If Wishes Were Kisses: Six Beloved Americana Romances, a Collection (Small Town Swains)

by Pamela Morsi

  It was ridiculous for a woman to sit and sigh at the moon, wishing a man was something that he wasn't. It was especially ridiculous when the woman was much better off on her own, she reminded herself. She needed to get on with her own life. Decide what she was going to do. But the decisions were harder than ever.

  Staying here with Violet and her father was even less possible now than before she'd taken such drastic action to get married. With Myrtie sure to marry next spring, there was truly no excuse for her to stay even if her father would allow it, and she was not too sure about that.

  Another marriage was not an option. Even if she could get an annulment instead of a divorce, she would never be considered marriageable. Unmarried women really couldn't work outside the home or the family business unless they were teachers, or maybe nurses. Hannah had neither training nor skills in either of those areas. Perhaps she could find an elderly woman with no family who needed a caretaker. The thought didn't fill her with optimism.

  She imagined herself ten years down the road, cloaked in faded, gray bombazine and spending her years in quiet, silent isolation as she watched aged dependents slowly slip from this world to the next. The face of her mother, weary and emaciated at the last, superimposed on the image of her future client and inexplicable tears stung her eyes.

  Oh, how she dreaded tying her life to that of the sick and dying. She wanted life and laughter. She wanted a future with love, a future with her man beside her, his arms around her, his lips in her hair. Duty and respect seemed to pale by comparison.

  A breathy giggle joined by a deeper laugh drew her attention to Myrtie and Will who were just coming out on the porch. Hannah gathered up her things to leave. She knew the young couple would want the privacy of the arbor swing to steal a few quick and desperate kisses. She gladly gave it over to them, with only a slight twinge of jealousy. She knew how it felt to be in love.

  Henry Lee sat at a corner table in Zanola Little's barn listening to the strange mournful sounds the musicians had chosen to play. All around him dancers slowly undulated to the strange mix of African and Indian rhythms, bodies slick with sweat and eyes closed, feeling only the music. He wished he could lose himself in the dance also, but lately nothing seemed to be able to work for him.

  The truth of that statement managed to bring a wry smile to his face. He had tried to banish Hannah from his mind with a pretty little dance hall girl in Ingalls. She was still fairly young and very skilled, but at the last moment he'd paid her and sent her on her way. He ached with desire, but could no longer find relief among the women of his past. The woman's painted face had offered no allure and the body that she eagerly pressed against him repulsed him and served only to remind him of what he really wanted. He wanted Hannah, only Hannah, and he knew now that he would never have her.

  When he'd returned to his cabin, he'd been hopeful. Hannah had a good mind, realistic and practical like his own. He was sure that after the first rush of anger, she would see that they could have a good life selling whiskey. She needn't ever worry about herself or her children doing without the things that they needed.

  When he'd found the note on the table, he'd wanted to lay his head down and cry. He'd sat staring at it for the better part of an hour. Thinking about her sitting at the table, writing out the conclusion of their life as one. He couldn't make out a word, except his name, but he knew she was telling him that it was finished.

  Henry Lee had chosen Zanola's place on purpose. The blacks mostly kept to themselves and he was tired of his every word and deed being the grist for the gossip mill. Elsewhere he would have felt like he had to look pleased, like he was quite content with the direction his life had taken. Here, at least, he had the luxury of displaying all the misery that he felt.

  Zanola hadn't asked for a word of explanation about his ill-fated marriage. "Your business is your own," she had told him. "You want to talk, I can listen, but sometimes you just got to think on it yourself."

  "She's left me," he told her simply. "Guess there ain't much more a man can say about that."

  "You can go after her, you know."

  Henry Lee shook his head sadly. "There's no purpose in it. Nothing has changed between us. I'm still the whiskey man and she's still the preacher's daughter. It was foolish to think for a minute that those two could make a pair."

