Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  The perfect sunset depressed him. He went back into his room and sat down at the oak mess table he used for a desk, blinking down like an owl at the ink-stained last page of his letter to Carrie. Had he been too restrained? Yes, but he’d done it on purpose, written her brief, factual accounts of his time, leaving out anything that would remind her too strongly of the past they’d shared. That was the kind thing to do, he’d convinced himself. But, of course, fear had had at least as much to do with it as kindness.

  Later, though, as the weeks and months passed, he’d found himself wanting more and more to write her long, personal letters full of his fears and dreams. He’d wanted to send her photographs of the camp, and silly pictures of his friends and himself, cutting up like soldiers away from home. He’d wanted to send her gifts, and jokes, and articles clipped from magazines that might interest or amuse her. In short—he’d wanted to act like a lover.

  Too late. Obviously she was finished with him, and she had been since the night he’d ridden down the mountain and out of her life. Rightly so. She’d been too kind or too gentle to tell him then, but she’d known. He remembered her silence when he’d said he would write to her. She’d known then she would never write back. Why should she? Carrie was strong; it ought not to surprise him that her very strength kept her from hanging onto a memory that must bring her nothing but pain. Why should she?

  Oh, but Carrie, Carrie, he thought, picking up his discarded pen, twisting it in his fingers. Bear with me, my love. Be gentle again, forgive me one more time. I’m slow, but I’m rock steady, and now that I know the truth, I’m ready to claim you. Could you call this a grace period, this time I’ve needed to know myself?

  “My dearest Carrie,” he wrote on a new page, and laughed out loud at how right it looked. He hadn’t even finished his brandy; otherwise he’d have thought he was drunk. “My dearest Carrie. What an idiot I’ve been. Let’s get married.” He laughed again, and crumpled the paper into a ball. No point in scaring her to death.

  “My dear Carrie. I’ll be home in a week. May I come and see you?”

  Too abrupt.

  “Dear Carrie,

  I’ve been remembering the last time I saw you—the last moment. You were kneeling beside Louie, holding him so he wouldn’t run after me, and your face in the twilight was full of sadness. You waved back to me, and the last I saw of you was the lacy white cuff of your blue dress. Even in sorrow, you looked strong to me, and natural; you fit, in my mind, in front of your cabin in the trees, with your mountain rising up dark and heavy behind you. And that night you told me you were happy. For a long time, those words and that picture gave me comfort. But they don’t any longer. Forgive me, Carrie, I don’t want you to be happy anymore, not without me. I want—”

  “Dr. Wilkes? Afternoon post, sir.”

  The trooper from the Seventh Cavalry who delivered mail to the barracks stood at semi-attention on the dusty steps outside the door, sweating in his khakis. Tyler got up and went to retrieve the short stack of envelopes the soldier held out to him. They gave each other lackadaisical salutes, and the trooper drifted away.

  Before he was halfway back to his desk, Ty saw Carrie’s letter.

  He carried it to his bunk in both hands. One of his most abiding fantasies in the past few weeks was that she’d written to him often, but somehow her letters had gotten lost. Here they were. How very odd; a minute ago he’d been castigating himself for being a selfish imbecile, for throwing a rare treasure away out of ignorance and arrogance. Was this any way to reinforce the lesson—to receive, to hold in his hands, his very heart’s desire? He must not have gotten the whole message anyway, because Carrie’s letter—so thick, so heavy, her loopy handwriting so heartbreakingly dearfelt like a reward he deserved after a long period of suffering. He was going to have to work on that “deserved” part, he supposed.

  Later, though. Not now. He felt the stupid grin stretching wider and wider between his ears. In a matter of seconds, his life had righted itself. He sat down on his cot and opened Carrie’s letter.

  He saw the money first. Uncomprehending, he took out the single sheet of paper folded around it. Dried leaf-pieces and a tiny twig floated down to his lap; he brushed them away with an absent hand while he scanned the page, dismayed to see that Carrie’s message was only a paragraph long. The second sentence stopped his heart.

  Dear Tyler,

  You told me once it takes 5 days to get to Cuba. If a letter takes the same, then I guess in 5 days after you read this I’ll be married to Eugene.

