She woke in the dark.
She did not know, the first moment, what had woken her. She lay under the two quilts and the wool coverlet and listened. The house did not creak. The chimney did not draw. The wind, which had been up the previous evening from the south-west, had dropped sometime in the night and was not in the chimney now. She listened to the silence of the room for a moment longer and then understood that what had woken her was the silence itself — the quality the room takes on in the hour before any other person in the house is awake — and that she had woken, as her mother had warned her she might, before she needed to.
It was the morning of her wedding.
She lay another moment in the warm hollow of the bed. The room above the parlor of her mother’s borrowed house was small — eight feet by ten feet, one window facing east across the cleared field toward the line of the Dan, one door opening onto the stair-head — and was at this hour entirely dark. The window was a square of slightly less black than the rest, but no light came through it; the eastern horizon was an hour or more from any true color. The fire in the parlor below had been banked for the night and was no warm pressure under her floor. The cold of the room was the cold of the room, not the cold of November outside the window, which was different and colder.
She put her hand out from under the coverlet and touched the floor by the bedside. The plank was cold. She drew her hand back and waited a moment more.
Then she got up.
She did it the way her mother had taught her in the four years since her father had gone south over the line and not come back — without thinking about it, with the body moving first and the rest of her following. She put her feet to the floor. She took the wool shawl from the chair at the foot of the bed and put it around her shoulders over the shift. She crossed the four steps to the writing-desk under the window. She struck the candle.
The flame came up small and steady. The writing-desk was an oak slab with a hinged writing-slope and a single drawer; her mother had brought it down from Lunenburg in the cart that summer, with the inkwell and the quill and the box of paper that had been the elder Mary Baker’s at Lunenburg before her. It stood against the east wall under the window. Mary Baker sat down in front of it and put her hands on the writing-slope and let them rest there.
The journal was where she had left it six days before. The cover was the plain calf-leather her grandfather had given her in the spring of 1778, when she had been thirteen and he had thought she might begin to keep a record of the household for the year of the war; the spine had darkened to the color of weak tea where her hand had held it across eighteen months. The journal was closed. It had been closed when she had put it down on the evening of the second week of November and it was closed now. She had not opened it in the six days between.
She did not open it now.
She put her right hand flat on the cover and let it rest there.
· · ·
It was, by her mother’s count, four years and a month since her father’s last documented day among the living. Baker DeGraffenreid had ridden south out of Lunenburg in the autumn of 1775, over the line into Guilford County on the place’s business, and the last the record held of him was a deed he had put his hand to at a Guilford crossing on the twentieth of October that year, the autumn she had turned eleven. He had not come back up the road, and no word of him had. No body had been recovered. No grave had been dug. Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid had administered the estate as a widow in deed if not yet in law across the four years since, taking the administratrix’s seat at the county court that September past; and Governor Caswell five days ago, on the Saturday now, had granted her four hundred acres in the Guilford country as land for a widow with three children to provide for and a daughter to marry off in a war.
The grant was on the parlor desk downstairs.
The Bible was on the parlor desk downstairs.
Her grandfather had ridden down from Lunenburg the previous afternoon with the Bible in the leather case he had carried it in since his father’s death in the autumn of 1742. He was sleeping in the small guest chamber off the parlor, where the bed had been made up the previous afternoon and where the fire had been lit at dusk and where, by the settled order of the household, he would be sleeping until first light. The Bible had come out of the case after supper and he had set it on the parlor desk with the marker placed at the page where the marriage entry would go and the inkwell beside it and the quill laid across the open page. Then he had banked the parlor fire and had gone to his bed.
The Bible was downstairs, alone in the dark parlor, on the desk.
She thought about it.
She thought about her grandfather in the small guest chamber off the parlor. Tscharner DeGraffenreid was fifty-six years old that November, the third generation of his family in Virginia, the keeper of the Bible since his father’s death at Williamsburg in the autumn of 1742, the same year he had married. He had buried his father that October and had brought the Bible home to the south-side seat in the cart with him. He had kept it since. He had written into it the births of his children and the deaths of his children and the deaths of his wife’s parents and his own mother’s death and his own brother’s death and the names of his grandchildren as they had come. He would write into it, this morning at ten, the marriage of his granddaughter to Gideon Johnson Jr. of Guilford County, who had been a private of the Second North Carolina Continental Line under Captain Armstrong and Colonel Martin for fifteen months in 1776 and 1777 and was home now, since February.
She thought about Gideon Johnson Jr.
He was twenty-five years old. She had known him eight months. He had ridden to her grandfather’s house in March, the second week of March, to ask permission, and her grandfather had given it, and her mother had given it, and she had given it; and the asking had not been the way she had been told asking went. He had asked it of her separately, in the cloister of her grandfather’s house at Lunenburg, after the supper, with the candle on the table between them. He had said: Mary Baker, I have asked your grandfather and your mother. I am asking you now. If you will have me, I will have you. If you will not, I will not press it. She had said yes. She had said it without thinking about it, and then she had thought about it, sitting in front of him with the candle between them, and had said it again, more slowly, and had understood that the second time was the answer and that the first time had been the body knowing before she did.
She thought about Vincent.
Her brother was in the field somewhere to the north. The letter that had come on the carrier the second week of October had been written from a camp the carrier could put no nearer than somewhere above the North River, the letter having come the long way down from the Highlands of New York by more hands than she could count. Vincent had been a private in the Virginia Line since the winter of 1777. He was sixteen years and nine months old as of the sixth of this month — she had counted, the morning of the sixth, sitting at this desk in the candle. He was perhaps four hundred miles north. He was perhaps five hundred. He had written, in the letter, that he had a wool blanket and a haversack and a flint and a tin cup and a coat that he had taken off a dead man, which she did not believe but which she had not, in her answering letter, said she did not believe.
She had written to him on the night of the second week of November.
She had written it in this room, at this desk, by this candle. She had written it after her mother had gone to bed and after the house had gone still. She had told him that the wedding was set for the eighteenth. She had told him that their grandfather would ride down from Lunenburg with the Bible. She had told him that their mother was well. She had told him that the household held. She had written, at the close, in her own hand, two words. No one had taught them to her. She had not had them from her mother the way she had had the keeping itself from her mother — which was by being inside it, and by watching it done, across the four years and the years before them, until the doing of it was in her own hands and she had never once been told a word of it. The keeping she had had that way. The words she had not had at all, until that night, when she had come to the close of the letter and found that what she had been doing all along had wanted a name, and that she had given it one.
She had written it under her name in the letter, and had folded the letter, and had sealed it with the candle wax, and had given it to the carrier on the Monday morning. The carrier had ridden south. The letter, by the count of the road, would not have reached Vincent yet. It might not reach him for another fortnight.
She put her hand on the closed journal on the writing-slope.
She did not open it. She did not need to. She knew what was in it. She had written the two words in the journal on the evening of the second week of November, after she had written them in the letter to Vincent and after the carrier had ridden, and had not written in the journal since.
