Willow Springs

by Jan Watson

  It was as if Simon had caught a wood sprite or a whisper of smoke. He’d captured her, but could he hold her?

  He resolved to visit his sister after office hours. He needed some advice.

  After a noon meal of fried chicken, potato salad, and strawberries with clotted cream, Simon settled his derby on his head, kissed Copper lightly on the cheek, and strode purposefully down the sidewalk, off to a waiting room full of patients.

  Copper leaned against the wooden porch railing, waving him away, absentmindedly touching her face where his mustache had tickled her cheek, glad for his good-bye. She couldn’t wait to get back to the library. A whole world of knowledge awaited in those forbidden books. What was the harm? She would just be careful to put them back exactly as she found them.

  The library was cool and filled with shadows cast by the huge sugar maple in the side yard. Copper raised the window, thankful for the screen to keep out flies, and propped it open with the stick left there for that purpose. Retrieving the tome titled Disorders of the Digestive System, she lost herself in the alimentary canal. Who knew there were thousands of feet of intestines curled up in the human body? How could such a thing be possible? She marveled at God’s creation as she smoothed a hand across her own flat belly.

  That afternoon she learned that the silver-dollar term for belching was eructation, and indigestion, or dyspepsia, was caused by impure air, inattention to diet, and drinking cold water with meals.

  Taken aback, she read that pork in the diet was the cause of diphtheria and wondered if she could give up her morning sausage and bacon. She decided she would rather be plump than take the fat-reduction drink made from the juice of pokeberries mixed with a little powdered licorice root, used by G. Million, MD, to reduce a lady’s weight from 247 pounds to 198 pounds in fifteen days.

  Shuddering to study about water brash and bloody flux, Copper was surprised to hear her own stomach growling in response to the tantalizing smell drifting her way from the kitchen, where Searcy was cooking supper. The afternoon had flown by. Simon would be home soon.

  She carefully positioned the borrowed book between its cousins on the polished shelf and pulled the curved front of the bookcase closed, pausing to wipe a smudge from the glass with the tail of her skirt. Before leaving Simon’s study, she glanced about, pleased to leave it as she found it . . . save for the open window, where lace curtains fluttered in the late-afternoon breeze.

  When Simon made his way home from his visit with his sister, he found his bride in the dining room arranging zinnias in a vase. Even though it was still light out, candles were burning on the dining room table, releasing the fragrant scent of vanilla into the air.

  Perhaps Alice was right. He just needed to take a firm hand, show Laura Grace who was in charge instead of spoiling her. Just look what his stand on her reading material had wrought. Obviously she’d spent the afternoon in the flower garden instead of in his library reading about matters much too weighty for the feminine brain. He silently congratulated himself. It is going to be easier to train a wife than I had imagined. A firm hand and she will learn her proper place, enjoying it all the while.

  They ate their meal in pleasant silence, each lost in thought, Simon dreaming of the acquiescent little wife Laura Grace would soon become.

  Returning from a late-evening call on Mrs. Wilson, who lived five miles out in the country and wasn’t sick at all, Simon found Laura Grace asleep on top of the bed, a fashion magazine spilling from her hand. He gently eased her beneath the light quilt that would protect her from the night air. He traced the outline of her shoulder before she stirred and brushed his hand away.

  “Oh, Simon.” She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. “I meant to wait up for you. Was Mrs. Wilson all right?”

  “She was fine, merely lonely, as I would be if not for you.”

  She burrowed under the covers, already asleep again.

  For a moment he sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. Her light breath stirred a lock of hair that had fallen across her face. He tucked it away and then knelt there, as he did each night, and thanked God for the goodness of his day, for Mrs. Wilson’s continued health, and for the gift of Laura Grace.

  Prayers finished, Bible read, teeth brushed, Simon trod down the stairs to close up the house. While winding the grandfather clock in the front hall, a drift of air gave him pause. He stepped into the library. The curtains gusted. The window was propped in a way that he would not have left it, the propping stick slanted across the opening while he would have positioned it straight up.

