by Sharon
With all he had, he never had more to offer her than himself. Long before she knew who he was, she had become everything she wanted to be.
He drew back her kapp, tasting her hair inside his mouth—it was the most perfect taste, perfect in infinite ways, past the power of his imagination to grasp how perfect. He closed his eyes, and the bright image of the hay door blazed on his retinas like black fire. "I want to stay with you today."
But she shook her head once more. "Go quickly." Her whisper was like his, only she was gasping. "This is too hard."
"I love you so much, Amish."
"Don't love me."
"Ask my heart to stop beating; that would be easier…" Holding her, just holding her… "I feel like it's some horrible cosmic error that we should be apart for even one second."
But she pushed his chest with the flat of her hand. He drew back, blind; no light seeming to be getting into his eyes, no air into his lungs, but he could smell the loft around him, grainy, musty. Afterward he was never sure how he found his way home.
Afterward she baked. Home was here, intangible in the yeasty puffs of bread rising on her kitchen sill, in the scents of spice and cream and a hot oven, in the sticky mystery of uncooked dough licked from her fingers. Everything pleased the surface of her mind, the delicate strengths and textures, egg shells and pastry, foam candy and cornmeal.
She took what she made herself to neighbors and family, not saying much, but in each drop of syrup and molasses was the sweetness of her affection; in every grain of salt, her sorrow that any act of hers had caused them to be angry at or ashamed of her.
She would have liked to cling to that, the joy in simple things. But her stomach never felt good, and her thoughts were jumping, jumping. Every second held a terrible feeling of anticipation—anything might happen, anything would happen.
There's a blankness, missing him.
Her body was a clumsy shell, as if she'd grown it new and couldn't get used to it. Daniel came up behind her once and touched her arm, and 'she dropped a plate of ginger cookies. After that, he spoke first when he came in.
Panic is in me here, always…
Alan had been to see her father. She'd had a good account of it from Luke, who'd been with Dad by the forge, sharpening corn shovels. Dad hadn't raised his face once to Alan.
It was easy to see how things would be between the two of them—Alan lost in a situation he could neither soothe nor negotiate, approaching things reasonably, with logic, warm in his new love, so confident in its power. It must have been hard for him to believe that barriers would not fall to pieces, like sand mountains, before its force. Alan's love was everything to Alan, but it wouldn't seem like much to her father, just easy, selfish desires, enflamed by challenge and unlawful proximity in a bored, immoral man who was too used to getting what he wanted.
Staring into the red, dirty heat of the forge, her father had said, "If you love her, then don't become her damnation."
Though Alan didn't come to see her after he left the haymow, she felt his presence without respite.
So lonely, wanting trim, wanting him… be doesn't come… Thank God be doesn't come, or I might weaken…
Daniel came with her to talk first with her parents; after, with leaders from the church, the Bishop and others, men she trusted as she would her father. Those hours she wanted to strip forever from her memory. Her father kept shaking his head. He'd shake his head, stare at his hands, murmur, "Susan, Susan…"
Her mother got so wan, then wild with anxiety. She'd had one daughter taken; she wasn't going to lose another. It just wasn't going to happen. This wasn't Susan.
Anyone could see this wasn't like Susan. There were reasons—her grief over John's death, and losing that tiny baby so soon after. She'd had no time to get over that before Rachel left them. It had been too much for Susan— she was troubled; she didn't understand what she was doing.
The charges against her were serious: sins against the rules of dress, of separation, sins of pride and fornication. It was a sickening nightmare to hear them on the Bishop's lips. She confessed immediately. She couldn't stand to have it go on. But to her horror, she was just saying the words.
As usual, Alan's emotions weren't for public consumption. He wrapped up the final days of his location work at Greyling, his efficiency mechanical, cruise control switched on. But everyone close to him had a glimpse of the turmoil inside in his rare moments of unguarded abstraction, when he let the facade slip, and the blank twilight of his unclothed anguish showed on his face.
