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“HOW MANY COUNCIL chairs have there been down through the years?” Carol asked.
We all looked at Sadie, who started listing them. “First, of course, there was Homer. Then John. His son was Jerrod Silas—they named him for his great-uncle.”
“That must have pleased Silas no end,” Carol said.
Sadie nodded, but it was Rebecca Jo who took up the list. “Ketchum was the next one.”
“Ketchum,” Carol said. “Wasn’t he the one who had the two older brothers who died saving the church doors?”
“Right. Henry and Jason they were. After Ketchum, uh.” Rebecca Jo paused, searching her memory and apparently coming up short.
“Tobe,” Sadie said.
"How do you spell that?" Carol asked. "Somebody mentioned him earlier—Melissa maybe?—and I wondered at the time."
"T-o-b-e."
"Why isn’t it pronounced Toby," Easton asked. "With two syllables instead of one?"
"It just isn’t." Sadie kept up her litany. “Tobe’s son was Morgan, the one whose lower jaw was so badly injured during the Civil War, and Morgan’s son was Obadiah.”
“Then Leon and Hubbard,” Rebecca Jo finished. “How many was that?”
Pat held up nine fingers. “I was counting.”
“And I plan to be the next one,” Ida said, “since I’m the only one in the whole list—except for Homer—who actually descended from a Martin.”
“Anybody want some fudge?” Tom’s voice rang from the bottom of the stairs.
“Fudge?" Glaze headed that way. "Where’d you get fudge?”
He appeared in the doorway and swept her into an enveloping hug. “Your husband the chef figured out how to cook fudge on top of a wood stove.”
“But,” Amanda sounded a bit scandalized, “what about supper?”
“Life is short,” Sadie said. “Eat dessert first."
That settled it.
“The sketches,” Dee said. “Don’t forget to take the sketches."
"But don’t let anybody drip fudge on them," Rebecca Jo ordered.
––––––––
THE FUDGE WAS A ROUSING success, and we women spent so much time talking about all our discoveries in the attic that we didn’t pay much attention to the lessening light as late afternoon turned into dusk. I did take a few moments to light tall tapers down the middle of the table. At this rate I was going to run out of candles really soon.
"How many candles," I asked the group, "do you suppose they needed over the course of a year?"
Maddy for once looked blank. I guess she hadn’t researched anything like that, so I shifted my gaze to Carol.
"Between three and four hundred per family," she said, "although they probably used a lot fewer than that when they were traveling here."
"Why?" Maddy of course was the one who asked.
"Think about it. In Brandtburg, they needed candles in their dark houses. Windows were small back then, so they didn’t let in much light to begin with. Then, at night and in hard weather they would have been shuttered, so the need for candles would be greater. Once everybody was out camping along the trail, though, they’d have the sun."
"So," Father John said, "they’d need the candles only in the evenings."
Carol disagreed. "In the evenings, they probably had cook fires large enough to light the whole clearing."
"Sounds like that was a good thing," Sadie said. "I’d hate to consider how much of a mess sun-melted candles would make in the bottom of a trunk."
Carol nodded. "They couldn’t possibly have stock-piled enough candles at the beginning of the journey to last for four years."
"I doubt they knew it would take that long, anyway," Henry said.
"So," Esther said, "they must have stopped along the way to make candles, wouldn’t you say?"
"Either that," I said, "or they just ran out and made do. It probably wasn’t easy to find beehives along the way."
I like the beehives. They sound like singing.
"Moose fat," Doc said. "Wasn’t there something about moose fat candles in one of the Mary Frances diaries?"
"And if I remember correctly," Glaze said, "Mary Frances said they stank to high heaven."
"Then Carol’s probably right," Bob said. "They must have relied mostly on the light from the campfires."
Henry gestured down the table toward Bob. "Would you pass those sketches back here? I’d like to take another look at them."
Maddy picked up another pair of gloves and the sketches as well. She walked them around the table to where Henry sat, waited for him to don the gloves, and then handed the drawings to him. "Be careful."
"Yes, Ma’am."
Every once in a while he’d hold up a sketch and comment on it.
