Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

  They helped her clear the other pastures, sawed the trees into logs, then placed them in neat stacks for use as firewood. She spent a week from sunup to sundown dragging brush and branches to several huge burn piles. Timor and his burly sons refitted the house’s well with a new pump and concrete cover, and repaired the septic tank.

  When she wasn’t working alongside the sweating, non-speaking Parks clan, she tilled and plowed her newly cleared land, wrestling the lurching old tractor until the steering wheel rubbed enormous blisters on her palms. She slapped bandages over them and wore two pairs of gloves, but kept working.

  Lupa stayed close by each day, stretched out happily in the fresh spring sunshine and cool dirt. She had settled into her job of chasing off the deer and rabbits that tiptoed around the clearing at night.

  Lily grew leaner, living off cheap sandwiches and clear, sweet water from the new well. She was at work when Timor and his boys arrived in the morning, and still going when they left at dusk. An enormous garden plot took form, with trellises for beans and neatly lined-off rows for the seeds she planted. She didn’t have much money, but she’d eat well. The Parks boys repaired the house’s neglected wiring and installed the sturdy secondhand stove and refrigerator she bought. After Joe had achieved his illegal prosperity and moved away, thieves had taken the old appliances.

  She fertilized the grove of apple trees beyond the backyard and hoped they’d produce a few apples by fall. She despaired of reclaiming the old barn, which Joe had ignored. Sheets of rusty tin had fallen from the roof, and there were holes in the sides where rotten boards had dropped away.

  Timor came over to her in the garden when he arrived one morning. She was down on her knees planting a hill of squash. “You work harder than any woman I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  Timor had spoken. Amazed, she looked up in awe. Sweat dripped from under a tractor cap she’d bought at a seed store in town. Her overalls were covered in dirt and chalky fertilizer.

  “Mr. Parks, you never saw my mama work.”

  He was carrying a large cardboard box. His sons hung around behind him, near their old truck, watching silently. He shifted from foot to foot, cleared his throat, and finally said, “Seein’ as how I’m thankful for the job you sent my way, and how I admire what you’re doin’, I brought you a gift. You want some Rhode Island Reds?”

  “Yes, sir!” She jumped up and looked into the box. Two dozen fluffy chicks were huddled in the bottom. Some were pink, others were purple, and a few forlorn ones were green. “Easter leftovers from my cousin’s pet store down in Atlanta,” Timor explained, looking disgusted. “But they’ll grow out of it.”

  “They’re wonderful. Thank you.”

  She lay in bed that night, listening to their soft, sweet peeps under the light she’d strung over their box to warm them. Through the screened windows and door she heard the night sounds—owls with their giggling whistles, a fox barking, insects beginning to hum with the new season. Beside her on the sleeping bag, Lupa snored. The world was quiet and achingly innocent. She thought of Stephen and Richard, and with a disturbing sense of loneliness, Artemas.

  Rising in anguish, her hands wringing the tail of her floppy T-shirt, she went, barefoot, outdoors, and planted zinnias in the moonlight.

  Mr. Parks and two dozen other people from the community, including Aunt Maude and the sisters, arrived unannounced one morning, trailed by an old logging truck stacked with faint green translucent fiberglass siding. They knew she needed the barn as a second greenhouse. They had come to repair it. Aunt Maude and the sisters had paid for the materials. “An early birthday present,” Aunt Maude said.

  Mr. Parks stepped forward uneasily, gulped on his shyness, then added, “We know Hopewell Estes ain’t giving you much to work with, and we know the Colebrooks ain’t happy to have you here. But we’re glad to have you.”

  When Lily sat down on the edge of the porch with one hand pressed to her mouth, Big Sis tottered brusquely among the awkward group, waving her cane and telling them to get busy Little Sis, decked out in overalls decorated with rhinestones and embroidered flowers, wandered over and sat down beside Lily. “You’ve got family, friends, a home—even if it’s only yours on lease—and work to do,” Little Sis told her. “Don’t sit here looking like you’re about to bawl.”

  Lily put an arm around her. “I’ll hang on to all this good stuff like a miser.”

  “There’s got to be more to your life than wanting some kind of vindication from the Colebrooks.”

