Graven Images (2 page)

“Indeed,” said Miss Mayhew.

“You’re very kind,” replied Miss Frye. She noted that, like herself, Mrs. Stiggins was attired in a black mourning dress.

“I believe that your Ethan and my Jeroboam were
dear
companions,” Mrs. Stiggins spoke up. “Aye, and full of mischief, as well.”

“All boys be apprenticed to the Devil,” said Miss Frye.

Tekoa entered with a pitcher of cider.

“And tell me, child,” Miss Bunch addressed her. “How does your sister Sarah progress?”

“She’s able to open her mouth, ma’am, and eat. But she’s weak still, and refuses to speak to a soul.”

“Truly now,” Miss Bunch lamented. “Come, child, sit down and visit with us.”

Tekoa turned her eyes toward her mistress, who was glaring across at Miss Bunch in dismay.

“If you’re fully caught up with your work,” said Miss Frye, “you may take a chair, Tekoa, and join us.”

The girl found herself a seat in the corner. In the midst of the conversation, Miss Bunch noticed Tekoa looking out the window.

She touched the girl’s shoulder. “What do you see, child?”

“Excuse me, ma’am. Nothing of importance, ma’am.”

“Nothing?” Miss Bunch lowered her voice. “You were eyeing the binnacle boy, I warrant. Watching the ones that speak in his ear — same as
I’d
be doing myself if I knew the trick of reading lips.” She glanced at Miss Mayhew and the two traded smiles.

“In truth, I was watching the swallows, ma’am.”

“Swallows!” Miss Bunch commenced to chuckle. “
Any
fool can see swallows, child. But perhaps you’d put your eyes to use — and tell us what you next see spoken into the statue’s ear.”

Miss Mayhew’s own dim eyes lit up.

“Really!” protested Miss Frye. “That’s not proper!”

“Purely to help pass the time,” said Miss Bunch. “To take our minds from our grief for a spell.”

Tekoa stared at the women uneasily.

“And naturally,” Miss Mayhew piped up, “with the curtains drawn, only she’ll know who’s speaking.”

“And she’ll
not
disclose the name,” Miss Bunch added.

Miss Frye looked over at Mrs. Stiggins. Both knew that the matter wasn’t right. And yet they too were curious as to what was said to the binnacle boy. After all, they themselves wouldn’t actually be eavesdropping. And the name of the speaker would remain a mystery, never to be revealed.

“You may humor Miss Bunch’s wishes, Tekoa,” Miss Frye announced after deliberation.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl.

The curtains were closed, dimming the light. Tekoa reluctantly took up her post, while Miss Bunch and Miss Mayhew looked on in suspense.

The church bell declared it to be eleven. Then noon. Impatiently the women fanned themselves, squirming about like children in church. Then suddenly Tekoa drew back from the window.

“Did you spy someone?” Miss Bunch burst out. And suddenly it occurred to her that some sharp-eyed soul might reveal the fact that one of the various false teeth she wore had originally belonged to a dog.

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

Miss Mayhew grinned eagerly. “Well then? And what was spoken, child?”

The girl swallowed.

“Come now — speak up! Let us hear it word for word.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Tekoa lowered her gaze. She studied her hands, and breathed in deeply.

“‘I know what killed the
Orion
’s crew.’”

After her three visitors had gone and Tekoa had finished her chores and left, Miss Frye climbed to the top of the stairs and then, as she hadn’t in weeks, turned right. Tekoa’s revelation still rang in her head as she walked down the hall, came to a halt, and opened the door to Ethan’s room.

She stood there in the doorway a moment. The room was musty, the light dim. She passed his bed, opened the curtains, and gazed out his window at the indigo sea, musing on all he might have been.

Miss Frye turned around. Surveying the cobwebs, she recalled that both her natural sons had occupied the room as well. But they’d grown up wild and long ago had left, following their father to sea, and like him gaining a fondness for the rum they freighted across the waters. When the schooner on which all three had shipped went down in a gale off the Georgia coast, Miss Frye had been neither surprised nor sorry and had returned with relief to her maiden name. Her mother, herself abandoned by her husband, regarded the sinking as a fitting judgment. “Men,” she’d summed up, “are a stench in God’s nostrils.”

Miss Frye paced slowly about the room. She found herself staring at Ethan’s washstand, recalling the chill October day she’d gone mushroom picking, miles from home, and discovered an infant wrapped in a flour sack, left at a crossroads, dead. Or so she’d feared, till she’d gradually warmed him, holding the bundle next to her skin — and felt him slowly begin to squirm. Astonished, she hadn’t known what to do, until suddenly something her mother had long ago told her leaped into memory: “If you save a creature’s life, Evangeline, you’re responsible for its every deed afterward.” Unwilling to entrust his raising to another, she’d borne him home, burned the flour sack, bathed him thoroughly, and named him Ethan.

Miss Frye walked up to his mahogany desk. The lamp by which he’d worked was dusty. His goose-quill pen and his ink bottle waited. She opened the primer he’d used, and recalled the pleasures of shaping his youthful mind.

A freethinker in religious matters, she’d refused to take the child to church and had taught him a catechism of her own devising. Shunning New Bethany’s public school, Miss Frye had been his only tutor as well. She’d vowed that Ethan would turn out a gentleman, cultured and refined, an exception to his sex. No weed would be allowed to take root in the boy; no unwanted notion would enter his head. She would tend the child like a seedling tree, encouraging one branch and cutting another, keeping the image of its final shape fixed firmly in her mind. After all, she reasoned, God had meant him to die; by granting him life she’d assumed His role. The boy was thenceforward her private domain, whose growing body she marveled at as if it were her own work.

Tekoa’s words came suddenly to mind, and Miss Frye emerged from her reverie. She closed the curtains, shut the door, and marched downstairs to the parlor again.

