The Blessed (27 page)

The scrapes on her hands were stinging and seeping a bit of blood. She reached into her apron pocket for her handkerchief and instead pulled out a handful of crumbs from the biscuit she’d stuffed in there at the morning meal. She felt like Hansel and Gretel with naught but bread crumbs to mark their path in the woods so they could find their way home. They’d ended up getting fattened up for the witch’s oven. A foolish fairy tale. But was it any more foolish than running after a woman who claimed to be going to dance with angels?

Lacey flung the biscuit crumbs out into the woods. Let the birds eat them. The way they did in the fairy tale. Her path hadn’t been marked with crumbs. She’d have clear marks where she’d crashed through the woods like a mad cow. There would be broken branches, stomped plants. Lots of trail signs.

She hadn’t walked far when the signs disappeared the way the path had seemed to do earlier. Maybe the angels were wiping it out. Maybe instead of dancing with Lacey, they wanted to lose her. Forever. Or perhaps that was only Aurelia’s plan.

“Stop being silly. Aurelia might be a little strange, but she’s not mean.” Lacey spoke the words out loud as if she needed to hear them as well as say them. Aurelia hadn’t lost Lacey on purpose. She would be aggravated with Lacey for not keeping up.

She’d find the path again. She just had to look for it. She moved to her left, but the underbrush seemed to get thicker that way. Nobody would be able to run through that. She was turning to go back the other way when she heard a noise.

“Aurelia?” she called.

A cow raised its head up over the bushes. Lacey jumped back and then laughed at herself. Of course there could be cows in the woods, since the pasture ran right up to the trees. But they’d passed the herd in the field. This one must be as lost as Lacey was.

Lacey stepped around the bush to get a closer look at the little cow down on its side. It stared at Lacey with panicked eyes as it tried to get up. But then the cow’s head plopped back down as its stomach heaved. The poor thing was trying to have a calf. A little hoof appeared and then disappeared back inside the cow again. Lacey had heard men back at the church talk about pulling calves when a cow was having trouble, but she had no idea how to do that or even if she could. She’d have to go for help.

Before she started back through the trees, she called for Aurelia again, but it was a waste of breath. Aurelia had run on ahead to dance with her angels with no worry about leaving Lacey behind. If she did decide to come back for Lacey, maybe she could get her angels to point the way. It should be easy as pie for them to find Lacey.

But just in case Aurelia and her angels didn’t show up, Lacey tried to mark her trail by breaking the ends off a few branches and pushing up little piles of last fall’s leaves. It wouldn’t do much good to find one of the brothers to help the little cow if she couldn’t point out where the animal was.

Intent on marking her path, she didn’t know Isaac was there until he stepped out in front of her. She was so startled that she tripped over her own feet and he reached out to steady her.

“Whoa,” he said. “I didn’t aim to scare you.”

“You didn’t,” she said as she stepped back away from him and stumbled again. This time she fell flat on her backside.

“Are you all right, Sister Lacey?” He stooped down in front of her, a concerned look on his face.

She sat there a minute, not sure whether to cry or laugh. To her surprise the laughter won out. “You must think I’m the clumsiest person you ever met,” she said.

“You do seem to have a problem staying on your feet.” He smiled as he stood up. A nice smile.

He held his hand down toward her, and with no thought of whether it was improper or against the Shaker rules, she let him help her to her feet. “Thank you. And thank you for keeping me from falling into the benches at meeting. I figure that probably brought you a good number of frowns from your Shaker brothers.”

“Brother Asa understood. I’m not much worried about what any of the others think.” He was still holding her hand. She tried to ease it away, but he tightened his grip on her fingers as he held her hand up to look at her palm. “You’ve hurt your hand.”

“It’s nothing. Just a little scrape.” She pulled her hand free and hid it under her apron. She could feel the color rising in her cheeks. “You won’t believe this, but I fell.” Then she looked up at him and couldn’t keep from laughing again. “Or then again, maybe you will believe it.”

