The Language of Paradise: A Novel

PROLOGUE

BIRDS AND BEASTS FLY OUT OF OUR MOUTHS LIKE ANGELS

SOPHIA, July 1838

SUMMER IS THE SEASON OF UNVEILING. THE BED CURTAINS came down last month, the carpets have been rolled up, straw matting laid on floors that hold the winter chill. Every door is open. The hall has been transformed into an airy cloister, a whole other room where the family sits on humid nights, enjoying the crosswind. It is possible to walk from the front path straight through the center of the house and out into the garden. Sophy Birdsall does that now, just because she can.

She is conscious of a certain impropriety. A few weeks along as she is, she should not be carrying herself like a bride walking down the aisle. She should not be sweeping, even if the infinitesimal weight makes her feel majestic. She’s always been a scanty little thing, a light craft at the mercy of every current. Now that she will soon have a prow, she feels for the first time like a vessel of substance, balanced even in unsettled waters. She believes she has finally grown into her proper name. She sees it inscribed on the stern of her boat in majestic, undulating cursive: Sophia.

The hall mirror stops her in mid-stride; these days she can’t pass by without measuring her silhouette. She steps away with a gasp—Mama draped the glass with muslin to keep fly-spots off! That won’t do, the soon-to-be-ample Sophia will not be reduced to a ghost! Her white dress has faded away, but her face and neck and hands show through the gauzy cotton, ruddy with a life of their own. Like a nun bathing in her shift.

She doesn’t know where the thought came from, but before she can ponder it, a nun confronts her from the clouded depths of the mirror. Eyes staring straight ahead, hands moving furtively over the wet cloth.

Sophy’s mind has always been prone to strange couplings. In her girlhood she would speak what she saw without hesitating, the words darting from her brain to her tongue in a single headlong swoop like birds lighting on the nearest branch. People might laugh or shake their heads—Sophy, her brothers would say by way of explanation, shrugging, as if her oddity were its own excuse—but at times these unlikely matches were even taken for wit. Then they came like gifts on the wing, quick and airy. Lately they barge in like intruders and harden to images that haunt her for days. Sophy supposes it must be her condition. She wishes she could ask Mama, for all the good it would do. Mama, who is no more troubled by unruly thoughts than she was by morning queasiness.

Gideon would never imagine his little wife could be prey to such unwholesome fancies. He assumes that her inner landscape is as sunny and placid as a baby’s. It suits his purposes to think so. An hour ago over breakfast—as avid for the quiet of his study as she was for his company—he gave her a commission. Why don’t you paint me a soothing scene to contemplate while I work?

You would do better to look out the window, she told him. She meant only to disparage her own talents, but he is not a man to take words lightly.

I’m not asking for a view, he said, peevish. If I wanted a prospect, I would climb a hill. Just paint what you see, as you see it, and for the Lord’s sake, don’t try to get it right. Remember what Leander told you. Perspective is the Devil’s trick.

Leander Solloway, the schoolmaster, is a man of strong opinions, and he is not shy about sharing them.

With effort, Sophy fixes her attention on the rectangle of garden framed in the back doorway. There’s a painting begging to be made here, if only she had the skill. Her brushwork isn’t deft enough to catch the conversation between sun and shadow, liquid gold and new green. She would approach it too earnestly, try to catch the movement and reduce it all to blotches.

On the back stair, she pauses to tent her eyes. The sun is a force today. Even in summer the Hedge farmhouse is dark, shrouded in old shade trees that reach above the roof. Her late Reverend Papa, a practical man, was thinking more of warmth than light when he put the windows in. Since childhood Sophy has moped through the winter—an eternal night in New England—but today she is grateful for months of cold and gloom. Contrast is everything, playing with paint has taught her that. Would the roses and sweet peas seem so bounteous, the foliage so lush, if it were brighter indoors? She and Gideon echo these contrasts, in their way. Sophy won’t go so far as to say that she is spring, he winter. It would be blasphemy to think so—not with his cornsilk hair. But his character she thinks of as wintry. Singleness of mind. A gravity rare in one so young. A stern and probing eye that pierces through the world’s seductions to the greater glory beneath. With these virtues to gird him, he hides himself in the study on this brilliant Monday morning, snatching a few hours at his desk before going off with Mr. Solloway to finish the house where the three of them will live one day. She is not permitted to know their intentions. They’re preparing a grand surprise for her, Gideon says: a sanctuary where she can paint from nature all year round.