We lingered over the Silas sketches, marveling at their precision and warmth.
"I wonder if he ever sketched these wedding couples after they got a lot older," Rebecca Jo mused. "People age, you know."
I heard Charlie expel a puff of air from between tight lips. She could be as sarcastic as she wanted, but someday she’d find out what it was like to get wrinkles and a saggy tummy.
~ ~ ~
MAY 1771
SILAS MARTIN WAS delighted that Parley and Brand had adjusted so well to married life. As many times as he and Louetta had shared a table with the two of them in the past three years, he never tired of watching the careful, always discreet, touches of a hand or an arm and the dear glances the young people seemed to pass back and forth like a loaf of warm bread fresh from the oven by the hearth.
Their affection for each other warmed his old heart. This cottage might be small, but it was filled with joy.
As he so often did, he pushed back from the table and retired to the chair that seemed to suit him best of all. The light from the fire was good here, and he could set his heavy leather case across his lap and draw while the women did their after-meal chores and Brand worked on the plans for his latest project.
When the women joined them, Louetta took her accustomed place just on the other side of the large fireplace, while their daughter-in-law settled into the chair beside her spinning wheel. The whir of the growing spool of yarn as it twirled merrily was like to put Silas to sleep. He shook himself and set to work drawing these three people who were the cornerstones of his life.
His wife’s face was half-illuminated by the fire, and he sketched the shadows almost more than the part of her face he could clearly see. It was a most unusual composition, and he was uncertain whether anyone would care for it. As he added in his daughter-in-law’s face—Parley sat full-on to the fire, so there were few shadows there—he saw with delight that the variations between his rendering of the older woman and the younger made a most pleasing contrast.
What to do with Brand now? Silas studied his step-son for several minutes before he chose to portray the boy—the man, really, but Silas would always see the boy in Brand’s face—half-way between the two women. Brand’s flyaway hair caught light and shadows. His face, which had lengthened so from the rounded freshness of youth, seemed to be lit from the fire on one side and from the reflection of the fire off Parley’s face on the other.
Tomorrow evening Silas and Louetta would go to the rooms where Louise and Frederick lived above the dry goods store. He would draw them as well and perhaps give the sketches to the two couples on the fourth of June, which would be the third anniversary of the double wedding ceremony Silas had so enjoyed.
As Silas and Louetta retired late that night, he wondered briefly if he would ever choose to ask Parley where she had gotten that wooden plate with the twining leaf design. It seemed unlikely that it had made it the long way from Brandtburg, but he could not be mistaken about the work of his own hands.
It was so very long ago, he decided, almost like another lifetime altogether. He had been young and foolish. Most likely Sophrona Blanchard had thrown it out as soon as he ceased calling on her. That would explain it. Someone had found the plate and kept it, not knowing its significance. After all, he had well-disguised the intertwined initials.
That still did not explain how it was that Parley and Brand had the plate, but Silas supposed it no longer mattered. He gathered his wife into his arms and kissed the top of her head before settling into sleep.
~ ~ ~
AFTER HENRY WAS THROUGH with the sketches, Reebok donned the gloves and went through them again.
You know how, sometimes, someone will sit so totally still that they become almost invisible, as if any casual sight lines headed their way bounce off and head in another direction? Charlie had been like that up in the attic, and Reebok was much the same way now. I found myself watching him as he looked at one of the Silas drawings. I sat a little taller in my seat so I could see which one it was. The happy one of Brand Tarkington carrying his little sister Louise—well, his half-sister—on his shoulders.
He reached up a gloved hand and wiped at his eyes.
“Are you okay, Reebok?”
No he is not.
He nodded at my quiet question and then shook his head and pushed the pile of drawings back toward the center of the table. “I had a little sister about that age.” His eyes tightened, and I wondered if he was going to burst into tears. It sure did look like it. Everyone had stopped moving. Almost stopped breathing.
“I used to carry her on my shoulders, just like,” he nodded at the sketch, “like that.”
I was so glad Sadie was sitting next to him. She laid her knobby, wrinkled hand on his. “You must miss her.”
