In a strangely cold tone, Ruth said, “The baby was born dead. We have wrapped it for burial. You will need to dig a grave for it, Owen. Do it now” she said.
I cleared my throat and said, “And Susan? How is she?”
Mary spoke then. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure. Do as Ruth said, Owen. Dig the grave. Susan will be fine. The midwife from Timbuctoo was over to tend her and left only a short while ago. She knows all the old remedies, and Susan has been treated by them. The baby has no name, but we need to bury it, so we can say our prayers for it. Lyman may want to make a marker, but there’s no need. It never drew breath,” she said, and added, almost as afterthought, “It was a baby boy.”
Throughout, Lyman had not made a sound or a move from the door. He stood there now, immobile and as silent as when he had come in. I had tears running down my cheeks, yet his eyes were dry and cool, his face impassive. My body was hot with rage, and I could barely keep it still, but Lyman stood with his hands slack at his sides. He was more a carved block of ice in the dead of winter than a man. He held himself like that and regarded his wife with strange placidity, as if he had come upon her sleeping and did not want to waken her but merely wished to watch her awhile without her knowing.
Finally, Susan said in a voice that was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry, Lyman.”
He twisted his lips as if to clear his mouth of an unpleasant taste, and when a few seconds of painful silence had passed, he said, “It was not meant to be.” And then abruptly he turned and departed from the house.
I followed him out the door, still shaking with what I thought was rage and grief. Unable to say anything useful or comforting to Susan, still unable even to pray, I proceeded at once to follow my stepmother Mary’s order to dig a grave for the infant. That would be my use. Then, before I had reached the barn, Lyman came riding out on Adelphi.
I reached up and grabbed the bridle and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Timbuctoo.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to put my cabin straight.”
“What? Why do that now? I don’t understand.”
He would not look at me. “I’ll be back in a few days, and I’ll be taking Susan then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying what I’m saying.”
“But you can’t leave,” I said. “She needs to be here, and she needs to have you with her.”
“No. She and I need to be amongst our own people. I don’t want to have to explain it to you, Owen. But it ain’t right for us to be living here anymore with you Browns. There’s too much gone wrong for us since we moved over here, so we’re going to go on back now, soon as Susan’s ready to travel that far.”
“No,” I declared. “You can’t do that.”
He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t know that you can stop me, Owen, since that’s what I’m determined to do.”
“This is Father’s horse you’re riding” I said, as if that would stop him. It seemed to me almost unthinkable, that he would remove Susan and himself from our house and return to their bare little cabin in Timbuctoo. Did he think that we had cursed him, had put a hex on him?
He looked down at me with irritation and something like pity on his face. “Fine,” he said, and he swung down from the horse to the ground, handed me the reins, and walked away. I stood there holding the horse and watched in silence as he strode across the yard to the road, then down the road in the direction of the African settlement, until he was finally gone from sight.
When I returned the horse to its stall in the barn, Watson was there, brushing down the other Morgan. “I thought Lyman went off on Adelphi,” he said. “What’s the matter? He was weird.”
“Yes, well, there’s bad news” I said. “Susan’s baby, it was born dead.” His bright face suddenly went slack and pale. He said nothing, simply stood there with the brush in his hand, open-mouthed and silent, as if he had been hit in the chest and had lost his breath.
“I need help digging the grave, Wat,” I said. “Will you come with me?” I had picked up the spade and pick and stood by the door.
“Yes, sure. Oh, this is pretty terrible for them, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s terrible.”
“Is Susan all right?”
“Yes. She’ll be fine in a few days.”
“What about Lyman?”
“Lyman’s upset, but he’ll be all right.”
“Where was he off to on Adelphi?”
“Stop asking questions,” I said, handing him the pick. “Just follow me; we’ll dig the grave.”
He shrugged his bony shoulders, grabbed up the pick, and traipsed along behind me, a pair of gravediggers on a cold, gray, drizzling dawn.
A hundred rods or so beyond the house, in a clearing near a stand of birches, my brother Watson and I dug a deep hole in the wet, rocky soil. Afterwards, I built a small pine box and into it placed the tiny body of the infant wrapped in a plain, earth-colored scrap of wool and nailed it shut. We never saw the infant itself; only its humble shroud. Then Watson and I lowered the box into the hole and filled it and covered the opening in the ground with sod. It would remain unmarked. And by the time we came seven weeks later to bury Mary’s and Fathers unnamed infant in its unmarked grave, the grass had grown tall over the first grave, and daisies were blooming there, and you could not see where it had been. Although I knew exactly where the first grave was located and saw it clearly, as if there were a tall, engraved marble stone at its head:
Unnamed Baby, born to Susan & Lyman Epps “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”
I Corinthians 15:51
It was a terrible time then, with the baby born dead and with Lyman and Susan gone off to live amongst the Negroes in Timbuctoo and with Mary’s own birthing date fast approaching — in itself not upsetting, even to me, but it meant that Father would soon be coming to North Elba, which now, more than ever before, filled me with nameless dread. Why was his coming so dreadful? He was my father. I loved him. I believed that I had done nothing wrong.
I could only say to myself that it had to do with the disarray that I saw all around, and I knew he would see it the second he drew up before the house — the Old Man could smell disorder in the air — and in short order he would set everything right again. Humiliating me. Even so, I felt strangely paralyzed, and my anticipation of his coming only seemed to make it worse.
Spring planting went ahead, but it was more Watson’s and Salmon’s doing than mine, and it was done in a desultory fashion; and though we continued to clear back the forest at a fairly good rate, cutting and burning and pulling stumps off nearly a half-acre of ground a week, we did it sloppily — unscientifically, Father would say — like hired laborers without a foreman. And the house was falling into steady disrepair, as we could not seem to find the time or the energy or the wit to repair the damage done to the roof and chimneys by the winter winds and ice.