Pocketful of Pearls

by Shelley Bates

  “Good grief, Dinah.” Matthew sat back, looking a little winded. “That is harsh.”

  She shrugged. “He lived for the Elect, and traditions that say women have their place and men run the show. But since he was stuck with me and the financial situation had to be dealt with, he finally entrusted me with his banking and portfolios, right after we got the diagnosis. Mom just isn’t capable of managing that kind of thing.”

  “So what do you think he felt when he found out Elsie was expecting you?”

  “I assume it was after the wedding, when there was nothing he could do except cause a horrible scandal. And being from a favored family and already Elder, that would be impossible. So he took his revenge.”

  “Would a man who considered himself a godly man think of it in those terms?”

  Dinah shook her head. “Who knows? But there is a lot in the Old Testament about the sins of the fathers being visited on the children.”

  Matthew got up to take the teapot to the sink. His back to her, he said, “It does have a sort of dreadful symmetry in an Old Testament way. Feed the child back to the man who fathered her.”

  Dinah winced, and the rocklike pain inside her throbbed as if someone had prodded it. “He used to quote that verse in Romans a lot. You know, ‘Present yourself a living sacrifice.’ I guess that was me.”

  Matthew slammed the teapot on the counter with such force she thought it would shatter. “Inexcusable. Dinah, I’m so sorry you’ve had to live this for all this time, like a toy batted between two cats.”

  She turned over a tired hand in a gesture of acceptance. “I got over saying ‘Why me’ a long time ago.”

  “Yes, well, from here on, things will be different, won’t they?”

  “I already decided that. No more hiding the truth and suffering in silence. I’m going to say what I think and you should, too. I told Mom about you, by the way.”

  “Since you can’t talk about these things with your father”— Dinah laughed out loud at the very thought—“you’re going to have to discuss them with your mother. If what we’ve been talking about is true and she wasn’t the one who allowed Phinehas to do what he did, then perhaps some mending of fences might be in order, to use a ranch metaphor from these magazines I’ve been reading.”

  “She can mend them with me any time she wants.” Why was she always the one who had to give and forgive instead of get and forget? It was time for someone else to step up and make her feel better for a change.

  “She may not be able to, Dinah,” he reminded her gently. “You have a pretty solid fence around yourself, you know, made of equal parts capability and contempt.”

  “Contempt? I don’t know where you get that. I just feel sorry for her, is all.”

  “Pity is easy.” His voice held the conviction of someone who knew what he was talking about. “True compassion and the forgiveness that goes with it is hard.”

  She set her half-empty mug on the table and pushed her chair back. “Come on, Schatzi,” she said to the chicken on the chair. “It’s time for you to roost up.”

  “Good night, Schatzi,” Matthew said. “Good night, Dinah.”

  But she didn’t answer as she closed the kitchen door. It took several minutes before her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, but she knew the way to the roosts by heart. When she finally let herself outside into the starlit yard, she realized that part of the problem was the tears that blurred the view.

  IT WAS TURNING out to be difficult, if not impossible, for Elsie to ignore her granddaughter. For one thing, Dinah made no effort at all to spare her mother’s feelings and keep the child hidden away in her room. On the contrary, if Elsie came down to breakfast, the baby was in her carrier, gurgling happily over pureed carrots. If she tried to do a little handwork in the afternoons, there she was in the middle of the carpet with Matthew, batting at the little wooden doodads he called carved birds.

  In the end it was painfully obvious even to someone as self-centered as her mother had always seemed that the child was growing out of her clothes. Dinah smothered a smile as Elsie brought this to her attention with some irritation and proceeded to take over the sewing machine in the downstairs guest room that up until now had been Dinah’s domain.

  Elsie, it turned out, had quite an eye for design. A day or two later, Dinah held up a little green outfit shaped like an apple, with two gathered openings for legs and a little white frill at the neck like a bit of leftover blossom. A pair of cocked leaves formed a pocket that had no earthly use except decoration.

