by Lynn Austin
‘‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Wyatt, but Frank had an established line of credit with us and you don’t. I’ll need to see some proof that your own credit is good before I can extend you a line.’’
‘‘That’s ridiculous! My credit record is exactly the same as his! We both own Wyatt Orchards.’’ As soon as I’d said the words I remembered that they weren’t true. I didn’t own Wyatt Orchards; Matthew did. This was one lie that Mr. Peterson could sniff out very easily. I held my breath, waiting for him to demand proof.
‘‘Even if the deed is in your name, ma’am, I would be extending credit based on your future crop—and since you have no farming experience, I have no way of knowing whether or not you’ll be able to bring in a decent harvest all by yourself.’’
I forced myself not to cry—or lose my temper. ‘‘I’m not all by myself. I’ve hired a manager. Would you like to speak with him?’’
‘‘Sure. If he comes highly recommended from some other established orchard it would certainly count in your favor.’’
He’d cornered me again. It sounded like Merle had talked to Sheriff Foster. I had to find some way out of this. Maybe I could fake a letter of recommendation for Gabe. But if all my problems were God’s punishment on me for lying, I would surely wind up in worse trouble if I kept on doing it. My sin had me up a tree and I couldn’t figure out how to climb down.
‘‘What if I promise you a share of my crop?’’ I asked.
‘‘That’s what a line of credit amounts to, ma’am.’’ He was losing patience with me. He sifted through the litter of papers by his cash register as if he had important business to tend to and I was keeping him from it. I thought about my kids and decided to beg.
‘‘Please, Mr. Peterson, I know my manager and I are going to bring in an excellent harvest this year, but even if we don’t, you know how valuable Wyatt Orchard’s assets are. You could take our cows or the horses or some of our equipment and easily pay yourself back if it comes to that.’’
‘‘Not in these hard times, ma’am. Entire farms are selling for pennies an acre, and farm equipment is a dime a dozen.’’
He was right. Mr. Wakefield had warned me that I probably wouldn’t get much if I auctioned off Frank’s equipment. Besides, I needed that equipment to run the farm.
‘‘Mr. Peterson, how long have you done business with Wyatt Orchards?’’ I asked.
‘‘Years and years,’’ he replied without looking up. ‘‘My father did business with your father-in-law before you and I were even born.’’
‘‘Then if you’ve known our family all your life, isn’t that recommendation enough? You attend the same church we do. You probably grew up with my Sam and his brother Matthew. Your kids go to school with mine. Doesn’t any of that count toward my line of credit? Can’t you please find it in your heart to help us out? I’ll bet if you shook your family tree hard enough a Wyatt relation would fall to the ground.’’
He looked up in surprise, then an angry glare froze on his face. ‘‘I don’t have to shake hard at all. My father and Frank were cousins. I don’t know how he did it, but Frank cheated my father out of his rightful share!’’
I’d played the wrong card and lost the hand.
I’d once heard a sermon in a Lutheran church in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, about how the sins of the fathers were visited upon their children for two or three generations. I was so afraid that my daddy’s sins were going to drive up in a wagon some day and pay me an unwelcome visit that I asked Daddy about it as soon as he picked me up from church that day. He looked real uneasy when I told him what the pastor had said, but my daddy never was much good at answering any of my questions.
‘‘Just do what the Good Book says, Eliza,’’ he’d mumbled. ‘‘You can’t go wrong if you do what the Good Book says.’’ But for a long time afterward, I couldn’t get the preacher’s warning out of my head. I pictured it like a ghoulish family reunion in a cemetery somewhere, with all my daddy’s ugly old sins coming by to pay me a visit like a bunch of long-lost relatives.
Now the exact same thing was happening with Frank Wyatt’s sins and his long-lost relatives. Frank didn’t have any children left, so the sins were all being visited on me and my kids. I’d noticed that my father-in-law didn’t have any close friends and that people seemed to steer a wide path around him at church, but I’d never known why. Now Alvin Greer and Merle Peterson had told me the reason—Frank had cheated his relations out of their inheritance. If every Wyatt cousin felt as bitter about it as they did, there would be a long line of them waiting to bid on Wyatt Orchards if I had to auction it off. And they’d only bid a penny each.
