Then they were all sitting at the kitchen table.
Willis spoke first, after Reverend Peterson said grace. He stood up and turned toward Violet’s father, with all the nineteenth-century country formality he had been raised with.
“Mr. Aubrey, I regret that I could never ask your blessing, for which I beg your forgiveness; but I have married your daughter in good faith, and I am not sorry for that. And I pray that in due course you will not be sorry either.”
The Aubreys looked at Violet, who nodded slowly, biting her lip. Todd seemed to struggle for what to say next. Jessica murmured, “Violet, you’re married…?” Their shock was evident.
The minister cleared his throat. “And for my part in that, I also ask your forgiveness, but I think you will at least understand better after you hear us out.”
It took until nearly noon before all the stories were told. There was finally a lull in the conversation. Then Todd said, “Son, you have my forgiveness, and my blessing.” He said the last word with something of a sigh. “But if I understand correctly, you didn’t actually need a bride after all, did you? It was all a lie.”
“Perhaps, sir. But I believed it.”
“You could have been free a hundred years ago,” Violet said. “All you needed was the truth that sets you free. Until I learned how sure and complete Christ’s claims on us are, I never could have stood up to the night-queen. But we so absolutely belong to Him—that’s all she had to hear. All Willis needed to be released.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” put in the minister. “Sometimes we need that ‘threefold cord’—God, us, and someone else. Even though all we truly need is Jesus Christ, the Lord never intends for us to do it all on our own. I just wish I had been clearer on all that stuff myself. I could have helped you out a long time ago.”
Willis looked at Violet. “I wouldn’t change anything at all. I am glad it was Violet who brought that truth to me. It was worth a few more decades of captivity to not be an old man when she came along.”
Todd Aubrey cleared his throat and spoke up. “I understand that you two are joined in holy matrimony—but you aren’t legally married yet. And I understand that is problematic. I don’t like the deviousness of using a borrowed identity, but the fact is, the government does it every day to protect witnesses and like that, so I guess I can live with that. Still, I want to make sure we do right by Violet.” Todd stood. “Son, you and I need to have a talk. Reverend, do you mind if we use some of the church space?”
“Use my office. It’s not locked, and there’s a space heater in there if it’s cold.”
Todd and Willis found their way to Reverend Peterson’s office. Spread on the desk was the paper trail of the minister’s complicity in their moonlight marriage. Todd looked over the papers for a few moments silently. While he did so, Willis’s bewildered gaze passed uncomprehending over the many unfamiliar items in the office—the printer, the computer, the desk phone; in his eyes, a lot of nondescript gray boxes. Seeking something he could understand, he walked over to the sunlit office window, which looked down the fields and meadows between the river and the road. The resonant whine of a powerful, long-bar chainsaw could be heard, and Todd could see town workers occupied in removing a huge dead white pine from the road margin. Willis seemed interested, but Todd sighed, gaining his attention.
“Son, look me in the eye one more time. Tell me that everything you’ve told us is true.”
Willis looked at him soberly. “Yes, sir. All true.” He glanced down at a large-print, leather bound Bible on the minister’s desk and placed a hand firmly on it. “As God is my witness.”
The whine of the chainsaw became a tortured shriek for a brief moment, and then the saw motor died abruptly. Even through the double-pane glass of the window Todd could hear the expletives of the workers. He leaned toward the window to get a better look. Willis did not turn toward the window, but chuckled under his breath, smiling slightly.
“My friend Jesse Widmer was given a hatchet for his thirteenth birthday. He tried to cut that white pine down with it, but it was already, in, oh, 1810 or thereabouts, a tall tree, thicker than his own waist. He should have known better. The hatchet got wedged into the wood and he snapped the handle trying to remove it. He was too afraid to tell his parents about it, and there it stayed. The wood grew over it and in a few years you couldn’t even tell it was there. I expect those men just found that very hatchet blade in the heartwood.”
A strange feeling came over Todd Aubrey. He quickly left the office, exited the church building and loped across the parking lot to the tree. Willis walked after him and found him regarding the shattered chain and ruined bar of the saw embedded deep in the trunk. The smell of pine sap and rotting heartwood mixed with petrol fumes in the crisp fall air. Within a half hour, using a second chainsaw, the men had managed to fell the tree, making a higher cut. As soon as the stump was bared to the sun, one of the men grabbed an axe from the bed of the truck and hacked away to free the trapped saw. Jessica and Violet appeared, standing away from the circle of destruction, shading their eyes.
About twenty minutes later, the town worker lifted away the chainsaw bar and pointed to a blackened chunk of steel, shiny where the saw had bitten into it. “Looks like a small axe head. The tree grew right over it.”
Todd was already counting the tree rings, his heart thumping. Finally Todd turned away from the stump, smiling as he batted sawdust from the front of his trousers.
The four of them walked back to the church building. “I counted two hundred rings to where that steel was embedded. Give or take a few.” He chuckled. “I guess the Lord really wants to make sure I believe you, Willis. And I do. Forgive me for doubting.”
As evening fell, Todd and Jessica went outside with Reverend Peterson to warm up their car. Violet and Willis stood in the kitchen. “I told you I wouldn’t leave you again, Will,” she sniffled with a wry pout. In the sunlight streaming in the kitchen window she could see things about him that did not show in the brightest moonlight—the amber glints in his brown eyes, the tiny scar on his left eyebrow, the few freckles that scattered the bridge of his nose.
