Remembrance

by Spaeth, Janet

  “I want to be able to carry my bride across the threshold,” Uncle Edward said. “That’s the only reason I’d delay matrimony with my Winter Butterfly.”

  Winter Butterfly? Eliza let it go and hugged her new friend. “That’s wonderful!” she said. “Isn’t it, Silas?”

  He hadn’t moved until she spoke. Then he shook his uncle’s hand. “Absolutely grand. Absolutely grand.”

  That moment of hesitation spoke volumes, and Eliza noticed the fleeting disappointment on Hyacinth’s and Edward’s faces. His approval mattered so much to them.

  She diverted them with questions about the upcoming nuptials. Had they spoken to Reverend Tupper? What about a reception afterward? A wedding dress?

  “I want you to make the dress,” Hyacinth said, her eyes again bright with excitement. “I know just what I want, too. Yellow silk—”

  “Yellow silk?” Eliza’s thoughts flew to the impracticality of yellow silk in the midst of winter. “Are you sure? Perhaps a soft woolen or even satin, although even one snowflake could spot it forever, would be better.”

  “She wants yellow silk? Yellow silk she shall have!” Uncle Edward boomed.

  Silas stood aside as the wedding plans were quickly spun into place. His lips tightly compressed, his dissatisfaction was evident.

  At last he spoke. “I am going home now. Uncle, are you coming with me?”

  Uncle Edward turned toward Hyacinth. “The hour is late, dearest. I shall see you on the morrow.”

  Silas rolled his eyes. “When did you turn into Shakespeare? Honestly!”

  “That’s not Shakespeare,” his uncle responded. “As much as you read, you should know that.”

  The two quibbled the entire way out of the boardinghouse, and their words carried across the open air as they headed to their house.

  “I can’t help but feel I’m at the center of some discord between Edward and Silas,” Hyacinth said as she shut the front door of the boardinghouse. “Silas doesn’t seem to be happy about my marrying his uncle.”

  Mrs. Adams came into the room and moved around the edges, straightening an antimacassar, adjusting a doily, wiping imaginary dust from a small round table. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m just tidying up.”

  A nod of Hyacinth’s head indicated that they should go upstairs where they could talk in private, and Eliza followed her into the older woman’s room, where Hyacinth sank onto the bed with an exasperated sigh.

  “What do you think, Eliza? Silas doesn’t seem to be as, well, enthusiastic as I’d hoped he would be.”

  Eliza detested being caught in the middle, and yet she saw no way to avoid it here unless she spoke carefully. Quickly she prayed for God to guide her words. “I don’t know that he has anything against you, Hyacinth. Of course he is concerned. You have to admit that you and Edward met in an unconventional way. You can’t blame him for being cautious. He loves his uncle, and he wants to make sure he’s doing the right thing.”

  Hyacinth flung herself back, her arms outstretched. “I am the right thing! Why can’t he see that?”

  “Well,” Eliza began, feeling for all the world like she was picking her way through a field of thistles, “I suspect he doesn’t know you yet. And he may be concerned that his uncle doesn’t know you well enough. Yet.”

  “But he does. There’s nothing hidden in my past. I’ve led my life as a good Christian woman. I tell you, Eliza, he could hire a detective and I’d come up as clean as new linen. How many women could say that?”

  Eliza flinched. It seemed like Blaine Loring had reached into her and seized her heart with his sin-stained fingers. She felt as if she’d never be clean again. The only relief she had was that she hadn’t let his advances progress. She had always stopped him. No, the spot on her soul was what she had done to others, on his cue.

  Hyacinth switched to the happier topic of her wedding plans, and Eliza let her mind continue to revisit the specter of Blaine Loring. How could she have let herself believe his lies?

  Was it wrong to trust so completely? The Bible did caution about this. Matthew 10:16 came easily to her mind: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

  “You’re not listening,” Hyacinth said accusingly, with a playful glint in her eyes, her earlier distress clearly laid aside.

  “I must be tired,” Eliza said. It was true. She was. It had been a long day with many unexpected twists and turns.

