“So how long are you plannin’ on stayin’, John Henry?” his uncle asked as the family finished supper and started into dessert.
“Only a week or so, Sir,” he replied, “just until Dr. Frink gets his wife and children settled up in Jasper and goes on back to Valdosta. I hope my bein’ here won’t inconvenience you any. My father told me you could use some help around the place, anyhow.” He was careful not to add his father’s comments on Uncle Rob’s place being like a convent—which seemed true enough, with all the praying that went on. Once supper was over and the evening chores had been done, there’d be more praying as Aunt Mary Anne gathered the children around her for evening devotions and the long recitation of the rosary before bed.
“I reckon I could use some help,” his uncle agreed. “That fence around the yard is needin’ some paint for one thing, if you’re willin’.”
“It needs more than just paint,” his Aunt Mary Anne countered, “it needs to be pulled out and rebuilt, that’s what. Why, John Henry would have to spend his whole visit here workin’ to fix it right. Whatever are you thinkin’, Rob?”
“Hard work never hurt a body,” his uncle replied with a shrug. “Besides, I know my brother Henry. He’ll expect to hear I gave the boy too much to do, or he won’t think I’ve been a good host.”
Mattie’s little sisters giggled at that, but John Henry saw nothing funny in it.
“I don’t mind fixin’ your fence, Uncle Rob,” he said earnestly. “I reckon I owe you a debt of gratitude for all you did for me some years back. I hope you’ll let me do whatever you need, to show my thanks.”
He’d prepared that little speech all the way up from Valdosta, but only his aunt seemed much impressed by it.
“Why, isn’t that sweet!” Mary Anne said with a smile. “I do believe Mattie’s right about you, John Henry. You have grown up—and turned into a real gentleman, as well.”
“But Mattie didn’t say John Henry was a gentleman,” Theresa said, eyes looking mischievous. “She said he was handsome,” and the way she drawled out the word made it seem sweet as pulled taffy.
“Is that right?” Uncle Rob said, and shot Mattie a quick look.
But his eldest daughter didn’t catch his glance, her eyes lowered and a blush rising in her freckled face.
“I suppose I said somethin’ like that,” she replied, then quickly changed the subject. “Is it true they really have ten libraries up there in Philadelphia, John Henry? That must have been lovely with all those wonderful books to read.”
“Actually, there’s eleven libraries in the city, if you count the one at the Medical School. But there’s more music halls than libraries, and more taverns even than that.” He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them, as his Aunt Mary Anne said with a disapproving lift of her brows:
“Oh?”
“Though I myself never visited such places, of course,” he added quickly. And as the lie seemed to placate her, he was about to add that he had spent most of his free weekend time at church, when little Jim Bob spoke up.
“Pa’s goin’ to the city,” he said. “He’s gonna live on top of a store.”
“Above a store,” Mattie said, whispering a correction. On top would mean livin’ on the roof, and that’s silly, of course.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” John Henry asked, bewildered by the seemingly meaningless turn in the conversation.
“Jim Bob means I’ve takin’ a position up in Atlanta,” his uncle said casually. “Your Uncle John Holliday has asked me to come up and help awhile in his mercantile partnership with Mr. Tidwell. I’ll be home again soon enough.”
“You’re leavin’ Jonesboro?” John Henry asked in surprise. He could imagine his own father going off from home on business, as Henry regularly traveled to Savannah and Atlanta on buying trips. But Uncle Rob was so much a family man that John Henry could hardly picture him without them, or them without him. “What about your job at the depot?” he went on. “I thought you were Baggage Master for the Macon and Western.”
“I was. But I’m gettin’ to be too old for baggage work, and I used to be in the mercantile business myself once, back before the War. Seems like a good opportunity.”
There was a general silence at the table, then Aunt Mary Anne said a little too brightly, “Well, look at the time! Why, it’ll be past bedtime before we get these supper dishes cleared and washed. Girls, get to your chores. And Rob, do take Jim Bob upstairs and get him ready for bed. Seven-years old is entirely too young for stayin’ up so late.”
