The Best American Short Stories 2013

JIM SHEPARD The World to Come

Sunday 1 January

FAIR AND VERY cold. This morning, ice in our bedroom for the first time all winter, and in the kitchen, the water froze on the potatoes as soon as they were washed. Landscapes of frost on the windowpanes.

With little pride and less hope and only occasional and uncertain intervals of happiness, we begin the new year. Let me at least learn to be uncomplaining and unselfish. Let me feel gratitude for what I have: some strength, some sense of purpose, some capacity for progress. Some esteem, some respect, and some affection. Yet I cannot say I am improved in any manner, unless it be preferable to be wider in sensation and experience.

My husband has since our acquisition of this farm kept a diary to help him see the year whole, and plan and space his work. In his memorandum book he numbers each field and charges to each the manure, labor, seed &c and then credits each with each crop. This way he knows what each crop and field pays from year to year. He asked me as of last spring once we lost our Nellie to keep in addition a list in a notebook of matters that might otherwise go overlooked, from tools lent out to bills outstanding. But there is no record in these dull and simple pages of the most passionate circumstances of our seasons past, no record of our emotions or fears, our greatest joys or most piercing sorrows.

When I think of our old farm I think of rocks. My father hauled rocks for our driveway and rocks for our dooryard and rocks for the base on which our chimney was set. There were rock piles in every fence corner, miles of stone walls separating our fields, and stone bridges so that we might cross dry-shod over our numerous little water courses. Piles of rocks were always appearing and growing and every time we plowed we would have a new crop. As a toddler, my first tasks were filling the wood box and picking rocks out of new-plowed ground. My father before his day began would say to me, “While I’m gone, you can pick up the rocks on this or that piece, and when you get that done, you can play.” And when he returned that sundown I’d still be in that field to which he’d pointed, on my hands and knees, in tears, the job always less than half done.

My sister’s features were so fine that my mother liked to sketch them by lamplight, and her spirit was equally engaging, but when it came to others’ affections, circumstances doomed me to striving and anxiety. I grew like a pot-bound root all curled in upon itself.

I resolve to strive even more fully for some of my former patience. And to remember that it was got at by practice. What most of us really need is simply to make habitual what we already know.

“Welcome, sweet day of rest” says the hymn and Sunday is most welcome for its few hours of quiet ease. A series of phaetons on the road despite the cold. Were it not for worship all of the ladies hereabouts would be in danger of becoming perfect recluses. As for me, I no longer attend. After the calamity of Nellie’s loss, what calm I enjoy does not derive from the notion of a better world to come. In the far field, foxes at play on their hind legs, wrestling like boys. The wind heavy at intervals. The snow is falling from the trees about the house so that the liberated limbs straighten up like a man released from debt.

Old Mr. Manning who’s been very low for several weeks died this morning.

The ink stopper has rolled on me and ruined a whole half-entry. Why is ink like a fire? Because it is a good servant and a hard master.

Sunday 8 January

A strong cold wind blowing all day from the west. Fried two chickens and made biscuits for breakfast. I want to purchase a dictionary. I have two dollars to spare and can’t imagine I could expend it better to my own satisfaction. My self-education seems the only way to keep my unhappiness from overwhelming me. I will recommence as well with my long-neglected algebra. Some time not working during the week is always wise. The bow forever bent loses its power.

An hour spent this morning chopping and spreading old turnips on the snow for the sheep. Dyer has culled the wisest of the rams to be set aside for sale in the spring, to let someone else have the pleasure of matching wits with them.

Nothing stirring outside except Tallie’s dog, who makes the rounds of the neighboring farms after woodchucks the way a doctor might visit his patients. Lurid clouds are rolling up against the wind. Dyer holds that the first twelve days of January portend the weather for the next twelve months. So that our fine day on the 4th promises good weather for the spring planting in April, the fourth month, and a storm tomorrow will guarantee trouble for the September harvest. He has spent the time I’ve been writing this reading an article in the Rural New Yorker, “The Inutility of Sporadic Reform.” He seems pained at my skepticism as to his weather acumen and smiles at me every so often. My heart to him is like a pond to a crane: he wades round it, going in as far as he dares, and then attempts to snatch up what little fish come shoreward from the center.

He has a severe cut through the thumbnail.

Sunday 15 January

Deep snow. Cold. A shovel and broom necessary on the porch before light. Tallie called here after breakfast. She and Dyer chatted a few minutes in the sitting room before he left to see to the cows. Her husband is spending the day killing his hogs with a hired hand. She said after Dyer left that she hoped she wasn’t intruding, and that it was the dullest of all things to have an ignorant neighbor come by and spoil an entire Sunday afternoon. I assured her that she was welcome and that I knew the feeling of which she spoke, and that during the widow Weldon’s visits I always imagine I’ve been plunged up to my eyes in a vat of the prosaic. She took my hand as she laughed. She said she’d gotten the widow going on the county levy and that the woman’s few ideas were like marbles on a level floor: they had no power to move themselves but rolled equally well in whichever direction you pushed them.

There seems to be something going on between us that I cannot unravel. Her manner is calm and mild and gracious, and yet her spirits seem to quicken at the prospect of further conversation with me. In the winter sun through the window, her skin had an underflush of rose and violet that disconcerted me until I looked away. I told her how pleasant it was finally to be getting to know her, and she responded that the first few times she had spied me she had kept to herself and thought, “Oh, I wish to get acquainted with her.” And then, she said, she’d wondered what she would do if we were introduced.

She asked if Dyer was as sober when it came to the cows as he sounded and I told her that he deemed cows needed not only a uniform and plentiful diet but also perfect quiet, and warm and dry stabling in the winter. He was continually exhorting our neighbors to either enlarge their barns or diminish their stock. I admitted that at times if a cow was provokingly slow to drink I might push its head down into the bucket, and he would tell me that anyone who couldn’t school herself to patience had no business with cows. Tallie said that her father had scolded her the same way, having assigned her work in the dairy barn at a very early age, which had become an ongoing vexation for him, since she had not been in favor of the idea. We compared childhood beds, mine in which the straw was always breaking up and matting together and hers that was as hard, she claimed, as the pharoah’s heart. She asked if Dyer had also been raised Free Will Baptist and I told her he liked to say that he was indeed a member of the church but that he didn’t work very hard at the trade. She said she felt the same.

