Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  Tonight’s decision was simple, once he put aside the hopes and anguish of the family: the young husband, red hair spiked with sweat and rain, the grandparents with young ones themselves, the intriguing Miss Canon. The child’s head crushed, the body withdrawn, the mother saved for future children.

  The sky brightened, that hour before dawn when one doesn’t so much see the sky lighten as instinctively know it is happening, when the edges of the clouds are distinguishable and the outline of a branch appears. Eliza stirred in the bedroom behind him. Through the open window he heard her rise, take the straight chair with the needlepoint cushion from its place by the hall door and set it next to the sill. She leaned out, rubbed his shoulder, ran her hand down his arm, squeezed his wrist.

  “Time to sleep, my dear,” she said. He shifted his chair so he could see her form, dark in the shadows, the edge of the lace curtain framing her profile like a mantilla. Her white satin nightgown was loose at the neck and fell open, the pale light caught the curve of her breast. The mole on its underside was dark as an ink spot.

  “Not tonight,” he answered. He slipped his hand over hers and intertwined their fingers so the knuckles lined up, large and small, brown and white, a matched set. He traced them with the finger of his free hand.

  “You lost the patient,” she said, a statement rather than a question.

  “I lost the baby,” he said. “I saved the mother.” He ran an index finger over the back of her hand, up her wrist and around to the soft cupped underside where the pulse beat. He pressed against the vein, feeling the life flow. A sense of passage seized him, and he wanted to grasp the pulsing life and freeze it for all time.

  They had been like this once before, years and years gone by, standing on a porch on a breezy spring night with the scent and sound of reawakening life all about, and he had held her hand. Now, a stiff breeze blew aside the clouds, and the waning moon appeared for a brief look. Jabez felt time circle around, out of its familiar linear path, to repeat itself.

  He pulled back and looked at Eliza through narrowed eyes. “You were wearing a blue gown.” He kept her fingertips trapped in his hand. “The blue gown with black lace. And your hair was in those horrid ringlets.” If he squinted enough he could almost raise the two images, side by side, Eliza as she was then and Eliza as she was now. The passion for her that once consumed him was now a memory, but Penelope-like, she had waited for him, and he loved her for that, in a deep secret place that nothing could touch.

  “How do you remember that? It’s been, what, ten years?” Her teeth flashed in the reflected light of the moon. “I wanted so much to go away with you.” She rested her forearms on the window sill, her chin on folded hands. “But off you went to meet your lovers.”

  “Lovers?” Jabez raised his brows.

  “The army and the gold fields. Two fancy ladies. No decent woman has a chance against them.”

  “Every man tires of whores eventually.” Jabez stroked her hair, once thick and lustrous, now dull and thin, the scalp visible.

  “Do you know,” she said softly, “I should like to walk with a cane. As an old woman, to walk with a cane. Canes are so … authoritative.”

  It seemed their entire acquaintance was a long farewell. They both knew it, they treated her death as an event in their futures to be scheduled and planned. It hung between them like the next Christmas dinner or a business trip to St. Louis. But they never talked about it.

  12

  Agnes first met Eliza Wetmore Robinson at the child’s burial. She and her husband stood at the graveside in cold sunlight and a stiff March wind, clouds like snowdrifts floating against hard blue sky. It was a small group, Agnes and Billy, his parents, Nancy and John, Sarah and the Reverend Marvin. Elizabeth remained abed, and Tom carried the tiny pine coffin himself, perched on his shoulder. The cemetery was a lonely place to leave the child, its black walnut trees catching the clouds in their uppermost fingers and its hilltop looming over an empty prairie. So Doctor Robinson and his wife were welcome, and Agnes found their presence a solace.

  Mrs. Robinson’s childlike expression, her waifish frame and fragile features, contrasted sharply with her husband’s powerful energy. Her eyes, an extraordinary cobalt, eclipsed her other features, and an exotic black lace mantle covered thin, dull hair. She whispered to her husband occasionally throughout the service, gloved hand on his sleeve. After the final prayer was offered and the mourners had filed past the grave to drop in a handful of dirt, dust to dust, the doctor introduced his wife to everyone.

