by Lisa Samson
After she set the washing machine to running, they walked toward Violet’s rose garden.
• 12 •
By ten o’clock they had pulled away the vines. The poor rosebushes looked like skeletons. Claudius reached out with his penknife and cut a stem near the base of the plant. “Still green down there. There’s hope.”
“What do we do next?”
“Cut away the dead wood, I suppose.”
Girlfriend and Scout lay belly up in the sunshine. Soon they’d both be snoring away.
“I love those animals,” May said. “I love all the animals around here, actually. And I think Eloise is becoming rather fond of me.”
“You’re a good milker, May-May. She probably appreciates your gentle touch.”
“I was thinking maybe we should get another goat. A female. Or sheep? We could raise lambs.”
He was surprised. “You realize lambs turn into sheep, and then they’re just more mouths to feed.”
“I was thinking about the wool.”
Claudius had recently brought her some wool yarn from a lady who made it at her farm, spinning wheel and everything. He saw Madge regularly at the farmers’ market and showed up at her place to barter some milk for a skein of the softest gray wool he ever felt. May proceeded to knit another scarf.
“Growin’ your own wool? That’s a fine idea!”
“It would be a good winter project.”
“I agree.”
Claudius was happy she was thinking about the future, but he didn’t want to risk saying so. He pulled a pair of pruning shears out of his back pocket and handed them to her. “Have at it, honey.”
“But what if I do it wrong?”
“These plants can’t be any worse off than they are now, can they?”
“Probably not.”
“Oh”—he reached into his pocket—“here.” He held out a pair of gardening gloves, brand new, just her size, on sale at the Family Dollar.
She slid them on, bending her fingers after the yellow fabric snuggled around them.
“Okay. Here we go.”
She reached for a branch, a gnarled dead branch, and snipped it off. She winced. “Was that right?”
“Looks that way to me. You go ahead and do what you think is best. I’m off to water the animals.”
There must have been thirty bushes, all in much the same condition. He had no idea what kind of roses they were, and in a way that was good. If they could get them to bloom, she could snip the blossoms and they’d compare them to pictures in the catalogs.
May-May loved her flowers. Maybe she could do something with them. He didn’t know. But he figured it was worth a try.
By noon clippings lay all around in piles like arthritic pick-up sticks. Claudius climbed the hill with a wheelbarrow. “Let’s haul these down, and we can throw them in the woodstove tonight. It’s supposed to get cool.”
His prediction proved correct, and that night they sat around the stove, no need for the usual heavy blanket but appreciating the warmth.
“It’s nice to see those old bushes again.” Claudius laid down The Three Musketeers. “I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it.”
“When did your mother pass away, Claudius?”
“About ten years ago.”
“Really? For some reason, I figured it was much longer than that.”
“We were a pair. She wanted so much for me to find a nice woman, settle down here. She even said she’d move off the farm and go live with her sister in Clay City.”
“She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was, May-May. I just couldn’t seem to face her flowers after a while, though. Hurt too much.” He raised his hand. “Now I don’t want to be sounding like a mama’s boy!”
“Of course not.”
“’Cause I wasn’t.”
“No. I believe that.”
He could tell by the look on her face she didn’t.
“She was just something, is all.”
“Well, maybe it’s time for you to face those flowers again.”
“Aw, I don’t know. But you doing it for me sure is something I could use.”
“Father Isaac once told me it’s not bad to bear each other’s burdens, Claudius.”
“No, it ain’t. You’re right about that. That Saint Paul, as you all call him?”
“I have no idea!”
They laughed and returned to their reading, he in France with Musketeers, May in the plant catalog he’d brought home.
“I don’t want to think I’m putting the cart before the horse, as you might say, Claudius, but I have a feeling those roses are going to do just fine.”
“I’m sure they’re glad somebody cares for them again.”
The next morning an old ledger-type book with a crinkly black surface sat beside May’s breakfast plate. She picked it up. “What’s this?”
