Night Fires in the Distance by Sarah Goodwin

Author:Sarah Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2016-10-12T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Laura

William got Jamison’s soddie up only a day before the first winter storm arrived. The screaming wind threw rain against the shutters and down the stove pipe to sizzle on the coals. It soaked the walls until damp oozed in. Besides going outside to feed the animals twice a day, William sat by the stove, smoking, working on a bench for beside the table, and playing Patience.

I had a pan of dough in the oven and Rachel was working with me on a rag rug like the one Martha’d made. Rachel cut strips from our old clothes, Beth plaited them, and I pinned them into a round, ready for sewing. William was watching us over his card game.

“I swear there’s at least a dozen other things that need doing,” he said, after we’d been going for a while.

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“I mean, the whole house is in need of a good clean, it’s like some animal’s den in here.”

I looked up at him, raising my eyebrows. “Well, you built a dirt house, you should expect a little of it to rub off.”

He glared at me, but for once I felt no more than a twinge of fear. If I didn’t want him to touch me, he wouldn’t. If he raised his voice or his hand to me, I would give him as good in return. No one else was going to save me. I didn’t know if I was brave or just too worn out to feel afraid.

“Thomas, how’s that work coming?” I asked.

He was sitting on his tick, our Bible laid out on his knees.

“I’ve almost got it,” he said, for I’d set him to commit a psalm to memory. “Only, this part I don’t understand. What does this word mean?” he spelt it out for me.

“Iniquity? It means, sin,” I said, “all the sins that keep us apart from God.”

“Oh,” he found the word on the page and read the lines around it, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble, my eye wastes away with grief, yes, my soul and my body. For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my in-iniquity, and my bones waste away...does that mean that sin makes us ill?”

“I suppose, in a way,” I pricked myself with the needle and shook my hand. “Sin makes us sick at heart, even if we don’t know it. That’s what I would think it means.”

“Do you think they’re sad because of the sin?”

I honestly didn’t know, my own Bible studies had ended years before, I could no longer remember the part he was studying. I’d begun to think of the Bible as a collection of stories anyhow, stories that had as much to do with me as the Indian’s fables. They didn’t comfort me anymore.

“I think anyone who has sinned and lost sight of God would be sad,” I said at last, accidentally catching William’s eye as I looked up. He was watching me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.