she said. “I can make you the tea tonight.”

  When Mary Elizabeth left for class, Maze walked to the corner and found a pay phone to call Vista. Harris had gotten the pickup running again, Vista told her; he’d come get her when she was ready.

  “Tell him I should be ready by noon tomorrow,” she said, and she hung up the phone and cried.

  The tea was dark, so dark it looked black against the red clay of the mug Maze handed her, and its odd, pungent smell reminded Mary Elizabeth of the front waiting room in old Doc Samson’s house in Richmond when she was a child—a mix of earth and mint and chemical smells that seemed both to comfort and frighten her when her mama took her there for a sudden spell of diarrhea or the croup.

  She drank the tea then, after a full day of classes and two rounds of vomiting and a supper of saltine crackers, at a diner down the street with Maze. But she drank it more on Maze’s behalf than her own. By that time Mary Elizabeth was back in the world she’d come to know and want: a world of rational decisions and clear-cut medical procedures and getting on with business, a world with no room for Shaker voodoo like that tea she’d thought she wanted only a week before. There was a surer way of handling this problem than the mountain magic Maze was offering her, and she’d been foolish not to see that Octavia would be as clear-headed and straightforward about this as she was about everything else.

  But there’d be no harm in drinking the thing, she thought; the worst it could do was put her to sleep, like the old valerian tea, and she was exhausted from the last day and a half with Maze. She’d already hurt Maze enough, she decided, and she choked down the whole bitter mug as she went over the notes from her European history class. Eventually the words began to run together on the page, and she dragged herself to her bed.

  She did sleep then, for four hours straight, waking only to change into her nightgown and try to do some more studying for the exam she had the next day. She woke the following morning to a stabbing pain in her belly and thighs and a bloodied sheet, weaker and more exhausted than she’d ever felt in her life.

  Maze stripped the bed, crying quietly the whole time, while Mary Elizabeth sat on the floor watching, hardly believing her eyes. Later Maze gathered up the sheets to take to a Laundromat near the campus. Mary Elizabeth walked to her class alongside Maze, leaning on her friend
to steady herself and ignoring the stares of passersby.

  At the door to the classroom where Mary Elizabeth would take her exam, Maze hugged her against her big belly, laughing through her tears as the baby gave a kick that both of them felt.

  “M. E., why don’t you let me get you back home and help you back into bed?” she said. But Mary Elizabeth said no, she could not afford to miss that exam.

  “Good-bye, Maze,” she whispered weakly. “And thank you.”

  After her exam, Mary Elizabeth walked gingerly back to Octavia’s house, stopping every fifty yards or so to rest. Though she’d known Maze would be gone, it saddened her to walk into her empty room. But she was too exhausted to feel anything for long. She climbed into her bed and slept for the rest of the day.

  That night she told Octavia that she had lost the baby that morning. So they would not need to go to the office at the unnamed address on Halsted Street.

  Octavia only sighed, then nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “Are you doing all right now? Do you need to see a doctor just the same?” When Mary Elizabeth said no, Octavia turned back to the stack of papers she was grading.

  But Mary Elizabeth lingered behind her and finally mustered the courage to ask, “Did Marcus tell you? Is that how you knew?”

  Octavia looked at her then, a little pityingly at first, Mary Elizabeth thought, but she quickly grew business-like.

  “Why do you think he hasn’t been around?” she said. “I told him to take his irresponsible self somewhere else.” Pointing her pen at Mary Elizabeth, she said, “Don’t even stop now, Mary Elizabeth. Move on. It’s what men do all the time—you might as well learn to start doin’ it yourself.

  “And just be more careful from now on,” she added as Mary Elizabeth turned to leave.

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1965

  Mary Elizabeth did very well on the exam she took the day after she drank the tea “For Sisters who have erred.” She did well on all her exams that year and the following year, and she made plans to go on to do graduate work in anthropology, as her idol and mentor had done. She continued to live in Octavia’s house, and when Marcus Dyer reappeared during her senior year, she slept with him again, a few times, on that narrow, sagging bed on the third floor. It wasn’t the same somehow, though, maybe because she was no longer sharing him with Octavia.

  Or maybe because she’d lost the sense, both horrifying and thrilling at the same time, of having a dirty, sullied soul that was making her give in to such urges. Neither a sullied one nor a pure one—despite what Sister Georgia might have thought. It was clear to Mary Elizabeth, who had barely spoken to her father and had banished any thoughts of her mother from her mind, that she had no soul at all.

  But the summer after she graduated, as she got ready to join Octavia and several other graduate students for fieldwork in the French West Indies, she got a call from Maze, who told her Sister Georgia had died.

  “She’s already buried in the Shaker cemetery,” Maze said. “But I want to have a separate memorial for her, up at Holy Sinai’s Plain. I wondered if you might come.”

  She paused, and when Mary Elizabeth said nothing, she added quietly, “I’d like for you to meet our baby Marthie, too.”

  And suddenly, for reasons she did not let herself consider, Mary Elizabeth found herself longing to be in Kentucky one more time. “I’ll find a way to get there,” she said.

  It hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. But still Maze had loved the brief moment of their experiment at Pleasant Hill. Patching the old roof and digging and planting and chasing errant chickens, swimming in the river in the late afternoons. Harris and Phil and Daniel made good farmers, she told them; they looked handsome with their tanned skin and untamed hair. She and Sarabeth drank beer after beer while they canned tomatoes one hot August afternoon, laughing over the two big pots of jars they ruined. In the winter they piled on layers of clothes to keep warm, and soon she knew she was pregnant. She’d promised to share her life with Harris without the slightest reservation; he was the one thing she knew about for sure. That was all their little experiment at Pleasant Hill had been, just one brief moment, and she could see that now. Sister Georgia helped her see it that way, and to feel better about it somehow.

