The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “I was over in Grandfather’s woods where I walk sometimes, and Zeb took off. I got worried he’d get lost or something.”

  “He’d have found his way home before supper time.”

  “Well, yeah, maybe, but that’s where I found him, or he found me. Anyway, I didn’t want to lose him, you know, so I went after him.”

  “You can hull while you talk.” Aunt Love pushed a handful of lima beans toward Jocie on the table. “So your mongrel took off and you followed him. Then you got lost, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know that I was actually lost lost, but I didn’t know exactly where I was.” Jocie broke open a lima bean hull. “Anyway, I came across this clearing with an old log barn and a stone chimney where a house used to be.” Jocie pulled the rock out of her pocket and laid it on the table by Aunt Love. “There was even a rock garden like yours.”

  Aunt Love rested her hands in the pan of shelled lima beans in her lap and looked at the rock. “So you found a rock garden. Were there rosebushes? There used to be rosebushes. Red and pink and yellow and white.”

  “You know the place?”

  “I do.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me about the baby.”

  “Baby?” Aunt Love’s voice sounded funny. “You found a baby?”

  “Sort of. Zeb did. A baby’s grave.”

  Aunt Love’s face went white, and she grabbed her chest. Jezebel yowled and jumped up on Aunt Love’s lap. The lima bean pan crashed to the floor, and beans bounced all over the kitchen.

  “Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and forgive all my sins,” Aunt Love whispered.

  Aunt Love was always clutching her chest and quoting Scripture, but Jocie had never seen her turn so white. Jocie grabbed the wet dishrag out of the sink and dabbed Aunt Love’s forehead with it. “Are you okay, Aunt Love?” Jezebel snarled and took a swipe at Jocie’s arm, but Jocie ignored the cat. “Should I call the ambulance?”

  “No. No ambulance.” Aunt Love took hold of Jocie’s wrist with more strength than Jocie thought possible. “Take me there.”

  “Where? To the hospital? But Dad has the car.”

  “No.” Aunt Love’s hand tightened on Jocie’s wrist. “To the place where you found the ba—where your dog found the grave.”

  Jocie stared at Aunt Love. “It’s way off in the woods, Aunt Love. You could never walk that far even if I could find it again, which I’m not sure I could.”

  “I can find it. Come on.” Aunt Love pushed Jocie’s hand aside and stood up, dumping Jezebel on the floor with the lima beans. Aunt Love went straight toward the door, not even noticing the beans she was smashing underfoot.

  Jocie scooted along beside her. “It’s miles, Aunt Love. You’d never make it.”

  Aunt Love stared out the back door as if trying to see across the distance to the place Jocie had told her about. Finally she leaned her forehead against the doorjamb. “You’re right. It is too far.”

  Jocie breathed a sigh of relief. She watched Aunt Love warily, but color was back in her face and she didn’t seem about to faint or anything. After a moment Jocie fished the bean pan out from under the table and began picking up the lima beans. Jezebel peeked out at Aunt Love from under a chair with wide, round eyes.

  Aunt Love turned from the door and said, “Forget about those beans and go call Wesley.”

  Jocie stood up. “What do you want me to tell him? To bring Dr. Markum out?”

  “I’m not in need of a doctor, child. Just do as I say and call Wesley at the paper. Tell him to come straightaway on that machine of his.”

  By the time Wes roared up to the house a half hour later, Jocie had finished picking up the lima beans, Jezebel was sulking under Aunt Love’s bed, and Aunt Love had changed into her gardening shoes and was waiting in the rocking chair on the front porch. Before Wes got there, Jocie had ventured a couple of questions, but Aunt Love had shook her head. “Later, child. I can’t talk right now.”

  So they had waited in silence. And Jocie had wished Aunt Love would quote Bible verses at her or something. Anything would have been better than the silence that was louder than the birds singing or the sound of Mr. Crutcher baling hay two fields over.

  Wes drove the motorcycle right up to the porch. Aunt Love was down the steps before he stopped. “What’s going on, girls?” he asked, balancing the bike with one foot on the ground.

