Letters on the Table

by Pattie Howse-Duncan

  Murphy wasn’t surprised by his parents’ actions because it was what his father and mother did best. To whom much is given, much will be required was an expectation rooted in their core.

  Helene glanced at her watch and gasped at the time. Handing him a copy of the order she had placed for Thanksgiving pies, she shooed him out the door. “Now hurry! The diner closes at 6:00 tonight since tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. You absolutely cannot pick them up late so skedaddle!”

  The list of pies would feed the inevitable crowd of family and friends expected to gather the next day at Beechwood: five pumpkins, four pecans, two pecans with bourbon sauce, and one lemon chess. His mother hadn’t forgotten his favorite. He was planning on eating that one all by himself.

  He pondered the unfortunate Engstrom saga as he drove the fifteen-minute route and wondered what would have caused the sheriff to end the search so early. Surely in a town the size of Kingston, someone must know something. A man doesn’t just disappear off the face of the earth, and for that matter, a sheriff doesn’t simply stop looking. Or does he?

  By the time Murphy arrived at quarter past six, the diner’s overhead lights were off, and the CLOSED sign was dangling on the door. It appeared the McGregors’ Thanksgiving would be without pie until Murphy’s eyes caught an unexpected sight as he began making a U-turn in the diner’s parking lot.

  A young girl, not more than seven or eight, stood just inside the screen door, as if she’d been expecting him. She opened the screen door and waited for him to enter.

  “Did Mrs. McGregor send you after her pies?” she asked with innocence, not knowing he was the heir of the McGregor fortune.

  “She sure did, and I hope I’m not too late. I’ll be cooked just like the turkey if I mess this up,” he said as he gave her a wink.

  Her ponytail danced with her laughter. She began handing him pie boxes, each labeled in the top right-hand corner with a red grease pencil and tied neatly with string.

  “You must be the famous pie queen. How’d I get so lucky?”

  Another laugh. Murphy realized those blue eyes and blonde hair were what you’d perhaps expect to see in Sweden. Strikingly beautiful.

  As he began placing the pie boxes in his mother’s car, he realized the problem at hand. “Let me give you a ride. It’s too dark and cold for you to walk alone. Where do you live?”

  “Here,” she said, pointing above the diner.

  Murphy felt a surge of guilt, as he realized whom he was talking to and the unfair hand she’d been dealt. Ashamed of his own ignorance and trying to hide any sympathy in his voice, he stuck out his hand and said, “Well, Happy Thanksgiving. I’m Murphy.”

  She reached up, grabbed his outstretched hand and with a strong grip said, “Happy Thanksgiving. I’m Katherine. Do you live in Kingston?”

  “I grew up here, but I’ve been away for several years. I’m headed across the world in another day or so, but after the war I plan to move back home. Maybe I’ll become your best pie customer if your lemon chess pie is as good as I hear.”

  Katherine responded with an impish grin and gave him a little curtsy. He responded with a bow fit for royalty and extended his arm. “May I escort your Highness back to your door, my lady?”

  She linked her arm in his, and they strode the few short steps back to the diner, laughing together. He opened the door with a grand gesture and watched as she shut and locked it behind her.

  It wasn’t until he was almost back on the grounds of Beechwood that something deep within his gut reminded him of the irony of Katherine’s childhood. What a far cry from his in which an entire staff of salaried people created grocery lists. And did the shopping. And the cooking. And the cleaning. To be fair, even the child raising.

  The image of the young girl and the sound of her laughter would linger in the back of his mind throughout Thanksgiving. But soon his leave ended, and his thoughts focused entirely on returning to his base and the many flying missions that lay ahead of him.

  Murphy would have scoffed if someone prophesied the little pony-tailed blonde would one day help him find his way home.

  Pixie Gifts

  Katherine referred to them her entire life as her “pixie gifts.” They began arriving soon after she moved above the diner, at a time when her mother was walking and breathing but not really much alive.