She described how restlessness had been her lot for as far back as she could conceive, and I told her how when I was young I would think, “What a wasted day! I have accomplished nothing, and have neither learned anything nor grown in any way.” She said her mother had always assured her that having children would resolve that dilemma, and I told her my mother had made the same claim. A short silence followed. Eventually we heard Dyer tromping about with his boots in the mudroom, and she exclaimed about the time, and said she must be getting on. I thanked her for coming and told her that I’d missed her. She answered that it was pleasant to be missed.

Sunday 22 January

Frigid night. Wintry morning. Dyer’s third day with the fever. At sunup he had a spasm but he was restored by an enema of molasses, warm water, and lard. Also a drop of turpentine next to his nose. His feet are now soaking in a warm basin. After breakfast I was emptying the kitchen slops and heard, off by the canal, several discharges of guns or pistols.

Dyer brought me as his bride to his house five years after he had begun to farm. In the journal I kept for a few months back then, I noted the night to have been cloudy and cool. We had about thirty-six acres that was not muck swamp or bottomland. Of those thirty-six perhaps one-third was hillside covered with scattered timber from which all of the best woods had been culled. It was not the ideal situation, but we all wish we had land of none but the best quality and laid out just right in every respect for tillage.

My mother had married my father when she was very young, without much consideration and after a short acquaintance, and had had to learn in the bitter way of experience that there was no sympathy between them. She always felt that she had not the energy to avert an evil, but the fortitude to bear most that would be laid upon her. She always seemed possessed of a secret conviction that she had left much undone that she still ought to do.

Dyer, as the second son of my father’s closest neighbor, helped out with numberless tasks around our farm for many years. He admired what he viewed as my practical good sense, my efficient habits, and my handy ways. As a suitor he was generous but not just, and affectionate but not constant. I was appreciative of his virtues and unconvinced of his suitability, but reminded by my family that more improvement might be in the offing. Because, as they say, it’s a long lane that never turns. And so our hands were joined if our hearts not knitted together.

As a boy he made his own steam engines by fashioning boilers out of discarded tea kettles and sled shoes, and I have no doubt he would have been happier if allowed to follow the natural bent of his mind; but forces of circumstance compelled him to take up a business for which he had not the least love. He admitted this to me frankly during his courtship, but also maintained that with good health and push and a level head, there is always an excellent chance for a fellow willing to work. And if one’s head went wrong, one could always level it up in good time, particularly if one was fortunate in one’s choice of partner.

He believes that one should always live within one’s income, misfortune excepted. He believes every farmer should talk over business matters with his wife; and then when he preaches thrift, she will know its necessity as well as he. Or she will be able to demonstrate to him why he worries too excessively. He feels he can never fully rid himself of his load. And I’m certain that because his mind is in such a bad state, it affects his whole system. He said to me this morning that contentment was like a friend he never gets to see.

Sunday 29 January

The night once again bitter cold. Despite an amaranthine fatigue, I’m unable to sleep. No sounds outside but the cracking and popping of the porch joints. Up in the dark to lay the kitchen fire, and through the window in the moonlight I could see one lean hare and not a creature stirring to chase it.

Snowpudding and corncakes for breakfast. Dyer up and about. He is much improved and has been given a dose of calomel and rhubarb. He intends running panels of new fence later this afternoon. Yesterday the timber was so hard-frozen the wedges wouldn’t drive.

The previous night’s unhappiness hangs between us like a veil. My reluctance seems to have become his shame. His nightly pleasures, which were never numerous, I have curtailed even more. He has been patient for what he believed to be a reasonable interval when it came to my grieving but has begun to pursue with more persistence the subject of another child. And in our bed, when he asks only for what is his right, I take his hand and lay it aside and tell him it is too soon, too soon, too soon. And so the one on whom all happiness should depend is the one who causes the discontent.

I can see that when I am unhappy his mind is in all ways out of turn, and so throughout the morning I made a greater effort at cheer. I shook out and stropped his coat while with a good deal of fuss he prepared himself for the long walk to the timberline. Inside his boots he wears his heavy woolen socks greased with a thick mixture of beeswax and tallow. Before leaving he suggested once again that perhaps the time had come for us to have our sleigh. He’s laid aside in the barn’s workroom some oak planks and a borrowed compass saw, which can make a cut following a curved line. He seemed to want only a smile and yet I was unable to provide it.

My mother told me more than once that when she prayed, her first object was to thank God that we’d been spared from harm throughout the day; her second was to ask forgiveness for all of her sins of omission and commission; and her third was to thank Him for not having dealt with her in a manner commensurate to all of the offenses for which she was responsible.

Sunday 5 February

Not too cold, though the moon this morning indicated foul weather. On the porch after sunup I could hear the low chirping of the sparrows in the snow-buried hedgerows. Breakfast of hot biscuit, sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and coffee. Dyer cutting timber for firewood.

A visit from Tallie yet again, and she came bearing gifts for my birthday! She arrayed on the table before us a horse chestnut, a pear—in February!—a needle case, and a pocket atlas. She brought as well for us to share a little pot of applesauce with an egg on top. While it was warming she reported that Mrs. Nottoway had had an accident; a horse fell on her, on the ice. Her leg by all accounts is crushed and Tallie is planning to pay a visit there later this afternoon. Tallie herself had an accident, she noted, on the way here, her foot having plunged into the brook through the thin ice in our field. I made her remove her boot and stocking and warmed her toes and ankle in my hands. For some few minutes we sat, just like that. The warmth of the stove and the smell of the applesauce filled our little room, and she closed her eyes and murmured as though speaking to herself how pleasant it was.

I asked after her health and she said she had generally been well, though she suffered chronically from painful tooth infections and the rash they call St. Anthony’s Fire. I asked after her husband’s health and she said that at times they seemed yoked in opposition to each other. I asked what had caused the latest disagreement and she said that he recorded the names of trespassers, whom he easily sighted across the open fields, in his journals, and that when she had asked what sort of retribution he planned, they had had an exchange that was so cheerless and unpleasant that they had agreed to shun the subject, since it was one on which they clearly had no common feeling. She had then resolved to come visit me, so that her day would not be given entirely over to such meanness.

