by Jane Yolen
My hands developed blisters that grew round, sore, and gray, then popped. Cousin Nancy put a lemon bee balm poultice on my hands at night and I slept with them wrapped up in white handkerchiefs soaked in the stuff until the blisters hardened into little calluses.
Often I simply dumped the last of the water from the tin bucket on myself to cool my fevered head. But neither the plants nor I were prospering in the heat.
“I know you’re tired and hot, Summer,” Cousin Nancy said, shaking her head at me as I stood with the water dripping down. “But without this garden, you and your papa will have little enough to eat and nothing put up for winter.” Then she gave me a hug and called me her big girl, her young heroine. “Like Molly Whuppie,” she said, “who saved her sister and herself from the wicked giant.”
So between telling me the truth of my family history and telling me fairy tales, between praising me and cozening me, Cousin Nancy and I worked the house garden. And with just the two of us we about managed. But neither of us was prepared to work on the big market garden out back. And without that garden, Papa and I would have nothing to sell down in Addison or Webster, nothing to go to Cogar’s Grocery or to the big hotel on Main Street, where people came to take the waters of the salt sulfur springs.
Cousin Nancy pushed Papa as much as she could, as much as she dared, but he hardly listened. Or he was listening to some voice other than hers.
The few vegetables she coaxed from the big plot were nowhere near as good as Papa’s. No one’s were. He’d a genius for growing. Or he did once. But like his mind, like his heart, that genius was gone, buried in the grave with Mama.
By the fall, our neighbors were wondering instead if he’d gone sick, pining for Mama. “He’ll be dead by winter,” they said.
By the next year, they were worried silly about him. “He can’t go on like this,” they said.
By the time I was nine, they were calling him names. “Maybe he’s turned queer in the head,” said someone down at Cogar’s. That diagnosis quickly made its way all around the town.
The kids in school, of course, took their ideas from their parents’ gossip. Travis Cogar, who was in my class and sweet on me, told the third-grade boys that his mama said that Papa had been howling at the moon. And later that day I found a crudely drawn picture of Papa sitting on his haunches, head thrown back, clearly baying like a hound. Underneath it said, Lemyule, the niht houler. I knew Travis had written it since he’d been sending me badly spelled love notes since the start of second grade. Spelling—like the definition of words—had always been my best subject and I was very particular about it. I crumpled the picture in my hand and dropped it in Travis’s lap where it belonged.
“Traitor!” I said. “Polecat!” I spoke the last loud enough for all the kids to hear. I actually sort of like the little critters though they stink something fierce if you bother them, raising that tail and stamping their little feet and throwing that smell over everything good. Just like Travis had just done.
At recess someone else called him a polecat, too, and pretty soon all the kids in school—all forty-seven of us in grades one through eight—held their noses when he went by, though I didn’t encourage it.
He never sent me notes again.
I told Cousin Nancy what was being said in school, and she acknowledged it was being said elsewhere as well.
“Rumor,” she told me dismissingly, “runs faster than truth. But truth gets there in the end.”
However, rumor had run right up and deposited its stinking message on my desk. Truth didn’t seem to be anywhere around.
•3•
DANCES AND SONGS
Not only did Papa sing to the plants. Once upon a time he sang to me, too.
“So you can grow like a little weed,” he’d say.
And Mama would answer just as quick as quick, “Not a weed but a flower.”
“Not a flower but a pumpkin.”
“A daisy.”
“Cabbage.”
“Bloodroot.”
“Runner bean.”
“Violet.”
“Ramps.”
“Rose,” I’d finally interject into my parents’ long list.
Nobody ever won these arguments since we all fell about laughing the minute I said rose, though I never knew why. Then Papa would pick up his banjo again and play us some of the old tunes. And once in a while, he’d pick out a new tune he’d written just for Mama and me. One I specially recall had lines that went: “My two ladies are just like roses,
Pink from their heads to their pretty little toeses.
All day, all night, everyone supposes
That they are full of thorns.”
That’s what I remember most about the old days, when we were three. Stories, jokes, music, and laughter.
Then of a sudden, it was all, all gone.
Papa and Mama had known each other from high school and got engaged the same time as Nancy Clarke got herself hitched to Papa’s favorite cousin, Jack Morton, who later was one of the first men killed on a beach somewhere in France right before I turned seven.
Cousin Nancy told me, “You were not expected but hoped for.”
I recalled the wildflowers that Mama had loved, their names and what they were useful for. Her favorites had been bloodroot and trillium and wild violets.
Papa had loved wildflowers because of her. But he tended garden flowers and vegetables so they could be sold down at the Addison town market or carted off to Webster or even Clarksburg and Morgantown for the city folk who’d no bottomland of their own.
Twice a week, he’d pack the old truck full of vegetables and drive through the night to get to those far places in time for the farmer’s market, coming home that evening with not a thing left to sell, dollars stuffed in the pockets of his overalls. And even though on market days he’d come home so tired he needed toothpicks to keep his eyes open—or so he said—he’d take out his banjo and sing to us while Mama and I danced all around the living room. Heel and toe and away we’d go! She and I held hands and swung till my feet left the ground. I remember that, too.
