“As was Aunt Phoebe a good portion of her life.”
Our footsteps left footprints in the dust on the hardwood floors. A bit of plaster from somewhere high on the foyer wall crunched underfoot. The air inside smelled like a damp cellar.
“Lots of upkeep in a place like this.” He rattled the loose newel post on the banister in the entry, as if punctuating his point.
“I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“That may be all you have going for you.” I’m sure those were his words, though he’d turned his back to me and lowered his voice. “Don’t suppose you need a tour.”
“No tour. Just the keys, please.” I refused to drop my outstretched hand, determined not to be the first to flinch. “Mr. Rawlins?”
“I must remind you that the bank’d be more than happy to relieve you of this albatross.”
“If you would be so kind as to help unload my trunks from the carriage, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I don’t think you’ve taken into consideration all this here house is going to require in the way of maintenance and—”
“I will save you the energy of delivering the remainder of your speech. Be assured I will inform Mr. Blakemore at the bank that you did all you could to persuade me. You discharged your duty as instructed. But I was and ever will be immovable on this subject. I’m keeping the house.”
The veins at his temples beat frustration’s pulse. He did not bear defeat well, which showed in his rough handling of my trunks and the fact that he left them on the porch. I was glad to be rid of him and his greasy odor, even if it did mean wrestling the beasts across the threshold myself.
After the dust of his departure settled, I walked back out through the front door and down the steps, turned, and approached on my own, with no irritation at my elbow. I reentered the house as I’d wanted to, with a sense of awe rather than restrained anger.
Aunt Phoebe’s home was now mine. It came to me along with her walnut rocker, her silver tea set, and six hand-painted porcelain cups and saucers—the extent of her earthly possessions she felt worth mentioning in her will. The truth of the matter is she outlived her husband and his modest savings. Medical expenses whittled away at her worldly goods until, at the time of her death, her bank account and her house were as empty as her spiritless body.
I hadn’t expected to inherit the house. I suppose that was naive of me. She had no other living relatives. When she died, I, also, was left with no one to call mine.
The key yet in my hand, I surveyed my new home. Empty, drafty, colorless rooms. All of them. As awkward in their emptiness as a missing front tooth on an otherwise distinguished politician’s wife.
A stubborn hint of elegance remained in the architecture. Lofty ceilings. Ornate carved mantels and woodwork. A staircase that swept like a swan’s neck to the second floor. The house whispered, “You should have seen me in my youth.”
Now, every inch was bare and unadorned, unless one could count the layers of dust and the crisscrossed trails of rodent droppings. On that first encounter, my footsteps echoed hollowly as I walked the barrenness of the once grand Federal-style home. My inheritance? Or my liability?
I had only a handful of items to my name. Everything else had been consumed by debts, which I also had inherited. I was as unprepared to furnish a house as was an immigrant whose life savings covered the expense of the ocean crossing but not a penny more. I stood with my feet on foreign soil but having no resources with which to move inland away from the shore.
The cramped room at Mrs. Hazelton’s boardinghouse took what little I earned but gave me the gift of closeness to the sanitarium where Aunt Phoebe’s days drained to the dregs. She needed companionship, a kind face in the midst of a cruel disease. And I needed to be near her.
So now, these years later, I stood dumbstruck and dreamless in her home. As if chiding a petulant child, I asked the barren house, “What am I going to do with you?”
Rather than envisioning richly textured oriental carpets with which I longed to cover the floors and yards of Venetian lace hung at the windows, that first day of official ownership I walked through the house making note of which rooms could be closed off completely. No need to heat emptiness.
Within minutes I decided to ignore the entire second story for a time and convert one of the downstairs parlors into a temporary bedroom. That left four massive rooms on the main floor to consider. The formal parlor to the left of the entry. The library directly to the right. The dining room with its startling rich mahogany-paneled walls. And the kitchen, which stretched the full width of the back of the house.
At my mother’s knee I learned to make do, to use creativity where money failed. But that first gray day, with the sun fighting a losing battle with the cloud cover, I could not rouse creativity from its untimely slumber. The emptiness kept its smothering hand over any thoughts wanting to be born.
How uncharming the house seemed, even as Aunt Phoebe became in the later stages of her illness. Sunken cheeks and sallow, parchment-thin skin. Relentless, suffocating cough that stopped only when her fight was over and her spirit lost its need for breath.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to remember her before she became sick. Rosy cheeked. Gracious in speech and movement. Full of vigor. Full of faith that patched all the holes in mine. Floating through those rooms, her skirts brushing past velvet settees and walnut lamp tables.
I opened my eyes to the vacant spaces around me. By the calendar, spring had a good foothold, but I felt chilled and as alone as a sane person dare feel.
How, God? How am I to do what You’ve asked of me? I’ve nothing but imagination left, and even it is threatening to resign. How am I to furnish this place—much less manage it—on a few remaining threads of misdirected ambition?
Before I finished formulating my complaint, the answer stole across the floor of the room. Ignoring the film of dust, sunlight fought its way through the beveled glass in the windows of the parlor in which I stood, laying a carpet of color on the floor and papering the walls with elegant, translucent shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Clouds reclaimed the scene soon enough, extinguishing the splash of color. But the deed was done. I had my answer . . . and fresh hope.
