by Betsy Haynes
"Who has found out something interesting?" asked Mrs. Clark once the class had come to order.
Curtis Trowbridge was the first to raise his hand.
"Tell us what you found, Curtis," said Mrs. Clark.
"One of my ancestors, Jonathan Barlowe, was a spy in the Revolutionary War and he's buried in the old cemetery north of town."
A few wows and all rights sounded through the class as Curtis looked around proudly.
"Good detective work," said Mrs. Clark. "I'm sure there are several of you whose families settled in this area many years ago and who have ancestors buried in the old cemetery. Because of that, I have scheduled a special field trip for Friday afternoon. We are going to go to the old cemetery and become grave rubbers."
"Grave robbers!" cried Tony. "That's against the law."
Melanie chuckled, thinking about how Tony probably knew more about the law than anyone else in the class since he had been taken to Teen Court so many times for breaking school rules.
"I didn't say grave robbers, Tony," Mrs. Clark corrected. "I said grave rubbers. What that means is, we're going to make gravestone rubbings. We'll take heavy wrapping paper, masking tape, and a box of large wax crayons with us. Then we'll find some old gravestones, preferably marking the graves of some of your own ancestors, and we'll tape the paper over the words carved in the stone. Then we'll rub the crayons over the carvings and make our own picture of the gravestone. Now, who can tell me what important information we can get off the gravestones?"
Melanie only half-listened to the other students say things such as names, dates of birth, dates of death, and things like that. She was already thinking about asking her grandmother if Great-great-grandmother Cordia was buried in that cemetery and planning to make a rubbing of her gravestone if she was.
After school, she hurried straight to her grandmother's house without going either to Bumpers or home. Her grandmother, Marounah Lee Phillips Pennington, was a tiny woman who stood less than five feet tall. "Come on in, love," her grandmother called out when Melanie rang the bell and peeked in the back-door window of her neat little brick house just four blocks from the Edwardses.
"Hi, Gran," said Melanie, stepping into Gran Pennington's sunny yellow kitchen where cookies and hot chocolate were waiting on the table. Melanie had called her grandmother the night before and told her about the genealogy project and the kind of information she would be needing.
"I suppose you want to get right to the important stuff," said her grandmother with a twinkle in her eye. She was loading the plate of cookies onto a tray as she spoke. "Get your cocoa and come on up to the spare bedroom. That's where I keep the trunk with all the old letters and pictures."
Melanie followed the elderly woman into a tidy room and sat down gingerly on an ancient four-poster bed. The lace bedspread was hand-crocheted, and little lace doilies decorated the tall chest of drawers. But the thing that caught Melanie's attention was an old brass-bound trunk with a domed lid, which sat beneath the window.
Gran Pennington saw her look of admiration and said, "That trunk belonged to your great-great-grandmother, Cordia Mae Lee. Now there was someone who was a character." She laughed softly as she put the cookies on the bureau and sat down in a rocking chair.
Melanie's heart skipped a beat. It was almost as if her grandmother had known whom she most wanted to talk about.
"But back to the chest. Before she was married it was her hope chest. Do you know what a hope chest is?"
Melanie took a sip of her cocoa as she thought a moment and then shook her head. She had never heard of such a thing.
"In your great-great-grandmother's day, young ladies did fancy needlework. They embroidered pillow slips and made lace tablecloths and things of that sort and put them away in trunks like this so that when they got married, they would already have some of the things they would need."
"Neat!" cried Melanie. "I wonder why girls don't do that now?"
Gran Pennington nodded her head knowingly. "Well, I expect it's because girls nowadays are too busy. They can't sit still long enough to embroider pillow slips."
Melanie started to mention that she had begun working on a counted cross-stitch picture once, but of course she had never finished it.
"You said on the telephone that you'd like to ask me some questions," her grandmother said. "I'm ready if you are."
Melanie swallowed a mouthful of warm chocolate chip cookie and opened her notebook. "Okay," she said, making a number 1 beside the top line. "Tell me about yourself. When were you born? Where? When did you get married to Grandpa Pennington? That sort of stuff."
Dutifully, Gran Pennington recited the information while Melanie wrote it in her notebook. Every so often the older lady would remember a story about her childhood or the early days of her marriage, and Melanie would make notes about that, too, and about Grandpa Pennington, who had died two years ago. Finally they had exhausted the questions about Gran Pennington, and Melanie brought up her great-great-grandmother.
"You said Cordia Mae Lee was a character. Mom said something like that, too. What can you tell me about her? Is she buried in the old cemetery north of town?"
"Yes, she's buried there, and I even have some pictures of her in one of these old albums." Gran Pennington carefully lifted the trunk lid and removed a fragile leather-bound album with PHOTOGRAPHS written across the front in scrolly gold letters. She opened it, turned a few yellowed pages, and smiled. Then she handed the album to Melanie.
"There she is, sitting under a shade tree in front of the old family home. She was very musical. In fact, that's where your mother gets her talent on the piano. You know," she added brightly, "I've never noticed until now just how much the two of you favor each other. You even have Cordia's reddish-brown hair and blue eyes."
