Chapter Five
THE BLESSINGS OFChristmas lingered in Sylvia’s heart into the New Year, sustaining her through the difficult last months of the war.
But the Christmas future with her husband and child that she had prayed for did not come to pass. Of the four men they were longing to see that day, only Andrew and Harold returned.
A few months after Christmas, James died attempting to save Richard’s life, determined to the end to protect him as he had promised.
The shock of the news sent Sylvia into premature labor. Her daughter, born too soon, fought for life for three days, but eventually slipped away.
Devastated, maddened by grief, Sylvia remembered little of the aftermath. As if looking through a fog of sorrow, she saw herself lying in a hospital bed, holding her baby’s small, still body and weeping. She recalled begging the doctors to release her so she might attend the funeral of her father, who had collapsed from stroke, unable to bear the shock of so much loss.
Eventually Sylvia was released from the hospital and sent home. For weeks afterward, she felt as if the world were shrouded in a thick woolen batting. Sounds were less distinct. Colors were duller. Everything seemed to move more slowly.
Gradually the numbness that pervaded her began to recede, replaced by the most unbearable pain. Her beloved James was gone, and she still did not know how he had died. Her daughter was gone. She would never hold her again. Her darling little brother was gone. Her father was gone. The litany repeated itself relentlessly in her mind until she believed she would go mad.
A few hesitant visitors from the Waterford Quilting Guild came by to express their sympathies and see what, if anything, they might do to help, but Sylvia refused to see them. Eventually they stopped coming.
The war ended. Harold returned to Elm Creek Manor thinner, more anxious—a pale shadow of the man who had left. Perhaps seeking a distraction or a return to normalcy, Claudia threw herself into planning her wedding. As her matron of honor, Sylvia was expected to help, but though she tried, she could not summon up any interest and had difficulty remembering the details of the tasks Claudia assigned to her.
One day a few weeks before the wedding, Andrew paid an unexpected visit on his way from Philadelphia to a new job in Detroit. Sylvia was glad to see him. He walked with a new limp and sat stiffly in his chair as if still in the service, and although he was pleasant to everyone else, he had barely a cold word for Harold, who seemed to go out of his way to avoid Andrew. Sylvia found this odd, since she had always heard that veterans shared a bond almost like that of brothers. Perhaps seeing each other dredged up memories of the war that were still too painful to bear.
That evening after dinner, Andrew found Sylvia alone in the library. He took her hand and pulled her over to the sofa, shaking from the effort to suppress his anger and grief. He had seen everything from a bluff overlooking the beach where they had been killed. He had been a witness to it all and powerless to help. He offered to tell her how her brother and husband died, but warned her she would find no comfort in the truth.
Without thinking of the consequences, Sylvia told him to tell her what he had seen. Haltingly, every word paining him, he described how Richard had come under friendly fire, how James had raced to his rescue, how he would have succeeded with the help of one more man. How Harold had hidden himself rather than risk his own life. How Andrew had run straight down the bluff to the beach where his friends lay dying, knowing that he would never make it in time.
“I’m so sorry, Sylvia,” said Andrew, his voice breaking. “He saved me when we were kids, but I couldn’t save him. I’m so sorry.”
Sylvia held him as he wept, but she had no words to comfort him.
Andrew left Elm Creek Manor the next morning. Sylvia brooded in silent rage as the days passed and the plans for the wedding continued. Finally, she could keep silent no longer. Her sister had to know the truth about the man she intended to marry.
But to Sylvia’s shock and outrage, Claudia denied the truth, blaming Sylvia’s accusations on jealousy that Harold had come back and James had not. Torn apart by this unexpected betrayal, Sylvia left Elm Creek Manor that day, unable to bear the sight of the man who had allowed her husband and brother to die, unable to live with a sister who preferred a disloyal lie to the truth. Into two suitcases she packed all she could carry—photographs, letters from Richard and James, the sewing basket she had received for Christmas the year before her mother died. Everything else she left behind—beloved childhood treasures, favorite books, unfinished projects, the Christmas Quilt. Everything except memories and grief.
