Roses

by Leila Meacham

  “It had to do with some… recent changes, I believe. All she told me for sure was that she loved you.”

  Rachel closed her eyes again. That, too, was unlike her great-aunt. Had she known she was seriously ill? “Did she tell you she had heart trouble?” she asked.

  “No, she never told me she had heart trouble. That came as a surprise to all of us. Now back to the question of your arrival….”

  “I’ll try to be there by ten in the morning,” she said, “and I would appreciate your making those appointments. I don’t know if I’ll have any luck persuading my mother and brother to come with me and Daddy, but would you also alert Sassie to the possibility that she may have to make up an extra guest room?”

  There was another pause, as if Amos were carefully considering his next statement. “I would suggest that you convince at least Jimmy to come with your father. I’m sure Mary would have wanted them both at the reading of the will to hear her… last regards to them.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, hoping that Amos’s phrasing might convince her mother to come, too. Aunt Mary’s will had been the source of all the trouble between them. Rachel could hear her mother now: I’ll never forgive you, Rachel Toliver, if your great-aunt leaves the whole ball of wax to you and nothing to your father and brother!

  “Well, then, I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel,” Amos said. “Let me know for certain the time, and I’ll be at the airport to pick you up.”

  Rachel slowly replaced the receiver, niggled by a sense that some other disturbance besides Aunt Mary’s death was troubling Amos… like a distinct hum beneath a louder sound. It was the second time that day she’d had the feeling that something else was wrong other than the trouble at hand.

  “I take it your great-aunt is gone from us?” Ron asked quietly, slipping a handkerchief from his back pocket to pat his eyes. He’d removed his hat and taken a seat on the other side of the room.

  “Yes, she’s gone, Ron. A heart attack around one o’clock. You’ll have to take charge around here.”

  “Be happy to, though I’m sorry it has to be this way. We’ll miss her, as we sure as hell’re gonna miss you.”

  Her eyes flooded again. “Tell Danielle, will you? I’ll be out in a few minutes. I need to notify my parents.”

  When the door had clicked closed, Rachel sat without moving for a few minutes, listening to the peculiar quiet that had fallen. Silence makes a buzzing sound when someone you love has died, she thought, like a fly in an empty room. She got up and moved to the window, desiring to see the sun before she picked up the phone. At one time, the number she was about to call had represented the truest place on earth to her, an umbilical chord to acceptance, understanding, and love. But that was before Aunt Mary. That was before Somerset.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Granddad?” Matt rapped a knuckle softly on his grandfather’s sitting room door and spoke quietly to avoid disturbing him if he’d managed to fall asleep in his chair.

  “Come on in, son. I’m up.”

  Matt entered to find his grandfather ramped forward in his recliner, looking none the better for his nap. His face appeared composed, but his red-rimmed eyes and the puffy pockets beneath them spoke to a loss far greater than that of an old friend and neighbor. Matt’s heart grabbed as it always did when he realized that his grandfather was nearing the end of his days. He drew up a chair. “Rachel’s just returned Amos’s call. I told Savannah to give him lunch. He hadn’t eaten.”

  “Johnnie Walker Red, from the smell of him,” Percy said. “That’s not like Amos.”

  “Well, maybe he took a belt or two after you called. Like me, he’d visited with Mary only a few hours before she died. You can tell he’s grieving.”

  “She’ll be a severe loss to him. They were great friends. Amos was even a little in love with her when he first came to Howbutker. He was a young man then. If Mary ever noticed, she didn’t let on. Goodness, what man wasn’t a little in love with Mary?”

  Matt couldn’t resist asking, “Including you?”

  Percy raised his eyebrows at him, dark expressive ledges over gray eyes that on good days were still remarkably clear and alert. “What makes you ask that?”

  Matt tugged at his ear, a giveaway to his grandfather that he wished he hadn’t spoken, but if it comforted him, what difference did it make now if he told him of the old horse Mary had let out of the barn? “Like I told you, I ran into Mary standing by that old elm near the statue of St. Francis. What I didn’t tell you was that I caught her looking confused and talking to herself.”