I was still holding her foot and unsure how to express the fervor with which I wished her a greater share of happiness. I reminded myself: (1) Others first. (2) Correct and necessary speech only. And (3) don’t waste a moment. I told her that Dyer thought Finney had many estimable qualities. She responded that her husband had a separate ledger, as well, in which he kept an accounting of whom she visited and how long she stayed. When I asked why, she said she was sure she had no idea. When I in my surprise had nothing to add to her response, she fell silent for some minutes, and then finally removed her foot from my hands’ cradle and brought the subject to a close by remarking that she’d given up trying to fathom all the queer varieties of his little world. I was oddly moved, watching her try to wriggle her foot back into her stocking. We enjoyed the applesauce and I exclaimed again on the surprise of my gifts and we chatted for another three-quarters of an hour before she took her leave. As she stood on the porch, bundled against the cold, and stepped forward into the wind, I told her I thought she was quite the most pleasing and thoughtful person I knew. Because I remember how appreciation made me feel, when I was just a girl, and I had resolved way back then to praise those who took up important roles in my future life whenever they seemed worthy of it. Dyer returned with two wagonloads of timber minutes after she departed, and once it was fully unloaded and stacked and he was able to take his ease before the fire, he gave me his birthday gifts as well: a box of raisins, another needle case, and six tins of sardines.

Sunday 12 February

The blizzard that began this last Wednesday continues with a stupendous NE wind. The snow has drifted eight feet deep. The barn is holding up well and there is feed for the stock, but the henhouse has fallen in on one side. Half the chickens lost. We dug ice and snow from their dead open mouths in an attempt to revive them. I’m told the Friday newspaper reported a train of forty-two cars from the center of Vermont having arrived at the Albany depot with snow nearly two feet thick on its roofs. Of course there is no question of visiting or receiving anyone; we are in all ways weather-bound. I found myself vexed all afternoon by the realization that I might have taken a walk to Tallie’s farm during a clear spell on Friday, but milk spilled on dry ground can’t be gathered up. By the fire Dyer and I made ready to sketch out on some writing paper our plans for the sleigh, but soon laid them by, since as a project it was so ill-conceived and weakly begun. We retreated to separate corners, myself to darn and mend and my husband to his ledger books.

He finally looked so distraught that I asked how long the feed in the barn would sustain the stock, should the weather not improve. He estimated five days before he’d have to go to the mill, whatever the weather. He said the newspaper had quoted a prediction that the storm would let up by Tuesday, based on an expert’s consultation of a goose bone. I let that prognostication sit between us while I repaired the heel of a sock, and he took his hair in both his hands and said with surprising vehemence that we offered and offered our hard work and God refused it by delivering brutal weather.

I joined him on the settee and reminded him that the best management always succeeds best, but in a real crisis of Nature, we are all at Another’s mercy. He seemed unconsoled. We listened to the wind. We watched the fire. He recounted again the story of his poor mother’s ordeal when just a child.

She had been seven and had awoken before dawn and gone to her window, and she told him that a flash of light that had seemed to run along the ground had preceded the earthquake. Her dogs when they saw it had given a sudden bark. A far-off murmur had floated to her on the still night air, followed by a slight ruffling wind. And then came the rumbling, and a sudden shock under which the house and barn had tottered and reeled. Latches leaped up and doors flew open. Timbers shook from mortises, hearthstones grated apart, pan lids sprang up and clattered back down in the kitchen, and pewter and glass pitched from their shelves. Their chimney tumbled down. The oxen and cows bellowed. She told him that she’d heard her mother calling for her, but she’d been unable to tear herself from her window, where she could see the birds even in the dark fluttering in the air as if fearing to again alight, and she could hear the river writhe and roil. She’d had to follow her brothers as they’d jumped down the collapsed staircase, and then the sun had risen and greeted with its complacent face her disconsolate and fearful family. And as soon as it set again that night, their fright had returned, a fright, his mother had told him, she had never again fully dispelled. For what was safe if the solid earth could do this? Before he finished his account, I stopped his lips with my fingers and led him to our bed, undressing him as I might a boy. We shared any number of caresses and he seized my hair in his fists and held my head to his own and passionately declared his love. Early this evening I rose while he slept and made us some beef tea and cornbread for dinner. For dessert, I cooked a very unsatisfactory rice pudding.

Sunday 19 February

Sleet, and ice, and a gloom so pervasive, all our lamps had to remain lit at midday. Both of us much borne down of mind all morning, and for the past five days. Dyer able to get to the mill.

Sunday 26 February

Bright sun. Biscuit and dried mackerel for breakfast. Tallie visiting her father in Oneonta. A lonesome and tedious week.

The Cobbs lost their son to pneumonia a few days ago. I think last week. Their only child. Dyer was loath to tell me, but the memories of Nellie came on only slowly after he had done so.

I never showed our daughter a face free of fatigue; the night I bore her I had just finished dipping twenty-four dozen candles, and she never seemed to lose her head colds and we had many hard nights. I never felt blessed with enough time for her when she was well and it was that much harder watching over her during her illnesses. I spent my days beyond distress, fearing the consequences of her sickliness, until when she was two years and five months on, she suffered an attack of the bilious fever, pleurisy, bowel problems, and croup. She was treated with bayberry and marsh rosemary to scour the stomach and bowels, and a tea of valerian and lady’s slipper for the fever, and though she rallied for a day or two, when she gazed at me, she seemed to know that even if her condition were to be coaxed into a little clemency, it wouldn’t spare her. The night came when she asked, “Mommy, take me up,” and I lifted her from her bed while Dyer slept. She asked for my comb, and when I gave it to her she combed my hair and then smoothed it with her palm on my head and then asked me to lie down with her and put her arms around my neck and did not rise again.

Since the norms of polite society require that private woe be concealed from public view, I was allowed to sequester myself away for some months following. There I remained speechless. I was surrounded by objects that, if silent everywhere else, here had a voice that rang out with her presence. And I never forgot her face that final night, because there was something so affecting about mute and motionless grief in a child so young.

