fiction: fuller’s tavern

Fuller hated Stearns. Stearns hated Fuller. 

That’s the way things had been in North Boston since shortly after Ira Fuller purchased the old Thayer Tavern on the Great Genesee Road to the Town of Buffalo. Industrious and practical, the broad-shouldered Fuller had made many improvements to the two-story building, which had been abandoned for nineteen years. He had lifted the roof and added an attic. He had replaced the cracked cylinder glass windows and rebuilt the chimney, stone-by-stone. On the right side of the tavern, Fuller dug a well. “Ye can live without love,” he’d say, “but ye can’t live without water.” Magnanimously, he allowed all of the forty-three people living in the Western New York settlement to draw water from the well. 

All, that is, except Henry Stearns and his family. 

Why Fuller denied Stearns access to the well remains a mystery. Perhaps Fuller didn’t agree with Stearns’ enthusiasm for the annexation of far-off Texas. Perhaps Fuller didn’t like Stearns’ jocosity. Or the cut of his jib. In any case, there existed a heap of hostility between the two men–though both were Quakers.

In the twenty-seven years since the sawmill opened, nineteen families had taken up residence in a cluster of houses in North Boston. Sadly, almost every family was touched by the tragedy of the Fuller-Stearns feud. A tragedy caused by the appearance of a stranger. 

On that fateful afternoon, a Thursday in mid-October, Ephraim Tuel Merrifield arrived by stagecoach from his hometown of Warwick, Massachusetts. Having watched two of his brothers die before their prime, Ephraim was on his way West in pursuit of adventure. Maybe he’d go as far as Alta California, where an ever-increasing number of American settlers were rumbling rebelliously against the Mexican authorities. The twenty-one-year-old thought being part of a revolution might turn him into a hero. Like Davy Crockett or the Swamp Fox.

Ephraim hadn’t planned on stopping in North Boston, but, after eight torturous days on the road, he was rattled and exhausted and decided to spend the night in a comfortable bed, rather than facing backwards on the bumpy seat of a stagecoach.

Why he’d chosen to travel by coach, rather than float on a boat down the Erie Canal, also remains a mystery. 

Fuller’s Tavern doubled as an inn and the forty-one-year-old innkeeper was happy to have a paying guest. He and Lucinda Mae, his comely forty-year-old wife, were considered to be “living in comfort” by their neighbors. Still, the couple had eight hungry children, ranging in ages from twenty-one to newborn. There had been other babies, in the intervening years, who’d died within days of their birth. Lucinda Mae had had a baby in her belly for half of their twenty-two years of marriage.

The three eldest Fuller daughters–Mary Jane, Lucy, and Julia–thought Ephraim Merrifield to be a striking and fine figure of a man, though his nose was rather large. His talk of sun-kissed beaches, of golden trout, of an unfettered future mesmerized them.

That evening, Ephraim sat with the Fuller family, eating supper. Though Lucinda Mae and her daughters had cooked a fine feast–corn, beans, and a choice hunk of beef–their sole boarder didn’t have much of an appetite. He was just too darned tired. 

A firm believer in temperance, he refused the offer of alcohol, preferring to drink a beaker of water. As Fuller enjoyed his mug of ale, Ephraim squinched his eyes, “I thought you Quakers abhorred liquor.” Fuller smiled, “Some do. Some of us are moderate in our consumption. Besides, ye can’t run a tavern without serving spirits.” His lips smacked, “This fine and foamy tonic is made at the brewery on Patchin Road. Good neighbors support each other.” Evi, his eldest child, thought, but didn’t say, “Unless that neighbor is Henry Stearns.”

While the women washed the pots and dishes, forks and knives, Fuller and two of his sons–Orville and Evi–sat with Ephraim by the fireplace. The night had brought along a chill. Evi, at twenty-one, was as lean as a bean stick. He talked proudly about constructing his own house, a mere thirty rods away, having torn down Nelson Thayer’s dilapidated cabin. Ephraim asked, “Who’s Nelson Thayer?” Evi started to explain, but Fuller shushed him, then turned to his guest, “As Isaiah says, ‘Do not dwell in the past.’ A sentiment to which I most assuredly adhere.” Evi hid a grin; once again his father’s troubles with Henry Stearns came to mind.

