by Lisa Samson
RESURRECTION
IN MAY
OTHER NOVELS BY LISA SAMSON INCLUDE
The Passion of Mary-Margaret
Embrace Me
Quaker Summer
Straight Up
The Church Ladies
Tiger Lillie
Club Sandwich
The Living End
Women’s Intuition
Songbird
RESURRECTION
IN MAY
LISA SAMSON
© 2010 by Lisa Samson
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Scripture quotations are taken from the American Standard Version of the Holy Bible, public domain.
Publisher’s note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Samson, Lisa, 1964–
Resurrection in May / Lisa Samson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59554-544-2 (soft cover)
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Older men—Fiction. 3. Death row inmates—Fiction. 4. Intergenerational relations—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A46673R47 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010016055
Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jarrod, pastor of the ether,
cherished friend and soul brother
Contents
part 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
part 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
acknowledgments
PART 1
ONLY A LIFE LIVED FOR OTHERS
IS A LIFE WORTHWHILE.
—Albert Einstein
• 1 •
Spring 1993
He wasn’t sure how he’d got to the far end of his life, or how he’d begun finding himself some mornings driving down to Natural Bridge and ending up on top of the great stone expanse. The vista of the earth far beneath his feet spread out wide, treetops like so much broccoli out in the distance.
Since Claudius was a farmer, everything ended up looking something like a vegetable in his mind. His mother had favored paisley prints, and he always thought of them as summer squashes. Whenever he saw a picture of a flying saucer—pattypan squash. Beads on necklaces, depending upon size, were either peas or cherry tomatoes.
He’d always lived right around this spot of Kentucky. And it was not that his own fields and woods weren’t enough anymore, but this vista did something for him he couldn’t even voice—he just knew he enjoyed it, the freewheeling breeze, the small pebbles lining the precarious sandstone path with no guardrails, even the tourists who liked to sit on the edge and dangle their feet into that same expanse of nothing but air.
But he’d lived close to the bone of his existence. Sitting on the bridge, he asked God in his usual easygoing way if maybe, now that time had whittled his life down to most likely just a few remaining years, if that same God, who’d always taken good care of him, would speak to him somehow. Other people at church heard directly from the Spirit, but Claudius had only seen the face of God in the world around him. Maybe hearing God would quiet the restlessness in his soul.
He took the words back immediately. For seventy years Claudius couldn’t remember a single day he wasn’t grateful, and he wasn’t going to change that today.
So, he said to the good Lord Jesus, he’d take whatever God was willing to give. No less and no more.
As he slowly drove back home down Route 11, old knees aching from the climb—he sure couldn’t do things so easily as he used to—he pulled his white Galaxy over to the shoulder for the hurried modern man or woman to pass along to a life obviously more pressing than his, which was fine with him, by the way. He patted the steering wheel in time to some mountain music on one of those stations lower down the dial. He’d taken good care of his mother’s old car for years, driving it around when Violet no longer could, changing the oil and filters regularly, rotating the tires. He’d have made a handy husband had some woman wanted him. Too late for that now.
He realized he’d forgotten to collect yesterday’s eggs from the coop; he also realized he’d become nothing more than the old guy people waved to on the street or chatted with at the gas station, but who hadn’t had a lot of visitors in the ten years since his mother died.
Well, unless you counted his pastor, but pastors were paid to do that, and Claudius had called him and asked him to come out so he could talk about willing his land to the church once he passed, a little over forty acres, along with the house and the outbuildings. He hadn’t had to wait but two hours for that visit to be arranged!
Claudius pulled his car over once more for a man in a battleship gray Taurus, just an undercoat of paint slathered over its panels, and he turned his head to wave a finger or two and nod.
“Ah!” he cried out, realizing someone was crawling up the road, right in front of him on the verge. He jammed on the brakes, his midsection slamming back against the seat, and oh my Lord in heaven above! He reached in his pocket, then wiped his forehead with a gray bandana.
A young woman crawled along the gravel, her head hung down like an old sick dog’s, swaying from side to side. He suspected she didn’t even feel the edged gravel pushing into her palms and knees, because she barely realized he was there when he knelt in front of her and placed his pecan-colored hand atop her head.
Finally, when he said, “Whoa there, young miss,” she looked up, squinted against even the pale morning sun that caught the gunmetal slick of her eye shadow, and sat back on her haunches.
“Mmm … ?” She closed her eyes, swayed, then righted herself. Opening them, she rubbed away long, straight blonde hair matted with throw-up. “You’re a light brown man,” she said. “And your eyes are so blue.” She smiled and swayed again. Too far.
