When the tent finally cleared, it was collapsed everywhere but under its main pole. There Purchase still sat in the healing seat, with Mary Josepha’s hands still on him.

six

Their congress when it was finished had lasted a full ten minutes, through all the bedlam, and if Mary Josepha had possessed healing power Purchase would have been cleansed and fixed of all that ever disturbed him. Instead, he was possessed by a great wanting, and when she removed her hands from him he was afraid such as he had never been before — of being without her touch.

She looked slightly wild about the eyes, and her girdle was misaligned. After she took her hands down she did not know what to think of the man who had sat so calmly through all the commotion without flinching, as if he were afraid of nothing in the world. When he finally stood and took her arm to find them a pathway out of the fallen tent, she felt hot beneath his hand and realized she had been wanting for him to return her touch the entire time he was seated there.

Outside, Purchase placed her on his horse, mounted the animal behind her, and rode off. Mary Josepha had a prearranged meeting on the edge of town with her husband, Oswin Palmer. When Purchase rode in the other direction, however, she did not protest.

Purchase took her to the same room in back of his workshop where he had asked her to wait for him the last time they met. This time, instead of going off, he went inside with her and bolted the door. There they spent the entire rest of the day in the thrall of each other’s embrace.

They were still there the next day, when Magnus came round from Stonehouses looking for him. Sanne had been very distraught that he had not come home after the chaos at the prayer meeting and worried he was hurt in the mayhem. Magnus, though, who had observed him as he sat in the chair, suspected he had finally conspired a way to be alone with the preacher woman.

When Magnus knocked at the door there was no response from inside at first. He knocked louder, finally calling out, until Purchase responded. “What do you want?”

“Open the door,” Magnus said.

It was silent inside, but after a while the worn wooden door creaked open and Purchase stood there, looking as though he had not slept for many days.

“Sanne wants to know what happened to you.”

“Tell her I’ll be around for dinner.”

“Will you?”

When Magnus came back without Purchase, but told them he had found him in his workshop, Sanne was quieted. Merian, however, grew suspicious.

“What was he doing there?”

“Repairing a wheel,” Magnus answered.

“Likely,” Merian returned. “Any sign of those two preachers around town?”

“None that I have seen,” Magnus said.

“You’re a remarkable poor liar,” Merian said. “That’s a marvel for a slave, but it’s a sign of your mother’s character, not your own. You would lie if you could; you just can’t. You are trying your mighty best, though.”

“He says he will be here at dinner.”

That afternoon, as Sanne and Adelia put food out for the family, Purchase came through the door, and Magnus was relieved to see his brother had not gone mad enough to bring the woman with him.

During the meal he answered all their questions glancingly, hiding his secret thoughts, and departed as soon as the table was cleared. Merian watched him go with a heavy heart, for he could see the beginning of unhappiness in his son, who until then had seldom known the evil of tears. At least that is what Merian imagined. Purchase to all the world looked elated that afternoon, and, when he took his horse and galloped off in a frenzy, anyone watching would have thought it was a youthful hunger for speed and experience rather than eagerness to find heartbreak.

When he returned to the shop that evening, Mary Josepha was gone again, as were all of her things, and the room was carefully straightened. Next to the place where they had made their bed, he found a coin with a strange marking on it he had not seen before. When he realized she had abandoned the place, he felt as if he had just walked through a sheet of glass and was only waiting for the noise to reach him. He knew then he could not hear the noise because he was inside it and its sound was pain itself.

He sat there awhile, still hoping her departure was only momentary and that she might come back through the door with all her things proclaiming the desire to stay with him, until he could no longer bear the atmosphere of the room and soon went out and mounted his horse, intending to ride a spell so that he might gather himself. His feelings were still tender in his breast three hours later when he stopped the horse in front of the roadhouse.

He entered and there was very little activity, as it was still the middle of the day and midweek at that. Soon the proprietress came out to oblige his needs, sending him into one of the rooms.

When he was done if he had to describe her he would have failed in all detail except her sex, which was female, and so all that mattered to his end of the trade.

As he rode home, he agreed with what Magnus had said, that taking one woman to forget another was indeed a peculiar sort of arithmetic. But, like some clever trick of calculus, it worked a shortcut to forgetting for him, and he was balanced enough so long as he was able to stay in the anonymous arms of the other woman. Seated on his horse, taking the trail back to Stonehouses, he felt a compounding of the shame that had seized him from the time he was there before and sensed how he was neglecting himself to behave in such a way. He knew nothing but the devil could work such low misery on a man.

“I must get this out of myself,” he said aloud, as he turned onto his father’s property. As he thought how he might be falling into Satan’s grasp, he resolved to himself never to go to that place in the woods again or do what he had done out there with anyone else.

When he came on his father’s land, he composed himself before riding to the house, but both his parents were still able to tell he was brought fairly far down by something. Sanne, not yet sensing its seriousness, did not try to comfort him. Merian, though, asked slyly whether he did not think it was time for him to begin thinking of taking a wife. “Of your own,” he added, as if in afterthought.

Purchase, when he heard this, looked severely at Magnus, thinking he had betrayed him.

“What puts that into your mind?” he asked Merian coolly.

“Only that it’s getting to be time. But you seem to have your own notions. What about you, Magnus?”

“What, sir?” Magnus replied.

“Have you given thought to a wife? Worse things can happen to a man at your age in life.”

“I’m still getting used to all that has changed in the last two years,” he said. “I don’t think a wife would help any but to confuse things.”

“Is there a drink to be had anywhere?” Purchase asked, when they had finished dinner.

Sanne, hearing this, grew worried. “There’s no need of drinking with every meal,” she said.

“No need for it, just asking,” Purchase said.

“Nay, have a drink,” Merian told him. “You too, Magnus. Let’s all sit down, since it is so rare we seem to be all together of late.”

Sanne went out into the kitchen, muttering that it was not temperate to drink in the middle of the week for no reason other than want of drink. “Salvation is in resisting urges, not giving in to whatever we want just for desire of it,” she said. Out in the kitchen she sent Adelia away and sat herself down at the low table, where she began praying for all of them in the house.

When she was younger all her prayers had seemed very abstract to her, and merely the habit of ritual and good behavior. As she prayed now, in the later part of her life, she was stricken with a great terror, and even the things she worried might happen in the afterlife seemed very real, nor did they seem far off. She prayed with an anxiety that she might pass at any moment and did not want any of her thoughts for her family to go unheard. She did not know what influence anyone on earth could have, either up there or in the other place, if people down there had sympathy for those still up here, but she knew that, without her, Merian would go to church very seldom, and Purchase and Magnus, whom she had taken in as an orphan even though he was well grown when he came into their lives, would not go at all unless it was for needs that had little to do with salvation. She did not think they were unscrupulous, any of them, simply that they did not pay enough heed to the care of their religion, in the same way some people would sit down to table without paying mind to the cleanliness of their hands.