The Innocent (6 page)

Briefly, she thought of the sheriff with the compassionate eyes. She could go to him. Tell her story first. He might believe her. But then what? While Curt had attacked her, she had escaped without visible harm. Curt was the one in need of a doctor. It would be her word against his. A woman many in the community considered a bit unhinged against a man who owned half the county. Whether the sheriff believed her or not might not matter.

It would be better to rid her and Asher of evidence of the encounter. To pretend it had never happened. To hope that Curt would do the same. That his pride would make him say he’d been attacked by a stray dog. That might be too much to hope for, but Asher appearing out of nowhere to help her escape Curt’s clutches had been more than she could hope for as well. An answer to prayer. And then the Shaker bell sounding. Dare she ask for more? Especially when she was running in the opposite direction of that answer.

Her mother’s words were in her head again.
Pray anyway. The Lord’s power is
not made smaller by our limited faith. Trust the way
the disciples in the Bible trusted
.

They had been having Bible study around the table during one of those times when her father had been gone for too many weeks and their cupboard was almost bare. At twelve, Carlyn no longer accepted whatever her mother said without question. She heard the church pray for this or that sick member and then watched them bury the very same person the next week. She’d read Job. She knew John the Baptist was beheaded. Stephen stoned.

“But didn’t they all die martyrs’ deaths?” She had stared across the table at her mother with some defiance. Sure of the answer, but at the same time wanting it to be different.

Her little brothers and sister had stared at her, dumbfounded, knowing even at their young age that it was bad enough to question their mother but even worse to doubt the Scripture. Carlyn didn’t care. She was tired of praying and pretending to be thankful for mush for supper.

Her mother surprised them all by not reprimanding Carlyn. Instead she reached across the table to place her work-roughened hand over Carlyn’s. “There are many ways to die,
my daughter. The one way you do not want to die is without the Lord. The faith of those saints carried them through fearsome times to glory. That is what you must remember. We look upon death with worldly eyes, but our lives are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”

Carlyn had bowed her head in submission to her mother, but the Bible words had not sunk into her heart.

Her mother sighed softly and squeezed her hand. “You will understand more when you are older, my daughter. Meanwhile search out the stories of faith in your Bible and let go of your doubts.”

Carlyn had muttered something. She didn’t remember now what, and her mother had put a finger under her chin and raised her face up to look into her eyes. “Whatever else, even on the days you find it hard to believe, pray anyway. It will make you stronger and the Lord will hear and bless you.”

Was any of that true or simply what her mother wanted to be true? That night and on many other nights, they still only had corn mush for supper. But they had not starved. She had met Ambrose and felt blessed in ways she couldn’t imagine. At least until the war had torn them apart. Perhaps Ambrose had not come home because she didn’t have the proper faith.

Yet she had been rescued this day by a dog that had somehow escaped a locked house to follow her and show up when she most needed him.

At the house, Asher’s escape was easy to see. The kitchen window was open. She had not expected him to jump through
that, but she was thankful he had. Thankful and worried at the same time.

It took the last of the water in the rain barrel to wash her dress and Asher. But what did that matter? Someone once told her the Shakers had running water and machines for washing clothes. She couldn’t imagine such a machine and had wondered at the time if that could be true. Now, she supposed she’d find out.

She hung the dress in the kitchen by the open window. No need upsetting her neighbors by draping it on the line outside. A person shouldn’t do laundry on Sunday.
Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.

There were things a person could do on the Sabbath. Tending a fire and cooking. Milking the cows and gathering in the eggs. Feeding the animals. Rescuing one’s ox from the ditch.

Carlyn shivered. She didn’t want to think about the ditch. Instead she lifted her gun off the nails above the door. She would not be caught unprepared again.

With the gun propped against the bed, she packed a few clothes in the same old carpet bag she’d carried away from her mother’s house five years earlier. Best to take only what she needed most and then come back for the rest. She’d heard the Shakers took whatever possessions a person had when one joined their society. Land, buildings, tools, household plunder. Everything went into the society to be used by all.

The brother of a man in their church had joined with the Shakers some years before, and Carlyn remembered the man’s anger and sorrow at seeing part of the family farm absorbed into the Shaker holdings. The father had gone with the men to the Shaker village to talk to his brother, but to no avail.
The brother had not come away with them. Instead he had tried to get them to accept the Shaker way.

“I could not bear his blasphemous words. As if he thought he knew more about the Lord’s salvation than the Scriptures have revealed to me,” her father had railed when he got back from the Shaker village. He paced up and down in the kitchen, his coattails flipping out when he made a turn. “They’re the devil’s leeches, sucking dry the weak and foolish for their own purposes.”

The weak and foolish. If the Shakers sought such as that, she would fit their need, whatever that might be. They weren’t of the devil. Her mother had assured her of that when they had crossed paths with the Shakers in town. Misguided, her mother said, but ever kind. After swearing Carlyn to secrecy, she revealed how some of the baskets of food they found on their porch from time to time weren’t from their own church people but from the Shakers.

“Your father would not accept their charity, but while he is away doing the Lord’s work, what the Lord supplies to feed you children, I will not refuse. Instead, I am thankful and pray the Lord’s blessing on them for their generosity in sharing their plenty,” her mother said.

Would they still be willing to share their plenty? Carlyn straightened up and caught sight of her face in the mirror across the room. Ambrose had been so proud when he brought the dresser home. He liked to watch her brush her hair in front of the mirror and often would wrap his arms around her to delay her pinning it up in the mornings. With his chin resting lightly on top her head, she would lean against him, wrapped in his love. Would she ever feel that safe again?

