The Blessed (25 page)

If there was a Sister Rella. It could be she only existed in Rachel’s mind. After all, Sister Janie hadn’t known anyone with that name. And they kept the doors locked at night. Lacey knew that, because on one of the first nights she’d been in the village, she had slipped out late one evening on the pretense of going to the privy but had gone to the Children’s House. The doors had been locked. Even the back door that led to the kitchen. Sister Rella would have to live in the house with the children to visit Rachel at night, but if that was so, then Sister Janie would know who Rachel meant.

Somehow the thought that this Rella might only be a figment of Rachel’s imagination made Lacey even more sorrowful. It was all because of her, as Rachel said the mystery sister had told her. Lacey had brought the sorrow down on them heavy and thick. She should have never agreed to come here with the preacher. It didn’t matter if she was married to him. Words spoken with no feeling. As Eldress Frieda said, there was no connection between them. None but the one they’d tried to concoct out of feelings that had as much chance of holding them together as reins of thread had of holding a horse to a hitching post.

Real or imagined, Lacey would still have to find a way to battle this Sister Rella. Lacey looked around to get her bearings. She’d been walking without paying the first bit of attention to where she was going. She had turned the wrong way out of the Children’s House and was in front of the Farm Deacon’s shop. Again no one was about, with the work of the day over and done. She stared down the road. She could keep walking. Just surrender Rachel for the time being. She could come back later for her after she was free herself. But could she ever be free of tears if she gave Rachel up so easily? Rachel was her child. It mattered not that she hadn’t been born of her body. She was her child. The desperate mother who had left her on the preacher’s back step had given her to Lacey. Miss Mona had given her to Lacey. The Lord had given her to Lacey.

“Dear Father in heaven, help me,” she whispered as she turned back the other way to walk to the Gathering Family House. She shut her eyes tightly and imagined her prayer spiraling away from her up toward the heavens. She stood still on the pathway a moment to see if an answer would fall back down to her. She wanted an answer, but all that came to her mind was that Beatitude verse.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
She didn’t want to inherit the earth. Just have Rachel’s arms sliding back around her waist.

Maybe it was the meek part she needed to be dwelling on. At least the appearance of meekness while she was facing up to Eldress Frieda and confessing her wrongs. All the while plotting more wrongs in the eyes of the Shakers.

25

The day after Lacey had smiled so joyfully at the morning meal, Isaac sneaked a look back over to the sisters’ side of the eating room to seek her out again, but her back was to him. The stern sister sat across from her. The one whose face was creased by frown lines. Drayma. That was her name. When she caught Isaac looking where he shouldn’t, her scowl grew even fiercer.

Isaac quickly turned his eyes back down to the food on his plate. That was where the leadership expected him to keep his attention. On the tasks at hand. Forks scraped against plates and spoons clanked in bowls. Next to him, Brother Jonas smacked his lips as he noisily enjoyed his biscuit smeared with fresh strawberry jam. At the end of the table, one of the brothers belched loudly and then couldn’t ask for pardon since no talking was allowed in the eating room. A tiresome rule to Isaac’s mind. Only one of many.

It wasn’t until they were lining up to leave the room that he chanced another look toward the new sister. She stood stiff and straight in the sisters’ line, staring forward at the door as was the rule. No trace of the joyful smile from the day before remained on her face. Where then she’d looked ready to bounce with joy, now she appeared to be cloaked in darksome thoughts.

He kept sneaking peeks at her as they walked out their proper doors to begin their assigned work. In the normal world, he could have simply gone up to her to ask what had so changed her demeanor in such a short time. In the normal world. But not in the Shaker world. Nothing was normal in the Shaker world except work.

Outside the house, the lines broke apart as the men and women headed to their workplaces. Sister Aurelia stepped up beside Lacey, and the two sisters moved away from him. Probably to pick strawberries or make jam. A simple chore, surely as normal here as outside the village. But then again even work was different here. While the tasks of feeding the horses or planting corn or dovetailing the joints of a bureau drawer might seem the same, the Shakers didn’t just work to get the horses fed, put corn in their cribs, or make a place to store their undergarments. Each task however mundane was considered worship. Hands to work. Hearts to God. He’d heard that at least once a day since coming to the village.

“Surely it would be a sin to do less than our best as we work to honor the Eternal Father,” Brother Asa had told Isaac last week when they first started working together in the barns. “Mother Ann instructs us to do our work as if we had a thousand years to live, and as if we might die tomorrow.”

