The field that had glowed white in moonlight just twenty hours before—it was snapped. Ravaged. Cotton flung every which way, the only spinning it would ever know was that of a tornado.
The little victory garden Hannah had planted to the east of the cottage—plowed straight through, the picturesque white picket fence a sickening pile of splintered shards. Cornstalks and strawberries long, long gone.
In the middle of an empty clearing stood, eerily, the steps that once had led to the cottage. Leading, now, to nowhere. A sound escaped her, a breaking inside. Half groan, half cry.
She took a step, and her feet stepped on something hard. She bent to pick it up, smoothing dark soil from its white surface and straining to see in the dimming light.
“Leven House.” She whispered the words etched before her, hands trembling.
Luke braced her hands with his, brushing the remaining soil away, plucking a rogue leaf from its surface.
They had pounded this sign to the house so securely, weeks before. She had penciled the name in careful script upon a plank; he had carved and burned the letters to stand the test of time. Their two sets of hands, set on this task that had somehow wrapped their hearts together, changed the course of everything. If that cyclone had managed to pry it loose from the cottage—then what had become of the cottage itself?
“I can’t look,” Hannah said. She heard the words come out of her mouth and detested the defeat in them. “But I will look,” she said, squaring her shoulders, closing her eyes, turning to orient herself toward the cottage. Waiting a second to gather her courage. And just—just a second more. And maybe one more. Or two.
She groaned, hating herself for this weakness. “But I can’t,” she said.
And then a low, steady voice beside her, a squeeze around her hand that clutched the wayward sign. “But you must,” it said. Was that—hope? Notes of hope, carrying that invitation to her heart. “Look,” Luke said.
Slowly, Hannah opened her eyes.
There was the sky, coral purpling into post-storm gray in that show of utter peace and unspeakable color that only follows upheaval. As if all the turmoil and chaos had lifted into the sky, its intensities wrapped in vivid light.
There was the top of the oak, peeking up beyond the cottage like fingers offering a timid, hopeful wave.
And there was the cottage. Standing. Its small turret and quirky centered doorknob and its welcome in a language she did not speak—waiting there, storm weary with shingles plucked from its roof and a window blown out. But looking right back at her, all the same, as if it and the land beneath them heaved a great sigh of relief that the storm had gone, and life remained.
On the ground beneath the turret, a plucky, endearingly off-key melody sounded, and she went to examine its source. A weathervane. Its arms a little bent, its song a little beaten, but spinning, slowly, with hope.
She picked it up, fingering a tag that had been tied on with a piece of twine and written in an oh-so-familiar hand. To: Hannah. From: Luke. Given to me by a couple in Belgium from the remains of their stone barn . . . for your collection of keeping things.
Tears welled and laughter sprang, a tempest of all her fears and joys together.
“Where did this come from?” she asked, sniffling.
Luke lifted a shoulder, his quietness returning. “Like it says,” he said. “Belgium.”
She socked him on the arm. “I mean right now,” Hannah said.
“This was what I invited you to the cottage to show you tonight,” Luke said. “But when I saw the tornado headed your way—I guess I dropped it when I took off running for you. Can’t believe it’s still here.” Luke’s arm came around her shoulder, pulling her close as they took in the miracle before them. “This is why I came to Oak Springs—to deliver this—and that letter.”
Hannah turned to face him, tipping her gaze up to meet his and drink in all the unspoken words this quiet man was saying with this, the gift of his heart. His life.
“Thank you, Luke,” she said, and sank into his arms, savoring the heart of a man who saw so much.
twelve
SEPTEMBER 1945
That hope-filled embrace stayed with Hannah in the days that followed as they and the rest of Oak Springs set homes and barns to rights. As they rallied to raise a new wall to replace the Fisher barn that had splintered away in the storm. As they cleared debris from the spring and waterfall, righted the waterwheel at the old gristmill, and righted wayward railings on the water tower. Methuselah often led the pack with his harness, pulling with all his age-old might. The old horse seemed to have been hit with a new wave of life after facing the storm. Hannah would never know what exactly had happened to him out there, but he’d returned two days later with a new vigor inside of him.
The list of reconstruction tasks was long, and full of items big and small. In quiet moments when they returned to the farm bone weary, she mourned the snapped ropes of the old swing beneath the oak. But with homes and structures and businesses needing attention, that was one task that would have to wait, and rightfully so.
It was hard work, the rebuilding. Soul-rending work, good work, heart-healing work, this putting together of things lost. It seemed fitting that it had come just as the newspapers and radios both crackled with news of the war’s final end. Great hope on the horizon, and great chasms and wounds across the landscape of humanity. There was work to be done.
It was the same goodness of work that the building of the cottage had been. And Hannah couldn’t help thinking that it had kept Luke here a little longer, when he was set to leave Oak Springs for his big New York job. All the while, as she watched that man slip into Oak Springs life like one of the locals—holding up beams with the men, digging in the earth like he was a part of it, wiping his mud-streaked brow, and pausing to smile at her, a smile so deep it felt like he was offering her his very heart—an ache began to grow inside of her.
