Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (8 page)

There’d be that huge man pounding her, and Rachel wailing, “Pa! Pa! Don’t!” and all the little girls wailing too and the mother silent night and day. He came to hate Sarah, I think, for making him be a bully when he wasn’t one at heart, and making all his family silent at the sight of him where there’d been love before. And he couldn’t even explain. If he could have explained, they would have supported him. They thought (except Rachel) that he only wanted to keep Sarah forever and make her work for him. Maddening to be thought cruel, when you’re guided by nothing but the loftiest moral purpose.

Then Sarah would get up and slowly go back into her house, the way to mine being furiously barred, shaking off Rachel’s efforts to support and guide and comfort her. Slowly she’d climb up to her pallet. It was the end of clearing the new field for that winter.

“Sister, Sister,
quit
. He won’t
let
you!” Rachel whispered. She’d followed Sarah up.

Sarah looked at her and then tried to turn away but couldn’t, being lame. So she shut her eyes dismissingly.

“I can’t stand this every day,” Rachel said. It had been then ten days.

“Pa’ll get so he can’t either,” Sarah said. “I don’t feel it at the time.”

This was the first Sarah had spoken to her in the whole ten days, so Rachel was able to fetch snow for Sarah’s bruises. She carried the snow in a pan past her father, who was sulking by the fire and who said not a word.

Then opening Sarah’s clothes, finding bruises (how not find them?), holding snow against them, Rachel murmured, “Bullhead, do you have to just put your horns down and run blind? He don’t want to hurt you. He don’t even want to keep you. He just wants an excuse now to stop. Can’t you see he’s just pleading with you to tell him a lie, so he can stop pounding you?”

“I haven’t got one,” Sarah said.

And then Rachel produced the selfsame plan I’d made myself, showing that female minds run in the same channel.

“You just say it was all a lie, what you said before,” Rachel said.

“But it wasn’t.”

“
Say
so. Say here’s your chance to get to the West where the men all are, at the expense of this well-to-do lady that wants the same but’s too scared to go alone.”

“I already said I love her. Didn’t you tell him that?”

“Well,
now
you say you didn’t think how that would sound. You thought it sounded better than being greedy for her money. But now you see the truth would’ve been better.”

Sarah had never dreamed women could be so sly. “I won’t say that against my feeling,” she said and shut her eyes and soul and pushed the pan of snow away.

Then, on second thought, she looked at Rachel again and asked, “Why did you tell him?”

With tears, Rachel said, “I didn’t know he’d take on so. I thought maybe it was a common thing. We never know what’s common, living back here like this. I was worried and I thought maybe he’d say it was nothing to worry about. I never knew he’d take on so.”

And even with an example of Rachel’s slyness so fresh in her mind, Sarah believed her.

I’m not proud of myself for this next part, but I’m proud of Sarah, and I have to tell mine to tell hers.

Sarah was at my door. I gasped at the sight of her, and took her arm to draw her in. Her eyes were bruised, face puffy, lip swollen and split, eyebrow cut. “Pa’s here,” she said, and, yes, he was, leaning against the wall beside the door. I hadn’t noticed anything except the condition of Sarah’s face, but when I saw him hulking there my heart began to pound so loud I thought it would deafen me and maybe deafen them too.

They both came in. I shut the door and leaned against it. I was very afraid. We were all mute. Soon I felt the door move, and Edward came in. I suppose Tobe or the children had seen them come and told him. I didn’t care. I may even have been a little glad. Sarah and I were lost anyway. At least Edward could talk.

“Was that necessary, Dowling?” he asked, tilting towards Sarah’s damages.

“I didn’t really hurt her. Just bare bands. That cut there’s the only one she’s got. Her own bone did that.”

Edward’s lips made an excellent scornful line. “Well, what brings you?”

“She was set on it. I thought there’d be no harm as long as I came too. Speak up, gal. We won’t stay long.”

She glanced at them, waiting for them to stand back and let us talk, but they stood right there, wouldn’t budge, and she looked at me and braced herself and said, “Do you still want to go?” She looked at me with love, right there in front of them. I felt angry at her. Embarassed.

“We can’t,” I said, because we couldn’t unless Edward bought me out and Sarah’s father stopped guarding her. We’d need so much help to go, and they’d set their wills against our going, and it was hopeless, and I couldn’t remember love. It was far away and lost, like infancy, and a mistake anyway.

“We can, unless you don’t want to.”

“It wasn’t very reasonable,” I said.

Her father said, “There, Sal, you’ve got your answer. Now let’s go.”

“If you want to, we’ll find a way,” she said.

“There is no way,” I said.

“You’ve got your answer. You was played with,” her father said. “Now come on.”

She said, “Do you
want
to?”

As a pauper and a fugitive? For a love I couldn’t remember the feel of? I didn’t want to. I wasn’t strong enough. I had to know what I was strong enough for. I had to know that much.

“No.”

With a great wailing groan she made for the door.

