Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (6 page)

She straightened up and turned her head and looked up at me.

“Is it really all right?” she asked.

“Of course it’s all right.”

She leaned back against me then. “I think about you,” she said. “Every day in the clearing I expect to see you again because I did once. That one time.”

“I think about you too,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders. She bent her left cheek down until it touched my hand.

“I keep thinking every shadow is you. Because when you came that day, there was this shadow in the corner of my eye that when I looked was you.”

“I’ll come often. And then we’ll go together.”

“I know it sounds like just talk, so soon, when I don’t even know you yet.” She pressed her lips against my hand. “I’d’ve waited, but I had to know what to tell Rachel.” She kissed each knuckle and reached the edge of my hand and kissed it. I felt her waiting there for me to turn my palm up. I could feel her wish, and wondered why she couldn’t feel mine, that she butt it up like a calf going for milk.

She shouldn’t have been afraid. She should have felt my wish. To punish her, I said, “I’m wasting daylight, standing here.”

She flung herself up. “Oh,
don’t
waste
day
light! Where’s my jerkin?” She rushed around blindly, looking for her jerkin. It was somewhere there. I myself couldn’t see or remember.

“You didn’t mean what I meant. It wasn’t all right at all. Now what’ll I do? Oh God, where’s my jerkin?” She found it and thrust her arms into the sleeves. “Well, Miss White,” she said, “you get on with your daylight and I’ll get on – ”

I stayed as she’d left me, looking down at the bench. I felt her gaze. She was trying by the strength of her wish to make me turn. I made her say it: “Won’t you look at me?”

“Oh, wasn’t I?” (My politest voice.) “I’m sorry. Are you leaving? Must you?”

“Oh, I can’t go away without kissing you!”

And I felt her lips on my cheek, nibbling towards my mouth, and getting there, and staying; and I knew why she’d been afraid and wondered why I hadn’t been, why I had lured this mighty mystery and astonishment into the room, into our lives.

I turned my head to save my life.

“Did I hold you too hard? Did I hurt you?”

“Oh no!” I said. I pressed her even closer, to show.

“Was that a feeling I felt in you?”

I hesitated and then told true: “Yes.”

She turned her face up, with the look of Jacob granted the Angel’s blessing.

Her fear was over. Mine not. “That’s something powerful, girl,” I said.

She nodded, breathing through her mouth because she’d just come up from deep water. Then she looked down at me, all seriousness except a little turning-up of the right corner of her mouth. I looked back, serious entirely, because it was up to me to save us from a thirst we could never come to a pause in or rest from. I was older. It was up to me.

She wouldn’t look away. She wanted the corner of my mouth up too, and when at last I gave her that, she kissed me again.

Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.

And that thought, that whatever this was I would live it, made it containable. I can’t explain why. I only know it happened.

Once I’d dreamed that a fierce wildcat was attacking me. I was very afraid, and then I thought, why, it’s hungry, and I offered it my hands to eat. It didn’t eat them. It became immediately gentle, a friend.

So when I let my head fall back under Sarah’s kiss, the frenzy I trembled at just wasn’t there. Instead, comfort and joy and simplicity and order and answers to questions I’d always supposed unanswerable, such as, why was I born? why a woman? why here? why now?

A wonderful glowing spacious peacefulness came to us. There was so much time. I took her jerkin off and kissed it and laid it down. All afternoon we leaned against each other at the table, and in the light from the frosty window I read to her about Genesee – the price of salt (one dollar a bushel), the wages of a laborer (ten to fifteen dollars a month, and board), the number of republicans, the number of federalists. On and on, and then repeat. That the mail stage ran out from Albany twice a week. That unimproved land west of the Genesee River sold for a dollar and a half an acre.

“That’s where we’ll go, west of the river,” Sarah said. “I’ll cut my hair and be a laborer. We can buy near seven acres for a month of work.” She couldn’t read, but she could deal with figures in her head. I’ve always choked up at the thought of figures myself.

“We’ll have other money, and you won’t cut your hair,” I said, very firmly, something like a man. I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other. Provided always that she didn’t cut her hair.