  Zanola was not as sure as Henry Lee, but she was a woman who had seen a good deal of misery in her own life, recognized it, and knew that the whiskey man was best left alone to see his own way through his troubles. She passed the word and Henry Lee found himself undisturbed by well-meaning advisors or cheerful comrades.

  He'd had plenty of advice already. The morning after Hannah left, the Oscar brothers had arrived at the jail. Putting their good reputation on the line, they insisted that charges against Henry Lee be dropped.

  When the judge heard Hiram Oscar's glowing description of Henry Lee's character and then looked at what little evidence Tom Quick had managed to scare up, Henry Lee was released immediately.

  The Oscars, with Henry Lee in tow, had made their way to the McCulley Dining Hall where he was given a very strong piece of their collective mind.

  "I try to judge a man by what he is, not what he does," Hiram told him solemnly. "But there is no way that I can countenance the kind of evil that you are doing. Sure, lots of folks drink, and most of the Indians, well, they think they ought to have a right to drink just like whites."

  The woodworker turned to Willard as if to enlist his support. "Drinking makes a man crazy, he don't know who he is or what he is anymore. He gets to caring nothing 'bout right or wrong, all he cares about is that drink and where he can get another one."

  Henry Lee continued to eat his dinner, listening, but unwilling to reply.

  "You didn't invent liquor, boy. It was here long before you were, and it'll be here after you've gone. But that don't mean that you've got to invest your life in it."

  "Hiram, I make good whiskey," he finally told him. "It's like working with the wood, it's a gift I've got, and it'd be a shame for me not to use it."

  "A gift to do evil ain't no kinda gift at all!"

  The old man lowered his voice, and spoke to Henry Lee more gently and with emotion.

  "I don't know nothing about you, except what you need to know 'bout a man. I done worked with you and seen that you're mighty fit to run the river with. Who your folks was, or how you was brought up, I don't know none of that. But Henry Lee, I tell you like a son, like I would have told my own, when you live your life outside the rules, outside what folks believe is right, it ain't no fit life. You get no respect, except from other 'uns as bad as you. And you got no respect for yourself 'cause you didn't play it straight. It's like cheating in a card game, you know even if you win that the others are all better than you."

  Henry Lee flinched at that and the Oscar brothers didn't miss it.

  "Henry Lee, you've got a strong back, a good mind, you're not afeared of work and you're plenty capable. You got that sweet little wife, and 'fore you know it, you'll have a house full of young 'uns. I'd say this boy's got some pretty serious thinking to do, wouldn't you, Willard?"

  The two brothers left shortly after that. Henry Lee hadn't the heart, or the guts, to tell them that Hannah had left him. He couldn't bear to speak of it. But everybody already seemed to know anyway.

  Holding up his glass, Zanola mercifully came by and filled it. Henry Lee stared at the clear liquid that was his pride and his livelihood and thought only of his Hannah.

  He'd tried staying out at his place, working, keeping busy. He'd reaped his harvest as soon as it was barely ready and worked like a madman sunup to sundown until it was in. He mowed his hay field all alone, not wanting the help that he usually hired. He needed the work, he needed to sweat and ache and hurt. He needed to cry, but a man didn't do that.

  Everything seemed to remind him of Hannah. He would sit at the table and imagine her sitting with him. Her serious talk interspersed with his teasing chatte
r. He would dress and remember it was this shirt that she'd mended. He ate his food straight from the can, when he bothered to eat at all. He tried sleeping in the bedroom, but the pillows had the scent of that thick, honey-colored hair and remembering it kept him awake all night.

  Sometimes, just for a moment, he would forget that she was gone. He'd seen a doe with her fawn taking a drink at the creek and he was rushing back to the house to have her come look, when he remembered she wasn't there anymore. He was walking through the cornfield nearest the house and decided that it would be the best place to put Hannah's garden next year. Then he remembered that there would be no garden, because Hannah wouldn't be there to tend it.

  He kept telling himself that it was really for the best. He was not much of a family type man. And he couldn't help but agree that a moonshiner might not be the best example for a child.

