The Gardens of Covington
Page 2
“I love the way we live together,” Amelia said, “coming and going with our own lives, yet being supportive of one another. There’s always a listening ear, a helping hand.”
The low autumn sun ceased splashing the front porch of the farmhouse with its fierce dazzle and slipped behind the hills. The ladies rocked in comfortable silence and watched the heavens turn flame and gold above a line of pale green sky that reminded Grace of lime sherbet. She licked her lips, tasting the sweetness, feeling the coolness, thinking how the brilliance excited and the green soothed. Day tiptoed into evening, and dusk shuffled across the mountains and slid down into the valley.
Finally, Amelia said, “Something smells great in the kitchen.”
Grace nodded. “An old recipe I forgot I had. Baked chicken smothered in apricot sauce.”
“Sounds marvelous!”
“Think you still have room for dinner before we go to the meeting?”
“Just try us,” Hannah said.
2
The Meeting at Cove Road
Church Hall
The social hall at the church was plain, its walls painted white, its only ornament a simple wooden cross that filled the space on the back wall between two windows. Men and women wedged shoulder to shoulder on chairs that stretched from a center aisle to both walls. Men of all ages wore their Sunday best, as did the women: older women with deeply lined faces, middle-aged women, most of them round about the middle, and young women, a few carrying babies.
Sitting on the aisle near the door was Velma Herrill, mother of Roger Herrill, known as “Buddy,” the young fellow who managed the general store and single-pump gas station on Elk Road, the only road into Covington.
“How you doing?” Velma asked, reaching for Amelia’s hand. “That’s a right nice picture of the church you made for Pastor Johnson. I saw it in his office just the other day.”
Amelia turned her full attention to Velma, a pleasant, plump woman in her mid-fifties. “Glad you like that picture. If you want, I’ll come on down and take one of your house,” she said. “With all those roses still blooming along the railing of your porch, it would make a lovely color photograph.”
“Well.” Velma’s face turned ruddy with pleasure. “I sure would like that.”
“Consider it done. I’ll come on Saturday if that suits you, weather permitting.”
“Saturday’d be just fine.”
“What time?”
“Two o’clock okay with you?” Velma asked.
“I’ll be there,” Amelia said, touching the other woman’s shoulder lightly. Then she moved on to join the others.
Halfway down the aisle, Brenda Tate half rose from her chair and beckoned them to join her. It had been while tutoring the then seven-year-old Tyler Richardson at Brenda’s Caster Elementary School that Grace had met Tyler’s father, Russell, and his grandfather Bob Richardson. Not only had she and Bob become friends, and she blushed to think of it, they had become lovers, and soon they would be business partners in a tearoom that they were having built on leased land on Elk Road.
“Sorry. Excuse me. Sorry,” Grace, Hannah, and Amelia murmured as they squeezed past knees and avoided stepping on the toes of those already seated in the row where Brenda held chairs open for them. People nodded and said hello.
Moments later, Harold Tate walked with a sure stride to the unadorned oak podium that stood to one side of the cross. “Many thanks to Pastor Johnson for openin’ the hall tonight for this meetin’.”
From the front row, the tall, round-shouldered, gray-haired pastor raised a hand in acknowledgment.
The room grew still. Harold’s deeply lined face flushed. He ran his palms across the top of his brush cut, cleared his throat, and looked at his wife. Brenda smiled encouragement at him. Harold began. “Well, y’all know there’s not a darned thing we coulda done to stop all that rippin’ and tearin’ and bulldozin’ and buildin’ over yonder in Loring Valley.”
“They’ve destroyed that right pretty valley,” a woman said softly.
A refrain of “Destroyed it” echoed through the room. Feet shuffled. A man called, “What we gonna do, Harold?”
“Nothin’ we can do about what’s already been done, but we can stop it happenin’ on Cove Road.”
“Cove Road?” Heads turned. Whispers rippled into corners.
“I hear tell.” Harold raised his arms. “Now, don’t none of you ask me where I heard it. I can’t tell you.”
