“Mama said she must have died while Fern was with me.” Kate’s unshed tears made a knot in her throat. She pushed her words out around it. “She knew. I think she knew when I was with her on Sunday that I was going to lose the baby. It was just a matter of when. So that’s why she sent Fern to see about me. And then she died. Both of them gone at the same time.”
“That Aunt Hattie.” Jay squeezed her hands and actually smiled. “You know what happened, don’t you?”
Kate frowned a little. “About what?”
“I’ve been hearing Aunt Hattie talk about being ready to head on up to heaven ever since I got home. She couldn’t figure out why the Lord kept her here, but now we know. It was so she could come by the house on her way to heaven and pick up our little boy. He didn’t have to go alone.”
Tears flowed down Kate’s cheeks then but a smile edged out through them to match Jay’s. “She would do that.”
“Give him a name.” His smile slid away as he stared into Kate’s eyes. “We don’t ever have to tell anyone else if you don’t want to, but he needs a name in our hearts.”
“What about Miss Myrtle?” Kate glanced toward the curtain between the beds.
“She’s been asleep for a while now. Don’t you hear her snoring?” He turned an ear toward the other woman’s bed.
“I thought that was her oxygen machine.”
“Nope. She’s sawing logs. So what should we name him?” When she didn’t say anything right away, he went on. “Unless that’s too hard for you to think about.”
“I want to think about him. His life barely flickered, but he was real.”
“So give him a real name.”
“All right. The names have to mean something special. Do you have someone you want to remember with one of the names?”
“Graham?”
She shook her head. “No, I want Graham to get to tell stories to the baby we name after him.”
“Right.” Jay thought a moment. “I had this Sergeant in the Army. I never called him anything but Sarge. Sarge Crane. But his given name was Marion.”
“Marion.” Kate tried out the name on her tongue. Something wasn’t quite right about it. Then she knew. “Marion Bo,” she said.
Jay smiled. “After Aunt Hattie’s boy.”
“I only knew him through Aunt Hattie’s stories, but she never forgot him.”
“And we won’t forget our baby either,” Jay said.
They locked eyes and tightened their hold on each other’s hands as they spoke in unison. “His name is Marion Bo Tanner.”
And a smile curled up in Kate’s heart where her baby would always live.
30
For a moment, Kate hovered in the shadowy world of some dream she couldn’t quite remember, but then the whisper of silky cloth brought her fully awake as Glenda, the night nurse, stepped around the curtain. Looking greatly relieved to see Kate alone in the bed, she stuck a thermometer under Kate’s tongue.
“You should have told him to go home.” She glanced at Jay, asleep in the chair, as she felt for Kate’s pulse.
“I did,” Kate said when the nurse took the thermometer. Jay had looked so tired, but he refused to leave.
“It’s sweet the way he stays right with you.” The nurse kept her voice low.
“We were apart a long time during the war.”
“He told me he got home in December.” The nurse pumped up the blood pressure cuff and listened through her stethoscope before she went on. “A man comes home from war, he expects things to go better. Now here he is, the both of you, having to face this.” She clucked her tongue as she rolled up the blood pressure cuff. “Everything’s looking good, sweetie.”
“Good,” Kate echoed. “I’m going home in the morning.”
“You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.” The nurse patted Kate’s hand and looked at Jay again. “I want you to know I’ve been a nurse a long time and I think that was the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. Him holding you like that last night.”
“Thank you for not making him move. He was right. I did need him to hold me.”
“I know.” The nurse smoothed down Kate’s covers. “Sometimes the most powerful medicine is love and prayers. You’re a lucky woman.”
After the nurse left, Kate smiled over at Jay, still sound asleep. “You’ve charmed another one,” she whispered.
From the first day she met Jay, she knew he was a charmer. Mike had even warned her not to fall for Jay because he had a way of leaving broken hearts in his wake. She didn’t doubt that was true, but he’d come home to love when he found Rosey Corner. She was so glad she’d let him charm her.
