The Blessed (4 page)

“It may seem a strange thing to you, Lacey, but I’m not as old as you’re thinking I am. And while I loved Mona, she’s gone now. On to a better place in heaven where she’s happy. You can be assured of that.”

“Is she looking down on us?” Lacey asked. She scrunched her shoulders together and tried to shrink away from his touch.

He loosened his hold on her arms but didn’t let go. “If she is, she’d understand this is the Lord’s answer to our dilemma.”

He spoke the words strong, but it was easy enough to tell that he wasn’t all that sure they were true. His eyes shifted away from Lacey to the side for a moment, as if almost expecting to see Miss Mona sitting there beside them. Lacey would have prayed her down if she could have. A ghost wouldn’t be a bit scarier than staring at Preacher Palmer and hearing what he was proposing. She tried to think of the right words to say, but nothing—absolutely nothing—came to mind as she kept staring at him, seeing him differently than she ever had before.

His eyes came back to land on her, but now the sure preacher eyes were gone as doubt crept over his face. He must not have planned on her looking at him with such dismay. He let his hands slide off her arms but kept his eyes tight on her as he moistened his lips before he started talking again.

“I can see this isn’t something you’ve given consideration to. And I suppose that is understandable, but marriage between an older man and a young woman in need is not uncommon. I’ve performed several ceremonies joining two such myself. Those unions turned out to be beneficial for all involved.”

Lacey found her voice. “I always thought marrying was something a person did after falling in love. You can’t be thinking on that kind of love, can you?”

Again the preacher shifted in his chair uneasily and a bit of color climbed up into his cheeks. Lacey hadn’t ever seen that happen except when he’d been out in the cold too long.

“I am a man, Lacey. And not too old for such thinking. I loved Mona as you well know, but due to her condition we hadn’t shared any kind of intimate marital relationship for many years.” His eyes bored into Lacey. “But I am a man.”

Lacey thought it was good she was sitting down, because her head was spinning. She put her hand flat against her forehead in hopes that would help her think of a clear answer. But there was no answer. No right answer. The clock kept ticking. The water kept whistling in the teakettle. Lacey kept breathing in and out, even though she was feeling more and more like somebody had punched her in the stomach.

Finally she pushed out the words that had to be said. “You aren’t saying you want to love me like that. Like a man for his wife?”

“Not exactly like I loved Mona. But I do feel desire for you, Lacey. Any man might. You’re a very pretty young woman. And I will promise to take care of you.” His voice changed, softened into a pleading tone instead of a demanding one. “It’s an exchange that will favor both our needs.”

Lacey had never spent much time thinking on how she looked. When she came to live with Miss Mona, she was beanpole skinny, with brown eyes too big for her face and mouse-brown hair chopped off short. Pretty was not a word she’d ever heard spoken in regard to how she looked. Not even by Miss Mona, who had loved brushing Lacey’s hair and catching it up in ponytails or braids after it grew out long and wavy. But now with the preacher’s words ringing in her ears, Lacey supposed her face had filled out some and that she’d plumped up in other ways as to how a woman should. Even so, she had no desire to be pretty to the preacher’s eyes.

“With words spoken or not, I couldn’t lay down with you.” Lacey looked straight at him. “I couldn’t.”

“Not even for Rachel?” Some of the pleading tone faded from his voice. Now it sounded more wheedling.

“I can’t see what Rachel has to do with the two of us laying down together.”

“To keep our little family intact. To see that nothing changes here in our home.” He kept his eyes steady on her. “Not just my home. Your home too. If we can do it proper.”

“What do you think Miss Mona would think proper?”

“For the sake of all that’s holy, Mona is dead.” He slammed his fist down with the words, bouncing the dishes stacked on the end of the table.

Lacey scrunched as far back in her chair as she could, but she didn’t turn her eyes away from his face. “That doesn’t change what she’d think proper.”

Preacher Palmer shut his eyes and blew out a slow breath. He didn’t say anything for such a long time that Lacey thought about sliding off her chair and running out the back door to find some dark place to hide awhile. But then there was Rachel in the little room upstairs. So she stayed where she was and counted the ticks of the clock in the next room while trying to keep her heart from sinking down to her toes.

