Faithful Unto Death

A Stormy-Weather Friend

surely would break down and shriek in terror, gibbering and begging for his life. He would need to be pried loose from the guard’s knees where he groveled, and word would reach his children, reach Orah, reach Anna’s brother and sister, who would smirk at his cowardice and his children’s disgrace. He took a deep breath, ›inching only when the man pulled a hood snugly over his face. Blackness, all was blackness. The rope slid over his head, hemp strands prickling the tender skin under his left ear. The knot snugged cozily against his other ear, like a cat’s whiskers without the purr. Distantly, he heard measured voices speaking, meaningless syllables. He tried to focus, to direct his mind toward God and the next world. He’d see Anna. She’d know, then, that he hadn’t done it. Or had he? Slow down, slow down; he had been in the kitchen, preparing the mush, hadn’t he? But then so had Ralph. So had Roy, and even Lottie had entered and left once, or was it twice? And Charlotte, where had she been? She and Anna together, night after night with nobody else around. Abruptly, he dropped, fell, hurtled through blackness. “Huh!” Henry jerked awake and lay there in the darkness, the sour sweat puddling on the musty canvas cover of the thin mattress beneath him. The death sentence didn’t exist here in Michigan. Premature burial did, however, and he was experiencing it ‹rsthand. Shivering in the cold puddle of sweat, Henry began to weep again. A Stormy-Weather Friend benzonia, june 1895 the noise gradually subsided. Stillness prevailed, a stillness that rang in the ears, made one afraid to take a step, to bump into a door jam, to knock over a lantern. Hesitantly the youngsters stood up, crept to the door, peered out. The sickly green of the sky had faded to the ordinary leaden tones of a rainy summer afternoon. They stepped out, Ralph ‹rst; Josie and Will, with the boldness of the very young, followed, with Lottie bringing up the rear. The countryside remained ‹rm and solid, yet it seemed to Ralph as though the shape of it had somehow altered. He turned in a complete circle, mouth ajar. The barn stood in its usual place; the house was in198 tact save for the screen door, which dangled from one hinge. Down the hill all looked well, except that a wide path was ripped through the orchard and tree limbs lay scattered higgledy-piggledy in ‹eld and yard. His eye fell on the elm that had stood to the rear of the house for as long as he could remember. This elm had shaded their back stoop in the summers; it had been the ‹rst thing Ralph beheld when he looked out his window in the mornings; it had guarded the younger children as they toddled about the yard. Slowly he walked over to the prostrate giant. Its limbs lay crumbled, shattered beneath its own weight. Its roots, denuded of their clothing of earth, sprawled promiscuously in dimensions utterly wrong for a tree’s roots. Numbly, Ralph stared at the root ball. He remembered the words of a missionary who had spoken at church some years ago, telling of the Dakota Indians he’d lived among for several years. “These savages were so ignorant,” Brother Harold had declared, “they were unable, until we began our saving work, to discern between human life and the lives of animals and plants. They called the birds ‘the winged people,’ and trees ‘the standing people.’” A lady in the row behind Ralph had clicked her tongue disapprovingly. Unbidden, the image of his mother thrust itself into his mind. His mother, apt as not to slap a face or pull out a switch at the least infraction . His mother, believing implicitly that a woman’s place was to be ruled by the man, had ruled the house with a will of iron. His mother, an avenging monolith. His mother, suddenly much smaller, her iron sinews reduced to so much yellowed skin-clad pudding, lying dead in her bed, green vomit caked at the corners of her lips, the smell of blood and excrement heavy in the air. As he stared at the fallen tree, Ralph, who hadn’t cried since he was six years old, felt tears sting his eyes. He felt a pain in his throat, wedged dryly like a bread crust he’d...