“A thousand years?” Isaac protested Brother Asa’s words. “Nobody can live a thousand years. Some people don’t even live twenty-five years.” A vision of Ella’s face frozen forever in death pushed into Isaac’s thoughts.

“Yea, you are right. Nor do the most of us expect to die on the morrow,” Brother Asa agreed amiably. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work with careful, dedicated hands and minds to finish our tasks in a timely manner. Will your contrary spirit argue with that?”

Isaac had looked up from the clean straw he was scattering in the barn stall with worry that he might see the same shadow of displeasure on Brother Asa’s face that so often darkened Brother Verne’s whenever he tried to pull Isaac along the Shaker way. But no frown lines marked Asa’s face. He seemed to look on Isaac’s contrariness as no bigger problem than the horsefly buzzing around his head that he easily waved aside.

“Nay.” The Shaker word spilled naturally out of Isaac’s mouth after his weeks of practice. He picked up more straw with his pitchfork. “I can find no reason to argue that.”

“Then see, that is one foot set upon the path of a Believer. The hands to work. Now to give your heart to God.”

“What gives you reason to think I haven’t?” Isaac straightened up and looked out of the stall at Asa. The little man had yet to go off to wield his own pitchfork but instead was watching to be sure Isaac knew how to properly muck out a stall the Shaker way.

“Have you? As a Believer?” Brother Asa peered at Isaac’s face. “If that is so, I should be talking to you about signing the Covenant.”

Elder Homer had told Isaac about the Covenant. A confession of faith and an agreement to abide by the Believers’ rules. Isaac couldn’t do the confessing or the agreeing. Brother Asa was right. His spirit was too contrary.

“Nay, not yet.” Isaac bent back to his work of evenly scattering the clean straw before he stepped out of the stall.

“I thought not,” Asa said.

“I’d like to believe.” Isaac opened the door of the next stall and the odor of fresh horse droppings and urine rushed out to him.

“I can see that you speak from your heart, but I hear in your voice that you think belief will be too hard. That believing will be an onerous duty, when in truth it will lift you up and make you feel light as a bird taking wing with the wind and using no effort at all.”

The little Shaker man leaned his pitchfork against the wall and waved his hands up and down almost as though he thought he might lift up off the barn floor. Isaac wouldn’t have been too surprised if he had. At the same time his own feet grew so heavy that it was all he could do to step into the stall and begin turning the straw. No birds were taking wing in his spirit.

When Isaac didn’t say anything, Brother Asa let a sigh whisper out of his mouth. Not a sound he made often. Isaac kept his eyes on the straw in the stall. He didn’t want to see disappointment with his contrariness on his friend’s face.

But then Brother Asa suddenly slapped his hands together. “But enough of sermons for this day. Another thing that our Mother Ann said was that none preaches better than the ant and it says nothing at all. So today I will be an ant and teach you through my faithful performance of my duties.”

“But there is more than work. There is also worship.”

“Yea, we do go forth in exercises at our meetings to strengthen our spirits, but the work of our hands, that is worship just as much. Even more.”

Isaac shook off a fork full of soiled straw into the wheelbarrow outside the stall.

Brother Asa looked up at him and laughed. “If you could see your face, Brother. What is it that confounds you so?”

“It’s hard for me to think about cleaning horse apples out of a stall as worship. I thought you had to be in church for that or reading the Bible or praying maybe.”

“Nay, nay, the best worship is that done with your hands.” Asa held up his hands and then reached for his pitchfork. “Even the sort of thing you are thinking of as worship—the world’s idea of worship—can happen anywhere. Such holy moments don’t only occur in a church or meetinghouse. Think of the Christ who had many holy moments along his road of life as he helped those he met.”

“As you helped me,” Isaac said. “Pulling me back from the river’s edge. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t seen me there in the fog that morning.”

“That could be true or not. The good Lord might have sent you another helper if I had refused his leading that morn. But we are duty-bound to do good if we can.”

“I am glad to be alive,” Isaac said.

“Yea, a day such as today can bring that joy to one’s heart. So perhaps your heart is ripe and ready to be harvested for our Eternal Father.” Brother Asa must have seen the doubt on Isaac’s face, for he smiled a little as he went on. “Our holy Feast Day is coming when we will march out to our Chosen Land to feast on love and gifts of the spirit. Many hearts are altered at our feasts. Yours could be one of those.”

“Chosen Land? Where’s that?” Isaac began sifting through the muck in the stall to dip out the rest of the horse’s leavings.

“Not far from here. A spiritual place of angels. With a fountain stone where the Believer can wash in heavenly waters and be cleansed.”

Isaac frowned at Asa. “There’s a fountain of water there? You mean a spring?”

