When she got to Pleasant Hill she couldn’t believe how much it had changed—all mowed and trimmed, with fresh paint on all the houses and buildings and not a soul in sight. She made her way to the Sisters’ Shop and found Harris Whitman there, loading pieces of Sister Georgia’s loom into the back of his pickup. He looked older than she remembered, with lines at the corners of his eyes now, but it suited him, she thought; he truly was a handsome man. He and Maze and the baby were moving back to his old apartment in Berea, he told her, for the time being.
“No place there for a loom this size, though,” he said. “We’ll just have to store it for now.”
Mary Elizabeth thought, with a pang, of the draft for a baby blanket she’d taken two years before. Taken and burned, in fact. She’d thought of it early in the morning, as she’d packed her bag, and she wondered if Maze had started again, with a new pattern, and finished that blanket eventually.
Now Harris stepped down from the pickup and walked over to give her a hug. “They’re already up there,” he said. “I said I’d walk up with you when you got here.”
When they reached the top of the hill, everything was bathed in a white-gold light—the worn ground, the circle of oaks and alders, the pair of tall firs, all of it the way Mary Elizabeth remembered it, and all of it glowing. And there, on the wide rock where Mary Elizabeth and Maze had sat to watch Sister Georgia at her worship, was Maze’s baby girl. Little Marthie, a year old now, with a few wispy blond curls and dark eyes like her daddy’s. She was wriggling free from the arms of her grandmother, Vista, who laughed and ran after her.
When she saw Mary Elizabeth, Vista swept up the baby and came over to her. “It’s good to see you, Mary Elizabeth,” she said and held out her hand. She wore a trim pair of pedal-pushers and a pretty blue blouse, and her hair was neatly permed and set.
“Hello, Miz Jansen,” Mary Elizabeth said, taking her hand, and then the child shook herself free again and tried to run, and then Maze was suddenly there, there and hugging her tight and crying on her neck, and then, to her own surprise, Mary Elizabeth was crying, too.
“I’m so glad you came,” Maze whispered, still clutching her tight. “I thought I’d never see you here again.”
Later, while Maze gathered together the things she’d brought up the hill for the memorial, Mary Elizabeth held Marthie’s little hands while she kept on walking, in endless circles, around a deep hole Harris Whitman had dug in the middle of the clearing. Maze had filled a wooden box with various things of Georgia’s—a ring that had been her mother’s, some old books of poetry, several of the old Shaker Spiritual Journals, and, Mary Elizabeth saw, peering into the box, the Sisters’ ledger book.
“No one but Sister Georgia knew about this sacred place called Holy Sinai’s Plain,” Maze said as they gathered around the box and the newly dug hole. “And if we can help it, no one ever will.” Then she read a prayer from one of the dusty old books, and a part of a poem, Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” that she said Georgia had loved.
“‘On with the dance!’” Maze read, her long blond braid turning copper in the late-afternoon sun. “‘Let joy be unconfin’d! No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet, to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.’” Tears streamed down her face as she read.
When she’d finished reading, Maze closed the box and fastened its clasp, then set it down inside the deep hole. Phil stepped forward then, to help Harris fill the hole with the shoveled dirt. He waved to Mary Elizabeth, and she waved back to him, and then to Sarabeth, who’d arrived while Maze was reading the prayer and now stood behind her, watching. Only then did it occur to Mary Elizabeth to wonder where Daniel was. Later, while they ate ham sandwiches and potato salad in Vista’s tidy little house in Harrodsburg, she asked Maze about him.
“He enlisted three months ago,” Maze said as she wiped Marthie’s mouth with a napkin, then handed her over to Vista. “He didn’t tell us until just a few weeks ago, right before he left for basic training.” She sat back in her chair and gazed out the window at the day’s fading light. “He said it was the only responsible thing to do,” she said, then turned back to face Mary Elizabeth. “I don’t know. Daniel had funny notions about responsibility. Maybe even a death wish, Harris thinks, but I don’t think that’s it.” She shrugged, then smiled sadly at Mary Elizabeth. “It hasn’t been a very happy month around here, M. E.,” she said.