As if of one mind and body, the audience waited now, silent, leaning slightly forward.
“I hear tell those developers are lookin’ for more land. There’s McCorkle Creek, but that’s too narrow and steep, and when old Miss Lurina passes away Masterson’s land’s going to the state for a park. So, that leaves Cove Road what with all the pastureland and views we’ve got.”
Murmurs rose. Heads wagged.
Harold lifted his arm for silence and continued. “Seems like they’re gonna be sendin’ us all a letter sweet-talkin’ us, wantin’ to buy our land.”
An electric shock sluiced through the room. Men and women turned or tapped their friends and neighbors on the shoulders, whispered to one another. Voices escalated, whisper to din, din to babble, babble to clamor. The news was confounding. If any of them sold, it would ruin this good earth, their paradise, Cove Road.
Goose bumps clumped on Hannah’s arms. Reaching over she squeezed Grace’s hand, which was as cold as her own. She remembered something that Harold had said to her recently. “One of them McCorkle fellas with fancy ideas married him a flatlander girl from South Georgia. Betcha he told these developers about Loring Valley.”
And the librarian at Caster Elementary had told Grace that she’d heard that the powers that be in Madison County encouraged development. “We’re not a wealthy county, you know,” she’d said. “Our population doesn’t reach twenty thousand. Housing for retirees from out of state’s a clean industry, you might say, and it brings in taxes and encourages small businesses. Not a bad idea, really.” She had looked at Grace sheepishly. “Unless, of course, the development’s in your backyard.”
Harold’s raised hand folded into a fist and dropped heavily onto the podium. The room grew quiet. “Come an offer, I just want y’all to know that us Tates, and our family, the Lunds, and the Craines aren’t gonna sell. I’m askin’ y’all to stand with us. We gotta be together in this. None of us sell out, or this valley’s done for.”
As Hannah drove the short distance home to the farmhouse in her station wagon, the ladies were silent, each lost in her own thoughts. From the backseat Grace studied Amelia’s and Hannah’s head and neck. Pixie-like, Amelia’s shortened hair capped her small, round head. Her neck was swathed in the ubiquitous scarf with which she hid the burn scars that dated back several years to the car crash that had killed her husband, Thomas. Thick graying hair fluffed out in disarray topped Hannah’s tall, slender neck. Instinctively Grace smoothed back her hair from her face. We’re a good team, Grace thought. Bob had dubbed her the heart of their home, Hannah the head. And Amelia?
“She’s sometimes fey, sometimes capricious, sometimes solid and dependable. Why, Amelia’s the spirit of our home,” Grace had said.
The three ladies had worked out systems, roles, which sprang from their interests and skills. Hannah repaired leaking toilets, changed air filters, oiled creaky doors, unstuck windows, and tended the garden. Grace did most of the food shopping, happily cooked and baked, and sang off-key. Amelia filled the house with flowers and music, and vacuuming and dusting gave her a sense of satisfaction, except when ladybugs returned, as they did each spring and fall, to inhabit the ceilings. Grace sat back. So much had happened since they moved to Covington, and from it all they had become more tolerant, patient, and accepting of one another.
The crunch of gravel under tires brought Grace back to the present. Moments later they were on the porch, and Hannah held open the front door and stood aside to let Grace and Amelia into the entrance hall. From the li
ving room to their left, a tall lamp on a timer cast a soft welcoming glow on the new Kerman Oriental rug with its soft colors and silky look that covered most of the foyer floor.
“I’m absolutely appalled at the idea that Cove Road could be threatened with development.” Amelia covered her forehead with her hand. “Mon Dieu, I’m too tired to think or talk about it now.” She started up the stairs at the end of the hall.
“Same for me,” Grace said, and she and Hannah followed Amelia up the carpeted stairs, each to her own bedroom.
Two hours later, lights peeped from beneath their respective doors. Grace was first down to the kitchen. Her yellow-and-white-striped pajamas and yellow socks matched the cheerful yellow walls of the spacious modern kitchen, where white Formica cabinets had replaced splitting wood cabinets, new appliances took the place of rusty ancient ones, and lumpy floors were supplanted by laminate wood floors.