I worried about what to do as I drove the team home from town. The spraying had to get done before the trees budded. If I didn’t spray I wouldn’t get any fruit. Terrible things would nibble away at it, like blight and coddling moth and brown rot and tree borers. But if I spent all my money on spray, how would I earn enough to pay off the mortgage in the forty-some days I had left? Should I ask Gabe for a loan? No, I should pay him for all the work he’d done already! Maybe I could find my daddy and beg him for money—if he had any, which I doubted.
I returned to Peterson’s the next day and used my asparagus money to buy the stuff I needed to spray my trees. I would have many long hours to figure out how to beg, borrow, or steal more money to pay the bank as I rode up and down the orchard rows on the spray rig.
It took all four of us to spray—Aunt Batty and Becky driving the horses, Gabe and I operating the rig. The boys begged to cut school again and help us out but Gabe told them that their education was more important. I recalled what Aunt Batty had said about letting my kids dream their own dreams instead of forcing them to live mine, and I knew Gabe was right.
The spray surrounded us like a blue fog, sticking to our hair and turning our clothing stiff. The stench of sulfur was awful. ‘‘We smell like we’ve all taken a boat ride down the River Styx to Hades,’’ Aunt Batty said. Surely this was punishment enough for my sins, wasn’t it? I kept waiting for a miracle—for God to drop five hundred dollars out of the sky into my lap—but April turned to May and there was still no miracle in sight.
One rainy morning when we couldn’t work outside, Aunt Batty and I chopped rhubarb and made a batch of preserves. I enjoyed having another woman to do my household chores with, even if Aunt Batty did drive me to distraction sometimes, singing hymns at the top of her voice.
‘‘I need a miracle real bad, Aunt Batty,’’ I told her as I pulled boiling hot jelly jars out of the kettle with a pair of tongs. She had been singing about what a friend she had in Jesus, so I thought maybe she could pull a few strings for me. ‘‘Next time you talk to God, could you ask Him real nice for me?’’
‘‘Why, sure, Toots. What kind of a miracle do you need?’’
‘‘He already knows. And tell Him I’m sorry about the lies and everything. I promise I won’t do it anymore.’’
After we finished spraying, Gabe and I moved all the beehives back into the orchard. Aunt Batty said it was best to do it at night so the bees would all be home in their beds. I headed up to my own bed afterward, but when I happened to glance out my window once the lights were out, I noticed that Gabe’s light in the barn was still burning. I started taking note of it after that, and no matter how late I turned in, Gabe’s light always stayed on long after mine.
One night my curiosity got the best of me. I put my coat on over my nightgown and crept outside to see what he was up to. From outside Gabe’s window I could clearly hear the clackety-clackof his typewriter keys.
I cried myself to sleep that night because the truth had finally sunk in—Gabe was a writer, not a farmer. Only a man who truly loved to write would stay up after a long, hard day of work to do it. Gabe was helping me because I had helped him, but that didn’t change what he was. Mr. Wakefield was a lawyer and Reverend Dill was a minister and Gabe was a writer. Period. Even if he was Matthew Wyatt—and I was starting to doubt that he was—he would always
want to write, not farm.
‘‘I can’t change what I am, Eliza,’’my daddy had once told me. I’d begged him to settle down somewhere so I could have a home to live in and a real family like all the other kids had. ‘‘Look it up in the Good Book,’’he’d said. ‘‘A leopard can’t change his spots.’’Gabe could grow a beard like a hobo or put on a pair of farmer’s overalls, but he couldn’t change what he was any more than my daddy could.
Change was all around me this time of year. The robins had returned, the buds were swelling on the trees, and the orchard was about to bloom. I used to grow excited every spring, waiting for all the trees to bloom and the birds to start singing again. But I’d been through too many changes this past year to get excited this time. I lay awake worrying night after night, watching the light in Gabe’s room burn until well after midnight, unable to sleep as I counted the days until the Deer Springs Savings and Loan would demand their money. Only one week left...Then five days...Then three.