  “Is that so?” A light flickered on behind the bloodshot eyes. “What was she saying?”

  “Well…” He squirmed a bit under his grandfather’s tightened gaze. “She thought I was you. She seemed to have gone back in time and was reliving some memory. When I called her name, she turned around and said…”

  Matt could sense his grandfather’s sudden tension. “Go on, son. She said…?”

  “She said, ‘Percy, my love, did you have to drink all my soda? I wanted it that day, you know, as much as I wanted you.’ That’s it verbatim, Granddad. I hope I’m not dragging up old memories better left buried.”

  “You’re not. Anything else?”

  “Well, yes.” Matt found himself wriggling again. “She said, ‘I was too young and silly and too much of a Toliver. If only I hadn’t been such a fool.’ And that’s when I shook her a little and identified myself.” He paused to gauge Percy’s reaction. “That’s why I asked if you weren’t once in love with her yourself.”

  Percy let out a raspy chuckle. “In love with her once?” He swung his gaze to the mantel lined with a series of family pictures. They were mostly of Matt in sports gear and one of him as an infant in his mother’s arms, but occupying front and center was the official photograph of his father in his U.S. Marines uniform, the left side of his jacket covered in medals and campaign ribbons. Matt couldn’t tell whether Percy’s eye fell on the portraits or the murky watercolor—a present from his father—that filled the space above it. In a voice scratchy with memory, he mused, “It was July 1914, at the dedication ceremony of the courthouse. That’s where Mary had gone in memory when you found her. She was fourteen, and I was nineteen. She wore a white dress tied with a green ribbon. I was already in love with her and planned to marry her, but she didn’t know it.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Matt felt a thrill of wonder. “Did she ever know it?”

  Percy said, “Yes, she knew it.”

  “Well, then, what happened? Why didn’t you marry?” His assertion was plain: His grandfather would have been a hell of a lot happier married to Mary Toliver than he ever was to Lucy Gentry.

  “Somerset happened,” Percy said, kneading the knuckles of his right hand, a habit when he was deep into himself, Matt had noticed.

  “You want to talk about it?” he asked. “That Johnnie Walker Red doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”

  Percy shook his head. “Won’t help, I’m afraid. And, no, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over and done with… all that might have been.”

  “Granddad…” Commiseration for his grandfather stabbed through him, bound all these years to a woman he did not love. “You’re breaking my heart. Did Gabby ever know about you and Mary?”

  “Oh, yes, she knew, but Mary and I happened before I married your grandmother, and there was never any ‘about you and Mary’ after that.”

  “Did… you still love her after you married Gabby?”

  Percy worked his hands. “I loved her all of her life, from the moment she was born.”

  Dear God, Matt thought. Eighty-five years…. A bereaved silence fell, Percy still massaging his hands. “Did Ollie know?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  Amazed, Matt blew out his breath, sad to the soles of his feet. “Was Mary the reason Gabby left you?”

  “She was a factor, but your grandmother had other grievances.” Percy adjusted his hips as if he were uncom
fortable. “All so much water under the bridge now,” he said.

  And not waters he cared to go fishing in, Matt gathered, but he wasn’t going to let him off the hook now that the line was in. “Well, I’d like to hear about it someday, Granddad. I’d like you to fill in the empty spaces of our family… while there’s still time.”

  Percy cast him a surprised glance. “Is that how you think of… certain periods in our family’s history—as empty spaces? Well, I suppose I can understand how you might be curious about them, but they’re in the past and don’t pertain to you at all.”

  “Why haven’t you and Gabby divorced?”

  “That, too, is a part of the past that does not pertain to you.” He bestowed his smile famous for disarming opposition. “Maybe you should go down and check on Amos. He’ll be even more upset now that he’s had to break the news of Mary’s death to Rachel. At least he’ll be consoled by the thought that she’s finally coming to live in Howbutker. He adores that girl.”

