The Blessed (34 page)

“I should have done more to help the preacher.”

“What should you have done?”

“Loved him as a wife should.”

“Love’s not some kind of stew you can stir up on the stove anytime you want. It was wrong for Preacher Palmer to put you in the spot he put you in. Wrong of me and the other women too. But the good Lord knows we all fall short some of the time in doing what we ought.” Sadie Rose clutched Lacey’s hand. Then she looked toward the bedroom door. “Is Rachel with you? I want to see her.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll have to open the curtains a little. The dark might frighten her.”

“If you have to.” She put her arm over her eyes as Lacey pulled back the curtains.

Rachel didn’t seem frightened at all by Sadie Rose propped up in the bed. She ran straight to her and crawled up beside her. “Richard said Jimmy died. Like Papa died.”

“He did.”

“I wish he hadn’t.”

“I know.” Sadie Rose put her arm around Rachel and the little girl snuggled down against her chest. “I know.” Tears leaked out of Sadie Rose’s eyes.

After a minute Rachel peeked up at Sadie Rose. “They took Maddie away from me. Do you think you could make another Maddie for me?”

“Rachel, now might not be—” Lacey started.

Sadie Rose stopped her. “Let me and Rachel work this out, Lacey.” The woman actually smiled as she wiped the tears off her cheeks. “You know what, Rachel. I do think I can. I’ll find me some material and go to work on it first thing in the morning.”

Satisfied, Rachel put her head back down on Sadie Rose’s chest. “I saw Jimmy’s grave. It looked like Papa’s. But Lacey says they’ll both have dandelions on them just like Mama Mona’s. And then we can do the dandelion dance again.”

“The dandelion dance?” Sadie Rose looked down at the top of Rachel’s head. “I don’t think I know how to do that.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll teach you,” Rachel said. “Like Lacey taught me.”

34

The sight of Brother Elwood jerking his arm free from Isaac’s hand and sliding off the roof haunted Isaac. The image was burnt upon his mind.

Why couldn’t he keep people from dying? His father. Ella. And now this man. He hadn’t cared about this man. This Shaker brother. He’d barely known him. And yet the guilt was still there. Because of Lacey.

He hadn’t turned him loose. It didn’t matter that the thought of Lacey being free had swept through his mind while they were on the roof. He hadn’t turned the man’s arm loose. He hadn’t. He told himself that a hundred times a day. At the same time he couldn’t help wondering if maybe he could have held just a little tighter. Maybe he could have somehow made a better effort to grab the man with his other hand. And kept him from falling.

They hadn’t let him talk to Lacey afterward. Brother Forrest and Brother William had pulled him back to safety. Barely catching Isaac’s legs before the railing gave completely away. They had hustled him away from the brother’s broken body and from Lacey.

A good ways down the road, a group of Shakers had been coming up from the Feast Day holy ground to deal with the tragedy. But there were no sisters yet there and Lacey had stood isolated and alone as she stared down at Brother Elwood’s body. Then she stepped back and looked toward him. The cap kept her face shadowed so he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Sorrow or anger? Despair or relief?

Not relief. She was too decent to think that. Even if she hadn’t loved the man. She had been prepared to lead him back to the world. To be his wife again. That’s what Isaac needed to remember no matter how much he wanted to follow the wagon carrying her and her dead husband’s body away from the Shaker village. He couldn’t run after a man’s wife when that man’s body wasn’t even cold to the touch. When that man might have lived if Isaac had only gripped his arm a little tighter.

In the days that followed, Brother Asa said it was good that Lacey was gone from the village. That it was the Lord removing a stumbling block from Isaac’s path.

“By letting a man die?” Isaac asked.

“Nay. The Lord had naught to do with Brother Elwood’s tormented mind.” Brother Asa looked up at Isaac from the fence they were mending in the pasture field. “That had more to do with the devil.”

