The Seeker (21 page)
She had sent a letter to her father on that first Monday with the Shakers the way she had promised Mellie she would. Gemma told her she was free to write what she willed to her father, but that the Ministry would read her words before the letter was posted to be sure she had written nothing too worldly or improper. So she had carefully considered each word she penned.
Dear Father,
Please forgive me for leaving and coming here to Harmony Hill without talking to you first. I tried to explain my reasons in the letter I wrote to you before I left Grayson, but sometimes it’s hard to tell everything in words on paper. As you may already know, Edwin has decided to join with the Shakers and become a Believer. Thus there will be no wedding in May and no joining of the Grayson and Hastings farms as we had once hoped and dreamed.
I followed Edwin here at his invitation in hopes of finding a new plan for my life. I brought Mellie with me and she is now a free sister among the Shakers. She has heard some disturbing news from Grayson that Selena has no awareness—as is understandable since she is so new to our home—of our commitment to our people. Our Negroes have long been loyal to us at Grayson.
I know you feel the same sort of loyalty back toward them and will want to protect them from the great sorrow of being forced to leave the only home many of them have ever known. I can’t believe you would approve of such a course of action and trust you will do what needs to be done to make things right again. For all of us.
Your loving daughter,
Charlotte
As Sister Altha read through the letter, the frown lines deepened between her eyes. But she made no comment for or against any of Charlotte’s words when she handed the sheet of stationery back to Charlotte. “Address the envelope,” she ordered. “I will have to post it for you.”
Charlotte dipped the pen nib in the inkpot and stared at the blank envelope, not sure which address to write. She could post it directly to Frankfort, but then what if her father had returned to Grayson? It had been her experience in the past that letters sent to him in Frankfort often were lost if he wasn’t still in the capital city to receive them.
“You surely know your own address, Sister Charlotte.” Sister Altha blew out an impatient sigh as she tapped her toe against the wood floor.
“Yea, of course, Sister Altha.”
“Then let’s be done with this. We cannot neglect our duties overlong.”
Finally Charlotte wrote her father’s name on the letter and sealed it with a bit of wax before slipping it into the envelope. Quickly she addressed the envelope to Perkins, the overseer at Grayson, with instructions on the back to forward her letter to Frankfort if her father wasn’t expected home. Perkins might be taking orders from Selena, but his first loyalties would surely be to Grayson and her father. He would see that the letter was delivered into her father’s hand.
“I hope you are not planning on writing many letters, Sister.” Sister Altha snatched the envelope from Charlotte before the ink had time to dry. “Now Sister Gemma is waiting to take you to your work duties. It is good to dwell on the truth that a Believer has no time to waste.”
Days passed and became weeks as Charlotte anxiously awaited an answer, while at the Shaker village she continued the mind-numbing cycle of work and listening to Sister Altha’s instruction in the Shaker way. With the seed packets all sealed and ready to be marketed in the world by the Shaker traders, she followed Gemma to a new duty in the pressing room on the third floor of the Gathering Family House.
It promised to be hot and tedious work. A fire in the small round stove in the center of the room kept the irons hot—and also the workers, whose faces glistened with sweat in spite of the windows open to the spring breeze. As she followed Gemma into the too warm room, Charlotte longed to fling off the worrisome cap and let her head feel the air, but she knew Gemma would simply fetch the discarded cap and pleasantly tell her to put it back on. Nothing she did upset Gemma, who seemed to float on a peaceful sea with no storm waves ever. But at the same time, she never allowed Charlotte to lag.
When she noted Charlotte eyeing the overflowing basket of bedclothes beside the ironing board assigned to her, Gemma laughed. “We have need of many beds for our sisters and brothers, but do not despair, my sister. We also have many hands to get the work done. You are not expected to do more than your share.”
“That is good to hear, but you’ll have to show me how,” Charlotte said as she watched one of the sisters pick up an iron from the stove and moisten the tip of her finger to give its flat side a quick touch. Obviously satisfied with the heat she felt, she moved back to her board and began smoothing the skirt of one of the Shaker dresses. “I’ve never used an iron.”
