The Star Garden

by Nancy E. Turner

  I got Blessing to bed that afternoon by promising to do my reading in her room while she slept. I stared at the stack of books and papers I trucked into her room and spread across the dresser. I stood lost in a dust storm of schooling and family, a constant panic at being so far behind in some areas, so yearning in others.

  The next day after two tests in mathematics to catch up with the class, I knew even if Professor McGinty turned my scores upside down so that 17s were 71s, I’d still not pass numbers. I felt more akin to my boys’ sentiments when they let themselves out of school than I ever thought possible. When Miss Alice asked me to stay behind the other students, I sat at my desk as they tiptoed out, feeling childish and scalded. Well, we had a good long talk. By mutual agreement, I have now let out of Mathematics, too. That leaves only General Science, Composition, and Latin. I never knew you could take part of school, but Miss Alice says to go ahead and finish the rest, and try again next term, so I promised I would. Next term? Of course. I’ll take it next term. By the time she and I finished, I’d missed half of Brownie’s class again, so I went to the library to study.

  I sat amidst row upon row of books. I ran my fingers across some leather bindings. I pulled out The Life of Major General Andrew Jackson, by John Henry Eaton. Why couldn’t I drop Brownie, too, and take up some good history class? I sat and read and read, until I’d missed Osterhaas’s class and half of Fairhaven’s. I slipped in just before class let out, purely numb with indecision.

  Professor Fairhaven asked me to ride him downtown again. He told me I was clever, and quite charming. Purely filled my ears with flattery. If he’d tried that when I first met him, I’d have scorned him good, but I found myself lapping it up as if I longed to hear more. I left him at the barber shop with a wave and went on home. That evening, when I carried a letter to Udell to the stand by the front door where Rachel would take it with her own letters the next day, I passed a mirror hanging by the entry and paused. The face that looked back at me appeared startled, and not for want of Magnolia Balm.

  From inside looking out, I had no sensation at all that I looked or spoke differently than other students. More than that, my clothes were not stylish, Magnolia Balm did not change the fact that I had passed eighteen some years back. That boy Foster had awakened memories with a story he knew nothing about. I fought Ulzana before some of those students were born, never mind that I had been just a child then, myself. Sitting in the classroom, I had felt sure I belonged in the company of like minds. I tried to be one of them, forgetting the miles traveled, miles that must have contributed to having failed equally at aprons and mathematics.

  I slipped my letter back into the pocket of my apron. I went to the kitchen, and dropped it into the stove. I should just go home, back to what I understand. From upstairs, Blessing’s voice called me.

  Rachel was beating eggs for a cake. Aubrey Hanna will join us for supper. He came early to visit while she and I put food on the table. He must resemble his mother, for he was very different from his father. When Harland, Aubrey, and Rachel went to the parlor to talk after supper, I asked them if they’d excuse me so I could study my lessons and write a letter for Aubrey to take to the ranch tomorrow.

  I held my pen above the paper for a great while. I wanted to quit school and go home. I wanted to run to Udell and at the same time to hold him at arm’s length—make sure no more cows got killed, no more old folks had shot at the clouds—I wanted to stop time so I could go to school, but only the way I wanted it, not the way they gave it. I was not a schoolgirl.

  I said to the bureau, “I shall write this: ‘My Dearest Udell, your gift of the one thing I’ve spent my life hanging all my wishes on, a University education, cannot be more appreciated by another living soul, and yet I would like to throw it away because the students shun me, and I am in sure peril of failing this semester due to having learned at my mother’s knee the difference between pan drippings and churned butter. I have unnaturally enjoyed the attention of a professor on an innocent buggy ride although I appear to be somewhat over the age of all students, and I have lost my backbone. I feel as childish as Blessing Prine, who is even now pitching a fit in her bedroom, being made to go to bed at half past seven, even though the doctor told her to rest.’

  “Or this. ‘Dear Udell, I cannot go back, as I am unpopular as a goat in church and between General Science, Mathematics, and Domestic Science, this school has reached a level of unpopularity with me that is beyond measure, therefore I plan to act an ungrateful wretch and waste your gift and quit and come home and marry you if you’ll still have me and forget this nonsense.”

  Blessing slipped into my room without a word, stared at me for a moment, then crawled up on my bed and wiggled herself into the covers, from which she faced me. I put down the pen, blotting the tip, and waited.

  “Who were you talking to, Aunt Sarah?”

  “Myself, I reckon.”

  “Did she answer you?”

  “No, not directly.”

  “Story pinched my arm. N’ I have stitches in my chin, n’ ever’thing.”

  “You’ll have a scar,” I said, forgetting her age.

  “I will?” A smile formed as she touched the threads with her fingertips.

  “Your first.”

  “I’ll get more,” she said, rather than asked.

  “Likely. Are you going to sleep in here with me, punkin?”

  She nodded. “May I?”

  “Stay there and keep it warm for me.” I hurried to the parlor. “Aubrey,” I said, “if you’re going tomorrow, will you be back before Monday morning at nine?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Is there something I can get for you?”

  “Take me with you. I had been going to stay in town this weekend but I need to go home, even if it’s just for a few hours.”

  He smiled and his eyes flickered toward Rachel. “At your service, Mrs. Elliot. Miss Rachel wanted to visit her folks, too. We can make it a fool’s run and back.”

  I saw them chance another look at each other. I drew in a breath. Sparks flew through the air between Rachel and him! For Mary Pearl’s sake, I’d better be sitting in the front seat next to Aubrey Hanna, I could see that.

  October 26, 1907

  After I said enough to be polite to Chess and Granny and the boys, I rode to Udell’s place, my heart heavy and my backside sore after the ride from town. When that stone house came into view, I threw back my shoulders and took a deep breath as if the sky opened above me. That big, lumpy gray house seemed a kind of castle. I know Jack always loved me, but we each carried our own loads. He always expected me to be strong enough for my own, and sometimes for his, too. Udell expects me to crumble, and seems surprised when I don’t, and yet, I believe in many ways he may be closer to knowing my mind than Jack had been. No matter what happened around me, at that moment I looked upon that house, that hill, and that man, as a refuge. I planned going to tell him so. Tell him I’d chosen him over the university after all.

  I found Udell standing on a ladder around back, putting up the double-hung windows that had come in at last. A stack of them leaned against the house below him and for a moment I had a real dread that he might slip off the ladder into that pile of glass. I dared not call out and startle him, so I waited, watching two men moving around the place. They were putting a door on, drilling bolts into the rock-and-mortar walls.

  Udell saw me and his face lit up. As he came down from the ladder, he called, “Oh, Mrs. Elliot! My friend and scholar! What a fine morning this is,” and stood in front of me. I’d have rushed to his arms, but both those workmen were in plain sight and propriety kept us from even shaking hands.

  “I see you’ve got work going,” I said. He nodded, so I went on, “How is your—our—garden?” One of those fellows came up and asked if Udell had any more cement, then left us. The other man, though, stayed within earshot. Heat flushed up my neck and my face burned. I said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you, and I’d like to sit a spell. Would you take a walk w
ith me?”

  Udell stepped over the feet of the man mixing a can full of cement to patch some holes, and opened the front door, sweeping his arms toward the room inside. “Come on in first. I want to show you how I’ve got some of the furniture in. Things Frances’s mother left behind. You’re going to like this. It’s real fine.” I stepped through the opening into a fine, large room. Stuffed chairs and couches nicer than in a hotel lined two walls. Tables—with lamps on every last one—filled every corner. Beyond the front room in the parlor, a big square piano crouched like an animal waiting to jump forward on fat carved legs. He said, “You’ll want to move things around, I suspect, to suit you. Just point and I’ll push and carry them wherever you want. There’s her square Chickering there in the parlor. Frances always wished she had that piano she’d played when she was a girl. Don’t know how we’ll get it tuned up. Maybe someone out of Tombstone.”

  “I don’t play a piano. It won’t matter.”

  He climbed halfway up the stairs, looking toward the higher landing, waving his arms. “Come on up. Of course, you have your own furniture you want to bring, but we’ll have plenty of chests and all. This one here is full of linen sheets and embroider-ied pillow coverings. Some of them are the best ones Frances ever made. Lace all around.”

  I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking into a small room off the front parlor while he peered into the open chest of Frances’s needlework. “What is this room?” I said. It was too small for a parlor or a kitchen, and a fancy mahogany bed sat against one wall with a tiny washstand near it. A mirror perched above it and across the room hung a framed picture print of cows grazing under a tree. The only rug in the house covered the brick floor in there. A delicate lace counterpane lay across the feather bed.

  He fairly galloped down the stairs in his excitement. “That’s for your mother. That’s a good heat stove in the corner, with the damper built right into the wall. See this crank? Rock walls, small windows. Cool in the summer, and safe as she can be. See that bed? Metal-spring frame. No ropes. It’d make her real comfortable. ‘Course, we’ll need blankets and such, but she might want to bring along the fine quilts she’s got now.”

  I followed Udell through the house he’d built, looked in every room and at his prodding inspected the insides of every chest of drawers. With each opened door I felt smaller and smaller until I nearly disappeared into my own shoes. On one wall by the stairs hung a framed doily with a carefully woven and knotted hair wreath all done up like flowers. Frances’s hair, no doubt. From the piano she’d always wanted to the lace curtains in the bedrooms and the gilt-framed daguerreotype of her in the hallway, this wasn’t a bower house for me.

  He’d built himself a house … for Frances.

  I lost all track of what I had come for. I told him I had to get home and start supper, and of course, he must come share with us. Then I headed home to think without anyone else’s opinion included.

  I changed to an old house dress and worked up the row of buttons on the bodice, staring into my little looking glass. I couldn’t marry Udell Hanna. Not for anything. He wasn’t building that house out of loving me. The man was marrying his dead wife. Building her a house. Filling it with her things. He’d sent me off to school as if he had been daring me to find some excuse not to come home. Now I didn’t want to. I tried to remember the words I had so easily rattled off to Mary Pearl, caught in just such a fix.

  But I was not Mary Pearl. I had my own land and house, my own children. I didn’t need Udell Hanna’s money, or his land, or his stone house. If I couldn’t have a man on my own terms, just for the preference of his company, I wouldn’t have him at all. It wasn’t the same as a young girl thinking of her future and needing a man to provide it. I wanted the things my own hands had provided, and I didn’t want to be seeing shadows in the halls nor wondering if he closed his eyes and thought of her at times.

  Lord. I’d never live in that house. Yet oh, what have I done? Lain with him as if we were married, promised him, too, and spoke words as if I’d stand by them or bust for all time. Gave my word and now was weaseling out. Maybe what both of us had thought was love was just lonesomeness for the past.

  When I got back to town, riding alongside Rachel in the back as Aubrey drove, I knew Aubrey had spent time at Albert’s place, but I couldn’t worry about whatever was brewing between those two. Hearing Aubrey’s voice as he and Rachel cheerily talked, I heard Udell’s voice, too. And Lord, I knew I loved him. But to spend my life there, with him, oh! My thoughts spilled on the floor like two sacks of loose buttons, never to be sorted out, and I stayed quiet the whole way.

  All week that blamed piano kept popping up there on the page of my general science book betwixt the geologic structures of North America. By the end of Brownie’s class Tuesday I decided it seemed only fair to Udell to break the promise between us. In town I felt too far from my home and from him, misplacing my trust and my real feelings.

  Life seemed better without Mathematics. Definitely better without Domestic Science. I wrote letters to Mary Pearl, and finally in one of them pressed her for some feelings toward Aubrey. I didn’t know if she were writing him, too, so I merely asked if she’d heard from him. Since I had fewer classes and more time, I went back to taking the buggy to school.

  Brownie’s lecturing got more addled with each day and when he sent back our papers, a note written on mine said that I hadn’t any idea how to back up my thesis. That detestable little canker sore. Every time I thought of him, from then on, I remembered I had a setting hen named Brownie with a much nicer disposition and a good deal more intelligence.

  Mister-Doctor Fairhaven acted kindly, even attentive. Too smiley, yet somehow his kindness was comforting, too. In Osterhaas’s class two more students read their “What I Want” themes. We discussed their way of putting words on paper as if no one cared what the students had put down that they’d like to own or sought to become. I looked again at the list of stuff I wanted, put it aside and rewrote the page, prettied it up with adjectives and such. Then I went to April’s house and had tea and read stories to her children while she nursed Tennyson. That little toot is tiny, but now that she is well, what a holler she’s got on her! She’ll be one to keep her mama busy, I reckon.

  That week, Harland’s children all got rashes and a cough so they were kept out of school and fretful. The doctor has been to the house and said it was the eight-day measles but they were not quarantined because it isn’t the bad kind. Before I headed to Brownie’s class each day, I made sure to check on the children, especially Blessing, who is doing fine and playing quietly with her toys for a change.

  One morning, having to feel obliged to drive Professor Fairhaven downtown suddenly seemed real inconvenient to me. I rode Baldy instead of driving the buggy and I determined I would do so until the end.

  Instead of being run over by bicyclers, I found that now students parted for me the same way they did for the teachers. I sensed it meant something. As I arrived at the classroom, the train downtown blew its whistle. It reminded me of little Blessing running away from home. I stopped with my hand on the door to Brownie’s room. I detested the very knob, hated the man behind it, the stupid way he made me feel. The whistle moaned, dropping at the end with a sigh like a mourning dove. Which home was I running from?

  We went over last week’s test in Brownie’s class. Mine had a large F on the top margin but not another mark. I’d long before swallowed any pride I’d owned about my scores. I’d gotten Cs and Ds all along, but never completely failed. I waited until after most of the students asked questions about the test answers they’d missed, then raised my hand. He called upon everyone he could find, even calling out names for their opinions, while my hand stayed up. When silence took over the room and my hand had turned to stone, I stood and said, “I’d like to know which of my answers is wrong, Professor Brown. I answered every question right. There isn’t a dot on this page except the F.”

  “Someone in class please explain a grading
curve to Mrs. Elliot. I haven’t time.” Brownie camped behind a battered old painted wood desk that like to swallowed him. He fiddled with some bent brads while I stood listening to a boy in the back explain that I failed because most people got a C, a percentage got a B, and one person could get an A, so someone else had to fail. I felt my breath go cold.

  I walked toward the desk. “Professor Brown?” I heard my hen cackling as I spoke.

  “Take your seat.” His eyes widened. The brads clicked on the desk as he shrank into his chair. He watched those little metal brads and pushed them around as if they were important as bullets.

  “Maybe you’ll have time to write something else on my paper,” I said.

  “No. Class is almost over. The lecture—” He stopped, his eyes darting, his thin, unevenly shaved little mustache quivering like a cat sniffing something putrid.

  I screwed up my eyes and quieted my voice, taking my sternest posture, the one I’d practiced on Rudolfo Maldonado. I felt almost as angry as then, too. “I got every answer correct and yet you tell me I’ve failed. I’ve read more books on geology and geography than anyone in this room, I’d lay a bet. Maybe even you. Professor Brown, you write on my paper that there are no incorrect answers. You don’t have to change the grade, just write the truth.” The little weasel squirmed in his chair. His inkwell was so dribbled on it had stuck to the desk itself. I placed my paper before him, dipped his own pen in the well, and held it toward him. “Everyone in this room is going to sit here until you write it,” I said. Then I gave those students a look that could defy the Magnolia Balm right off a woman.

  Brownie trembled and breathed noisily. He stared at the pen. He looked around the room, but none of the students made a move to shoulder him up. A drop of ink hit the blotter in front of him and made a spider of blue. One tiny droplet dashed onto his knuckle and spread in the wrinkles. I waited, counting seconds, like I’d done with Rudolfo, never taking my gaze from his face. He coughed after nine seconds of pure silence. The faint smell of urine rose from under his desk. A clock in the hallway chimed. No one moved. Someone dropped a pen and a handful of papers, but didn’t retrieve them.