The Outsider (26 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Ye are not yet a full member of our society. You can’t sign the covenant until you are twenty-one. It wouldn’t be hard for you to leave.”

Gabrielle felt weak. She couldn’t leave the Believers. She belonged here. “I am a Believer whether I have signed the full covenant or not, Sister Helen.” But even as she spoke the words, she knew she’d been fighting the thought of leaving the Believers ever since she’d left Brice in the woods months ago.

Gabrielle pulled her arm away from Sister Helen’s hold and joined the other sisters in the middle of the floor. She began to move through the exercise, forcing her mind to concentrate on each and every step.

As Gabrielle walked back to her room after the meeting, she thought how often lately she’d felt this same relief when the last song and prayer were finished at meeting. She got ready for bed without a word to the two other sisters who shared her room now, for while Sister Mercy had agreed to allow Gabrielle to teach again, she no longer trusted her to watch over the younger sisters at night.

Gabrielle knelt on the cold bare floor and quickly said her night prayers before lying down on the narrow bed. She pulled the quilt up under her chin and waited for sleep to rest her mind, but sleep eluded her. Thoughts crashed through her mind like a river swollen out of its banks by heavy spring rains.

At first her thoughts jumped from one thing to another with no order or reason. Then as usual at night, Brice was in her mind. She saw his face as it had looked the first time she’d seen him when he ran into the fire to save Nathan, and later the gentleness in his eyes when he called her young sister. She touched her hand that had been burned and knew the same tremble inside her she’d known then at his touch.

Then she hadn’t recognized the love growing in her heart for him. Even later when she went to his cabin after Becca, she tried to deny the strength of her feelings for him. She’d assured them both it was a passing thing, nothing more than a stumbling block in her path. She’d thought she could stand up and continue on her way through life as she’d always planned. She belonged with the Shakers. She was a Believer.

Ever since she and her mother had joined the Society of Believers, she’d been sure of that. She was a Believer. Then why had so much confusion fogged her thinking these last few months? A bit of fear crept into her heart as she looked straight into that confusion. She was not sure she was ready to face the questions she’d avoided for so long, but there would be no more putting them off. This night she would seek the truth of what she really believed.

First there was the Eternal Father. She couldn’t doubt her faith in him, for she knew he was there even through the darkness that had settled around her of late. Then there was the Christ, a man without sin of any kind who’d walked on the earth and offered compassion and love to all around him and even now these many centuries later to Gabrielle.
God is love.
That was the first Bible verse her grandmother had taught her many years before in Virginia.

And finally there was Mother Ann, the spiritual daughter of God who had established the first communities of Believers and the rules of behavior that were to guide them in making those communities a heaven on earth, free from all worldly sin. Mother Ann had left them instructions before she’d gone to be with the Eternal Father. They were to love one another only as brothers and sisters. Men and women were to stay apart except during meeting, and it was a sin to commit matrimony. There were more rules of behavior. Many of them, but Gabrielle did not resent the rules of behavior.

She thought of the love she had for her sisters and brethren there at Harmony Hill. It was good. Not that their life was without problems, but the love was there and the peace of a simple, contented life for many among the Believers. Still it wasn’t so for everyone who came into the Shakers’ community, and she had to admit it was no longer so for her. She knew a different kind of love now. Her love for Brice tore at her and tortured her as it pulled her away from those she considered her family. Her Shaker brothers and sisters told her that love was wrong, but she no longer believed that in her heart.

Suddenly the vision of death was before her. Now it was even more terrible because she could no longer even hope that it wasn’t true. Without a sound, she slipped from her bed and went to the window. The snow was gone. Soon the grass would turn green and it would be time for planting. There was comfort in the sameness of the seasons each year. Planting, growing, harvesting, and the winter rest when the land readied itself for more planting.

Gabrielle looked beyond the clearing around their village to the shadow of the trees. The moon was bright and she wished she could slip out of the house and go find her quiet place in the woods to pray. But Sister Mercy had forbidden it.

That was where she’d last seen the doctor. He’d been waiting for her that night. Would he ever wait for her there again, and if he did, would she go with him?

After a long time she crept back to bed. She could not leave the Believers. One year couldn’t change the direction of a whole life. But she wasn’t sure she’d ever find the path to climb out of this valley of darkness to the peace of the mountaintop. She began reciting Psalm 23 in her mind.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

29

Spring 1813

Brice lost track of the days. At first he’d been too sick to know night from day. But somehow he had kept a fire burning in the cabin’s fireplace, and before the sack of meal was gone, he’d fought off the fever and begun to heal.

