by ML Gardner
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. He grinned beneath the beard, his brown eyes danced, crinkling at the edges.
He said no more, just turned and began walking away.
“Where are you going?” I called out after him.
“I’ll wait by my boat, That’s where I want to be when I cross over,” he said above the crashing ocean waves. Suddenly, he stopped and turned around. “If this girl, your girl, calls to your heart more than anything else, go to her and never look back,” he said. And with a small nod, he turned in the direction of his boat, and never looked back.
I selfishly wished he wouldn’t leave. I wanted to tell him about Elizabeth and my visions. Most of all, I wanted to ask him if he knew why his nephew clouded my dreams all the time. And, if he didn’t have a life on the ocean, why I saw him amidst a storm that tore a boat in two. The old sailor likely had no answers. I decided that if he had, I had a feeling he wouldn’t have shared them. I thought of his advice and wondered briefly of my alternatives if I didn’t return to Elizabeth. I resigned myself to the inability to ever really leave her. He called it as it was. She was my heart and I couldn’t abandon her, even in death. Not even for the pain of watching her being destroyed by the others who controlled her mind. I would stay with her and protect her.
I had vowed that much to her in life, in not so many words, when we declared ourselves married. I turned toward the direction of her house. Hard as it was, I would stay.
Till death do us reunite, I vowed silently as I made my decision.
It was well after dark when I returned to the house. Elizabeth, her father and mother sat at the dining room table, set semi-formally. Her mother said little and stared at her food as she ate. Her father smiled with hazy eyes as he asked questions of a young man, a strapping-looking fellow, though a little skinny.
“You ever do much sugaring, son?” he asked, shifting the food in his mouth to compensate for a few missing teeth.
“Back on my parents’ farm, we did a lot before they died. Got a sister who lives in Georgia, she grows cotton with her husband. Ain’t heard from her in awhile. Got another sister in the big city. We haven’t talked in years neither.”
“What brings you here?” Elizabeth asked. The way she smiled at him made me uncomfortable. She sized him up appreciably and made sure he noticed.
“Well, ma’am–”
“Call me Elizabeth,” she said.
He smiled back, and his eyes said enough to make me want to knock him out of his chair.
“Well, Elizabeth, I just been working my way slowly up and down the country. Not a lot of jobs round the small towns, but farms always need some extra hands. I’ll be saving just enough to get down to my sister in Georgia. Stay on with her for awhile, I suppose.” The sudden hint of courteous southern accent caught me by surprise.
“What’s your name?” she asked with a tight smile.
“Daniel, ma’am,” he said with a teasing emphasis on ‘ma’am’.
“Well, the sooner you can start the better,” her father interrupted. “All my other chores have kept me busy. There’s a room set up in the barn. You’re welcome to use that. Meals are at seven, noon and six while you’re here. There’s a lot of buckets out there. Afraid they aren’t all together, maple syrup not being our main crop. They’re dotted all over the farm. Then, of course, we gotta boil it all down, get it bottled. Gonna have to work fast, the sap season’s winding down. I can pay you a fair percentage when it’s sold.”
“Sounds fair to me,” Daniel said to her father, but kept his eyes on Elizabeth.
The next day I followed Elizabeth out to the barn. She wore her father’s work pants with a plaid shirt, her hair tucked up under a man’s hat. She hadn’t said much of anything to her father all morning, but helped him care for the animals and then helped him stretch a new hide on a large wooden frame.
They stopped together and sipped from their bottles. Her father sighed heavily, leaning against a pole inside of the barn.
“I better go check on our new hire,” he said. “Can you handle the rest of this?” He gestured to the back of the barn where two chickens waited to be slaughtered in a small wire cage.
“I can go check on him,” Elizabeth offered. Her voice was lower, more insistent. Her father shrugged his indifference, tucked the bottle in his back pocket and picked up a small hatchet. The edge of the blade caught the light, and it flashed brightly as he twirled it, over and over, in his large hand. “Here, chickie, chickie, chickie,” he called as he walked toward them.
Elizabeth stepped into the mudroom and slipped out of the work clothes, which were covered in bits of hay, mud, manure and slimy bits of flesh debris from the freshly scraped hide. She stepped out of the pile nude, and made her way upstairs, lacking any modesty. She returned a few moments later in a dress and a black wool coat, her hair brushed and her face washed. She hummed to herself as she came down the stairs, smiling.
I walked with her into the thin woods, following a string her father had tied between trees leading to every productive maple on the property. She came upon one, peeked in the empty bucket and went on to the next, still humming.
Daniel stood in the distance pouring the contents of a bucket into a cauldron sitting in a wheelbarrow and then placing it back on its hook.
“Hello,” she said as we got closer.
“Well, Elizabeth, ma’am. Hello to you, too. How are you this fine day?” He smiled with shining dark brown eyes.
“Just fine. And yourself?”
“A lot better now,” he said and grinned.