Sunday 4 March

Windy and very bright. Dined with the Hill family last evening. On our way there we saw hunters with ducks over their shoulders and boys skating on the river. A most excellent dinner of seven dishes of meat, four of vegetables, pickles and a pie, tarts and cheese, and wine and cider. This morning a breakfast of only oatmeal, jam, and coffee. Mr. Tarbell came and hung the bacon. Dyer is augmenting the padding in the cow stables with his hoardings of leaves and old straw, which he believes to increase the manure output.

It seemed Tallie would never appear, but time and the needle wear through the longest morning. When she arrived my heart was like a leaf borne over a rock by rapidly moving water. She said that a few days earlier their hired hand had pulled down a box of eggs and broke nearly two dozen, and that Finney had announced to him that he was unlucky to eggs and was no longer allowed to approach them. Her husband believed that he suffered a great deal from the carelessness of hired hands, she said. She claimed that old Mr. Holt was said to have swum his horse over the canal despite the cold, and that the widow Weldon’s son had been contracted to carry the mail on skis, but that otherwise there was no news. She was much better in her health. She was overjoyed to see me.

She said she’d spent the previous two days rendering the lard from the hogs and making soap. She said her husband was even more out of sorts than usual, and that he had mentioned again the idea of migrating west. I told her that I considered migrating west a bad idea, since my uncle had moved to Ohio and had come to a desperate end. She asked if that wasn’t where my sister had settled, and I said no, that my sister was out near Lackawanna, and that her husband was a manufacturer of horse cultivators. She asked me to tell her more about my sister and I told her how Rebecca had always loved legends of Indians and Quakers and county witches, and how our church had frowned on dancing but had allowed kissing games, and how she had been a champion at Copenhagen and Needle’s Eye. She had met her future husband at an agricultural society fair in which she had been named Queen of the Livery. Tallie remarked with some wryness that it sounded very grand, and I wanted to embrace her for that kindness alone.

I asked about her brothers and she answered only about the one who had survived. She said that once he was old enough to stand, he’d gone round with a sling that he claimed was identical to the weapon with which David had slain Goliath. He never killed anyone but he did give his family some anxious moments. She said that when he was fourteen she’d caught him skinning baby rabbits alive and he’d told her that the rabbits were used to it. She said that a year later he’d knotted a rope on his wrist and their steer’s horn, and had been dragged cross-country. When their mother had asked what made him do such a thing, he had said he hadn’t gone a half-mile before he could see his mistake.

We talked of parents. I told her of remembering my father telling my mother that she shouldn’t feel bad about me because sometimes the plain grew up to be enormously wise. She told me that only once in her life did her father say an encouraging word, though he said plenty of the other kind. She said that she refused to offer an excuse for her constant disobedience to him, but that she did believe now that her father had done her a far greater wrong. I said that I was sure she’d been as good as gold and she answered that she had been the kind of willful child that no frown would deny nor words restrain, and that because of that her father had often taken her in one hand and a strap in the other, and brought the two together until she had had enough.

By then we were in late afternoon light and Dyer had again returned to shed his outer clothing in the mudroom with maximum fidget and fuss. She stood and composed herself, and touched a finger to my shoulder. I felt, looking at her expression, as if she were in full sail on a flood tide while I bobbed along down backwaters. And yet I never saw on her countenance the indifference of the fortunate toward the less fortunate. At the mudroom door my husband greeted us before passing inside, and Tallie put her cheek to mine before leaving. I watched her ascend the snowy path toward her land, her dog running to greet her. While Dyer rubbed his lower extremities for warmth, I added to our hearth fire, contrary to my usual custom. It cheered the room a little but everything still looked desolate. That is me, I thought, taking my chair. One emotion succeeds another.

Sunday 11 March

A sloppy day. The wind chilly but with hints of a warmth. Up early. Ham and potatoes and coffee for breakfast. Scalded my wrist with boiling fat. Applied flour and hamamelis, since we have no plaster.

A bad week for burns. Dyer and Finney were summoned on Thursday to tend to Mrs. Manning’s little girl, who had just been severely burned. They reported that they accomplished all that they could for the little sufferer until the doctor arrived. It’s thought she didn’t die of the burn but of pneumonia from taking a chill from the water thrown upon her. She complained of being cold from that moment until she died.

A cardinal pair has adopted the house. I’ve been laying out seed to sustain them, and sometimes when I forget they fly to the kitchen window to remind me. The female is the prettiest muted green.

The week spent sowing clover. What’s needed are still mornings, ideally after frost heaves, when the sun has thawed the soil’s surface just enough to fasten the seed in the mud. We sow with a Cahoon, which hangs on a pair of suspenders and throws out a continuous stream with a handle-crank. On Friday we had to finish in a headwind, which was hard on the eyes. I look as if I’ve been on a spree.

My mother’s mother was born in 1780 in a log house right here in Schoharie County. I wonder now at the courage and the resourcefulness of those women who fared forth, not knowing where they were being led, to begin to chip into the wilderness the foundations of a civilization. Maybe they found love and kisses in their loved ones’ regard, and a certain high hopefulness that we do not possess.

Astonishment and joy. Astonishment and joy. Astonishment and joy. I write with only the small hand lamp burning, as late as it is.

Dyer asked after breakfast apropos of nothing if my friend Tallie intended to visit us again today and when I informed him that I expected she would, he gave no further sign of having heard me, but went about the business of gathering his outer garments and eventually left the house.

Tallie arrived some minutes later with a handkerchief to her nose. When she heard I was well she claimed to be disappointed and said she’d hoped to compare colds. I showed her my burn.

When she had completed quizzing me on the various remedies I had applied, we talked of our admiration for each other. She said she had from her earliest childhood an instinct that shrank from selfishness or icy regard, and that she cherished the safety she felt when in my presence. She said she’d composed a poem titled “O Sick and Miserable Heart Be Still.”

I told her how as a little girl I’d always imagined cultivating my intellect and doing something for the world, and she gazed at me as though I’d said the absolute perfect thing, and I thrilled at the possibility of having done so. And when I said nothing more she wrung both of my hands with hers, and said that that moment in which we were carried in triumph somewhere for having done something great and good, or we were received at home in a shower of tears of joy: was it really possible that such a moment had not yet come, for either of us? When I regained my voice, I said I thought that it had. Or it could. She asked what I imagined. And I said, astonishing myself with my own dauntlessness, that I loved how our encircling feelings left nothing out for us to miss or seek.

