Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  And he did see something: he was staring at the rocking chair in the corner of Jane's bedroom. It was a pretty chair, very old; Jane would sit in it once in a while, with a cup of tea.

  "Buster, come here," she beckoned softly. But Buster did not move; he continued to stare intently at the rocker with flattened ears and what Jane could only describe as a teeth-clenched howl. She stood there a long moment, poised between him and the rocking chair. She herself felt nothing; no presence, no sense of ... anything. She walked slowly over to the rocker and gingerly lowered herself into it. Nothing.

  "Come here, Buster," she coaxed.

  But Buster would not come in.

  Chapter 12

  Jane knew a thing or two about apparitions. She knew that people who saw them claimed they were accompanied by a sour smell ... or a chill movement of air ... or a deep sense of unease. She'd felt something of that sense of unease whenever she was in, or even around, the burying ground; but no such feelings were bothering her now. The air in the bedroom was cozy and warm, and smelled of nothing more sinister than potpourri. Buster, of course, was scaring her plenty; but Buster was the only one.

  She left the chair and called repeatedly to the dog, but he kept staring at the empty rocker, ignoring her. Eventually he stopped his moaning howl and turned cautiously away, head held low, tail between his legs, glancing behind him until he was safely down the hall and down the stairs. Jane remembered that she was running bath water and dashed into the bathroom before the inevitable flood. She took her bath, went to bed, slept unusually soundly, and didn't wake up until she heard the rumble of the John Deere in front of the house.

  In a moment Jane was up and getting dressed. She was very aware that she'd said nothing so far to Mac of the creepy series of events that had become part of life in Lilac Cottage. She wanted to tell him about last night. After all, he was a man of the earth; he'd know if Buster was just baying at the moon or not.

  But something held her back. For one thing, she still didn't — quite — trust Mac. He was so full of hostility; who knew where it might lead him? Anyway, even assuming that none of the pranks was his doing, he simply wasn't the kind of man who'd accept some weird interpretation of ordinary events — she found that out after being scratched by the rose. Mac McKenzie would demand proof of a perpetrator: photos, tape recordings, eyewitness accounts by sober groups of ten or more. No, Jane was not yet ready to confide to him her bizarre little tales.

  Mac was sitting in the tractor seat. The morning was mild and he wore no hat. He greeted her as he always did, with a slightly ironic, squinty hello. He'd already positioned the tractor so that the spade was encircling the male holly, ready for lifting. Jane went up to him and asked him if he needed any help.

  He nodded. "Keep an eye on the house; make sure I don't bang it up getting the holly out. Watch for buried wires or pipes, although we should be okay there." He showed her two or three hand signals to use, and Jane took up her position.

  Mac set to work on the hydraulic controls, lowering the huge steel spades into the ground to a depth of several feet. The spades sliced through the damp earth like butter, cutting through whatever roots lay in their path. Jane stood alongside, watching for problems, awed by the mechanical ruthlessness of the machine.

  By the time Mac got down from the tractor to take a closer look, Jane was having serious misgivings.

  "Can a tree really survive this kind of thing? Do you think we ought to have waited for a better time? What if something goes wrong? I'd never forgive myself."

  "Neither would I," he said.

  He got back on the tractor and began to control the process of lifting the holly from the patch of earth that had protected and nourished it for the past half century. Jane listened in agony to the sound of the last of its roots tearing and breaking and understood, at last, what Mac had been trying so hard to make her see: that some things in life are irreplaceable.

  And inseparable. The two hollies had grown old together, had slowly reached out over the years to one another across the expanse of her front porch. Together they'd sloughed off rain and snow and fog. Together they'd watched Mac grow up. And now, because she said so, the male holly was going to be torn away from its mate and forced to exist in dreary isolation, out of sight, out of harmony with its universe.

  "I'll move the door!" Jane cried over the chugging din of the tractor. She was wringing her bands with remorse. "I'll move it, I promise, I'll move it."

