Chapter 28
Now We See Face-to-Face
Ginger’s hands were filthy and the air flowed into her lungs like water. Summer was coming early and Virginia was full of herself, wearing a heavy gown of heat and humidity. As Ginger dug through the bricks in the floor by the back wall, she was convinced this springhouse had never really worked. The years of perfectly dry junk that had been piled in it gave testament to that fact. The pond should have released water, cooling the building so it would keep milk from spoiling. It also would run through it, down the creek bed, under the covered bridge, and flow to the Shenandoah. But clearing the years of furniture and farm equipment from the building had done nothing to release the water. Instead she found the floor of the building bricked over.
“I think, Dad”—she grunted as she hit a brick with her pick—“that this was just here to look like a springhouse. I don’t think that pond ever flowed.”
“Oh, yes, it did!” her dad replied as he tossed the growing pile of debris from his daughter’s efforts out the door. “You can see right where you are working the edge of the older floor. These bricks are newer, which means they are not original to the building. They don’t belong.”
“That still doesn’t mean the springhouse was a functioning springhouse.”
“Well, why else would it have been built, Ginny?”
“Who knows? Why is the covered bridge here?”
“Ah! So people could read the signs on Highway 81 and follow—”
“Yes, thank you, Father,” she said as her pick fell again, the brick breaking in half beneath its steel point. Sweat fell from Ginger’s neck and hit the floor like rain. Her father chuckled, his feet shuffling softly as he cleared their work area. Bending down, Ginger lifted the two halves of the brick she had been working on. As she removed them, the older one next to it moved from its resting place.
“Shoot!” she breathed as she tossed the two halves of the broken brick over her shoulders.
“Hey! Watch it!” her dad yelled.
“Ah! Sorry,” she replied. “I think I broke the original floor.”
“Let me look.”
Scooting over, Ginger let her father inspect what she had done. “Did I screw that up?” she asked.
“No,” he mumbled as he squatted down. The back of his shirt was soaking wet. He was not from here and she was sure if the heat was bothering her, it must be torturing him.
“Maybe we should take a break, Dad.”
“This brick was moved before, as was this one,” he said.
“Hey! Look!” Her father leaned forward a little more and when he stood up he held within his hands a small, dusty box the size of a pound box of chocolates. The wood was scratched in places and as her father held it up for inspection, rotating it around in his hand to see all sides, Ginger spied a small brass lock with a tiny keyhole.
“I have that key!” she declared, leaning her pick against the wall.
“To this?”
“I think so.” She smiled a great smile. “It belonged to Jesse.”
“How’d he have the key if the box was buried under here?” Her father pointed to the old brick floor.
“Who knows! Let’s go check to see if it fits.”
Excited, Ginger stepped from the springhouse and found the air no less cool even though there was a breath of a breeze. The key? She thought for a moment; it was in her desk drawer. With her father following close behind, she made her way toward the house by way of the cemetery. As they passed it, they fell into their own thoughts as they gazed at the newest addition to the family plot. Samuel’s grave was just like Juliette’s, a simple stone cross standing above his resting brow with his name chiseled at the bottom. Juliette’s cross was weathered and gray, old. Samuel’s was white, sparkling in the late spring sun. Ginger thought one day, when she, too, lay beneath that soil, his would look just like any of the other headstones there. Nothing would set him apart as he stood apart now. Something in that thought saddened her and as she turned into the orchard she felt the emptiness of his loss. Two months he’d been gone, but it seemed like forever.
“Miss you,” she whispered.
“Lots of people at the stand,” her father noted.
Ginger gazed over to the vegetable stand that Eli and Jacob had made. The Smoots’ crops weren’t yet ready, but there were bushels of apples and pears from Ginger’s orchard. There was a line at the stand and Miriam had Oliver scampering around like a mouse on a corn silo floor, putting fruit into bags and handing them to the paying customers. Then Ginger peered down the road and found cars parking one by one all the way down on the right side. People walked in the middle of the street, laughing and talking with one another. Children raced toward the covered bridge, where Henry stood watch.
Once upon a time, people would come down to Smoot’s farm, stop, and turn around. Now they stopped and got out. They bought eggs, walnuts, apples, and pears and picked their own herbs from the garden near the barn. Fresh vegetables grown by all the other farmers on this little hairpin turn of the Shenandoah ended up at Ginger’s vegetable stand, and after the visitors bought things, they’d wander over to the field to watch the land farmed with horses and mules. There was something to see, something to learn, something to eat, something to do now at Smoot’s farm.
The forty-two acres would now be given to Ginger, not born a Smoot but a Smoot all the same, trusted to her to be worked and then passed along as it had been since 1799. It was her home and her work. But she had yet to find her dream on it. She spent her days working the farm with her family and there was a great deal of work to be done. It was no longer solely a corn and hay farm. It was milk and eggs and vegetables. It was corn for animal feed and husks grown to be sold for the table. It was picking fruit and nuts and finding buyers in the local markets for the first time. Ginger worked the books, bought the seed, planted, plowed, and, like any farmer, prayed for good weather.