He laughed too. The sound seemed to fit with her laughter and land softly in her ears. Not like Aurelia’s laughter earlier that had seemed so jarring and out of place in the Shaker village. But they weren’t in the Shaker village now. They were alone in the midst of the trees with no spying eyes watching from the high windows or from the fenced walkway on top of the Centre Family House. Built to give the watchers a good view of the whole village. But the watchers couldn’t see through the trees.

27

Isaac had the strongest desire to reach for the new sister’s hand again. And to not let her pull her fingers away from him this time. To instead pull her closer to him. To where he could look into her beautiful brown eyes. To where he could feel the whisper of her breath on his cheek.

He remembered feeling this way once before. With Ella. Swallowed up by her beauty even though there was little in the young woman’s face in front of him that was like Ella. Brown eyes instead of blue. Soft brown hair instead of raven black. A scattering of freckles across her nose and upper cheeks that would have sent Ella into a panicked frenzy of creams. Standing there with an aura of toughness that Ella would have never known. That Ella hadn’t needed to know. Not with her father protecting her. Not depending on Isaac to continue that protection.

The all-too-familiar flash of guilt burned through him, but then when it was gone, Lacey was still standing there, her eyes not shying away from his even though her cheeks were flaming. “Are you alone?” he asked.

“I was with Sister Aurelia, but she ran ahead and I lost sight of her.” She glanced around as though she thought she might yet locate the other sister. “Then I saw this little cow. So I was trying to find my way back to the village to tell someone.” She turned her eyes back to Isaac’s face.

“You found the cow?” Isaac didn’t wait for her to answer. “That’s why I’m out here. To search for a heifer ready to calve.”

“That must be the one I saw. She appeared to be having some trouble.”

“Can you show me where she is?”

“I think so. I tried to mark my path.” She turned away from Isaac and hesitated a moment before heading back the way she’d come through the trees.

He followed after her along the faint path and thought how unlikely it was that he and the new sister would stumble across one another in the woods. And that she would have seen the cow. It seemed Providence somehow, the same as Brother Asa appearing out of the fog on the river docks to help him keep breathing.

Providence. What was it Mrs. McElroy said about Providence? That it was the Lord taking care of a person. But why would the Lord be taking care of him? A man who had never reached for help or forgiveness. Who deserved no forgiveness. Instead of the Lord’s providence, it could very well be nothing but sinful temptation, and he should be doing the Shaker stomping dance to keep back the devil. But he didn’t stomp once. He just followed after the young woman, glad for whatever had made their paths cross.

When she stopped to get her bearings, he stepped up beside her. “Have you lost your way?”

“Sister Drayma certainly thinks so.” She looked up at him with a wry little smile. “And I don’t doubt the truth of that. Ever since I stood up beside the preacher and said the marrying words, my way has been muddled.”

It seemed she had purposely misunderstood his question—or perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps his true question had come from his heart. “None are married among the Shakers,” he said.

“I am not a believing Shaker. I hold to the ways of the world.”

“As do I.”

“Even in the world, it would be wrong for me to feel pleasure in standing here so near you.” She didn’t look away from his face. “To wish to be loved the way you loved your wife who died. It has to be wrong for me to speak such words aloud to you. Or to think them either.”

“Yea, some things are judged wrong both in the world and among the Shakers.” He curled his hands into fists and forced his arms to stay by his side. He wanted to touch her hair, to offer to love her as he had loved Ella. No, not the same love. A different love, but one that would fill his heart just the same. Not to push Ella out, but to open a door to a new room in his heart.

“And wrong in the eyes of God.” She looked sorrowful as she softly added, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”

“Do you love him?”

“Love has little to do with the promise I made him. But it was a promise made before God.” She looked away from Isaac up toward the treetops. “A promise not kept. I haven’t been a proper wife. Our marriage is nothing but a sham. A sham that I fear has affected his sanity. It worries me when I see him now.”