When her expression remained as it had been, I added that perhaps I presumed too much. The pyre in the hearth collapsed with a little show of sparks. We both gazed upon the flaming logs. Finally she murmured, so that I could just hear, that it was not those who showed the least who felt the least.

Her pacing dog’s toenails were audible on the ice on the porch. She leaned forward and offered me her lips to kiss and then turned her cheek, which I then kissed instead. I asked why she hadn’t done as she was going to do, and she had no reply. So I took her hands, and then her shoulders, and with our eyes fully open brought my mouth to hers.

She smelled of rosewater and an herb I couldn’t identify. Her taste was suffusing and sweet and entirely full. Her mouth was at first diffident, and then feathery and tender, and then welcoming and immersive.

She worried I would catch her cold. She took in her breath at the passion of my response. We skidded our chairs closer and had no thought of peril nor satiety, listening to the wind’s increase outside like an index of our exhilaration and starting up at every sound of her dog on the porch. There was a sweet biscuity smell to her hairline. Eventually she pulled free and bade me open my eyes and said she was leaving.

Dyer when he returned noted all that I still had not yet accomplished when it came to my evening’s responsibilities, and asked with some irritation as I stood over the pump and sink if I required assistance. I came very near answering that I did, I felt so undone by my Tallie’s departure. The moment she had left I was like a skiff pushed out to sea with neither hand nor helm to guide it.

Sunday 18 March

Falling weather soon, whether rain or snow. For three straight days my bowels have remained unmoved. A spell of dizziness and shortness of breath this morning, and no appetite, so Dyer made his own breakfast. He says that old Mr. Holt while returning from a sale in town was badly beaten by two strangers, so that he had to be hauled the rest of the way to his home in his own cart. Their intention had been to kill him but they were mistaken as to who he was.

Dyer also claims to have had many unpleasant dreams, owing to his mind. Otherwise he has been notably silent all day. I am happy to be left to my solitude. Thankful to my Maker for such blessings &c.

When still just a little girl I used to hope that God with a voice as loud as thunder would proclaim that all of my sins were forgiven. Now I know that I can wait until doomsday and I still will not hear any such thing. And yet the repentant sinner must actively seek God’s forgiveness instead of waiting for Him to act.

Hard labor all week, sunup to sundown, helping Dyer in the outer fields with the smoothing harrow and the roller. Old Bill our horse has the heaves. Both of us fit to drop by Saturday eve. Both of us mournful this morning. Both of us seemed to have spent the day listening for footfalls on the porch. And yet when my thoughts turn to her I think with special heat, Why are we to be divided? Merciful Father turn the channel of events.

Still feeling poorly by nightfall, and so unable to cook. A dinner of tea, bread and butter, and cold ham.

Sunday 25 March

A wild mixture of wind and rain and clouds and sunshine. Muddy March has dragged on like a log through a wet field.

Downhearted and woebegone. A poor night. Fried corncakes and ham for breakfast. Poor Dyer suffering from a painful cough.

Opened the mudroom door this afternoon to Dyer having returned from the fields, and he said with some asperity that it was pleasant to be greeted by the smile one values above all others, only to see that smile vanish because it’s been met by one’s own presence, instead of someone else’s.

He sat with me a while, then, still in his boots. I asked if he wanted more of the ham and he said no. I told him that when he next went to town we needed calico and muslin and buttons and shoe thread. He asked if he was troubling me, sitting with me like this, and when I assured him he was not, he remarked that he had learned consideration of others. And that he had learned the need of human sympathy by the unfulfilled want of it. I told him that I felt as though I had provided him with much sympathy throughout our years together, and he allowed as to how that had been so. We then waited again, sitting facing each other, and I thought with some pity how his life seems equal parts furious work and resignation. When Tallie arrived he greeted her and seemed in no hurry to take his leave. He remained sunk in his chair for nearly a half an hour while we exchanged pleasantries and news before he finally rose to his feet and left without announcing his business.

Once his figure was out of sight through the windows, I asked in a low voice after her spirits. She was content to repeat only that she was feeling doleful and unreasonable and unaware of what it was she wished. I asked what it was she then required of me, and she said, responding to my tone, that she wished me to be gentler. I asked again, chastened, what she desired, and she answered that she wanted to lay bare for me all of the hoardings of her imagination. I said nothing. Although I often speak before I think, I can keep still on occasion. She said our kisses had swept through her the way measles had the poor Indians, laying waste to everything. She said she had told herself to abolish all desire for comfort or any sort of happiness and then had immediately abandoned her resolution.

She asked that I speak. I almost cried out, How should I have known what was happening to me? There were no instruction booklets of which I was aware. I told her I could feel something rising in me as she approached, like hair on the back of a dog. I told her the thought of her during the week was my shelter, the way the chickadees took to the depths of the evergreens to keep the snow and ice and wind at bay. I told her that I believed that we were now encountering that species of education that proceeds from being forced to confront what we never before acknowledged.

She asked if we might share some tea and was silent until it was brewed. She said she believed that intimacy increased good will, and that if that were the case, then every moment we spent together would further tie happiness to utility. Wouldn’t our farms benefit from our more joyful labor? Wouldn’t our husbands’ burdens be lightened?

We spent some additional interval thereafter consoling each other. We allowed ourselves some gentle excitement. And after she had departed I looked round the room and thought, “She’s gone and it’s as if she’d never been.”

Sunday 1 April

Warm and windy with the appearance of rain. First day this spring we could go all afternoon without a fire. Fried chicken and potatoes for breakfast. The morning spent manuring the onions.

Dyer took the wagon after breakfast without explanation. My burn seems to be healing poorly. Tallie here earlier than her usual time, and we embraced in the mudroom as if rescued. She mentioned as if in passing that her dog would provide ample notice of arriving friends or strangers. Having done so she led me to our chairs and delivered herself over to our kissing as if it were the most urgent of errands. When I withdrew for breath she kept her face close, describing along my mouth delicate patterns with her tongue. During our longer kisses her breathing grew stronger.