“Daddy sent me to check on you,” she said, beginning to walk a circle around the tree and glancing to make sure his eyes followed her every move.
“Well, I assure you I’m working hard. Got about twenty trees done just this morning. Getting ready to take this load to the fire pit.”
He stood behind the wheelbarrow and picked it up by the handles, flexing his muscles with a little more added show than was necessary.
“Daddy was wondering if you needed any help,” she said, still circling, still watching him. It suddenly reminded me of the patients who circled the doctor’s desk. Hunting.
“No, I’m doing fine. But the company sure is nice. Gets lonely out here all by myself. No one to talk to but the trees. And they don’t say much back.” He flashed another smile.
“I’ll stay and talk to you,” she said.
“I’d love that. Your father’s paying me good money for this job, though, so I’ll work while we talk, if you don’t mind.” He smiled and started walking the wheelbarrow over the uneven terrain of the natural forest floor.
“So your first name is Daniel. What’s your middle name?” Elizabeth asked.
“Don’t have one,” he said and then grunted over a few rocky bumps, trying not to spill the sap.
“Everyone has a middle name,” she said. She walked slightly ahead of him, swaying her hips a little too graciously.
“Well, I don’t. My family was sort of cast out. My parents eloped against both the families’ wishes, so they were disowned, I guess you’d say. I guess they figured there weren’t any names they wanted to keep the tradition of.” He attempted to shrug while holding up the handles of the wheelbarrow.
“I’ll give you one,” she said. “Everyone needs to have a middle name.” A slow smile spread across Elizabeth’s face.
He stopped and carefully set the wheelbarrow down with a grunt.
“Alright then,” he smiled, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, slightly out of breath. “What is it?”
“Stewart. Your middle name is Stewart,” she said with an intoxicated grin.
“Alright, ma’am. I suppose that’ll work. Daniel Stewart.”
“You won’t mind if I just call you Stewart, will you? In honor of me giving it to you and all,” she said and swirled her skirt around her legs.
“I’d be honored.” I walked behind them back to the house, rethinking, again, my decision to stay. I t
hought of Anna; how upset she was when she found out Matthew had moved on. I was torn, stuck between my vow to stay by Elizabeth’s side and watching her move on and find happiness in someone else’s eyes. It’s not really her, I thought. The stronger Elizabeth is still in control, and she is the one making advances toward Daniel, I reminded myself. That helped a little, but not much, because it was still Elizabeth’s eyes that shined and flirted. It was still her lips that smiled, still her blood that flushed her face; though the blushing did seem to be on cue.
When the house came into view, I had talked myself fully in circles, deciding twice to leave and a last time to stay. He said he would be leaving and if I could hold out until then, I would have Elizabeth all to myself again. He set the wheelbarrow down and tossed a flirty grin Elizabeth’s way. As he stepped away, I stuck my foot out and he went sprawling, quite ungracefully, landing on his face in mud.
“Oh, Stewart, are you all right?” Elizabeth rushed over and held his arm, helping him up.
“I’m fine. Tripped over my own feet,” he said, looking back over the flat ground. “Mama always said I was clumsy as a newborn colt,” he said as he stood, slightly embarrassed.
My little prank backfired in my face as Elizabeth stood very close to him, brushing bits of dirt and small twigs from his shoulder. She lingered too close for too long with an alluring smile, and I threw a tiny pebble at his head to break their concentrated stare. He rubbed his head and went back to his work.
“Tell me about your family,” she said, as he dumped the sap into the boiler.
“Not much to tell,” he said, frowning slightly.
“You said you had sisters.”
“And I said we don’t talk much.”
“Why?”
“You’re a nosey one,” he said. His teasing grin lingered and so did her question. “We’re just real different. One’s a real homebody. She doesn’t like me wandering around like I do. The other one is real uppity. We never did get along.”
“Why?” He shot her an amused look with a hint of frustration and ran a hand through his dark hair. “C’mon. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so I don’t know about this stuff,” she said.
“We just don’t get along is all. It isn’t much different with siblings than it is with other people. Isn’t there anyone you didn’t get along with, no matter how hard you tried?”
“Yes, now that I think about it. A couple of people,” she said with a tight smile.
“Why don’t you get along?”
Her smile dropped, and her fists slowly curled into balls at her sides. “Because they interrupt. They keep trying to yell over me, and they won’t,” she paused, looked up, took a deep breath and said, “play along. It’s very frustrating.”
“Well, that sounds like my sister. Like I said, she’s the uppity type who can’t stand it if everyone isn’t looking at her, talking to her, talking about her. The whole world had to revolve around her, and there was hell to pay if it didn’t. I can’t stand her and she can’t stand me.”
“Why can’t she stand you?”
“She says I’m a habitual liar.”
“Are you?” she asked curiously.
“If I gave you an answer, how would you know if I was telling the truth?” he teased.