“Never?” Gemma looked surprised. “Did you wear your clothes wrinkled?”
“Oh no.” Charlotte almost laughed at the idea. Her mother had taught her that a lady had to maintain the proper appearance at all times. “That wouldn’t have been allowed.”
A sister plain of face and looking to be in her middle years looked up from her steady pressing strokes. “Our new sister was a lady, Sister Gemma. Remember? Ladies have servants to do such common chores. I’ve even heard they have servants to dress them. That all they do is hold up their arms and turn and stand like a china doll while a servant tightens their corsets and does up their buttons. Is that true, Sister Charlotte?”
The other sisters in the room held their irons up away from the fabric spread on their ironing boards and looked at Charlotte as they waited for her to answer. None of them had probably ever had a servant do up their buttons or tie the laces on their pantalettes, but Charlotte sensed no animosity, only interest in what her answer might be.
“At times,” Charlotte said. “For fancy dresses and such. A lady’s waist must be fashionably slender and so the stays must be pulled as tight as possible. Tighter than one can do on her own. And then the buttons are completely out of reach on those dresses and they have no wiggle room. Not like these dresses at all.” Charlotte smiled and pulled the loose fabric of her dress out away from her waist.
The other women looked at her with unbelieving eyes as if hardly able to imagine such a life where somebody else fastened one’s buttons. One of the older sisters returned her iron to the stove and picked up a new one. When she spat on it, her spit sizzled on the hot surface before she turned toward Charlotte. “Did you not like being a lady, young sister? Or did your family’s fortunes change?”
The woman’s look was sharp, and Charlotte thought that, not only would she know if Charlotte did not speak the truth, she would be sure to report such a lapse of honesty to Sister Altha. So she simply said, “At times I felt trapped in dresses I could not unbutton.”
She might have said more, but one of the younger sisters spoke up. “I wore such a dress once. My wedding dress had tiny pearl buttons with fabric loops to hold them. My dear mother fastened them for me. She’d worn the dress when she married my father years before.”
“And did you feel trapped in it the way our new sister says?” the older sister asked.
“Nay. I felt beautiful and happy on my wedding day.” The girl’s face softened as if she could still see herself the way she had looked on that day.
“Such feelings of vanity are a sin, Sister Dulcie,” the older sister warned.
“Yea, Sister Erma.” The young woman lowered her eyes to the floor. “I will confess my sin at the first opportunity.”
“You are married?” Charlotte looked at the girl in surprise. “I understood marriage was not allowed among you here.”
Gemma answered before Dulcie could. “Many come among us with the need to shake free from the sin of matrimony before they can begin living the true way.”
“And how does that happen?” Charlotte asked. “Aren’t the vows of marriage sacred? Doesn’t the Bible speak of forsaking all others and cleaving to your husband or wife?”
Gemma smiled. “Sister Altha is right. You do have many questions and little understanding of our ways. Here in our community we demonstrate the practical love that is asked of believers in the Scripture. ‘By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’ The selfish love of husband and wife and children cannot satisfy that commandment of the Lord. Such selfish unions bring naught but sin and stress into one’s life. But the peaceful, all-encompassing love we practice here for all our brethren enables us to live the perfect life at Harmony Hill. Is that not right, my sisters?” Gemma swept her eyes around the other women in the room.
“Yea,” they echoed one another, but Charlotte noted some of the voices sounded less enthusiastic than the others. Dulcie’s yea was barely above a whisper.
“Good, we are all agreed as how it should be. We have no ladies here, only sisters,” Sister Erma said with another sharp look toward Charlotte before she began plying her iron again. “Now it will be best if we stop our chatter and attend to our labor. The irons do not smooth the wrinkles without our arms pushing them.”
Again the sisters answered with a chorus of obedient yeas as they turned back to their ironing boards. Dulcie stepped over in front of Gemma. “If it pleases you, Sister Gemma, let me show our new sister how to iron the sheets. I have not learned much well enough to teach it while I have been here at Harmony Hill, but I know well how to do this duty. And there is an open ironing board here beside me.”