She reached toward him, wanting to feel his skin under her fingers, but his chair was too far from the bed. Then almost as if he sensed her need even in his sleep, his eyes opened.
“Are you all right?” He leaned forward and caught her hand in both of his.
“I’m all right.” And she was. Sad and feeling empty, but somehow all right in spite of that.
He scooted his chair closer to the bed. “Do you need me to stay awake?”
“No. I’m not afraid of the dark, and even if I was, it’s not dark in here.”
“So many ways for it to be dark,” Jay said softly.
“And so many ways to reach for the light.” Kate looked up toward the ceiling. “Aunt Hattie would tell me the best light to reach for is Jesus.”
“Don’t you know she’s doing some shouting and dancing tonight up in heaven?”
“With her Bo.”
“And our Marion Bo.” Jay leaned closer to gently touch her face. “Now go to sleep.”
“You first.”
He was asleep again almost before the words were out of her mouth. She held his hand and the night passed. The darkness of grief was there inside her, but the light was too. The Lord would help her through. Jay would help her through. The whole family would be ready to love them both through. And sooner or later, the emptiness would fade away. Perhaps even be filled with a new hope.
The next morning, the room didn’t spin when she stood up. After Jay helped her dress, Kate insisted he go get breakfast in the cafeteria while they waited for her to be released. She missed him as soon as he walked out of the room, but she didn’t call him back. He had to eat.
“He’s such a nice young man,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Yes, he is,” Kate agreed with a smile. Smiling was easier with the morning sun. Sadness sat heavy on her heart, but she was trying to do as Aunt Hattie would tell her and not wallow in her misery.
Before the day was over, she’d have to say goodbye to Aunt Hattie’s earthly remains, but her spirit was already in paradise with Bo and Kate’s baby boy, fully formed now. Marion Bo Tanner. She let the name circle in her mind as she imagined a little boy running through a field of daisies in heaven.
Miss Myrtle broke in on her thoughts. “I finally remembered why your name sounded so familiar. It was just there in my head this morning when I woke up. Isn’t that the way it is? We think and think on something and then we stop thinking and the answer pops right up to the top of our minds.”
“My name?”
“Well, I suppose your maiden name. Birdsong.”
“Oh no, my name isn’t Birdsong.”
“But I thought that sweet child was your sister.” Miss Myrtle frowned a little.
“She is. We sort of adopted her when she was five. Her family couldn’t take care of her.” Kate hoped that would be enough of an explanation for Miss Myrtle. It was too long a story to tell before the nurse came to let her go home.
“Is that so? I suppose that happened often enough during the Depression when things were so hard for everybody. Things were hard for the Birdsong man I knew too.”
Kate stared over at Miss Myrtle. “You knew someone named Birdsong?”
The woman bobbed her head and pushed herself up higher in her bed. “It’s such an unusual name, I don’t know why it didn’t come right to me. I used to be abl
e to remember things without a whit of trouble. I knew everybody’s name at the home and their grandchildren’s names too.” She let out a long sigh. “Age has a way of catching up with a person.”
Kate clamped down on her impatience. “But you remember now. The man named Birdsong.”
“Indeed I do. My cousin lives up in Cincinnati and one of her daughters, guess that would be my second cousin once removed or something like that, anyway she married a Birdsong. Juanita, I think was her name. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s it. Juanita Birdsong. Well, Juanita Hastings Birdsong. She was a Hastings before she married.”
Kate jumped in when Miss Myrtle paused for breath. “Do you know if she had children?” Kate went still listening for her answer.
“I couldn’t say for certain. I haven’t heard from Mattie for some time now. She probably thinks I’ve passed on or maybe she did. She wasn’t much younger than me. I’d say it’s been seven or eight years since Mattie wrote me about Juanita getting married. At last. Those were her very words. She’d about given up on Juanita finding anybody. The girl was getting a little long in the tooth, you know.”
“Oh.” Kate let out her breath. Juanita couldn’t be Lorena’s mother.
“I sent her a present. Some pretty glasses. Never did get a thank-you note.”
