From roots to sky, p.9
From Roots to Sky, page 9
She gripped the ropes, face to the sky, soaking in the warmth and allowing herself to remember, just for a moment, that bygone dream of flight. Back and forth she swung, the billows of her skirts like ruffling wings as she gained height. And just as she’d done when she was young, she waited until that breathless moment hanging in the balance between upswing and down, right in that space where anything seemed possible, to open her eyes.
As she did, time slowed. The branch just out of reach was stark in the richness of its bark against the blue sky, but for one place where freshly carved lines revealed new, light wood. An etching of wings, and in the glorious space between, two sets of initials:
HG
+
LH
“But that’s us,” Hannah breathed. “That’s—that’s me.”
And then, as if her words had severed a cord between her and the upward ascent, the hovering swing succumbed to gravity and swung down, down, down . . . where the sight awaiting her caused her to dig her heels in and stand, hand to her mouth.
Luke knelt before her on one knee, his expression one of utter openness and heartrending hope.
“Hannah,” he said, voice husky. “My heart is yours. It’s not what you deserve, not even close to being enough. But if you’ll have me, if you can put up with the life of a pilot, if you maybe wouldn’t mind even coming with me sometimes—because truth be told, Hannah, I can’t tear myself away from you. Can’t imagine tearing myself away from you to fly those skies, and if anyone belongs up there, soaring, it’s you. If you could do with a life like that—”
“Do with a life like that?” Hannah’s hand transferred to her heart. “Do you not know?”
Luke furrowed his brow, and she wished to kiss every doubt away from the contours of his handsome face.
“Luke, I would give anything for a life with you. But more than that—I’d give anything for you to have the life you were meant for. I came here today to give you this.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulled out the flight-wrinkled envelope. “They’re ready for you. I know it.”
He took the offered letter. Beheld it for a moment and shook his head. “That might be,” he said. “But I’m not ready for a life without you. Hannah Garland . . .” He opened his palm, where a tiny glint of light danced up at her from a simple ring of gold. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes!” she said, then clapped her hand over her mouth at the embarrassing force and speed at which that word had come out. “I mean—I’m just me and you’re you and I don’t know if you’ve really thought this through, Luke, but if you think you can do with me at your side, then I—”
He was up then. Kissing her in a way that told her she’d been wrong all along . . . that his home wasn’t in the lofty skies above these branches. It was, miracle of miracles, with her.
Epilogue
CHRISTMAS EVE 1945
Dear Hannah.”
Dear, dear Hannah.
Luke spoke the words, felt them engrave into the deepest parts of him, and halted. He remembered so vividly another night, one year ago, when he penned those words and held fast to the thought of this woman. She had saved his life then. God had filled his life with the gift of her since then.
And now, he had traded that star-studded, frozen sky for a shower of sunlight slipping through oak leaves that clung to their green, even in December. They stood together, hand in hand, heart in heart, beneath the great oak, before God and all these witnesses. Here, he would give everything he had, and ever would have, to her. In the two months that had passed since he’d gone to New York, their letters had flown across states at a dizzying speed, and engulfing length. Sketches from time to time, for old times’ sake—but the quiet man had a deep-running well of things to say, it turned out, and Hannah happily continued to be a fount of words and joy. The time had simultaneously crawled excruciatingly by and flown at alarming speed, bringing him at last back down from the skies and to this singular tree and this moment in time.
It was all he could do to keep from reaching out right then and lifting the veil that happily did a very poor job of concealing the bright blue of her eyes, the breathless smile on her face. All he could do to keep from running his hand along that cheek of hers. He was fit to burst with gratitude, and the only way for it now was out. In words.
He repeated after the preacher, with solemn honor and deepest hope. “With this ring, I thee wed, and all my worldly goods I thee endow. In sickness and in health, in poverty or in wealth, till death do us part.”
He nearly gathered her up in his arms on the spot when she began by uttering beneath her breath, “Great gumdrops . . .” and then letting the rest of the vows march out in her sweet voice, with all the conviction in the world.