“It was my mother’s gardening journal. She kept detailed notes every year.”
May looked like she’d been given a map to buried treasure.
“I figured it would be a guide of sorts for you.”
“Oh, my gosh, yes!” She flipped it open, and lines of Violet’s perfect handwriting flowed across each page. “This is wonderful!” She turned to the last year. 1983.
“And it might help you narrow down what them roses are.”
“That’s right!”
“Why don’t you take the morning off and read through it?” He reached behind him to the hoosier and lifted off a composition book, black with white speckles. “You can make your own notes and start your own journal, May-May. Some things need to be written down. It’s important. And you never know who’ll need it someday.”
“It’s true! Who’d have thought I’d be taking over Violet’s gardens?”
His smile felt so wide, he wondered how it hadn’t swallowed up his eyesight with it. But there she stood before him, her hair in a little ponytail now, her skin pink from working outside yesterday. And he was proud of her. So proud! “Life can turn on you in ways you never could imagine.”
“For good and for bad.”
“We just have to enjoy the good and recognize it, May-May.”
She set down the book. “You’re good at that. Maybe I’m starting to learn that too.”
“That’s good.” He reached for his jacket hanging on the hook near the kitchen door. Time for chores.
“I mean, Rwanda happened, and it was horrible. But does it have to ruin the rest of my life?”
He didn’t know. “I don’t believe so, but I’ve never—”
“Just tell me it doesn’t, Claudius! You can, you know.” Her blue eyes glowed with a begging need, as if she was floating out from shore in a little boat, and all he needed to do was catch the rope she was throwing to keep her from drifting away completely.
He caught it. “No, May-May. It doesn’t. The lady who grew those flowers you’re bringing back to life—I’ll bet she thought her life was over when she found out she was pregnant with me. But it didn’t ruin the rest of her life, now did it?”
“No! You’re here!”
He smiled at that. “I am indeed.”
• 13 •
Claudius headed off to the first farmers’ market of the year in Lexington. He loaded up the Galaxy with crates of tender greens and jars of apple and pumpkin butter. Several sugar buckets held bouquets of daffodils, some pure white, others pure yellow, others mixed, some with bright orange centers. May had bundled them in groups of six or twelve. She’d clipped the stems evenly and tied them with white satin ribbon Claudius found at Ellen’s Uniques in town, a shop with the oddest collection of craft supplies and decorative items he’d ever seen. Not that he’d seen many. Or any, for that matter. But something that hodgepodge clearly wasn’t normal, was it? It sure was interesting though.
He returned from the city with the news that every single bouquet had been purchased. “You made yourself fifty dollars today from them posies, May-May.”
He
handed her the bills, and she handed them right back.
“You keep this, Claudius, after all the food and warmth and clothing you’ve given me.”
He said nothing and slipped the money into his front shirt pocket.
As the spring turned into summer, those fifty dollars would turn up in the oddest places. The sugar bin, May’s gardening gloves. She’d return the favor. In his book, his fiddle case. And they never said a word about it. Claudius spent too much time thinking about where the next hiding place would be, and he didn’t care.
As the rosebushes struggled, the rest of the flowers grew: tulips (a big hit with the city dwellers), irises in purples, whites, and yellows, larkspur and zinnias, Jacob’s ladder, daisies, sunflowers, dianthus, primroses, delphinium, snapdragons. Some raised from seed in the tiny greenhouse Claudius fashioned, others from the catalog company as promised, lilies mostly: Stargazer, Elyse, Silk Road, and May’s favorite, Orange Crush. Glen the postman would deliver those all the way up the drive.
The first time Glen made a personal delivery, Claudius had made sure May stayed by the door. She needed to see someone other than him and Sister Ruth occasionally. The world was so big once, now it was so small.
“He wasn’t scary,” May said after Glen climbed back into his Jeep. “He was nice. He has those basset hound eyes and, I have to admit, nice calf muscles.”
