Roses

by Leila Meacham

  “What presumption!” Mary scoffed, finding the will to push out of his arms. “And what if I feel the same way about us when you return?”

  “You won’t.” He smiled, not with the smugness of Richard Bentwood, but with the quiet, unshakable confidence of his knowledge of her.

  Somehow she managed to flounce back to her side of the car, straightening her dress. “Put it out of your head, Percy Warwick. It’s not going to happen.” She looked around for her hat and saw that it had landed in a field, where a cow was happily munching it for its dinner.

  “It will happen,” he said, starting the motor.

  Mary could not look at him as they pulled back onto the road. There was now a new enemy in her midst, far more insidious than the boll weevil, more deadly than hail or flood or drought, more frightening than a cartel of Boston bankers lying in wait to foreclose on Somerset. Now she knew what was behind her strange antagonism toward him these last few years. He had the power to make her love him. He could weaken her will to his. Marriage to him would mean combining their interests, expanding the Warwick timberlands at the expense of Somerset. She would become absorbed into the Warwick identity, lose the special distinction associated with a Toliver. Their children would be raised as Warwicks, and the Toliver line would perish. Miles was no Toliver. He was his mother’s son, a Henley, a weak-willed visionary. She was the only true remaining Toliver. From her would come the sons to sustain the line, but only if she married a man who shared her commitment. Percy Warwick was not such a man.

  “It would behoove us both,” she said, staring straight ahead, “never to put ourselves in this position again.”

  “I promise nothing, Gypsy,” he said.

  At her door, she extended her hand formally. “Thank you for meeting my train, Percy. It’s not necessary for you to come in.”

  Percy ignored her hand and slid his arm around her waist. “Now, don’t worry about what we discussed,” he said. “The subject can wait until I return.”

  She lifted her face to stare straight into his eyes. “I want with all my heart for you to return, Percy, but not to me.”

  “It must be to you,” he said. “There can be no one else. Now, go easy on Miles. He’s been like a hound beset with wolves this year. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that he’s no farmer. He’s made a mess of things, as I’m sure you’ll point out, but the man has done the best he could.”

  Mary nodded to indicate she understood. “That’s my girl,” he said, and drew her to him to kiss her lips lightly. She tensed against the rise of passion, a self-betrayal his amused gaze indicated he’d felt. “I’ll see you later,” he said, leaving her to descend the steps. Behind her, she heard the door open and Sassie’s exclamation of welcome, but it was a long few seconds before she could take her gaze from his confident stride to the Pierce-Arrow.

  Chapter Twelve

  HOWBUTKER, OCTOBER 1919

  The train was late. For the tenth time in as many minutes, Mary glanced at the lapel watch pinned to her outdated dark green serge suit before once more staring down the empty track.

  “The train was probably late in leaving Atlanta,” Jeremy Warwick offered, to ease the mounting tension in their little group gathered on the platform. There were four of them—Jeremy and Beatrice Warwick, Abel DuMont, and Mary—waiting among a larger crowd that had come to the station to welcome “the boys” home from the war. The high school band was there, lined up and ready to strike into “Stars and Stripes Forever” the moment a uniformed figure stepped down from the train. A banner reading WELCOME HOME, HOWBUTKER’S OWN was draped over the entrance to the station, and one like it stretched across a section of Courthouse Circle for the parade scheduled later that day.

  The war had been over for nearly a year, but not for Miles and Ollie and Percy or for thousands of other members of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) delayed in France—either by the scarcity of ships to bring them home or by occupation duty in Germany.

  Only Percy would be coming home unscathed. Miles had been severely gassed toward the end of the war, and rather than leave him behind, Captains Warwick and DuMont volunteered to remain after the armistice to help demilitarize a hostile Rhineland. Shortly after Christmas, as a member of the occupying garrisons, Ollie had been injured by a grenade that had all but severed his leg from his hip.

