Pamela Morsi (21 page)

Her eyes were wide with teasing innocence. “It wouldn’t be fair any other way,” she said.

Moss, pretending disgust, offered his hand to help her up. As she came to her feet, he didn’t immediately let it go. They walked hand and hand away from the river.

This is how it would have been if he had courted her, he thought to himself. But of course, he would have never courted her. He’d never intended to court. He intended to leave. Somehow he wasn’t sorry about all that had happened. He wasn’t sorry that he’d been forced to marry her.

If a man was going to leave a place behind, the very least he should hope to carry with him was not the fine saddle horse or the versatile side arm, it was fond memories of the place he’d left behind. Eulie was helping him create those fond memories.

How could he help but love her for that?

When they reached the clearing, they saw that the game was almost ready to begin. A half dozen chairs were grouped in a circle. Several young ladies were already seated. Their gentleman friends, or at least the fellow who was getting the attention today, stood behind them.

Bug and Clara were in the group. Eulie’s sister looked very pretty, animated and blushing. Bug stood at her back, looking puffed up and proud, his grin
almost wide enough to offset the size of his bulging eyes.

Maylene Samson was laughing and giggling in that a-little-bit-loud, a-little-bit-less-than-proper manner that she was infamous for. She was the current belle of Sweetwood society, collecting beaux the way some young girls collect hair ribbons. She was a pretty girl, there was no denying that. But
pretty
was not what made Maylene so sought after. In truth, Moss thought, Clara Toby was a good deal prettier and his Eulie had finer features and a better hair color, even if he did say so himself.

No, it was not Maylene’s looks that made her so popular. It was the teasing, flirty, almost suggestive way she treated every male in trousers. From young striplings like her cousin Dudley Samson, who was staring calf-eyed across from her now, to the old grandpas so blind they couldn’t tell the sixteen from the sixty-year-old, except by feel, they were all taken with her.

Today she was sitting in front of Ned Patchel. Patchel, one of Miz Patch’s stepsons, was even older than Moss. More than a decade undoubtedly separated him from little Maylene.

Moss gave heaven a quick thank-you that if he was going to be foolish enough to get himself trapped into marriage, he was glad it had been to Eulie and not Maylene. If he’d wed Maylene or some gal like her, his life wouldn’t be worth living.

Yes, Moss decided as his wife took a seat in the chair in front of him, the day he’d kissed Eulie Toby up at the falls might well have been the luckiest day of his life.

“All right,” Tyre Dickson said “Is everybody ready to begin?”

Nobody protested.

“Then, fellows, start winking,” he announced.

Around the circle, the young women sat perched on the edge of their seats. There were three chairs, however, that were empty. The boys standing behind them had no girls. It was the object of the game for these young men to “steal” girls from the ones that had them.

A boy with an empty chair could wink at the girl of his choice. If she got out of her chair before the fellow behind her could stop her, then she went to sit with him.

Most of the attention was directed at Maylene. Clara got her share as well, but she seemed very slow to move. Her deliberate indolence allowed Bug to catch her every time.

Moss knew that Eulie would never make it easy for him. She moved quickly when she set her mind to it. And she was faunching at the bit for a fun time this afternoon.

Moss played the game with the same kind of determination he put to everything else in his life. It wasn’t difficult for a man to keep his eyes on winkers he suspected of being interested in his girl. It was the ones you didn’t expect who caught you off guard and always managed to rob you.

Delbert Pusser unsuccessfully winked at Maylene three times and at Clara once before casting an eye at Eulie.

Moss reached for her as quick as lightning, but it was not fast enough. She was out of the chair and
gone. He spent the rest of the game trying to get her back. Tyre Dickson managed to steal her while Delbert was watching Moss. And Delbert’s brother, Donald, got her away from Dickson.

When Moss finally got her back he was so excited he grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth.

Moss wasn’t sure who he surprised most, Eulie or himself. With hoots and catcalls all around, the two shared a secret, private moment where faraway places and personal responsibilities could never intrude.

