by Leisha Kelly
“Helping, I think. But she said he wants to inquire about a railroad job too.”
Eliza picked at her oatmeal, and I gave her a sprinkle of sugar across the top as enticement to finish what she could. She smiled.
“The whole family’s well?” Marigold asked on about the Kurchers.
“Well enough, I guess. Dodie didn’t say anything different.”
“I would love to visit them again. Dearly I would.”
Josiah let his aunt’s words go, and I was very glad. The thought of her hopping a train with him to ride off to an unknown town was quite unsettling.
I was hoping he would leave after breakfast with the jazzy music still on his lips and no more thought of the Scripture he’d left off in the middle of reading yesterday. But Marigold reminded him, scurrying dishes out of the way when he was finished with them to make room for her big, leather-bound book.
He read all the rest of that chapter and the next, and I tried not to listen as I washed up the dishes yet again. But one verse stuck with me, and I couldn’t quite get it out of my mind.
“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!”
Did that mean that God’s thoughts about me were precious, or that I was supposed to consider his thoughts precious, whatever they might be? I couldn’t quite decide, and either way it seemed unfair and unjust. How could I be expected to think his thoughts precious if they allowed for agony and pain? Or could he truly be thinking good things for me? If so, why was I now being forced to live as a widow and provide without means for a fatherless child?
Josiah Walsh shut the book when he finished the chapters and rose to his feet. “Got to be going, Aunt Mari. I’ll see you a little earlier tonight, Lord willing.”
The words seemed harsh, like a slap at last night’s pain. He turned away and would have gone, but Marigold stopped him to give him the last pie she and Eliza had made yesterday.
“Lunch,” she told him. “Eat it all if you want to. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
With a brief nod to her and not a word in my direction, he was out the door and gone. And just like yesterday, it was a relief.
Now we could get to the business of the day. More canning, of course. We’d barely gotten started with that. And there were the carrots to dig. And the laundry and such things to be done about the house. But Marigold had other things in mind, at least at first.
She pulled a picture album from a cupboard and took us to the sitting room where we could join her on the settee. Eliza was excited, I could easily tell. But I trembled inside at the very idea of viewing pictures of John’s family and talking about them.
“Thought you might appreciate the chance to see these,” she said. “No sense in slaving away the whole time you’re here.”
She showed us John’s parents, her own parents, and an immense assortment of siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.
“Some of them don’t live too awfully far away,” she said. “Maybe we could have a little get-together.”
I hoped not. I’d met many of them, but John had not made keeping in touch with them a priority, so I didn’t feel I had any real relationship with these people. And even if I had, to be put on display in front of them now would be awkward at best.
I wondered if Marigold would say anything about Josiah or his parents. She didn’t mention them, but she spoke more about her sisters, and John’s mother in particular, than anyone else. I would have liked to know their relationship, to know if John had been close to Josiah as a boy, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask.
On one of the last few pages, Eliza found a tiny photograph of an infant draped with a lacy coverlet and staring intently at a wooden pony someone held overhead.
“Pretty baby,” she remarked.
“That, dear one, is your father,” Marigold stated warmly.
“Really?” Eliza exclaimed with a deep intake of breath, as though she’d found a sublime treasure. She moved her fingers to the very edge of the picture but didn’t touch the face of it. “It looks a little bit like my baby brother.”
My eyes filled with tears, and through them the photograph looked far more like Johnny James than I could ever have expected. I could almost see his tiny, frail fingers clutching for the pony, his plaintive wail letting me know that all was not right with his world.
Aunt Marigold suddenly took my hand in hers and squeezed it, then she closed the book and set it aside on the lamp table.
“I’m glad baby Johnny and Daddy are together,” Eliza said. “If only one was in heaven alone, they might be lonely. It’s better that I gots Mommy and Johnny gots Daddy so nobody gots to be alone.”
I couldn’t answer, but Marigold gave Ellie a little hug and nodded her head. “That’s a very good way to look at it, and I’m sure that they’re glad to be together just like you said. But nobody is ever alone in heaven or here on earth, because the good Lord is always with us.”
There was nothing I could say, and I didn’t want to sit and listen to any more. “The sun’s shining,” I said, standing to my feet. “Looks like perfect weather for digging those carrots. Are there digging tools in the shed?”
Marigold looked up at me for a moment. “You know it’s all right to slow down enough sometimes to remember and reflect.”
“Maybe so,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t seem as practical as bringing in a harvest that’s in the ground and waiting.”
She smiled. “You’re quite the go-getter. But we all cope in our own ways.”
I found her reference to my grief irritating. I didn’t want it mentioned. I wanted only to move on into the work that needed to be done where I could maintain my composure and feel like I was accomplishing something. I was about to go on outside when she mentioned something I’d already thought of but felt too uncertain to mention on my own.
“You seem to take natural to the garden and such, but I was hoping you wouldn’t mind helping me with another chore first.” She took Eliza’s hand in her own and continued. “I hate to ask you to help with the washing, but it’s become awfully difficult for me anymore and we’ve got such aplenty waiting. I meant to ask Josiah to bring down anything that might be in his room yet, but I forgot. If you could check for me and then help me get everything started, I can wash and you can rinse and put on the line.”