  It had been a long twenty-six months for the returning soldiers’ families. The war years themselves had been worrying enough, with newspaper accounts of soldiers enduring unspeakable anguish and hardships of combat, and then of influenza raging throughout the AEF, striking as many as ten thousand a week. But then reports at the war’s end had caused even more agony with tales of wounded men still in critical condition being moved from base hospitals to forwarding camps, where they were left to convalesce without medical supplies and attention.

  At news of this, the families’ hopes sank to their lowest depths of the war. It had been bad enough imagining the boys engaged in trench warfare, shivering in tents on quagmire floors without sufficient fuel or blankets during the coldest winters Europe had ever known, but to think of Miles and Ollie wounded and forgotten, cut off from home, and Percy facing the same possible fate every day was an even worse nightmare.

  There had been virtually no mail received on either side of the Atlantic. The few letters that had trickled in from overseas complained of the abysmal mail service, and the families—who shared every letter among them—could hear their sons’ plaintive cries of loneliness between the raillery of their lines.

  Beatrice Warwick, unable to deny her, had allowed Lucy, too, to pore over her son’s letters, reading after reading. By now, Mary’s former roommate was installed at Mary Hardin-Baylor and had made frequent weekend visits to Houston Avenue, where she had managed to insinuate herself into the Warwicks’ reluctant good graces, which included a guest room. Lucy preferred their forced hospitality to the lack of any at all in the Tolivers’ cheerless mansion up the street.

  Naturally she would be here today, Mary thought with familiar irritation as she glanced in Lucy’s direction. Slimmer and fashionably turned out in a becoming mauve dress whose hugging lines and shorter length showed off her new figure, Lucy had strolled away to check her reflection once again in the station house windows. Lord, how that girl could wriggle in where she was determined to be. Mary had learned through the Warwicks’ cook that Beatrice—a formidable woman hard to outmaneuver—was at a loss as to how to deal with the nuisance Lucy had become.

  Earlier that day when Percy’s parents had called for her in their shiny new Packard—Lucy preening in the backseat—her onetime roommate had looked delighted to see her appear in her old green serge. “You look marvelous!” she’d cried as Mary lifted her outdated long skirt to get in. “I’ve loved you in that for years!”

  “So has Percy,” Beatrice drawled from the front seat. “How thoughtful of you to wear something he will remember, Mary Lamb. So much has changed around here since the boys have been away.”

  Lucy lapsed into silence, and a glance at her pouting lips told Mary she realized she’d been put firmly in her place. Mary felt a warm glow of appreciation toward Beatrice Warwick. She knew she stood high in her respect and affections, higher than in her own mother’s. She would brook no one patronizing one of their own, especially an outsider whose designs on her son were as clear as well water.

  Mary looked affectionately at her sitting stoutly beside her husband—suited, gloved, and hatted in expensive black. She had donned what everyone called her “widow’s weeds” the day the boys left for war and had dressed in black ever since. It wasn’t that she had no faith in the boys’ deliverance from the jaws of death, she said. It was her way of protesting war in general, the stupidity of nations to engage in barbarity to settle their differences. She wore mourning, she said, for all the sons who would not make it home.

  On the platform, Mary turned her glance from Lucy to Abel DuMont. From his expression, she could tell that alread
y Ollie’s father, a widower since Ollie was ten, was visualizing the tragedy of his son descending the train on crutches. Surgeons were already scheduled in Dallas to restore the leg as much as possible. Moved by sympathy for him, she slipped her hand under his arm, gloved to hide the giveaway signs of her labor. His deepened crow’s-feet crinkled in lieu of a smile, and he patted her hand in understanding. Mary hoped that he’d forgiven her for not wearing the beautiful day dress with a matching cape she’d left hanging in her closet. She had modeled it in a fashion show for the DuMont Department Store. As a reward for participating, all the young women who had paraded down the ramp, town girls like herself, were given the dresses they had modeled. Mary was certain the fashion show had been arranged for her benefit, as yet another way that Abel might introduce a new dress into her wardrobe for the homecoming events. She’d appreciated the gesture, but the Tolivers were not ready for charity yet.

