The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Sophia hesitated. “Well, shading,” she said. “And line.”

  The girls were sitting back down in their places. After a moment, even Eliza, the hollows beneath her eyes wet with tears.

  “Shading and line,” Samuel said.

  Quiet fell as they drew. Caroline watched Livia’s pencil, waiting to see it bore into Eliza’s eye on the page. Her own eye watered.

  * * *

  *

  That night, the four teachers sat before the fire in the sitting room, pretending to read while they watched one another and listened to the sounds of the girls’ feet on the upstairs floorboards, tapping into and out of their rooms.

  Sophia was reading her Bible, which had a recitation-prize look to it, all crisp gilt edges. Caroline could imagine the letter she might write tonight, if David would let her, to Mama or maybe Reverend North. This is a cruel place.

  Broken blood vessel, broken blood vessel, Caroline silently repeated, instead of reading the page she had open. The reasonable words David had uttered. Blood vessels could break, like glass, like hearts, without their breaking meaning anything.

  The way the spot looked there, though, against the gray and white of Eliza’s eye. Another splash of red where it didn’t belong. Or perhaps not a splash but a welling-up from somewhere deep inside Eliza that all their lessons and words couldn’t touch. Perhaps part of some plan her body had for itself. Hadn’t Caroline spent her whole life understanding that bodies could make such plans?

  They read on. Caroline was more aware than usual of her own blinking. Sophia adjusted the weight of her Bible in her lap.

  David rose: “I need a book from upstairs.”

  Caroline waited, turning a page, turning another. No plant now knew the stock from which it came; / He grafts upon the wild the tame…Then she shut her book and stood, saying, “That reminds me.”

  David had left the door to the Moores’ room ajar. Caroline ducked inside, feeling too late the heavy stillness of the room, seeing too late Sophia’s dress splayed across David’s desk chair as if it had fainted away with passion. David whirled; she’d startled him.

  Her own discomfort made her angry. This was her house, even if David and Sophia and all these other people were living in it. She had played with her doll on this carpet.

  “What your wife said to my father was surprising,” she said. “Don’t you think? Questioning him in front of the girls.”

  Sophia might overhear, if that Bible wasn’t holding her attention. Let her.

  David reddened. “Sophia is…” He paused, lowered his voice. “She’s still learning the way things work here.”

  He shifted on his feet. Caroline saw that he wasn’t going to ask her to sit down. After all, to sit in the desk chair she would have had to sit in the lap of the dress, unless he moved it.

  “How is she at learning?” Caroline said.

  He flinched. “Sophia left school when she was eight, did you know that? Her mother needed her to help with the littler ones. I’m not sure she’d ever read a book, a whole book, before—”

  “Before you.” Caroline was starting to see. “So you were saving her.”

  “Not saving. Showing her, maybe. All anyone else ever gave her to think about was dresses and chores and camp meetings.”

  David in the corner while the preacher screamed and the people flailed, just as Caroline had imagined, but it seemed his eyes had been on one particular body in that moving crowd.

  Those eyes were on her now, and his brow furrowed. “I wish there were some way to make you understand that place, what it’s like to be from there. Growing up here—there’s really no way for you to grasp it. Since you were a girl your father’s been clearing away all the dimness. Teaching you, just the way we’re now teaching all of these girls. You don’t even realize why you are the way you are.”

  “What way is that?” Caroline said.

  “So clear of sight.”

  She considered telling him she might be happier if her sight were a little dimmer. She considered asking if he really thought it was true that she was the way she was only because it was how her father had made her. How would she know? (And how would he?) Instead she said, “I didn’t see Sophia. I had no idea at all about her. You never mentioned her, not once.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “I should have, I know. I meant to. But somehow we were talking so much about other things that I didn’t happen to say anything for so long, and then I just couldn’t quite think what the words should be. I couldn’t think how to explain her to you.”

  That hung in the room.

  David turned abruptly to search for his book again.

  Caroline looked at the dress. The neck had been left turned out just a bit, and so at the collar she could see a glimpse of the lining, pink silk, a pretty secret for tucking against Sophia’s skin. She reached out, lifted the dress, pulled the neck straight, watching David watch her holding it. She draped it neatly over the arm of the chair.

  His wife. Her house.

  “It would be better if Sophia didn’t speak to my father again that way in front of the students. We may be teaching them to question, but we don’t want them to think we’re questioning ourselves.”

  “Caroline, I—”

  “You can tell her, or I can.” She turned and left, knocking her hip against the bedpost, but not letting him see the ache of it anywhere in her stride.

  * * *

  *

  Three days after, Caroline walked to the post office. Partway to town her footsteps raised a flock of trilling hearts from the grass beside the road, and they wheeled and flew toward town. Maybe they had other nests there, on other roofs. She eyed the lines of each house and building she passed but spotted no shaggy bundles.

