by Lynn Austin
I remembered the way he had stood in my kitchen that first night, reminding me for all the world of my Sam. He had even bowed his head and prayed before eating like Sam always did. And he’d known just what work needed to be done out in the barn. He’d had a guilty look on his face, too, when I’d asked him how he’d known my last name was Wyatt. I shivered again.
I slowly paged through the photo album, staring at Matthew Wyatt’s face in every picture, searching for a resemblance to the bushy-haired man in my spare bedroom. Hadn’t Aunt Batty said Gabe looked familiar the first time she saw him? And he called her Aunt Batty much too easily to be a stranger.
Maybe that was why Gabe had refused to see the doctor— maybe he had a scar or a birthmark or something that the family doctor would recognize, maybe even that scar on his chest. And maybe that’s why Gabe seemed so put out with me when I told him I’d rummaged through his things. He didn’t want me to discover the truth.
But why all this secrecy, especially now that his father and brother were both dead? Why didn’t he just step forward and say who he was if it was true? I couldn’t very well ask him without admitting that I’d read his private journals. Besides, I had no idea how he would react if he found out that the house and the orchard now belonged to him. Would he take it all away from us? Kick us out in the snow? For all I knew, Gabe—or Matthew, or whatever his name was—had a wife and a family of his own somewhere who were just dying to move right in.
‘‘Aunt Batty, whatever happened to Matthew?’’ I finally asked.
‘‘Matthew?’’ She glanced around the room with a worried look on her face as if he’d been here a moment ago and she’d misplaced him. Then she caught herself. ‘‘No, that young one is named Jimmy,’’ she said aloud. ‘‘Matthew joined the army and went to France to fight in the war.’’
The war. Gabe carried a U.S. Army canteen in his bag.
Part of me wanted Gabe to be Matthew so he could pay off the mortgage and help me run things, but part of me was afraid that the kids and I would lose our home—and I could never allow that to happen.
‘‘The war ended more than ten years ago, Aunt Batty. What happened to Matthew after that? Do you have any idea? Did he ever come home?’’
Aunt Batty squinted in concentration. ‘‘Matthew was still over in France when his mother died. I wrote to tell him that she’d passed away. Lydia had given me his address and asked me to write to him before...before she left us....’’ It seemed as though there was more Aunt Batty wanted to say. I waited.
‘‘Matthew wrote back to me just the one time,’’ she continued. ‘‘He thanked me for telling him the news and asked me to please take care of Sam. That’s all—just that one short letter. I don’t think anyone has heard from him since.’’
‘‘Do you still have that letter? Could I see it?’’ I already knew what Gabe’s handwriting looked like. I could easily compare the two.
‘‘I don’t know if I kept that letter or not. I could look for it, I suppose. Is it important?’’
‘‘Yes, it’s very important.’’ But I knew I was asking the impossible with Aunt Batty’s house in the mess it was in. ‘‘If Matthew had died over in France,’’ I asked her, ‘‘would Frank Wyatt have told you?’’
‘‘Never! Frank hasn’t spoken to me since the night he burned my father’s house down.’’
‘‘He burned your father’s house down?’’
‘‘Yes, he certainly did! He wanted to plant peach trees on that plot of land and my house was in his way. Oh, he tried to make everyone think it was an accident but I knew better. I’m telling you, Toots—as sure as apples grow on apple trees, Frank Wyatt started that fire. I’ve had to live in the little cottage ever since.’’
She was describing a history I knew nothing about, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. I had been afraid of my father-inlaw from the very first day I met him. Later I grew to hate him for allowing Sam to die. He had always insisted that Aunt Batty was crazy. Now I wondered who I should believe.
‘‘Come to think of it,’’ she said, ‘‘it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Frank Wyatt made my kitchen roof cave in, too.’’
‘‘But he died last November. How could he—’’
‘‘Oh, you don’t know him like I did, Toots! He might have sawed through the roof timbers and then waited for it to snow.’’
