outstretched, the folds of her skirt and her long hair bobbing on the surface of the water. Her cloak sat on the riverbank, neatly folded.
“Look away, girl,” my father said as he tried to turn me by the shoulders. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her.
Father sounded the call while I stared dumbly at her corpse. Other searchers came crashing through the woods, following my father’s voice. Two of the men waded into the frigid water to pull her body from the embrace of the frozen grasses and the thin shelf of ice that had started to claim her. We spread her cape on the ground and laid her body on it, the sodden fabric clinging to her legs and torso. Her skin was blue all over and her eyes, mercifully, were closed.
The men wrapped her in her cloak and took turns holding the edges, using it as a sling to carry Sophia’s body back home, while I walked behind them. My teeth chattered and my father came up to me to rub my arms in an attempt to warm me, but it did no good, for I shook and shivered from fear, not cold. I held my arms tight to my stomach, afraid I would be ill in front of my father. My presence dampened the discussion among the men and they refrained from speculating as to why Sophia had taken her life. They generally agreed, however, that Pastor Gilbert would not be told about the cape set deliberately aside. He would not know that she had been a suicide.
When my father and I made it home, I ran straight to the fireplace and stood so close that the fire toasted my face, but even that heat could not stop my shaking. “Not so close,” my mother chided as she helped me take off my cloak, afraid no doubt that the cape might catch on a spitting ember. I would have welcomed it. I deserved to burn like a witch for what I’d done.
A few hours later, my mother came up to me, squared her shoulders, and said, “I’m going to the Gilberts’ to help with the preparations for Sophia. I think you should come with me. It’s time you started taking your place among the women in this town and learned some of the duties that will be expected of you.”
By now I had changed into a heavy nightgown, curled by the fire, and had drunk a mug of hot cider with rum. The drink helped to numb me, to tamp down the urge to cry out loud and confess, but I knew that I would come undone if I had to confront Sophia’s body, even in the presence of the other women in town.
I rose up from the floor on an elbow. “I couldn’t… I don’t feel well. Still cold…”
My mother pressed the back of her fingers to my forehead, then my throat. “If anything, I’d say you were burning with fever…” She looked at me cautiously, skeptically, then rose from the floor, tossing her cloak over her shoulders. “All right, this one time, seeing what you went through earlier…” Her words trailed off. She looked me over one more time, in a way I couldn’t quite figure out, and then slipped out the door.
She told me later what had happened at the pastor’s house, how the women prepared Sophia’s body for burial. First, they set it by the fire to thaw, then they rinsed the river silt from her mouth and nose and gently combed out her hair. My mother described how white her skin had become from the time in the river, and how she’d been scraped with thin, red scratches after the current had dragged her corpse over submerged rocks. They dressed her in her finest dress, a yellow so pale as to be almost ivory, embellished with embroidery by her own needle and tailored to her slender frame with pin tucks. No mention was made of Sophia’s body, no abnormality, no remark of the faintest swell to the dead woman’s abdomen. If anyone noticed anything, it would be attributed to bloat, no doubt, water the poor girl had ingested as she drowned. And then a linen shroud was tucked into a plain panel coffin. A couple of men who had waited while the women completed their work loaded the coffin into a wagon and escorted it to Jeremiah’s house, where it would lie in wait for the funeral.
As my mother calmly described the state of Sophia’s body, I felt as though nails were being driven into me, exhorting me to confess my wickedness. But I held on to my wits, if barely, and cried as my mother spoke, my hand shielding my eyes. My mother rubbed my back as though I were a child again. “Whatever is it, Lanore dear? Why are you so upset for Sophia? It is a terrible thing and she was our neighbor, yes, but I didn’t think you even knew her very well…” She sent me up to the loft with a goatskin filled with warm water and went to chide my father for taking me with him into the woods. I lay with the goatskin pressed against my stomach though it brought me no comfort. I lay awake, listening to all the sounds of the night-the wind, the shaking trees, the dying embers-whisper Sophia’s name.