Orville, barely sixteen and a tad chubby, growled about his schoolwork, “Why should I care if the Austrian Empire borders Prussia?” Evi laughed at his brother’s frustration, but Ephraim yawned, not out of boredom, but the need for sleep. At the stroke of eight, the candles were blown out or carried upstairs, where the entire household headed for a well-deserved slumber. 

Outside, owls and crickets serenaded the locals, lulling them to their dreams. On occasion, the quiet was broken by the howl and snarl of wolves devouring a rabbit.

An hour or so after the “goodnights” had been said, Ira and Lucinda Mae were shaken awake by the sound of screaming. Donning slippers and robes, the two hurried down the hallway, their candle waving away the dark. Their children’s eyes peered through doors opened a sliver. Inside his room, Ephraim spoke babble. Lucinda Mae took hold of his hand and, with soothing words, calmed his soul, while Fuller placed a cold, damp cloth on the young man’s fierce-with-fever forehead. 

The next morning, Friday, Ephraim Tuel Merrifield was dead.

This was the first time a traveler had died under Ira Fuller’s roof and he was mightily disturbed–a sudden demise of this nature might ruin the inn’s reputation, “Especially given the place’s unpleasant past.”

As Evi and Orville stood on either side of the bed, wrapping the body tightly in a blanket, their father searched through his dead guest’s few belongings. A Bible, The Emigrant’s Guidebook, a pistol, a second shirt, some dried fruit–nothing that would indicate how to contact the man’s parents. “Then again,” Fuller grunted, “Ephraim’s folks might’ve preceded him to the Celestial City…”

Knotting a rope around the blanket, Evi asked, “What shall we do with him, poppa?” The tavern keeper scratched his white-speckled beard, unsure.

Lucinda Mae stepped in, suggesting that “the poor fellow” be buried in the Town of Boston cemetery, beside Saint Paul’s Presbyterian Church. With his left index finger poised across his lips, Fuller gave several slow nods of approval, so Evi and Orville loaded the remains into the wagon. Just as they were about to snap the reins and ride off, Mary Jane jumped on board. A few days shy of her fifteenth birthday, she clutched a handful of flowers she’d mournfully picked from her mother’s garden. At the gravesite, the flowers were laid, prayers were said, hymns were sung, and Ephraim’s journey west ended.

Yet, that was not the end of him.

Come the dawn of Saturday, Orville woke up with a kicked-in-the-head-by-a-mule headache. The teenager, always a gargantuan eater, pushed away his plate of eggs, potatoes, and bacon, complaining that his stomach was sore. Feeling a bit of heat on his forehead, Lucinda Mae ordered Orville back to bed. Evi kidded, “He’s just trying to avoid geography.” Mary Jane, sympathetically rubbing Orville’s round stomach, promised to care for him while their mother tended to the younger children and the daily chores.

After Orville was tucked under the covers, Mary Jane read to him from an old copy of The Saturday Evening Post. Her voice, normally sweet, went deep as she grimly declaimed the words of a new and scary story, The Black Cat, by that writer Poe. But she stopped mid-way when her brother began to sweat, his forehead burning like Ephraim Tuel Merrifield’s. And Orville was slurring. Mary Jane yelled for her mother, who–hearing the fear–came running. Lucinda Mae, in turn, summoned her husband, who put a few shards of ice in the boy’s mouth. 

Then, the sixteen-year-old’s bowels erupted and he defecated, soiling the sheets and raising a putrid smell. Mary Jane changed the bed linens as Fuller opened a window and Lucinda Mae cleansed her son’s quivering body. 

