Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (24 page)

“Miss Dowling has an uncle there,” I said, to have a little laugh at Sarah.

He said, “Well, get on board anytime. She’ll sail when she’s got the tide to boost her along. If anything happens, hold your breath. Don’t breathe the steam is all.”

So we climbed the gangplank. Sarah was afraid, her eyes big like a child’s, but she kept up with me. The boilers were building pressure, getting ready, making a noise like nothing I’d ever heard. Like a dragon, perhaps. A herd of dragons. The deck pulsed under our feet like a panting dog, and it was hot though the wind off the harbor was cold.

“I’ve heard these things do blow up,” Sarah said.

“And carriages overturn, and horses throw their riders, and walkers fall into pits, and oxen gore, and if we tried I’m sure we could smother in our beds.” (“Bed,” I amended in a whisper.) “Trees fall, lightning strikes. Let her blow!” (I whispered, “I don’t care, while we’re together.”)

“Maybe you better hold my hand, so we won’t get blowed apart,” she whispered.

I took her hand. It was natural to feel timid and hold together. All the ladies were doing it. If I hadn’t taken her hand someone else would have. She looked so darling, tall and worried there.

And late in the morning the tide came up the bay and up the river and our pilot nudged us out into it and the people on the deck waved and called, “Goodbye, goodbye,” to the people on the dock who were shouting something our engines drowned out, but I read their lips and it was “goodbye” too. The way west was first north, up the Hudson. Not many of us would ever come back.

Midstream, the boat set to in earnest, so
fast
. A horse can gallop that fast, or seem to. It can make the wind whistle past your ears that way, for a little while. But a horse gets tired, and our wonderful big paddle wheels never did, and the tide behind us gave us the whole weight of the sea as a shove. I held Sarah’s hand and felt the ancient sea and the new wheels carry us to a life we had no pattern for, that no one we knew of had ever lived, that we must invent for ourselves on a razor’s edge, and I tipped my head back and sang three hallelujahs.

Sarah, in a little time, grew accustomed, like anyone else who farms a volcano, but I held her hand until the other ladies calmed down too and ceased to cling together.

It was not possible to talk, so much surrounded. I could not think of a single thing to say that was fit for a lady to overhear, and Sarah was still under my command to be silent.

It was a strange day, silently riding that tall rushing house between the miles of cliffs and mountains and villages, eagles and mansions and waving children. I thought it would come back in my dreams. It was so much like a dream already. I found my head full of vast meaningless truths, such as life is a river, which I am grateful not to have had an opportunity to express. That’s the kind of day it was, unreal, and at sunset the hills to the right – the Berkshire Hills – caught the yellow light and were very beautiful. Night came fully dark, but we kept on, steering perhaps by farmhouse windows, and at a little after eight Sarah and I and our three trunks and our one handbox were deposited at the steamboat landing of the city of Hudson, New York State.

We took a room in Hudson and slept as though we’d walked those miles, and in the morning a ferryboat rowed by many slaves took us across and down to Kaatskill. We left the trunks and all at the ferry landing and walked around.

Kaatskill was so busy then, full of drovers and wagons, a turnpike town with goods to store and travelers to feed. I couldn’t believe it was dying, but Sarah had Parson Peel’s word for it, and the banker had said the same, and in eight more years, yes, the turnstiles stopped turning and the pikes grew grass.

To buy land you
know
will drop in value! But the bigmouths at the boarding house in New-York had scared my Sarah, and Parson Peel had scared her, and we’d come to a stopping place, and what
did
we want, as Sarah said, but to live? Didn’t Columbus himself aim for India and find America as something of a letdown?

“Shall we stay?” I asked.

“I believe we ought,” she said.

It was March 27, 1817.

We took a pleasant room in a Kaatskill lodging house, and then began the process of finding a farm, a matter neither simple nor swift.

Even letting our intention be known was not simple because it was not feminine. I did not know how. As Edward had said, men make the world go. How does a woman go up to a strange man and announce that she wants to buy a bit of it? Can a woman approach the courthouse loiterers or the tavern or the docks and ask for news of real estate? The problem was peculiarly vexing because we had not anticipated it. There would be a public list, there would be a land office, there would be notices in the newspaper. There would be anything except this staring dry-mouthed at each other and wondering how to begin.

Sarah even offered to cut her hair again and be our man, if a man was so much needed, and the thought rallied my womanly pride enough to make it possible, after all, to speak to the banker when I deposited our money, and to the drayman who brought our trunks up from the landing, and to the postmaster when I posted a letter to tell Edward where we were. And the storekeeper, and the farmer’s boy who brought eggs to our landlady, and the stablekeeper where I asked after livery rates, and in a day or two the word was around that two eccentric Yankee females with more money than sense were in the market for a farm. We liked that description of ourselves so well that we decided it was time to let Sarah speak again.

We began to hear about farms. So many farmers wanted to move on. Only we wanted a farm in Greene County. Soon I could no longer remember just why we did. Sarah claimed that she still knew why.

Each farm had to be gone to, by hired horse and buggy, looked at, walked around on, thought about, judged, compared with the others. We told each other we would not be hasty in a choice that meant comfort or ruin for the rest of our days. We needn’t stay in Greene County at all, we said, unless it really pleased us. Even as we said that, we must have known we had to stay. We’d spent too much for lodging and hiring a horse to start the same long business again somewhere else.