  “Mom, this is adorable. Tamsen will love it.”

  “I haven’t worked with color in so long it made my eyes hurt trying to choose something in the fabric store.” Her mother put away the spools of thread and swept the green scraps into the trash basket. “But of course she won’t wear black until she goes to school.”

  “What pattern did you use?”

  Elsie shrugged. “None. I’ve been sewing longer than you’ve been alive. Why would I need a pattern for something as simple as a pair of rompers?”

  “Not everyone can make a pair of rompers look good enough to bite into.”

  Elsie said nothing, but when Dinah stole a look at her, the expression of pleased embarrassment spoke volumes.

  Tamsen subsequently became the proud model for an outfit resembling a pink strawberry and something white that Dinah couldn’t identify, but that had folded arcs of yellow and purple fabric in place of the pockets.

  “Those are crocuses,” Elsie said shortly. “That one needs a bit of work.”

  When they went to Gathering Sunday morning, Dinah dressed Tamsen in her apple outfit and Elsie said nothing while she buckled the baby into the car seat. And once the women got over oohing and ahhing over the little outfit there was nothing more to be said. If Elsie Traynell thought her illegitimate granddaughter should be in Gathering with the rest of God’s people, then no one was going to argue with her, not with her recent loss and health problems. Dinah noticed that Rebecca Quinn, bless her, was right there in front after Gathering was finished, when it came time to have a look at the baby. With two such pillars of the church standing up for Tamsen, there wasn’t much that old gossip, Alma Woods, could do except mutter to her cronies that it was a shame and a scandal and Elsie should know better than to display the fruit of sin like it was something to be proud of.

  Dinah hoped no one paid any attention.

  As for herself, she held her head high and smiled for all she was worth, sticking by her mother’s side with the baby’s carrier gripped in one hand so that Derrick Wilkinson couldn’t get a word in edgewise about lunches or free time or anything else. Sticking by her mother was a bit of a novelty, too, but Dinah figured that if Elsie had come around enough to stand up for Tamsen, then Dinah would stand up for her.

  Claire Montoya, she noticed, was missing, which caused her an unexpected pang. She asked Claire’s mom where she was.

  “The bank sent her on a weeklong training course in Seattle,” Mrs. Montoya said. “I wasn’t sure about her mixing with all those worldly people, not to mention getting a bunch of training in a job she’ll give up when she meets the right man, but she was adamant.”

  “She had to go all the way to Seattle?”

  “Yes, to their head office. But fortunately we have relatives there. She’ll be able to get to Gathering and they’ll have her for supper and such.”

  And Julia Malcolm was in Seattle.

  Perversely, she hoped Claire would have the nerve to visit. They could all use a good dose of nerve and do some things they wanted to do just because they were right and good in themselves. The Elect didn’t have a monopoly on right and good, though they certainly thought so.

  Sunday afternoons were usually a mad rush of big meals and visiting and getting ready to go to the evening Mission service. But for once, they had an afternoon to themselves. Once Tamsen had gone down for her nap, Dinah let all the chickens out to ramble on the grass and took a garden chair out there herself.


  She relaxed into the sun with a sigh. There was no sound except for the rush of the river across the road, behind the trees. The chickens conversed among themselves, punctuated by the occasional squawk as one was disciplined by a bird above her in the order. Schatzi queened it even over Joseph, their lone Wyandotte rooster, who tried to tread her and got a whack on the side of the head for his trouble.

  Dinah grinned and closed her eyes, letting the sun warm her face.

  “May I join you?”

  Elsie stood a few feet away, carrying her own plastic garden chair. Dinah straightened.

  “Of course. Should you be carrying that?”

  “It’s only a chair. Weighs hardly anything. And I don’t need people to fetch and carry for me. Meg did that for two solid weeks. In the beginning, of course, I was grateful. But I don’t need to be treated like a baby all the time.”

