The widow's war by Sally Gunning Page B

does as he pleases, but I said what of the Indian, and she said one Indian does not make the rule. I said who does make the rule and she said God and Papa. I think God or Papa should have told the Indian the rule, don’t you, Grandmama?”
    “Here we are,” Lyddie said. “Get the rake from the barn. You may start by raking the seaweed away from the foundation.”
    “Why do we put seaweed around the house, Grandmama?”
    “To keep out the cold.”
    “Then why do we rake it away now?”
    “To keep away the rot.”
    The girl bobbed off toward the barn, craning her neck for one last look at the Indian before he went around the turn.
    Lyddie drew water, went inside, and tucked up her skirt. She decided to begin with the cellar. She knocked down what cobwebs had managed to foil the round design of the cellar, collected the bits of molded food, and scraped the shelves clean. Back upstairs she cleaned the glass and had just begun to wash down the walls when Bethiah came in, wild-eyed. The Indian. The Indian was coming. She dashed behind Lyddie and caught hold of the band of her apron.
    The door rattled under a hard pair of knuckles, and Lyddie stepped forward to open it, dragging the girl behind, her own heart accelerating. Which of us feeds the other? she wondered. And just what was it they feared in this Indian? His sheer power and size? His darkness? The fact that “Papa doesn’t like him”? Or was it that he “did as he pleased,” fearing neither God nor Nathan?
    He stood filling the doorway. “You’re back now?”
    “No, we’re cleaning. The house is to be sold, as I told you. Mr. Crowe comes to look on Friday. This is my granddaughter Bethiah.”
    The Indian moved his eyes without haste from Lyddie to the girl, but they didn’t linger. It seemed to give Bethiah courage to be so quickly dismissed; her grip on the apron band lessened. “My wife spoke to you,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “About your husband.”
    “A little, yes.”
    “I had him. A good grip. He was alive. I felt him take hold.”
    “Yes. All right.”
    “It tore.”
    “What?”
    “The coat tore.”
    “All right. Yes.”
    “He was in my hands and then he was under.”
    “Yes, Mr. Cowett. I understand. And I do thank you.”
    He didn’t move. “Ned Crowe,” he said, as if he were the subject all along. “Ned Crowe looks to live here?”
    “We have good hope of him,” Lyddie said. “Deacon Smalley proved a disappointment, but things are looking up now.”
    Silence.
    Would he never go? Or look away? In the end he did both together, in one graceful swing of his shoulders, and Lyddie’s “Good morning” struck at his back.
    She was surprised when he stopped, turned, and offered a half-bow in answer.
    “Oh, my, ” Bethiah said.

10

    Lyddie snapped out of a nightmare about Edward in the well—Lyddie reaching for his coat sleeve and his arm coming off with the sleeve to hang limp in her hand—but it wasn’t the dream that had woken her, it was sound, a whole series of sounds: doors, voices, feet. She heard Nathan shout, “What the devil! Sister!” She slid to her feet, pulled her shawl around her, and felt her way to the keeping room.
    Nathan stood at the door with a single candle held high, ushering in his brother Silas’s wife, along with her five children. The candlelight touched down here and there as they filed by, lighting up first a gold head and then a pair of pale eyes and then another, and another, until at the end of the line came the shadowed hills and valleys of the mother’s worn-out face.
    “I’m so sorry, Brother, so sorry to trouble you, ’tis Silas, maddrunk, come at me with a knife this time, and I didn’t know where to go at this hour. Have you room? Just for this night? He’ll be right as rain come morning.”
    “Room! Good God, woman, look at the lot of you, I’m not an inn! There now, the whole house is up. Go on, go on, Nathan; you girls, back to bed with you. Ah! And now here’s my wife, and she