The Language of Paradise: A Novel (15 page)

All around her stood the house the Hedges had built, its thick walls mortared with good sense and good works, remedies tried and true, devotion and self-denial. The only home she had ever known. She wasn’t brave enough to leave it yet. She kept her seat and took what it offered: a set of stays to keep her back straight until she trusted herself to move.

CHAPTER 12

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DESTINATIONS

S
OPHY IS BEGINNING TO THINK THE CHOICE WAS MADE FOR
her—that there never was a choice at all. She doesn’t necessarily believe that the Emperor in the Sky has been twiddling his thumbs. Still, it is a remarkable fact that she and Gideon are together more often now, with little meddling from the outside world. This is all so new that she can’t help but wonder whether, at the beginning of time, some farseeing deity, matching names on a celestial chart, decreed that this Gideon and this Sophy would be a pair. Whether—to use a phrase of Caroline’s—the two of them were meant to be.

In her more realistic moments, she has to acknowledge that predestination may have nothing to do with it. They are being ignored because they’re insignificant: a couple of extra parts with no real function in the household. In good times they’re made use of, but in crisis they are only in the way. Sophy isn’t sure what, exactly, has happened to her family. All she knows is that preoccupation hangs over the Hedge household like smoke. Papa—the fixed point of everyone’s world, whose routines regulate their movements as precisely as the works of their new clock—is in Boston for days at a time. Twice he has left early on a Monday morning, sitting straight-backed in the wagon with reins loose in his hand, his old beaver hat set squarely on his head and the scarf Mama knitted for him coiled to his ears. The weather on Mondays seems always to be gray and chill, a brooding cold too miserly to bloom into snow. They assemble outside to watch him go, and as the horse begins its reluctant swaying amble down the road, desolation overtakes them all, as if he were being carried from home for the last time.

Everyone seems lost without his guiding spirit. James is sullen, prone to fits of melancholy. Caretaking the farm steals all his time; he has none left over for the house he is building. He had expected to be married by now, but Caroline’s visits grow more widely spaced, and when she bothers to come at all, he clings to her and doesn’t hide his misery. Sophy has heard them arguing—Caroline alternately childlike and imperious, James pleading—and the note of supplication in her stalwart brother’s voice wrenches her heart.

Reuben does his share: no more, no less, with a drop of bitters added. He seems to look upon their troubles through a spyglass, and to find them a sorry spectacle. With Papa gone, he leaves right after dinner and stays out half the night, never arriving home till the early hours. Lately he has begun to invent outings that take him away during the day. Agricultural fairs, he informs them: if the farm is to thrive, it’s important to learn about the latest methods, see the new implements. But everyone knows that the real purpose of the fairs is to race horses. People travel miles to wager on these trials of speed, and a few foolish locals have fallen victim to swindlers and lost all their money. Papa has devoted an entire sermon to the subject, quoting Zechariah on the “plague of the horse.” He fears that this new vice, until recently the property of the gentry, might outpace drunkenness in the competition for the laboring man’s soul.

In the clutch of these changes, Mama says nothing. Not when Papa sends a letter saying he can’t be back for Sunday services—an event as rare and portentous as a celestial eclipse—and instructing her to ask the deacon to take his place in the pulpit. Not when Reuben swaggers to the breakfast table smelling of what he drank the night before, or James shoves his plate aside and rests his head in his hands, as if his thoughts are too heavy to bear. She goes about her tasks in a mute fury, her lips set tightly; Sophy imagines a merciless overseer cracking a whip inside her, but Mama, being Mama, won’t give him the satisfaction of crying out. Her silence is the most frightening omen of all. For years now, Sophy has considered Mama’s talk a tedium to be borne, an endless commentary on the topmost crust of life, with never a thought going deeper or a fancy rising above. Sophy has made it a habit to store this daily chatter on the same shelf as Papa’s sermons, escaping into her own thoughts as she pretends to listen. These days, she wishes she could reach up to that shelf and retrieve a handful of trite sayings, blow the dust off and look at them in the light.
Beans doing poorly, turnips coming up nice this year, that chair needs mending, dog going lame
. All adding up to blessed assurance. This too will pass. Life goes on.