He was leaving. He had to. As much as he seemed a part of this place, there was a part of him that would never be at home with two feet planted firmly on the earth. She knew it as much as she knew herself, for wasn’t she the same? The call of the sky, the way the clouds beckoned until she felt homesick—she could see it on him. But she could see a growing unrest in him, too. A sadness and silence whenever the topic of his leaving came up. The way he stopped to look at the For Sale sign in front of the old Whitlock homestead, the way he glanced back at her, and back at the sign, and up at the sky.
It broke her heart right in two. So when she returned to work at the Feed and Dime and picked up the post for Gran and Jerry on her way home one September night, she thumbed through the three envelopes. A smudged envelope marked in childish handwriting for “Grampa Jerry at the big hotel” tugged at Hannah’s heartstrings, and she sent up a prayer that little Arnie could come soon to be with this man who gave every last ounce of energy in his wiry, wind-weathered body to bring him to a good life. She flipped past an issue of Woman’s Home Companion for Gran and stopped cold at the last envelope.
Addressed to Mr. Luke Hampstead, care of the Kissing Tree Inn. She had to smile at the incongruity of those two names together, for he was everything reserved and steady, the sort she was sure would save anything to do with kissing for an audience of just one. She recalled that kiss in the cellar, and what it felt like to be that one singled-out soul. There was something about Luke Hampstead that told her a kiss like that—a man like this—came but once in a lifetime . . . and when he gave himself, he gave every last bit of that deep-running man.
Then she saw the return address: Pan American Airways.
She froze in her tracks, right there in the middle of the dirt-packed road home.
“This is it,” she said. “This’ll be good-bye.”
So when he met her coming up the road with an eagerness of a little boy, wrapped up in the form of a man, she smiled. She took his offered hand, relished the strength of it for what might be the v
ery last time. Tried to muster happiness—and managed a smile as she asked him, before they parted ways at the drive, to meet her in an hour beneath the oak.
She would give him his letter. She would give him her heart, in the very most complete way she could: She would let him go.
Every step up the slow rise to the oak felt impossible and good, an hour later. She drank in the golden air, filling her courage coffers with visions of Luke soaring in the clouds. She could be a part of making that happen.
“You’re going to fly, Mr. Hampstead.” She practiced her line, which she’d planned carefully on her way through the tornado-snapped cotton field, trying not to think of the visual irony of it all. Wading through broken things with a broken heart to offer her broken hopes in order to give the man she loved flight. Life. Leven.
Her voice was all wrong. It sounded like a limp wet rag. She needed it to convey the fullness of heart she felt when she thought of him soaring. “You’re going to fly, Mr. Hampstead,” she said again, infusing strength into the words. But it still wasn’t right. “Fly,” she tried, on a quieter tone. “Fly!” she shouted, fisting the air with a small leap. None of it seemed quite right.
She reached the top of the hill and saw his silhouette there, bent like one of the branches, hovering over something. As natural as if he were a part of the tree itself.
“You’re going to fly, Luke,” she said, and this time, the smile on her lips was as sincere as it could be. He belonged up there as much as Danny had belonged to this land. Where she fit in all of it, she did not know.
The silhouette straightened and approached her. As he emerged from the shadows of the Kissing Tree, his smile washed over her with the answer: with him. You belong with him.
“I’m going to fly?” he asked.
“Oh!” Her eyelids flew open wide. “You heard that?” She gripped the letter behind her back, slipped it quietly into her skirt pocket. Not ready to let go just yet. Or ever.
“I have a question for you,” he said in answer. “How would you feel about flying?”
“Me?” she said, her voice curving down around the word that made no sense.
“You. How did you put it? ‘Up and up and up . . . to see all the world.’” He led her into the gentle cover of the tree’s canopy. It was another world, in there. A cathedral of light and green, shifting shadows and glancing sunrays, birdsong falling like rain. There, in the middle of it all, was the swing. Ropes repaired, plank securely tied. The place her dreams had once lived.
“You fixed it,” she breathed, a smile overtaking her whole being.
He gestured to the seat as a gentleman might to a fine lady in a refined restaurant. “Care to fly?”
Hannah bit her lip. She shouldn’t. She should do what she came here to do. Give him his final summons to the great far-off north, for surely that was what lay in the envelope. The war was over, thanks be to God. And those flights would be up and running as soon as the airline could manage, eager to beat their competition back into the air.
But he was behind her then, pulling the ropes back. Pausing for half a second as her breath caught—and releasing her into the sunlit air.
She gripped the ropes, face to the sky, soaking in the warmth and allowing herself to remember, just for a moment, that bygone dream of flight. Back and forth she swung, the billows of her skirts like ruffling wings as she gained height. And just as she’d done when she was young, she waited until that breathless moment hanging in the balance between upswing and down, right in that space where anything seemed possible, to open her eyes.
As she did, time slowed. The branch just out of reach was stark in the richness of its bark against the blue sky, but for one place where freshly carved lines revealed new, light wood. An etching of wings, and in the glorious space between, two sets of initials:
HG
+
LH
“But that’s us,” Hannah breathed. “That’s—that’s me.”
