by Jeffrey Lent
Phoebe Davis said, “That’s my chap, there. More froze than the rest of us because he can’t dance about and worry over a moment of cold that’ll be set right in a heartbeat, you stop carrying on. I know you’re used to life alone; it was never my plan to live so either but we need each other and soon enough we’ll come to terms with it. Meantime, sir, wrap that boy under your robe and step aside, for I’m coming through.”
The summer her mother died of malarial fever,Becca Davis was fourteen and for two years had been working summers and after school as a clerk and helper in Malin’s store at the Four Corners. Harlan was attending the same dame school that she did, run by two older celibates. Marcus Malin and wife, Judith, were not followers of The Friend but understood many of their customers adhered to that simple faith and held both sympathy and respect for Becca Davis—facts she knew when she sat down two weeks after her mother died and outlined her plans with them.
“I can do my sums, account entry work also, and read and write a fair hand. I know geography and the scripture well. I’m on my own now but not alone. I’d work all the hours you’d want and be grateful for it; I know you prefer to board your help to save cash money but I need to watch over my brother and Mr. Ruddle at least a year or two more. Harlan ain’t but ten and I’d not set him loose to his own fortune so soon. But I’d work all hours you needed—as long as there was food the two of them could warm when they needed. I’d rise before dawn to cook it. Earlier, the dark winter months, to serve you well.”
Marcus began to speak but Judith Malin interrupted him. “You’re an earnest girl, Becca Davis. But your brother and Albert Ruddle both need you evenings and I dare say you need them as well. We’ll arrange your hours to suit.”
Marcus said, “That can’t last forever, though.”
“Yes, sir. I imagine a year will suffice. Harlan will speak again soon enough; his silence is as much worry over what comes as what has gone. And once he does, he and I’ll work out a plan. He’s a smart boy.”
“The two of you have had a hard row to hoe.”
“Not so much as some. The negroes you shelter in the basement, awaiting their night passage onward.” She stood and said, “I’m also not living scant miles up the road at the Poor Farm. I’ll be here in the morning, first light.”
Albert Ruddle’s parents had followed The Friend out of Philadelphia and up the Susquehanna through the narrows and over the gaps to the valley of the Chemung and then northward along the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, from there west the twenty miles to the new Jerusalem tract. The settlement was not a dozen years old when he was born; and following that event his mother had forsworn the bounds of marriage and moved into The Friend’s new-built manse to live out her days as a celibate acolyte, leaving Albert and his father to eke out as they would, which among other results left Albert’s father an involuntary but resigned celibate himself; no great surprise that Albert chose to follow the same course. Their one stroke of luck had been the random award of their holding, eighty acres of prime bottomland in the valley through which flowed the Kedron Brook to where it spread into the small marshy delta and then into the west branch of the Crooked Lake at the Four Corners. His father had sold all but ten acres to the farmers north and south of him and raised beans. Ten-foot-high corn, thick swales of barley and wheat stretched either side of their fields but his father chose beans, and beans it was. Speckled, pea, navy, cranberry, soldier, bird’s-egg, all the varieties that Albert’s father had carried out of western Connecticut down the seaboard and then north and west into this fabled new land. He was a true believer, a man of faith and an old-time Yankee: Rumors of great bounty would not tide a man through a long winter but honest beans would stew with only water and time, a bit of salt pork, maple or dark cane molasses, if you had them but even without, the covered clay pot set in the banked coals of a hearth would turn out food against starvation. A loaf of bread, corn dodgers, a slab of pan-fried ham—all those things and more would make the beans a feast. And all but the beans, come winter, were extra.
