The Star Garden

by Nancy E. Turner

  “Udell, you’re talking in circles.”

  “Yes’m, I am.” He breathed deeply and started again. “There’s one thing the boys told me I could give you that no one else ever gave, nor did you have the chance to take. One gift that might mean more to you than a box full of solid gold. And so … and so I put your name in at the college and enrolled you as a student. Unless you swear right now that you don’t want to, Mrs. Sarah Elliot, you are going to the university in Tucson this fall. Fully enrolled. It’s a betrothing gift to you. Latin, English composition, algebra, and general science. Girls are required to take cooking, too, isn’t that a hoot? You could teach them a thing or two. You’ll have to be there come August.”

  The breath went out of me. My heart came to a complete halt. I stammered for words. I looked at this man sitting in long grass beside me, still facing the house, his eyes on the sky above it. I trembled so hard my teeth chattered. I said, “Aw, you’re just teasing.”

  “It’s the gospel, Sarah. On my life.”

  “Udell,” I whispered, brushing my lips with my fingertips. “Oh, Lord. Udell Hanna.”

  To the sky, he said, “I’ll expect you to make passing marks, of course.”

  He turned to me, and I kissed him as I’d never imagined doing. Rapture sent my arms to his neck and my lips to his mouth again and again. We fell into the grass, returning the other’s kisses as if there were no night or day, no world around us. Oh, Lord, stop me! The birds chirped “University, University!” and we kissed each other as if we were to become the other, melting together like candy under glass. We rolled on the grass until my hair came loose and spread like a great feather fan I could feel with my cheek when I turned my head as he kissed hard at my neck. This, then, was love. Crushing his chest into mine with my arms, I closed my eyes against the morning sun and my surrender didn’t seem wrong, or sad, or anything else but heaven-come-to-earth to lie with him there in the grass, finding each other, tumbling together, knowing his body and him knowing mine, and all the earth coming to a stop at this place and this time, the sun shining like a halo on his hair as he raised over me, the very breath he breathed making my heart sing. Merciful heaven. Oh, perfect bliss.

  We awoke cold. Under the grass, the ground was damp with winter dew and our skins not used to so much daylight and cool air. Faint and still trembling, I straightened my skirts and then my hair, combing grass from it with my fingers while he turned away, doing buttons.

  Add this to my list of sins and I was truly unlovable, a betrayer of enemy and friend alike, and now, no better than a common strumpet. By having succumbed to my foolish loss of all reason, I will have lost his respect, lost the future he meant and has so earnestly planned for, and lost my life’s dearest secret dream. All because of the fulfillment of that dream. Savannah was right, I had no business thinking I could teach anyone’s children. Yet, I loved him more, wanted his touch more than before, as if this act had tapped at some secret doorway, too long shut, that I craved to fling wide open. Iwill know when he turns around.

  As I tried to get a small burr worked out of my hair, he shook his head and swept his hands over his clothes, brushing off bits of grass. Udell turned at last, with a deeply embarrassed expression on his face, and reached toward me to help me stand. It took me some doing to look him in the eyes. I felt craven and low, and at the same time would have offered my lips to more kisses at the least invitation. When at last I raised my face he seemed worried. His lower lip trembled as he said, “Please forgive me. Oh, please, Sarah, I never meant to take advantage. I’m so sorry. Only say you’ll not hate me—”

  I drew a breath so sudden and deep it felt as if my ribs had taken a life all their own. “Hate you? Oh, Udell, do you hate me? Do you scorn to see—”

  “That you love me, too? That I’ve made you happy?”

  “Beyond all my dearest hopes, Mr. Hanna.” I kissed his cheek, in a sisterly way.

  “We ought to marry, then, Mrs. Elliot. It’s only right. I never meant to hurry … but it’s only right. We can ride to Benson by dark. I’ll stand by you. Do the right thing.” He kissed me deeply. Nothing brotherly about that one.