This time Reebok’s head didn’t seem to know which way to bobble. “I used to visit her grave every day, and then it was once a week, and now it’s only every couple of months. I thought I’d gotten over it, sort of.”
Sadie was silent for several long moments. “That’s not something you get over, Reebok.” She turned to Easton on her other side. “Run upstairs, dear, and bring back the last—what is it?—volume three, I think.” Shifting in her seat, she smoothed a slight wrinkle in Reebok’s heavy wool sleeve, and I thought it was more a matter of letting him know he was being cared for than any need to spruce him up. Her instincts were right on.
He took her hand in his—I couldn’t help but notice how smooth his young skin looked next to her age spots—and hung on while tears spilled over and coursed down his cheeks. I took a clean hanky out of my left-hand pocket and handed it across the table to Sadie. She let it lie there, only pushing it a bit closer to Reebok with her free hand.
“She was five. She acted like she wasn’t feeling very well, so I took her on a picnic to cheer her up. Carried her on my”—he nodded toward the drawing again—“on my shoulders. We weren’t far from the house, but Mom was over checking on a friend of hers who’d been sick—she took them a casserole or something—and Dad was at work. We just went a couple of blocks to a grassy field on the edge of town. I had our picnic blanket and a couple of sandwiches in a duffle bag. Peanut butter, the creamy kind, she didn’t like the crunchy stuff. Grape jelly. And a bag of chips.”
His eyes had taken on that unfocused look of someone who was back in the past.
“I packed a can of orange soda for us to share. She only ate a few bites of her sandwich and then she ... she threw up all over the place. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to pat her on the tummy—that’s what my mom always did when I had a tummy ache—but she started screaming.”
Easton hurried in and took her seat. She set all the journals on the table in front of Sadie, right next to the unused hankie, and I was glad to see she’d put on a pair of the gloves.
“I picked her up and ran for home. Between her screaming and my yelling for Mom, you’d have thought the world was ending. In a way, I guess it was. All the neighbors came out to see what was going on.”
He shook his head slightly, noticed the hankie, and used it to wipe his eyes and blow his nose.
“I still have nightmares about it. They told us afterwards her appendix had ... had exploded. That’s the word they used.” His head was hung so low by this point I had trouble hearing his next words. “I ran as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough.”
I looked a question at Bob. Had he known about this? He frowned. No. I guess he hadn’t known.
“Mom and Dad and I never went on another picnic.”
Sadie winced. I think Reebok was squeezing her hand way too tightly, but she didn’t make a move to extricate herself. She knew too well the value of someone to hang onto.
After a few moments she gestured with her head to Ida. “Would you read that part about her first entry in six years? Just the first few sentences.”
Ida looked a question at Sadie, but picked up the third volume and paged through it.
13 July 1752
This is my first entry in more than six years. I take up this journal again to record glad tidings, the first of which is that when the sun rose this morning, I felt for the first time since the death—how I hate to write that word—since the death of my husband, that I am among the living myself. There seemed to be no particular reason for my change of heart this day except that perhaps it is time for me to move forward.
“It took Mary Frances six years,” Sadie said. “And look at me.” She ran her free hand down her bright pink sweatshirt and onto her dark blue sweatpants. “It took me half a century.”
Dave opened his mouth, but Pat nudged him. “Here.” She handed him the empty fudge container. “Help me get the table cleared off.”
Dee joined the two of them and they puttered around the kitchen for a bit. When I realized they were pulling a meal together, I tried to help, but Pat shooed me away, so I caught Bob’s eye and motioned toward the backyard. “Birdseed,” I mouthed.
He pushed his chair back as quietly as he could, and Amanda surprised me by standing up as well. "May I help, too, Biscuit?"
I nodded my thanks and she joined Bob and me in hauling bags from the pantry. They were getting considerably lighter. I hoped the ice would melt before we ran out of bird food.
And raccoon food.
I grabbed a thick scarf from the coatrack and wound it around my neck over the top of my parka.
Marmalade went along with us to the backyard, still slick from the day’s rain. Just behind the fence we could see bright raccoon eyes. There were two possums perched on top of the fence. It was nice to feel depended on.