I recalled some of Mama’s songs, too, like “All the Pretty Little Horses.” Especially the part where Mama sang: “Blacks and bays, dapples and grays . . . all the pretty little horses.”
Oh, and, “Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
Of course that never happened. He didn’t buy me a diamond ring or anything else. He was now, Cousin Nancy said, a “man of constant sorrow” like the old song goes.
Back then, it was Cousin Nancy who’d bought me the navy blue dress with the white bib and the navy blue coat with the matching hat that I wore as I trudged up to the grave site alongside Papa. That and the big boots. She got them all at a church tent sale down in Webster. Because I hadn’t any decent enough clothing to wear to Mama’s burying, all the rest being pinafores and overalls and sack dresses in bright flowered prints that Mama had made on her old Singer sewing machine with the foot treadle.
I reminded her of that dress, those boots.
“Couldn’t have you going up to the graveside with your fanny hanging out of those old overalls,” Cousin Nancy said, and I laughed, suddenly recalling those overalls. My, how I’d loved them. They were fourth or fifth hand by the time I got them and Mama had sewn little pink flowers all up and down the legs. She used to decorate all my clothes with hand-sewn embroidered flowers.
I pranced around the post office room pretending that my bottom was stuck out till Cousin Nancy was laughing along with me. We laughed a lot together. It was better than crying. We’d already done a whole lot of that.
Each year that I grew bigger and taller, Cousin Nancy got clothes for me, though always secondhand. Some were hand-downs from children of the town, others from the church charity shops. As she said of herself, “I was never much for sewing, not like your mama. But I can always find a bargain.”
And, after all, the country was deep into the Depression. West Virginia had never been a rich ma
n’s place anyway. We all knew how to make do.
Of course, the hat and coat that I wore in the burial picture and the boots have long since been passed along to some other poor child in need. Not to any of the Morton cousins. They’d have thought that bad luck. But to someone way off in Cooleyville or Onego or Erbacon, or even farther, maybe all the way to Clarksburg.
Papa was so deep in his grief, he probably would have let me walk in my raggedy overalls behind the coffin. Or left me at home all alone to cry myself to sleep. And even though Cousin Nancy was still in mourning for her Jack, she didn’t throw herself into that grief the way Papa did.
“A woman hasn’t time for such,” she told me when I asked. “Life goes on.”
“Mama’s didn’t,” I whispered, “nor Cousin Jack’s.”
We both sat close for a quick cuddle and cry, the photo album put aside for later. Then we made a batter cake, which helped us both feel a lot better. I took a slice home for Papa, but he never ate a bite.
•4•
COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
Lemuel Morton was the handsomest boy in our class in Addison even in elementary school. And the sweetest. When we all went up to Webster for high school, that sweetness only grew.
Of course, all the Morton boys were handsome in a way, but none of the rest of them could be called sweet. Not even my Jack. They were hunters and most of them were hard boys and harder men. They had to be, out in the mountains all day and half the night. They were never lost, though. Or as Jack used to joke about that, “Nope, never been lost, but I’ve been bothered for a day or two at a time.”
But Lem had plant dreams in his fingertips. And my, how those things grew. Sunflowers big as trees, melons you could play basketball with, pole beans that sagged heavy on their sticks. He sang to his plants, too, which seemed to make them grow in wild profusion: cressy greens and dandelions for both salad and wine, corn and squash, dock and cabbage, and more kinds of beans than you could shake a stick at.
I think most all the other girls in our class thought Lem was too soft. He didn’t hunt, he loved plants, and he read those books about aliens, starships, and faraway worlds that the general store sold, there not being a library in town. No one knew why he read such things, but I always figured it was because he wanted to find an explanation for the magic in his fingers. His wife, Ada Mae, said it was because he wanted to know why he was different, almost alien, from all the other boys in town. However, I loved him from the time we were six-year-olds at school.
Oh, I was plenty happy with my Jack. He’d the wryest sense of humor and was a loving man. I loved Lem in a different way. We four—Jack and Lem and Ada Mae and me—spent many hours singing and laughing and playing jokes on one another in front of their fireplace, while baby Summer lay sleeping in her cradle.
I didn’t change my mind about Lem Morton even when he went crazy from grief. I’d never expected anything to come of my love for Lem, though everyone else in town and certainly all his kin considered that we two—widow and widower—would soon be married. Instead I gave my love over to Summer, when she needed it most. I would have given my everlasting soul for the two of them.
And I guess I almost did.
•5•
BESOT
Two years later, when I was eleven, Papa had begun tending his garden again. His green fingers still held their magic, but he no longer sang to his plants.
He no longer sang to me. The only place he sang anymore was up at the old abandoned Morton church, sitting by Mama’s grave. He’d go there every evening, when Cousin Nancy and I began to wash the dinner dishes. Pushing his chair back from the table, he’d say with nary a smile, “Another fine dinner, Nan,” grab his banjo, and be gone.
I’d settle in to doing my homework, and Cousin Nancy would work a quilt on the dining room table till he returned. He never actually asked her to stay with me, but he never actually asked her not to, either. We were quiet company together. And Papa knew she’d keep me safe.
