After the Leaves Fall

by Nicole Baart

  I knew that to place such a lovely volume in Grandma’s hands—a book that would have been enormously meaningful to her son— would be the finest gift I had ever given her. I flipped past the memoir and chronology of Donne’s life to the contents, where I found among the poems of his first collection the verses that Dad had particularly loved: “A Hymn to God the Father.” I read it three times, wondering at how such fear and sin and repetition of transgression could end in forgiveness. How it could end in “I fear no more.”

  I paid Mr. Fletcher with a twenty from my pocket and watched as he counted out the bills for my change. He peeked at the book a few times as if reluctant to part with it, as if he had changed his mind about the price or had never intended for it to end up on one of his shelves.

  When I mentioned it was for my grandmother, he seemed to resign himself to letting it go, and as he handed me eight dollars, he said, “Did you see the inscription inside the back cover?” I shrugged and he gently took the book from me and turned to the last page. There, in slanting calligraphy, I read: For my esteemed friend, D. Scott Braddock, from your friend G. Adolph Erni. Christmas 1884.

  “This book was a Christmas present over a hundred years ago,” he said. I could tell that in his mind it lent the book a certain weight, a history that made its value far more than the twelve dollars I had just paid for it. I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty, like I had stolen it from him somehow.

  “I didn’t realize,” I began falteringly, about to return the book though I hated to part with it.

  Mr. Fletcher saw my hesitation and thrust it into my hands, waving me out of the store. “Give it to your grandmother. I hope she enjoys it.”

  It was a gruff thing to say, but he didn’t mean it that way. I thanked him very earnestly as I turned to leave. He received one of the first real smiles I had mustered up in the last several weeks, but it was lost on him—he already had his head buried in another book.

  Though it wasn’t snowing, I carefully tucked the heavy volume into my coat. Mr. Fletcher hadn’t given me a bag, and I hardly dared to ask him for one in case he changed his mind and decided he wanted to keep the book.

  In the car, I rearranged the groceries into three bags and wrapped the fourth around the book, folding and refolding it until it was a tight, waterproof bundle. Although I was already hoping that Grandma had wrapping paper at home, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to wait until Christmas to give my gift to her. The very thought of surprising her was so stirring that I could almost be convinced as to the merit of the holiday I had only minutes ago dwelt on with dread. I hummed along with the radio on my way home.

  “A tree!” Grandma exclaimed when she came out to help me unload groceries. “I had completely forgotten about getting a tree this year!”

  “I thought it would be nice,” I said meekly, hoping she wouldn’t consider me presumptuous in my purchase.

  “Oh, it is nice,” she murmured, touching the tip that was sticking out the window. “I love how a pine tree makes the whole house so fragrant.” Grandma stroked the needles for a moment before turning back to me, an exuberant expression on her face. “Let’s do Christmas tonight, Julia!”

  “Tonight?” I echoed hesitantly, though I couldn’t think of a single reason not to. Besides, the book hiding beneath the driver’s seat was a convincing argument in her favor.

  “Why not? We’ll turn on some music and have some fun in the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon; then we’ll put up the tree, eat too much, and laugh the night away.”

  It was a fine thought. I grinned at her. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  She clapped. “How fun! How spontaneous!”

  The rest of the day was such a rare pleasure that I had to stop from time to time and make myself genuinely appreciate it, take it all in. It was as if we had been given an invaluable few hours of freedom—freedom from our fears, our obligations, our own worries, and our unanswerable questions. It was as if we had been given a gift that we hadn’t asked for but immediately realized was the only thing that we truly wanted. I wanted to shout with the lightness of it.

  When we had eaten every Christmas delicacy we could conjure up and when Grandma’s records were tired from being played and replayed, we turned off the music and the lights in the kitchen and brought the tree in from the porch. I had shaken off as much snow as I could, but when we had the tree rooted firmly in the stand and cut through the twine with a steak knife from the kitchen, the boughs fell in a shower of freezing droplets. We giggled in the glistening cascade, enjoying the sprinkling baptism of icy water.