I heaved a tired sigh. I had more questions now than before I started looking for answers. How was I ever going to untangle this mess? I turned to the last page in the album and found the very last picture of Matthew. He looked to be about eighteen years old, standing beside his brother Sam. Behind them was the newly painted sign on the side of the barn: Wyatt Orchards—Frank Wyatt & Sons, Proprietors. I carefully removed the photo and handed it to Aunt Batty.
‘‘I need to find Matthew, Aunt Batty. Do you have any idea what might have happened to him?’’
Aunt Batty didn’t answer me. Her mind had drifted off to another place and another time. In the silence, I heard a freight train rumbling past the orchard. The whistle’s mournful sound reminded me, as it always did, of all my years of longing for a home. I had criss-crossed the country on trains, gazing at the lights that glowed from the windows of the houses I passed, dreaming of a family and a house like this one. I’d made my decision ten years ago to grab hold of Wyatt Orchards and make it my own, never knowing its hidden secrets and heartaches, unprepared for all I had bargained for.
But now I had three kids to think about—kids I would lay down and die for. I had to find a way to make a living for them, to keep the home that belonged to them. I had to prove that Matthew Wyatt was dead.
‘‘Please, Aunt Batty. If you know anything at all about Matthew, please tell me.’’
She frowned. ‘‘If you want to understand what happened to Matthew, you’d have to understand my sister, Lydia, first.’’
‘‘Tell me anything you think might help. I don’t want to lose this orchard. I want it for my kids. It’s their home—my home.’’
She glanced at me sharply, an angry look suddenly crossing her face. ‘‘Are you sure you want to keep this orchard for those young ones? The price is very high, you know.’’
‘‘I know. The man from the bank wants five hundred dollars, and if I don’t pay him in ninety days we’ll lose everything.’’
She turned away. ‘‘Oh, it costs much more than that. It has already cost the lives of the people I loved....’’
Lydia ’s Story
Deer Springs, 1894
‘‘We need to be angels for each other, to give each
other strength and consolation. Because only when we
fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of
sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.’’
HENRI NOUWEN
CHAPTER SIX
My sister, Lydia, was the most beautiful girl in Deer Springs—and I was the homeliest. Lydia could spend hours gazing at herself in the mirror, but I always turned my head away whenever I passed one because I hated what I saw. My face was as round and as plain as a baking powder biscuit, with a nose like a Roman emperor’s stuck right in the middle of it. And my body—well, my body certainly should have matured by the time I’d celebrated my twentieth birthday, but I was still as plump and flat-chested as a schoolgirl. My mother nagged me constantly about the way I slouched, warning that I’d surely cripple my spine if I didn’t stand up straight. But the taunts of my schoolmates and the nickname ‘‘Betty Butterball’’ rang louder in my ears than any of my mother’s warnings. I was short and fat and that was that.
My shoulder-length hair wasn’t chestnut like Lydia’s, or auburn or mahogany or some other glamorous color like the heroines of all my favorite novels. It was plain old brown, like mouse fur. Its unruly waves frizzed around my face like a bush, refusing to stay neatly piled on my head. My eyes, under thick, heavy brows, weren’t dark and mysterious like Lydia’s eyes, which had the rich luster of bro
nze velvet. They weren’t even an interesting color like hazel or caramel or sandalwood. They were just plain old brown, the color of dirt. No wonder the only things I knew about love and romance had come from books. No wonder I’d never had a single boyfriend until Frank Wyatt courted me.
Lydia was the one who attracted boyfriends like bees to apple blossoms. Lydia was seventeen months younger than me, and from the time she turned fourteen, her voluptuous figure had more curves than a country lane. If she hadn’t been my best friend, I would have hated her for certain. But the two of us were as close as two sisters could be, forced to turn to each other for affection and consolation by our grim, practical-minded parents. They staunchly refused to pet and cuddle us for fear we would grow up pampered and spoiled.
‘‘Children need discipline and order in their lives,’’ my mother believed, ‘‘not a bunch of foolish molly-coddling.’’ Her typical answer to all our wounds and heartaches was ‘‘Quit your bellyaching.’’