  Lily held out one hand, palm up, as if trying to weigh unseen fears. “I want justice for Richard. I want acceptance for who I am, for the quality of my word—my honesty. I want to feel satisfied that I’ve stood up for what I believe, and I want”—she lowered her hand and looked at Little Sis—“I want to feel there’s some rhyme and reason for why my son is dead.” She shook her head. “That’s asking for the impossible, I know.” The next words came hard. “Maybe Artemas and I are the guilty ones.”

  Little Sis gasped. “What? How?”

  “If we’d never cared about each other, if I hadn’t made him feel responsible for me having to sell the farm, if he hadn’t tried to make that up to me years later, by hiring Richard’s firm—”

  “Listen to me, Lily Amanda.” Little Sis snagged her hand and gripped it fiercely “Loving somebody doesn’t make you responsible for their weaknesses, even if you put ’em in the position that brought those flaws to the surface. Richard, and Julia Colebrook, and the others—they made their own mistakes. You and Artemas have to live with the consequences, but don’t ever think you caused them.”

  Lily rubbed her forehead and tried to believe that. “The consequences are that he and I can’t overcome anyone’s mistakes—including our own.” Looking at the people who were bustling around, trying to help her while all she could do was mourn unchangeable sorrows, she rose to her feet. “But no, I’m not going to sit here brooding over what can’t be changed.”

  “Wait!” Little Sis stood. Turning Lily’s hand upward, she pointed to the palm. “There’s still hope. You and he have come back together, just like I predicted.”

  Lily flinched. The truth of Little Sis’s old soothsaying made chills on her skin. “You never said it’d be happy. Or that it would have anything to do with love.”

  There was a portentous silence. Little Sis appeared to be sorry she’d brought this subject up. Pursing her lips as if considering whether to lie, she hesitated, exhaled, and said, “I think you do love him. I think you always have.”

  “Don’t.” Lily moved away, shaking her head. “Don’t—”

  “And he still loves you. That explains a lot.”

  “No. You’re wrong.” Pulling a pair of work gloves from her jeans pocket, she hurried to help unload siding from the truck, as if action could erase thought. Little Sis dogged her steps and clamped a hand on her shoulder. Lily halted, pretending to study a sheet of siding, paralyzed. “I don’t know if loving each other is meant to make you happy,” Little Sis told her. “I just know that you do love him.”

  Lily sat down in Mr. Svenson’s cramped little office. Beyond a glass door a world of china and crystal glittered under soft lights. Her eyes felt grainy She had slept worse than usual last night. She’d had another nightmare. The terrible dreams had started soon after Richard and Stephen’s deaths, and still continued.

  Sometimes she saw them climbing from the debris of the bridge, mangled, grotesque, begging her to believe they weren’t dead. Sometimes she saw them beautifully perfect and serene, but trapped behind an invisible wall. Sometimes she heard them calling to her from some dark, unfathomable place her eyes couldn’t penetrate. Last night she’d heard Stephen’s voice in such vivid detail that she woke up crying for him.

  Finally, around dawn, sitting at the old kitchen table she’d bought last week at a flea market, she’d dozed with her head on her arms. And dreamed about Artemas. His presence had been all around her, wordless and powerful, and she dreamed of sh
utting doors as Richard and Stephen tried to walk toward her, of turning away, toward him.

  She’d spent most of the day trying to forget that dream. Finally she’d driven down to Atlanta, convinced that settling one uncertainty would help settle the rest. For her own peace of mind, she wanted to know that the teapot was gone.

  Mr. Svenson’s assistant stepped into the office and shut the door. “Mrs. Porter,” he said happily, his gaze as delicate as the wares in the showroom, but no less exclusive. She knew how out of place she looked now, in her jeans, leather work shoes, and old T-shirt, with her hair knotted up in a bandanna. She looked like the kind of person who couldn’t browse in the shop without being scrutinized by wary salesclerks. “What can I do for you?” the assistant asked, sitting down at the desk. “I’m afraid Mr. Svenson is out of the shop today.”

