The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  The girl’s eyes widened a bit. “I felt the same way when I crawled in there. Spiders are creepy.” She shivered, and the dog licked her face.

  “Yet spiders are surely one of God’s most amazing creations.” She couldn’t believe she was talking about spiders. Shouldn’t she be screaming? Or crying? At the very least praying? But what was there to pray for now?

  At last Wesley stuck his head out of the cave and crawled back out. She didn’t know why her heart started beating faster. She knew what was in the cave. The child had already told her. Still, it seemed to need confirmation.

  Wesley was somber. She appreciated that. He laid his hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye. “It’s like Jo said. There’s a grave in there. A baby’s skeleton under a pile of rocks. That big flood last spring must have shifted some of the stones, and that’s how come the dog found it.”

  “I see.” Love looked away from Wes toward the sky. It was blue, very blue with no clouds. The kind of blue that as a child made her think that God was in his heavens and all was right with the world. But now there should have been clouds. Love could feel the child’s eyes on her, but for once she was quiet. Not a common thing for Jocelyn.

  After a while, Wesley asked, “What do we do now, Lovella?”

  “I don’t know,” Love said.

  “Do you want to tell us about it?”

  “I don’t know if I can. It’s something that’s never been told.” Love looked at Wesley. “I wasn’t married, you see.”

  Wesley wiped the sweat off his forehead with a rumpled bandanna before he sat down beside Jocelyn and leaned back against a rock as if he had all day to hear whatever she had to say. But what could she tell? Especially with the child there staring at her as though she’d suddenly grown two heads. And maybe she had. Maybe it was the second head that started talking about something she never thought she would.

  “We aimed to be married,” she said softly. “We ran away that weekend for the sole purpose of marrying before Gil went overseas to fight in the war. That was the First World War. But when we got to Louisville that day, it was late and the courthouse was closed, and we didn’t know where to find a judge or a preacher. So we had our wedding night early.”

  Even now, all these years later, the pure pleasure of lying beside Gil, knowing he loved her, knowing she was going to be his wife, still caused her to feel warm in places her father would have told her it was sinful to even acknowledge were there. “Our plan was to get up early the next morning and find a preacher before Gil had to catch his train.”

  “What happened?” Jocelyn asked.

  “We didn’t wake up in time.” Love’s heart had clunked in her chest when she’d opened her eyes to the sunlight pushing through the dingy window in the hotel where they’d spent the night. She had stared at Gil’s watch for a good two minutes before she could believe the hands. After she’d shaken him awake, they’d had no time for anything but a mad rush through the streets to get Gil to his unit. The train was leaving. Gil had to get on it. There was a war on, and if he hadn’t gotten on the train, he’d have been a deserter. Funny how a few hours of sleep could so change a whole life.

  “He promised he’d come back. And I thought he would. I wasn’t a child. I was into my twenties, but I didn’t know about war. And the boys were all so sure they’d go over there and take care of business and come home.”

  “ I remember,” Wesley said. “There were signs about enlisting everywhere. I lied about my age and tried to sign up, but I was a little squirt and didn’t even look thirteen. They laughed at me and sent me home.”

  “That was lucky for you,” Love said. She’d watched the tracks long after the train had disappeared. Finally somebody had asked if she’d needed help, and of course, she had. But she’d said no and walked back to the hotel. She’d worried about paying the hotel bill. She’d worried about what she’d tell her father when she went home. She’d worried about how she’d stand it till the war was over. But she’d never once worried about Gil not coming home. “ I thought Gil would be lucky too. He was so strong. He could do anything and nothing scared him. Not even my father.”

  She’d used the money Gil had given her to pay the hotel bill, then walked to her aunt’s house, her father’s widowed sister. She’d said she was going to Aunt Betty’s in the letter she’d left on the kitchen table back at the house. She hadn’t cared whether her father believed it or not. Not when she left. But once Gil was gone, her courage had collapsed. Aunt Betty had let her stay one night, but she couldn’t stand up to Love’s father any more than Love could.

