The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (4 page)

P
HINNIE PAINE WAS
indeed an agreeable man, as Jane’s father had described him, so agreeable that Jane had no single past experience of him out of temper to help her anticipate him now. She had intended to be asked something more and was prepared to answer with more—that she felt a couple should know each other something better before they talked of marriage, that she was no longer quite so willing to take the unknown parts of Phinnie on trust as she might have been a month ago. Exactly why that was she didn’t know, and that this idea would be new to Phinnie she understood well enough, but she also knew that it must be so.

Jane was prepared to say most of this to Phinnie, but the chance never came. He popped off the bed, pulled on stockings, boots, and coat, and left the room; Jane followed him into the keeping room and was greatly surprised to see him continue through the keeping room and out the door. In no long time she heard his horse snuffling and prancing in the dooryard in its own surprise, and no long time after that she heard it pounding down the cartway toward the King’s road.

The rest of the house heard it too. Jane had carried the troublesome oil lamp with her from the front room and set it on the keeping room table; it rested between Jane and the stairs and lit each member of her family as they tumbled down: her father first, her stepmother behind, next Neddy, and then the little girls. At last Bethiah appeared, looking the least startled of all, perhaps because she was still the most asleep. Jane’s father said, “What the devil goes on? Did I just hear Paine—?”

“He’s gone home to Wellfleet, sir.”

“The devil! If he thinks to wiggle out now—”

“ ’Tis not him wiggling, sir. I told him I didn’t wish to marry him.”

Behind their father, Bethiah’s eyes went round as plums. As if he could feel them, Jane’s father whirled around. “Get upstairs. The lot of you.”

They went in reverse of how they came, Bethiah first, Mehitable herding the little girls, and Neddy behind, looking over his shoulder as if he never expected to see Jane whole again.

But when Jane’s father spoke he was all calm. He said, “Very well. Explain yourself.”

Jane did so. When she’d finished, or in fact some good time before she’d finished, her father explained
him
self.

“I couldn’t claim the title of caring father if I allowed a foolish case of nerves to destroy my daughter’s best chance in life,” he said. “You live in a small village, with limited choices before you, and none with the character and resources of a Phinnie Paine. This I am sure you will understand once you have paid better attention to the matter, and once you have done so, this is how you will go forward. Tomorrow you will write Mr. Paine a letter apologizing for your behavior, claiming the onset of some sort of ail, or whatever it is you claim in such cases. At the same time I shall write and explain that on reflection a fall wedding would better suit our circumstance. You see how I bend to your whim in this? You see how I am not the kind of father who would ride roughshod over a daughter’s concerns? By the fall you might know all you wish to know of the man. By fall you might know all you wish to know of an entire king’s regiment. By fall you might have been to another wedding and seen what poor choice remains. Now, we are clear, are we not? Go to your bed, Jane.”

Jane climbed the stairs. At the top she found Bethiah hovering on the landing, attempting to catch the voices below. “Must you take him?” she asked.

Jane said, “Go to your bed, Bethiah.”

THE NEXT MORNING AFTER
his breakfast Jane’s father addressed her again. “I’m off to Nobscusset to see the cooper. I shall expect to see your letter on that table when I return.”

Once Jane’s father had gone, Jane rose to help Mehitable clear away the dishes, but her stepmother took the plates from her hand. “You’d best get after that letter.”

Jane released the plates, but as she did so she took a new, secretive look at her stepmother. Mehitable was a tall, high-colored, well-set woman who might have held her head up in any man’s home; instead she spent all her time looking down at a babe, a sleeve, or, as now, a dirty bowl. How was it she had come to marry Jane’s father? Jane wondered. Had Mehitable's father fixed on Nathan Clarke the way Jane’s father had fixed on Phinnie Paine?
Look up,
Jane thought.
Look at me. Tell me what you know.
Indeed, Mehitable did look up, but only when Bethiah came banging through the door with the milk pail. “Bethiah, take some of that milk to my mother,” she said. “She misses her cow.”

Jane said, “I’ll go.”

SHORTLY AFTER MEHITABLE’S MARRIAGE
to Jane’s father, Mehitable’s father drowned. For three years afterward, for reasons that had been half whispered and half spoken aloud, Jane’s father and Mehitable’s mother had been estranged. A year later the widow had married a lawyer named Eben Freeman, who had boarded with her for some time, a dwelling arrangement that had inspired some but not all of the whispering. Soon after the marriage Freeman had been elected to serve in the legislature, and the couple had gone to stay at Boston while he served out his term. Jane’s father had advised Freeman to sell or let the house in Satucket, but Jane’s grandmother had argued against it, believing they would return to Satucket to live between sittings of the legislature. In the space of three years, however, Freeman had managed to free himself for only a handful of brief visits home; a lengthy stay had been promised for that spring as soon as the weather cleared; Jane’s grandmother had waited through April, May, and into June, but when her husband was forced again to postpone, she had departed for Satucket alone. The situation between the families being such as it was, Jane couldn’t have said she knew her grandmother well; indeed, half of what she knew came from rumor and the other half from her father’s complaints of what he called his mother-in-law’s licentious opinions.

Jane’s grandparents lived in a neat, tight house of one and a half stories situated about halfway along the landing road. The early June weather was the weather that Jane liked best out of all the Satucket year—the air was neither hot nor cold, blue had just won out over gray above, the spring mud had dried out below, and on either side of the road new leaves shone whole and clean and bright, not yet dulled by dust or riddled by insects. Jane took the walk slowly and felt the smoke clearing from her lungs as she went; as if sharing the thought, Jane found her grandmother out in her garden instead of indoors.