  “Miss Agnes Canon,” she said, as she shook Agnes's hand. “My husband tells me how helpful you were the night of the child’s birth.”

  “He was very skillful,” Agnes said. “Without him we might have lost Elizabeth.”

  “My husband is an excellent doctor with wide experience.” She watched his broad back as he walked ahead, in conversation with John. “The loss of a child has always affected him, though, more than any other death. He’s seen many over the past ten years.”

  “You’ve recently arrived, I understand?”

  “From Ohio, near to Columbus. It was a dreadfully cold journey.” She laughed, a husky sound. “I was not well, and poor Jabez nursed me throughout our honeymoon. We’ve been married but six weeks.” Her gaze swept the gathered family, moving in a cloud of black bombazine and wool toward the cemetery gates. “He tells me he met your family last fall when you arrived in Holt County.”

  “He was kind to my cousin. She fell ill when we stopped at Iowa Point.”

  “I’m so sorry. I haven’t asked about Mrs. Kreek.” She stopped, laying a hand on Agnes’s arm. “How is she? My husband intends to keep a close eye on her.”

  “She keeps to her bed, but she’s improving. Truly, she seems better than she has been all winter. She’s talking with us again, and eating.” Agnes opened the low iron gate, and Mrs. Robinson swept through in a rustle of black taffeta. “It’s as if her body held a corruption, a contamination. Do you think it’s terrible to think of a child that way?” This had been troubling Agnes greatly, and she was astonished to find herself saying such a thing to a stranger. She’d spoken of it to no one else.

  “We all must contend with our own private devils,” Mrs. Robinson said softly. “Perhaps this was your cousin’s.” She turned to Agnes. “Do you have private devils, Miss Canon? I know I do.” She turned away again. “I suppose everyone does.”

  There was something bewitching about this woman, as if she reached across chasms that others are too dull or stupid to detect.

  “Perhaps devils drove me here, drove me west,” Agnes said.

  “Oh, you understand! So few do when I rattle on.” Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Perhaps not devils that drove you here, but something else, the converse. Angels, perhaps. Everything has a mirror image, don’t you think? Every action a reaction. I’ve thought about this often.” She gestured with black-gloved hands. “There are good forces and there are evil forces. It’s our responsibility to encourage the one and reject the other.” She laughed again, a rush of sound as if the pressure of her thought had been released, steam escaping from a valve.

  “I’ve been reading Mr. Andrew Davis. The clairvoyant?” She glanced at her husband, then leaned in to Agnes with a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t tell the doctor. He doesn’t believe in such nonsense.” They had reached Missouri Street, the corner by Ed Poor’s smithy. The sound of the forge and the work of the blacksmith, the busyness of the town flowed over them, in contrast to the silence of the cemetery. Doctor Robinson shook hands with John and Sam.

  “I’m so pleased to have met you, Miss Canon.” She gave Agnes her hand, her smile brilliant. “Please let’s continue our conversation,” she said. “I would so like to know you better.”

  Agnes wanted to know her, too. She was captivated. By the contrasts between the faded woman and her vital husband. By her exquisite, otherworl
dly charisma. “I’ll tell Elizabeth that you and your husband were here.”

  “Oh yes, please,” she said, as if she’d forgotten Elizabeth again. “And when she’s well perhaps I may visit and get to know her, too.” She released Agnes’s hand, bowed to Rachel and Nancy, and turned away.

  

  Agnes often thought of the doctor and his wife. She watched them from the schoolyard or from the upstairs window in the Jackson house as they walked in the evenings or rode out in the doctor’s buggy. Two halves of one thought, as Margaret Fuller said, dark and fair, tall and slight, one bursting with energy, the other languid. They chatted when she chanced to encounter them in Zook’s mercantile or the Irvines’ bakery.

  And then for a fortnight she saw nothing of Mrs. Robinson. Word spread she was indisposed.