Today she is glad enough to work outdoors. Her easel is under the copper beech, but she walks past it to the outbuilding Papa built for his study. Since the days when she and Gideon were courting, it has been a little home for them. Sophy can’t resist a peek through the window. She rarely has her husband to herself nowadays; if she can’t be at his side, she must settle for a glimpse of the back of his head.

By his own choice, his desk faces the far wall. The light that trickles through the small panes is barely sufficient for the minuscule print he pores over hour after hour; her beloved astral lamp—a wedding gift from Papa’s congregation—burns all day next to his open book. Its crystal drops hold rainbows she could look at for hours, but the colors are wasted on Gideon. Sophy would love nothing better than to slip in behind him, clasp his temples in her cool hands, ease his poor laden head back to rest against her. She would remove the spectacles that grip his nose like pincers, and rub the clefts they leave, and the ridge between his eyes. But she knows better than to interrupt him at his work.

Gideon is unveiling words, peeling off layers of meaning encrusted over centuries—barnacles, he calls them—to get to the pure image at the core. His interest is more than scholarly, his ambitions infinitely higher than the usual reverend gentleman’s. Papa’s thick black dictionaries and works of philology line the walls of the study. Mausoleums for language, in Gideon’s opinion. Words are alive, they carry the breath of Creation. Is it any wonder they turn to ash in such sepulchers? Sometimes, after supper, he opens one of the tomb-tomes and chooses a word at random—a choice morsel for Mr. Solloway’s delectation. Last night he was hilarious over baboon, pursing his lips and reciting each stage of its etymology in a pinch-nose drone. "The syllables ba, pa, naturally uttered in talking, are used to signify the motion of the lips, or the lips themselves, especially large or movable lips, the lips of a beast. Arriving at the end, he’d paused and heralded the words with a sputtering fanfare: "An animal with large ugly lips when compared with those of a man. When he clapped the book shut, a puff of dust rose from it. Pity the poor beast, Gideon said gleefully. Summed up for all eternity in such an epitaph! I ask you—who is the monkey here?"

Gideon likes to call himself a naturalist of the chairbound variety, who prowls for specimens in the dictionary instead of the forest or jungle. In truth, his aim is so lofty that the thought of it prickles the skin on the back of Sophy’s neck. The object of his investigation is nothing less than the language spoken in man’s first home. Gideon believes that the world God spoke into being—the tender new world that he trusted Adam to name—is as round and real as their little village of Ormsby, Massachusetts, but sunk deeper than Atlantis beneath eons of careless speech. The great task, then, is to raise up this fallen garden by the same means as it was created: word by word. Delving is his name for this process—an anointed form of digging, it seems. If he can trace even one or two words back to their original source, reclaim a microscopic fragment of that sacred green, he will have done his life’s work. The thought of it carries him away. Imagine the conversations we will have. We’ll go Adam one better, Sophy—we won’t just name the animals, we’ll speak them. Birds and beasts flying out of our mouths like angels!

It is hard for an ordinary mind like hers to grasp. What will it be like to live there? she asks him. How will it be different?

Then he paints for her a picture she could never reproduce on any canvas, had she a thousand times the skill she was born with. Colors so radiant that the brightest hues appear sickly gray in comparison. A preternatural clarity of light: each man and beast and tree cut cleanly against a sky of purest crystal; each the ruler of its own small kingdom, inhabiting its allotted space with authority and grace. And yet, a harmony of which man can only dream, all these potent singularities joyfully subservient to the whole—immersed, he says, and bids her think of a pastoral landscape reflected in a lake, the forms distinct but liquidly blending into each other.