“Nay, a spiritual fountain. A fountain of holy water visible to those with pure hearts. But any who are unworthy or have unconfessed sins should not wash in the waters.”

“What happens if they do?”

“Some things are best not tested.” Brother Asa’s voice was grave and full of warning.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t be dipping into any spiritual water.”

“In time you may have a clean spirit and a heart made ready by belief and confession. Once you sign the Covenant.”

Isaac had turned back to his task of cleaning out the stall. That he could clean. His spirit was a different matter.

Now with the holy feast only days away, Isaac could see the excitement build among the Believers. Excitement Isaac couldn’t really understand. It all sounded too strange. Holy fountains with spiritual water. A place searched out and prepared by specially chosen instruments under the guidance of angels. Feasting on nothing but spiritual food. He had pantomimed eating a few invisible apples that sisters at the meetings were wont to pretend picking and passing around in baskets. That had been odd enough, but to plan a whole feast of imaginary food seemed the next thing to lunacy to Isaac.

He’d watched the Shakers come under operations. He’d seen them shaking and dancing and stomping. He’d heard those claiming to be instruments deliver messages from some long-dead person or an angel the way Sister Aurelia had done at the last meeting. And although he never spoke it aloud, he didn’t believe any of it was holy.

But then perhaps he didn’t recognize holy because he had never reached for such in his own life. His mother had. Mrs. McElroy had. Even Ella had, begging him to attend church with her at the fort before the fever came on her.

He wondered what Ella would think of the Shakers. She might like Brother Asa. She’d be nervous around Elder Homer in spite of his peaceful countenance. But men like Brother Verne with his dark frowns and piercing eyes would send her into panic. One peek at the glowering Shaker would have sent her running to hide behind her father.

It could be she should have taken one look at Isaac and run to her father. From the first day of their marriage she had seemed to look backward with regret for what she’d left behind. Isaac’s love hadn’t been enough to wrest her away from her father. Not truly. Now even in death Isaac thought of her belonging with the judge and her mother and not with him. Perhaps if they had been married longer. Perhaps if he could have changed and surrendered his dream of adventure and lived the life she’d wanted, he might have taken over first place in her life in time. Perhaps.

A man could drive himself crazy thinking about perhaps. There was no perhaps when it came to death. Ella was dead. Nothing would ever change that.

But other things did change. He changed. Winter gave way to spring, and with the change of the seasons, he couldn’t deny that he was ready to put his grief behind him. To start living again and let spring awaken in his heart once more. He was shamed by that. Ella had only been gone seven months. But grief could lengthen the days into weeks and the weeks into years.

He had no right to do so, but he was turning Ella loose. He could no longer recall the scent of her perfume. He no longer felt the sharp stab of pain when he thought about taking the combs from her silky dark hair to let it fall down around her shoulders. Instead there was only the kind of lingering sadness he felt when he thought about his father dead these many years.

Brother Asa told Isaac it was good that he was forgetting Ella and his sinful bonds of marriage. He need never entertain the errant thought of a wife again. All women were sisters to him. Including the one named Lacey.

Asa didn’t mention her by name. While Asa had voiced his suspicions of Isaac gazing wantonly on the new sister when she fell against him at the meeting, he had not continued to poke at Isaac’s denial of sin to see if he could find a soft spot of untruth. Unlike Brother Verne who kept watching Isaac with hooded eyes of suspicion. Eyes that were more able to note that sin because he had looked at Lacey with other than a brother’s eyes himself. Brother Asa knew nothing of the power of that temptation. He was every inch a Believer. A brother to all.

Even to poor Brother Elwood, who appeared ready to escape reason at any moment and chase after the balance he claimed the spirits were ordering him to find. As if walking along a fence rail could give him spiritual peace. So perhaps he too was tormented by the new sister who had been his wife in the world. Or by the message of Sister Aurelia’s angel who had shouted out words of sin at Lacey. Maybe he’d felt those words bouncing off her toward him as her sinful husband. Condemnation that as a preacher he might never have known in the world.

There he was the one holding the holy book. The one interpreting the message for his people. And now he was only another of the novitiate brothers trying to shake off lustful sins of the world. Isaac had seen him shaking. Intently serious. Not as a mere exercise to satisfy those watching, as Isaac sometimes shook his hands at his side.

Unlike Isaac, Brother Elwood earnestly sought the Shaker belief. Even after weeks with them, the only part of the Shaker life that called to Isaac was their laden tables of food in the eating room. He had come to hide among the living dead, but he knew now he would not stay in their village forever.