The Purchase by Linda Spalding

no child but a legal wife. She drifted over to the pastor’s missus and spoke to her, and when Daniel next saw her she was waiting quietly at the wagon, hands clasped at her waist. “We can stop at the pastor’s for a butter churn,” she said with a pleased intake of breath.
    “Now then, what have you done, Ruth Boyd?”
    The Doughertys lived in a frame house four miles east. From it, the pastor covered a circuit of some fifty miles in the course of a month. He and his wife had given up their cow. “I haven’tthe time these days,” Missus Dougherty had explained to Ruth, “and would be glad to buy butter.” At the kitchen door, she invited the Dickinsons in, but they stood in a kind of supplication until she pointed to a shed where she stored the unused churn. “I could take five pounds on a weekly basis,” she said proudly. “I so often send Mister Dougherty out on his travels with bread for the people who house him on his circuit and of course I like to bake for the church women.”
    Daniel went to the shed, which was a jumble of broken tools, barrows, the churn, and a milking stool. He put his head out and asked if they might … and held up the stool while Missus Dougherty nodded vigorously.
    “We have only the one cow,” Daniel reminded Ruth as they rode home with the churn rolling noisily in the wagon bed. “Although Tick is a fine Alderney, to be sure.”
    “A
fine
Alderney, to be
sure
,” Ruth sniffed because even at the pastor’s house Daniel had not seen fit to clarify her position. Miss Dickinson, she had been called, and again Daniel had not bothered to correct that mistaken impression.
    At home Mary had been making a meal of pancakes. She had tried to make burnt sugar syrup and had succeeded well enough that the boys thought the churn must be something to celebrate. The family sat around the outdoor fire on this Sunday afternoon and ate pancakes and felt the sun bright and warm on their faces. Daniel leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs. He was growing accustomed to life on the ground, but he thought of Rebecca’s way of sitting so very straight on a chair and that led him to a memory of her graceful, sliding walk and the way she had handed him his china plate and silver fork the day they met. Then he remembered that it was Luveen who hadbrought the plate and wondered why had he changed the truth of it. He must be careful about his memories and keep them pure. He must remember the lurch of pleasure he had felt in his breast, sitting across from Rebecca on her painted chair, and the way his gaze had travelled up her arm from wrist to shoulder and then to blue-eyed face. Their eyes had met and she had winked and all of it had happened in the space of the longest minute of his life. Whether cake or lace had been served, it had been done with a sly, teasing manner that had made him lonely for her before he had left her presence. For weeks after that, he had been in an agony that he had no name for, calling to mind her voice and gestures and a certain weather that seemed to encircle her. He believed that he had courted her diligently, and finally won her hand, having no idea that she had set her cap for him from the start or that her father had never been averse to the union. Daniel, younger than Rebecca by three years, was a second cousin to John Dickinson, who had signed the constitution and helped compose the first amendment. John Dickinson was now president of Pennsylvania and a worthy relation in any case. In terms of the family business, Daniel could be moulded. He would raise the children as living parts of God. But look at them, Daniel thought, sitting around a fire like Red Indians. He thought that if Rebecca were among them, she would be mortified by their sudden lack of station. Eating from their hands. Chewing with mouths open. And they had forgotten to pray. He looked at Ruth in her straw hat. All the way home, she hadn’t spoken to him. Now she was sitting on a log