  The tree itself was fat and charming, and the one bare spot only made us love it all the more. We strung colored lights around it and garlanded it with paper strings I had made when I was a little girl. There were glass ornaments from my grandmother’s childhood tree and a wooden cowboy with arms and legs that moved from when my dad was a kid. The final touch was silver icicles that hung on tiny hooks and twirled daintily in the slightest breeze. Grandma sat with her back against the couch, directing me where to put them so that the tree was resplendent in glimmering light.

  “I love it,” she pronounced as I placed the last icicle. “I could sit here all night.”

  “Me too,” I whispered, joining her to gaze at the finished tree.

  We sat in silence for a moment before she said, “The only thing it’s missing is presents.”

  “Not for long,” I teased, hopping up from the floor to retrieve my hidden treasure. We had been so busy that I hadn’t even bothered to ask for wrapping paper or find a more suitable covering for it. The book was still unfittingly adorned in a Value Foods bag, but I thought it looked mysteriously satisfying—there was no accounting for the value of what lay inside.

  I returned to the living room with a barely concealed grin on my face and found Grandma placing a bundle beneath the tree.

  “Caught!” she said with a laugh. “I wanted you to think Santa brought it.”

  “I don’t think I ever believed that.”

  “No,” she consented. “You were far too wise to be fooled with such nonsense.” It sounded like a compliment, but there was something in the tone of her voice that carried the slightest resonance of regret.

  I ignored it. “You go first,” I said, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the tree and offering her my sad-looking parcel.

  “Lovely paper,” she cooed, stroking the plastic bag and giving me a bit of a sly look.

  “It’s all the rage right now, Grandma. You really should try to stay current with these things,” I kidded, straight-faced. “Oh, be careful,” I added as she turned the bundle over in her hands. “It’s fragile.”

  She gently unwrapped the plastic bag and eased it off the book with a little sigh of anticipation. It was something she did every year, this show of eagerness to make me feel like I had nearly taken her breath away with such a thoughtful, caring gift. I had never warranted it before, but when she realized the book that she held in her hands, her eyes really did widen slightly.

  “Oh, Julia, what a beautiful book,” she breathed. “Your father . . .” She couldn’t say any more.

  It was a joy to see her sincerely appreciate something I had given her. “I just stumbled across it,” I confessed, feeling that I had misrepresented myself a bit. It wasn’t like I had thought of the gift myself; it had sort of hopped off the shelf at me. It found me.

  “Oh, but I just love it. I don’t know that I’ll understand a single word that’s written in it, but I do love it.”

  I laughed. “Of course you’ll understand it. You’re the wisest woman I know.” The words sounded a bit strange in my ears, but I realized as I said them that I really did mean them. When I thought of her life, of all she had done and endured, I could think of no one who had lived her days with as much insight and wisdom.

  “Here,” I said quickly, trying to defuse the strange feeling in the air from a compliment that came too close to serious introspection, “look at the in
scription in the back.”

  Grandma read it with delight in her face, and we flipped through a few passages, laughing at ourselves when something was particularly obscure or complicated. I didn’t show her the poem of Dad’s particular interest, deciding I would save it for another day as it felt too serious, too burdensome, for such a night as this.

  “My turn,” Grandma finally said, laying the book aside and collecting the package that I had watched her place beneath the tree. “We were on remarkably similar wavelengths when we selected Christmas presents this year,” she observed with a smile.

  The parcel in my hands was obviously a book, thinly veiled by a layer of red wrapping paper with gold-flaked poinsettia leaves. It was large and heavy, and though I suspected a parenting book of some sort, I could hardly imagine what psychologist would have the resolve to stick with such a tiresome, overdone topic for so many pages. I tried to cast an enthusiastic look at Grandma before sliding my finger under a fold in the paper.