The phrase was in two places this morning. In the letter on its way south. In the journal closed under her hand.
It was not in the Bible.
The Bible downstairs in the dark parlor was Tscharner’s keeping. The marriage entry he would write into it at ten this morning would be in French, in the formal hand he had kept since the spring of 1742, with the names and the date and the parish and the witnesses laid down in the settled form his father had taught him as the form of the family’s record. He would not write the phrase. He did not know the phrase. The phrase was hers — she had come to it herself, at the desk, in the dark — and the keeping it named was her mother’s and the household’s and now hers; but the two words were her own, and were not yet anyone’s else.
She thought, for the first time since she had woken, of her mother in the room below.
Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid would be lying in the bed she had moved into the parlor in October, when the upstairs bedroom had been given to the daughter for the wedding morning. She was sleeping. She was thirty-five years old that November, four years a widow in fact and not yet in law, the administratrix of an estate that had no body to bury, the holder this past week of a Carolina patent in her own name. She would not move for another hour. The first sound from her would be the bed-rope creaking when she sat up; the second would be the kettle hook swinging on the parlor crane.
The candle had burned down a quarter of an inch.
· · ·
She sat at the desk in the dark and thought about none of these things in particular. She had thought about all of them already, in the days that had led up to this morning, and what she was doing now was not thinking but the quieter thing that comes after thinking, which is the sitting with what has been thought. The desk was solid under her hands. The candle was steady. The journal was closed. The Bible was downstairs. Her grandfather was in the guest chamber. Her mother was in the parlor bed. Her brother was north, in the camp in the Highlands, with the letter she had written him on its way to him and not yet arrived. Her father was in whatever ground had taken him, four years gone and a month, with no body recovered and no grave dug. Gideon Johnson Jr. would ride up to the house with his cousin and his cousin’s wife and his uncle in the third hour of the morning, after the household had risen and had eaten and had laid the parlor out.
The wedding was at ten.
She sat at the desk a little longer. The candle burned down another sixteenth of an inch. The square of window above the desk did not yet show any color; the eastern horizon outside it would not begin to lift toward gray for another forty minutes. She put her hand again, gently, on the cover of the closed journal. She did not open it. She did not need to. She thought the two words in her own head — we continue — and she did not say them and did not write them, and let them sit in her where they had sat in the room, waiting to be carried.
Below her, in the room on the other side of the floor, the bed-rope creaked.
She lifted her hand from the journal. She did not move otherwise. She waited.
The bed-rope creaked again. Then there was the soft fall of bare feet on the parlor floor — her mother’s feet, walking to the hearth — and then the iron sound of the kettle hook swinging out on the parlor crane.
Mary Baker DeGraffenreid sat at the writing-desk in the upstairs bedroom of her mother’s borrowed house on the south side of the Dan River and listened to her mother make up the morning fire in the room below.
The wedding was at ten.
She blew out the candle.
· · ·
She sat at the desk a moment longer in the dark.
The candle was out. The square of the window above the desk was beginning, in the next quarter hour, to take a paler shade than the room around it; the eastern horizon outside it had begun to lift toward gray while she had been sitting. She did not look at the window directly. She put her hand on the cover of the closed journal one more time and lifted it, and stood, and put the wool shawl back around her shoulders over the shift, and crossed the four steps to the door of the bedroom, and opened it.
The stair was darker than the room. The parlor below was the color of a coal that had been banked and had not yet been built up — a faint red glow at the hearth, the rest dark. She came down the stair holding the rail with her right hand and the shawl closed at her throat with her left. The treads were cold under her feet. The fifth tread creaked the way it had creaked since her mother had taken the house in October. She came down it slowly and put her foot down on the parlor floor.
Her mother was at the hearth.
Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid had built up the fire to a clean flame and had hung the kettle on the crane and had set the iron trivet on the hearth-stone and had taken the wooden butter-firkin from the shelf and had set it on the trivet to soften, and was now kneeling at the hearth with the bellows in her hands, working the bellows at the base of the fire with the patience of a woman who had built up four years of morning fires alone in borrowed houses and was building up this one. She wore a brown wool gown over a clean shift, her hair pinned up under a white linen cap, no apron yet. She did not turn when her daughter came down. She had heard the fifth tread.
She said: Come to the fire.
Mary Baker came to the fire. She stood beside her mother at the hearth-stone and put her hands out to the warmth and let the heat take the cold out of her fingers. Her mother went on working the bellows for another minute, until the fire was running on its own, and then set the bellows aside and stood up, and put her hand on the back of Mary Baker’s head briefly and let it rest there, and took it away.
She said: You did not sleep past the hour.
Mary Baker said: No, mama.
Sarah said: I did not think you would.
· · ·
The morning began.
Sarah swung the kettle hook back over the fire and went to the cupboard by the parlor wall and brought out the wooden bowl of corn-meal and the smaller bowl of salt and the jug of milk that had stood in the cold of the kitchen lean-to overnight, and set them on the parlor table, and went to the small chamber off the parlor and put her hand on the door and stood a moment listening, and then knocked once and said: Father, the fire is up. Her own father-in-law she had called Anton for nineteen years; her own father lay buried at Cumberland in 1772; the man on the other side of the door was the father she had now. He answered through the door that he was awake and had been awake an hour and would be out directly. Sarah came back to the parlor.
She said to her daughter: Eat first. Then we go up.
Mary Baker ate at the parlor table standing. She did not sit. Her mother stood at the other side of the table and ate the same way. They ate corn-mush from one wooden bowl with two wooden spoons, with milk poured over and a pinch of salt, the way they had eaten at the borrowed house since October, the way they had eaten at Lunenburg before that, the way Sarah had been eating with her children for the four years since the survey trip had not come back. The food was hot. It went down into the body and stayed there. Mary Baker ate three spoonfuls and her mother ate four and they were done.
Tscharner came out of the small chamber while they were drinking the last of the milk from the bowl.
He was dressed for a wedding. He wore the dark blue broadcloth coat he had brought down from Lunenburg in the cart with the Bible, the coat his wife had cut and sewn for him in the winter of 1773 when their daughter Anna had been married; he wore a clean linen shirt and a black silk stock and the wool breeches he had worn under his coat on the road; his stockings were the cream-colored worsted he kept for court days and his shoes were the black-buckled shoes he kept for the same. His grey hair was tied back at the nape with a black ribbon. He had shaved.
He looked at his granddaughter across the parlor and inclined his head to her in the formal way he inclined his head to women in his own house at Lunenburg when they came into a room.
He said: Mary Baker.
She said: Grandfather.
He said: The morning is come.
She said: Yes, sir.