The Ruddle men grew beans. The plants pulled when the pods were drying, late summer through the fall depending upon the variety, hung to finish in the long, low barn that was more shed than barn, then the pods cracked and the dried beans gathered, winnowed free of dust and sacked true to type. And their neighbors who did not waste ground to plant beans but had their own bean pots, receipts handed down, larders of ingredients, each fall felt the stirring toward winter and made their inventory against the worst possible winter and so trekked to Ruddle’s for their sack of beans—also knowing the elder and then the younger as years passed, knew what might be best offered in trade. Hard coin was not refused but more welcome was a crock of brined cabbage, combs of honey tied tight in waxed sailcloth, sacks of cornmeal or wheat flour, stone-milled oats, potatoes, apples, head cheese, sides of bacon or hard beef sausage. Parsnips, carrots, turnips, any such thing come October that would last.
The Ruddles, even after all those years, lived to survive lean times.
Albert sat across the table from Becca. A spring evening two years on. They’d supped on cornbread baked in a hot spider, boiled young nettle leaves, bacon sliced thick and buttermilk, and Harlan was now in the small room he and Becca shared, bent close over McGuffey’s Third Reader to memorize Washington’s Farewell Address. They were drinking tea made from the previous year’s dried wild spearmint: Albert did not hold with coffee or tea, believing their stimulating effect to be deleterious to thought and violently purgative.
“Missy,” Albert said. “You’re lingering. The Malins have been gracious in their patience but if you’re to make a go of it with them you need to give them your full attention. You do it well but you split yourself twixt them and us two, here. The boy and I get on just fine. He’s a hand to hoe and come autumn knows his beans and what needs to be done with em. He’s weary of the school and has learned most all he needs of it. Truth be, all you try to do for him and me mostly gets in the way of our doing it ourselves. He won’t let me lift a hand to supper if he thinks you’re aiming to make it back in time to cook it for us: We set hours sometimes waiting but he won’t let me speak of it. So there it is. I’d think your mother would agree I’d done my part by you, but it’s time for you to go.”
She wasn’t so surprised but said, “And you’ll set to the wash kettle and paddle yourself? Or will you have Harlan do that work?”
He tipped his fingers together as prayer, touching his chin with the tips and said, “The Widow Gould at the Corners has agreed to pick up the clothing and linens as needed Monday morn and have them back clean, dried and folded neat before end of day for pennies a week.”
“You’re ahead of me,” she said.
“It’s the benefit of age,” he said. “Also, you seem to forget it’s little over a mile from here to Malin’s. My guess is you’d see your brother as often, and easier for the both of you if he was to step before your counter and buy a peppermint stick or a cone of salt for the house when the need or urge came than if you stayed on here.”
Quiet a moment, she then said, “I’m not ready to leave him.”
Albert Ruddle nodded, paused, and then said, “I’m not either. But I will, sooner than I’d wish. And we’d welcome your visits, as long as they were of free will and carried no efforts to provide meals, tucker, the like. Likewise, Malins are happy with it and the weather suits, no reason why we all shouldn’t continue walking to Meeting together. So you see, the world need not change so much as you think, but rather direct both you and your brother onward into life. As I said, the day will not be so far off when I’ve done all I can.”
She looked at him. “Are you ill?”
He smiled at her, with most of his teeth the color of corn. What hair remained on his head could be counted by strands but for how wispy they flew about, the liver spots on his skull as visible as those on his hands. Like many of the older farmers, Albert dressed each day in black wool trousers and jacket over a white shirt, though his shirt
s were yellowed with age. His dress and comportment were equal parts antique and of his self-imposed withdrawal from the world that whirled in Time.
He said, “Nothing is hidden from you, but the earth pulls me downward, the spirit urges me home. Truth is, Becca Davis, when I was asked about taking in your mother and you two children I was greatly troubled by the prospect—such a change in how I’d always lived, how I’d thought I’d live all my days. But we are not asked what we cannot bear and so I said Yes. Odd thing, that: These years have been among the best of my life, though the loss of your mother was a blow. Yet you and Harlan are part of my household as much as the floorboards and walls. I watched you rise up as a young woman, those months the chap would not speak so struck he was by her death.