I
N
the small clearing in the woods, the fertile scent of the loamy forest floor so close beneath his cart was familiar and comforting. It was like leaning against the breast of Mother Earth herself. He heard someone approaching, but he didn’t turn toward the sound. With any luck at all, Jeptha thought, whoever it was would spot him and walk away. That’s what he wanted. No casual conversation, no people surreptitiously looking in his direction.

The afternoon sunlight dappled through the trees, laying long dark shadows like prison bars across the ground.

He’d been a fool to come. He knew, of course, exactly why he had. A taste of the sweet forbidden always whetted the appetite for more. For more than twenty years he’d purposely, correctly, kept his distance. But just a few minutes, just a very few minutes, and all his long-held resolve had shattered.

The person stomping along the path was getting closer. At any moment now he would be spotted. He was not a praying man, but he wished desperately in his heart for a moment of privacy. His emotions were far too raw for another encounter.

The footsteps ceased. He was no longer alone in the clearing. He didn’t turn. He made no effort to greet or acknowledge. He still held hopes that the unwelcome intruder would simply go away.

“So, Jeptha Barnes, have you come here to hide?”

The woman’s voice was familiar, too familiar, and too insistent to be ignored. Reluctantly he turned to look at her.

“Well if it ain’t
Miz Patch.
“ His tone was snide, the emphasis on her name unkindly. “Have you come to gawk at the freak in the cart or to make more comments about my bathing habits?”

She did not cower at his words or cast her glance away from him. She looked him over calmly, without any hint of hesitation, undaunted by the close-up sight of his legless body.

“Obviously my words did some good,” she said. “You look quite a bit cleaner than last time we spoke.”

He raised his chin defiantly, his eyes narrow. “Eulie asked me to clean up. I did it for her,” he said. “Don’t you be thinking I did it for you.”

Miz Patch chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound.

“I would never think that in anything you do, I would ever be a consideration.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know what to say at all. He’d wanted to be alone, to stay hidden until it was time to go back to the homeplace. He silently swore to himself that if he ever got to his cabin, he’d never leave again. He had determined to do that once before and had kept his resolve for more than two decades.

“I should never have come,” he muttered to himself.

“Did you think that they wouldn’t look at you?” she asked him. “Did you think they wouldn’t be curious or stare or feel ill at ease?”

“No,” he answered. “I knew they would. I knew it and avoided it for twenty years.”

She huffed disapprovingly and shook her head.

“As if that made it better instead of worse,” she said. “A war wounded veteran catches attention and sympathy. A war wounded veteran who has, for a generation, hid himself like a hermit, is a folktale told over a campfire on spooky nights, a marvel to be seen in the flesh at long last.”

“I just want to be left alone,” he said. “I don’t need their sympathy or want their attention.”

“If they’d seen you once a month for the last twenty years, no one would even bat an eye by now,” she said. “They would have grown accustomed to the sight of you long ago. But you hid out then, like you’re hiding now.”

“What business is it of yours?” he asked angrily, hating the fiber of truth in her words.

“It’s no business of mine, Jeptha Barnes,” she answered. “It’s no business of mine at all. You’ve already wallowed half your life away in self-pity, you might as well throw the rest of it away, too.”

“My life? You think I’ve thrown away my life?” he asked furiously. “I didn’t throw it away. It was stolen from me. Stolen from me in the first blush of youth.”

She shook her head, refusing to agree.

“Nobody robbed you,” she insisted. “You have your life. Maybe it is changed, maybe it is harsher than you imagined it would be, but it is here.”

He looked down at the stumps of his legs and gave a humorless chuckle of snide derision.

“This is no life,” he said. “It’s a life sentence.”

“Because you’ve made it one,” she said. “You lived through the war, Jeptha. You lived to come home.”

“Well, maybe that’s not the great prize that some would think it to be,” he told her.

She blew out a sigh of frustration and raised her hands as if she were giving up. “There is just no talking to you, is there?”