  Laura Grace came back in here after I asked her not to! Indignant, he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and turned one in the lock of each bookcase, then took himself up the stairs.

  It’s my duty to protect her, he thought, puffed up with righteousness, never owning that what he really wanted was to make her over to his specifications, break her will, have her be the wife he thought he wanted, the one his sister told him he needed. Climbing into bed, he tucked her sleeping body into his own and drifted off into the deep and dreamless sleep of the pure in spirit.

  Copper stared at her breakfast. Weighing starvation against diphtheria, she shook pepper on her eggs and took a bite of crisp, thick-sliced bacon. She spied Searcy through the screen door, sluicing water over the stone porch floor, scrubbing mightily with an old mop. “Searcy, come and eat with me. I need company.”

  “Miz Corbett, this ain’t no time for socializing,” Searcy huffed. “Mallie done scrubbed all her porches. She be like a fox. No matter how early a body starts, she be finished first. Her floors wet before the sun come up. Sometime Searcy like to ring her head with this here mop.”

  “If you would let me help, we could finish way before Mallie.”

  Searcy cast a silencing look Copper’s way, then sank to her hands and knees and dipped a scrub brush into the steaming water. “Don’t need no help,” she mumbled as water splashed about. “They be plenty work left in these old hands.”

  Simon and Laura Grace were up early Saturday morning, he to attend a symposium at Transylvania University, his alma mater, where he was to deliver the opening address.

  “Hold still.” Laura Grace pinned a freshly plucked rosebud to his lapel. “I wish I could go with you and listen to your speech.”

  He pulled her into his arms and nuzzled her neck. “You would be bored silly.”

  “You’ll make me muss your coat,” she replied, wiggling out of his arms.

  Taking a small comb, he stood before the mirror and groomed his mustache. His eyes met hers in the looking glass. “What will you do with yourself today?”

  “Well, since Alice and Benton are coming for supper tonight, as well as Hester and her mother, I’ll have plenty to do.”

  “I don’t want you to tax yourself.”

  “Don’t fret; it’s just supper. I want to do something nice for Alice. I want so much for her to like me.”

  “I . . . I’m sure she does.” The lie tripped on Simon’s tongue and gave him pause. His sister didn’t like his wife much at all. His visit with her after finding Laura Grace in the library had made it obvious. . . .

  He’d found Alice in the dining room, sitting alone at the end of the long table, composing her week’s menus, writing on the finest onionskin as if it were the most important task in the world. The afternoon was unseasonably warm, he’d noticed on his walk from the office, and he mopped perspiration from his brow as he approached his sister.

  “Simon,” she chided, “why do you insist on walking instead of having Reuben bring your carriage around?” She offered her cheek for her brother’s light kiss.

  “It gives me a chance to meet people. . . . Oh, thanks, Joseph.” He took a long swallow from the glass of chilled water Alice’s butler handed him. “Folks are more likely to ask for help if they see me on the street. They won’t come to the office because they think they have to pay if they do.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” She put aside her writing supplies a
nd arched her eyebrows, just like she used to when he was a boy with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Why shouldn’t they . . . ?”

  “Pay, Simon. Why shouldn’t they pay for your services?”

  “You miss the point, Alice. If they had funds, they’d come to the office. Oh, never mind. We’ve had this conversation before. It’s not why I came.”

  “I don’t know why you insist on hobnobbing with every derelict in Lexington instead of claiming your proper place in society. Why did you come?”

  He sat down, bouncing his hat on his knee. “I wanted to thank you for the dinner party.”

  “It was my duty. Now that you are married you will have to think of how your actions affect your wife’s social standing. I suspect she will have trouble enough without your adding to it.”

  A sharp retort formed on his lips, but he held it back. He loved his sister. She was more like a mother to him than his own frail one had ever been. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but someone must care for the indigent.”

  Standing, Alice moved behind his chair and put her hand upon his shoulder. “It is not your place to save everyone. Now you’ve gone too far. Laura Grace will cause you nothing but grief.”

  “Please don’t say that,” he replied, angry.