He reached out and righted her and remembered those punching-bag clowns kids used to play with. Blam and down they’d go and then they’d pop right back up for more punishment. Like the human race in general.
Well, his mother never had prepared him for this, and he thought about that prayer atop the bridge. He hadn’t really asked for this. The girl was packaged in a watermelon-colored dress that had clearly been cut f
rom the vine before it had been allowed to grow all of its skirt—I need to get a TV. Maybe I wouldn’t be so shocked by young people.
Then he realized girls were dressed like this all the time in Lexington, where he took his produce to the farmers’ market once a week. He just wasn’t used to seeing them mid-Monday mornings along Route 11. That was it. A matter of context. He certainly didn’t want to think of himself as a judgmental old coot. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what a hangover felt like. Now that was something a fellow remembered even though many rings had accumulated on the trees in the woods since.
She leaned over and heaved on the roadside grasses.
Claudius wasn’t much affected by what bodies did. Or said, for that matter. He pulled out his bandana again from the back pocket of his gray work pants while waiting for her to finish. He’d get her a Coke. A cold bottle of that worked miracles, and there was that liquor store just around the corner. They tried to call it a convenience store, but it was only convenient if you were trying to buy a case of light beer.
When she straightened, he wiped her face. “You look like you’ve had a rough time of it.”
She nodded and moaned softly. Even amid the gravel and the hard night before, the effects thereof sadly evident, he pitied her. So young and lovely, and here she was. Side of the road. In her pretty party dress. Not from around here. Poor thing. Couldn’t have been much past twenty years old.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Let me help you up.” He guided her to her feet, his knees feeling that stiffness again. “Come on, I’ll get you back to my farm, and you can sleep it off. Then we’ll see who you are.”
Limply following his lead, she handed him a small purse that had been hanging crosswise over her shoulder, tanned arms and legs putting Claudius in mind of the weeping willow his father planted for his mother when Claudius was only eighteen. She didn’t argue, which made sense considering what she was doing in the first place.
—She probably needs to argue with life a little more than she does. Well, don’t we all.
It wasn’t as if his life had made much of a difference to anybody but his parents. And the animals.
And the land.
There was that, of course.
He helped her into the passenger seat, smelled the sourness of her breath as he buckled her in, thankful for her sake he wouldn’t hurt even a garter snake, glad he’d found her before someone else had, someone of dubious intent. He settled her purse next to her then wiped the gravel from her knees and her palms. Maybe he’d sneak in a word or two that she might want to be more careful in the future.
Once at the farmhouse, the bungalow-style place where he was born—just big enough for mother, father, and himself—he led her upstairs to the room the evangelists, traveling preachers come to cause revival once a year, used to stay in when they came to Beattyville. Violet Borne made ample use of her gift of hospitality, which in the early days meant good food and a quiet room with sheets that smelled like the breeze off the Kentucky hills or a little lavender if she went the extra mile.
His stepfather, Garland Borne, possessed the gift of the gab, and many’s the time Claudius, sitting there while Garland told jokes to Violet or the traveling preachers, would compare his own light brown skin to the pale Irish complexion of Garland and realize afresh he really wasn’t the man’s child. The blessing was, most days he forgot. His stepfather was kind, a person who looked you in the eye and listened to every word you said, who could actually make you feel better with a little joke and a glass of overly sweet tea.
He’d sacrificed a lot to marry Violet, who never would tell Claudius, or anybody else for that matter, how he’d come about. And he was her biological son—they had the same facial structure, although once more their skin colors merely coordinated. His was the skin of the walnut, hers its flesh.
After throwing back the yellow quilt and the mint green sheet, Claudius lowered the young woman down onto the mattress—getting her up the stairs hadn’t been as easy as it would have been even a few years before. Oh, Lord have mercy on his back. It wasn’t giving him too much trouble yet—except when he chopped wood or lifted hay bales—but he couldn’t count on that much longer.
He tucked the covers up under her chin, thinking how vulnerable she seemed. Like a little girl wearing her older sister’s party dress and the older sister always seemed to take things a little too far and the mother would die if she saw her baby trying to emulate the child she’d been trying and failing to rein in since she was ten years old and realized that boys liked her for some reason. Of course she figured out why by twelve.
“Just keep ’em alive ’til they’re twenty-six,” he whispered. His father, a church deacon, would pass on this crust of wisdom to parents who sat at his table wringing their hands over their wayward offspring. He hoped somebody had thrown a similar crust to this girl’s parents.