Now as he tramped through the woods around the cabin checking the snares he’d made, he tried to decide what month it was. Finding food and firewood had taken all his strength for weeks, but this morning he’d gone almost his complete circle back to the cabin with the pain in his shoulder nothing more than a mild irritation. Even his legs felt strong and fresh, not weighted down by fatigue and sickness. Maybe it was the new warmth in the air that filled him with fresh energy. Winter was surely on the way out since underfoot the snow was melting and the tree buds were beginning to swell. It had to be late March or early April.

He took a rabbit out of his last snare and headed back to cook his breakfast. The cabin was hard to see among the trees until he came right out on it. Bare arms of vines had crept up over the logs, and in the summer when they leafed out, a person might easily pass by it without noticing it there at all. He’d thought he might come across a body or bones when he first explored around the cabin, but he found nothing to show what kind of man had built it and lived there and left behind his sack of cornmeal.

Brice could barely remember the dream that had led him there. In fact, added to all the dreams that had whirled around him while he fought the fever, he wasn’t sure if anything he remembered was real. He could have stumbled across the cabin and then had the dream about Nathan. He’d dreamed about him often enough since then. And not only Nathan, but Seth as well. And always Gabrielle danced through his mind.

Sometimes when he had awakened in front of the fire with his fever raging, he had imagined her there with him. Only it wasn’t this cabin. They were both in his cabin back in Kentucky, and the past was gone from them. He was no longer haunted by the sights he’d seen with the army, and she no longer followed after the Shaker way.

As Brice skinned and cleaned the rabbit outside the cabin, he shut his mind to the hope in those dreams. The past could never be completely left behind. It wound around them, shaping them for the future.

Above his head, the sky was a clear blue. It hadn’t snowed for more than a week. Spring was definitely coming to the woods and with the thaw, the Indians would begin to come away from their winter camps and start hunting farther afield.

Brice put the rabbit in his iron pot over the fire. The winter rabbit was scrawny, hardly fit to eat, but it was food. Tonight at dusk he’d check his traps again. Then at daybreak, he’d leave this cabin and head south.

As the smell of rabbit stew filled the air, a hunger sprang up in Brice, but it wasn’t a hunger the meat could satisfy. He hungered for the sight of Gabrielle. And not just in his mind as he’d pulled her up in his thoughts in the months since he’d left Kentucky.

She would have changed. No one lived almost a year without changing. He could only hope she hadn’t completely shut him away from her thoughts and that she would listen when he returned to the Shaker village. He shut his eyes and imagined her in his arms, and he wished Kerns were there with him to teach him how to pray a better prayer so that the Lord might grant him this desire of his heart.

What was it the boy had told him? That anybody could talk to the Lord. That it was as easy as getting up in the morning and saying, “Good morning, Lord.”

It couldn’t hurt to give it a try. The last few weeks he’d felt the need to talk to someone and not just to himself. It was as if someone kept poking him and urging him to do it now. But no one was there and he wasn’t sure what to do.

All his life he’d been told there was a God and some of the time he’d believed it. But once he’d outgrown the prayers his mother had taught him, he’d stopped talking to the Lord. He never had any reason to believe God would listen to him. Maybe to others, but not to him.

In churches the preachers prayed and Brice had let their words roll through his ears without paying them much notice. Seth had talked about the Lord and the Bible, and Brice had seen the boy’s faith in his words. Brice’s mother and Jemma had both trusted the Lord, and after he watched them die, he had fervently hoped heaven was real and all they had expected.

But he’d never thought about the Lord or heaven for himself. He’d been too busy, too sure he could do everything on his own. But now it was as if someone was hovering there beside him, waiting for him to look around and admit that maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was time for him to stop listening to others’ prayers and start talking his own.

Brice looked up toward the ceiling and spoke out loud. “All right, Lord.” His voice cracked and sounded rusty to his ears. He didn’t know whether it was because he hadn’t said anything aloud for weeks or because he felt funny talking out loud to the Lord.

Brice could see Seth smiling at him in his mind. He imagined him saying, “Go on, Dr. Scott. You might as well go ahead and spit it out. The Lord knows what you’re thinking already anyhow.”

So he did just spit it out. He pretended like the Lord was sitting down on the other side of him there in front of the fireplace. He hoped the Lord wouldn’t mind too much that he sometimes saw Seth’s face as he talked.

“I’ve never been much for praying up till now, Lord, but I thank you for this rabbit you’ve provided for me. And I thank you that I’m alive to eat it. I don’t really know why that’s so. Why I’m still breathing when so many others aren’t, but if you have a reason for it, I’ll do my best to follow through. I don’t know that I can understand your ways, so you’ll have to be pretty plain with me to show me what you want. I know you’re there. I’ve watched you take people I thought would get well, and I’ve watched you heal people when I didn’t think they’d make it through the night. So I’ve never denied you’re there. Not completely. I just haven’t ever known what you wanted me to do about it. I’m not sure I do now, but I’m ready to listen and pay attention if you want to tell me.”

