The Blessed (12 page)

Sadie Rose’s eyes came back to Lacey’s face. She didn’t pay any mind at all to Rachel and try to moderate her words as she went on. “I’m telling you, it sounds about half crazy when you hear them talk about it, and then there he was telling us that the preacher—our preacher, mind you—was going to tell us how it was all true. That he’d had a vision. A vision of ruin, according to that Shaker boy. Something about the church falling down. That the roof was just going to fall down on top of all our heads or something foolish like that. Harold and the other men put that roof on over there.” She nodded toward the church building. “They built it sound.”

Sadie Rose stopped talking to breathe in and out a couple of times in an attempt to compose herself. “Anyway, Harold told me to come over here soon as I could get away from my chores to see if anything that Shaker boy said was true.”

“Maybe Deacon Crutcher needs to ask the preacher about that himself,” Lacey said as she rubbed her hand up and down Rachel’s back.

“Oh, he will. Don’t you worry. But that Shaker boy said Harold wouldn’t find him today. That Brother Palmer was over visiting their place. Is that so?”

Lacey picked her words carefully. “I don’t know. The preacher doesn’t normally tell me where he’s going. But he has been talking some to them. I’m thinking everything that’s happened lately has put him under a strain.”

She didn’t know why she was trying to protect him. If he was having visions and going Shaker, it wouldn’t be secret long. Not secret like the way they were living. She thought about telling Miss Sadie Rose about that. That maybe it would make her not look so hard on the preacher, but then the woman would be back to looking hard on Lacey. Some messes didn’t allow for the first bit of untangling but just kept getting more knotted up.

Miss Sadie Rose stared at her with her mouth hanging open a minute as though Lacey had just confirmed all her fears. “Then don’t you think he ought to be talking to his Lord about his worries or maybe his deacons who’ve been worshiping faithful with him for more years than I like to number?”

Lacey didn’t have any answer for that, nor did Sadie Rose expect her to. They just sat there and looked at each other. Two women without answers. Lacey was used to the feeling. She hadn’t had answers for some time, but she could tell it was different for Miss Sadie Rose. She thought she already knew the answers. She wasn’t expecting the man she’d sat in church and listened to for years and years to suddenly be saying those answers might be wrong. That he was coming up with new answers that might shake the foundations of the church. Make the roof fall in on top of them all.

After a long minute, Miss Sadie Rose spoke again in a quiet little voice. “All right, Lacey. Answer me this. Do you think he’s considering what they’ve been telling him? Seriously considering it.”

Lacey couldn’t do anything but tell her the truth. “I’m thinking he might be.”

Sadie Rose twisted her mouth in concern. “To actually go live in their village?”

“I don’t know. He’s been pointing out to me the part of the Bible that says a man of God shouldn’t be married.”

Sadie Rose huffed a breath of air out her nose and stood up. “They don’t believe in families, you know. Divide a man and his wife. A mother and her children.” Her eyes fell on Rachel. “Of course that might not be such a problem for you with no borne children of your own. But it wouldn’t be a path I’d want Harold to follow the preacher on.”

“You think he might?” Lacey wrapped her arm tighter around Rachel as though to shut out Sadie Rose’s words denying the true connection between her and the child. Born to or not didn’t matter all that much.

“Men can get some strange ideas sometimes.”

“But over there they say it was a woman that started them. A woman that told them to live like that.”

“I’ve heard the same.” Sadie Rose’s face brightened at the thought. “Harold won’t go for that. No matter what the preacher might preach to him. Not that he should get his gospel from a woman. The Bible speaks strong against that.” She reached over, grabbed hold of Lacey’s hand, and squeezed it hard. “We’ll just have to pray about it. Pray for the preacher that he’ll come to his senses.”

Lacey looked up at the older woman and nodded. Wasn’t that what women were always left to do? Pray.

“Before Sunday,” Sadie Rose added as she lightly touched Rachel’s head and stepped past them toward the steps.

Lacey watched her until she was out of sight and then went back to cleaning the kitchen ceiling. Each time she dipped her cleaning rag back in the water and wrung it out, she said a silent prayer.
Lord, watch over us. Me and Rachel and Miss Sadie Rose. And the preacher too.
It didn’t seem right not to throw the preacher in there with them in her prayers. She thought about mentioning the Shaker men, but they were the ones causing the trouble. Then she knew it wasn’t just them. The trouble had been there in the house before they ever showed up with their seeds of discontent.