Hannah and Luke Hampstead’s hearts beat as one, there upon the ground where their story was embedded and held deep in the roots, and high in the branches above. Looking on through its wide-eyed round windows was Leven House, sunlight glancing on the windowpanes like a wink as the weathervane above the turret sang out a clear, bright song.
This was the house that had given their hearts a home . . . and now, with greatest hope and hardest good-byes, it was time to take flight. But they wouldn’t leave without first doing for the house what it had done for them: giving the home . . . a heart.
Amid a whirlwind of dancing beneath and around the tree, Uncle Sarsaparilla’s Orchestra—all four members—played “Stardust” with every bit of soul they could muster, and the couple pulled Jerry into the shadow of the cottage and handed him an envelope.
Onlookers—and being that Oak Springs residents loved one another’s business as much as they loved one another, there were plenty of onlookers—would later tell how Jerry stuck a thumb under that envelope’s flap, pulled out a paper, read it, and looked at them in confusion. How you could’ve tipped him over with a feather, he seemed that shocked. How his chin trembled somethin’ awful until he took the newlyweds in his arms and squeezed them in a hug but good, and how he then demanded two things. That if he did this thing—if he indeed took up residence in Leven House, made it a home for his Arnie, a new life for them both, then they owed him two things: a good long visit every time they came across these parts or anywhere near . . . and a bag of snaffle bits, which an awestruck young airman had failed to deliver to him when he first came to town.
Luke happily did both. In the years that followed, every time they came to Oak Springs and stayed at the farmhouse, there were great pots of chili and bouquets of thistles on the old plank table; the occasional batch of burnt buttermilk biscuits, which Hannah plated up with her winking and squinting rendition of eyelash batting; Luke’s ladling of his hearty gravy, concocted over the years as a companion to those biscuits to the cheer of every mouth; and a merry band of souls gathered in the kitchen of the cottage or farmhouse.
And as the “grown-ups” among them talked long into fireside tales of travel and home, Luke would watch his own young daughter slip away into the long grasses, chasing Jerry’s grandson, who always held a sparkle in his eye and a fire in his heart for their girl. He watched from afar as their feet flew beneath those branches, fireflies dancing to light the way, and the boy would set the girl to swinging high in that sky.
His heart, and Hannah’s, were full. Light dancing from above, roots plunging life through dark, and warmth all around.
Sneak Peek of
Yours Is the Night
by Amanda Dykes
Prologue
OCTOBER 24, 1921
CHALONS-SUR-MARNE, FRANCE
CEREMONY FOR THE CHOOSING OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
There are days you live over and over again, for as long as you live. October twenty-fourth of 1918, just days before the unending war ended, was one of mine. I went into a forest of darkness that day, never imagining how that place would claim me. Four years ago, to the day.
And four caskets before me now.
There were four of us, then, who took a journey, armed with bayonets and canteens and a mission we had no idea how to accomplish, bumbling fools that we were. A mission of greater import than we realized at the time. One that would change us all.
I watched now from the outskirts of the solemn ceremony as a man in uniform gripped not a bayonet, but a bouquet. A grip of roses—white. Pure. Absent of the scarlet we’d all seen too much of. Slowly, he walked down the line of boxes that held the remnants of so much life. Nobody knew whom the boxes held. And yet everybody knew a thousand soldiers, brothers, friends whom they might hold.
We were no different. I stood shoulder to shoulder with two of my brothers from that time. We’d seen it all, then. We’d seen each other at our best and our worst. We’d scorned one another and needed one another and had left that battle-gouged land with battle-gouged hearts. We’d left one of us behind, in that forest, and though we would never know who lay in these caskets, every one of us wondered: Is it him?
The man before us now would walk this line. He would place that spray of roses on a single casket. The casket would be taken back across the sea, to our nation’s capital, to the soldier’s homeland, to be entombed there. Guarded, always. Kept safe from war, from loss, from all the atrocities he had faced. And in this, he would bring something to a nation. Something we brought out of the forest that day, a lifetime ago.
