Thanksgiving

Dinner

1662

The Turkey

The fire is nearly out. In her hurry to flame it, she rushes through the daydark and bumps herself hard on the cradle. She keeps forgetting it's there, planed smooth as skin, still tight in the rockers, still smelling new-woody.

Daydark is a shift in the house from black to twilight.

When the house was being built, Cale's family promised them window glass. It kept not coming. She tried not to think of it as a punishment. His parents, two miles away, have eight windows, each one beautifully paned. His brother next door has four; so does his brother across the road.

Her eighteenth birthday was last week. Get ready for a wonderful gift, his father told her, and she was so excited, she almost hugged him. Glass, she thought. She made Cale hold off on nailing the shutters and planking them for the winter, her first as a wife.

It's late November. In the warm weather she tacked linens on the openings. Spring and summer and early fall were squares of gauzy paleness, gauzy air, buzzing insects catching onto the cloth. She had learned the hard way to not leave shutters open in windy rain.

Cale planned to make the cradle himself. He's not a natural with tools, so it would have been less than perfect, like everything they have for furniture; but still.

My name is Patience. I must choose every day to be the same as my name.

Called on at church to speak, she bows her head calmly, willing her voice not to quiver, her cap not to slip off her hair; she hates tying it tightly. At dinners with his family they call on her as soon as the grace is over. The next to last plate to be served is Cale's. The last is always hers.

She's five months pregnant. The cradle model Cale started is gone: a burl off a tree in the woods, partially hollowed like a rough little bowl. On her birthday, the minute his parents went home, he sneaked it away from her and threw it in the fire. She had carried it in a pocket of her apron.

My name is Caleb. I must choose every day to be the master of my willfulness, my duties, my wife, my home.

He was supposed to wake her before leaving at dawn to join the hunting party. She hopes that if anyone shoots anything to eat in the woods today it's him and no one else, not that this ever happened before. He's hunting with his father and brothers.

He left her dry kindling and logs. Firelight is not the same as sunlight but the heat is lovely and she lingers at the hearth, stepping into her shoes with languid contentment, although her feet are freezing. Her new laziness is gorgeous to her, and thick and deep and married-people secret. Sometimes she finds herself laughing alone in the house for no reason, forgetting the heaviness of daydark. She loves what it's like to look forward to night. Night isn't heavy. Night is supposed to be dark.

Are you willful, Cale?

That I am.

Can you master your duty at home?

Yes I can. Would you like to be patient?

Only if you're about to make me glad.

I'm about to make you very glad indeed.

Then tonight I'm the same as my name!

In the fireglow, she notices his shot pouch on a hook by the door. She usually packs it for him on hunting days.

She hasn't been sleeping well, waking often with nausea or in a strange, sweaty excitement from unremembered dreams. But he should have made her get up. He should have stuck to their routine.

He forgot his pouch? They'd never let him hear the end of it. She checks the storage box to see if he took shot and filled his pockets. Balls are in piles a few inches high, lead-dull, looking harmless as toys. But she can't remember how many were there to begin with. He took his pistol, which he always keeps loaded, as well as the musket.

She hasn't cleaned out the hearth for a while. The smoke is ashy, greasy. She didn't clean the pot she cooked the last bit of venison in yesterday, or the one the day before of turnip stew. She's going to be sick.

His father told her that if a pregnant wife suffers from digestive imbalance beyond the early part of pregnancy, it's a sign from God that she's unrighteous. He made it sound as if the part of her that keeps puking is her soul. But if being together unlawfully was a sin, she feels, God would make sure Cale's guts are as wretched as hers.

She can't let the house smell worse than it does. The first wave of nausea is mild enough to give her time to put her cloak on, get outside, and make her way to the back. No one else is out. With the men away, her sisters-in-law closed up their houses and went down the road to spend the day with Cale's mother, as they always do on hunting days. As always, she wasn't invited.

The only thing moving is chimney smoke on its way to meet clouds so close and still, they look painted. The blue shock of the sky hurts her eyes. The cold takes her breath away.

The hard ground, shiny with frost, is a mess of old stalks and vines she never got around to clearing. The wide, shallow brook at the end of the yard is the border between home and the wild. She's supposed to remember which trees along the front of the forest are maples for tapping, but they all look the same without leaves.

The evergreens stand in rows that go on into forever. Cale wants her to learn the different kinds: spruce, fir, pine, hemlock. He's planning to write what he calls an encyclopedia. He wants to list and describe, with drawings, every plant, tree, and bush he ever met. But they don't have paper or ink.