The wavy mirror bent her reflection out of shape, but that
seemed only right with the unknown future she faced on the morrow. She touched her hair and thought of the caps the Shaker women wore. Her hair would be tucked away all the time, hidden from the world. But then so would she, and after what happened today, she wanted to be hidden. Safely tucked away from danger. From Curt Whitlow. From starvation.

“Oh Ambrose, why didn’t you come home?” Carlyn spoke aloud to the mirror, not paying any mind to Asher when he raised his head up off his paws to look at her. “We were going to have children, grow old together. And now if you don’t come home to rescue me, I’ll grow old alone.”

Hardly alone. She’d be surrounded by people. Shakers, to be sure, but they were only people who had decided to walk a different path than most in the world. It would be like being a child again, sharing space with sisters and brothers. That would not be so bad. Like her mother, she would not look askance on the help the Lord sent her.

She wondered why her mother had been so much on her mind. Perhaps it was the Lord’s doing, his way of helping Carlyn be brave enough to face the future with faith. Her mother’s faith had never wavered even at those times when her path was obscured with difficulties.

Carlyn looked at the mirror again and wondered if her mother and father had shared love the way she and Ambrose had. They must have. Five children testified to their union as man and wife. Carlyn touched her flat stomach. Another regret. If Ambrose had given her a baby, the child would be at least three now. She imagined a little boy the image of Ambrose with laughter in his eyes, clinging to her skirts.

Her arms ached with emptiness at the thought. But it was just as well the child was no more than a yearning of her
heart. The Shakers had a special house for the children who came into their society. Apart from their mothers. Carlyn couldn’t have borne that, and hadn’t her mother always assured her the Lord wouldn’t test her beyond her endurance?

Funny how she remembered more of her mother’s daily Bible teachings than she did her father’s sermons from the church pulpits. His sermons always had a feeling of doom, while her mother told Carlyn about a compassionate Lord who knelt down to make mud to put on a blind man’s eyes. Who healed lepers. Who offered living water to the woman at the well. Who knew the weaknesses in people but loved them anyway.

Her mother never doubted that love even when the cow went dry, the hens stopped laying, and the cupboard was bare. “God will provide,” she would say. And he had. A few turnips overlooked in the garden. A rabbit in a snare. Fish from the nearby river. Walnuts in the woods. Those food gifts from the Shakers.

But Carlyn’s father always made it home eventually from his preaching journeys. No one had ever called her mother Widow Wilson. No one had gone to the sheriff to put them out of their house. Carlyn sighed as she stared down at the few things packed in the bag. Her life stripped to the bare bones. Asher got up from his spot on the floor and leaned his head against her.

“I know.” She put her hand on the dog. “If wishes and tears could bring him home, he’d have been here long ago. Now it’s time to leave such behind and face an unhappy future.”

Blessed are they that
mourn: for they shall be comforted.

She pressed down the clothes in the bag to make room for her mother’s Bible. Her mother had thrust it at Carlyn the
day they left for Texas. Ambrose had already marched away to war and her mother wanted Carlyn to go with them to Texas. Carlyn had trembled at the thought of being under her father’s roof again, but she also trembled at being left behind. Alone. But Ambrose had promised the war wouldn’t last long. She had to stay and keep the house ready for his return. That’s what she told her mother.

“Then keep this.” Her mother had held the Bible out to Carlyn. Its cover was worn even then and some of the page edges tattered, showing the many trails of Scripture her mother had walked through it, searching for answers.

“I can’t keep your Bible. You’ll need it.” Carlyn was unable to take the treasured book from her mother’s hands.

But her mother had insisted. “It eases our parting for me to leave the comfort of God’s Word with you. Each time you open it, I will be reading along with you. In my heart.”

With her mother’s words echoing in her head, Carlyn let the Bible fall open and smoothed her hand over the page, as though she could absorb the words through her skin. “Oh Mother, if you were only still near to help me find the answers.”

Maybe she should try to find her way to Texas. But no. She had her answer. She would follow the toll of the bell in the morning.

6

Carlyn lay awake through the night, fearing footsteps on the porch. Each creak and groan of the house, usually so comfortably familiar, now seemed to warn of new threats. She had never felt so alone.

She told herself she was no more alone than she had been for the last few years, but the thought skittered away from her like water spiders on a pond. It wasn’t just her fear of Curt Whitlow and what he might do to her or Asher. No, it was the thought of the morrow. The thought of going to the Shakers and what that meant. With the black of the night pushing down on her, she couldn’t hold on to the whisper of belief that Ambrose might yet come home. Instead the name Widow Kearney echoed in her ears. Within these walls where she’d been so happy with Ambrose, she’d shunted aside common sense and held on to hope too long.

Come morning, she would leave this house forever and, along with it, that hope of Ambrose returning to her loving arms. A sadness beyond tears gripped her. She wouldn’t
pretend any longer, but neither would she forget the vow she’d made to him.
Till death do us part
. The army reported him missing. They had no proof of his death, and so she would stay faithful to her promise until she knew for sure he had gone to his eternal home.

Carlyn welcomed the first hint of pink in the eastern sky, glad to have reason to rise from her bed. The sky was clear, promising another day of sunshine, but Carlyn barely took notice of anything more than the daylight. She did her morning chores by rote. Smoothing the covers on the bed. Milking the cow. Mixing the leftover cornbread with a bit of milk for Asher. She didn’t bother stirring up the fire in the stove. She thought it wise not to put anything in her queasy stomach.