Two days before the loan was due, I was pacing in my bedroom shortly before dawn when I thought I heard Winky barking outside. I peered out of my window and saw a ghostly figure dressed in white, fluttering through the cherry orchard. I ran to a different window for a better view, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Beneath lacy pink branches that had seemed to flower overnight, Aunt Batty danced in circles in her nightgown, with Winky barking and leaping for joy alongside her. As the sun slowly rose behind them, a chorus of birds burst into song. If fairies and wood sprites had crept out from behind the trees and joined the celebration, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.
I ran downstairs and slipped into my coat and a pair of boots. As I grabbed Aunt Batty’s coat off the hook and hurried outside with it, I told myself I was only going out there to keep the poor, silly woman from catching her death of pneumonia. But in my heart I knew something else drew me. The miracle of springtime had exploded all around her and I needed a miracle to descend upon me, as well. Aunt Batty had promised me an angel and God had sent me two. Maybe another wonder would drop out of the sky along with the cherry blossoms.
Aunt Batty grinned when she saw me hurrying toward her, then she lifted her arms in the air and twirled like a ballerina. I halted her in the middle of her spin and draped her coat over her shoulders.
‘‘What are you doing out here in only your nightclothes?’’ I chided. ‘‘You’ll catch your death!’’
‘‘Not death, Toots—life! Resurrection life! Eternal life!’’ She spread her arms wide and her coat slipped to the ground. ‘‘Walter told me to come out here and see God’s promise for myself!’’
I knew that a few more of her tent stakes must have slipped loose if she heard Walter talking to her after all these years. Winky must have suffered the same affliction. He was still leaping and twirling and barking as if he hadn’t noticed that his dancing partner had stopped. I bent to pick up Aunt Batty’s coat and slipped it around her again. She gripped my hands.
‘‘Did you come out to dance with us?’’ she asked, twirling me around in a circle with her.
‘‘No. I...Ithought you might be cold.’’
‘‘Come and join us, Gabe!’’ she suddenly called out. I turned around, mortified to see Gabe walking toward us. He had dressed hastily, with one strap of his bib overalls still undone and his coat unbuttoned. He had forgotten his shirt altogether.
‘‘What’s going on out here?’’ he asked, combing one hand through his tousled hair.
Aunt Batty dropped one of my hands and beckoned for him to join our little circle. ‘‘Come on, we’re celebrating life!’’
‘‘Life?’’ He seemed as puzzled as I was. He halted a few feet away from us, his hands shoved safely in his pockets. I freed my other hand from her grasp and quickly pulled my coat closed over my nightgown.
‘‘Yes, life!’’ Aunt Batty said, spreading her arms wide again.
‘‘I’ve seen spring come to the orchard every year as far back as I can remember and I’ve never grown tired of it. Oh, the wonder of it! The outrageous beauty! God didn’t have to give us cherry blossoms, you know. He didn’t have to make apple trees and peach trees burst into flower and fragrance. But God just loves to splurge. He gives us all this magnificence and then, if that isn’t enough, He provides fruitfrom such extravagance!’’
Gabe and I exchanged uneasy glances. ‘‘You’re barefoot, Aunt Batty,’’ he said. ‘‘Maybe we ought to go inside and talk about this.’’
‘‘Oh, but the promise of eternal life is out here, all around us! A week ago these trees were just dead sticks—now they’re bursting with life! It’s a message from God, just like Walter said.’’
‘‘When did Walter tell you all this?’’ I asked warily.
‘‘Oh, years ago!’’
I frowned. Couldn’t she see that her stories had more holes than her old moth-eaten yellow sweater? ‘‘You told me all about Walter Gibson, but you never said—’’
‘‘That’s because I didn’t get to finish Walter’s story. Well, I guess it’s my story, too.’’
‘‘You mean there’s more?’’