  Nearly in a swoon again, I stepped back, blushful and gasping. I couldn’t believe the words spilling from my own lips. “It’s only right,” I said. It was all sliding away—washed down the river like a petal from a fading flower. School. College. Books and wonderful teachers and unsavored colloquiums awaited me. “I need to think.” I walked in a small circle, making a tent with my fingers pressed tight, searching inside them for some kind of wisdom I didn’t feel at all capable of finding. I said, “If, you see, if there is no child that comes of this, this … today, then I might still go to school, mightn’t I?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “But if—married—this were to happen on a regular basis, even if there were no child today, that might be something that might happen.”

  He nodded, looking as dazed as I felt. “It might be likely. If you didn’t mind. I don’t mind.” He lowered his voice, flustered. “I mean, well, I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind, either,” I said. My cheeks flushed anew at the depth of his loud sigh. “But for a few months more, if I could go to school, just for a while, just a few months, Udell, I’d never forget it as long as I had breath. I’d better go home. I have some work to do. Plans to make. Packing, and all.”

  We rushed to each other. I inhaled the smell of his skin, the soap he’d used, the shaving lather, the very sweetness of his lips and a lone stickery whisker he’d missed near his chin. We kissed long and hard until I felt compelled to sink to the grass again, but held my ground with more strength this time. Let the birds sing “University” all they wish, but even a precious baby would certainly sing, “Not for you, my loving mama!”

  I said, “We’ll wait, then. I’ll dream of school for a couple of weeks, and by then we’ll know. There will be time enough to marry, and I’ll not be sorry if we do. I think I’ll not be sorry one bit, Mr. Hanna. For two weeks, though, I’ll have my dream.”

  “I’ll not be sorry, Sarah. You forgive, then? I aim to do the right thing.”

  I held out my arms and he wrapped me in his. “Oh, Udell. There is nothing to forgive. We’re not children. We will marry in the future, whether nearer or farther, that’s the only question.”

  Udell and I rode to my place, me sitting in front of him on the workhorse he had named Dodger. We tied Baldy on behind, which didn’t sit well with either horse, but after a mile they settled. Udell’s arms around me fit just fine, and I leaned my head back against his shoulder while he held the reins, both his hands around my middle. We got to the yard and I felt guilty and rumpled and plenty glad no one was there at that moment. He turned that horse to go home and gave him a good kick, sending him running, Udell hollering, “Wahoo!” at the top of his lungs like a boy.

  I fairly flew to my bedroom and closed the door, going through the house to the baño at the back to run a bath.

  For two solid days I sat with myself and my thoughts, not letting much of anything interrupt me, and had some good long thinks and some not so good. I thought of Mary Pearl’s fear. Of how Miss James seemed, instead of low-down and mysterious, just frightened and confused. Of how Miss Castle—rest her soul—seemed not trashy, just sad. I tried to figure out what I’d done with myself, what had happened to the person I thought I knew that I’d so recently misplaced and replaced with this new one I couldn’t get a rope around. Why, I barely recognized my own reflection in the mirror.

  Latin and English, he’d said. No doubt heights of examination in those languages that I’d never dream. Intellectual things. College things. General science? I wanted to study specific science! Didn’t Charlie have that geology book, and would they take up geology in “general” science? Gleeful shivers ran up and down my spine. And why not some Greek history, too? Would there be room for Plutarch and Homer? India. China! Maybe I’ll learn about China. But would there be room for a woman who might have
grandchildren but the heart of a hussy? And would that day’s indulgence be the last bar on the door for me? Would the miracle of my own body take away that chance with the coming of a baby, no matter how dear? Udell was an ordinary man, I thought, but a man with an extraordinary way of thinking. That was truly worth more than gold: extraordinary thinking.

  The next two nights I dreamed not of school but of nursing babies. Sometimes two at a time, always with golden halos in their hair like pictures on the Jesuit mission’s walls. Like Udell’s. I was happier than I could remember being in a very long time. Silly as a goose. Couldn’t stop grinning. Couldn’t think any more at all. That waterfall had become a torrent and I was head over heels under the stream of it.

  May 11, 1907

  “Mama?” Charlie said. “I’ve asked you four times now. Do you need anything from town? Elsa and I want to take the buggy. She’s wanting some fresh vegetables.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. “What’s Gilbert doing?”

