by Nagle, Pati
Jenny took her turn around the set. The fiddle bow leapt up and down like the music gave it wings. The same wings clapped to Jenny’s shoes. She reached Al and held out her right hand. They circled each other, holding tight, and then she circled with Matt, holding his left hand and letting him hold her gaze. This was her place and her time. When she danced she was more than just Hope and Martin Fletcher’s saucy daughter. She was Jenny all herself, she was pretty, she was strong and she could do anything. The men all lined up to watch her with yearning hearts and every woman’s eyes glowed green with jealousy.
The song darted around the barn and picked up the tumult of pounding boots and swishing cloth. Mr. Cooper called the figures strong and hearty. Jenny slipped to the center of the square and all the others danced around her. She looked up into the faces of the four young men as they circled her and saw the same hungry look in each of them, and she savored it.
But none of their hunger could hold on to her. The music sparked a magic inside her soul. It lent her limbs a grace that made anyone near her look clumsy. With half a thought, she knew Matt, all wooden, tried to match the ease of her motion, and couldn’t. His warm hands touched her, but couldn’t hold her. Sound and movement whirled themselves together in her blood. The sensation carried her straight up to the rafters, so high she didn’t even feel the boards under her feet.
Harry laid down the final chord. Applause and whoops brought Jenny back down to the floor. She gave Matt a saucy eye and Matt just shook his head.
“I’m beat, Jenny Fletcher. What’s more, I’ll swear there’s not a man on God’s earth can hold you to your word.”
“Well, you don’t mind if I try then, Matt?” Holden Caraway put his broad back between Jenny and Matt. “Miss Fletcher?” He held out his arm.
Jenny took it, and was hard pressed not to rush him into the long line that set up for “The Fisher’s Hornpipe.”
Holden put her across from him. Over his shoulder, Jenny saw Tom Hawkins in the shadow of a ridge pole. His dark eyes drank her in, but it was not the familiar hungry look. His eyes just looked soft, and a little sad. His square face was gentle under its tangle of beard. Jenny felt her heart tip.
The music rang free of Harry’s fiddle and the dance took off. Jenny’s heart set itself upright again and lost feeling for anything but the hornpipe. Tom was a good man, but he couldn’t dance to save his soul. Although, she couldn’t help wishing he’d try.
Holden lasted through the Fisher’s Hornpipe and took her round the floor for a hop-step schottish polka, before he admitted he was beat. Kevin Greer stepped on her feet all the way through the “Portland Fancy.” Raphael Spinner danced her firm enough through “Darling Nellie Grey” and the “Money Musk” but couldn’t hold her eyes for the “Weevily Wheat.”
The music stole her so far away, she scarcely remembered whose hands held her to the floor.
The music fell quiet and the dancers broke for refreshments. Raphael scuttled to fetch her a cup of punch. Jenny’s gaze wandered the room while she waited. With a start, she realized she was looking for Tom.
Instead, her gaze found the flint cold shape of Reverend Cook. He was all in grey and looked like a ghost man as he crossed the floor to stand beside her.
“Miss Fletcher.” He stood close enough she could smell the soap all over him. “I was afraid you would be here.”
“It’s a fine evening, isn’t it, Reverend Cook?” she said politely. Her throat itched for the ginger punch and she looked around quick for Raphael.
“Jenny,” he sighed, and all the sorrows of the world were in his face. “I’ve been watching you. Don’t you realize you are going to damn your soul to everlasting torment for your pride and intemperance?” Fire snapped in the preacher’s eyes and his voice rang clearer than the fiddle’s music had. “If you dance to the Devil’s song, it’s him you’ll have to pay!”
“Well,” Jenny met his gaze and matched his tone. “Once I’ve paid the fiddler, I get to pick the tune, don’t I?”
Reverend Cook shied back from this blasphemy and Jenny almost wished she could take it back.
The preacher straightened up again and held out one, bony hand. “Come with me, Jenny. Come now and pray with me for God’s mercy on your wicked soul.”