  “I sold a Colebrook Blue Willow teapot to him a while back. I just wondered who bought it.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Such a rare piece. Colebrook stopped making the Blue Willow pattern just after 1900. And we dated your teapot between 1850 and 1870. Mr. Svenson was delighted.”

  “Could you check your records and tell me if someone bought the teapot?” She tried to sound casual, and gave him a sheepish look. “I know it sounds silly, but I’d just like to know if it got a good home.”

  “Oh, certainly, I understand. One moment.” He turned to a computer terminal on the desk and began typing. Lily cradled the big cloth tote she carried as a purse and reminded herself not to wad it between her nervous hands. As usual, it contained sandwich bags with plant rootings she’d gathered from the roadsides. She never tampered with endangered species, just the ordinary wildflowers—yarrow and crown vetch, daisies and coneflowers.

  Of course, she would have to buy plugs—rootings—of most other flowers from commercial growers, to build parent stock from which she’d propagate next year’s plants, but she loved knowing that some of her inventory had come to her as freely as a gift from the land.

  The rootings nestled in her bag would join the seedlings arranged in neat trays in the greenhouse. She nurtured her flock with obsessive attention, and only during the bleakest times, such as last night, admitted that her life had become a constant drive to salvage and rescue—and love—things that would never fill the void.

  “Here it is,” the assistant said, squinting at the computer screen. “Good Lord. We didn’t keep it long, did we? A Mr. LaMieux purchased the teapot from us the same day you sold it.” He sighed and sat back, unaware that she was stunned. “I’m afraid all I can tell you is that he paid with a personal check and has what appears to be a post-office-box address, here in Atlanta.”

  There couldn’t be a different LaMieux from the one she knew, who’d waltz into this shop and buy a Golebrook teapot as soon as she’d sold it. Mr. LaMieux had been sent here by Artemas. Artemas had been watching her. She thanked Mr. Svenson’s assistant and walked out, then broke into a run toward the truck as soon as the shop’s security guard politely closed the door behind her.

  Twenty-two

  The landscape outside the truck’s window was a blur. She passed cattle pastures, chicken houses, apple orchards, and wide, empty fields ripe for planting. Every house had a garden patch beside it; most had satellite dishes.

  Her heart began to race when she reached the turnoff for MacKenzie. She took a narrow paved road and then another. She’d go straight to the estate. If he was there, she’d say—what? She wasn’t certain. Only that she had to know why he wanted to control her life.

  Finally, her throat dry, she crossed the bridge over the shadowy Toqua River and entered a different world. Not her land. Nearly hers, though, in spirit, and an integral part of her image of home. A narrow two-lane highway veered off to the right, seeming to disappear into a tunnel of forest.

  Blue Willow Road. The farm’s driveway was three miles down, past the estate’s entrance. The estate’s clocktower sat in a grassy clearing in the corner of the junction between Blue Willow Road and the highway.

  The sight of the Gothic stone tower, its steep blue-tiled roof looming high overhead, made her stop her car and gaze upward with tears on her face.

  Blue Willow. She had roamed its deserted forests, fished in its lake with her father, daydreamed in the beautiful, forgotten gazebos, played princess on the mansion’s awesome, windswept loggia, peeked through cracks in the boarded-up windows, picked flowers in the overgrown gardens. She wondered if Artemas thought about that as often as she did. With startling ferocity she hoped he never hired an outsider to re-create the gardens. Her gardens.

  The estate began where the river formed its eastern boundary. Darkly forested land rose sharply on her left, but on the estate’s side it sloped gently upward from the road. Blue Willow Road cut through the estate’s southern edge until it finally met with the road to Victoria, seven miles away.

  The Colebrooks had built it, then donated it to the county so people could take the shortcut to the neighboring town. In 1900, that shortcut had meant a lot to the locals, Lily recalled her grandfather saying. The Colebrooks were generous to their neighbors back then.

  Lily sat there anticipating the last three miles to the farm’s driveway, suddenly afraid that she was going to say all the wrong things, accuse him, hurt him, let him hurt her again.

  Deep, melodic chimes sounded from the clocktower. Even the clock was serving him faithfully, again. Keeping his time.