  Aunt Love didn’t give Jocie time to say anything. “Can you get down a tractor road in the field on that contraption?”

  Wes frowned a little. “I expect so, if it’s not too rough. Why?”

  “Then I’m taking you up on that offer of a ride. Help me climb on and let’s go. The child can follow on her bicycle.” Aunt Love lifted her skirts and eyed the motorcycle.

  Wes looked too surprised to speak, so Jocie said, “Aunt Love, you can’t ride on a motorcycle.”

  “I can and I will. Now are the two of you going to help me or do I have to climb on the thing by myself?”

  Wes kicked down the motorcycle’s stand, got off, and took Aunt Love’s arm. “Is somebody going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Jocelyn found a baby’s grave. I want to go there.” Aunt Love stared straight at Wes. “There’s more to the story, but that’s for later. Are you going to help me on this monster or not?”

  Wes stared back at Aunt Love. “I’ve never seen you like this, Lovella.”

  “No, you haven’t. But I’m in need of your help, Wesley. It’s a long walk, and I think Jocelyn is right that I might not make it, but if you refuse to help me, I will walk.”

  Wes looked at Jocie, who shrugged and threw her hands up. “Don’t ask me. I told her I found the grave. She went bonkers and here we are.”

  Wes eyed Aunt Love’s dress. “You’ll have to bundle up your skirt.”

  Aunt Love hiked her skirt up higher. Wes steadied the motorcycle, and Aunt Love used Jocie’s shoulder for balance while she eased her leg over the passenger’s seat. She tucked her skirt under her thighs and didn’t seem a bit concerned about her white knees shining in the sun.

  “You’ll have to hang on to my waist,” Wes said as he got on in front of her. Aunt Love grabbed hold of him as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She said, “I’ll poke you when it’s time to turn.”

  Jocie pedaled hard to keep up, but they kept disappearing around curves. Zeb stayed in front of her too, running ahead of her bike as if to keep them in sight and then running back to make sure Jocie was still following. They waited for her at the turnoff into the field. The sagging wooden gate had a couple of broken planks and clung to the post by the top hinge. Jocie pushed the gate open just enough for Wes to get through and then let the gate fall back against the post. The tractor ruts were so rough that she ditched her bike and walked. Ahead of her Wes carefully nosed out the smoothest path, but it was still bumpy. Aunt Love’s dark purple skirt jerked loose from under her leg and snagged on a branch.

  Love sneaked a hand loose from Wesley’s waist and stuffed her skirt back under her. She didn’t care about the torn material or her knees shining in the wind or the bumps jostling her insides loose. She hadn’t been down this road since she’d moved to town after her father had finally passed on, but the bone-rattling bumps were familiar. Her father had never done anything to smooth the road, just drove their old car around the rocks where he could. Her father had never worried about smoothing out anything for anybody.

  Love turned her mind away from her father. She didn’t let herself think about him, hadn’t for years, even before he died. She’d taken care of him. She’d cooked his meals, fed him with a spoon, and kept him clean in his later years, but she hadn’t thought about him. He’d been a task, his care a chore that had to be done. Everyone thought she was a devoted daughter. They didn’t know about the can of rat poison in the top of the cabinet over the stove or the times she’d actually held the open can in her hand while she scrambled her father’s eggs in the morning. She’d never shaken the first drop
out of the can, but she’d wanted to. And that was a sin. The Lord had said as much in the Sermon on the Mount. If the desire was in the heart, the sin was already committed.

  She’d asked the Lord for forgiveness, but the Bible also said the Lord would forgive if you forgave, and she couldn’t forgive her father. After her mother died, she should have left. Should have laced up her shoes and walked away with the clothes on her back. But she’d thought Gil might still come back. She’d known in her heart he wasn’t coming when the first long year after the war had passed with no word, but she couldn’t desert her hope that he might. She hadn’t seen the letter that said he was dead. If she had, perhaps her life would have been different. But she’d stayed there and waited for what would, what could, never happen.