She looked at his hand, skinny and crooked, and then she looked into his eyes, and she saw the look she knew so well, the look that came to her from the men she danced with.
Hunger. Hunger for her. At last, she understood.
“If you want me, Reverend Cook, you have to dance with me. That’s the bargain I’ve made.”
Reverend Cook looked down at his own hand. A moment later it curled into a fist and for an instant, Jenny thought he was going to strike her.
“I will pray for your soul, Jenny Fletcher.” He turned his back on her. “But I fear the Lord has little mercy for such as you.”
Jenny stood like a stone. She watched him walk out of the barn doors and into the darkness.
When the time came to go home, Jenny had danced with half the men in the barn, and not one of them would take her up a second time. It was the same way at Bess Kale’s wedding, and again at the county fair. Summer travelled by in a riot of green leaves and bright flowers. Only old Mr. MacRory asked her to dance at George Jessup’s christening, and then for just one dance.
Jenny truly didn’t know which was worse, the restless fluttering in her heart when she heard the music and had no partner, or the black looks from atop Reverend Cook’s pulpit and the blacker whispers behind her back.
Eventually, rust spotted the deep green mountains. Jenny put the final tucks into her dress for the harvest dance. No one had asked her, but she held firm to her pride. She’d swallow a hot poker before she let on she felt beat.
In the end, she went in her father’s wagon, sitting beside her sour parents. Her bonnet concealed the disappointment she couldn’t keep off her face.
The party gathered out back of Mose Johnson’s sprawling white house. Not a woman there didn’t have on a brand new dress, all full of lace and flounces. Their men fussed in suits they’d only wear again to get married or buried. All the cakes and pies on the stretch of tables were prize winners. The smell of the pig roasting over the open pit filled up the steady breeze.
Jenny tried to keep herself busy gossiping and helping with the food, but her mind kept skittering to the dance. Along with Harry’s fiddle, there’d be a banjo and a mandolin. She ached to think she might be standing still during all that fine music.
The supper passed without Jenny tasting any of it. When the sun hid itself behind the crooked hills, Mr. Johnson’s slave lit the lamps that hung on poles around the yard. The musicians set themselves down on their stools and began tuning up. Mr. Cooper stood up front, opened his frog mouth and let out, “Choose your partners all for ‘The Wild Irishman.’”
The soles of Jenny’s feet itched as all the young men walked by with other girls on their arms. The yard filled up with squares of couples.
“May I have this dance, Miss Fletcher?”
Ancient Mr. Johnson held out his withered arm. Jenny took it gladly and they walked into place as the side couple in the final square. Right after them, the fifth man, their “Wild Irishman,” stepped into the center of the set.
Jenny had to look twice to be sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks. But no, it was Tom Hawkins who stood there in a new suit the same deep brown as his eyes.
She barely had time to get her jaw closed before the music rang out overhead and Mr. Cooper’s voice started up the rhythmic call.
“Wild Irishman, swing at the head.
Wild Irishman, swing at the foot.
Wild Irishman, swing at the side.
Wild Irishman, swing at the side.”
Tom moved easy as breathing. He swung Meg Carey ’til she giggled and spun her back to her partner just as he turned to take up Laurie Jones. While the grand right and left flowed round him, Jenny saw him looking at her and remembered the barn d
ance in the spring where she’d seen that gentle look before.
Tom swung Tully Price and then turned to Jenny. Her hands were already out for him to grasp. The music carried them around. A breath later, he set her back in her place. He had stepped back into the center before she had time to blink.
The dance had barely finished before folks set up a breathless clamor for another.
Jenny’s gaze hadn’t left Tom. The musicians struck up a new tune. After the first few chords, Jenny recognized the merry “Devil’s Dream.”
Tom took her hand without asking and walked her into place at the head of the line.
“Hands around,” Mr. Cooper sang out. Jenny and Tom circled with the next couple down the line. The music lifted Jenny as soon as they began to move.
“First couple out to the right, and circle four hands round. Gent leave his lady there, go on to the next alone. And circle three. Put that lady on your right, on to the next, and circle four!”