He went past her to the parlor desk where the Bible was, and stood at the desk a moment with his hand on the leather cover of the case the Bible had been carried in, not lifting the case, not opening the Bible, only standing with his hand on the case the way a man stands at a horse he has rested and is now going to ride. Then he took his hand off the case and turned and went to the kitchen door and out into the lean-to, and the back door of the lean-to opened and closed, and they heard his shoes on the path going down toward the cleared field where the horses were tied for the morning under the lee of the line of pines at the south side of the field.
Sarah said, when the door had closed: Now we go up.
· · ·
The back bedroom was the room behind the parlor on the ground floor — the room Sarah had been sleeping in since October, the room she had moved out of the previous afternoon when the bed had been re-made up for the bride to dress in. The fire in the small grate had been built up before dawn and was holding steady. The shutter on the single window had been opened a quarter-turn to let the gray light in. The gown lay on the bed.
It was a wool gown the color of new butter, a clear pale yellow that her mother had dyed at Lunenburg the previous winter from the onion-skins her aunt at the south-side seat had saved through the autumn of 1778 for the dye-pot, and her mother had cut it and sewn it across the spring and summer of 1779 in the slow hours when there had not been anything else to do; the bodice was lined with the brown wool that had been Sarah’s own bodice once, before the borrowed house and the second cutting; the skirt had a panel at the back let in from the same brown wool to give it the fullness the front did not need. The sleeves were three-quarter, finished with a band of plain linen. The neckline was cut square and the linen of the shift would show at the collar. It was not a Charleston gown and it was not a Williamsburg gown. It was a Lunenburg-County widow’s daughter’s wedding gown, made in a house that did not have the means for silk, by a mother who knew her trade.
There was a cap for the hair, plain white linen, pinned with two black-headed pins that had been her grandmother’s.
There were stockings, cream-colored, worsted, the same wool as Tscharner’s.
There were shoes, brown leather, low-heeled, with brass buckles her grandfather had brought down from Lunenburg in the cart for her in October.
Mary Baker took off her night-shift in the back bedroom and stood in front of the fire while her mother washed her face and her neck and her arms and her hands at the basin with the cold water from the ewer, drying her with a piece of plain linen that had been a sheet once and had been cut down for the cloth-bag. The cold water on her shoulders made her breathe in. Her mother did not say anything. Her mother had washed her at five and at seven and at ten and at twelve and at every birthday up to her thirteenth in this same manner, with the same kind of cloth and the same kind of water, and the body that stood in front of her now was the body she had known since she had brought it into the world fifteen years and two months and fifteen days ago, and was also the body of the woman who was going to be married in three hours. She washed the body and dried it and did not say anything.
Then she helped her into the clean shift.
Then the stockings, sitting on the edge of the bed; the stockings up to the knee, tied with the plain linen garters her grandmother had made.
Then the gown.
The gown went over her head, and her mother turned her and worked the buttons down the back from the shoulder-blades to the waist, twelve buttons of bone, working slowly, and then the lacings at the bodice, drawing them and tying them off at the back below the waist where the apron would cover them. The wool of the bodice was warm. The skirt fell straight to the instep. Mary Baker stood with her arms a little out from her sides while her mother walked once around her and looked at the shoulders and the seat and the hem and the sleeves, and came back to the front, and adjusted the linen at the collar so that it sat clean inside the square of the neckline, and looked at her face and did not say anything.
Then the shoes.
Then the cap.
The cap went on last, after her mother had taken the long brown hair down from where it had been pinned for sleep and had brushed it out with the boar-bristle brush her grandfather had brought down from Lunenburg and had pinned it up again at the crown of the head in the plain knot a young woman wore under her cap on her wedding morning, and had set the cap over the knot, and had pinned the cap with the two black-headed pins.
She stepped back.
She said: Look.
There was a small mirror on the wall above the basin, no larger than a hand-span across; her mother had brought it from Lunenburg in the cart in October with the writing-desk. Mary Baker turned and looked. The face in the mirror was her face. The cap was straight. The collar of the shift sat clean inside the neckline. The pale yellow of the wool was the color of butter in the mirror as it was the color of butter in the room. She looked at the face for a moment and then at her mother behind her in the mirror, and her mother looked back at her in the mirror, and neither of them said anything.
She turned around from the mirror.
She said: I am ready.
Her mother said: Yes.
· · ·
The parlor when they came back into it was full of gray light. Tscharner was in the parlor again; he had come back from the horses, and had laid his coat across the chair by the hearth, and was standing at the parlor desk with the Bible. He had taken the Bible out of the case. He had set the case on the floor beside the desk. The Bible was open on the desk now at the page where the marriage entry would go — the page after the births in his own hand, the page he had left clean across the four years he had thought he might write his son Baker’s death-entry there and had not yet, because there was no body and no dated certainty and the law of his own house was that the family record carried only what it knew. The page was blank. The inkwell was beside it. The quill was laid across the open page.
He did not look up when they came in.
Sarah crossed the parlor and stood beside her father-in-law at the desk a moment, looking at the open page with him, not touching the page, not touching the Bible. Then she put her hand on his sleeve at the elbow for a count of two and took it away, and turned, and came back across the parlor to her daughter at the front of the room.
The front of the room had been laid out the previous evening. The chairs had been carried in from the kitchen and the lean-to and the small chamber and had been set in two short rows facing the parlor desk, leaving an aisle of about four feet between them. The cleared aisle ended at a small space in front of the desk where the bride and the groom would stand. The desk was the altar. The Bible on the desk was the witness.
Mary Baker stood at the front of the front room in the pale yellow gown with the clean cap and the cream-colored stockings and the brown shoes with the brass buckles, and put her hands together in front of her at the waist and let them rest there. Her mother stood beside her. Neither of them sat down.
The clock on the mantel — a plain pine-cased clock her grandfather had brought down from Lunenburg, wound the previous evening — read three-quarters past eight. The clock had been set the previous evening against her grandfather’s watch.
They listened.
For the first quarter hour they heard only the fire in the hearth and the sounds of the house — the kettle hissing softly on the crane, a board contracting under the floor as the morning came on, her grandfather’s breathing at the desk behind them. Sarah did not speak. Mary Baker did not speak. The cap on her head was light. The wool of the gown was warm against her arms. The shoes were stiff at the heel because they were new.
She thought of nothing in particular. She had thought already, in the dark hour at the writing-desk upstairs, of everything she had to think. What she was doing now was the other thing — the standing-and-waiting that comes after the thinking is done.
The clock read four minutes past the nine when she heard the horses on the track from the south.
She heard the four horses. She counted them. Four horses on the frozen ground of the track coming up the cleared field from the south, the sound coming clean through the still air of the morning before any wind had come up. The horses were perhaps a half-mile down the track. They were coming at a walk. She listened to them coming and did not turn her head and did not move.
Her mother heard them at the same moment. Sarah turned her head a quarter-turn toward the door and listened, and then turned back, and looked at her daughter.
Sarah said: They are come.
Mary Baker said: Yes.
