The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “But who leads the praying?” Sophia said.

  The truth was that Samuel did, most of the time.

  “It’s as I told you, my sweet,” David said. “Any thought, any sustained, questing thought, is holy. No third party is necessary to sanctify it.”

  My sweet. Caroline spoke so that her face might have its motion as a screen: “It’s surprisingly busy here, I think you’ll find. We’re in need of our rest come Sundays.”

  “I promised about church,” Sophia told David. “Mama, and Reverend North.”

  “Why would they make you promise such a thing?” David said.

  Samuel squinted at his own fingertips as if inspecting them for dirt, doing his best not to witness this marital moment.

  “They were right to, weren’t they? Reverend North told me it was especially important I look after my moral welfare. He senses a lot of the Spirit in me.”

  “How did he come to sense that?” David said. “You know I think you spend too much time with Reverend North.”

  “Well, you weren’t there,” Sophia said, chewing egg, looking as if she might cry.

  Under other circumstances Caroline would feel pity for this woman, who had come so far from her home to a place that did not seem to suit her and to a husband who spoke to her as David had just done. Under other circumstances she might have reached out just now and touched Sophia’s hand. She watched Sophia’s trembling mouth and thought how terrible it was to feel so ungenerous, so unmoved; to have such scant resources remaining to her that she couldn’t afford to spend them on anyone else, lest she herself be left with nothing.

  “My fault he was away, I’m afraid,” Samuel said lightly.

  “I’m sure,” Sophia said, as if she had barely heard.

  * * *

  *

  In the barn, just before his lesson began, Sophia asked her husband, “Duck, aren’t you going to sit at the desk?” She was close enough to Caroline on the visitors’ couch that Caroline was breathing her flowery, humid smell.

  “Duck?” Livia said, seizing on this extravagant gift.

  “That’s what I’ve always called him. He just has a duckie sort of look to him sometimes.”

  Sophia’s mood seemed to be lifting, perhaps because David was at the front of the room, and hers.

  “Please, Sophia,” David said. He was trying to seem amused. This was the opposite of his usual act in the time just before his lessons began, when the girls would pepper him with teasing questions and he would feign offense. What do you do when class is over, Mr. Moore? Mr. Moore, what’s your favorite thing to eat? Do you like mornings or afternoons better? Summer or fall? Blue or green? Walking or riding? Each question a search for a loose piece of skin they could pry up. David knew better than to answer most of the time, but Caroline had seen the way he relished the search.

  “Duckie,” Felicity said.

  “Duckie duck,” Livia said.

  “Please, girls.”

  Samuel wouldn’t have said please; he would have just stopped it somehow. But Samuel was in his study, reluctant, perhaps, to see any more of Sophia’s first full day at Trilling Heart.

  David took a breath, adjusted his face, and reached into his pocket for his notes. As he drew them out—just at that moment, as if he were pulling a rope—the section of ceiling over the bookshelves gave, with a wet rotten-voiced splintering. A cascade of something fell to the ground.

  Everyone shrieked, then gathered around the column of dusty light that now stood in the room, peering up at a patch of light blue sky. A cloud drifted. The boards sagged, lolled like a tongue.

  The smell—wet, rich, dark, animal—reached them, and they pulled back, covering their mouths.

  “What happened? It’s not even raining,” Meg said.

  Sophia gestured toward the boards’ moist, ragged ends and spoke through her fingers. “It didn’t have to be. Look at the wood. It’s amazing it held this long.”

  The brown cascade had heaped at their feet. Like the weave of a basket, it was at first one thing—one dun-colored mass—and then, when the gaze lingered, many small bits of things. Slivers of soft wood but also loose twigs, grasses, all of it wet looking. A dirty tuft of reddish-brown feather. Pieces of it still together enough to suggest curvings, cuppings, but of several different circumferences. Caroline tried to assemble the mess into one shape in her imagination.

  “A nest?” said Felicity, wrinkling her sharp nose. She toed the feather, closer even than David to the whole mess despite the smell. Felicity, Caroline sometimes suspected, might have a future as an intrepid explorer of some distant region. “A trilling heart nest?”

  “I don’t know,” said David. “It’s the wrong time of year. But it does look that way. They must have piled all this on the roof, and then water accumulated in it, and that’s the source of the trouble.”

  Could the others see now that they were being invaded? These birds were not some beautiful, romantic happening, some transforming touch to turn life into Pearson’s novel or Samuel’s essays. They were strange, savage creatures that carried their inscrutable nature with them and sent it raining down on top of other, feebler plans, and could the others smell it?

  Caroline peered up through the ceiling hole into the sky, craning for a glimpse of—what? Whatever landscape the birds had made of their roof. Though somebody would have seen, wouldn’t they, if there were much more than this, if this weren’t all or close to all of it.

  “Oh!” said Julia, and pulled something from the jumble, touching only the corner. “Look, the lace bit I was missing!”

  “We told you none of us took it,” Livia said.

  “It’s all stained.” Julia dangled it so they could see the watery blotch in the middle. “Do you think with washing…?”

