The Blessed

by Ann H. Gabhart

  22

  The strawberry patch stretched out in front of Lacey so far a person might pick all day without finding the end of one row, but on this day Lacey didn’t mind. She didn’t even mind how the sweat was rolling down her face from the edges of the wretched bonnet she had to wear all the time, or how her dress was sticking to her back as she filled her baskets with the plump red strawberries.

  She didn’t let it bother her that it was forbidden to eat any of the strawberries off the vine, when everybody knew that strawberries tasted the very best with the sun warming their sweet flavor. Not once did she try to catch the other sisters with their heads turned away so she could sneak a berry into her mouth. This day she would be a dutiful Shaker and abide by the rules, for when the strawberries were picked and the evening meal had been eaten, she was going to see Rachel.

  If it hadn’t been for the worry of squashing a few berries, Lacey might have done a few steps of her dandelion dance. She bent down to pluck another strawberry from the vine to hide the smile that wanted to spread clear across her face. Sister Drayma had already taken Lacey to task for the way she had smiled with too much abandon in the eating room. It had been on the tip of Lacey’s tongue to say that Aurelia’s angel Esmolenda was dripping smiles down on her, but then Sister Drayma would have given her the lecture on lying. A well-deserved one at that, because no angel was smiling through her. She was doing every bit of the smiling herself.

  In fact she had almost laughed out loud when she’d caught the eye of the young brother, Isaac, who had caused such a stir in the meetinghouse on Sunday when he reached out to catch her. It hadn’t exactly worked since they’d both ended in a heap on the floor and shocked the stuffing out of the assembly. If the woes were still echoing a bit in Lacey’s head, then they were probably sounding ten times worse in his. So it was no wonder he’d looked surprised to see her grinning from ear to ear like she didn’t have a care in the world. He had surely thought she would be downcast from all the finger-pointing and blame that had gone on at the meeting. Blame for something as innocent as a clumsy fall. Or an angelic push. Either way, a totally innocent happening as far as she and the brother were concerned.

  Certainly nothing she’d planned, even if something about Isaac did jerk on her heartstrings. She couldn’t pay any attention to that. She didn’t have any loose heartstrings for anybody to be jerking. But if she did, if she wasn’t Mrs. Reverend Palmer, if she wasn’t living right in the middle of a bunch of people who thought being Mrs. Anything was the biggest sin a person could commit, then she might hope, might even dream of falling against that young brother again. Without a few hundred eyes looking on.

  She could almost hear Miss Mona whispering in her head, If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So it was better to stay focused on what was and not be pondering what wasn’t. She was the lawfully wedded wife of a man who had lost all touch with reason ever since those seed-selling Shakers had landed on his front porch. That was what was. This morning the poor man had appeared sickly, standing there in the middle of the eating room looking for all the world like a blind sheep in need of a good shepherd to prod him along the proper path.

  She’d known it wasn’t going to be easy for Preacher Palmer here with these people. He was used to declaring the gospel, not hearing it from others. It was still beyond her how he could have swallowed what these people preached. That the Lord had to come back again like he hadn’t gotten the job done right the first time. And then to come back in a woman. While Lacey could almost wrap her mind around that even as crazy strange as it sounded, she couldn’t see the preacher ever being able to do so. Not with what he’d always preached from his pulpit. Yet the day before, he’d been shaking and quaking and losing all grasp on his sanity, from the looks of things.

  There wasn’t the least thing she could do about it. Even if the way she’d acted toward him after they’d spoken their vows might have been the first shove toward his downward slide, she couldn’t change that now. She didn’t like to think about what Miss Mona would tell her if she were still breathing, but then if Miss Mona had still been breathing, none of this would be happening.

  It was all a tangle. That was for sure. Such a tangle that she just pushed it to the side and gave up pulling any strings to untangle it. She was going to see Rachel. That was what she needed to think on. That and how the sky was a robin’s egg blue and the strawberry juice on her fingertips was sweet and Sister Drayma was way at the other end of the patch. Too far to hear any careless word Lacey might let escape her mouth to bring on one of the woman’s lectures.