Vista piled up their empty plates and carried them to the kitchen on one arm, lifting Marthie onto her hip with the other.
“Your mama looks good,” Mary Elizabeth said, watching her. “Guess she’s happy to be living in this new house.”
Maze shrugged. “I don’t know, M. E.” She watched her mother collect more plates and cups, then turned back to Mary Elizabeth. “She loves Marthie, and she’s finally got her own house and her yellow kitchen and all that, but I’m not sure any of that’s made her happy, really.”
She smiled, then laughed, remembering something.
“She doesn’t really fit in here in Harrodsburg, you know, and I don’t think she really wants to. She can’t keep her mouth shut. Those county Preservation Society people had a funeral for Sister Georgia in the meetinghouse not long after she died. It was all wrong for Georgia, just a regular old Baptist service—she would have hated it. After the service, they had cake and coffee in the Trustees’ Office, and some blue-haired woman said something about how seeing those flower children from Berea move in must’ve been what killed the poor old woman. Vista made a noise like a snake when she heard that, and then she said, clear as day, ‘What killed her is what y’all are doin’ to this place.’”
Maze shook her head. “I’ll tell you, M. E., both those women—Sister Georgia and my mama—just kept on surprising me these last few months.” There were tears in her eyes as she reached for Mary Elizabeth’s hand and peered at her closely, probing. “And why haven’t you told me anything about your mama for so long, M. E.?” she said. “How is she doin’?”
At that Mary Elizabeth looked at her watch and cleared her throat. “That’ll have to wait till another time, Maze,” she said as she stood and drank a last sip of lemonade from her cup.
In the kitchen, Mary Elizabeth found old Uncle Shade, skinny and hobbling, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, coughing into the sleeve of his sweater. He offered her a glass of bourbon, but she declined. “I still have to drive to Stanford tonight,” she told him.
Before she left, she pulled from her purse the little Shaker bonnet she’d taken two years before. She’d thought, earlier, of sneaking back up to Holy Sinai’s Plain while the others were heading back down the path and quickly burying it there herself, however shallowly, alongside Maze’s box. But she’d decided against that, and now she brought it over to the corner of Vista’s living room, where Maze sat in a rocking chair, nursing Marthie.
Marthie craned her neck to look at Mary Elizabeth but kept her mouth on Maze’s nipple the whole time, working away. Mary Elizabeth laughed and held the stiff little bonnet out for the child to take in her hands. Then she reached for Maze’s face, smoothing her hair with both her hands, then bending to kiss the top of her head and quickly turning to leave before she could see her friend’s tears.
Sister
1965
Sister Georgia went to the river’s edge to die. She was ninety-three years old by the clock of this world, barely a heartbeat, the blink of an eye in the realm of the spirit where she had chiefly dwelled.
Her life only one brief moment. Fifty years and then some at Pleasant Hill, yet she remembered the smell of camphor in her father’s house as if she’d risen there that morning, as if the smell dwelled, still, on her clothing, the skin of her hands.
She brought along her balsam pillow, its faint scent of pine the smell of woodlands and of longing, and that was where she laid her head. Settling, as if into sleep—the settling of a weary body into well-earned sleep being one of her life’s purest pleasures. Smell of balsam, also, sweet-sour
taste of berries, little Maze handing her bouquets of weeds, the heft of the baby, Marthie, at her hip or on her lap. The softening, finally, of that stubborn woman Vista, who had, at Marthie’s birth, finally let something loose, like air, like breath she’d held since her own daughter was born.
Then suddenly, in Georgia’s ears, these words:
For seventy years and upwards
It has been my happy lot
To dwell with pure relations
Upon this sacred spot—
Sister Hortency’s poem. Had she sung the words or only thought them? The sun was warm on her head, leaves stirring in a soft breeze, the river brown and slow, occasionally a bird’s brief song trilling above her.