Isn’t it amazing how hope can so quickly grow stale when it is exposed to doubt? I vowed not to let that happen again.
God called me to the task. He’d accompany me through it.
Ivy—1951
Ivy laid down her pencil and flexed her fingers. The pillow Anna had suggested for the small of her back helped, but no cure existed for a hand cramp except to stop writing.
“What task, Miss Anna?”
“Hmm?”
“To what task did you feel called?”
“Oh, I’ll get to it.”
The longhand story already filled several pages of the steno pad Ivy had purchased at the five-and-dime. How far would they be into the notebook before Ivy knew where the tale was headed? How long before she even knew if the words were true or a brilliant work of senile fiction?
Did it matter?
Anna’s face boasted more color than Ivy had seen in a long while. Her eyes danced with her memories, real or imagined.
Ivy could think of worse ways to spend her late afternoons and occasional evenings. Trapped between the broken springs on the seedy, tweedy davenport her father liberated from the alley-dump behind the dry cleaner. Stuck to the chrome and vinyl chair at the table in the perpetually humid kitchen. Writing airmail letters she didn’t dare send. Taking out all the truth and writing them again.
If she kept Anna talking, rarely a challenge, she could forget what was happening in her body and on the side of a Pacific Rim mountain or in a rice paddy across too large a body of water.
“Weren’t you afraid to stay in that big house alone, Anna?”
“Hmm? No. Alone, I was used to. An expert at it, you might say.”
“And how old were you then? When you first got the house?”
Anna smiled. All her own teeth. Beautiful. “Mr. Rawlins was a poor judge of just about everything. I was all of twenty-seven when I took over Morning Glory.” She hoisted her body straighter in the chair. “But don’t you write that! It’ll throw people off. It wasn’t Morning Glory when I got it. That came later. They came later.”
“They?”
“The morning glories. You been getting adequate sleep, Ivy? You’re having a hard time following a simple story.”
Ivy pressed her lips together. Swallowed a reply. Picked up her pencil and wrote.
7
Anna—1890s
Even now, when I think of it, my shoulders and back and knees and hands ache with the effort it took to scrub away the neglect in the house brought on while lawyers argued and paperwork floundered. A thousand trips to the pump in the backyard for yet another bucket of water. A year’s supply of tallow soap.
Many nights, I crawled onto my straw tick near the fireplace in the day parlor too exhausted to pull the blanket over my body. Rebellious muscles then began the nightly ritual of releasing their tension, searching valiantly for a comfortable position in which to sleep. I awoke as stiff as a woman three times my age, but plowed back into the task as if I had more than a self-imposed deadline.
The color came every afternoon when the clouds were busy elsewhere. The rich bands seemed to appreciate my efforts to keep “their” windows sparkling clean. An onlooker would think me daft, but I often dropped my washrags and scrub brush when the prisms of light visited. I stood in the middle of them, in the middle of God’s promise to me, gaining strength for the next chore and the next and the next.
One of those days, a knock sounded on my front doors at the very moment I returned inside from tossing the last bucket of scrub water into the yard behind the kitchen. I dried my prunelike hands on my work apron, then quickly removed it on my way from the back of the house to the double doors in front.
“Heard you was movin’ in,” the man said without even a how-do-you-do.
“Yes,” I said, offering an outstretched, waterlogged hand in greeting. “I’m Anna Morgan. And you are . . . ?”
“Percival Lincoln Crawford, ma’am.”
I cannot tell you how far my mind traveled in those few moments, inventing explanations for the circumstances under which a newborn, now a full-grown man with tattered coveralls and a sweat-stained hat, would have been given the name Percival Lincoln Crawford. Did he sense my rabidly wandering thoughts?
“Lincoln ain’t my real middle name,” he explained, as if that were the most curious part of his story. “I give that to myself, being as I never did like the name Clarence, and being as Mr. Lincoln was someone I’m proud to share a name with.” He whipped his hat off his head as if he’d just remembered he was speaking with a woman.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Crawford.”
“Most people who call me something decent call me Puff.”
“Puff?”
“That’s right, ma’am.”
“Do you smoke? Is that the reason you’re named—”
“Oh, no ma’am! God done broke me of that! You can be sure!”
His agitation startled me. I hadn’t meant to rile him. I was looking for a rationale behind his nickname. “Forgive my asking, Puff.”
“Oh, you got a right. You got a right, that be sure.”
“I do?”
“Well, now, you don’t want to be hiring someone with a tobacca habit, I don’t imagine.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crawford.” And I genuinely was, strangely enough. “I’m not in a position to hire anyone right now.”
“But you surely do need help, if you’ll pardon my pointing that out.” He wore a grandfatherly expression. “You got outbuildings that seen better days. If you don’t get some paint slapped on this house you might as well hang a sign inviting insects and such. And I might of killed myself coming up these steps, what with them rotten boards, which if they ain’t tended to could drop a person clean through to kingdom come.”
