“Really?” she asked, wanting to believe.
“Really,” her mother said.
“What did she die of, Mama?”
Her mother was busy writing. Finally, she looked up. “Back then, people died of all kinds of things. It’s not like now where we hop in the car and go to the doctor and get a penicillin shot when we get sick or hurt. Back then, people just died more.”
How terrible. Thank goodness they lived now instead of then so their mother wouldn’t die of any of those things. She couldn’t leave them because she filled up all the space between and around them clear to the sky. Sometimes she sat on the couch and invited her four children to pile on, and she kissed the tumble of them—faces, elbows, hands, heads, even feet—asking them if they were happy. Everybody but the baby said Yes, Mama. When she had to lie, Harriet Jane felt guilty.
She put her arms around her mother, who kissed her on the head and held her close. Harriet Jane was getting so tall it felt strange to be cuddled.
Finally, her mother gave her a squeeze and stepped away. “I’m going to the garden for a while. I need to stretch. Will you listen for the kids? If the baby wakes up, bring her out to me.”
Harriet Jane nodded.
Her mother tied her hair with a scarf and put on sunglasses.
When she was on her way to the garden, Harriet Jane went into the baby bedroom very quietly so she didn’t wake Annie, who slept on her back, her arms out, her face turned to the side, a little dark spot of drool on the crib sheet.
They had all slept in the baby bedroom until, like birds leaving the nest, they flew upstairs and landed in their real bedrooms.
Through the window, she could see her mother working in the garden. Their mother didn’t can and freeze and pickle and preserve like their relatives along Lovell Road did. She said anything that had to be canned or frozen, she’d buy at Kroger’s, thank you. But she did like to grow food they’d eat fresh. Peas that were sweet as candy, which Harriet Jane liked to eat right off the plant, standing in the garden with the sun on her shoulders. Fat watermelons that weighed a ton and dripped off your chin onto your arms and the tops of your feet.
There was an old pump that squealed like a pig when anybody moved the handle, but it was a good place to wash dirty feet and hands. The water was always cold.
Harriet Jane thought of the swimming pool. How good the water would feel rising up around her shoulders. How long she’d stay cool afterward. She thought of the icy sweetness of the snow cones from the concession stand and how they stained her mouth. It probably would have been fun to go. She would go next time.
She went upstairs and peeked in on the girls in Mona’s room. They were sound asleep. She glanced into Phoebe’s empty room, where a giant pink panda sat in the corner. There was a room waiting for Annie, right across the hall from Harriet Jane. Maybe their mother would have more babies and they’d have to share bedrooms. Phoebe and Mona could share. They almost did anyway.
She went into her own room. The cousins and her friends teased her about her bed because it was so old-fashioned, but she loved it. It made her think of a pretty cage that didn’t keep her in but let her keep the rest of the world out when she needed to. But she didn’t need to now. The spirit from the bad place was lifting. She felt better. Like nothing bad could ever happen to any of them. Like she could do anything.
She got her crayons and colored pencils and inks and brushes and went to the north wall, where there were no doors or windows to break up the smooth surface. Her cousins were openmouthed that she was allowed to do this. The first time, about six months ago, she hadn’t had permission. She’d just done it. She’d been looking at Josephine’s postcards and admiring the way artists painted on the walls and ceilings. She stood up feeling so strong. She could do that too. Her room would be as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel.
With joy surging through her, she’d drawn big things with her crayons and chalk. Trees and flowers and people and houses and hills and clouds as high as she could reach standing on her desk. She’d forgotten time and where she was. Then she’d gradually fallen back to earth and known she was in terrible trouble. Why had she done such a thing?
Her mother hadn’t discovered the ruined wall for two days. During that time, dread trailed Harriet Jane.
One afternoon her mother brought in Harriett Jane’s freshly ironed clothes, smelling like spray starch, to hang in the closet.
She stopped. She stared, frozen.