The present world is only a covering. Gideon often says so, and she knows it must be true. Yet, looking around her now—the garden at its peak, all her roses out at once like suitors contending for her favor, the stone wall giddy with honeysuckle—Sophy thinks this ought to be enough. Is it a shallowness of soul that her longings are so easily satisfied? She can’t quite stifle a wish that he might sit beside her on the stone bench as he used to when they were first acquainted, the two of them gazing out at the trellis as if their joined lives were twined there. On a day like this, the troubles that beset them these last months seem like relics of a dark age. The summer has come, Gideon is himself again, and she is as she was meant to be: as filled with life as the rest of creation.

SOPHY SETTLES INTO HER CHAIR, the afternoon heat, heavy with fragrance, gathering around her. The painting on the easel has preoccupied her for the last week. She has been trying to capture that section of the garden where the land rises ever so slightly to meet a wall of wild roses and honeysuckle. The illusion of height seems to promise some marvel just beyond the bushes: a still lake or a verdant valley, a meadow rolling in rhythmic curves to a gently lapping sea. She’s done well by the foliage—she will grant herself that—and the effect of light and shade is the best she’s ever managed. Today, though, the painting doesn’t draw her in. There is a flatness to it, a mincing correctness that Gideon and Leander will mock. She can’t lift her brush without their voices resounding in her ear. Imagine you are Mother Eve, gazing at the world for the first time.

She has what they call an innocent eye—or so they tell her. It is an affliction she was born with—not so inconvenient as a wandering eye, or so noticeable as crossed, but of particular interest to Gideon and Leander.

Are you trying to tell me I paint badly? she asked when they first began to rhapsodize about the phenomenon. There’s no need to mock me. I know that already.

Between the two of them, they’ve decided that she is a simple, natural creature who can shrug off experience as easily as changing a dress. She feels a sudden sympathy for the maligned ape, doomed to be defined by the terms of others. Who is the monkey here? She thinks she knows. True, she hasn’t delved as deeply as Gideon, or explored as much of the world as Leander, but she’s seen things. Her eye is more weathered than they realize. That being so, how is she to fool the jaded organ into discovering this scene for the first time when she’s been contemplating the same patch of garden for days?

They’re right, of course. Exactitude isn’t truth. Something more than accuracy must have pulled each name, full-blown, from Adam’s throat as the parade of beasts passed before him. An urge to play is pulling at her now—overflow from the beauty of the day. She stares into the painting and introduces, in turn, a small ruined temple; a pillar, behind which a hunter lurks; a fleeing nymph; great bloated clouds hanging placidly above, indifferent to the chase. The drama plays itself out while her hands are still folded in her lap.

When at last she picks up her brush, it is to paint a single figure: a few quick strokes that make a man. She places him at the highest point of the hill, with the roses at his back. He stands alone for almost an hour as Sophy squints at him and makes timid dabs at the angle of his head. By four o’clock his mouth is wide open, and poised on his lower lip, like a diver about to leap into the brink, is the small but scrupulously rendered figure of a baboon.

CHAPTER 1

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GIDEON

GIDEON BIRDSALL—BENT OVER ONE OF THE WEIGHTY black volumes he professes to despise, trying to ignore the doubled radiance of the July day and his wife’s bright face at the window—might remove his spectacles to rest his eyes and reflect that he owes his present existence entirely to his gift for Hebrew. It was his facility with that ancient tongue that commended him, a scant two years ago, to the notice of the Reverend Samuel Hedge.