  Before the paper was completely off, I realized exactly which book it was. The worn corners and overstuffed pages were familiar even when I first held them in my hands, imagining that they belonged to some mundane modern volume. But when I could see various papers and mementos peeking out from between the pages, I had to acknowledge what it was even though I could hardly bring myself to believe it.

  “You’re giving me your Bible?” I asked, and my voice was much quieter than I intended it to be.

  “I want you to have it,” Grandma said, almost as if she knew she would have to talk me into keeping her most treasured possession.

  I was baffled. “But I have a Bible.”

  “I know, but I wanted you to have this one.” Grandma leaned over and lifted the Bible from my grasp so she could take my hands in her own. “Julia, I never parented a daughter, and if I had, her teenage years would have been twenty years ago. I don’t know what to do with a nineteen-year-old now any more than I knew what to do with a fifteen-year-old a few years ago when your dad died. I feel like I have failed you in so many ways.”

  “Grandma—,” I tried to interrupt, but she squeezed my fingers as if warning me to let her finish what she had to say.

  “We’re going to make it through this—I know that for sure—but I’ve never been much of a preacher, and I’ve never been one to take control, so we’re going to work our way through this together. This—” she inclined her head at the Bible lying beside us—“is the best road map I’ve got. You need it now. I want you to have it.”

  I glanced down at the imposing book softened by the collection of devotionals, prayers, flyers, musings, and keepsakes sticking out at all angles. She saw me looking at them, and when I opened my mouth to protest again, she cut me off by saying, “I want you to have it all. You called me wise earlier and I know that’s not true, but I know you will find some wisdom in there. I don’t want to withhold anything that just might help in some small way along this journey. I don’t want to hide anything from you if it might be able to cast a little light on the coming days.”

  I was speechless. It was the most excessive gift of self I had ever received, and I absolutely did not know what to do with it. Grandma was offering me her heart and soul, her spiritual journey—what could be more intimate? I wasn’t sure that I even wanted what she was so freely offering, but it was such an extravagant bequeathal that I felt humbled and small beneath the great love and immensity of it. In the end there was nothing I could say but “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and she gently laid her hand against my forehead.

  It was a strange thing to do, as if she were testing my skin for the telltale, radiating warmth of a fever, but as she touched my head, I understood her hand was laid on me in blessing. Her palm was cool and soothing against my skin, and I pressed myself into it almost against my will as a part of me even now balked against her unfathomable kindness. Who was I to deserve her hand so tender along my brow?

  The room was still and glowing with the lights from the Christmas tree. Grandma held her hand above me in the silence, and I couldn’t help but imagine December next year, a baby in my arms. My breath caught in my throat. There was a swell on the horizon, a fathomless, deepening wave that would surely consume me in a torrent of blue. I was to be dashed against the rocks. What could I do but sit there with my eyes closed and let myself slowly, clumsily accept her gift, her love, her blessing? Her promise of light.

  Last Threats

  I BEGAN TO CARRY GRANDMA’S BIBLE with me everywhere. It was a security blanket of sorts, a survival manual that I had not yet opened nor tried to understand, counting on the hope that when I truly needed it I could whip it open and some resounding truth would ring forth with unmistakable clarity. The Bible was my backup plan if my own resourcefulness managed to fail me.

  However, Grandma had never intended for me to use her treasured book as my ace in the hole. Her amusement was indulgent at first, then waning, and finally it ripened into a quiet disappointment that propelled her to confront me one morning at breakfast.

  “You know, Julia, you should actually try reading it.” She pointed a forkful of scrambled eggs at the book that lay idle beside my plate.

  I started to say, I do but stopped myself before I could lie to her face. “I know,” I murmured instead. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know the old stories. It wasn’t as if I had never read the book. Was it really necessary to read and reread such a tedious and seemingly incomprehensible collection of children’s stories?

  Grandma read my mind. “I know you know the stories, but there’s a lot more to the Bible than you remember from Sunday school.”