  21

  “AND THIS TIME DON’T come back,” Carrie commanded in a whisper. “Hear me? I don’t want to see you again, or any members of your immediate family. This is good-bye.”

  With a flourish, she opened her cardboard trap and stood back so the big-eared, long-tailed mouse inside wouldn’t panic as much when he scampered away toward the stone wall and freedom. Of course, there was no way to tell if he was the same mouse she’d caught and deported about six times by now during the annual autumn-long game, but she liked to think he was. She’d never taken him this far away before, halfway up the ridge behind her house to the crumbling stone fence, where he’d have plenty of natural food and protection. She wished there was some way she could mark him, for if he followed her home from this distance—well, for heaven’s sake, she’d just have to let him stay. Even if he did keep her awake at night, hunting for crumbs in her kitchen.

  The air smelled like snow. Through the black pine branches, the stony December sky looked glutted and overweight. If it did snow, it would be the first fall of the season. Three nights ago there had been an ice storm, but it melted early and by nine in the morning everything went back to looking smoke-gray and somber.

  Back in the cabin, Carrie apologized to Lou for leaving him locked in. “But we know whose fault that is, don’t we?” she reminded him. He was getting better about chasing things, but an escaping mouse still would’ve been too much for him. Sometimes she despaired of Louie. One day she might just have to face it: he was no Shadow, and chances were he was never going to be.

  While she was taking off her coat, the mantel clock struck three. She’d never disliked a particular time of the day before, but lately the short, dark, dreary afternoons had been making her feel blue and mopey. With a sigh, she sat down at the table and pulled the half-empty bowl of black walnuts toward her. Tedious, delicate, time-consuming task, shelling black walnuts. She did it every winter with scarcely a thought, but this year she found the job almost intolerable. She felt restless and melancholy, keyed up and depressed, and today was the worst day yet. No need to ask herself why. It was the tenth of December, and by now Ty had surely gotten her letter.

  She’d filled the morning with chores in town on purpose so she couldn’t think about it. She’d even met Eugene for lunch at the drugstore, and gone over to Eppy’s afterward to mind the new baby—Mary Ann, six weeks old and already a handful—for an hour while Eppy tried to take a nap. “I’m so sick of children,” she’d grumbled to Carrie in a harsh whisper over the baby’s head, as if Mary Ann might understand her if she said it any louder. “I hope I never see another infant after this one for as long as I live, and that’s the truth.”

  It wasn’t; she’d said the same thing after Fanny was born, Carrie remembered it clearly. But to cheer up her friend, she’d put aside her shyness and mentioned what Ty had told her about a woman’s “cycles,” and how some times of the month were safer for marital relations than others.

  “Oh, for the Lord’s sake,” Eppy had snapped, impatient and irritable. “That only works if you’re regular.” Carrie had been thinking about that, off and on, ever since.

  When she wasn’t thinking of that, she was thinking about Ty’s reaction to her letter. Now, with no distractions except a pricked thumb on a walnut shell from time to time, she couldn’t get him out of her mind at all. He’d be relieved, of course, when he read her news. And that hurt—fool that she was. She might’ve gotten over h
im a little by now, started to at least, if he hadn’t kept on writing to her. Just when she’d begin to think he’d quit, here would come a new letter, and everything would start up again. She knew every one of them by heart. “Shall I tell you I miss you?” he’d written in the last one. Oh God, oh God. She’d read it so many times, it was a wonder the paper hadn’t disintegrated. He missed her. Just his handwriting gave her a jolt, a physical thrill. Just the sight of it.

  “Stop it!” she said out loud—jarring poor Louie out of his sleep. “Sorry,” she told him, in a softer tone. “I have to stop thinking about Ty.” The dog’s eyelids dropped closed again. “I have to now, because it’s wrong. It’s a sin. I belong to another.” She stared into the log fire, listening to the words and trying to believe them—until Lou startled her by jumping up and dashing for the door. She couldn’t hear a thing over his wild barking. Was somebody coming? Sometimes he barked at absolutely nothing. She snatched up her shawl and opened the door.