Joan had heard about the pigs from Alan, in language so stark, it made the hair rise on the back of her neck. She was furious for him, furious for Susan; angry, helpless, and more than a little taken aback. What were these people going to do next, burn crosses on Susan's lawn?
Saturday night Daniel picked her up in his buggy, and she was so upset that she did one of the two things she had promised herself she wouldn't do: She got into a fight with him about it. Or rather, she tried to.
They stopped in a deserted park near the dam. Starlight sparkled on the indigo water, but somehow the peace wouldn't penetrate, and she kept harping on the subject until he took her hand and brushed it over the tree bark and said, "Rough"; held her hand in the water and said, "Smooth and wet"; brushed it over the grass and said, "Soft."
His touch, as always, was gentle, and as always it made her pulse beat in counterpoint. "What's that supposed to mean? Are you imitating someone?"
He held onto her hand. "Anne Sullivan."
"Anne—teaching the blind? I'm not that bad."
Smiling, he leaned back against a tree trunk, his hat tilted over his face, shading his dark, expressive eyes.
"You're leaving in a couple of days. This is the last time we can spend together. Let's have one night clean."
Beautiful and not knowing it, clever, natural, he was more than she could resist, and she did the second thing she'd promised herself she wouldn't do. She bent forward and kissed the warm satin of his mouth. She felt a slight motion that might have been surprise, a breath indrawn, and then his mouth remained still, a gracious captive.
By no one's definition was she an insecure woman, but the failure washed deep down into her most primal fears, and she drew away, frost growing under her skin. She tried to take back her hand; he kept possession of it.
She asked, "Are you a virgin?"
He had to think it over. He actually had to think it over, and she felt the frost in her cheeks turn to flame, wondering what kind of angles he had to consider. With a half-smile, he said, "Technically."
If he had the decency to be embarrassed, she couldn't tell it from his face. She had the decency to be extremely embarrassed. She turned to stare at the moon cups in the water, and in a moment she felt his hand moving slowly in her hair and realized with an exquisite leap in the pit of her belly that the touch was no longer sexless.
His breath swept against her ear. "I'm trying not to take advantage of you."
She paused incredulously. "You don't want to take advantage of me? If your friends put pigs in poor little Susan's bed for sleeping with a man she loves, I can't imagine what they'd decide to put in mine. Maybe a brontosaurus."
His soft laugh wavered on her cheek. Barely breathing in surprise, she felt his callused hands shift tenderly on her, lowering her to the warm, tickling grass, and he followed her down, covering her mouth in a long, erotic kiss, sublime, unselfconscious, questing.
"You're so very beautiful," he murmured. His fingers wandered with delicacy over her face, her brows, her eyelids, over her nose and lips.
Even more softly, she said, "I can't imagine what you believe you're protecting me from,"
"I'm not trying to protect you. I only want it to be different for you once." He sat with his back against the tree, taking her head gently onto his lap, placed his hat playfully over her face, set it on her stomach. Then he asked, "How's Alan?"
"Dying by inches. How's Susan?"
"The same
."
"Maybe she should just—I don't know. Go with him."
"To Los Angeles?"
"He'd treat her like a jewel. He'd ease every step of the way. She might be very happy."
"It isn't only a religion, being Amish, it's a way of life. It's her way. She grew up in a church where women don't speak in service, with no divorce, no contraception. We don't bear arms. If she left and had sons, they would be subject to a military draft Susan's never been more than thirty miles from home. Almost everyone she knows is a relative."
She stirred and sat up, wearing his hat. He tipped it forward over her nose. "How did the movie end?" he asked.
"What do you mean? The filming?"
"No. The story."
"As a matter of fact, he's changed it. And changed it. First time he's done anything like this."
"What changes?"