“Did you go to their wedding?”
“Goodness no. Not all the way up there in Cincinnati. Mattie just wrote me about it all. Said the Birdsong fellow was a widower but didn’t have any children. At least none they knew about. He came from out west somewhere and wasn’t much of a talker. That bothered Mattie some.” Miss Myrtle smoothed down the covers over her middle.
“Why’s that?” Kate readjusted her thinking again. Lorena’s father perhaps, but that would mean the mother Lorena hoped to find had died long ago.
“She was sure he was hiding something. Maybe something bad. He told Mattie straight out that it was better talking about the now than what was. But a body loses a lot if he doesn’t remember all the times of his life. The hard ones and the easy ones.” Miss Myrtle wiped her eyes with an edge of the sheet as though her words put her in mind of some of her own hard memories.
That might be the way Kate would be when she was Miss Myrtle’s age and thinking back on losing her baby. And it could be what the Birdsong man didn’t want to remember was deserting his daughter in Rosey Corner.
“Do they still live in Cincinnati?” Kate asked.
“Oh, honey, I just don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t heard from Mattie in ages. Juanita could have moved down here next door to the home and I’d never know it these days. That’s how living in the home is. We’re stuck in that private little world. It can be lonely there, but now I’ll have you sweet people to think about when I go back. And I can brag about knowing Lorena Birdsong. Somebody who sings on the radio. Imagine that.” Miss Myrtle smiled.
“When you go back to the home, I’ll bring Lorena to see you. She can sing a song for you there.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Miss Myrtle held her hands up against her cheek.
A nurse’s aide rolled a wheelchair into the room to take Kate down to the door. Another nurse bustled around Miss Myrtle. Jay followed them in. He interrupted the nurse taking Miss Myrtle’s blood pressure to give the old woman a hug.
“Fun meeting you, Miss Myrtle.”
“That’s Auntie Myrt to you children.” Miss Myrtle raised her eyebrows at him. “That sweet Lorena, she said I could be an aunt.”
“Welcome to the family, Auntie Myrt.” Jay grinned over at Kate. “Can’t have too many aunts, now can we, Kate?”
In the car on the way home, Jay said, “Birdie knows how to collect family.”
“She does.” It would have been the perfect time to tell him about Miss Myrtle remembering the man named Birdsong, but she didn’t. She needed to think about it first. Maybe talk to her mother. But all that could wait until after Aunt Hattie’s funeral.
“I’m glad Birdie took a liking to me and wanted me in her family.” He reached a hand across the seat to grasp hers. “I’m glad you took a liking to me too.”
“Everybody likes you, Jay. You’re a charmer.”
“You’re the only girl I ever wanted to charm.” He squeezed her hand. “We’re going to be all right.”
She looked out at the road, stretching away from them, taking them home. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”
31
Clay came in from the field before noon. The sun was shining and the ground was in perfect shape for planting, but some things were more important than getting the corn seeds tucked in their rows. For days, he’d jabbed the corn planter tip into the freshly worked ground and released the seed over and over until at night that’s all he could see when he closed his eyes. Long rows waiting for the seed as the sound of the handles of the planter chug-chunking open and closed echoed in his ears.
He didn’t mind the job, tedious as it was. The sun was in his face and the good smell of dirt in his nose. He was connected to the earth in the same way his father and his father’s father and countless generations before them had been. Tilling the ground, planting the seeds with hope for a harvest, praying for rain in season. A time to plant. A time to reap.
A spring day like this first day of May begged a man to be in the fields. Especially with rain in the forecast. Not that those radio weathermen always got it right. Clay could pay attention to the turn of a maple leaf in the wind, the dew on the grass, or the call of the rain crow and be right as often.
If the weather held, he’d get the corn in before the end of the week. But planting was through for the day. His mother wanted to pay her respects to Hattie Johnson. All of Rosey Corner would pack the church for a last goodbye to the little black woman who had helped so many Rosey Corner babies into the world.