“Does he love you?”

“He loved Miss Mona. His first wife. She died last year. Just as your young wife did.” She let her eyes barely touch on his face before she whipped them away to the trees again. “But no, he doesn’t love me. He had other sorts of feelings for me. He told me that being a preacher didn’t stop him from being a man.”

“Guess that takes becoming a Shaker.” Isaac hadn’t thought her cheeks could get any redder, but they did.

“So Brother Forrest told him. That being holy meant putting that kind of thinking clear out of his head. The preacher swallowed the whole bit about marrying being a sin. The whole bit, even though might near every married couple in Ebenezer stood in front of him to hear the binding words spoken.” She looked like she was still trying to puzzle out the strangeness of the preacher’s change of thinking. “And I’m not arguing that me and him marrying wasn’t sinful. That’s the good Lord’s own truth, but to say all marrying is sinful? That can’t be right.”

“So what does he, the preacher, think now?”

She blew out a long breath of air. “I have no way of knowing that. I’ve only seen him across the room at mealtimes and at your meeting. But it looks to me that he hasn’t found any more peace here than we were finding back at the house. At least there he could do what the Lord called him to do. Preach the word. And I could hold Rachel and dig in my own garden and cook on my own stove. Here I feel like one little broom straw stuck in with a whole passel of other broom straws to make a big broom that somebody else is sweeping with.”

“A spoke in a wheel,” Isaac said.

“No.” She frowned. “I’d think each spoke would be necessary to the strength of the wheel while a broom straw could break free of the others and the broom would keep on sweeping just the same. Would probably sweep up that broken broom straw and throw it away. That’s me here. I’m that contrary broom straw that refuses to do what I was grown for.”

“You mean be useful?” Isaac offered.

“That might be your spoke in the wheel again. The useful, necessary thing. Is that you? A useful spoke in the wheel here with the Shakers?” She looked at him. “Instead of a contrary broken bit of broom straw.”

“Useful and necessary? It’s true I’m here because of the necessary need to eat. I was hungry. Brother Asa promised plentiful food here in exchange for some useful labor, and so I came to put my feet under their table.” He studied her face a moment. “Why are you here?”

“Because the preacher came looking for that peace Brother Forrest said could be found here. I heard him promising Preacher Palmer he’d be able to capture peace like as how it was a dove fluttering down to light on his hand. But that didn’t happen. From the looks of the poor man, it doesn’t appear he’s found a lick of peace here at Harmony Hill.”

“Maybe he’s too tormented by things he’s done wrong to get still enough in the spirit to let that peace come down.”

Isaac’s words bounced right back at him. Peace. Who was he to pretend to know anything about peace? As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than a vague promise on the wind that no one ever captured. But then Brother Asa seemed to have a good grasp on it, along with many of the other Shaker brothers and sisters in the village. Even those who had never felt compelled to walk a fence rail to seek it. The Shaker peace had fallen on them like rain and melted away their contrary corners.

“What things?” Lacey asked.

“I don’t know.” Isaac shrugged a little. “I guess that’s for him to answer and not me. I just have to worry about my own wrongdoings.”

“Like talking to a sister hidden in among the trees?”

“A sin of the first order here in this place,” Isaac said, but he didn’t feel sinful at all. He felt better than he had for weeks.

She looked down as the color bloomed in her cheeks again. “Sister Drayma will not be happy with me. I should be picking strawberries.”

He smiled. “You ran away from your duty?”

Her face cleared as she looked up to smile back at him. “But then I found the cow, so maybe my wrong will be forgiven even if Sister Aurelia will be angry that I couldn’t keep up with her.” She looked around again and turned away from him. “I think it’s this way.”

“Why did Sister Aurelia want you to come into the woods with her?” he asked as he followed her.

Her shoulders stiffened a bit as she kept walking. He had about decided she was going to ignore his question when she spoke without looking back at him. “She told me the angels wanted her to dance with them and that they were wanting to dance with me too.”

