Her feet took a bit to slip into the rhythm, but Luke’s gentle strength at her back eased her into it, until it felt oddly natural.
“I like the music,” he offered, and she breathed easy at the silence between them being broken.
“Do you?” Pride swelled up in Hannah at her town’s band. “Oak Springs is lucky to boast our very own string quartet,” she said. “Not many small towns can say that.”
“String quartet?” Luke said, surprise in his voice.
“See for yourself.” Hannah led him to the low stage, where Ralph Gleason fingerpicked his fiddle, Sam Granger strummed his guitar, and Jake Eden plucked a long string tied to a stick at one end and an overturned washbasin at the other—a contraption he called the “gut-bucket.”
“Sarsaparilla’s Orchestra, they call themselves.”
“After the soft drink?”
“No, after the lone donkey who resides in the barn where they practice. Though now they’ve taken to calling themselves Uncle Sarsaparilla’s Orchestra. Our own USO. They feel very patriotic about it.”
Luke laughed, and Hannah felt it resonate right into her.
“Where’s the fourth member of the quartet?”
Hannah sobered slightly. “Off at war,” she said. “We all hope he’ll be back safe and sound, maybe sometime soon. In the meantime, these three carry the torch and do a mighty fine job keeping Oak Springs in Bing Crosby.”
As if on cue, the trio wound down their rather tinny rendition of “Don’t Fence Me In,” their concluding chord a little off-key.
Which was exactly how Hannah felt. What now? Was she supposed to stay? Were they done dancing? She’d just found her land feet, so to speak, out here on the dance floor, and they’d hardly had a chance to talk.
“Stay?” Luke said, as if reading her thoughts. The deep green of his uniform jacket and the gold of its buttons called to her. She closed her eyes, seeing the deep green leaves of her oak and the golden light slipping in through its branches. Mingling with the greens and golds of his uniform until she didn’t know where one stopped and the other began, and she felt just as home in the arms of this man as she did in the limbs of that tree. They dipped and moved to the plodding, plucky tune, she hardly noticing a note of it.
She opened her eyes again as the band began to play “Stardust,” and saw Luke Hampstead as he was: the embodiment of something faithful and true, strong and adventurous, steady and kind. Like her tree—but—real. Or human, rather.
And like her tree, he seemed carved, in his very soul, with stories. Stories she wished to know.
His single-word question from minutes before marched through her mind. Stay?
And her answer was, resoundingly, yes. For the first time in the history of Oak Springs, Hannah Garland dreamed not of flying, or leaving, or taking flight . . . but of staying.
eight
AUGUST 1945
For the next few weeks, Luke replayed that dance in his mind more times than he cared to admit. It wasn’t until Jerry called him a “human jukebox” for whistling “Stardust” one too many times that he realized he had, perhaps, lost a grip on reality.
“Hey, Jukebox,” Jerry said one day as the August heat drove them to work on inside projects.
“Yeah?” Luke said with some difficulty from his place holding up the mantel—the extremely heavy mantel—as Jerry mounted new braces for it.
“You still planning on leaving?” Jerry asked, in uncharacteristic simplicity. So direct the question scalded him.
“I . . . don’t know,” Luke said. “Don’t know where else I’d go if not New York, with the job waiting. They’re holding it since they can’t start commercial international flights up again just yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Jerry reached out a hand and flicked Luke hard on the forehead.
Luke exhaled in pain. Convenient that Jerry had waited until he couldn’t defend himself to mount his attack.
“What’d you do that for?” he asked
“’Cause you’re dumber than an ox with his head in the mud,” Jerry said. “Nobody around here has seen Hannah so—so alive—since her brother passed.” Jerry turned his attention slowly back to hammering a nail in place.
“That’s good,” Luke said. “I’m glad to hear she’s doing well.”
Jerry tossed his hands up in the air in frustration, letting his hammer fall to the ground. “I’m glad to hear she’s doing well,” Jerry said in a nasal tone. “You hear yourself? You sound like a heartless old catfish.”
Luke braced his shoulder beneath the weight of the mantel, flushing in heat from the strain of it, and from frustration at his own self. Why was he so bad at saying what he meant? He propped the mantel up with the ladder and crossed his hands over his chest, facing Jerry.
“I just mean that if anyone deserves joy, it’s Hannah.”
“Good,” Jerry said. “’Cause you know if you up and leave to New Jersey or New Connecticut or wherever—”
“New York,” Luke muttered. Not that it mattered.
“New Timbuktu, for all I care! If you leave, you leave that girl in a world of hurt. So you’d better change one or the other of those things. Either don’t you leave, or you better tell her now that you’re not fixin’ to stay.”
The words settled heavy in him. The truth was, he’d give anything to stay. But who was he to presume a place here, with a girl like Hannah Garland, who could have any fellow in the world? She deserved the very best.
“Or take her with you,” Jerry said. “She ain’t married to this land, you know.”
That didn’t mesh with what she’d told him when he’d first arrived. It was clear Oak Springs and Hannah Garland were a part of each other. How had she put it? “Some dreams fade away. . . .”