  “Dr. Stoneman!” she cried, and rushed out into the yard to meet him. He was stiff from the cold, and he moved slowly as he climbed out of the buggy, bundled from his knees to his shoulders in a wool blanket. She touched his icy hands in a greeting. “Hello, I’m happy to see you! Are you all right? Is anything wrong?” He’d been back in Wayne’s Crossing for two weeks. She’d been to visit him twice already, but he’d never come to see her before, never set foot in her house in all the years she’d known him. She could hardly believe he was here.

  “A lot of things are wrong,” he griped, his breath billowing out in a puffy white cloud. “Right now, the main one is that I’m freezing my behind off.”

  “Should I unhitch your mule? Will you stay to supper?”

  “Leave ’im be, I’ll only be here for the time it takes me to say my piece.” She was used to his cantankerousness, of course; she wasn’t even fazed when he shook her hand off his arm. “I’m not crippled, either,” he grumbled, heading toward the house, Lou dancing around his legs.

  “No, but you sure are cranky,” she retorted.

  He sent her a sideways glare. “I liked you better before you could talk.” That just made her laugh. “Thunderation,” he said to Louie, pretending to kick at him. “That’s the stupidest animal I ever saw.”

  “Last week you said you liked him.”

  “That was before I found out how stupid his mother is.”

  Sighing, Carrie followed Dr. Stoneman inside the cabin.

  “Hah. So this is where you live. Fusty, isn’t it? Looks like a damn museum.”

  She followed his gaze around the room. He hadn’t meant that as a compliment, she knew, but she took it as one. Besides her notebooks and journals, she’d moved all her natural specimens inside for the winter, and some of them were out in the open so she could look at them whenever she liked—her insect and moss collections, the tent caterpillar egg cases, the little dead shrew she hadn’t gotten around to sketching yet. If he thought it was “fusty” in here, he ought to see Artemis’s bedroom, she thought wryly, which was now her natural history storeroom. “Sit down by the fire,” she urged, and he obeyed that order, at least, while she went to put more wood on.

  “Anything hot to drink around here?”

  “Sassafras tea?”

  He made a disgusted sound. He wasn’t drinking alcohol anymore, or not as much anyway, which just made him all the more irritable. But he wasn’t dying anymore either, and that was about the best, most miraculous thing that had happened to anyone Carrie knew in a long, long time.

  The kettle was already on. She made him a cup of tea with plenty of sugar, the way he liked it. Handing it to him, she noticed his color was better, and not just from having been out in the cold. He wasn’t so scrawny anymore, and sometimes, when he turned his head a certain way, she could tell that once he’d been a very handsome man.

  “What the hell’s wrong with your hands, Carrie?”

  “Oh,” she laughed, looking down at her black fingers. “Walnuts. I should’ve worn gloves, but it’s too late now. The stain won’t come out for days.” She went to get the chair she’d been sitting in at the table and pulled it up next to his by the fire.

  “Well, I heard,” he said after a pause.

  “What did you hear?” But she knew, of course.

  “I heard you’re going to ruin your life by marrying that—that—” He stopped, and she realized the look she was sending him was a warning one. “That Eugene Starkey,” he finished, frustrated. “I couldn’t believe my ears when Eppy told me.”

  “Well, it’s true,” she said softly, plucking at her skirts over her knees.

  He slurped his tea noisily. “Ty know about this?”

  Carrie went stiff. Even Eppy hadn’t had the nerve to mention Tyler to her since he’d gone away. Sometimes Dr. Stoneman took too much on himself; if she didn’t love him so much, she could be very, very angry with him. “I wrote him,” she said, with no tone in her voice at all. “He knows.”

  “Hmpf. And what does he have to say about it?”

  She worked up her courage to say, “Nothing that would concern you, I don’t think.” He made another “hmpf” noise, but this one sounded almost like a laugh. She thought his shrewd old eyes twinkled a little, and it bolstered her nerve. “Until you came back,” she said boldly, “Eugene Starkey’s been the only friend I’ve had in all of Wayne’s Crossing. Except for the Odells, of course,” she amended out of fairness. And Broom—but that went without saying. “Nobody else would have the least thing to do with me.”

  “That right? You must’ve been mighty lonely.”

