by Неизвестный
“What do you want?”
“Pastor Simon,” Lucretia nodded at him but stepped no closer. “My name is Lucretia Mott. You invited me here through our correspondence. I hope I have not mistaken the date.”
The pastor squinted his eyes in puzzlement, then widened them in recognition. “Of course! Oh, my dear lady, forgive me. If I don’t write things down, often and in quite conspicuous notice of my face, I forget so easily these days. I’d forget to put on my underpants if it weren’t for my wife.”
When neither of us laughed at his lewd jest, he shook his head and apologized. He motioned for us to step inside, but as we moved forward, the deep, rattling moan started up again. I saw Pastor Simon’s shoulders tense, and he turned to shout into the darkness: “Quiet her! For the Lord’s sake, woman, keep her quiet!”
He backed out of the doorway, swinging the doors shut. He turned to us but held the doors closed behind his back. “I must apologize again. I-it isn’t a good time. My granddaughter, she’s come down with a bad fever, and her mother, my daughter-in-law . . . well, she’s her first child and she needs a lot of help to care for her. A lot of help.”
“Malaria,”1 I said. “It’s been bad all summer.”
He nodded, wiping with his shoulder a bead of sweat that sprouted along his stubbled chin. “If you don’t mind, we’ll speak out here. The fever . . . it’s mighty contagious.”
“Of course.” Lucretia told the pastor about her intentions for the women’s convention, asked when the church might be available to host it, even offered to pay the man a little coin for the use of the place. He graciously refused any remuneration, but hinted strongly that a little goodwill in return for the use of the space would not go unappreciated—a warm dish to eat, a hand-knit sweater for his granddaughter, some light landscaping around the churchyard if the husbands were up to it. Lucretia handled the negotiations and within minutes it was set: in two weeks’ time we would hold our first very public women’s rights convention here.
On the walk back to the café to fetch Martha, I turned to Lucretia. “Well, that was strange.” She made no reply. “Did you not find Pastor Simon’s behavior at all strange?”
“I find all behavior strange,” Lucretia said, eyes straight ahead on our destination. “Especially male behavior. Sickness is weakness and weakness irritates men because it so intimidates them. Pastor Simon is unused to weakness presenting itself so close to him. He fears it will rub off on him.”
“Well, if it’s truly that contagious—”
“Illness is a weakness of the body. He—all men—fears a weakness of something greater.”
“The mind?” I ventured.
She looked at me. “The heart.”
And then we had reached Martha.
Over the following two weeks, I heard nothing from Lucretia. She returned none of my letters. I only knew the convention was still set because it was announced in The North Star. It was my own fault she ignored me. I could not blame her. I had pushed things too far.
That very night after we had secured the Methodist Church, Lucretia was in a sullen mood. With the disappearance of the sun, the heat had fizzled down to a mild, not unpleasant warmth. Arriving at my home, all three of us removed our boots and set about soaking our tired feet. Martha attempted to jest with her sister but Lucretia was silent, fully focused on the task of washing her feet. After a light meal, Martha retired to the guest room—my eldest’s room, actually, but he would not have use of it for several weeks—and Lucretia and I were left alone.
By candlelight, Lucretia’s skin softened and a healthy color returned to her cheeks. I studied her for a while but she took no notice. Lost inside her brilliant mind. How I’d do anything to be allowed to know her thoughts, her innermost secrets and wishes.
I was a young girl, then. I had experienced much yet so little of the world, and I thought I knew everything. I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong, and that I, through sheer willpower, could make right the wrong things.
Eight years ago, Lucretia thought the same.