It was dusk. She stood watch on the binnacle boy, hoping to catch someone seeking his ear, desperate to know whom Tekoa had seen.

When the light at last failed, she gave up her vigil and slowly sipped down a bowl of bean soup. She wondered if Tekoa might have made up the message she’d reported — then quickly put the thought out of her head. There wasn’t a speck of deceit in the girl, and Miss Frye wondered what Tekoa must think of a mistress who ordered her to eavesdrop.

She broke through the crust of a cold plum tart and considered the girl’s ways. She performed her duties competently enough, and yet there was something distant about her. The others had hopped to Miss Frye’s commands and striven anxiously to please her. They’d always been afraid of her, as Tekoa’s sister Sarah had been — little wonder, since of all the town, Miss Frye alone did not go to church. She rarely went out and was rarely visited. Yet in her presence quiet Tekoa seemed to be calmly detached.

Hoping to break through the girl’s silence and frantic to know whom she’d seen at the statue, she called Tekoa from her work the next morning and set her to watching the binnacle boy. She felt a need to win the girl to her and hoped she was appreciative of this respite from her chores. Doggedly, she attempted to kindle a conversation with the girl, in vain. Thereafter Miss Frye sat in silence, studying Tekoa’s pale features, hoping the speaker she’d seen might return.

For an hour Tekoa watched from the window. Then glancing over to her left, she sighted Miss Bunch and her two companions, traveling under the portable shade of their parasols, bustling down the walk.

“Dear child, how good to see you,” Miss Bunch addressed Tekoa at the door. “And good day to you as well, Miss Frye. As you’re no doubt lonely without your dear son, we felt it to be our solemn duty to lend you our company once again.”

“You’re most kind,” Miss Frye curtly replied.

“And while we’re here,” Miss Mayhew added while Miss Frye led them into the parlor, “we thought Tekoa might be allowed to read out the secrets spoken to the statue.”

“In quest of the truth concerning the
Orion,
” Mrs. Stiggins sternly declared.

Miss Frye declined to mention the fact that she’d already had the girl doing just that. Ashamed to engage in the practice so openly, she decided to set Tekoa to spinning — when she glimpsed a woman crossing the street and heading toward the binnacle boy.

“Yes, of course!” she stammered. “Why, we owe it to the town!”

She hurried Tekoa back to her seat. A few moments later the girl turned around.

“Well?” asked Miss Frye. “Have you something to report?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl gravely replied.

Mrs. Stiggins leaned forward. “Let us hear it, then, child!”

Tekoa lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “‘Miss Pike put no money in the collection plate at church, but only rattled the coins.’”

Miss Bunch and Miss Mayhew gaped at each other. A blush spread over Mrs. Stiggins.

“You may return to the window now, Tekoa,” Miss Frye informed the girl.

In silence, the women fanned themselves. Mrs. Stiggins looked across at Miss Frye.

“My dear Jeroboam always spoke
most
highly of your Ethan.”

Miss Frye gazed blankly, lost in thought. “He might have been a scholar. Or a poet, perhaps.”

Slowly, Tekoa drew back from the window.

Miss Frye’s eyes flashed.

“What is it? Something spoken?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well then, speak it out, Tekoa!”

The girl glanced down at the hardwood floor.

“‘Tonight we meet. Under the elm tree.’”

Miss Bunch gasped for breath. “
Which
elm tree, child?”

“Didn’t say, ma’am,” Tekoa replied.

Miss Bunch and Miss Mayhew sighed in unison. Again they waited while Tekoa watched.

“My Jeroboam had just turned fourteen,” Mrs. Stiggins said. “And your Ethan?”

“Fourteen as well,” Miss Frye replied.

Mrs. Stiggins released a sigh.

An hour passed. The church bell rang twelve. Miss Bunch yawned and reached for her parasol.

“Perhaps we should go.”

“Indeed,” said Miss Mayhew.

Suddenly, Tekoa turned. Her eyes appeared glazed, her features stiff.

“What is it?” Miss Frye demanded. “A message?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl reluctantly replied.

“Let us hear it then!”

Tekoa swallowed. She gazed absently before her.

“‘One of the tins of tea snuck among the
Orion
’s provisions — was poisoned.’”

“Poisoned?”
shrieked Mrs. Stiggins. “The tea?”

Miss Frye jumped up. “Is there more, Tekoa?”

“That’s all of it, ma’am.”

Mrs. Stiggins shot forward. “I insist you reveal the speaker,” she cried, taking hold of Tekoa’s shoulders.

“But ma’am, the agreement —”

“She’s right,” said Miss Bunch. “The name of the speaker must not be revealed.”

“But my very own Jeroboam — poisoned! The murderer must be brought to justice!”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Mayhew, “the speaker is lying.”

Slowly, Miss Frye paced the room. “But why would someone lie to the statue?”

“No reason at all,” Mrs. Stiggins snapped. She sat back down and wrung her hands. “They must have opened the tea that morning.”

“And Lord knows,” Miss Mayhew grimly continued, “with all the molasses they sweeten it with, they might have drunk hemlock itself and not known it.”

A silence fell over Miss Frye’s three visitors. They rose to their feet, bid farewell to Miss Frye, and slowly retraced their steps down the street, avoiding the binnacle boy’s eyes in passing, as if this knower of secrets might discover their own with a glance.

Miss Frye did not sleep well that night. The next morning, Tekoa’s revelation still echoed in her ears. When the girl arrived at eight o’clock, Miss Frye set her to mixing up bread dough and stepped outside to the garden.

At a deliberate pace she strolled the paths, searching for comfort in the company of flowers. She smiled to see her larkspur thriving and lad’s love blooming in its appointed season. She gazed upon her Queen Margrets and mint, and sampled the various scents of her roses.