Grace had barely filled the kettle and set it on the stove when Amelia appeared in the doorway in a pink silk peignoir and mules, followed by Hannah, straight and solid as a lighthouse in her gray terry-cloth bathrobe with red lapel and belt and ragged terry-cloth slippers.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Hannah said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table.
“Neither could I,” Amelia said. “Ah, cookies.” She reached for the plate of cookies on top of the refrigerator and deposited it in the center of the table.
“What if someone sells out to those developers?” Grace brought her knife down hard into the lemon she was quartering. From a cabinet above the sink she lifted a compartmentalized wooden box filled with a variety of teas and positioned it on the table facing Hannah. Amelia set the table with small plates, cups for herself and Grace, Hannah’s favorite mug, spoons, sugar bowl, creamer, and the quartered lemon. Soon the kettle whistled, and Grace poured the steaming water into the cups and mug. “Well,” she said, taking a seat across from Hannah, “we know the Tates won’t sell, nor their daughter, Molly, and her husband, Ted Lund. They have just above a hundred acres.”
“The Craines own a lot of land, and they’re Harold’s cousins. Their land’s quite steep, though,” Amelia said.
Grace opened the wooden box of tea and offered it around. “They’d never sell. They like to tell people how their ancestors, the Covingtons, first settled this valley and gave the area its name.”
Bending over the tea box, Hannah considered and rejected mint, Earl Grey, orange and cinnamon, chamomile, and Tetley tea, then pulled out a bag. “Darjeeling.” Hannah dangled the bag above her mug, dropped it in, and watched the water curl about it before soaking it through.
Grace’s mind was elsewhere. “Besides the parsonage, there are seven families on Cove Road.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Us, the Craines, the Tates, the Lunds, the Ansons, the Herrills, and the Maxwells across the road.”
“Developers wouldn’t be interested in the church’s land. That’s only about thirty-five acres, nor our twenty-eight acres,” Amelia said.
“Maxwells and Ansons are the big property owners, over five hundred acres each, Harold told me.” Hannah fished out the tea bag with a spoon and set it on the plate on which her mug sat.
Grace’s head jerked up. Anxiety clouded her clear, brown eyes. “Oh, please, God, don’t let the Maxwells sell their land.”
“Stop this.” Hannah tapped the side of her pink mug, which read in bold red script, GARDENERS MAKE THE BEST LOVERS. It was a gift for her seventy-third birthday from her grandson, Philip. “We can’t make ourselves crazy. We haven’t gotten any letter. Maybe this whole thing is nothing but a rumor.”
“Would Harold have called a meeting? Would everyone have shown up for a rumor?” Grace frowned. “The Maxwells didn’t come.”
“Don’t frown, Grace,” Hannah said. “You’ll get wrinkles, which you’re lucky enough not to have.”
Grace ran her hand across her brow as if to smooth the lines. “Better?”
“Not much,” Hannah replied. “Got to stop worrying, all of us.”
“How?” Amelia asked.
“By looking at the facts. First, we’re not sure of anything. Two. We don’t know that anyone on Cove Road would sell land passed down to them by their forefathers. Three. There’s not a darn thing we can do about it, especially not tonight. Enough talk now, let’s go on up to bed.”
Grace raised her hands. “Tried that. Once I got into bed, I couldn’t shut off my head.”
“Tell you what,” Hannah suggested. “Let’s get out the Chinese checkers. Help distract us.”
Grace removed the plate of cookies from the table, covered it, and placed it atop the refrigerator. An hour later, when the kitchen clock read one A.M., they put away the game, ready to try their beds again.
“Now remember,” Hannah said from her bedroom door, “read, listen to music, breathe deep, whatever helps you get to sleep. Thinking serious thoughts is forbidden, right?”
They retreated into the privacy of their respective rooms.
From light cast by the lamp near Grace’s bed, the peach-colored walls glowed warmly, and on a shelf of her floor-to-ceiling bookcase the seven clowns in her collection somersaulted, waved, and grinned with their exaggeratedly painted mouths.