Melanie blinked as she looked at the picture. There was Great-great-grandmother Cordia, sitting under a tree with sheets of music spread around her and smiling at the camera. But what gave Melanie such an eerie feeling was that her grandmother had been right about how much she resembled her relative from long ago. It was almost as if she were looking at herself in a mirror.
"Now let me see, what can I tell you about her?" said Gran Pennington, rubbing her chin and gazing thoughtfully into the distance. "As you can see, your great-great-grandmother was a very pretty young woman," she began slowly. "So pretty, in fact, that the young men swarmed around her like bees around honey."
Tingles raced up Melanie's spine, and she couldn't help smiling with pleasure. "Really?" she whispered.
"That's right. In fact, some of the girls in her sewing circle at church snubbed Cordia for a while because their own boyfriends were trying to call on her. And there's another story about a young man who threatened to climb to the top of the church steeple and jump off when she wouldn't go riding with him in his buggy."
"Well, it sounds as if it wasn't her fault," Melanie said defensively. "She couldn't help it if the boys thought she was gorgeous and totally irresistible."
Gran Pennington laughed. "Oh, she could have helped it if she'd wanted to. The truth is, she was a flirt! In fact, according to some, she usually had two or three beaus at once, and she tried to keep each one from knowing about the others. Can you imagine a thing like that?"
Melanie gulped and looked down at the album where Great-great-grandmother Cordia smiled at her. What would Gran Pennington think if she knew how much her own granddaughter loved to flirt? And that Melanie always had two or three crushes of her own?
"Thumb on through the album, if you like," suggested Gran Pennington. "There are pictures in it of Cordia with several of her boyfriends, or beaus, as she called them. Let's see . . ." Gran reached over and flipped a few pages. "Here she is again with one of them."
Melanie felt a ripple of excitement at the sight of the happy couple, smiling at each other instead of the camera. Cordia was sitting in a swing tied to the leafy branch of a tree, and she was looking up at a blond-haired boy who seemed about to give th
e swing a push. Under the picture were the faded words: John, my very best beau. "Oh," Melanie sighed aloud, trying to imagine herself in the very same pose with Scott or Shane or Garrett.
"Take the album home with you, if you'd like," Gran Pennington offered. "I'm sure you'll enjoy looking through it, and you can bring it back when you've finished."
Melanie smiled appreciatively as her grandmother went on, "Here. Look in the trunk. She saved a whole bundle of love letters from young men who wanted to court her. She tied them in a pink ribbon, and they're in here with the other family albums and some other papers and letters that I've collected over the years."
Melanie's eyes brightened. Love letters? The idea was so romantic that it made a lump form in her throat. Maybe someday someone will write love letters to me, she thought. Maybe Scott or Shane or maybe someone I haven't even met yet.
"I'll just go down and do some things in the kitchen, and you can look through the trunk to your heart's content. You may find all sorts of information for your genealogy project. How's that?"
"Gosh. Thanks, Gran. That would be super."
As soon as her grandmother left, Melanie knelt before the old trunk and carefully lifted the lid. It was filled with yellowed papers and fragile photograph albums just as Gran had said it would be, and a stale, musty odor drifted into the air. She wanted to look at everything, but first she had to find Great-great-grandmother Cordia's love letters.
Beneath the first layer she found them. The pink ribbon was faded and the bow flattened from years in the trunk, but Cordia Mae Lee's name was on the front of every envelope.
With trembling hands she lifted the packet out of the trunk and placed it in her lap. Then she slid the first letter from under the pink ribbon and opened it.
CHAPTER 6
The old-fashioned handwriting was slanted and hard to read. My dearest Cordia, it began.
I have been watching you during church, praying that your eyes would meet mine and that you would smile at me the same way you did that Sunday last month at the church picnic.
Melanie giggled. Gran was right. Cordia had been a flirt!
Your smile was so warm and sweet that I thought surely you cared for me as much as I care for you. But now I fear that I was mistaken. If you really do care, please meet me by the poplar tree behind the church next Sunday morning before the service.
Your devoted admirer,
Ben
Melanie clasped the letter to her heart, trying to picture Ben's face and deciding that he was probably very handsome. "I wonder if she met him," she whispered out loud. "And I wonder if he was the one she married."
Quickly Melanie turned to the next letter in the stack and began to read it. It was from a young man named John. Melanie gasped. He was the one in the picture who was ready to push her in the swing. And Cordia had written my very best beau under the picture.
My beloved Cordia,
I have been worried sick these last few days. It seems so long a time since you favored me with a smile. Is something wrong? Have I offended you?
I beg your humble pardon if I have. Please give me a sign that you still care for me.
Yours forever;
John
"'Yours forever,'" Melanie repeated just above a whisper. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes, seeing Cordia twirling a lock of her reddish-brown hair and smiling softly as she read this very letter from John all those years ago. If he was her very best beau, surely they had gotten back together. But what if they hadn't? She wished she could call to Cordia back through the years and urge her to smile at John again and to smile at Ben, also. I certainly would, she thought.