  Matt acquiesced to his brush-off. He supposed he’d never learn why his grandfather had stayed in an absent marriage when it had always been obvious to him that he was born for home and family, for a wife’s devoted care. Still, he felt a strange envy. What it must be like to love a woman as he had… for as long… and never to want another. In that regard, he had been a very lucky man.

  “I’m looking forward to Rachel living here myself,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s time we got to know each other better.”

  Percy gave him a penetrating look. “I wouldn’t be getting any ideas about her, Matt. She’s like a young Mary in more ways than her looks, and they’re not Warwick-friendly.”

  Matt gazed down at his grandfather. “That sounds like one of those empty spaces I mentioned, and if Rachel’s as lovely as I remember, it would be hard for a man not to get ideas about her.”

  Percy’s face grew serious. “Let’s just say that in Rachel’s case, the apple fell directly under the tree, and I wouldn’t want you to repeat my history.”

  Matt punched his shoulder. “Well, until you tell me what I’m to look out for, I’ll just have to take my chances, won’t I?”

  PERCY LISTENED TO MATT’S FOOTSTEPS recede down the hall. Confident young pup. He had no idea what he was letting himself in for, if history was indeed so unkind as to give a repeat performance. Percy wouldn’t be worried about him if he weren’t so much like himself—unable to resist the allure of a challenge, the thrill of the chase, and then when the trap was sprung…

  Slowly he rose and let himself out onto the shaded porch of his sitting room. The afternoon felt as hot as it had in 1914, and he remembered that cold chocolate soda and Mary’s haughty rejection of it. He remembered everything about Mary, her taste and feel and smell… even now.

  He drew a chaise longue farther under the shade of the roof and stretched out. The only way to prepare Matt for Rachel was to fill in those spaces he mentioned, and that he would never do. But if he ever were of a mind to relate the tale of how he’d aborted his happiness, where to begin? He supposed it would have to be the day of his greatest pain, the morning he returned from Canada and learned that Mary had married Ollie….

  PERCY’S STORY

  Chapter Thirty-three

  HOWBUTKER, OCTOBER 1920

  The train was late chugging into the station. Percy had slept sporadically during the weeklong trip from Ontario, rising before dawn to smoke on the platform, staying up past midnight in the lounge car, drinking an ocean of coffee, and cursing himself for being a fool. He should have let his parents know to expect him, but his mother would alert Mary, and he wasn’t sure what her reaction would be, considering how they’d parted. He planned to take her by surprise, sweep her into his arms, and kiss her senseless, tell her he loved her and that he didn’t give a damn about her obsession with Somerset, if only she’d marry him and live with him forever.

  Last night, however, he had slept soundly through the last call to breakfast and almost missed the first sight of the Piney Woods this side of Texarkana. He had awakened startled and hurriedly pulled on pants and a shirt to make his way through the berth cars to the rear platform. He had gripped the railing, the wind ballooning out his half-buttoned shirt, and sucked in the pungent air of East Texas on the verge of autumn. He stood there now, recalling when he and the boys returned from France. He’d never in all his life forget the vision of Mary standing on the platform, aloof even in the crowd, her clothes outdated, her expression too tense, but, Jesus, she’d been beautiful… his Mary. Almost there… almost there… almost there…, the wheels sang, and he believed the promise of their cadence.

  Yes, by God, almost there, almost home, almost back in Mary’s arms, which he never should have left. He’d gone away hurt and angry and determined to get over her. He’d never played second fiddle to anything or anybody, and he certainly wouldn’t to his wife’s affections. He would be first or not at all.

  The cold of the Canadian Rockies had burned the arrogance out of him. The isolation had cleansed him of his pride. Lying in camp at night, listening to the men regale one another with tales of women, hearing beneath the braggadocio the wistfulness, the bitterness, the loneliness, he had felt the reach of an icy wind deep into the part of him that only Mary could warm. In the day, as he sawed and loaded and climbed trees whose heights touched the clouds, a need for her grew within him, more gnawing than any hunger, more essential than air or water or food.

  At the end of two months, he could stand no more. He was almost twenty-six. He yearned for a wife and home and children… for Mary. He wanted her no more than a heartbeat away in his bed, a hand across his table, a chair’s distance from him in the evening. He could learn to play second fiddle. The idea was to be in the band.