"Well, there were technical changes in the way the film looks. Color film is very… rich. It makes things look bright and pleasing, and Alan originally wanted it more subdued and moody, so they prefogged the film. It's a subtle effect; the audience probably feels it more than notices it, but it makes a big difference in terms of impact. Anyway, Alan saw Susan on film and right away he wanted full color. That meant they had to waste some of the stuff they'd done already. That was just the beginning. It's not the same film he started out to make."
"In the end?"
"There's this—I guess you'd call her a sorceress, some kind of demon being that controls the man Susan loves. The man Polly loves. The demon wears his soul in a ring on her finger. Whoever wears the ring will control him absolutely. Now, when Adam Burke, Polly's husband, is a monster, he has to eat living flesh. He can't stop himself. Polly learns about all this and has to go through agony to get hold of the ring—if she gets it, she can wear it and free him from becoming the monster. In the original, it's just too much for her, the burden of this other soul, and it kills her, and her true love is frozen forever in the form of a monster. He goes crazy with grief and carries her off to this cave far underground and stays with her, hovering over her until he dies of starvation."
"Alan wrote that?"
"The darkest imagination since Poe, the critics say. He says, 'For God's sake, it's just commerce.' I think he sees himself as the missing link Between H.P. Lovecraft and the Rocky Horror Picture Show."
"Lovecraft? Rocky Horror Picture Show?"
"Sorry. English weirdness." She kissed him. "In the rewrite, the monster trusts her so completely, she's able to endure his possession of her in that form and they both live." She put the hat on her knees and stared into it. Moments passed before she spoke again.
"Daniel, tomorrow morning when she has to do that truly barbaric and repugnant thing that we won't discuss again—has she told you what she's going to say?"
"No. I don't think she knows."
Chapter 21
On Sunday morning, Susan's father came to take her to service alone, as he had on her baptism, her wedding, and on the day of John's funeral. She met him in the kitchen, and found him eating one of the doughnuts she'd made yesterday. She brushed the powdered sugar out of his beard and he gave her a guilty grin.
"Too much baking around here. You'll wear yourself out and get Daniel fat." He smoothed her hair back from her face. The motion was clumsy for all its gentleness, and he accidentally dislodged a strand, which came dangling over her nose. They smiled a little at each other. "Ach," he said, "big, dopplich hands…" He brought his other hand from behind his back. "Look what's out. Wild roses."
"You picked me roses, Dad?"
"On the way over." His smile became shaky. "Do you remember the last day your sister was to church?"
He would not say her name. But that he spoke of Rachel at all amazed her. She nodded.
"There was blue flag out," he said, "and I thought, I ought to pick some of that for her, she was so fond of them. She had my dander up, but I thought of it anyway. I didn't do it, though. I don't know why. A man gets too late smart…"Then he began tucking the roses into a jar on her counter, and she stood there with hair over her nose and a pain in her middle.
"Dad, aren't you mad at me?"
He was concentrating hard on the flowers, as if it were the most important job he'd ever had to do. She saw him swallow. His voice was rough. "When I had more hope I was mad. Now I can only worry."
Hoofbeats drummed on blacktop, bringing the line of buggies to service at the farm of Ezra Peachey, John's father. Susan tried to close her mind, to endure it all as she must endure it, with humility and submission. Here there were not a thousand paths, choices like a field of pretty stones to hunt among. Here there was one course— repentance followed by forgiveness.
Ezra's deep white barn rose from its skirt of green foliage toward a shimmering blue sky. When she arrived in the rig, her eyes strayed to the steep-pitched gable roof, toward the shed dormer. John had sat there, his long legs dangling over the eaves as he waved cheerfully to her. Five minutes later he was dead.
Her father followed her gaze, and his broad hand left the reins, and, smelling of leather, came to lay over hers.
"Still you look," he said.
Half past eight in the morning and it was already hot. Bright, moist sunlight made the shadows cool oases. In the pools of shade that dotted the farmyard, folks had been greeting one another, men shaking hands, children with scrubbed, shiny faces finding friends and cousins, leading toddlers. Here was every living being she loved in creation— except two.