Slowly she picked up a third letter, from Charles, who was equally infatuated with Cordia and who had also thought she liked him but was having doubts when he wrote the letter. One after another, the letters sounded similar. The one from Jacob, the one from Aaron, the one from Robert, all swearing their devotion and begging her to care for them, too.
Melanie was deep in her reading when her grandmother called up from downstairs. "Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes, dear. Would you like me to call your mother and see if it's all right for you to stay?"
"Eeek," squealed Melanie, pulling herself into the present and looking around the room. She hadn't realized that it was so late. "Sorry, Gran. I've got tons of homework so I'll have to go home. I'll be down in a couple of minutes."
Melanie looked at the pile of letters in her lap. She wanted to go on reading them. There was something almost magic in holding them in her hands and knowing that they had been sent to someone very much like herself so long ago. She could almost see Cordia's flirtatious smile as she bestowed it on first one young man and then another, and feel her great-great-grandmother's heart skip a beat when the smile was returned. "I know just how she felt," Melanie murmured, reluctantly putting the letter she held back on top of the packet. I absolutely have to come back and read more of them tomorrow.
She retied the letters with the pink bow and started to put them back into the trunk when she noticed another letter. It was addressed to Gran Pennington, and her own mother's return address was in the corner. What caught her eye was the postmark, only seven months before her own birth, and Gran's notation on the envelope: News that Kathy's going to have a baby.
Melanie stared at the letter for a moment. Kathy was her mother's name, and her family had lived in another city from the time her parents were married until they moved to their present home when Melanie entered second grade at Mark Twain Elementary. It gave her a tingly feeling to see the letter lying there and know that it was about her before she was even born.
Should I read it, or shouldn't I? she wondered. Shaking her head, she placed Cordia's love letters back in the trunk and started to close the lid. Still, she reasoned, Gran said to look through the trunk as much as I wanted to. She didn't say there were things I shouldn't see.
Slowly Melanie lifted the trunk lid again. She could see the corner of her grandmother's letter peeking out from under the stack of letters tied with the pink ribbon. Using two fingers like pincers, she slowly pulled the letter out and held it up, reading the notation on the front one more time. News that Kathy's going to have a baby.
"It's about me," Melanie said aloud. "So I'm going to read it."
She felt a glow of anticipation as she pulled the pages out of the envelope. It was going to be exciting to read about how she was going to be born. Dear Mom, the letter began.
I know you've been wondering why I haven't written in such a long time and that you always say that no news is good news, but the truth is, I haven't been sure if the news I'm going to tell you is good news or not.
Melanie gasped softly. What had her mother meant? This certainly wasn't what she had expected to read. The letter went on:
Larry and I had planned to wait awhile to have a baby. You know how I've worked for years to become a concert pianist and have given up a lot to achieve my dream. But accidents happen, I guess, and now I'll have to forget that dream.
The words blurred before Melanie's eyes as their meaning slowly sunk in. "An accident!" she whispered. "They didn't plan for me to be born. They didn't even want me!"
With trembling fingers, she folded the letter and put it back into the envelope, stuffing it under an old photograph album. She didn't want to read the second page. She already knew what the letter said, and it was awful.
Melanie sat in the growing shadows of the old-fashioned bedroom, staring at the crumbling photo album in the trunk and thinking about the letter underneath it. Her mother had said she wanted to be a concert pianist, but now she couldn't. She couldn't because she was going to have a baby. "And that baby turned out to be me," Melanie whispered.
It took all the acting skill that she possessed to go downstairs and face her grandmother without letting the emotions she was feeling show. She kissed Gran Pennington on the cheek as she clutched the album containing Cordia's pictures and headed for home.
When she reached
her own house a few minutes later, she hesitated an instant before going inside. How was she going to face her parents knowing what she knew now? All these years they had pretended to love her when all the time they were only faking. How could they love her? she reasoned, when she had spoiled her mother's chances for a wonderful career. Without me, she would probably be famous right now, thought Melanie, and rich!
Melanie tiptoed through the kitchen, hoping her mother would not look up from the pot she was stirring on the stove, but of course she did.
"Hi, honey," she said brightly. "Did you get all the information you need from your gran?"
A lump jumped into Melanie's throat, and when she tried to say yes, only a squeak came out, so she nodded and hurried to her room. She was in a fog all through dinner, and later she couldn't remember what she had eaten. She stayed in her room until bedtime pretending to work on homework, but instead the words of the letter burned in her mind. You know how I've worked for years to become a concert pianist and have given up a lot to achieve my dream. But accidents happen . . .
Melanie thought about the piano downstairs in the living room. She knew her mother played extremely well. Sometimes she even played for weddings or special programs at church. But why hadn't she ever mentioned to Melanie that she had wanted to be a concert pianist? Why? she asked over and over again. Then she shuddered. Maybe it was because she wanted to be a concert pianist so much that it hurt to talk about it.
Next her thoughts turned to her own attempts at piano lessons when she was in third grade. It had been fun for a while, but then she got tired of practicing and gave it up. Melanie sighed sadly at the memory. Just one more way I've disappointed her, she thought.
Her mind was still on her mother when she got to school the next morning, and she was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she didn't hear Funny come running up to her.