Her grandfather behind them at the parlor desk closed the Bible gently on the marker and stepped back from the desk and put on the dark blue coat his wife had sewn him in the winter of 1773. He did not say anything.
The horses came up the track. The sound of them grew. They came past the line of pines at the south side of the field and into the yard at the front of the house and stopped, and there was the small sound of the riders dismounting on the frozen ground, the soft fall of four sets of feet, and then a man’s voice low, a woman’s voice answering, and then the sound of feet on the path coming up to the front door.
There was a knock on the door.
Sarah looked at her daughter across the front room.
Mary Baker looked back.
Sarah crossed the room to the door.
· · ·
Sarah opened the door.
The cold of the November morning came in past her into the parlor and went up into the high corners of the room and was gone, and the gray light of the yard came in at the door behind it, and the four who had ridden up the track from the south came in out of the cold and the light into the parlor where the fire was up and the Bible was on the desk.
Gideon Johnson Jr. came in first. He was in a brown wool coat that had been cut for him at Guilford in the autumn after he had come home in February, and a clean linen shirt with a black silk stock, and wool breeches and the same cream-colored worsted stockings Tscharner had on, and brown boots that had been on the road four hours from the inn at the south end of the cleared field where they had slept the night. He took his hat off when he came in. He had cut his dark hair short the previous afternoon at the inn.
He looked across the parlor at Mary Baker.
He said: Mary Baker.
She said: Gideon.
He came across the parlor to where she was standing in front of the front room and stopped two paces short of her, the way a man stops who has been on a road and is now at the place he was going to. He did not take her hand. He did not need to yet. He looked at her face in the pale yellow gown with the clean cap, and she looked at his face above the black silk stock, and they stood looking at each other across the two paces without saying anything for the space of three breaths.
His uncle came in behind him. Joseph Johnson was forty-eight years old that November, the elder brother of Gideon’s father, a Guilford County farmer of three hundred and twenty acres on the south side of the Dan with two grown sons and a daughter married to a Pittsylvania man and a wife of twenty-three years standing beside him now. He wore the dark blue coat he had worn to court since 1771 and the wool breeches he had worn under it for the same number of years and the black-buckled shoes he kept for the same. He took his hat off and held it in his left hand and looked once at Sarah at the door and inclined his head to her, and Sarah inclined her head back.
His cousin John Johnson came in behind his father. He was twenty-six years old, a year older than Gideon, a Guilford farmer in his own right since his marriage three years before. His wife Elizabeth came in behind him in a dark green wool gown and a clean white cap with the same kind of black-headed pins Mary Baker had in her own cap, having been brought up in the same Guilford Anglican way and dressed for the same kind of Carolina November morning. She was twenty-four. She had a small leather travelling-bag in her left hand that she set down inside the door and did not open.
Sarah closed the door behind them.
The parlor was full now. The four who had come up from the south were in the front part of the room by the door; Mary Baker and Sarah were at the front of the front room facing the parlor desk; Tscharner was at the desk with the Bible open on it. The fire was up. The kettle was off the crane and was on the trivet on the hearth-stone where Sarah had set it after the eating. The clock on the mantel read seven minutes past nine.
Tscharner did not turn from the desk when the door closed. He had stood at the desk through the dismounting and the knocking and the opening, with his back to the room, looking at the open Bible and the inkwell and the quill on the page, the way a man stands at the work that is in front of him because the work is the thing that gets him through. When the door closed he turned.
He looked at the four. He looked at his granddaughter. He looked at his daughter-in-law. He looked at Gideon.
He said: We will begin.
· · ·
The household took its places.
Joseph and John and Elizabeth Johnson came across the parlor and took the three chairs on the right of the cleared aisle that Sarah had set for them the previous evening, and sat down. Sarah crossed back to her own chair on the left of the aisle and sat. The aisle between them was about four feet wide. The cleared space at the front of it, in front of the parlor desk, was where the bride and groom were to stand.
Gideon walked to the cleared space and stood at the right side of it, facing the desk. Mary Baker walked to the cleared space and stood at the left side of it, facing the desk. They were a foot and a half apart. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. They both looked at the desk in front of them where her grandfather was now turned to face them across the open Bible.
Tscharner had the quill in his right hand.
He did not pick the Bible up. He left it open on the desk where it had lain through the morning. The page he had marked the previous evening was the next clean page in the family record — the page after the last birth he had entered, which was the birth of his youngest grandson at Lunenburg in the spring of 1776; the page he had thought across four years that he might write his son Baker’s death-entry on, and had not, because there was no body and no dated certainty and the law of his own house was that the family record carried only what it knew. The page was clean. The marker tape was laid down the left margin. The inkwell stood beside the page on the right. The blotting-paper was folded once and was laid above the page where his right hand could reach it.
He looked across the desk at his granddaughter and at the man standing beside her.
He said: Gideon Johnson, son of Gideon Johnson of Guilford County, you have come here this morning to take Mary Baker DeGraffenreid, daughter of Baker DeGraffenreid of Lunenburg, to be your wife.
Gideon said: I have.
Tscharner said: Mary Baker DeGraffenreid, you have come here this morning to take Gideon Johnson to be your husband.
Mary Baker said: I have.
Tscharner said: Will you hold him in this life and not put him aside.
Mary Baker said: I will.
Tscharner said: Will you hold her in this life and not put her aside.
Gideon said: I will.
Tscharner said: Then the marriage is between you. The household stands witness to it. The entry will stand in the family record.
He turned to the desk.
· · ·
He dipped the quill. He held it a moment above the inkwell to let the surplus run back. He brought it down to the page.
He wrote in the careful French he reserved for the most important entries, in the formal hand his father had taught him in the spring of 1742 when he himself had ridden into Lunenburg County to be married, in the hand he had kept since:
> Gédéon Johnson, fils de Gédéon Johnson de Guilford en Caroline du Nord, époux. Marie Baker DeGraffenreid, fille de Baker DeGraffenreid de Lunenburg en Virginie, épouse. Mariés à la maison de la mère de l’épouse dans le comté de Guilford en Caroline du Nord, le dix-huitième jour de novembre, 1779.
He set the quill in the inkwell.
He took up the blotting-paper. He laid it across the entry and pressed it down with the flat of his hand for the count of three, and lifted it, and set it back beside the page. The ink had blotted clean. The entry stood on the page in his own hand.
He looked at it.
The entry was in his hand. The French was correct. The date was correct. The names were correct. The place was correct. The father, the mother, the bride, the groom, the day. The entry was the entry the family would come back to. He had written Marie Baker DeGraffenreid in the French form of her given name, the way his father had written Marie for the elder Mary Baker on the entry of his own marriage in 1742, because the formal hand carried the French convention and his granddaughter was now also Marie on the family page.
He held the page a moment longer with his hand at the upper margin. Then he took his hand off.
He turned the Bible toward the cleared space in front of the desk where Gideon and Mary Baker stood, and pushed it forward an inch, and set the quill on the page above the entry.