  Mac turned off the engine. The uprooting of the holly was now a fait accompli; anyone could see that. The root ball had been cut completely away from its larger root system and the holly lifted a foot or so out of the ground. She was too late.

  Mac walked over to her and stared at the uprooted tree. "So now you want to move the door." He said it completely without emotion, which made Jane extremely uneasy. She edged away from him an extra foot or so.

  "I should have done it in the first place," she said in a tremulous voice. "It's not a big-deal doorway. It has no pediment, no sidelights. I should have done it in the first place. I'm so sorry, Mac," she said, biting her lower lip. "I wasn't thinking."

  "You were thinking, all right," he said in the same lifeless tone. "You just weren't feeling."

  It hurt, the way a slap across her face would hurt. The one thing in life she never wanted to be accused of was not feeling. "Can we put it back?" she asked in an impossibly tiny voice.

  "Of course we can put it back. We can put it anywhere now. It doesn't make any difference. Now."

  "It does make a difference! It will mend better here. It's used to being here. Used to the exposure ... the soil ... used to her," Jane said, pointing to its berry-laden mate. She sounded like an idiot, projecting human feelings onto the holly that way. But she didn't care. All she cared about was putting things back the way they were, before she'd come and turned them upside-down.

  "This is so typical," Mac said tiredly, more to himself than to her. He climbed back onto the seat of his tractor.

  "I ... what do you mean?"

  He folded his forearms across the steering wheel the way a cowboy would fold them over the horn of his saddle. "You people can't sit still, and you can't seem to let anything else sit still, either. If something's in your way, hell, knock it down. Tear it out. So what if it's been around longer than you have. You have a vision," he said derisively. "And nothing can get in the way of your vision."

  "I said I was sorry," she said humbly.

  "Right." He pushed a button and the diesel sprang back to life.

  Jane wanted to run and hide under a bushel basket, but she forced herself to stay and watch while Mac lowered the holly carefully back into its hole. That done, he used the spade to tamp down the earth around the replanted root ball. He was finished. The holly was on its own.

  "Is there anything I can do to help it live?" she asked, feeling miserable.

  "Water. Plenty of it. Then leave it alone. You can do more harm than good at this point."

  He backed the tractor away from her house and headed back to his nursery. Jane ran to her aunt's potting shed with all the urgency of a surgeon in triage and emerged with an old galvanized sprinkling can. She made half a dozen trips to the bathtub to fill the can before she realized there was an outside spigot on the side of the cottage. Presumably there was a hose around, too.

  Gawd. A gardener I'm not, she thought morosely. Really, it amazed her how little she'd learned in life. Ten-year-old Jerry knew more about nature and survival than she did. Part of the problem was that, like Cissy, she was a city girl thrown into a semirural setting on a remote island. There were no building supers to call when the faucets leaked; no all-night drugstores around to buy Robitussin from when she was sick. No discos, no Wal-Marts, no Dunkin' Donuts. It was disorienting.

  Still, she was learning, even if slowly. She sat on the steps next to the holly as if she were sitting next to a hospital bed comforting a patient in intensive care. "I'll make a deal with you," she whispered, lean
ing close to the glossy green leaves. "Promise not to die, and I'll promise to decorate both of you with white lights this Christmas."

  As soon as she made the promise, she realized that she wouldn't be on the island this Christmas. "No problem," she added. "I'll make it a condition of the sale."

  ****

  The next morning Jane went wandering through the lanes of town again. Her walks past the colonial houses and their picket-fenced gardens were becoming a habit, almost an addiction. The old "runner's high" was being replaced by the new stroller's contentment.

  Today Jane had a specific goal in mind: to find the Quaker Burial Ground and, with any luck, the Cursed Rose itself. She wondered what a Cursed Rose looked like. Did it grow gnarled and crooked? Was it massive and intimidating? Was there something that would make it stand out from the pack? Hopefully the caretaker at the Quaker Burial Ground would have some clues.