“All right, Lacey,” he said finally. “I’m not going to force you into anything you don’t want to do. But I think the Lord and Mona would agree that something has to be done. I can see you need time. Time I’m willing to give you. We can get married and keep things as they are. Rachel will have a home. You will have a home. And I’ll have someone to cook my supper.”

“And the other?” Lacey thought it best to be straight and clear on what he expected of her.

“I’ve promised you time. Not forever, but long enough. You’re a woman the same as I’m a man. Both of us have needs to be met.” He reached across the table and stroked the top of her hand with his bony fingers. “Will you agree to that? For Rachel? For me?”

What choice did she have? She needed a roof over her head. She needed Rachel in her lap.

That was how come she was standing there between the two of them—Rachel and Preacher Palmer—hearing the question she didn’t want to answer.

“Do you, Lacey Bishop, take this man, Elwood Palmer, to be your lawfully wedded husband to love and obey in sickness and in health till death do you part?”

The silence in the preacher’s parlor grew deeper and deeper. The preacher’s wife stared at Lacey. Lacey could feel Preacher Palmer shifting uneasily on his feet beside her. And still the expected words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. The preacher in front of them read the question again. Lacey opened her mouth but had no voice.

Finally Preacher Palmer answered for her. “She does,” he said as he grabbed her right hand and squeezed it so hard Lacey thought her knuckles might pop out of her skin.

The other preacher kept staring at her and she managed a nod. That seemed good enough and the deed was done. Till death do them part. A tear slipped out of the corner of her left eye and traced a path down her cheek. She didn’t try to pull her hand free of the preacher’s or move her other hand off Rachel’s back to wipe away the tear. Instead she blinked her eyes to keep any more tears from slipping out. She was a grown woman who had made a choice. There wasn’t the least bit of need crying over it now that it was too late to change.

4

Fog rising from the Ohio River swirled about Isaac as he leaned against a post and peered down at the river. The cold, dark water beckoned him. He could take one step forward and let the river swallow him. Have done with it. He’d heard it said drowning wasn’t such a bad way to die. That a person floated down into the watery depths and oft as not didn’t even fight against the water filling up his lungs. At least not after the first shock of not being able to breathe. For a certainty it had to be easier or at least quicker than starving. Or dying of sorrow.

People said that last didn’t happen. That nobody ever died of sorrow. But then Ella had. Sorrowed herself into a fever and turned loose of life as easily as dropping a pebble into a pool of water. The pebble she’d tossed—the life she’d given up—was still making rings in its wake these months later.

Her father was not about to let the surface of Isaac’s life settle into any kind of calmness. The judge wanted vengeance. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. No mercy in his court. Nor was there any in Isaac’s. His life was no longer worth the food he needed to put in his mouth to keep him alive. Even if he had a way to get that food.

Food. His empty stomach made it hard to think about anything else. Except Ella. Food and Ella. Ella and food.

Those first few weeks after Ella was put in the ground, he had wandered the streets with no purpose to his steps and often as not ended up at her grave, wishing he could trade places with her. Some nights he slept there, stretched out on the mound of dirt as if he might reach down in it and still embrace her. Other nights he made his bed wherever dark overtook him.

Somehow he made it through the cold months. He wasn’t sure exactly how. It was all as foggy in his brain as the air enveloping him on this day. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Burton Hayes was there frowning in his head. The old storekeeper never smiled. Not even at his customers. But he’d let Isaac sleep in the store’s back room with a sack of beans for a pillow as long as Isaac kept the snow off the walkways around the store. There’d been other odd jobs now and again to make a few coins to buy food. Jobs he couldn’t remember now, even when he tried, while other things he couldn’t forget. Like how cold it was up in the cemetery and how his footprints had spoiled the pristine snow piled on top of Ella. The snow melted. Mud took its place. Others gave him handouts, but charity had a way of running out. Especially when the judge let it be known kindness to Isaac could mean trouble from him.

Isaac stared down at the murky water and was glad it wasn’t clear enough to bounce any kind of reflection back up to him. He knew how sorry he looked. Just the day before, he’d come face-to-face with that truth when he’d turned a corner and almost stumbled over a cracked mirror somebody had tossed out behind a building. For a few seconds he hadn’t believed the reflection could be his. The stranger staring out of the mirror held little resemblance to the man who had left for the West in such high spirits last year to seek his fortune. That man with hopes and dreams had been buried with his Ella.