Harriet Jane was on her bed reading Blue Willow. She wanted to vanish. She waited for her mother to yell. To say she couldn’t believe Harriet Jane had done such a thing. To tell her to stay in her room until her daddy got in from the field. Harriet Jane almost threw up at the idea of his knowing. She had never done such a disobedient thing. She might get a spanking. It wouldn’t hurt much, but it would break her heart. And her daddy’s heart.
She waited, wishing her mother would go ahead and yell.
Finally, her mother sat on the bed, her eyes still on the ruined wall.
“That looks so joyful,” she said. She was crying.
Harriet Jane stared in horror. Her mother never ever cried. “I’m sorry,” she said, starting to cry herself. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Her mother turned her face away, but she caught Harriet Jane’s hand. Finally, she took a deep breath and let it out. She wiped her face with her hands. “A long time ago I knew someone like you. Someone who often felt really sad.”
Harriet Jane stared. How did her mother know?
Her mother made a humming sound and stared at the wall. “I think your art is beautiful,” she said. Her face looked strange and broken like she needed to cry and smile at the same time. “Just beautiful.” She brushed away tears. “Go ahead and do it when you feel like it. I’ll talk to your dad.”
Her dad never said anything about this strange indulgence. Harriet Jane kept expecting he might talk to God about it during grace, but thank goodness he didn’t. There was puzzlement in the back of his eyes sometimes when he looked at her, and she was afraid she’d disappointed him.
When the dark spirit dragged her down, it helped to go to the walls of her room and fight back. She wondered who her mother had known long ago who often felt really sad.
·· four ··
Tulip
1977
TULIP woke up and instantly knew what was different and special about the house. Her sister Annie was asleep in the bedroom across the hall. Annie had a red car, three boyfriends, and plans to spend a lot of time with Tulip this summer. Or so Tulip hoped.
The smell of coffee and the drone of the TV drifted upstairs as she peeked into the jumble of Annie’s room across the hall. The sun bathed it in light, picking out the details of Annie’s suitcases and laundry bags and boxes of books from her dorm room. Annie’s strawberry-blond hair shone like real gold in the sun. Annie made Tulip think of a peach, and Tulip loved peaches. She loved Annie. She loved her other sisters too, of course, but they were much older. More like aunts. Annie was only twenty. Twice as old as Tulip, but not that old.
Annie’s white peasant blouse was tossed on the floor. Tulip crept into the room and picked it up because Annie was kind of a slob. Before Tulip laid it on a chair, she held it to her face. When she was little and her feet were cold, Annie let Tulip get in bed with her until they were toasty, and then Annie piggybacked Tulip back to her own bed. Tulip loved the way Annie’s pillows smelled. When Annie first went to college, Tulip got into her bed one night. But it made her so lonesome she never did it again.
She listened for the sound of the new tractor and thought she heard it far in the distance where her dad was working on the acreage he’d bought from Aunt Marie after Uncle Robert died last year. Tulip’s mother said her dad was spending money like there was no tomorrow. He patted her on the behind and said there would always be a tomorrow.
Tulip would probabl
y be on the tractor with him this morning if it weren’t Annie’s first day home. Tulip went to the bull sales with him and watched the beautiful animals in the arena and told her dad the ones she would buy if she had money.
Downstairs, she poured a glass of orange juice. She saw her mother out in the garden, the ties of her sun hat ruffling in the breeze.
On her way to the garden, Tulip snapped off a lilac blossom and held it to her nose.
Her mother was on her knees harvesting spinach and lettuce. “How’s my little Tulip?” she asked, standing up.
Tulip used to love having a fancy name, especially when her sisters had such ordinary ones. But now Tulip was starting to feel babyish. Especially when it was my little Tulip. Plus, her cousin Thomas—who was really her nephew, but almost her same age—had a collie pup he named Marigold, which she thought he did on purpose to annoy her.
“Why did you name me that?”
“Don’t you like the name?” her mother asked.
“Kind of. I guess. But everybody else has a normal one.”
Her mother brushed Tulip’s hair off her face and behind her ear. “You were a surprise so you got a special name.”