  She started out for the cemetery with clear directions in her head, but after detouring down Fair Street past the old Quaker Meeting House (which was closed), and then meandering across Lucretia Mott and down Pleasant, then across Candle House Lane, up New Dollar Lane and across Milk Street, she ended up, at last, on Vesper, one of the streets which she remembered bordered the cemetery.

  She walked a fair distance out of town before deciding she'd got it wrong after all. Disheartened, she was about to turn around when Mac McKenzie pulled up in his dark green truck.

  "You look lost," he said, rolling down his window.

  Jane reluctantly explained her problem.

  "You're looking for Vestal Street, not Vesper," he said. He reached over and opened the door to the passenger side. "Get in; I'll take you there."

  Jane climbed into the cab of his truck feeling less competent than ever. Mac didn't allude to the holly fiasco, but after a little neutral chitchat about the weather, she felt obliged to bring it up herself.

  "I owe you some money for your time lifting and replanting my holly," she said in a businesslike voice. "Please send me a bill." She thought of Jerry's four stitches and Mac's fight with Celeste, all for nothing. She wanted to ask Mac how his son was doing but didn't dare.

  "What's doing at the Quaker Burial Ground?" Mac asked, not unpleasantly.

  He honestly didn't seem to guess why she wanted to go there. "I, ah, thought I'd just look around ... see what the rose situation was ... whether there was one ... uh ... that looked like the one on Judith's grave."

  Mac turned to her and laughed out loud; the surprise in his face was genuine. "Well, here we are," he said, pulling up alongside a stile-fenced meadow. "See for yourself."

  It was a lovely spot, on high ground the way cemeteries often are. The view was rural and expansive, marred only occasionally by new construction. As for the cemetery itself, there didn't seem to be any: only a big grassy field, dotted by a couple of lonely headstones. Well over to one side, there were several dozen more headstones squeezed together. But mostly it was plain, mowed grass. All that was missing were the picnic tables.

  "I don't get it," Jane said, her voice a blank. "Where is everybody? This is supposed to be a major burial ground for the Quakers."

  Mac was leaning against the front fender of his pickup, with his arms folded across his chest and a glint in his eye, watching her confusion. He was wearing his heavy canvas barn jacket, which made her wonder whether she was keeping him from a job somewhere. "They're there," he said at last. "Ten thousand Quakers — all the movers and shakers of old Nantucket.

  "It's a funny thing," he said, his voice becoming pensive. "The Quakers made Nantucket rich, made it a household name around the world. And in the end, they willed themselves into oblivion. What you see is almost symbolic."

  "But ... but I don't see anything," she said, as baffled as ever. "Including any roses — cursed or blessed." There was nothing growing in the field except a few shrubs along one section of the stile fence. As for there being an actual caretaker on the premises — well, Cissy wasn't the only naïf on the island.

  "Can we go in?" she asked.

  Mac nodded, and they climbed over the fence together and began walking toward the cluster of headstones at one end. A candy wrapper and a crumpled sheet of paper littered the field; Mac picked them up and stuffed them in his pocket.

  "Will you tell me about the Cursed Rose now?" she asked him softly.

  He answered her question with a question. "And your shoulder?"

  She stooped down to pick up a bit of litter on her own. "I have to admit, it's better." If only she knew why.

  He paused and scanned the horizon, then pointed out a newly built and rather pompous house nearby. "So. It's finished," he said with obvious distaste. "What a piece of ..."

  They walked on, and Mac got around, finally, to the Legend of the Cursed Rose. "All the versions you heard the night of Phillip's dinner party were malarkey. Do you know anything at all about Quaker history?" he asked, throwing her one of his you've-been-to-college looks.

  She shrugged. "I know the usual amount: that the Friends were nonviolent, had no formal creed, heeded an ‘inner light,' and were all for equal rights. Oh, and they spoke in thees and thous." She added, "I do know that the Quakers were a major force on Nantucket."

  "You can see why. They put a premium on hard work, simple living, education, and equality. How could Nantucket go wrong with a value system like that? During the Revolution half the islanders were Quakers — that's why Nantucket stayed neutral in the war — and their influence on island life was profound. After that their popularity continued, but by then things were going very wrong — am I boring you?" he asked self-consciously.