He said: Sign.
· · ·
Gideon picked up the quill. He had to step half a pace closer to the desk to reach the page. He dipped the quill in the inkwell. He held it a moment above the open page. Then he wrote, in his own hand, in clean English, below the formal French entry his bride’s grandfather had written:
Gideon Johnson Jr.
He set the quill in the inkwell. He stepped back to his place.
Mary Baker stepped forward to the desk. She picked up the quill. She dipped it. She held it above the page for a moment shorter than her husband had held it, because she had known for some hours that she would write her own name on the entry her grandfather had written and had decided, sitting at the writing-desk upstairs in the dark hour, what hand she would write it in. She wrote in the small clear English hand she had been writing in her own journal across eighteen months:
Mary Baker DeGraffenreid Johnson.
She set the quill in the inkwell. She did not step back yet.
She looked at the entry on the page. The French in her grandfather’s hand. Her husband’s name in his own hand below it. Her own name in her own hand below his. The three lines were the family record now. The Bible on the desk was the keeping-Bible and the page was the family’s and the marriage was on the page and the morning had done its work.
She stepped back to her place beside her husband.
· · ·
Sarah came forward from her chair on the left of the aisle and crossed the cleared space and picked up the quill, and dipped it, and signed beneath the bride. She wrote in the hand she had kept since her own girlhood at Lunenburg, the hand her mother had taught her, and that the family record at Lunenburg had carried since her own marriage to Baker in 1762:
Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid
She set the quill down. She did not look at the entry on the page for longer than the count of two. She turned and went back to her chair.
Joseph Johnson came forward next. He signed in the steady hand of a Guilford farmer who had signed deeds and court papers and tax rolls for twenty-seven years:
Joseph Johnson
He stepped back.
John Johnson came forward. He signed in a hand younger than his father’s and slightly less practiced but the same kind of hand — the hand of a man who signed his own papers and had signed them for the four years he had been a farmer in his own right:
John Johnson
He stepped back.
Elizabeth Johnson came forward last. She was the only woman of the four witnesses besides Sarah. She had been taught to write at Guilford by her mother and had signed her own marriage three years before. She wrote in a clean Anglican hand that had been taught in the same way Mary Baker’s had been taught and the same way her own daughters would be taught:
Elizabeth Johnson
She set the quill in the inkwell. She stepped back to her chair beside her husband.
The signing was done.
· · ·
Tscharner came forward to the desk. He took up the blotting-paper a second time and laid it across the page and pressed it down with the flat of his hand for the count of three, the way he had blotted his own entry, and lifted it, and set it back beside the page. The ink had blotted clean. The four witness signatures stood on the page beneath the names of the bride and groom and the French entry above them. The page was the family record. The Bible was the keeping-Bible. The work of the morning was on the page now and would stay there.
He stood at the desk a moment longer with his hand at the upper margin of the page, the way he had stood at the desk when he had first come into the parlor at dawn before he had gone out to the horses. He did not say anything.
He took his hand off the page.
The clock on the mantel read twenty-three minutes past ten.
The parlor was quiet. The fire was up. The kettle on the hearth-stone was steady. The eight people in the room — the grandfather at the desk, the bride and groom in the cleared space, the mother on the left of the aisle, the uncle and cousin and cousin’s wife on the right — were quiet with the quiet that comes after work has been done.
The ink on the page was drying.
It was drying at the rate of November ink in a parlor with a clean fire and the gray light of mid-morning coming in at the eastern windows. The French entry in the formal hand at the top of the page was dry already. The bride’s and the groom’s names in English below it were nearly dry. The four witness signatures at the bottom were taking the longer they took because the parlor was cold at the desk and the ink had gone down recently. Tscharner watched the ink. Mary Baker watched the ink. Gideon Johnson watched the ink. The four witnesses on the right side of the aisle watched the ink. Sarah watched the ink from her chair on the left.
The ink dried.
The page was the family record. The Bible was the keeping-Bible. The morning was done.
The Wedding-Supper Hour
The ink on the marriage entry was dry on the page at twenty-three minutes past ten on the morning of Thursday the eighteenth of November of 1779. Tscharner had blotted it once, set the blotting-paper aside, and lifted his hand from the desk. The Bible lay open on the parlor desk with the entry on the recto and the previous page’s last entry — the death of his wife the elder Mary Baker at Lunenburg on the seventh of June of 1773 — facing it on the verso, the two pages set against each other, the household’s losing and gaining held on the open Bible.
The parlor was quiet with the quiet that comes after work has been done.
The household stood for a moment where it had been standing. Mary Baker DeGraffenreid Johnson — the name now on the page — was beside Gideon at the parlor desk. Sarah was on the left of where the aisle had been. The three Johnsons were on the right. Then Sarah said: Come to the table. And the household moved.
The parlor table was a plank table, six feet by three, that Tscharner had set against the south wall of the room four years earlier when they had moved in with Sarah’s brother’s widow at Guilford and that Sarah had pulled out into the middle of the floor at first light that morning before the bellows went on. She had laid it the night before. The cloth was the good linen cloth her mother had given her at her own wedding to Baker in 1762 and that she had kept in the cedar chest since 1775. The plates were the eight pewter plates the household had carried down from Lunenburg in the cart in 1775 — six of the original eight from Sarah’s marriage settlement and two that had been Tscharner’s at Lunenburg before the elder Mary Baker died. The cups were tin. The forks were horn-handled. The knives were the household’s good knives, sharpened at the lean-to the previous afternoon.
Tscharner sat at the head of the table because he was the senior man in the household and because the household placed him there. Mary Baker and Gideon sat together on the long west side. Sarah sat across from them on the long east side, in the chair where she could see the kitchen door and the parlor door at once. Joseph Johnson took the chair to Tscharner’s right at the foot end. John and Elizabeth Johnson took the chairs beside Joseph, John next to his uncle and Elizabeth at the foot of the table, the chair the household had set there because eight chairs at a six-foot table required one at the foot.
Sarah brought the Carolina ham in from the kitchen lean-to first. It was a six-pound ham she had started on Tuesday morning, a country-cured ham Joseph had brought down from his own smokehouse in October on his last ride up to see his nephew at Guilford before the wedding date was set. She had simmered it in the iron kettle at the lean-to fire across Tuesday afternoon, taken it off the fire that night, set it in the cold-cellar across Wednesday, and brought it back to the lean-to fire at four o’clock that morning to warm through. She carried it to the table on the pewter platter. She set it at the place to the left of Tscharner. The carving-knife was beside it.
The corn-bread came from the parlor hearth. Sarah had set the spider on the trivet over the hearth coals at twenty minutes past nine, while the four riders were still on the cleared field, and the corn-bread had baked through the half-hour of the ceremony and the quarter-hour of the signing and the seven minutes of the company moving from the cleared aisle to the table. She lifted the spider off the trivet with the iron hook, turned the corn-bread out onto the wooden board, cut it across in eight, and brought the board to the table.
