With scarcely a breath she added, "Sam, this is your cousin Annie, my favorite niece."
I laughed. "She says that to all of us. 'Course she really means it with me."
"I'd shake your hand," Sampson said, in a strong but gentle voice--was I hearing an echo of David? "But you can see, I'm busy. Mom just couldn't wait to get these in the ground."
I heard the "Mom" and was glad they didn't hear my gasp.
"He brought them up from the cabin," Aunt Sophie said, in a voice I'd never heard, edged as it was with a maternal and, yes, an ownership tone. "One of the last patches left, as most of it is grass now he tells me. A proper lawn." She sighed.
Sampson took the jug from her and poured the water into the hole. He scooped up the rest of the berry plants and arranged them in the muddy row.
"Don't you have a hose around here?" He looked around.
I jumped up to get the hose from where it was curled up at the side of the house. I turned it on to a slow stream and brought it to him. After firming the ground around the berry plants, he added water until it ran off into the grass.
They both leaned back and said, "There," at the same time. We all laughed.
"Annie," Aunt Sophie said, "help me up." I gave her my arm and Sampson steadied her under her other arm.
"Sampson! That's enough water. Let's go wash up, and eat." He got up, more easily than she, but he wasn't young, either. Just how old was he? Born around, what, 1920 wasn't it?
He rejected her outstretched hand, "Thanks, Mom. I got it." And he did. A minute's calculations reminded me that he was over fifty-five, an old guy. It seemed odd that Aunt Sophie's baby could be old.
He was taller than she by about six inches.
From his pants pocket he pulled a handkerchief and wiped his hands. Stained but cleaned of the mud, he reached his right hand out to me. "A proper hello, cousin Annie. I've heard a lot about you."
Aunt Sophie busied herself rolling up the hose to put back at the side of the house, but she was attentive, threw me a little smile.
"And I've heard a lot about you."
"I 'spect you have." He gathered up the trowel and the pad Aunt Sophie had kneeled on. He looked around for where to put them.
I was proud to be able to show him where we put the tools.
"Over here, in the little shed Uncle Boyd built for Aunt Sophie." I opened the door to the shed. "We put them here."
We. Our. I liked using those ownership words. And then felt silly at myself. I kept talking as I put the things on a shelf and came back out. He closed the door with the little peg-latch.
"But most of what I know about you is of you as a baby and little kid."
Aunt Sophie opened the screen door to the house, waving us in before her.
"Yes, Sam." Aunt Sophie started to shut the door and then left it open for air. "Annie doesn't know much about you now, about what happened to you after the war."
"Oh, she doesn't want to hear all of that." He looked at me. "You don't want to hear all that?"
I just shrugged at him, trying to be agreeable with this stranger with whom I felt so familiar.
"Long ago and too much history. Old history."
"Well, something. How about now? You're married? Children? Do you still have the cabin? Can I see it?" I hardly gave him time to answer.
"Whoa," he laughed. "Sweet Sue. Two boys, but they're not little. Yes, and of course."
All the while I was thinking, I need my camera. But I let the camera lay--too intrusive.
"I have pictures I can show you after dinner. Sue and I have some cottages that we built with Dad and Mother Amy, on the property where Mom's cottage was. Dad named them 'Sophie's Cabins.'
"When the war was over, I studied agriculture at Oregon State. Sue was in school there in Business Ed, and working in the Ag office. We met. She was a pretty wench. Sue's a farm girl, from Damascus, up by Portland. Raised on her parent's farm, an orchard of primarily prune and peach trees. My very own peach. We married. Mom and Dad loved her, too.
"After graduation I didn't have a job, so we lived on the farm with Sue's parents. Our Davie was born there. It was a good life, and lots of free fruit. Hard work but we liked it. Then Dad, my dad, had one of his ideas, and we moved back home to help my parents build and then run the cabins. It was going to be for just a while, but it became our life. We lived in town; it's a good place to raise a family. Davie's grown and married, with twin girls. Mom and Dad are gone, so now, Sue and I live in their old place. Modernized it some.
"You can stay with us, or in Sophie's Cabins, when you come down."
We pulled out the chairs and sat down at the table where Aunt Sophie had set our places with soup bowls. I'd put the bread on a platter, in the center. She smiled now when she picked up the plate.
"Annie! Rye bread? How clever. Nice to have something different now and then, don't you think?" She directed the latter part of her remarks to Sampson.
"Yes, indeedy." He smiled at her and then at me. "I wondered when she was ever going to let me meet my other family."
"Jonathan." The formal reproach made us both look at her. "You surely understand, it was different times and then... It never seemed the time to just bring you up. Oh, not you." She was stumbling around her words, trying to smooth out the harshness.
"The situation. And I wanted to protect you too." She put down the knife with which she was buttering her bread, and reached out her hand to put over his, "I couldn't stand to see any condemnation of either you or me, or your father. So I lived with it and built a life here without you. And I wish..."
She pulled her hand away and wrung it with the other one before dropping them into her lap. "I wish it could have been different. That I could have been braver."
She put her hands to busy work, spooning stew into our bowls and handing them to us.
"But I wasn't."
"It's okay, Mom." He took his bowl from her.
She sighed again, this time a lighter sound, happy. She began to eat.
Sampson filled the dinner hour with tales of his life in the years between then and now.
He had first come to visit Sophie after the war, a visit which began the healing for both of them. At first, after the tourist season died down, he and Sue brought the boys up and spent a week playing in the city. After they started school, he would come up by himself or they would just come up for the weekend.
