Where Lilacs Still Bloom

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Wonder all you want, but nothing will change. Blooms come when they will. Rivers flow and flood regardless of our efforts. I submit, we humans can’t do a thing to get an earlier bloom or extend the season either.”

  I reminded him that where a rosebush was set could change the blooming time and how it seemed to me the activity of birds and bees from one year to the next changed the colors of my daffodils. I love daffodils and have hundreds of them planted around the house, lining the walkway, perking their yellow heads up against the barn, marking spring as they push up beneath the water tower and windmill. I’d dabbled in changing plantings, not understanding how it worked until I read about Mendel’s and De Vries’s efforts and how they “bred” plants, though I’ve never told Frank of such readings. I’m not sure a wife should keep such things from her husband, though, so I took a deep breath.

  “There’s this Californian, Luther Burbank. He’s extended the season of certain plants by having them bloom earlier in the year, bringing on the fruit before you’d think. He put thousands of french prune buds into young almond saplings, grafting them in June. With careful pruning, by December, he had nearly twenty thousand plum trees ready for orchard planting, enough for two hundred acres.”

  Frank looked at me. “What would you do with twenty thousand plum trees?”

  “Nothing.” I waved my hand to dismiss his words. “It’s the idea of it. That grafting one plant to another can make significant changes.”

  “There certainly have been changes since I got grafted onto you.” He wiggled his eyebrows. They had a touch of gray already.

  “Frank. Listen.” I sat beside him. “Where once was an almond tree, now is a plum, or at least it behaves like a plum tree. That’s almost a miracle.”

  “I submit, you’ll twist the minds of our children with all this talk of changing nature.” He didn’t sound cross, so I took it as a wary jest, but then he added, “You’re a simple German housewife, Huldie. A good mother, my helpmate on this farm. That’s enough for any woman, or should be.”

  I remembered my father’s warning, brushed at the bun at the back of my neck and stood. I picked up an apple. It looked bigger, but it still didn’t have the crisp I’d hoped for. I considered telling Frank about my grafting efforts as I sliced and placed apples in the bowl with the other soft little chunks. “Ouch!” I put my finger to my mouth.

  “What?” Frank said, turning to me.

  “I’ve cut myself. These apples! The peels cling like babies to their mothers.” I sucked at the cut, then Frank, who had gotten up, handed me a clean cloth and held it to my wound, his big fingers warm and comforting around my hand.

  “Guess I shouldn’t sharpen those knives so often.”

  “It’s not the knife.” I pointed. “It’s this apple!”

  “No sense decrying its nature.” He looked at me, must have seen the determination in my face. “I submit that if anyone can bring about a change in God’s design, it’d be you,” my husband lauded.

  I took the strip of cloth from Frank, and he helped wrap it around my cut finger. It would annoy me all day having that cut.

  “I guess every great inventor has to have a little pain in his life,” Frank said. He still grinned about my wanting that better apple, but he kissed the bandage and returned to his oatmeal.

  “Frank.” I stood beside him.

  “What?”

  He turned and I popped a piece of the soft apple into his surprised open mouth. “Just remember this conversation on the day you have a big, crisp, sliced apple and pies more than once a week.”

  THREE

  JASMINE AND NELIA

  Old Fort Vancouver, 1900

  The once-slave woman, old and worn, ambled up the hill from the river carrying the cargo she’d been sent to recover. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times, you ain’t allowed near that river. Too dangerous and deep, your papa tells you, and I’m telling you too, though Lord knows, you don’t listen to either of us no more.” She set the six-year-old down, heaving from the effort. Nelia, the child, turned and stamped her foot.

  “I hate you! I hate you, and I hate Papa. I hate everyone!”

  “Well, I suppose you do, but that don’t change the fact that you ain’t allowed near the river without an adult beside you. They’s currents in that stream could suck you under. It ain’t like that paucity, Leaf River, where you was born and growed.”

  “I want that river back,” Nelia screamed.