She doesn't care what the names are. In their crowds, in their deep, abiding greens, they're friendly strangers.

The big old oak, she knows personally. It's on the mossy homeside bank, with a crown starting low and a trunk so thick, even Cale with his long skinny arms can't reach around it. When they were building the house—this house that was needed in a hurry—they said they left it standing on purpose, for acorns and shade and fire sticks. But really, after an ax got stuck in the bark one time too many, they gave up trying to kill it.

She wants to make it to the brook, but no. She stops in her tracks astonished.

A fully grown tom is in the oak, fat and brown-black feathery, roosting close to the trunk. Its head is tucked down like a funny little knob. It's facing the woods. If it turned a moment earlier to see who was coming, it must have decided she's nothing to worry about.

All her life she's heard turkeys gobbling, even shrieking, but always at a distance, invisible in the woods. She knows they're not stupid. They had learned a few things about hiding from men with guns. She never expected to see one up close.

She grew up on a farm near the village as the child of indentures. Her parents are working their contracts still. The chickens on the farm are as cunning and haughty as the owners, who keep finding new ways to keep servants locked into old bonds. But you can't compare a chicken to a turkey, not really. It's like comparing anything wild to anything that isn't.

The bird makes the tree look small. In her amazement, she's suddenly all right. The wave of sickness, having reached her throat, simply comes to a stop and settles down. She feels like a bottle that someone, at last, stopped shaking.

She doesn't see the arrow in flight, or where it came from, or who shot it. She will realize later it left a bow before she passed the side of the house and entered the yard.

It's a kill shot to the breast. The turkey makes a small, squeaky gasp, like it's saying, on the verge of sighing gladly, Oh! She'll never know if the sound was human and terribly familiar when she heard it, or if she only imagines this was so.

The turkey falls sideways, landing at the edge of the brook. The bits of feathers on the arrow shaft are exactly the same as the bird's.

Every instinct tells her to run back inside. She doesn't care about the throb in her leg from the cradle bump. Her body's ready to flee, but at the same time, like the feel of being sick, her fear gives way to something else.

This is her yard. That side of the brook is hers. That oak is her tree.

Beyond the brook, nothing stirs. The silence extends everywhere. No one's in the cornfield that starts at the side of her yard and lies stripped. On the other side of the field is the Morley apple orchard, winter-bare. No one's there.

PATIENCE MORLEY I CALL ON YOU TO SPEAK.

There comes to her the image of Deacon Morley in his wig and robe in church: her furious father-in-law, loud as thunder. She knows he blames her for the way Cale's not afraid of him anymore, for Cale not obeying him and becoming a minister, for Cale not marrying a landowner's daughter like his brothers, for an awful lot of things. But thunder can't hurt you. You just have to find a way to put up with all the noise.

My name is Patience. I must choose every day to be…

Thankful. She fills in the word like the end of a line in a prayer. If God doesn't want her to have the turkey, why did it fall where it fell? God thinks she's righteous. God thinks it was wrong of Cale's parents to break their promise about the glass. It's obvious why they wanted a cradle in the house so early. They didn't have to explain. They were sending a message to the baby that in spite of being burdened with parents such as Cale and herself, there is hope.

Cale's father compares everything to voyaging across the ocean to America. He thinks her body is a boat, and her passenger-baby quivers with fright about storms, immense waves, a shipwreck. So giving the cradle was a pledging of faith, as if the baby has eyes to see through her belly to a new horizon. The cradle is a sign of a shore.

Well, he should count his blessings that Cale didn't throw the cradle in the fire instead of the burl.

He'd never let them forget what it was like for him to find them in the barn on the evening last spring that changed everything—and he couldn't prove they'd been doing anything except standing together talking, their clothes in place and buttoned up. He never went into the barn after dark. They'd never know who tipped him off. He had wanted to know, like a judge considering leniency for a first offense, was this the first time they were together? Cale could have lied. But he didn't. I've known since I was a boy there'd be no one for me but Patience.

And up went the house in a hurry, and after giving the promise of window glass, his father made it clear that she and Cale would get nothing more from the Morley family, ever.

Maybe what bothered him most that evening was the way they didn't look guilty, the way they'd been giddy like little children, holding back laughing, because imagine if he'd come in five minutes earlier!

Thank you, God, she's saying.

Almost crawling, she makes for the brook and grabs the turkey by the arrow, as if it's there to be a handle. She's strong from a life of hard chores, but the heaviness surprises her; she staggers backward when she tries to lift it. She promised Cale she wouldn't carry anything straining, so she picks the smoothest route through the yard to duck-walk and drag it. She's been hauling baskets of wet laundry from the brook the same way.