But how judge a winter field? How weigh what a farmer who wants to sell out may assert about the yield per acre? How prefer one slaty hillside to another? I was not a good companion night or day. I was too nervous. Sarah claimed she wasn’t nervous. It was not hard to tell a good farm from a bad one in any season, she claimed. Something about the kind of trees and the growth they’d made. Something about the kind of ball the soil made in her hand. I didn’t question her very hard. One of us had to know, and it could not be I. If she didn’t, I didn’t want to be told so.

All I knew was the price we should pay, because the banker in New-York had told us; we could go to eight hundred for forty acres, but it must be soon while there was that much left.

At the end of April, we were still looking. That is, Sarah was. To cut the livery charges we’d given up the buggy. Sarah rode out alone on horseback. I stayed at our lodging and sewed for her. I was glad not to go, not to be party to the endless solemn tedious country dickering, so full of pauses, so reluctant to name a figure. Sarah enjoyed it. Let her do it, I thought.

But some evenings she didn’t get back to Kaatskill until after dark and I could not endure many of those. By day I could sew almost peacefully, but come dark I had to have her by me. At first she couldn’t even see why. Didn’t I trust her?

The lodging was no place to discuss it, so we walked down to the Hudson and sat, a little apart, on the fresh spring grass. It was a moonlit night.

Sarah said, “When I do get back, you hardly ever love me. So what does it matter?”

“I worry when you’re out after dark.”

“You didn’t worry back home. You
made
me be out, back home.”

“That was different,” I said.

“To me it seems no different, except now I’m on a horse and then I was afoot.”

“It’s different,” I repeated, to keep my position simple and unassailable.

She said, “I’m looking for a place for us. Should I look just nearby and miss the faraway that might be better, to hurry back to you, when you won’t love me?”

“Stop saying that. You know I love you.”

“Oh, Patience, I get scared. Like what if you just want to be friends after all, and what if you don’t need what I do? I get so scared.”

“I love you. I need what you need.” I took her hand.

“Then you should kiss me. You should hold me.”

“You get excited. I don’t dare.”

“Well, sure I do. But we got something to do for that. When did you start figuring it was a bad thing?”

“Not bad. Unwise. When you started being noisy, darling.”

“
Am I?
”

“Don’t you hear yourself?”

“Just some hard breathing. Maybe a sigh.”

“You groan like a woman in childbed, sweetheart. I don’t want people to think I’m beating you. I’d been saying you have nightmares.”

“Who
to?
” she asked, much offended.

“To the ladies. The lodgers. First time they asked, ‘Why, what was that noise in your room last night?’ Since then they’ve said, ‘Oh, poor Miss Dowling had another dream last night and you took so long to wake her from it I near came in myself.’ I think we should be sparing, don’t you?”

Sarah said, embarrassed, “All right. But you might’ve told me before stead of letting me get so scared.” She was silent and then she laughed. She said, “I feel foolish about it, and yet somehow – vain too. I can be sparing, now I know you still want me. I can wait.”

“Well, hurry with our place. Because I can’t wait.” I kissed her hand and pressed it to my bosom. I said, “When we have our place, I think you’ll find me ardent enough. We haven’t begun to use our ardor. I long to give you all of mine.”

“You’d better kiss me before we go back.”

“I’d better not,” I said.

We walked back along the main street, past the taverns and inns loud with rivermen and drovers and teamsters. I remembered how once I had envied men because they could have what I needed but could not have. But they couldn’t, after all, have what I needed.

After all my explanation, in bed Sarah wanted to kiss me. I wouldn’t let my toes tingle for her and she got discouraged and stopped. She whispered, “I’m putty in your hands, but you can always say no to me. Why is that?”

“Because I’m older than you. Be back every day by dark, and find us our place, and someday you may be older than I.”

The state of Sarah’s wardrobe made another urgency. She had worn the same dress every day since we left Connecticut, and though her own sweet body could never soil it, the smell of horse began to be powerful before I had her new dress finished. The new one was made of the same almond wool as the other. My thought was to make it seem she had a dozen dresses, all the same. Not just from pride, though pride was part of it, but as a protection; I was willing for us to seem eccentric or subject to an occasional nightmare, but never piteous or helpless or poor.

Those could have been somewhat pleasant days, if I hadn’t been so generally nervous. I sat in the parlor with the other ladies, merchants’ wives whose husbands were inland, up the turnpike, on business. It was eccentric too, of course, to be making something so large and useful as a dress while the ladies worked at needlepoint and satin stitch, but they did not too severely frown on me. Loving Sarah had freed all my tender feelings for women. I could always find in my heart an excuse for anything any woman did, and how could they earnestly disapprove of anyone who felt that way?

They put in many an hour of mystified speculation about Sarah and me, while I stitched away and was pleasant and evasive. Where did we come from? “The East,” I said. But where in the East? “Just – East,” I said. They devised, a bit at a time, beautiful tales of blighted love for both of us, which I looked mysteriously pensive over. Two heartsore maidens seeking solace from mutual misfortune through mutual sympathy, and fleeing the scene of their dispair, a place so painful that even its name could not be uttered. Somewhere in that tear-drenched country, the men we loved lay – buried? Or strolled unfeelingly with the wives we could only hate and envy? I couldn’t choose my favorite speculation, and by my silence let them all seem possible.