When we separated, we took each other in. Myself, overquiet. Tallie, flushed and on the lookout. Together we made for a distressing pair.

I took her hands and she expressed pain at my sadness. She asked if I’d been to town during the week, and when I told her I hadn’t, she reported that they were cleaning out the drain under the streets along the fork and that several people were down with the fever.

She added that her husband had told her that he didn’t consider that he had a wife, and that he would not lie with a woman if it required a contention. She said that she had informed him that he shouldn’t have anything to do with her; that she was opposed to it; that she was not willing. I was shocked and asked what his response had been. She said he had had no response. I asked if she believed he had given up on the notion of children. She said she had no insights to share on that question.

We were silent for some time, then, out of respect for our predicament. I asked her husband’s age and she said he was nineteen years her senior and had been born in 1811, which would make him forty-five. I asked about his demeanor and she said that as mealtime conversation he had lately begun giving great credit to reports of men living far from town who had worked to poison and thereby kill their wives.

I asked if she really believed he would acquiesce to the notion of no sons. I asked if she believed he resented her visits here with any special fervor, and she said she thought not. We worked ourselves nonetheless into a state of alarm, which was then only assuaged by more embraces and two or three extended kisses of great sobriety.

She admitted to having been at work on another poem, which she had brought to show me, but she allowed me to see only the opening lines, which read: I love to have gardens, I love to have plants / I love to have air but I don’t love ants. I told her I could not support the rhyme, which saddened her. She held the poem between us and together we studied it as if it were the incomplete map of our escape route. Finally she said she felt that when she drew near, I would retreat, and when she kept still, I would return but remain at a fixed distance, like those sparrows that will stay in the farmyard but not enter the house. I responded that in her presence I felt perpetually as if I were ready to take her by the hand and lead her to my garden gate and to say: everything in here is yours; come and go and gather as you like.

She also unwrapped from the same packet in which she had secreted the poem a sprig from her favorite cedar, which I told her I would plant where it would forever stay green.

After she left I took myself outside into the sunshine and spread some feed for the surviving chickens. Upon Dyer’s return he found me taking my rest in the shade and kissed me, before withdrawing to refill the water buckets. After a dinner of duck and beets and sweet potatoes we enjoyed some little company together.

Sunday 8 April

Very damp, cloudy, and cool. Smoky. Perhaps the forest is somewhere on fire. A breakfast of hotcakes and custard and pickled peaches. Dyer seems now quite worn down at bedtime with grievance and care. We fear his cough is producing a decline. A syrup of old wine, flaxseed, and a medicinal called Balsom of Life seems to have helped. This morning he made me a trellis for the lima beans and shot a crow and filled it with salt to be hung in the shed over the corn to warn off others of its kind. The whole house seems both angry and repentant. God help us.

No word from Tallie. At midday I stood off the back porch in the sun, my face turned in her direction. Above me a circling hawk used a single cloud as his parasol.

Sunday 15 April

Rain in torrents nearly all night. The lane is flooded and the ditches brim full. This morning only a slight shower.

A breakfast of oatmeal alone. Prepared the pea sticks for the first crop of peas and drowned the barn cat’s kittens. The new wheat because of the holes in our fencing is still exposed to the hogs, which we have driven out several times already. We keep identifying new holes, which we cannot adequately repair for lack of time. Thus we find our enterprise sinking, level by level.

A dispute with Dyer over the windows, open vs. shut. Unable to sit still afterward. Our quarrels always throw me out of harness. How many are there that have a happy fireside? Broad is the gate that leads to dissatisfaction and many wander through. Such is the effect of absence from what we love. But I have always been morose. My mother used to call me her rain crow, because she said time with me was like standing in an endless drizzle.

After Dyer retired I took his spyglass and crossed the fields in the darkness to Tallie’s farm, approaching the front windows of her home as close as I dared and fixing through the kitchen glass, after some patient searching, her motionless figure in relief against the darkness within. Her features were still. By turning the lens-piece I drew her face nearer to mine and held it there until she turned away. Could I have been seen from the inside? I felt a giddiness like the violence of the impulse that sends a floating branch far out over a waterfall’s precipice before it plummets. Her dog’s barking drew her husband out onto the porch and I made my way back, plunging in over my boots in the mud.

At sunset, earlier, a good three minutes of the honking of mallards, winging their way northward. By what faith do they arrive at their destination? I imagine them alighting at some marshy pond, where one by one their scattered kind arrives in safety, there to be together.

A terribly bad spring so far but the clover has come up through it all and is all right.

Sunday 22 April

Finally a glimpse of her after three weeks of no word. She and her husband stopped their wagon outside our house to invite us to dinner this Saturday next. They were on their way again before Tallie and I could exchange much more than a look. The Nottoways report that our hogs have continued to stray into their fields, as well, and threaten increasingly harsh measures against them, including putting out their eyes and driving them into the river. The cardinals are enjoying the hornbeam and the catkins on the birches. The female seems to prefer feeding on the ground.

Cool, but warm enough for no fire in the sitting room.

Sunday 29 April

Rain all week long, so heavy that it broke down the mill. All of our ditches are running to overflow. The lower clover field is swamped.

Two of our hogs are still loose, since they are ailing and Dyer believes a hog is a good doctor and can cure himself if he can find the medicine he needs.

For dinner Saturday night Tallie served us ham, beef, duck, potatoes, beets, pickled cucumbers, biscuits, and cornbread. We commended her on her labor and her husband said that he recalled a day when every family was fed, clothed, shod, sheltered, and warmed from the products a wife gathered from within her own fence line. I said that it must have been two full days that Tallie had spent on this feast, and she responded that her mother had always said that the week’s end was always the hardest part of the week.

Her husband while we ate offered up what news had lately occurred. We were all uneasy to find him so voluble. He mentioned that the Mannings’ third daughter was now one week old. He said that old Mr. Holt had apparently by some means pitched himself forward out of his cart, which had then passed over his back with its load of five hundred pounds, and that because of the mud the doctor says he is not severely hurt. He said that he had heard, when examining the damage at the mill, of news from Middleburgh: that a man down there had of last week been admitted to jail for shooting his wife in the face.