And then, as if her words had severed a cord between her and the upward ascent, the hovering swing succumbed to gravity and swung down, down, down . . . where the sight awaiting her caused her to dig her heels in and stand, hand to her mouth.
Luke knelt before her on one knee, his expression one of utter openness and heartrending hope.
“Hannah,” he said, voice husky. “My heart is yours. It’s not what you deserve, not even close to being enough. But if you’ll have me, if you can put up with the life of a pilot, if you maybe wouldn’t mind even coming with me sometimes—because truth be told, Hannah, I can’t tear myself away from you. Can’t imagine tearing myself away from you to fly those skies, and if anyone belongs up there, soaring, it’s you. If you could do with a life like that—”
“Do with a life like that?” Hannah’s hand transferred to her heart. “Do you not know?”
Luke furrowed his brow, and she wished to kiss every doubt away from the contours of his handsome face.
“Luke, I would give anything for a life with you. But more than that—I’d give anything for you to have the life you were meant for. I came here today to give you this.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulled out the flight-wrinkled envelope. “They’re ready for you. I know it.”
He took the offered letter. Beheld it for a moment and shook his head. “That might be,” he said. “But I’m not ready for a life without you. Hannah Garland . . .” He opened his palm, where a tiny glint of light danced up at her from a simple ring of gold. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes!” she said, then clapped her hand over her mouth at the embarrassing force and speed at which that word had come out. “I mean—I’m just me and you’re you and I don’t know if you’ve really thought this through, Luke, but if you think you can do with me at your side, then I—”
He was up then. Kissing her in a way that told her she’d been wrong all along . . . that his home wasn’t in the lofty skies above these branches. It was, miracle of miracles, with her.
Epilogue
CHRISTMAS EVE 1945
Dear Hannah.”
Dear, dear Hannah.
Luke spoke the words, felt them engrave into the deepest parts of him, and halted. He remembered so vividly another night, one year ago, when he penned those words and held fast to the thought of this woman. She had saved his life then. God had filled his life with the gift of her since then.
And now, he had traded that star-studded, frozen sky for a shower of sunlight slipping through oak leaves that clung to their green, even in December. They stood together, hand in hand, heart in heart, beneath the great oak, before God and all these witnesses. Here, he would give everything he had, and ever would have, to her. In the two months that had passed since he’d gone to New York, their letters had flown across states at a dizzying speed, and engulfing length. Sketches from time to time, for old times’ sake—but the quiet man had a deep-running well of things to say, it turned out, and Hannah happily continued to be a fount of words and joy. The time had simultaneously crawled excruciatingly by and flown at alarming speed, bringing him at last back down from the skies and to this singular tree and this moment in time.
It was all he could do to keep from reaching out right then and lifting the veil that happily did a very poor job of concealing the bright blue of her eyes, the breathless smile on her face. All he could do to keep from running his hand along that cheek of hers. He was fit to burst with gratitude, and the only way for it now was out. In words.
He repeated after the preacher, with solemn honor and deepest hope. “With this ring, I thee wed, and all my worldly goods I thee endow. In sickness and in health, in poverty or in wealth, till death do us part.”
He nearly gathered her up in his arms on the spot when she began by uttering beneath her breath, “Great gumdrops . . .” and then letting the rest of the vows march out in her sweet voice, with all the conviction in the world.
Hannah and Luke Hampstead’s hearts beat as one, there upon the ground where their
story was embedded and held deep in the roots, and high in the branches above. Looking on through its wide-eyed round windows was Leven House, sunlight glancing on the windowpanes like a wink as the weathervane above the turret sang out a clear, bright song.
This was the house that had given their hearts a home . . . and now, with greatest hope and hardest good-byes, it was time to take flight. But they wouldn’t leave without first doing for the house what it had done for them: giving the home . . . a heart.
Amid a whirlwind of dancing beneath and around the tree, Uncle Sarsaparilla’s Orchestra—all four members—played “Stardust” with every bit of soul they could muster, and the couple pulled Jerry into the shadow of the cottage and handed him an envelope.
Onlookers—and being that Oak Springs residents loved one another’s business as much as they loved one another, there were plenty of onlookers—would later tell how Jerry stuck a thumb under that envelope’s flap, pulled out a paper, read it, and looked at them in confusion. How you could’ve tipped him over with a feather, he seemed that shocked. How his chin trembled somethin’ awful until he took the newlyweds in his arms and squeezed them in a hug but good, and how he then demanded two things. That if he did this thing—if he indeed took up residence in Leven House, made it a home for his Arnie, a new life for them both, then they owed him two things: a good long visit every time they came across these parts or anywhere near . . . and a bag of snaffle bits, which an awestruck young airman had failed to deliver to him when he first came to town.
Luke happily did both. In the years that followed, every time they came to Oak Springs and stayed at the farmhouse, there were great pots of chili and bouquets of thistles on the old plank table; the occasional batch of burnt buttermilk biscuits, which Hannah plated up with her winking and squinting rendition of eyelash batting; Luke’s ladling of his hearty gravy, concocted over the years as a companion to those biscuits to the cheer of every mouth; and a merry band of souls gathered in the kitchen of the cottage or farmhouse.
The Kissing Tree Page 24