Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  He leaned back in his chair. “Who?”

  “Broom. That’s not his real name, of course; people just call him that because of his hair, and because he’s so skinny. He scared me when I first saw him—I was only thirteen, and he was already tall as a tree. But he liked me right away, and it never mattered to him that I couldn’t talk. We had in common that we were both different from other people, so it was easy to be friends. He’s been my friend even longer than Eppy or Doc Stoneman.

  “Did you know he lives by himself in his own house? Outside of town on the Chambersburg Road. It’s not much of a house, but it’s his. He used to live there with his mother—she wasn’t quite right in the head; she took in people’s washing for a living—until one day she disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to her, and then finally somebody thought to ask Broom. Why, she died, he told them. He found her dead and cold in the bed one morning. So he buried her in the backyard, and kept on as if nothing had happened. They dug her up, of course, and found out she’d had a heart attack. Everybody thought it was silly and wrong, but they went ahead and reburied her anyway in the indigents’ graveyard outside of town, because of the law against burying kin in your own yard.”

  She paused to wet her throat with another sip of tea. “After that, nobody wanted to take Broom in, but they didn’t want to send him away, either, so finally people just stopped worrying about him and let him stay where he was. He still lives in his mother’s house, and he gets jobs sometimes, but they don’t usually last long. People like the minister and Doc Stoneman look out for him as much as they can, but mostly he’s on his own. He’s like a child, pretty much. He’d never hurt a fly, even when the children torment him. Most folks are so used to him, they don’t even see him anymore.”

  No wonder her hair was always falling down from the knot she tied it in, Tyler mused, gazing at her through half-closed lids; she had that shiny, slippery kind of hair that wouldn’t stay put no matter how many pins she stuck in it. The kind of hair a man wanted to set free with his fingers. And then bury his face in. Her voice still beguiled him, and so did the sensual play of her lips over her white teeth and her pretty pink tongue. Everything she said enchanted him. But the minutes ticked by, and the fog of fatigue in his brain thickened. He encouraged her with appropriate noises and movements of his head, but he heard less and less of her fervent, soft-voiced soliloquy on the baby rabbits she’d set free, her prayers for Doc Stoneman’s recovery in the Harrisburg sanatorium, Eppy Odell’s exceptional qualities as wife, mother, and friend. He’d never associated sensuality with somnolence; nevertheless, as physically stirred as he was by Carrie’s subtle loveliness tonight, he found himself unable to resist the strong, gently sexual pull of languor that stole over him while he tried to make sense of her words. The last thing he heard clearly before sleep swallowed him up was, “His name’s Old Crutchy, and he looked so pathetic I had to give him a nickel, even though I knew he was spoofing. He comes every few months and begs for pennies, or sometimes it’s eggs, and each time he pretends he’s got a different handicap. Today it was an ulcer on his elbow, but he’d just smeared pokeberry on it, you could tell by the smell.”

  Carrie watched Tyler’s eyelids flutter closed for the final time, his chin sink to his chest and stay there. “Doc Stoneman says Old Crutchy’s a tramp, and tramps aren’t the same as hobos,” she said softly, experimentally. His breathing stayed slow and heavy; he didn’t move. “Hobos will work if they have to, he says, but tramps are just friendless outcasts who’d rather starve than work. And bums are somewhere in between.” She set her glass on the table without a sound and stood up carefully. “Artemis says there wouldn’t be any beggars if there weren’t any givers. He made a sign once that said, ‘Cross Dog Here,’ but it didn’t work. Doc Stoneman said tramps have a gossip network, and they’re always telling each other which houses they can get a handout from and which they can’t.”

  She smiled, partly because she felt silly, and partly for the pleasure of looking at Tyler—she guessed she could call him that now. Tyler Wilkes. My friend, Dr. Tyler A. Wilkes. She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.

