*
Peter had long disliked our family’s simple ways. Our parents hadn’t even brought gas lighting or water pipes into our house, and this separated us from the general crowd of forward-thinking Philadelphians; it even separated us from those many Friends who didn’t hold the testimony of simplicity as near to their hearts. And Peter didn’t intend to spend his life making furniture, as had our father and grandfather. But Peter had always been quiet, so Father had little inkling of his opinions until shortly before his departure, when the two of them were attempting to remove an oversized rolltop desk from our wagon.
They’d fetched it for repair from a Chestnut Hill household and needed to unload it. Our horse was restive; her hooves were caked in mud and most likely uncomfortable. The two men were struggling to remove the heavy desk amid her shifting—but it would have made extra work to unhitch our horse, then hitch her up again to get the wagon to the neighbors’ barn. So Father yelled for help, and I left my sewing to hold the horse.
“There, there, Sarah, we’ll clean your hooves soon.” I scratched the hard place between her eyes, with its white diamond marking. Short hairs and dirt rose around my fingers and clung there. She banged her head into my belly, threatening to nip, huffing her frustrated breath onto me, and this kept her hooves still long enough for Father to pull the remainder of the desk from the wagon. Too much weight fell on Peter, however, and his footing faltered. He jerked Father’s hold on the desk away, and it landed on the toe of Father’s boot. Father fell back onto the street, with his foot trapped beneath the desk.
“Bloody hell!” he cried, the worst epithet I’d ever heard him utter. “Between this horse and thee!”
“I didn’t expect that much weight.” Peter flushed as he heaved the desk off Father.
“Thy attention has been poor all week.” Father rose with a grimace. “Thee used the wrong sandpaper, and carved that letter backwards, and applied a second coat before the first had dried.”
Peter muttered toward me. “He never forgets a fault.” His hair hung in his eyes, and with the back of his hand he shoved it away.
I didn’t feel compelled to defend my younger brother at that moment. I hitched our horse to the post and ran inside to gather the items needed to treat Father’s foot. Peter helped Father walk inside and settle into a chair, removed his boot, washed Father’s bloodied toes, and bandaged them. Somehow this struck Peter as an opportune time for revealing his plan.
“Thee won’t have to bother about me soon,” he started. “I’m leaving for Pittsburgh in early Sixth Month with Johan.”
Father shifted in the chair to turn his contorted face to Peter. “This is how thee informs me?”
My brother lowered his eyes to the wood planks, looking younger than his twenty years. “Without Mother here, I’ve got no reason to stay.”
“No reason? How can I keep up with orders without thy help? Who’ll do the carving? And Johan—scoundrel! Was this his idea? He said he’d work five years.”
“I’m going. We both are. It was my idea.” So I had my brother to thank for luring Johan away. Peter swished the bloody rag in the bucket of water and wrung it out. His demeanor remained bland; only the shaking of his hands showed his feeling.
“The two of you are going to ruin me! And thee will never have a better opportunity than taking on this business.”
“I don’t want to live exactly as thee has!” Peter turned to me. “Isn’t this a miserable house to live in?”
I nodded. Father said nothing, but his eyebrows drew together at that unexpected hurt. Then Peter added, “I won’t always be a helper if I work in a steel mill. I can rise in the ranks.”
Father snorted. His neck and face swelled red. “Rise in the ranks? Being the master is far better than falling in with any ranks. It won’t be more than ten or twenty years till thee takes over here and has an assistant or two to do thy bidding!”
Ten or twenty years must have sounded to Peter like a lifetime. And Father’s rage, no matter how reasonable its origins, could no longer affect my brother. Father pressed hard for several days, even offering to pay Peter and Johan five dollars more per month despite their having room and board supplied, but he couldn’t halt their plan. It seems young men don’t like to see sameness too far into their futures. This only increased Father’s misery at his own unchanging future.
As it would have increased mine, if I hadn’t known that soon I would, in secret, follow. Johan, Peter, Pittsburgh, and some sort of teaching work—these were to be the cornerstones of my reconstructed life. It was this belief, along with my own fleshly weakness and desire to be loved, that opened me to further seduction.
*
We’d kissed before, but always standing up—beneath the grape arbor, beside the garden shed, against a kitchen wall when Johan came in for a slice of bread or a cup of water. Thus I failed to understand the power of a full embrace. So on the night before Johan and my brother left for Pittsburgh, I hardly hesitated at Johan’s whispered request. I consented to wait till the others were asleep, then to ascend to his attic aerie. And when I left my childhood bed to climb that ladder, I didn’t know how readily our intimacy would arouse the craving animal in me. I didn’t know it would snap the chain that had always held that animal to its stake.
Johan greeted me with warmth. I slid beneath his feather quilt into his lean and muscled arms. And with surprising speed his suspenders came down, and his shirt gave way to naked skin—skin that proved startlingly and thoroughly inebriating. His chest and arms seemed made of velvet; his lips and tongue, of something finer. Swiftly we moved to a place that had no time in it, nor even physical existence. It was a place comprised entirely of sensations, which came in subsuming waves; a place I swam in, like a fish; a place in which no rational thought or worry could interfere.