  The first gift was a piece of blue satin ribbon, mirroring the cornflower hue of Katherine’s eyes. She discovered it one morning at the diner’s back entrance tied loosely to the latch of the screen door. Remembering all the bedtime stories her father used to tell about the pixies who fell in love with her the moment they saw her lying in her cradle, Katherine’s heart settled on the notion that the pixies had somehow found her again.

  And so it came to be during the days and months ahead that the blue ribbon was constantly in Katherine’s possession. In her hair, around her neck, stuffed in a pocket, it was her talisman, always within easy reach. Katherine decided those pixies were quite cunning. They knew she needed to hold something that reminded her of her father. Remembering his strength gave her the endurance she needed while her heart remembered the days of her life before he left them.

  The next pixie gift arrived just a couple of days after the first. A pile of the reddest, sweetest pears she’d ever seen, stacked in a small mound on the concrete bench next to the screen door.

  And then a short time later there arrived a little carved wooden puppet—a rabbit on a string sitting ever so cleverly upright on the short sycamore stump just beyond the bench out back.

  They never arrived daily but often enough, and each gift was just as delightful as the one before.

  Her mother seemed to brighten a little when Katherine displayed the latest addition to her collection of pixie gifts. Doc not only seemed intrigued, he was curious to know where she found each one. But the person who enjoyed them almost as much as Katherine was Lily Mae.

  “Are you telling me you just walked outside, and you looked over and saw this wooden rabbit sitting on the stump? Think he was sitting there hoping you’d be the one to notice him?” Her voice was leery, but she couldn’t hide her playful eyes from Katherine.

  “He’s more than a wooden rabbit, Lily Mae. He’s a puppet! And I love him. I wonder if the pixies know how much I love him.”

  “Child, believe me, those pixies surely know. Why, I think they’re all pleasured up knowing their gifts make you so happy. Think they might already be working on your next surprise?” Then, without waiting for Katherine to answer, she continued, “Those pixies will be there for you as long as you need them. Don’t expect them, but don’t be surprised by them either.”

  Occasionally a pixie gift was clearly intended for her mother and those always seemed to coincide with the days Emeline was feeling well. A bushel of peaches, which were immediately turned into fried pies and sold faster than Katherine could peel. Maybe a couple of dressed quail ready for frying. And each fall the pixies left a bulging crinkled paper sack full of shelled pecans, which were stored for the eventual endless list of Thanksgiving and Christmas pie orders.

  Katherine never lacked for friends. Her magnetism seemed to work on everyone. She could gather a crowd faster than a six-week-old puppy. The teachers knew about her father’s disappearance and her mother’s declining health. They also knew to alert Doc Bishop if she had needs of any kind. Physical, emotional, financial, it didn’t matter. Doc wanted to know, and he took care of whatever came up.

  Each morning on her way to Garfield Elementary, Katherine was forced to walk past a small gang of older girls who lurked in front of the junior high next door. They seemed to relish insulting the younger ones who passed, and Wanda Sullivan was the self-appointed leader.

  Like a volcano spewing hot lava, they showered Katherine with vicious words as she walked past. Their taunts zinged and stung day after day, but Katherine was determined not to let the g
irls see the injury they inflicted on her spirit.

  She saved her questions for the evening when she was at home and alone with Lily Mae. “What’s a looney bin?”

  “Where on earth did you hear that?”

  “That mean Wanda girl said that’s where Mama lives and Daddy ran off to get away from us.”

  Lily Mae turned Katherine’s face to hers and took a deep, sorrowful breath. “Queenie, that Wanda girl is full of meanness. She’s pure trouble. The whole family is. Something evil has crawled up in her heart and turned into some kind of poison in her.”

  “But why does she have to be so full of mean to me? I’ve never said a mean thing to her ever. I promise, Lily Mae. I didn’t even know who she was until she started picking on me one day about Daddy.”