She keeps her eyes ahead, on the future. She has already blanked out of her mind the fact that the arrow was shot by a person. There wasn't a person. There wasn't a past, not even a past of just moments ago.

How much will a turkey fetch at market? Cale has friends who are always going to Boston. They know about buying and selling. They can be trusted not to tell his family. One pane of glass? Surely there'll be enough for one pane, plus maybe enough for paper, ink. The value wouldn't diminish, she feels, if she takes off a few feathers and keeps them for quills.

Hold on tight, she says, patting herself on the belly, talking to her baby, like Cale does when he's about to make her glad.

The stoop is a granite block. There's a second foot-lift to cross the threshold. She squats to spare her back muscles, and slides her hands under the bird, hoisting it, pushing it. She opens the door and hoists and pushes it again.

Uh-oh. The feeling of sickness had only been postponed. It's coming on fast.

She leaves the turkey by the door and rushes for a slop bucket, and that's when she hears the shot. It's coming to her as a muffled, air-crackly exclamation from the edge of the woods. It's joining the start of her retching.

She guesses it's Cale, heading home for his pouch. Even in her distress, she's praying. She hears him calling to her, his voice coming closer, and she's thanking God for his return. Now she won't have to cope with the turkey on her own; they can speed the business of getting it to market. Glass, she's thinking. Paper and ink. Our future.

She doesn't want to press her luck by asking God for more bounty from this day, but all the same, she wonders what Cale had shot. She feels certain his aim had been true.

Was it a game bird? Another turkey? A deer?

She's finished with being sick. She goes to the door to meet her husband, imagining him proud of himself, in a glow of well-being, which will grow like the baby inside her, just grow and grow and grow.

1673

Pumpkins

The frost was late. The harvest this year is huge.

Hester was worried about the table collapsing from all the weight; but something that looks weak can be strong. Her father built the table before she was born. It's a little uneven, with too-skinny legs.

The pumpkins are coming in, coming in.

A long day of boredom lies ahead. The rain stopped finally and it was harsh and whipping; not the easy rain that streams on window glass and lulls her to a deep, lazy happiness, as if the house is a boat, and she's traveling with her parents through the hours on a safe, quiet sea.

Her father brings in pumpkins, brings them in.

She knows that a part of him is dark and secret, not like a gloomy mood, but something else, root-deep, baffling, unknowable. She can see it in his face on autumn days like this one when he stands by the back window, looking at the woods. A strange silence comes out of him like bad air. His expression frightens her. Leave me be, he tells her. Stop looking at me. Stop asking me what's wrong.

Today he said he was low because the sun isn't shining. There needs to be sun. She's going to get to work on that.

My mother's name is Patience,

My father's name is Cale,

I am HESTER!

I HATE PUMPKINS!

Her job is to separate seeds from the stringy pulp and get them ready for roasting. She's planted on a stool at a second, makeshift work table of planks set on chair seats, waiting for her mother to pick up the hatchet and start the splitting.

The pumpkins on the table are for hanging in strips to be dried. The ones by the hearth are for cooking today, either by roasting or stewing. The ones in the corner farthest from the heat are for the root cellar; some of these will be winter food, some will be ale. The best, piled in a slatted wood box, are for sending to market. The biggest ones go under the table for her father to hollow for bowls. Her mother will harden the shells on a rack above a slow, low fire. They'll go to market later on.

Her favorite thing to do with her father is have drawing lessons: trees, rocks caked over with moss, ferns, an oak leaf. Her second favorite thing is to watch him with his whittling knife, but that's not a lesson. She knows he won't let her use it. When he goes to work on the bowls, all it will mean for her is more pulp.

Her father cradles pumpkins in his arms. Sometimes he puts them down roughly, as if daring them to break. He looks disappointed when they don't. Nothing that needs not to break is breaking today and that's excellent. But this is not the way a father should be acting.

My mother's name is Patience,

My father's name is Cale…

Stop, her father says. If you want to sing, you know plenty of songs that are songs. You don't have to make them up.

But I like to.

In November he scolds her for things he admires the rest of the year. He's the one who should be scolded! He's supposed to put each pumpkin in the correct pile, but he'd left the sorting to her mother. He's supposed to wipe them off and leave the mud outdoors. Mud and bits of vine-rope are everywhere.

The fire is roaring, in a preface to cooking. Even with the constant opening of the door, the air is vegetable-heavy, mud-reeky, smoky.