  From within the layer of brown peeked something else, underbelly-light. Caroline bent and lifted it. A small bit of fraying ribbon, sun and rain bleached to a faint seafoam color, rough between her fingers with grime.

  “That’s mine!” said Abigail. “I lost it the first week.”

  “No, I think it might be mine. I’ve been missing my blue ribbon for ages,” said Tabitha.

  “It isn’t blue, though, it’s green—I dropped one just like it somewhere,” Eliza said.

  “Can I see?” asked Rebecca, taking it from Caroline’s hand. “Really, I think it’s mine. My sister gave me a pair of them for my birthday. I’ve only got one left in my box upstairs.”

  “Girls,” said Caroline, taking it back, “it’s only a tiny scrap. It could be anybody’s, or a tatter of laundry from the next house. Certainly it’s good for nothing now anyway.”

  David used his foot to rake the pile toward the corner, as if in this manner the birds’ invasion could be reversed, when the smell still hung, thick with life as the mud at the bottom of a river. He stretched up to push the loose boards back into place, but when he let go they dropped again. “I’ll nail it back up for now,” he said. “I’ll just be a moment—I’ll fetch a hammer.” This chance to escape a lesson that hadn’t been going well was not, perhaps, unwelcome.

  The door closed behind him and they all went back to their seats. The shaft of light hovered solidly, like a feature of a holy painting. And in the corner that formless, indecipherable heap.

  Slowly, the smell dissipated. Slowly, the room began to shift its attention to Sophia. She had long ago done what they all wanted to do, after all, pried up David’s skin and gotten to the meat of him.

  “Mrs. Moore, how did you meet Mr. Moore?” Livia asked, leaning her chin into her hands.

  This Caroline did know how to stop. She could just stand, go to the blackboard, and copy out a prompt for the girls to answer in their notebooks while they waited. In doing so she would show the girls they were not to ask such questions and show Sophia she was not to refer to her husband as “Duckie” i
n front of their mutual students—show her that she had, perhaps, much to learn here and that Caroline knew it all already.

  But Caroline also wanted to hear the answer to the question Livia had asked.

  “Oh, when do you meet the people you’ve known forever?” Sophia said.

  “You were childhood sweethearts?” Rebecca asked.

  “I was a child, anyway.” Sophia laughed.

  “What were you wearing when he proposed?”

  “My best yellow gown. This was just after church.”

  Every girl in the room was putting herself into that yellow gown and into the space in front of David. Caroline too could feel the sunshine warmth of its fabric under her own palms, and beneath, her own body, warmer still, and soft.

  “He told me, You look beautiful. You always do. Would you do me the great honor of being my wife?” Sophia’s caricature of David’s voice made Caroline flinch. “All stiff, just like that, like he was reading lines.” She laughed again, and the sound this time was low and almost secretive.

  Eliza said, “Do you think we should be discussing this?”

  Sophia stopped.

  “I mean, it’s very interesting, but I wonder if Mr. Moore would like it. Since he’s not here,” said Eliza, with one of her best smiles.

  Eliza was paler and thinner than she had been, Caroline thought, the skin of her face tightening and drawing back. The look of suffering was on her like gray light—though since she had fainted Caroline hadn’t caught her suffering at anything.

  This intercession of Eliza’s was of course a reprimanding of Caroline too.

  “He’d think it’s fine.” Flustered, Sophia waved a hand. “I’m allowed to talk about him.”

  But she didn’t anymore.

  As they listened to the clock tick then, waiting for David’s return, Caroline glanced—she tried not to glance—at the ribbon she’d put beside her on the couch, which looked—she tried not to think it looked—like one she’d had as a girl, a beautiful spring-green ribbon she’d tied at the end of her long braid. Whatever happened to that ribbon? Thrown away or lost somewhere. It had probably not been sitting in the soil of their fields for over a decade, waiting for a beak to pluck and carry it. No reason to look at this scrap and read her name. And what if it were hers? There was no special meaning in that. Only that so many years had passed, and the birds had plucked the ribbon straight through those years for some purpose of their own, and here she still was, just the same, to meet that purpose, to have it done to her.

  * * *

  *

  While Caroline was walking that afternoon, Sophia waved to her from across the fields: “Miss Hood! Caroline!”

  Caroline stopped to wait.

  “I’m scouting for places the girls might draw during our first lesson,” Sophia said when she reached her. She brushed a tuft of grass off her skirt. “Is there anywhere a bit more manicured?”

  “You had more gardens in Ohio?” Caroline revised the great dust-colored tracts of farmland she’d been imagining as the backdrop for the younger David, replacing them with an overwrought spread of flowers. Sophia at the center of the panel, stems and blossoms twined about her as if growing out of her flesh.

  “It’s just when I pictured this, where David would be taking me, I pictured gardens. He made it all sound so pretty.”

  “I’m sorry he misrepresented,” Caroline said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Sophia said, checking Caroline’s face. “But not even a little rose garden at the back door? Mama had one—I always used to draw there.”