Claudius was glad to hear that kind of talk. Meant she was alive again, or at least starting to open up like the flowers she arranged so prettily.
And every Friday she’d sit in her circle of flowers, clippings around her, and fashion posies for the people of Lexington to grace their tables and counters with. Maybe they’d take some of them to a loved one in the hospital or the assisted living home. Maybe they’d take them to church.
“I almost don’t want to know,” she said one evening as she arranged the bouquets in an old five-gallon paint bucket. “Wondering is so much better than knowing for sure.”
“Sometimes it’s fun picturing them, though. You ever do that?” Claudius, tired, threw himself down on the grass and arranged his arms behind his head.
“I sometimes picture an elderly lady, the tops of her feet puffing up from her pumps as if they’d been stuffed with down.”
He laughed. His mother had that sort of feet.
“She comes up with a purse hanging from the crook of her arm. And she tells me how she’s always loved flowers, has purchased a bouquet every week for the kitchen table in the small apartment she’s lived in for years since coming to the city to teach kindergarten after her husband died in the coal mines.”
She sat down next to him, cross-legged.
“Sounds like a reasonable way to imagine it. You do get some old women buying your posies, so who’s to say whether or not you’re right about at least one of them. I can tell you this, though, most of them leave with a little smile on their face.”
“But why flowers, Claudius? Why do flowers do this for people?”
“You know why yourself. You told me you were always taking pictures of flowers even though nobody else was. And you did it for you. Why?”
“I just think they’re pretty.”
“Well, there you go, then.”
Finally, the week of the one-year anniversary of May’s return to the United States, Claudius sat her down. “Now, I haven’t wanted to tell you this, because I didn’t want you to get a big head or anything.” He smiled. “But people wait in lines to get your posies, May-May. Just tomorrow, would you drive into Lexington with me so they can meet you? I’ll take your chair for you, and you won’t have to do a thing. If you want something to keep you busy, we can take some flowers and you can make posies on the spot.”
“But there won’t be room for me in the car, will there?” Hope against hope.
“Oh, we’ll figure it out. Not as many tomatoes ripened this week as I thought. Don’t worry about that.”
“Can I think about it for a couple of hours?”
“Suit yourself, honey.”
She gathered the blooms and set them in buckets of water as he harvested his whimsical heirloom tomatoes. She whistled to the dogs, who came running from behind the barn where they’d been sleeping in the shade. The day was hot. Late July was always hot in Kentucky.
He watched as May and the dogs trekked toward the back of the property, up the hill into the woods to the clearing. She stood on the edge of the world, he knew. Maybe she picked Girlfriend up in her arms and kissed her head and face, running a hand over her soft ears. Maybe Scout sat panting, dripping lips in a grin of sorts. Nice old dog.
The foothills spread out like wide skirts of green.
She was gone for another half hour, and he wished he could hear her thoughts. What could it hurt really, she might be thinking. All she had to do was sit in a chair and smile. She’d done that plenty of times in college classes, hadn’t she?
“Why not?” she said to Claudius as she sliced green tomatoes to fry up for supper. She dipped the slices in a bowl of buttermilk, then in a plate of cornmeal, salt, and pepper.
“I knew you’d see sense, May-May. You always do.”
“Really?”
“Eventually. I’d say you’re ready for this.”
She stopped, her fingertips plump with cornmeal. “I don’t know.”
“I do.”
• 14 •
Loaded up and ready to set out by 5:30 a.m., they’d already tipped back two mugs of coffee and eaten two bowls of Shredded Wheat.
“You won’t have time to breathe, May-May, it’ll get so busy.” He loved the bustle of the market, the chatting, the bright colors, the canvas shelters; he loved the aromas of fresh vegetables and baked goods. Combine those with the sizzling smell of sausages and burgers cooking from the trailer one of the local stock farms always set up, and the music of the street musicians, it all made for a feast of the senses. It was like going to a carnival every week.