Her parents.
He jostled her shoulder. “Do you need me to get word to your home?”
She shook her head and moaned. “Have my own apartment.”
“All right. I’ll be back in a moment.”
He went downstairs to mix up the hangover concoction his mother had made him drink a time or two. A few minutes later he slipped back up the steps, lifted her head off the pillow and cradled it against his upper arm, and made her drink up. She protested a little with screwed-up eyes and a grimace, but he was patient, knowing the ginger would cut the nausea. He settled her back down and wiped her chin with a clean napkin.
She pulled her arm out of the covers and rested it atop the spread.
Interesting. He’d never seen a person with a tan like that. She looked somewhat carrot-colored. Not exactly. But close enough. He wondered if she had some kind of bizarre medical condition. He hoped not. Life was hard enough for young people nowadays. So much simpler when he was young.
Claudius sat in a straight chair until he heard the girl’s breathing steady up. He laid his hands atop his thighs for support as he stood.
Her purse. She might be concerned if she woke up. He hurried down to the kitchen and brought it back up, arranging it just so on the seat of the chair so she could see it there right away.
So, the chores needed doing as always. You could always count on the farm giving you something to do. He snapped shut the curtains in the small square window beneath the eaves and stepped softly down the narrow steps and out into the early May sunshine.
His farm spread before him, its faded outbuildings yellow against the electric green of new grass. He’d mow some after taking care of the animals. But maybe not. It might wake her up. That wouldn’t be good, to wake a person so sick before she was ready.
At seven that night, figuring ten and a half hours was a good amount to sleep off a hangover, he poked his head in the door. “You up now?” he whispered.
She scooted up a little in the bed, the covers pulled up around her chest and tucked under both arms. “Yes. I don’t know what happened.”
“Not many people do. Even when they’re sober.” He chuckled a little. More from nerves, he realized. He hated that about himself. Always had. Put him in a room with a pretty girl and he felt like Bozo the Clown.
“Where am I?”
He told her, edging into the room with a tray, the frayed sleeves of a blue-and-green plaid cotton shirt swinging from his elbows. He’d been needing to do some laundry and was sorry now he’d put it off.
“I’m glad nobody come over that hill and hit you. Lordymercy, them fellers from Lexington come up here in their sports cars and think they’re driving Formula One or something.”
“Thank you. I don’t know what I was thinking, coming all the way out here graduation night.”
“Got some chicken soup. Made it fresh. And an aspirin and some sweet tea.”
“I’m hungry. I should be sick.” Eyes bluer than the periwinkle vines beneath the oak tree out front blinked.
His father had eyes just like them. Light and friendly, not aloof
like some blue eyes. A tiny scar ran for a quarter of an inch just below her bottom lip on the right-hand side.
“You probably don’t remember getting my surefire hangover-proof concoction before you drifted off.”
“Sorry, no. But I appreciate it.” She tried to smile, the corners of her mouth pushing up soft cheeks. “It sure beats Tylenol and a big glass of water.”
There wasn’t anything harsh about her face. No protruding cheekbones crescented beneath her eyes, jaw soft and feminine, almost childlike. She looked like a Hollywood star from his own times, not nowadays, if the bony-faced girls he saw on the magazines at the grocery store were indicative of the fashion. Not that they weren’t pretty now. Just not much to his liking.
“It was my mother’s recipe. She said her mother made it for my uncle many a time. And I have to admit I tasted it more than once or twice myself when I was a youngster.”
She scooted up yet further against the pillows, her dress rumpled beyond any pretense now, its pink creases running in several directions, fabric flattened and folded. Her hair was stuck together in some places, flyaway in others, like a chick that’s losing its down while growing its feathers.
—My, how ugly and pitiful those birds look at that stage.
Claudius set the tray on her lap. She grabbed the spoon right away, dipping into the bowl. Her hand shook a little as she raised the spoon to her mouth, then slurped off the soup. She closed her eyes in what appeared to be a kind of relief. “This tastes better than anything I’ve ever had.”
“Food’s better when you know who it was laid down its life so’s you could live to see another day,” he said.
“Is this”—she looked out the window toward the barn—“one of your chickens?”
He nodded. “Parma-Jean.”
She sucked the sweet air of the room into her chest. He’d opened the window when he checked on her earlier, releasing the alcohol stink, not to mention the odor of throw-up still clinging to her hair.