  Back in her room, she got ready for bed quickly. Once she’d buried herself under the quilt and the extra blanket from the chest at the bottom of the mattress—the night was indeed cold—she closed her eyes and thought again about the verse.

  Sheep. Wolves. Serpents. Doves. It was quite a menagerie for so few words but its meaning was clear. If only she’d heeded it earlier.

  She said her prayers and turned over, ready to sleep, when one final thought crossed her mind. Harmless as doves. It was beautiful. She could do that. She could be as harmless as a dove.

  ❧

  Silas helped his uncle to his bedroom, noting that each evening the trip seemed to get easier. His ankle was healing.

  “I’d like to talk to you before we turn in, Silas,” Uncle Edward said as he hobbled into his room. “Have a seat.”

  Silas sank into the chair beside the small table in his uncle’s room. Fortunately it wasn’t one that Uncle Edward had recovered in his remodeling frenzy, so he was in no imminent danger of sliding off.

  His uncle patted Silas’s shoulder, and for the first time, Silas noticed how rheumatism had swollen the joints. Carpentry must be painful for him.

  “Silas, don’t be too harsh with Hyacinth and me. I do love her.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Edward sighed. “I do. I don’t expect you to understand, Silas, at least not in your brain. Please try to understand in your heart. I never married, you know that. I told myself that was fine, and I guess it was. I had the carpentry business, but after a while, it all wears thin. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “You don’t need to.” The last thing he wanted was to hear his uncle wax rhapsodic about his Chicago sweetheart.

  “I do need to. You’ve been like a son to me. But I’d like a wife. I want to be loved, to be held in a woman’s embrace. I want to wake up to the smell of lilacs on my pillow. I want—”

  The smell of lilacs. Or soap, like Eliza. In a town that often didn’t smell very good at all, a woman’s scent had great power.

  He was getting as fanciful as his uncle.

  He could understand the need to be loved, but what if Hyacinth wasn’t the right one? His uncle had spent his entire life single. Was he leaping headfirst into trouble by choosing the first woman he courted?

  It all seemed so impetuous. And impetuous meant silly.

  “Good night.” Silas left his uncle’s bedroom, shutting the door and heading to his own room.

  What a day! He had worried about his own future, what he would do if Hyacinth came into the household, and now, all of his concerns about that disappeared. Like early snowflakes that evaporated before landing on the ground, the burden he’d carried about his livelihood vanished.

  He would have the carpentry business. His financial future was settled. The irony of it struck him—if Hyacinth hadn’t come into his uncle’s life, this security might have remained elusive.

  Nothing was going to ever be the same in his life again, and he had to admit that some of that came from a woman named Eliza.

  She fit in so easily at church and with the Robbins family. Eliza had a rare talent for gentleness and yet he also saw a great source of strength. He had never met anyone quite like her.

  Eager to get his mind off the strange turn of events, he opened Professor Barkley’s Patented Five Year Plan for Success. He was supposed to be reading these in the morning, not the evening, and he felt a twinge of guilt about that. Tomorrow he’d change.

  The day’s study was about t
rust. Professor Barkley pointed out that one must trust in the Lord’s guidance rather than the often-faulty perceptions of man. He cited some direct advice from the Bible, which was the verse for the day. It was Proverbs 3:5–6: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

  Silas shut the book. It was excellent advice but, like much excellent advice, hard to put into action.

  He wondered how Eliza fit into God’s ways for him. The thought carried him into sleep, and sleep carried him into dreams, dreams sprinkled with a magical glimmer.

  Five

  Time was flying by. Eliza counted the days she’d been in Remembrance—almost three weeks now. She’d been so busy at the Robbins’s house that she’d barely had time to think.

  Hyacinth handed the platter of hotcakes to Eliza. “I could eat all of these, they’re so good, but I’d be waddling down the aisle if I do. You’d better take them.”

  “If one of us has to be waddling around, it might as well be me.” Eliza took another hotcake. They were good.

  “Tell me about yesterday. How was it?” Hyacinth took a sip of her tea as she waited for Eliza’s answer.