  Just most of it. Then Dinah squelched the nasty thought. Matthew had said she used contempt to fence people out. Well, there was a perfect example. And really, since she’d come home from the hospital Elsie had been unusually easy to live with, even to the point where she’d made breakfast this morning when Matthew was busy with the chickens and Dinah was occupied with the baby. In fact, her timely help was all that had enabled them to get to Gathering. Until someone was named Deacon to manage the Gathering here, Melchizedek had decided that Gathering would be at the Mission hall, with Owen Blanchard leading.

  Elsie sank into the chair with a sigh of satisfaction, unlike her usual put-upon noise that gave the impression life was just too much trouble to manage. She, too, tilted her face to the sun.

  “I feel as if I haven’t felt sunshine in years,” she said.

  “It’s been a long winter, hasn’t it?”

  “‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’”

  Dinah glanced at her, puzzled. “Is that from the Bible?”

  “No, dear. Shakespeare. Richard the Third.”

  Dinah closed her mouth, which had fallen open in astonishment. Then she said, “I didn’t know you knew Shakespeare.”

  “You’d be surprised what I know. We did Richard the Third for the senior class play. Well, I didn’t do it, of course,” she added hastily, as if Dinah would think she’d put on makeup and costume and go onstage in front of a crowd of worldly people. “I was excused on the condition that I wrote a two-thousand-word essay. So I picked Elizabeth and the ramifications of what would have happened had she not married Richard. And in the process I memorized quite a bit.”

  “‘The winter of our discontent,’” Dinah repeated slowly. And now the truth had come in like the sun and changed the way everything looked.

  “That’s what it’s been like, you know,” Elsie said. “When I was in the hospital convinced I was going to die or be a vegetable, it was like the ice breaking on the lake after a hard winter. I vowed that if God got me through it, I’d make some changes.”

  Elsie had been in no danger of dying, to Dinah’s knowledge, but she could imagine what might have gone through her mother’s mind in the long nights in the hospital. “What changes?”

  Elsie gazed out over the river. “Where is the law of loving kindness in me?” she asked softly. “Where is the enlarging of my heart?” Dinah had the feeling the questions were not directed at her. Then her mother glanced at her. “I’ve lost half my family. And I’m in danger of losing you if I don’t start treating you like a mother should treat her daughter. My world is small, and it’s my own fault. I need to do something with the life God has let me have before everything I am implodes.”

  In the silence, Dinah tried to understand what was going on in her mother’s head. She’d never spoken like this before. Never taken charge, most especially of her own direction. And most of all, had never confided how she felt.

  In the distance, an osprey lifted off a snag and coasted on the breeze, following the river. “You’re not going to say anything, are you, Dinah?” Elsie asked, her gaze following the bird’s flight.

  “About what?”

  “About . . . well, you know. What we talked about the night I came home.”

  “About Phinehas using all of us to satisfy himself?”

  “Yes.” Elsie dropped her voice, as if it would encourage Dinah to speak more quietly. “That.”

  Dinah didn’t answer her question right away. There was something else she wanted to know first. “When did Dad find out about me?”

  It took her mother a moment to answer, as if she had to wrest her mind off the future and think back through layers of time and unhappiness to find the words. Or maybe she simply didn’t want to.

  “I told him when we got back from our honeymoon. I was so in love and I trusted him to forgive me, you see. I discovered that seeking forgiveness is an act of faith. One that was misplaced, as it turned out.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Oh, no. And such a godly man, too, in other ways. He never let on to Phinehas, not once, that he knew. Never let it affect his service, though I know it cost him. But he never left me alone in his presence, either. As if I would have been unfaithful to him.” She snorted. “The love may have been gone, but I took my vows seriously.”

  Her parents had been married twenty-five years, Dinah thought, dazed. And only two weeks of those years had been filled with love.

  “So Dad never loved me either?” she asked at last. May as well have the obvious out in the open.

  “I think he did, in his own way. He let you go to college, after all. Not many fathers would have done that.”

  “But not the way he loved Tamara.” Who was his own child.

  “Not like that, no. He never knew about her and—and Phinehas.”