He had leaned toward the mirror as if to peer deep into it and somehow find the image of the man he used to be. But up close the mirror’s crack ran right through the middle of his face and skewed his reflection. That was as it should be. He was cracked and broken, little more than a shell of a man going through the motions of living. His hair straggled down over the dirt-encrusted collar of his shirt. His cheeks looked hollow and his eyes haunted. He slammed his fist into the mirror and watched the glass splinter and fall to the ground.

It was a minute before he noticed the blood dripping off his fingers. He lifted up his hand and watched the blood pulsing up out of the cuts on his knuckles before he finally pulled out his handkerchief, soiled though it was, and wrapped it around his hand. The cuts didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d cut off his whole hand. Nothing about him mattered. He was a man without hope or a future. A man who had descended so low that he wasn’t above picking through trash to find a crust of bread to eat. A man who would never find work in this town but with no will to leave it. A man getting what he deserved as he teetered on the edge of despair. A man the judge was determined to push over the edge.

A man ready to surrender to the push but not able to make the jump himself. What was it in a man that kept him clinging to life even when that life was naught but misery? Isaac shut his eyes to the pull of the water as he leaned his head against the rough post and trembled until his teeth chattered.

The chime of church bells echoed through the fog, and Isaac counted off the bongs of the hours. Seven. He wondered if the sun was shining up above the fog or if clouds were heavy all the way to the heavens. He was so cold. The damp river fog had the bite of ice in it. Not normal for April. But winter hadn’t given up its hold on the city this year. Or maybe it was only the winter Isaac carried in his soul that kept spring from him. Perhaps others around him were welcoming the spring while he had been condemned to never see the sun again. Just as Ella would not.

Isaac looked up in hopes a shaft of sunlight might break through the fog just for him. A last wish granted before he gave up living.

Nobody would miss him. Nobody would even know he had died unless his body washed up on the riverbank somewhere. Maybe whoever found him would bury him and say words over his grave. That was as much as he could hope for. His mother would never know what became of him. Nor would Marian. He would pass with no more notice than a bird falling from the sky.

A bit of Scripture came unbidden to his mind, a legacy of his years of Bible reading with Mrs. McElroy. He couldn’t recall the exact words of the verses, but the gist of them tickled his memory. Something about not a sparrow falling but that the Lord knew and how a person, any person, was surely of more value than many sparrows. But as he kept looking up at the fog thick over his head, he didn’t feel as valuable as a single sparrow feather. He wished he’d paid Mrs. McElroy’s Bible teaching more mind. Then maybe he’d know how to pray some sunshine down on his face, some forgiveness down on his soul.

“It might be best to step back a bit, my brother.” The man’s voice carried an echo of cheer as he took hold of Isaac’s arm. “There’s the feel of ice in the fog this morn, and you wouldn’t want to be slipping into the deep with no one about to pull you out. I would give it a try, but it’s a fact that I’m not much of a swimmer and not half as big as you. So the end result might be that we’d both be off to meet our Maker. And to be truthful, that wasn’t a journey I had plans to make on this day.”

The man’s grasp was firm and Isaac let him pull him back from the edge of the dock.

“Come. You look to be in need of some morning sustenance. The same as I am.” The man kept talking as if not even noting Isaac’s gloom. “I came down here to see what steamboats had come in, but that appears to be a job better done without so much fog about.”

Isaac went with him. His stomach had been empty too long to allow him to turn down the offer of food. No matter what the eventual cost. But it wasn’t right not to give the man fair warning. Isaac stopped halfway up the wooden steps from the river. The fog was lifting and he took a good look at the little man beside him. He’d been right when he’d said he wasn’t much more than half as big as Isaac. The top of his hat barely came up to Isaac’s shoulders. It was a broad-brimmed affair that struck a memory in Isaac’s mind. He’d seen such a hat before, but he couldn’t quite recall where.

The man tipped his head back to look up at Isaac. “You needn’t be worried about any harm coming to you from me. As if you could even imagine such from a man as small in stature as me.” His bushy black eyebrows almost came together in a line over dark eyes that might have looked fierce if they hadn’t been softened by the sparkle of kindness. At that very moment, a ray of sunshine burned down through the fog to touch them both.

“The harm I thought might come was not to me but to you.”

The man eyed him for a long moment. “A man intent on evil would give his victim no warning. You do not appear to be a dangerous man.”