“And was it the devil that kept me from being able to hold him?” Isaac held the plank in place and waited for Asa to hammer in the nails to secure it to the post.

But Asa straightened up to look Isaac in the face instead. “I sometimes fear that you are letting poor Brother Elwood’s torment awaken in your mind, my brother. You have told me what happened. Brother Forrest and Brother William have told me of how near you came to following the man in death while you tried to pull him back from the edge. You did no wrong.”

“I might have held tighter.”

“And he might have not climbed to the roof to look for harmony with the spirits. A harmony he could have found in better ways. Such ways were freely available at the feast. Didn’t you tell me you were feeling a peaceful forgiveness before Brother Elwood ruined the day?” Asa leaned down and hammered the nails with sure strokes to hold the plank in place. When he was finished, he stood up and lightly poked Isaac’s chest with the hammer head. “Do not invite the devil to put doubts in your heart where belief is trying to grow.”

Isaac looked off toward the woods where Lacey had led him to the cow. The calf was over behind him in the pasture, running and jumping. Alive because of Lacey. And what was he? Alive to the world or dead to the world?

“I want to go after her,” he said. It was the time for truth between them.

“Nay,” Brother Asa said, his voice distressed. “You want to jump too fast from one thing to another, my brother. It has only been a few weeks. Give yourself until the end of the hot weather.”

“But what if she marries someone else?”

“Then you can rejoice in being saved from the sin of matrimony.” He reached down to lift up the next fence plank and hammer it in place with firm strokes.

They didn’t speak of it again. Isaac had not spoken any words of promise aloud, but somehow they both knew the pledge had been made. Till the end of the hot weather.

The first week in July a new preacher moved into the house by the church. Reverend Holman. Reverend Seth Holman. He wasn’t married, which had made for questions in the church house and much talk out in the yard. Some thought a preacher needed to be married. Others said it didn’t matter. Still others among the women eyed the new preacher and then let their eyes linger on Lacey. They felt it was somehow ordained. Not right away. Decency demanded a grieving period for Lacey even if she hadn’t worn black but three Sundays before shedding the mourning garb.

Sadie Rose didn’t care what she wore. She had gotten out of her bed and took up her sewing basket the first week Lacey and Rachel were there. After she made the Maddie doll, she stitched a mourning dress for Lacey to wear to church, but when Lacey told her she couldn’t bear putting it on again, Sadie Rose hadn’t said a word. She just found some rose-colored material and made a new dress for Lacey before the next Sunday.

As the weeks passed, Sadie Rose slowly picked up her load as mother and wife again, but she wasn’t the same woman as before. That was how she and the Deacon Crutcher always spoke of little Jimmy’s passing. What was before and what was after.

Before she’d had surety about what was right, she told Lacey. But now she couldn’t say for sure about the right or wrong of what anybody did. She didn’t entertain such questions, and if anybody from the church came carrying a bit of gossip or complaint, she’d just look off into the distance until the other woman’s voice would sink to a whisper and then fade completely away. Then after a minute of uneasy silence on the part of the visitor, Sadie Rose would tell Lacey to go get them some tea.

The only time she smiled was when Rachel sat next to her and played with her Maddie doll, acting out the silly stories Lacey told her. And when the boys came in from the field and hugged her neck. Every time they came in the house, all four of those boys lined up to hug her neck. Even the gangly Harry who was going on seventeen. A good draught of medicine for the heart. The morning Lacey saw Sadie Rose reach for Deacon Crutcher’s hand as they walked out of the church after a Sunday morning sermon, she knew Sadie Rose was back to coping with life.

The churchwomen must have been seeing the same thing, because they started fretting over Lacey and what was to become of her. Sadie Rose told her not to worry her head over it. That she had a home with them forever. But the churchwomen thought a few months might be forever enough. And when Reverend Holman moved in the preacher’s house and didn’t have the first person to take care of him, it wasn’t two Sundays until the churchwomen had figured out the solution to both problems. Lacey needing a home and the reverend needing a housekeeper.