  “So when it came to leaving me alone with Phinehas, he didn’t have a problem.”

  “You were a child, Dinah. Phinehas isn’t like that.”

  “But it has to start somewhere. And he gave me love, then.”

  “Yes, Phinehas did do that. Try to think of that during the dark times. Try to forgive.”

  “The problem was, Mom, he had an ulterior motive. He was priming the pump for what he planned to do later.”

  “Please don’t say that, Dinah.”

  “It’s true. Matthew says that’s what abusers do.”

  “Matthew?” Her mother straightened in her chair, her hands gripping the arm rests. “Matthew knows about all this?”

  “Oh, yes. His knowing is what saved me.”

  “Dinah, please tell me he won’t say anything.” Her mother leaned forward, her eyes wide with apprehension. “Please.”

  “He doesn’t have anything to say. It’s me that has to act.”

  “Don’t. Please.”

  “Why not, Mom? Phinehas is a criminal. He has to be stopped. I told you that before.”

  The fear in her mother’s eyes clouded over, and she slumped, her spine a curve of hopelessness. “He’s the power in Washington State, Dinah. Nothing we say will do anything. And he can do everything to destroy us.” Pain wrote lines on Elsie’s forehead. “We’re taught to lay up treasures in heaven. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have much else, and he can take away what I do have. Our place, our reputation . . . he can Silence us or cast us Out altogether. And then what?”

  Dinah sat wordlessly. She knew it. If he were cornered, he could take away everything her mother had lived for and built up in the absence of love. Everything, in essence, that she had, except for the ground they stood on.

  “One last thing, Mom.”

  “I hope so. This is the most painful conversation I’ve ever had with you.”

  Dinah cocked an eye at her. “It’s the only valuable one we’ve ever had, too.”

  “Honesty is a hard virtue. But we have to start somewhere. What else?”

  “Did Dad allow it? Did he even think about stopping Phinehas once he started coming to my room? Even once?”

  Elsie sighed, a long, troubled sigh that ended in a hitch. When Dinah glanced over, she saw a single tear track it
s way over the cheek that had once been smooth and smiling.

  “No, sweetie,” she said at last. “In fact, he locked me in the bedroom to prevent my going out into the hall and diverting Phinehas away. He was afraid that if he didn’t let him have you, he’d come after me. Not that I meant anything to him by then.” She paused, and swallowed. “He said he was doing what Jesus commanded, and rendering unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s.”

  Chapter 17

  BE CAREFUL WHAT you wish for.

  For years, Dinah had wondered what could possibly have kept her parents from protecting her. Now that she knew, the long-awaited confirmation just made her sick.

  Not throwing-up sick, though that in itself was unusual. She hadn’t been losing her meals as much lately, and consequently was feeling stronger and able to catch herself before she said hurtful things. Her vow to honesty didn’t, after all, include contempt and sarcasm, those weapons that came easiest to hand.

  In the spaces that contempt had once filled came compassion. She supposed she had Tamsen to thank for that. The next day, as she was giving Tamsen her bath in a plastic tub on the kitchen counter, the baby laughed out loud at some soap bubbles and clapped her hands to make them fly. Dinah felt a helpless sinking in her heart that she recognized some time later as the moment she fell completely and unreservedly in love with her niece. Half-sister, she amended to herself. She was no longer a burden to be kept clean and fed, but a person, a member of their household with likes and dislikes and the ability to love right back.

  Dinah had loved Sheba without reserve, but it wasn’t like this. She knew Sheba loved her, but of course a bird had no way to express it except by taking what Dinah had to give. Tamsen showed it every day by greeting her in the morning with a big smile and a screech of joy.

  Unfortunately, love didn’t make the baby any quieter. Sunday Gathering and midweek prayer meeting were turning out to be quite a trial, because Tamsen saw no reason why she shouldn’t vocalize along with the men, and she was a lot louder than they were. Dinah spent most of the time standing out in the parking lot of the hall with the baby in her arms.