I shook off the chilly weakness that had come over me, thinking of Jonathan, who, when I had glanced back at him with my foot on the stair, was sitting with his head bowed on his breast, his hair drifting over his brow, which had turned a grayish, uneven color.
I told her she had to let him go. I said it was a sin. All my rage with her came up and burst like gall. The way she brooded and schemed alone. Her secrecy, her mistrust. Her sudden, blunt demands, her heartlessness, her pride. I told her she’d always been a sneak, ever since we were children. She got a funny look at that, a kind of twitch. Then her face turned narrower and darker, almost purple, and as I paused for breath, she stamped her foot and screamed.
She stamped again and screamed something like “Awk!” Like some savage, blood-mad bird.
I stared. I’d never seen her act like this. Even when she was a little girl, when the boys nearly drowned her in the creek, she’d walked home numbly, shivering but not crying.
Now tears shot from her eyes. They didn’t come like water dripping but like a stove exploding. “Leave me alone!” she screamed. She jumped up and down, she kicked the earth like a child. “Leave me alone, alone! You don’t love me! Any of you! You’d pick a foreigner over me!”
“That’s not—” I began faintly.
“Yes, it is!” she said, and started to sob. “Even though he—he’s stronger than me—you don’t stick up for me. Nobody sticks up for me, ever, ever! It’s just—complaints—people coming down with Mary to get her fixed, to get her new heart. And nobody cares when her wheels fall off. Nobody cares if she’s rusting. And that Mel Fisher comes around with his friends and wants to watch moving pictures, and old Kurtz wants me to start her building chairs, and now this foreigner comes and she won’t obey me! I told her the words—Jephthah’s daughter—she wouldn’t obey.”
When she said the words, I flinched, glancing at Mary.
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” wailed Mim. “You have to say her name first, you have to use a special tone! I’m not an idiot, Lyddie! And I’m stuck here with fools and I don’t know how to do anything. I’ve never been taught. And that foreigner—he’s got everything! He’s got everything and I’m stuck with kitchen whisks! With a bunch of farmers! And she wouldn’t hit him, Lyddie. She wouldn’t listen to me.”
She dug her fists into her eyes and cried.
“It’s good she didn’t hit him,” I said. “He’d be even worse hurt. He could have wound up dead. Then where would we be?”
She shook her head, still sobbing. “It’s because she remembers him. She remembers, don’t you see? And he wants to wipe her out, so she won’t . . . remember . . . anything.”
“He has to,” I said softly. “It’s the only way. Otherwise that PI doctor will keep spying on us. He’ll see Jonathan here. He might come after him. Mim,” I interrupted as she tried to speak again, “we got into more than we bargained for, okay? Now we have to stop.”
“But she won’t know me,” she whispered.
“She won’t know me either,” I said. “She’ll get to know us again. Come on.”
I put my arms around her. Mim had never been a hugger. It was like hanging on to a gatepost. I saw her mother watching us through a back window, pressed anxiously to the dirty glass.
“Mary’s a machine, remember?” I whispered. “That’s what you told everyone. Like the thresher.”
I felt her stiffen even further, hardening like ice. I knew right then she wasn’t going to wipe Hard Mary’s mind. I was right: over the next few weeks, she would work in the cellar with Jonathan. Sometimes I’d take some apples down there, or a basket of rolls, and find them arguing with each other, Mim squatting on a crate, Jonathan splay-legged on the floor, his open knapsack and wires and foreign tools around him. And Mim would give me her sideways look, a bit glinting, a bit sly. Now she pulled back and faced me.
“Of course I told them that,” she said, with a splinter of a laugh. “How do you think people stay alive?”
In a gesture that was strange for her, she touched my cheek. “Go on home, Lyddie. Your pies are burning.”
We are going through the beautiful country around Jericho. We walk into the shadows of Front Mountain. We are passing Kootcher’s Hollow, where Shep, the Headless Dog, runs beside us, panting through his neck. If you look directly at him, he’ll jump on your back, so we don’t look. We pass a hanging rock with a pile of money under it. Anyone who touches this money gets bit by a thousand snakes. We arrive at the abandoned hotel where the dead thief walks in circles, holding a bag. “Where shall I put it, where shall I put it?” he moans. He doesn’t know what to do with his sin. In the ghost hotel, a chandelier lies smashed in the lobby. Half the piano keys have fallen in. You open the back of the piano, disclosing mouse nests and a staircase going down. We climb into the piano and go down the stairs. There’s a radiant expanse at the bottom. It is a sea of glass. People are skimming back and forth across it in little sleighs. A man comes toward us, pushing his sleigh along with a pole. The pole has a circle of teeth at one end so it can grip the glass. “Hop in,” says the man. His face is covered with a kerchief of fine white linen. Only one eye shows. This eye is bloodshot and terribly bruised, with dark, powdery streaks around it, but it is kind. It looks almost newly awakened, peeled, as if in baring this one eye he has cast off all intelligence, all design. We get in the sleigh. “Why did you go away?” you ask the man, and he says he was buying you a sleigh of your very own.
She Too Is Longing for the Heavenly Home
They came in the middle of the night. A blaring yanked me out of sleep. Lights were flashing in the windows, like the lights of the trucks that pass out on the road, only brighter and more insistent. “NO ONE WILL BE HURT,” the blaring said. Sam and I pulled on our clothes in the dark and the ragged bursts of light. “Stay inside,” he told me, and I said no, and he said, “Do as you’re told,” and the blaring said, “WE REQUEST THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY.”
We rushed outside. Everywhere people were coming out of their houses, some half dressed. The chickens had set up a racket. A line of vans was ranged along the road. There were men in heavy black, with guns. That made my heart toll like a clock.
“Go back to the house,” said Sam.
People were arguing and crying. There were children outside, and people were pulling them in. The men began to gather in a knot. They advanced toward the vans in a knot together, shielding their eyes from the flashing lights.
“NO ONE WILL BE INJURED IF OUR PROPERTY IS SECURED. WE REQUEST THE INSTANT RETURN OF OUR STOLEN PROPERTY.”
Someone rushed up in the dark and grabbed my hand.
“Esther!” I cried, and hugged her.
“Oh, Lyddie,” she choked through tears, “it’s all our fault.”
“We have to get Mim,” I said. Her house was far away from the main road, and I wasn’t sure she’d hear the noise. We ran through the dark weeds, holding up our skirts. “I don’t think this running is good for us,” Esther panted. We were both pretty heavy in the middle by then. I had a tingling feeling in my head, but whether from the baby or from horror, I couldn’t tell. Every moment I expected to hear shots. I thought of our good, crooked-backed old bishop, of my father, and of Sam.
Barb and Kat caught us up on the way. They’d had the same idea. Barb was the most pregnant of us, Kat still trim as a bean. I was surprised to see Kat, for I couldn’t imagine Joe Miller would let her out of the house. In fact, we would later learn, he hadn’t let her. She had gone out a window and down a tree. Her stockings were torn to kingdom come. “This is a fine kettle,” she said.