  “Your life is just beginning,” she said when Maze came to her, crying and handing over the squirming girl Marthie for Georgia to hold. “For all of us,” Georgia told her, “our time here has only been one brief moment.”

  The head of the county preservation society, a tall man named Samuel Dibbet who was sweating in his buttoned-up collar and tie, had arrived early that morning, Friday the 25th of June, 1965, to tell them they had one month to vacate the premises. Those were his words: “Vacate the premises.” He added that a month was generous, in his opinion, for a bunch of war resisters who were living in sin.

  Maze didn’t tell Sister Georgia everything Samuel Dibbet had said that morning. The county owned the land now, he told them, since there was only one frail and feeble and clearly demented Shaker left. Arrangements had been made for her at the nursing home in Harrodsburg. The few other families left in Shakertown would be leaving soon, too. They should go back and ask their long-haired professors at that college about something called eminent domain if they needed more of an explanation.

  When he drove away, Phil tried to make a joke about Dr. Wendt being bald, but no one laughed. Maze went inside the old inn to nurse the baby; then she walked over to the Sisters’ Shop to tell Georgia.

  They were going to make it into a place for tourists. Someone had already come out to ask Sister Georgia for any old Shaker records or artifacts she might have. “You can have whatever the young people don’t want when I’m dead,” Georgia had told the woman and sent her away.

  They were already at work on most of the buildings. The Brethren’s Shop and the Trustees’ Office and the West Family Dwelling House had all been scraped and painted, the old reds, grays, and browns replaced with bright whites and pale yellows. For weeks now, work crews had pulled in early every morning, the roar of their engines and the buzz and whine of their saws piercing the clear air. The floors of the meetinghouse were polished and gleaming, the walls painted a clean, new white, the trim a muted blue. All the bundles of clothes and boxes of pots and pans that belonged to the Goodwill were gone, as was the old upright piano; the space inside was bare now, except for a row of benches along each wall—the way the preservation society members had determined the meetinghouse had looked during the Shaker community’s most active period, more than a hundred years before.

  Maze had to admit that it all looked beautiful. “You ought to go see the meetinghouse,” she told Sister Georgia. “You could go in and have your worship in there.” Maze still had the key, which, she’d discovered, still worked.

  But Georgia refused to go see any of the restored buildings, even though every day through the spring and early summer, some other person from the preservation society showed up at the Sisters’ Shop and tried to get her interested. Since the winter she’d rarely left the Sisters’ Shop, and when the weather turned warm again in April she felt too tired, she told Maze, for the trek to Holy Sinai’s Plain. She didn’t feel the need to worship there, or anywhere else now, she said, and Maze didn’t push her to say more.

  But a week after Samuel Dibbet showed up and gave them a month to leave, Sister Georgia walked out of the Sisters’ Shop with new energy, almost a spring in her step, carrying an old Shaker pillow made of a stitched-up square of muslin filled with the needles from a balsam fir.

  She found Harris Whitman picking beans in the kitchen garden and asked him to help her walk down to a spot along the river she’d been remembering the past few days. She held his arm but hardly needed to, he said later; she’d scrambled along the path to the river like a young girl.

  When they got to the spot she had in mind, Harris helped her get settled, seated on the ground, her balsam pillow at her back, leaning on the trunk of a paw-paw tree on the rive
rbank.

  “That’ll do fine,” she said to Harris then. “You can go along back. I’d like to sit here by myself for a spell.”

  Did she need anything? he asked her, puzzled, but she said no, she had a flask of water in her pocket, and she’d be fine. She planned to think a while, maybe to pray. “You might check back in a few hours,” she told him.

  When Maze came to find her a couple of hours later, she thought at first that Sister Georgia was sleeping. She looked so peaceful there, now lying on the ground and curled up like a child, her head on the fragrant pillow. But she was dead, Maze realized before she touched her. Dead at ninety-three, with a funny, knowing little smile on her face. Maze sat down beside her and watched the slow-moving river for a while before she went to get Harris and Phil.

  Mary Elizabeth borrowed Octavia’s car for the trip. In Richmond she drank a cup of coffee with her daddy and Iris Jones, his new wife, in the front room of the little house on Big Hill Road. No time to stay for a meal, she told them; she was due at Sister Georgia’s memorial up at Pleasant Hill in just a couple of hours, this was going to be a whirlwind trip, she had to drive back to Chicago the next day and leave the day after that for Martinique. But it was awfully nice to see them, she said.

  After that it felt to Mary Elizabeth as if she didn’t breathe until she had stepped into the car and started the engine, turned off Big Hill Road onto the highway, opened her window, and exhaled. She breathed all of it out the window then—Iris Jones’s nervous banter, her daddy’s bursting pride that made her want to spit coffee at him. Sarah Cox’s presence no longer visible anywhere in that house, but her ghost there everywhere, everywhere Mary Elizabeth looked.

  She drove fast with the window down, the hot wind blowing in on her, and she breathed in deep gulps of it. At one point it occurred to her to wonder who, if not her daddy, she had accomplished so much for, but she turned on the radio, loud, to get rid of that question.