“TELL ME ABOUT SILAS,” ISAAC asked Patience one night, some weeks later. She found herself stunned by the question. It’s not that she and Isaac didn’t speak; they did. Quite easily at times about their children, “former” spouses, and such. But most days they were too tired to talk and they both liked silence, didn’t feel the need to fill it, the way their neighbors did. Compared to Monroe and Serah, their cohabitation had been largely uneventful. Isaac was a considerate and kind housemate, whose calm temperament often matched hers. Most evenings after they ate, he often helped her with her carding or sewing, and before sleeping, they both spent a good deal of time praying. Separately, of course, as their traditions were different, but he never mocked her the way the others sometimes did. Thinking she was haughty now or putting on airs for not wanting to go out into the woods with them like she used to. He let her be.
And when he was tending to his own spirit ways, he sometimes allowed her to watch. It reminded her of her father. The bowls of water, the symbols and figures he drew in the dirt floor of the cabin.
When she made the mistake of mentioning it to the lone other Louisiana Catholic among the neighboring folk, the woman told her she should report his bedevilment to the Lucys. That if she wasn’t going to work to convert him, she should do everything in her power to get out of that house. Patience nodded to get the woman to shut up, but she knew she had no interest in either of those things. She would never report him to the Lucys, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to the cabin with Junie and Lulu.
It startled her now, this question of his. So much so, her fingers faltered, and she had to yank out the last two stitches that she had sewn and do them over again. “Why you want to hear about him?”
“’Cause I want you to see something,” he said. He sat on the floor, weaving the base of a basket, plaiting thick strands of fever grass.
Patience tried to speak, but she couldn’t. The lump in her chest moved up into her throat. She sucked in air and blew it back out. “I can’t.”
“Close your eyes and try.”
Patience put down her sewing and shut her eyes. She sat there a moment, just trying to breathe. In and out, in and out, then a deeper breath, in and out. The dark expanded, the room growing wide around her. She could feel a breeze now, hot rays of sun heating up her skin. A warm concentrated weight in the middle of her back. The boy’s breath on her neck, babbling just beneath her ear. She was in that old Louisiana widow’s yard, hanging wet clothes on the line. Silas hitched to her spine by a piece of cloth tied around her chest.
In an instant, he was older, now in the Lucys’ yard. She was hanging clothes again and she let him put his feet atop hers, and cling to her legs as she moved down the line. He’d laugh and hang on, then fall off, begging to do it again. “C’mon, Ma, again.”
“Just one more time and then you got to help. Alright?” she heard herself say.
“Yes, Ma.”
He climbed on again, and she could feel him there, his small hands clutching her legs, his head thrown back and laughing. A glorious song.
“You act like he’s gone gone. He still here,” Isaac said, his voice breaking through the reverie. “Our dead don’t leave us.”
When she finally opened her eyes a good while later, the room was dark and still. She stood up slowly. “Isaac,” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said. He relit the fire in the hearth. “You alright?”
“Believe so.”
“Good. Go to sleep. If you have questions, they can wait ’til sunup.”
She did have questions, but she was too tired to argue. She felt barely awake, barely alive even, as if she were conducting this conversation from somewhere else entirely. She lay down on her pallet and pulled her covers over her head, her mind already drifting. Her limbs felt heavy, but everything else inside her was so light, it seemed likely to float away.
Isaac tried to explain it to her the next day, but most of it was lost in translation. He knew of no equivalent in English, so he told her in Fula. She didn’t understand the words, but some sense of it became clear.
“A door was opened” was all she really understood, but she wasn’t sure how or why. When Sunday rolled around, she set out to make a treat for Silas. She traded a neighboring woman a gill of oats and a thin slice of bacon for two thimblefuls of freshly tapped maple syrup and a small tin of flour.
Back at the cabin, she got a fire going in the hearth, then proceeded to make real biscuits. She combined the flour, salt, and water into a stiff mixture. There was only enough batter for about four biscuits, but that would be fine, she figured, as she set them all in the hearth to bake.
Once done, she set out two bowls and put a hot biscuit in each one. The other two, she wrapped up in a cloth and set them aside for Isaac. A pang of guilt stabbed her in the side as Jacob’s face flashed quickly across her mind. No. The act of setting food aside was as sisterly as it was wifely. Nothing more.
She shook off the bad feeling and returned to the two bowls, steam rising from the flaky brown bread. She cut both biscuits open and drizzled each with syrup.
Placing one bowl at the end of the table, she sat down at the opposite end, placing the second bowl in front of her. “If only I got some butter, huh, Silas?” she said. “But I know you won’t be able to resist either way.” She laughed and closed her eyes until she could feel him there, faint but warm.
“We thank the Good Lord for this food. And this company.”
She picked up her biscuit and bit into it. A delightful sweetness flooded her mouth, her chest. She savored each bite, chewing slowly. She sat there, longer still, ’til the warmth of Silas’s presence faded.
She rose slowly. She cleaned her dishes and utensils, while leaving Silas’s plate undisturbed a little while longer. She’d have to ask Isaac to teach her more about his spirit ways. This small bit he had shared with her had already loosened something inside her.
How full she felt now. So different from when she performed those rites and rituals she’d brought from Louisiana. How pressed down they had always made her feel. Emptied. Hollowed out. That was fine before, but she wanted something else now. Something fuller and sweeter.