  Gil had been her father’s hired hand. He’d hired him on after her younger brother, Homer, joined the army. Poor Homer had died on the ship to France before he heard the first shot. Some kind of sickness. He’d been buried at sea. They had read the letter and known it was true, but at the same time, without the proof of a body to mourn, it was like the words weren’t talking about Homer. Not their Homer. They had half expected to see him coming up the road carrying his pack for months after they got the news. A person shouldn’t just disappear.

  That’s the way she’d felt about Gil. One day he was there, catching her away from the house and begging her to run away with him. And she had. Her mistake was coming back. It hadn’t seemed such a mistake at first. Just a bit of a wait till the war was over.

  The road got some smoother as they came out into the clearing and saw what was left of the barn up ahead. It looked funny with no house behind the barn, but Mae’s husband hadn’t wanted to sell the farm or rent the house. So he’d let Junior Perkins salvage what he could out of it. Junior had used some of the lumber to build a garage out behind his house. The rest he’d sold. A piece here. A piece there. The living room mantle was in a house over in Grundy, and the doors were in Davis Norville’s house on Bush Avenue uptown. Wilbur Smith had used the tin off the roof to build a chicken house. They’d come in the store and told her where each piece went while she poked the keys on the cash register to total up their groceries. They had thought she would care.

  The chimney looked lonely sticking up from where the house had been. Nobody had wanted to haul out the rocks. Rocks weren’t that scarce in Holly County. Wesley stopped the motorcycle next to the forsaken steps and held it steady while Jocelyn helped her climb off. The child kept sneaking looks at her as if expecting to see the top of her head flipped off and her brains scattered on the wind. Love patted Jocelyn’s cheek after she climbed off the monster machine. Her whole backside felt numb, but the thing had gotten them there.

  “Where is it?” Love asked.

  “Down by the creek. There’s a cave down there,” Jocelyn said.

  Wesley took her arm. “So this is the home place. I guess as how it’s sad seeing it gone and not like you remember.”

  “Not a bit sad. I tried to burn the thing down when I left, but Mae’s John happened by before the fire got going and put it out. Scorched the living room wall, they told me. Said they figured I’d spilled a coal out of the fire onto some papers, and I said that’s how it might have happened. It wasn’t how it happened, but it might have been. I should’ve dropped that coal on the papers closer to the drapes.”

  Jocelyn’s eyes got big. “Why ever would you want to burn down your own house, Aunt Love?”

  “I guess I shouldn’t have told you about that, but I never felt the least bit guilty about it. I was ready to put an end to this part of my life, child, and it just seemed burning was a good way to put a seal on it.”

  “I can relate to that,” Wesley said. “I’ve done some bridge burning in my day as well.”

  Love looked at Wesley and nodded. She’d always known he was running away from something. That’s why he came up with those crazy stories about Jupiter. So he’d never have to tell the truth. Just the way she’d never told the truth after she’d run away from this place. She hadn’t exactly lied or made up stories, but she’d never told the truth. Never. Maybe because she’d never known the whole truth. Not till now.

  She leaned on Wesley as they moved down past her rock garden toward the creek. Sometimes she thought that rock garden was all that had kept her sane before her father died. There, still standing in the middle of the garden, was the birdbath she’d fashioned out of pebbles and shards of geodes and an old sack of mixing cement she’d come across in the barn after her father could no longer get out of the house, but her mother’s rosebushes were gone. She remembered the times she’d stood in the garden and tried to think of nothing but the sweet scent of those roses. If she shut her eyes, she could still almost smell them. Almost.

  This was where she had always imagined the grave to be. She’d always hoped there was a grave, but she’d never been able to find it. She’d never once thought of the cave, although Homer used to hide in it when he was a boy and wanted to get out of his chores. He was the baby, and oft as not she’d do his chores for him along with her own to keep him out of trouble with their father. He’d been the only person in the world outside of Gil and her mother who she’d ever felt loved her. Homer had a way of smiling that could bring sunshine through the dingiest window into the soul. It had been too hard to think of both Homer and Gil dying in the war. That’s why she had stayed and waited so long for Gil to come back for her. She couldn’t believe God would take both of them so close together. But of course, God never promised that troubles wouldn’t come. That had taken her some years to understand and even more years to accept.