‘‘Much more! Jesus said that whoever believes in Him will never die! You and your kids will see Sam again, Gabe will see all his friends and loved ones again, I’ll see mine....Springtime is God’s promise that someday we’ll all share His resurrection life! Our weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning!’’
Aunt Batty’s Story
Deer Springs, 1895
‘‘Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over
it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow!’ ’’
THE TALMUD
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My father’s house seemed very quiet after Lydia married Frank Wyatt and moved away. I missed her terribly. It was just Father and me in the long winter evenings—and he never was one to waste words. Frank hired a girl from town to help Lydia with the housework and the new baby, but Lydia was still much too busy to visit me very often. I wrote some halfhearted poems and stories, but without my sister’s encouragement I lacked the confidence to send them away to be published. The year dragged slowly past.
The following spring I poured all my creative energies into planting a vegetable garden for Father and me. It cheered me out of my winter doldrums to plant the seeds, then tend them and nurture them and watch them grow. I had spent all morning in my garden one hot day in early July when Father called me inside around noontime.
‘‘Betty, get in here. It’s time to fix lunch.’’
I tried not to let his bossiness irritate me. That’s just the way Father was. Besides, the sun was getting too hot to hoe weeds. I hung my straw hat on a hook by the door and waited a moment for my eyes to readjust from the bright sunlight. When they did, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Father sat at the kitchen table counting money like a Wall Street banker. He had a huge stack of cash piled in front of him.
‘‘Where did all that money come from?’’ I asked.
‘‘We have boarders again.’’
‘‘Boarders? You mean, someone rented the cottage?’’
‘‘Yes, that Gibson fellow came back. He paid for two months this time.’’
Surprise sucked the breath right out of me. I stared at my father, afraid to believe him, afraid to raise my hopes too high.
‘‘Really?’’ I finally managed.
It peeved Father that I would question him. ‘‘You think I’m making it up? The man came back, I’m telling you. He drove up in his fancy carriage while you were working outside, and he rented the cottage for the rest of the summer.’’
I had read about hearts soaring in novels, but I’d never known what it meant until then. I would have turned and run straight down to the cottage but my clothes were all sweaty and I had dirt beneath my fingernails.
‘‘Does he want meals again?’’ I asked as I started pumping water into the sink to scrub up.
‘‘He says there are two of them to feed this year. That’s
why he paid me all this money.’’
I suddenly knew what it meant to have your heart sink, also. Mine plummeted. ‘‘Two people? Who’s with him, Father?’’
‘‘His wife, I suppose.’’
I took my time fixing lunch as I steeled myself to meet Walter’s wife. She would be a very beautiful woman, of course, and very elegantly dressed in fine linen and silk—no feed sack aprons or muslin petticoats for Mrs. Walter Gibson. Her skin wouldn’t be sun-browned and freckled like mine, either. Rich women always sat under parasols when they went out in the sun to preserve their delicate, porcelain complexions. And she would be thin—‘‘slender as a reed,’’ a novelist would describe her—and every bit as graceful as one. I considered strapping on my bust-perfecto corset, just so she wouldn’t pity me, but I needed Lydia to help me man-handle the laces.
How could Walter bring his wife back to the place where we’d shared so many happy memories? I wondered as I finally carried the tray of food down to the cottage. Then I nearly turned around and ran home when I realized the truth. Of course! Walter didn’t know I was here! He thought I married Frank and moved out of my father’s house. He would expect my sister or someone else to bring his meals, not me. I slowed my steps, searching for a way to avoid seeing him. I couldn’t think of one.
As I emerged from the trees into the clearing, I saw Walter sitting all alone in a cane chair facing the pond. I drew a deep breath, trying to will back my tears at the wonderful sight of him. I had believed I’d never see him again. Then the cottage door opened and our second boarder came out onto the porch. It was his servant, Peter.
I was so relieved, so overjoyed, I nearly dropped the lunch tray. ‘‘Walter!’’ I called out to him as I hurried across the grass.
He turned and saw me. ‘‘Betsy? What a wonderful surprise!’’ He tried to smile but he appeared shaken. ‘‘I didn’t realize you and your husband lived nearby.’’