Josephine didn’t dislike J. M. Bridges. In fact, she found him interesting and amusing, with his odd mixture of naiveté and enthusiasm. Still, she couldn’t help but resent him as well. His easy assumption of expert knowledge, the idea that a man from the East could sashay in and lecture them all on the uses of the river—it might have seemed comical if it hadn’t been so stupid. But she had dealt with condescending ignoramuses all her life, so there was nothing surprising about it.
As for his obvious infatuation—another unsurprising bit of nonsense. She didn’t know how many Walter Scott novels he’d been reading, but she had no intention of playing the rustic maiden to his wandering knight.
Still his impending arrival for Sunday dinner made her uneasy. For as long as she could remember, Sundays were days of freedom in Daybreak, no common meals, no community meetings, just quiet time for individual pursuits. Some villagers rode into town for church; some stayed home and rested. For Josephine, it was a day to take walks if weather permitted, to read and mend. With Christmas approaching, she had hoped to spend some time making gifts for the children of the town. But instead she would be sweeping, cooking, and thinking up conversation topics to keep this visitor amused. Of all the adjectives in the language, “amusing” was the one to which she least aspired.
Memories of her stepfather, Michael Flynn, had faded through the years, and she was no longer sure which were actual memories and which were imaginings and retellings. She had been in the room when he struck her mother; she remembered that well enough. And she remembered slashing him with a kitchen knife when he had refused to let someone go for help. The memory made her smile despite its grimness. Seven years old, and already one of the toughs.
What she remembered most vividly about him, though, was not any particular incident, but the smug, proprietary air with which he ordered them around, and the cold dread that she carried inside, morning through night, like a block of ice under her breastbone. No doubt her mother had her reasons for marrying him, but Josephine would be damned if she’d ever allow a man to act the owner with her.
On Saturday her unease would not let her rest. She walked the village a while, aimless, ending up at Pettibone’s house at the far south end of town. Pettibone’s boy Jeff sat on the front step, eking out a tune on a cut-down banjo. Josephine sat beside him.
“What’s the song?” she said.
“‘Arkansas Traveler.’ You know it?” He was his father’s boy, a tangle of blonde hair that pointed in all directions of the compass, and a splatter of freckles over his face.
“Oh, sure.” A limberjack was lying on the porch a couple of feet away. Josephine picked it up and straightened out its tangled strings. “This your sister’s?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“She’s going to catch it if her mother sees her toys scattered all around.”
Jeff Pettibone grinned. “Already has. She’s out doing my chores today.” “Well, you play, and I’ll sing, and I’ll see if I can make this little guy dance. Does he have a name?”
“Susie calls him Jumping Jimmy.”
“All right, Jumping Jimmy, do a jig for us.”
The boy’s playing was painfully slow, and he missed as many notes as he hit. But Josephine sang along, trying her best to make the puppet dance by rhythmic slapping of the flexible stick beneath its feet. But it had been a long time since she’d played with a limberjack, and she couldn’t quite keep him jumping.
“Once upon a time in – Ar-kan – saw . . . “
Jeff reached for a note.
“An old man sat in his little cabin door . . . “
“Fetch the doctor!” Jeff cried in mock alarm. “Jumping Jimmy’s havin’ a fit!”
“You just play,” Josephine said with a laugh. “I’ll take care of Jimmy.” Jeff clenched his tongue between his teeth and stared at the neck of his banjo as if to tame it.
“And fiddled up a tune that he played by ear, a jolly little tune that we’ve heard . . . be . . . fore.”
At the end of the verse Jeff collapsed over his banjo in exhaustion. “This is hard!”
“Nothing worthwhile ever comes without effort,” Josephine said. “I expect your folks have told you that.”
“Every day,” he said wearily.
Pettibone’s wife Jenny came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron. “Hello,” she said. “If I had known you were out here I would have asked you in.”
She wasn’t that much older than Josephine, nine or ten years, but she carried an air of age and fatigue as if she were from an entirely different generation. The life of marriage and child rearing, Josephine supposed. She liked Jenny, but always sensed in her the instinctive mistrust of the married for the unmarried.
“That’s all right,” Josephine said. “I was just roaming around.”
“Wish I had the time to go roaming around,” Jenny said. “But with this lot there’s always something to tend.”
Josephine wanted to leap to her own defense—didn’t she do enough for the colony? Wasn’t caring for her mother its own kind of labor? But she held her tongue. “Charley said you told ’em good up at the silver mine,” Jenny said, as if in apology for her tone.
