If this wasn’t heaven, it sure felt like it. And if this wasn’t heaven . . . he sure had a lot of life left to live. And a letter to deliver . . . and a promise yet to keep.
one
MAY 1945
OAK SPRINGS, TEXAS
The farm truck that had picked him up somewhere on the road from College Station, Texas, groaned a metallic farewell. A cloud of dust and wayward bits of straw engulfed Luke. They billowed and settled, revealing a main street approximately twenty strides long with a looming gray water tower standing at the end. Oak Springs Welcomes You, it read in large painted letters, and looked for all the world like an overgrown tin man standing guard over the yellow brick road. Only instead of yellow bricks, it was sidewalk-lined asphalt with a lone blue model A pickup truck parked in perfect parallel with the curb.
“No place on earth like Oak Springs,” Danny had said.
“Really, Danny? Looks like you landed me in Oz.” Luke wished he could sock his friend on the shoulder right about now.
Unfolding his map, he looked from this spot—so small it wasn’t even named in writing—to the place he was headed for: New York. People’s hopes were high that the war would end soon, and the world of air travel was on the brink of big changes . . . changes he would be a part of. An honorable discharge followed by a long and confining rehabilitation, in which he nearly went mad, had set him ready to be back in the sky in a matter of months. This time, blazing the postwar trail in commercial flights, bringing war-weary Americans to places over the sea once more. Please, God.
Traveling to New York via Colorado with a detour to Oak Springs, Texas, may not have been the most expedient choice. And his wallet was nearly caving in on itself with emptiness because of it. But he had a delivery to make, and it was one that he’d agreed in his soul had to be made in person. Hannah Garland had saved his life, though she didn’t know it, and this one small thing was the least he could do to close this chapter of his life. Judging by the size of this town, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one woman. He had her address, of course, but no knowledge of where in this town or its reaches it might be.
He approached the first in a row of brick storefronts—Tom’s Diner. His stomach growled at the thought of a plate of steaming breakfast, though it was well past dinner, as proved by the locked door handle. Be back at sunup, the note on the door said.
Across the way, a tall brick theater with light-studded letters dubbing it the Orpheum Cinema touted in rounded black letters upon its marquis that Meet Me in St. Louis would open there this evening.
He passed a few other storefronts—Nettie’s Notions, its window display featuring fabric bolts lined up like so many books. The Chili Parlor, the air lingering with spices of cayenne and onion making its Closed sign a special brand of cruel. And the Ice Cream Emporium, where a lone busboy swept up the gleaming wooden floor inside.
Faint whistling sounded, and a man whittling in a rocking chair a few doors down gave a wave. His denim jeans were dusty and his plaid shirt had seen some trials in its day, but they suited the man and his entire come-sit-awhile demeanor just fine. “Howdy, soldier,” he said, chewing on a long piece of straw. “Not from around here, are ya?”
Luke slung his kit bag over his shoulder and approached, taking the man’s proffered hand.
“No, sir, I’m not.” He wasn’t exactly a soldier, either, but didn’t want to correct a perfect stranger. His uniform made him conspicuous out here, he’d realized on the journey. But that empty wallet—it didn’t have any hidden stores for purchasing extra clothes. He had a few civvies, but they were worn and dusty from travel, and this delivery deserved every ounce of respect he could muster in his meager possessions.
The man squinted at him past bushy dark brows, inviting more of an answer.
“I’m looking for someone, actually. A Miss Hannah Garland. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could find her?”
“Hannah Garland.” The man repeated the name as if it were the most perplexing thing on this green earth. “Now, what’ll you be wanting with Hannah Garland?”
Luke removed his hat, holding it to his stomach. “I knew her brother, Danny,” he said. “I just came to . . . to . . .” To what? Offer condolences? Which he’d already done by mail, when they’d first started writing. Deliver a letter on a paper-sack scrap that looked like a tot had written it? Which he could’ve done just as easily by mail.