Now even with all his way with growing things, Papa never brought flowers up to Mama’s grave. That was Cousin Nancy’s business. And mine. She’d cut flowers from Papa’s garden but let me gather wildflowers like pokeweed and yellow foxglove and the pretty blue-rayed asters that grew along the borders of the fields. And we’d walk up every week in the growing season to put the flowers on Mama’s grave of a Sunday after church. But Cousin Nancy wouldn’t let me pick any of the fuzzy snow whites that grew all about the edges of the graveyard. “That’s snakeroot,” she warned me. “It brings on milk fever.”
“I’m too old to get milk fever,” I told her.
“That’ll only make it worse,” she said. Her voice was firm and I learned, once Cousin Nancy put her foot down, it stayed flat on the floor and she could not be budged.
Papa always cleared the flowers we left on Mama’s grave the very next evening. He said he couldn’t stand to see them curling up, growing black at the tips and dying so quickly, cut off from the sod.
Cousin Nancy kept telling him that if he’d give her permission, she’d plant something on Mama’s grave for him. “So there’d be something growing there.”
But Papa gave her a black look whenever she proposed it, though otherwise he was still a sweet-natured man. “If she can’t be growing beside me,” he said, meaning Mama, “then I want that grave to be stark.”
And stark it was. Even grass didn’t grow on it. It looked like a scar on the churchyard’s green mantle, just as Mama’s death was a scar on Papa’s heart.
Cousin Nancy didn’t give up, though—not for the longest time. I loved her even more for that. “A climbing rose might be nice,” she offered once, “or a bunch of early snowdrops. Little purple crocuses come fall?”
Another black look from Papa. A shrug. A grunt instead of a kind word in return. It made me wonder about True Love.
Oh, we knew where he was going when he went out after dinner, and we let him get on with it. There was no stopping him anyway, not even the time I had influenza bad and Cousin Nancy had to bathe me in lukewarm water to get my fever down. He had his banjo and his sorrow, and he was away.
There were still sweet times with him out in the garden, where he showed me how to coax snowdrops out by pulling away the heavy pack of snow from their roots. And days when he taught me how to pick the green cabbage caterpillars and aphids and caterpillar eggs off the leaves and squash them. We even made up a squashing song with a chorus of “Squish, squash, ugh! Go away, bug!” that had me howling with laughter and Papa smiling a little.
And there were times he would look at me and sigh. “You do so look like your mama, Summer.” And then he would touch the top of my head as gentle as could be, as if he feared I might break at his touch.
But mostly he was distant.
Not mean.
Not cold.
Just not there.
About that time, I began starting fights with Cousin Nancy, being sassy to her, not heeding a thing she said. And when she told me to “Mind your manners, missy,” I’d snap back, “You don’t tell him to!” Meaning Papa.
“He’s a grown man and a sorrowing man,” she said.
“Well, I’m still sorrowing, too,” I shouted at her, though I wasn’t. I ran into my room and slammed the door. She didn’t come in for long minutes and when she did, she sat down beside me on my bed and said, “He’ll come through it, Summer. I promise he will. And so will you.”
But I thought I had nowhere to come to. Papa was that far away.
Only one day Papa came down from the mountain with a woman none of us had ever met and only I’d clapped eyes on her before. He was set on marrying her, even given her his grandmother’s diamond ring, the one that was too big and gaudy for Mama, though she’d kept it in her jewelry box, letting me play with it every now and then.
“Too soon. Too soon,” Cousin Nancy said, though it wasn’t all that soon, not really. It’d been almost four years since Mama’s death, since we’d walked up to the mountain gra
veyard and set her down. Everyone else in town thought it was well beyond time.
I know that everyone, me included, had been expecting Papa to marry Cousin Nancy after he left off grieving. I think Cousin Nancy expected it, too. Though we hadn’t known he’d left it off till he came down the mountainside with that woman.
“Your poor mama hardly stiff in her grave, and that . . .” Cousin Nancy hesitated. “That witch.” I think she had a different word in mind, though back when she said it, I wouldn’t have known what the other word was anyway. Or would’ve taken it instead for a hound dog’s mama. “That witch has him besot.”
It was a long time before I understood the true meaning of that word. Besot means “muddled.” “Fuddled.” “Bewitched.” “Charmed.” A fairy-tale word for a terrible condition, one that about killed him and me, too.
While I hardly remembered Mama and the baby or the burial excepting as it is in the photograph, I surely recall how the rest all fell out and will till my dying day. It happened this way.
As usual Papa went to the graveyard after dinner. He’d been at it for more than three years and didn’t look like he was ever going to change.
And as usual, I was not allowed to go along. He said he liked the lonely walk up the mountain. His mood matched the owls’ and other night birds’ mournful calling. “Like a long, sad song,” he said.
Cousin Nancy was brushing my hair a hundred strokes, till it seemed my hair was a-crackle with little lightning bugs. Then she yanked at my hair a bit too hard. I pulled away, my upset with Papa turning into an upset with her.
“Ow, you’re pulling. You’re a cruel old . . .”
“Didn’t mean to, honey. But you gotta sit still and not wiggle.” She gathered up a hank of my hair again.