There were silences. Tallie seemed to be keeping strict custody of her eyes. I remarked upon the duck and the men discussed for an interval the old shovel plow, which Dyer compared to dragging a cat by the tail. I marveled at the size and power of their hanging lamp, and Tallie answered that it was eighty candlepower and that she had induced her husband to purchase it so that everyone could read with equal ease all around the room. Finney said that he believed that even if he had been brought up not to read overmuch, he should give his children every chance to do so.

The rain came under discussion. Finney said that no matter what misfortunes arrived at his doorstep, he would seek improvement of his lot with his own industry; he would study his options closely and attend to everything to which he’d believed he had already adequately attended, but with more vehemence. Dyer commended him and reminded the table that when success comes, someone is working hard. Finney said as an example that when he’d first begun farming he’d been so vexed by his inability to stop his dog’s barking one January that during a storm he’d held the animal around the corner of his barn in a gale until it had frozen to death.

I replied after a moment that I found that reprehensible, but he seemed not to hear. I felt sure I was white as a sheet. I could see from Tallie’s face that she’d heard this story before. He held forth to Dyer about his hinged harrow, complaining that the spikes that caught the rocks and roots were forever breaking. He told Tallie, once he saw that we had finished eating, to bring the dessert, and I said we were stuffed and she said that he insisted on his pastries and preserved fruits and creams, and rose to clear the table and fetch them. I excused myself to assist her, and in the kitchen I asked in a whisper about her situation and she shushed me with a shake of her head. I asked after a bruise on her neck and she said she’d taken a fall over the fence. I answered with some petulance and anxiety that I hadn’t heard, and she responded that many things had happened to her about which I hadn’t heard.

Back at table her husband’s mood seemed to have darkened. He served the pastries and fruit and creams himself, leaving only her plate empty. “Is your wife being punished?” Dyer joked. And when Finney chose not to answer, Tallie finally said that it was not in her husband’s temper either to give or to receive. He responded that he had lately been sick in the chest, but as she had expressed no feeling for him, he had been hardened.

The entire ride home my speculation was hectic with dread. I was finally able to ask if Dyer had felt anything amiss, but he shook his head while keeping his attention on Old Bill. Along the river he pointed out a flooding so extensive it had carried away the long wooden bridge at Washington; fragments of it, with the railing still erect, came floating down past us. Hard on its heels followed a tree of enormous length with uptorn roots and branches lashing the current. Once we reached our property he remarked with disgust on one of our line fences that he said hadn’t been cleared in all the years I’d been here. I said that it looked perfectly serviceable to me and he said that it looked like a hedge.

Sunday 6 May

No word from Tallie. No visit. A mild and lonesome night. My anxieties cause me between tasks to pace the house like a prisoner. The windows open.

My mother told me once in a fury when I was just a girl that my father asked nothing of her except that she work the garden, harvest the vegetables, pick and preserve the fruit, supervise the poultry, milk the cows, do the dairy work, manage the cooking and cleaning and mending and doctoring, and help out in the fields when needed. She said she’d appeared in his ledger only when she’d purchased a dress. And how have things changed? Daughters are married off so young that everywhere you look a slender and unwilling girl is being forced to stem a sea of tribulations before she’s even full grown in height.

Dyer keeping his distance seeing me in such a state. The night fair and warm with the appearance of a coming rain. A shower.

Sunday 13 May

My heart a maelstrom, my head a bedlam. Tallie gone. This morning the widow Weldon on the way to town reported their house and barn to be abandoned. Rushed over there myself, Dyer galloping along behind and calling to me. Their barn, which I passed first, had been emptied of stock and feed. Their front door was open. Some furniture &c was there but most was gone. A dishtowel lay on the kitchen floor. A spatter of blood spread up the wall above the sink. A handprint of the same marked the lintel above the door.

Furious colloquy with Dyer most of the night about the county sheriff’s office. He promises tomorrow to make the rounds of the neighbors and if unsatisfied to take our fears there.

Monday 14 May

No work. The Nottoways report spotting their caravan on the county road in the late evening on Friday the 4th, heading NW. Dyer said Mrs. Nottoway believed she spied Tallie’s figure alongside her husband’s but was unsure. A hired hand, she thought, was driving the second wagon. The sheriff refuses to investigate. Dyer says if I refuse to calm myself he’ll lash me to a chair and administer laudanum.

Sunday 20 May

I’m a library without books. I’m a sea of agitation and trepidation and grief. Dyer speaks every so often of how much we have for which to be grateful. The two of us sit violently conscious of the ticking of the clock while he continues to weep at what he imagines to be his poor forgotten self.

Sunday 3 June

A letter this Friday, delivered into my hands by the widow Weldon’s son—! In it Tallie apologized for all it could not be. She said she understood that the best of letters were but fractions of fractions. She asked my pardon for having been prevented from offering a proper farewell and regretted that we’d traded one sort of anguish for another.

She said that houses deep in the backwoods always seem to feature something awful and unnatural in their loneliness, and were there only a ruined abbey, the view would be perfect. Their ramshackle roof shed water nicely in dry weather but they had to spread milk pans around the floor when it rained. Still, outside the kitchen there were already anemones and heart’s ease and even lovelier flowers, which her ignorance prevented her from naming. She joked that when it came to her new situation, it was only the resilience of her nature that allowed her to overcome such a dismal start.

She said that during what little time she had to herself Finney read to her from the New Testament, but that when it came to the Bible, he was familiar with many passages that had neither entered his understanding nor touched his heart.

She said she had enjoyed herself less these last few weeks than any other female who had ever lived. She said she could not account for her husband’s state of mind except her company being intensely disagreeable to him, and that if that were the case she was sorry for it.

She said that force alone would never have carried her to this spot but that she had been induced to act in support of the interest, happiness, and reputation of one she professed to love.

She said that as far as she might estimate we were now only eighty-five miles apart, but that she realized that poor people rarely visit.

She said she had always marveled that her name was so close to mine; didn’t I think it strange? Though as with most things, she said, it probably gave her a greater pleasure to tell me than it did me to hear.