The minute Aunt Hattie walked into a house, she brought calm with her. Clay’s mother said Aunt Hattie had healing hands, but Clay wondered if it wasn’t her healing prayers that mattered more. The first time he heard her pray was a revelation to Clay. He didn’t know a person could just look up and start talking to the Lord. His mother prayed, but she did it in her quiet corner. And he never heard his father pray out loud, although he was a churchgoing man. But when Aunt Hattie prayed, it was like she pulled up a chair to the Lord’s kitchen table to ask him for a few helpings of mercy. Helpings she had full confidence of getting.
Clay had tried to pray that way while he was planting corn. He needed answers. Paulette thought she had his answers. She brought sugar cookies by the house on Monday evening. They sat out on the bench in the yard near the dogwood tree he’d dug up out of the woods for his mother after his father died. It was in full bloom, a burst of white that shouted spring.
The evening had been pleasantly cool to Clay after the day in the fields, but Paulette pulled her sweater tight around her and leaned toward Clay. He hadn’t taken the hint to put his arm around her. He supposed he should have. But hugging a girl shouldn’t have anything to do with should-haves, but more to do with want-tos.
They’d talked about church, about the movie, about the cookies, about the tree frogs coming out early. And all Clay really wanted to do was go in the house, eat the supper he hoped his mother was keeping warm for him, and fall into his bed. He liked Paulette. He did. But he didn’t love her. He wasn’t ever going to love her.
The next day, as he walked the long rows planting corn, he decided he had to tell her that. It wasn’t fair to let her think she could capture his heart. He’d given his heart away already and whether, in time, he ever managed to reclaim enough of it to fall in love again, he didn’t know. But it wasn’t apt to happen anytime soon.
He wouldn’t bother Victoria anymore. She’d been plain with him. She told him to go away. Until she told him different, that’s what he would do.
But that didn’t keep him from thinking about her. She’d be at Aunt Hattie’s funeral. While the whole community had called the little woman Aunt Hattie, the Me
rritts had claimed her as part of the family. She cooked and cleaned for old Mr. Merritt, who ran the store before he left Rosey Corner some years back. Folks said he went to Oregon and married a woman half his age. Aunt Hattie stayed on in his house, keeping it for him in case he decided to come back to Rosey Corner. Folks gossiped some about that. They’d gossip even more now if that crazy Lindell woman kept living there.
People liked to talk. Plenty of them were talking about Mr. Merritt digging Aunt Hattie’s grave at the church. Mr. Merritt didn’t care that folks said the graveyard there was for white people only. He went to a called meeting of the church deacons and told them straight out Aunt Hattie had a right to six feet of ground at the church she had attended faithfully for more than sixty years. A couple of the deacons said that didn’t change the fact she was colored and they thought it would be more fitting for her to be buried in the colored cemetery just this side of Edgeville.
Clay’s mother had heard all the talk when Aaron took her to the store the day before, where they found Graham Lindell behind the counter trying to take care of customers. Victoria’s sister, the one married to Pastor Mike, was there too, but Clay’s mother said she was useless as a flyswatter in a swarm of bees.
“Guess she has reason, being so far along with her baby, but she might as well stayed home on the porch swing for all the help she was,” his mother had said last night at supper. “If Victoria hadn’t come in, I might still be there trying to pay for my groceries. But I shouldn’t be fussing. Not with the hard times that family is seeing this week. Poor Kate, they say she nigh on died when she lost her baby. That would have been a bitter pill for Nadine and Victor. Can you believe it was that Fern Lindell that helped her?”
“Hard to imagine,” Clay said, just to let his mother know he was listening. Or at least pretending to listen. At the first mention of Victoria, his mind had flown off, chasing after her.
“They say Fern went to the church and helped the men dig Aunt Hattie’s grave. It’s just a good thing Pastor Mike came in and set Willis Combes and Marvin Best straight on where Aunt Hattie was to be buried. The very idea that she couldn’t lay in our graveyard when she’s lived among us all these years, catching our babies and healing the sick. Reverend Winston’s too new to the church to know how to handle things like this.”
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