  “The family certainly does need help. The mother is so sick, and the father is stretched as far as he can go, I’m afraid. I spent all of my time there trying to do something with the children’s clothing. They have six children, and five of them are boys.”

  “How sad. Were you able to mend the clothing?”

  Sudden tears crowded behind Eliza’s eyes, and she made a great point of buttering the hotcakes. Finally she said, “I did what I could. The youngest one, poor thing, is getting the worst of it. By the time the clothing gets to him, the material in the shirts and trousers is worn almost through. It seems like as soon as I mend something, it comes back to me with more repair needed. The fabric is simply giving out.”

  “Can we get some more yardage from the mercantile?” Hyacinth asked. “I’d like to help in some way, but I’m not a seamstress and I’m not a carpenter, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been around children, but I could buy several yards if that would help.”

  “It would! Hyacinth, you’re a blessing for all of us.”

  Her offer was the answer to a prayer. Eliza had spent several days at the Robbins’s house, dissecting shirt after shirt to make them last for one more wearer, one more season. Just the day before, as she stitched a side seam, the back split open, it was so worn. Her sewing was slow. Not only was she hampered by the lack of her sewing machine, she was frustrated by the condition of the fabric. Some of it was so thin that it almost came apart in her hands.

  “Let’s go over as soon as the store opens, then, and we can select some new fabric,” Hyacinth said, her face glowing as she planned the trip. “And let’s make sure the littlest boy gets a new shirt. Actually, let’s see if we can’t find enough for everyone to have something new.”

  “It’ll mean so much to them.” The family had done with so little for so long that the new clothing—from new fabric—would be a real treat for them.

  The woman truly had a heart of gold, Eliza thought. She’d make sure that Silas knew about Hyacinth’s offer. Maybe that would help him see her in a better light.

  “As much as I like Mrs. Adams, and I do like her and she certainly can cook circles around me,” Hyacinth said as they left the boardinghouse, “I’m not complaining, mind you, or maybe I am, but I’m feeling a bit stifled with Mrs. Adams always looking over my shoulder. I’m used to living on my own, having no one to answer to but myself and God.

  “Well, I’m not in the house yet, am I? We’re stuck forever in the boardinghouse. We’ll grow old together there, you and I. But we’ll have our breakfast at seven, our dinner at noon, and our supper at six. And between three and five on Saturdays and Sundays, we can receive gentlemen callers in the parlor. Oh, we have a grand life ahead of us, Eliza.”

  They stopped and peeked in the window at the small house. “I think I’m going to have a talk with Edward about this,” Hyacinth declared. “It doesn’t look as if a single thing has been done to it.”

  Eliza stood on her tiptoes and stared through the grimy panes. “It does need a good cleaning.”

  Hyacinth shook her head and sighed. “Something has to be done.”

  After one last look through the window, they left the house and headed for the store.

  Walking into the mercantile was like stepping into a kaleidoscope. Dazzling in the early morning sunlight, colors were jumbled together. Green pickles in brown barrels and red licorice in rainbowed glass. Silvery nails and bronze tacks. Pink combs and yellow brushes. In the sewing section, spools of ribbons slid on a rod, spilling out in a rainbow of bright stripes; bolts of calico leaned against workaday chambray and broadcloth; thread glowed in multi-hued splendor.

  “I suppose this is nothing like you’re used to,” Hyacinth whispered as they approached the fabric. “The shops in St. Paul must be fantastic.”

  Eliza pulled a strand of chocolate brown ribbon between her fingers. Its velvety texture would make a striking detail on a winter dress. “I generally didn’t have the option of selecting the material. I did to-order dressmaking.”

  “Look at this pattern, these tiny blue flowers against the cream. Wouldn’t it be the perfect material for a young girl’s dress?”

  It would look striking with Analia’s chestnut hair. Eliza thought of the girl with the sad eyes, and an idea came to her. Analia was so quiet that it was easy to forget her as she curled in the corner with her books and dolls, especially with five boisterous brothers demanding attention.

