Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) by Isabel Miller Read Free Book Online

Angel’s blessing.
    Her fear was over. Mine not. “That’s something powerful, girl,” I said.
    She nodded, breathing through her mouth because she’d just come up from deep water. Then she looked down at me, all seriousness except a little turning-up of the right corner of her mouth. I looked back, serious entirely, because it was up to me to save us from a thirst we could never come to a pause in or rest from. I was older. It was up to me.
    She wouldn’t look away. She wanted the corner of my mouth up too, and when at last I gave her that, she kissed me again.
    Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.
    And that thought, that whatever this was I would live it, made it containable. I can’t explain why. I only know it happened.
    Once I’d dreamed that a fierce wildcat was attacking me. I was very afraid, and then I thought, why, it’s hungry, and I offered it my hands to eat. It didn’t eat them. It became immediately gentle, a friend.
    So when I let my head fall back under Sarah’s kiss, the frenzy I trembled at just wasn’t there. Instead, comfort and joy and simplicity and order and answers to questions I’d always supposed unanswerable, such as, why was I born? why a woman? why here? why now?
    A wonderful glowing spacious peacefulness came to us. There was so much time. I took her jerkin off and kissed it and laid it down. All afternoon we leaned against each other at the table, and in the light from the frosty window I read to her about Genesee – the price of salt (one dollar a bushel), the wages of a laborer (ten to fifteen dollars a month, and board), the number of republicans, the number of federalists. On and on, and then repeat. That the mail stage ran out from Albany twice a week. That unimproved land west of the Genesee River sold for a dollar and a half an acre.
    “That’s where we’ll go, west of the river,” Sarah said. “I’ll cut my hair and be a laborer. We can buy near seven acres for a month of work.” She couldn’t read, but she could deal with figures in her head. I’ve always choked up at the thought of figures myself.
    “We’ll have other money, and you won’t cut your hair,” I said, very firmly, something like a man. I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other. Provided always that she didn’t cut her hair.
    At the end of the afternoon I bundled her up to go home, giving little kisses at every stage, and then more, and sent her off. Her face showed glory so bright I might have worried, except that I was sure no one else had any basis in experience for recognizing it, and I didn’t think it would hold up through her long cold walk home anyway. Surely she’d get home red, frowning, and miserable like an ordinary person.

     
    What Sarah wanted was to get aside by herself and imagine every detail about me, but a family that’s spent a winter Sabbath crowded up in a country kitchen isn’t likely to let a returned traveler hold back. They wanted news, and they’d learned to expect it from Sarah, who knew how to notice and remember. She always had some little thing to tell from going somewhere.
    The little girls (her older sister was married and gone) tagged her up the ladder to the loft where she got out of her mother’s dress and into her own breeches, and then back down again where she sat beside the fire and tried to dream. They were asking to be told, again, what my house was like, and what I was like, and whether I had jewels, and about Edward’s children, and what color our dogs were, and how tall our woodpile. “No, no, I’m tired,” she’d say, or, “I already told you that,” laughing and trying to push them off. They were supposed to be knitting, or learning to.
    She thought how pretty they were and that she loved them, and in the midst of being happy on this happiest of her days, she felt a completely unexpected