“And did you?”

She peeked over her shoulder at him then. “Did I what?”

“Dance with them.”

“No. I fell flat on my face instead. I’m thinking they probably prefer more graceful dancers.”

“Like Sister Aurelia?”

“They do seem to call to her.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

Again she looked back over her shoulder at him, slowing her step a bit. “What makes you say that?”

“Your face at meeting when Sister Aurelia or perhaps her angel was pulling you out on the floor. Your voice now.”

“I believe in angels. I’m just not expecting any of them to come down to talk to me the way they do Sister Aurelia.” She turned away from him back toward the path as her voice changed, sounded sad all of a sudden. “Do you think angels can want to hurt you?”

He wished the path was wider so he could step up beside her. He wanted to see her face. “I don’t know. That might be something you should ask Sister Aurelia.”

“Maybe I’m afraid of what she will answer.” Lacey’s voice was so soft he could barely hear her. Then she seemed to shake off whatever was bothering her as she pointed up ahead. “The cow was right over there. On the other side of those bushes.”

The heifer was down on her side, exhausted from the effort of trying to push out her calf. She raised her head and scrambled to a sitting position when she saw them but didn’t stand up.

“Can you help her?” Lacey asked.

“Maybe. If she stays docile.” Isaac slipped the coil of rope off his shoulder and fashioned a loop in it. “I’ll see if I can get this over her head. Stay back in case she gets excited.”

Lacey stepped back and Isaac moved closer to the heifer, talking softly to her. “Easy girl. We just want to help you.”

The Shaker cows were used to being handled, so she let him step up beside her. She threw her head to the side when he reached down toward her, but he got the loop over her head on the second try and then quickly twisted the rope in another loop around the heifer’s nose. As the cow scrambled to her feet to get away, Isaac wrapped the other end of the rope around a tree a couple of times and held it tight until she quit pulling against it. Then he handed the rope to Lacey. “Here, hold this and try to keep it from slipping.”

She took the rope with a worried look. “Do you think I’ll be able to hold her?”

“The tree will do most of the holding. Just make sure you don’t get your hand between the rope and the tree.”

“All right.” She grasped the rope with both hands.

The small hoof sticking out of the heifer’s vulva was right side down. That was a relief. There should be two, but at least the calf wasn’t upside down in the birth canal. Isaac kept talking to the cow softly as he rolled up his shirtsleeves and moved around behind her. He’d helped Mr. McElroy pull calves back on the farm. It had usually taken every bit of the strength of both of them, but sometimes a little change in the position of the calf could make a big difference. For sure the calf wouldn’t have much chance if he had to go fetch Brother Asa. That would take too long.

He put his hand up inside the cow to feel for the position of the calf. The heifer tried to jerk her head around toward him, but the rope held. Isaac shot a quick glance over at Lacey, who had braced her feet and was holding the rope taut around the tree. He turned his attention back to what he was feeling inside the heifer. The position of the calf’s head seemed all right, but one of its legs was doubled back. With care to keep the sharp hoof from injuring the cow, Isaac pushed the calf back down the birth canal to give the leg room to uncurl. He eased the curled leg forward until it seemed to be in the right position. The heifer’s head went down again as she started a new contraction. Working with the contraction, Isaac tugged the calf’s foot forward gently and then waited until the heifer’s muscles relaxed to pull his arm free.

He held his breath and felt a prayer want to take wing in his heart. For a cow. He couldn’t believe he was wanting to pray for a cow. If Brother Asa had been there, he would have been praying. He’d tell Isaac the Lord was in little things as well as big ones. And helping a poor dumb creature have a calf might very well be one of the big things.

The seconds ticked by. Became a long minute and then two. Nothing happened. He bent his head, not sure what he should do next.

“Are you praying?” Lacey asked. When he didn’t answer right away, she went on. “I am.”