  He was as beautiful asleep as he was awake, though in a different way. She cocked her head, studying him. Artemis looked slack and empty-headed when he slept; Broom looked like a little boy, more childlike and defenseless than ever. But Dr. Wilkes—Tyler—looked serious and grave, as though he wasn’t sleeping at all but pondering some knotty problem with his eyes closed. He wore no jacket or vest, and no collar on his clean white shirt; he’d rolled his shirtsleeves over his elbows, and she could see that his forearms were tan and muscular, the soft hair on them a lighter shade of brown than the hair on his head. He still needed a haircut, and she still liked the shaggy curls that fell on his forehead and tickled his neck. The bones in his face were proud and fine, which must be why he always looked handsome no matter how weary he was. His lips, so clean and strong, stirred memories of the first time he’d kissed her. And the second time. She sighed.

  She drew her notebook out of her pocket without making any noise. Dear Tyler, she scribbled, then paused for a full minute to stare at the word she’d never written before.

  I bet you wish I was still mum! Before, when I could talk, though, I never was such a magpie as tonight, so I think it will go away and the next time you see me, I will be normal! I’m sorry to have kept you awake this late, but to tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure I’d do it again. I’m so very glad we are friends now.

  Sincerely yours,

  Carrie Wiggins.

  Stealing to the screen door on tiptoe, she saw that the rain had stopped and a milky fog was creeping in, swirling low on the ground, ghostlike. She stepped outside, wincing when the door hinge squeaked—but Tyler didn’t wake. Dr. Stoneman had once told her that a tired M.D. could go to sleep anywhere, in any position. She threw a last look back through the screen. “Night,” she called in a secretive whisper. “Good night, Tyler Wilkes. I love you.” She touched her fingertips to her lips, then to the rusty screen. Then she set out for home through the mist.

  12

  CARRIE HAD NAMES FOR everything.

  Tyler discovered this by accident on a hot June afternoon when she suggested, after a long walk on Dreamy Mountain, that they sit down for a rest on Watch-From Rock. Her husky voice definitely capitalized the words, and for a moment he looked around for a sign or a plaque near the high, flat limestone boulder she was indicating. There was none—but there was a fabulous, unobstructed view of South Creek and the wide valley through which it wound, and beyond them both the spectacle of the sun dropping down behind the Tuscaroras forty miles in the distance.

  As June turned into July, she introduced him to other points of interest in her personal landscape: Butterfly Field, Come-Upon Pond, Possum Stump, Nighthawk Hill. She made an expert guide, and part of the pleasure he took in her company nowadays was the opportunity to absorb the naturalist’s lore she dispensed with effortless abandon. Carrie saw everything, and her ability to observe the patterns and minutiae in nature impressed the scientist in him. Wherever they went she would repeatedly warn, in a gentle, motherly tone that always enchanted him, “Careful, Ty, don’t step there,” thus saving the life of the snail, baby turtle, or pink lady’s slipper he’d been about to trample. A five-toed smudge in the stream bank, she informed him, was a muskrat’s footprint, but that four-toed one on the trail was a fox’s. “Oh, look, chipmunk trails,” she’d exclaim, pointing to nothing but an overgrown tangle of weeds, through which there were never any visible highways that he could see. That sharp chicking sound in the underbrush was a white-eyed vireo—which was similar to but not to be confused with the chicking of the crested flycatcher. Crushed jewelweed stems were an antidote to poison ivy, she explained, politely hiding her amazement that he, a doctor, didn’t know that. She taught him the interesting lesson that scooping up a handful of whirligig beetles from the surface of Come-Upon Pond made your palm smell like apples for an hour afte
rward.

  Birds seemed tamer around Carrie, squirrels less inclined to scamper away, and it wasn’t his imagination. Once he watched her pet a bumblebee’s back with her fingertip while it gorged, oblivious, on sweet clover nectar. The world was simultaneously simpler and more complex when he was with her, for she taught him a new way to see. And she taught him to listen for the loveliest, most haunting music on the mountain: the song of the hermit thrush.

  Today, while he waited for her in a buttercup-covered field at the foot of High Dreamer (what would she call it, he mused, Wildflower Meadow? Honeybee Pasture?), he made an attempt to take careful sensory note of the sights, sounds, and smells around him, the way Carrie would; but without her sharp-eyed, beguiling presence he lacked the initiative. “What are you looking at?” he was always asking her, watching as she stared, minute after minute, entranced, at something completely unremarkable in the distance. She’d look at him in mild surprise and answer, “Why, the sky,” or “the sun on that tree.” Then he’d see it: the extraordinary cinnamon color of oak tree branches in the hour before dusk, the elegant silhouette of green-gold leaves against an opal horizon.