  “We don’t get back what we lose.” The old woman sighed. “We get what we got comin’ to us. I ’spose, though, we can make somethin’ outta that. God gives us tools, child, He does.” She softened her voice. “You missin’ your mama, and that’s a worthy fret.” She touched the girl’s narrow shoulders. “It surely is.”

  “I hate it here. I want that river to take me under.” The child stood defiant, but her arms no longer crossed her slender chest. Hair as black as oil splayed around the child’s face like grass around a fence post. The child had found a pair of scissors and hacked at her curls.

  “Come here, child. Let me put a little huggin’ on you for a time. I could use some of that myself. We’ll ’member all the good things of your mama. Then we’ll catch the day, strengthened by our bit of honoring hope.” They walked the lush grounds separating the buildings Mr. Lawson had called the Fort. “Let’s count all these gardens, Nelia.” The child used her fingers.

  “One more than all my fingers,” she announced. “Eleven.”

  “You’re such a smart girl. Eleven gardens. Hmm-um.” The old woman smacked her lips. “All them taters and kale. Those men eat well. And see them strawberries marching beside the paths there? They’ll be ripe soon.”

  Jasmine wondered if their new home near Woodland, Washington, would look like this place, with chilly winds in the morning kissing squares of growing things. She wondered how her employer had found such a place for his tailoring business. She guessed the man wanted to go as far away from the memories as he could and had chosen a landscape and relationships so different only his accent—and the presence of a colored woman—would link him to his past. She hadn’t seen many people like her in Fort Vancouver, though seeing a few Indians made her feel a little at home.

  She watched her charge, Nelia, lean over the strawberries, poking with her small fingers at the tiny green stubs that if left alone would turn red and be ripe for picking. The child needed time and tending just like those berries, but she ought not be left alone the way Mr. Lawson did his daughter. Jasmine ached for the sadness of the child’s life, a hole she could not fill. She watched the girl pull at the berry, toss it aside. To distract her, she shouted, “Look there.” She pointed past the six-year-old child. “Over there, Nelia Lawson. Would you look at that!”

  The girl turned. “I do believe that’s a lilac blooming,” Jasmine said. “Like the one your mama planted when you was born. Let’s go take a sniff and then sit.” Jasmine could use the rest.

  Nelia didn’t want to smell flowers. Flowers wouldn’t bring her mama back and they wouldn’t make her papa smile again and they wouldn’t make her like this cold breezy air or those trees that made your neck ache as you tried to see their tops. This Washington was a strange place and she wouldn’t love it, not ever! She crossed her thin arms again, pressing them against the ivory buttons of her dress. She kicked at the hemline of her skirt, didn’t care about the mud collected there that Jasmine now brushed at.

  Jasmine pushed up against her knees. It was the old woman’s heavy breathing that finally loosened Nelia’s arms. She worried over the woman. People you loved died if you weren’t careful. Nelia must not have been careful looking after her mama. Now Nelia was in a strange place, her father distant as the Mississippi and as elusive as feathers floating on wind.

  “If you don’t want a hug, that’s fine,” the old woman said. “But I needs one real bad today, and I know yours is a tender heart, Nelia.”

  She didn’t want Jasmine dying, and that bre
athing worried her, and so Nelia sighed and walked behind the old woman who lifted her heavy legs up the hill.

  “Let’s take a sniff. Where your papa is taking us, we’ll find a lilac bush like that. Won’t that be dandy?”

  The child nodded, took the old woman’s hand, and they sauntered to the shrub. Nelia gentled the pale lavender bloom in her small hand and inhaled. Tears formed and spilled. The scent brought back thoughts again of all they’d left behind.

  Jasmine sniffed too, saw the child’s tears. “Ah, Nelia, let’s let the fine smell of this here flower be a hope for the future as well as a sniff to honor the past.”

  “Mama would have liked this flower?”

  “I declare, she would have.”

