A simple love story

–Hast never shelled peas before, husband?

Hannah’s face was mild, she was not a reproachful woman, he thought, and she did want his help. He gestured for her to show him how.

–I should think not, with thy fine eddication. Here, like this.

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Married under sufferance by the ship’s captain only because he did not wish to tolerate irregular behaviour on board, they had emerged bewildered into the heat and dust of Charleston docks. His wife followed him mutely, subdued; he showed a grim burst of energy and determination. They found a single room on the edge of town, and she set to sweep and tidy it as he walked out to find work. For the first week they ate little and barely spoke; she scrubbed his collars. Jobs blew in on the burning wind. First their landlady needed a parlour painting; he re-lettered the sign above her door for free. Then backdrops at the local theatre: broken columns, misty Italianate landscapes, drapery. One day he came home with his first real smile, laid down some money on the table between them. He would be upstate for three months, decorating a new music hall in a saw-mill town. She counted the money, promised not to work for his pride, but knew she would take in the landlady’s sewing.

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He slept in an attic with eight other men; he woke one night to find one of the carpenters going through the pockets of his coat. He nearly threw the man down the ladder; in the morning he carried on as though nothing had happened. He painted the rough woodwork to look like carved marble, coats of arms that flickered in the lamplight, moonlit castles, stormy seas. People wept to see it but still rifled through his pack. What he could save of his money he sewed into his waistband and slept with it. When he finished, he stayed an extra week to paint the manager’s wife and son, another for an inscription at the Baptist Tabernacle: Enter into his courts with thanksgiving in your hearts… they wanted gold paint but there was none to be found.

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The mail coach dropped him back in Charleston at midnight and he walked through the night to get back to the rooming-house, dozed in a chair on the veranda so he’d be there to see her when she got up. One of the maids screamed when she came out and saw him there first thing, pistol on his lap. The landlady came running.

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Rising awkwardly, he said –You can tell my wife…

She cut him off. –She’s not here. She went back to England.

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She watched his reaction with a level look, then called back the maid and instructed her to make ready a small chamber on the top floor for their guest. He found more work in the city easily, white-front saloons were going up as fast as they could fell the trees for them. One Sunday evening the landlady called him into her parlour and poured him a glass of whisky. The road to ruin, he thought. But it’s only a small one. She made it clear what she was after. A steady man wasn’t easy to find. She had already found occasion to warn him off the maids, cynically dismissing their characters. –Irish girls, she had said. –What can you expect? I have to keep them in line. Barely speak English, they’re like cattle. But they’ll work for nothing.

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He hadn’t been interested in the maids anyway. The whisky went quickly to his head.

–You know I have a wife, he said. She shrugged.

–Not here, she replied.

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He told her he’d have to think, and she was amazed. She’d never seen a man think about something like this.

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The next day he was working downtown, and he went to ask at the docks about passenger lists for the boats back to England. Of course they had names in their ledgers, but only for the wealthier travellers. Hannah would have been in steerage if she’d gone. When he tried to describe her, they just laughed in his face. Who would have taken notice of a woman like that?

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At table the landlady passed him the good cuts of meat and he thanked her politely but wondered for the first time whether her story had actually been true. Where would a young woman alone have gone to in a city like this, and how long would the money he had left her have lasted? He tried to ask one of the maids if she knew what had happened, but the girl flung him a terrified look and scuttled out of the room.

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He repaired all the joinery around the boarding-house’s front porch, built a new set of steps. He helped the landlady to throw out a couple of drunken guests one night, made sure they knew they’d have to shape up before they returned. It was everything she wanted. Then he put up a large welcome sign, carefully lettered below with prices, terms and conditions. After that he waited around each of the city’s churches in turn as the congregations emerged after Sunday service, to see if he could catch sight of his wife. No joy. Evening services too, perhaps she’d taken a job as a servant? Finally, the hospital. A sympathetic registrar asked how long they had been married, how long he had been away, had he thought to try the Lying-In hospital downtown? He paled. When he got there, they listened to his story in mildly reproachful disbelief and checked the logbooks. No one there by her name. America was so big.

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One night the landlady cried on his shoulder about something, he held her awkwardly. This would be so easy, he thought. She wants me to kiss her. The rest comes naturally.

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Why won’t he kiss me? she thought. It’s so easy. I’m making it easy for him, he’s not stupid. We both know what happens next.

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It happened. They both hated it. And afterward he couldn’t sleep, walked around the perimeter of the little kitchen garden all night, tying up stakes, doing stupid pointless jobs in the cold dawn light, until he met the letter-carrier by the front gate.

–Another of these! the boy said with a grin, slapping a small grey envelope into his hand. It came from his wife, miles away near Asheville.

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He woke the landlady and demanded his money from her strongbox. She was alarmed by the change in his voice and manner as well as the letter he was holding, identical to several that she had intercepted and burnt before.

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The journey took three days, and he read and re-read his wife’s desolate letter in the coach, smoothing it out on his knee and then impatiently folding it and returning it to his pocket. He weighed and re-weighed things as he watched the landscape change and build in colour outside. His fickleness and faithlessness; her sense of abandonment. How easy it would have been to cast her off and forget. The cost of settling in a new town; they would never go back to Charleston. The wind soughing in the cottonwoods, some strange code in the yapping of the dogs, spools of cloud dripping from the high bright air.

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It took an hour and a good part of his reserves to buy back her indenture from the foreman, who spat into the empty fireplace and sent a boy to fetch her from the picking fields. Eventually she shuffled into the office, eyes to the floor as she was unable to raise them to meet her superior’s. He wept for the sight of her sunburnt cheeks and her oil-stained fingers. We are one, he thought, and one is always more than two.

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–Your woman, the foreman sneered, dismissing them both.

–Hannah, he said in a broken voice. She looked up.