She intended never to return.
Fifty years later, when she received word of Claudia’s death, she tried to find someone else to inherit the manor—a distant relation she had never met, anyone. She even hired a private detective, but his search promptly turned up nothing—so promptly that she sometimes suspected he had not searched as thoroughly as his fees merited. But with no one to pass on the burden to, she returned to Elm Creek Manor as the sole heir to the Bergstrom estate.
And here she would live out her days, no longer consumed by regrets, thanks to the intercession of Sarah and Matt Mc Clure. She would always long for what might have been, but she would also accept with gratitude the blessings that had come to her late in life.
If only Claudia were there to share them with her.
She heard the back door open and Sarah and Matt came in, laughing. “We found a tree,” Matt called.
Sylvia rose to join them.
In the back entry, a six-foot blue spruce lay on the floor. “What do you think?” Sarah asked, as she and Matt removed their coats and boots.
“It doesn’t look like much, lying down,” Sylvia remarked. She glanced at her watch. Bringing in the tree had taken them a respectable hour and a half. That spoke well for the couple—better, in fact, than she had expected. They had clearly not wasted time in argument, nor in indecisiveness, with neither willing to hold to a position for fear of offending the other. Nor had they returned too quickly, indicating that only one of them had chosen the tree and the other had been unwilling to suggest an alternative, or had spoken up only to be ignored. If a husband and wife could not work together in a simple task like choosing a Christmas tree, it did not bode well for the more important decisions they would face in their life together.
Sylvia thought Sarah and Matt would do just fine.
“Shall we set it up in the west sitting room?” asked Sarah.
“All in good time,” said Sylvia. “First I need to pay a call on someone I’ve too long neglected, and I would appreciate a lift.”
Sylvia sat on the passenger side of Sarah and Matt’s red pickup truck, the pinecone wreath she and her mother had made on her lap. They passed the old red barn Hans Bergstrom had built into the hillside, rounded a curve, and drove downhill along the edge of the orchard. The gravel road narrowed as they entered the woods, bouncing and jolting over the potholes, until they emerged a quarter of a mile later and turned left onto the paved county highway that led to the town of Waterford proper.
“Do you mind telling me where we’re going?” asked Sarah. “Or is it a surprise?”
Sylvia gestured toward the road ahead. “Just keep heading into town.”
Sarah shrugged and did as she was told.
As they drove north, the rural landscape gave way to planned neighborhoods that had sprung up on the farmland during Sylvia’s absence, and a couple of strip malls that looked like every other strip mall one might find in the more urban regions of Pennsylvania. As they approached the heart of town, the buildings showed more age, and more character, though most of the shops Sylvia had frequented as a young woman had been replaced by quirky boutiques, restaurants, and bars catering to the students and faculty of Waterford College.
“Turn here,” Sylvia said as they approached Church Street.
A block from the town square, Sylvia asked Sarah to park in the church’s lot. As Sylvia gazed through the
windshield at the small churchyard enclosed within a low iron fence, Sarah asked, “Do you want me to come with you?”
Sylvia roused herself and unbuckled her seatbelt. “No, dear,” she said. “I need a word in private.”
Carrying the wreath, she made her way carefully across the parking lot and passed through the gate into the cemetery. Like the parking lot, the walking paths had been cleared of the previous night’s snowfall, but a light dusting of snow had blown across the paths since then, and in the footprints left behind Sylvia read the longings of the other mourners who had come to pay respects that day. Few had been buried in that churchyard since the 1950s after the larger cemetery was established east of town, but the Bergstroms owned a family plot, and many generations had been laid to rest in the shadow of the old church steeple.