  Lily Mae studied Katherine’s face reflected through the mirror. “So, she’s that kind of mean, huh, talking about your daddy? She’s mean as a snake doctor, and can’t give away kindness ’cause she doesn’t know kindness herself. You can’t give what you don’t know. It’s the evil ones who hate the light. But you know what? You’re going to have to do something that most people can’t. You’re going to have to learn to forgive her, Queenie. Not just Wanda, but especially Wanda.”

  Katherine buried her face in the crook of her arm. “I can’t do it, Lily Mae. How can you ask me to forgive her? She’s probably thinking right now how she can be even meaner to me tomorrow than she was today. I can’t do it. I hate her. I hate everything about her.”

  Lily Mae turned Katherine towards her again, lifting her chin so they could see eye to eye. “Child, we’ve got to figure out why she does those things. It isn’t really Katherine Engstrom she hates. She has hate for her own self, but she sees you as someone she wants to battle. Wants to torment you like the way she’s tormented inside her own self.”

  It pained Katherine to think Lily Mae didn’t understand the impossibility of what she was asking her to do. “That kind of meanness doesn’t deserve to be forgiven, Lily Mae.”

  Lily Mae put the brush on the dresser and motioned for Katherine to climb in her lap. “If you don’t forgive her, she’ll win. She’ll win this battle because she’ll one day move on to try to break someone else into a million pieces with her wicked tongue, but you’ll be the one stuck in the prison of the past.”

  Katherine knew she couldn’t argue with that. “Will she change if I forgive her?”

  “Might not, can’t promise you that. But you will change if you can’t forgive her, that I know. Her poison will seep into you. It’ll lock your heart up cold and make you bitter. The Lord says to get rid of that bitterness. You’re already as strong a gal as I’ve ever seen, and now she’s making you even stronger. You’re too good to be bitter. And I’m never going to let you forget that.”

  Lily Mae reflected on her own words and decided maybe Katherine needed to hear one more thing. “Besides, child, there’ll come a day when someone will pay her back for that ugliness she flaunts around. When she’s least expecting it. Don’t know who or when or how, but it’ll happen. Always does. Seems like the Lord makes sure of it.”

  Lily Mae’s words provided the armor Katherine needed to prevent Wanda’s poison from penetrating her own heart. She wasn’t wise enough to see it coming, but Katherine’s ability to disregard their very existence caused the girls to channel their energy into a cyclone bent for annihilation, aimed right for her.

  The first cold winter day of her tenth year she wore the same winter coat to school she had worn for two years. Her sudden growth spurt by summer’s end prevented the coat from buttoning across her chest. When the cool weather arrived, Emeline had been home for a few weeks, and she was well enough to plainly see Katherine was in need of a new coat before the bitterly cold winter winds arrived. But the pixies were watching, and within three days of that first cold snap, they left a package for her on the bench by the diner’s back door. When Katherine unwrapped the brown paper, she uncovered the most beautiful coat she’d ever seen. It was pale blue winter wool with a rabbit fur collar and a matching fur hand muff. The blue did not surprise her for it seemed almost everything made of fabric the pixies brought her had a bit of blue. But the fur collar and muff were beyond anything she had ever seen. She laid it out carefully the night before, eager for the new day to arrive so she could wear it to school.

  If Katherine could have somehow predicted her new coat and muff ensemble would have provoked such trauma, she probably never would have worn it. Just a mere glimpse of the beautiful rabbit fur muff was more than the wicked minds of the covetous older girls could stand. They immediately devised a diabolical plan, improved it each time they had a stolen moment to connive, and carried it out just as that school day ended.

  Wanda Sullivan snuck into the janitor’s storeroom and found an old rag tied to a stick immersed in a can of thick tar. Holding that stick, strong with stench, she waited until Katherine came down the steps of Garfield Elementary, then she smeared it across the front of the rabbit muff, instantly ruining the one frivolous, beautiful possession Katherine had received since her father’s disappearance.

  No matter how hard her shoes pounded the pavement as she ran, the sound of the girls’ malicious laughter chased her long and hard all the way back to the diner.