At the end of the afternoon I bundled her up to go home, giving little kisses at every stage, and then more, and sent her off. Her face showed glory so bright I might have worried, except that I was sure no one else had any basis in experience for recognizing it, and I didn’t think it would hold up through her long cold walk home anyway. Surely she’d get home red, frowning, and miserable like an ordinary person.

What Sarah wanted was to get aside by herself and imagine every detail about me, but a family that’s spent a winter Sabbath crowded up in a country kitchen isn’t likely to let a returned traveler hold back. They wanted news, and they’d learned to expect it from Sarah, who knew how to notice and remember. She always had some little thing to tell from going somewhere.

The little girls (her older sister was married and gone) tagged her up the ladder to the loft where she got out of her mother’s dress and into her own breeches, and then back down again where she sat beside the fire and tried to dream. They were asking to be told, again, what my house was like, and what I was like, and whether I had jewels, and about Edward’s children, and what color our dogs were, and how tall our woodpile. “No, no, I’m tired,” she’d say, or, “I already told you that,” laughing and trying to push them off. They were supposed to be knitting, or learning to.

She thought how pretty they were and that she loved them, and in the midst of being happy on this happiest of her days, she felt a completely unexpected grief because it was not certain that something wonderful would happen to them too. If she hadn’t studied so long to be manly, she’d have wept. But all through, she stayed happy too.

Rachel was squatting beside the coals tending supper. She said nothing, asked nothing, but she kept looking up at Sarah’s face.

“What’s that burning?” Sarah’s mother asked. “Why, you ninny, you’ve burnt the supper. Stayed right there by it and let it burn!”

It wasn’t really burned, just beginning to be. The men (Sarah and her father) ate first. Sarah really didn’t. She wasn’t hungry, and then, unwisely, she remembered our kisses and her throat got big – it felt as big as a singing frog’s – and she couldn’t swallow.

Her father said, “Well, you’ve got yourself a nice job, waiting on that Patience White while she sets on a silken pillow. I expect you spent the day studying where to get a carriage for her to ride in. She’ll ride out in a carriage and you’ll walk out and meet her there.”

Fathers, I think, are rather alike in the kinds of things they say when someone has a hope.

Sarah didn’t answer. Couldn’t, actually.

“Well, is that the plan?”

She shook her head and kept looking down.

“Oh, she’s got to have a carriage. And you better figure on about a hundred pairs of them silken slippers. They won’t hold up long in the woods, and she couldn’t wear no ordinary boots like no ordinary girl.”

I suspect that a Chinese father would have said about the same, or English, or Esquimau.

Her father ate quickly, being spared Sarah’s impediment – perhaps never having known it – and left the table. Then Sarah could leave it too.

She went directly to the loft and laid aside her clothes. She lay down on her cornhusk pallet and pulled the quilt over herself and folded her arms under her head and let loose the thought of me.

“With all that blue blood in her feet, she can’t hardly,” her father shouted, somewhere way off down there. He didn’t interrupt Sarah’s thoughts.

But Rachel climbed up. She interrupted. “Shove over,” she whispered, and lay down on Sarah’s pallet, though her own was right beside. She strained to see Sarah’s face, but couldn’t yet. Sarah could see very well, from having been in the dim light longer.

“What happened?” Rachel whispered. When Sarah said nothing, Rachel said, “Your face. It shows in your face. What happened?”

Sarah said, “I found my mate.” She thinks she said that because it wouldn’t have been fair to let it seem that Rachel had to stay behind for an unimportant reason. I think she just plain wanted to tell.

“Who?” Rachel asked, alarmed but not forgetting to whisper.

“Patience White.”

“And she goes with you and I stay here?”

“Fraid so, Sister.”

Rachel pressed her face against Sarah and wept. Sarah held her, whispering, “Never mind, Sister. Pretty soon the one for you will come, and you’ll be glad you’re not there with me. You’ll be glad about your whole life.”

“I hate her. She’s rich and that’s why.”

“No. I love her. I love her.”

“It’s always been you and me.” Rachel lifted herself and looked at Sarah. “From the start. When the babies was inside Ma and she couldn’t get up and feed us or anything. When they was coming and we was scared she was dying, wasn’t it always you and me holding together? How can you say you love somebody but me?”