The lilac bush her father had planted remained, dormant now in the depths of winter but thriving, larger than she remembered. In the spring, the winds would shower her parents’ graves with fragrant blossoms. Sylvia gazed down upon the headstone engraved with both of their names, the dates they had died fifteen years apart. They had made the most of the time granted to them, and Sylvia wished she had followed their example. She understood too late how wise they had been.
She said a silent prayer and looked about for the headstone she had seen only once, a few days after her return to Waterford. It was smaller than her parents’, low to the ground and engraved only with Claudia’s married name, date of birth, and the day she had died. It was simple and modest, chosen by two women from the church, who apologized when they showed it to Sylvia. Claudia had set aside a little money for her burial, they said, but it did not stretch far. If they had known she had surviving family, they would have waited, but as it was they followed Claudia’s instructions the best they could. If Sylvia liked, she could replace the headstone with something more suitable.
“No,” Sylvia had told them. “This is what she requested, and it will do. Thank you for seeing to it for me.”
As she had on that first visit two years before, Sylvia studied the headstone and wondered why Claudia had selected this plot for herself and had buried Harold in the newer, larger cemetery. Why had she not wanted to be interred beside her husband, as their parents had done? Why was Harold’s headstone as stark as Claudia’s, with no fond epitaph to show the world that he had once been loved?
Sylvia suspected she knew. If Claudia had come to believe the truth about Harold’s role in Richard’s and James’s deaths, Sylvia could not imagine how she had endured living so many years as his wife. Elm Creek Manor was not so large that they could have avoided each other indefinitely. Sylvia knew so little of Claudia’s life after her abrupt departure. Agnes had remained at Elm Creek Manor for several years until she left to marry a history professor from Waterford College, but she had told Sylvia very little of those days, probably wishing to spare her pain. Sylvia had so few clues to tell her of the woman her sister had become—a few unfinished quilts, the overgrown gardens, the dilapidated state of the manor—but none of her own words, not one single photograph. Forever Claudia would remain fixed in Sylvia’s memory precisely as she was the day their final argument compelled Sylvia from their home.
If only Sylvia had remembered how they had been each other’s light in the darkness on the last Christmas of the war. If only she had remembered that, and come home.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said aloud. “I’m sorry I was too proud to come home. I’m sorry I never had the chance to apologize to you. All these years I’ve blamed you for driving me away, but that’s not why I left, not really. It’s not because you married Harold. It’s not even because I couldn’t bear the sight of him, although it did take me a long time to stop hating him.”
Sylvia inhaled deeply, her nostrils stinging from the cold, her breath emerging as a stream of ghostly mist. “I ran away because I was afraid. I didn’t think I could endure the daily reminders of the happiness I once had and had lost. Now I know I should have stayed. Together you and I and Agnes could have helped one another bear our burdens. Instead I ran away, but I took my grief with me, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
She bent down to lay the wreath on Claudia’s grave, arranging the red velvet ribbon with care. Then she straightened. “I wish—” She hesitated. “I wish I knew that wherever you are, you’ve forgiven me.”
She murmured a quiet prayer, then turned and made her way back to the waiting truck. Sarah offered her a sympathetic smile as she took her seat, but thankfully did not trouble her with questions.
Back at the manor, Sylvia and Sarah found the Christmas tree still lying on the floor just inside the back entrance. Matt was in the west sitting room, putting the last screws into a metal tree stand he must have purchased earlier that day because Sylvia had never seen it before. He had moved furniture aside to clear a corner of the room for the tree, setting the sewing machine against the wall and stacking the pieces of the Christmas Quilt neatly on the sofa. Boxes of ornaments lay scattered on the floor between the coffee table and the two armchairs by the window.
Matt looked up and smiled as they entered. “Just in time,” he said. “Sarah, could you give me a hand with the tree?”
Sylvia scooted out of the way while the young people hefted the tree and carried it from the hallway into the sitting room. She offered directions as they wrestled it into the tree stand, pushing it this way and that until it stood straight and tall. Then they set it back into the corner, rotating the stand so that its best side faced out.
It was a beautiful tree, full and tall and fragrant.