"Possums never get rabies," Amanda said. "Did you know that?"
Bob nodded and started spreading the seed, but I was a bit surprised. "They don’t?"
"They can’t. I learned that from my grandmother. Something in their body chemistry." She tilted her head back and studied what few stars were peeking through the cloud cover. I glanced up and recognized Orion’s belt.
Can you hear the stars singing?
After a moment, I put the scoop back in the bag of safflower seeds and readjusted the scarf. "There’s so much about this world we don’t know."
"Sadie’s really wise, isn’t she?"
I wondered where this was leading. "Yes. She is."
"My grandmother was like that."
I made a noncommittal sound, while Bob opened the next seed bag.
"Until she was murdered."
"She ... she ... what?"
"She liked creamy peanut butter, too, like Reebok’s little sister. That was what reminded me. I haven’t thought about it in a long time."
I looked over at Bob. He shook his head, recognizing, no doubt, that Amanda wasn’t here with us in the backyard. She was somewhere else altogether.
She is here, but she is very sad.
One of the possums gave a funny snuffling sound, no doubt reminding us to move away from the seed. I touched Amanda’s arm and we moved up onto the side porch. She and I took the swing ...
Me too.
... and Bob sat in one of the rocking chairs. It was cold, but Amanda didn’t seem to notice her breath coming out in long streams. Marmalade’s breath formed little puffs that merged with Amanda’s.
"I was fifteen," she finally said. "I’d been over there—she lived across the street from us—just a couple of days before. We always baked cookies together, sugar cookies. And she’d tell me about what it was like growing up way back then."
I had to stifle a twitch. Way back then probably meant just a decade or so before I was born. Somehow this reminded me of the delight Sadie told me about, when little Charlie Ellis used to walk across the street to bake cookies with Sadie. "What happened, Amanda?"
"I ... I was supposed to go over there one afternoon, but I’d come down with a heavy cough, so my mom walked across the street to borrow some sort of cough syrup. The next thing I know, I hear screaming coming from Grandma’s front door. It was summer, and all the doors were open. I forgot about my cough and went running, but Mama grabbed me as I pelted up the porch steps. She didn’t catch me fast enough, though, to keep me from seeing the blood."
She was silent for a long, long time.
"It was after that that we moved down to Atlanta." She set one mittened hand on top of the other and started to knead. "My mom couldn’t stand being here any more."
Bob’s voice was so gentle when he asked, "Did they catch whoever did it?" That would have been before Bob’s time, back when his father was the town cop.
She nodded. "But that didn’t bring Grandma back."
I shifted on the swing seat so I was facing her more directly. "If you need a hug, I’m available."
Luckily, I’d thrown that thick soft scarf around my neck, so her cheek didn’t have to rest against cold wet parka fabric.
Bob sat quietly and waited until Amanda drew away from me.
"Thanks," she said. "I think I could use some of Reebok’s hot chocolate right about now."
––––––––
THE MOOD HAD LIGHTENED considerably by the time we got back inside and closed the squeaky door firmly behind us.
“Hey,” I said as soon as I saw what they were doing. “No fair. You were supposed to wait for us.”
Bob removed his gloves, shaking off the rain. “Huh?”
Amanda shook off her mittens and walked over to Reebok, who headed for the pan of hot chocolate on the wood stove. Amanda picked up a mug and followed him.
“You didn’t miss much,” Dave said. “It’s just a bunch of stars.”
We pulled off our drenched hats. “What stars?” Bob asked.
I wagged my finger at the group. “They looked at the next sketch without us.” Nobody seemed particularly sheepish. Not that I expected them to.
“We knew you’d get here soon enough,” Ida said.
“Maybe you can figure it out.” Sadie held up the sketch so Bob and I could see it. “It’s dated 1771.”
“Let me get undressed first,” I said, which of course prompted a couple of totally unnecessary comments from Dave.
“Parkas,” Bob said, giving Dave a glare.