Shutting off serious thoughts was not easy for Grace. Being told not to think of something guaranteed that it was all she could think about. She opened her window, and her eyes searched the dark night for the stream, nearly fifty feet to the east. The security light, on its tall pole in front of the Maxwells’ barn, cast long shadows across the road. George and Bella Maxwell. Grace knew their names, but not the people. She couldn’t put a clear face to either of them. They waved driving by, yet remained distant. They would send their son, Zachary, over with fresh apples from their orchard, or a fresh baked apple pie, but they had never invited any of them into their home, or dropped in on the ladies. They seemed disconnected from the other families on Cove Road, yet had been conspicuous by their absence at the meeting tonight. Grace’s heart plunged. Of all the landowners, if anyone, were they most likely to sell out?
Grace hit the side of her head gently with her palm. Stop thinking. You know nothing about the Maxwells. Pulling a chair to the window, she rested her head against its low sill and listened to the soothing gush and gurgle of the nearby stream. She loved water yet had never been swimming at a beach, never seen the ocean or even the Great Lakes, though she had lived a lifetime in Ohio. Unbelievable. She, with all her books and dreams of faraway lands, had hardly stirred from Dentry.
Something small and hard hit her hand. A ladybug, fallen perhaps from a minute crack in the window frame. She studied its spots, started to count them, and remembered reading somewhere that in a French vineyard a ladybug is a sign of good weather. Pushing open the screen a bit, Grace flicked the ladybug outside. Did it fly away or fall to the ground? In the darkness she could not tell. Raindrops pelted her fingers, and when she drew her hand in, it was wet.
Grace’s mind drifted back through the years to Dentry. Like a cloud, she floated above her small hometown and scanned its familiar streets and places: Main Street, Western Ohio Bank, Trinity Church at the end of Livermore Avenue, Barker Elementary, where Roger cried so pitifully that first day of school that she felt her heart would break. She lingered over tree-shaded Park Road, circled her red-brick ranch house and the river of yellow tulips that spring faithfully ushered in each year along both sides of her front walk.
Sitting at her window, the rush of the stream outside seemed to grow louder, and as she listened to its music she mused about her deceased husband, Ted, a good, hardworking man, not given to words or to overt expressions of affection.
“You know me well enough to know what I’m thinking,” he’d say when she asked his opinion on things. He must have said he loved her before they married, but she couldn’t remember him saying the words in all the years that followed. “Do you love me?” she would ask.
“Why else would I be here?” was his standard reply.
3
The Buyout Offer
Grace awakened to soft light flowing through her bedroom windows. She stretched, then rolled over and hugged her pillow. She loved this room, this house, this land. If she followed the stream around the farmhouse, through the pasture, and past the apple orchard, she could climb a hill and enter miles of woods crisscrossed with creeks and congregations of wildflowers. If she hiked, as she sometimes did, to the crest of their land, she could see through the bare winter limbs of shagbark hickory, locust, oak, ash, and poplar, to softly humped mountain ranges that vanished in the distance behind a soft bluish gray haze. The Blue Ridge Mountains. Aptly named.
Grace turned from the world of nature to a consideration of practical matters. Today at lunch, she and Hannah would meet Emily Hammer, the young woman that Bob’s son, Russell, was enamored with. It had been more than two years since Russell’s wife, and Tyler’s mother, Amy, had been killed in that dreadful car accident, and now Russell had met a young woman named Emily Hammer, the daughter of new residents of Loring Valley.
Having spent an hour last night deciding what to wear for this luncheon meeting, Grace had chosen a simple blue skirt, a pale-blue long-sleeved shirt, and a vest embroidered down the front with bright yellow and rose flowers. Now, twisting and turning, she inspected herself in the mirror. At times like this, it would be nice to be thinner and more sophisticated. She shrugged. Oh well. When she needed a boost, Grace reread the note Bob had given her, and which she had taped in a prominent place on her mirror.
The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure she carries, or the way she combs her hair.