That night the preacher came home with a packet of butterbean seeds. That seemed proof that he’d been to the Shaker town to do some more talking, but at the same time he brought in the seeds. That had to mean he expected Lacey to plant them and watch them grow into the summer. He didn’t talk about it and she didn’t ask him.

But come Sunday morning, he did more than talk about it. He got right up in the pulpit and preached about it. He talked about that vision of the church falling down around them because they weren’t living right lives. Folks stirred a little in their pews with that, but it wasn’t uncommon for a preacher to talk about wrong living. Then he started talking about the Shakers and their Mother Ann being God’s daughter. Three families stood up and walked right out the back door without waiting for the final prayer. That just brought on more fervent preaching and dark warnings of condemnation.

Lacey sneaked a look over her shoulder to where Sadie Rose sat with her two youngest boys on the pew behind Lacey and then at Deacon Crutcher over on the men’s side of the church with the older boys. Lacey didn’t think Sadie Rose had to worry about the Shaker thinking cracking through the deacon’s stony face, and Lacey was glad that maybe her prayers for Sadie Rose had been answered the way Sadie Rose wanted.

Lacey turned back to look at Preacher Palmer. On the other hand, it didn’t look like she was ever going to pick the first butterbean off the plants from those seeds she and Rachel had put in the ground the day before.

12

“There’s no reason to delay when you see a thing needs doing. No, more than see it needs doing. When the Lord shows you in clear and certain ways that it must be done. A man sins who doesn’t obey his calling.” Preacher Palmer spoke the words with a surety, like he was declaring a truth anybody ought to understand.

He stared across the table at Lacey with a strange light in his eyes that she wanted to blame on the reflection of the oil lamp on the table between them, but some things were hard to pretend. She looked away from his face and stared at the kitchen window open to the night air. Moonlight flowed in it so bright that she could have gone out on the back porch, picked up her hoe, and gone to work in her garden. But if any of them came by, the church people would think she was crazy out there chopping in the moonlight.

Bad enough that they already thought the preacher had taken leave of his senses. The deacons had come to him one by one on Sunday afternoon after he’d preached about the Shakers’ perfect life. Then they’d all come together on Monday morning. Left their plows in the field on a sunny day and congregated to save their preacher. The Shaker brothers had been there on the porch standing beside the preacher when the deacons showed up. Brother Forrest and the young one Jacob along with an aged man they called Elder something. There was a lot of talk. Most of it not so pleasant. Lacey hadn’t even offered any of the men a drink. She didn’t have that many glasses.

Tuesday nobody had come knocking on the door. Nobody at all. That somehow seemed as strange as all the comings and goings the day before. And now the preacher was telling her they were going to the Shaker town. That he was giving up the church he and Miss Mona had started when they first came to these Kentucky woods. The church he’d let Miss Mona name.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer. Hither by thy help I’m come.
Lacey could hear her singing the song about the fount of blessings and showing Lacey the chapter in Samuel where the prophet had placed a stone and called it the name of Ebenezer for how the Lord had chased off the Philistines with a great and mighty bang of thunder. The prophet Samuel’s Ebenezer stone in the Bible first. The Ebenezer church next. The Ebenezer community last.

Lacey didn’t say anything, even though the preacher had quit talking. It was like he was taking a pause in preaching, and it wouldn’t be right to interrupt his thinking. Besides, she didn’t have the first idea of what to say anyway. But he kept sitting there looking across the table at her until she knew he was waiting for her to say something, and the only word rising in her head was no. That was the word she should’ve said to him some weeks back when he talked on how they had to get married.

More minutes crept by and she had to fight the temptation to leave this sorry moment behind and go off in her imagination to think up a story to make things better. To somehow change what was happening into a story with no more bothersome problem than getting past a snake on the porch step. That was the story she’d told Rachel the other day out on the back porch while the little girl was letting her latest fishing worm pet curl up in the palm of her hand.