The sketch was so unlike the others I had a hard time recognizing it as something from Silas Martin’s hand. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it upstairs. A night sky stretched above the cliffs, which he just barely suggested. There were stars, thousands of stars. The Milky Way—I wondered if they called it that back then. Maybe Maddy would know. Or Carol.
“Why on earth?” Bob let the question dangle there, unanswered.
We might not have had answers, but we had food. So we ate.
~ ~ ~
1771
SILAS MARTIN WAS an even-tempered man, but Doctor Blanchard’s actions were too much for him to bear. The man forced his way into the house early in the morning, past the indignant form of Mary Frances Martin, who had come to sit with Louetta the night before and minister to her in this most uncommon illness. Louetta had ever been so filled with vibrant health, Silas had found himself the previous evening at a loss for how to deal with her flushed face, to say nothing of the bloody vomit.
Afraid to leave her, but unable to deal with it by himself, he had run to summon Mistress Martin and Miss Julia, both of whom came immediately with their baskets firmly in hand and their determination to foil this demon with their herbs and poultices, teas and cool cloths, kind words and gentle touches.
The real demon was Doctor Blanchard.
The man entered the house without first knocking. Before Silas could come from the other side of the bed, Miss Julia sprang from her seat beside Louetta and positioned herself between the bed and the doctor. Silas joined her. Mary Frances walked past the doctor and made a third in the line of defense.
“We have no need of you here, Mister Blanchard.” Silas refused to use the honorific, for Silas knew of no doctor who deserved it less. “My wife is well tended.”
“How dare you, Sir? You prefer the work of ... of witches over my scientific training?”
Beside him, Silas felt both women tense. A charge of witchcraft was never to be taken lightly, no matter how ill founded the assertion. And Silas knew well how many of the townsfolk believed in the fleam wielding man. He wondered which of them had watched Silas run to summon the two women. Who would have told the doctor that his services were needed in the home of Silas and Louetta Martin?
A small voice niggled at the side of his brain, asking why the doctor had waited until morning to come. No doubt Blanchard had believed a full night’s rest was his due.
“I thank you for your concern, Sir, but my wife is considerably better.” He took a step forward and the two women flanking him advanced as well.
It was good that Blanchard had not shut the door behind him when he entered, for now he was not forced to back into the solid wood as the three closed ranks with him. As soon as he edged backward through the portal, Silas pushed the door more gently than he would have liked to. It would have felt satisfying to slam it on Blanchard’s nose, but that might have waked Louetta who was indeed, as he had said, appearing to be somewhat more settled, although saying she was considerably better was perhaps stretching the point a bit. At least she had ceased to vomit.
For three more days his beloved wife lay almost insensible.
Silas felt at such a loss, for there was naught he could do other than hold her hand and speak encouragingly to her as he had heard the two other women do. He was so gratified that Mary Frances—he was loath to call her Mistress Martin, knowing as he did of ... of her connection with Hubbard Brandt ... John Gilman. She was such a good friend to his wife, and he was saddened that she had spent so many unhappy years married to Homer Martin. Silas gritted his teeth at the thought of his brother’s unyielding nature.
Miss Julia and Miss Mary Frances never left Louetta’s side except for brief trips to the privy.
Each time Louetta slept fitfully, Silas drew, time and again, the image of Blanchard. Blanchard with devil’s horns, Blanchard as a venomous serpent, Blanchard with teeth that looked more like the fangs of a painter, Blanchard with the menace of Death trailing behind him, Blanchard with a fleam that resembled a bloody spear.
By the evening of the third day, Silas could bear no more. He gathered all those drawings of the fiendish doctor and threw them into the fire. He walked outside and looked up in wonder at the immeasurable beauty and marvel of the night sky. There were many who said that the night air was filled with dangerous miasmas, but Silas had never catered to that belief. How could anything so magnificent hold danger?
When he came back inside, Mary Frances was crying. Before his heart could stop, Miss Julia reassured him. “Her fever has broken. Now, all she will need is rest and good food.”
Silas kissed the cool forehead of his sleeping wife and breathed a quiet prayer of thanks for Miss Julia and Mistress Mary Frances. He took up his paper and ink. The stars held such promise.