  Two letters were waiting for her, both from Miss Marsh’s. One fat and one thin, addressed to Caroline in different hands. Caroline opened the thin one first:

  Dear Miss Hood,

  Thank you for your letter. We enjoyed teaching Miss Bell and are always happy to hear word of her. We found her to be an exemplary student in all respects, however, and do not have anything to report in response to your inquiries. We send to her and to you our best wishes.

  Yours sincerely,

  Miss Lucille Marsh

  Headmistress

  Then the fat:

  Dear Miss Hood,

  Our headmistress has undertaken to respond to you already, but I heard of your letter—you will understand the way everyone hears of everything here—and felt I should write one of my own. I have the utmost respect for Miss Marsh’s judgment, but fear she may on this occasion be erring on the side of forbearance.

  I have been the sewing instructor here for some years. It is not in my official capacity to form opinions on the character of my pupils; but such opinions nevertheless play a daily role in my life and in my teaching, as, I believe, they ought (this too I am sure you will understand). I taught Miss Bell for the whole two years she was with us, and in that time I had ample opportunity to observe her. I found her to have many of the important womanly gifts: her turns of phrase, her needlework, naturally beautiful. There were occasional instances in which her behavior toward her educators overstepped, but that is not unusual in girls of her age, and she was mostly tractable. She was well-liked by her fellow pupils.

  There was, though, at times a strange quality in that liking. The examples I have to disclose are small: imitations of Miss Bell’s dress, or gestures, or manner of speaking, things of that unremarkable order. But one episode did frighten me, when Miss Bell began to control her own consumption of food such that she became quite thin, and several of the other girls followed her example. I recall on one occasion looking around my classroom and noting how slight, how very slight, all their wrists had grown—so slight I felt cruel asking them to complete the tasks I had se
t them. None would give us any reason for what she was doing. Each only said she hadn’t much appetite.

  This passed, after a month or two, with no great consequence. Now that I have recorded it on the page it does not strike me as so very dramatic.

  I only felt I ought to write, because your letter seemed perhaps to suggest that this pattern has not abated, as I had hoped it would, when Miss Bell departed from us. I hope that I am mistaken, and hope too that you understand that my motive is a true desire to help you and help Miss Bell. Please forgive me if this letter seems to you unnecessary, and please believe that I have no salacious wish to spread tales for the spreading’s own sake.

  With all my best wishes, from our school to yours.

  Most sincerely,

  Miss Gloria Sterne

  Miss Gloria Sterne. She had a plump hand, stuffed full of those womanly virtues. Samuel, Caroline knew, would only huff if Caroline brought this to him. Of course Eliza undertook her own projects, if what they were giving her was needlework, he would say.

  But it was not every girl who would decide to turn herself into a needle in response.

  Caroline herself had stopped eating once. When she’d read Lives of the Saints, at twelve, for three days after she’d eaten only crusts of bread. To achieve this she’d cut the crusts from their doughy, inviting centers, there at the table with her father, and pushed the soft goodness to the side of her plate to be resisted.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “All right,” her father told her on the first day. “We should all allow ourselves to be invaded by our reading from time to time.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.” Caroline felt cheated that he’d guessed.

  “All right,” he said again, and returned to his book.

  The second day, her father paused in his eating, when she refused the plate of roast, and said, “I’m not sure Saint Boniface and Saint Philippa and the rest would want you to slight Mrs. Wilmer in this way, Caroline. She started cooking this supper at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  Actually, Saint Catherine was the one who had caught Caroline: the bedridden girl afflicted with her vision of the crucifixion, her white-hot blisters. When Caroline read about Saint Catherine it was her mother she was picturing in the bed.

  “You don’t really know what they’d want, though,” she said to her father.

  He set down his knife and fork. “You’re right,” he said calmly. “I don’t. It’s at least worth considering, though, that neither do you, dearest.”

  She had always wondered what dearest really meant, when she was the only one left.

  On the third night he was waiting for her when she came to the dining room for supper. “Let’s take a walk before we eat.”

  It had been a lovely summer evening, the air gentle and delicious. Her father had walked quickly. She had to hurry, her empty insides cramping, and still she couldn’t catch him. He finally stopped just before the woods to wait for her.

  “Here,” he said. “Look and listen, please.”

  “What?”

  He only shook his head. So Caroline looked. So she listened to birds making soft, contented sounds, and insects chirping, and the wind rustling thick, thriving leaves. Those leaves flickered their undersides. A wren flew from one branch to another.

  She looked back at her father.

  “God created this plenty and set you down right in the middle, Caroline. His intent can’t be for you to turn your back on it. Since you’re interested in proofs just now, you can tell because turning your back is impossible. Where could you look without seeing something beautiful? The saints are important figures in the history of faith, but you, dearest, are not a saint, and that is a wonderful thing.”

  By the time they got back to the dining room, and her father took his plate into his study and left her alone with the fragrant roast chicken, her plan had felt far away from her, somehow. She’d piled her plate high.

