more, then?” I nodded. “Come along, say what you have to say.” She motioned me to close the barn door; then, as I followed her, she made her way to the dooryard where she disposed of the stool and ushered me up the steps.
When she had poured the milk into a crock and put it in the refrigerator, she nodded for me to be seated as she put the kettle on to boil. The lamp she had turned on laid a warm pool of light on the scarred and ringed surface of the wooden table. She washed her hands, and when the kettle began to sing she took it from the stove plate. She brought down the box of Weber’s tea; brewing it, she spoke over her shoulder. “Who shall say, ‘Be like me’? ‘Be like all the others’? If the bull cares to give milk, who shall say him nay? And if folks-folks like me-think about the old ways, who shall say them nay? Who shall say me nay? I have a cow, and if I believe the Mother fattens the plain for Caesar’s Wife to provide me milk, no man’s goin’ to tell me no.” She brought the cups on their saucers and laid them on the table. “If your wife tells you that it’s because of women and their strength that men survive, who shall tell her no? Not you, if you’re as smart as I think you are.”
Her step as she laid out the tea things was scarcely as spry as I had seen it on other occasions. Her face looked tired, and without that inner spark that usually animated her every word and gesture, and I saw that she was a very old woman. There was pain in her searching look; in back of the hooded eyes lay a question-hers, not mine, a question in answer to my question. She sipped, then took a hank of wool from a basket and began winding the end around her fingers.
“Planting Day? Spring Festival? Midsummer’s Eve? Harvest Home? Certain they’re older than the hills and they’re not like Santy Claus that you stop believin’ in when you catch your ma hangin’ up stockin’s Christmas Eve. They’re in people’s blood and marrow and hearts and they been there for centuries. You don’t take them things lightly, nor do you laugh nor interfere just because you’ve had too many pulls at the jug. And a man who dares is bound to come to grief.”
Outside, it was dark. The light above the table was a single beacon in the shadowy room. She continued winding the yarn. “Adam delved and Eve span,” she said wearily. Thinking of what I had discovered an hour ago in Soakes’s Lonesome, after leaving jack Stump’s, what I had known I would find, I remained silent, aloof, watchful of her, one hand employing the spoon to stir my cup, the other deep in my jacket pocket.
I knew I would never come to this kitchen again, never sit at her table, never drink her tea. It was, in a way, like the end or an affair: bitter, hopeless, irreparable,
“Spinning is a woman’s natural work,” I said at last.
“Aye, traditionally.”
“We were speaking of grief. Has Worthy come to grief?”
She bit her lip. Then: “We all come to grief, one time or another.”
“What will happen to him?”
“That’s no concern of yours.”
“Because I’m an outsider? Worthy’s like a son to me.”
“He was a son before he ever met you.”
“He’s a kid! Sixteen! What did he do?”
“He damned the corn!” Her eyes widened. “He damned the crops. That’s a serious business.”
“All he did was run off from something he didn’t want, to find something he did want. Is that so terrible? You never would have found Worthy if-”
“Yes?”
“-if Tamar Penrose hadn’t seen my letters and steamed it open. She told the Constable, who told Mr. Deming. Mr. Deming called you, the night I brought you the sewing machine. You sent him after Worthy.”
“Don’t you go glarin’ at me, you and them dark Greek looks. Worthy Pettinger knew what he was doin’; he had plenty of time to think it out-all them weeks I sent him ‘round to you, hopin’ he’d come to his senses. He was chosen. He was to be the Young Lord in the play.”
“But you
“How much better Worthy would’ve been. Made for it, he was. Proper age and all. Seven years younger than Justin, almost to the day.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s not so much for him, but for the other boys comin’ along behind him. Can’t have notions like Worthy’s goin’ abroad through the village. He’s got to be taught-”
Now, I thought; now. Say it now. Say it and be done. I said, “Like the Soakeses taught Jack Stump.”
“Aye.”
“Rolling him in ashes-”
“Aye.”
“Old Man Soakes cutting out his tongue with his knife-”
“Aye.”
“The boys sewing his mouth with their canvas needles-”
“Aye. Poor Jack, all he did was talk, and for that they mutilated him beyond hope.”
“No! For that
“Here, now-” She drew back from me as though to mantle herself in the shadows. I reached in my pocket and produced the scrap of paper with the writing over the skull and bones. “There’s a warning the Soakeses supposedly left him in the woods-only it wasn’t from the Soakeses, it was from you!” I turned it over and laid it before her. “Does that look familiar?” I reached to the shelf above the sink and grabbed a box from it. Tea sprayed around me as I tore out the liner and spread it beside the piece of foil paper, whose silvery reflection had caught my eye by Jack Stump’s fire. “Read it.”
“Can’t see without my specs,” she said truculently.
“You don’t have to see. You can feel it.” I seized her fingers and pressed them on the foil lining. “Weber’s tea. Embossed. With ‘One-B’-remember?” I turned Jack’s message over and pressed her fingers there, on the identical foil, embossed the same way. “One-B Weber’s.”
“I don’t expect I’m the only person to use Weber’s tea.”
“You have to send for it-remember? To London. You used one of those scraps from your kitchen spindle to write the note, and had it put in Jack’s trap, the traps you moved yourself.” She pulled her hand away; I seized her arm and gripped it. “Jack Stump was in the woods all right, and you didn’t want him there any more than the Soakeses did. But you decided to do something about it. You caught him, you and the other women over at Irene Tatum’s for a quilting party. He wasn’t rolled in the ashes from Soakes’s still, but in the ashes from Irene’s soap kettle. Then you cut his tongue out. With these.” I yanked my hand from my pocket, raised it, and brought it down. The teacup and saucer broke as the pair of rusty shears struck them.
“There’s your missing scissors, Mary, and you didn’t leave them at Asia Minerva’s house. You lost them in the woods when you attacked Jack. You were looking for them the day we hunted mushrooms. After you cut off his tongue, you took your needle and thread and stitched his mouth up. You planned it all, the quilting party at Irene Tatum’s house, all of it.”
She looked at me across the broken pieces of the cup, something defiant in her eyes. “First time you ever called me ‘Mary.’ Seems strange. People don’t call me that much. Clem used to, of course-Robert sometimes.” One hand came from her lap and touched a fragment of china. “Aye, Jack was a talker. And a meddler, and that’s a bad combination in any soul, man or woman. Tamar put the quietus to him.”
“Tamar?”
“It was she who done the cuttin’ and sewin’ of poor Jack. Strong measures, I’ll agree, stronger than was warranted, maybe, but sometimes Tamar’s got to be restrained. Yet I couldn’t say it wasn’t necessary. Nobody would’ve been beholden to Jack for goin’ off on one of his territory circuits and talkin’ at every doorstep along the way.”
“Talking about what?”
“Things we don’t want talked about.” She spoke angrily. “Some things are no one’s business but our own. We got skeletons in our closets same as other folks. Jack was afflicted by tongue and nose, both. Went pokin’ his nose around the Lonesome, where he oughtn’t to have been. Went pokin’ it around town and findin’ out things outsiders oughtn’t to be concerned with.”
“I’m an outsider.”
“But we didn’t want you to be.” She looked up at me with mute appeal. “