Jenny’s soul soared. The music spun into the movement and raised her clear to the watching stars. But as high as she flew, Tom stayed by her side, his warm, strong hands over hers, his firm stride keeping time with her lilting step.
The final notes drifted off into the night and Jenny stilled her feet. Her hand was still enclosed in Tom’s.
“Do I win, Jenny?” he asked, although every ear in the gathering was turned to them. “Will you have me?”
A hundred emotions swept through Jenny’s soul, surprise, delight, fear at what she’d said and done, and what lay before her now. But memory of her own promise and of Tom’s dancing made only one answer possible.
“I’ll have you, Tom,” she said. As Jenny spoke, though, she caught a glimpse of Tom’s father, Jay Hawkins, and the glare he levelled at her made the breath catch in her throat.
Jay Hawkins was still looking the same way three weeks later, when Reverend Cook married Jenny to Tom. He stomped off before the ceremony was over.
At the wedding breakfast, there was dancing the like of which had never been seen. Jenny danced every dance in her husband’s arms and shook off the feel of his father’s knife-edged stare.
Jenny scarcely got her things moved into Tom’s four room house before the winter rains began pouring down. Wet, grey days faded into black nights over and again while they learned to live together. Jenny came to respect her husband’s careful ways. He thought hard before he made any decision, whether it was buying up the corner patch of the neighbor’s land, or taking aim at the wolf that broke into the pig pen in late January.
One of his decisions seemed to have been to make Jenny happy. He complimented her meals and housekeeping. He told her about any new thing he saw when he was in town. When he could afford it, he’d bring back little gifts, like a comb for her hair, or embroidery thread for fine work. Many dim evenings in front of the fire, they waltzed slowly to the music they hummed under their breath. At night, under the quilts, he cradled her as gently as if they were dancing close.
The tenderness he put into his courting won her the way the deeds themselves never could have. By the time March came and the rains slowed their pace, Jenny was firmly in love with her husband.
The winter mud had not quite dried when Tom returned hard-faced from a trip to town. He did not raise his hand to her as he led the horse to the shed. He did not kiss her when he walked through the door.
“What’s happened?” she demanded.
“War,” he told her grimly. “Fort Sumpter’s been fired on. Government’s calling up troops to put the rebels down, and they ain’t going down easy. It’s war, for certain.”
He walked past her and sat down by the fire. He didn’t eat supper, and he didn’t come to bed. Jenny tried to sleep for awhile, but sleep didn’t come. Finally, she wrapped a quilt around herself and went to sit in the rocker beside him. Together, they watched the coals shine until the ashen morning light oozed under the door.
Tom turned his head and looked at her with his steady brown eyes. Jenny’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Jenny, I’m going.”
After a moment, she nodded. Of course he was.
The morning clouds made a lid for the mountains. Jenny wrapped up corn bread, salt meat and coffee, all of it flavored with her tears. As she tied his pack shut, Tom laid his calloused hands on her shoulders.
“Why’re you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?”
She turned around and said the words she hadn’t thought to say before. “Because I love you, Tom.”
He kissed her for a long time. Then, without another word, he picked up his hat, his pack and his gun, and he walked out the door. Jenny stood in the threshold and watched until the piney hillside swallowed him whole.
She wasn’t watching alone. War cut a bloody gash down the valley. Men streamed out to where the fighting was. Some went to wear blue, some to wear grey, some to make up for the choice their brothers made.
Every Sunday, women, children and old men held prayer meetings in the church. There was no service. Reverend Cook had gone off to be a chaplain for the rebels.
Jenny worked around her home until she fell exhausted into bed at night. Wearing herself clean out was the only way she could wipe away thoughts of Tom and get any sleep.
A month dragged itself by, and another. A year. And another. Letters came now and then, but Tom did not. Jenny spent hours staring up into the pine woods along the path Tom had taken, wishing him back. Every empty night, she knelt by their bed and prayed to God he’d live long enough to come home.
In the middle of muggy July, while she prayed at her bedside, a sickly wind slid through the open window.
“Why you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?” murmured a voice.
