“Thanks. Um, Billy, he paid for the colas and one sandwich,” I said, pointing to the money he’d left. Then I started to open my purse.
“Don’t worry about it. Where are you headed?”
“Alaska,” I said.
“Alaska?” she said. “Why?”
“It’s a long story. It’s just…something I have to do for my little brother. He’s ill. Not contagious ill—that’s not why he’s waiting outside. We have a dog with us—” I stopped. This was sounding more convoluted the more I tried to explain it. “Look, he’s OK now, but he wants to go to Alaska while he still can, so I’m taking him. That’s the simple truth. And we found out that our mama is living here. At least, that she was as of about four years ago. We thought she’d died seven years ago.”
Jean studied me. I could tell she was deciding if she was going to help us or not. Finally, she shook her head and said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, but—wait here a moment, child.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. Joanne came back behind the counter and whispered, “What did she say? Does she know your mama? Is she going to help you? Why—”
Joanne hushed and stood up straight as Jean came back out of the kitchen with a pie.
She set it on the counter. “Apple,” she said. “Noah’s favorite.” Then she looked at Joanne and demanded, “Give me a piece of paper and pencil.”
Joanne pulled a sheet off the order pad and her pencil out of her smock pocket. Jean snatched both from her, as if she were in a hurry to do this before she changed her mind. She started scribbling and said, “This is the way to Noah’s place. Just head out on Main Street, on through town, then turn right at County Road 152. You’ll see his place on the right. Just tell him you’re bringing a pie from Jean Garfield and that she said he should talk to you.”
She shoved the little map at me and gave me a look like she wished I’d hurry up and go before she snatched the pie back and changed her mind.
“Who is Noah?” I asked.
“Noah Litchfield. My sister—God rest her soul—was married to him. She passed last spring. Anyway, Harold Litchfield was their son.”
Joanne was staring at the map. “But that’s—” she stopped. “Oh.” She gave me a sorrowful look, then looked at Jean. “Now I remember some customer telling me the story….”
Jean gave her a look. “Shush up, Joanne.”
Will and I sat in the car on the gravel path that led up to Noah Litchfield’s small wood frame house. To the west of that house, along the county road, was a cemetery. “Piney Woods Cemetery” was the name spelled out on a sign over the wrought iron gate, and in fact, the cemetery was amply filled with pine trees among the headstones.
I looked at Will, who was holding Jean’s pie in his lap. He looked a little pale.
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I want to know. Don’t you?”
Sitting in Mama’s car, staring at the ramshackle house where supposedly lived a man who had the answers about her last years, I wished I hadn’t brought up the possibility of finding Mama in Shelby. But now not knowing what had happened to her would weigh us down for the rest of the trip. I couldn’t do that to Will.
I opened my car door. “Come on,” I said.
Will followed me, carrying the pie, Trusty trotting along beside him. We went up the rickety steps, knocked on the front door, waited.
“Maybe he’s not home. Maybe we should—”
“His truck is by the house, so he’s home,” Will said.
I glanced off the side of the porch at a red, rickety pickup truck. “I’m not sure that truck even runs. He could have another truck or car and be in town, or away—”
But of course Will ignored me and knocked again, harder.
A second later, the door creaked open. An old, skinny man peered out at us. He looked at me for a second, did a double-take, then started to shut the door.
“Mr. Litchfield, Mrs. Jean Garfield said if we brought this apple pie that you would talk to us!” Will said quickly.
The man peered out at us again. “Then you might as well come on in. If Jean sent you out here to talk to me, and I don’t, she’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
We followed Mr. Litchfield into his front parlor—even Trusty, who Mr. Litchfield liked immediately. Trusty was wary of the elderly man kneeling beside him, but Will cooed at him until he let Mr. Litchfield pet him. After we settled into the dim parlor—the only light came from a fire in a buck stove—Mr. Litchfield took the apple pie to his kitchen. I looked around, noting carved wood figurines—of animals, people, trees—dotting every surface from windowsills to the fireplace mantel. The figurines reminded me of the salt and pepper shakers in Grandma’s diner, except Mr. Litchfield had made these pieces, not just collected them. He came back from the kitchen with several slices of bologna for Trusty, who gobbled them up and then settled in front of the fire.