  Aurelia was there beside her, picking one strawberry to Lacey’s four. She kept smiling too. Some the same as Lacey. But some different too. Not big smiles like the ones Lacey kept having to bite back when she thought about seeing Rachel. Aurelia’s smiles were a bare lift of the corners of her lips, like as how she knew where the mouse had hid the cheese. And she was the only one who did. The only one who ever would.

  Lacey supposed that might be the way of it after an angel stepped down inside a person. That person might feel things a bit different for a spell. Even if a person was making the whole thing up, the fact that she’d fooled so many people might keep a smile lurking for a day or two.

  Idle chatter wasn’t encouraged while they worked, but a few words now and again were overlooked. Besides, nobody was close enough to know if they were talking about strawberries or what.

  “Are you feeling all right, Sister Aurelia?”

  “Yea, I am fine. I might claim even better than fine.” Sister Aurelia lay the strawberry she’d just picked gently down in her basket. Then she moved it to the side as though each strawberry had its assigned place in her basket before she looked up at Lacey. The corners of her lips turned up a bit more and her eyes looked ready to laugh. “Why do you ask, Sister Lacey?”

  “You just seem a little off kilter this morning. Like maybe you’d been spinning some this day like as how you did in meeting and it was keeping you from thinking straight.”

  “Spinning.” Aurelia did laugh then, a sweet whisper of a laugh, as she held her arms out away from her and looked ready to do a turn or two. She dropped her arms back to her side and bent down to the berry row again. “I’m so glad you came here, Sister Lacey. You are an answer to prayer.”

  “Me?” Lacey stopped picking and stared at Aurelia. “What prayer?”

  “The better question might be, whose prayer?”

  “All right then. Whose prayer?”

  “Whose prayer indeed?”

  “I think that’s what I asked you.”

  Lacey waited for Aurelia to answer, but she just kept smiling mysteriously at Lacey with no words forthcoming. Like maybe she was trying to get under Lacey’s skin. If so, it was working.

  With a shrug, Lacey smashed down her irritation. “I don’t know what bee you’ve got in your bonnet this morning, but I don’t see any need in letting it sting me.” She turned her attention back to the strawberry plants and searched through the thick growth of leaves to locate every ripe berry. She didn’t look at Aurelia as she went on. “And if prayer brought me here, then could be prayer will see me away from here.”

  Aurelia leaned over to find another strawberry too. Her head was very near Lacey’s and her hand swept through the same plants that Lacey had just picked clean. “Don’t you like it here, Sister Lacey? With the angels? With me?”

  “There’s ways I’d rather live. That doesn’t have anything to do with you or the other sisters either. It just doesn’t seem natural.” Lacey moved a short way down the row. There wasn’t the least bit of sense of them picking in the same spot. She looked back at Aurelia. “What about you, Sister Aurelia? Do you like it here? With your angels?”

  “Some people don’t have any choice.”

  “That’s God’s own truth,” Lacey said. “Plenty of times life don’t give a body much choice.” One by one she picked off a handful of strawberries to drop into her basket. Out of the corner of her eye
she saw Aurelia pick a green strawberry and then stare at it as if she could make it turn red before she dropped it on the ground and quite deliberately stepped on it.

  “Nor do the angels,” Aurelia said as she leaned back over to the strawberry plants in the same place, the already picked place, and began searching through the leaves again.

  “I think we’ve already got the ripe ones there,” Lacey said. “Maybe you should move up the row a little.”

  Aurelia paid no attention and Lacey picked back through the strawberries between them so none of the ripe ones would be missed. Aurelia certainly couldn’t be relied on to find them. Not on this day when her mind seemed on anything but strawberries. They worked in silence for a moment with Aurelia continuing to rake her fingers through the strawberry leaves, checking the ones with just a blush of red over and over before leaving them on the vine.

  Lacey had almost forgotten her question about the angels by the time Aurelia decided to answer. “They’re not my angels. More like I’m their mouth and hands. Can you understand what I mean by that?” Aurelia looked over at Lacey. “How if you had no voice you might have to borrow someone else’s. That’s the way of the angels. They have to borrow my voice, my body. I am their instrument.”