Brice fell silent for a minute and did that very thing. Listened. The fire snapped. Snow melted and dripped off the eaves. A crow cawed in the distance. No words came into the silence. But in the silence was peace.

“Thank you, Lord.” Again Brice was silent for a moment before he went on. “In the morning I’m going south. Watch over me and let me make it back to Gabrielle. I don’t know if that’s something I should pray about or not, taking Gabrielle away from the Shakers, but if Seth was right, you already know what I’m feeling.”

At Harmony Hill spring had touched its finger of fresh life all around. The grass was greening, and the first flowers were proudly holding up their blooms. Little leaves struggled out of buds to open up in the warm sunshine. The Believers welcomed the spring with their usual steady calm, glad the growing season was near so they could put their hands to better use in working. Crops weren’t the only things growing this spring. Buildings were being started to make room for new converts.

Even with the spring departures of those who had only pretended to be converts for the winter, their number had grown. While last year after the harvest barn had burned there’d been some worry among the Believers, this spring seemed to bring with it a sure promise of prosperity and increased blessings from Mother Ann.

But for Gabrielle it was as if spring had not come. Winter stayed in her heart with its cold and dark. The school session was over. The children were needed to help with the planting. Gabrielle had been assigned to the laundry duty. Always before it had been one of her least favorite duties, but now she was glad to be in the laundry house. The splashing of the water and the slap of the clothes being scrubbed made talk among the sisters difficult and often impossible.

Gabrielle was glad. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. No longer did she try to make newcomers to the Believers welcome. When Sister Mercy took her to task for not showing the proper love for her new sisters and brothers at the meetings, Gabrielle could only nod and admit her wrong.

The vision stayed in her mind. Sometimes it shifted a bit, and a new scene tried to flash before her eyes. But always something kept her from seeing clearly. Then the old vision of death would return.

Visitors from the world had told them many of the men who’d been taken prisoners in the war in the Northwest had returned to Kentucky, but many had not. No names of survivors reached Gabrielle’s ears. There was no reason for them to. The Believers had no part in the war. Even if the brethren who went out among the world to sell seeds heard news of the men, Gabrielle couldn’t ask, for Sister Helen or Sister Mercy would be sure to know and bring it before the elders and eldresses. Gabrielle couldn’t bear the thought of perhaps being put under constant supervision once more.

So she still knew nothing about Brice other than what her vision had revealed to her. He was at the River Raisen during the massacre, and she held tightly to the belief he was alive. But she knew not where. He might even be at his cabin just a few miles away, but she could not imagine him there. Not even when she tried to call forth her gift of knowing. She could see him in no place. Only his face with the cruel lines around his eyes.

More than once she thought of slipping away and going to his cabin, but she pushed the thought away as quickly as it came. She’d made a decision to stay on the path she’d vowed to follow almost seven years before. She had to forget the doctor and push his worldliness away from her. She had no reason to believe he would seek her out again if he did return, and even if he did, she’d have to send him away again just as she had the last time.

So she tried to forget the doctor, but she might as well have tried to forget to breathe. He was a part of her. Even if she never saw him again, his memory and her love for him would go with her to the grave.

That was her sin. The sin that kept her feet from finding the path out of the dark valley and back up onto the mountain. She had promised to give her hands to work and her heart to God. The worldly love of a man kept her from the total commitment that would bring peace back to her spirit.

It was May when he came. Gabrielle was helping with the garden planting, putting beans into a row and carefully covering them with dirt. As soon as she’d opened her eyes that morning, she’d felt an oddness inside her. She’d knelt by her bed and closed her eyes without praying, thinking she might see the reason for the strange feeling in her mind. Nothing had been there but Brice, and he was always in her thoughts.

At first she thought it might be a vision when she straightened up from covering the beans in the row and looked across the way to see the man on the horse in front of the Children’s House. It was Brice. She knew him at once even though he was too far away for her to see his face clearly. Gabrielle blinked her eyes and stood perfectly still to allow the vision to melt away. But it was no vision. He was there.

Her knees went weak with relief. He was alive. He had survived her vision of death. Without thinking, she dropped her container of beans, spilling the seeds out on the dirt, and walked out of the garden toward him. She had to see his eyes. She had to touch him and be sure he was real. She didn’t think about why he had come or what she would tell him. Her heart and mind were too full of joy to worry about what might happen next.