Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (3 page)

That day was Sunday, and the Marshall family never missed Preacher Bowman’s sermon. Sean’s family spent a good deal of money to help build the tiny Baptist church so that the family beliefs were as well represented in Cloverdale, Oregon, as they had been in Tennessee. Even though Preacher Bowman was not an ordained minister until their small congregation had proclaimed him so, he knew the book and preached with fire and brimstone, and he, too, was from Tennessee. Thinking about all that, Sean was beginning to feel even more miserable. He just wasn’t ready to show anyone the picture. Maybe he would try to talk to Blair. One thing was for sure: Sean was of no mind to attend services that day and face Preacher Bowman. He removed his pants and crawled back under the covers, hiking his knees to his chest. When his mother missed him at the breakfast table and came looking for him, he would feign stomach cramps. Then, when the family and farm hands left for church without him, Sean would have space to think about what he should do.

“Oh no you don’t, young man! Get out of that bed before I switch you for your laziness. There is nothing the matter with you at all.”

Mavis Marshall wasn’t sympathetic to sudden illnesses that seemed to strike her boys on Sunday mornings but vanish by Sunday evenings.

Sean groaned melodramatically. He was unaccustomed to lying to his parents. “Ma, my gullet’s aching awful bad.”

Mavis slammed firm fists against her bony frame and gave her youngest son a firm glare. “You get yourself dressed an’ down to the kitchen this instant or your gullet isn’t the only part that will be aching you, Sean. You know I’ve been down there in my Sunday’s-best since the sun rose, rolling out biscuits and frying pork to go with today’s porridge. Now you hightail it down there and get some ‘fore we leave for church.”

Sean dejectedly pulled himself from the mattress and began pulling on his pants again.

“Lord, Mama. I’m a man now. A man oughta decide for himself if his gullet’s in any condition to travel.”

Sean knew his mother was not a nagger, a calamity-howler or a complainer, and she didn’t tolerate any complaining or feeling sorry for oneself from her boys either. Sean knew that his feigned illness had not fooled her one little bit. She’d had him licked from the beginning.

Mavis simply turned and left. Sean could hear her heavy boots crossing the soft fir floorboards. He reached for his own boots, and there again was the box.

“Aw, hell,” Sean murmured miserably.

With yearning, he remembered that when he was a small boy, before Preacher Bowman came to town, his father, Wyatt Marshall, would conduct the family worship on Sundays. They would get dressed in Sunday finery and assemble in the small parlor downstairs, and Wyatt would read from the Good Book. Wyatt would read the parables and leave time enough for the boys to work the lessons out. Sean had only been five years of age, and he couldn’t remember particulars, but he’d gleaned a theme from his father’s preachings; and it was friendship, truth, honesty, loyalty, and a reverence for God and one’s parents. Sean missed those sermons and lessons. He hankered for a return of his family’s unpainted version of faith, a simple interpretation that asked only for the good Christian to keep the faith of his father and live honestly before man and God. For living according to the Good Book, it was considered that God would see to it all would be well in the end. Those were the lessons he learned as a small boy from the man he most respected in the world. After what he’d witnessed of the preacher, Sean dreaded going to Bowman’s church and listening to his speeches of hellfire; he felt it a blasphemy.

The church was newly whitewashed and practically shone in the bright sunshine. As the Marshalls’ buckboard pulled up the road, Sean could see Preacher Bowman standing at the foot of the steps, greeting his flock. The day was hot, but Sean felt a sudden chill. The preacher was smiling and shaking hands. At his side was his silent daughter, Blair. Before the previous day, Sean hadn’t paid much attention to her. But that day, he noticed that she was even prettier than he remembered, with doe-like brown eyes that were sad and brooding. She bowed her shoulders forward and stood with her arms wrapped protectively about her waist. She stared at the dirt beneath her boots all of the time. It occurred to Sean that Blair did not want to be noticed. She acted like someone who wished to be invisible. Sean could not take his eyes from her.

Blair appeared nervous and Sean wondered if she could feel him watching her. He’d be nervous if he were her—he’d always worry if anyone knew. The poor girl must be drubbed by a fear of her secret getting out. Blair lifted her eyes and Sean could tell she was clearly startled to see him standing before her, smiling. She seemed to jump right out of her skin and blanch at the sight of him. It made his heart ache for her all the more. He wanted to throw his arms around this fragile dark beauty, but instinctively, he knew better than to touch her.

“Hiya, Blair,” was all Sean could think to say to her.

She backed away from Sean a half step and looked back at the ground. Everyone else had gone inside, and the church doors were closing. Sean witnessed an almost-manic darting of the girl’s eyes like some poor wounded bird.

“That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing, Blair,” Sean offered.

In truth Sean thought Blair’s manner of dressing was odd. For one thing, the girl wore too many clothes for such a warm day—a blouse under her dress and a sweater over the top—and she’d put a cleaning scarf over her lovely dark curls and chose to wear her work boots with her Sunday dress. She looked up briefly at his compliment, and Sean could tell she distrusted it, and him. She looked away again.

“Really, Blair. You look so pretty today. I was wondering if you’d let me take your picture later.”

At that, Blair jerked her head up and shouted in a strange, hoarse whisper, “No!” And with that, she ran behind the church.

Sean followed around the building but could see that she intended to run all the way back to her home.

Sean wished he could kick his own behind.
What a stupid thing to say! Maybe she don’t aim to look pretty, you idiot
.
Heck, that’d probably be the last thing she’d want to do. Stupid!