“You’re already looking forward, and our dear Harlan knows loss but sees one day following after another. You move to Malin’s, he’ll gain a freshened sense of the loneliness central to life—and so cast his eyes a bit tighter upon me. And when I drop or grow feeble it will not be his place to step in and take upon himself the beans but rather the certainty within that he’s of value to other men. That he’s of stout heart and disposition that will serve him well for some greater farmer.”
“You’ll make of him a hired man.”
Albert Ruddle said, “Don’t discount it. A good one can become nigh a partner, more so if there happens to be a daughter and no son. No, I can’t foresee the future for any of us but I do know the sort of man your brother’s growing into, and whatever may come his way he’ll rise up and meet boldly face-on.”
She paused, thinking herself only a shopgirl, after all. Then, dipping her voice low but also full of wonderment, she said, “You love him, don’t you?”
Without pause Albert said, “Dear as a son. You as well. But upon Father’s death these acres’ value reverted to The Friend; I’m but a life tenant and not unhappy, it’s how such things should be. Upon your mother’s death my pang of regret that I could not bestow the land upon you and Harlan was momentary—not enough land to support one in these coming days, let alone two, and their families. The days of beans is about done.”
She rose and walked around the table, stood before him, and then leaned and kissed his brow.
“There, now,” he said, flushing under spring sunburn. “That’s enough.”
“Not hardly close,” she told him.
August and Harlan were scything ditches, had been at it for two days now. The reaper sat ready on the barn floor, the cutting bar greased and knives sharpened, three worn ones replaced, the drive wheel and cogs, the wheel bushings spread with axle grease from the tub. The platform and wooden paddles checked for stoutness and suppleness and the belt from the drive wheel to turn the paddles tightened, checked for wear. The granaries and threshing floor had been swept clean of dust, old chaff, mouse droppings. All was ready but for the ripeness of the grain and that was drawing close. Each afternoon August would wade to the edge of his oat field and strip two separate stalks, worrying the oblong oats free of their hulls and biting down on two from each stalk, one at a time. They were almost hard, almost dry-cured upon stalks the pale yellow of the stone his house was built from. But not quite: Each gave a bit in the middle, the last moisture holding in the germ of the grain. A matter of days.
So they scythed ditches. Around them the grain fields, the oats and the bright brass of the barley, the more dusky yellow of the wheat. Also pastures and meadows of hay growing toward the second cutting which would start as soon as the threshing was done. A month and a half of long, hot, dusty days lay ahead. It was hot work what they were doing but free of dust. The ditches ran along the farm lanes to draw excess water off the fields, with a fence running along the bank of the ditch on the field side. August walked with his feet in the bottom of the ditch, scything upward toward the fence, cutting not just the lush grass that grew there but also the burdock and thistles and young saplings of sprouted trees hidden in the grass. His feet feeling for any stones or clods that had rolled into the ditch to impede the flow of water. Now and again he’d find a place where water had caved the ditch bank and blocked the flow altogether. Those places he’d note to return to later with a spade to clear. Because of the moisture in the ditches there were plots of wild spearmint and peppermint and he left those so come September they’d remain as high, bright green stands, easy to find and gather to dry or boil with apples from the orchard to make a jelly whose tangy sweetness married well with darker meats in winter—beef or ham, venison if he had the occasion to shoot a deer between corn harvest and hog-killing time.
Harlan worked a dozen strides behind, his own feet upon the lane and so swinging his scythe downward and back to cut the near bank. Like August’s, an unnatural stroke made harder by repetition—the backstroke offered the chance to catch breath but no relaxation of muscles—lifting the scythe upward instead of feeling it loose its load and slide empty back across the fresh stubble as the man stepped forward to swing and cut again.