Then Mr. Litchfield asked us what we were doing in Shelby, Montana. I started to ask, right away, about Mama, but Will interrupted and said we were on a road trip to Alaska to see his land. When Mr. Litchfield laughed and looked skeptical, Will went back out to the car to get his framed square inch deed. As soon as Will went out the front door, Trusty was at the screen door, watching him.
“You look just like Rita,” Mr. Litchfield said.
I made myself hold his gaze. “I’ve been told. Except for my nose. Like my daddy’s.”
Mr. Litchfield nodded. “I only met him once. He came here, looking for your mama. She and my son were staying with us then. I want you to know that Rita never mentioned that she had children. Or a husband back in Ohio. If we’d known that, we’d have never let her and Harold stay here. He told us they’d met and married before getting here.”
My throat tightened. She never mentioned us. And then I thought, Daddy must have come here when he said he was going to Florida to check on Mama.
“Is she…does she…live nearby still?” I asked as Will came back in, holding his deed.
Mr. Litchfield studied me for another long moment. “Darlin’, this isn’t a pretty tale. Are you sure you want to hear it? Or have your little brother hear it? If you think that you’re going to meet your mother and she’ll pull you both into her arms and tell you she loves you and that there will be a sweet reunion, I have to tell you that that is not how life works.”
Will came back in as Mr. Litchfield was talking. “We know that,” he snapped.
Mr. Litchfield stared at him then. Assessing, I thought. Deciding.
Then he sighed. “All right. We hadn’t seen our son, Harold, in years, not since he shipped off with the army in World War Two.
“And then, about seven years ago, he showed up with Rita McKenzie. Said he’d met her in Ohio, before the war, scouting talent for the Chicago record company where he worked. On a road trip, he happened in to where she was singing—the luckiest day of his life, he said. After the war, he got his old job back and he looked her up again. They went to Chicago for a while, and he set up a few singing sessions for her, but things didn’t work out. Then he lost his job. We never heard why, but I’m guessing he had too many wild nights and didn’t make enough money for his company.
“He told us that they were married and that they were going to be in Shelby just for a little while, stay with us until they got back on their feet. Then her husband showed up—that was a shock. She’d written him, asking for a divorce because she wanted to be free to marry Harold. I only met your dad once, but I felt sorry for him. He begged her to come back with him, talked about the two of you, but she said no. She’d rather die, she said, than go back to Ohio. She was staying with Harold, and soon they’d go back to Chicago, where she could sing.”
Mr. Litchfield shook his head. He picked up a figure of an owl from the end table, thumbing the top of the owl’s wooden head as if it were a worry stone. “It about broke my wife’s heart, learning that our only son had taken a woman away from her husband and children. Mine,
too. I wouldn’t talk to them after that. Or give them money. I kicked them both out.”
I swallowed hard. “Did they go back to Chicago, then?”
Mr. Litchfield stared into the fire for a long time. I looked at Will, tried to read in the dim light how he was taking this news. He looked tired but then he turned his gaze to me. I’m fine, his expression said. I nodded.
“Mr. Litchfield, please tell us the rest,” I said. “Did they go back to Chicago?”
Finally, he shook his head. “No. Harold worked here, odd jobs. Rita sang at several different clubs. I never heard her, but I heard talk that she had a lovely voice. I also heard talk that they really did get married. That’s when my wife wanted me to go see them, talk to them, but I was having none of it. Then one day the sheriff came out here, told us they’d been out driving in Harold’s truck. The sheriff said it was hard to tell from what was left, but it looked like your mother was driving, tried to cross the railroad track, even though the guard crossing bar had come down, but they didn’t make it across in time. They died instantly.”
He looked up at me, said softly, “Rumor has it that Rita had just found out she was, well, expecting a child. But no one seems to know if that’s true.”
