At the Scent of Water

by Linda Nichols

  There was one small comfort. She knew Sam hadn’t given up on his marriage. Not yet, anyway. No, this year, at least once more, he’d gone to The Inn for supper on their anniversary. Loretta Samples had been there having dinner with her son from Durham. She had seen Sam and told Marva Jane Whitlock, who had passed it on to Mary in the checkout line at the Winn-Dixie. Sam had waited. Annie had not come, Marva Jane had said, patting Mary’s hand and shaking her head with sympathy. Mary shook her head now and thought about her son. It was a topic that brought as much grief as Annie Ruth, for though he was closer and called her on the telephone once a week, there was no doubt his heart was light-years away. From his family as well as his estranged wife. Her hands fell down limply at her sides, and suddenly the house felt unbearably close and dark.

  She gathered up sheets and towels for the guesthouse, went out the front door, across the screened porch, down the steps, hearing the door springs twang shut behind her. It was a mild morning, still slightly moist with dew, but by afternoon it would be searing hot. Instead of going to her destination, she detoured down the graveled path, past the vegetable garden, past the roses and the cutting flowers, back to the little spot John had made for her in the perennial garden he’d planted, one of the last things he had done before he’d died. The flowers were all in lush bloom, and she hoped she could keep them watered through what looked to be another dry summer. She sat down in the wrought-iron chair.

  Mary looked at the statue her husband had bought for her the year after it had happened. He had ordered it from a sculptor in Asheville, and her heart had been touched by his gift, by his mute way of saying what he could not find words to express. It was lovely, done in bronze. A little girl, about four years old, sitting on a bench. She was looking at a flower she held in the palm of her hand. Mary liked to look at it. At her. The statue girl’s face even looked a little like Margaret’s.

  “Margaret,” she said out loud, for no one said her name any longer. “Margaret,” she repeated again firmly. Her granddaughter. Who had existed.

  Mary closed her eyes and she could see Margaret’s face, a perfect blend of her mother’s and father’s. She’d had Sam’s blue eyes, Annie Ruth’s curly red hair. She had been a lovely child, and Mary could still see the porcelain skin, the pink cheeks, the sweet little mouth. If only.

  If only she could talk to Annie about it now, she thought for the hundredth, thousandth time. Really talk about it. She didn’t know what either of them would say, but somehow she knew until the dam of sorrow was breached, no healing would come. But that was a conversation she had tried to have many times, and she knew now that she would not be the one to speak healing words to Annie. She had prayed for so long that He would send someone else. That He would raise up someone to guide her lonely daughter-in-law along the path back toward home. She felt bereft again. Of all of them.

  “Oh, Jesus, help me!” she cried out of the deep anguish of her heart. She heard no answer but the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees behind her. After a moment she wiped her face and went to the cottage to finish her work.

  Thirteen

  “My name is Elijah Walker,” Annie’s seatmate said, extending his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” she replied, shaking it. “I’m Annie Dalton.”

  She gave him an appraising glance, and something about what she saw there intrigued her and drew her back for a closer look. He was in his mid-sixties, she guessed, maybe early seventies, hair thinning, and what was left more salt than pepper. His face was lined, and he had the weathered look of someone who had worked outside all his life. She supposed he might be a man of leisure and simply live somewhere sunny, though they had both boarded this plane in Pittsburgh. She rejected that possibility after another glance. He didn’t look like someone who basked by the pool or the golf course. There was something about the set of his jaw and the craggy lines of his face that ruled that out. She glanced at his hands. She saw no thick calluses, but still, she had the impression he was someone who had worked hard all his life and without much material reward.

  His clothes were plain and unremarkable. There was no Louis Vuitton briefcase or Italian leather shoes. He wore common beige twill trousers and a blue short-sleeved shirt, the cotton well-worn, the colors slightly faded. There was a plainness about him, a rough-cut look to his features that said country. Besides, she thought she had detected in his brief introduction a trace of the accents of home. But there was something else, almost regal, in his bearing. He had a quiet dignity about him, an almost tangible peace. She was staring. He was noticing. She felt herself flush. She glanced away, but when she looked back he was smiling gently.

  “Are you from North Carolina?” he asked. A kind conversation starter, a distraction from her rudeness.

  She moved her head, half nod, half shake. Her place of origin was a complicated issue these days. “I’m traveling from Seattle, but I’m originally from North Carolina. A little place called Gilead Springs,” she said, preparing for the inevitable addendum that it was west of Asheville where the Great Smokies met the Blue Ridge.

  “Gilead Springs? I come from Silver Falls, just up the road,” he said, and his face lit with genuine pleasure.

  Her heart thumped at the coincidence. Silver Falls and Gilead Springs were but a mile or two apart, but really, what did she expect? People lived in Silver Falls, and Asheville was the closest airport to both cities. She was being hypersensitive, seeing supernatural coincidence in everyday occurrences.

  “How long has it been since you’ve been home?” he asked.

  “Five years. Actually four years, nine months, and twenty-two days.”

  He looked at her intently and nodded. “It’s been longer than that for me.” His eyes clouded and he looked out the airplane window hungrily, as if he might see the Smoky Mountains in the distance.