  “Is it a good feeling? Seems like it might be scary to me.” Lacey had her basket heaped up. No little sister was close to fetch her an empty basket. That was their duty in the patch, but there were many pickers and only a few children. So she dropped her handful of berries in Aurelia’s basket. Aurelia wasn’t ever going to get it filled up the way she was going anyway.

  “Angels are creatures of love. A vessel filled with love keeps a trace inside the way a jar of honey can never be completely emptied without leaving behind the film of sweetness.” Aurelia finally stepped up to the row and picked a ripe strawberry. She gazed at it for a moment before she put it in her mouth rather than in the basket without even a glance around to be sure no one was watching.

  “Whatever was talking through you didn’t appear all that loving to me,” Lacey said as she dropped another handful of berries into Aurelia’s basket.

  Aurelia grabbed Lacey’s wrist just as she had at the meeting. Her eyes went cold as she said, “You should not speak ill of angels.”

  “Turn me loose, Sister Aurelia.” Lacey kept her voice even and didn’t try to jerk free of the sister’s hold. Instead she met her eyes fully and said, “I wasn’t speaking ill. Only the truth. I think an angel can bear up under the truth. And so can you. Whoever was talking through your mouth yesterday wasn’t talking love, but sin.”

  “Sin.” Aurelia whispered the word and dropped her hand away from Lacey’s wrist. A look of distress crossed her face. “You cannot hide from sin. Even when you hide it from everyone else, the angels know.”

  “The Lord does for sure.” If Aurelia kept up with these angel carryings-on, Lacey might look more kindly on going back to hearing Sister Drayma’s sermons in her ears. She glanced down toward the older sister who was still too far away to hear them, but she was standing with her hands on her hips watching them. Lacey stooped down beside the strawberry row to give her back a rest. “We’d better get back to filling up our baskets before Sister Drayma decides I’m not working diligently enough. I wouldn’t want them to change their minds about letting me see my daughter tonight.”

  Aurelia squatted down across the row in front of Lacey. She didn’t even make a pretense of berry picking now as she said, “You have no daughter. Isn’t that what the angel told you?”

  Lacey sat back on her heels and considered Aurelia. “I thought you didn’t remember anything the angel said.” She didn’t know why she was surprised. She had never really believed an angel was talking through Aurelia.

  “At times the angel’s words hover in my mind and come back to me later. As now. Am I not right? She did not accuse you of the sin, but didn’t she tell you that you have no daughter? Wanting a child to be your child does not make it true.”

  “Rachel is my daughter.” Lacey spoke the words slow and true.

  “But didn’t you tell me she does not call you mother? That she called another such and that one was not her mother either. Not her natural mother.”

  Lacey had told her that, but coming out of Aurelia’s mouth the words sounded different. Like they had nothing to do with a real child. More like the pronouncement of a judge on a guilty party. “It doesn’t matter about names or who gave birth to her. It matters how I feel.”

  “And yet you deserted her here. Just as she was deserted by her first mother. Just as she was deserted by her second mother.” Aurelia’s voice was harsh.

  “No, that’s not true.” Tears spilled out of Lacey’s eyes. The baskets of strawberries were forgotten. Sister Drayma storming up the row toward them didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Aurelia’s words that had stabbed through Lacey’s heart. “I didn’t want to be parted from her. I had no choice. Why are you saying these awful things?”

  “Can’t you bear up under the truth, Sister Lacey? As the angels can. Do you think the first mother had a choice?” Aurelia leaned closer to Lacey. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Lacey whispered. “How could I know?”

  Sister Drayma was only a few steps away. Her frown was fierce as she called out to them. “Sisters, what is the meaning of this?”

  Neither Aurelia nor Lacey turned to look at her. Instead their eyes were locked on one another, and all at once tears appeared in Aurelia’s eyes to match Lacey’s. She reached across the row to lightly touch Lacey’s hand. “I am sorry, Sister Lacey. The sin is not yours. It has never been yours. Please forgive me.” Then a tremble shook through her as she sank down between the strawberry rows.