As had been the case at her wedding, Sophia Jacobs’s funeral was a mean affair, attended by her husband, her mother, and a few of her siblings, and not many others. The day was cold and overcast, snowfall promising to drift down from the sky as it had every day since Sophia had killed herself.
We stood and watched from a hilltop overlooking the cemetery, Jonathan and I. We watched the mourners press around the dark, hollow plot. Somehow they had managed to excavate a grave site though the ground was beginning to freeze, and I could not help but wonder if it had been her father, Tobey, who had dug the grave. The mourners, specks of black against a white field far in the distance, shifted to and fro restlessly, as Pastor Gilbert pronounced words over the deceased. My face was tight, swollen from days of crying, but now, in Jonathan’s presence, no tears came. It felt surreal to be spying on Sophia’s funeral-I, who should be down there on my knees, begging Jeremiah for forgiveness, for I was responsible for his wife’s death as surely as if I’d pushed her into the river myself.
Next to me, Jonathan stood silently. Snow began to fall at last, like the release of a long-pent-up tension, tiny flakes swirling on the cold air before landing on the dark wool of Jonathan’s greatcoat and in his hair.
“I cannot believe she is gone,” he said, for the twentieth time that morning. “I can’t believe she took her life.”
I choked on my words. Anything I could say would be too weak, too palliative and altogether untrue.
“It is my fault,” he croaked, raising a hand to his face.
“You mustn’t blame yourself for this.” I rushed to comfort him with the words I had said to myself over and over the past few days, as I’d hidden in feverish guilt in bed. “You knew her life was miserable, from when she was a child. Who knows what unhappy thoughts she carried with her, and for how long? She finally acted on them. It’s hardly your fault.”
He took two steps forward, as though longing to be down in the graveyard. “I can’t believe she had been carrying thoughts of self-injury, Lanny. She had been happy-with me. It seems inconceivable that the Sophia I knew was fighting the desire to kill herself.”
“One never knows. Maybe she had an argument with Jeremiah… perhaps after the last time you saw her…”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “If she was troubled by anything, it was my reaction when she told me of the baby. That is why I blame myself, Lanny, for my thoughtless reaction to her news. You said”-Jonathan lifted his head, suddenly, looking in my direction-“that you might think of a way to dissuade her from keeping the baby. I pray, Lanny, that you didn’t approach Sophia with any such plan-”
Startled, I jerked back. I’d thought these past few days about telling him everything, as I’d struggled with my guilt. I had to tell some-one-it was not the kind of secret a body can keep without doing irreparable harm to the soul-and if anyone would understand, it would be Jonathan. I’d done it for him, after all. He’d come to me for help and I had done what was required. Now I needed to be absolved for what I had done; he owed me that absolution, didn’t he?
But as he searched me with those dark, willful eyes, I realized I could not tell him. Not now, not while he was raw with grief and capable of being carried away by emotion. He would not understand. “What? No, I came up with no plan. Why would I approach Sophia on my own, anyway?” I lied. I hadn’t intended to lie to Jonathan, but he surprised me, his guess like an arrow shot with uncanny precision. I would tell him one day, I resolved.
Jonathan turned his three-cornered hat in his hands. “Do you suppose I should tell Jeremiah the truth?”
I rushed up to Jonathan and shook him by the shoulders. “That would be a terrible thing to do, for yourself as well as poor Sophia. What good would it do to tell Jeremiah now, except to appease your conscience? All you would accomplish would be to ruin Jeremiah’s illusion of her. Let him bury Sophia thinking her a good wife who honored him.”
He looked at my small hands clasping his shoulders-it was unusual for us to touch each other now that we were no longer children-and then looked into my eyes with such sorrow that I couldn’t help myself. I collapsed against his chest and pulled him toward me, thinking only that he needed comfort from a woman at that moment, even if it wasn’t Sophia. I will not lie and say I didn’t find the feeling of his strong, warm body against mine comforting, too, though I had no right to comfort. I nearly wept with happiness at the touch of him. Holding his body against mine, I could pretend that he had forgiven me for my terrible sin against Sophia, although, of course,
