Her Dear and Loving Husband (15 page)

“I am no more a witch than you are a wizard,” she says, “and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.”

I am dumbfounded watching this horror. The accusations are foolish. Everyone must know this. But when times are hard even the most conscientious people have a life-preserving instinct. They shall point at others first so others do not point at them. One of the women waiting to die is an elderly, sickly woman I know as a neighbor and love as a friend, a good woman who should have never seen this gruesome day. 

I did not mean to see this. I was out walking, trying to find some coolness somewhere, some sea breeze near the shore to settle my sweating skin because it is a sweltering, humid summer day when the air is heavy enough to hold in my hands. It is hard, doing everything for two. I walked far from the shore, and now I am here. I do not want to see this terrible scene but I cannot make myself walk away. The actions are unreal, the women unbearable to watch, but I cannot turn my head. Can no one help them, I wonder in the screaming of my mind? Can no one speak for them? I feel nauseous and do not know if it is the heat or my child or the horror. 

“They’re hanging her!” I say. I can hear the terror in my own voice. I see my friend praying as she waits for the realization of her own mortality. Then I feel a gentle hand on my arm.

“Come,” he says. 

I look up at him and though I cannot see his face I know he looks at me with great concern. 

He puts his hand on the small of my back as he nudges me forward, and finally I am leaving. As I walk away I can hear the slap as the woman is pushed, the snap of her neck as she dangles—a slow, strangling, torturous death. I try to keep my weeping to myself and I hope she does not suffer long. I am crying, but he continues nudging me gently forward, ever so gently. Instinctively, my hand reaches for my stomach, bulging clearly now, and I worry what a world I am bringing this child into, a world where innocent women are hanged from the false accusations of others. Is there no reason here? Maybe my husband is right. Maybe we should leave this place. I am afraid.

CHAPTER 13

The next day Sarah could think in words again, and soon she molded those words into sentences. In the morning she did nothing but jot notes about her dream into her journal. She forgot to eat. In the afternoon she opened her door, grabbed the newspaper from her lawn, and opened to the classified section. There were some nice used cars available for not a lot of money. She could afford a nice used car. She looked at the time and sighed, dreading the library. James would be there since he had class that night, and she thought of calling in sick. But Jennifer would know why, and she didn’t want them to know how upset she was. She would be brave, go to work, ignore James if he was there, ignore Jennifer as much as she could, and go home. Alone.

When she arrived at the library she realized how much she didn’t want to run into James or Jennifer. Instead of working on the main floor, she switched with another librarian and spent the evening in the annex, located between the Central and North campuses. She liked it in there. Quieter than the main floor, the students in the annex were focused on their studies instead of socializing and they were a pleasure to work with. Sarah thought she would ask Jennifer to place her there permanently.

Halfway through her shift, she saw Jennifer wheeling a book cart into the room. Sarah moved behind the computer screen, hoping Jennifer wouldn’t see her. She didn’t hide well enough, and Jennifer stopped in front of her. Sarah nodded in greeting and returned to work. Jennifer looked around, then leaned close to Sarah and whispered.

“I’ve known James my whole life. My mother has known him her whole life. We’re both still around to talk about it.” When Sarah didn’t look up, Jennifer sighed. “He’s known my family for generations. He’s helped us in ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

Sarah still couldn’t look at her. She felt like she had been played for a fool by the two people she trusted most. Here she had spent countless hours with James, and it had never once occurred to her that he was anything other than what he seemed to be. He had oddities, certainly, but everyone does. Being odd doesn’t make someone unhuman. She was upset with him for hiding his secret, but she was mad at Jennifer too. Someone should have told her sooner. Someone should have given her the option to choose who, or what, she spent her time with. 

“Do you need something, Jennifer?”

Sarah kept her voice pleasant. After all, Jennifer was the head librarian and her boss. She had to remain professional, but she didn’t feel like chitchatting. She wanted Jennifer to go away.