His first sight of the man whose acquaintance would alter the course of his life was not promising. The Reverend Professor Hedge had chosen to welcome the new crop of students to Andover Seminary with a sermon on Divine Election—hardly a theme to mesmerize a group of raw seminarians sweating through their first chapel service on a sultry day in September. The Reverend was sparsely made, sharp-featured, his black coat well brushed but rusty with wear, and when he began to speak, his voice was as meager as his person. Strive to enter in at the strait gate, for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in and shall not be able . . . An exhortation—yet his tone was both flat and hollow, as if the marrow had been scooped out of the words, leaving only brittle casing; his voice rose on the last phrase in a verbal flinging-up-of-hands. It seemed clear that he had little hope for one such as himself, and even less for the sad specimens before him. He paused and sighed, lost in morose contemplation, and the seminarians, Gideon included, shifted in their seats and waited for it to be over. The Reverend looked up then, impaling the lot of them with his pointed gaze. For STRAIT is the gate, and NARROW is the way, which leadeth unto life, and FEW THERE BE THAT FIND IT! He drove the words in like nails, and, having secured his listeners, proceeded to transport their rigid forms through a veritable Red Sea of flame, the Chosen marching single file like miners in a shaft, eyes straight ahead, hands locked in prayer, while on either side of them the sizzling multitudes begged for mercy. When he finished, an hour and a half later, more than a few of the young men were shivering as if an early frost had descended.

That evening, sleepless in his narrow bed, Gideon wondered why Reverend Hedge never said a word about where the Redeemed were headed. Toward some vaporous mist, apparently, not unlike the formless matter from which God made the earth. Why had the parson poured all his eloquence into the torments of the damned and saved none for Paradise? Gideon had been asking that question since he was very young. Alone for the first time in his own room, he’d awakened in the night to pure black and cried out that he was blind. His mother had to light a candle to prove to him that he could see. After that, he would burrow under the covers and, in the shelter of a more intimate darkness, try to imagine a paradise of pure light. The preachers at Sunday meeting gave him little to build on. Heaven was only a name to them: the featureless opposite of the other place. The horrors they warned of seemed garish and exaggerated, no more real than the stories boys told about ghosts and bogeymen. Gideon was not frightened of Hell. He was frightened that there was no place as light as the dark was dark.

He had grown up poor, the only son of a widowed schoolmistress. His father had died before he was born—lost at sea, his mother told him when he was old enough to ask questions. If Gideon pressed her, she gave him more—releasing each fact with a curious reluctance, always defining his father by what he was not. Good-looking, but his features were not as noble as yours. Intelligent, but had not your refinement of mind. In time these negative attributes condensed to a comfortable absence in Gideon’s thoughts. As he became more conscious of his own place in the world, his curiosity dwindled. Clearly, his father’s purpose in life had been achieved in creating him. Other boys might make heroes of their dead fathers, but Gideon was not like other boys. A man so inconsequential wasn’t worth mourning, and, as his mother often said, We make our way well enough, you and I.

When she was done teaching for the day, his mother tutored him herself, but his knowledge of Latin and French soon exceeded hers, and larger schools in neighboring villages had little to offer him. He had few friends—his intensity struck children of his age as strange and his precocity intimidated the local teachers—but he learned early to cultivate the regard of men of influence. A local mill owner, a wealthy and pious man whose daughter had been taught by Gideon’s mother, saw to it that he was tutored in the classics, and sent him first to Harvard and then (judging the Divinity School too liberal) to Andover Seminary as a living tithe. Such a scholarly boy must surely be destined for the church.