  They were both really better off. He had his freedom. He could continue in the whiskey business without worrying about getting someone else involved or about leaving a wife and child when he went to jail.

  The whiskey business was a good one, and he was the best in it. How could she expect him to give up a business that he'd built himself? Something he'd worked so hard to perfect.

  He saw himself as he had been back then. Just a dirty-faced boy. Hungry. He was so hungry that winter. Skut had been too drunk to do anything and too drunk to care. Drunks never get hungry, they just get thirsty. There was no food in the house and no money to get any. Henry Lee had eaten the fodder from the corn crib, and scavenged the forest for berries and nuts, robbing the stores of the squirrels and woodchucks, but it wasn't enough.

  An old Indian showed up to buy whiskey. There was none to sell. Skut had drunk up everything they had made and had wandered off to try to find more. The old man had brought carrots and potatoes to trade. Henry Lee's mouth had watered at the sight of them. He had begged the old man. He had dropped down on proud, young knees and begged for the food.

  "Please mister," he heard his high childish voice pleading. "I ain't et nothing but roast acorns for more than a week. I'd do anything, anything, for one of them taters."

  The Indian had eyed him somewhat disdainfully, but had generously given him one potato and one carrot.

  Even today thinking back, he could still taste the bitterness of his humiliation with that sweet, half-burnt, half-raw food that he had wolfed down. The food had done more than fill his belly and recover his strength, it had brought home to him that he was very much all alone in a rough world and that if he wanted to eat regular, he would have to depend upon himself.

  He was too small to hire out, if anyone would have had him anyway. And it was too late in the year to try to get a crop into the ground. He could have taken off to town and tried to flim-flam or outright steal, but he didn't have the nature for it. So he did the only other thing that he knew could make money, he made whiskey.

  He'd watched Skut and others before. While his father had drunk and talked with the Ozark moonshiners, Henry Lee had observed and listened. He carefully tried to recall all that was said. He experimented and learned to trust his own judgment.

  The whiskey he produced wasn't very good at first, but he was able to sell it and get enough to eat and money to buy more corn, to make more whiskey. As he continued to distill, he learned from his mistakes and once he had it down, once he could shake a jar of his own liquor and see that the proof was right by the size of the bubbles, he began not just to eat, but to make a living from whiskey.

  He'd done it on his own. No one ever helped him. He was a child alone, who taught himself to be a man. And no one, not Hannah or anyone else, would tell him that what he did was wrong. Alcohol was bad. He knew that. He'd had a drunken lout for a father and a mother that wasn't a lot better. But people chose to drink, he didn't force them. Even if he never made another batch of whiskey, there would still be fathers who drank up all the cash and left their sons to go hungry. They were guilty, but he was not.

  He would do what he had to do. What he wanted to do! He would sell whiskey whenever he could to whoever he could. And if the law didn't like it, let them try to catch him. And if Hannah didn't like it, well, she'd made her choice.

  He took another slug of corn liquor.

  That was another thing that didn't seem to work for him. All his life, he had been careful not to get too drunk. Now, he wanted to be so drunk he was senseless. To not be able to remember who he was or where he'd been. But as he gazed at the clear liquor in the glass, not his first of the evening by a long shot, he was cold sober.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The noonday sun beat down on the green alfalfa, shimmering in the heat, as the women in the wagon arrived at the hay meadow. Without a word to the other two, Myrtie scampered off to find Will for a private moment alone, leaving Hannah and Violet to set up a camp lunch for the hay haulers.

  The two struggled with tent poles, erecting a lean-to shade on the side of the wagon. "It's a good thing you're here, Hannah," Violet said. "With Myrtie's mind so full of Will Sample, I never would have been able to put this thing up by myself."

  "One of the men would have come to help," Hannah replied, making light of her stepmother's gratitude. "But that Myrtie, she really does have her head in the clouds these days."

