by L. S. Young
“Lily! I never should have told you that tale!” I scolded, but I laughed, and so did she. For the picture we made, two young women with flowers in their hair and mouths stained with berries, on a fine bright day full of bloom, the Grecian reference was far more apt than the Biblical.
I had forgotten what a sight the Macready house was, even from a distance. It was a house of many windows and gables, with a peaked gray roof, and a wrap-around porch with a smaller balcony supported by four columns in front. The columns, once covered in peeling paint, were new and bare, which meant Mr. Cavendish had replaced them in his work on restoring the old place. The flower gardens in front were still scraggly and over grown, but an ancient magnolia gave the front walk a stately elegance as we surmounted the front steps and knocked on the door.
We knocked several times, waiting for a few minutes in between, but received no answer.
“Perhaps we ought to leave the basket and go?” queried Lily.
“I didn’t walk all this way not to see him,” I said, making my way down the steps again. She followed me, and we rounded the corner of the house. After checking the derelict dovecote, with its gate swinging crazily on one hinge, we found William working in a vegetable garden next to one of the fallen down outbuildings, hoeing with his shirt off.
He wore a pair of brown, patched britches, and his suspenders were off his shoulders, hanging down around his thighs. He was sweating, and the sun gleamed on his bare chest and broad back. The muscles in his arms and shoulders stood out with every swing. He was a strongly built man by nature, and physical work in the months since he first came to Willowbend had hardened him.
“You’re quite welcome,” Lily whispered. I poked her arm, and she squealed, alerting Will to our presence. He raised his hand to us, giving me a glimpse of the hair under his arm; it was ruddy and golden, a bit darker than the hair on his head. I stood as if frozen.
“Say something,” Lily whispered.
“G-good day!” I managed, my throat feeling as it did in those dreams where one must scream for help yet is stricken mute.
Will leaned his hoe against a tree, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his face with it. His shirt was hanging from a low branch, and he took it up but did not put it back on. Just then, I remembered the flower wreath, and scratched it hastily off my head. Lily left hers, but she reached out and smoothed my hair where I had mussed it.
“Good morning!” he said, approaching us. “I’m sorry for my dishabille.”
“Not at all,” said Lily.
Resisting the urge to poke her again, I said, “We’re sorry to interrupt your work. Our stepmother sent us with a basket for you. She thinks you don’t know how to cook for yourself judging by how heartily you eat.”
Will laughed. “It’s not that. It’s only that the cooking there is so good.”
“Oh dear, I’ve left it on the front porch,” I said, my cheeks reddening.
“Please, come inside, both of you. Just give me a moment to wash, and I’ll show you around.”
We waited in the parlor as Will bathed and dressed. It was obvious he had not done as much to improve the inside of the house as the outside. The rug was passing clean but old, worn by many generations of feet. There was dust, but not such an abundance as to have been left by decades of neglect, and I surmised that he had at least cleaned since moving in.
Will returned from his bath sans sweat, with his hair combed. He had changed into a gingham shirt, with khaki trousers and a tweed waistcoat. After offering us coffee, which we declined, he gave us a tour of the house and grounds. The house itself was rambling, filled with echoing rooms haunted by shapeless furniture covered in white drapery. In addition to the parlor, there was a library, a large dining room, a billiard room, and a spacious attic. It was a house for entertaining large parties and balls, a house for leisure, a house that demanded servants for its upkeep; in short, a house from a time that had passed on, but I was enchanted by it.
There were many outbuildings on the property. Some were sturdy even after more than a decade of disuse, while others were falling down. Will had erected a small lean-to and a corncrib since his arrival. He took us through what had been the garden and showed us the land he meant for his tobacco crop. The land directly behind the house, butting up nearly to the outbuildings and the vegetable garden, was all farmland; every foot of available space had once been used to grow cotton.
The field was freshly plowed, and way out in the middle stood a lone oak tree that was so large it had been left to grow when the ground was cleared many years before.
“Can you imagine it surrounded by swaying white cotton?” I asked. “It must have been beautiful.”
“Would you like to walk there?”
“May I? That is, if Lily wishes to come.” I turned to Lily, but she was examining the inscription on a stone statue of St. Francis of Assisi.
“I’ll stay behind,” she murmured, “and walk among the dead roses. It’s hot. You two go ahead.”
Will offered me his arm, and we walked beside one another in the fresh dirt, each in our own row, until we reached the live oak. It was an ancient tree; its branches spread wide and long and low, and its great trunk was more than forty paces around. Its distance was far enough that the manse looked only a few inches high from where we stood, and Lily was invisible as she made her way among the roses.
“It must be three or four hundred years old,” said Will.
“More, perhaps.” I stared up into the gnarled limbs and slipped off my shoes, letting the dirt sink between my toes, cool from the tree’s shade.
“I’m glad the two of you came to call.” Will took a pipe out of his pocket and began to pack it with tobacco.
“So am I. I’m interested to see what you’ve done with the place. It certainly speaks to the fruits of your labor, but you have your work cut out for you yet, I’d say.”
“There’s a magic to it though, isn’t there?”