ONLY MICAH IS THE SAME
. It isn’t just that he’s one of them—living on the periphery as she and Gideon do—but that, in some mysterious way, he is theirs. The three of them have become a little family, and Micah, being the youngest, has taken on the role of child. A very agreeable child, hardworking and self-sufficient, quiet to a fault, asking only to be near them. Sophy believes she has always regarded him in a maternal way. Though less than four years separate them, he is the only Hedge born after her, the only one of her brothers that she has seen at the breast and in the cradle. She remembers leading him by the hand when he learned to walk, and deciphering his infant syllables in the early days when his speech came freely. It’s a gift that has persisted. She isn’t sure where her understanding comes from, or whether the possession of it makes her a translator or a prophet, but even Mama will grant that Sophy knows what Micah means to say before he can get the words out.

At around four on this Sunday in January, Micah knocks on the door of the study. He has been chopping wood since dinner. His hat and shoulders are sugared with white, the sky having finally consented to give up its riches. Cradled in his gloved hands are three apples from the cellar, as ruddy as his cheeks and polished on his sleeve to a high shine. He likes to bring them little presents. She takes his coat and claps the snow off, whispers that she’s making tea.

They are careful to be quiet while Gideon is working. The Lexicon is his charge now, since Papa has no time for it, and Gideon is digging deeper than Papa ever dared, using his freedom to pursue his own inquiries. Although he’s just a few yards from them, bent over his desk in a corner of the room, he might as well be miles away. Sophy believes he actually is—embarked on a journey they can only guess at, mapping routes for them to follow. She pictures him on the road like Papa, only his destination isn’t banks and business in Boston—a city she would paint in shades of gray, though she has never been there—but a place so drenched in color as to dazzle mortal eyes. Colors not to be possessed, but longed for, as Joseph’s brothers coveted his dazzling coat: a potent glimpse that lodges in the mind, itching and smarting, until it turns to lust.

One thing Gideon has in common with Papa. He will come home, eventually. The hour of pleasurable anticipation is Sophy’s favorite part of the day, and on an afternoon like this, the sky darkening early, the window dashed with snow, she savors it all the more. The cold outside makes their one-room house feel warmer. She puts another log in the woodstove and sets the kettle on top, pondering (as she has seen Mama do a thousand times) what they have to eat. She is scrupulous about what she will take from the pantry. Mostly she steals from her own plate, slipping bread and cheese and a bit of meat into a napkin when no one is looking, contriving to keep it from the dog. Today she’s done well by her brood, with oatcakes and cold bacon from breakfast, and Micah’s apples for dessert. A modest feast, though they won’t be subsisting on it: Mama expects them at the big table for leftovers from Sunday dinner, and they eat to please her, whether they are hungry or not. Still, Sophy cherishes the illusion of self-sufficiency. They could survive here, if necessary. They have warmth and food and each other. All they need.

She circles the room lighting candles, taking pleasure in the corners that leap into vivid life, as if she had applied paint to a pencil sketch. She wishes, not for the first time, that she could bring her easel here and play with her pale excuses for colors while Gideon works. The only lamp, a small one, is on his desk, though he is too absorbed to make use of it. He must be seeing with his inner eye, Sophy thinks. How else can he go on reading fine print in the well of shadow that his desk has become? She bustles about discreetly while making tea, hoping that the clatter of plates on the engraving table and the aroma of cakes warming on the stove will lure him back to earthly comforts.

Micah needs no such tempting. He’s sitting cross-legged on the small rug in front of the stove, knife in hand, chipping a piece of wood into another animal. His creatures line the window: a rabbit, a fox, a vole, a squirrel. Common beasts quirked up, a single trait exaggerated so they seem to laugh at themselves as they strike a pose, like characters in their own Aesop’s. Sophy prefers them to the august inhabitants of Papa’s Bestiary; they have more life and teach no lessons. Every few seconds Micah gazes at the stove, then at the back of Gideon’s bright head, which hasn’t strayed from regions celestial for the last half-hour. Ravenous as the boy must be after his chores, he would never eat a bite before they do. He is always hungry, but it’s a patient hunger.