Through good weather and bad, the farm was now school, too. With the designated curriculum from the school district in hand, Ginger, her parents, and Osbee took up the responsibility of Henry, Bea, and Oliver’s education. There was breakfast in the morning, class until noon held by one adult or another, while the rest went out and worked. Lunch would be eaten together and then all would head out to the fields and barns once more. The children had settled into the life of a farm family, their days filled with work and one another and friends coming to visit.
A screaming child brought Ginger’s attention back to the orchard where she was walking. A father, mother, and unhappy toddler stood under a pear tree, the mother trying to give the child water.
“Cooler in the shade,” Ginger said to them as she passed.
“So hot here,” the woman replied.
“Where you from?” Tim asked.
“Seattle,” the man said.
“Welcome to Virginia!” her father said, handing the dusty wooden box to Ginger. “Come. There’re benches out behind the house under a grandfather of a walnut tree. Much cooler there.”
“Oh, thanks!” the woman said, visibly relieved.
“Ever been to the Ginger Moon?” Tim asked as he walked away from his daughter with the Seattleites.
“I love that store!” The woman grunted as her screaming daughter tried to squirm from her arms.
Ginger shook her head. Her father was still out here but his heart was in Seattle. Her mother had returned to the shop the week before, as she and Tim had stayed in Virginia until Oliver was mostly healed, leaving the Ginger Moon in the capable hands of their employees. But it had been two months and someone had to go back home. Someone had to start wrapping things up on the West Coast. In the time Tim and Monica had lived on Smoot’s farm, they had discovered that things had shifted—things had moved on. They had become part of the farm. They were part of Henry, Bea, and Oliver’s daily lives. They were two more pairs of han
ds to serve the land and grow the family. The Ginger Moon and all they had built in Seattle was no longer their future. Their life was here and so Monica returned to Seattle to start settling their affairs there while Tim oversaw the construction of the doty.
After a month of Osbee’s house being filled with people, Ginger asked Jacob and Eli if they would build a doty in the same manner as in an Amish home. In their world, grandparents live in the addition to the original house, or doty. It was natural for one to be made onto Osbee’s house; it fit in easily just behind the porch on the north side. The dining room window became a door and the echoing sound of hammers falling meant a sitting room was being constructed just on the other side. A small set of stairs would open up onto a bathroom and bedroom. Tim himself wanted to stay and set the bathroom fixtures in place. Once finished, it would be time to leave for Seattle to aid his wife in the settlement of their affairs. Until then, he decided to clean out the springhouse and make the water flow, enlisting his daughter to help. Ginger wondered if he would stay and just leave Seattle to her mother.
“Dad,” Ginger called after him. “Maybe you can go back with them. Ask them when their flight leaves.”
Her father laughed and took the two-year-old from her mother. Instantly, there was silence except for the hammers banging away on the other side of the house.
“Keep it going there, Miriam,” Ginger said when she passed the vegetable stand. As was always the case when day shifted toward the violet hour, Ginger spotted Solomon Schaaf wandering up the road. The day Ginger began to farm her own land with Eli and Jacob, the old farmer watched from a distance, sitting upon his tractor. As time went on, he could be found chatting with the boys and soon the boys would walk him home to take dinner with the old man and his wife. It was as if there were no fence now between their farms, and in the stillness of their return each night Ginger could hear Eli and Jacob speaking in whispers in their mother tongue. She didn’t know the language but understood what was happening.
They were men. They were available for hire and slowly they spent less and less time with Ginger and more with Mr. Schaaf. They kept his farm pretty much going and the only thing that was left to him to do was tending his fields with his tractor. Ginger knew it wasn’t because Jacob and Eli wouldn’t use the machine. It was because plowing his fields was the one task Solomon Schaaf loved to do above all else. No one would take away the old man’s love of work until he was ready to let it go.
So there Solomon was, walking toward Smoot’s farm with a basket of eggs for the vegetable stand, and as she waved to him he smiled, handing the basket to Oliver and then heading to the bridge, where Henry stood guard. The task delegated to Ginger’s eldest this day was the guarding of the bridge. People were allowed to walk through it and around it, but the path to where Jesse’s tree once stood was strictly for family. She waved to her son, who gave a nod in return. As Ginger climbed the porch, she found the black Mercedes still in the drive.
“The battle continues,” she breathed and, without hesitation, grabbed the doorknob, opened the door, and stepped into the house.
“What do you mean, Virginia, building onto this house?” Ester demanded from the dining room.
“Good day, Ester. Hugh. Mr. Glenmore. It’s almost dinnertime. Will you be staying?” She smiled a great Southern greeting and then turned to the right to head up the stairs.
“We can sue,” Hugh said, standing from his chair. “My arm was broken by your negligence with that goat.”
“We’re having a light dinner with salad and bread and apple tart. The kids made fresh ice cream,” she added as she climbed the stairs.
“Did you hear me, Virginia?” Hugh called after her.
“Oh, sit down, Hugh.” Osbee’s voice was confident and unafraid. “If you’re thinking about suing, I remind you to remember it’s still my land.”