Uncle Rob smiled wearily. “You see how it is, John Henry? I’m a henpecked rooster in a hen house. Be good to get away for a while, pretend I’m a single man again. I’ll let Jim Bob here wait on these women. Come on, son,” he said, tousling the boy’s hair, “best not disobey your Mama. And don’t you stay up too late, either, John Henry. You’ll want to start on that fence before the sun gets too hot.”
“Yessir, Uncle Rob. And Sir?”
“Yes, John Henry?”
“Do you still have that saddle horse you used to keep? The one with the russet coat?”
His uncle nodded. “She’s out in the barn if you want to take a look at her. She could use a good groomin’, too, when you get done with that fence.”
“Yessir,” he said again, and gave a casual glance across the table toward Mattie. “Maybe I’ll go out for a ride tonight, once the moon gets high. I always was fond of that pretty mare.”
He hadn’t been riding in Jonesboro since the summer of his exile there, but it was all so familiar still: dusty Church Street that joined up with the Fayetteville Road, the green waters of the Flint River over to the west, the track that led down to Lovejoy off to the south. But he wasn’t riding out of adolescent frustration this time, letting the horse take him where it would, and he had no interest in ending up at the Fitzgerald’s plantation—though he did have a plan in mind. For he hoped that Mattie might have taken his hint and would be waiting for him back in the barn when he returned from his ride. And this time there would be no anger between them, only the sweetness of a few stolen moments of romance in the moonlight.
He could just see how it would be: he’d come in from the ride, feeling flushed and healthy, and Mattie would step out of the shadows with a smile that said she knew what he was thinking of. But lady that she was, she would cast her gaze aside, pretending not to see the eagerness in his face, paying attention to the horse instead.
“She is a pretty thing, isn’t she?” she would ask.
“She’s pretty all right, more than I remembered.”
And when he slid down from the saddle and ran his hand over the horse’s shining flanks, his fingers would meet Mattie’s as if by accident, and hover there.
“You didn’t wait up just for me, did you?” he would ask, teasing, and she would answer with a toss of her auburn hair.
“Of course not. I was just worried about the horse, that’s all.”
But her hand wouldn’t move from under his, and when he closed his fingers around hers and turned her to face him, he would hear her breathing coming fast as a heartbeat.
“I have missed you, Mattie,” he would say, whispering the words, and she would sigh and look up at him with shining eyes.
“I have missed you too, John Henry!”
And when he bent to kiss her lips she’d catch a breath and then melt into his arms. And where it went from there, only the night and the moonlight knew.
That was the plan, anyhow, and thinking of it made him feel light-headed and he raced the horse faster than he should have in the late summer heat. By the time he got the mare back into the barnyard she was working on a lather, and he had to attend to getting her brushed down and watered before he could look for his expected company. But though he waited in the barn for nearly an hour, grooming the horse until her russet coat gleamed, Mattie never did come.
Had she misunderstood his intention? Had he been too obscure for fear of being too obvious? Had something else d
emanded her attention when she tried to free herself of the house? Or was she simply not interested in meeting him there in the moonlight? His pride wouldn’t let him consider the last possibility, and left him wondering and frustrated with his unfulfilled imagining.
But as he shut up the barn and headed back into the house, past the rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden and the heroes’ graves in the flowerbed, his eyes caught a glimpse of something unexpected. In one of the upstairs windows of the house, a curtain fluttered to a close and an oil lamp went quickly out. And he was certain, with all the surety of youthful passion, that it was Mattie who had been there at the window watching him all along.
But that furtive glance from a window was all the satisfaction he had for his train ride north and his week’s visit in Jonesboro. For with all the family meals and family prayers and the work of mending his uncle’s dilapidated fence, he had no time at all to be alone with Mattie. And if he hadn’t known better, he might have thought there was some kind of conspiracy to it, the way everyone in the family seemed to work together to keep the two of them apart. When Mattie brought him a pitcher of lemonade after his long morning of pulling nails from the old fence boards, her sisters Lucy and Roberta came along to help pour. When she brought him a wet towel to wipe his brow after a hot afternoon of digging post holes, Catherine and Theresa had to help her with the water bucket. And even on his last morning there, when he boldly asked her to walk with him up to the train depot to say goodbye, young Jim Bob was sent to walk along with them.