Sophy mouths, “Soon.” She leans over his shoulder to see what he’s making—a quizzical sparrow. Once again, she marvels at the sureness of his hand as he cuts; it seems the bird has always lived in this block of wood, and Micah is doing what he must to release it. When they look up, their small world has turned on its axis. Gideon is yawning, rubbing his eyes and asking what’s for tea.

“ALL THIS TALK OF WORDS
has put our young friend to sleep,” Gideon says.

They’ve moved nearer the stove, pleasantly full after disposing of the oatcakes, lacking only rockers under their straight-backed chairs. Gideon pours the last of the tea and jiggles his cup to settle the leaves. “Do you think he minds? I wonder sometimes if I’m being cruel to jabber on about language when he struggles with a simple sentence. He must see it as a kind of flaunting—like doing an Irish jig in front of a cripple.”

The object of their discussion is snoring gently on the hooked rug, in a state of bliss beyond all moral quandaries. His head is pillowed on his hands and his knees are drawn up close to his body, an infant’s pose that stirs a wave of tenderness in Sophy. She knows about original sin, but it seems to her that he was born innocent and is likely to remain so. Much as she hates it when Papa extracts a lesson from Micah’s affliction, she believes that stuttering has kept him pure, free of the sins of speech that bedevil the rest of them. Slander, lying, mockery, boasting find no home in him: it’s as though the hurtful impulses die without words to stoke them. If trapped thoughts churn and boil in him, he hides it well. Nothing disturbs his composure except a direct question.

“I doubt that Micah cares,” she tells Gideon. “He admires you so much. Can’t you see it? You could read from the Lexicon and he would cherish every word. All he wants is to be in the same room with you.”

“With us. He’s no less fond of you.” Gideon turns Micah’s bird in his hands, testing the sharp beak against his forefinger. “I have great respect for Micah—not only for his many gifts, but for the light way he carries them. He’s such a modest soul, I’m sure he never considers the service he does us. His natural tact makes him the perfect duenna.”

“What are you calling my little brother? One of your Latin names?”

“Just a fancy word for ‘chaperone.’ Not even accurate in Micah’s case. He’s no dragon of a Spanish lady. He lends his presence in the humblest way, and vanishes at the right moments. Without him, we wouldn’t be free to enjoy each other’s company. We would lose all this.” He waves his hand as if a vast estate surrounded them, instead of a single cluttered room. “He has been our faithful companion, and we must be his wherever life takes us, always.”

Always
. Gideon pronounces the word with such solemn finality that Sophy hears
all ways
: not a single straight path to eternity, but roads running riot in every direction, spreading over the earth’s face like cracks in ice.

She looks down at her lap before meeting his eyes. Is he offering her the future as if it were a settled fact between them? Her mind can’t stretch to cover such a distance—not from here. The study is too warm and snug, its plain comforts too near at hand. She feels a sudden longing to be out in the sharp, clean air, gazing up at the sky as white manna rains on her.

Her mother again, tempting her to dance—a command performance that propels her out of her chair and over to the window.

Gideon follows her. “Sophy, have I assumed too much?” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Is it Micah? I regard him as you do—a brother in spirit, the first fruit of our new family. I thought you would want him with us. If I’m wrong—”

“You are not wrong.”

Sophy continues to look out. The darkness is complete by now. No snow is visible, but she senses it drifting down, mounding in heaps on the ground, abundant as the blessings Papa says flow ever from above. In the glass the points of the candle flames shiver in front of their faces: tremulous little tokens of the make-believe home they’ve made, the family they pretend to be. The room they stand in is no more substantial than the Garden he assures her is ahead: their true home and ultimate destination, where he spends so many precious hours of their shared time. It seems to her that the only solid thing, in this world or the next, is the snow she can’t see. All she wants, at this moment, is to be the first to print a pattern on it.