The stewed apples were in the brown stoneware bowl. They had been put up at Lunenburg the previous October from the apples of the small orchard the elder Mary Baker had planted in 1745, and Sarah had brought eight jars of them down to Guilford in the cart in 1775 and had three jars left in the cold-cellar that morning, and she had opened one of them on Wednesday and stewed the apples slowly across Wednesday evening with the cinnamon Joseph had brought up in October. The bowl went to the centre of the table.
The Madeira was in the brown stoneware jug Joseph had carried up in his saddle-bag from Guilford. He had got it the previous week from a Guilford factor named Hawkins, in trade for a quarter of beef from his own October butchering. He had not opened it on the road. He had set it on the table himself when the company first sat down, in the place between his own plate and his nephew’s.
There was cider in a second jug — a sweet cider Sarah had pressed at Guilford in early November from the apples of the orchard the brother-in-law’s widow kept up — and the cider was in front of Mary Baker and Sarah. Mary Baker did not take the Madeira. She took the cider.
Tscharner said the household’s grace. It was a short grace in English, the grace he had said at his father’s table at Lunenburg through the thirty-one years of his father’s life there, and that he had said at his own table at Lunenburg through the seventeen years he had been the keeper there with Mary Baker, and that he had said at this table at Guilford through the four years since 1775. Lord, we thank thee for this food, and for the day, and for the company at the table. Amen. The household answered amen.
Tscharner carved the ham. He carved standing, in the careful way the elder Mary Baker had taught him at Lunenburg in the first year of their marriage when he had not yet learned to carve and she had set him to it once and watched him do it badly and then taken the knife and shown him. He set six slices on the platter and passed the platter to his left, to Sarah; Sarah took her own slice and passed to Mary Baker; Mary Baker took hers and passed to Gideon; Gideon took his and passed across to John Johnson; John took his and passed to Elizabeth; Elizabeth took hers and passed up the table to Joseph; Joseph took his and set the platter at the place to the right of Tscharner. The household ate.
Joseph spoke first across the table. He said the road from Guilford had been cold. He had left the inn at the south end of the cleared field at first light with the lantern hung at the saddle and John and Elizabeth behind him. The cold had been hard in the third hour of the ride, between the inn and the bridge at the upper ford. He had thought twice about whether the cold was beyond what an old man should be riding in.
— You are not an old man, said Tscharner.
— I am forty-eight, said Joseph.
— I am fifty-six. You are not an old man.
— You are not an old man either, Tscharner.
The household laughed. It was the first time the household had laughed since the riders had come up the track at four minutes past nine that morning. Mary Baker laughed beside Gideon, and Sarah laughed across from her, and John Johnson laughed at his uncle, and Elizabeth Johnson laughed at her husband laughing at his uncle. The laughter went around the table once and stopped where it had begun, with Joseph and Tscharner looking at each other across the corner of the table.
Sarah passed the corn-bread to her right. The board went up the table to Gideon, and Gideon took a piece and passed to John, and John to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth to Joseph, and Joseph set the board between himself and Tscharner. The stewed apples went the other way around — Sarah served a spoonful onto Mary Baker’s plate and a spoonful onto her own and passed the bowl across.
Joseph asked Tscharner about the south boundary of the Caswell grant. He had ridden the line in October on his October visit, when he had come up with the ham and the cinnamon, and he had seen the chestnut at the south corner that Tscharner had named to him as the marker, but the line east from the chestnut had not been clear to him on the ground.
Tscharner said the line east from the chestnut ran to the second white oak in the small bottom that drained to the south. He had marked it on the September walk with the surveyor.
Joseph said the small bottom had been wet in October.
Tscharner said the small bottom was wet in October most years and that the line ran through the wet ground because the surveyor had laid it through the wet ground, and the line was the line.
Joseph said the line was the line.
Sarah said the grant was for four hundred acres in the Guilford country and the household would have the survey returned to the Land Office at Hillsborough before Christmas if the weather held.
Joseph said his own four hundred had taken six months to return after the survey, the clerk at the Land Office having been slow.
Tscharner said the Hillsborough clerk was a man named Williams and the man had moved on Tscharner’s October papers in two weeks.
Joseph said in that case the household would be on the grant before spring planting.
— Before March, said Tscharner. The cabin at Lunenburg holds till March.
— And after March, said Joseph.
— After March we cross the Dan and we build, said Tscharner.
— And the grant is in your name, said Joseph.
— The grant is in Sarah’s name. I filed the request for her in May, and the clerk at Hillsborough wrote it to her in October. She is the widow; the governor granted it to her.
Sarah said the clerk’s name was Williams and the clerk had been respectful.
Tscharner said the clerk had been respectful.
The household passed the Madeira jug up the table. Joseph poured for himself and for Tscharner and for John and for Gideon. Sarah passed the cider jug to Mary Baker, who poured for herself and for her mother and for Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said the apples were good. She said her own Guilford orchard had not given well in October because of the late frost in May, and the few apples she had put up had been hard. Sarah said the Lunenburg orchard had given well in 1778 — the year before the frost reached as far north as Guilford — and the apples in the bowl were from that October, kept in the cold-cellar through the year. Elizabeth said the cold-cellar at Guilford did not keep as well as the cold-cellar at Lunenburg apparently did. Sarah said the Lunenburg cold-cellar was deep and the spring that ran behind it kept the temperature even. Elizabeth said she would build a deeper one at Guilford in the spring.
The household was eating. The corn-bread was eaten. Sarah went to the kitchen lean-to and brought back a second board with a fresh half of corn-bread she had baked at five o’clock that morning, and the second board went around the table the way the first had gone. The Madeira jug was poured a second time.
It was past noon. The London-made parlor clock on the mantelpiece — the clock Tscharner’s father had brought from Worb in 1709 and that the elder Mary Baker had wound every Sunday morning of her keeping of the household at Lunenburg from 1742 to 1773, and that Sarah had wound every Sunday morning since they came down to Guilford in 1775 — read twenty-two minutes past twelve. The light at the south windows was the light of a frontier November noon, low and clear, with the leaves down and the field visible all the way to the cleared edge at the south.
Sarah said: I sent the letter to Vincent on the third.
She said it across the table to Joseph. The household waited.
Joseph said: The post north.
— The post north. To the regimental address I had from the May muster. I do not know if it has gone forward from Hillsborough.
— The carrier from Guilford went on the seventh. He went up with my October letter to Hillsborough and forward up the road. He would have had the third’s mail.
— So the letter was on the carrier on the seventh.
— On the seventh.
— And the carrier south goes how far.
— The carrier I sent it with goes to Wilmington. From Wilmington it goes by the coast carrier south. The coast carrier was running steady in October. I do not know about November. The weather has been hard south of Wilmington this month.
Mary Baker said: Wilmington is where the regiment was in October.