Still, the truth of Jerry’s words resonated with something that had been tumbling around inside of him for weeks now. So, he took himself to his room that afternoon and did what he did best: reconnaissance. It had been his mission in the war. He’d been so proud to be a part of the army air force, had studied hard and pushed himself to be one of the few who would be assigned not to bombers but to reconnaissance planes. To observe. Map. Photograph. Chart. In essence, to use reality to plot a navigable course for others whose lives depended upon it.
From the bottom drawer of the old bureau, he pulled his few possessions of significance from the shadows and laid them out in the light.
Letters.
Three rows and four columns of them, evenly spaced, until he could see the familiar handwriting stamped upon each envelope again and again and again. Just as the writer of those letters was stamped upon his very soul now.
And then there was this last letter. Not from Hannah . . . but from Caroline. Spilling her self-proclaimed broken heart onto paper, about how it was killing her, not knowing whether he was safe, not knowing when or if she’d see him again. How she had to “set him free,” that he could fight better, unshackled by thoughts of a girl back home. She had signed it with the word he would never use to close a letter again: Sincerely, Caroline.
That letter had not unshackled him but untethered him. Snapped his last link to any semblance of home or family, and sent him floundering in a sea of unbelonging. He had written back, taking painstaking care not to fumble his words as he always did, to assure her she never had shackled him. It had taken everything in him to write that letter—and his only answer had been silence. That is, until a cousin of hers had seen fit to mail him her wedding announcement from the Herald, claiming he deserved to know. He could still feel the hollow sickness of the months that followed.
Until Danny had happened along, clapping him on the back and calling him “brother.” Bidding him to write to his sister, who—Luke laughed dryly recalling this—he had imagined to be a spinster. He hated himself for having categorized someone so, regardless of age or circumstance, without ever having met them. Truth was, even if Hannah had been much older than she was . . . and even if, at th
at age, she had never wed, spinster was the farthest term from that woman’s soul. He wished to banish the word from the English language, for all the single-dimensioned presumptions it made about a person.
The letter in his hands felt hollow, somehow. In the end, it was true that Caroline had been kind. A bit dramatic, perhaps, but a nice person, even if she’d reduced him to a Dear John. And just as she’d set him free of herself, this letter . . . it had no place in his present. No place in his future. When he looked at the field of riches that lay before him in Hannah’s grid of perfectly spaced letters—he knew exactly what he had to do.
Standing, he strode to the fireplace. Pulled a dusty jar of matches from the mantel, struck one—and watched as flame took to the paper that had once charred him. He held it a moment, watching the paper disappear before his eyes—and moved to discard it in the fireplace.
“Luke?” The voice came floating up the stairs, followed by soft but eager footfalls. Hannah.
He froze. Caught between everything right—the letting go of this letter, the approach of Hannah Garland—but feeling everything wrong about it. She would see. Her letters laid out so meticulously. Him with Caroline’s letter, one he should have left behind long, long ago.
His thoughts slowed into a maddening muddle and then—she was there.
“Luke?” She stood in the open doorway, hand poised to knock, and face full of eager joy.
“H-Hannah,” he breathed, her name coming out like the truest thing he’d ever spoken.
The next second seemed to slow. He watched her take in the scene before her. Watched her face register her own letters, and the one in his hand. Watched as that smile, which could warm straight through ice, melted into crestfallen hurt.
And that was when he remembered he was holding fire. Or, rather, the fire reminded him, reaching his fingers and causing him to drop what was left of Caroline’s letter, the pain of it paling in the wake of that look on Hannah’s face. It was written there clear as day: She believed he’d burned one of her own letters.
“I—I’m sorry,” she said. “I should go.”
“Wait,” he said, urgency telling his feet to fly him to her, but the smoldering embers of the fire requiring him to stay, to stomp them out where they had fallen on the floor.
By the time he caught up with her, she was outside and halfway to the safety of her white-as-snow fields of cotton. She heard him, glanced backwards, and just as quickly fixed her gaze on the path before her, which carried her into the low-hanging branches of the oak.
“Hannah, please,” he said. He saw confirmed upon her being what she had perceived—that the letter in his hand had been one of her own. That he was destroying her words, committing them to flame. And judging by the look on her face, it may as well have been her heart.
He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she stopped, shoulders heaving.
“I shouldn’t have come up there,” she said. “It’s none of my business what you do with your things. They’re just papers.” Her words were winding up, gathering speed. Her arms regaining some of her usual animation as she raised a palm to her forehead. “I mean, I hardly knew you when I wrote those. I didn’t know you at all. Why should you keep them? I thought we were friends—and maybe we are—but—come on, Hannah. Keep well, Hannah, your letters always said, and it just sort of got inside me, you know, and made itself a part of me until you showed up and said them in person, of all things—Keep well, Hannah—and I guess seeing the hands that wrote those words burning one of my letters . . .” She paused, taking a deep breath. “Stop it, Hannah. Compose yourself.”
She had stopped talking to him at some point and slipped into lecturing herself, rendering him suddenly an eavesdropper. And a gentleman should always make his presence known when in danger of becoming an accidental eavesdropper.
Even if it was on a conversation between a woman so maddeningly wonderful he got tongue-tied in her presence . . . and her own self.