“I like to watch the trains,” he said, as the three of them trudged up Church Street toward the railroad tracks. “Did you like to watch the trains when you were little, Cousin John Henry?”
“I reckon I did, Jim Bob. I always liked to think of the places a train could take you—far-away places you only heard of.”
“I like the noise,” Jim Bob replied. “And the smoke.”
Mattie smiled over his head at John Henry. “Jim Bob says the train looks like a dragon, the way the steam comes out its nose.”
“Mama says I have a peculiar imagination,” the little boy said. “That’s a funny word, ain’t it? Mama’s always saying funny words like that. And what’s a party-gal, anyhow?”
“A party gal?” John Henry asked with a laugh. “Why, I reckon that could mean a lot of things . . .”
“None of which you need to know about just now, Jim Bob,” Mattie put in primly. “Where did you hear that, anyhow?”
“From Mama,” Jim Bob said, absently kicking at a stone lying in the dirt. “She told Pa that John Henry’s like a regular party-gal, come home again. She said it like it was somethin’ nice, like a black sheep turned white, she said.”
John Henry gave Mattie a glance and saw that she was smiling, too.
“So what’s a party-gal?” Jim Bob asked again, and Mattie answered him patiently, like the schoolteacher she had trained to be.
“I believe the word was prodigal,” she explained, “like the story of the prodigal son in the Bible. You remember Mama tellin’ you that at bedtime when you were little, don’t you? The Prodigal Son is one of the Parables of our Lord, about a rich young man who went off and squandered his inheritance, then repented of his sinful ways. And when he returned home at last, his father gave him a feast and put a fancy new cloak on him.”
Jim Bob took a long look at John Henry, considering. “Are you really rich, John Henry?”
“Only a little,” he replied, laughing at the boy’s literal-mindedness. Of all Mattie’s bothersome siblings, the inquisitive little boy was the most entertaining. But his next words took the laughter right out of John Henry’s heart.
“So if you’re rich and your father gave you a cloak and all, how come you have to wear sheep’s clothes? ‘Cause when Mama said you were a black sheep turned white, Pa said maybe you were really just wearin’ sheep’s clothes. What’s that supposed to mean, anyhow?”
John Henry didn’t answer the question and neither did Mattie, taking a firm hold of Jim Bob’s hand like he’d done something wrong.
“That’s enough questions, Jim Bob,” she said with uncharacteristic sharpness. “Why don’t you take John Henry’s satchel and run ahead and see if the porter can put it on the train?” Then she gave him a push and turned to John Henry. “Don’t listen to him, honey! You know how he is, always makin’ things up. Why, a train’s a dragon to Jim Bob. He probably just misunderstood. I’m sure my father never said anything of the sort . . .”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” John Henry cut in hotly, “the way everyone’s been actin’ this week, like they can’t trust me to be alone with you. Your father said he felt like a rooster in a hen-house, so I reckon he thinks I’m a wolf, come to steal his chickens away. No wonder he kept me workin’ so hard I never even had a chance to kiss you.” He was so angry at his uncle’s injustice that he didn’t realize what he’d said until Mattie remarked demurely:
“You wanted to kiss me?”
“Hell, yes! What did you think I came all the way up here for, anyhow? Just to fix your father’s broken fence? If all I wanted was a lot of hard work, my father’s got plenty for me to do back in Valdosta. I’ve been waitin’ for over a year to kiss you again, Mattie Holliday, and I hoped you’d been wantin’ the same.”
It wasn’t the romantic speech he’d intended to make nor even a particularly passionate one, more anger than anything. But Mattie blushed prettily like he’d just paid her the nicest compliment in the world, and said softly, “I wouldn’t mind you kissin’ me.”