Jennifer pointed to the book cart. “I need you to deliver these to Meier Hall.”

Sarah recognized the books. She had ordered them herself. “I can’t bring those. They’re for James.”

“Exactly.”

Before Sarah could protest, Jennifer was gone. Sarah fumed as she stared at the cart. There was no reason she had to be the one to bring those books to James. There were two other librarians on duty that night. Besides, his office was on the third floor of the main library building. Why did Jennifer wheel the book cart to the annex, then send her across campus to deliver books that could have been sent up in the elevator? Jennifer wanted her to see James. That was the only explanation.

Sarah stayed behind the librarians’s desk, ignoring the cart, helping students, scanning barcodes. She wouldn’t deliver the books. Why should she? She didn’t want to see James. She had no reason to see him. But she didn’t want to be weak, either. If she didn’t go she would show them that she was afraid, and she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She had fought through fear before. When she left a bad marriage that had been part of her entire adult life. When she had nightmares and pulled herself out of the frights. She wasn’t going to let some vampire professor and his Wiccan friend scare her out of something as simple as a book delivery. She brought books to professors around campus all the time, she thought. This was part of her job.

The distance from the annex to Meier Hall seemed further when pushing a heavy book cart with wobbly wheels. She cursed Jennifer under her breath as she stumbled past Rainbow Terrace and the residence hall, across College Drive, around the campus center and the tennis courts, until she reached the School of Arts and Sciences. She wheeled the books into the building, checking room numbers as she went. When she turned the corner she heard James’s voice coming from the classroom at the end of the corridor, the door propped open by a chair. She stopped, surprised by the warmth she felt at the sound. She didn’t want to feel warmth for him. She pushed the cart down the hall slowly, trying to silence the squealing of the wheels. Then she heard laughter coming from the classroom, and she was curious. She wanted to peek around the open door, but she didn’t want to be seen. She sat in a lounge chair in the hall, close enough to hear but far enough to stay hidden. 

“That’s not what it was called, Doctor Wentworth,” she heard a young woman say.

“It is,” James said. “I’m not taking any credit for it, but the name of the house was Wentworth Place. It was owned by Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Brown said that Keats wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in that very house in the garden under a mulberry tree.”

“That was in the 1800s,” another young woman said. “It’s not like Professor Wentworth could have been there.”

“Of course I wasn’t there.” Sarah heard James’s amused undertone as he continued. “The co-owner of Wentworth Place, a man named Dilke, insisted that Keats didn’t write the poem at the house at all, and the story that he did was pure delusion on Brown’s part.”

“So who was right?” a male student asked.

“Who knows?” James said. “No one wrote Keats’s biography when he was alive. After he died people tried to piece bits of his life together to form some kind of narrative, but memory is a funny thing. We remember what we want to remember and leave the rest out. Two people can experience the same event at the same time and have completely different memories of it. Which one is right?”

“I think the nightingale is right,” the male student said.

James laughed with the class. “Very funny, Levon,” he said.

“Seriously,” Levon continued, “that was some nightingale. Keats made it seem like that bird’s song could send you spinning into an acid trip or something.”

“I don’t think they used acid in the nineteenth century,” James said. “Opium was more like it, but you’re on the right track. What in the poem makes you link the nightingale’s song to a drug?”

“It’s right here,” Levon said. “‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.’”

“Very good,” James said. “Yes? Crystal?”

“I don’t like this poem. It seems like it’s going to be a sweet tribute to the nightingale’s song, but really it’s about death and dying.”

“It’s about immortality,” said another male student. “It’s about removing the line between life and death.”

From the hallway Sarah heard the pause in James’s voice. “What makes you say that, Greg?” he asked.

“Starting on Line 61: ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down…’”

“He’s talking about the line between reality and fantasy,” said Crystal. “He’s not saying that death is a good thing. He’s saying he can’t tell.”

“I don’t get it,” said another male voice.