I smiled, which he seemed to take as an invitation to continue.
“Your garden out back ain’t about to produce beetle manure if it don’t get planted.” His voice trailed off after the word manure, his eyes dropping to the hat he held in his hands. Was he concerned that he’d offended my “sensibilities”?
“Puff, I would like nothing better than to have some help around here. And I can see that you are a man of vision as well as energy. But I am simply not able to pay. Currently. If my circumstances should change, where might I contact you?” I added the question to give him a shred of hope. He looked as if he could use it. Subconsciously, I must have spoken the words to give me hope that my financial picture might indeed one day accommodate a hired man.
“You can ask around about me.”
“Where, Puff? Do you live in town?”
“Just ask around. People knows me. G’day then, ma’am.” He doffed his hat to me and bowed slightly before turning to leave. I couldn’t help but smile when in his descent he gingerly avoided the rotten boards on the steps. He glanced back. I nodded that I’d noticed.
I say that an answer knocked at my door that day. I just didn’t know it at the time.
I slept a weary but satisfied sleep that night, ignoring the emptiness, enjoying the fact that the emptiness was clean and smelled delightfully fresh. Left to my own devices, I would have stayed nestled in my makeshift bed far longer the next morning. But one can hardly sleep through the sound of hammering right outside one’s door. I’d slept in my clothes, so I bounded up immediately, without the need to dress.
“Puff!”
“Yes, ma’am?” He removed a fan of nails from between his front teeth. “Did I start too early for you?”
I surveyed the work he’d already begun on the steps. The old boards had been removed. I slept through that? The first of several sawmill-fresh planks was well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture on my front porch.
How could he have misunderstood? Didn’t I make it clear to him? Was he—the precious soul—unable to mentally comprehend what we’d discussed the day before?
“Puff, I cannot pay you!”
“Yes, ma’am. I know that.”
I knelt on the top step and took the hammer from his hands as gently as I could, praying that my actions and words would not be perceived as condescending. “Puff, please understand. I haven’t money enough to feed myself, much less hire you to do this work.”
“I understand that. Yes, I does.” He took the hammer from me and resumed using it to pound nails into the wood. Two mighty blows per nail. His strength would have been frightening if he hadn’t been humming at the time.
“Mr. Crawford!”
He looked up at the formality.
“How much for the lumber?”
“Man at the mill needed a couple of chickens. I had me one or two to spare. You got your new steps.”
“But . . .”
“Now, listen . . .” He stood to his full height—well over six feet—slapped his hammer into a loop in his belt, and crossed his tree-trunk arms across his chest. “Are you tellin’ me that if God ’structed me to do something good-deedlike for someone who needs it, you’re gonna stand in my way?”
The fact that I was still kneeling at the top of the steps made his question all the more humbling.
Did I intend to stand in God’s way? My heart longed to be generous with Puff, not take from him. But it appeared I was being called to receive. Would I do so grudgingly or graciously? One response would bless Puff. The other would not.
“Then, I thank you for your kindness, sir.”
His grin threatened to carve a permanent fissure connecting his ears. I didn’t count them, but couldn’t help noticing that Puff was missing a few teeth. He filled in the gaps with joy. Beautiful.
He helped me to my feet. Sighing with an unusual, unexplained contentment, I left him to his work.
Coffee was all I had to offer him. I’d not
taken time to bake anything for many days. But I do make an acceptable cup of coffee.
By the time I carried two cups of coffee to the porch, Puff was sweeping the repaired steps free of sawdust, his job completed. He received his cup with a nod of appreciation.
The sun had just pulled free of the treetops, brushing the eastern edge of every leaf and limb and blade with spun gold. It moved me that words were not necessary to bridge the space between us. The scene itself spoke loudly enough.
Too long I’d failed to fully appreciate that—in addition to the house that screamed its barrenness—I’d also inherited responsibility for the land on which it sat. The land—richly upholstered, all forty acres of it, with a narrow band of woods along the sides, a neglected orchard across the back, and profuse fields of wildflowers in front. The tree-shaded house itself sat three hundred yards back from Stony Creek and its namesake, Stony Creek Road, which ran parallel to the creek and then crossed it on a rough, slightly more than wagon-wide bridge.
“When the original shingles were laid on this many-gabled roof fifty years ago, two decades before Lincoln’s war”—I emphasized the connection—“the house towered over the griddle-flat landscape, Puff.”
“I can picture it.”
“This imposing building was as out of place as people like me feel in the community.”
He looked askance at me. “People like you?” His chuckle shook his shoulders.
“But the maples and oaks and pines and cottonwoods Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Raif planted on this once-bald property have certainly matured, haven’t they? Branches, not shingles, claim sky-brushing dominance.”
“You got a way with words, Miss Morgan.”
His own forced a smile long absent. “Aunt Phoebe’s journals and reports from the town’s self-appointed historians tell me what the place looked like before the wagon tracks at the end of the lane were pressed into a semblance of an actual road, before the town took root where the creek joins forces with the river.”
“Four miles downstream.”
When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777) Page 6
