Lightning and Blackberries by Joanne Jefferson

Author:Joanne Jefferson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV016170, JUV030030
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2011-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

All through the rest of the summer and into the early weeks of autumn we met when we could, when the ripening corn, or apples, or squash weren’t taking up my time. If one of us visited the tree and didn’t find the other, she would leave a clue or a treasure in a hollow place. It was a language of gifts.

I was amazed at how quickly Marie-Madeleine learned to understand and speak English. I had been having French lessons for years, but could barely navigate my tongue around a simple sentence. She picked up words and phrases easily and was soon able to express a surprising range of feelings and ideas. It felt odd to go from Evans Hall, where my father’s English was carefully spoken in complete sentences, to the beech tree where all conversation was carried out in a loose and crazily jumbled mix, usually in fragments as they came to us. The latter seemed to me such a free and true form of expression that I became less and less interested in engaging in polite conversation with Father, or Mr. Jefferson, or our neighbours in the township.

On Sundays, of course, I spent part of the day going to service in town. No one did any farming on Sunday, and Sadie sat in her room reading the Bible. I often wondered, on those long quiet days, how Marie-Madeleine passed her holy days. She had shown me her chapelet, a string of beads that she explained were like counters—one for each prayer. She told me that the prayers were said to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Did she spend the day praying? Was Sunday any different than any other day when you had no church to go to?

I described for her the church at the old garrison in Annapolis, the wooden box pews with their little latched gates, the minister’s grand pulpit, from which he expounded on the nature of faith, and sin, and community. I told her how his black robes flowed with his gestures and had the effect of hypnotizing my sleepy Sunday self so that by the end of his sermon I was in a trance, stunned by the words, and the light through the long windows, and the bobbing ribbons on the girls who sat in front of us. I was quite sure I achieved nothing of holiness and everything of sloth in church.

Mr. Jefferson, being Church of England himself, attended service with us and sat in our box. He held the gate for everyone else to enter first, like a farmer letting his sheep into the pen. Then he would find the appropriate page in his prayer book and follow the words of the liturgy with one calloused finger.

I tried to describe Mr. Jefferson to Marie-Madeleine, but every time I did I got more and more confused. She must have thought that I liked him one day and hated him the next.

“Is he a good man, like your father?” she asked.

“I think he is,” I told her.

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