She said it was so difficult to write of gratitude, but that she had to begin. She said my companionship had been a spacious community. She said she felt for me a tenderness closer than that of sisters, since her passion had all the honor of election. She said the memory she most cherished was of my turning to her that smile I wore when I saw that I was loved. She said she wished to see me more than she had any chance of making me understand. She said she was unsure what was to come, but that our occasions of joy and trust and care and courage would shine on us and protect us. She said that though the future seemed to admit no relief she would hold me by her fire until we found a season of hope and the beginnings of mercy. She said she had always believed in me. She offered again her heart’s thanks for all that I had given. She closed by pledging that any letter with which I responded would become her most closely guarded treasure, and would be preserved and returned to me in the event of her passing.

Cleaned out the shed, which was full of rusty and dusty rubbish. Washed windows and swept for the summer. Beneath it all, the irresistible current of the ongoing composition of my response. I will tell her that God caused this connection, and that what God has joined together let no man put asunder. I will tell her that I imagine the happiest of unions, of the sort in which two families previously at daggers-drawn are miraculously brought together on love’s account. I will tell her that our cardinals have come to love the acacia, on which I today counted twelve full branches in flower. I’ll describe for her our sudden wealth of fireflies, blown about in the evening breezes.

Fourteen dollars from the sale of our milk and butter.

Tuesday 5 June

A letter to Dyer from Finney informing him that Finney’s wife died on Thursday the 24th of May in the full enjoyment of her Christian faith. She was taken on a Wednesday and gone on Thursday. Her husband said he wished all to know that her last prayers were to God to help her love His will even in her bitterness.

Thursday 7 June

Bleary and short of breath from the laudanum. I wake weeping, retire weeping, stand before my various duties weeping. Dyer takes the implements from my hands and finishes whatever tasks I’ve begun. I still move about the house as though performing in their appointed order my various offices.

He has conveyed my accusations to the sheriff, who was finally induced to visit. Despite some hours without the laudanum I was befogged and wild with anger and grief and the sheriff was left unsettled and wary at my state. Even so he claims to have satisfied himself in person after a two-day ride and interviews with both the bereaved husband and the sheriff of Oneida County that there has been an absence of foul play.

Monday 11 June

Took the wagon and rode to see Finney myself. Dyer refused to permit my departure and then refused to accompany me and then caught up to the cart just at the end of our property and climbed aboard. We were the very picture of anguish, rattling along side by side. A quiet but heavy rain persisted the entire second day.

The house even for that country had a wild and lonely situation. No one answered Dyer’s knock or call but the door was ajar and when he pushed it to, Finney was sunk in a chair in the middle of the room, facing us. He seemed unsurprised at our appearance and asked us our business.

At Dyer’s silence I gathered enough resolve to overcome my fear and said that we had come in order to learn what had happened to Tallie.

He said he thought that might have been our errand. He said he’d heard us arriving and had taken us for the tin knocker and had brought out all the pails and kettles that needed mending.

It was a hideously dark and dirty kitchen and it grieved me to think of Tallie among its spiders and yellow flies. I asked again for his account and he offered us nothing more than he had offered the sheriff. He remained in his chair and we remained in the doorway. He made no move to light a second lamp.

I said I had ridden three days for more particulars and that I would not leave without more particulars. He said he was not concerned with my desires. None of us said anything further and a mouse scuttled across the floor. He looked at Dyer with contempt. He related, finally, that Tallie had taken a chill and had continued ill for two days. He said he’d treated her with among other remedies a tea of soot and pine-tree roots, which had had some good effect, but that sickness always tests our willingness to bow before the greatest Authority.

He said nothing more after that. I was weeping such that I could barely see. I asked to view her grave and he said he had buried her up in the woods. I asked him to show me the location and he said that if he found us anywhere else on his land once we left his porch we would see what would happen. Dyer told him sharply that there was no cause for threats and that he should keep a civil tongue. He took my arm to lead me out and I pulled free and asked Finney how he lived with himself. He said he’d been sleeping well except for some rheumatism of the knees. He came onto the porch once we were seated on the wagon, and said that on the final day, Tallie had been able to sit up a little, with help, and that her expression at the very end had reminded him of the last afflictions of Mrs. Manning’s little girl, who had suffered so with her burns. And I could see on his face that he could see on mine the effect he had desired.

Sunday 24 June

A cut on my hand from a paring knife. Dyer at work in the barn. Night after night we enact our separation. Anxiety is now his family, and discord his home. Dark spirits his company. Captious dignity and moonlit tears his two prevailing states. This love he seeks to win back he fails to apprehend would be only the hulk of a wrecked affection, fitted with new sails.

There is no more uphill business than farming. The most fortunate of us persist without prospering.

Carried off in the night by the immensity of what we promise ourselves and fail.

At one point during Tallie’s last visit she expressed regret that I had never crossed the fields to visit her. I imagined telling her of my midnight expedition with the spyglass, but refrained. I joked instead about the need to preserve one’s self-respect, and the way I sometimes seemed to believe the only safety to be within. She’d had to look away, as though sharing my shame. Finally she’d said she always feared that she called misfortune down onto those she loved because of her intemperance, and that that thought on occasion had terrorized her. After another silence she asked if I didn’t think it eloquent that I had contributed nothing in response to her remark. I told her that I could not imagine what more we could do for each other, and she answered that the imagination could always be cultivated. And in the interval that followed, her fingers intertwined with mine but her silence was like the sight of a leafless tree in an arbor everywhere else blooming green.

Found Dyer in the late afternoon sitting beside Nellie’s gravestone. Sat with him in the dry grass. As though it were someone else’s I reread the poem I composed for her epitaph: One sweet flower has bloomed and faded / One dear infant voice has fled / One sweet bud the grave has shaded / One sweet girl O now is dead.

After dark across our upper fields I walked over the hills for the wide wide view. I stood there with my child’s face and my selfish love. I imagined my Tallie in that home that had lived mostly in our thoughts. I imagined myself not governed by the fear that holds the wretch in order. I imagined my response to her crying, “What do I know about you at this moment? Nothing!” I imagined cherishing a life touched with such alchemy. I imagined the story of a girl made human. I imagined Tallie’s grave, forsaken and remote. I imagined banishing forever those sentiments that she chastened and refined. I imagined everyone I knew sick to the point of death. I imagined a creature even more slow-hearted than myself. I imagined continuing to write in this ledger, here; as though that were life; as though life were not elsewhere.