He placed the pipe between his teeth and lit a match by striking it against the sole of his boot.
“There is indeed. A grandeur.”
“I can’t think what to call it now it’s my own. Do you know the original name?”
“Macready Place is what I’ve heard all my life. It’s what my mother called it, but I never liked it. It needs something with substance.”
“What would you call it?”
I bit my bottom lip, searching the grounds for inspiration, then leaned against the trunk of the oak, smiling. “Oakhurst, of course. How simple!”
“Now that is a name,” said Will, puffing his pipe. “I’m indebted to you.”
He smiled at me, his eyes strikingly blue in the midday light, and as he looked at me, my hand strayed unwittingly to the scar on my mouth. I dropped it again just as quickly, but he had noticed. His gaze grew more serious, and he put his thumb out and traced the line.
“What happened, here?” he asked. “I’ve often wondered.”
I swallowed, my fingers hovering lightly over the rough bark of the oak against my back, and he kept my gaze for some moments, letting his thumb remain. I could feel his fingers resting lightly against my cheek and was struck with the urge to press my lips into his palm, but I dropped my eyes instead and turned my face so that his hand fell back to his side.
“I was taken up for insolence,” I said.
He did not respond, and when I ventured to look at him again, his brow had furrowed.
“You’re thinking I ought to have said I tripped and fell,” I said defiantly.
He shook his head. “No, I was thinking that only cowards and fools hit women and children.”
I pushed off from the tree trunk and picked absently at my skirt. “Now I’ve spoiled our walk.”
“Not at all. You mentioned your mother.”
>
“Yes?”
“It’s just that you rarely do.”
I shrugged. “She died when I was seven. I’ve spent most of my life without her.”
“But you miss her. I see it in your eyes sometimes, a sadness.”
“Everything was better before she went,” I admitted, “but that’s the way of things, I suppose.”
He offered me his arm. I smiled at him and accepted, but we were more sober on the return journey. However, I was soaring inwardly at the memory of his touch, and not even the thought of past harm, or loss, could bring me back to earth.
That night I consulted my mother’s journal again.
December 1865
I don’t think I shall have much trouble out of Mr. Andrews after all. His rib is healed, so he is learning to walk on his bad leg, and it has properly cowed him. We spoke at length today. He tells me he is from Florida, a place in the uppermost northern part of the state called Willowbend. It sounds poetic, like something from Tennyson, especially how he describes it. “It’s nothin,” he told me, “but swampland, scrub pines, live oaks, and the age ole Suwannee river, brown and wide, windin’ like a ribbon. In winter, there’s a sky at night blacker ‘n your hair, and thick with stars as flies in molasses.”
I said it sounded like a wild kind of paradise, and Mr. Scruggs said, “Thet’s cuz you ain’t been to Nerth Carolinny. My deddy used ter say, tek yer a big ole swamp, set it down in the middle ‘a Hell, an fill it with catamounts an skeeters—thet’s Flerida. Ain’t no kinda paradise I’d wanna see.”
I thought Mr. Andrews would take offense, but he only laughed. “That is about right. Been away so long, I reckon I romanticize it. The Carolinas though, you’re right about ‘em, by God. I’ll never forget bein’ up in them hills at sunrise, smellin that sweet grass and seein’ the mist lyin’ in all those blue-green hollows. Why, I thought I’d been shot and gone to heaven in my sleep.”
“Ain’t nothin like mist in a holler of a early mornin’,” agreed Mr. Scruggs, winking at me. I fled before I could figure out what he meant.
After Lily and I called on him at home, William was a fixture in our home at Sunday dinner. As a bachelor, he always enjoyed a home-cooked meal, especially if it included my fried chicken and biscuits or Indian succotash. He was fond of Colleen’s northern dishes as well, her stuffed cabbage especially. Eric and I had always hated it on principle for being “Yankee food,” but it was the favorite meal of the younger children.
On fine Saturdays, he occasionally called on us with an invitation to come berrying and picnicking on his property, and we always readily accepted with Colleen’s approval, glad for his society. We would bring a basket of baked goods, jams, and ham sandwiches to enjoy on a quilt beneath the live oak as the younger children played.
“If you’re not careful,” Gran would joke, “one of ya is gonna cook your way right into his arms. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, ya know.” She liked Will. He had renewed the hope that Lily or I would not become old maids, and she wanted one of us to snatch him up before he moved on.
Although Will found Lily too youthful for him, there existed between them a familial camaraderie that I could not share because of my feelings. My thoughts of him had progressed far beyond those of friendship, yet there were things I had to know before I opened my heart: was he a man of patience, integrity, forgiveness? Was he short-tempered? Did he drink or gamble? Would he be willing to overlook my poverty, and my past?
On a Sunday after church, expecting Will for dinner as always, Lily and I went out to pick fresh tomatoes from the garden. It was late May and very warm. She and Ezra headed back toward the house as I stayed to pick off some of the hornworms that were eating the tomato plants. With the early summer sun beating down on my back, I heard Lily utter a scream of terror. I grabbed the hoe I had leaned against one of the tomato trellises and ran to the end of my row.