If, at Harvard, Gideon had been considered too serious, wanting in humor and high spirits, at Andover he was among peers. Yet even in this natural habitat, he held himself aloof from the irreverent joking that lightened the long days of his fellow seminarians. The classroom was more sacred to him than chapel, and the men who presided there, eccentric and fallible as they sometimes appeared, emanated the power of shamans, dispensing knowledge as priests dispensed the host. Of all their teachers, the Reverend Hedge was most often mocked—in part because he was feared—but Gideon couldn’t bring himself to call the master of Hebrew and Greek Hedgehog and Prickles and Porcupine as others did. It might be true that the professor’s rare words of praise concealed a stinging quill of reproof; still, Gideon coveted them, and worked hard to merit them. He moved ahead quickly with his translations, from sentences to verses to psalms, English to Hebrew and the reverse, and eventually his papers were returned to him without corrections, and even a Well Done in the professor’s angular script. Emboldened, he decided to attempt a longer translation from the Hebrew on his own time. He kept hidden from himself his desire to present it to his teacher as an offering—pride, he knew, was his besetting sin—but agonized over which passage to choose as if Hedge’s gimlet eyes were already boring holes in the page. After much deliberation, he settled on ten chapters of Isaiah, beginning with God’s mockery of the idols of Babylon and ending with 55, a chapter he loved for its exuberance, the mountains singing and the trees clapping their hands.

Gideon began his labor in the middle of a snow-bound February, working late into the night after completing his regular assignments. The room was so cold that his fingers cramped as he wrote. His chamber-mate, a surveyor’s son from Billerica, snored all night, then complained in the mornings that Gideon’s candle had kept him awake. But no adversity could quench the revelations he was drawing from the text. His earlier exercises had been shallow compared to this: simple surface transactions, an English word supplied for a Hebrew one. Never before had the Hebrew pulled him in and under, made him swim in the depths beneath the familiar verses. Often he was flailing like a drowning man, grasping at the ready word from the text he knew by rote. But once in a while he would plunge deep enough to glimpse a sunken city: the crystal walls of the New Jerusalem. And beneath this, a place simpler and more brilliant still, a clarity so dazzling that he was filled with awe.

He remembered sitting in his mother’s lap when he was very small, staring at the page as she read to him. The lines of letters were as stiff and straight as soldiers, but the story his mother enticed out of them was all movement and color, brighter than the world he walked through every day. It seemed to him then that the elves and giants and dragons must be trapped in the white space behind the letters, waiting to be released, just as the sleeping princess behind the briar hedge waited to be awakened by a kiss. He would have liked to set them free himself, if only he were clever enough, if only he knew the way in.

His expectations diminished when he learned to read. It was too easy for him, his brain effortlessly converting the symbols on the page to meaning. Before Gideon quite knew what was happening, his early wonder had ebbed to a fascination with words: the shape and sound of them, their feel on the tongue. Reading was to him what running or leaping was to other children—a release of energy that was physical, the encounter on the page so vital that he sometimes had to put a book aside to catch his breath. But once he closed the book, the world was what it had always been. The tale that had transported him would live in his mind for a few days and then fade, like a hothouse plant exposed to harsh weather. Not until he was older and beginning to study the classical languages did the magic return. His tutor had given him a Greek Alphabet to master, along with a worn copy of Plato’s Republic in the original tongue. The letters stirred his sense of mystery: some were close to the ones he knew, but others were tantalizingly strange, as cryptic as hieroglyphs cut in stone. He had an idea that if he discovered their secrets, he would be admitted to the land of gods and heroes. He took to studying them at night, the light of his candle making eerie patterns across the ancient script. Athens eluded him, but one evening, very late, Gideon blinked his weary eyes and saw white marble pillars sprouting like cornstalks from a field of rocks.

SPRING WAS IN FULL BLOOM by the time he finally finished; the term was nearly over. Gideon put down his pen at three in the morning, and heaved himself from his desk to his bed as Handel oratorios resounded from the hills and the campus elms rustled their new leaves in discreet applause. He slept until the middle of the afternoon, missing two of his classes; Osgood, perhaps in revenge, had not bothered to wake him, or had tried and failed. Gideon splashed water on his face and raked his hair back with damp fingers. He stared in the little mirror above the basin, shocked at how pale and thin he’d grown. He had been so absorbed in his work that he’d neglected himself. But at the thought of his accomplishment, the triumph of the night before came back to him, and he turned again to his desk.

