The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “So this girl—what did you say her name was again?”

  “Leigh. Leigh Jacobson. You want me to write it down for you?”

  “That might help. I used to not have a bit of trouble remembering names. I clerked at Masterson’s Market for years and could call everybody who came in by name, but lately I just can’t seem to get hold of names. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I forget everything.”

  “You remembered going to church with Polly Wilson,” Jocie said as she took her bowl to the sink and quickly dumped the rest of her oats into Zeb’s pan before she found some paper to write down Leigh’s name.

  “Oh yes, I can recall things that happened years ago. It’s what happened last week that wanders away from me. I can’t even remember what your father preached on last Sunday morning.”

  Jocie paused in her writing to think. “Me either.”

  “You probably weren’t paying proper attention.”

  “I listened. I always listen to Dad preach. Seems like it was from Corinthians, or maybe that was the week before. This week was something about freedom. You know, because of the Fourth. You can ask Dad. He’ll remember.” Jocie finished printing out Leigh’s name and handed it to Aunt Love before she picked up Zeb’s food.

  “Leigh Jacobson.” Aunt Love stared at the paper. “This could be an answer to prayer.”

  “What?” Jocie stopped on the way out to feed Zeb and looked back at Aunt Love. “Have you been doing a girlfriend prayer for Dad?”

  Aunt Love actually smiled. “I pray for your father every day. I pray the Lord will bless and guide him. If the Lord has decided to bless him with a good woman, then who am I to second-guess the Lord? Besides, your father has been alone too long.”

  “He’s not alone. He’s got us.”

  “But he needs a companion, a helpmate. All men do.”

  “What about women? I know lots of women who aren’t married. Zella. You. Didn’t you ever pray for a husband for yourself?” Too late Jocie remembered Tabitha telling her about Aunt Love’s fiancé getting killed in the war, but there was no way to take back the words.

  Aunt Love sat down at the table again and wrapped both her hands around her teacup. She didn’t take a drink. She just stared down the reddish-brown liquid. “I did, and the Lord answered my prayer. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

  “I’m sorry. Tabitha told me the man you were going to marry got killed in the First World War.”

  “He did, but I didn’t know that for years. I just knew he never came back for me.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “When my father passed on, I found a letter in his Bible from one of Gil’s army friends. They had made a pact to write to the other’s sweetheart if anything happened to either of them in the war. His name was Albert Wiseman. He was from Missouri. He said Gil was killed in the Meuse-Argonne battle. I didn’t even know where that was, but I went to the library and found out it was in France.”

  “Why didn’t your father give you the letter when it came?”

  “He didn’t let me read any of Gil’s letters. I found one in the mail one time that I suppose he’d overlooked, and he yanked it away from me and threw it in the stove. I tried to snatch it out, but the flames got it first.” Aunt Love rubbed a scar on her arm. “Father didn’t approve of Gilbert.”

  “That was an awful thing to do.”

  “Yes.” Aunt Love took a sip of her tea. “Yes, it was.”

  Jocie wasn’t sure what to do. She couldn’t hug Aunt Love. She never hugged Aunt Love. It might give her a real heart attack if she did. So she just put her hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Aunt Love covered Jocie’s hand with her own. Her skin felt dry and scratchy like oak leaves in the fall. “You should give thanks every day for the blessing of a kind and good father. You and Tabitha both.”

  “I do,” Jocie said.

  Aunt Love pushed Jocie’s hand away and picked up her teacup. “Now get on with your chores.”

  As Jocie went out the door, she looked back at Aunt Love. Imagining her young and in love was almost as impossible as imagining that camel through the eye of a needle. But just because Jocie couldn’t imagine it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Or that the memory of it didn’t still make Aunt Love sad. Jocie wanted to say something to make her feel better, but she didn’t know what. She couldn’t very well say maybe Aunt Love would forget about it the way she forgot other things and then she wouldn’t have to be sad. She hadn’t forgotten it in fifty years. That memory was probably stuck in there with the Bible verses. A Bible verse might help, but all Jocie could think of was one of the Beatitudes. She decided to try it. “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

  Aunt Love looked around at her. “ ‘To every thing there is a season. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.’ It’s your time to dance, Jocelyn.”