The past year had widened the frame of silver around her grandmother’s face, but the straight back, vivid eyes, and strong jaw hadn’t changed. As Jane made note of these things it occurred to her that this woman was much closer than Mehitable to the age Jane’s mother would have been had she lived. As to any other coincidental likeness Jane couldn’t say—the little she remembered of her mother had long ago gotten mixed up with the death’s-head angel that topped her gravestone, complete with
painful grimace. But as the older woman folded the younger into a hug that included the milk jar and a fair amount of sandy dirt, Jane seemed to remember that as well.

Jane handed the jug to her grandmother, who peered into it and beamed. “Milk!”

“My mother says you must miss your cow.”

“And my hens. And all that should be growing out of the ground.” Jane’s grandmother carried the milk jug into the house; Jane followed. There too she saw the effect of her grandmother’s long absence in the frost of salt on the windows, the thirsty wood, the mildewed plaster, the cobwebs that hadn’t yet surrendered to the broom. Jane’s grandmother seemed to notice it as Jane did and slashed the air in frustration. “I’ve been at work on the place since I came and not a minute of it shows.” She set the milk on the table and sat down on one side of it, waving at Jane to take a seat on the other. She said, “Now, Jane. Tell me all that goes on.”

All that goes on. The list was long, but for a grandmother who was nearly a stranger a shorter list would do. Jane began with Nate’s fall, went on to her sister Anne’s first stitching, from there to Neddy’s good report from his tutor. She considered mentioning Winslow’s horse, but already, despite the neglect, her grandmother’s house had settled over her with a peculiar kind of sheltering peace—in such a place such words would sound profane. Instead she asked, “How long do you stay at Satucket?”

“Eben joins me as soon as he can; we stay as long as he can.”

Jane looked with greater care at her grandmother. Despite all the rumors about her grandparents that had floated around the village, this was the first time Jane had actually thought of them as the human beings behind the rumors, thought of the human feelings that had locked them together despite such rumors. Now that she looked, she could see the claims of husband versus home battling all across her grandmother’s features. And indeed, there was something in the house that made Jane reluctant to leave it. She found herself saying, “I was to marry Phinnie Paine, but I may not now.”

Jane waited for one of her grandmother’s “licentious opinions” but none came. Her father often said his mother-in-law was the only woman of his acquaintance who could speak her mind with her mouth closed, but Jane discovered nothing in her silence either. She decided to continue along. She told her grandmother of her conversation with Phinnie, of Phinnie’s riding off, of the letter her father required, agreeing to marriage in the fall.

When Jane finished, her grandmother surprised her by saying, “ ’Tis no easy thing to go against one’s father.”

“No.”

“Your father does business with Mr. Paine. He may assure you of a fair trade with the man; he may not assure you of a fair marriage.”

“You’ve met Phinnie Paine?”

“A time or two.”

“And how did he take you?”

“What little I took I liked well. Which is of course no greater help to you.”

No.

THE LOOK JANE RECEIVED
from Mehitable as she entered the keeping room told her she’d been overlong at her errand, but she’d still returned long before her father could be expected back from Nobscusset. Bethiah and Hitty were pressing butter into molds at the keeping room table, but with Mehitable’s eyes on her back, Jane continued past them to her room. She sat down at the little table by the window, took up her pen, touched it to the ink, held it over her letter book, set it down again. The idea of writing a letter to Phinnie by itself did not distress her; indeed, she felt she owed him more words than her simple
no
; the distress came in attempting to form up the particular additional words. No matter how she tried to work it, every sentence sounded too much like her father’s
not now.

Jane sat, struggling to order her thoughts, but the more she sat the more she began to resent the fact that she’d been forced to such a struggle at all. Her father could marry as many housekeepers as he chose; he could not marry away Jane as he chose. And what of Phinnie? Could he not share some of the blame for her predicament? All these words that would not slide off her pen the way she wished might have slid easily enough off her tongue if he’d but stayed to hear them instead of bolting off in the dead of night and disrupting the household. And she might not have needed to explain anything at all if he’d managed to answer a few simple questions with a little honesty and attention.

The longer Jane sat the greater her resentment grew. She redipped her pen and wrote across the page,
Dearest Brother.

When the letter was finished she folded it, addressed it, and carried it out to the post table.

WHEN JANE’S FATHER CAME
in he caught sight of the letter on the table and smiled. It was the kind of smile that caused Jane to wish for a second that a different letter sat on the table. He picked up the one that did sit there, and Jane watched as the address on the letter blanked out the smile. “Your brother. Again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And where is Mr. Paine’s?”

“I discovered I had nothing else to say to Mr. Paine just now.”

“Nothing else to say.”

“Beyond what I said last night.”

“Which you understand discharges him from any future obligation to you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which you further understand requires a letter from you to reinstate that obligation.”

“I do.”

“So you will write him.”

“No.”

No.
The single word sounded strong and clean and neat, as if Jane had just learned a new language of one word and that word contained in it everything she needed to know. She said it again, but with the necessary amendment, “No, sir,” and waited in that brief pocket of roaring silence for her father to explode.

He did it well. “I should like to know where you come by such a high opinion of yourself!” he shouted. “You think yourself entitled to my roof, my fire, my food, forever and ever until you grow old? You think you need do nothing to keep yourself? Or do you think your looks will save you, looks that have already begun to turn? Look at that beetling brow! Look at those bony wrists! You’ll be a fine match for old Presbury Fuller, who’s already pissing his breeches—is that who you think to marry now? Or do you think at all? Well you’d best begin the practice by thinking how you’re going to earn your dinner!”

Jane considered telling her father that she was going to earn her dinner by cooking his, but he’d already gone into his office and kicked shut the door.