  Now Caroline needed to find the equal of that walk and those words for Eliza. To show her it was foolish to read too much into the body, its failings, its needs, its capacities for withstanding.

  While she considered, the spot in Eliza’s eye didn’t grow and didn’t shrink, but just stayed there. A small red fact. There was a wince in that half of Eliza’s face, and she led with the other when she entered a room or conversed, so that her attention seemed perpetually turned to the side. The other girls spoke to her reverently and only from her good angle.

  “Pay it no mind and it will pass,” said Samuel, said David.

  Sophia said to Caroline, as they walked from the house to the barn one chilly afternoon, “I still don’t understand why we aren’t doing anything about it.”

  Outward agreement with Sophia was too much for Caroline to expect of herself. “What, like a poultice? Do you know one for a small red dot in the eye?”

  “We should be doing something.”

  “What Miss Bell needs,” Caroline said, “is for all of us to stop paying so much attention to her.”

  Sophia looked incredulous. “What person has ever needed that?”

  Caroline walked a little faster.

  But of course there was no leaving Sophia behind, not really. That evening when Caroline came around the corner of the house—walking again, she was always walking now; she wondered if this was what spinsters did with all their unfillable old age—she discovered Sophia and David. They sat with their backs to her on the bench beneath the maple, whose last dull brown leaves had mostly fallen, covering the bench seat to either side of them and the ground. They hadn’t heard Caroline coming. She stopped.

  “I’ve been praying for her,” Sophia was saying. “That’s all I said. I can’t do that?”

  “Oh, love,” David said, with her hands closed in his.

  Caroline closed her teeth on her lip.

  “Your prayers are, of course, your own province.”

  “Duck, so serious.” Sophia reached up to his face and moved his mouth with her fingers. “Province.”

  He dodged away from her hand, laughing. Sophia grabbed him by the back of the neck to pull his face toward her.

  “Not here.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “You know what I want,” he said, his voice very soft. Caroline’s face flamed. “But we need to talk about this.”

  “Why?” Sophia said. “What else is there to say? For some reason you wish I wouldn’t pray for Miss Bell. Or say too much about her, or to her. Or read that book.”

  “I didn’t say any of that, love. But we should be helping her forward in every way we can and encouraging her not to dwell.”

  “That’s what Samuel thinks.”

  “He does, and what he thinks carries weight—can you see that?”

  “It’s a different kind of place here,” Sophia said. “People thinking they’re better than everybody else, thinking they know everything.”

  “No one here feels that way.”

  “You know, Mama always thought that about you,” Sophia said. “She’d say things. ‘He’s just a farmer. All very well to feel tenderly, but don’t forget there are twenty other farmers a stone’s throw from here.’ ”

  “I knew she wasn’t fond of me, of course.” Caroline could hear David’s hurt. “I thought it was because of church.”

  “She didn’t love that either.”

  “If you feel that way too…,” David began.

  “Duckie. I always told her, every time—I said I had eyes and I could tell what was what.”

  He kissed her hand.

  “I’m praying for Eliza is all. Nobody can tell me that’s wrong, not even your Samuel, or your Caroline.”

  Caroline’s fingertips prickled: your Caroline.

  “Why would you call her that?” David said.

 
“I’m praying for your Caroline too,” Sophia told him.

  * * *

  *

  For Thanksgiving, Mrs. Sanders heaped the china that had been Caroline’s mother’s with potatoes and roast onions and cranberry sauce and a turkey that spilled stuffing from its neck. “We don’t use that china often,” Caroline said, when she saw Mrs. Sanders bearing the platter, with its prim, intricate blue rim, to the table. By often she meant ever: those dishes had sat enshrined in the cabinet in the corner since she could remember, too holy to eat from.

  Mrs. Sanders set the platter down and dabbed her sweating face. She said, “It’s the only set with enough pieces.”

  This made sense, certainly, though it had taken Mrs. Sanders to see so.

  Samuel gave Caroline a nod and a brave smile when he saw the food on the dishes, the new flesh on those brittle, flowery bones. He sat down at the table and surveyed the girls.

  “Before I say the blessing,” Samuel began, “I encourage each of you to take a moment to give thanks silently. Each of our souls has different debts. Let’s remember them now.”

  They sat with their eyes closed or on their plates. Caroline watched her mother’s still, blue roses. Gratitude was one of her father’s favorite words. She herself had never had any trouble thinking of what she loved: their hillsides, their library, her father’s abstracted face while he read. But gratitude seemed to require a stationary accounting, and she’d never wanted to consider her position fixed enough to survey from.

  After a few breaths, Samuel began the general grace: “Our truest Father and friend, on this day of thanksgiving, we are ever grateful for the gifts You have bestowed on our hearts and heads, and grateful too to have this day set apart to remember them. We are grateful to be taking part in the project You have enabled us to begin here. We are grateful that we are becoming, each of us, daily, wiser and stronger. We are grateful for the company of one another. Your gifts have made us rich, beyond measure rich.”