Talk had died. Group by group everyone had become aware she was here and had gone quiet. Only the smallest went on as they had been, and the pretty babble of the very young became clear and seemed loud, like the clatter of cutlery at the table when there was an uneasy silence. Faces were especially clear today. She had never seen them so well. At no time had they been more dear.
I should have lived every day of my life in thanksgiving for all that you'd given me. Lord.…
For she was no longer dear to them.
Some had turned their backs on her—Seth's sister Ada, two of John's brothers, Shem Whetstone. It was better to see their backs than their faces. Worst of all were the small mercies, the resolute acts of kindness. Fanny, with her chin up, came forward to greet her in that terrible pall of silence just as if nothing had happened. Her own family slipped toward her, to touch her arm protectively, to smile at her. Ezra brought forward his sons Dan and Isaac, and watched grim-faced while they made lifeless apologies for their act against her home. With hard-held balance, she learned that it was not Seth who had thought to soil her bed with shoats—it had been her brother-in-law Isaac.
Preaching service was in the barn. For air, two wide doorways on either side stood opened, dazzling squares of light. Between the rows of benches rolled the scents of the pasture, warm oats and alfalfa and sun-soaked wood, and the hymns held a faint echoing murmur, as though the earth herself gave praise. The final tone of each song stayed with Susan, richly vibrant to her ears. She could hardly hear the spoken words of the service. What she heard she could not interpret, for even the holy passages of scripture were formless anagrams. She clung only to rhythms, the slow meter of the hymns, the fluid chant of the sermons. She saw the heat, clear, wandering ripples of distortion that arose from the sandy drive beyond the door, but her senses rejected warmth also. She felt sticky and cold.
Katie grew restless near her mother, and Susan drew her little sister onto her own lap, cuddling the pleasing roundness of childhood, playing silent finger games to amuse her, rocking her, her own cheek pressed to the smooth plump one.
Katie fell deeply asleep after the final hymn. Children were released now, and with them, those, like Daniel, who had not accepted vows of baptism. She did not look up to see them leave. It took all of her concentration to realize she must open her arms to allow Anna to carry Katie off.
Sound remained as eerie whispers on the edge of her consciousness, and in time it was her mother who held her close and told her softly that
she must go to the Bishop now; they were ready for her.
She walked forward blindly, and as she knelt, she could hear with startling clarity the solemn quiet within the barn. So many were here, and yet she heard the feathery flurry of pigeons in the open mow above her. She felt the heat in a thick wave, threatening sickness. Light perspiration pooled on her breastbone and between her shoulders, turning cold on her skin and she began to shiver under her clothing. She recalled briefly the day of her baptism, at eighteen, kneeling like this, the air warm and spicy with mystery, the concrete rough against her legs, the utter silence as the deacons gently removed her kapp, and the Bishop's hands on her head, then above it, cupped to receive the baptismal water, which flooded through, trickling in cool joy and grace into her hair, into her lashes, to sparkle with her tears on her cheeks and throat That was the memory, but now…
"I am no longer…" Her voice weakened and broke. In a moment the Bishop softly murmured encouragement. "I am no longer easy with myself."
Where were the words? Did they exist?
"I have allowed myself… to be employed in worldly ways so that I could give the money to my sister Rachel. I couldn't stop myself thinking, 'What if she gets sick? What if she loses her job?' I have offended God in ways I cannot count. I confess to the sin of fornication with—"
The pattern of flecked straw on the floor blurred, grew white spines of light.
"I saw in Alan Wilde… his compassion, but he had none for himself. I saw that there was love in him, but he couldn't recognize what it was. He had so much vision, and at the same time he was blind to his real gifts. He thought he was like a machine that could only say, 'Put a camera here, put a camera there—'" I am wandering.