He shouldn't have said that about songs. The songs she knows are for Sundays. If God wants people to sing hymns at home, she feels, there'd be no such thing as church.

My name is Hester Morley,

I live in Massachusetts.

I wish I had a sister,

So SHE can work the PUMPKINS.

They're all in, says her father. It's less than I hoped but we did all right.

Her mother pauses, a pumpkin in hand for the last box. They put their pumpkins in boxes to keep them separate from the others. It's a shared wagon run. Her father whittled his initials on theirs, a C and an M.

Her mother's apron is so soiled from wipings, hardly any white is visible. She's not wearing a cap. She doesn't wear one at home, unlike every wife in every house Hester ever visited. The hair knot at the back of her neck is loose and untidy and alarming, like vines and mud indoors, but the thing to worry about is the pulled-tight look on her face. It's a warning sign.

Her father is soaking wet, caked with dirt. He didn't have to shake his feet so that mud falls off his boots to the floor like a splattering of little turds. But he did it, and he waits, like Hester does, in the gap of a moment between stillness and maybe something big. He's a storm cloud, ready for lightning to strike.

But her mother looks away from him. She places the pumpkin in the box carefully, and only says, like she's saying aloud the last part of what she's been thinking, It would be good for us all if we had windows I could open.

In its fixed panes, the window glass is steam-smoky on the in, raindrop-beady on the out. Everyone else on the road has windows you can open and close.

I'm sorry, her father says.

Her mother is not a bolt of lightning. She's another November dark cloud. Hester sees they need God to look in the direction of this house and set in motion a mighty splash of light, sweeping through this room like a broom.

Her father goes over to her mother. Hester looks at how tall he is, standing there, still. Her mother reaches up and touches her fingers to his chin, wiping off a mud smear. It's a quick, slight gesture. But it means a lot. She never sees her parents touching each other.

Don't tell Hester not to sing what she sings, her mother says. You sound like your father when you talk like that. Maybe you should have been a minister after all.

Don't be saying things that aren't true.

Maybe we don't know anymore what's true and what isn't.

We know, her father says.

From out in the road comes the sound of wagon wheels. Her father picks up the pumpkin box.

Don't let them stop long enough that they'll want to come inside, says her mother. I don't want anyone gossiping about the condition of my house.

Men don't gossip, says her father.

That's what you think, says her mother.

On his way past Hester, he stops. She feels the pressure of the force inside him that's his love for her and her mother. She knows it's there, trapped.

The sun will start shining again very soon, she tells him.

That's good to know, he says.

She jumps up to open the door for him, closing it fast against the wet-heavy cold. Her mother picks up the hatchet and cleaves pumpkins, chop chop chop chop; the blows are perfectly placed. The hatchet never goes too far, never strikes the table top. In all the times her mother bladed food on this table, she has not made a nick in the wood.

Soon her mother is hand-scooping seeds in their tangles of pulp. She heaps it all on Hester's table. The pulp will go into a bucket to be given to the driver of the market wagon when he comes back tomorrow; he has pigs.

I'm sorry I said I wish I had a sister, Hester says.

Her only-ness as her parents' child is a touchy subject, rarely raised. Maybe she was trying to be a lightning bolt herself.

I don't mind you said so. It wasn't wrong of you, says her mother. It was God's will. Some day I'll try to explain it to you.

You could explain it now.

I'll wait until you sit with me all grown up and your own child is in your arms.

Hester knows by her mother's expression not to argue with that, and finally, when all the pumpkins are scooped, her mother begins the slicing. She likes to get the strips done first, before the cooking; they require the most concentration.

Hester grabs some pulp, picks out seeds.

You shouldn't say hate, says her mother. You shouldn't hate anything, or anyone.

What about the devil?

That's different, says her mother.

What about Indians?

Indians?

Hester drops seeds into the roasting pan on the floor at her feet. She puts the pulp in the bucket beside it. There was a raid in the next village last week. No one told her details, but she knows it was terrible.

She's never seen Indians except once when her father took her to the mission school. The Indians wore clothes like Americans. Their skin was all brown but she was amazed to know brown has so many shades. The same went for the blackness of all their hair. They didn't speak to her. The teachers said they were too new at English. They were happy, the teachers said, but they didn't look it. They looked tired, even the children. They looked like people who keep getting shouted at for doing things wrong. It was strange to see grownups as pupils in a school.

Her father had told her before they arrived that the men and boys would have long hair, perhaps in braids. She'd looked forward to that. But they'd all had haircuts.