“I know the old-time language can be confusing,” James said, “but stick with it, Pete. It’ll make sense soon.”      

Then Levon’s voice: “Doctor Wentworth?”

There was a pause, then James said, “Yes, Levon, go ahead. Good luck tonight.”

“Are you coming? You promised you were coming.”

Another pause. “I’ll do my best,” James said.

Levon burst out of the room with such speed he didn’t see Sarah sitting in the hallway. He tripped over the book cart and pressed his heavy hands onto Sarah’s shoulders as he struggled to stay upright. 

“Excuse me, Miss,” he said as he sprinted down the hall and disappeared out the side exit. Sarah noticed that he was wearing his blue and orange ice hockey jersey. That’s right, she thought, tonight’s a big game against Bowdoin.

Back in the classroom, the conversation continued.

“Professor Wentworth, is Keats saying death is a good thing or a bad thing?”

“What do you think, Amy?” 

“I think he’s saying that since he’s heard the bird’s song and it was so beautiful he feels like he can die now. He’s experienced the most beautiful thing there is. He doesn’t seem afraid to die, though, almost like he welcomes it. Or like he thinks there’s no difference between life and death. That’s crazy.”

“Is it?”

Sarah needed to see James’s face. She wanted to see the man, the…man she had dismissed from her life the night before. Is this who she was afraid of, the English professor who spoke to his students with such patience, the one who gave her gifts of poetry, the one who wouldn’t let her leave the library alone at night, the one who wouldn’t leave her side without kissing the top of her head? She stood up, pushed the book cart forward, and stood in the open doorway. A few students noticed her, but they didn’t seem concerned to see a librarian with a cartful of books. She watched James as he sat on the edge of the instructor’s desk, his arms crossed casually in front of his chest, his eyes on the linoleum floor as he considered his words. An expression of such thoughtfulness. Sarah knew suddenly that her idea of a romantic hero wasn’t a warrior or a superhero. He was intelligent and contemplative. Kind. Caring. Like James.

Finally, James said, “What if there isn’t the line in the sand between life and death we insist on drawing there? What if what waits for us on the other side isn’t better or worse than what we have now? Just different? What if we can transcend life and death to a limbo world between, and find as much joy in the next life as we can in this one…?”

“Do you really think we can find joy after we’re dead, Professor?”

James saw Sarah standing in the doorway.

“I do,” he said.

He stared at her until everyone in the class turned to see where he was looking. A few students snickered, snapping him from his reverie.

“All right, everyone,” he said. “See you next week.”

The students grabbed their laptops and their backpacks and filed out the door. A few greeted Sarah when they passed her. When the room was empty, Sarah stepped inside and waited. She wasn’t afraid of him, not anymore, but she wasn’t sure he wanted to see her. She had dismissed him so rudely the night before. Not that she didn’t have her reasons. Though she hoped he understood, she wouldn’t blame him if he never wanted to talk to her again.

James watched her, the same intense gaze he always had with her. He walked to the book cart and asked, “Are these for me?” Sarah nodded. “Thank you,” he said, glancing at the titles. “These are exactly what I needed. But you didn’t need to drag them across campus. You could have sent them up to my office from the main floor.”

Sarah felt her cheeks blush hot. She hadn’t wanted to bring James the books, and now there was nowhere else she’d rather be than in that classroom beside him.

“Jennifer told me I needed to bring them to you,” she said.

He shook his head. “Jennifer. That doesn’t surprise me.”

“She is my boss.”

“I think bossy is the word. Perhaps meddling is more like it.”

He checked the time on the clock on the wall. “I have to go,” he said. “I told Levon I’d try to make it to the game tonight.”

Sarah had to hide her disappointment. She was hoping he’d be so glad to see her he’d sweep her into his arms and carry her back to his wooden gabled house, or at least hold her close awhile. She sighed when she realized he wasn’t thinking any such thing. He was standing away from her, his hands in the pockets of his gray trousers, his eyes on the books on the cart.