He didn’t know quite how to explain to a stranger what he was doing here. Which was ironic, since Hannah Garland herself was essentially a stranger to him, too.
“Never you mind,” the man said, and the tangle of words fell away from Luke, as they always did when he got tongue-tied. “You might check inside,” he said. “They’re still open and might know Hannah’s whereabouts. Hard to keep track of that one.” He chuckled, shaking his head.
Luke studied the man, trying to grasp his meaning. The way Danny had talked about his older sister, she was a steady sort of presence who kept to home, holding down the fort there on the farm and keeping things running. He’d gathered from her letters that she was highly intelligent, and the sketches she had shared proved to be the careful work of someone extremely level-headed. The work of a mature soul, in both mind and body. Danny had always spoken of her with great respect.
“Yes, sir,” Luke said at last, and turned to go in the door indicated. Bresden’s Feed and Dime, the sign said, and a cardboard cutout of a man grinning over his tray of green-tinted 7Up bottles welcomed him inside. A bell jingled, and the warm scents of beeswax and sorghum-sweetened horse grain filled the place.
“Come on in,” a voice said, its source darting behind the storeroom door. “Got your snaffle bits up here, Jerry.”
But “up here” seemed to have four different directions, for the way the figure darted out of the storeroom, stuck a paper bag up in the air near the front of the store, ducked behind the counter to retrieve something, bumped her kerchief-covered head on the way back up, and was gone again in a flash.
He made his way to the front counter, which bore scratches and dings in its dark stain from decades upon decades of grain sacks and coin payments.
Reaching it, and with no sign of the proprietress, he cleared his throat. No response.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, Jerry, just take ’em. I’ll add ’em to your tab.”
“I, um . . .”
The kerchiefed figure emerged, bright cornflower-blue eyes glued to a paper she carried as she snapped a measuring tape absently in her other hand. Young—perhaps midtwenties—she wore denim overalls over a blue-and-white checked shirt like a modern-day Dorothy. She looked about as befuddled as if she’d just landed in Oz, too. That makes two of us, he thought.
She nearly bumped into the post between them, her hair gold as the wheat fields, a loose curl brushing her delicate chin.
“Watch out for the—” he started to say, but she dodged it without looking up.
“But that won’t work,” she mumbled to herself, tapping the paper with her thumb. “Assuming the width is twenty-six feet, then scaling it down to a quarter of the size would be . . .”
“Six and a half feet,” Luke said, at the same time as she.
“Right.” She slapped the paper on the counter. “Which won’t work with the current dimensions of the—” She snapped her attention up, as if realizing for the first time that she wasn’t alone.
“You’re not Jerry,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
“Jerry doesn’t do numbers,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He didn’t know Jerry, but he wasn’t about to argue with the narrowed eyes that seemed to be doing ten thousand calculations a minute as she looked him over, uniform and all, as the color suddenly went from her face. She gulped.
“Closed,” she said, in nearly a whisper.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re—we’re closed.” She scratched her head,
flustered. Looked at the clock. Stacked her paper on top of ten others like it, each one worn but kept with care. She gathered them up, crossing her arms over her heart with them held close.
“Great gumdrops, I lost track of the time. Pete’ll have my hide for closin’ late again.”
Grabbing the paper bag containing the snaffle bits, she lifted the hinged portion of the counter, ducking beneath to come out and show the way to the door. When she reached it, she paused with her hand on the knob and turned to face him full-on. He paused, too, hat in hand. “If you could just tell me where to find—”
She backed up a smidge, eyes on his uniform again, and nearly toppled a display of Murphy’s Oil Soap bottles behind her. He dove to catch the wire rack before it hit the ground, realizing he’d braced her elbow, too, steadying her. He froze, and so did she. Silence ticked between them. As he took a step back and withdrew his hand to regain a gentlemanly distance, she rolled her shoulders forward as if to settle something within herself. At their feet lay her beloved papers, and Luke stooped to gather them.