  Besides, there had been Love’s mother to consider. She wasn’t well. Hadn’t been well since Homer was born. Love suspected she didn’t want to be well, but that didn’t change the fact that she was no longer capable of taking care of herself, much less the house. She was a fleshy woman, and there were nights she didn’t bother to heave herself out of her favorite chair to go to bed but just slept where she was. Love often got up in the night and spread a blanket over her.

  Her mother hadn’t been in good health, but she hadn’t been idle. Her hands were always busy, quilting, braiding rugs, or tatting the intricate lace Love sold to the neighbors. But Love had been taking care of the house since she was twelve. She hadn’t minded the work. They’d all had to work to scrape a living out of their rocky old farm. Her father had set the example. He’d rarely sat for more than long enough to eat his meals, and then he’d attacked the food on his plate with the same single-minded purpose he’d used when plowing and planting.

  Love’s mother had disgusted him. And that’s why Love had to go home. She shouldn’t have. Mae could have seen to their mother, could have made sure she had food and clean clothes. But Mae couldn’t have stayed to be a buffer for their father’s anger. She had a family of her own. Three boys and a girl already. David still hadn’t been born. He’d been a late-life blessing. And what a blessing, though at the time Love could barely force herself to look at him or any other baby.

  So, wrong as it turned out to be, she’d gone home. Her father had backhanded her across the face and knocked her down. After that he’d acted as if she didn’t exist except as the means of getting a myriad of chores done. Of course, then he hadn’t known about the baby. She hadn’t either.

  Love looked at Wesley and the child. Wesley had his eyes half closed, giving her time to think. The child was trying to be as patient, but she was fidgeting. The child never sat still very long. It wasn’t in her nature. Love had once been that way, as if by her pure busyness she could make sure she wouldn’t end up sapped of energy like her mother. Love hadn’t understood then the many things that could rob a body’s life energy.

  Love stared at the opening into the cave for a long moment. The truth was almost half a century old. She wasn’t sure it should be told. She wasn’t sure she even knew the truth. At last she took a deep breath and began talking. “My father was strong in the church. If the preacher wasn’t able to come, the people looked to my father to lead the services. He had a deep voice and a knowledge of the Scripture and assurance in what he said. When he prayed it was easy to imagine God’s head bent over to listen.

  “I was the next to youngest child. Homer was two years my junior. Mother’s health was bad from the time I can remember. I took over the house and vegetable garden completely after Mae married when I was twelve. I didn’t mind the work. We all worked. Even Mother as much as she was able, peeling and such and with her needlework. Father said idle hands were an invitation for the devil to get you into trouble.

  “Father never thought about a war taking Homer or me marrying. He planned to keep us two youngest children home to help him keep the place going. I was a homely child and backward socially besides, so he wasn’t worried about any suitors showing up on our doorstep. And he knew how Homer loved the farm. It was always a great sadness to me that Homer wasn’t buried on the land. He wasn’t a thing like Father. Everything fascinated him. A rock shining in the sun. A pret
ty leaf. He made a pet out of a groundhog once. And Father let him keep it for a spell. I never could understand that. Father wouldn’t let us keep more than three or four barn cats. If too many kittens showed up, he just swung them by the tail up against a tree trunk. It was one of my chores to carry off the carcasses. One time he caught me crying over a dead kitten, and told me there wasn’t enough milk for the cats and us too. When I told him they could have my share of the milk, he just boxed my jaws for being mouthy.”

  Love looked up at the sky again. Still blue. Still no clouds. Wesley’s eyes were kind and sympathetic, but the child looked half peaked. She shouldn’t have told about the kittens. She wished she could forget about the cat brains on the tree trunks herself. But after the baby had come, the kittens had been all she could think about for a long time.