It didn’t help that Reverend Holman had looked at Lacey wearing her new rose dress that first Sunday he stood in the pulpit and decided the very same thing. Or that Lacey had looked at the reverend and not thought about him one time the way the churchwomen were hoping. He wasn’t a bad-looking man in spite of the fact that his nose was a little large for his face and his eyes had a droop that made him look sad even when he was smiling. He did have a booming preacher voice that filled up the church building when he was reading the Scripture, but he was a little man. Not an inch taller than Lacey. Not someone who could lift her up and swing her around no matter how joyful the moment might be.

She tried not to think about Isaac, but she might as well have tried not to breathe. She kept seeing him up on the roof hanging on to Preacher Palmer. Doing what he could to save him with little regard for his own safety. She kept seeing his face when he’d come down afterward. The sadness so plain there for a man he barely knew. Then to turn her thoughts away from that sorrow, Lacey would think about the little cow having the calf. And life.

More than once she considered asking Reuben to go back to the Shaker town to find out if Isaac was still there. But what good would that do her? She was a new widow. It couldn’t be proper for new widows to go chasing after men who lived in villages with people who didn’t believe in marriage. The whole idea was hopeless.

Reverend Holman didn’t come courting until August. He sat on Sadie Rose’s porch and pretended to be visiting the both of them the first time. The second time he asked Lacey to go for a walk with him. Lacey told him it was too hot for walking and she had supper to start. The third time he brought Rachel a peppermint candy stick and asked Rachel if she’d show him out to the field where the men were working. Like he wanted to visit with the deacon. Lacey didn’t have any choice but to walk out to the field with them. Sadie Rose gave them a fresh jar of water from the well to take to the deacon and the boys.

The reverend carried the water and walked in almost a march as if everything was business to him. Lacey knew absolutely nothing to say to him, and she remembered how she’d felt the same with the preacher. He seemed at a loss for words too until Rachel ran ahead to chase after a yellow butterfly. Then he spilled out his speech in a rush. “Miss Martha and Miss Jo Ann have been telling me about you, Lacey. About how you and the preacher before me were married but that you didn’t have what they would consider the conventional marriage.”

“What is a conventional marriage?” Lacey asked.

“Well, it’s, it’s . . . ” He sputtered for a minute, hunting the right words. “It’s a joining of a man and woman in the sight of God. A holy union.”

“Do they have to love one another? This man and woman when they marry?”

“At times. At other times love comes later as they settle into a good life together.”

Lacey didn’t say anything to that. She knew that years could pass and she wouldn’t feel love for this man. But she couldn’t very well tell him that.

He cleared his throat. “At any rate, it has come to my attention that you might be in need of a husband and I am already very aware of my need for a wife.”

“A wife or a housekeeper?”

“I would hope both.”

She kept her eyes on Rachel running back toward them as she picked her words carefully. “I couldn’t possibly entertain thoughts of marriage. Not so soon after my husband’s passing.”

“Then you might think on it later on?”

There was hope in his voice. She should have smashed it and stomped on it the way the Shaker people stomped out the devil in their dances. But Rachel was showing her the dandelion flower she’d found. And she let his hope live on. His and the churchwomen’s. And it grew every day until by the end of August he was coming by Sadie Rose’s house nigh on every day. Even Lacey began to fear it was inevitable. Because the churchwomen were right. She and Rachel couldn’t stay at Sadie Rose’s forever. And hadn’t she always done whatever had to be done?

July and August were hot. The first day in September the wind switched to the east and the day was unseasonably cool. It seemed a sign to Isaac. An answer to the prayers he’d silently offered in his awkward way as he knelt each morning and night by his Shaker bed.
You forgave me. Now help me know what to do next. If I’m supposed to forget Lacey, wipe her out of my head.
But the Lord hadn’t made him forget. Instead Isaac thought of her more and more each day. And worried that the hot weather was lasting too long.