Having been barred, due to our sex, from the convention proceedings in London, we had had hours to wile away until some man—a husband or a friend or an empathetic stranger—would report to us the day’s events. It was during one of these lingering afternoons that the rain kept Lucretia and me indoors, holed up in my room playing cards to avoid the bustle of the overcrowded common area. We had been on the edge of something the entire week; we felt it like something hot passing between us when we looked at each other, when we passed each other without touching, so careful not to touch. But this day, I went to pick up a card, and she put her hand out to pick up one as well. Our fingers met and that sealed it. We both stood, and she planted both hands on the sides of my face, her fingers snagging in my curls. She pulled me to her and kissed me in a manner entirely unbecoming of a married woman, a manner which I quickly copied and which went on for several yearning seconds. Afterwards, she apologized and left the room. From then on I could not get her alone to speak of it. I would allude to it in my letters and she would pretend I had never mentioned it. She erased it. I tried as well. But.
But here we were. Alone.
“May I help you? I have this balm . . . .” When Lucretia did not look up from working her fingers between her toes, I spread a bit of the ointment on my hand and laid it on the arch of her right foot. She jerked slightly but did not pull away. I rubbed her feet in silence.
“That feels nice.” Her eyes were closed, the candlelight casting shadows over the bottom half of her face. She had removed her bonnet and her hair hung loosely to her shoulders.
“I’ve waited,” I started, my mouth gone dry around the words. “I’ve waited so long . . . to touch you again.”
“Cady,” she said, and my heart quickened. Cady was her private name for me. She had accidentally referred to me as Miss Cady when we first met, before my husband appeared. After that, when we were alone—before the kiss—she would call me Miss Cady, or simply Cady, with a wink and a smile that instantly made her ten years younger.
She said it now not with a smile but with a sigh, and yet it gave my fool heart hope.
“Lucretia, please.” I rose from her feet, bending closer to her face. “Please do not deny me. I have been so lonely here. Please.”
“Do not beg me.”
“Why?” Our faces were a breath away from each other, we barely had to whisper to be heard. I cupped her cheek to my palm and she did not try to stop me. “Why should I not beg you? Because I am a woman and above begging? Because I—”
“Because I would submit.” She sounded so tired. “Because I would submit to you.”
Just then my neighbor’s youngest daughter, a skinny, jittery girl of twelve years, skittered through the back door into my darkening kitchen.
“Mrs. Stanen! Mrs. Stanen!” None of the country children could quite pronounce my name correctly. “Please come, please! Daddy’s hurting Momma again!”
“Has he been drinking?” I asked the child.
“A barrel full,” she said, one foot out the door. I wished I could be certain she was exaggerating.
“What is it?” Lucretia was already lacing up her boots. I dried my hands on a towel and set to lacing mine as well, explaining as I did: “The Cookes. Large family down the road, father takes to beating the wife when he’s fallen gullet first into his cups. I’ve broken up their rows more times than I can count.” I grabbed the rolling pin from the counter on the way out the door.
We raced through the breezy night on the heels of the Cooke daughter, Lucretia keeping pace like a woman half her age. The breeze brought the smell of burning to our noses, and soon enough we could see a deep orange glow against the backdrop of night. The fire was burning uncontrolled in the Cooke’s front yard; while it was not entirely unusual for folks to burn their garbage out here—or to cook their freshest kill of deer or slaughtered goat on a spit above a roaring bonfire—this fire was a haphazard thing. Dangerous em
bers blew this way and that in the wind. Patches of the unkempt lawn were already ablaze. A rocking chair lay a few feet from the primary fire, flames licking up its wooden spine. I sent the Cooke girl to the well. When she was gone, the father emerged from the house, hoisting a nest of blankets above his head which he then chucked at the flames. They smothered half the fire, clearly not the desired effect, so Cooke picked up the rocking chair and threw it on top. The blankets quickly caught fire.
“Mister Cooke, you’ll bring your entire house down!” I screamed at him.
He looked in my direction, but his eyes filled with smoke. “It’s all tainted,” he roared back. “Tainted with sick!”
His wife came out, bloodied in the face, and they began to scream at each other. While his back was turned to me I brought the rolling pin around beneath his chin and pulled him back with both hands and all my strength. Caught off guard, he folded easily, falling to his knees with a grunt and swiping at my arms.