“That would be fine,” I told her. “Would it be all right if I add a few things of ours?”
“Of course.”
“You needn’t wash if you want to continue working apples,” I told her. “Just show me what you use and I can take care of the washing. We could get two jobs done at once that way.”
Despite my preference for working alone this morning, Marigold was not about to let me have my way. “The work goes quicker when it’s shared,” she said. “I won’t be able to dig the carrots later, but I can still get my hands in my own laundry, and I won’t have it any other way. Not just yet, at least.”
So she started drawing water from the sink, and I went upstairs to gather any dirty clothes I could find. Walking into Mr. Walsh’s room was a little strange, even with him gone to work. There was nothing about it even remotely similar to the room Eliza and I had been given. This was a man’s room, through and through. There were no flowery curtains or pretty pictures on the walls. Even the bedspread was a plain brown, trimmed in blue.
The room was not tidy, with clothes and even part of the bedding strewn about the floor. I felt like stripping all of the bedding and carrying it down with me along with the clothes, but I wasn’t sure if we’d have time or room on the clothesline for all of that today.
I gathered up the filthy clothes, wondering briefly about the man who occupied this room, who’d at first been altogether too friendly, and now rather like a closed door. There was nothing at all in here to give me any indication of the sort of person he might be, no personal effects except one small picture, laid flat on the dresser. A woman, quite young and rather attractive. She wore a
button hat and a tiny, almost mischievous smile. It would have been nice to know a little something about her.
I carried my load down carefully, glad to be here to help Marigold with such a chore. We filled the barrel of her wringer washer and then a couple of tubs for rinse water and worked side by side. It was difficult to keep Eliza back, she loved the wringer so much, but I didn’t want her hand getting pinched. We’d never had one of these, and she’d never even seen one before.
“Fancy,” she called it, and I had to agree, compared to washing by hand, which I’d been used to doing.
“Does make things faster,” Marigold agreed. “That’s important when you get to be my age. But I expect it’d help a young wife with a big family get to the other needs of her day a lot quicker too.”
“How old are you?” Eliza asked before I could stop her.
“Sixty-two,” Marigold answered without hesitation. “But sometimes I feel older. I’m not as spry as my mother was at this age.”
I knew that Marigold’s mother had had fourteen children. Marigold was the second oldest. And Azalea, John’s mother, had been thirteenth. There’d been six girls and eight boys in a span of twenty-two years. John’s grandmother must have been an amazing woman.
I put clothes through the ringer from the first rinse into the second, and then again from the second rinse into a laundry basket to take and hang the clothes outside. Marigold handled rubbing any special stains, putting everything to churning in the wash and then ringer-pressing it into the first rinse tub. Josiah’s work clothes were the absolute worst, and she threw those back into the washing tub three times.
I asked about the bedding, but she decided on another day for that simply because, just as I’d thought, there wouldn’t be room enough on the line for it all with the other clothes. The water in the washtub was too dirty after the work clothes to do a good job at anything else thrown in now anyway. So we went ahead and drained it.
With that chore behind us, we moved with a will into the canning and the digging. I was disappointed to find no more than two pecks or so of fresh carrots, but Marigold was pleased as she could be, and so was Eliza. We cleaned carrots on the spot and each had one for a snack. Marigold thought they’d all keep all right and we wouldn’t need to can any of these. She separated a mess of carrots to cook, and a bundle for the icebox, and sent the rest downstairs with me to a bin in the basement.
Meanwhile, Marigold kept the canner boiling with our second batch of applesauce, and, not sure what else to do, I kept sorting through the apples and cutting more. We started apple butter and made a canner load of pie filling, and then I showed Marigold how my mother had made cinnamon apple tarts. I felt good about the whole day.
The following day was almost like it. We canned more apples, kept up with what little the garden held, and got a start at cleaning the house. I gathered more turnip greens and even wild greens enough to can a mess. Occasional interruptions by a train whistle had become predictable and not too terribly difficult to put from my mind. And despite Eliza’s initial enthusiasm to explore the town, I kept myself busy with everything around me, hesitant to venture into the wider unknown.
But after Friday’s biscuit making, the flour supply was low, and though we’d been making do with what was around, the time had come when groceries would have to be ordered. Josiah had given Marigold grocery money from his paycheck before he left with the biscuit bundle and a bucket of apples for the Kurchers, but he wouldn’t be able to pick up the groceries himself because he wouldn’t be back before the grocer closed. Marigold said she could use the neighbor’s phone and have her items delivered, but she preferred if I would take the order to the store myself.
“You’ll have to go right by the school on your way,” she said. “And you can register Eliza Rose for classes starting next week. The time has come. I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Of course she was right. I couldn’t continue to ignore that detail, as much as I might like to. Eliza had scarcely left my sight since we’d lost Johnny James, and part of me preferred to keep it that way. But she was a big girl and ought to be in school. I was confident there would not be a problem with her starting late.