His small store of rapture drained out of him as he read. He was struck first by the crudity of his translation. The prophet’s words, cadenced and elegant in the King James, had been reduced to lumps that weighed on his tongue like chunks of mutton. All the poetry was gone. There would never be a Birdsall Version of the Scriptures, but perhaps his clumsy efforts would be of use in the mission field. He saw himself capering before a tribe of squatting New Guineans, fleshing out his tortured locutions with pantomime. Had he really been so vain, so foolish, as to think Reverend Hedge might look kindly on this monstrous hybrid?

Self-disgust made his head spin; he’d tumbled too quickly from the heights. He tried to open a window, but the old frame refused to budge. He flung open the door instead, and ran headlong down the stairs and out of the dormitory. The sweetness of the air was a shock to him. He had ignored his surroundings for so many weeks that spring had advanced without his noticing. Gideon stood for a moment taking in the different shades of green, the flowering bushes that softened the gray stone of the chapel like lace trim on a mourning dress. It was a privilege just to breathe, he thought. From now on, he would renounce ambition and seek to live a life of simple purity. He would forsake the seductions of the mind and find his nourishment in Holy Scripture. But even as he imagined feeding his soul on the plain brown bread of the Word, he realized that he was fiercely hungry; he had scarcely eaten these last two days. He headed for the kitchen to beg alms from the cook.

That evening, having dined well and lingered at the table for the first time in weeks (Now that Lazarus has risen, I might even get some sleep, Osgood had said), Gideon forced himself to look at the translation again. For whatever it was worth, he had completed the task he’d undertaken. It would be an act of cowardice not to submit the result to Reverend Hedge. He was here to learn, not to display his plumage and wait for praise. If the professor chastised him, he would take his stripes like a man, and strive to do better next time. And it was just possible that Hedge might find one or two things of interest: neat little solutions that shone like crystals in a mud puddle. The King James translators, divinely inspired though they were, were only men, and not in possession of the full mind of God. Was it unthinkable that a humble student, made of the same clay, might be granted an insight that eluded others? The light of truth, it was said, could penetrate the densest substance. Gideon sat back, his hands folded over his full stomach, feeling pleasantly dense himself. Now that the decision had been made, the only question was how to approach the professor.

AFTER CLASS THE NEXT DAY, Gideon lingered as Reverend Hedge attended to papers on his desk. Gideon had memorized a graceful little speech, deferential without groveling, but his mouth was so dry that the words stuck in his craw. He cleared his throat. Sir, you are very busy! he pronounced, plunging in headfirst when he had meant to tread water. I mean, I believe—I know—that you have no time. Even so, I’ve been bold to make this unworthy attempt— He staggered to a halt, clutching the pages he had inscribed with such care the night before.

The professor regarded him with a long look, fixed and all-seeing like the framed Eye of God that haunted Gideon’s bedroom. You appear to know a great deal about me, Mr. Birdsall, he said. "Since we only meet in class, I wonder how you come by your knowledge. I have the same ration of time allotted to every other creature in our limited sphere, but I don’t hoard my hours like miser’s gold. I spend them, and I hope you do the same, young man, for none of us knows the measure of his days. Now, what have you brought me? The fruit of some precious minutes, I hope. Without waiting for an answer, he snatched the pages from Gideon’s hand. Isaiah! I admire your ambition. The prophets are not easy, I find; they are not straightforward like the Gospel accounts. One doesn’t translate prophecy; one strives with it. I myself have recently attempted the Lamentations with limited success, but I’ll wrestle on. I won’t let it go until it blesses me."

There were moments when I did feel blessed, Gideon ventured, gaining courage. I struggled, just as you said, and then a word would . . . reveal itself, and it seemed to me that I saw something wonderful. A glimpse of another world. He was certain that he’d gone too far. It was late. I was probably dreaming.