  “I guess you’re wondering what too many kittens has to do with a baby’s grave.”

  “You tell the story however you want to tell it, Lovella. The shade’s about made it over to us, and we ain’t in a bit of hurry,” Wesley said.

  Love wanted to reach out and touch him. To thank him for his kindness. Once when her father was on his deathbed, she had tried to recall a kindness he’d done for her. Just one single kind thing. She had thought about it through those long days while her father clung to life one raspy breath at a time. She’d made her mind travel back over the years, searching in every least important memory, and was not able to remember even one kind moment. Not even when her mother died, but that had been only a few months after the baby.

  She’d wanted to be wrong. She’d wanted to stumble across a forgotten memory when he had taught her to put a worm on a hook or had smiled or tousled her hair when she was a small child. And perhaps he had. Perhaps it had just been blocked out by the misery of the years in between.

  He’d been kind to Mae’s children. In his later years he’d sat on the porch swatting flies in the summertime and watching for one of the grandchildren to come by. He’d given them peppermint sticks and told Love to make sugar cookies. And she’d seen the ghost of her own child in the shadow of Mae’s children.

  She started talking again, the words struggling up to the surface of her mind like the thick popping bubbles of apple butter cooking. She had never been able to stir apple butter without having burns to show for it. “I wore loose dresses and never complained about being ill, so no one knew I was in the family way. Not even Mae. No one except Mother. Mother sometimes pretended not to notice things just so she wouldn’t have to be bothered, but her eyes were sharp, and she started knitting the baby a sweater when I was seven months along. We didn’t talk about it, but she let me lay my head in her lap and stroked my hair on the days I felt the worst. I don’t know what we thought was going to happen. Maybe that the war would be over and Gil would get home before the baby came and make an honest woman of me. I don’t think we were thinking. We were just letting it happen because we didn’t know what else to do.”

  She’d loved the baby from the first moment she’d known he was growing inside her. She’d written Gil and told him, but she never knew if he got the news. Her father wouldn’t let her have Gil’s letters. He’d burned them unopened in the cookstove. Even now she could see the letters of her name on the envelopes turning black in the fire. She’d always wondered why he hadn’t burned the one she’d found in his Bible after he died that told of Gil’s death in the war. Perhaps that was the one kindness he’d done her, not burning the letter so that she could know Gil hadn’t just broken his promise and not come back for her even if she found the letter years too late for it to make a difference in her life.

  “The baby was strong and healthy. He kicked and boxed inside me until sometimes I thought he was going to break right out of me. I’d helped Mae and others in the neighborhood during their confinements, so I knew what to expect. Or at least I thought I did.” Could any woman ever know what it was like for a baby to fight his way to freedom until she’d experienced it?

  “I had a bad confinement. We still hadn’t told my father what was wrong with me. Mother just told him it was female problems, which was certainly no lie. Before my pains got too bad, we came up with a plan of sorts. Mother would help me deliver the child. We’d hide him out like Moses in the Bible until I got my strength back, and then I’d go to my mother’s sister who lived in another state. Mother had some money put back from selling the lace she made. We’d say my husband had gone to war. It was close to the truth. I even planned to take Gil’s name. Gil would have wanted me to. When I worried how Gil would find me, Mother said she’d tell him where I was.”

  It had been such a good plan. Love had felt hope for the first time in weeks. She could feel the ground under her feet walking away from the farm, and for a while the pain hadn’t been so hard to bear. But the hours had dragged on. The pains had strengthened. The baby hadn’t come. She looked down at her hands again and wondered if she would have the courage to tell the rest of the story. Maybe she should just leave it there and say no more. She used to wish she could think to that spot and not remember the rest. But of course, she couldn’t.

  After a few minutes, Jocelyn reached over and touched Love’s hand in her lap. “What happened, Aunt Love? What went wrong?”

