Elderberry Croft: The Complete Collection

by Becky Doughty

  Slipping the pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, he lit one up, knowing they’d probably catch a whiff of it, and feel guilty, thinking they’d kept him up. Willow had approached him just last week about it, but he’d assured her he only heard them when he was outside. How could she know how tightly sealed he kept his barracks?

  It was cold; colder than he’d expected. One more cigarette, and he’d call it a night, and head inside to keep company with some cheesy television B-movie cast, and his refilled flask.

  Chapter 2

  Doc watched from the front porch of Al’s place as the rented U-Haul truck pulled away from The Coach House Trailer Park, its 12-foot box packed to the gills with all the earthly belongings of the couple living above Prudence Meriweather in the main house. The two were moving in with Andrea’s parents; they’d reconciled after almost five years, and they had some making up to do, especially in light of the tragedy the kids had endured last month. Doc was glad for them. He knew what it was like to be estranged from family.

  He knew where Eleanor lived. He knew where the two girls lived, as well, and that Tracy was married to Pete Jenkins, and Janeen had been dating the same kid for at least a year now. But then, most of her boyfriends only lasted about a year before she moved on, unwilling to commit to someone who might walk out on her someday. At least that’s what Eleanor surmised.

  She wrote to him once a month, even though his only response was a monthly check in the mail. She kept him apprised of the goings-on of his daughters, but she never said anything about herself. He didn’t know if she’d remarried, he didn’t know if she was healthy, if she still worked as a secretary, or if she’d gone back to school as she’d dreamed of doing. For the last thirty-one years, Doc had sent her money and nothing else. She, in turn, sent him updates on his “investments,” their daughters, who were long past needing his money.

  But Eleanor kept cashing the checks, and out of guilt for abandoning them, he dropped another one in the mail every time he got paid.

  Over the last few days, watching the bittersweet and tentative reunion take place across the way, Doc couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to see his own family again. He grunted at the impossibility of the notion after all the years that separated them. He stood up to leave.

  “I’m taking off,” he stated, not quite looking at Al. Thinking of his family always made him thirsty.

  Al just nodded, the two of them needing each other’s conversation even less than they needed the company, and appreciating each other all the more for it.

  ~ ~ ~

  He couldn’t sleep. It was well after midnight, and his mind wouldn’t shut down. It didn’t matter that he would be up in six hours to get to his job at the VA. Cursing in frustration, he sat up on the edge of his bed, glad at least that his restlessness hadn’t led to more night terrors and flashbacks.

  Outside, the darkness harbored no threats, and he could hear very little, other than the splashing, gurgling creek, and the nocturnal busyness of critters that slept all day. His was Space #1 at The Coach House Trailer Park, even though technically, it wasn’t a space. His apartment was the loft above the old carriage house where Eddie stored lawn mowers, chainsaws, and other gardening paraphernalia; even an old Bobcat the park manager took out on occasion while working around the property.

  Through the brush and trees growing along the banks of the creek, he could see the flickering light of a fire burning on Willow’s patio, the smell of wood smoke in the air. What was she doing up? Was she alone? With Andrea having been gone for nearly a week, he’d seen very little of the red-head of late, and especially not deep into the night like this.

  Maybe she’d be interested in some company. He could certainly use a draught of her soothing voice.

  He descended the steps and circled his car, his boots crunching softly on the driveway. He peered into each window, a habit formed of deeply-entrenched paranoia, then headed at a leisurely pace to the sturdy bridge that crossed the creek to Willow’s side.

  He approached softly, not wanting to startle her. Bundled in blankets, she sat upright in one of the lounge chairs pulled close to the warmth. On her lap was a pile of papers, and she was feeding them, one by one, to the hungry flames.