  From far away came the sound of the long awaited train whistle. “I hear it!” someone shouted, and the crowd stirred anew, moving into the small, elite group that had stepped closer to the edge of the platform.

  Mary felt as if her heart were ready to burst through her chest wall as the whistle blew again and a thin spiral of smoke rose in the distance. How would he be changed… Percy Warwick, the town’s golden boy? Surely war must have altered him. Would he return with the same easy manner, the quick laugh, the confidence with which he’d always met life? Would he still want to marry her?

  Even now her blood warmed at the memory of their last moments together on this very spot over two years ago. In front of everyone, he had drawn her into his arms… a small enclave of intimacy in the midst of the crowd. She hadn’t seen much of him between the time he’d brought her home from the train and the day he left for officers’ training camp, or in the week’s interim between his return home and his departure for overseas. Even if she hadn’t spent every day at the plantation and evenings unraveling Miles’s ledgers, she doubted he’d have tried to see her. He was playing a waiting game, she was sure of it—waiting for her to tire of running Somerset, hoping she’d be run to earth with the struggle of it by the time he came home.

  “My intention still stands, Mary,” he’d said that day. “When I come home, I intend to marry you.”

  “Never,” she’d vowed, her heart pounding so hard, she was sure he could hear it. “Not if it means giving up Somerset.”

  “You’ll have it out of your system by then.”

  “Never, Percy. You’ll have to accept that.”

  “I accept only that I want us to be married.”

  “Why?” She’d thrown the question at him, memorizing how the sun struck his hair, the deep tan of his skin, the clarity of his eyes. He’d held his billed hat under his arm. “I’ve thought it over and decided it’s… simple lust between us. That’s it, isn’t it? I don’t think you even like me.”

  He had laughed. “What has liking got to do with it? And of course there’s lust, but I want to marry you because I love you. I’ve loved you all your life, ever since you smiled at me through your cradle bars. I’ve never considered marrying anyone else.”

  She’d heard him in disbelief. Percy… who could have any girl he wanted… in love with her since she was born? How had she missed it?

  She’d relived that moment thousands of times in the twenty-six months of his absence… remembered how he’d placed his hat back on, slipped his arm around her waist, and pulled her to him and kissed her… how they’d parted numb with desire, drowning in each other’s eyes. She’d been vaguely aware of the ripple of shock around them, of her brother’s startled gaze, Beatrice’s raised brows, Abel’s quickly averted glance, and finally… Ollie’s resigned smile when he approached her as Percy left to join his parents.

  “Don’t worry, Mary,” he’d said, his eyes grave, the twinkle extinguished. “I’ll see he gets home in one piece.”

  “Ollie, dear…” There had been a catch in her voice as she’d said his name. She’d only then realized what she’d been too blind, too single-focused, to see. Ollie was in love with her, too. Now he was bowing from the competition, yielding the field to Percy.

  “See that you take care of yourself, too, Ollie,” she’d said, and hugged him hard, his custom-fitted uniform already too snug from the extra pounds he’d gained while home on leave.

  Thinking now of Ollie, she was chilled by a suspicion that had haunted her often since the telegram arrived informing them of his injury. The few subsequent letters had offered sparse details. The families had learned only that Percy and Ollie were together on patrol duty when a grenade landed close by. In the still, dark hours of her many sleepless nights, Mary had asked herself, Could it be—was it possible—that Ollie had sacrificed himself for Percy?

  A mauve sleeve pushed in beside her, and Mary turned in exasperation to her friend. “Lucy, do give the Warwicks the first opportunity to embrace their son.”

  Lucy’s blue eyes darkened in offended injury. “Do you think I wouldn’t, Mary Toliver? You, of all people, should understand how I feel about Percy.”

  “I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t understand how you feel about Percy.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.” Lucy spoke in an edgy whisper so the Warwicks would not overhear. “Everybody else might think that I believe I have a chance with Percy, but you know that I know I can never win him. But what’s to keep me from loving him, praying for him, being glad he’s home safe until he falls in love with someone else?”