To his astonishment, the stern features softened. It is wrong to diminish these experiences. Very likely, what you saw was no shadow, but a greater solidity. Minds more distinguished than my own are persuaded that Hebrew is the language our first parents spoke in the Garden. When we disturb the topsoil, who knows what fragment of the sacred turf we might unearth? I’ve followed in the footsteps of my betters and done some small research on the subject. A few essays—trivial things from my etymological cabinet of curiosities—and the work that has an enduring claim on my heart, a Philosophical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible.

"I-I’m not acquainted with philosophical lexicons, Gideon stumbled. I know Gesenius’s, of course—"

And you are wondering how anyone could improve on that great scholar’s work. I confess, when my colleague Gibbs produced his translation from the German, I put my own efforts aside. I made a fine copy of the pages I’d completed and laid them in a drawer, feeling—do not judge me, Mr. Birdsall—that I’d buried one of my children. Reverend Hedge bowed his head in brief homage, cocking a watchful eye at Gideon, who might, after all, be caught judging.

I humbled my ambitions. Went about my duties with a chastened spirit. When I was all but quenched, the Lord gave my vision back to me—doublefold, as He restored Job. It is one thing to anatomize the body of a language—the grammar, the logic of its structure—quite another to apprehend its soul. Yet both make the man, isn’t it so? I resolved to compose a monograph on each of the Hebrew letters, drawing out its essential character—its nature, if you will. The purpose that God infused at the dawn of Creation—so far as a mortal mind can discern—with disquisitions on relevant words, by way of illustration.

Hedge leaned across the desk, his dark eyes gleaming. "An enormous undertaking—yet one to which I am called. Our good Mr. Gibbs is a diligent scholar whose modest manner is a credit to him. Perhaps also a limitation. He is not, how shall I say, an architect, he does not see the whole. He chisels each stone with a master hand, but the Temple, Mr. Birdsall—the Temple remains unbuilt!"

In the silence that followed this effusion, Gideon realized that the professor was waiting for a response. It’s the work of a lifetime, he said. Several lifetimes.

The Reverend nodded soberly. I pray I may be granted the time to pursue it. If not in this world, then the next—though why we will need dictionaries there I cannot imagine. I’ve sometimes fancied that our Heavenly Father might place those of us who are philologically inclined at tall desks, like the monks of old—purely to keep a record of earthly speech, you see. But it is useless to speculate. We look through a dark glass, and our own selfish needs look back at us. He sighed, looking so wistful that Gideon was alarmed by the unguarded display of emotion, as though a statue had begun to weep. You have some affinity for Hebrew. Perhaps my jottings would interest you.

I would be honored to see anything you’re willing to show me.

Then come to our service at Ormsby on Sunday and stay for dinner. You look as if you could do with a good meal. I’ll get to your translation on Friday evening. It’s my habit to reserve the Jewish Sabbath for the tongue of the Patriarchs.

Gideon stammered his thanks, but the professor had already turned away, busy with the papers on his desk.

CHAPTER 2

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HOYDEN

WOODEN TEETH SLICE DOWN THE CENTER OF HER SCALP. In her mind’s eye, a ribbon of blood, a furrow of fire. A yank to the left, a yank to the right. Mama anchors the comb in Sophy’s hair as she assesses.

Crooked! If you weren’t such a fidget, I could part it straight the first time. Do you want Papa to look down from the pulpit and see you all askew?

Oh, can he see through my bonnet?

That’s enough sauce from you, miss. And on a Sunday, too—if Papa doesn’t see, you know who will. Mama takes her revenge with the comb, this time to her satisfaction. She pulls the hair tight on either side, pasting Sophy’s ears to her skull, and twists it into a knot behind. There! she says, putting in the pins. Don’t go galloping about now. Try and act as if . . .