Hastily she joined him, scurrying with lightning speed and pressing the papers close to herself once more, this time with corners pointed every which way and the crinkle of paper filling the space between them. She stuck out the paper bag to him and opened the door, practically pushing him out.
“But these aren’t my—”
She pulled the last remaining paper from his grip, with a quick smile said, “Thank you, sir,” and shut the door. But not before he glimpsed the stick-straight etching on the paper. His thoughts slammed as worlds collided.
That—that was his drawing.
One—or one of the many, rather—that he’d sent to Hannah Garland.
If the ridiculously straight lines and too-sharp angles didn’t give it away, his trademark signature in the bottom right corner did: Keep well, Hannah.
He never signed it sincerely. Too many people signed letters that way and didn’t mean it. He should know.
Echoes of the jangling bell laughed at him right along with the man in the rocking chair.
“Find what you were looking for?” the man said.
He glanced through the glass door at the whirlwind of a woman flitting about, turning off lights. She looked away at rapid-fire speed the one time she glanced over her shoulder at him. If this was Oz . . . was she Dorothy or the tornado?
“Y-yes,” he said slowly. “I believe I have.” And she was not at all what he’d expected. “But I’ll have to try again tomorrow, I think.”
“You think,” the man said, and laughed deeply. “Tell you a secret, son. There’s a time for thinkin’, and a time for actin’, and many a fool get the two mixed up.”
“That may well be, sir, but I’m afraid today is not my day for acting. Is there an inn or a boardinghouse here?”
A fresh wave of laughter from the man was less than comforting. “Sure is,” he said. “Down the road a piece. Take a right at the windmill. Keep going toward the big tree. You’ll see it. Can’t miss it.”
“Thanks,” he said, the paper bag crinkling in his arms and reminding him of its presence. With the store dark as night behind them now, he had no chance of returning the snaffle bits to tornado girl. “Do you know a Jerry?”
“Sure do,” the man said, standing stiffly, so that the echoes of the creaking rocking chair seemed to reverberate in the man’s bones. He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet ya.”
“Jerry.” Luke shook the man’s hand.
“Last I knew, that’s me. Sat down a spell to rest my rusty old joints before goin’ in for my snaffle bits. Looks like you saved me the trip, and I thank you for it. And you are?”
Lost, he thought. “Luke,” he said. “Luke Hampstead.”
“Well, Luke Hampstead, stick with me. I’ll show ya where you can stay, and you can try again tomorrow with Ms. Hannah.”
two
Someday, I’ll keep going. Just up and up and up, and I’ll see the world.”
Hannah lay on the grass beneath the great old oak as purple-gray dusk slipped through the branches above. She could almost hear her childhood self saying it, hair flying wild behind her as she swung from the swing that hung from the big branch.
And even more, she could hear her brother’s laugh. “I know you will, Hannah,” Danny had said when they were kids. “And I’ll build a house and put down roots right here, and you can come home whenever you need a place to rest those wings.”
She remembered how he’d stood so proudly, looking out on their grandparents’ farmland to the east. The tree didn’t belong to them, but the innkeeper who owned it on the next parcel over never minded their playing beneath it, so long as they steered clear of the weddings and such.
It had been a magical childhood, growing up there, with the inn’s lights glowing into the evenings, its player piano piping ragtime that tumbled down the hill to her and Danny. She used to spin herself around, fancying she knew all the loveliest dance steps, while Danny rolled his eyes and kept to his books.
And then the inn had fallen silent and empty, those months after Black Sunday. She remembered that day in vivid detail—the tinny voice on the radio was somber with news of the great wind that picked up the earth itself from all that farmland, up in Oklahoma, spun it up in the air, and blew it clean away. So far that it blackened their skies down here in Oak Springs, its doomsday effects killing the land and sucking the life right out of towns like theirs, with farmers picking up and heading west before they lost everything.
Couples seeking a romantic getaway stopped coming to the Kissing Tree Inn, and the old Victorian had been boarded shut for a decade now.