  She rarely chastised me, so when she did, the obligation I felt to honor her was tenfold what it would have been if she had been the type to nag me constantly. “I don’t know where to start,” I finally admitted, willing to do whatever she suggested.

  The one comment started a tradition in our little family. Every morning I would come downstairs for breakfast and find a slip of paper on my plate. Between the flowery border of a three-inch square piece of stationery I would read my assignment for the day: sometimes a couple of chapters in a book I had to look up in the table of contents, other times a few verses from various books that kept my fingers jogging over the parchmentlike paper for over an hour. I was surprised to find that I could remember the Old Testament books in their proper order thanks to a rap song we had learned in Sunday school when I was nine. The New Testament books, on the other hand, were less familiar, and no matter how hard I tried to keep them straight, I kept mixing up First and Second Corinthians with First and Second Chronicles.

  To say that it was immediately rewarding would be a lie. At first I read and reread passages trying intently to glean wisdom and help from the ancient words. Later I got bored and found it hard to focus, dwelling instead on the possibilities of my future: getting a job, finding day care for the baby, maybe moving out of the farmhouse so Grandma wouldn’t have to regress to the stage of her life that she had left behind decades ago.

  When I went to my doctor for the first time, he sternly reminded me of the possibility of putting the child up for adoption, and the thought consumed me for days and eliminated any ability I had to silently read my Bible. I sat with the book open but utterly unused, and I deliberated and argued with myself until I realized that I could never do such a thing. It didn’t matter how beautiful, honorable, and possibly even better for the baby that self-sacrificing act might be. I didn’t have the courage. I wasn’t strong enough. I didn’t need to bury myself in Bible passages to know that one truth.

  Though I considered myself rather weak and irresolute in regards to the pregnancy, when it became public knowledge that I wasn’t going back to school after Christmas break, I found I had reserves of strength that took me completely by surprise. Maybe my steely forbearance through whispers and stares was a direct result of the overwhelming conviction that I was doing the right thing. This child was not a mistake. My own action
s, my recklessness with Parker, had been a dire lapse in judgment—a sin, to use the language that I was beginning to become reacquainted with—but to call the child an error was as abhorrent to me as the thought of ending the life I had so carelessly begun.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if my dad had felt the same way. It seemed he was a shadow just behind my shoulder, fading against the light I cast each time I turned to catch him hovering over me. He didn’t whisper to me as some otherworldly apparition or my own personal guardian angel, but as I walked the same path that he had taken, he reminded me of things—of the fierceness with which he’d loved and protected me every day of my own mistaken life. I understood the depth of his love against the backdrop of indiscretion and the well-intentioned but cruel assumptions of people who believed they knew what was best for the child who was already so inexplicably dear and loved.

  In the first few days, I simply smiled and ignored nearly everybody. I went to church with Grandma the Sunday after the gossip had spread like a ditch fire in the fall—rushing through each blade of grass and licking every green thing dry until nothing but ashes remained—and sat still and resolute beneath the onerous weight of conviction and disapproval.

  No one knew that I was pregnant, but they did know that I would not be going back to school after Christmas, and there was plenty of speculation about why. Maybe I had been caught up in the party crowd, falling prey to drugs and alcohol. Maybe Brighton wouldn’t take me back because I had confirmed myself to be slothful and stupid and had been kicked out. Whatever the reason for my departure, it was surely juicy and scandal worthy, and though I wished I could have proven them wrong, the truth was probably worse than their malicious assumptions. I dreaded the day that the whole truth would come out.

  It would be unfair to say that everyone was as cold and charred as I, in my cynical imagination, envisioned them to be. One sweet woman actually wrapped me in a fervent embrace and said absolutely nothing while she held me as if her grip alone would protect me from every possible sorrow. She knew nothing of my trouble, and yet she touched my cheek as she walked away and offered nothing more than the solidarity of her arms. I had to blink back tears.