My father had married my mother, a spinster school mistress, when she was thirty-five and he was forty-two. He’d lost his first wife and two sons to a cholera epidemic and had hoped to produce another son to inherit his land. Instead, he’d been sorely disappointed to find himself stuck with two daughters. And after Lydia’s difficult arrival as a breech baby, my mother promptly moved him out of her bedroom, making it very clear that he would father no more children by her.
With tenderness and sympathy so hard to come by in our household, Lydia and I learned to rely on each other. ‘‘I’ll be your guardian angel, Betsy,’’ she promised, ‘‘and you can be mine.’’ We made a solemn vow to watch out for one another when I was eight and a half and she was seven, and we formalized it with a ‘‘pinkie promise.’’ We never let each other down.
That’s why I turned to Lydia in utter misery after I’d completed the eighth grade of grammar school and my father informed me what the future course of my life would be. He had called me away from my novel and my rocking chair on the front porch one soft summer day and ordered me into our front parlor. It was a bleak, colorless room with worn rugs on the floor and dreary pictures on the bare plaster walls, a room that felt chilly even in the summertime. We lived in an era of ornate Victorian frills—fringed horsehair sofas in silk tapestry and damask, glassfronted curio cabinets stuffed with ornaments and gewgaws, flocked wallpaper, crocheted doilies and antimacassars—but our farmhouse was as plain and as cold as my cheerless parents. We didn’t own a Gramophone or a stereopticon or a magic lantern— not even a piano or a cottage organ. The sound of the mantel clock ticking out the passing of time accompanied our evenings as we sat on the plain, mismatched furniture that other people had discarded. That’s where Father ordered me to sit on that warm afternoon, and coming from him, his plans for my future had the tone of a death knell.
‘‘I have decided that you will continue your education next fall,’’ he announced. ‘‘You will be a schoolteacher, like your mother.’’
‘‘But I don’t want to be a teacher!’’ I cried. In my fertile but nai ve imagination, I had daydreamed of moving to New York City to become a newspaper reporter like my idol, Nellie Bly. My horror at the thought of being trapped in a desolate one-room schoolhouse all day with two dozen mulish farm children made me outspoken for the first time in my life.
‘‘Please, Father, don’t make me be a schoolteacher. I want to be a newspaper reporter and write for the New York Worldlike Nellie Bly.’’
‘‘Out of the question. That is not a suitable career for a young woman, nor is New York City a suitable place to live. You will be a teacher.’’
The discussion was over. It was useless to try to argue with him. I would’ve had better luck trying to fly. He was my father and I had to obey him. Fathers were gods in their own households, determining when their family rose and when we slept, who we saw and who we didn’t see, how we thought, how we behaved, how we felt. I could no more decide the course of my life or my future than the cows could decide when they would be milked. To defy my father was unthinkable. I poured out my sorrow and disappointment on Lydia’s shoulder later that night.
‘‘Don’t cry, Betsy. Going to teachers’ school is an honor,’’ she tried to assure me. ‘‘Didn’t you tell me that Nellie Bly once studied to be a teacher, too?’’
‘‘Well...yes, until her father died and she ran out of money.’’
‘‘See? You can still become a newspaper reporter, just like she did.’’
‘‘So it isn’t ho...hopeless?’’ I asked, hiccuping through my tears. I took the handkerchief Lydia offered me and honked my beak of a nose.
We were in our attic bedroom where we shared all our secrets and a double bed, along with an ancient three-drawer dresser and an unfinished closet with mice. We’d moved the bed to the middle of the wall, squeezed between the two dormer windows so we could gaze up at the sky and the stars at night, even though the single-glazed windows were so drafty in the wintertime that frost sometimes formed on the inside of the glass. We had long since learned to sit up carefully in the morning so we wouldn’t bump our heads on the slanting ceiling. As cold as it was in winter, the room was stifling in the summer with the sun beating down on the tin roof right above our heads all day. On that hot summer night, as we hugged each other in our cotton nightgowns, our sweaty arms stuck together as if we’d been glued to each other with white paste.
