Susannah Morrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

heard her say, “I never imagined this, Judith. To
     see you this way after so long.…Ah, ’tis not how I wanted it.”
    My father cleared his throat. She started, then looked up. Without a word, she backed away, easing between the candles lighting
     my mother’s body.
    My father stepped past me to the edge of the bed and stood there with his hands resting lightly on the thin scarlet bed rug,
     looking into Mama’s face. I watched the way his gaze moved over her, her dress, her quiet hands, the face I had washed lingeringly
     and long—she had no cause to fear bathing or exposure to ill-humored air now. He leaned back his head; the candle near him
     flickered at his sigh.
    “She does look peaceful,” he said to Susannah.
    She nodded, but her gaze went past him to me. And when she said, “Thank you, Brother,” I felt the praise in her words too,
     and I smiled at her, unable to help myself, because he had praised me—even if he had not known it—and she had led him to it.
     I was grateful and happy that for once I had done something so right. I would bask in the words he’d said to my aunt for a
     long time.
    It was that solace I clung to when my father left the parlor without another word. I was so thankful for my aunt that later,
     much later that night, when I lay awake listening to the wind whistling through the crack in the windowsill and the barred
     owl’s
Hoo-who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?
in the oak outside, I reached out in the bed for her hand. I was afraid I would not find it, afraid that I had fallen asleep
     and she had somehow fled in the night. When I touched her fingers, she murmured something and curled them around mine in a
     warm and reassuring grasp.
    I did not let her go. When I woke, I still gripped her hand. The faint pink light of dawn was easing through the windowpanes,
     and I pulled away from her, relieved and a little embarrassed, not wanting her to see what I had done, not wanting her questions.
     I did not know how to explain that I had wanted to keep her with me, that I could not bear the thought that she would sneak
     away and leave me the way my mother had done, that I would have to find my way to my father without her.
    The day of my mother’s funeral was cold and bright, the wind biting as we followed the bier with her coffin to the burying
     ground.
    I walked behind, holding Jude’s hand, with my aunt Susannah and Pastor Parris a little ways away. It seemed everyone in the
     village was there; my mother had been well liked. In spite of the things my father had said—and no doubt because baby Faith
     was now in Hannah Penney’s care—Goodman Penney held one of the corners of the heavy purple pall that lay over the coffin.
     Joseph Putnam was another pallbearer. He and my father had been friends for many years. Joseph was the favorite son of old
     man Putnam, who’d died and made Joseph one of the richest men in the village before he was eighteen. Since the moment Joseph
     had been born—the first son of a new wife—old man Putnam had doted upon him. ’Twas like the biblical Joseph all over again,
     complete with a coat of many colors in the form of a rich estate, and older brothers who despised him. All the village knew
     of the animosity between Joseph and Thomas Putnam, who was the oldest son, and the one who should have inherited.
    I saw Thomas Putnam now, walking with his wife and their children, keeping their distance. He and Joseph hardly talked to
     each other, not since Joseph had made things worse by marrying a Porter girl. No one ever said it out loud, and you would
     never know it to hear them talk to each other at meeting, but the Porters and Putnams had been quietly feuding for a long
     time. Joseph had shown where his allegiances were.
    It had not exactly been a scandal. We did not have scandals in Salem Village. We had
history.
I’d grown up with such stories. I could not even remember how I knew them, but I could look at anyone here and tell