I let her go. There was no more to say. Then when she and her father were out the door, there was one more thing to say.

“Sarah!” I called. She faced me so fast, so hopeful.

“Don’t you care what people think?”

“Course I care,” she said. She turned away. She stumbled as she walked away. I shut the door.

Edward was still with me. For something to do, not to look at him or talk, I sat down to spin. He was standing in the middle of my kitchen, just standing there, for the longest time. Go, go, go, go, go, I thought. Out, Edward.

“She really feels,” he said, slowly. “I never knew anybody to feel so much. Not even a man.”

I faced again my fate as spinster sister and aunt, but it was worse now because I believed it, as I never really had before. I knew myself unable to change my life.

I worked at forgetting what I thought I knew when Sarah kissed me. That whole day came to seem very childish and foolish and unworthy of me. I struggled for calm and unselfishness, to be of service to others, and I thought, why, this is suffering, this is the pain of life, this is what they talk about in Church, this daily struggle to keep going without knowing why. And I saw what was meant by faith: faith is the belief that this life is not our only chance. Wavering of faith means beginning to believe in this life and wanting to live it, denying all duties and dashing off uncontrolled. What would I do, I wondered, all uncontrolled and raging and self-seeking, my tiger-soul unchained, these dangerous passions freed? I would seek Sarah’s lips again and be calm.

The story of the Prodigal Son attracted and warned me. He demanded his patrimony, as I had meant to demand mine. He squandered it. I tried to imagine how one might squander – what dissolute living might consist in. Searching my soul for an answer, I found again my longing for Sarah’s lips. But that wasn’t dissolute in a man. Men could have women’s lips. And I felt, I think for the first time, a rage against men. Not because they could say, “I’m going,” and go. Not because they could go to college and become lawyers or preachers while women could be only drudge or ornament but nothing between. Not because they could be parents at no cost to their bodies. But because when they love a woman they may be with her, and all society will protect their possession of her.

BOOK TWO

Sarah

Chapter One

Pa and me walked home, single file, him first. The tears just poured down my face. I couldn’t’ve stopped them even if he’d been looking.

I’d made the mistake of letting a feeling get past the point where it can be stopped. You can’t stop tears if they get as far as your eyes, or even to your throat. Only place to stop them is in the feeling, keeping it out. But I didn’t see, and still don’t, how I could’ve done different – not felt for Patience. And once I’d felt, I had to stand whatever happened.

Pa said, half over his shoulder, “I see now I wouldn’t’ve had to lay it on so.”

I didn’t answer.

“No hard feeling?” he asked.

“No, Pa.”

And I really didn’t have a grudge against him. I knew that if Patience had felt what I did, nothing Pa did could’ve kept her from me. I knew that by his own lights, Pa’d acted right. I couldn’t hold that against him. And I didn’t. I was just finished with him.

We walked along. I could feel every place he’d hit me. I hadn’t much before. But then I could.

“I’ll be leaving, soon’s I heal up,” I said.

“Like you was planning.” He nodded, like broad-minded. “Now,
that’s
all right.”

I was really finished with him. I didn’t even hackle up and ask what made him think it mattered to have him say it was all right.

“I think you’ll be back,” he said.

“No.”

“I think so. But I think you need to find that out for yourself. And that’s all right. When you want to come back, I just want you to know you’ve got a place.”

I would hang myself by the neck before I would come back, but I didn’t say so. I just walked along behind him.

I clumb up to my bed soon’s I got home. Rachel came at me right away. I had no grudge against her either, but I could see that I was through with her too. I knew she never meant to harm me. It didn’t matter. It was like an ax had come down and cut me from her. I wondered if that was how Patience felt about me.

Rachel said, “Oh, Sister, where you been? What happened?”

I just shook my head and turned away.

All I wanted was to heal up and get out of there.

I didn’t go down for supper. Pa yelled for me. I thought next he’d send up one of the little ones, knowing I still had feeling for them. I braced myself. I’d say, gentle, no, I wasn’t hungry.

But it was Ma that came. She shouldn’t’ve! With her lame shoulder, up the ladder like that, with her shoulder like that – “Oh, Ma!”

“Now, gal,” she said.

“I just want to heal up and go.”

“Sure. I always knew you’d go.”

“Patience don’t want to.”

“She’s scared.”

“Scared? You think so? She didn’t say so. She just said, no, she didn’t want to.”

“She’s too scared to think if she wants to.”

All the while, Ma was wiping my eyes and nose on her skirt. Hard-woven linsey, scratchy. It shouldn’t’ve felt so comfortable. It took me back to when I could reach no higher than her skirt. Oh what a skirt she’s had through the years, smeared with baby noses.

I said, “She won’t come.”

“No, she won’t.”

“I can’t stay here.”

“No, you can’t.”

By March I was healed up. Every outside part of me worked just right. There wasn’t a bruise to show. I didn’t cry for Patience except when nobody could see.