Beyond spare comments passed on the prospects of the weather or the heat of the day, creatures or conditions noted in passing, they’d said little to one another during this spate of work and the silence suited both. Until mid-morning of the second day, when August climbed out of the ditch onto the lane, rested the tip of the snath upon the ground and pulled his stone from his pocket, spat upon it and began putting a fresh edge to the chine. He heard Harlan stop behind him and soon heard the sing of Harlan’s whetstone upon his blade. His own cutting edge began to glisten, silver in the sun. He squinted and studied the edge, looking for deeper nicks or pocks where he’d have to peen the chine but it looked good, a small nick in the toe but nothing that wouldn’t hold an edge a day or more.
He dropped the long whetstone into his rear pocket, lifted the scythe by the snath and pivoted on one heel, planting the snath again upon the lane and crossed his arms over the beard of the blade and leaned, looking at Harlan. The boy tracked the movement but kept his eyes upon his job as he finished sharpening his own scythe, his head cocked as he studied the edge being drawn out, eyes squinting against the sun the better to see. Then he pocketed his stone and, too short to lean against his upright tool as August did—or possibly disinclined to mimic—turned it downward and held it by the grips across his body. Ready to swing it back and go to work.
“What?” he said.
August said, “I told you I’d respect your desire to hold your silence. But you’ve a troubled mind. These past couple days I’ve seen you studying me when you think I’d not notice. As if gauging if you could trust me, or perhaps just waiting a moment seems right to you. Last time was up the ditch, not a quarter hour ago.”
“Of course my mind’s troubled. Isn’t yours?”
August considered the sky before answering. “Many are the things that may trouble us in this life. But there’s that grand unknowable design behind it all, where we can’t know what the Lord intends, how far His reach and understanding is. Which alone is the Glory of the Lord. But also, our questing is why He sent His Son unto us. So we might better grasp our place in His unknowable scheme, how we comprehend His Love and devotion to us weak and fallen vessels. And to know that and raise our hearts and souls and place our trust in that love of Our Heavenly Father. And you know this, you were raised so. Would you say otherwise?”
“I’d say the Lord don’t want us to stand by with silent tongues when we see a wrong being done. What sort of a Lord would that be? Was that what Jesus did? Set back silent and wait for His Father to sort it all out?”
“There now,” August said.” Are you ready to give voice to the question your eyes have been darting my way?”
Harlan paused, pushed a roughened foot in the dust of the lane and said, “Are you gaming me?”
“I don’t know where you learned such talk, though I can guess. But the answer is no; you should know me well enough to not say or think such things. I’m offering you the chance to speak your mind and perhaps, by doing so, you’ll find clarity. Has h
appened to me upon occasion.”
Harlan eased the scythe from hand to hand, shifting the weight. Finally he said, “I know Stone doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. He’s set upon a course and all I’d say would muddy his waters. And Malcolm Hopeton, he doesn’t want any of it, Stone or me. So I wondered if I should set back and let it go the way it will—guessing the judge could be well inclined to listen to Brother Stone and Bethany’s father, the two of them together. But even if they did, not only would they be wrong but wrong in a way Mr. Hopeton could not bear. So it comes back to me and what I seen and heard, what I know.”
August interrupted: “You assume the judge would not be interested in what you have to say. It’s his job to not only listen but to hear how a thing is told. Meaning he might hear in your version some elements missing from Brother Stone’s account—also how the judge might view David Schofield’s account, that man speaking of his own daughter.”
“You’re thinking I need to speak to the judge.”
“I’m thinking you already know that. I’m thinking there’s some other part to the matter you’re wrestling with.”
Harlan grinned, couldn’t help himself, though the grin slipped off quickly. “I been talking in my sleep?”
“No.” August smiled shortly himself, then said, “I think if it was only your concerns, you’d have answered that question by now.”
Harlan nodded. “All right,” he said. “There’s another part.”
“Share it or hold until you know.”
“I’ll share. But I’m not looking for answers, except from myself. As you said, airing a question aloud sometimes helps it come clear.”
“Fair enough. Speak and I’ll not say a word, unless you decide to ask my opinion. But before you speak, let me say this: If you decide to talk to the judge and you want me along, I’ll be there with you.”