Sylvia nodded her approval as Sarah and Matt stepped back for a better look. “You chose well,” she praised them. “I believe you must have found the finest tree in the forest.”
“There was another one we liked better, closer to the manor between the creek and the barn,” said Sarah. “We decided not to cut it down because there was a bird’s nest in it.”
Sylvia gave her a long look. “Indeed?”
“The nest looked abandoned to me,” said Matt, “but we decided not to disturb it just in case.”
“I understand completely,” said Sylvia, inspecting the tree. “I see you had to trim off a bit here,” she said, indicating the top of the tree, where the severed trunk was hidden among the boughs. “Was it crooked, or did you think the tree would be too tall?”
“We didn’t cut off the top,” said Matt. “See how the wood has weathered? The top of this tree was cut off long ago. We just took off the next six feet down.”
Sylvia stared at him, then at Sarah. “What you mean is that when you had that arborist out here last spring, he pruned this tree.”
Matt shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant. When I say long ago, I mean decades. Maybe between forty and sixty years, but I’m just guessing.”
“Fifty-five,” murmured Sylvia. It was an unlikely coincidence. Out of all the trees in the forest, Sarah and Matt had just happened to pick the same blue spruce that she and James had chosen? She was too skeptical a soul to believe that.
But how could they have known?
She shook off a quickening of excitement. Coincidence, she told herself firmly. Nothing more.
They strung tiny white lights upon the tree, the candles of Sylvia’s childhood gone the way of other hazards they had once accepted with blissful ignorance. As Sarah’s CD player serenaded them with carols, they adorned the tree with the beloved, familiar ornaments from Sylvia’s youth—the ceramic figurines from Germany, the sparkling crystal teardrops from New York City, carved wooden angels with woolen hair from Italy. Beneath the tree, Sarah arranged the nativity scene Sylvia’s grandfather had carved, while Matt placed Richard’s soldier nutcracker and Grandmother’s green sleigh music box on the table. Sylvia found the paper angels she and Claudia had made in Sunday school, yellowed and curled with age, but so dear to her that she would not dream of leaving them out. She placed them in prominent places high upon the tree, Claudia’s on one branch and he
r own on the opposite side of the tree exactly even with her sister’s—not one branch higher, not one lower.
“What should we put on the top of the tree?” asked Sarah, digging through the boxes. “I haven’t found an obvious tree topper, like a star or an angel or something.”
“For many years, we left the highest bough bare,” said Sylvia.
“Why? Is that symbolic of something?”
Loss, Sylvia almost said. “No. For many years we used a red-and-gold glass star, but it went missing one year and we never replaced it.”
“I think I know why,” said Matt, nodding toward the paper angels with a grin. “You and your sister fought over whose angel should be above the other’s. Neither of you would give in, so you didn’t use anything.”
“You know us too well,” said Sylvia lightly, although until that moment, it had never occurred to her to wonder why no one had ever suggested using their angels in that fashion. Perhaps the bare top of the tree was meant to prick the prankster’s conscience, an annual reminder that the loss of the star had not been forgotten. More likely, their father had not wanted to suggest anything that might stir up an argument between the sisters.
Just then, Sylvia heard a knock on the back door and a slight pause before it swung open. “Hello,” a voice called out. “Is anyone home? Don’t bother denying it because we saw the truck in the lot.”
Sylvia smiled, recognizing the voice. “We’re in here, Agnes.”
A moment later, Agnes appeared in the doorway, petite and white-haired, her blue eyes beaming behind pink-tinted glasses. Behind her stood her eldest daughter, Stacey, a head taller than her mother but with the same eyes and raven black hair of her youth, bearing only the first traces of gray. They had both removed their coats, and Stacey carried a white bakery box.
“Merry Christmas,” Agnes greeted them. She embraced Sylvia first, then Sarah and Matt. “What a beautiful tree.”
Elm Creek Quilts [08] The Christmas Quilt Page 18