  “He went to get mail, but he wants to go, too. I reckon it’s a good idea, to let him ride shotgun, if you can spare us three or four days.”

  “Surely that’s fine,” I said. I felt purely stupid. Too happy, too sad at once, too confused to make any sense at all. I had discovered—the way women do—that there was no child to come from lying with Udell on the banks of the Cienega. My eyes were on Charlie hitching the rig, but my heart was blanketed with warm sunshine of that afternoon ten days ago, the light that surrounded every living thing, the joy that drew me to a man. And Udell has been only tender and gentlemanly ever since, so that nary a notion has crossed my mind that I have lessened in his esteem. He worries the opposite, he has said, feeling it was a great fault in his character to have let it happen.

  How could I blame him? There surely wasn’t any cry of “no” from me. But no baby. How I covet to hold a baby. How empty not to expect that miracle. Yet, an expectation of other joy has come in its place. I plan to ride to Udell’s place this afternoon when I’ve finished my chores.

  Gilbert brought in a small stack of paper envelopes. I asked him what they were and he only hollered from the hallway, “I don’t know. I have got to take a bath!” and disappeared. Well, his going must be about the mysterious girl, I speculated.

  My sons left with Elsa. Chess was out in the barn, Granny worked on her quilt. The house was quiet. I put the mail under a bowl on the table to wait for later.

  About an hour after the boys left, the dogs started barking. Then I heard hoofbeats, coming at a fine pace but not a full run. I stepped outside to see Mary Pearl riding up on her three-year-old stallion. She slipped off his bare back before he’d stopped, and looped reins at my porch rail, hurrying to me. The girl grabbed my shoulders and hugged me. “Mama will scold me if she knows I’m here, so I have to ask you to keep quiet again. If you won’t, or can’t, say so now and I’ll leave.”

  I said, “Glad to see you, Mary Pearl. Is it a sin now, for you to talk to me?”

  “Are you going to tell?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll stay. Aunt Sarah, Mama is driving me to distraction, she’s so peeved at me for going to school. I have thought and thought until my head aches, and I finally figured a way to settle it. She is giving me lectures until you’d think I was only born to get married to the first man that came along. I do love Aubrey, but, you know, he said he’d wait for me. If he won’t, then he’s not the kind of man I’d care to marry anyway. Don’t you think that’s right?”

  I wasn’t sure just what to say. Her coming here had jarred me, and it seemed as if the threads of my thoughts were hard to gather. “Come have some lemonade and tell me how you’re going to fix this.” I led her inside where we spent a few minutes admiring Granny’s quilt blocks before we began to talk.

  Mary Pearl drank a whole glass of lemonade in one long, thirsty draft. She sat in a chair opposite her grandma. Then she addressed both of us and said, “I have written a letter to Aubrey, just as formal as I know how—because he is a lawyer and knows more than I do, and Mama says we are legally bounden to marry. She pulled a wrinkled half sheet of paper from her pocket and held it to her face and read, “And it says, I hereby request that we conveniently agree to null our betrothal for the good of any and all, for the duration of my schooling, to be hence and forthwith reconsidered at which future time I shall return to the Territory of Arizona and all its legal confines.’ How does that sound?”

  I said, “Well, I’m not sure. Why do you want to do that? In a letter, I mean.”

  “Because I’m only seventeen. And do you know how old Aubrey is? Twenty-eight. He’ll be thirty when I get done.”

  “Thirty is a good age,” I said. Jack was thirty. Lands, I wish I’d married him the first minute I laid eyes on him. But I saw real fear on Mary Pearl’s face.

  “Mary Pearl, sit down here, honey, and catch your breath,” Granny said.

  “Granny? Mama says I have made a commitment to God, being betrothed, and I’d have to get a divorce to go to college! I can’t get a divorce—dang, I’m just seventeen. Aunt Sarah, I just can’t. It would be the ruination of our family. I’d be so ashamed.”

  Granny said, “Don’t you like the rascal?”

  Mary Pearl’s face reddened and her chin crimped hard when she said, “I love him. I kissed him. But I’ve been thinking about art school for a whole year, and Mama won’t let me go to school betrothed. She and Papa have been squabbling on it for days.”