  “How long?”

  “Forty-five years.”

  “Mercy. Not even a visit in all that time?” she asked in wonderment.

  He shook his head. “My people were all scattered. The old ones had died.”

  “Where were you?” she asked, her interested piqued again, knowing, somehow, that the answer couldn’t be Pittsburgh.

  “Africa.”

  She had known it! She had known he was a story on two legs. She felt like taking out her notebook and interviewing him. “What were you doing in Africa?” she asked, as eager as a hound on a trail.

  “I was a missionary.”

  “Oh,” she said. Oh no, she thought.

  He laughed, a deep amused chuckle.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized.

  “That’s all right,” he answered, his faded blue eyes looking straight into hers. “I love to talk about the Lord, but I don’t force Him on a captive audience.” He gave her a wink, then turned to gaze out the window. She felt ashamed.

  The flight attendant came around and served drinks. Elijah Walker requested coffee, and Annie followed his lead. She glanced at him as she sipped, trying to imagine what was in store for him. Shock, no doubt. It had been 1959 when he had left the States, and she tried to imagine how much the countryside had changed. After a moment or two, she caught his eye and made a conversational peace offering.

  “Are you staying with friends?” she asked.

  “Sort of. A pastor friend back home arranged something.”

  She nodded. “What was it like in Africa?”

  “Dry and hot and dusty,” he answered, turning to face her. “That much is probably the same in North Carolina. I heard they’ve been having a drought.”

  She nodded. She followed the news from home on the Internet. “Stage Four Water Conservation Measures. Just short of emergency restrictions. Another few months, and they’ll probably up the ante again.”

  He shook his head and she did, as well. Both of them were probably visualizing the beautiful forests and fields of home a parched dry yellow instead of lush velvet green.

  “Why did you leave Africa?”

  “Had to
come back to the States and have an operation. On my heart.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Spent a few weeks in the hospital, but now I’m good to go.”

  “Will you go back to Africa?”

  He gave a slight shrug and a look she couldn’t read. “I’m waiting to hear.”

  She nodded.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “I’ve been living in Seattle for the last five years. I’m going back to Gilead Springs to settle my affairs. I’m going to get my place ready to sell and see my family.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “My people are all gone now. Except for one sister.”

  She nodded, not about to be drawn into that discussion.

  “What’s your spread like?” he asked.

  “Twenty-six acres of woods and pasture.” She swallowed. “And a house.”

  “Sounds like heaven on earth.” She saw a hungry look in his faded blue eyes. “Whatever made you leave it?”

  She started to say personal reasons, but she could almost see Ricky Truelove making a face at her and calling her stuck up. “My marriage ended, and I decided it would be good to get away,” she said bluntly.

  He tipped his head in acknowledgment. “That can be a temptation in those times.”

  She wondered at the implications, but didn’t have time to respond.

  “So what’s changed?” he asked. “Why come back now? Or would you like to tell an old man to tend to his own business?” He grinned, defusing her prickliness.

  She couldn’t help but smile back. There was a winsomeness about this man, a twinkle in his eyes that was refreshing. She would never see him again. What was the harm in a conversation? Besides, something about him was comfortable and familiar. She supposed he reminded her of uncles on the porch, or grandfathers and kin she hadn’t seen in years.

  “I haven’t seen my people in a long time,” she said. “Life is short.”

  “It is that,” he agreed, nodding, his kind blue eyes looking at her, and oddly, she felt as if she knew him. He was as close to a friend as she had at this moment, and suddenly she wanted to tell someone, felt, in fact, that she must.

  “There’s more,” she blurted out. “I recently filed for divorce and then found out that my husband, my former husband,” she corrected, the truth lying somewhere between the two labels, “is in trouble.”

  Mr. Walker frowned. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

  She nodded. “I’m afraid it is.” She took her neighbor’s purloined front page from her bag, and there was that horrible headline. “Parents Feud Over Girl’s Right to Die.”

  He glanced at the paper, then back at her. “I don’t understand.”

  She opened the paper to the sidebar article, and there underneath it was Sam’s face again, smiling, hopeful, in horrible juxtaposition.

  “That’s your husband?”

  She nodded.

  He reached for the newspaper. She gave it to him. He took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket, put them on, read silently for a few minutes, then set the paper on his knee and looked up.

  “What kind of man was he?” he asked. “Before all this happened.”

  Not the question she’d expected, but then again, what was normal about this conversation?

  “His name is Truelove,” she said by way of answer, her mouth lifting into a tight smile. “And it fits him perfectly. He never makes a promise he doesn’t intend to keep, and when he says forever,” she said, with a certain grimness in her tone, “forever is just what he means.”

  “Go on,” her seatmate urged.

  “He follows his conscience,” she said, “no matter what the cost.” And she remembered how dearly it had cost her. “He’s respectful and patient.” She remembered how he had waited for her and, in fact, she had a sudden vision of him sitting alone at The Inn at Smoky Hollow. “He never gives up on something he feels called to do,” she finished, and she thought how wry life was. How ironic. The very qualities that had made him so precious to her then were now like chains around her legs, dragging her alongside a life she wanted to forget.