  This was the woman they had teaching art at their dream of a school, because as a child she’d liked drawing roses. Of course Caroline’s skills too had always been cloistered, but she knew their scale; she’d learned them from her father. Poor Sophia. Nothing she’d taught herself in a rose garden could equal what they would ask of it.

  No, not poor Sophia, because all the time she’d had David waiting outside that garden, just there, by the gate.

  Caroline gave Sophia her calm face. Calm was what she would always give Sophia, a calm uncrossable distance. “You might have them draw the trees, the leaves, if you want color?” The hillsides still flamed, though they were browning.

  “Miss Bell would love drawing leaves, I’m sure.”

  Caroline shrugged. “It’s hard to tell ahead of time what Miss Bell will like.”

  “She’s the famous one, isn’t she?”

  “Her father was famous.”

  “That writer.”

  “Miles Pearson.”

  “That’s right,” said Sophia. “What sort of a girl is she?”

  Sophia’s brow bone, Caroline noticed, came to a sort of cliff’s edge above her eyes, which gave her an air almost of studiousness. Caroline had to resist pressing her fingertips assessingly to her own forehead. “I don’t quite know what you’re asking,” she said.

  “Just, was that—this morning—the way she usually is?”

  “That challenge? Certainly it’s happened.”

  “I wouldn’t call what she said a challenge exactly,” Sophia said.

  This woman was a feature of the landscape of her life now, Caroline reminded herself. She was a tree or a rock that made unpleasant sounds; she was another new bird, calling. “Eliza enjoys exerting an influence.”

  “If I knew more about her, for tomorrow, maybe I could make sure I don’t get off on the wrong foot,” Sophia said.

  “She can be…difficult to predict,” Caroline said. “I’m not sure it would be worthwhile to try to make a plan around her. And of course that’s not what we do anyway, plan around one student.” Though no mention had ever been made of any previous teaching Sophia had done, and Sophia didn’t necessarily know this at all. “You could always ask David for his ideas, about the right foot.” Caroline might stage a contrast: arrange to walk in right after Sophia asked this question, read a tricky passage aloud, then ask David’s opinion on some thorny pedagogical question.

  But what was she hoping for? David had talked to Sophia before. He’d known her for a long time before he’d married her. He’d married her anyway.

  Sophia laughed. “I doubt he’s noticed a thing about her, he’s so busy thinking his thoughts. My poor Duckie—he misses things about people. It’s just the way he is. The whole time he was courting me, you know, he talked to me mostly about your father’s essays.”

  “Really? What did he say?” asked Caroline.

  “I don’t know. You’d have understood better.”

  Caroline stared at the trees. Yes, she would have.

  “He just started coming around, taking me on long walks, talking about truth and knowing myself. I don’t remember half of it. I could see what he meant by coming there, though. The rest didn’t matter.” She stopped. “I don’t mean any offense.”

  “Of course.”

  “I hope we can be friends.”

  “Oh yes.”

  A trilling heart flew past, alaruming. A brighter flame than any of the leaves even at their brightest. Caroline’s cheekbones ached with the sound.

  Sophia watched it. “Everyone says they’re so beautiful, but I don’t know. They make my skin creep.”

  “Mine too,” Caroline said, the admission surprised out of her—that of all the people she’d heard talk about the birds, it was Sophia who’d come nearest to articulating her own feeling.

  * * *

  *

  At night, Caroline listened for sounds. The Moores’ bedroom was just across the hall from her own; she thought she might hear things. It was quiet, but she imagined what she might see just now if she crossed the hall to that door and opened it. David hunched over his wife’s body on the bed. The room close and warm. Their faces would turn to her, and what expression would she see?

  Imagined humiliation blanketed
Caroline, trailing a thrill like a lace hem. She touched its edges, setting off waves and waves of red.

  Then came a noise, a real noise.

  Caroline stopped moving.

  Doors opening and closing softly; the hissing of whispers. The full moon through the windows let her make out the clock: it was twelve thirty. She went quietly to her door, quietly opened it, tiptoed to the top of the stairs. Like peering down the shaft of a well, in the darkness at the bottom she glimpsed a scrap of nightgown, there and gone, cloth floating on the surface before submerging.

  Caroline knew which stairs creaked. No one was waiting for her on the landing. She cracked the front door open and saw, in the moon’s strange white light, a huddle of girls in their nightclothes, walking away from the house. One warm yellow lantern surrounded by the pale bobbing bits of them.

  She followed, through the dark. She left some space, but still, if they looked back they’d see her. They didn’t look back. On they all walked, to the faint tin buzz of the season’s last insects.

  What kind of plans had these girls been making?

  They reached the woods’ edge and passed under the first trees. First the girls, then Caroline. The night’s sounds grew softer, closer, and more muffled, more like sounds in a room. Caroline wasn’t sure she’d ever been in these woods at night. She didn’t recognize these slim faint lines of trees, this heavy darkness. Every night her woods had been changing into a different country while she’d slept.

  A girl, hard to tell in the lantern light which, held up her hand. “Here,” she said.