by T. C. Boyle
“Tucking in there, Missus, eh?” William observed, giving her that same grin even as he nudged Nathan, and here was another story.
“We’ve been on the road since eight in the morning,” she said, wondering for the life of her what was so amusing about sheltering in a hovel in the woods fit only for a band of naked savages, “and it’s now past two in the afternoon. A woman has got to eat, if only to keep up her strength.” She was throwing it back at them, and why not—that was how she felt. And she was hungry, nothing to be ashamed of there. But the sauce was the strangest color—a purple so deep it was nearly black—and the thought came to her that the hostess had stewed the meal in her dye kettle.
William was watching her. As was Nathan. The hostess had vanished in the back room and the sound of the fowl scratching in the dirt of the yard came to her as if she were standing there among them. Very slowly a branch outside the sole window dipped in the breeze and parted the dense shadow on the wall. She hesitated, the spoon hovering over the dish—they were both of them grinning like fools—and then she plunged in.
Foxvale to Providence
This was the leg of the journey that wore on her most. The new man—Nathan—rode hard and she had to struggle to keep up with him, or at least keep him in sight. Though he’d seen her discharge William handsomely enough and pay for his refreshment too, he didn’t seem in the least solicitous. He was a hat and pair of shoulders and a back, receding, always receding. Her mount wasn’t much taller than a pony and tended to lag no matter how much encouragement she gave him, running to his own head and not a pace faster. The clouds closed in. A light rain began to awaken the dust. Nathan was gone.
She’d never been out alone in the wilderness in her life. When she was younger she’d gone berrying on the outskirts of town or spent a warm afternoon sitting by a cool brook, but the wild was nothing she wanted or recognized. It was a waste, all of it, and the sooner it was civilized and cultivated, the sooner people could live as they did in England, with security and dignity—and cleanliness—the better. To her mind, aside from the dangers that seemed to multiply with every step they took—a moose, indeed—it was the dirt that damned the wild more than anything. She hadn’t felt even remotely clean since she’d left town, though she’d done her best to beat the soil from her skirts, brush her shoes of mud and see to the demands of her hair. And now she was wet and the horse was wet and her baggage and the road before her, and every leaf on every tree shone and dripped.
She tried to concentrate her thoughts on easeful things, the tea set in her parlor and her daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge pouring out the tea and artfully arranging the pastries on the platter, because it was teatime now, and if it was raining there they’d have built up the fire to take the damp out of the air—but she couldn’t hold the picture long. Her thoughts kept coming back to the present and the dangers of the road. Every stump seen at a distance seemed to transform itself into a bear or wolf, every copse was the haunt of Indians mad with rum and lust, the birds fallen silent now and the rain awakening the mosquitoes that dove at her hands and face where they’d coarsened in the sun. She’d thought she was going on an adventure, a respite from town and gossip and all the constraints of widowhood, something she could look back on and tell over and over again to her daughter and the grandchildren she saw as clearly as if they’d already come into existence—but she wasn’t foolish, and she wasn’t blindered. She’d expected a degree of hardship, an untenanted road, insects and the like, wild animals, and yet in her mind the road always ran between inns with reasonable beds and service and a rough but hardy and well-tendered fare. But this was impossible. This rain, these bugs, this throbbing ache in her seat that was like a hot poker applied to her backside by one of Satan’s own fiends. She hated this. Hated it.
At Providence Ferry
It got worse.
Nathan’s silhouette presented itself to her at the top of a rise, unkempt now and dripping. Slowly, with the testudineous progress of something you might crush underfoot, she made her way up the hill to him, and when she got there he pointed down at the lashing dun waves of the Seekonk River and the distant figure of the ferryman. She didn’t say a word, but when they got there, when the water was beating to and fro and the ferryman accepting her coin, she held back. “The water looks doubtful,” she said, trying to keep her voice from deserting her.
“This?” Nathan looked puzzled. “I’d call this calm, Missus,” he said. “And the quicker we’re over it, the better, because there’s worse to come.”
She closed her eyes fast, drew in a single breath and held it till they were across and she knew she was alive still and climbing back into the saddle even as the rain quickened its pace and the road ahead turned to sludge.
Providence Ferry to the Havenses’
They hadn’t gone on a quarter of an hour when they came to a second river, the name of which she never did learn. It was dark as a brew with the runoff of the rain and ran in sheets over the submerged rocks and boiled up again round the visible ones. She felt herself seize at the sight of it, though Nathan assured her it wasn’t what it seemed—“No depth to it at all and we’re used to ride across it even at spring thaw”—and when they were there at the crossing and Nathan’s mount already hock-deep in the surge, she just couldn’t go on. He remonstrated with her—they were late on the road already, dusk was falling, there was another crossing after this one and fourteen miles more to the next stage—but she was adamant. There was no inducement in the world that would make her risk that torrent.