He cleared his throat.
She was pacing now, and glanced up at him as if he were some distant apparition. “I’m positively mortified at myself, Mr. Hampstead,” she said. “I don’t know why I reacted like a skittish old deer. I just—I saw those letters and I saw the one in your hand and the—the fire—” She stopped and brightened, as if a lightbulb had just gone on in the ether above her hair that circled her head in a braided ring like a slightly off-kilter halo. “Say, did a candle fall on it? Is that why it was burning? Maybe you were saving it.” She scrunched up her nose and shook her head. “Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. Only . . . did it?”
Her eyes were so vibrant blue, so full of hope, and his words were stopping up all stumbly again. So his feet did what his words failed to. They closed the distance between them, until his hand reached up to trace her face.
“Hannah,” he said.
She swallowed, waiting. A breeze rolled through the oak’s reaching branches, setting its green leaves to trembling in a dance of light and shadow.
And those words, they stacked up in the unspoken place. There’s no one like you on God’s green earth.
He let his thumb linger, brushing her soft cheek in its rosy glow. This woman . . .
“The candle didn’t fall on the letter,” he said, unwilling to leave her anguished question a second longer. “But—it wasn’t yours,” he said.
“It wasn’t?” She bit her lip, and it was all he could do to keep from gathering her up entirely. That all of this should have meant so much to her . . . it was more than he’d dared to hope.
He shook his head. “I could never do that to your letters.”
“You—you couldn’t?”
Oh, if she only knew. How her letters had been his lifeline. His warmth. But for that . . . she deserved more than words.
“Can you meet me this evening? There’s something you should know,” he said, finally withdrawing his hand from its place cradling her face. Her hand flew up, her fingers touching the place he just had.
“This evening,” she said. He didn’t know if he ever had or ever would see Hannah Garland so at a loss for words.
“At the cottage,” he said.
“Well, I normally help Gran with her pies on Monday nights, but she’s off for a visit to her sister over in College Station for the week, and I guess I—” She looked up, apparently seeing the same anguished waiting on his face that he’d seen on hers just moments before. “I’d be honored,” she said.
Those words surrounded him with the rush of the wind as it drove him home to the inn. It was time, at last, to do what he had come to do.
nine
Hannah was jitterier than a jitterbug, and it was rubbing off on the animals as she made her rounds. The hens dashed around their pen like spooked things.
“I know how you feel, girls,” she said. “What’s it mean, anyway? ‘There’s something you should know.’ What is it? Is he leaving?” The black-and-white barred Rock cocked her little hen head, staring an inquisitive red eye at her before ducking away with the others behind a bush. “Smart,” she said, pointing. “Take cover. Maybe I should take a cue from you.”
The pigs were no better, with Porky grunting to beat the band, and Porky’s little ones squealing something awful.
Still, it wasn’t until she reached Methuselah’s trough in the grazing pasture that it struck her—something else was going on. Methuselah paced the fence, bobbing his roan head, the wild whites of his eyes scanning the horizon.
Hannah reached an arm under and around his head, stroking his muzzle. “Hey, boy,” she said, following his gaze to the field path Danny had always walked home on, whistling up a storm.
The only thing that whistled now was a rogue gust of wind, setting the cotton to bobbing eerily in the darkening sky.
“He’s not coming, boy.” Hannah felt the burn in her throat as she spoke the words, resting her forehead against the horse’s soft neck.
Methuselah trembled
, and when a second gust of wind kicked up, he reared back.
That was when a cannonball sank right down into her stomach. She’d seen this behavior before. Back in ’38—the year of the last big tornado.
Don’t say that word. The old warnings of the townspeople whispered among the whistling cotton, sending a shiver up her spine.
Surely it wasn’t a coming tornado. Surely not now. Still, that cannonball in her stomach seemed to grow weightier by the second. A scan of the horizon a few miles yonder showed the thick gray of a cloud aloft dripping its middle into a sickening funnel and telling her one thing: run.
She did. She ran from pen to pen, opening the gates, setting the animals to running. They knew what to do, and one girl alone wouldn’t have time to get them all to shelter if she tried. She’d do them more harm than good. Being set free gave them their best chance of finding cover, with the tornado so close at hand.
But when she got back round to Methuselah’s pasture and opened it, he slowed his stamping foot and hung his head. Still as a statue, but for the way his mane rippled and whipped in the growing gusts.
“Get on, boy,” she said. “Go.”
But he wouldn’t budge. He looked again to Danny’s ridge, still maddeningly empty. The church bells rang out from town with wild abandon, pealing the storm warning as far as they could possibly fling such news. Time was short.
“He’d want you to go,” she said, her voice growing thick. “Go,” she said. But when he didn’t respond to her prodding, her clicks, her signals to gallop and “git on,” she knew it was time. She had to get to safety, too, and her only prayer was that if she left this gate open, he’d change his mind and flee.
But at the last second, just as she was about to go, she spotted his halter and lead. The same one Danny had used every day with him. Maybe if she tried that . . .
Quick as the lightning flashing over the Fishers’ field yonder, she buckled the halter around him and led.
The Kissing Tree Page 22