As if you were the Reverend’s true daughter and not his niece, an errant shoot grafted onto the family tree. No need to finish the sentence when they live out its substance daily. Mama is too kind to say so, and too stoical to complain, but Sophy suspects that she besieges Heaven at times, demanding to know why the Lord took the daughters of her own robust flesh if his only intention was to put such a flimsy excuse of a girl in their place. An alien creature, another woman’s blood and bone. There is a baffled affection in her eyes as she looks Sophy over one last time, fluffing the skirt of the blue Sunday dress she stitched with care, flicking a bit of dust off the white stocking. We’ll make a proper lady of you yet, she says.

Vain hope. Sophy has lately discovered that being the family misfit confers a certain freedom. Folks expect more of her than, say, a half-wit, but they make allowances. These last couple of years, as she turned from girl to woman, she has begun to wear her difference as an ornament, a badge of pride. Let her brothers tease and mock her, let Papa frown or Mama despair aloud. A person Sophy has never met lives in her: an animating presence, sometimes quiet, sometimes active, always there.

Tell me about my mother, she begged Papa when she was younger. Tell me what she was like. In those days he was her best friend, taking her on long walks in all seasons and pointing out small marvels she might miss on her own, beetles and bird’s nests and garish orange fungi that sprouted like Gypsies in their damp New England woods. Papa would sigh and offer words so sparse that Sophy couldn’t patch a picture out of them. She was small like you. Full of life, always happy. A sweet singer. If she pressed him for more, he turned away, a pinched look on his face—miserly, hoarding his memories of his only sister, keeping them to himself. The last time she questioned him, he said, I was wrong to burden you with your beginnings when your own life is forming. No good can come of it. Don’t ask me again, Sophy. That was the end of the confidence between them. He looks at her now with narrowed eyes, always on guard—against what, she isn’t sure. Some unseemly thing that’s been growing inside her since she was born and might erupt any day.

From the woman she calls Mama, she has gotten even less. A tart look. Hands on hips. Your mother is the one who did the work of raising you. Be thankful, girl, and don’t brood on the dead when you can be useful to the living.

How to conjure the author of one’s being from scraps? And yet, her mother will not be subdued. The older Sophy gets, the more boldly she asserts herself—or perhaps it’s only that Sophy recognizes her now. The oddities that people have marked in her since she was a child—the likenesses she sees, the way words turn to images in her head—what can these be but her mother trying to escape her unnatural confinement, reminding Sophy she’s still here? Some in the congregation might call this possession, but there’s nothing dark in it. If a spirit inhabits her, its nature is joyful, verging on the wild. Sophy will be sweeping the kitchen, or sitting quietly in a corner reading, and suddenly she’ll feel a shimmer through her body, as if the blood running in her veins has turned to silver. She has to get away then, somewhere she can be alone. A meadow faces the front of their house, a farmer’s field abandoned for as long as she can remember; Papa talks of acquiring the land and putting it to good use. Meanwhile, the grasses are tall, the flowers are thick and wild, and sated bees circle crazily, drunk with sweetness. A garden of glorious neglect.

Sophy gazes out the window. Ahead are hours of sitting still in the front pew, her sides compressed in the stays Mama makes her wear at meeting to improve her posture and concentration. Hours of Reverend Papa droning on about sin and salvation and the next world, while spring exults outside. The torment won’t end at dinner: Papa is bringing one of his students home, and they’ll be theologizing all afternoon, possibly in Hebrew or Greek, and she’ll be expected to help Mama serve, and pretend to read her Bible after, and speak when spoken to, if anyone bothers to address her. There will be no time to paint at all.

Mama is upstairs in her usual state of distraction, making Micah presentable as she parleys between James and Reuben, who are having one of their disputes.

I’m just going out for a bit, Sophy calls.

The wild asparagus should be up. Pull some if you can, but don’t be long. You’ll make us late.

IN A MONTH OR TWO, the meadow will be its own seclusion, the grasses higher than her knee. Now the green is new and tender. To be safe from prying