  But the cave made sense. She should have thought of it. It had been January. The coldest on record until about ten years back. Some days the thermometer on the back porch had never made it past zero. Her father couldn’t have dug a hole in the frozen ground.

  The baby would have been forty-six last January. Love always remembered his birthday. It seemed funny to think about him older than David. She’d known the baby was a boy. Her mother had seen that much before her father had taken him away.

  Wesley crawled through the hole Jocelyn pointed out. The dog tried to follow him, but the child grabbed him around the neck and pulled him back away from the opening into the cave.

  After Wesley’s feet disappeared into the darkness of the cave, Love thought she should pray or at least whisper some Bible verses, but nothing came to mind. Instead, echoing across the years was the cry of a newborn. She wanted to put her hands over her ears, but of course that wouldn’t stop it. It never had.

  “Are you okay, Aunt Love?” Jocelyn asked. “Maybe you should find someplace to sit down.”

  She did feel a bit faint as her heart pounded inside her chest, so she sank down on a boulder. The warmth of the rock surprised her. She’d barely noticed the bright sunshine. She’d been standing too deep in the shadows of the past.

  She tried to hear Wesley moving inside the cave, but all she could hear was the dog panting beside her and a crow cawing in some trees out behind the barn. The child was still staring at her as if she expected her to keel over any second. That was one of the problems with getting old. Folks kept expecting you to die right in front of their eyes. There had been times when she’d wished it was that easy, that she could just close her eyes down here and open them up in heaven, but a person couldn’t pick her time. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die.”

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken the Bible verse aloud until the child said, “That’s in Ecclesiastes, isn’t it? Where it starts out ‘Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.’ What does that mean, Aunt Love?”

  It wasn’t a time for a Bible lesson. Too much of her mind and heart was inside that hole of a cave with Wesley. But the child kept looking at her expecting an answer, so she said, “That our lives don’t matter all that much in the whole of time. We’re born. We die.”

  “But what a
bout all the years in between?”

  “That’s when it’s time to sow and reap, to weep and laugh, to dance, to mourn. ‘But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.’ Ecclesiastes 11:8.” Love had committed most of Ecclesiastes to memory years ago.

  “Why not remember the days of joy and try to forget the darkness ones?” Jocelyn asked.

  “I don’t know, child. Maybe because it’s the dark days that bring us closer to the Lord.” Love stared at the cave and wished she’d just told the child to ask her father. David could have explained it to her without losing the joy.

  “Is that why you’re so close to the Lord, Aunt Love? Because you’ve had a lot of dark days?” Jocelyn asked softly. “Knowing the Scriptures and knowing the Lord aren’t the same thing,” Love said. “I know the Scriptures because I searched for answers there.”

  “About God?”

  Love looked down. It still surprised her sometimes to see her mother’s hands lying in her lap. Slimmer but still liver spotted just the way she remembered her mother’s hands. Her mother’s hands knitting a tiny pastel yellow sweater. “God and other things,” she said after a moment.

  “Did you find the answers you wanted?”

  “Sometimes there are no answers.”

  The child frowned. “But Dad says you can always find the answer in the Bible.”

  Love herself had once wanted the answers to be clear and simple, had thought she just wasn’t searching hard enough, praying fervently enough. “Sometimes the answer is that there is no answer.” Love looked up from her hands toward the hole Wesley had slid through what seemed like hours ago. “Do you think he’s gotten stuck in there?”

  “It’s bigger than you think it would be inside. It opens up where you can almost stand up. Didn’t you ever go inside it when you were a kid?”

  Love almost smiled at the sight of Jocelyn struggling to think of her as a child. “No. I never cared for caves. Homer—that was my brother—he liked to go crawling about under the ground, but I prefer to see my spiders and snakes before they fall on my neck.”