“It’s different. She kissed me. I never felt such a feeling.”

“I’ll kiss you.” Rachel pushed her dry frightened lips against Sarah’s. “You want something else? I’ll do that too. More’n
she
ever would.”

“Oh, Sister, don’t. The one for you will come. Man or woman.”

Rachel sat up and dried her tears and nose on her sleeve. They kept filling and she kept drying them. Sarah watched her, not knowing anything to say or do. In time the tears stopped.

“I wouldn’t have nobody but a man,” Rachel said.

“If it happens that way to you. It happened this way to me, and I’m really happy.”

“I used to worry about you. That no man would have you. I never thought to worry you’d think you
was
a man.”

“I’m not. I’m a woman that’s found my mate.”

“Oh, shut up!”

So Sarah rolled over. Rachel sat a while before climbing down.

In a house so small the only solitude anyone had was that given by a turned back.

Sarah fell asleep easily.

Chapter Four

Monday when I woke I thought first thing of Sarah. Instantly my bosom filled, as though with milk, and tingled. I lay there thinking how fine it was to be a woman and have a part that could please me the way my bosom did from just a thought, and imagining Sarah, waking now too, thinking of me and glad to be a woman.

How easy it was to wake that morning, when the world and my life in it were for the first time more interesting and beautiful than any dream I could lose by waking. So many times I had wished to be like a bear and not get up till spring, but that morning the cold couldn’t touch me, and I would not have been a bear and foregone a winter’s kisses for anything in earth or heaven.

There had been more snow during the night, and a wind to blow the paths full. Tobe was shoveling towards the barn when I went out to do my milking. “Well, you sure look happy,” he said. He smiled, tobacco brown.

“I am – I am,” I said and stepped into the snow he hadn’t got to yet. He’d been shoveling for a fair while, though, and he’d chopped a hole in the creek to let the cattle drink. A small limping lonely old man, Tobe. How did he get up in the morning? Had anything beautiful happened to him his whole life long? How could he smile when he saw me happy? His pleasure in my pleasure seemed a generosity so unlikely as to make me think, at first, that he must have changed. Then I saw, of course, that I myself had, and I felt a pang at how many years I’d wasted not knowing that kindness was everywhere around, common as stone; and I felt also another gratitude to Sarah, for fixing me so I’d know from then on.

My two cows, as always when I entered the barn, began at once to sigh and drip milk. I find that so interesting. Martha’s cows always did that too, at the sight of her but not of me. Martha considered it a waste, and I suppose it was, especially in winter, but how interesting.

There is something very dear and good about cows. They are gentle, alert, calm, and fresh-smelling. I put their careful winter portions into their mangers, and while they fed I pressed my brow hard against their warm, gurgling, dingy flanks, seized the flabby tits, and drew out the scanty thin winter milk. “Dear friend,” I murmured, “Sarah and you and your cow friend and I are going to where you’ll be slick and bountiful and the streets are paved with kisses.”

I knew of course that for some years the cows couldn’t have even a barn, and that when they did get one it wouldn’t compare with this, my father’s pride. Sarah’s and mine would be of logs and small. My father’s barn was fine, all boards and huge pegged beams and stone. It had a vast crammed hayloft, which was why we could milk all winter, and a threshing floor, and bins for grain, and many stalls, and cover for the plows and other tools, and cover for the buggy and sleigh. It had a special place for breaking and hatcheling flax, something we didn’t do any longer of course and a root cellar, and as a last detail, in the stone of the retaining wall beside the stable door, a gap, a cavemouth, leading into a cozy little lair for dogs. The dogs would never stay in it, and even though my father had felt only playful when he built it, once he had it made he wanted it used and he was angry and puzzled at the dogs. I was a child then, and wanted the dogs to keep house as much as my father did, so I was angry and puzzled too. One day I put my head inside the dog-cave, and heard a sound like a distant waterfall or a conch shell held to the ear, and I think that faint roaring is the reason the dogs were so ungrateful. My father said nonsense, and my brother said nonsense, but I still think that was the reason.