  Stomping the accelerator, she sent the truck rumbling down Blue Willow Road. The unkempt laurel lining the roadside had been trimmed back, and the old, gnarled dogwoods were carefully pruned. The ground was freshly tilled and sprayed with green material she recognized immediately as a seed-and-mulch mixture.

  She reached a widening apron of pavement that curled off in a spur to the estate’s gate. The gatehouse, once an empty shell with the leaded-glass windows broken out and kudzu covering the walls, had been fully restored. Dark blue shutters ornamented the new windows. The stonework had been cleaned of graffiti. The kudzu was gone. The majestic old iron gate, with its matching patterns of willows, had been repaired and painted. It stood open.

  A stocky gray-haired man in a security-guard uniform exited the cottage’s side door quickly and planted himself in front of the open gate, watching as if he expected her to roar through like a lunatic, which, she realized, she’d given him some reason to expect. He even rested one hand on the heavy pistol holster on his belt.

  Lily lifted a hand in greeting, but drove past. She wasn’t going to ask to be announced, like some goddamned stranger.

  The old hardwood forest closed around her. She crossed MacKenzie Creek at the stone bridge, which had been cleaned and freshly mortared, the banks around it cleared and planted with ivy.

  When she reached her mailbox and driveway, she pulled onto the secluded road and parked, then got out and started through the woods. She could find her way to the estate’s main road blindfolded.

  The land had not emerged yet from decades of neglect. The walk took her along an eerie pathway of fallen trees and tangled undergrowth. A mile inward the one-lane road split and formed a circle. She looked at the majestic, gnarled willow at the center of the circle, standing alone in what had once been a small park. Lily averted her gaze from it, remembering how she’d considered it her own, how she’d claimed it that day as a child, the pockets of her overalls bulging with soft brown apples, and how Artemas had stepped underneath, an unsuspecting victim who had terrified and then enchanted her.

  The undergrowth and the ground around the thick, sinewy roots had been cleared. The commemorative plaque that had been there when she was a child was gone.

  She walked faster. The land rolled and dropped, and the road followed its contours, taking her deeper into the Colebrook world with every second. Newly graveled service roads curved out of the woods to meet the main drive. She knew them by heart. They led to the lake, the guest houses, and across the river to the estate’s dairy barns, fields, and stables. A small fiefd
om had existed here, self-absorbed and self-sufficient.

  Her palms were clammy and her chest tight with emotion. The strain of the past months had taken its toll. She knew that, and struggled to keep calm.

  The road rose and curved up the side of the big ridge that ran through the heart of the estate. She came to a pair of granite boulders fifty feet tall guarding either side of the road, with willows carved into their rugged contours. The craftsmanship was so expert that the carvings seemed natural. Decades of wind and weather had softened them. They might have been drawn by rivulets of rain rather than human hands.

  A hundred yards beyond them the road uncurled suddenly at the top of the ridge, emerging from the woodlands with an abruptness that made her heart rise in her throat. Sunlight burst onto raw red earth—the old meadows, fanning out from either side of the road. They had grown up in pine forest when she was a child, but were now cleared again, and waiting to be replanted.

  She looked into the distance, and her breath caught. Rising from the far side of the ridge, the estate house lifted steep, gabled roofs of weathered blue slate against a dark blue sky with curls of pink clouds above it, shot through with beams from the descending sun. Long shadows were creeping over the land.

  Keeping to the road, she strode past the cleared foundations where collapsed greenhouses had been, cracked foundations, and piles of construction debris. The house was surrounded by scaffolds. Any workers who had been there were gone for the day. Toward the south end, the curving glass roof of the palm court, once dotted with gaping holes, was covered in black plastic.

  Utility poles had been jabbed into the lawn. Heavy electrical cables stretched from them to open windows on the main floor. With all the lines and equipment around it, the mansion resembled a surgery patient receiving intensive care.

  She halted in the wide cobbled courtyard in front of the main entrance and considered the enormous front doors. Their stately glass and wood, covered in intricate patterns of black wrought iron, belied the mansion’s disarray. Was there a butler still to command those doors? She ran up the steps and pressed a buzzer set in the stone wall on one side. If it worked, the chimes were too muffled to hear. Tapping a heavy brass knocker, she felt insignificant and angry.