  She looked up at the child and tried to keep her face expressionless. “I screamed. Heaven knows I tried not to. When my pains started, my father was out sawing wood. It was dreadfully cold, but Father never surrendered to the elements. But he came to the house at dark after seeing to the animals. I’d labored all day with no progress. The pains banged against me, tore through every inch of my body, attacked me like a wild animal. Mother rolled up a piece of cloth for me to bite, but there comes a level of pain where there is no control. I screamed. We had barred the door with a chair, but it wasn’t enough to keep my father out.” Her father had slung the chair across the room, yanked the covers back, and cursed her. “I thought he was going to kill me, and I didn’t even care. I just wanted to be free of the pain. Mother grabbed his arms and begged him to go for the doctor or at least Mae, but he refused. He would not allow me to shame him in the neighborhood.”

  Love took a breath and looked back at the sky. Still blue but somehow different, as though the blue was fading into evening. “The pain devoured me. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I don’t know how long it was before the poor little thing finally made it out. From somewhere far away I heard Mother say it was a boy, but my father took him away from my mother. He wouldn’t let me see the baby. He said the baby was dead.”

  She had screamed again and tried to get up to follow her father when he went toward the door holding the child. Her mother had wrapped the baby in a towel while she was cutting the cord, and all Love had been able see was the towel in her father’s hands. She hadn’t been able to get out of the bed. Her legs and arms wouldn’t move. It had been as if the air was mashing her against the bed. She’d gotten her head up. Her mother’s hands and dress had been covered with blood, and tears had been streaming down her cheeks as she’d gently held down Love’s shoulders. She’d tried to fight her, but the bed had begun spinning. She’d begun falling down a deep hole. And that’s when she’d heard the baby cry. She’d tried to climb back out of the hole, but the sides had been shiny with blood and she’d kept slipping deeper down into it.

  She tried to turn her mind away from the echo of the baby’s cry. It had all been so long ago. She looked at Wesley and Jocelyn. Tears were sliding unnoticed down the child’s cheeks. Love shouldn’t have told so much, but it was too late to take back her words. Now she was anxious to finish the telling of it. “Mother thought I was going to die. I don’t know why I didn’t. I wanted to. Mother and Mae nursed me. I don’t know whether Mother told her about the baby or not. I don’t think she did or surely Mae would have said something. Father told everyone I had rheumatic fever. Every church in the county prayed for me. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I had visions of the war. I dreamed about Gil. The baby haunted me. And I couldn�
�t die. I decided it was part of my punishment to have to live. I had sinned, and sin brings its own punishment. In the spring I finally got out of bed and went back out into the sunshine. But I didn’t feel its warmth for a long time.”

  She had been little more than a ghost searching for some sight of the ghost of her baby. She’d begged her father to tell her what he’d done with the baby, but he’d forbidden her ever to mention it again. So she had searched every inch of the farm for some sign of a grave. “That was when I started my rock garden. It was something to keep me sane until Gil came for me. I still thought he’d come. The war was ending, and the soldier boys were coming home. But he didn’t come. And my mother died in June. I came in from hunting rocks for my garden and found her dead in her chair. And still I couldn’t leave. Not only might Gil come for me, but the baby was there on the farm.” She looked over at Wesley. “You do see that I had to stay.”

  Wesley nodded. “Life can sure serve us up a pot of misery sometimes.”

  Love saw the pain in Wesley’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have burdened you with my story when you have troubling memories of your own.”

  “Sometimes there’s healing in the telling,” Wesley said.

  “Some things never heal. I think you know that.” Love looked from Wesley to the child and reached out to touch the tears on her cheek. “Everybody has troubles, child, and secrets that might be best untold. But shared sorrows get lighter. Thank you for your tears.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Love, for every time I’ve ever been mean to you,” the child said.

  Love managed a smile. “There have been times when you have surely tried my patience, Jocelyn, but never a day when I didn’t thank the Lord for the kindness of your father and for him allowing me to be part of your family.”