The widow's war (18 page)

Silas didn’t go to the tannery the next day. Not trusting him with her pantry, Lyddie waited till Patience and the children had returned with their bundles from Sears’s store, and by the time she got to Cowett’s, again late, he was gone. He had a good deal of washing she might have caught up on, but instead she tended to his chamber and his meal and his floor and left before he returned.

Silas had got his drink from somewhere and sat at table shouting for his wife and children to bring him his pipe, his knife, his waistcoat, getting up only once to piss in the dooryard. Whenever Lyddie passed near he made some remark about the Indian, sometimes complimentary, such as one remark about the man’s skill with an oar, but most times offensive. He called him the black stench, or the heathen slaver, or the keeper of the heathen whores. Altogether it gave Lyddie a headache: she spent the late afternoon working in the garden,
and when she returned to the house she found women and children gone, Silas Clarke frozen in his chair at the table, and Sam Cowett leaning over him, speaking low.

“Are you clear on it? ’Tis your own life you’ll pay with. You keep off or you’ll keep in the ground.” He swung around, saw Lyddie, and continued as if he were still talking to Silas. “Come.” He walked out the door. Lyddie followed, but he kept walking ahead, down the road.

“Where are you going?”

“Where I can have you alone.”

“I can’t go there now. Think what these people might say.”

He stopped and turned. “What care you what they say?”

“Less than you should, judging by the way you spoke to him just now. Do you wish to pay another fine? Or worse?”

“They can’t hold me.”

“I’m going back.”

He caught her up, but she pulled free. “Will you think what you do? Anyone could come along the road and see.”

“’Tis all been said already. As you said. Come. Come with me now.”

“No. Not now.”

“Tonight.”

“I’ll see.”

She hurried back down the road.

When Lyddie returned Patience Clarke had set out her family’s supper on the table. Lyddie got her own bread and beer from the pantry, ate them in her own chamber and stayed there, listening as the house quieted down. It would have been easy enough to go out the back door, and if seen, declare a need for the necessary house; if unseen,
she could continue freely through the woods to Cowett’s and either return the same way in the dark or stay through midmorning and feign surprise on her return that no one had heard her leave before dawn.

Lyddie did neither. A general unease filled her. She lay fully clothed on top of her coverlet and reviewed the events of the day, trying to get at its cause, and came first against Sam Cowett’s threat to Silas Clarke. Words, she thought, nothing but words, but words spoken against a life. And to what cause? Unease over Lyddie’s safety while Silas Clarke remained under her roof? Very well, Lyddie could share the same unease. A drunken man with a kitchen knife might not choose his target with the greatest care, and although Lyddie had no wish to see Patience run through, she had less wish to be run through herself. But Cowett’s words gave Lyddie a second cause for unease. They appeared to take his regard for Lyddie a step further than she had so far placed it. Any man making threat against a man’s life, but especially an Indian making threat against a white man, put himself in grave danger of the law. Lyddie had no doubt that if Silas Clarke registered a complaint with the constable, Cowett would soon find himself in gaol at Barnstable. She should go to him, she thought. But to do what? Warn him? Thank him? Lie with him?

And still she didn’t move, her mind now going back to Silas’s words about heathen whores. What had happened to the young Indian woman who had walked back and forth to Cowett’s every day, and then had not walked back and forth so very much at all? When Lyddie had first returned to Cowett’s house it had seemed well kept, much better kept than Sam Cowett’s efforts alone might have accounted for. Was Lyddie nothing but the white replacement of that heathen whore? Or had Silas’s heathen whore been Lyddie all along? She’d been long absent from church; she’d believed Nathan Clarke’s old rumors to have been squelched by Nathan Clarke, but what rumor was ever completely squelched? Hadn’t Silas said the day be
fore, “Do you not hear what they say?” Was everything ever said about Lyddie and Sam Cowett still alive and seething underground?

But what did Lyddie care about a drunken Silas Clarke’s ramblings? He’d made little enough sense, his talk ranging from oars to whores. Yet Lyddie did not want to be found in the middle of the road pressed up against Cowett’s body, and for him to do such a thing without thought to Lyddie’s position took away some of this new idea of the great caring she’d been ready to lay at his door.