  She saw him long before she acknowledged him, he was certain of it, and that made him falter. He’d gotten good at reading the faces of the wounded; his job as a janitor—no, a sanitation engineer—kept him in contact with broken people, but no longer responsible for them the way he’d once been. Ms. Goodhope was one wounded little girl; he’d seen that the first day she set foot on the property. He’d watched her rake and sweep, trim and scrub, turning the forlorn little cottage into a place fit for a fairytale princess. Doc didn’t know any fancy words for it, but he was pretty sure she was projecting her need to fix things in her own life on the place she was calling home for the time being. He had no illusions that she was staying. She wasn’t like the rest of them who’d come here to wait for whatever it was coming for them.

  But he also knew the look of someone who was cornered, desperate; and Ms. Goodhope had that look about her tonight. He knew, too, how unpredictable a cornered, desperate creature could be.

  “Come on over, Doc. I won’t bite.” She’d read his mind, even though she still wouldn’t look directly at him. As he approached, he could see why. Tears glistened on the pronounced angles of her cheekbones, her eyes bright in the flickering flames.

  “Pull up a seat. It’s cold tonight.”

  He grabbed the back of one of the green plastic patio chairs and drew it up close to the flames. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t think she expected or even needed any words from him just yet.

  Stretching out his legs in front of him, he crossed one ankle over the other, his boots clunky and male next to Willow’s slender feet. She wore tiger-striped furry socks and wiggled her toes inside them toward the heat.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  Willow snorted. “Not if you don’t mind if I smoke.” She gestured toward the plume that rose into the night sky from the blaze. “Did you hear about my visitors the other day? I’d spent the whole morning cleaning up around here and was burning the brush. Well, I discovered that although eucalyptus smells divine, the oily leaves create a whole lot of smoke. A couple guys from the fire station up the way stopped by to make sure I hadn’t set the park on fire. They could see the smoke a mile away. Literally.”

  “I heard.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Silence fell between them again. Doc had never seen her this edgy before. Usually she wore her mysterious dark cloud with grace, the beauty of her spirit undimmed by her secrets. Tonight, though, she’d succumbed a little to the shadows, and he felt a camaraderie with her that only wounded warriors shared. She didn’t question why he was out wandering around after midnight and he didn’t ask her why she was sitting out here in the dark. He smoked; she gathered up the scattered envelopes on her lap, stacking them neatly and slipping a rubber band around the packet.

  “How’s your tree,” he asked, tossing the filter of his cigarette into the fire.

  “My tree?”

  “That broomstick you’ve been paying homage too.” He pointed at the low-growing, scraggly thing perched on the bank of the stream at the edge of her patio. It looked hung-over to Doc, like it had celebrated a little too hard the season before, and was now spent, desperate for rest. “It doesn’t look so good.”

  Willow smiled and swiped at a stray tear. “That little tree has used itself up for me, Doc. I think this is the first year since moving to California that I didn’t have to buy dried elderberries from out of state. You should see my freezer.” Leaning forward, with an iron poker, she rather aggressively jabbed at a log that had broken in half and tumbled a little too close to their feet. “It’ll come back, just you wait and see. In a few months, it’ll be all green and fancy and laced with flowers. Showing off.”

  “Really.”

  “Yep. That’s the way
God designed it. No reservations, Doc. Elderberry trees go all out, full-throttle, wild and willing. They give and give and give some more, and then it’s time to rest so they can start the giving all over again.” She fluttered a hand at the skeletal branches. “That, neighbor, is a true Giving Tree.”

  “Hm.” Doc studied her more closely. “Reminds me of someone I know.”

  “Don’t, Doc. Please. Flattery will just get you kicked off my patio tonight.” Her eyes shifted so she was looking at him, but she didn’t turn away from the fire. It was a warning, but her candidness actually put him at ease.

  That being said, he wasn’t going to be the first to look away, but he raised both hands in surrender. When she finally closed her eyes, he leaned forward to squint at the packet of envelopes still clutched on her lap, her long fingers folded tightly around the ends. He thrust his own work-roughened paws into his coat pockets, his thoughts slowly taking shape around an idea. Maybe she needed to hear about his tree.