  “No, that’s not it,” she denied, seeing where he was going with that. “I haven’t been lonely at all. At least—”

  “No? What is it, then? You’re in love with him? Can’t keep your hands off him?”

  She looked at the fire and didn’t answer. Angry and embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he said finally, sounding tired. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

  She heaved a sigh. “It makes sense for me to marry him, Dr. Stoneman.”

  “How so?” he asked, in a voice that told her that maybe now they could really talk.

  “Because … he wants me to, for one thing. That’s the main thing. That’s a lot. And even though—even if—” She started again. “I’m fond of him. He’s been nice to me, and more patient than you’d think.”

  “Patient?”

  “He’s been asking me to marry him since—” Since Ty left. “For months. I always said no because I couldn’t even imagine it, being married to anybody. But now …”

  “Now?”

  She sat up straighter. “Now,” she said with dignity—but then she lapsed into a short, helpless laugh. “Now I need a husband.”

  He sent her a look of alarm she didn’t understand. Then she did.

  “Oh—no! No, I didn’t mean that! No, I meant I can’t support myself any longer. I thought I could, but I can’t. Now I have to be practical. And Eugene loves me.” She hoped. Lord knew, he felt something for her, and it was so stubborn it had finally worn her down. “He really does, I’m almost sure, and—”

  “Explain that,” Dr. Stoneman cut in. “Why can’t you support yourself? Maybe not in much style, but what the hell do you want? You own this house, don’t you? You sold that book, didn’t you?”

  “No, I don’t own this house. I have to be gone by January first.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Mueller explained it to me. Since my stepfather never adopted me, I’ve got no legal claim on his estate.” She gestured with one hand. “This is his estate. Now it belongs to some distant cousin of Artemis’s in West Virginia, and she says she wants to sell it.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, but what about your book? You could buy this place with that money, couldn’t you? Or rent a place if it wasn’t enough?”

  “I couldn’t afford to buy the cabin because the cousin won’t sell it without the land, and there’s quite a lot. My book—” She swallowed; this
had been a bitter pill when she’d first received the news, and it still was. “The publishers Mr. Odell found will only pay twenty dollars for it, and they’ll only print a hundred copies. Twenty dollars—it’s a lot, but even if I was careful I couldn’t stretch it past a few months, especially with rent to pay. Then what? Eppy’s been trying to pay me when I help her out with the children, but money’s tight for them too, and I know they can’t afford it, not really. I’m charity to them, and I can’t stand that.” She hit her fist softly against her kneecap for emphasis.

  Dr. Stoneman didn’t say anything, just sat there rubbing his chin, and after a few minutes Carrie got up to stir the fire. “Shall I get you some more tea?” she asked.

  “No.” He put his cup down on the arm of his chair. “Listen to me and don’t interrupt. I’ve got a lot of money saved up and not one damn thing to do with it—”

  She interrupted. By yanking his cup away and standing over him with it in her hands. “Thank you very much, Dr. Stoneman. I’ll never forget that you said that. You’ll make me sorry I told you all this if you argue with me about it, though. I know you mean to be kind and generous, but I’m just not going to take somebody else’s money for my own life. I’m sorry—I know I sound ungrateful, and I’m not. But I have to tell you this now, straight out, or else I can see you and me arguing about it till one of us dies of old age! Since I’m not going to accept your offer, I think it’s better to get it over with fast, the arguing. But—thank you. Thank you very much.”

  She shut her mouth, took his cup to the sink, came back, and sat down. “Are you mad at me now?” He didn’t answer. “You’re thinking it’s funny I won’t take money from you, but if I’m marrying Eugene—”

  “No, I wasn’t thinking that,” he barked. “Stop telling me what I’m thinking.”

  “—But if I’m marrying Eugene it’s pretty much the same thing,” she concluded stubbornly. “Well, it’s not. I’m nineteen years old, a full-grown woman. My mother had me by the time she was my age. As long as I can remember I’ve wanted children, but I never thought anybody’d marry me because I was mute. Do you know what Eugene told me? He said he’d’ve married me even if I still couldn’t talk.” She looked at him for a reaction, but he just grunted, watching the fire, resting his veiny hands on his knees.