“Anything, Mama.”
“I want you to promise me when I’m gone you’ll leave this place and never come back again.”
“But, Mama—”
“No buts,” Bethany cut her off. “I know Daddy will want you to stay, but don’t do it. I’ve suffered through all these years of our not being together so you could have a better life. Please don’t let him take that last little bit of happiness away from me.”
“If I leave Daddy will be all alone. Is that what you want?”
“No.” Bethany shook her head ever so slightly. “It’s what he wants. It’s a path he chose years before you were born.”
She gave a saddened sigh then added, “Before his stubbornness got the best of him, your daddy and I were happy together. He’d come in from the field, and the first thing he’d do would be take hold of me and kiss me as if he’d been gone a month.”
She hesitated a moment and let the sweetness of that memory linger in her thoughts.
“After supper we’d sit on the porch swing and push back and forth until the moon was high in the sky. Sometimes we’d talk and other times we’d be silent as stones, just enjoying the closeness of each other’s company. Back then I thought it would be that way forever.” She absently fingered the narrow gold band on her left hand. “I guess forever was too long a time to expect of anything.”
“What happened?”
“It was so long ago, I barely remember. I know it started with a squabble over a piglet, but your daddy took it as an insult to his pride. A man’s pride will cause him to do things you never dreamed possible. He got fired up about being right and blocked out everything else.”
“Even you?” Margaret asked.
Bethany gave a bittersweet smile. “In an odd way, anger and hate are a lot like love. Once they get into your heart they affect everyone around you. Your daddy was worst with poor Elroy. He picked at your brother for any little thing he could think of, and when I defended Elroy your daddy saw it as me taking sides against him and he couldn’t move past that.”
Margaret started to object but once again Bethany silenced her.
“Just promise me…” she whispered then lowered herself onto the pillow and closed her eyes.
That afternoon with Margaret sitting by her side, Bethany drew her last breath and slipped away quietly. When Virgil came in that evening, Margaret had a stream of tears running down her cheeks, but Bethany appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
“Mama’s gone,” Margaret said, sobbing.
“Gone?” Virgil said and stood there looking lost.
* * *
On an icy morning in February, Bethany was buried on the high ridge in a spot right next to Elroy. With the bitterly cold weather, only five people were there: the Andersens, Pastor Whitcomb, Virgil and Margaret. Seconds after they lowered the wooden box into the ground, the pastor bowed his head and said a quick prayer. Then he and the Andersens hurried off. Virgil and Margaret stayed behind, setting a small pile of stones to mark the spot where she’d been laid to rest.
“You ought to plant a tree or a bush,” Margaret said. “Mama would like that.”
“Come spring I will,” Virgil replied. He shook his head sadly then added, “I guess your mama’s happy now. She’s with Elroy, and that’s what she’s always wanted.” His words carried the sound of resentment.
Margaret turned and gave her daddy a frigid stare. “Elroy needed Mama. That’s why she was always watching over him.”
“How come you’re still sticking up for her? Did you forget she sent you to live with Aunt Roslyn and kept Elroy?”
“I didn’t forget anything. Mama did that because she loved me.”
Virgil gave a grunt expressing his disagreement but didn’t bother arguing the point.
As they walked down the steep ridge road, side by side but not touching, Virgil said, “Now that you’re home, things is gonna be different.”
“I’m not staying, Daddy. I’ve got my last year of high school to finish, and I’m going back to Richmond to do it.”
“No, you ain’t,” Virgil replied. “I’m your daddy, and you’ll do as I say.”
Margaret turned with the same look of determination Bethany had.
“Not if you say I’ve gotta stay here. Before Mama died she made me promise I’d go back to Richmond, and come hell or high water I’m going to keep that promise.”
“I can make you stay if I want to.”
“How? You gonna tie me to a chair? Lock me in a room?”
“You know I won’t do something like that.”
“Well, it’s the only way you can keep me here. Otherwise the minute you turn your back, I’ll be gone.”
“You always were a difficult child,” he said begrudgingly. “I guess you ain’t about to change now.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Two days later Virgil took Margaret back to the train station. They sat together until the train chugged up to the platform.
“I’ve got to be going now,” she said.
With his expression flat as a cement walkway, Virgil said, “Once you get on that train, you’re the same as dead to me.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Margaret said. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek.
“I’ll write,” she promised then turned and climbed aboard. As the train left the station she took one last look back. Virgil stood there alone, looking as lifeless as a dead tree.
* * *
Just as Margaret promised, she did write. The early letters were pages and pages of what she was doing at school and the young man she’d begun to date. But when weeks and then months passed by with no answer, her letters became shorter. In time she’d scribble a single sheet saying she hoped he was doing well and drop it in the mail once a month.
After two years of not a single letter from Virgil, Margaret stopped looking for one. She penned a single letter on his birthday and didn’t bother to include a return address.
Virgil stuck to what he’d said. When the letters from Margaret arrived he slid them into the top drawer of the desk unopened. He couldn’t bring himself to toss them in the wastebasket, but neither could he find the heart to open them.