She would not go to him. Lyddie took off her skirt and shoes and stockings, got under the sheets, and fell into what she would have called a dreamless sleep, but when she woke it was as if she’d just wakened from the old dream, full of the conviction that she could not believe Sam Cowett.

Lyddie got up and dressed with impatience. There was no room for any doubt of Edward’s death; Lyddie had laid out his cold, flaccid body with her own hands; she had watched his coffin go into the ground.

Lyddie breakfasted in her room again, tended her night jar, and left for Cowett’s.

This time Cowett had waited for her, his mood no great improvement from the day before.

“What’s took you? A half hour and I lose the tide.”

“And what need you of a half hour?”

He pulled her into his chamber and would not be put off by her stiff flesh; he stroked her and stroked her till she softened, only easing into her at the last minute and then rushing his clothes so fast he ripped the tape off his shirt and had to find another.

After he’d gone Lyddie sat in his bed among the sheets that smelled of dark and light sweat together and mended Sam Cowett’s shirt with Rebecca Cowett’s needle. She couldn’t have said the minute the old unease of the dream began, but it did begin, and stayed, and grew until at last, looking at the torn cloth, it came to her
why she shouldn’t believe Sam Cowett, what her dream had really been trying to tell her.

Sam Cowett had told her Edward’s coat had torn in the attempted rescue, but she’d seen it herself, in real life and in the dream, over and over: Edward’s sturdy work coat had survived whole.

During the day, as Lyddie put Sam Cowett’s house in order and then returned to do the same to her own, sidestepping as best she could the many Clarkes, Edward’s untorn coat meant only one thing to Lyddie: Sam Cowett had wished an excuse to offer Lyddie for his failure to save her husband, or, put even more simply, he had wished to salvage his pride. But that night, after she’d slid the bolt and thought with some irony that she did nothing but bolt the danger
in,
as Silas Clarke had obeyed her instruction and come back by dark, the matter of the untorn coat returned to disturb her sleep.
The coat tore,
Cowett had said. Could there be another motive for Sam Cowett saying Edward’s coat had torn? What might have happened out there on the water that would make Cowett lie about it? Lyddie cast her mind back to every conversation she’d ever had about Edward’s death, starting with Shubael’s.
’Twas Sam Cowett got there first.
Shubael had had little to say about the drowning, and according to the later overheard conversation that Lyddie had somehow forgotten in all the confusion in her own life, he had feared Lyddie’s questions. He had feared the Indian. But why? Because Shubael had seen something that implicated the Indian somehow, and if the Indian knew it, he wouldn’t hesitate to protect himself at Shubael’s expense? At the expense of Shubael’s life?

No, no, no. Lyddie wouldn’t think it. But Silas would. Had not Cowett threatened Silas’s life the previous night? And what if Lyddie now put another interpretation on the Indian’s little speech, put
him not attempting to protect Lyddie, but attempting to protect himself? What else might Cowett wish Silas to keep off, if not Lyddie herself? What if the thing he wished Silas to keep off was not Lyddie at all, but the subject of Edward’s death? The one man’s experience with spirits would have told him what might come out of the other man’s mouth. And things had come out of Silas’s mouth. His words hammered at Lyddie’s head.
Him who widows you supports you…Do you not hear what they say?…Bloody murdering Indian…skill with an oar…

Lyddie threw back her covering and sat up, the bile rising in her chest, thinking of the gash in Edward’s head, a gash the shape of an oar’s blade. Oh, yes, things had come out of Silas Clarke’s mouth, and Lyddie had only half heard them, and what she’d heard she’d dismissed as drunken nonsense, but now, sitting there sick, in the dark, she wondered if she mightn’t have dismissed them too quickly. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what Jabez Gray had told her about Edward’s drowning: the boat going over, the line and block tossed to the other men to bring them safe aboard, Sam Cowett finally going after Edward himself, with his oar
…
Good God, Jabez Gray had said it himself: Sam Cowett
went after him with his oar.
In that dark, churning water who could say what blow might have been struck with it? Perhaps confident of a fatal blow he’d then gone through the rest of the act, taking hold of Edward’s coat and pulling him in, but once he’d seen that Edward breathed, that Edward lived…oh, hadn’t Jabez Gray said it in just those words?
I saw your husband breathing, I saw his chest heaving…he was alive…

But then what? Lyddie didn’t know. Jabez Gray had not seen, he’d turned away to tend Shubael’s boat, and when he’d turned back Edward was gone.
That’s all I can tell you. Gone.

