Lilac year, p.12
Lilac Year, page 12
Things were moving quickly, almost too quickly. She needed to get that horse back and ride it home.
She put down her teacup, with the tea completely untasted, and stood. “Is that horrible creature still out there? I should go. I have much to think about.”
“I’ll get Stonewall for you, and I’ll have a few words with him to make him settle down.”
“Thank you. Do you mind if I take a peek at my nephew before I leave? It’s been so long.”
“He’s a light sleeper, so be careful,” he warned.
He stayed back and let her go to the room by herself. Her face was soft and loving as she pulled a blanket over the boy’s legs, which he promptly kicked off again.
He went outside and reached for Stonewall’s reins, and the horse flicked his head, trying to move them out of reach, but he was faster. He had everything ready for Mariah when she came out.
“I think this is for the best,” he said. “If, after a year, you still think he should be in Massachusetts, perhaps it will be my turn to uproot myself. We will see.”
“It’s for the boy,” she said, nodding. She looked up at him. “Thank you.”
Moonlight caught her hair, adding a silver cast to the auburn glow, and her eyes caught the glow of the stars overhead.
There was a time for everything. The Bible even talked about it. And this was the time for him to kiss her.
He touched her cheek, and she lifted her face to him. He lowered his lips—
And the horse nipped his shoulder, ending that moment.
“I told you it was a nasty creature,” she said, touching the tip of Ben’s nose.
Then she put her foot in the stirrup and was most of the way across the saddle when Stonewall broke the reins free from Ben’s grasp, bearing Mariah over the prairie, one foot still under her.
“Bye!” she called as she waved with one free hand. He could see that once again, she was holding to the mane with the other hand. “Pray for us!”
In the span of one evening, his whole life had taken an unexpected turn.
The next afternoon, when he and Jacey were alone, he brought out the drawings the boy had done while traveling with Bo and his family. He was most interested in talking about the one with the rat in the front.
“Can you tell me about this?” he asked the boy.
Jacey ducked his head. “Do I have to?”
“Well, no, I don’t suppose you do, but I am curious. What can you tell me about it?”
“It’s the building I lived in with my mom in New York City.” The sentences began to tumble out. “That’s my dad, not you, but my dad in heaven, and those things are his wings.” He pointed to the triangles coming out of the head. “My mom is here, and she’s laying down because she can’t really sit up anymore because she’s so sick. And this is Auntie Mariah, except she never did come, although we waited and waited and waited for her. These are snowflakes because it was cold. And these are rats, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Ben wrapped the little boy in a deep embrace and whispered to him, “God will always be here for you, and I will always be here for you, and so will your Auntie Mariah.”
He would make sure of that.
❧
The renegade horse put in the barn until Olea or Fred could come get it the next morning, Mariah stood at her front window. The mosquitoes were fierce tonight, so if there was one advantage to having the world’s fastest horse as her transportation, it was that not a single insect landed on her during the ride home. In the barn, of course, it had been a different matter, and she scratched her arms and her legs and, oh—this could only happen to her—her mouth.
Today had been like a series of scenes from somebody else’s life. She had found her nephew. Or rather, he had found her.
Something had happened in that barn. She hadn’t talked to Ben about it, and she might take it to her grave.
She didn’t recognize her own nephew, the one she’d come out here for. That was the guilt that dug at her and dug at her and dug at her, but now she was going to have to face it. She had gotten so caught up in earning money to save Lorna and Joshua, that she’d totally forgotten them. Letters were infrequent, visits nonexistent.
It had been her goal to make their lives better, when in fact she could have gone to see them earlier. She could have settled for less money. She hadn’t even asked them if they wanted to be saved from the tenement. She suspected they did, but she’d never asked.
Why hadn’t she simply gone to New York City and offered her own apartment as temporary and crowded lodging? Why did she decide she had to move them into their own apartment? She’d even chosen it. It was lovely but beyond their means, which meant she’d had to work more, work longer, and delay going to get them.
Her sister had been dead for over five months before she found out.
She was a terrible, terrible sister and aunt, but this option that Ben presented to her gave her the chance to redeem it all.
She opened her little purse and took out the tiny picture she always carried of her and Lorna. Lorna’s hair was piled on top of her head in some kind of messy bun that they’d thought was the most fashionable style. She had her arm around Mariah, protectively, and they both grinned widely at the camera.
She remembered the day. They were on top of the world that day, and nothing could ever stop them. They’d stolen away to Coney Island, a place where no reputable woman would go alone, let alone two young women, and stayed only long enough to get it documented on film in a photography cabana. The place terrified them both, and when a man with two teeth and smelling of beer had lurched at them, they had scurried on home.
They found out later they’d managed to end up in the most disreputable part of Coney Island, and there were other parts that were lovely, but they had learned their lesson and never went back again.
She ran her finger over her sister’s image. “Lorna, it’s time for me to settle down and do what’s right.” She paused, and then she said, very softly, “And find out who’s right. . . I—I think he’s right.”