But she had not yet finished speaking her piece.

“Do you think you are the only human on earth to drink from the bitter cup?” she asked him.

The question caused him to sit up straighter, but he didn’t answer.

“I have buried a fine, caring husband and three of the most blessed children ever put on this earth,” she said. “I was abandoned by the only man I ever loved. And became an old woman before I was twenty. I’ve seen pain and misery, disease and hopelessness until I was sick myself just from the stench of it.”

The words were ripped from her heart.

“You are so prideful in your misery, Jeptha Barnes. As if your suffering were so unique. As if your sorrows were the greatest ever borne. There is not a thing in the world that you can tell me about grief or loss or anger at God that I haven’t felt.”

Her hands were clenched tightly, her own anguish and despair visible in her eyes.

“Of all of them, you were given a chance to go on,” she said. “And you’ve thrown away that opportunity as if it were nothing. Would you have wanted Nils to do that? Or Zack? Or DeWitt? What about Tom or
Judd or Claude? Is this what you would have wanted them to do if they had been given this chance instead of you? The war is over, Jeptha. You dishonor the memory of those we lost with your failure to move beyond it.”

“I have no legs,” he told her.

“You have your life,” she answered.

She spun away from him, clearly intent upon walking away. Somehow he could not let her do that.

“Sary!” he called after her. “Sary, come back here.”

Slowly she turned to face him.

“You’re calling me?” she asked. “You’re calling me to come to you?”

“I … I have to explain,” Jeptha said.

In truth he had no idea of what he wanted to say or why he didn’t just let her go. It would be so much better if she would go. He could hide once more.

“There are … there are things I have to explain,” he said.

“Explain?” she questioned. “You think you have things to explain? Why don’t you start with the six long months that I came to your cabin every day. The six long months that I waited and waited upon that porch. The six long months when you refused to see me, when you told your sister to send me away. The six long months that I cried and begged and pleaded to be by your side and was turned away.”

“I … I thought I was going to die,” he said. “I didn’t want you to see me like that. I wanted you to remember me as I had been.”

“You wanted me to remember you as a foolish, wild-eyed young boy instead of the man I loved?”

“It was that boy you knew,” he said “It was that boy
that you loved. The one who held you close that night in the woods.”

She shook her head. The anger had gone out of her now. She was hurt. He could see that. He had known that. But he’d never had to see it before.

“I was
in love
with the boy that night in the woods,” she admitted. “I was just a girl myself. But I
loved
the man who wrote me letters from the war. Letters about great things and small, letters about the future as well as the past. I
loved
that man whose heart was so very close to my own.”

Jeptha swallowed thoughtfully.

“I had forgotten about the letters,” he said. “They were the only thing that kept me going through those hard, horrifying days. Knowing that when lights were low, I could share it all with you.”

“I still have them.”

“What?”

“I still have the letters,” she said. “Ezra asked me once to get rid of them. He rarely asked me for much and I tried always to do as he liked. But in this one thing I refused him. I kept those letters. I treasure every single word.”

There was a silence between them.

“Patchel was good to you, then?” he asked finally, more quietly.

Sary nodded.

“Did you … did you tell him about me?”

She chuckled lightly and shook her head. “I didn’t have to,” she answered. “Everybody in the Sweetwood knew that I loved you. They all knew that I went to your cabin every day. They all knew that I begged to see you. They all knew that you’d broken my heart,”

“I worried,” Jeptha said. “When I heard you’d married, I worried that he wouldn’t treat you well.”

“But not worried enough to come and try to stop the wedding,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s what I dreamed about,” she told him. “That’s what I hoped. That you would come charging down the mountain and ride right up to the church and claim me for your own.”

Jeptha’s brow furrowed, he couldn’t quite believe her words.

“That was more than two years after I returned,” he said. “Surely you weren’t still pining after me for more than two years.”

“Two years?” her question was incredulous. “Oh no, I didn’t pine after you for two years—more like twenty-two.”

Her declaration momentarily knocked the breath out of him.