And then: Lady Mar’gret she mounted on her milk-white steed, Lord William his dappled gray.… And
Three times he kissed her snowy white breast
Three times he kissed her chin;
But when he kissed her clay-cold lips
His heart was broke within.
She heard it clearly and knew it immediately—that purest tenor, Tobias Jewell, singing to her below the magnolia tree.
She had spent fifty years hiding, she knew now, from the black-coated men who drove the engines of the world. Youth—she and Tobias, Maze and her young man and their friends—so powerless in the face of their laws and their wars. Yet children were born, Marthie among them, faces without masks and hearts still pure, their futures unknown.
One life only a single heartbeat. One blink of an eye. What was sin, or the flesh, in a vastness like this?
She heard the wind and the river. She could see Tobias Jewell’s eyes quite clearly. She closed her own eyes and breathed in the smell of balsam, then sank into her well-earned sleep.
Pilgrim and Stranger
1965
The morning after Sister Georgia’s memorial, Mary Elizabeth and Clarisa Pool were driving along narrow, rutted country roads outside Stanford. Clarisa had to be in Richmond for work at nine. When they turned onto the dirt road they were seeking, the only sound was the hum of the engine as the car bumped along. Nothing moved in the few tumbledown cabins they passed but a few chickens in the yards. A dog barely lifted its head as they passed a cabin about half a mile after the turn onto Black Pool Road, and Clarisa pointed out her open window to say, “That was your grandparents’ place.”
Mary Elizabeth glanced and nodded but kept her eyes on what there was of a road. When it finally petered out just before a stand of trees along a creek, Clarisa signaled for Mary Elizabeth to pull alongside the old fence to their right.
They stepped out of the car to the sound of one lonely bird singing. Beyond the fencerow was a field of clover, and the grass they stepped through was wet with dew. The sky was busy with gray clouds, rain about to fall any minute, and the green, living smell of the morning was too much suddenly, filling Mary Elizabeth’s lungs until they hurt, until her heart was almost breaking. All she wanted was to get back in the car.
But Clarisa, even heavier now than she had been a year before, was already walking ahead of her, moving with dogged effort and concentration toward the row of trees, and Mary Elizabeth made herself fall into step behind her.
Then Clarisa stopped and pointed at a broad stump on the ground to her right. Its wood was gray, parts bleached almost white, and it was covered with tangled green vines.
“That’s it,” Clarisa said. “That’s where it was. They cut that tree down two days after she found him. Thirty years ago now.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her uniform and wiped her eyes and face.
Mary Elizabeth felt her knees start to give way, then straightened herself and took a breath. Strong and good, she thought—unbidden words—and she shook her head to banish them. The air was damp and humid, warm already, and sweat was rising on her forehead and on her sides. What was this thing in front of her? What did it mean for her to be here now, on some green back road deep in the Kentucky hills, trickle of stream down below, land no one bothered to farm now, grass and vine and clover without memory of that day? And a tree stump, also, she thought, without a memory of its own.
She felt she ought to say something but couldn’t think of what. “Hard to imagine that old stump as a full-grown tree with a body hanging from it,” she said, surprised by the flatness of her voice.
“Not really,” Clarisa said, standing there beside her, looking ahead at the sky. “It’s not hard to imagine that at all.”
Later, after she dropped Clarisa Pool at the Stanford hospital, Mary Elizabeth grew uncontrollably cold, shaking as she drove. At the edge of town, she pulled to the side of the road, put her head down on the wheel, and wailed.
She didn’t leave for Martinique the next day after all. Instead, two weeks later, she followed Marcus Dyer to Paris, where he knew some other musicians he could play with, and where he thought he might just try to wait out this goddamned war.
Sarah
1963
One of them came to clean the house.
One of them took in the wash.
That same one fried an extra chicken the way George liked it every week and brought it to the house with some skillet bread and collards.
All those women crawling around the house like ants. Back when she was still living there, the only thing Sarah wouldn’t let them touch was the piano. When she heard one playing a note or two, hitting the keys while she dusted, maybe, that roused Sarah Cox up and out of her bed fast, gathering a robe around her waist and running downstairs to slam the lid of the thing closed, hard.