The reason for the visit was that her father was bringing a gift of firewood. He'd borrowed a wagon from one of her uncles. He's always bringing things to the Indian school: wood, maple syrup, apples, whittled toys, desks, and chairs he built with wood from the forest, which he didn't use for a new table and chairs at home.

Her grandfather says Indians are devils God put on the earth to test the faith and devotion of Americans.

Grandfather says Indians have to stop being evil and act like us, or else they can't get to live in America, Hester reminds her mother.

You know we don't want you listening to such talk.

Her mother uses the carving knife for the drying strips. Pumpkins are hard. Her hands are strong like a man's. Why do you call it whittling when a man's doing it with something you don't eat, but not when a woman is doing it with food?

Why do you call it…

Don't distract me when I'm using a knife, says her mother.

Hester wonders if Indians at the mission school get angry at Indians who go on raids, or if they secretly cheer. She wonders why people in the raided village didn't pray that God would protect them, like she does. If they'd taken the time to pray, there would not have been a raid. Or maybe they took the time, but they didn't pray right.

She takes another round of pulp, picks at it. She hears the market wagon driving away. She thinks about how good it will smell in the house when the cooking gets going; and here's her father, coming back inside, muddier than ever, smiling a sad smile.

The sun's coming out, he says.

Hester feels a glow. She's proud of herself, proud of God. She sees that this is a good time, with her hands deep in busy-work, to speak to God about certain other things that need to happen.

She looks away from her father and concentrates hard on praying. First she thanks God for the sunlight, and then for her home and America and also her bed and her quilts, and how good it is to sleep warmly at night when it's cold, even though her bed is a trundle stored daytimes under her parents' big one; it has to be pulled from their alcove. She tells God she doesn't mind it when her cousins make fun of her for sleeping in the main room under the table, because she really does love her bed.

Then she gets down to real business. We must never be raided, she prays. Then she thinks about her mother touching her father to take off a bit of mud. He didn't touch back, but he had looked like he wanted to. Please, she's saying, could my mother and father touch each other all the time and not live with a wall between them?

* * *

Now it's night. She's under the table. A cooking pot is over her head, put there for cooling. Inside it is filling. They don't have flour to make a shell for a pie, but there is always hope they'll be able to get some. The filling will be stored and that's all right, because it means there'll be pie in the future.

Her belly's full from tastings. She'd fallen asleep but woke uncomfortably a few minutes ago, all jittery, like something inside her is buzzing. The cloth tacked over the opening to her parents' alcove is in place, as still as a drooping sail on a ship that's making a voyage, but there isn't any wind. Her grandfather had told her that there were days and days on the ocean to America when God took his breath from the sails and they'd sit there rocking on waves, and the only thing to do was figure out which passenger had done something wrong, so the offense could be punished, and they'd be moving again. He had raised his hand to her as if he'd hit her when she asked him if the person who did a wrong was ever him. She had ducked, had run away from him. That was the first time it occurred to her that when her grandfather talked about God the Father, he wasn't talking about God. God wouldn't strike a little girl. He was talking about an idea of a father just like himself.

She had figured out that she really doesn't have to believe anything her grandfather says. She feels proud of that. She feels that a rebel is a good thing to be.

She slips out of her bed. The reason her parents' sleeping alcove has a cover is that children aren't allowed to see a mother and father in their bed. That's a rule only a rebel would disobey.

She lights a candle from the hearth and tiptoes to the cloth, parting it just enough. They're sleeping deeply in the box of darkness that's their room, Patience and Cale, husband and wife, her mother, her father. She goes warm like the candlelight with love. She would never compare herself to God, but she wonders if this is how he must feel, watching over people, knowing things about people in their houses that no one else can know.

The strange divider that clefts her parents' bed down the center was maybe built by her father, same as the table, before she was born. It's a pair of wooden planks joined on their sides, one on the other, in a wall on top of the quilt. The bed is a four-poster. The head is an oval slatted in rails, and the bed-wall leans against a rail, so it's slightly tilted. At the foot, where the oval is solid, the wall fits snugly against it. In the daytime, she knows, the wall is under the bed, flat, under her trundle, like an extra layer of floor. Her parents are sleeping on their sides, facing their wall. The planks are pine. Near the head, where a pine knot used to be, there's an eye-shape of an opening. Sometimes when it's summer or spring, and their hands don't have to be under the quilt, she sees that her mother is asleep with one finger there, or her father is. She's never seen them with fingers touching, but maybe soon, now that she prayed for it, they will touch.

Back in her own bed, the candle returned exactly in the right spot, she thinks of the future. She thinks about pumpkin pie. She