Inside the small church, Preacher Bowman was telling his rapt audience of the genius of Paul: “‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?’”

Preacher Bowman searched his audience for one with the answer, but they all were quiet.

“His name is Savior!” The preacher boomed. “He sets the prisoner free. He forgives sin and gives the guilty conscience peace. He does more, far more! By the indwelling presence of his Holy Spirit, he gives us the power to achieve a permanent victory over the most sordid, stubborn of the sins that haunt and harass us. In Christ, we find the secret of moral victory! We know how we ought to live. We know how we want to live. It is the power we lack to fight Satan’s temptations. This church is your vale of soul-making. We are all here to do the will of God, to be trained for our eternal destiny as his sons and daughters by the disciplines of life. Amen!” the preacher thundered.

“Amen,” answered the small congregation.

Sean watched the preacher’s face grow red and huffy as he shouted his sermon at the parishioners. Sweat trickled down the sides of the preacher’s fattened face. White spittle had taken refuge in the corners of his mouth. His mouth contorted with ecstasy while delivering his conviction of God’s forgiveness for even the most sordid sins. Sean could not stomach any more of it. His gullet truly was peckish now. He hurried quietly out the doors into the harsh sunlight and gulped in the fresh spring air. He had to find a way to help Blair Bowman.

Chapter 4

T
here was a small lean-to at the backside of the tiny cottage, the roof of which sloped so drastically low that occasionally, the goats would use the wood pile to climb atop it. Blair liked to climb to the roof as well. It was a hideout where she gained some sense of privacy and could submit to her pain-free fantasy world. She ran from the church to the top of the lean-to, and as she picked at the fir needles, she hugged herself with protectiveness and began the almost-ritualistic habit of talking to herself. The self she spoke to was much stronger and far more sensible than the Blair on the outside, she thought. The Blair inside, she knew instinctively, was the only reason she survived. She decided to give herself an inner name which she would protect from the world.

He wasn’t looking at you the same way Father does,
her inner-self told her.
It was different…it was like…he cared about you.

She picked up a handful of needles and threw them off the roof, watching them cascade down to the ground.
No. I should know better than that. Father’s always said the day would come when tempting him would no longer be enough for me, when I would begin seducing other men. And that’s what I must have done. Why would Sean Marshall care about me?
she returned.

But you didn’t do anything. You didn’t even look at him. He approached you and said you looked pretty,
argued the inner self.

It was my fault. I should not look pretty. I should not tempt. I must be a demon, as Father says.
She hugged herself tighter and began to sob.

I know you didn’t mean to,
the inner-self reassured her.
Good gravy, Blair. You dress stranger than a two-headed cow!

Blair could not suppress a small smile to herself.

Why must it be a sin to be pretty anyway? Why can’t a boy be interested in you without it being evil? Why don’t you get to have a life that is normal?
the inner-self asked desperately.

Blair fumbled for the worn folded paper she kept next to her heart. Pulling the paper free, she unfolded it carefully and her slender fingers smoothed it out against her skirt-draped knees. She found it soothing to recite the words from the now-faded penmanship of a favorite teacher—how Miss Joseph knew Blair would treasure the poem by Emily Dickinson, she could not fathom. Her mouth moved soundlessly as her eyes followed the lines:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops–at all

And sweetest–in the Gale–is heard

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land

And on the strangest Sea

Yet–never–in Extremity,

It asked a crumb–of me.

Her shoulders slumped farther. Her suffering was silent.

After a long while, Blair heard the sounds of her father’s wagon pulling up to the house. He would be furious with her for not having started Sunday dinner. Surely it must be nearing two o’clock. She scrambled from the roof and into the summer kitchen, grabbing flour and leavening from the shelf and pulling potatoes, carrots, and onions from the drawer. She tried to look as though she’d been busy with dinner preparations for some time by scattering flour here and there and pumping cool water over the chicken and placing it in the enamel roasting pan.
Her trembling hands were well onto the peeling of a third potato when her father walked in.

“I did not see you inside the church, child. Where did you go?” Her father wanted to know where she was and who she was with all of that time.

Blair concentrated hard on peeling the potato without taking too much of the potato away.

I went to hell for a short holiday,
the inner self whispered to Blair.

But what Blair said aloud was, “Sean Marshall started talking to me just outside the door, Father, and—”

“Ah!” the preacher yelled as though he’d been wounded. “It begins now! You surely are the temptress, Blair. More so than your mother ever was.”

“No, Father! I wasn’t tempting anyone. I was…I was minding myself. I didn’t want him to talk to me. I don’t know why he chose to. I ran all the way home,” she added desperately in her defense.

“And you believe, to be certain, that you did not tempt the young man any more than you have tempted your own father? You know that you are the Genesis seductress, Blair. ‘Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him that we may preserve the seed of our father.’”

The preacher’s breathing was becoming heavy and his speech husky, with the sing-song quality that made the back of Blair’s neck grow cold. She knew that if she turned, she would see the glassy, faraway look in her father’s eyes. Tears began to well up in her own eyes, and a fluttery fear rose in her stomach. She could not see the potato she was peeling at all clearly, and she cut herself with the paring knife. Quickly, she grabbed a sink cloth and wrapped it around her thumb.

Without turning, she said softly, “I don’t wish to tempt anyone, Father. I never wanted—”

“Ha! Never wanted? Do you not remember how you wanted, even when you were but five years old? You would come to me with stories of the devil and demons and ask to come in to my bed. I would hold you like a father, and you would squirm and rub against me like the temptress you are.”