  “Your pride, maybe?” Mary suggested. How could any woman lay herself so unabashedly open for pain, like a puppy happily exposing its underbelly to be kicked?

  “Pride?” Lucy chortled. “Horsefeathers! Pride is nothing but a hobble that confines you to a small space with no chance of ever seeing what’s over the mountain. You’d better take a long look at pride, sweetie. It could be your undoing.”

  “Here they come!”

  The train was slowing, nearing the station. Every neck craned in the direction of its approach. Abel, tightening his grip on his cane, solemnly drew himself erect. Lucy forgotten, Mary felt her eyes smart. Already tears were running down Jeremy Warwick’s cheeks, and Beatrice withdrew a voluminous lace-edged handkerchief from the black sleeve of her dress and held it to her mouth. The band director raised his baton. The stationmaster took his stand importantly beside the place the train would stop.

  “I see them!” whooped a man who had moved on down the track. Mary recognized him as a farmer who had lost his oldest son at Belleau Wood. He whipped off his hat and began to wave and shout at the faces peering from the train windows. Mary experienced a sudden, aching desire for her mother to be standing beside her, but she was lying at home, a wasted figure swallowed by her bed. Her long battle with alcoholism was finally over, but the end had been bought at what may have been too dear a price. Only time would tell, and her mother’s willingness to live. Maybe Miles’s homecoming would help. Maybe he was in time to save her, and they could be a family again.

  Lucy squealed in her ear. The train was gradually screeching to a stop, and all on the platform stared at the open windows, looking for familiar faces smiling back, the sight of uniforms. The stationmaster hopped on board.

  “What’s keeping them?” Lucy demanded.

  “They’re probably gathered in the corridor, waiting to get off,” Beatrice said.

  “Maybe Ben is alerting the boys to the mob that’s waiting,” Jeremy surmised, referring to the stationmaster.

  “Or maybe my son needs help,” Abel remarked. “The T and P wires such information ahead, you know.”

  “Ben would have said something to us about that,” Beatrice said in her rational tone.

  “Well, where the hell are they?” Lucy whined as the crowd fidgeted and waited.

  The stationmaster reappeared and stepped quickly down from the platform from which the honorees would descend, holding up his hands to the crowd. “All right, everybody, Captains Tol
iver and Warwick and DuMont will be out in just a moment. I’ll ask you all to move back except for the families. Remember that there are other passengers aboard. I’d ask you to allow them to get through to the station house.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ben,” snapped Beatrice. “Stop talking and get the boys down here!”

  The stationmaster bowed and stepped again onto the platform. “Gentlemen!” he called into the car.

  The crowd held its collective breath, then let it out in a huge cheer as Percy stepped out. The band struck up, and the Warwicks and Lucy rushed forward, but he appeared to be searching over their heads for someone else. Mary slowly put up her hand, and his gaze lit upon her and held for a long, heart-stopping moment before he descended the steps and was lost to her. She caught only a glimpse of his uniform hat before he was set upon, blocked from sight by Beatrice’s towering hat and his father’s broad-shouldered figure. Poor Lucy hopped up and down behind them like a bright little fledgling pushed from the nest, unable to break through the barrier of their embraces.

  Mary felt her whole body explode with joy. Relief thundered through her. He was alive… he was well… he was whole. He was home.

  After another breath-held minute, Ollie appeared, his smile as beaming as ever. Mary’s gloved fingers flew to her lips. Beside her, Abel stiffened and uttered a strangled cry. “Oh, my God. They’ve cut off his leg.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Miles followed shortly, stepping out onto the platform with the blinking gaze of a man seeing sunlight after a long confinement underground. Both Mary and Abel stared mutely. Ollie waved at the suddenly quiet crowd with one of his crutches, then adroitly maneuvered down the steps with his usual jauntiness. The right leg of his army jodhpurs had been brought up and pinned at the knee, leaving the rest of the pant hanging as flat as an empty bellows.