— Wilmington was where the regiment was in October, said Joseph. They were moving south then. I do not know where they are now.
— South Carolina, said Tscharner. The papers at Hillsborough in October said the regiment was moving to South Carolina.
— South Carolina is where they are then, said Joseph. The coast carrier goes south of Wilmington to Charleston when it runs. It does not always run.
Sarah said: So the letter may have gone, or it may not have gone, or it may be on the coast.
— It may have gone, said Joseph. The carrier was steady on the seventh.
— That is what I wanted to know.
— Yes.
— Thank you, Joseph.
— Yes, Sarah.
The household ate the last of the apples. The Madeira jug was put down. The cider jug was put down. Sarah cleared the plates one at a time, taking them to the kitchen lean-to and setting them in the wash-tub there. She did not bring out a sweet. There had been no sweet planned. The Carolina ham and the corn-bread and the stewed apples were the meal.
The supper hour had been about an hour and twenty minutes. The clock read fourteen minutes before two.
Joseph said: We must ride.
Tscharner said: Yes.
The company began to rise. John and Elizabeth Johnson stood first. Gideon stood and helped Mary Baker out of her chair, in the careful way he had been taught at his uncle’s house in Guilford. Sarah came back from the lean-to and stood at her chair.
Tscharner did not rise immediately. He sat at the head of the table for a moment with his hands flat on the linen cloth. Then he stood and went the four steps to the parlor desk where the Bible still lay open at the marriage entry.
He did not say anything when he stood at the desk. The household did not look at him directly. The four Johnsons were at their chairs near the foot of the table, gathering the things they had brought in with them — Elizabeth’s travelling-bag with the gift inside, Joseph’s hat from the floor by the chair, John’s gloves from the table by the parlor door. Mary Baker was standing beside Gideon at the long side of the table. Sarah was at the kitchen door.
Tscharner read the marriage entry once through. He stood at the desk with his hand resting beside the open Bible and read what he had written an hour and forty minutes earlier in his own hand in French. The ink was dry. The page would take the closing without smudging.
He closed the Bible.
The leather case sat on the desk to the left of the closed Bible. He picked up the Bible — small and heavy, the way a keeping-Bible is — and slid it into the leather case the way the elder Mary Baker had shown him at Lunenburg in the second year of their marriage, when the Bible had not long before come to him from his father — the book his father had carried over from Worb and kept to his death — and she had said We will have a case made and had had a case made for it by a saddler in 1744. The Bible went into the case the way it had gone into the case the eighteen years previous times Tscharner had closed it after an entry.
He set the case on the desk.
He stood with his hand on the closed case for a moment. Then he took his hand off the case and turned to face the room.
The morning’s record-keeping was complete.
The Afternoon and the Parlor Closing
The Bible was in its case on the desk. Tscharner had turned from the desk and was facing the room. The four Johnsons and Mary Baker and Gideon were standing near the foot end of the table. The clock at the parlor’s north wall read fourteen minutes before two.
Joseph said the horses would need to be off the rail by half past, if the company were to make the inn before the light went.
Sarah said she would put up cold ham and corn-bread in a cloth for the saddle bags.
Mary Baker said she would get her things from the back bedroom.
She went through the parlor door and the hall and into the back bedroom. The small portmanteau Sarah had packed the day before was on the bed against the foot board. Two changes of linen, the wool shawl that had been her grandmother Mary Baker’s and had come to her at eight years old, a comb, a needle case, a folded square of brown paper holding three sprigs of dried lavender from the Lunenburg October cutting of 1778, the small leather wallet Sarah had given her at her thirteenth birthday with three silver shillings in it, the second pair of stockings, the second pair of garters. Mary Baker did not open the portmanteau to check what was in it. She had watched Sarah pack it yesterday afternoon. She took the portmanteau by its leather handle and carried it back through the hall and into the parlor.
Gideon was at the parlor door holding his coat. He took the portmanteau from her hand. He carried it out to the front step.
Sarah came in from the lean-to with the cloth and the cold ham and the corn-bread and a small stoneware bottle of cider with a wooden stopper. She tied the cloth into a bundle at the four corners. She gave the bundle to Joseph. Joseph said he would carry it in his off saddle bag with the powder-flask.
John Johnson and Elizabeth went to the front step for their coats and their hats. Joseph went out after them to see to the horses at the rail. Gideon went out behind Joseph. The parlor was for a moment Sarah and Tscharner and Mary Baker.
Tscharner said: You will write us on the road.
Mary Baker said: I will write from Guilford.
Tscharner said: That will do.
He put his hand on her shoulder once. He took his hand off. He went out through the parlor door and through the hall and out to the front step to see to the standing of his guests at their horses.
Sarah and Mary Baker were alone in the parlor.
Sarah said: You have the wallet.
Mary Baker said: Yes.
Sarah said: Mind the second pair of stockings is the wool. The cotton is the first.
Mary Baker said: Yes.
Sarah said: I put the lavender in for the linen press at the Guilford house. Mind it does not crumble.
Mary Baker said: I will mind it.
Sarah said: Then go.
Mary Baker went the four steps to her mother and put her arms around her and held her. Sarah held her back. Neither of them said anything. After what may have been four seconds or six Mary Baker took her arms down and stepped back. Sarah’s hand on her sleeve went down with her step and then off. Mary Baker turned and went through the parlor door and through the hall and out to the front step where Gideon and his father and his brother and his sister were standing at the horses and her grandfather was standing at the bottom of the step.
Sarah came out behind her and stood at the top of the step at her husband’s place, which was where she stood when she saw company off. Tscharner moved one step to the side and Sarah stood beside him.
The horses were four. The Johnson grey for John. The Johnson chestnut for Joseph. The Johnson bay mare for Elizabeth, who rode well and had ridden up from Guilford on her own seat. The Johnson roan for Gideon and Mary Baker. Gideon would carry her on a pillion behind the cantle. The pillion was strapped. The portmanteau was lashed at the off side of the cantle. The cloth-bundle of ham and corn-bread was in Joseph’s off saddle bag.
Gideon mounted. He turned the roan to bring its near side to the step. He held his hand down.
Mary Baker came down the step. She took her grandfather’s hand at the bottom of the step. Tscharner held her hand for the count of two and put it down. She turned to her mother. Sarah came down the one step to the ground and put her hand on Mary Baker’s cheek and said nothing. Mary Baker put her hand on Sarah’s hand and said nothing. Sarah took her hand off. Mary Baker turned. She put her foot on Gideon’s boot in the stirrup and her hand in his hand and her other hand on the pillion strap and was up behind him. She found her seat. She put her arms around his waist.
Gideon said to Sarah and Tscharner that he was much obliged for the day they had made.
Sarah said she was glad of the day, and that he was to take care of her daughter on the road.
Tscharner said the company would be at the inn well before the dark and that he wished them a good ride down.