  “What do you got there, Ms. Goodhope?” When she opened her eyes, he dipped his head at the envelopes. He needed to know just how badly he was interrupting her first.

  “Letters.”

  “Hm.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “What?”

  “Hm.”

  “Hm.” He didn’t elaborate. He had all night.

  “They’re letters. From my husband.” She held one up; one she’d kept separate from the bundle. “Except for this one. It’s from Andrea.”

  “From upstairs?” He nodded toward the outline of the main house behind them.

  “Yes. I thought I’d be glad to get my place back to myself, but while Andrea was here, I had someone besides myself to feel sorry for.” She sighed and withdrew the folded sheets of paper from the envelope that looked pink in the glow of the fire. “Do you want to know what she wrote?”

  “That’s up to you.” Ms. Goodhope was taking evasive action.

  “She starts out talking about some girl stuff. I won’t freak you out with that.” She chuckled softly. “Freak you out? Now I’m starting to talk like her. Sheesh.”

  Doc grinned, and Willow began reading Andrea’s words. “My mom told me they’ve been looking for me all this time. She showed me flyers they’d printed and posted all over the place. There’s even one on the Missing Children Board at the SmartMart in town; the same one I camped out at a few times that first year. I saw it myself this week. My mom wanted them to take it down, but they said they’d need a police statement to do it. I convinced her to cover for me on the way out so I could tear it down and she did! My mother now thinks she’s a criminal and she’s weirdly proud of herself.”

  “Sounds like this is a good thing,” Doc interjected. Willow nodded.

  “Yes. I’m so glad for her. For them. Her folks were sure she’d be back, but when she didn’t come home, they went wild looking for her. I still think it’s amazing that they could be just one town apart all these years and not know it. I mean, she was in a government subsidized rehab facility. You’d think the police would have access to those records.” She waved the paper in the air to fan smoke from her face.

  “Red tape. Bureaucracy. Privacy laws. She was a legal adult, right? As far as the law goes, if she doesn’t want her folks to know where she is, they’d have to jump through some major hoops to get permission to get to her.”

  Willow shrugged. “I suppose that makes sense. And Andrea assumes no one who might recognize her ever spotted her because she worked nights and slept when most people were awake. She and George pretty much kept to themselves, too.”

  “My dad thinks George is awesome,” Willow continued to read. “My brother does, too, but he moved out a year ago so we don’t see him much. Just as well, I suppose. My folks say they want to work on fixing the broken parts of our relationship. I’m cool with that. It’s different than it was, but underneath all the changes, we’re still the same people who lived together in this house for all those years, you know?”

  Willow folded the paper in her lap and rested her head on the seat back behind her. “I like that,” she murmured. “Underneath all the changes, we’re still the same people we were.” She turned weary eyes on him. “Do you think that’s true, Doc? Are you the same guy you were before the war? Before moving here?”

  Chapter 3

  Doc didn’t respond for a long time, and finally, Willow tucked the handwritten pages back into the envelope and shoved it under the rubber band, adding it to the bound stack of letters. When Doc finally spoke, he was sure he saw her flinch. He didn’t know if he’d startled her by speaking into the settling silence, or if it was his words that struck her.

  “Why are you burning your husband’s letters?”

  Now it was her turn to pause, the quiet weight of indecision heavy between them.

  “It’s time,” she murmured, her voice little more than a whisper. “I need to move past this place. I need to lay this season to rest.”

  Her answer did little to enlighten him. He’d talk about himself. Give her a reason to trust him. “I had a tree once. A Giving Tree, as you call it.”

  One eyebrow disappeared under the curls that fell across her forehead and she turned in her chair a little. He thought that admission might get her attention.

