“Too proud?” Cullah asked.
“Proud enough not to be branded a lout for bad manners in public. You yourself ate at table, not on the street like a vagabond,” I said. We found a bench under a tree. Once I had half the pie and gave the rest to Cullah, I moved my money to my pocket, put my dyes and bundles in Jacob’s pack, and we started for the house in Lexington. That house. That place where I slept and cooked and wove cloth. Where I waited for my brother. Waited for calm seas. Waited for these cocky woodsmen to finish their noisy labor and leave me in peace. August was coming, that was the one happiness among all the thorns left in my soul by Wallace Spencer. My heart was full and my feet felt heavy with the weight of it.
The road was not much used, and we found long miles without another soul, so Cullah sang. He tried to teach me some of the words to his sad song. After one particularly bad try, he took my hand in his, faced me, and said, “Watch what I am saying.”
“Could you not write it down?”
“I never learned. Just pay attention; if you can learn French you can do this.” He said the words slowly. I repeated them, then more quickly, then with the melody. Suddenly I realized I had heard some of the syllables before, in the chants and charms Goody Carnegie used for every occasion. We sang it again and again, until I had it. He did not let go of my hand. It was only at my door that I realized we had strolled hand in hand and arm in arm like lovers most of the way. Cullah’s father had followed two steps behind, neither speaking nor slowing. I took my hand away, blushing.
Jacob gave me my bundles. None of us spoke. At last I asked, “Ah, shall we have some supper?”
As Cullah was nodding his head yes, Jacob said, “We’ll be sleeping at the goodwife’s house from now on. We will let no man pass the road without knowing what he is about. No more committees will darken your door.”
“But my brother is coming. You would not stop him?”
“It might be your brother. Might be some other wight.”
“No one else would search for me. It is August.”
Cullah said, “What is his look? How would we know him?”
I cast my eyes about. “He was fifteen when last I saw him. His hair was not quite as dark as yours. He was not tall. Very big feet. He had a mole on one cheek right above his dimple, so he looked something like a painted doll when he smiled, and a scar over one eye where he once got a fishhook in his brow. I suppose he might be taller, now.”
“Perhaps,” Jacob said. “With big feet, a boy often grows into them.”
“Would you allow me to measure you, so I could make him a shirt?”
Cullah’s face warmed as if he stood before a fire. “One man is not like another,” he said. A low, rumbling sound came from him, a laugh.
Jacob grunted and said, “Measure me, lass. I’m the best measure of any man.”
Cullah’s eyes flashed with anger. “I didn’t say I would not do it.”
“You did.” Jacob’s manner bristled, too, as if he were ready for a battle.
I said, “I will measure you both, then, to make a shirt for August.” Before I had finished speaking Cullah stripped off his coat and drew a deep breath, expanding his ribs, setting his shoulders well back. Jacob growled and took off his own coat, standing beside his son with a frown on his face and his eyes on the ceiling. I used a thread, knotting it for shoulders and arms, length and girth. While Jacob’s face registered a snarl, Cullah’s seemed merry indeed.
*
We began work again after a couple of days of dry weather. I set my loom to make the finest linen I had yet warped, thinking of a shirt for August. Before that, though, I had miles of thread to spin. Jacob and Cullah slept at Goody’s but worked the day through at my house, and within the week Jacob began the thatching of the upper floor. Cullah was still hard at work on something inside, but I had no time to dandle about and watch them, for I had those many yards of weaving to do for August. The noise of their work bothered me not at all now. Three days passed as if but an hour.
The clatter of the men’s tools had quieted for an hour the afternoon Goody came calling up my lane. I had had to take time from my spinning to tend my goats, and had a nice pan of milk to carry to the house. “Abigail? Abigail?” she called.
It vexed me to answer to that name, frightened me, in a small way, that she might find too much to be similar and I would suffer Abigail’s fate. I called to her, “Goody! I am in the goat yard.”
“Never you mind, dearie,” she said, grabbing my shoulder roughly. “In the house. Hurry. Bar the door, bar the door. Abigail, they are coming.”
I searched the sky for clouds but found none. “No one’s coming, Goody. Unless it is Jacob and Cul—”