  Eliza looked at Hyacinth, now leafing through a copy of Godey’s that she suspected was quite out-of-date, and had an idea.

  “I’ll be going over to the Robbins home again later today. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll need to take more measurements and do a bit of fitting work, and I can always use some help.”

  Hyacinth put down the magazine. “I don’t know a thing about it, but that’s never stopped me before,” she declared.

  Eliza smiled. Hyacinth’s ready good humor was going to be a blessing to her as she remade her life in Remembrance.

  They selected utilitarian thick cotton to make trousers for the boys, bright plaids for shirts to replace the faded and worn ones Eliza had been trying to repair, and the blue and cream floral as well as a soft pink and white striped fabric for dresses for Analia. At the last minute, Hyacinth added a delicate spring green flannel for a nightgown for Mary.

  “Do you want a peppermint stick?” Hyacinth asked as they approached the cash register. “I confess I have a weakness for them.” She picked one out of the glass jar on the counter. “One for you, too?”

  “Of course! Peppermint and snow. They go together, don’t they?”

  At last they left the store, their bulky packages balanced carefully, and they picked their way across the snowy road to the Robbins’s house. “We should have gotten Silas to help us,” Hyacinth panted as one of the bundles nearly slipped out of her grasp.

  “He’s already there. They started early because they’re working in the pantry area today, putting up new shelves, and want to get them done by the end of the week.” She tucked her chin deeper into her scarf.

  “Will it take that long? I’d think they could do that in a day or two.”

  Eliza laughed. “Not with five boys eager to ‘help.’ That makes every project last even longer.”

  “I suppose it would. My son Thomas nearly drove his father to the madhouse, dogging his every footstep. He wanted to know what every seed was that his father planted, how long it took to come through the earth, how seeds ate—”

  “How seeds ate? What kind of question is that?”

  “A Thomas question. He was full of them. How do seeds eat? Do caterpillars dream while they’re in the cocoon, and do they dream caterpillar dreams or butterfly dreams? He teaches at a college in New York now.”
r />   “You must be very proud of him.”

  “I am. Oh, I am.”

  “This is the house, by the way,” Eliza said.

  “I’m so glad. My fingers are frozen into immovable sticks. I’m going to have to knit some warmer mittens, and soon!”

  They were met at the door by all of the children. “What did you bring?” they chimed.

  “Nothing more exciting than fabric, I’m sorry to say,” Eliza said. “Let’s go to the table and open these packages and you can take a look at what your new clothes will be made out of.”

  The children danced happily to the table and began opening the packages. Brian, the four-year-old, whooped. “Are these for us? There are—let me count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven! Eleven peppermint sticks.”

  “Silly.” Luke, his older brother, took the candies away from him and put them back inside the wrapping. “That doesn’t even make sense. There are six of us children, and Mother and Father. That’s eight.”

  Hyacinth laughed. “And Mr. Collier and Miss Davis and myself. That makes eleven. Here, my darlings, one for each of you, one for your father, one for your mother, and please take one to Mr. Collier, also. But don’t spoil your dinner!” Hyacinth’s last words were lost to the shouts of joy from the children as they each took a peppermint stick and then argued over who would take the others to the adults. The littlest ones were victorious, and soon all of them, adults and children alike, held a candy stick.

  Silas popped out from the pantry area. His hair was liberally dusted with sawdust, and his face had a big smear of something dark on it. A peppermint stick stuck out of his mouth like a striped cigar. “What a treat!” he exclaimed. “Thank you so much! I haven’t had one of these in years.”

  “Hyacinth got them,” Eliza said. “The children are certainly enjoying theirs.” She couldn’t resist just a bit of teasing.

  “You don’t have one?” he countered, coming close enough that she could smell the clean aroma of newly sawed wood mingled with the crisp scent of peppermint. A few shavings fell from his arm as he pointed to her hand, which held her own peppermint stick. “Let me guess. You’re a savorer, someone who makes the candy last as long as possible. This peppermint stick will probably last you a week.”