“I said what I could,” Josephine replied. “I doubt if it will have much long-lasting effect.”
“You did your bit,” Jenny said. “That’s all any of us can do.” She turned her attention to Jeff. “Come on, you. There’s plenty to do.”
Josephine suddenly felt infantile, sitting on the porch with a toy in her hand. She handed it to Jeff and stood up. “Give that to Susie when her mother says it’s all right to.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll be along now.”
“Won’t you stay a little longer?” Jenny said. “Coffee’s on the stove.” And now Josephine heard something else in her voice, not the reflexive semi-hostility of a moment before, but something almost desperate, the desire to talk about something other than chores or cleaning, about bigger things, the life of the community and the world beyond the community. Josephine didn’t think of herself as someone worthy of envy, but she was envied nonetheless.
And yet—
And yet there was no satisfaction in being the object of someone’s misplaced envy. What Jenny saw as her freedom, she saw as merely a different-shaped box.
“Thanks, no,” she said. “I should be—” She had nothing with which to finish the sentence, so she simply stood up, brushed off her skirt, and walked away without speaking. Better an awkward silence than a polite lie.
Instead of returning the way she came, Josephine walked away from Daybreak, south to where the road brushed the bluffs alongside the river and then opened out again into a new valley.
What she wanted, she thought as she walked, was neither to be envious nor envied, both low goals at best. What she wanted was to have done something worthy of being envied. Just one big thing to mark her life, or to make her mark on life, and be able to say, “There. I was a part of that.” Charley Pettibone, Charlotte Turner, even her mother, all had the founding of Daybreak and then the war. Whatever they thought of the war, they had been there, and it was their experience, and no one could take it from them. Scolding a couple of money men over a day’s loss of water hardly matched up. Not that she wanted a war—just something, anything, that would make a milestone in the endless line of days, months, and years. Was she born to live and die in Daybreak? It wasn’t the worst of fates, but if it was to be hers then she hoped for something of significance to come of it.
Before she knew it she had walked halfway to French Mills, and there was Masterson’s farm, with its newly painted barn and that preacher, Braswell, out in front of it setting up a second hitching rail beside the old one. She had not meant to walk this far, but here she was.
“Young miss,” Braswell called. “Coming to church tomorrow?”
“I think not,” Josephine said.
“And why is that?”
“Because I think not,” she answered.
“I recognize your voice,” Braswell said. “You’re the woman who guided us across the river in the darkness when we first came here. Josephine, they call you. I’ve been praying about you.”
“I didn’t guide you across the river, as you’ll recall, although it makes for a fine retelling.”
He faced her and laid his hammer on the crossbar of the hitching rail. “The Lord’s Barn gets fuller every week. Several of your townsfolk come for the message. Some come to mock and stay to praise.” He gestured to his tools. “I spend the week making benches and fixtures.”
“Bully for you,” Josephine said.
He leaned toward her. “Why so cynical, miss? People are hungry for the Word. Is that such an offense?”
Josephine blushed. He was right. What had this man ever done to her to make her feel so suspicious? Still, the notion of being prayed over by a complete stranger felt invasive. She turned to leave.
Braswell moved closer. “I have been given the gift of discernment. I didn’t ask for it, but it was given to me nonetheless. And here’s what I discern.” He closed his eyes, and his muttonchops bobbed up and down as he worked his jaw. Josephine looked away, but the spectacle of him entering his trance, or whatever it was, compelled her gaze. When he opened his eyes again, it was with a look so fierce, so intractable, that she almost felt afraid. But she was not going to flinch, whatever it took.
“You have been given the gift of beauty in face and figure,” he said in a soft tone. “And you have been given the gift of a bright and inquisitive mind. But the sons of men, being low and base, see only the beauty of form and not the inward brightness. This failure of spirit has made you hard and suspicious. But I want to tell you, sister—”
He reached out and took her by the shoulders. The movement was not surprising, but it was altogether too familiar, and Josephine wanted to tell him to let her go. But she didn’t.
“God has a plan for you,” Braswell continued. “Perhaps that is what I was led here to reveal. But you have to be open to it. Be open and ready in prayerful waiting. God’s plans are never frivolous.”
Josephine turned away from him and walked up the road to Daybreak, walked at a pace that was nearly a run, and didn’t look back. She didn’t want this strange and unsettling man to see the tears in her eyes and the fear on her face.