This end of the garden is—like the seedlings the women are planting in its plowed, hoed, fertilized, raked rows—beautiful in its potential, and already the carrots have put up lacy plumes, and the first umbrella leaves of squash are unfurled. Miriam stands near the gate. She gives Stephen a cold look as she takes the flat. “About time.”
I put in, “About time for the tar paper, too. Sorry to be so slow.”
She shrugs. “Put them down. We’ll take care of them later.” Then she turns away, takes the flat along the row to Enid and Grace.
I prop the squares against a fence post, take a deep breath of the musty perfume of the earth, and remember the seasons I’ve spent here coaxing out the green miracles with hard work. This was Rachel’s garden. This was my garden. Yet now I am unnecessary here.
I start down the slope toward the house. Stephen joins me, walks silently beside me for a while, then at length he speaks. “Miriam says you hate her, you know.”
Startled, I stop, search his face. He said it so matter-of-factly, so indifferently, yet what I see in his hooded eyes is bewilderment.
“Stephen, did Miriam tell you that?”
“No, not me. I heard her talking to Grace yesterday in the garden.”
Of course. If it can be said that we have a gossip in our community, it is Grace. And if one wishes to convey anything to the community without doing so personally, one has only to tell Grace.
I turn and continue toward the house. Miriam is experimenting in manipulation and propaganda. She isn’t subtle, but here she doesn’t need to be. Damn her.
“Mary?” Stephen kicks at dandelion heads as he walks.
“It’s all right, Stephen. Don’t worry.”
“Do you hate her?”
And that’s the question I asked myself only hours ago, but my feelings aren’t as simple as an affirmative or negative would indicate.
“I wonder why Miriam would say that, Stephen. And how she feels about me.”
We have no further opportunity to discuss the matter. Little Mary and Jonathan are coming around the corner from the house, each carefully balancing a flat of seedlings. Stephen says, “I’d better hurry and get another flat up to the garden.”
“Yes, you go ahead.” I watch him jog toward Mary and Jonathan, stop to exchange a few bantering words with them. They part laughing.
By early afternoon the last rain clouds have vanished, the sun is striking rainbows on every blade of rain-dewed grass, and the air is as clear as a drop of water. I’ve draped the chairs on the deck with blankets. The wood is still damp, but I don’t want to sit inside now and waste this crystalline afternoon. Shadow curls napping at my feet, and Falstaff, the old yellow tabby, has taken up residence in my lap, purring while I stroke his broad, amber back. He seldom plays the lap cat, but apparently he finds my lap in this sunny place acceptable.
I listen to the omnipresent rumble of the surf, watch the foam-laced breakers curl and spill in white avalanches, but I’m thinking about Miriam, about rumors of hate, about candles for reading. There’s so little time for the children to read, especially in spring and summer when the tasks necessary to survival take up most of the daylight hours. If Miriam won’t let Stephen read at night by candlelight, he’s left only a short time after evening services before he goes to bed.
And Miriam is well aware of that. She doesn’t want him—or any of the children—to read. Except the Bible. For her that one book is the fount of all wisdom. It is all she will tolerate in the way of wisdom.
The other adults are more tolerant, but it is the tolerance of indifference. They follow Jerry’s lead in that. He sees no harm in my teaching the children, nor is he particularly interested in what I teach them. He did, after all, give his word.
But if it ever comes to a choice between me and Miriam—rather, as Jerry will see it, between me and peace in the family—I wonder how tolerant he will be.
And the family peace is fraying. I felt it at midday meal. Uneasy pauses in the conversation, uncertain glances exchanged.
Or is that only a projection of my own tension? Certainly Jerry was his usual ebullient self, eating heartily of chicken stew, peas, and potato cakes thick with butter, while he talked about the cedars he found up the Styx, which will provide good lumber for the addition to the north wing.
Shadow lifts her head, looks northward, and I see Stephen and Isaac coming around the corner of the house. They don’t bother to go to the steps at the south end of the deck, but climb over the railing. Stephen waits to offer Isaac a helping hand, then as they approach me he says, “Miriam said Isaac should rest for a while. Is it all right if he stays with us for the lesson?”
No doubt Miriam is making Isaac her innocent spy. “Of course, it’s all right. Isaac, why don’t you go in and get a chair.”
He boosts himself onto the railing. “This’ll be all right.”
Stephen gestures toward the empty chair. “You sit there, Isaac.”
Isaac shrugs, gets off the railing, stops to pet Falstaff. The cat rouses, annoyed, and leaves my lap, venting his choler with a swipe at Shadow’s nose as he departs. Shadow only draws back and growls, then resumes her nap. Isaac laughs, and that brings on a spate of coughing, which he ignores as he settles in the chair.
Stephen winces at the dry hacking, then turns to me. I think he’d like to talk about Miriam, about my feelings for her, hers for me, but he is constrained by Isaac’s presence. He asks, “Did you and Rachel ever go on another journey to look for survivors?”
I would also like to finish our discussion about Miriam. I don’t like to leave it unresolved in Stephen’s mind, but I’m equally constrained. “No, Stephen. That one trek was lesson enough. It taught us our limitations and forced us into certain decisions.”
“You mean like preserving the books?”
“Yes. Our legacy.”
Isaac asks, “What’s a legacy, Mary?”
“Well, it’s a sort of gift. A gift to future generations.”
Stephen perches on the railing. “Jeremiah said when Grandpa Luke was on his deathbed he told him Rachel had a divine mission to save the books.”
I nod, thinking how deceptions stick like burrs to your skirts. Luke held the secret so many years, but I encouraged Jeremiah to divulge it. It served my purposes.
“Rachel and I considered it the most important thing in our lives. Yet it was so slow. Time, that’s what we were shortest on. And wax. The bees only produced so much every year, and we needed most of it for candles.”
“Wax?” Stephen asks. “How did you use wax?”
“To seal the books. First we wrapped each one in aluminum foil—we had a lot of that from our scavenging—then we covered the foil with melted beeswax. We applied it with Rachel’s bristle brushes, the same ones she used for her encaustic paintings.”
“Oh, yes.” Then he adds: “I don’t think I really understand some of her pictures.”
“You mean the abstracts. Maybe because they aren’t pictures; they’re paintings. I think what she was trying to say is that things aren’t always what they seem, but they’re all interrelated.”
“I think the pictures are pretty,” Isaac insists.
Stephen laughs at that, then: “Mary, what did you do after you covered the foil with wax?”
“Well, when the wax was a quarter of an inch thick, we wrapped each book in another layer of foil to protect the wax. Our packaging was at least watertight. We experimented with a couple of duplicates.” I look north toward the vault. Its brick and stone and cedar seem so solid, so steadfast, but time and weather can destroy mountains.