  Violet laughed. "It's kind of silly to watch from the outside, but you know how it is. When you're in love, you just can't seem to help but make a fool of yourself."

  Hannah let that comment pass. The last thing she wanted to discuss was how foolish a woman in love could be.

  "What do you think about Myrtie and Will?" she asked Violet, diverting the subject.

  "Well, to tell the truth," Violet answered, "I suspected it all along, not that Will ever let on in any way. It's just that a man who's kind of shy and backward, why, he'll fall for a bubbly, little magpie like Myrtie every time."

  Her stepmother's perceptiveness surprised Hannah. She had become so accustomed to thinking of Violet as light-minded, it hadn't occurred to Hannah that she might have some very keen observations.

  When the two managed to get the poles firmly into the ground, about ten feet from the wagon, Hannah climbed into the wagon bed and brought out a tarp. They rolled it out on the ground and attempted to secure the other two corners on the tent poles. Neither woman was quite tall enough and after numerous failed attempts the two were laughing so hard the tears were coursing down Hannah's cheeks and Violet was doubled over gasping for breath. They finally managed with Hannah holding Violet up, so that she could get a good grasp on the tarp and secure it to the upright.

  “It worked!" Hannah exclaimed when the shaded area was finally constructed. "That was a good idea, me holding you up. I never would have thought of it."

  "I don't know why not?" Violet answered, still smiling. "You've been helping to hold me up through the whole first year of my marriage. Covering for me at every turn."

  Hannah felt genuinely embarrassed that her assistance had been so obvious.

  "I meant well, Violet. I know I seem to always have to have things done my way. I truly didn't mean to intrude on you like that."

  "Lord, Hannah! I'm grateful that you did. I don't know how I would have made it without you." She put her arm around her stepdaughter and hugged her closely. “I never had any idea of the things that were expected of a preacher's wife. When I married your father, I truly thought of nothing but making him happy." She smiled is if having chanced upon a precious memory. "If it hadn't been for you, I would have had this whole congregation up in arms."

  "The congregation loves you!" Hannah insisted.

  "Yes, I think they love me all right, now. They've begun to accept me as I am. But when I first married your father, you weren't the only one that had doubts about it."

  Hannah's mouth dropped open in surprise. How could Violet have sensed her concern over her father's choice?

  "I always liked you," Hannah said. "I just couldn't understand what you and Papa could possibly have in common."
>
  Violet smiled knowingly. "Your father and I have a lot in common. We have our love of the church and our attraction to this prairie. But, Hannah, it's not always what you have in common that makes a good marriage. Like I said with Will and Myrtie, sometimes it's the things you don't have in common that are the most important."

  "You mean opposites attract?"

  "No, not really that." Violet pursed her lips as if trying to gather up the words. "It's more that when you marry you do become one flesh, like the Good Book says. And for that marriage to work, the one flesh needs to be a whole person. So each one brings part of that flesh to the whole."

  The idea made a furrow in Hannah's brow.

  "A marriage should represent all sides," Violet continued. "And it takes differences in people to do that. Your father and I, together, make one whole person."

  "And Myrtie and Will make one whole person," Hannah agreed. "Because he is shy and hardworking, and she is so vivacious and carefree."

  "Yes," Violet said, "Will and Myrtie make one person. And of course, you and Henry Lee."

  Hannah stopped dead still and turned to look at her.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You and Henry Lee make one person, too," she said.

  Hannah quickly shook her head. "No, Violet, we really just don't suit at all."

  "You suit each other perfectly," the older woman insisted, waving away Hannah's hasty denial. "I've seen it! When you are together, it's plain as pancakes. You become more like him and he becomes more like you."

  "No, I just—"

  "Just think about it, Hannah," Violet interrupted her. "Don't dismiss the truth before you've even given it a look." Her stepmother's words were kindly, but serious. "Think about how you feel when you are with him. How he makes you laugh. He makes you think and say things that you would never have done on your own. And you do the same for him, whether you realize it or not."