The rain had begun to let up now and a few late faltering streaks of sun shone through the clouds across the river. But wasn’t that a house there on the far shore? A cabin, crudely made of logs with the bark peeled back and smoke rising palely from the stacked stone of the chimney? The current sang. Nathan swung his horse round on the shingle and gave her a look of hatred. “Does someone live there?” she asked. “In that cabin there?”
He didn’t answer. Just thrust his horse into the current and floundered through it with a crashing like cymbals and she was so furious she would have shot him right through his pinched shoulder blades if only she’d had the means. He was deserting her. Leaving her to the wolves, the murderers and the haunts. “You come back here!” she shouted, but there were only his shoulders, receding.
That was her low point. She tried, at first, to screw up her courage and follow him—it wasn’t so deep, after all, she could see that—but the way the water seemed to speak and hiss and mock her was enough to warn her off. She dismounted. There was a chill in the air, her clothes wet still, the night descending. She should have stayed home. Should have listened to Robert and her daughter and everyone else she talked to—women simply did not travel the Post Road, not without their husbands or brothers or kinsmen there to guide and protect them, and even then, it was a risk. Something settled in the back of her throat, a hard bolus of self-pity and despair. She couldn’t swallow. One more minute of this, one more minute of this water and these trees, these endless trees, and she was going to break down and sob like a child. But then, out there on the naked back of the water, she saw the envelope of the birchbark canoe coming toward her and a boy in it and Nathan beckoning to her from the far shore.
What to say? That the crossing—eyes tight shut and her grip on the papery gunwales like the grip of death—was the single worst moment of her life, at least until the next crossing, through which they plunged in a pit of darkness so universal that it was only the tug of the reins, the murmur of the current and the sudden icy stab of the water at her calves to let her know she was in it and through it? Or that the fourteen miles remaining were so tedious she could scarcely stay awake and upright in the saddle despite the horripilating shivers that tossed her from one side to the other like a ball in a child’s game? Say it. And say that she thought she was dreaming when the Post sounded his horn and the snug, well-lit house of the Havenses materialized out of the night.
At the Havenses’
As weary as she was, as worn and dispirited, she couldn’t help feeling her soul rise up and shout when she stepped through the door. There was Mr. Havens, solicitous and stout, and Mrs. Havens beside him with a welcoming smile, the fire going hard in the hearth and a smell of beef broth to perfume the air. She saw immediately that these were people civil and clean, with a well-ordered house and every sign of a demanding mistress, a picture on one wall of the sitting room and a glass vase of dried flowers set atop an oiled sideboard on the other. Chairs were drawn up to the fire and a number of people cozily ensconced there with their mugs and pipes and they all had a greeting on their lips. Mrs. Havens helped her off with her riding clothes and hung them up to dry and then asked if she could get her anything by way of refreshment, Sarah answering that she had a portion of chocolate with her and wondered if she might have some milk heated in a pan. And then she was shown to her room—small but sufficient and tidy—and the door was shut and she felt as if she’d come through a storm and shipwreck and washed up safe.
She must have dozed, because she came back with a start when Mrs. Havens rapped at the door. “Yes?” Sarah called, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was.
A murmur from the other side of the door: “Your chocolate, Missus.”
The milk had been boiled with the chocolate in a clean brass kettle, and there was enough of it to give her three cups full. And there were corn cakes, still warm from the griddle. This was heaven, she was thinking, very heaven, dipping the cakes into the chocolate and warming her hands at the cup, but then the voices began to intrude. It seemed that her apartment, separated from the kitchen by a board partition, wasn’t quite as private as she’d supposed. Next door to her—just beyond that thin rumor of a wall—were three, or was it four, of the town’s topers, and all of them arguing a single point at once.
She listened, frozen on the starched white field of the bed, and she might as well have been right out there among them.
“No,” a voice declared, “that’s not it at all. Narragansett means ‘briar’ in the Indian language, and the patch of it was right out there on Peter Parker’s place, twenty feet high and more—”
“I beg to differ, but it was a spring here—and that’s where the country gets its name. Waters of a healing property, I’m told.”
“Yes? And where is it, then? Why aren’t you drinking the waters now—why aren’t we all?”
A scuffle of mugs, the scrape of chair legs. “But we are—only it’s been distilled out of cane.” Laughter rang out, there was a dull booming as fists pounded the tabletop, and then someone followed it up with a foul remark, in foul language.
And so it went, for what seemed like hours. Exhausted as she was, there was no hope of sleep as long as the rum held out, and she began to pray the keg would run dry, though she was a practical soul who’d never had the calling and she never expected her prayers to be answered since there were so many worthier than she calling on the same power at the same moment. But the voices next door grew thicker, as if they’d started chewing maple sap boiled to gum, and the argument settled into a faintly disputatious murmur and then finally a pure drugged intake and outlay of breath that formed the respiratory foundation of her dreams.
The Havenses’ to the Paukataug
The next knock came at four in the morning, black as pitch and no breakfast but what was portable, and here they were, back out on the road in the dark and cold, deep in the Narragansett country now, which to Sarah’s mind was just more of the same: the hard road, the shadowy trees and the reptatory murmur of the waters that were all running underfoot to gather in some terrible place ahead. “Narragansett,” she whispered to herself, as if it were an incantation, but she had to be forgiven if she couldn’t seem to muster much enthusiasm for the origins of the name.