The House on Harrison Street
It might seem that once the Dodd family was settled in a home of their own Cyrus would let go of the regrets he’d carried around for over a decade, but that’s not what happened.
Prudence Greenly’s furniture appeared out of place in the small house. The sofa was too long for the living room wall and had to be set cattycorner with one arm blocking part of the doorway. In the course of moving the dresser into the upstairs bedroom, a knob had been knocked off and the bottom drawer now had to be jiggled open. With the furniture so at odds with the house, it served as a reminder of things to be regretted.
On the day they’d moved out of the Greenly house, Cyrus left a check for five hundred dollars on the kitchen counter. It was an amount he considered fair payment for the furniture and furnishings. At the time he’d felt proud not taking charity but now such a sum seemed hardly justifiable, especially since the furniture was such a poor fit for the house.
Then there was the issue of Joy, who for the first two weeks sat on the steps looking weepy-eyed. When Cyrus asked what was wrong, she said she missed her home and her friends.
“This is your home,” he answered, but then she started to cry harder and he was stuck with no other answer to give.
He lowered himself onto the stair and sat next to her. Curling his arm around her narrow shoulders he gave a sympathetic sigh.
“I understand how you feel,” he said. “I felt the same when your mama and I left the farm to come to Wyattsville.” He bent down and kissed the top of her head.
“It gets better in time,” he promised, but there was not a whole lot of conviction in his voice.
Later that same evening he decided to surprise Joy with a swing set similar to one he’d seen at the city park. He worked lon
g into the night drawing up plans and figuring what supplies he’d need to build it. The next morning he called Samson Brothers Lumber Yard and placed an order.
That Saturday the lumber was delivered and stacked in the backyard. Before Cyrus could get started on the swing, Ruth wrapped her arms around his neck and whispered how wonderful he was.
“How did you know this is exactly what I’ve been wishing for?” she asked. “All the while I’ve been thinking how lovely it would be to eat dinner outside instead of in the kitchen, you’ve been planning to surprise me with a picnic table.”
Instead of admitting that he’d planned to build a swing, Cyrus ordered another load of lumber and built both. When he finished he stepped back, looked at the two wooden structures stretched across the backyard and gave a sigh. Originally he’d thought of having a small garden—a dozen or so tomato plants, some bush beans and maybe a row or two of squash and carrots. Now there was barely enough room for a border of marigolds along the back fence.
* * *
That first summer the Dodd family ate dinner outside most every evening, and often they would linger with a glass of lemonade watching Joy push back and forth on the swing until the sky grew dark. On warm evenings when the air was filled with the sweet scent of jasmine and fireflies danced about, the backyard took on a magical quality. Times such as that Cyrus could almost forget the past and believe from this day forward his life would remain as perfect as it was at that moment.
He could almost forget but never totally. The one thing Cyrus had learned in all his years was that nothing stays the same, especially not something as perfect as that summer. Before another year had gone by Joy tired of the swing and moved on to a group of girlfriends who whispered secrets in one another’s ears and giggled about the boys at school.
The years rolled by in what Cyrus considered the blink of an eye. The little girl who’d sat on the steps crying because the new house was not home had disappeared. In her place came a teenager with long legs, a ponytail and lips brightened with Tangee Peachy-Pink.
It was not at all unusual for Cyrus to return from work and find a new face sitting at the supper table. Pulling Ruth aside, he’d ask, “Who’s that?”
“Joy’s friend, Brenda,” Ruth would answer. If it wasn’t Brenda, it was Mary Alice or Peggy or a study buddy from school. With their ponytails and rolled-up jeans, it seemed to Cyrus they all looked alike.
Although his life continued to move ahead day by day with the same routine, the world around him changed. Nowadays everyone hurried. Even though there was no wood to chop or stove to tend, kids were too busy to sit a spell and chat. It was always something; dashing off to the movies or a football game or a spin in somebody’s new automobile. The simplicity of life had somehow disappeared. Evaporated into thin air. There were nights when he came home expecting to have supper with his family, and he’d find Joy’s chair empty.
“She’s out with her friends,” Ruth would say, seeming not the least bit perplexed by this.
On occasion Cyrus would give a disheartened sigh and say, “I miss the old days when we were her friends.”
“Times change,” Ruth told him. “And we’ve got to change with them.”
“I suppose so,” Cyrus answered, but the truth was change was something he found difficult to accept.
He envied the way Ruth could slide from one life into the next with hardly a hiccup of anxiety. In a single day she’d settled into the Greenly house and called it home. Then they’d moved to Harrison Street, and within the month Ruth had lady friends all along the block. When they attended Joy’s school play, dozens of different women came to give her a hug and say what a wonderful job she’d done on the costuming.
“Costuming?” Cyrus asked.
“I helped out with sewing,” she replied.
It seemed so much of life passed by, and he was standing on the outside edge of everything. Even though he owned the house outright and had lived in Wyattsville for more than seventeen years, he still found it hard to think of this as home. Wyattsville was simply a place to live. Elk Bend was home.