“I wouldn’t. But you don’t have a reason to lie to me,” she said.
“True. You seem harmless enough.” She didn’t answer, but stared at him, her face void of emotion. “Okay, maybe I’m a bit of a liar,” he said with a laugh.
“How so?” She folded her arms over her bulky coat and stepped out of the way as he continued to work.
“Well, what I told your father at dinner about my folks, that was a lie. Sort of.”
“You said your parents died.”
“I did. And they did. Sort of. They’re dead to me, so I guess that’s the same thing. I took off years ago, and I haven’t been home since. My one sister who still lives in Georgia has written to me, begging me to come home. She misses me, and her husband could use the help with the farm, so I told her I would. I’ve been working my way south for a few weeks now. But I’m taking my time about it, you see. Not real anxious to see my folks again.”
“Why not? Were they bad to you?”
“Not directly, I guess. My dad’s had some problems with women. He ran his business and our family into the ground with his habits, and my mom stuck by him the whole time. When I left home, they had lost just about everything. I hated him, and I couldn’t watch my family suffer, so I just took off.”
“So it’s been awhile since you’ve been home?”
“About six years.”
“Do they know where you are now?” she asked.
“No. Last I wrote them, I was in Connecticut.” I watched Elizabeth closely and could see her mind turning furiously behind her eyes.
“How long do you think you’ll stay on here?” she asked over her shoulder as she started to walk away.
“Till the work is done,” he said and then stopped, bucket mid-air, looking her up and down with obvious meaning. “Unless I find another reason to stay,” he added with a suggestive grin.
She smiled, blushed, and turned toward the house.
Later that evening at dinner, I stood against the far wall of the dining room, glaring at him. I had tried talking to him while he worked, but he had a strong mind. He didn’t hear me, he only saw Elizabeth.
I watched as they peeked up to steal glimpses of each other, much in the same way Elizabeth and I had in the hospital, and it made me furious and mournful of our time together.
A few days went by, and I swallowed my anger and heartache for the sake of staying near her. Glances turned to stares, smiles turned to giggles and innocent brushes turned to lingering touches.
She brought his lunch to him every day and stayed to talk, never minding the winter’s wind and sticky mud. She stopped wearing her father’s clothes and stopped working with him in the barn. He protested slightly, mostly missing the company and small talk, but she brushed him off and disappeared into the woods for hours at a time. I noticed neither of her parents argued with her. No matter what she said or did.
On a bitterly cold Monday toward the end of February, I realized where this was going with Elizabeth and Daniel. She stood against a tree to watch him work. Something in the way the two of them acted told me something had changed. The stakes had been raised, and this was more than causal flirting out of boredom.
He leaned in to kiss her, after a steady buildup of glances, giggles, teasing and suggestive looks that morning. I closed my eyes and turned away. It was time to visit David, I decided.
Stepping back into the halls of the hospital was slightly unnerving and uncomfortably familiar. Not much had changed. A few new faces. The new doctor walked by, holding Sobbing Susan’s hand and talking quietly. Three resident ghosts followed close behind him. Not menacingly, but curiously.
David couldn’t contain his smile when he saw me. He motioned with his head toward an empty room, and I followed him as he paused along the way to grab a stack of clean linen.
“Simon, how are you?” he asked in a whisper as he started to make the bed.
“All right.”
“How’s Elizabeth?”
“It got to be too much. I had to take a break.” I shrugged, looked down.
“What got to be too much? Is she getting worse?”
“No, not really. She’s not better, either. The stronger one is still in control. But she’s, ah, found a new interest,” I said and crossed my arms, leaning against the wall.
“You had to know that would happen,” David said.
“I know. But it’s still hard to watch.”
“You’re not messing with him, are you?” David grinned.
“Well, you know.” I smiled and shrugged.
“Simon, that’s not nice,” he whispered, his teasing smile lingering, his eyes dancing. “What did you do?”
“I tripped him. And threw a pebble at his head
. Nothing too ghastly.”
“You’re not the ghastly type,” he said as he smoothed down the flat white sheet. “Speaking of that, though, the king went on, finally. Ronnie’s been doing a whole lot better for it.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it. How’s Loretta?”
He paused, peeking out the door to be sure we were alone.
“She’s expecting,” he said with a grin when he turned around.
“Congratulations! That’s great.”
“It is, but it’s also complicated. She’ll have to leave here when she starts to show to avoid questions.”
“Where will she go?” I asked.
“North Carolina. I’ve got some family there, she’ll pretend she’s a widow and find work there till it gets close. Then she’ll go to my parents in Georgia and have the baby there.”
“It’s awful that you guys have to do things like this.”
“I’ll head down there when it gets close.” He frowned as he went about his work. “I hope I make it this time. I missed little David Jr. by two days. Hardest part is bein’ away from them for so long.”
I watched him work for a moment, unsure of what to say.
“Anna’s been back a few times,” he said, breaking the silence.