Then Mr. Litchfield stared out the window. “They’re buried out there. Maureen, my wife, insisted on it. And now she’s buried there, too. I don’t think she ever forgave me for not speaking to Harold and Rita after your father was here. I think she always thought if I had, they’d be alive. Maybe if I had, she’d be alive. Doctor said last year she died of emphysema. I think it was mostly from a broken heart, though.”
He looked down at the wooden owl, as if just then aware that he was holding it. I wondered if he’d started carving after Maureen had died.
Will and I walked to the cemetery before nightfall. We asked Mr. Litchfield if he’d like to go with us, but he told us no.
We followed the directions he gave us, winding our way, Trusty by Will’s side, along the tidy gravel paths. Mr. Litchfield kept his cemetery neat and orderly, just like his house.
Then we found the headstones—Mama’s, and Harold Litchfield’s, and Maureen Litchfield’s. Will and I studied them quietly in the cold wind barreling across the fields and cemetery. I’d like to say I felt something strong—sadness, anger, something—when I stared at Mama’s headstone, reading over and over the simple epitaph: “Rita Litchfield, 1915–1949, Rest in Peace.” Had she found peace? Had the wreck been an accident…or on purpose? Had she killed herself, and her new husband, because she couldn’t stand the thought of being tied, again, to a family? Why was she so restless, so sad?
There were some questions I’d never quite find the answers to. I suppose that I should have felt frustrated, at least.
But all I felt was nothing, except cold in the howling wind.
“I think Mr. Litchfield blames himself,” Will said. “But he shouldn’t. I don’t think his wife is right, that it’s his fault they died.”
I pulled him to me, wanting to protect him from the sharp wind. “I think…sometimes, people just do what they think they have to do. And Mama was unhappy with us, but it sounds like she was just as unhappy without us. And that misery had nothing to do with us. We didn’t cause it, and we couldn’t fix it. It was just…hers.”
As soon as I said that, I felt something after all, staring at her grave. Relief. And release. At last, I could let Mama go. I didn’t need to understand everything about her. I just needed to understand that her choices weren’t, in the end, about me, or Will, or even Daddy.
“Do you think we should tell Mr. Litchfield that?”
“I think he’s starting to understand that, and that’s why he told us everything he did.”
Will frowned. “But I don’t understand why his sister-in-law would just send us out here, to remind him. Do you think she blames him, too?”
I shook my head. “No. I think she wanted him to see that the children his son’s wife left behind turned out OK anyway.”
“We did?” Will said. “Well, maybe I did, but you can be pretty annoying sometimes.”
Even standing at Mama’s grave, my little brother made me laugh. For a long time after that, we stood quietly, hugging each other in the harsh Montana wind.
Finally, we made our way back to Mama’s car—no, my car now—and our camper. There was a note under the car’s windshield wiper from Mr. Litchfield: He was cooking dinner, which we were welcome to share with him, and we could also camp there for the night, if we wanted to.
Chapter 27
Will and I took Mr. Litchfield up on his offer.
Mr. Litchfield made bologna and cheese sandwiches, and pork and beans on his wood-fired stove. The kitchen just had one small table and two chairs, so we ate the sandwiches and beans in the parlor, balancing our plates on our laps. The room was lit by the fire and a kerosene lamp on a side table next to Mr. Litchfield’s easy chair.
After dinner, I washed up the bowls and stew pot in the kitchen, and when I came back out to the parlor, Trusty was settled in front of the fire again, and Will finally showed Mr. Litchfield his deed and said that we were on a trip to see his land, and taking Trusty with us, because Trusty really belonged in Alaska. He talked about how he wasn’t sure how Trusty had ended up in Groverton, and about how we’d rescued him from a mean scrapyard owner, and how Trusty didn’t bark but made a good watchdog anyway. He didn’t say anything about being sick or how we had left in the middle of the night.
Mr. Litchfield hung on to every word Will said, even as he got a length of wood from his back porch and a whittling knife from his pocket and started working the wood. I wondered what he was making. He’s lonely, I thought, watching him whittle as Will talked. Then Mr. Litchfield put his whittling aside and the two of them pored over the deed and atlas in detail. Finally, Mr. Litchfield stood up stiffly from his chair and lit another kerosene lamp sitting on a quilt chest.