Hope.
This is our tale.
May we never forget.
1
Matthew Petticrew
1900
GREENFIELD, NEW YORK
Rules:
1) Keep off the racetrack, you dolt! That’s what Mr. MacMannus says. He says that if the Maplehurst Stables is the crowned jewel of thoroughbred racing, then “that dirt you think you can just run on any old time is as good as gold.”
2) Feed the hens and horses between the hours of four and five, and if you finish early, stay out and play. Do not come back to the caretaker’s quarters before that. And don’t run on that golden dirt.
I looked at my old notebook, scratched with these two rules. I was five—almost six—and I had written them down with the help of Mr. Haggerty, the gardener, so I wouldn’t forget. When I forgot, bad things happened. He’d looked at me a little funny when I told him what they were, but he wrote down the hard words for me before getting back to pruning his roses.
The rules weren’t so bad. The rest of the green rolling hills of Greenfield Springs, New York, were mine for the taking, and most of the racetrack, too. But tonight—tonight there was one more rule.
“Stay with Mrs. Bluet, tonight,” Mother had said. “You know the way?” She’d smiled and winced at the same time, cradling her swollen belly before reaching out to ruffle my head. I was not the smartest boy around, but I could tell something was different. Her breath came quick or sometimes not at all, like she’d been the one caught running around the racetrack and not me.
Her hand was stiffer than usual, and her smile so tight. It wasn’t right. Her smile always went deep and wide, probably the deepest, widest thing I knew in my small life.
So, I packed a clean shirt like she told me to right after she’d kissed me on the top of my head. But I tucked myself right under her window outside, instead of heading to the cook’s quarters at Mr. MacMannus’s house. It sat just on top of the hill, looking down on our little house, the way hawks look down at field mice. I didn’t like it there. It was called Maplehurst too, just like the stables. It sounded sweet like the syrup, but for all its fancy rooms and people coming and going in suits and dresses, it felt awful cold and un-sweet to me. I accidentally called it Maplehurts once while I was there eating a molasses cookie in the kitchen. Mrs. Bluet looked at me with flour on her face and her eyebrows raised and said, “Well, young Matthew, if that isn’t about the rightest thing I ever heard.”
I did not wish to go to there that night. I didn’t want to be near Mr. MacMannus and his rules and the big, cold house. I didn’t want to be away from my mother. She needed me, I could tell.
Only once did I peek inside the window, where an oil lamp glowed so dim I could barely see her there on the bed. Her face was pinched up so that it hurt me to look at her, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
That was the night I first felt the Flame. I called it “the Flame,” for I couldn’t think of any other way to describe the burning in my chest, where Mrs. Bluet said my heart was. I once saw them set off dynamite at the quarry over the hills. The way the spark chased a cord to the place it would explode—that’s how I felt. A spark hot within me, a cord running between me and Mother, but I was not allowed in, not allowed to let that spark rush in and explode inside the little house and chase her pain away.
Two ladies came and spoke together so quietly I couldn’t hear. Mother always said that hearing was my gift because I could hear things others couldn’t. Even so, strain as I might, I couldn’t make out what their concerned tones were saying. One woman kept coming and going, bringing cloths and boiling water, while the other one stayed with Mother and said things to her and held her hand while her cries turned into the sort of moan that could dig into your insides and hollow you out. What was wrong?
The groans grew louder, and longer, until the spark inside of me was gone, smothered by a blanket of fear so heavy I didn’t know whether to run or stay.
So, I prayed. We always prayed on Sundays, Mother tucking her white blanket around my shoulders and reading scriptures to me at our table beneath the very window I now sat beneath. She baked something very special on those days, like an apple cake just my size, which she gave completely to me, or vinegar pie, which we shared. I felt like a king on Sundays, wrapped up in that blanket like those red capes that kings wear, only mine was so old and had been washed so many times, it was much softer than any king’s.