That gave them something to talk about for months.
She felt proud of Mary Elizabeth when she wouldn’t play for that room full of white men, but then sorry when the house grew quiet, the top of the piano covered with a thick layer of dust. She surprised herself by feeling glad to see the young friend who came for tea, the one with the strange name who asked her all those questions.
Why are you asking me about all these things? she’d wanted to ask the girl, though she tried to smile and give the shortest answers she could. Why don’t you ask my daughter? But then Mary Elizabeth wouldn’t know the answers. She knew next to nothing about Sarah’s life before she was born. George had seen to that. Better to protect her from all that, he said.
So let’s have your friend stay! We can find her a dress among Paulie’s old things—let’s get down that old trunk. And you go on to that dance with her, sure!
She tried to be the way a college girl’s mother ought to be. But Mary Elizabeth said no, she’d rather stay home. Home with her. Her and all the ants crawling around that house, hoping to know their business.
Trouble come from music again. That was what her own mama would have said. Then that tea the girl brought home, whatever in God’s name it was, the sweet way it made her head go foggy and her neck get limp, that easing down deep into a sleep that swallowed everything. As she drifted, she saw Robert and she heard his voice, still calling her. She spoke back in whispers until the darkness took her. But then the summer ended and the tea was gone, and Mary Elizabeth went back to college.
Gone again. No more piano, she’d said, never again.
Sarah tried again, but this time it was George who came and cut her down.
Then the busy ants were out of her sight and out of her hearing. Just old folks then, and the crazy screamers and mutterers—like her, she realized all of a sudden, and she would have laughed if she’d had the energy or strength.
She had no energy for anything now. She only waited for Robert to tell her what to do.
Clarisa Pool came every day. Yes, she remembered her, she’d tried to nod and smile. Old Win and Annie Pool’s littlest one, a girl after all those boys, running after her brothers by the time she was four.
Sarah tried to smile at her. She’d been a skinny little girl with pigtails, and now here was this big woman in front of her, with tears in her eyes, eyes so deep and full of something. Love and understanding. The words came to her from somewhere—from George,
she realized, from the Bible, the words he said every Sunday at the end of services: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” But here in this woman’s eyes was something else. Love. Love that passeth all understanding.
One day Clarisa Pool took her hand and put something there, a little bottle wrapped in a handkerchief. She put it there, and then she wrapped Sarah’s fingers around it and squeezed her hand closed with both of hers. She looked deep into Sarah’s eyes with her own eyes full of love that passed all human understanding.
“These are for you, for if you need them,” she said. “You don’t have to go the way he did.”
Pilgrim and Stranger
1968
Mary Elizabeth did not think of Paris as a city of light. For her, it was a city of shadow and rain, clouds of smoke above a plaintive saxophone, teasing notes on a piano, soft brushes against the top of Marcus’s drums. Slow and smooth like that, a ripple of pleasure under the skin.
They’d parted ways not long after she arrived, but Mary Elizabeth stayed on in Paris for two more years, making her way and slowly, quietly, beginning to play the piano again. Here and there, in one friend’s apartment or another, in the studio of a teacher who became her lover for a while. She followed that man to New York, another blue-gray city, and when he left to return to Paris, she stayed.
Her apartment, on the eighth floor of a gray building in upper Manhattan, was stripped and bare—white walls, wood floors, and a rich, dark rug from North Africa, sent to her from Paris by Marcus Dyer—who, she knew when it arrived, was hoping to worm his way back into her heart, not to mention her New York apartment. There was one piece of furniture in her front room, by a window that looked out onto Morningside Park: a baby grand piano. A used Steinway that had been a parting gift from her lover.
Most nights in her blue-gray New York City, Mary Elizabeth sat at that piano. She played Debussy again, and Chopin. And she started trying to tease her own songs from the keys, a little like blues, a little like the old hymns. In the morning, her fingers twitched and tingled the way they had years before, at Berea. In that other lifetime.
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