But the tree lived on, bearing story upon story in its carved trunk.
“Just not mine,” she said, breathing out. She had never launched from that swing, kept on flying to see the world. And, ironically, Danny had been the one to be plucked from the land, until the war had claimed him for good. So here she was, planted in the grass he’d loved, fresh off from making a fool of herself to that nice airman today.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway, Hannah Garland?” She hopped to her feet, ready to give herself a proper scolding. “A man serves his country in this awful war, comes back, finds himself in the Feed and Dime, and all you can do is hush up like a silent old grave and push him out? Great gumdrops, you fool. You should’ve rolled out the red carpet! Pulled out a trumpet! Baked him a cake!”
The tirade against herself was off to a good start, but it hadn’t tapped into the tempest inside of her. Approaching the trunk, she leaned her forehead against it and let out a wail. A fake wail, but she’d long given up thinking she’d ever cry again. When news of her brother’s demise reached her, she hadn’t shed a tear. The pain went too far down, way past the place of words, and stopped up her tears forever, it seemed. The guilt over that seared her something fierce.
The truth was, that same force—whatever had stopped up her tears—had resurfaced again today. When that airman stood looking at her with solemn hope in his gray eyes, she’d wanted to hug him for whatever he’d been through, and she wanted to slug him for not being Danny, and she felt eternal remorse for the latter. The whole crisscrossed mess inside of her just stopped up her words and turned her into a bumbling fool. Well, even more of a bumbling fool than usual.
“Make it right, Hannah.” She closed her eyes as she felt the bark of the tree press into her forehead. Lifting her head, she rubbed the spot and took a shaky breath. “Get to work.”
Pulling the papers from her satchel, she spread them fan-like in her hand. Danny had sent some, and his friend Luke had carried the torch when Danny no longer could. The two men’s drawings were as different as night and day. Her brother’s were haphazard in scale and captivating to behold. When he’d been drafted into this war and she’d been the one to put down roots to hold down the family farm, he’d promised to send her the world, one picture at a time. And he had. Sketches of London from the air, of a
tiny chapel in the Alps, of a cathedral in Italy. The focus of his sketches had kept narrowing, from castles down to homes, until that was almost exclusively what he’d sent. Homes, he’d written. To give us hope for when I return and you can take flight, Hannah.
It was then she’d determined that they’d be kept more than on paper. She’d bring them to life, in a house right here. Danny’s house, and it’d be waiting for him when he got back. A place to hold the broken things he’d seen and taken such care to remember . . . and a place to hold him, too.
Luke’s sketches, when he’d taken over, had been a scalding oil and healing balm all at once. The unfamiliar hand—the absence of Danny’s trademark scribbles—broke her heart. And yet Sergeant Pilot Luke Hampstead’s attention to detail, to scale and measurement, was a boon. His sketches came with a few lines of correspondence and no more. He was a man of few words, it seemed, but the places he chose to sketch proved he had great heart. These places have been destroyed by war, he’d written. But at least they might keep in these humble sketches. Keep well, Hannah. He always signed it that way, and it always struck her. Simple and yet—so different. She felt an ache in the words. As if he meant that though the world before him crumbled, if he could just know the people back home kept well, then he might keep on.
He drew images side by side—what a building looked like after it had been reduced to rubble, and what it had looked like before its demise. He captured so much life in these that she had asked him, once, how he knew what they had looked like before their destruction. He’d written back: You can tell a lot if you watch and listen, and study a thing closely. Its surroundings, the buildings nearby, the person who built it, the people who knew it well.
His words surprised her. They made her feel that she knew these buildings well, too. And somehow, in the process, she was known a bit more. She felt those drawings etch right into her being. The quirky centered doorknob of a rowhouse in Rotterdam. A carved welcome in the wall of a French farmhouse—Bienvenue. A turret-like gable from a Scottish castle in Clydebank, vanished after two nights of blitzkrieg.
The Kissing Tree Page 17