“How I ate created nature by my subtle art,” confessed the damned shade of The Alchemist

-Canto 29

…

Mother’s hands had seized up on the washing. She was starting to experience the pains of the old at only 35. She blamed the wind-bitten winter of 2022 and 3 when she had to turn ice into water for every task. Lynn held her by the shoulders while she sat upon her stool before the kneading board and went outside of her own mean worries, “Mamma, I will stay and help you. I’ll Mary a Bernie man so I can be here with you.”

The thanks in Mother’s teary eyes as she looked up into Lynn’s, who realized for the first time—that is how selfish she now discovered herself to have been—that she towered over mother, broader, stronger, that she had in her much of gone Father and this would hurt Mother all the more. For, Lynn could see also in those still pretty blue eyes, that it had been done, that a marriage had been agreed upon, that Fate had, with Her cold distaff, spun out the rest of the years to loom before her.

Mother saw the recognition of plight in Lynn’s eyes and hugged her weakly from the stool, and sighed, Kyle keeping to the precinct of the fireplace pretending to busy himself with wood, “Baby, your husband comes for dinner, a traveling man like you asked, a read man, a learned man. He is to bring two girls and two boys for your bride price.”

‘I am sold, like that,’ she panicked within, and then calculated, resigned, coldly, thought: ‘I must manage my plight, and not alone. I must pray, must pray to the angel behind the dream. The dream knew, perhaps brought by the magpie messenger? Did I kill God’s messenger?’

The stiffening in her back was a tell to Kyle, who was not such a clod after all and who stalked over haltingly, not with great confidence and stammered, “I met Doctor Brendan Felt at Lord Bernie’s Keep yesterday, up from Bliss he is, with a train of Dast and Irish slaves. [0] He offered also twenty silver crowns for your hand. I declined, before our good Lord Bernie, and assigned that such silver was to go into your hand, four your needs.”

Lynn had no difficulty looking into Kyle’s watery eyes, so lacking in confidence, though he had done his best, and showing what she would mark at a later date, as her first inkling of a woman’s grace. For though she was sick to vomiting inside, Kyle stood in a crisis of faith in his own judgment as a man that has not, in his own inner measure, been up to a terrible task. Kyle loved Betsy Jamison, and had sold off her only living child to wife.

Lynn stood a bit tall and smiled softly, “Kyle, thank you. I will not shirk as a wife or bring reproach down on your house.”

He hugged her, for the first and for the last, with a stiff shoulder that creaked and popped when he enwrapped her, and she felt for his declining years how in such pain he would be.

Toothless Ted, who did possess still three teeth, tittered over in the corner by the hearth, placing some rose hips in the evening kettle of tea nettles, and smiled narrowly over her way and mumbled, somewhat heroically, “Ye booifool ‘ike da winta’ moon, Mizzy Lynn. Me ‘opes ye ‘ubman be a right lord o’ a right ‘igh mob!”

‘Selfish I have been, never even noticing how this old wretch has looked upon me with such favor.’

Lynn walked over to Old Ted, looked him in his blear eyes as if he were not ugly as sin itself, no taller than she he was, held his shrunken shoulders, and kissed him on his branded cheek, “Thank you, Dear Ted.”

To her surprise the old man shivered and cried, so she hugged him, wondering, ‘Oh Ted, I should have learned some lady craft and sewn you something. But I spent my life afraid of these deserted inner doors, occupied with silly song and outdoor chores.’

Mother and Kyle were hugging her from behind now and they all stood in a teary pile and she castigated within, ‘They do love me, and hate to see me go.’

Just like that the many chores that would be poorly done, the girls and boys that might run, the hugs and graceful words that she had just learned all at once resided in her, would forever by taken from her parents. Tomorrow, less than a full day since she first realized that for her family losing her was a disaster and a duty, all in one, that they largely would suffer because she had oft declared that she wanted a learned husband, not some Bernie Man with a dull mind to match his rough hand, tomorrow, she would be gone.

‘Shit for judge, I’ve made a mess of womanhood already. Perhaps though, he’ll have a kind face, handsome even, for me to learn not to hate.’

Lynn Jamison knew herself not near as well as she wished. But she did know with a certain, that some wily, willful, bitch coyote of a muse coiled down deep in the den of her weird soul, skulking in those shadowed catacombs beneath her thought-vaulted cathedral. She felt Her down there, felt her stir and sniff in her den, and patted her family three on their backs. As she played the lady as if she had been rehearsed by a minstrel playwright, a sword riding a horse like a knight bobbed again in her mind’s eye, and her inner mind declared, ‘I suppose he comes for super. I must tend to the cows.’

Betsy was all but collapsed in tears and was being sat back down by Kyle and Ted—toothless in her mind’s eye no more.

Lynn walked out feeling freer that she ever had, to her remaining chores, into the fresh furious winds under a darkening sky. In the space that six bread loaves had been kneaded, a mote of cloud had whirled down from over Chalk Creek, to darken the sky.