“Calm down, Mister Cooke!” This was not the first time I had pulled Cooke off his wife. There was always a row over one thing or another that needed to be quelled, not just in this household, and for some reason the neighbor children had taken to alerting me whenever this task needed doing. Mayhap I had the biggest rolling pin in town.
He continued to wail about sickness, and his wife sat in the grass and cried. Several of the smaller children appeared in the open doorway of the house, sleepy eyed, their bedclothes soiled. When the Cooke girl ran back into the yard from the well, Lucretia retrieved the bucket from her and dumped the water over Mister Cooke’s head, then handed it back to the girl for another round.
The cold shocked Cooke into silence. I tightened the rolling pin against his neck and spoke harshly into his ear. “Now calm down. No squabble is worth burning your house over. Unchecked, your fire may burn the next farm down, and the next. I know that’s not what you want, so calm down now, Mister Cooke. Just calm down.”
“Why is he so upset?” Lucretia asked Mrs. Cooke.
It took her a moment to pull herself together enough to respond. “The children. The children have been sick. They cry and they want. It’s too much wanting for him. He went to hit the littlest one and got bit. That’s what brung on the madness.”
“Gotta burn it out,” Mister Cooke said. “Burn it out.”2
The girl returned with another pail of water and dumped it over the primary fire. Smoke plumed into the air with a hiss.
We stayed with the Cookes until all the smaller fires were out and the wife had settled the children back into bed. I explained to Mister Cooke that it was the season for fever, and it would burn itself out, as he insisted it do, with a little patience and perhaps some medicine. I promised to return with food and medicine in the morning. All the fight had gone out of him, slumped there in my arms, and so I sent him back inside.
During the short walk back home, Lucretia asked me about the fever, how bad it was here. “Flares up in the hottest months of summer,” I told her. “It can lay you up for weeks, months. Even I have a touch of it now.”
She held her knuckles to my forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”
I took her hand and held it in mine. “I can.”
She bent her head forward and allowed me one quick, chaste kiss on the place her knuckles had been. “You are a good woman, Elizabeth. I’m certain your husband thinks so too.”
And she said not another word to me that night, and in the morning she and Martha were gone.
I sat in a chair at the front of the church, looking at the crowd of forty or so women and a handful of men. We had started later than intended, having arrived at the church hours before only to discover the doors barred against us once again. Eventually, the Smiths’ youngest, a spritely lad of no more than six, volunteered to be hoisted through a side window and then unlock the doors for us. We hastily scanned the church proper for Pastor Simon, but every second we delayed the proceedings was one more second for those assembled to entertain doubts as to the validity of our cause. So we got to it.
I listened to James Mott open our convention for the rights of women. It was only proper etiquette at the time to have a gentleman be the first to address the audience, and Mr. Mott was a decent enough speaker; his voice was soft and coaxing, taking you by the hand to lead you through his words. I waited with bated breath for Lucretia to speak, for she was a powerful orator. When she spoke, she held nothing back; there was something wild inside her, a caged animal that almost escaped on every word, and her listeners clung to the faintest syllable, eager for the animal’s release. She kept you waiting and waiting and wanting and wanting.
We had printed up a program for the day, and while Mr. Mott gave a quick summary of the accomplishments of democracy in our free country, I checked the schedule. We had decided, through correspondence filtered by Martha, that James would open the convention, and then Lucretia would speak about the specifics of our goals, and then we would present the Declaration of Sentiments, which she and I seemed to have been working on all our lives, and finally open the floor for debate. I thrived on a good debate. As passionate a speaker as Lucretia was, I was a fierce debater. Counterarguments fell to the ground beneath the sharp slice of my words.
