Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) by Isabel Miller Page B

“Ah, Sam,” he said, “be nothing but a good boy. Scatter bastards all the way to Genesee, like a real American.”
    He’d never talked like that before, that backwards mean way. He even took a crack at Potiphar with the whip I’d always taken to be just an ornament. Potiphar was so surprised he looked around.
    “Parson, don’t be riled,” I said. “I can’t help it.”
    “Yes you can. You could help it very easily. You could consider that I might be telling you the truth. This is a common natural thing. Men love each other, Sam.”
    “Stop calling me Sam. I’m Sarah.”

Chapter Four
     
    I swear Parson was surprised, even if he did claim not. He stared so before he started laughing, about how you laugh when you drop something on your foot.
    “Did you really take me in, for one single minute?” he said. “Didn’t I know? Somehow? Of course I must have. It’s so easy to see.”
    I said, “Maybe it’s why you – had feeling?”
    “No, no,” he said, like brushing off a skeeter. I was used to having him give a little thought to what I said. And even if I didn’t want him pestering me, it took me down some to think it would be plumb simple for him not to.
    I said, “Maybe you won’t want me around now.”
    “My dear – girl! Do you think I feel no responsibility towards you after taking you a hundred miles out of your way?”
    “Well, don’t worry about that. I don’t regret. It’s just that we might not be easy together, now.”
    “I feel completely comfortable. More so than before,” Parson said. It seemed to be true, and I mostly wanted it to be. How could he care for me as a woman when he already had a wife? So we stayed on our way together.
    But differences came creeping in, like Parson started helping with the book boxes and he never said another cuss word in my hearing, and I think a little at a time he stopped educating me. I mean, he seemed to stop saying whatever came into his head. There’d be little waits, it seemed to me, while he thought out what it was fitting or useful for a woman to know. He didn’t leave me alone nights if there looked to be a fight coming up.
    I thought, well, good and bad’ve come out of this. I liked the extra care and company he gave me, but then I began to see that he wasn’t getting the good of his summer if he didn’t feel free to have a dram and talk wherever he went, whenever he felt like it. I found that it’s worse than lonesome to be with somebody that would rather be someplace else, even when he keeps still about it and acts kind. I found that all the changes were bad. Not one was good.
    I’m not faulting Parson nor blaming myself either. I’m just trying to tell how it went. You wouldn’t think just a word could change a whole friendship like that. I didn’t get weak and gal-ish. Nothing happened but a word. But we couldn’t fix it, and I knew I had to leave Parson. I knew he would never ask me to, and that I could take advantage of his kind heart for a long time, but I had my pride and my own life to make.
    Summer being over, and Genesee further away than before, I decided I had to stay with him to New-York and work the winter there and hope to get started off early the next spring. I remember steering Potiphar along the Boston Post Road, along the Connecticut shore heading west for New-York, and making the plan while Parson slept. There’d be lots a boy could do in a city like that. Deliver wood, tend horses, carry messages. I didn’t worry I might have to turn to Parson and bother him in his home. I knew I wouldn’t.

     
    I wonder if it was how Potiphar perked up because he knew he was going home, that put it on my mind how my home was off that way too. Every day took us closer, and I got nervous, afraid what I might do, because I was so excited. I said a little of it to Parson, because it was so much on my mind, and he told me a story about a sea captain that had his sailors stuff their ears with wax and tie him to the mast so