Lily was in a crouch, clutching Ezra to her, and coiled not six feet from them, waiting to strike, was a diamond back rattlesnake as thick as my thigh at its widest point.
I circled it, giving a wide berth, and it stirred with indignation, its rattle sending a tattoo of warning that sounded like dried beans in the bottom of a tin can, but much more sinister. Lily snapped her fingers at it just as I swung the hoe in a fierce arch with all of my strength, but in my terror I just missed the mark and pinned its head to the ground rather than breaking its neck as I had intended. It roiled and curved, trying to turn itself over, and Lily screamed again as I exerted more force, fastening it to the ground. Just when I thought my arms would give out from effort, a hatchet swung from my left and cut the snake in two, severing its head from its body.
I let the hoe fall and turned toward William. In my terror and struggle to defeat the snake, I had not even seen or heard him approach. A sheen of sweat had popped out on his forehead, and he wiped it with his sleeve. Lily joined us with Ezra in her arms, and I snatched him from her and clutched him to my chest just as she fell into a dead faint. Will lunged forward and caught her, lifting her easily.
He carried her into the house and placed her on the sofa in the parlor, and Colleen administered smelling salts as I hung back, watching, with Ezra balanced on one hip.
“She wasn’t bit, was she?” he asked.
I gasped. “Oh God, I never even thought! Colleen! Check to see if it struck her!”
We anxiously checked her limbs for bites but found none, to our relief. When Lily came round, she assured us that she was fine, she had only fainted from fear, and the heat. Colleen brought her a glass of cold water fresh from the pump, and we adjourned for dinner. I hung back so I might exit the room at the same time as Mr. Cavendish and laid my hand on his arm. It was the first time we had touched since the day Lily and I visited him at his home. I knew he might consider it an improper thing for a lady to do, but I couldn’t help myself.
“You don’t know how indebted I am to you, Mr. Cavendish,” I said. “You’ve just saved the two dearest things in the world to me.”
“I ran as soon as I heard her first scream. But to tell you true, when I saw your predicament, it was you I thought of saving.”
I looked up and met his startling blue eyes. They seemed to be full of feeling, but I couldn’t identify if it were regard or only kindness.
Chapter 9
June
One Sunday in June, Bill Harmon, who was the wealthiest man in Willowbend next to Ida’s father, was standing on the church steps with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders, greeting everyone who entered with jolly alacrity. He had a red, cheery face and an ample belly, but I disliked him, for he tithed to the dime and no more and had once driven past our wagon in his coach and four without so much as a glance when we’d broken an axle on the way home from the general store. I had never seen him spare a penny, not for a friend in need, nor for a poor youngster to buy a piece of candy with, as Daddy often did. He had moved to Willowbend from New York during reconstruction and, in spite of being despised and called an upstart Yankee by most of the locals at the time, had built both a lumber mill and cotton gin and employed most of the former slaves who had not run away during the war, as well as many of the sons and husbands of the poor. He had purchased an old estate nearby, built a fine house on it, and settled his wife there. She and his two daughters wore the latest fashions in the finest fabrics.
“I reckon you’ve done mighty well this year, Harmon,” a farmer was saying to him as we approached. “That new filly you bought for your Bess is a sight to see.”
Harmon boomed a laugh. “She’s a purebred quarter horse, quick as a wink! I reckon it’s a waste to give a beast as great as that to a girl, but Bess sets a great store by her riding, and with no sons, I don’t see the harm in it! We brought in a killing with the mills this year, but as for me, I can’t take any of the credit. The Lord is the one who ha
s blessed me.”
This galled me, along with the comment about a fine horse being wasted on a girl. “You might take some of the credit Mr. Harmon,” I said, dropping a slight curtsy. “The Lord’s no respecter of persons, and if he were fond of handing out money to just anyone, I suppose we’d all be rich. As it is, I reckon you’ve your own ambition to thank for your wealth, as well as your workers at the mill and the fertile land the cotton grew on.”
The gentlemen standing nearby guffawed, but Mr. Harmon bristled like a scalded cat, and Colleen cried, “Landra! How insolent you sound! She didn’t mean it, Mr. Harmon, not a word.”
I bowed again, reluctantly this time, and said, “Begging your pardon, sir. Sometimes my tongue’s quicker than my manners.”
Mr. Harmon looked less than mollified, but he returned the bow and replied, “I’m sure you meant no offense, young lady.”
When we went into the sanctuary, we spied William sitting by himself near the back, and Colleen invited him into our pew. Before Eric went away to school, our seating arrangement had always been him first on the end seat next to the aisle, then me, Daddy, Colleen with Ezra in her lap, Edith, the twins, and Lily. It was Lily’s job to keep the younger children quiet, so she did not often enjoy church, as one might imagine. I remembered the days when she was a little girl and it was my place to sit next to her and keep her still; she was a curious yet introspective child—my task had been far easier.
With Eric away, the space next to me was empty, and William eased himself into it, smiling his hello. I told him good morning, but I put my chin up as I said it, like a cat snubbing someone on a whim. I was young, and I wanted him to work for my affection, not to kneel at his feet.