“TOM!” Jenny whirled around on her knees. But she was all alone with the candle’s flickering shadows.
“Why you cryin’, Jenny Hawkins?” Tom’s voice breathed again. “Why you cryin’?”
Her throat pulled itself tight and her heart stopped dead. The world went grey and red in front of her.
Next thing she knew, Jenny was out the door running. Her bare feet flashed white across the ground. Up ahead, the glow from the fire in Mr. Hawkins’s cabin cut the darkness. Jenny ran up to the door and hammered at it.
“Mr. Hawkins!” she gasped. “Mr. Hawkins!”
The door jumped open, revealing to her the pinched old man in its threshold. “What you want?” he asked flat out.
“Tom’s dead.” Her whispery words shook worse than her knees. “God have mercy, I heard his ghost. Tom’s dead.”
The old man’s pointy jaw worked itself back and forth. “Damn you to hell, Jenny Fletcher!” he shrieked.
Jenny took a step back, her eyes wide and staring.
“God as my witness, I hope you burn like you sent my boy to burn!” Spit flecked his lips and tears streamed down his sunken cheeks.
Jenny just choked on whatever she thought to say.
“Didn’t stop to think where Tom learned to dance that way, did you?” Jay Hawkins sucked in a ragged breath. “He was sick for love of you, the fool boy! He went . . . He sold his soul to the devil for you!”
“What?” Jenny croaked.
“He went out at the dark of the moon. He climbed up the west hills. I didn’t see him for three days, and when he did come back, he told me . . . he told me . . .”
Jenny tottered back until she hit the porch rail. Her jaw wouldn’t close. Her eyes couldn’t blink.
“Damn your soul, Jenny Fletcher, ’cause you surely damned my Tom’s!”
He slammed the door. The sound slammed against the mountains.
Jenny stumbled and fumbled her way back home like a blind woman. She curled up in the rocker beside the banked coals of her fire. No tears came to ease her knotted chest.
Tom had sold his soul to the devil. For her. To win her challenge and dance her to the altar. Her sharp, thoughtless words had sent the best man in the world into Hell.
Jenny looked to the floor in front of the empty hearthston
es, at the empty chair by the table, through the window where in daytime she’d see a carefully mended fence. She felt Tom’s skin against her and smelled the warm earth scent that hung around him.
“No,” she said at last, and the word released all the breath her body had clamped around. “I don’t care if Old Scratch himself does have you, Tom. He can’t keep you.”
She got up and put on her working dress and boots. She pulled Tom’s spare hat over her unbound hair. She didn’t take the lamp with her, or think to bar the door. She just walked out across the yard and into the forest, following her husband’s footsteps.
Day came up slow in front of her. She paid it no heed. The hills rose and dipped so steeply she had to scrabble with her hands in the dead pine needles and crumbly dirt to make her way along. Skinny pines rattled their branches at her, filling the sticky summer wind with the smell of fresh resin. Only the birds and the beasts saw her climbing between the trees and the bracken, and they didn’t think to care. Night came and she slept without shelter. Day returned, and she rose to walk again.
Round about mid-afternoon on the third day, she broke out of the woods onto a twisty dirt road. She set her aching feet to follow it. Hunger knotted her stomach and her throat felt like she’d been drinking sand. The echo of Mr. Hawkins’s words, sputtering out what Tom had done, shoved her forward.
As sunset tinged the sky candy-pink, Jenny caught a sound that stopped her in her tracks. Fiddle music. A jaunty tune rippled like a spring creek from up ahead. Jenny hurried herself along the road, toward the music, her heart pounding at the base of her throat.
She rounded a bend in the road, and paused. About a hundred yards ahead, her road met up with another. At the place they crossed waited a fine, white-walled church, with a cross on its door and a bell in its steeple. The fiddle music streamed out of the church windows as if carried on the orange-gold light that shone within. She heard the familiar sound of booted feet stamping on floorboards, and the sound of a man’s voice crying, all in time to the cheery music.
Jenny forced her spine to straighten. She wrapped her love for Tom tight around her and strode up to the church’s open doors.