A brilliant yellow sun was setting over the creek when Lucinda Mae implored her husband to ride into the Town of Boston to fetch Doctor Lucas Raymond, the only physician within twenty miles. Fuller hemmed then felt Orville’s skin, which was less on fire. With an encouraging smile, Fuller announced, “He’s young and tough as tar. Not like Merrifield, who was a mite frail. Let us wait to see how the boy is faring come sunrise.” Lucinda Mae said nothing, but thought, “Men–they could lose an arm and still want to wait a day to see if the bleeding stops.”

The following morning, Orville’s temperature had, in fact, moved even closer to normal, though he had another bout with dysentery and was lost in bizarre ravings. Lucinda Mae once again asked Fuller to go for the doctor, but, with irritating patience, he replied, “After we attend the Sunday service.” Exhaling her exasperation, Lucinda Mae chose to stay by her son’s side, while the rest of the family made their way the short distance to the newly built meeting house. 

As they shared the Quaker stillness with their fellow Friends, Mary Jane began to feel poorly, bedeviled by symptoms similar to her brother’s. Toward the end of the hour, she shot up out of her seat and, drops of sweat draping her face, commenced shouting gibberish–though a number of the congregates believed that she was blessed by the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. Sometimes, faith gentrifies reality.

Fuller thought he saw Henry Stearns smile cruelly at Mary Jane’s screeching.

He lifted his febrile daughter into his arms and carried her home and up the stairs to the room she shared with her sisters. Following behind him were his other offspring, James, Lucy, Julia, and Nancy, at whom he shouted, “Go back downstairs.” They obeyed immediately.

As Mary Jane lay in bed, spouting nonsense, Lucinda Mae was fraught with anxiety. In the course of their marriage, she and Fuller had witnessed many crises–her momma’s heart failure, his poppa’s throat cancer, the colic that took their babies–but nothing was as confounding as this malady. She whispered to her husband, with heightened urgency, “Go for the doctor.” But Fuller stood his ground, wiping the wet off his daughter’s bespotted, angelic face. Lucinda Mae watched him shift from one foot to the other, “Does he hesitate because he blames Raymond for the sadness surrounding our previous deaths?”

Finally, he spoke, “What on God’s green Earth could have sparked these sicknesses?” Lucinda Mae proffered her opinion, which she’d held inside too long, “This tavern is cursed. There’s an evil spirit lurking in the corners. Maybe one of the Thayer boys or John Love, creaking about. An evil spirit, I tell ye. Why else would the tavern have sat empty for nearly twenty years?”

Her husband scoffed, “Old buildings are like old men, they creak,” then tendered a different possibility. “Maybe there was something wrong with the fixings that the three ate at last Thursday’s supper.” His accusation made Lucinda Mae fret, but she deflected her guilt, “Then why aren’t the rest of us in such a sad condition?” Fuller sniffed and shrugged. 

Mary Jane, her face scarecrow pale, began to caterwaul, “Do not touch me.” Her fists punched the air, as if fighting off a demon. Fuller moved to comfort her, but her arms flailed, “Do not touch me.” He stepped back–had he become the demon? Or was her torment retribution for something he had done? The altercation with Stearns? His facade of fortitude crumbled, “We need Doctor Raymond.” His wife simply raised her chin, “Then, get ye gone.”

Fuller rushed out of the tavern into the autumn wind. He climbed onto his horse and, chased by the Furies, dashed to the Town of Boston. Stepping onto the porch of the apothecary, Fuller learned from the chemist, Tallcut Patching, that Doctor Raymond was away, visiting relatives in Albany. Fuller, without wishing Tallcut so much as a fare-thee-well, spun around, took to his horse, and galloped down the wagon trail to Buffalo, hoping to find another medicine man.

Meanwhile, Evi sawed a plank of wood for his new house. He did so with a smile coursing his lips, conjuring the day he’d ask Lizbeth Hallick to be his wife. He was sure a fine home would further entice the sixteen-year-old to stand before their fellow Quakers and declare her love. He picked up some sawdust and tossed it in the air, imagining it to be stardust. Then he laughed, “Ye romantic fool…”

A moment later, his smile faltered. His saw halted mid-way through a board. A queasiness churned through Evi, aping the misery which had slowed his brother and sister. In need of a mother’s care, he hurried to the tavern, the sawdust tumbling off the tops of his boots.