Tulip held the lilac blossom out to her mother, who brushed it beneath her nose, then tucked it into her hatband.
“Mom, if we cut that old bush way back, it would bloom better next year.”
Her mother smiled. “The things you know.”
Tulip shrugged. She noticed and remembered things having to do with plants and animals. She was going to grow up and farm forever. People said You mean you’re going to marry a farmer. That was not what she meant.
“Is Annie still sleeping?” her mom asked.
“Yes. Do you think I should wake her?”
“Not yet,” her mom said. “But when she gets up I want you two to go into town and get flowers for the cemetery. Then weed and trim around the graves, scrub the bird poop off the markers, and make them look nice like you always do. Memorial Day is around the corner.”
Good. She was going to spend the day doing something with Annie. Even if Annie decided she’d rather be with friends, their mother said.
But Annie didn’t complain when she finally woke up after Tulip made as much noise as it was possible to make and still have it seem accidental.
“Okay, okay,” Annie called.
A while later, Tulip sat on the edge of the bathtub watching Annie blow out her long hair and make it really big. She wore a pair of cutoffs and a white T-shirt, and at the last minute she added a pale blue bandana, rolled and tied around her neck. It made her blue eyes glow and her freckles stand out. She looked so beautiful Tulip could hardly stand it. Then she put on a pair of wedge sandals and stood three inches taller.
Tulip flung her arms around her sister. “Let’s go!”
They loaded the trunk of Annie’s car with a broom, four plastic jugs of water, a bucket, rags, and clippers.
As they left, Tulip saw her dad with the builders who were putting up the fancy new pole barn. It would be one long building with a barn, a machine shed, and a shop for welding and machinery repair all in one.
“You want to see what Dad’s doing?” she asked Annie.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Annie said.
And so Tulip did, ending with, “The shop will have a concrete floor. And a bathroom! And there will be a refrigerator for storing medicine for the cattle and a hot plate for heating calf formula.”
Annie laughed. “How about a TV?”
Tulip said no, then realized Annie was teasing.
“And when the barn is finished, we’re going to build a bunker silo.”
She waited for Annie to ask what that was, but instead Annie pointed to the FOR SALE sign in front of Great-uncle Robert’s house. “When did that go up?”
“About a month ago.”
Where Great-uncle Joseph’s family had once lived there was now a family who kept peacocks. Annie slowed to look. “Aren’t they pretty?”
“But they make weird noises. It sounds like they’re saying Help!”
Great-uncle Samuel and Aunt Ruth still lived in their house, but they were old. Tulip mowed their yard and her dad rented their farmland. The little dollhouse was empty. Miss Doll had died two years ago at a hundred and one. The yard was overgrown inside the spiked iron fence.
“Looks like something from a spooky movie,” Annie said.
Tulip nodded.
Where their great-grandparents had lived, in a house that had once been a beautiful gingerbread place that Tulip had seen in pictures, there were just the broken backs of outbuildings.
As they drove past the other farms, Tulip told Annie which neighbors had new trucks and new equipment.
“Little Miss Farmer,” Annie teased.
Tulip didn’t care. She thought it was interesting.
When they got to the highway, Annie shifted through the gears until they were flying. They put down the windows and turned up the radio.
At Wal-Mart, on the other side of town, they bought silk flowers for the graves of Grandma Lovell, Great-uncle Robert, and a lot of way-back Lovells Tulip didn’t know. The backseat was full of flowers when they were finished.
They were the only people at the cemetery, though a few graves had already been spruced up and decorated. They went from grave to grave, Annie sweeping away dried grass thrown up by the mowers, Tulip cleaning the monuments with a damp cloth.
It was very quiet. Big trees shaded the graves and sunlight danced over the stones in the breeze. Tulip felt the dead people waiting to be remembered.
Someone, probably Grandpa Lovell, had already put a large wreath at the base of Grandma Lovell’s angel. They added a spray of silk gladiolas.
“People say she was very beautiful,” Tulip said.
