Free The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma Page A

platter of sugared bannock cakes on the side table. Beside the platter lay a wadded handkerchief stained with rust-colored sputum. Reverend Stone pulled a rocker alongside the bed and read Scripture interspersed with Dickens and Irving, unable to look at the handkerchief. The room’s air tasted foul, poisoned. He felt as muddled and removed as a man in a dream.
    To distract themselves they compared memories of the first Sunday she’d appeared in Newell, sitting straight-backed in Lemuel Butler’s pew, her lace-collared dress drawing flinty stares from the congregation’s women. Everyone in Newell knew she was a Boston girl, sent to board with her father’s family. The minister’s sermon that morning seemed directed only to her, so often did he glance her way. She recalled that his words had concerned Luke’s description of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, and the vigorous force of temptation in everyday life, and at this they both smiled, Ellen pressing a hand to her lips to keep from raising a laugh.
    Temptation. After the service, in the sodden meetinghouse yard, he’d moved among other members of the congregation, avoiding Lemuel Butler’s clan. They stood patiently in the chilly rain, waiting to introduce this young woman, Ellen Butler. She was just nineteen years old, to his forty-two. Finally there was no one left but himself and the Butlers and a pair of stray hogs snuffling along the road edge. When she was presented to Reverend Stone he said, “Next Sunday I may ask you up to the pulpit beside me, so folks won’t have to crane their necks.”
    She offered an exasperated grin. “I pray by next Sunday the novelty will have worn thin.”
    “You underestimate the regularity of town life.”
    “In Boston I was told that wasn’t possible.”
    Lemuel Butler introduced himself uneasily into the conversation, commenting on the stoutness of the stray hogs and his fine early crop of sweet corn, a notice in the Springfield
Intelligencer
about a new moral primer available at the print shop, and did the minister recommend this new text or should they remain reading the old to their children? Reverend Stone paused, his thoughts aswirl. He said, “Yes, both.”
    What did we know? Reverend Stone wondered now, half asleep. The view from the belfry of faraway thunderheads. The taste of blackberry preserves passed from Ellen’s lips to his own. The words to “The Girl in the Homespun Dress.” He mumbled a scrap of half-remembered lyrics:
Across the slippery river rocks, a blue-eyed girl with auburn locks.
Ellen’s eyes were cornflower blue, her hair an oaky auburn. He closed his eyes, intoxicated by the memory. She wore lilac water on her throat and breastbone. Her nose was marked crosswise by a thin white scar. Her feet canted outward when she walked, giving her a broad, boyish gait. She’d told him during their courtship that it was one of her several mannish qualities.
    One morning seven months after the wedding he had awoken to a hail storm’s thrum on the roof, and then she had appeared in the bedroom doorway, nightclothes gathered around her waist, a heaviness about her lips. The light held a rounded, silvery cast, lending her sight an ethereal quality. Her warmth had covered him; then she’d murmured in his ear, “Wake wake wake my dear husband wake.” He’d feigned sleep, savoring the moment. She whispered, “When you awaken I will drain you dry.”
    We loved too much, Reverend Stone thought now. Not connubial love, or chaste love: they’d loved urge and sensation and pleasure, beyond the point of modesty. Surely it was sinful to love so much. At crucial moments he’d been reduced to a bare outline of himself, his mind overwhelmed by touch and sight and smell. When he woke the next morning he felt choked with guilt, shocked and embarrassed by the memory of his ardor. As Adam must have felt, the morning after the fall.
    Reverend Stone’s mind lingered over the memories, like fingertips drawn to