“Will, all this talk of this trip of yours has made me hungry again,” he said. “Would you go slice us up some of Jean’s pie? Rattle around in the kitchen and it won’t take you long to find plates and such. And get a few more slices of bologna from the icebox for Trusty, here. There’s milk in the icebox if you want it.”
Will looked at me and I gave him a little nod. He put his deed and the atlas on the quilt chest, next to the kerosene lamp, and headed back to the kitchen.
Mr. Litchfield picked up the deed, stared at it, running his thumbs over it. “That’s quite a sense of adventure the two of you have,” he said. “Makes me long for my younger days—but I’m content, I reckon, to live out what’s left here. Maureen and I had a lot of good years here—and some tough ones, too.”
He put the deed back down on the quilt chest and gave me a hard look. “Is Will strong enough to finish the trip?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Of course.”
“He’s sick. I can tell. I’ve gone to see plenty of sick folk, to make arrangements before they die, and I’ve learned to recognize the look, even in a young one’s eyes. I’ve been the undertaker for Shelby for near on four decades.” He pointed his pipestem at Trusty, who hadn’t followed Will to the kitchen, but who had perked up and was on alert for his return. “Some animals, particularly dogs, can sense it, too. It’s almost like they smell it in a person. If they like the person, they’ll get very loyal and protective.”
That sounded crazy, I thought, the idea of Trusty sniffing cancer in Will. But then I thought of MayJune and her crazy homespun remedies and way of seeming to know when we were coming, or when we’d need something—like a camper.
I blinked back the sudden moisture in my eyes and said quietly, “Yes, Will is sick. Lymphoblastic leukemia. He’s on medicine that’s maintaining him for now, but in a few months…well. That’s why we’re on this trip.” I blinked again, but it was too late. The tears rolled down my cheeks anyway.
Mr. Litchfield nodded. “It’s good,” he said. “Good you’re on this trip.” He pause
d. “Good you came by.”
At that moment, Will came in, three plates of pie and a glass of milk and bologna on a tray. He distributed the food, Trusty gobbling his bologna quickly. Mr. Litchfield and Will dug into their pie, and Mr. Litchfield said, “Mmmm-mmm. That Jean’s a nag, but she can bake.”
I was full, but I took a bite of the pie anyway, just to be polite, and before I knew it, I’d eaten the whole slice. Mr. Litchfield was right. His sister-in-law could bake a wonderful pie. As good as Grandma’s.
That night, Will and I slept in the camper in Mr. Litchfield’s front yard. Trusty was still wary about the camper, so he slept up on the porch. I was worried he’d be too cold, but Will told me I was being silly, that after all, the dog was a husky.
For a long time, I lay awake, cuddled down under my blanket, listening to the soft, even rhythms of Will’s breathing. I thought about everything we’d learned, everything Mr. Litchfield had said, and finally I decided that he was right—it was good we were on this trip. It was good we’d come by to see him.
Then, at last, I fell into a long, deep, dreamless sleep.
When we woke up the next morning and crawled out of our camper’s tiny sleeping area, we saw that the red rickety truck was gone. But Mr. Litchfield had popped open the back hatch of the camper, where there was a small workbench and above that built-in cabinets.
He had left a paper sack on the workbench. We opened it and sorted through the contents: bologna, cheese and bread, two slices of the apple pie wrapped in wax paper, and two maps, of Glacier Park and British Columbia. There was also a tiny wooden figure, a likeness of Trusty.
There was a note, too: These maps are from my and Maureen’s honeymoon, so they’re old, but they have some more detailed roads than your atlas. If you can make it to Dawson Creek, you should be able to take the Alaska Highway up to Tok. The carving of Trusty is my thank-you for listening to an old man. Good Luck. Noah Litchfield.
“The maps are good,” Will said, closing his hand carefully over the wooden figure of Trusty and putting it in his pocket. “The atlas just shows the main roads in Canada.”
My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) Page 23