  Carrie, Carrie. She was on his mind constantly. How flat his life in Wayne’s Crossing must have been—he could hardly remember it—before she’d shared her secret with him and they’d begun to meet in fields, beside brooks, and on meandering mountain trails. Innocent though it was, they kept their friendship hidden from other people because they both knew it would be misunderstood—and also, of course, because Carrie was in constant dread of being seen or heard speaking. And speak was what she did now at fervent length. Ty clasped his hands behind his head and peered up at the drifting clouds, wondering how he’d have fared if she’d been any less engaging or fascinating a confidante—because, like it or not, he was the bemused recipient of all the dammed-up thoughts, emotions, questions, and convictions she’d been collecting for years. The dam had burst, and he was standing alone in the path of a rushing, gushing flood of words.

  Luckily, she was a delight. She lit up his days like winter sunlight; fatigue, boredom, impatience, and career dissatisfaction were far from his mind when he was with her. The real Carrie was sociable and generous beneath her habitual reserve, and expansive, inquisitive, and free-spirited under the constraints of loneliness and self-inflicted silence. He couldn’t see that he’d done anything to deserve the privilege of knowing and enjoying the truth about her, but it was a gift he didn’t take for granted.

  Only two clouds marred the clear sky of his content: the possibility that whatever dire circumstance had compelled her to adopt her radical disguise in the first place might still threaten her; and the worry that if he allowed the intimacy between them to progress naturally—the way it became increasingly clear each day they both wanted it to progress—Carrie would end up getting hurt. Regardless of his own needs, he had an obligation to save her from that. His privileged world was wide and full of opportunities; hers was unique and full of wonder, but at the same time narrow and inescapable. Occasionally he was clear-sighted enough to see a day coming when he would have to protect her from himself.

  Something, maybe a note-change in the steely drone of insects, made him sit up and turn his head. Carrie was sailing toward him across a sparkling lake of yellow flowers, legs swinging in the long, graceful glide he loved to watch, already smiling at him. He jumped to his feet. Sunlight glinted on metal—his field glasses, swaying from her shoulder; she never went anywhere without them. “Hello,” she called, still twenty feet away. “Am I late? I hurried, but at the last minute I had to pack a supper for my stepfather to take with him to Porterstown—he’s going now and staying overnight, to help pull stumps out of a farmer’s field.” She came to a halt in front of him, pink-cheeked and beaming, her red-gold hair a lovely windblown tangle.

  He took the hand she held out and smiled back at her. “Look at you, you have on a new dress.” White and flower-sprigged, a pretty, impractical dress unlike any of her others. She’d made it for him. He was sure of it, and the certainty filled him with a guilty delight.

  She stepped back, pulling the full skirt out to one side to show him. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s very pretty. You must be a good seamstress.”

  “I’m not, though. No one ever really showed me how.” She lifted her head and took a sniff of the air. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? How are you, how long can you stay? Should we sit here or in the shade?”

  “Shade,” he voted. Holding hands, they sauntered toward the edge of the meadow, where a sycamore tree threw enormous shadows on the grass.

  “Look, I brought you watermelon cake,” she said, rummaging in a cloth sack she was carrying. “How long can you stay?”

  They sat down on the grass, resting their backs against the peeling tree trunk, shoulders touching. “Only an hour. Every one of Anna Shindeldecker’s children has the mumps, and I have to go look at them at three o’clock.”

  She looked disappointed, but only said, “I’ve never had the mumps.”

  “Then you’d better stay away from the Shindeldeckers for the next three weeks. What in the world is watermelon cake?”