What was she giving up? He had laid everything out so plainly that she didn’t feel as if she had been backed into agreeing to stay for a year. Actually, this had been quite nice, not working six and a half days a week and ten- to twelve-hour days.
He had been about to kiss her until that dim-witted horse had intervened. If she knew how to shoot a rifle, and if she knew where a rifle was—and bullets, of course—she’d actually think about going out and shooting the fiend.
A kiss! Her first kiss, truth be told.
A kiss! He was going to kiss her!
A kiss! And with it an odd little implicit marriage proposal, but she didn’t really think he meant it.
Still, a kiss!
And she was now under the lilac year agreement. She knew she’d try her hardest to make the things grow.
❧
Summer ended quickly, and Jacey was back in school. He had to go to Arrow Township’s school since there wasn’t a school in Prospect. It worked out all right. A parent would take a wagonful of children in the morning, and another picked them up after school. Once the school in Prospect opened, life would be much easier. The plan was to open one school in a year if they could find a qualified teacher and the right facility to house the school.
They’d also agreed to call him Jacey, since that was the name he’d chosen for himself. He had been told that if he ever wanted to return to Joshua, they would be fine with that.
The sewing business had picked up, especially now that Meggin trusted Mariah with the new machine. It put in a line of stitches in record time, and Mariah knew how to keep it in check so it didn’t take off like a runaway horse.
Ben tsked anxiously whenever their paths took them past Lars’s fields. They were a mess. Plants, partially harvested, hung at awkward angles, almost as if the fields had been completely abandoned. But Lars was still at his house—they had seen him outside, with his characteristic rolling gait—and of course, every day in the mercantile, over at the pickle barrel with the old men.
Ben and Mariah took a trip to Fargo and selected two lilac bushes, prepared for autumn planting. They looked like dead sticks, but the fellow assured them that she could probably expect blooms in the spring.
They planted them that evening, all three of them. “The soil is supposed to be rich in nutrients,” Ben said, “and this spot is about as devoid of everything as you can get. So make sure you use your cooking water on them since they’ll have extra good things for the bushes. And anything that’s left over, you could bury under them, but bury deep, or you’ll be operating a hotel for visiting critters.”
“You can have all my vegetables,” Jacey offered. “Especially that zucchini. Ick.”
Ben looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know. He just won’t eat it.”
She grinned. “Not to make your life harder or anything, but I won’t eat it either. What a nasty vegetable. Give me fresh green peas, straight from the pod in the garden! Or beans, pulled right off the fence. Yum.”
“You never let me eat right out of the garden,” the boy said to Ben. “How come?”
“I don’t know,” Ben admitted with a smile. “It just never came to that. You can next time.”
This was a lovely evening, the three of them together, even if they were planting the lilacs that he was sure would never live. But he knew he’d be paying regular visits to the lilacs, doing everything in his power to keep them alive.
“Jacey has something for you,” Ben said and nodded to the boy, who went back to the wagon and brought over a box.
“You can put these on the tree, and it won’t look so bare,” he said.
He had made paper chains of colored paper, and Mariah helped him loop them around the branches. “There,” she said. “Lovely.”
“And now,” Ben said, “we have another surprise. Every-body in the wagon. We’re going to see Olea and Fred.”
Jacey and Mariah looked at each other. “Kittens!” they shouted.
When they arrived at Olea and Fred’s house, one kitten had already been taken—the gray striped one. “That’s okay,” Jacey said. “That means there’s one for each of us.”
The cats were separated to Jacey’s satisfaction. The black one with the white forehead he named Tom and was his cat. The fuzzy one was Abe and became Ben’s kitten. The gray and white one was called Victoria and was Mariah’s.
They took the kittens home to get them accustomed to their new environments. “This is like Christmas,” Jacey said. “But with live presents!”
The kittens played happily together at Ben’s house, and after the boy went to bed, Ben and Mariah stayed up for a bit to discuss the day.
“I’m concerned about you staying at that house without any transportation in the winter,” Ben said. “It hasn’t been an insurmountable problem in the summer, but as we move into snow, I’d feel a lot better if you had some way to get from place to place. What would you think about a little horse and wagon? I saw one in town, and it would be perfect for you.”
“Oh, I can’t ask you to do that,” she said. “You’re very kind, but I know that there is an expense associated with that.”
“It’s not much.” He grinned. “It’s a very small wagon and a very small horse. And you could pick up Jacey easily. And go back and forth between the houses.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea, and you are so thoughtful to think of it.”
He only grinned at her. “Actually it’s self-serving. I’m tired of having to load Jacey in the wagon to take him with us when I bring you home.”
“I withdraw the remark about being thoughtful, but I still appreciate the offer of the horse and wagon.”
“It’ll be in your barn tomorrow,” he promised. “But for now, this is one last trek across the prairie with a sleeping boy in the wagon box.”
