Free The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma

aboard. Reverend Stone seated himself across from the pair. The carriage jerked forward. Buffalo’s streets were deserted, the awnings drawn and shopfronts dark save for an occasional lit-up saloon. They passed a theater and surgeon’s college, an opera house with white stone columns and a lofty dome. A pair of steeples loomed behind the blocks of row houses but the minister could not gauge the denomination.
    He turned from the window to find Jonah Crawley staring into Adele’s blank gaze, as though they were engaged in a wordless dialogue. Crawley patted the girl’s hand; then she glanced warily at Reverend Stone. Her expression embarrassed the man. Jonah Crawley said, “No need to offer me compensation, Reverend! I’m merely trying to aid a fellow traveler.”
    The minister dug a finger in his pocket and produced a quarter dollar. “Thank you kindly. Please.”
    Crawley tucked the coin in his waistcoat. “Some of these hotels are owned by Jews, some by Catholics. You need to be careful where you lay your head.”
    “And the proprietor of the hotel tonight?”
    “He’s a good wet Baptist.”
    The carriage turned down an alleyway lit by saloon windows. Reverend Stone smiled mildly at Jonah Crawley but said nothing. A dull, unnameable urge gnawed at him. He would buy a tin of medication tomorrow morning. The thought lingered in his mind until he forced it away.
    They rolled to a halt before a two-story hotel with a sagging porch and unpainted front door and missing shutters. The signboard was so weathered as to be unreadable. Crawley said, “Here we are now.”
    Reverend Stone studied the building before opening the carriage door.
    “You should try to temper your expectations,” Crawley said. “That’s the traveling life.”
    Reverend Stone said nothing. He mounted the steps then glanced back at the waiting buggy. “Are you not unloading your trunks?”
    “We’re staying farther up toward the falls. This lodge will do you just fine but it’s a mite characterful for my daughter.”
    The minister raised a hand in farewell as the carriage rattled away. He knocked softly at the door; eventually it opened on a man holding a lantern that threw just enough light to shadow his eyes. He led Reverend Stone up a back stairway and pushed open a room door, dipped a rush into the lantern and passed it wordlessly. Reverend Stone said, “Obliged,” and closed the door, tossed his hat on the floor and shucked his jacket and trousers. The rope bed-frame sagged as he crawled beneath the quilt.
    Wind rose from the street and howled through the loose window frame, the sound holding a vaguely human quality. As he listened the howl coalesced to a moan, emanating from the room next door. The moan repeated: a sweetly falling note, an aria of loss. He wondered about the nature of the woman’s grief.
    For some months after his wife’s death Reverend Stone had found himself contemplating the sorrow of others. Grief, it suddenly seemed, was all around him: in his bedroom, on Newell’s green, in the fallow tobacco fields, each stone and sapling shadowed by loss. He found himself wondering at the depth of other folks’ grief, his thoughts accompanied by startling rushes of affection for his fellow sufferers. It seemed natural that grief should marry folks in shared misery. But instead the minister felt terrifyingly alone.
    She had fallen ill on the third Sunday in March: her first coughs echoed through the meetinghouse during his sermon, and he’d shot a quick, irritated glance from the pulpit. That evening at supper the cough slid from her throat down to her lungs, bringing a liquidy rasp and bright, spidery threads of blood. Reverend Stone’s thoughts crumbled at the sight; he was stricken by the memory of his meetinghouse scowl. Ellen’s expression was one of shame, and poorly concealed horror.
    He prepared her bedroom as if for a wedding-week stay, a pyramid of songbooks and novels and literary journals beside the bed and a