“I think maybe, you should start calling me Elijah. A new name for a new life.” He toyed with the small but very pretty topaz ring on Violet’s left hand, that the Reverend had insisted Willis give to Violet; he had once given it to his wife. Willis had knelt and slipped it on her finger in the sanctuary of the church.
“It’s the color of your eyes, with the sun in them,” she said. “And I like ‘Will”. That’s how I’ve always known you.”
She thought back to the conversation she had had with her mother while her father and Willis consulted in the church office.
You have a lifetime to find out everything about him, Violet, Jessica Aubrey had said. I wouldn’t have wanted your marriage to begin the way it did, and there’s no undoing it now, but we need to do things wisely. You’re still in college, Willis hasn’t got a penny to his name—we’ve got work to do. You’ll be glad later on.
Willis was saying, “It’s only for a time, Violet. And it’s for the best. And I am so happy and grateful, I just thank God that we are standing here. I waited two hundred years to be standing here, in the light, with someone, belonging to someone. Looking forward to something. In several lifetimes there is no one else I’ve met that I’d rather be with and belong to, looking forward together. Smile, Violet.” He smiled at her. She was too tired to resist his very real happiness, and she grinned back at him, wiping her tears away.
“You’ve had a little head start on me when it comes to learning patience,” she said, and they laughed. Then they leaned tiredly against each other a long time, until Reverend Peterson came back in the kitchen door, and Violet went out to the car, and Willis stayed behind.
VIOLET-GRAY
Violet met her roommate outside the dining hall.
“You found him.” Susan stated.
Violet smiled. “I found him.”
S
usan actually put her arms around her. “I prayed for you so hard, girl. I was really worried. Everything’s okay now?” She pulled back, looking at Violet’s face.
“Unbelievably more than okay.”
“You got some ‘splainin’ to do, my friend.”
“Only if you promise to at least pretend you believe me.”
Susan smiled her crooked smile. “Done.”
“What about you and…?”
“Loser-man? Forget him. Not worth it.” Violet looked at her significantly, touching her upper arm. “Oh, definitely not worth that.”
“Good. Let’s go eat, I’m starved.”
Willis stayed on with Reverend Peterson, who introduced him to the intricacies of the twenty-first century. Willis learned how to use dental floss and automatic teller machines. He worked on the parsonage and church, doing repairs. The old pews and furnishings had scrollwork that was broken in many places and he carved replacement pieces for them, affixed them and stained and finished them to match. Vera and the other old ladies crowed over the restored work as they unnecessarily oiled and polished the new carving. The minister taught him to drive a car, and they went to the Department of Motor Vehicles with his borrowed birth certificate and Social Security card for a driver’s license. Thus armed, Willis registered for the diploma equivalency test and got a high school diploma.
The minister took him to grocery stores and shopping malls. Willis read library books on American and world history. They visited the mossy gravestones in East Wentham where he read, with a strange grief, his name, algae streaked, eroded and nearly unreadable on the family headstone, with the names of his brothers and nephews and nieces.
His woodwork in Christ the King Church caught the notice of a town selectman whose brother owned a historic renovation firm in Springfield. He was offered a job. On the side, he sold a number of statues he carved of forest animals for an amount of money he found shocking. In late winter he rented an apartment in Springfield that Violet found for him, and learned to use the city bus that stopped around the corner.
Violet finished the year at Springfield College. In the spring, she walked down the aisle of Christ the King Church in a cream empire-waist dress that reproduced one she had found in a book of early nineteenth century costume. Willis, in a black Armani knockoff, smiled even while he blinked tears away. Kate and Susan wore similar dresses beside her.
“I love this color. What do you call it again?” Kate had asked at the dress shop.
“Violet-gray,” Violet said.
“Violet-gray?” Susan had said with a wry twist to her mouth.
“Mrs. Violet Gray to you, dear. I don’t care if you’ll never forgive me, you can’t wear a black dress to my wedding, my Gothic friend.”
Violet and Willis, a.k.a. Elijah Williams Gray, reiterated their vows before God and Violet’s family. The bridegroom’s side of the church was filled with members of Christ the King Church. Vera and her friends were in the front row. Spring rain had washed away the last, dirty snow the night before, but in the morning the sun struck the world brilliant and made the still air soft and fresh. Light streamed in the stained-glass windows as she walked down the aisle on her father’s arm to stand beside Willis and take his hand where he stood in a pool of colored sunlight.
His smile was like daybreak, and nighttime was light-years away.
####
About the Author
Meredith DeVoe grew up in Connecticut and spent several years vagabonding around America before settling in Vermont, where she married Robert DeVoe and had two children before moving to Upstate New York, and then Africa as a missionary. She has also been a cook, sawmill worker, paperhanger, artist’s model, homeschool mom, dogsled driver, and briefly, a professional musician. She has a Bachelor’s in Religious Education and currently teaches school in Nigeria.
Thank you for reading Blackbirch Woods. I truly hope you enjoyed it and will share your enjoyment with book lovers you know.
Connect with me online:
Blog: www.blackbirchwoods.blogspot.com
E-mail: [email protected]
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