No, no, no. It was not true. It was another trick of the night. Lyddie would wake in the morning and remember something else someone had said that would make nonsense of all of it. To begin, why
would Sam Cowett wish Edward Berry dead? In all their years communing over the woodlot Lyddie had never heard a wrong word between the two men. But even as the forepart of her mind formed that thought, her memory dredged up something else, some words battered about in the wind between the Gray brothers one day after meeting as they discussed Sam Cowett:…
I guess I’ll not quarrel with him…No? Then I guess you’re not Edward Berry…

But why would they quarrel? There was nothing, nothing…but there was. Of course there was. If Lyddie looked through the window behind her she might stare at it in the moonlight. The land. A valuable piece of land, passing from Cowett hands to Berry hands without a thing given in compensation for it. Lyddie had seen the deed of gift herself and hadn’t missed the fact that no Indian who signed with a primitive
V
could have written such formal English. What made her think he would even understand such language? Say, then, that something underhanded had gone on to move the land from Cowett to Berry; say this history had festered over two generations to leave Sam Cowett with an aching grudge. Had not Eben Freeman called him “a man with many grudges to feed, old and new”? Had not Sam Cowett himself referred to God’s scales as balancing land with water? Would Sam Cowett take it on himself, when the opportunity presented itself, to right an old theft of land with a death by water?

Lyddie wished to say no, she tried to say no, but interrupting her were more questions of her own role in it. If Sam Cowett had a grudge against Edward, if Edward’s death were not enough, what else might he do to hurt the Berrys? He might attempt to stymie the house sale, but once he saw the wife and read a certain rebellion in her, he might have fixed on another path. How easy it had been for him to lure her, first from her faith, and then from her family, and next from her community, in the last gasp putting her at odds with the one man who might right her with all.

But had Sam Cowett really done all that? Lyddie didn’t need the clear light of morning to tell her that no, of course, he hadn’t. She couldn’t blame him for herself. But he had helped. Lyddie had leaned so far toward each of those things that a push by any little feather might have toppled her, and Sam Cowett had been more than a little feather. All that talk of Indian gods and Indian morals, had it all been toward one end, Lyddie disgraced and dependent and his to save or destroy as the spirit moved him?

No, no, no. Lyddie wouldn’t believe it. She closed her eyes and thought of his hands on her willing body, but even in that she now saw a manipulation of the flesh that paralleled a manipulation of the mind. How else could Lydia Berry, descended of the very religious elders who had formed the moral laws that ruled the colony, come to such a place where she could find no sin in such acts as she had committed? How had it come to pass that this man of all others had been allowed to strip away her beliefs along with her dress? And there Lyddie remembered something else almost more painful than all the rest. Sam Cowett had stripped away Lyddie’s dress many a time, but that first day, that first time, he had made no move to discard Rebecca’s. The man who had worked so hard to cut every last thread that bound her to Edward had kept Rebecca’s dress between them like a shield.

Morning did not deliver Lyddie her usual reprieve from the night’s thoughts, but it did leave them in greater confusion. Where the night before every last piece of information had marched along one behind the other like a neat row of ants, now that line stood broken and scattered as if a hungry bird had dropped down in its midst. While Lyddie wasn’t ready to deny outright the night’s conclusion, she had some trouble finding her way over the old track.

But where the ants wouldn’t line up for her, the stars did; having risen late she was just coming from the necessary when Jabez Gray came by on his way to the landing. Lyddie hurried into the road after him.

“Widow Berry!” he greeted her. “Is all well?”

“An ill night,” she said. “Would you be so kind as to tell Mr. Cowett I’ll not be there to clean this morning?”