  “I can’t dance,” Jocie said.

  “You dance every day to the tune of life.”

  Zeb, impatient for his food, jumped up on the screen door, and Jocie hurried on out the door before he pushed the screen loose from the frame. She didn’t know what Aunt Love was trying to tell her anyway with that Bible verse. She’d always figured Aunt Love was one of those people who didn’t exactly approve of dancing.

  Zeb gulped down the food, licking up every bit of the oats with relish. As usual, when he was sure every speck was gone, he sat up and put his paws together as if saying doggy grace. Jocie had quit trying to get him to do it differently. She figured that where he’d come from he’d had to eat first and thank the Lord second to be sure nothing grabbed his food.

  Jocie stuck her head back through the screen door. Aunt Love was still holding her teacup at the table. “I’m going for a walk. I’ll wash the dishes and sweep the floors when I get back, okay?”

  “All right, but don’t forget we have to hull those lima beans that Janie Brown gave your father.”

  Jocie groaned. “Why are all vegetables green?”

  “Beets and carrots aren’t green.”

  Jocie got her bike out. She’d told Aunt Love she was going on a walk, but Aunt Love wouldn’t remember what she’d said ten minutes from now anyway, so it wouldn’t matter. She hoped Aunt Love would forget to save the lima beans and have them already in the pan cooking by the time Jocie got home. Jocie didn’t mind hulling peas. Pea hulls popped right open and the fat peas shelled out easy as pie, but a person could make airplane glue out of whatever was on the inside of some lima bean hulls.

  She hadn’t been to her grandfather’s old woods since the day she’d found Zeb. But today the sun was shining and the wind was blowing in her face. A perfect day to go exploring. Zeb was her dog now. He wouldn’t disappear on her. Not even if the Jupiter spaceship did come back for him.

  She stashed her bike behind some bushes and followed Zeb into the shade of the trees. The air was immediately cooler, and the noise of cars passing on the road faded away. Shadows blended together, and she imagined animal eyes watching her and Zeb as they followed a faint path. Zeb scooted back and forth in front of her sniffing rocks and tree trunks. A few times he stopped, stared intently into the shadows, and barked his thunder barks.

  “We won’t see so much as a squirrel with you making all that racket,” Jocie told him, but she didn’t mind. It was good having company in the woods. She found a blackberry bush and shared a few ripe berries with Zeb. A rabbit must have peeked out of the brush and made a face at Zeb, because the dog suddenly took off through the woods. Jocie yelled at him to come back, but he didn’t even slow down.

  She pushed through the bushes trying to keep Zeb in sight, but he outran her in minutes. She paused to catch her breath and look for a path, but there was nothing but more bushes and trees. Worse, she couldn’t hear Zeb now. She whistled and called, “Zeb, here boy.” Above her a crow complained as if she’d interrupted his morning nap. The bird flapped off through the trees when Jocie whistled again.

&nb
sp; Then it was quiet. Spooky quiet. Nothing looked familiar. “Don’t be stupid,” she told herself. “All trees look sort of alike.” She looked for moss, which they said grew on the north side of trees, but the problem was she didn’t know whether she needed to go north or south or east or west to get back to her bike. She never paid any attention to directions. Well, she knew you went north to Grundy and south to West Liberty, but that didn’t do her much good out here in the woods. Besides, she couldn’t go home without Zeb.

  So she wasn’t lost. Zeb was the one who was lost. She began walking south, if the moss on the trees was right. She just kept pushing under tree limbs and circling briar thickets. Every few steps she whistled till her lips were dry. At last she heard barks in the distance, and she plunged through the trees toward the sound.

  She stumbled out on an old tractor road. She’d never found it before, and she wondered if she was even still on her grandfather’s old farm. She started following the old road, but Zeb barked again off to the left. She ducked under some cedar trees and followed the sound. The cedars were thick, and Jocie had to practically crawl through them. Under her feet, the ground was cushy with fallen cedar needles, so she made hardly any noise as she hurried toward Zeb. The dog’s barks were getting louder. He must have treed something. Jocie hoped for a cat or maybe a possum, nothing too big.