“Now, usually I try to resist, May-May, but I do believe today we’ll treat ourselves to some ribs one of the city ministries sets up to raise money.”
“I love ribs!”
“Yep. Set up the barbecue right there. And some cornbread and coleslaw too.”
He hoped that would provide a little sense of comfort or adventure. She was blazing forward, a new trail, a path that would have been tame and not much fun last year, he suspected.
“You’ll see, May-May. You’ll have a fine time.”
She opened the door to the Galaxy. “Father Isaac would have gotten a kick out of it, that’s for sure. He’d have struck up conversations with each customer. He’d definitely have found something in common or something to joke about.”
“He sounds like a good man.”
She slid in. So did he.
“And you know what, Claudius? It wouldn’t be but a minute or two until they would open up and start sharing their pain. Father Isaac had that way about him. He never condemned me. He let me know I wasn’t the first to go astray and I wouldn’t be the last.”
He pulled out onto Route 11. “You act like you were so bad, honey. Sounds like a typical wild youth. Not overly wild, mind you. Not a lot of drugs or stealing or something.”
She laughed. “Maybe I’ve just got a guiltier conscience than most people!”
“Maybe it’s time to move on. It’s been almost a year since you’ve stepped off the farm. Unless you were sneaking off at night, I think you’ve most likely behaved yourself quite circumspectly.”
She laughed a loud quick Ha! and turned to him, leaned forward a little, and laid her hand on his arm. “Claudius, you are exactly right!” She slammed back with relief against the seat. “You just gotta move on from some things, right?”
“Right!” He wasn’t about to bring Rwanda into it. First things first.
—Maybe I should speak up more often.
“I mean,” she said, “I didn’t realize until just now that I could move on. It’s been a long time since I let a guy—”
> “Good for you!” He had to interrupt that sentence and quick.
Claudius pointed out who lived where (my old Sunday school teacher’s granddaughter and her family in that yellow house there), what they farmed (soybeans and corn to the left), and where they worked (at the prison in Campton, or the Shell station near the gorge), trying his best to sell her on the outside world (and if you look up yonder on that ridge, you’ll see a bitty little cabin where my great-granddaddy was born). They both waved to Glen, out doing his Saturday delivery on Route 11.
“You been to a Dairy Queen in a while?” Claudius asked after they passed it.
“No.”
“Me neither. Heard down at the feed store they have things called Blizzards. They’re these thick shakes with whatever kind of candy you’re hankering for thrown in and whizzed up.”
“I’ve had them.”
“They worth the press they get?”
“Yep. They sure are, Claudius.”
“Well, maybe I’ll give that a try. Live a little.”
He pulled onto the Mountain Parkway in Slade. The divided highway flowed next to the Red River.
“Is that the Red River of that Red River Valley song?” she asked.
“I have no idea, honey. But this ain’t the Red River Valley, so I doubt it’s the same. Must be a lot of Red Rivers across the country.”
They puttered along the parkway, most of the cars passing the old white Galaxy. They didn’t seem to mind. He figured they had to admire the car was still capable of fifty-five miles per hour.
“You know, I just remembered my own little car sitting there in my parents’ driveway. I don’t know why I haven’t thought to go pick it up.”
Well, he could have told her that.
“Maybe because I didn’t need it, or maybe I just don’t want it anymore. I mean really, Claudius, look at me. Can you imagine me in that thing?”
He had to admit she didn’t match it anymore, sitting there in oversize work clothes with wild brown hair and pale skin and hands that looked like they hadn’t ever seen a manicurist at the beauty parlor.
“I haven’t worn makeup since my first day in Rwanda. If you’d held up a before and after picture, you wouldn’t think I was the same person.”
Claudius cleared his throat. “I was wondering something, May-May. Now, as it’s coming right on the heels of this big day in Lexington, I may be taking my chances, but I figure life’s one big chance anyways. I mean, not in the larger sense, but every day, if you know what I mean.”