If there hadn’t been a crowd of people gathered at the platform already and no privacy at all, he would have taken her in his arms and kissed her right then. But Jonesboro was too small a town to make a public show of affection like that without word getting back to Mattie’s folks even before she got home herself. So all he could do was lean down to kiss her on the cheek, like a proper loving cousin.
“I’ll be back again come spring,” he promised. “And then I will kiss you, if you’re still willin’ to have me.”
Mattie nodded a reply, but her words were lost in the scream of the steam engine’s whistle, as Jim Bob came running back toward them with his arms waving.
“John Henry! You better get your ticket before the train leaves. Wish I was goin’ off somewhere on the train!”
And for the first time in his life, John Henry didn’t feel the same way.
He thought about Mattie and that unfulfilled kiss all the way back to Valdosta and for many long summer days after that, which was probably why Miss Thea Morgan became the surprised recipient of his frustrated affections, if only for a brief evening.
Thea had been one of his preceptorship patients that summer, come into the office with a troublesome toothache that ended up as six fillings and three extracted molars. And though it had been a complicated treatment, taking five office visits altogether and causing her several painful nights of recovery, Thea had borne it all bravely—a courage that impressed John Henry. For in most ways Thea Morgan still seemed the same plain and timid girl he had known during their school days at the Valdosta Institute, pale-haired and pale-eyed, with a skinny figure that womanhood had done little to enhance.
She also seemed to have the same infatuation for John Henry that she had harbored during all those school years—though he blamed himself some for that. If he hadn’t taken Sam Griffin’s bet those many years ago and kissed Thea at the spring barn dance, she might have gotten over him as soon as school let out. But he could tell by the way she still turned moony eyes toward him, simpering at his every word, that she had neither forgotten him nor given up her schoolgirl hope of winning him over. But though he didn’t return Thea’s affection any more than he ever had, he did feel flattered that she should hold him in such high esteem. So he wasn’t opposed, as the time drew near for his return to dental school, to accept her invitation to supper at her family’s home as a sort of farewell party for him. Besides, the Morgans still owed him twenty-o
ne dollars for the work he had done on Thea—and the money would come in handy on his return to Philadelphia.
The Morgans lived out at the end of Troupe Street, close to the piney woods at the edge of town, and they didn’t receive too many visitors—especially since Thea’s father had recently passed away and Mrs. Morgan was in her widowhood seclusion. But in spite of their proper mourning, the family seemed pleased to entertain “young Dr. Holliday,” as they kept calling him, even though he explained twice that he wouldn’t receive that title until his graduation in the spring. And when Thea said in a meek voice that, doctor title or no, John Henry was still the best dentist in town and they would all miss him when he left for school again, he found himself enjoying the attention. It was nice to be fussed over and hear that his leaving home meant anything to anybody. For unlike the year before, when he’d left Valdosta with a shiny new set of luggage and best wishes from the whole town, it seemed that folks had gotten used to his being gone and didn’t notice much that he was leaving again.
Thea noticed, though, and when supper was over and she walked him out to the front porch to say goodbye, there were even a few tears in her colorless eyes, and John Henry was grateful enough for the attention that he thought he might manage to give her a quick kiss on the cheek in parting. After all, they were old schoolmates.
But Thea seemed to misunderstand his casual intention as he bent his head toward hers, for just as his lips should have met her cheek, she turned her face and he found himself giving her a real kiss instead.
As a gentleman, he should have turned his face aside, coughed as though he hadn’t noticed the unexpected intimacy, then made a hasty farewell to save them both from an embarrassing moment. As a gentleman, he certainly shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation for his own gratification. But finding himself in a sudden embrace, with surprisingly willing lips against his, he pushed all gentlemanly thoughts aside and went right on kissing her. And for a few stolen moments in the dark shadows of the Morgan’s front porch, he let himself imagine that it was Mattie he was kissing and who so eagerly kissed him back.
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