  That year, spring burst out overnight. A soft south breeze snaked its way over the prairie, melting the crusty patches of dirty snow like butter. The orchards responded with a wash of green, promising a sea of blossom. Doors stood open, and bedding flapped on the lines. Farmers plowed and harrowed and planted their fields to corn and wheat, the black soil of the prairie sending up a dank smell, steamy and rich as the warmth of the sun soaked in.

  The rising spirits of the winter-bound citizens of Holt County responded, and like a spring freshet found an outlet in the form of a dance. The arrival of an itinerant fiddler, an Irishman of some fame, provided the excuse, and the Cottiers offered their barn, an ambitious structure supporting an ambitious farm.

  Agnes and the Jackson family, the Canons and the Kreeks arrived to find the interior brilliant with lanterns swinging from rafters and hooks, and the Cottiers, man and wife, standing in the doorway. The Zook tribe debarked from wagons and carriages, William and Daniel and Levi, their wives interchangeable, small, lively and plump. Aldo Beaton, bachelor, had waylaid Billy, who but half attended Mr. Beaton’s words, his eyes fastened on a bevy of young girls. The Baxters sat with the Kunkels, and Jace Biggers, the banker, stood deep in conversation with Doctor Robinson. Rufus Byrd and Mrs. Byrd buzzed about, and our old one-armed friend Bigelow lurked diffidently in the shadows, accompanied by his wife, our first sighting of the elusive Miranda. Willard and Jake Bigelow slouched behind the punch table, dipping from the spiked bowl. Mrs. Robinson sat with the elderly ladies, handkerchief pressed to her lips against the dust.

  They’d scarce said their hellos when the fiddler climbed onto a platform in the corner and tucked his instrument under fleshy jowls. A waif of a child with deep eyes and a shock of untamable hair moved to the front of the platform and folded his hands. The bow drew back, the strings sang once and were still. Tom Kreek and the men talking orchard business around the punch bowl quieted, the children hushed. John shed his jacket and grinned down at Nancy. Billy headed for the girls. Another note, slow and mournful, then a third, then a flurry of tones that spoke to the blood and moved faster and faster. Boots tapped, young people looked sideways at each other, Ben Cottier seized his wife by the hand and swung into the middle of the floor. John followed with Nancy, the spell snapped and the reel took over the entire company.

  Agnes found herself whirling in the arms of Aldo Beaton, past Sarah and the Ramsey boy, past Billy with a pretty girl she’d never seen before. The fiddler’s arm flew. The boy, tambourine in hand, leapt about the stage in time. The dancers stamped and whirled and raised a cloud of chaff that set the onlookers to sneezing and wiping their eyes. Even old Rufus Byrd, his absurd round head bobbing on its neck like a dandelion too big for its stalk, clumped by with his rotund wife, her cheeks glowing. Abruptly, the reel came to an end with a commanding twang of the bow. The dancers stumbled to a stop, laughing, gasping and surging en masse toward the punchbowl.

  “You’re a right fine dancer, Miss Canon,” said Aldo Beaton as he steered her, hand on her elbow, toward the punchbowl. “Did you learn that in Pennsylvania?”

  “I can’t tell you how I learned that. We never had such dancing in Pennsylvania.”

  “We danced it in the Virginia mountains,” he said, ladling punch into her cup, “but I was just a boy and don’t remember it quite so lively. My ma could dance though, she was known through three counties.”

  “The fiddler’s a master.”

  “It’s witchcraft, cousin!” The crush had spun her up against Tom Kreek, big hands wrapped around filled tumblers. “The Irishman has bewitched us with his fiddle.” He gestured toward his wife, ensconced in a chair next to Eliza Robinson.

  “I’ll have Elizabeth up and dancing, too, before the night’s out, you wait and see.” And off he went. Beaton, however, hovered. The warmth of the barn amplified the scent of his hair oil. He bore an unfortunate resemblance to her erstwhile suitor back in Pennsylvania, and when he turned to speak to Mr. Cottier, she edged away.