The boys knew her as Grandma Sophie.
They stayed in a hotel downtown. Sophie and Sampson recounted the year his sister Lily and family came from Wyoming. They'd all gone to Jantzen Beach Amusement Park, rode the roller coaster, ate cotton candy. Grandma Sophie went up with Sampson and Lillie's children on the Ferris Wheel, even though it scared her to death. She and Lily had hugged in relief when Sophie and the children were back on solid ground.
As they told me the stories, laughing together, I understood that this telling of the whole story to me, with him, was healing something in her that I'd not known was broken.
After dinner he showed me photos of his family, and he let me take a couple of him and Sophie together. It was still light outside, so I got a couple of great shots of the two of them by her new berry patch.
"Oh," she said as we came back into the dim house. "I almost forgot. Turn on some lights, Annie. Sampson, please, the sack."
He handed her the paper bag I'd noticed on the couch when I came through the house, but hadn't thought about once I'd got outside and seen him.
"Here, Annie. Hold the bottom."
I took hold of the sack while she reached in and pulled out the contents.
The quilt.
Sampson and she stretched it out over the back of the couch, arranging it so I could see The Beach In Winter: Haystack Rock, the Fingers, the tide pools, the ocean, the lighthouse shining through the gray sky. It was faded and ragged in places, the binding coming loose around the bottom.
She fussed with it, tucking the binding into place. "Oh, you'll have to leave it with
me, it needs some mending." Her fingers traced the edges of Haystack Rock, smoothed an edge of sky where her stitching had come loose.
The Beach in Winter was more beautiful than any other quilt of hers I'd seen. Maybe because I knew the history. The work wasn't as fine as her later prizewinning ones, but there was a life there, in that putting together of pieces of fabric, that still spoke through the wear of the years.
And of course I wanted it, but it was Sampson's. The way he handled it when he helped Aunt Sophie fold it to put it back in the bag to leave with her to mend showed me that. I did get a photo of her with the quilt when she had mended it. It is tucked into the corner of the mirror by the table where I write.
* * * *
The photos and memories are all that I have left of her now.
Cousin Sampson and Sue are important to me. We are good friends as well as relatives with whom we can be honest and open.
That night, after Sampson left and I was getting ready to leave, Aunt Sophie reached for me and hugged me tighter than she ever had. We never talked about it again. She died peacefully in her sleep some years later. I have the box, with the papers still inside, and some other things to remember her by, though I don't need any thing for that.
I thought a lot about her story, and why she told it to me, after keeping it closed within herself for all those years. Perhaps the most amazing thing of all was that after she opened up her secret with me, she told the whole family, in one fell swoop. She took Sampson to the yearly family reunion on Memorial Day.
It's always held at the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. We put flowers on the graves, and then picnic after at a park nearby. Grandmother Mandy was confused and her open mouth was a sight to see. Some of it came with her age, but it appeared to me she was more surprised that such a thing had happened and that she had never known about it. This tickled Aunt Sophie.
"Well, 'Sampson', is it?" As she handed him a plate, you could see she thought his name was odd. "Get yourself something to eat." She waved at the picnic table, and added, apparently as an afterthought, "Join the family."
She walked away muttering, "I don't know why it was such a big secret, Sophie always had to do things her own way, never trusting us." Her children who were there--my dad and a few of his brothers and sisters--were reserved at first. Maybe they felt the way I did, uncertain about our relationships, and our place now in Aunt Sophie's affections. Had the love all those years been a lie? She sure looked happier with Sampson than with us all, but again, was it the fear of being replaced? That faded quickly as we adjusted our family roles to include a nephew, a cousin who was easy going and had a family of his own.
We started feeling rich and happy to have a family member with cabins at the beach that we can rent for less. He didn't want to charge anything but we're not a bunch of freeloaders. However, we are willing to take a break when we can get it.
I stopped seeing Len soon after my weekend with Aunt Sophie. The pull to submit to him was strong. It would have been so easy. But he laughed at me once too often. During the fight that followed, he said, "I don't want you fooling around with that picture business anymore. I don't want a wife who smells like a chemist."
I wasn't sure after that that I wanted to date again, but of course, I did. Now after several cautious years I've found a man who is secure enough in himself to enjoy my love of photography, who knows it's part of me.
We're going down to the beach this weekend, to the cabins, for cousins Sampson and Sue to get a good look at him. Who knows, as we say in the trade, what might develop?
I think Aunt Sophie would like him.
The End
About the Author
Patsy Brookshire loves stories: reading them, writing them, and telling them. She wrote her first story in the eighth grade, a humor piece. In high school and college journalism she wrote humor and feature pieces, vignettes of peoples' lives. She wrote her first novel, Threads, from an altogether different angle, tangling fiction, family fact, history, and bits of herself together. Into her second novel, she finds humor catching her again. "It is good to laugh at the crazy things we do for love," she says.
Patsy has been married twice, had children twice, had grandchildren four times. She lives on the Oregon coast, beside the ocean and a pond, with John, her second husband, and two or three cats. She had an interesting childhood, complicated adulthood, and now she is into a fascinating third part of life. A cabin in the woods is her favorite place, but a cottage in England is a close second. She is obsessed with quilts, England, and Spring. Someday she would like to follow the blooming of daffodils from March on the Oregon Coast to Maine's rocky shore, as a way to stretch out Spring. She will, of course, write about it.
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