“But you married, you had a family,” he said.

“I cared for Ezra,” she answered. “I was a good wife to him and mothered his children the best I knew how. But I never loved him. I knew that. And he knew that. I loved you, Jeptha. I loved you and I love you and nothing you can do now nor ever can make me stop. I’ve tried to make the best of my life. I tried to live it full and with purpose. But I never had to stop loving you and I never will.”

Her words almost unmanned him. Jeptha felt the sting of tears in his eyes and he ground his teeth together, forcefully pushing them back.

“I never stopped loving you, Sary,” he told her.

Her eyes widened and her anger was back.

“You never loved me at all,” she accused him. “You could not have loved me and sent me away like you did.”

“I sent you away because I did love you,” he insisted. “I sent you away because I wanted the best for you.”

“Being with the man I love would have been best for me,” Sary said.

“I didn’t even think I would live,” he told her once more. “I didn’t want to shackle you with a dying man.”

“Don’t you think I should have been given a choice about that?” she asked him. “Don’t you think I should have had something to say about it?”

“You would have stayed with me out of pity,” he said. “And I could never have stood that.”

“I would have stayed with you out of love,” she said. “Whether it had been a day or a month or ten years or a lifetime, I would have been exactly where I wanted to be.”

“But that wasn’t the life I wanted for you,” he said.

“It was the life I wanted for myself,” she said. “I wanted to be your wife. I wanted to be by your side. For better and worse and sickness and health and everything.”

“You deserved more.”

“And since when in life do we get what we deserve?” she asked him.

His heart was pounding furiously. He had to somehow make her understand.

“Look at me, Sary,” he said. “Look at me. Do you see what the surgeons left of me? Do you see that I will never be whole?”

“I see that you will never walk,” she answered. “I see that you will never dance a jig or run with me to the
woods. But I also see the man I love and I wish that he had loved me enough to make me his wife.”

“Sary, I have no legs!” he told her, angrily slapping the remnants of his limbs. “I could not have offered myself as a husband for you.”

She raised an eyebrow. Her tone was haughty and unmoved by his declaration.

“Oh, my mistake,” she said, facetiously. “I didn’t realize they’d cut off that part of you as well.”

Rans had not allowed the slights and injustice of the morning to ruin his whole day. He managed not to run off and waste Preaching Sunday. But he made a point to steer clear of Moss Collier. He didn’t like the man and the man didn’t like him. Well, maybe Moss liked him well enough, but he thought he was a child. Rans was certain that he was a man in practically every way, except perhaps his height. He deserved to be treated like a man.

With that thought in mind, after finishing his food, he avoided the children’s games and sought out older boys who gathered within the seclusion of the edge of the woods. Beneath the tall cool shade of the towering hemlocks they were able to see without being seen.

Joe Browning was there and Stuart Madison. Rans had a powerful admiration for both young men. Conrad Samson was also there. Rans had had run-ins with him a time or two and didn’t care for him much. His younger cousin, Dudley, was there also. But Dudley was not even as old as Rans and therefore of little account in his eyes.

Having already discarded his coat and footwear,
Rans leaned his back against the scratchy bark of a tree trunk and gazed at the other fellows over the tops of his knees.

Stuart had filched a pipe somewhere. It wasn’t much, just something whittled out of an old corncob, but it was much-used and mellowed by time and temperature. He packed the narrow blackened bowl with tobacco and carefully lit it. He puffed enthusiastically to get it going. Smoke billowed out in great scented clouds around them. It was wonderful.

Stu passed the pipe to Joe and he began to smoke it as well.

“Look what I got,” Dudley said, eagerly emptying his pocket.

Rans looked at the boy’s face and almost felt sorry for him. He was trying so hard to please. But he was just a kid still, so it didn’t matter.

From the farthest depths of his trouser pocket, Dudley brought forth a small rectangular box and held it out for inspection. Joe, Stuart, and Conrad all sat up immediately.

“Is that what I think it is?” Joe asked.