“Not harm from me, but because of me. I’ve made an enemy of a powerful man in this town. A judge who has found reason to throw others in jail for giving me a few coins to buy food.”

“The judges of the world are of no concern to me. I answer to a higher judge.” The man put his hand on Isaac’s arm again and started back up the steps. “But it could be I should have introduced myself. I’m Brother Asa Jefferson.”

“A preacher?”

“Nay. Not so much. But yea, a brother to any in need, and I get the sense that might be you. Our Mother Ann instructs us never to neglect doing good to those we meet.”

“Mother Ann?” Again there was that echo of a memory that Isaac couldn’t quite capture in his head. Perhaps the cold and lack of food was stealing his power to remember.

“Yea. The leader of our group of Believers. I am sure you have knowledge of the Christ who preachers tell you died for your sins.”

“I’ve not spent much time in church lately, but I seem to be good at making people die,” Isaac said. “At least as far as other people go. Don’t seem so good at it for myself.” He looked back down toward the riverfront with some regret.

Brother Asa’s smile faded but not his look of kindness as he said, “Why don’t we rest here in this spot of sun a moment before we continue on? The dampness of the morn is making my rheumatism act up and the gift of the sun’s warmth is the best healing power I know.” He sat down on the steps, and Isaac dropped down beside him as the riverfront began to stir to life and workers tromped past them on the steps with barely a glance.

Isaac raised his face up toward the sun. If only the sun had broken through the fog a few moments earlier to give him his last wish, he might even now be floating in the river facedown. And if this little man hadn’t come along. Isaac tried to ignore his stomach’s anxious growling as he waited for the man to speak. To say what he might want from Isaac. There was always a price to pay for charity doled out. A chance to work would be best, but Isaac was guessing the man had in mind to do some preaching at him. If so, he could give ear to his sermon in exchange for the promise of food. It had been two days since he’d found anything to eat. Hunger was perching on his shoulder like a vulture patiently biding its time.

The little man briskly rubbed his knees and elbows, so perhaps he’d spoken the truth of needing a rest. Then he took off his hat and balanced it on his lap as he peered straight into Isaac’s face. “Have you killed someone, my brother?” The man’s voice held no condemnation.

Isaac didn’t turn from the man’s eyes as he answered the question with truth. “Not with gun or force, but there are some who lay the blame of a death on me.” Ella’s face floated before him and he dropped his eyes down to stare at his hands. The handkerchief still wrapped around his hand was stained with blood, but none looked to be fresh.

“And do you put that blame there as well?” The man took hold of his hat and slid down to the step below Isaac so he could keep peering up into his face.

“She’s dead and I live.”

“And so you think you should stop living too? Take the heavenly Father’s will for your life into your own hands and cut your days short of those he has laid out for you?” The man glanced over his shoulder toward the river and then back at Isaac. His eyebrows glistened with the moisture of the morning mist.

“I was hearing the invitation of the water,” Isaac admitted. “But I was too much a coward to answer it.”

“Nay, my brother. It is living that oft takes courage. A cowardly man looks for what he imagines will be an easy escape from his troubles, but that man dooms himself to eternal punishment since how can he beg our Father’s forgiveness for such a sin once he is dead? Such a decision should be one that we wrestle with, as Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord when he was running from his sin. Dying is not meant to be easy. Not if it isn’t the Lord’s will.”

Isaac turned his eyes away from the man back toward the river where the fog was nothing more than wisps of mist now as the sun won the morning battle. After a minute he said, “The thought of it seemed easy. Just jump in the river and don’t come up for air.”

“Have you ever been witness to a man drowning?”

The man’s voice wormed into his ears, bringing to mind things he had no wish to think on. He thought about standing up and walking away, but his empty stomach demanded he see the man’s words through.

“I was on a riverboat once when the boilers blew. Men and women and children drowned that night. Those that weren’t killed in the explosion.” Isaac looked out past the little man toward the middle of the river. The water had been murky that day too. The day his father had died.

“You must have been blown clear of the boat and had knowledge of staying afloat. Was that the way of it?” Brother Asa pushed on with his questions.

“I was on deck. Everybody said I was lucky. That my father loaned me his luck and that’s why he was below deck where he didn’t have the chance to make the shore. Of course the boat caught fire.”