  Nelia nodded, and before Jasmine could stop her, she broke a bloom from its stem and headed toward the big building she’d seen her father enter earlier. The stately man stepped outside at the knock of his daughter. He looked at the flower she held up to him, but he didn’t take it. He scowled at Jasmine as she waddled up behind Nelia.

  “She was just interested in the bloom, Mr. Lawson, sir.” Jasmine puffed from the effort of her fast walk to catch up to the child. “Reminded her of Mistress Mary. A good memory, don’t you think, sir?”

  “There is no good memory of a woman who died before her time.” He stepped back inside, away from Nelia.

  Jasmine bent to inhale the bloom, held Nelia’s hand. “Some folk can’t face what is, child. Always make it harder to move forward.”

  FOUR

  SWEPT ALONG

  Hulda, 1900

  It became important to me for Frank to understand my need to create, and daffodils were the perfect school slate. I tried to explain what I wanted to do.

  “Really, Huldie.” He called me Huldie when he was questioning my wisdom, making me sound like a young girl when I’m nearly forty. “You can tell such differences?” Frank—if he swept the floor—would sweep with a wide brush and not notice the little things that stuck in the corners. That feature of his nature allowed him to overlook a person’s flaws, for which I’m grateful, as I have my share. But it kept him from seeing the world the way I did, full of small parts to puzzle together to form grand pictures.

  “Yes, I can see traits. I notice which rosebush opens its blooms before the others, and I can see the slightest shade of color difference in a daffodil. They aren’t all yellow as a canary.”

  “Show me,” he said.

  We walked outside into the March morning. The daffodils were planted in patches in the front and another in the back. Bobby, our dog, bounded past us as we stepped down from the porch. He was an inside dog for his meals (along with the cats) but out in the woodshed on his old quilt for sleeping. This meant more sweeping every day, but the children learned how to do that early on, and even Fritz, our youngest and only son, wielded a broom with aplomb by the time he was four, Bobby barking at the straw strands as our boy laughed and swept.

  The dog with his swirling shepherd’s tail bounded ahead as Frank and I walked to the closest daffodil patch. I had a hundred bulbs planted south of the house that year, and many were well up, nodding their yellow heads. A chinook wind warmed the air and teased those flowers open, slow and tender like a courting man’s words to a young woman’s heart.

  “See, this one’s slightly more yellow than … that one.” I pointed to a plant a few feet away from the one whose bloom I held in my hand, two fingers separated by the stem, the bloom soft as a baby’s bottom in my palm. I leaned my steady hoe against my knee as I squatted. “This one here has a hint of red.”

  Frank squinted, touched the bloom as though the feel of it would help him see the color better. He took a step toward the one I pointed at. “That one over there is slipping toward more yellow,” I said. I walked the edge of the patch and checked for snakes before I reached into the flush of yellow, choosing another single bloom that had the shade of a male meadowlark’s breast; such a brilliant yellow. “Now that one is even more golden than the first I showed you, can you see that?” He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he really did. “That one is duckling down. This one, morning sun.” I pointed to another. “Egg-yolk yellow.” Frank squinted. I could tell he tried to see what I did.

  “I’ll mark that one.” I took a strip of red yarn from my apron and tied it to the stem. “The sunlight is perfect to catch the slightest distinction. When I break the bulbs apart this fall, I’ll want to plant this one right next to the other egg-yolk yellow, and that way, they’ll fertilize each other. I might get an even deeper hue.”

  I inhaled their scent. I noted those differences too, marking ones with the most deeply satisfying smell with a white strand of yarn. I thought of my mama. She loved the smell of daffodils. Inhaling a soothing scent from a flower could take away pain, the kind of pain that comes with loss and longing. I urged Frank to inhale, and he stuck his slender nose inside the bloom.

  “They’re all individual to me, Frank. I see each one, unique and perfect as it is, but a few move toward more what I’m imagining than another.”

  I showed him a few more distinctive blooms, noting the size differences as well as color and then found myself kneeling and weeding, my mind soothed by the effort, inhaling scents of heaven. I pulled yarn and marked them for scent and color and hardiness and early or late blooming.