  “She’ll never be happy here. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Then I shall take her home.”

  “That might be best for all concerned. . . . Benton could arrange an annulment.” Sadly, he heard the relief in his sister’s voice.

  “Ah, Alice.” He patted the hand that rested so heavily upon his shoulder. “If she goes, then so do I.”

  Copper took a moment to clean and oil her rifle. Loving the heft and feel of it, with its sleek wood stock, she looked down the sight and then fitted a shell into the chamber. A pang of homesickness, sharp as a whetted blade, caught her off guard as the memory of hunting the mountain hollows with her father crept into her mind.

  She’d swiped a pair of Simon’s old britches, and now she cinched them tightly about her waist with a length of grosgrain ribbon. They fit much better than the ones of her father’s she used to wear. Dipping a piece of cloth in a tin of kerosene kept for the lamps, she swabbed a ring around her ankles. She hated chiggers with their mean bites and didn’t care if she smelled like a smoky lamp pot if it prevented that infernal itching. As she pulled on her work boots, she laughed to think of the difference in her attire from Wednesday night when she had been all in splendor.

  “What are you laughing at, Miz Corbett?” Andy Tolliver peered through cupped hands held against the screen door.

  Copper opened the door, and Andy barreled in. “Well, I suppose you are right funny-looking,” he said around the mouthful of biscuit and bacon she set on the table for him. “I ain’t never seen a woman wear pants before.” He continued to eat like a starved dog, and his eyes grew wide when he noticed her weapon. “What’re you doing with that there gun? Doc told me you’d be getting the house ready for company and for me to come help.”

  “I’m about to get supper. Do you want to come along?”

  Copper and Andy climbed the fence to the back pasture and hiked out to the woods they could see in the distance. Paw-paw snuffled and snorted his way alongside them, his excellent nose pressed to the ground.

  “This is real exciting, Miz Corbett. I ain’t never hunted for anything ’cept something from the cupboard to feed my sisters.”

  They made their way to a rolling hillside, thick with trees. Here and there Copper spied a few stately hickories and walnut trees too numerous to count. These woods should be thick with squirrels. The air was dense and moist with dew, perfumed by the fertile smell of the earth itself, of buried rock under soil made up of eons of decaying leaves and animal droppings. From somewhere came the sound of water burbling up out of the ground, a spring close by. A quick wind stirred the tops of the trees, and their branches clicked out a tune her ears were hungry to hear. Copper inhaled deeply, the first full breath she’d had since she left her mountain home.

  They pushed on and soon came upon a clearing, where they sat a moment. “We must be very still so the squirrels won’t spook,” she whispered. “If they see us, they’ll stay on the back side of the trees and we’ll not get a clear shot.”

  Killy . . . killy . . . killeeee. A shrill call interrupted Copper’s caution. A hawk soared above them; sunlight flashed off its slate blue wings.

  “There’s a chicken hawk,” Andy cried. “I hate them things. Minny Gerhard gave us eggs ’til them chicken thieves killed all her hens.”

  “That hawk is too small to kill chickens, Andy. It eats field mice, chipmunks, and sometimes even small snakes. Let’s lay back and watch the sky. Chances are we’ll see a chicken hawk. Their cry sounds like keeer . . . keeer.”

  Andy mimicked her movements and rested the back of his head on his laced fingers.

  “It’ll give you the shivers when they scream,” she continued as she stared into the blue sky, where little puffs of white clouds romped like sheep in a pasture, “for you know they are about to kill something. Once one carried off my pet rabbit, but I have to admit, they are beautiful to watch.”

  “Look!” Andy pointed.

  High above, three hawks circled the meadow. Ever so slowly, other redtails joined the three. Copper and Andy watched, mesmerized, while dozens of the raptors spiraled together, forming a funnel-shaped mass of dancing birds.

  “That’s called a kettle when they bunch in the air like that,” Copper explained.

  “Wow, that was something to see. You sure know a lot of things, Miz Corbett. How’d you get so smart?”