Rachel liked something worrisome in her stories, and since her fondness for worms didn’t carry over to snakes, the mere thought of a snake in her path was plenty worrisome. But this snake had turned out to be the talking variety, although not the Garden of Eden trouble-making kind. Her story snake had been a right handsome fellow with black rings who had come very politely asking for help for his sister who’d fallen down in the well. In the story they’d gone right out to let the bucket down in the well so the sister snake could crawl in it and be pulled up to slither away with her brother.

Lacey mentally shook her head. It wasn’t a time to be fading out into the world of make-believe. Preacher Palmer wasn’t one to encourage flights of fancy. His dark eyebrows were almost meeting over his eyes as he stared at her.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything, girl?”

Finally the word she wanted to say came out. “No.”

But of course her real meaning of it was lost from delaying so long. He just thought she wasn’t arguing against the move. And she supposed she wasn’t, seeing as how her words all seemed stuck in her throat. His eyebrows settled back in their proper places and he looked relieved.

“That’s how I thought your thinking would be,” he said. “Since you’ve been crossways with this union we might have entered in a bit too hastily for your peace of mind. The Shakers believe in a different sort of union. A union of peaceful living without the distractions of worldly living.”

“I’ve been told they don’t believe in families.” She stared at the flame burning steadily inside the glass chimney of the lamp.

“Nay, that’s not true at all,” Preacher Palmer said.

Nay. He was talking like those Shaker men with their yeas and nays. She let her eyes go to the preacher’s face. He had already stepped across the divide into the willingness to follow their ways.

He kept talking. “They believe in family in a better way. A more united way where none are excluded and all are brought into proper fellowship with one another and the Lord. Brothers and sisters, all. Just as the Bible commands. Love thy brother.”

“And sister,” Lacey said in a voice not much above a whisper.

He must have heard something in her voice then. Some reluctance to accept his word. “I thought you would welcome this.”

Lacey didn’t look down even though she wanted to. She kept her eyes on the preacher’s face as she said, “They divide families.”

“We’re already divided. Have ever been. You told them our marriage was an abomination. You can’t be sorry to wipe that away.”

“But what of Rachel?”

His eyes pierced her in the lamplight. “What of Rachel?”

“She needs me.”

“The Lord takes care of little children. And so do the Shakers. They have many orphans among them.”

“Rachel isn’t an orphan.”

“How can you say she’s not? A child abandoned on a doorstep with no mother to claim her.”

“I claim her. Miss Mona claimed her. You claim her.”

“I never claimed her.” He put both hands flat on the table and leaned toward Lacey as he continued speaking, each word getting a little louder. “Never. She has never been more than an abandoned waif in need of care. Care she will abundantly receive among the good Shaker sisters. She has nothing to do with me. Or you. You are not her mother.”

She wanted to tell him how wrong he was, but the fire in his eyes burned away her words. She stared down at her hands and prayed for courage to speak. After a minute she said, “What if I don’t want to go with you?”

“Lord, grant me patience,” he whispered under his breath. He sat back in his chair, and when he next spoke, his voice sounded tired. “You don’t have to go with me. You’re my wife, but you can go to town and file to have the union dissolved. I don’t know what might happen to you then. You can’t stay here. The church owns this house. I own a bit of land to the south, but that will go over to the Shakers when I sign the Covenant of Belief. That won’t be right away. There’s a trial period, they say. But there’s no house on the property. Mona and I had hopes once of building there, but the church built this house for us close to the church building first. I suppose you might go to your father if you can find him or perhaps hire out to someone. That might have been what you should have done before.”

“Except for Rachel,” Lacey said quietly.

“You will have to choose whatever way you think best, but I will choose Rachel’s way. She has never called you mother.”

“What difference does a name make?”

“True enough.” He leaned his head against his hand and rubbed his forehead back and forth. “‘Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.’ Oh, that I had attended to the apostle’s words. You carry the name wife, but it’s a word without meaning for the two of us. That you cannot deny. Nor can I.”

Lacey felt a blanket of guilt fall around her shoulders. He was right. She had denied him the rights of a husband. She had driven him to this decision. She swallowed hard and forced out the words as she peeked up at him. “I can change. Be the wife you asked me to be.”