“That would be good, Sister Dulcie. Sister Altha has asked me to write some letters for her since her arthritis is making writing difficult, so this will give me the opportunity to tend to those duties. Plus I must confess ironing is not my favorite duty.” Gemma flashed them her smile before she headed for the door.
Dulcie watched Gemma leave and then shook her head slightly. “Sometimes you want to pinch Sister Gemma just to be sure she is a flesh-and-blood sister and not an angel in Shaker dress. Have you ever seen her the least bit perturbed?”
Charlotte thought a minute before she said, “Not that I can remember. Even my many questions don’t seem to bother her. She always answers me kindly. Unlike Sister Altha who tells me such mindless curiosity will surely lead me down the devil’s path.”
Dulcie made a sympathetic face. “Yea, Sister Altha does greatly desire to keep us off that path. But engaged in our duties, we won’t be tempted to stray. Come, let me show you how to do this ironing duty.”
She pulled the basket of sheets over to the side and showed Charlotte how to sprinkle water over them and then roll them up tightly so the fabric would be damp enough for the irons to smooth more easily.
The hiss of the heated irons against the damp cloth, the clank of cooling irons being set back on the stove, and the rustle of the fabric being shifted and straightened on the ironing boards made it impossible to hear any words spoken except by someone standing very near. Charlotte peeked over at Sister Erma to be sure she wasn’t looking their way before she asked Dulcie, “So how come you to be here if you were married?”
Dulcie kept her voice as low as Charlotte’s. “My husband was converted by a Shaker brother selling garden seeds. Our farm was rocky and the ground so poor we could barely grow enough corn to feed our children.”
“Children?” Dulcie looked too young and too slight to have ever borne a child. “You have children?”
“We had three. Two girls and a wee boy. Then the wee one, our sweet little Willy, got a fever and died. I could have overcome the sadness, but my William felt it was a direct punishment from the Lord for what he called our sins of lust.” Dulcie kept her eyes on the tightly rolled dampened sheet as she placed it back in the basket. “Brother Joseph, the Shaker man, said the Lord had revealed that truth to William, and the only way to protect our girls was to come to Harmony Hill. So we did.” She stood up and together they carried the basket of dampened bedclothes back to the ironing board.
Charlotte shook out a pillowcase and laid it on the board as she saw a sister doing across the room. “Are you sorry to be here?”
“We don’t go hungry and Shaker children rarely get fevers.” Dulcie handed Charlotte an iron. “Careful. You can burn yourself,” she warned as Charlotte set the iron down on the pillowcase. There was a slight hiss as steam rose up around the hot iron.
“Keep it moving or you will scorch the fabric.” Dulcie took the iron from Charlotte and moved it back and forth with just the right pressure to smooth out the wrinkles. “A very hot iron works best, so when this one cools you must put it back on the stove in the iron holder and take a newly hot one. When you need to adjust the material, you can set the iron down on its heel.” She propped the iron up on the end of the ironing board.
“It looks easy when you do it,” Charlotte said as she picked the iron up to give it another try.
“I’ve had much practice. My mother had me ironing pillowcases by the time I was six.”
While not as quick as Dulcie, Charlotte managed to smooth the wrinkles out of the rest of the case. She ran her hand over the warm cotton with satisfaction at its smoothness.
“Now fold it over and do the other side,” Dulcie instructed. “We have no time to admire our work. There are many pieces to iron.” She watched as Charlotte pressed and folded the pillowcase into a square that matched all the other Shaker pillowcases. Uniformity was desired in all they did. “Now lay it aside on the finished table and begin another until your basket is empty.”
Charlotte looked at the basket heaped with sheets and pillowcases. “I have to do them all? Today?”
Dulcie smiled. “I will take from your basket too and we will be finished before the midday meal. Sisters help one another here. That is a good thing.” Then her smile faded as she reached down to lift a sheet out of the basket and hold it up against her bosom as if the bundle held a baby. “But I do miss holding my children against my heart.”