  The cedars began to thin out a little, and she could stand up and weave her way through them. She came out into a small clearing. Zeb’s barks were louder than ever, but she still couldn’t spot him. At the edge of the clearing, the log part of an old barn still stood with bent pieces of rusted tin roofing and weathered planks scattered around it. Past the barn, purple phlox was blooming around what was left of a rock chimney. A good-sized maple grew up in the middle of where a house must have once stood, and poison ivy vines climbed on the chimney rocks. A rusted old bucket with no bottom lay on its side in the grass near an old cistern.

  Jocie peered down through the rusting top of the cistern held down by a huge rock and saw the glint of water. Beyond the cistern, the spiky stems of a yucca plant stuck up out of a circle of rocks. More rocks, mostly geodes, were scattered willy-nilly through the grass. It looked like Aunt Love’s rock garden gone wild. Jocie picked up a sparkling splinter of a geode and put it in her pocket to take to Aunt Love for her rock garden.

  Jocie moved on down an incline toward a creek. Zeb was still barking, but he was nowhere in sight. She whistled again, and Zeb poked his head out from behind some rocks down by the creek. Jocie picked up another couple of rocks just in case Zeb had treed something wild and vicious.

  A small cave was tucked up behind some large rocks, and whatever Zeb had treed there must have long since found another way out, because when Jocie peeked inside she couldn’t see the first glint of animal eyes or anything else. Even Zeb, now that she was there, lost interest and stopped barking.

  “No spaceships, eh?” Jocie sat down on the biggest rock and gazed back toward where the house had once sat in the clearing. “Wonder if whoever lived here ever went in this cave.”

  Zeb seemed to take that as permission and scooted inside. Jocie got down on all fours and crawled part of the way through the entrance after him. Light sifted in around her and through a chink in the top of the rocks. The cave was bigger than Jocie had expected. Plenty of room for snakes and spiders. It didn’t matter that Zeb was nosing around in every corner. The snakes might be on the rocks above her head. Cold chills tiptoed across the back of her neck.

  She jerked her head out of the hole, but then curiosity got the better of her. She gingerly stuck her head back in the hole and waited till her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Zeb looked around at her before he went back to digging around a small mound of rocks at the back of the cave. He pulled out something and carried it toward Jocie. Jocie pulled her head out of the cave opening to let Zeb carry it out into the sunlight.

  When Zeb dropped it at her feet, Jocie shrieked. It was a skull. Jocie put her hand over her mouth and leaned over for a closer look. A very small human skull.

  Jocie jumped back. She wanted to run up the bank and through the woods to the road where her bike was hidden. But she stood stock-still, closed her eyes, and whispered a prayer. “Help me, Lord. I don’t know what I should do.” She kept her eyes closed an extra minute in case the Lord wanted to plant an answer in her head, but nothing happened. She still didn’t know what to do.

  Of course, she did know some things. She knew she shouldn’t let Zeb have the skull, and really, he didn’t appear to want it now that he had presented it to her. He was sitting back, his head cocked to the side, waiting for her to do something. A chill tickled her spine as she imagined a baby’s tiny ghost beside Zeb also watching and waiting.

  She couldn’t just leave the skull there on the ground, and she didn’t think she should carry it home with her. She looked over at Zeb. “I don’t guess you’d like to put this back where you found it.” Zeb just kept panting.

  “That’s what I thought. Then I guess I’ll have to do it, snakes or no snakes.” Jocie picked up the skull. It was so small it fit in her palm. “Poor little baby. Wonder what happened to you. Why are you buried down here all alone in this cave? At least, I guess you’re alone.” Suddenly more ghosts popped up around her.

  Jocie carried the skull very carefully toward the hole into the cave. She placed it inside the cave as far as she could reach and then crawled in after it. Zeb sniffed her feet as she pulled them into the cave and would have followed her in, but she made him stay out. He’d done more than enough digging for one day.