‘Is this a realization of the sword on saddle premonition?’

‘Is this what it is to be a woman, to be now beyond chores and in constant inner calculation and speculation?’

‘Or, is this what it is to be a weird woman—or perhaps a lady? Is not a lady a weird woman, being so rare? I will be a lady now, a minor sort, hated by the real born ladies, just like that, married to a learned man—made not born and twice over strange.’

Lynn stood outside her own mind, her thoughts even, for a moment, and felt rather than wondered at how her inner thoughts, her mind, had of a sudden quickened, as if her soul had transformed from draft mare to racing mare.

A great pattern of wind whirled about the whole valley, starting up Chalk Creek, circling down to the Lord’s Keep, and returning up Shingle Mill Hollow, bringing with it a smokey reek. The smell was a slight taint of some greater stink, so she did so sniff and turned and walked over to the stone pile in her bare feet and stepped up over the building stones and looked over the valley. Down there, towards the West Hills, giant Tipanogas rising in the background, Lynn saw a fire upon Little Calvary, the level space set into the fore west hill just above the Lord’s Tower, so squat and tiny in the distance. There, was not a single fire, but three, three smokey, greasy fires burning ashy in the distance.

The sky was dark with cloud, the sun hidden behind a shroud, the wind singing its leafy song, a song threatening to bring the quaky leaves on the high mountains down before their time. How she dreaded to see the quaky leaves go before their time, to see those bald, white trunks from afar, offering no winter refuge for the coyote in her inner soul.

Lynn stood on the Middle Bench, the Upper Bench being the pastures, looking down upon the Lower Bench. [1] Lynn looked down the narrow road, wide enough for a cart. From Oaktooth, a rider was crossing the wooden bridge over Shinglemill Creek among the willows, where the creek tumbled down from the Lower Bench to the flat Vale proper where it was drunk by Beaver Creek to become Wooden Shoe River, like she supposed the fates drank their souls.

Lynn shivered, but felt no fear.

The stone bridge over Beaver Creek was visible among the cottonwoods that told of the creek’s location, for its water could not be seen down in its grand rocky ditch. The smoke rose more furiously from the three tiny fires afar and joined with the whirl of gray clouds making them more ashen, and transporting a hint of stain upon the wind.

A single, slight figure upon a pale horse, a figure she knew by its lilt in the saddle, but on a horse that she was unfamiliar, trotted up the narrow, stony road. Lynn stood patiently and watched as a young man who had been suggested as a husband to her, but whom she rejected for lack of something, a rejection that Granny Darla supported based on a certain lack of rugged bearing, came nearer. Lynn was now possessed of a patience she did not know she had ever had. Eventually, as a taint of ash reached her nostrils and she winced inside, Way Hayward, youngest son of the Deacon Hayward at Virgil’s Church, reigned in the pale horse and doffed his slouch hat. He was wearing a curious beige vest, “Lynn.”

“Way Hayward, what is that smoke, those three fires on Little Calvary?”

“That is what I am here about, announcing the purgation of sin and plague on behalf of my new master, Plague Doctor Brendan Felt.”

‘I will be sick,’ mused she as something snarled deep in her secret den, “And, Way, that is not all you are about.”

“I suppose you know, by know, that my Master is to be your husband. I am here to arrange for dinner, the night’s stay and the bride price exchange.”

‘He is smart enough, I suppose, but must he explain everything like a drool didact!’

Way seemed stunned to silence for a moment as she regarded him so judgmentally, and continued, “Master Felt will be here with the train to which we shall both be bound, in one hour, the stroke of the last hour before nightfall. This is an important hour for such heavy business as falls upon the shoulders of Master Felt.”

‘Darla was right, Way is too slavish by half.’

Lynn put her hands on her ever widening hips and felt there that they were balled into fists and glared up at the man she had spurned, a man who now served the man her brash stubbornness had earned. And she did not err when she recalled later that she snarled, for Copy Jester Bray Hayward, bound over for Whitefish Priory, in temporary service to Plague Doctor Brendan Felt, also recalled that it was so, that Lynn snarled like a veritable bitch hound in grim service to some scorned Fury out of witchery and dire fable. [2]

…

Notes

-0. Irish slaves in Awes West are brought every two years from Iron Forge, New Ireland, in Outer Easter New England, across the Mississippi from Awes South, at the alternate lost world site of Memphis.

-1. The shelves of stony pasture and, scrub and wood that make up the tiers of the Rocky Mountains, above passes, meadows, rivers and alpine lakes and valleys, are called by the inhabitants of those high places, “benches.”

-2. Copy Jesters are factors assigned to a monastery, cathedral or other place of importance and are regarded as subordinate lay factors, and as well alternates and subordinate to deacons in their role of grave stone engraving and of teaching and entertaining the common and servile folk