  He reentered the corridor. The train would be pulling into Howbutker within the next fifteen minutes or so. Once again, he was glad he’d not told his parents of his arrival. He’d be free to see Mary first. Today was his mother’s day to play bridge at the country club, and his father would be at his office. He’d take a cab and pick up his car without their being the wiser. If he didn’t find Mary at home, he’d drive directly to the plantation, and later when he saw his parents, he’d tell them he’d proposed to her.

  In the corridor, he encountered the young Negro porter who hailed from Howbutker and knew his name. “Why, Mister Percy, you missed your breakfast this morning. Want me to see ’bout rustlin’ you up a bite?”

  “No thanks, Titus. We’ll be arriving in a few minutes, and I know where I can get the best breakfast this side of the Sabine.”

  “And where might that be, sir?”

  “At Sassie’s table in Howbutker.”

  Titus nodded. “That be Miss Mary Toliver’s residence, I reckon. Or should I say ‘Mrs. Ollie DuMont’ now.” He smiled happily in bestowing this information, the glow of the corridor lamp glinting off the wide exposure of his teeth.

  The sudden drop of his blood pressure caused Percy to reach for the railing behind him. “I’m sorry, Titus. What did you say?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You just now be comin’ home, and they be already gone, but I’da thought you knew ’bout the weddin’. Not that it was a big one. Miss Mary and Mister Ollie married rather sudden like ’cause he was goin’ over to Paris awhile. The trip had somethin’ to do with his papa’s store. They goin’ to combine business with pleasure.”

  Percy experienced the total lack of sound he’d encountered in the trenches when the blast of a mortar shell landed close by. For a few paralyzing moments, as the earth blackened before him, he saw Titus’s lips move but heard only silence.

  “Mister Percy, you all right?” Titus asked, waving his hand before Percy’s frozen stare.

  Percy’s lips moved woodenly. “How do you know all this?”

  “Why, ’cause it was all in the paper. There was even a picture of the newly marrieds. Miss Mary, she was all decked out in a white dress, and Mister Ollie, he was turned out in one of his smart s
uits. Mister Percy, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so, you don’t look so good. Sure I can’t get you some breakfast?”

  “No, no, Titus. How did they look? In the picture?”

  “Well, Mister Ollie, he had that bridegroom look. He got only one leg, you know, but that don’t stop him from lookin’ at Miss Mary the only way a man can….” He stopped, embarrassed, his color a shade lighter. “I mean… that is, to say—”

  “I know what you mean. Go on. What about Miss Mary?”

  “Well, now, Miss Mary, she don’t look so chipper. Most womenfolks don’t, I guess, when they get married….” Again the porter looked uncomfortable. “By that, I mean all the plannin’ Miss Mary had to do for the weddin’ and packin’ for the long trip to Europe. That’s enough to take the sap outta anybody….” Titus paused. “Mister Percy, you look like you could use a cup of coffee. Be right back.”

  Percy let his full weight fall against the paneled corridor wall. It wasn’t possible. He was dreaming. Mary couldn’t—wouldn’t have married anyone but him. They belonged together. They were one. Titus was mistaken. He felt along the railing until he reached the sanctuary of his Pullman. He plunked down in stunned disbelief until he heard the porter at the door. He heaved himself to the lavatory and buttoned his shirt. “Come in,” he called in a steady voice. He didn’t recognize himself. His mouth was thin and bloodless. In five minutes, he’d aged ten years. “Leave the coffee there, Titus. Tip’s on the nightstand.”

  “I’ll just help myself to a dime, Mister Percy. Welcome home.”

  There has to be a mistake, he told himself again. But his mind forced him to realize what his heart would not accept. There was no mistake. Mary had married Ollie to rescue Somerset after he’d rejected her and compounded his stupidity by running off to the Canadian Rockies without a word. But how could she do this to him—to them—marry his best friend, a man she did not love and never would as she’d loved him… as Ollie deserved to be loved?