  And bumped into Doctor Robinson. In deference to the heat his jacket was gone, but his white shirt was crisp and clean, his waistcoat a stylish cut, well-fitted across his broad chest. He laughed, and she had the distinct understanding that he knew she attempted escape. He positioned himself between her and Mr. Beaton and dipped a cup of punch for himself. “Must I rescue you from another mule?” he asked, raising his cup to her in a toast.

  “Hush,” she hissed. “He’ll hear you.”

  “Then we’d best move away.” He grasped her elbow and pulled her beyond the table. “There now. I even succeeded in holding onto you again.”

  “Really, sir, very improper.” She sipped at her punch, thinking she flirted where she shouldn’t.

  “Not so improper at a dance.”

  “Is Mrs. Robinson not dancing?”

  His expression sobered, his eyes flicking to his wife.

  “No. No, she’s not well. I was pleased she agreed to come tonight.”

  Now the fiddle interrupted, two introductory notes to set the mood, then a rill and something astonishing. The fiddler’s boy, arms at his sides and upper body held still, eyes fastened on a point on the far wall, shifted his feet. His lower body moved, a separate being altogether from his upper body, nailed boots clicking in time to the jig, gaze distant as if seeing the far valleys and villages where such dancing was invented. Doctor Robinson and Agnes shifted with the crowd toward the platform. The fiddle flowed in and out, weaving a story without words.

  The music faded, and the child’s feet stilled, his reedy voice melting into the fiddle’s song. The fiddler allowed his note to die away on the evening and stood back as the boy blended words to the memory of the tune and sang, unaccompanied.

  Oh Shenandoah,

  I long to hear you,

  Away you rolling river,

  Oh Shenandoah,

  I long to hear you,

  Away, I’m bound away

  ‘Cross the wide Missouri

  The words called to something deep inside, wild and free and lovely, the tune like the wind in greening treetops. Then it melted into whisper and gently died away, and with a shiver Agnes returned to the brilliance of lanterns in a homely barn, Doctor Robinson by her side.

  “I envy him,” she said, the first thing that came to mind. “Roaming the west, unfettered—what an education. Fortunate child!”

  “Not so very fortunate, I think. I knew that old man in California. He takes on boys like a hurdy-gurdy man takes on monkeys.” He watched the singer head for the punch bowl. “Perhaps he’s better off than he would be starving on a farm in Ireland, but he’s bound to the old man.”

  “Do you mean he kidnapped the child?”

  “Not at all. The boy probably went with him gladly enough just to survive. The child is chattel, Miss Canon. The old man owns him, to do with what he wishes. It’s the way for many children.”

  He glanced at her face. “But I’ve spoiled the evening for you, let me make amends. Whatever the old man is, he’s a master of the violin.” And he bowed over her hand as the fiddle slowed into a sweet melody, a
simple version of a Strauss waltz. Agnes curtsied, and he swept her onto the dance floor.

  She was electrified, as if a power source flowed through him and out his fingertips to hers. Dancing with him she grew graceful and light. His scent, soap and cigar and sweat, made her giddy. She reached high to place her hand on his shoulder and wondered what it would be like to feel that rich beard against her forehead.

  He looked down at her from his height, his eyes somber. “I’d like to ask a favor of you,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Would you visit my wife?” He glanced toward Mrs. Robinson, one of the few not dancing. “I mean, come to the house. She’s no longer able to join me when I call on patients. She’s lonely.”

  “She doesn’t look well.”

  “There’s a cancer that began in the breast some years ago. Her father was a doctor, and he managed to treat it at the time, but it’s back, and it’s spread beyond anything I can do.” He spoke in a rush, as if getting the words out quickly would lessen their horror.

  Agnes shivered. Mrs. Robinson's devils were gathering. “Yes, of course I’ll visit,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  The music ended, and he released her waist, touched her elbow. “Come say hello to her. She’s looked forward to seeing you tonight,” and he guided her toward the seating arranged along the wall. He bowed to them both and took up his post behind his wife's chair.

  “Miss Canon.” Mrs. Robinson smiled, squeezing Agnes’s hand. Her recent indisposition had left her visibly weaker, her complexion a dull gray. Agnes dropped onto a hay bale and dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief.