by Jane Peart
Shocked, Holly stared at her cousin. "I don't know what you mean, Hetty. When did I ever hurt you?"
Red blotches were coming out on Hetty's face now, her hands were clenched into fists at her side, her lip curled as she continued, "You hurt me plenty. Lots of times. Dozens of times. You ignored me, treated me like I didn't matter—"
"If I did—and I don't remember doing it, I never guessed—"
"How could you?" Hetty demanded furiously. "You were always too busy playing the belle of the ball to notice anyone else!"
"If I did, I'm truly sorry," Holly said contritely.
"Sorry? What good does it do to be sorry now?"
"Well, that was then, Hetty, this is now. If I was a thoughtless, self-centered girl who didn't know she was doing it—we're both women now, can't we possibly put all that aside, be friends?"
Hetty shook her head. "It's too late, Holly. I don't need your friendship. I don't need you. I've made a place for myself here. I've got a husband and children, my own friends, and I don't need you anymore."
Holly felt sick and shaken by the bitterness in Hetty. Gone was any pretense of relationship, cousinliness, now even the possibility of friendship. Holly got to her feet, not knowing what more she could say. Then before her horrified gaze, Hetty's features began to break up; she turned away and put her face in her hands and began to sob, the harsh, painful sound of someone who had not cried since childhood.
Helplessly, Holly stood there, knowing if she reached out in comfort she would be rejected. Then Hetty's muffled voice said, "Please go—"
"Hetty, I—"
"I said go!"
Unsteadily, Holly made her way to the door, then she turned and looked once more, struggling for something to say. All that came was a broken, "Believe me, I am sorry."
But Hetty did not move, turn, nor reply, and Holly left.
Once outside she realized she had been so upset that she had forgotten to leave the book for the children.
She walked through town in a daze, the things Hetty had said ringing in her ears. Had she really been that indifferent, that selfish, that unsympathetic? Vaguely she remembered Mama's urging her to see that Hetty had a good time at one of the impromptu gatherings of young people that seemed to happen so often at their house. She couldn't honestly remember making any concerted effort on Hetty's behalf. With belated realization, Holly knew she had found it flattering and enormous fun to be the center of attention herself and gave little thought to any of the other girls who might be longing for some of the spotlight she had always taken for granted.
How hard that must have been for someone like Hetty, painfully shy, awkward, tall and skinny, and insecure. Holly was genuinely sorry that she had been the cause of some of Hetty's unhappiness, but she couldn't take the blame for all of it. Holly recalled how she had once overheard Aunt Dolly, Hetty's mother, complaining to Holly's mother that Hetty was "impossible, glum, moody, uncooperative—"
Mounting the schoolhouse steps and letting herself into her own apartment, Holly said aloud, "Well, at least I tried, didn't I!" She made herself some tea and feeling rather sorry that her sincere efforts for reconciliation had been so rebuffed, she went over some of Hetty's accusations, trying to justify herself.
Unkind? Indifferent? Unfeeling? Maybe she had been. She thought of the Scripture she had found at random: "As in water face reveals face, so a man's heart reveals the man."
She had gone to see Hetty to try to make right the difficulty between them. In her heart Holly had believed it was all Hetty's fault. But instead of getting the expected apology from Hetty, she had heard a lot of unpleasant things about herself.
Maybe her heart wasn't right. Maybe she needed to think about all the things Hetty had said. Whatever Hetty had perceived her to be she was different now. She remembered her feelings upon her arrival in Riverbend when the stagecoach driver had shouted—"End of the line!"
In a way, it had been the "end of the line"—at least of one part of her life. That frivolous life she had led with all the careless abandon of a butterfly, the life that had ignored people like Hetty. Things had happened to change her. She had closed that chapter of her life, and she had opened a new one. New things were being written in it. Why couldn't Hetty see that?
Maybe, in time, she would, Holly sighed but with little hope. Hetty had told her to leave. Would she ever feel comfortable returning to Hetty's house after today? When would she get to see Aurelia and Teddy? Sadly, Holly drew the beautiful new edition of Alice in Wonderland out of her basket. Idly she turned the pages, looking at its colorful illustrations, pausing to read some of its amusing verses. She had loved Alice when she was a child and had wanted so much to share it with Aurelia and Teddy. She stopped at one of Alice's encounters with the White Queen and read, "Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come today. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"
She too had come a long way from Willow Springs. She had managed and coped, accomplished and overcome a great many things she would never have thought she could before. She had even often "imagined six impossible things before breakfast!"
God bless Lewis Carroll, Holly thought, closing the book and feeling much better.
If, in spite of all her attempts, Hetty refused to be friends, hadn't she gone the extra mile? Holly shrugged, What else could she do?
Just then she heard the sound of horses hooves, buggy wheels outside. Blaine! Holly felt her heart lift immediately. She jumped up, took a quick glance in her mirror, patted her hair, straightened the brooch on her collar, and hurried to open the schoolhouse door.
Her eager smile faded when she saw that it was Ad! He had just thrown the reins over the hitching post and was putting the block on the ground when he looked up and saw her standing at the door.
"Good afternoon, Miss Lambeth," he greeted her making a sweeping bow. "It was such a pleasant day, I rented this and took the liberty of coming out to see if you were free and to suggest we take a nice ride through the countryside? You look like you could use a little outing—or did I mistake the expression on your face for something else? Disappointment?" his smile was slightly sardonic. "Were you expecting someone else?"
Quickly Holly assured him. "No, of course not! And I'd enjoy some fresh air and sunshine! Wait until I get my bonnet and shawl," she told him and ran back inside.
So what did it matter if she had hoped it was Blaine? Holly scolded herself. Ad was always amusing and took her mind off her troubles. And she was foolish to spend time thinking about Blaine Stevens who was a man totally dedicated to his career and far too busy to spend a Saturday afternoon frivolously.
PART 4
Heap on the wood! The wind is chill!
But let it whistle as it will,
Well keep our Christmas merry still.
Sir Walter Scott
Chapter 17
One Friday early in December as school was dismissed, there was a little more than the usual scramble for the door. As was her practice, Holly followed her students out onto the porch to see them off, to make sure that the older boys didn't start a scuffle or fight. But the excitement that erupted as the children poured through the door, down the steps, and out to the play yard were for a different reason. "It's snowing!" came glad shouts. Holly looked up into the pewter-colored sky. When she saw large snowflakes drifting lazily down, she, too, experienced the same childlike thrill at the sight of the first snow of winter.
Holly had always loved snow, perhaps because her birthday was in December, and at home it had always been celebrated festively. In her happiest memories of childhood, it always seemed to be snowing. Maybe because her parents always gave her a wonderful party. There had been one birthday she remembered with particular joy. She must have been about eleven, and her father had rented a sleigh and all her friends had been invited for a sleigh ride. She could still feel the cold air that made it almost hurt to breathe, the bite of the wind in her face that made her eyes sting, and
the merry sound of the sleigh bells ringing as the sleigh skimmed over the icy roads and fields. . . .
Holly wondered if anyone in Riverbend owned a sleigh or if there ever were sleighing parties or carol sings? She put some wood into the stove and got the fire going again, glad she had the whole weekend to herself with no lessons to prepare for the next day.
The following morning when she woke up, the room held a peculiar brightness. Had she overslept? Then she realized that it was Saturday, and there was no school today. She could look forward to a day all her own, a welcome break in the routine of the week. When she finally got up, she saw to her delighted surprise that the ground was covered with a light powdering of snow, and it was still snowing.
It was still snowing when, after her leisurely breakfast, she decided to indulge herself and spend the day reading. It was a perfect day to reread one of her favorites, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Before settling down with it, she looked out the window again. The snow was coming down thicker and faster now. Maybe she'd even get snowed in! She had plenty of wood and food and lots of reading material, so she smiled to herself as she pulled her rocker close to the stove and opened to page one. "Marley was dead, dead as a doornail. ..."
The next thing she knew, the room was gray, and it was getting hard for her to see. She got up to light her lamp and, at the window, saw that it was still snowing, and in the quickly falling darkness the pine trees at the edge of the road were new shapes of white pyramids. It looked like a Christmas scene, Holly thought. Christmas! An unexpected wave of homesickness surged through her. She'd be spending this Christmas thousands of miles from home. . . .
At Christmas the Lambeth home was very Dickensian. As they had said of Scrooge at the end of the book, her family "really knew how to keep Christmas!" There was a gaily trimmed six-foot cedar in the front hallway by the staircase, its banister and post entwined with evergreen boughs and red ribbons, the mantelpiece in the parlor decorated with red candles and poinsettias, and in the dining room, on the sideboard, was a big cut-glass bowl of eggnog to be offered to the many guests who came calling during the holidays, to be served along with slices of Mama's heritage fruitcake.
There had been parties every night of the week between Christmas and New Year's and the annual Christmas pageant and program at the church—
A Christmas program! That's what this school needed—a project in which everyone could have a part! One that they could put on for the parents to come and see the children perform. Why, they could have carol singing, and after the Nativity play she could have a party right here in the schoolhouse—
What an inspiration, just the thing to bring parents and children together. Of course, it would mean a lot of work, but it would have such rewards that it would be worth it.
In the weeks that followed, Holly would have to remind herself often of her first enthusiasm. There were days when nothing went right and everything went wrong. The children were inattentive, couldn't remember their lines or the lyrics of the simplest, oldest carols, some of which, to Holly's astonishment, they had never heard before. The old piano badly needed tuning, but she struggled along with it to keep the various-ranged voices on key or at least partially so.
She divided the Christmas story into what she judged were basic scenes with minimal lines for each of the speaking parts to memorize. Even so, such phrases as "Lo, I see yonder Star" and "Be not afraid" proved almost impossible for some to learn or remember. There were moments when Holly was close to desperation that it would not all come together, and many times when she was ready to give the whole thing up.
But the excitement of the children, their eagerness to participate, their anticipation of wearing costumes, and the idea of performing before an audience was contagious. And when Holly was at the point of losing heart, something or somebody rescued her from the brink of despair.
Holly sent notes home with the children, announcing that there would be a Christmas program and a party afterward on the evening of the last school day before the ten-day holiday period.
After that, the days seemed to fly by. Every day Holly used the incentive of play practice and carol singing to get through the regular lessons with dispatch and inspire more effort on the part of the children. She was encouraged by the willingness of most of them to cooperate. Although there was much discussion about the role each one was to play, there seemed to be less squabbling, shoving, pushing, and general naughtiness with the prospect of the Christmas program always ahead.
"I'd like to think it's the Christmas story itself having an effect," Holly sighed half-humorously to Vi one afternoon when she went over to consult with her about costume descriptions to send home to the children's parents.
"Don't underestimate the power of the Word," Vi replied as she went through her scrap bag, getting out materials Holly could use to put together shepherd's robes and strips of sizing to stiffen angel wings.
"While you're here, come see what I've done," Vi suggested, her eyes shining, and she beckoned Holly down the hall and opened a door at the end. "I've redone Avesta's room for a surprise when she comes home for the holidays!" Vi said excitedly watching for Holly's reaction.
"Oh, Vi, it's any girl's dream!" declared Holly stepping into the room and gazing around. There was a white iron bedstead with gracefully scrolled enameled loops and gilded curls covered by a white matelasse woven spread, and a white painted bureau and washstand on which stood a china pitcher and bowl covered with painted pansies. The windows were curtained in gauzy white organdy tied with lavender ribbons. "Oh, she'll love it, Vi," Holly exclaimed.
"I hope so," Vi beamed. "Avesta likes things pretty, feminine, and she loves this color." Vi touched the lace pillows threaded with lavender satin ribbon.
Holly hoped Avesta appreciated her mother and knew she was the center of Vi's life. Now that she was so far away and on her own, Holly had begun to realize how much her own mother had done for her when she lived at home, all the little things that went unnoticed and unacknowledged. Holly left Vi's and headed for Ned's store.
She was anxious to find out if the small Christmas gifts for the children had arrived yet. She had ordered them from one of Ned's catalogues: spinning tops in all colors for the boys, hair slides and ribbons for the girls. She was going to wrap them with each child's name and then tie them to the branches of the Christmas tree in the classroom.
One new experience that Holly was particularly enjoying was managing her own money. At home she had gone to her father whenever she wanted money. Although the Riverbend teacher's salary was small, it gave Holly a feeling of independence to know she had earned it and could spend it any way she liked. She loved using a small part of it to plan the Christmas party.
Before, when Holly ran the lending library, she had discovered that the little world of Riverbend revolved around the General Store. There was always a group of men discussing the weather, the crops, the current topics. Even the women shopping for groceries or dry goods often gave their opinion, made a comment, or expressed their views.
This Saturday when Holly entered there seemed more hubbub than usual in the voices of those gathered around the potbellied stove in the center. The jangle of the bell over the door seemed to go unheard, and she moved immediately over to the counter where Ned was ringing up a purchase. As she waited for Ned to finish with his customer, she overheard the men, inasmuch as none of them were making any attempt to lower their voices. In fact, it seemed they were raised, indignant, and argumentative.
When Ned was free, he smiled and greeted her. "Good morning, Holly, what can I do for you?"
He came over to where she stood, and she leaned toward him, nodding her head to the group at the stove and asking in a low tone, "What's all that about?"
Ned lifted an eyebrow, slipped a folded copy of the RiverbendMonitor in front of her, tapped his forefinger to the bold-faced column headed "Editorial."
"Oh, dear, what's Ad been up to now?" she sighed, her eyes racing down the rows of prin
t.
WHO STILL BELIEVES THE RAILROAD IS COMING THROUGH RIVERBEND?
Only the people who will benefit continue to perpetuate this myth; namely Miller's Brickyard, Tidwell's Lumber Mill, Bankers, Realtors, possibly the politicians if they can convince their constituents that their clout will make the planners and the Eastern owners of the railroad companies change their minds-which of course won't happen! These decisions are usually made in Washington, D.C., and that's where the "Big Boys" play.
All the usually "reliable sources" we've checked have told me the railroad is NOT coming to Riverbend; the town of Medford will get the proposed branch line from San Francisco to Portland, NOT Riverbend.
"Uh-oh!" Holly said softly as she raised her head and met Ned's eyes. "Ad's in big trouble now." Ned nodded solemnly and gave a shake of his head.
The store was filling up with people getting their weekend supplies so Ned and Holly had no more time to discuss their friend's latest published opinion. Ned checked the shelves of the post office, found Holly's package, and she left.
The day was windy and overcast, and Holly's thoughts were as storm-tossed as the clouds overhead as she walked home. Why did Ad always stir up something, "trouble the waters"? Maybe it was his "exile mentality," the thing that he claimed was their bond, that neither one of them really belonged in Riverbend, that their stay was temporary and they had no stake in what happened, that they were both "birds of passage."
But Ad was wrong about her, Holly thought, as she turned into the school yard. Something definitely had happened to her. She wasn't sure just what. She could feel it. Everything was drawing her in, deeper, closer—almost as if she was becoming part of everything—the hills, the river, the town, the people— like the Healys, the members of the Literary Society, the friends she had made, Vi, the Bodine sisters, Mr. Clegg, and Rupert Benson—and the children, especially the children—Aurelia and Teddy, of course, and Joel and Cissy, and—Blaine Stevens.
