Chapter 7 - The Geography of the River
The house at Upper Blackwood was not a manor.
It was a fieldstone farmhouse built in 1782 by a Quaker weaver named Jonathan Paxson, who had chosen the site because the spring that emerged from the limestone ridge never froze, even in the terrible winter of seventy-nine when the British were burning the mills at Trenton.
It had walls two feet thick, floors of wide white oak that had been planed with an adze and secured with square-headed iron spikes, and deep window sills where four pots of red geraniums sat in the southern light, their leaves smelling of dry spice whenever the sun hit the glass.
We moved in on the first of November.
The house had belonged to James’s great-uncle, an eccentric man who had collected first-edition books on American silviculture and had left the property to James because he said James was the only boy in the family who knew how to prune an apple tree without killing the fruit spurs.
There were four rooms downstairs, each with its own open hearth built of river stone, and three bedrooms upstairs under the eaves where the cedar shingles rattled against the rafters whenever the north wind came down from the Water Gap.
On the first Saturday of the month, the rain began early—a cold, steady, soaking rain that washed the last of the yellow leaves from the sugar maples and turned the lane into two inches of greasy, slate-colored mud.
I was in the kitchen.
It was a long, low room with a ceiling of exposed joists that had been whitewashed sixty years ago. On the center table—an eight-foot trestle of heavy walnut that had been built for the house when the country had only thirteen states—sat my nursing gear.
My stethoscope, its black rubber tubing slightly sticky from the hospital disinfectants; my state registry cards; three textbooks on pediatric pharmacology; and the green leather box containing the Persian Gulf pearls.
The Eleanor Vance gown was gone.
On the Thursday after the wedding, Catherine had come to the farmhouse in her station wagon. We had not spoken of the trial. We had not spoken of Patricia’s frantic, misspelled letters that had begun arriving at the firm’s office in Doylestown, begging for "family arbitration before the neighbors find out about the writ."
Catherine had carried a heavy tin box lined with blue tissue paper and four bags of dried lavender from her garden.
We had folded the 1953 satin together on the walnut trestle.
We did not fold it like modern clothing; we folded it along the architectural darts that the Como seamstresses had laid down seventy years before. Catherine had placed sheets of acid-free parchment between the silver bullion embroidery and the skirts, so that the pewter thread would not mark the face of the Como satin during the next forty years of darkness.
"Where will it go?" I had asked her, watching her hands smooth the tissue over the boat-neck collar.
"Back into the vault at Chestnut Hill," Catherine had said, her fingers tucking the lavender into the corners. "Until James has a daughter who knows how to hold her head up when the wind gets into the orchard."
She had looked at me then—not with that fierce, terrifying authority she had shown on the lawn at Blackwood Manor, but with that quiet, settled affection that doesn't need to announce itself with exclamation points.
"You're back at the clinic on Monday?" she had asked.
"Seven o'clock," I said. "The seven-to-seven shift."
"Good," she had said, closing the heavy tin lid with a soft, metallic click. "A woman who doesn't work is at the mercy of the people who buy her bread. Eleanor Vance knew that. She owned three brick kilns in Germantown and never let her husband see the invoices."
Now, on Saturday morning, James was in the lean-to behind the kitchen.
Through the six-pane window, I could see him by the light of a kerosene lantern hung from the rafter. He was wearing an old gray wool sweater with the elbows darned with green twine, split cowhide work gloves, and his high rubber boots.
He had our two cords of swamp oak stacked against the stone wall.
Tock. Crack. Thud.
The sound of his eight-pound splitting maul came through the wet glass with that steady, rhythmic, mechanical precision that made the house feel like an engine that was running at its proper idle.
He didn't swing with his arms; he swung with his hips, his large shoulders rising, the steel wedge catching the heartwood clean on the grain, the two halves of the round flying apart into the sawdust before he set the next log on the block.
He had been at it since six.
He had two cords to split before the hard freeze on Tuesday, and he worked with that unhurried, terrifying stamina that I had seen in his mother when she walked across the lawn to take her seat on the left side of the aisle.
The kitchen door clicked.
It was Sarah.
She had come down from the inn at New Hope on the morning bus, her small canvas bag held by the strap, her trench coat wet through at the shoulders from the walk up the lane from the blacktop.
She stood on the braided rug inside the door, her shoes left outside on the flagstones, her socks damp and gray at the toes.
"Emily?" she whispered.
"Sit by the hearth, Sarah," I said, not turning from the stove where the iron kettle was beginning to sing its thin, high note. "The tea is Earl Grey. The bread was baked yesterday by the Quaker woman down at the mill."
Sarah sat on the low wooden stool beside the stones.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, but the frantic, hysterical twitch that had made her look like Vanessa in the motel room had begun to fade. She smelled of wet wool and the pine-scented soap the motor inn put in their plastic dishes.
"They sold the LeSabre," Sarah said, her voice dropping into the quiet of the stone room.
I poured the boiling water over the leaves in the brown earthenware pot.
Hiss. Bubble. Settle.
"Did they?"
"Aunt Patricia sold it to a wholesaler on the highway for twelve hundred dollars," Sarah said, staring into the embers of the hickory fire. "To make the first payment on the legal escrow. Vanessa wanted her to fight it. Vanessa told her that if they went to court, she’d tell the judge that Catherine Whitmore had threatened her with physical violence in the suite."
"And what did Patricia say?"
"She slapped her," Sarah said softly.
The word fell into the room like a cold stone dropped into a deep cistern.
"Aunt Patricia slapped her across the mouth right there in the kitchen on Linden Street," Sarah continued, her fingers curling into the wool of her skirt. "She told Vanessa that she had spent thirty years building a house for her to live in, and that Vanessa had burned it down with a pair of five-dollar scissors because she couldn't stand to see Emily have a good man. She told Vanessa to get out and find a room at the YWCA in Trenton."
"Did she go?"
"She packed two suitcases," Sarah said. "She was crying so hard she couldn't breathe. She stood on the porch waiting for the bus, and Aunt Patricia pulled the shades down and didn't even look out the window."
I set the brown earthenware mug on the small pine stand beside Sarah’s knees.
The steam rose between us, smelling of bergamot and woodsmoke.
I looked out the window again.
James had finished the swamp oak. He had laid the maul against the chopping block, taken off his cowhide gloves, and was wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his gray sweater. He looked up, saw me standing by the glass, and raised his hand—not a wave, just two fingers lifted from his temple in that quiet, level greeting that meant the wood was dry, the chimney was drawing, and the house was ready for the snow.
"Is it over, Emily?" Sarah asked from the stool, her voice trembling slightly as she took the warm mug between her palms.
I looked at my hands.
May you like
The nails were short, trimmed clean for the ward on Monday morning. The small red marks where Patricia’s nails had dug into my wrist had faded into four tiny, faint yellow shadows that would be gone before the week was out.
"Yes, Sarah," I said, walking to the door to let my husband in out of the rain. "The work is finished. Now we just live in the house."