“You would prostitute yourself for the child. A child conceived in sin and clothed in temptation.” His eyes burned into her, condemning her words. “The Lord sent the Shaker brothers here to keep our feet off that sinful path. ‘For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins testify against us.’”

Lacey not only knew he was speaking Bible words, she knew they carried truth. She looked back down at her hands folded in her lap. She was beaten. Her sins were testifying against her. She was clinging to what she wanted without opening her heart to what the Lord intended for her. The way she was fighting against humbling her spirit was doing nothing but trapping her in a deeper quagmire with every word.

But the Lord couldn’t want her to give up Rachel. The preacher, yes. She could give him up without a second thought. The preacher’s house, yes. But not Rachel. She couldn’t give up Rachel. She’d just have to turn this mess over to the Lord. To trust him to make it right while she kept walking the path set before her, even if she couldn’t see where it was leading her.

What was it Miss Mona always told her when she was worrying over something? There wasn’t no need in borrowing trouble from tomorrow. If such was laying in wait, it would get to her soon enough. Best to keep praying. Keep hoping the trouble would slide off in the shadows before she reached the valley.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.

The preacher pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “You have to decide, Lacey.”

“When are we going?” She looked up at him, surrendering her will.

He nodded a bit in acknowledgment of her decision before he said, “The Shakers are bringing a wagon to pack our things in tomorrow.”

“We’ll be using our things then at this new town?”

“Nay. All will be given over to the Shakers. They’ll use what they can, sell or give away what holds no use for them. All property there is owned in common.”

“But what if we don’t stay?”

“We’ll stay.” His shadow in the light of the lamp reached all the way to the just-washed kitchen ceiling. He looked as fierce as she had always imagined the Old Testament prophets when they made their pronouncements of the Lord’s coming punishment for evil behavior, but then he changed his words. “I’ll stay.”

“The church here will have no leader.” The thought made Lacey sad.

“Those who want a leader will come with us. Those determined to continue on the wrong way have rejected leadership.”

“Are some others convinced to try the Shaker way?”

“The Whites and the Barlows, they’re considering it. And others may follow in the weeks ahead when they acknowledge the error of their ways.”

“It’s a way you taught them.”

“A man must stand ready to follow the leading of the spirit. If I were to turn from this, I’d be tormented with failures. My sins.”

“They don’t sin at the Shaker town?”

“They remove all reason for sin and are ready to confess their wrongs. You will see.” He stepped back to the table and twisted down the wick of the lamp until the flame guttered out. He stared down at her in the moonlight flowing through the window. “Our house will be cleansed of sin. A cleansing we need. You will see.”

The next morning when she told Rachel they were leaving the only home the child had ever known, she looked at Lacey with enormous eyes and hugged her Maddie doll tighter, but she didn’t cry. She trusted Lacey the way Lacey was telling herself to trust the Lord. Neither one of them mentioned the preacher closed up in his room doing his own packing or soul cleansing or whatever. He hadn’t even eaten his breakfast. Just came out for a cup of coffee and carried it back into his bedroom with barely more than a grunt of greeting.

There wasn’t any reason for talking anyhow. They’d done that the night before. Lacey just set his plate of eggs and biscuits in the warming oven and ate her oatmeal with Rachel. She didn’t bother with feeding the fire in the cookstove. She’d cooked her last meal on that stove in Miss Mona’s kitchen. She turned her mind from that thought before tears could steal into her eyes and kept spooning in her oatmeal to set the right example for Rachel. Food wasn’t to be wasted.

It didn’t take long to pack up the dishes, even with the way her fingers wanted to linger, tracing the rose pattern on Miss Mona’s Sunday plates. If the preacher was right and they weren’t going to be able to use them in the Shaker town, then she should have let Miss Sadie Rose carry them home. At least that way Miss Mona would be remembered. But none of the church people had come around. Lacey supposed they’d given up fighting the preacher’s vision of truth.

Lacey stood up and stretched. Rachel was pulling all the pans out of the bottom of the cabinet, enjoying the clatter they made. Lacey peeked out the back window toward the church. The roof looked sturdy as ever. Not in the least bit of danger of falling down. But she supposed there was more than one way for a roof to fall in on a church. Certainly the preacher turning from the beliefs he’d been preaching since before the church roof was built was a way none of them might have ever imagined.