Seeing her usually robust son running wobbly fired up Lucinda Mae’s panic and distress. Her husband’s sharp words pulsated through her heart: Had her cooking brought about all this pain? Once Evi was resting in bed next to Orville, Lucinda Mae sat in the kitchen, completely still, listening to the silence like a good Quaker. But all she could hear was the agony of her three eldest children. She forsook her quest for peace-of-mind and got busy. Anything to keep her terrors at bay, even washing bespoiled bedsheets.

As she heated the water for the laundry tub, Jacob, her eight-year-old, burst through the front door with news: Two of Peter and Agatha Ingraham’s children had taken to suffering in the same manner as the Fuller brood. “But how is that possible?” Lucinda Mae wondered. “We’ve had no contact with those people.” She and Fuller never socialized with the Ingraham family. Though the couple was “nice enough,” they were savagely poor and weren’t Friends, in either sense of the word. She only ever saw them when they stopped at the well for water.

Late that Monday, Fuller returned home to say that Doctor James Becker would come as soon as he was able. “In the meantime, Becker advised us to keep the children cozy–and pray. Naturally, I inquired, given the complications, what might be the cause. He hesitated answering, saying he wouldn’t know ’til he performed the examinations. But he added, ‘The answer might be right in front of ye.’ I am not sure what he meant by that.”

Waiting her turn to speak, Lucinda Mae told Fuller about Evi falling ill, as well as the Ingraham children, “So, my cooking isn’t to blame. Nor the tavern’s curse. There’s another reason out there hiding.” Fuller, who was usually full of opinions, bit into his lower lip. If he had a comment, it remained unexpressed. Lucinda Mae folded her fingers together, as if to pray, “Why are young’uns the only ones affected? And will more of them be hurting?”

The answer came on Tuesday morning–at the home of another Quaker family, Thomas and Marjorie Penhallow, whose seven-year-old Harrison’s body was wrecked by blistering fevers, thundering headaches, and vile discharges. In his delirium, the boy wandered through a jungle, chased by snaggletoothed lions.

The mind can mangle one’s perception. Soused in worry and helplessness, Ira Fuller was not immune to such twists and upheavals. That night, he stood in the doorway of his boys’ bedroom as his two eldest moaned and mumbled. That night, he sat by Mary Jane’s bed, staring through a window at the sky. The Harvest Moon was a full circle and flame-red. 

Mary Jane begged for water. Giving her palm a loving squeeze, her father hurried down the stairs to the kitchen, only to find the bucket empty. Candle in hand, Fuller stepped out into the darkness and walked to the cobblestone well he’d built. As he lowered the bucket, he recalled Doctor Becker saying, “The answer might be right in front of ye.” Then, Fuller heard the bucket hit the water with an echoing splash. 

In that splash, a new reality hit him: Ephraim Tuel Merrifield had drunk water from the well at that Thursday dinner, “So had my children. And they and the Penhallow and the Ingraham families have been drinking the same water every day since. Perhaps it is tainted.” He pulled up the bucket, dipped a metal ladle inside, and took a minimal sip. The water tasted odd, but he wasn’t certain if this was fact or his imagination. 

Back inside the kitchen, Fuller laid out his theory to his weary wife, “The well water may be at the bottom of our concerns,” and offered her a cup. “Tell me if this is foul.” Lucinda Mae obeyed and winced, knowing that was what her husband wanted. Fuller, his fright justified, grew more confused, “How could the water be tainted? The river by the tannery in Torrey’s Corners does not feed into our well.”

Then, his brain was flushed with dark conceptions. “Someone poisoned the well.” Lucinda Mae looked at him, cringing, “Who? Who would do such a damnable thing?”

Ira Fuller grimaced, “Stearns.”