  It would take time to change a tree’s or flower’s habit of being. My father used to say it took thirty days to change a person’s ways. Much longer for a plant. But like people, they can be shaped if the qualities one loves the most are noticed and nurtured. In some ways, I think Frank knew that insight first, as he loved me out of my annoyances from the time I was sixteen and his new bride until now when we partner together to raise our family. I hoped he understood that daffodils gave me more.

  “Where are you off to?” I asked him as he turned, began to step away. “I thought you wanted to know how I see things.” I was irritated with him for flitting from one thing to another like a bee to a bloom.

  He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “I’ve been standing here close to an hour watching you seek and find. You just disappeared inside that patch, Huldie.”

  “No,” I said. No to my not realizing he’d been standing there, and no to how much time could have passed. I looked toward the sun.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I just—”

  “I submit you’re lost in the blooms. Like once you got lost in me.”

  “Oh, Frank.” I stood and kissed his cheek, the hoe against my shoulder between us. “I still get lost in you.”

  Frank gave me a wistful smile, and I swallowed no small level of guilt. I didn’t devote myself to him the way I did to those flowers, but wasn’t that in human nature too? We fall in love, our passions deep and moving, and then we go on to living, the love still strong but different, as babies come and cry and need our loving too. They grow older, and we seek nurture in new places, and what safer place can there be but in a garden?

  Frank walked off toward the barn, and I didn’t know what to say to keep him with me. A hummingbird vibrated past my head looking for sweets. I worked my way back toward the house, calling Bobby with a slap to my knee, hoeing out a few weeds as the dog came running. Was it wrong to find sustenance in creation, to feel pride in seeking those crisp apples? I put my hoe away, took off my hat and decided to bake fresh bread for Frank’s supper. It was the least I could do when he felt my love for him wasn’t as grand as it was for a daffodil. Or an apple. He was wrong, of course, wasn’t he?

  That fall we harvested the apples from my father’s orchard. I gave each apple tree that same scrutiny I gave my daffodils so I could keep shaping and deciding which branches I’d graft where the following year. Baskets sat on the ground, and despite the work, it was a happy time with my children—all four here on weekends, the oldest two away in Portland attending school during the week. I looked for the largest apples, and on that day in 1900, I saw the fruit of my labors. On the ladder, I pulled a
good-sized apple from the stem, rubbed it clean with my apron, then with anticipation, bit in.

  Crisp as thin ice on a spring morning! “Frank!” I shouted, nearly spilling off the ladder. “Come here. I think I’ve got it!”

  “Got what?” he shouted back. I watched him step back off his ladder.

  “Just come.” I scrambled down, lifting my skirts. On the way I grabbed two more apples, then three more cradled in my apron. “Here.” I gave each child and Frank an apple. “Bite into it.” I grinned.

  “Tart,” Lizzie, our oldest said. “But good.”

  “Good,” Frank said. Fritz nodded agreement, and Delia and Martha rolled their eyes with pleasure as they chewed.

  “Tart, yes. And big. And now the test.” I took my knife out and began to peel the apple I’d bitten into. I managed a long, slender peel instead of the dozens of small, broken bits of skin that I was used to. “Would you look at that?” I held up the length of peel that wiggled its way into an S. “I’ve got my crisp, bigger, easier peeler. Right here in Papa’s orchard!” I danced a little jig.

  “Glad a good apple makes your day,” Frank said.

  “Don’t you see? I bred these, Frank. Papa and I grafted them. A Wild Bismarck and a Wolf River variety, and now I have the best of both in one fruit. Oh, I can hardly wait to make you a pie.”

  “You grafted these?” Frank raised an eyebrow.

  “I did, and I’ve been waiting these long years to get what I wanted.”

  “Why didn’t you say?” Martha, our youngest girl, asked. She’s fourteen, and she sounded hurt.

  “Oh, it was just an experiment. If it didn’t work out, I didn’t want to bother you all. I had no idea it might actually work.”