The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,51

It was a giant meadow, graced with clusters of trees watered on three sides: the Skug River to the east, Foster’s Pond to the west, and a swamp to the south that no one had named, as it was believed to be haunted by those who had been hanged there. I looked at the vast spread of green and yellow grasses, some growing knee high, and my mood lifted despite my efforts to anchor it down with crossed arms and a clenched jaw.

Mother said, “I used to come here with Mary when I was a girl.” I realized that she meant Margaret’s mother, Aunt Mary, but it was hard to think of my restrained mother as a girl gamboling through a field. “The first time I saw the meadow,” she continued, “was when your grandmother brought me here. I was about your age, maybe a bit younger. I had been for a while angry with her, over what I cannot now remember, and I had made myself ill from it. I could not eat nor sleep and would pace the house just as I have seen you do. My mother brought me here and said to me, ‘This one time, until you are grown, you may say whatever you wish to me. Whatever anger you have stored against me or the world you can speak it to me and I will not chastise you or punish you nor reveal to another living soul what you have said.’ ”

She paused here and turned her face to the light of the sun, closing her eyes to its warmth. “She told me that hoarding anger is like hoarding grain in a lidded rain barrel. The dark and the dank will cause the seeds to sprout but the lack of light and air will soon force the grain to spoil. So I told her my resentments and my complaints, such as they were, and she listened to me. When we left this field, she was good to her word and we never again talked of those things. But I was unburdened and it brought more harmony between myself and my mother.”

She opened her eyes and her gaze turned to me in a questioning way. For a moment we looked at each other without speaking, but I knew for what she waited. She waited for me to reveal all of my angry thoughts, but I did not open my mouth to speak. I did not believe she had enough of Grandmother’s sympathies to be kind to my disappointments or painful losses. And if there had been such harmony created, what had happened all those years later to cause Grandmother to lock her daughter out of her own house for a time? But there was something else as well, something deeper that I could not confess: my fervent prayers to be returned to Margaret and her family. As much rage as I had felt in my mother’s presence, I could not admit to her that I had wished her dead. So I continued to stare off into the waving grasses, making my back as rigid as my mother’s ever was. She sighed in a way that was both tired and accepting and she said, putting equal emphasis on each word, “You are so very hard.”

“You have made me so,” I said bitterly.

“No, Sarah. This hardness is native born.” She placed herself in front of me and said softly, “But I have done little to tender it.” I turned my back to her, unbalanced by her sudden gentleness, and the grasses swam like kelp through the tears I would not let fall.

“Do you think I don’t know what it is that you want?” she said impatiently, and I expected the burn of her fingers on my arm, but she did not touch me. She kept her distance and then said tightly, “And so we are to keep our disharmony a while longer. Then you and I will talk of petty things.” She started to walk about, aimlessly, I thought, looking down at the ground, kicking away bits of scattered limbs or piles of fallen leaves. She knelt down, her dark skirt pooling around her legs, and uncovered something white growing under a bit of bark. She called for me to come, and I walked reluctantly to stand at her shoulder and saw that she had found a mushroom. I had been mushroom hunting many times with her before. Hunting morels in May in the wild-apple orchard, gathering