  Lacey sprang up and across the row, but she couldn’t catch her. She sat down in the dirt beside Aurelia to lift her head and shoulders up on her lap. “Aurelia. Are you all right?” The woman’s eyelids twitched but didn’t open. Lacey loosened the strings of the woman’s cap and slipped it off to begin waving air with it down toward her face.

  “Was she having a vision?” Sister Drayma asked. The crossness in her voice was gone, replaced with a hint of awe. Angel visions obviously took precedence over duty.

  “Perhaps. She seemed not herself,” Lacey answered.

  Other sisters were clustering around them now, all the baskets forgotten for the moment.

  Sister Drayma asked, “Was it that angel again? Esmo something.”

  “She didn’t call any names,” Lacey said. “It might be no more than the sun too hot. We need to fetch her some water.”

  “The sun is hot on us all and none of the rest of us are falling prostrate in the patch.” But Sister Drayma looked around and ordered a young sister who wasn’t much bigger than Rachel to bring a dipper of water.

  Rachel. Lacey had to take charge of this confusion to make sure Eldress Frieda’s promise wouldn’t be taken from her. That might happen if Sister Drayma decided Lacey was the reason for the disruption in the strawberry patch instead of Aurelia. After all, nobody expected Lacey to be seeing any angelic visions. Least of all Lacey.

  But maybe Aurelia was being visited by angels. Or thinking she was. She hadn’t seemed herself. Lacey pulled up the corner of her apron and gently wiped the dirt streaks off Aurelia’s damp cheeks. And she had pleaded for forgiveness there before she’d started playing possum. She knew her words wounded Lacey.

  Lacey could forgive her. That was easy enough with her head lying in Lacey’s lap and her face as pale as the sliver of moon that sometimes hung in the sky during the daylight hours. But why had she said them? Why did she or this angel keep saying Lacey had no daughter? If angels were love, as Aurelia claimed, those angels would know that love was a bond as strong as any forged by blood. And how could the Shakers not believe that when they spoke continually of love without the strictures of the natural blood relationships? If Sister Drayma had told her once, she’d told her a dozen times that all were of a family in the village. All in union.
All loving one another as their Mother Ann and the Christ directed.

  Sister Betsy got back with the gourd dipper of water, no more than half full since she’d spilled much of it in her haste to bring it. Lacey raised Aurelia’s head and Sister Drayma tipped the dipper up against her lips. The water dribbled out the corners of her mouth and down on her dress.

  “It might be well to carry her to the infirmary,” one of the older sisters in the circle around them suggested.

  “She will be heavy,” another spoke up. “We should call the brethren to help. They could bring a stretcher.”

  “First let me try to give her another drink,” Lacey suggested. Aurelia’s eyelids were twitching again. Lacey thought it might be according to whether Aurelia liked the idea of being carried to the infirmary how soon she decided to let them open.

  Sister Drayma handed over the dipper. With no warning of what she planned to do, Lacey threw the little amount left in it directly into Aurelia’s face. The woman gasped and jerked straight up from Lacey’s lap. It appeared angels didn’t care a whole lot for water.

  23

  “Perhaps you could fetch another dipper of water, Sister Betsy. I think Sister Aurelia could use that drink now.” Lacey held the dipper out toward the young girl, who took it with a notable lack of enthusiasm. She didn’t want to go off to the water pail at the end of the patch and miss whatever was about to happen with Aurelia who was looking mad as a wet hen. An apt description, in spite of the fact there couldn’t have been more than a cupful of water in the dipper that Lacey had splashed on her face. Aurelia swiped at a few wet strands of black hair falling down on her forehead and snatched her cap out of Lacey’s hands.

  “Sister Lacey, that lacked kindness.” Sister Drayma frowned.

  “Yea, you are right, Sister Drayma.” Lacey was ready to make amends. “I should have dipped the corner of my apron in the water and brought our sister back from her faint more gently.” Without looking at either Aurelia or Sister Drayma, Lacey cast her eyes down at her empty hands, but she could feel Aurelia’s angry stare. “But our sister is back among us in body and spirit now and can perhaps walk on her own feet to the infirmary while the rest of us continue in our duty of picking berries.”