  There were no words Emeline or Lily Mae could say to console her, and they knew there was no remedy for removing the tar from what just moments before had been beautiful and pristine.

  Katherine wept as she watched Lily Mae wrap her tar-stained muff in old newspaper and then placed it in the bottom of the trash barrel, ready to burn in the morning with the rest of the unwanted rubbish.

  “Child, I don’t know the source of the evil that grows in Wanda Sullivan’s heart, but I do know she’s seen this kind of thing all around her. Has to. She wouldn’t be so cruel if cruel weren’t living in her own house.” Lily Mae was trying to wrestle the anger in her voice, and it took all the strength she had to keep it in. “This I know to be true. You’ll never forget what happened today for as long as you live. What you got to do now is decide where this memory will live. Is it going to live right up front in your heart like it’s what you want to think about all the time, or is it going to be just a memory mixed in with all the others? If you can do that, not let it be the most important thing, you’re telling that bad deed what kind of strength you have deep inside of you. One day when you’re telling your own girl what it means to treat people right, you might pull up this memory and tell what it felt like to be wronged by someone evil. And remember what we are all asked to do…forgive those who trespass against us.”

  Together, Emeline and Lily Mae put Katherine to bed and sat beside her, one on each side, until she slept, exhausted from the agony and the tears. And then Lily Mae seemed to be in some kind of a mighty hurry, said she had some things that needed her attention and rushed right out the door.

  When morning did arrive, Katherine knew she had no choice. There was nothing to be done but return to school and endure the haughty laughter and the smug looks coming from Wanda and her spiteful gang.

  Or, at least that was her plan. Evidently, the pixies had another.

  It was the first and only time she found a pixie gift anywhere other than the screen door, the bench, or the stump. The next morning, a package sat on her school desk gently wrapped in worn tissue and tied with a piece of thin string. Attached were the words “do unto others” penned boldly on a small scrap of paper, penned by a hand that had already seen a lot of life, an old hand.

  Inside the worn tissue was an exact replica of her prized rabbit fur muff. Tar-free and just as beautiful as the original once was, she turned it over and over in her hands, inspecting it with wonderment. Oh, so slowly, a smile emerged on her face as it dawned on her that the pixies had found her school, her classroom, and her desk. This meant they also knew her path to and from school, and they knew of the wickedness and evil in the hearts of
those girls. The mean ones.

  Katherine never really understood all that took place that day, but she knew her teacher had tears in her eyes when she heard the painful details of what happened the afternoon before. Sometime before the morning recess Katherine looked out the classroom window and saw a car identical to Doc’s parked in front of the school. Before lunchtime, she was summoned to the principal’s office to once again tell the ugly story, and by the end of the day Wanda and her gang would be forced to apologize. And for the next four weeks the girls were not waiting for her to pass in front of the school each morning and each afternoon. They were too busy scrubbing the desks and the bathroom floors throughout the school.

  But Wanda remained like a piece of gravel in Katherine’s shoe, which would become more and more irritating throughout each stage of her life. She would one day have to confront again that poisonous spirit and then it would be over something else Wanda coveted that belonged to Katherine—the love of her life.

  One War Ends

  The town of Kingston lost only two of her sons in the first World War, but regardless how many, the town grieved. World War II was a different story, when she saw many of her bravest fight on foreign soil. Some of them came home whole and others returned with injuries, both seen and unseen. Only the dog tags returned home for those who laid their lives on the altar of freedom. And then there were the ones who were listed as missing, leaving nothing for the families to wrap their arms around to grieve.

  The entire town of Kingston felt the loss when a family received tragic news. The bell in the belfry of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, located just a block off the town square, tolled three times when horrible news arrived. Some said it was a reminder to pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Others thought the three chimes were to remind the townsfolk to pray “Send them home” or “God Bless America.” Later, some of the mothers admitted they secretly and selfishly uttered, “Please, not mine.”