The Blessed by Ann H. Gabhart Page A

at the child’s hopeful face and thought about how rare Rachel’s smiles had been in the last few weeks. As rare as her own. She’d agreed to wed the preacher to keep mothering Rachel, and now here she was shirking her duty, pulling sadness over on her when there wasn’t a bit of need in that. Even if come summer she’d have to attend to the preacher’s demands. Married women did as much everywhere. Cleaved to their husbands.
    Lacey grinned at Rachel and sat down on the porch steps to start unlacing her shoes. Rachel giggled and kicked off hers too. They danced all across the backyard right out into the edge of the woods to a little wet-weather spring the rain had made. The water was cold, just the way it was supposed to be, as they stomped and laughed. Lacey didn’t even look over her shoulder to be sure no church people had come to the preacher’s house to check that his wife was attending to her proper place.
    With their skirt tails soaked and mud between their toes, they went back out of the woods, but instead of going straight to the house, Lacey led Rachel over to the church house and into the graveyard. She’d been putting off visiting Miss Mona’s grave though she’d promised Rachel they’d plant flowers there. It had been too hard to think about Miss Mona in that cold winter ground. Too hard to think about her being gone forever.
    They both got quiet as they solemnly walked toward the new grave. Lacey’s heart started pounding almost as hard as it had the night the preacher had climbed up to the attic room. Maybe they shouldn’t have done the spring dance with Miss Mona so newly gone. The gloom was coming back to sit heavy on her shoulders, when all of a sudden, Rachel jerked on Lacey’s hand and started jumping up and down.
    “Look, Lacey. Look. Mama’s doing the spring dance with us.”
    Lacey could scarcely believe her eyes. Bright yellow dandelions were blooming all across Miss Mona’s grave like as how somebody had sowed them there. A blanket of yellow spring.
    It was a sign. Miss Mona was telling her or maybe it was the good Lord who was telling her that spring comes. Even when a person tries to close it out. It comes.
    Rachel ran ahead to the edge of the grave and reached down to the dandelion blooms. Lacey started to yell at her not to pick any, but she held back the words as the little girl ran her hands across the blooms like she might be stroking a soft pillow. Lacey sat down right beside her and told the stories about the spring dances her mother told her and about the spring dances with her mother and Junie and the ones with Miss Mona. And finally the story of this spring dance when spring was late to come to Lacey.
    “You think Mama’s hearing your stories?” Rachel asked as she leaned against Lacey.
    “Oh yes. I’m sure of it. That’s why all these sunspots sprouted here on her grave. So we’d know it. So we’d know that spring comes, and with the spring somehow things will be all right. Now we’ve got to go make that cake.”
    They had the cake in the oven and the mud washed off their feet and their skirt tails drying by the stove before the preacher came home.
    The next day the Shaker men came peddling their bean seeds.

7

    As Isaac made his way to the outskirts of the city where Brother Asa had promised his horses a rest before starting for the Shaker village, he didn’t spot any of the watch. But they could be after him. They might even put a price on his head that would have everybody hunting him. He imagined his description on flyers spread across town like the ones he’d seen for runaway slaves. Fugitive white male, 25, brown hair, shifty brown eyes. Dangerous. Reward offered for his capture.
    There hadn’t been time to print anything like that. Isaac knew that. All the same, he cringed every time he stepped from the shadows into the open. So he slipped down back streets and cut across backyard fences. Here and there a dog chased after him, barking loud enough to