She walked with me that overcast day, excited to be finally exploring but a little apprehensive just the same.
“I wish you were a teacher, Mommy. Then you could go to school too.”
“Oh, they prefer unmarried women to be their teachers,” I said without thinking, and we both fell silent.
We’d brought along Marigold’s wheelbarrow to manage the groceries on the way home and parked it carefully beside a pair of bicycles in the schoolyard when we went in.
The teacher I spoke with was very polite and offered to take Eliza immediately to her class, but I told her we felt it best to wait until Monday. She showed Eliza around the building anyway and let her peek at her classroom from the doorway so she would know a little of what to expect. The children were all reciting their alphabet letters, which Eliza already knew, so she felt at least a little at ease. The teacher stepped out for a moment to introduce herself, shaking Eliza’s hand kindly. She also offered to let Eliza stay for the rest of the day. But Eliza shook her head determinedly, and since I’d already told her differently, I didn’t make her stay.
I’d been glad to find the school such a short walk from the boardinghouse. It would be easy to take her there in the morning and meet her again in the afternoon. And the grocery store was not much farther. I let Eliza sit in the wheelbarrow on the way there. The clouds were passing for the most part, and I was enjoying the breaking sun. The store where Marigold sent us was a big cheery place with rows and rows of most any food I could imagine. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d shopped at a grocer for any real order of supplies. For our last few weeks in St. Louis, we’d been unable to afford more than an item or two at a time, if anything at all.
Marigold had a generous list, and it made me feel rich to relate it all to the helpful man behind the counter. Flour, oil, bacon, and potatoes. Corn meal, sugar, sweet peas, tea, and much more. She’d even said I should get us each an orange as a special treat, which of course made me think of the orange on the train.
“God has taken very good care of us,” Eliza suddenly said, as if she’d shared the same thought. “He’s given us Aunt Marigold, and Mr. Josiah, and plenty of food to eat. I never see’d so many apples in all my life, plus the other stuff. It’s blessings just like I prayed for.”
I nodded to her, willing to share in her gratitude if only from a distance.
“Mommy, did you ever think we’d be so blessed?”
“I – I hoped for the best.”
“Ill’nois is happy for us, just like you said.”
Things had been going rather smoothly, with Marigold at least. But Josiah seemed to be doing his best to ignore or avoid us. Obviously he was not pleased to have us around, and I wondered how much longer the friction of those feelings could continue without coming to some sort of a head.
The grocer offered to walk our wheelbarrow home for us, but I told him I’d manage just fine. Eliza would have liked to sit in it again. She seemed to be getting a little tired, but there was no room for her now. I almost forgot that Marigold said I should check the mail while I was out. Hers was always delivered to the post office, and she usually had Josiah go and check it once a week, but since I was out and about anyway, I might as well find the post office for myself and even give them my name, in case any mail ever came for me.
As it turned out, they hadn’t gotten my name quite soon enough but had graciously held on to a letter anyway. From my old friend and neighbor Anna in St. Louis. She’d placed only my name, the word “Boardinghouse,” and the name of the town on the envelope, but it had gotten here just the same.
I had no idea what to expect from her letter because I really hadn’t thought she’d ever write. And maybe she wouldn’t have on her own. Her words were short and to the point:
Dear Leah,
Your father called looking for you. He is ill and wishes to speak to you. I wasn’t sure from the way you talked whether you’d want me to tell him where you are. So please let me know because I told him I might be able to find your new address and he said he would call me again. If you have access to a telephone, could you call and give the information yourself? I would prefer that. I hope that everything is going well for you in your new home.
Sincerely,
Anna
I could not remember my father ever looking for me before. I thought of Mother’s sudden illness, and my heart pounded, yet at the same time a bitter resolve tried to raise its ugly head. He’d never cared to have much to do with me before. Why now?
Of course I couldn’t call, because even if I used the telephone of a neighbor or businessman here, I had no idea what number to use. The last I’d known, Father had no telephone at home. But why should I try to reestablish communication? I didn’t need his thunderous assaults jabbing at my ears, pounding on my heart. So many times I’d left his presence emotionally in pain. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to hear his voice again.
And yet he was my father. And I was the only child he had left in this world. If he was really ill, if this might really be serious, maybe he only wanted me to know, or maybe he had something else that he wanted to say.
My eyes filled with tears, hoping he’d choose to do more than relay, by word or impression as he’d done so many times before, just how grievous a disappointment I was to him. I’d known almost for as long as I could remember that it had been my older brother James that Father had really loved and had hopes for. Despite all my tomboy efforts, I could never be more than a poor replacement.
“Did you get a sad letter?” Eliza asked, waiting quietly beside the wheelbarrow on the post office walk.
“No, honey,” I tried to assure us both. “Not terribly sad. Your grandfather is not feeling well, but there’s nothing to indicate that it’s serious.”
“We should pray for him,” she said immediately. “And tell Aunt Marigold to. She’ll pray. I know she will.”