  “It was the end of November, 1967, and we’d just outed the VC—that’s the Viet Cong—at Hill 875 near Dak To, our base. It wasn’t permanent, we knew they’d be back, but we’d taken the hill under eight-to-one odds, and for a few days, we had a reprieve. Mail got through and there was a package for me. My wife, Eleanor, she always sent me letters and pictures from home, of her, of our two daughters.” He paused, expecting her to ask about his girls, but she just watched him with those cat eyes of her, glowing amber in the shifting light. “She opted not to send me boxes of stuff most of the time, mainly because she knew letters were easier to get through to me wherever I was, and easier to carry around with me, wherever I went, too. I kept one in my pocket at all times.” He absent-mindedly patted the place over his heart.

  “But this time, when the supply truck showed up and unloaded the mail bags, she and the girls sent me a package; a two-foot-long tube, sealed with gray tape. I ripped one end open and started to pull out what looked like a piece of painted rebar.” He grinned, remembering his confused curiosity and the other marines gathering around with questions of their own. “I got it halfway out when the first row of branches popped out. It was a miniature artificial Christmas tree, the kind where the branches fold up against the metal trunk. The stand, too, scissored closed, and was shoved in the tube next to the tree.”

  He nudged at another wayward blackened branch with his toe, sending sparks shooting up into the night sky. “You’d have thought we boys had never seen a Christmas tree before, but I think it was more that we didn’t know if we’d ever see one again. Christmas was just around the corner, and although we rarely spoke of it, we all knew there would be no white Christmas for any of us, unless we went home in a body bag.” He paused, stroking his beard, the motion soothing as he felt his pulse quicken. Any time he thought about Nam, it stirred him up.

  “One guy, Toby Thompson, started singing ‘O Christmas Tree,’ then a few others joined him as I set the thing up on the ground in the dirt. As soon as that song was over, someone jumped in with another, carol after carol. It was 98 degrees and a hundred percent humidity, and we were singing about snow-covered branches and winter wonderlands.”

  Willow smiled encouragingly, the letters in her hands now pressed close to her heart beneath her crossed wrists. Doc didn’t think she realized what she was doing, but he saw it for the truth it was. Those letters held her heart whether she liked it or not.

  “In a matter of days, we were back out on another Search and Destroy mission, and I had that cardboard tube shoved into my ruck. I didn’t know how long the mission would take—it wasn’t like what you see in the movies. We’d go out for a month or more at a time, not just a day trip and then back
to the base to sleep in our freshly made up bunks. We’d come back to base thirty, forty, fifty days later, smelling of jungle rot, fear, vomit, and death.” He ran a hand over his face, then slid it into the inside pocket of his coat, reaching for his flask. He unscrewed the lid and held it out to Willow, offering her the only solace he could guarantee would work. She shook her head, the smile not leaving her face, but her eyes seemed to dim a little.

  “At night, when all had quieted down, the danger was even worse. Charlie—the VC were like evil spirits, slipping in, catching us before we could scream.” He took a long draught; yes, the familiar burn tasted like home, like sanctuary, like silence shutting out the roaring in his head. “We didn’t care. We pulled that tree out and set it up whenever we got the chance. In a ditch, beneath a tree, behind a boulder. We didn’t talk about home; it would have broken us. But if I let the night settle in before putting it up, I’d hear about it. For some reason, Ms. Goodhope, that tree kept our fear at bay. It gave us hope even when everything around us told us there was none.”

  Willow had stopped looking at him and now studied her elderberry tree. Her eyes glistened, on the verge of brimming over.

  “Everyone wanted to touch it. They’d rub the branches between their fingers like they could make it smell like Christmas if they bruised it hard enough. One kid, John Lewis, got an ornament from his wife; one of those picture frame kind with a picture of his dog in it, a black Lab named Lucky Dog. He tied it tight to the top branch.” Doc took another swig, remembering.

  “I took that tree with me into Khe Sahn a month after Christmas. You know anything about the Tet Offensive?”

  Willow shook her head. Tears dropped slow and steady to her lap, some falling on the packet of letters, where they were absorbed quickly into the paper fibers made thirsty by the dry heat from the fire. For some reason, Doc deeply appreciated each drop she shed.