“You know,” she said as they traveled the short distance to her house, “I’d always thought of the city as being loud at night. Refuse containers clanked. Fire wagons clanged their bells in alarm. People laughed and shouted, and dogs barked. Where I lived, there was a man who sang opera in Italian every night, not well, but I liked it. But this is absolutely pandemonium. A beautiful pandemonium.”
He knew what she meant. The prairie was just as loud but with a different symphony. The night insects buzzed and hummed in a nonstop rhythm. Night birds called to each other loudly. A dog barked—and it could be a township away, sound carried so clearly on the prairie. From somewhere, a locomotive chugged along. A wolf—or perhaps a fox, he didn’t know, and he couldn’t see at night—bayed plaintively.
When it was cold like this, cold enough to kill off the mosquitoes, a ride on the night prairie was a delight.
Ben stopped the wagon in the middle of the flatness.
“All around us,” he whispered in hushed tones of awe, “is the prairie. In a month, you’ll hate it. The wind sails right across it and tries to take your skin off your face. The cold will be so relentless you’ll wonder who in their right mind would live here. Look around and remember. This is the reason.”
Purple and indigo shadows slid across the land, under a starry expanse that stretched from one side of the world to the other.
“It’s so beautiful,” she murmured. “ ‘He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.’ Psalm 147:4. Isn’t that the best? To think that he knows how many stars there are, and each one has a name given by Him.”
He put his arm around her, and they cozied up under the limitless sky and the cool night air.
“If He knows their names, then He knows ours, too,” Ben said.
He turned to look at her. “And He may very well know what this man is about to do to this woman.”
Then, finally, after all the waiting, he kissed her.
And the world paused, happy.
❧
First Church knew how to celebrate Christmas, Mariah thought. Every bit of wood that could hold a branch or a swag was decorated with pine or cedar. Candles wrapped in ribbons sat in each window, snuggled in a holder of winter greenery.
“If it can be decorated, it is,” Ben said to her as he handed her another white candle to wrap with red ribbon.
“So if I decorate the candle with ribbon, what do I decorate the ribbon with?” she teased.
“Ssh! Don’t even mention it. The next thing you know, someone will hand you a box of old fabric ends and ask you to make tiny fans out of each one. And that’ll go on the ribbon. And then the fan will need a shiny thing. You get the idea.”
“I understand.”
So far the experiment was working quite well. She saw Jacey—she still stumbled over the name occasionally—almost every day, and she and Ben had moved into an easy relationship that was clearly leading to love.
The cats were growing fat and obnoxious, constantly underfoot, but worth their weight in the mouse bodies they presented their owners each morning.
For Christmas, Jacey hung new streamers on the bare lilac bushes, adding a bit of color to the now solid-white prairie.
She was coming to terms with their odd little family, and having the three of them together made her very happy.
“I have a gift for you,” Ben said as they tucked the last candle up on the altar. “Come with me.”
“Shouldn’t it wait until Christmas?” she asked. She had made him a new quilted vest, a mélange of the blues from the nighttime prairie. It should make his eyes look extraordinary, but she had kept it tucked away at her house. For Jacey, she’d made an oversized cat that he could sit on in the wagon. Part pillow, part toy, he should like it.
What did he have for her? She followed him to the side room of the church, where the dinner had been held.
“I wanted to give this to you here in the church. It just seemed right. This was in a box that was sent on from Orphans and Foundlings. It was in the apartment. There wasn’t really anything else in it.”
“She probably sold it all,” Mariah whispered.
“I imagine that’s what happened. At the time, it didn’t make too much sense, but now it does. Here.”
She opened the wrapping and found a photograph of her family: Lorna, her, and their parents. Lorna must have been around seven in it, which would have made her five. The image was still as sharp as the day it was taken.
The frame was new, and she looked at Ben, who nodded. “There wasn’t one.”
She leaned across and kissed him, very lightly. “This is the kindest, best gift I could have received.”
“You are the kindest, best gift I have received,” he said.
“Cut the mushy stuff,” Jacey said, coming into the side room. “Reverend Timms told me to get you so we could sing some Christmas carols, and then we can all go home. I’m hungry. Let’s sing and then go home to eat. And see my cats. And open my presents.”
“The Spirit of Christmas has spoken,” Ben said with a laugh.
After several rousing choruses of some well-loved Christmas carols, the congregation dispersed, calling greetings to each other across the snow-white prairie.
“I’m glad you brought the cutter,” Mariah said to Ben. “It’s so romantic.”
“And a lot more practical than a wagon in the snow.”
Jacey was sitting between them, a buffalo robe over their knees, and as a gentle snow began to fall, she thought nothing could be more perfect.
six
Cough. Cough—cough—cough. Cough. Cough.
The sound was relentless, coming from Jacey’s bedroom.
Cough. Cough. Cough.
Poor child. He couldn’t sleep for all the coughing, and yet the coughing wasn’t going to get better without some sleep.
She’d volunteered to stay with her nephew while Ben rode into town in search of help. She’d instructed him to get some menthol, camphor, and eucalyptus oil. Her mother had made a mixture of that, and it had helped relieve chest congestion.