  “When I was about your age, my daddy and I lay out on a rock ledge high up on the side of a mountain, and he showed me just what I’m showing you. I love to be outdoors just watching things, don’t you?”

  “I ain’t had much time for watching,” Andy said in a voice too grown-up for a boy. “I have to take care of my family. I do jobs for anybody who’ll pay me, ’specially Doc Corbett. Why, sometimes he’ll slip me a fifty-cent piece when I ain’t hardly done nothing. Like today, he’ll likely pay me for having fun with you.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  Andy turned onto his belly and began to pull the heads off long stalks of ryegrass and pop them in his mouth. “No’m, but I’m real quick. I learned to read, and I cipher real good, so I don’t need no more schooling.” A long green stem bobbed in his mouth as he talked. Sitting up, he scratched his bare shin. “Bothersome chiggers, they get me ever time. I hope Ma’s friend left some whiskey at the house. That’ll stop the itch.”

  Copper sat up beside him and stared at him, alarmed. “You shouldn’t be into whiskey.”

  Andy looked at her as though he were the adult and she the child. “Don’t you go worrying about that. There’s never more than a taste in the bottom of his bottle. I keep it in case Dodie gets a earache. I wouldn’t ever drink it. It’ll make you puke your guts out.”

  “Is Dodie your sister?”

  Andy jumped up. “Dodie’s the baby, Marydell’s my sister.” He looked away from Copper. “Ma gets lonesome sometimes. . . .” His voice trailed off. “Hey, ain’t we going to shoot that gun?”

  “Sure, Andy.” Copper picked up the rifle. “See that black walnut tree? See that patch of bumpy-looking bark? That’s a gray squirrel. He’s supper.” She raised the gun to her shoulder. One clean shot felled her prey.

  Half a dozen squirrels later, Andy had his turn. Copper stood behind him, helped him sight his target, and held his shoulders steady.

  When the squirrel fell, Andy let out a war whoop to rival any brave. “Boy, Miz Corbett, I could do this all day. I never knowed you could have fun getting supper. Can I have this one to take home? Do you cook it like chicken? How do you get the fur off?”

  “That’s the next lesson, Andy. But first we need to find a nice fat rabbit. Alice doesn’t like squirrel.”

  As evening drew near, Copper dressed simply in
a brown broadcloth dress trimmed with black silk braid. She sat in front of the mirror and tried to tame the curls that escaped the tortoiseshell combs catching her hair in a roll at the back of her neck. Frustrated, she put the brush aside and opened the top drawer of her dressing table, searching for another comb.

  Her grandmother Taylor’s emerald necklace lay nestled on a bed of lace handkerchiefs. Picking it up, she let it dangle from her fingers. The jewels cast dazzling green prisms of light across the cabbage-rose wallpaper and flashed at her from the mirror. Mesmerized, she wondered about the things she’d heard Alice say at the party. What was the secret of her grandmother’s past? Why had Mam not told her about her family? Why hadn’t she asked?

  All Copper knew was that her natural mother and her stepmother were sisters and that Mam had once been a teacher at the Finishing School for Young Ladies right here in Lexington. The fall before Copper married Simon and left Troublesome Creek, Daddy had told her about the tragedy of her mother’s demise just two days after Copper’s birth. Shuddering, she remembered his words. She could almost feel the rush of dark water that carried her mother to her death.

  A solution came to mind. She could write Mam and ask her. Pen and paper would be ever so easy, and Mam wouldn’t be able to ignore her or change the subject.

  “You look very far away.” Simon’s voice startled her as he entered the room. She let the necklace fall back into its nest and closed the drawer as he planted little kisses on the back of her neck. “Supper smells good,” he continued. “I’m starving.”

  Alice sat ramrod straight at the table on the porch. The evening breeze felt fresh and cool, but whoever heard of eating out of doors? And such a menu: squirrel meat with gravy, soup beans, fried potatoes, corn bread—a lowlife’s supper. Where was Searcy? She’d have a word with her for neglecting her duties while Laura Grace kept jumping up to pile more food on her guests’ plates. So common . . .