  “He sounds like a good man,” Elijah said.

  “Yes. I suppose he is. Was.”

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “Things changed. He changed. I told you the good things. I could spend just as long on the bad.”

  “Good men can make mistakes. Nobody does it just exactly right.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Has anybody prayed for God to heal the child?”

  She looked at him blankly, for she had not been thinking about the child any longer.

  “You don’t believe in miracles,” he stated.

  She shrugged. “It’s just that I haven’t seen many.”

  He nodded, and understanding lit in his eyes. “You don’t see because you don’t believe. You don’t believe because you don’t see.”

  She stared at him. “Are you actually suggesting that God could heal this little girl? She’s been in a coma for nearly five years.”

  “Lazarus was dead.” He said it boldly and stared back at her, waiting for an answer.

  She had none to give him.

  “He’s the God who raises the dead,” he said matter-of-factly, “who calls things that are not as though they were. He has the power to do what He promises.”

  “I don’t think He’s promised this,” Annie argued back.

  He shrugged. “Maybe not, but I believe in asking.”

  The flight attendant brought around pretzels and beverages. Annie was relieved to have something to distract them from more conversation. He leafed through the in-flight magazine. She took out her knitting somewhere over West Virginia.

  He put down the magazine, glanced toward her knitting, and smiled. “One of my sisters used to do just about anything with a hank of yarn,” he said. “She could spin and knit and weave. Our grandmother taught her.”

  “Who’s your sister?” she asked, wondering why people did that. Ask about the one person they knew in a state of eight million.

  “Dorothy Walker.”

  She felt that chill again, the uncanniness of paths crossing and weaving, a pattern she couldn’t yet make out taking shape nonetheless. “Your sister taught me when my stepmother had brought me as far as she could,” Annie said. “Dorothy was an artist with wool and loom.”

  “She was that. I wish I’d been able to make it home for her funeral.” His smile was wistful.

  “I didn’t know she had died.” Annie felt stricken. Another loss.

  “Three years ago. Heart attack.”

  She murmured her regrets.

  “It certainly is a small world,” Elijah repeated, giving her another of his gentle smiles. “What a coincidence that we’d end up sitting beside each other.” But he looked at her strangely, as if he didn’t think it was a coincidence at all.

  Annie nodded and smiled back, but she had a funny feeling that he was right, and it gave her a shudder of fear. She didn’t like the Almighty taking notice of her.

  ****

  There was something about the young woman that caught at his heart, Elijah realized. He had the feeling again that she was a prisoner of some sort, trapped inside those messes she’d been describing to him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and he rose and stepped into the aisle to let her out. She was fairly tall for a woman. And lean without being stringy. He didn’t care for the look of a stringy woman.

  He tried to remember if he knew any Daltons or Trueloves and couldn’t come up with any, though something about the young woman seemed familiar to him, which was odd because there was nothing usual about her. Her hair was long, shiny, and the color of the red clay dirt of home. Her eyes were a gold-speckled green. She was covered with freckles, of course, all over her cheeks and her small upturned nose. Her eyes tilted up at the corners, too, as if she’d been caught laughing.

  She carried a smile on her face, and he liked th
at. Some women were so grim nowadays—all rushing and pushing and fidgeting, but his seatmate had a sort of gentleness about her, though now that he gave it a second thought, he supposed there was starch there as well as lace. She hadn’t minded telling him to keep his Jesus to himself. She had the look of somebody who wouldn’t be pushed around nor give up something she loved without a bruising, clawing fight. Which was why her words had surprised him so. That she had given up on her marriage.

  He fixed his eyes on the back of the seat before him and prayed for her and for the man whose picture she had shown him. He was praying so intensely he didn’t notice that she had returned.

  “Excuse me,” she said gently, and he startled and rose to his feet.

  She slid into her seat by the window and picked up her knitting again, flashing him one of her smiles, and his heart caught again, for he could see something else in her face now that he knew what to look for—a deep sorrow. He wondered about it, but resigned himself to the fact that he would never know. They were only strangers, passing for a moment. Seatmates on a plane.

  Fourteen

  Sam drove automatically and, upon approaching Gilead Springs, still had not decided if he would stay or if he would even make anyone aware of his presence. He reserved the possibility of dropping in for a few moments, an hour, and disappearing without a word to anyone. He felt a flotation, a weightlessness. This was freedom, he told himself, and he wondered why everyone desired it so passionately.

  He had no place to be. No appointments. No one vying for his time. He thought about time. What was it, really? A series of events. A way of ordering them. One thing before another and neatly divided into past and present and future, but there, in the place to which he was going, he felt the familiar sensation that the lines were blurred. It was as if the past was still there, liable to take shape and form, its molecules reassembling themselves. He had the feeling that if he stared hard enough at the brick courthouse, he would see some long-ago magistrate unlock its door. If he looked beyond the doorways of the hair salons and nail parlors, he might glimpse the dry goods store and millinery shop. He could still imagine dense forests around him, of chestnut, hemlock, and oak, and if he gazed past the two-lane blacktop, he could see a road cut out of the red dirt, could see wagon ruts, hear the jingle of harnesses and the clop of hooves.