* * *
The year Joy became a senior in high school, she took on a glow that made her look even more beautiful than she already was. Cyrus noticed but attributed it to the summer sun. One afternoon in the early fall he and Ruth were sitting in the backyard when they heard the trill of girlish laughter coming from the Crawford house three doors down.
“That sounds like Joy,” Cyrus said.
Ruth smiled. “It is.”
“Why is she down there instead of here with us?”
“She likes the Crawfords’ son, Peter.”
Cyrus knotted his eyebrows. “Likes? Do you mean in a man-woman way?”
Ruth laughed and gave a nod. “Our little girl is growing up. Next thing you know she’ll be married with babies of her own.”
“But that lad is just a boy.”
“Actually he’s twenty and works as an investment broker.”
“Joy is only seventeen; that’s much too young—”
“Have you forgotten I was seventeen when we got married?”
“But you seemed so much older.”
Ruth chuckled. “Not to my daddy. He thought you were just a boy.”
Cyrus wanted to say he was not the same as this lad with a job. He was a man who owned his own farm. It was on the tip of his tongue when the bitterness of what he’d lost settled in, and he said nothing.
Two days later he tore down the swing and burnt the wood in the fireplace.
“What a waste,” he said as he watched the flames swallow the dried wood.
“No, it’s not.” Ruth smiled. “Our little girl loved that swing, and now we’ve got a cozy fire to keep us warm. What more could you ask of a piece of wood?”
“But all the time I put into building it,” he replied ruefully.
She looked at him and laughed. “Now, Cyrus, you know you enjoyed doing it. I distinctly remember hearing you whistle and hum the whole time you were working. While you were building that swing you were happy as…”
Ruth was going to say as when he worked on the farm but thought better of it. After she took a deep breath, she said, “Happy as I’ve ever known you to be.”
Cyrus knew what she said was true. Even now with Joy a high school senior, he still looked back on that first summer and remembered it as a good one.
The week before Thanksgiving Cyrus was promoted to scheduling supervisor and given an office at the Grumman Bank Building in downtown Wyattsville. He would no longer have to take two different busses to the far edge of town. He could easily walk the half-mile to his office and almost always did.
His office was on the fifth floor of the Grumman building. Peter Crawford worked for the Reliable Investment Company, which was on the second. Often they passed one another in the lobby and stopped to exchange a word or two, both of them wearing a freshly-starched shirt and dressed in a suit and tie. The boy had a pleasant enough smile and a quick handshake. Although he appeared far too young to have such a prestigious position, it was difficult not to like him.
Cyrus could do little more than shake his head and question the irony of such a young lad being his equal, especially since it had taken him eighteen years to reach this point. On days when the sky was a clear blue he would stand at his office window, see the smoke of the train yard in the distance and wonder where it was that he’d gone wrong.
Wedding Bells
Before long Peter Crawford was a regular visitor at the Dodd house. Most every Sunday he was there for dinner and when the weather turned warm he was there every evening, sitting on the front porch glider with his arm around Joy.
One evening when Cyrus was in the middle of explaining the complexities of a railroad schedule, he noticed the way Joy was looking at Peter. He recognized the look. It was one of sheer adoration—one that until recently had been reserved for him. It seemed that all too quickly she’d gone from a toddler to a teen, and now here she was standin
g on the brink of womanhood.
That evening as they were climbing into bed he asked Ruth, “Have you noticed the way Joy looks at that young man?”
She nodded. “Of course. They’re in love.”
“So soon?”
“It’s not all that soon,” Ruth replied. “They’ve been dating for over a year.”
Cyrus gave a weighted sigh and turned off the lamp. Lying there in the dark, he thought back to the time when Ruth looked at him in that same starry-eyed way. He was a young man then. A man with a strong back, a good future and a farm he could call his own. He had something to offer before Virgil Jackson took it away.
Cyrus thought back on those years, the hardships they’d suffered. He remembered Ruth, frail and sickly. He remembered the baby boys, gone before they’d uttered a single cry. The house where they planned to live forever, also gone. Here they were, living in a town they’d come to as strangers.
Yes, they had a home, but not because he was a good provider. It was because Ruth had made friends with Arnold Greenly’s widow. His job, the house they’d lived in for ten years, all given to him. Given, not earned. He couldn’t help but wonder if the truth of all this had changed Ruth’s feelings for him.
“Ruth,” he said hesitantly, “do you still love me?”
She gave a soft chuckle. “Of course I do. Why would you think otherwise?”
Nearly a minute passed before Cyrus answered. When he finally spoke his voice had an underlying echo of sadness.
“I’m not the man you married,” he said. “You expected we’d raise a family on the farm, and I’ve let you down—”
Ruth bolted up and turned the lamp on. “Cyrus Dodd! How can you even think such a thing? It’s true we’ve had hard times, but there was never a single moment when I didn’t love you!”
Her eyes had the wrinkles of time bracketing the corners and her hair was threaded with silver, but the tenderness of her expression was just as it had always been. Cyrus leaned across and kissed her mouth.
The Regrets of Cyrus Dodd Page 12