  "No! No, please continue," she said, intrigued as much by his enthusiasm for the subject as by the history itself. He was speaking in whole paragraphs; it was a breakthrough of sorts. "I want to know."

  "Good. The point is, disownment — ejection from the Society of Friends — was the only penalty these people had for an offense, no matter how big or how small. Of course, anyone would agree that disownment was justifiable for the serious violations. For example, forty-seven Nantucket Quakers fought in the Revolution; under their strict code of nonviolence, all forty-seven were disowned. Or say someone married outside the Society, which happened. You could argue that that was a serious breach as well, and worthy of disownment.

  "But somewhere along the line, the Elders got caught up in going after the trivial stuff, all in the name of simple living. If you wore a fancy little buckle, for instance — disowned. If you went dancing, disowned. Furniture too fancy? Disowned. Drunk? Disowned.

  "It got to the point that for every one new member born into the Society, five were disowned. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that those numbers can't work for long. The Society kept on petering out, and by the middle of the nineteenth century there were only about three hundred practicing Quakers on Nantucket."

  They paused to read a headstone: EMILY W. HUSSEY, WIDOW OF JOSEPH W. HUSSEY, DIED SEPTEMBER 1859, AGED 63 YEARS, 9 MONTHS.

  "She would've been one of them," he commented. "The last formal Meeting of the Friends on the island wasn't long after that," he said. "By 1900, when the island's population had dropped from ten thousand to three thousand, there were no Quakers left at all. An enlightened and wildly successful movement — finished. And why? Because they lost their way. The quest for simplicity became a corruption of power."

  "Is that why there are no headstones?" Jane ventured. "Because they were considered a vanity?"

  He shot an appreciative glance at her. "Exactly. The few headstones you see were from the reform movements that came too late for Nantucket. There were the Hicksites, and later the Gurnyites. It was the Gurnyites who began using headstones, around 1837. You'll find no stone here that predates that time."

  "But where does the Cursed Rose fit in?" Jane asked, although even as she said it, she thought she knew. It's as if the answer were stored in some locked box in her mind, and all she needed was the key. Mac had the key.

&nb
sp; "Ah, that Cursed Rose." He smiled to himself and pressed an upturned clod of earth back into the ground with his heel. "That part's a little tricky. Sometime around 1830, a man was buried here. His widow, distraught by the notion that there would be no marker on his grave, dared to plant a rose on it."

  His voice became low and thoughtful, as if he were reaching back to the moment a century and a half earlier. "You have to understand that while the Friends permitted the planting of herbs and vegetables in their kitchen gardens, they disapproved of flowers. Like music and art and literature, flowers were frivolous. So the widow's deed was doubly offensive: she committed an act of defiance with a thing of beauty."

  An act of defiance with a thing of beauty. It simply amazed Jane that Mac McKenzie was capable of such eloquence and sympathy. She did not know the man at all. "What happened to her?" Jane asked, although of course she knew.

  "Disowned. She's not buried here, you can count on that. But the question you should be asking is, what happened to the rose? I have no answer to that. What I've told you so far is fairly common knowledge to anyone who bothers picking up a history of Nantucket.

  "But there's also a story, less well known, that an outraged Elder personally yanked out the rose, and that he died immediately afterward. That, I assume, is where the Legend of the Cursed Rose began. You can safely forget the brain fever, forget the gangrene." Mac let out a soft, rueful laugh. "What he probably died of was hypertension."

  Jane plunged her hands deep in her pockets as they continued their stroll among the headstones. The wind whipped her auburn hair in long, snaking tendrils around her face. She wished she'd worn a sweater under her light jacket; it was a gray, penetrating day, and she felt it keenly on the hill. "I don't suppose it was a rugosa rose," she said without much hope.

  "Don't know that either; but I'd guess not. The Quakers would have found the Rosa rugosa too useful to be so offended by it: it had medicinal value, after all. I suspect the so-called Cursed Rose was pleasing to the senses, and that was all."