They’d been joined at the Havenses’ by a French doctor, a slight man with a limp and a disproportionate nose, whose name she couldn’t pronounce and whose accent made him difficult to understand, so that they were a party of three now for this leg of the journey. Not that it made a particle of difference, except that Nathan and the doctor rode on at such a furious pace as to leave her a mile and more behind, alone with her thoughts and whatever frights the unbroken wood might harbor. From time to time she’d spy them on a hill up ahead of her, waiting to see that she was still on the road and not lying murdered in a ditch, and then they’d tug at the reins again and vanish over the rise.
The Post had warned her that there was no accommodation or refreshment on this stretch of the road—no human habitation at all—for a full twenty-two miles, but as the morning wore on it seemed as if they’d gone a hundred miles before she saw the two figures poised on a ridge up ahead, looking back at her and pointing to a tight tourniquet of smoke in the distance. She’d been down on foot and leading her mount at that point, just to ease the soreness of her seat and thighs, but now she remounted with some effort and found her way to the source of the smoke: an ordinary set down beside a brook in a clearing of the trees.
Painfully she dismounted and painfully accepted the refreshment the landlady had to offer—stewed meat and Indian bread, unleavened—and then sat over the journal she’d determined to keep while the landlady went on to the doctor about her physical complaints in a voice loud enough to be heard all the way to Kingston town and back. The woman spoke of her privates as if they were public, and perhaps they were, but just hearing it was enough to turn Sarah’s stomach and she had to take her book and sit out in the courtyard among the flies, which were especially thick here, as if they’d gathered for some sort of convention. She sat on a stump and swatted and shooed and blotted her precious paper with the effort until the Frenchman and the Post, still chewing a cud of stewed meat, saddled up and moved on down the road, and she had no choice but to rouse herself and follow on in their wake.
The country was unremarkable, the road boggy, the sun an affliction. Her hands and face were burned where they were exposed and the pain of it was like being freshly slapped every ten seconds. She saw a pair of foxes and what might have been a wolf, loping and rangy, with something dangling from its jaws. The sight of it gave her a start, but the thing ignored her and went about its business, which was slipping into a ravine with its prey in order to feed in some dark den, and then she almost wished it would emerge round the next bend to attack her, if only to put an end to the ceaseless swaying and battering of the horse beneath her. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and at around one in the afternoon she found the Post and doctor waiting for her on the shores of a broad tidal river she knew she would never get across, not in this lifetime.
At the Paukataug
“Well, the road ends here, then, Missus, because the doctor has his business in Kingston town and I’ve got the letters to deliver.” The Post was leaning across his saddle, giving her a look of indifference. He was going to desert her and it didn’t bother him a whit.
The doctor said something then about the ebbing tide, but she couldn’t quite fathom what he was getting at until Nathan translated: “He says it’s easier crossing at low tide—”
“Well, when is that, pray?”
“Three hour. Maybe more.”
“And you won’t wait?”
Neither man spoke. They were both of them like the boys she used to teach at school, caught out at something—doing wrong and knowing it—but unequal to admitting it. She felt her jaws clench. “You’d desert me, then?”
It took a moment, and then Nathan pointed an insolent finger at what at first she’d taken to be a heap of flood-run brush, but which she now saw was some sort of habitation. “Old Man Cotter lives there,” he said, and at the sound of his voice a great gray-winged bird rose out of the shallows at river’s edge and ascended like a kite on the currents of the air. “He’ll take you in.”
Stunned, she just sat there astride her horse and watched the Post
and doctor slash into the current until the water was at their waists and all that was visible of their mounts were their heads and a flat sheen of pounding rump, and then she made her way to the ramshackle collection of weathered boards and knocked at the door. The old man who answered gave her a startled look, as if he’d never seen a woman before, or a lady at any rate, but she steeled herself, and trusting in human kindness, offered him a coin and asked if she might shelter with him until the tide drew off. Very slowly, as if it were coming from a long way off, the old man discovered a smile and then stood back and held the door open for her. She hesitated—the floor was bare earth and there were animal skins on the wall, the place as dank and cold as a cellar. She turned to look back at the river, but the Post and his companion were already gone and the day was blowing away to the east in a tatter of cloud. She stepped inside.
The Paukataug to Stoningtown
There was a wife inside that hut and two children, both girls and ill-favored, and the whole miserable family dressed in rags and deerskin, and no furniture but for the rounds of logs cut for stools, a bed with a glass bottle hanging at the head of it for what purpose she could only imagine (decoration?), an earthen cup, a pewter basin and a board supported on rough-cut props to serve as a table. The hearth was a crude array of blackened stone, and as Sarah stepped through the door the wife was just setting a few knots of wood to the flame. “I don’t mean to intrude,” she said, all the family’s starved blue eyes on her, “but I’ve been deserted here at the river and I don’t know what else to do—”