“And the kids’ home,” Ginger hollered as she entered her room. Before there was another word, she shut her bedroom door. Dusty box in hand, Ginger stepped over to her desk and opened the top drawer. She shuffled though papers. A whippoorwill sounded far afield. She stopped and gazed out her window.
The bridge stood sturdy in the growing violet hour. Holding her breath, Ginger waited, hoping somehow Samuel, her friend, her supporter, would appear just once more.
“He won’t show,” she whispered. “He’s been found.”
Leaning into the window, she peered far to the right, past the orchard, past the chicken paddock. Samuel’s cross was bright, reflecting now the purple glow of Virginia’s sky. One day it would be just as all the others were—dull, aged, and forgotten by all except family. She thought then of her childhood trip through the mist to Chief Seattle’s grave.
“All gifts left for the gentle, honorable man,” Ginger whispered, her breath causing her bedroom window to fog.
Buried in Arlington, Jesse was one of many remembered for their service and duty because of where they rested. She wanted that for Samuel. But here he was next to Juliette, where he belonged, and no one would know his sacrifice—the years he spent between his beginning and his end. The last duty of pulling his friend from the battlefield and trying to bring him home. The love he gave up in service to that duty. That seemed so wrong.
She stood staring at Samuel’s cross and felt the world shift—shift in the way it had done when Samuel was around. A familiar stillness surrounded her. She did not move. She waited in the space between—waited once again to be enveloped by acoustic shadow.
“Samuel?” she whispered. “Samuel? Is that you?”
But there was no acoustic shadow. Something inside her opened, as if eyes closed for years finally gazed out onto the world seeing all things as new—as if she was seeing with her Child’s Eyes. In that vision, rising from the mist of her breath upon the window in the light of the violet hour, she saw her dream. She’d build it, just like the giant structure that she remembered stood over the grave of Chief Sealth.
It would rise beyond the covered bridge in the shape of a bivouac sheltering two graves from the storm. She saw a small building just on the edge of Schaaf’s farm, where people would come down the road and get out of their car just as they were doing now. But instead of just a farm to wander about in, they’d enter that building to see a butternut uniform with mismatched buttons. They would find—what would they find?
“Love,” she said to the violet hour. “Love in the chaos of war.”
The streambed was dry now, but she’d clear the springhouse and then it would flow under the bridge and return once more to the long-awaiting embrace of the Shenandoah. Ginger stood in awe, watching the sparkling little creek reflect the violet hour with her Child’s Eye.
“A butternut uniform and what else, Samuel?” she asked.
Her hand moved and touched the dusty box, bringing her eyes and mind back to it. What had her husband left her? A message? A final note telling her—what? Or was it his childhood dreams of his own future? Jesse was gone but at least she’d finally have an answer to one of the mysteries he had left her: the key.
“The key,” she said, shaking her head at herself. It wasn’t in the dresser. It was still in her purse.
Reaching over to the foot of her bed, Ginger grabbed her handbag and rifled through it. She found the yellow envelope, and as she flipped it over to release the key she dropped her purse on the desk chair.
Her heart sped up as she lifted the key. It slid easily into the keyhole and, with a small turn, she heard the lock click. Slowly, she opened the box.
Inside she found one, two, three—she counted fourteen brass buttons scattered on top of folded papers, which were tied together neatly with a black ribbon. Ginger lifted the box at an angle and coaxed the buttons out onto her desk. Then she extricated the papers, and when she did so, her heart stopped.
There, at the bottom of the box, was a photograph of Samuel, his form seated in sepia exactly as
she had seen him in Woodstock. And next to him, with her hand resting upon his shoulder, was the image of Ginger herself—an apparition, a ghost. A spirit standing by his side. There and then as here and now.
Author’s Note
I have studied the Civil War from the West Coast much of my life, never really believing I’d get to walk on the land where it was fought. I personally owe a deep debt to Shelby Foote for spending twenty years of his life living in the history of that time so I can come along many years later, pick up his narrative in a bookstore in Washington state, and listen to him as he walked me down that road. A map in a book was all I had for so long that when I actually stepped onto the grass and gravel of those places, I can only say it was spiritual. It would not have been so had it not been for the lifelong work of Mr. Foote.
With that said, I’d like to leave the reader with an opportunity. A shift in life can come from anything—a character in a book, a comment by a neighbor, a movie, or a three-thousand-page narrative. I have found if ever there was a path that needs walking, it is your history. Talk with your grandparents. Listen to your aunts and uncles, cousins and parents and siblings. Everyone comes from somewhere, so go, put on your shoes, and follow the map. When you walk through history, you become part of it. You find your place in it and it becomes your history. It becomes your story. I invite you to find your story. . . .
About the Author
Nicole R. Dickson resides in North Carolina. For updates on Nicole R. Dickson, please visit her Web site at www.nicolerdickson
.com.
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION
1. What is the purpose of the covered bridge?
2. What is the meaning of the Civil War to the Smoot family?
3. Jesse was good friends with Ed Rogers. Why did he not share that relationship with Ginger?
4. Why does Jesse have the key?
Here and Again Page 33