  “Did you send him this yet?” I asked.

  “No. I want you to mail it for me. Mama’ll want to know what I’m mailing anyway. She’d make me read it to her.” She held her rumpled letter as if it hurt to gaze at it. It looked more childish than the lessons Zachary usually brought to me. Seemed to me that she was feeling like a cornered kitten.

  I said, “If I did that, I’d be going behind your mother’s back again. It’s one thing not to tell her something I didn’t think would matter, but this would matter. Is that all your letter says, honey? Doesn’t it say that you care for him?”

  “That’s pretty much the whole thing except for ‘Dear Mr. Aubrey Hanna, Esquire’ and ‘your true friend,’ me. I wanted it real formal.”

  I said, “Why don’t you write another letter? Explain it in a kinder way. Tell him you care for him but you are too young to bind him to such a pledge when you are headed off for two years. Tell him you respect him and admire all his good qualities, and that if God and nature allow for you to meet again and you find that you’re still in love, then you will happily make a reacquaintance with his promise. Or some such.”

  She smiled. “Can you tell me all those words again?”

  “No, you make up your own. And then tell your mother you want to send it.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. If you’re woman enough to go to college clean across the States, you’re woman enough to tell your mama you want to. You aren’t running away like Esther did and you sure aren’t hiding behind my skirts to do it. Don’t be sassy, just brave up.”

  Granny said, “About time somebody went over and talked to her,” pointing her gnarled finger at me. To Mary Pearl she said, “Child, get yonder and start to writing. Then you, Sarah, get your best dress on and hitch the buggy and take me visiting. Is my purty bonnet washed?”

  I said, “The boys took the buggy.”

  “Fiddlesticks. I’m going to see Savannah and Albert. Are you ridin’ me over, or am I walking?”

  I did not want to fuss with Granny, nor face Savannah. I wanted to pretend there was no quarrel and go on forgetting her five minutes at a time, but I could only do it if I stayed away from Savannah. Granny wouldn’t let it rest, and she kept on at me while she got her bonnet on. I didn’t have any choice, really. Much as I didn’t want another scene with her—deep down, I knew Savannah was right, although she wasn’t giving me any quarter—I reckon I would rather face her and say the things I ought to say, than keep on being squeezed by folks I love to take one
side or the other.

  Chess helped me with the hitching, then got in to drive, too. When we got the buckboard pulled to my door, Mary Pearl sat busily working on her letter at the kitchen table, with Granny coaching her every word. When she was satisfied with it, Granny and I climbed in while Mary Pearl got back upon Duende. I watched the wheels turn and my heart thumped against my ribs in time with the squeaking. Why, I’d been stubborn! I had the gumption to go tell her so. No sense carrying on a fuss-fight when we could just be friends again. I’d tell her straight out I was sorry for waiting so long, too. It isn’t like me to be so stubborn, I’ll say. Why, I’ll tell her everything that’s happened. She will have gotten over being mad. Surely she will have.

  We found Savannah kneeling in front of their porch, working a hand spade around a flower bed. I thought about Udell’s trouble with shade and wondered if I should say something. That kind of talk would have to come later. We had some fence to mend first. Savannah stood. I could read the consternation on her from across the yard. All these years she and I have cared for each other like sisters, nursed each other’s wounds and brought forth each other’s babies, and here she is still mad at me after all these days. I stood there by the buggy, pretending to fiddle with the brake and get the reins tied up real tight. Clover helped Granny to the ground.

  Mary Pearl slid off her horse and headed toward the house, but Savannah stopped her, saying, “Where you been? You have chores to be done.”

  “I know, Mama,” Mary Pearl said. “I wanted Aunt Sarah’s advice on a letter I want to send to Aubrey. She helped me fix it.”

  Savannah looked from Mary Pearl to me and I saw real hurt in her eyes. She said, “I see. So you’re writing him to break the engagement? You’d rather do that on a whim than live up to your promise?”

  “Savannah,” I started. She held up a hand to quiet me, the same way Rudolfo had stilled his children. The move made me angry but I kept quiet. She stared at Mary Pearl.