But for the rest of the week, she was quiet and troubled most evenings, her only prayers silent, and mine, too.
That night was a Tuesday. I prayed aloud on a Tuesday for the first and only time I could remember, that night. The shortest prayer—it did not rhyme or sound very right, but it was the truest prayer I had ever prayed.
“God in Heaven, help her.” I pressed my eyes shut so tight it must have sent my prayer higher, louder. It had to. I rocked myself back and forth to the words and said it again. And again, and again, and again, my words mingling with her cries until her cries grew quiet and were replaced by another, smaller cry. That of a baby.
Something strange happened, then. I have never felt it since that moment and maybe never will again. But as I rose to my knees and clutched the windowsill, my fingernails caked with dirt, and peeked inside that golden-glow room, I saw something perfect.
Mother, happy. A baby in her arms, all wrapped up in the old king’s cape blanket and her smile once again so deep and wide.
That was the last time I saw her. I did go up to Maplehurst after that, and when the morning came, I awoke to Mrs. Bluet sitting beside me and holding my hand. She looked like the whole world had cracked open overnight. And when she spoke, I found that it had.
Mother was gone. She had died in the night, gone to the angels and God above. Leaving behind one tiny angel in her place, and both of us without a mother or a home.
In the years that followed, there was much I came to understand. First, that it could be a good life.
2
1914
The world was going to pieces at war, way across the sea. But at Maplehurst, the earth erupted every day at twelve o’clock sharp. It started as a rumble. A tumbling, trembling sound that burrowed through the soil like it burrowed through my veins. And then it grew louder, the current separating into rhythm, the rhythm pulsing into force, eclipsing the tick of the clock on the stable wall.
I looked down the corridor. I’d pitched hay, mucked stalls, and pounded horseshoes since before dawn. My work was done—almost. And the pulsing called to me until I obeyed, leaving the home stable behind and letting my own pulse sink into it as I ran out the big white doors, up the pasture hill, over the ridge until I could see the cloud of dust rising, like it was reaching up to see me. My own feet pounding back into the earth in response: I’m coming.
I knew each one of those beasts like my own always-smudged face. From the time Mr. MacMannus discovered me and Celia squirreled away in the old loft rooms over the stable, where Mrs. Bluet and Mr. Haggerty took turns smuggling us food and staying with us while we were still small, he’d looked at us grim and silent and said a few words—powerful and unhappy words—to our unlikely caretakers. They’d said a few words back—quiet and strong ones—that seemed to silence his anger, or at least send it deeper inside of him, away from us. Ever since, I’d been the resident stable hand, and Celia a small seamstress at the ready, mending blankets and garments for horses and humans alike by the light of our one window. She sewed, and I worked shoulder to shoulder with the best thoroughbreds in New England. “The finest in the country,” Mr. MacMannus liked to tout to his visitors.
It was not a bad life. We had a home. We had food. We had the gruff humor of Mr. Haggerty, who gave us a garden plot out behind the barn and liked to call me “the boy born in a barn!” Stable, I’d correct him, with a laugh, even though we both knew neither was true. I only lived in a stable, and Celia was closer to being born in one than I had been.
Still, something in me rather filled up with a sort of pride when the gardener called me that. At times, it felt like it must be true, this tale of my being born in a barn. For this was what I was born for. Mr. Haggerty started saving the funnies from his Sunday edition of the Herald, slipping it my way so I could read “The Escapades of the Rough Riders.” It was a comic strip, but nothing was comic about it at all. I followed the daring deeds of Theodore Roosevelt, Jasper Truett, and the rest of the men, wondering why I hadn’t been born two or three decades before, so that I could’ve been valiant alongside them.
Mrs. Bluet, whenever she sensed either of us was feeling sad, would bake a blueberry buckle before the sun was up and sneak it our way. It was a consolation, but also an omen of sorts. I always got a sinking feeling when I smelled the sweet dish in the air, for it meant something difficult was afoot.