“And died tragically young,” Annie said. “It was a great love story.”
Tulip nodded. People told it the same way they told other cemetery stories. The eleven-year-old boy who’d been crushed by a piano. The man who had fathered twenty-three living children. The little girl who’d died of hydrophobia. The good doctor who’d nursed everybody through the flu epidemic of 1918, then sickened and died himself. And Belle Lovell, the beautiful bride with the handsome husband, who’d been called home to heaven too soon, leaving her heartbroken little daughter behind.
They moved on to Great-uncle Robert’s grave. He’d died from cancer a few months ago.
“I think we should put lots of flowers here,” Tulip said. “He probably hates being dead more than everybody else because the others have been dead a long time.”
“I don’t suppose he has any feeling about it one way or the other,” Annie said. But she didn’t discourage Tulip’s plan.
They moved on to graves of the very old Lovells. At each one, as they did every year, Annie read the name and dates, and Tulip laid a few flowers on the ground in front of the marker.
Annie would probably think she was being silly, but Tulip felt the dead people’s appreciation. She knew they had been waiting. She and Annie were probably the only visitors they had, the only people who still said their names.
“Why do we never say Harriet Jane’s name?” she asked—not that their oldest sister was dead. She lived abroad. She’d moved away before Tulip was born.
“Because it upsets Dad,” Annie said.
“Do you remember her?” Tulip asked.
Annie nodded, but her face got that closed look Tulip knew too well.
“How old were you when Harriet Jane went away?”
“I was eight and when we’re done here—which we almost are—let’s go to the new mall over by St. Louis. We can ask Mom if she wants to come.”
That sounded boring. The only thing to recommend it was being with Annie. “Maybe,” Tulip said. “But it feels wrong not to say a person’s name. It�
�s like she doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have to talk about her around Dad. But you and I can talk about her.”
Annie sighed. She undid the bandana around her neck and took a long time tying up her hair with it. Finally, she said, “What do you want to know?”
“Why did she leave us?”
“Do you pinky swear you’ll not tell Dad I told you stuff?”
Tulip locked her finger with Annie’s.
“She left—”
“Say her name. We should say her name.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “Harriet Jane left when she was seventeen. She ran away.”
“Why?” It was the best home in the world.
“I don’t know. I was just a kid. Nobody told me anything.” Annie sat down under a tree and unbuckled her platform shoes. “These shoes aren’t very comfortable,” she said, wiggling her toes.
Tulip sat beside her. She so hoped she looked like Annie when she grew up.
“Nobody told me anything, but I overheard a lot of stuff.” Annie looked at Tulip. “You know. Grown-ups talking when they don’t think you’re listening.”
Tulip nodded for her to go on.
“You swore you’d keep this conversation secret forever and ever.” Annie raised a reminding eyebrow at Tulip.
“Yes.”
“She stole her savings bonds for college out of the freezer and ran away to the West Coast and became a hippie.”
“Why?” It was really wrong to steal. And hippies used drugs and weren’t very clean.
Annie leaned her head back and stared up through the leaves. “Harriet Jane was kind of weird. It’s hard to describe. She was very beautiful and very smart, but something was wrong with her.”
“What?”
“Sometimes she got so sad. She tried to hide it, but you could see it in her eyes. Other times she acted so happy. Mom seemed to understand. I always thought she loved Harriet Jane most. Maybe because she was the first child, but maybe because Mom knew Harriet Jane was having a hard time. After she ran away, I heard Mom crying and trying to explain Harriet Jane to Dad, and he flew into a rage. They didn’t get along for a couple of years. In front of us, they tried to act like everything was okay, but we all knew it wasn’t. Mom actually left for a few months, if you can believe that. It was awful. I thought the world had ended. And Dad was so weird. He just went totally silent about Harriet Jane and Mom, like if he pretended everything was okay, then it was. And we had to pretend too. Had to. I knew if I failed at that, the world would truly end. I’ve never been so terrified.”
Surprise Lily Page 3