Joseph said he thanked them for the hospitality of their house and that he would carry their compliments to his wife at Guilford.
Sarah said the compliments were to go to Mrs. Johnson with her own.
Elizabeth said she thanked Sarah for the day, and that the parlor had been a fine room for the morning.
Sarah said she was glad it had served.
John Johnson said he would write from Guilford when the company was in.
Tscharner said they would look for the letter.
The four horses turned and walked off the front yard onto the track. Joseph led. John behind him. Elizabeth behind John. Gideon and Mary Baker last. The track ran east along the cleared field to the head of the field and then south at the bend.
Sarah and Tscharner stood at the front step and watched the company down the track. The roan went at the back at a walk. Mary Baker did not turn in her seat to look back. She had said her goodbye at the step. The roan’s tail swung once and again.
The company reached the bend at the head of the cleared field. The horses turned south. Joseph at the head of the file went out of sight behind the standing trees, and then John, and then Elizabeth, and then the roan with Gideon and Mary Baker on it. The tail of the roan was the last thing.
Sarah stood at the step for the count of perhaps ten after the last horse was out of sight.
Then she said: Well, Mr. DeGraffenreid.
Tscharner said: Well, Mrs. DeGraffenreid.
She turned and went up the step and into the house. Tscharner came in behind her and closed the front door.
The clock at the north wall read eight minutes past two.
Tscharner went the four steps to the parlor desk. The Bible in its leather case was on the cover where he had set it down. He stood at the desk for a moment with his hand on the edge of the desk. He sat down in the chair. He put his hand on the leather case. He took his hand off and put the pen back in the inkwell, which he had not put it in when he closed the case, and put the cap on the inkwell, and put the inkwell to the back of the desk where it lived between uses. He put the small flat of sand he had used at the entry to blot the ink to the right of the inkwell. He moved the candle two inches to the left of the case.
The desk was in its keeping.
He sat at the desk for some time with his hands on the cover at either side of the case.
Sarah was at the parlor table.
She lifted the silver-edged dish that had held the stewed apples and carried it to the lean-to. She came back. She lifted the platter that had held the ham and carried it to the lean-to. She came back. She lifted the corn-bread board and carried it to the lean-to. She came back. She lifted the eight pewter plates two at a time and carried them to the lean-to. She came back the fourth time. The table was bare.
She went to the cedar chest at the parlor’s south wall and lifted the lid and propped it on the hinge stop. The linen cloth from her own wedding was on the table. She went to the table and took the cloth up at the two corners nearest the parlor door and walked it back along the table folding it once at the half and once at the quarter. She brought the corners together and folded the cloth on itself. The cloth was a square the size of a folded apron. She carried it to the cedar chest and laid it on the linen at the bottom of the chest with the other things her mother had given her at the 1763 wedding, which had lived at the bottom of the chest between her own wedding and her daughter’s. She closed the lid of the cedar chest.
She came back to the table.
The table was the heavy oak plank Tscharner had set up six feet on the trestle for the supper. She took the two halves apart at the joiner’s pegs the way she and Mary Baker had set them in this morning, only in reverse. The west half she carried to the south wall and stood on its short legs against the wall where it lived between dinners. The east half she carried after it and set it against the west half at the joiner’s pegs and slid the pegs home. She took the trestle apart at the cross-piece and stood the trestle in the corner by the cedar chest. The parlor floor where the table had been was the parlor floor.
She moved the six side chairs against the east and west walls in the places they lived between meals. The two arm chairs at the head and the foot she carried to the parlor’s north end, the head chair to the right of the desk and the foot chair to the left.
The parlor was the parlor it was on an ordinary afternoon.
She went to the hearth.
The fire she had built up at half past four that morning had run down through the morning and the supper and the early afternoon and was a good red bed of coals under a low flame. She took the poker from the hook beside the hearth and raked the coals to the back of the firebox. She took the small shovel and lifted ash from the front of the hearth and banked it over the front of the coal bed in a half-moon, leaving the back coals open to the chimney for the draw and the front coals banked under the ash for the slow burn through the night. The flame went down. The light in the parlor went down with it. She put the poker back on the hook. She put the shovel back on the hook.
She stood at the hearth.
The clock at the north wall read twenty-two minutes past four.
The light at the west window was the late light of a November afternoon at the latitude of the Dan River. The light at the east window had gone. Sarah went to the east window and pulled the inside shutters to and put the bar across. She went to the west window and stood for a moment at the sill and watched the last of the light go down behind the standing trees at the head of the cleared field. The track was empty. The company would be at the inn by now or close to it. She pulled the inside shutters to and put the bar across.
The parlor was in the half-light from the hearth.
She went to the parlor door and stood at the door. Tscharner was at the desk with his hands on the cover of the case. He had not moved in the time she had been working. He turned his head.
She said: I am going up.
He said: I will come up in a little.
She said: There is bread and the cold ham in the lean-to if you want it.
He said: I am not hungry yet.
She said: Then I will go up.
He said: Goodnight, Sarah.
She said: Goodnight, Mr. DeGraffenreid.
She went out through the parlor door and up the stair.
Tscharner sat at the desk with his hands on the cover of the case for a time he did not count.
The fire at the hearth made the small sound a banked fire makes through ash.
At length he took his hands off the case and stood up from the chair. He went the four steps to the hearth and stood at the hearth and looked down at the banked coals. He took the candle from the desk and lit it at the back coals where the bed was still open to the chimney. He carried the candle to the parlor desk and set it down beside the case. He sat down in the chair.
He took up the pen. He uncapped the inkwell. He dipped the pen. He did not open the case.
On a small sheet of foolscap he kept in the right drawer for daily entries he wrote the date — Thursday 18 November 1779 — and below it, in the plain hand he used for the household ledger and for the day-book of the magistrate’s docket, Mary Baker DeGraffenreid married Gideon Johnson Jr. at this house this morning at ten o’clock. The Reverend Mr. Whitaker of the Dan River Baptist congregation officiating. Witnesses Joseph and John and Elizabeth Johnson and Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid and the undersigned. Mary Baker and Gideon Johnson Jr. departed this house at two o’clock for the inn at the south end of the cleared field. Joseph John and Elizabeth Johnson departed with them. The day was clear and the road was good.
He signed it Tscharner DeGraffenreid in the hand he used for the magistrate’s docket.
He blotted the sheet on the flat of sand. He put the sheet in the right drawer of the desk on top of the household papers. He capped the inkwell. He put the pen back in the holder.
He sat with his hand on the cover of the case.
The candle burned at the desk. The fire made its sound at the hearth.
After some time he stood up from the chair. He took the candle from the desk in his right hand. He put his left hand on the cover of the leather case for the count of one and took it off.
He went out of the parlor with the candle.
The parlor was empty. The case was on the desk where he had left it. The fire was banked. The shutters were across. The clock at the north wall read seven minutes before five.
The light in the parlor was the light from the banked fire.