But this first day, we would never get to the debate, though certain accounts claim otherwise. Which is all to the good; I am the first to break our vow. Here is the truth of that day, if you think you can stomach it:
Lucretia was winding down her speech, on the verge of introducing the Sentiments. The sun came in heavy through the windows at the sides of the church, bathing the attendees in a light and warmth that should have weighed them down, but they were buoyed by Lucretia’s words. We were all at attention. And so when she abruptly cut off mid-sentence, we held our breath. Then she looked to her left, and I, from my vantage point, looked across the stage. From the back room stepped a little girl, no more than eight or nine, her white dress stained dark by something we could all smell the moment she appeared. It covered her face too, especially around her mouth, but in the forever silence of that moment I would be surprised to learn that any of us thought, “That child is covered in blood.”
One of the female attendees in the front row stood up. She made to take a step toward the child, but Lucretia held a stiff arm out to her: stay put. The child’s eyes rose to meet Lucretia’s, and though I was seated fifteen feet away I could tell there was no light in them. The silence stretched, and the child smiled—smiled beneath all that filth, her teeth rotted with the same stuff, she smiled—and then emitted a horrible sound, something close to shrieking but more guttural, and she launched herself at Lucretia.
There was no hesitation in Lucretia; she moved her body as surely as she spoke her words. She planted her left leg and brought her right leg around to connect her boot with the child’s head. Over the collective gasp of the attendees, over my shout, you could hear the snapping of the skull. The child slumped to the ground as if her shrieking were the only thing keeping her upright, and when Lucretia’s kick cut that off the rest of the body followed suit.
I leapt up, instinct pushing me to check on the girl, but Lucretia grabbed me as I attempted to run past. “No,” she warned. “She may not be dead.”
“Dead?” I could not believe what I was hearing. “Dead? You struck a child, Lucretia! You want her dead?”
By this time others were getting to their feet, shouting and demanding answers. Above this din there came the sound of something else: someone screaming.
Still grasping my shoulders, Lucretia called to her husband, “James, bar the doors!”
He raced to the front of the church, dodging upset attendees with a nimbleness even I haven’t known since my youth. He pulled the heavy oak bar through the handles of the double doors. It was slow enough work that someone could have stopped him, but just then the screaming rose and, alongside it, a terrible, rattling moan.3
Suddenly, the crowd on the left side of the church swelled outwards. In the center of thei
r scattered ring was one of the little Cooke children, my neighbor. He had latched himself onto the shoulder of Mr. Cooke, who shook him violently with no result. Mrs. Cooke screamed, holding onto her other three children, who cried or looked at the floor. Spittle flew from Mr. Cooke’s mouth as he pounded on his son’s head, but the jaw was set and the child continued to moan into his father’s shoulder in something akin to ecstasy.
The rest was pandemonium. I cannot say exactly how Lucretia and James did it; they moved with such grace, such purpose, as though they had rehearsed. James hooked his arms underneath Cooke’s armpits and yanked him back as Lucretia—who had left my side so quickly I had not even realized she had gone—gripped the boy’s neck and gave it a sharp, violent twist. His jaw popped loose from his father’s arms with a sound like the opening of a pressurized jar. Lucretia dragged the boy by his neck to the right of the stage, where she opened a small broom closet there and tossed him unceremoniously inside. James brought the father, who struggled weakly against him, and threw him in as well. Then they closed the door and cast around for something with which to bar it.
Shock had gripped the attendees like paralysis. Plenty of mouths flapped but no legs moved. Women who’d brought their children held them tighter and wept, and women who’d brought their men allowed themselves to be held. A young lad towards the back had gotten up and made for the door, but suddenly Martha Wright was there, holding him off with no more than the unsympathetic look in her eye.
Finally, James found a brass candlestick to shove through the door handle of the broom closet. When he got it in place, pounding started up inside and Cooke called out to be released. His wife, hearing him, started toward the closet, wailing.
“You can’t do this to him!” She cried, dragging her children with her. “What are you doing to him?”
“Please,” James began in his soft tones.
“You must sit down,” Lucretia demanded. “All of you, sit down. Everything will be explained. Sit down.”