Susannah Morrow Read Online Free

hear her words. I reached out to her…and she was gone.
    My hands shook on the pail handle; I felt my tears on my cheeks. I stared at the dirt wall, willing her to return. “Come back,
     Mama,” I pleaded. “Come back.”
    ’Twas then I heard little Faith upstairs, starting to cry, a high-pitched wailing that did not sound healthy to me, as if
     she could not get enough air into her lungs. I heard my father call, “Charity? What keeps you?” and with a final look back
     at the place my mother’s spirit had been, I took the milk upstairs.
    When I reached the hall, Goody Way stared at me oddly. “What ails you, child? You look pale.”
    “She’s just lost her mother. I’d think ’twould be reason enough for paleness, don’t you?” Susannah asked.
    I tried to gather my wits. “I’m well enough,” I said hastily, another lie to add to my sins. “Truly I am.”
    “Well then, bring the milk over,” Goody Way told me. “Have you a rag? A clean one, mind you.”
    I ran to get that too, and when I brought it back, the midwife sat on the settle and pulled the pail of milk close. I watched
     as she twisted the rag and dipped the end into the milk and tried to dribble it into the babe’s mouth. Most of it trickled
     over Faith’s red little cheeks. Her screaming grew louder.
    “You’d best start thinking now, Lucas,” Goody Way said. “Even if she takes to this, she won’t survive on it. She needs mother’s
     milk to thrive.”
    I so rarely saw my father look helpless. I looked up at him, standing next to the bed he’d shared with my mother, her body
     only a shadow beyond the curtains that looked gray in the darkness. I thought I saw hesitation and uncertainty in his eyes.
     And fear. Fear in my fearless father, in the man who I knew was afraid of nothing but God.
    He looked so bereft, I longed to comfort him, to be comforted.
    Perhaps he feels the same way.
The thought came to me suddenly. I looked at him—yes, he needed me now that Mama was gone. Perhaps he would need me so much
     that he would love me at last.…
    “Is there no one who’s had a babe lately?” Susannah asked.
    “Hannah Penney,” I said. “Her Johnnie’s but a month old.”
    My father started. His dark brows came together. “No child of mine will be in that home.”
    I had displeased him again.
    Susannah asked, “Who is Hannah Penney?”
    “A neighbor,” my father answered.
    “Charity is right, Lucas,” Goody Way said. Her voice was mild, and it reminded me of the way my mother talked to him, that
     easy voice that always calmed him and made him listen. The voice I had never been able to copy, and would never have dared
     to use, in any case. “Hannah’s loyalty is to her husband now.”
    “George Penney is involved enough with Tom Putnam for the both of them,” Father said. “And Hannah’s father has too much invested
     in Putnam to let his son-in-law make his own decisions. Who do you think was behind George’s purchase of those three acres
     next to Putnam’s land? ’Twas John Tyler. He’s got his nose into everything George does.”
    Goody Way sighed. “Lucas—”
    “George and Sam Nurse were arguing over a boundary just last week. ’Tis sure that Tom Putnam’s involved in all that too. There’s
     bad blood enough between him and Sam.”
    “That’s all in the past,” Goody Way protested.
    “Aye. But ’twill cause trouble in the Village Committee, and there’s enough argument there as it is. I won’t have my daughter
     exposed to it.”
    I wished I had kept quiet.
    Goody Way only shrugged as if she’d heard these things too often to care. “Will you be the one trying to feed this child,
     Lucas? She’ll be safe enough with Hannah, and you only a few hundred yards away. Thomas Putnam won’t be involving any infants
     in this, and well you know it. You send this babe over to Hannah, Lucas—’twill be the best thing all around.”
    My father didn’t answer. I saw him look to Mama’s body again,