‘‘It’s not hopeless at all!’’ Lydia said. ‘‘Father knows you’ve inherited all the brains in this family so he’s making sure you get a good education. Look at me—I’m so dim-witted I’ll probably never even make it to the eighth grade. All I’ll ever be good for is a wife and a mother. At least being a teacher is glamorous.’’
‘‘Ha! Then why are the women teachers always old spinsters?’’
‘‘You won’t be a spinster, Betsy,’’ she said smoothing back my unruly hair. ‘‘You’ll find a very special man who—’’
‘‘I don’t want a man! I want to be a newspaper reporter and be daring and brave like Nellie Bly. I want to expose injustice and corruption and change the world like she does.’’
Nellie Bly was twenty-three and I was fourteen when she pretended to be insane in order to write about life in a notorious women’s asylum. Her daring won her a job with The New York Worldand launched her adventurous career as a stunt reporter. I loved reading about all her exploits—posing as an unwed mother to expose the baby-buying trade, pretending to be a thief in order to see inside a New York City jail, and so on. In an age when most women were mere adornments on their husbands’ arms, Nellie was an independent woman who dared to enter a man’s world and prove she was just as good as they were—maybe even better.
But my dream of becoming a stunt reporter would have to wait. I attended school that fall and studied to be a teacher, as my father had decreed. During my second year there, Nellie Bly had the greatest adventure of her life: She traveled around the world, all alone, in an attempt to beat the hero’s record in Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. For two-and-a-half months the whole world followed her progress religiously as she made her way over land and sea, returning to New York in only seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds. She was the most famous woman in the world and I wanted to be just like her.
My favorite teacher, Mr. Herman, knew how much I loved reading about Nellie and always gave me his New York Worldas soon as he was finished with it. I made a scrapbook of all her exploits and filled notebook after notebook with imaginary exploits of my own. When I wasn’t writing I was reading, devouring books as fast as Mr. Herman loaned them to me.
‘‘You’re my best student, Betty,’’ he told me one day after I’d finished reading Sense and Sensibility, ‘‘but I’m worried about how you will fare as a teacher. To be honest, you’re so tiny and softspoken that I’m afraid the students will mistake you for one of themselves.’’
It was his polite way of saying that I was absurdly short and pa
infully shy—and the rough-and-tumble farmers’ children were going to mop the floor with me.
‘‘I really don’t want to be a teacher, Mr. Herman,’’ I confessed. ‘‘It was my father’s idea. What I really want to be is a stunt reporter like Nellie Bly.’’
He thought for a moment before he replied. ‘‘That could be a difficult career, too, for someone as...as reserved as you are.’’ He might have added ‘‘innocent’’ or ‘‘nai ve’’ or ‘‘scared of my own shadow.’’ While I loved reading about Nellie Bly’s exploits, the truth was that I would have fainted dead away if adventure had tapped me on the shoulder.
Mr. Herman must have seen my quivering chin and brimming eyes because he quickly added, ‘‘Don’t get me wrong. You’re a very gifted writer, Betty. I enjoy reading everything you write. Your work is head and shoulders above your classmates’ work. I’m just not sure that being an investigative reporter is right for you, either.’’
‘‘Sometimes I write poems,’’ I blurted.
He smiled gently. ‘‘Yes, I do see you more as an Elizabeth Barrett Browning than a Nellie Bly.’’
‘‘Would you like to read some of them?’’
‘‘I would be honored.’’
But I never had a chance to show my poems to him or to finish my studies or to become a teacher—let alone a stunt reporter. Mother took sick the year I turned eighteen, and Father made me quit school to take care of her and run his household. Lydia had a good job by then, working at the Deer Springs Dry Goods store, and Father didn’t want to give up the paycheck she brought home to him every week.
I don’t think Lydia actually did much work at the store. The owner simply parked her behind the counter and told her to smile, and the competing store across town just about went out of business. Every salesman and farmer’s son who walked through the door instantly fell in love with her and would start buying whatever she was selling. Give Lydia two dozen umbrellas on a sunny day and they’d be sold out by noon. She was the store’s most valuable asset, and they knew it.