  Cake batter tinted red, she informed him, surrounded by regular white batter, with raisins mixed in for “seeds.” It looked peculiar but tasted delicious; he ate it all, including her piece when she insisted because he’d missed lunch, and then licked his fingers.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” she said when he complimented her. She took out the little hand lens she always carried and began to examine a green bug making its way along the rough bark between them. “How did the pennyroyal work on Louie’s fleas?” She looked up when he didn’t answer, and laughed out loud when she saw his face. “It worked, didn’t it? I knew it!”

  “There seems to have been a moderately beneficial effect, which may or may not be a direct result of—”

  “It worked,” she crowed, “admit it! ‘Folk medicine,’ you called it. I guess that means it works for folks.” She stuck a finger in his ribs, making him jump.

  “All right, all right, his fleas are better,” he admitted grudgingly. “Now have you got anything to make him stop digging holes in the yard? He doesn’t look Chinese, but he sure wants to go there.” Carrie laughed gaily. “Yesterday he left a little surprise for Mrs. Quick on the sitting room rug. I could hear her yelling at him from downstairs, and so could my patient. She chased him down the back steps with a broom.”

  “Poor Louie,” she tsked.

  “Poor Louie?”

  She put her magnifying glass away, plucked a blade of grass, and carefully positioned it between her thumbs. “Yes, poor Louie. Nobody tells him what they want him to do till after he’s done it wrong.” She took a deep breath and blew hard against her thumbs and the grass blade, emitting an ear-piercing shriek.

  “Ow!” he complained. “Cut that out.”

  She laughed again and looked smug; she’d tried for half a day once to teach him how to make grass whistles, but it remained an art he couldn’t master. “Oh,” she said suddenly, sitting up, “I just remembered—I brought you a present. Close your eyes.”

  “Why? This present better not be alive.” He was thinking of the glowworm she’d brought him last week, another “close-your-eyes” kind of present.

  “No, this is a gift for your nose. Come on, close your eyes.”

  Grumbling, he obeyed. He heard her rustling in the cloth sack again, and a moment later he felt something tickle the end of his nose.

  “Guess what it is,” she challenged.

  He inhaled something tangy-sweet and pungent. “Mmmm. I’ll say … white birch?”

  “No.”

  “Ivy?”

  She tsked again. “No.”

  “I give up.”

  “Sassafras. Like it?”

  “Mm hm.”

  “Now, what’s this?”

  Something sweeter this time. “A rose?”

  She snorted. “No, bayberry. I guess you can
open your eyes.” Her way of saying he’d never guess the rest.

  She laid something on his palm, and he blinked down at a motley collection of leaves and twigs and wildflowers tied together at the stalks and spread out like a fan. “Well, look at this. It’s … um …” He didn’t have the slightest idea.

  “An olfactory bouquet,” she enlightened him. “Sassafras and bayberry, and this is sweetfern—smell. And this is spicebush, here’s yarrow, and this is catnip.

  He sniffed each one, humming appreciatively. “Very nice.”

  “I used to leave them sometimes for old Mrs. Urquehart until she passed away. She was blind,” she added in explanation.

  “Left them for her?”

  “In her door.” Her sweet smile turned a trifle wistful. “Well, I couldn’t talk and she couldn’t see, so there didn’t seem any point in trying to make friends.”

  He touched the back of her hand with his finger.

  “Do you think she knew who was leaving her the bouquets?”

  “Oh, no, she couldn’t have, she didn’t know me at all.” She cocked her head to one side. “Listen. Hear it?”

  He heard a bird, making a gurgling sound somewhere on the other side of the meadow.

  “It’s a redwing.” She leaned toward him. “The males take more than one wife, you know,” she said in confidential tones.

  “Why, those heathenish rascals.” Diverted, he watched her unlace her shoes and shuck them off, toe to heel, then matter-of-factly strip off her cotton stockings. He caught a flash of cream-white calf, long and slim and startling in a bar of golden sunlight. Then she shoved her skirts back down and curled her toes, which were long and bony, into the cool grass, sighing with contentment.

  He swallowed, and popped a handful of blackberries, still warm from her pocket, into his mouth. “Got a letter from my mother today,” he mentioned.

  “You did?” Her face lit up with interest. “That’s nice.”

  “Ah, well. Not altogether.”