  Something rustled in the cave behind her. Jocie froze on all fours, imagining snakes slithering toward her. She slowly turned her head and studied every inch of ground around her, but nothing was there. At least nothing she could see. She picked up the tiny skull and got a whole new crop of shivers up and down her spine as she crept toward the mound of rocks at the back of the cave.

  “I’m sorry Zeb dug up your grave.” Jocie’s voice echoed in the cave. “He’s just a dog, or at least I think he is. Anyway, we didn’t mean any harm.” Jocie laid the skull down and began gingerly replacing the rocks Zeb had disturbed as she recited the Lord’s Prayer. She talked fast, but she didn’t skip any words before she said amen and scrambled back out of the cave.

  Zeb licked her face when she stuck it out into the sunshine. She pulled herself out of the cave and gave Zeb a hug. “Now what do we do?” she asked the dog as he licked her face again. “Tell somebody, I guess. You wouldn’t happen to know the way home, would you?”

  Zeb barked, made a circle around her, then stopped and waited. “I take it that means you’re as lost as I am. You could at least look worried.” Jocie looked up at the sun. It had to be noon already. She licked her lips and looked longingly at the creek, but her father said drinking out of a creek could give you the pukes. She remembered the glint of water in the old cistern, but snakes came to mind again. Zeb waded into the creek and lay down in the water while he lapped up a drink.

  “Guess there’s no need in both of us being thirsty,” Jocie said. “Or are you trying to tell me we should follow the creek? Up or down creek?”

  Zeb climbed out of the creek and shook, showering Jocie, before he trotted off downstream.

  “As good a direction as any.” Jocie followed him. They’d hardly gone fifteen steps before the trees swallowed them up again as they left the clearing behind. It was easy walking on the flat rocks in the shallow creek. Zeb jumped out of the creek to chase a grasshopper but came back when Jocie whistled.

  When the creek ran under an old wire fence, Jocie deserted the creek to follow the fence line. The trees began to thin out, and they came out in a pasture full of cows who stopped eating long enough to give them the eye. Jocie climbed the fence and headed across the field. Nobody could be lost in a pasture field. They topped a rise on the other side of the cows and saw the road. A half hour later she was back where she’d left her bike. She looked back at the woods a
nd wondered if she could find the cave again.

  The midday sun was hot, and Jocie’s sweat burned the scratches she’d gotten chasing after Zeb as she pedaled toward home. She thought about just going straight to the newspaper office to tell her father about the skull, but she was too thirsty. And Aunt Love might have remembered that she should have been home hours ago.

  Aunt Love looked up from the pan of lima beans in her lap when Jocie burst through the kitchen door. “For mercy’s sake, child, you look like you’ve been crawling through a briar patch.”

  Jocie wiped the sweat off her face with her shirt tail and went straight for the water pitcher in the refrigerator. She gulped down a glassful before she said, “I have to call Dad at the paper.”

  “He’s not there,” Aunt Love said. “He’s taken Tabitha to Grundy. No telling when they’ll be back.”

  “Grundy?” Jocie sank down in one of the kitchen chairs. Jezebel sniffed Jocie’s feet and hissed.

  “He got her in to see a doctor over there.” Aunt Love split open one of the lima bean hulls with a paring knife and pushed the beans out into the pan. “What’s so important anyway? Have you hurt yourself somehow?” Aunt Love looked half worried, half irritated. “For heaven’s sake, you need to learn to be careful. Your arm’s bleeding.”

  “I’m not hurt, Aunt Love.” Jocie rubbed at the dried blood on her arm. “But I found something.”

  “Ticks and chiggers, from the looks of you.” Aunt Love picked up another lima bean and slit the hull. “You need to check through your head for the ticks. Better to find them before they dig in.”

  Jocie ran her fingers through her hair absentmindedly. She wasn’t worried about ticks. She poured herself another glass of water. She couldn’t wait till her father got back from Grundy. She had to tell somebody. Aunt Love might know what she should do.