American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “Come, Seth,” she said. “Come through the house with me. We’ll sit on the back porch.”

  Three minutes later they were seated on the porch swing, gently rocking back and forth.

  “This is much better,” said Veronica, giving her face a few swishes of her fan for effect. “I am starting to revive.”

  Beruriah appeared with their drinks. Veronica took them without thanks.

  “I am so content when I am with you, Seth,” said Veronica when the house slave had returned inside. She let out a long sigh, sipped at the edge of her glass. “You are so good to me. It is almost like all my dreams have come true. And see—my headache is gone already.”

  “Uh… good, that’s great,” mumbled Seth.

  “Just think,” Veronica went on dreamily, glancing toward him and batting her lashes, “when I am your wife I will be able to make you just as happy.”

  Seth’s eyes opened wide in dumbfounded silence. For the first time, all Veronica’s hints and playful suggestions he had allowed himself to ignore and laugh off as mere childish talk—she had talked about marrying him since they were children and he had ignored it just as long—culminated into the stark realization that she was serious! He had thought about it too, just like when Thomas overheard him talking to Demon, but it had never seemed quite so close… so real!

  He took a nervous swallow of julep to keep from having to reply. Yet even as he did so, it could not be denied that Seth Davidson was under Veronica Beaumont’s spell, and had been, without knowing it, for some time.

  After a few more minutes of light chitchat, Seth excused himself, over Veronica’s objections, insisting that he had to get home with his mother’s package. The truth was, he needed some fresh air himself, and a chance to think. Now he was the one getting a headache!

  The ride home plunged Seth deep in thought. As soon as he arrived back at Greenwood, his parents knew something was on his mind. For the next two days he kept to himself and remained uncharacteristically quiet.

  The next day, Saturday, the same three friends who had seen Veronica in town were visiting at Oakbriar. As always their talk centered around young men. As was usually the case, eventually Veronica’s love life came to dominate the discussion as they clustered about her and tried to fix her long black curls into one or another of the different styles they had seen in a fashion magazine.

  “You and Seth are simply always together!” giggled Sally O’Flarity, daughter of a plantation owner south of town.

  “How do you think I should wear it for my wedding?” said Veronica with serious expression.

  “Veronica, you didn’t tell us!” exclaimed the youngest of the group, seventeen-year-old Brigitte McClellan who looked upon Veronica Beaumont as the authority on everything about winning the affections of a young man.

  “Tell you what, silly?”

  “That you and Seth are going to be married!”

  “Are you really engaged?” asked Marta Perkins, daughter of the manager of the Dove’s Landing Bank.

  “No, silly!” laughed Veronica. “Don’t you think I would tell you if I was?”

  She cast a glance in the mirror, admiring the handiwork of her friends and fiddling with a curl or two with her fingers. Slowly she became serious.

  “Well…,” she said after a minute or two, drawing her words out teasingly, “I suppose you could say we are sort of engaged. I am easing him into it,” she added with a wicked smile, “I just haven’t made his mind up yet.”

  “Well, you had better make sure before you lose him,” said Marta.

  “He wants to marry me, I know it.”

  “Why doesn’t he ask you, then?” said Brigitte.

  “He’s too shy.”

  “You’d better make sure you nab him before he gets away,” said Sally.

  “What does she have to worry about?” said Brigitte. “Who else is Seth Davidson going to look twice at?”

  “Maybe one of you!” laughed Veronica.

  “Don’t be silly. We would never steal him from you.”

  “He is so handsome,” sighed Brigitte.

  “I still think you ought to make up his mind for him as soon as you can,” added Marta. “He will be rich when he inherits Greenwood. You have to do something, Veronica. You don’t want to wind up as the wife of a shopkeeper or day worker or something horrible like that.”

  “You three worry about yourselves, not me,” laughed Veronica. “I have no intention of being anything except the mistress of Greenwood—just so long as Seth’s father doesn’t go broke first… at least that’s what my father says could happen.”

  “I hear they are making more money than ever,” said Marta, “and that the slaves have to give them back all the money they pay them anyway.”

  “Where did you hear something like that?” asked Sally. “It can’t possibly be true.”

  “From my father. He knows about everybody’s money. He thinks I’m not interested, but I listen to every word he says.”

  “If half the things they say about Seth’s father are true, he must be crazy,” said Sally.

  “I am going to marry Seth, not his father,” laughed Veronica. “Within ten or fifteen years we will own Greenwood anyway. By then his father will have nothing more to do with it. As soon as we are married, I will make sure of that.”

  Forty-six

  One Sunday afternoon in March, Seth wandered into the kitchen at Greenwood. Maribel was elsewhere in the house and Carolyn was opening a jar of peaches canned from the previous season when Seth sat down at the table. His father and brother were out at the stables working with a new horse they had just bought for Thomas.

  Carolyn could always tell when Seth wanted to talk. Sometimes he was reluctant to share and at other times he seemed to want to tell her everything. This day proved to be the latter.

  Carolyn had always been the listener with whom he had shared all his life’s dreams and troubles, anxieties and ambitions, frustrations and triumphs as he grew from a boy, through his early teen years, and toward manhood. Her thoughts and suggestions were always sound, and now that Seth was indeed nearly a man, he relied more than ever on her common sense and wisdom.

  To the outside world, Carolyn Davidson appeared a dutiful wife, perhaps too eager to put her husband on a pedestal, never engaging in the subtleties of critical innuendo that bound so many women of her station together in common exasperation with their men. Because she carried herself with a graceful deportment that did not find it necessary to speak her mind on every topic raised, as many women feel to be their solemn duty, there were many who never perceived the depths of intellectual currents in which Carolyn Davidson’s brain swam.

  But Seth recognized it. He had plumbed those depths through the years. In them he had discovered the wisdom that comes with years of prayerfully absorbing truth, along with obedience to that truth which—and only which—has the capacity to bring potential wisdom alive. For until it is enlivened by obedience, all knowledge and insight are but dead things, not yet living truth.

  In short, Seth and his mother were friends of both heart and mind. He not only loved her, he trusted her, and was eager to receive from and be fed by her. He saw in her what she would always be in this life—his spiritual elder.

  As they chatted casually, gradually he began to talk about Veronica. Soon, without the slightest embarrassment to confide such things to his mother, he told her everything that had happened two days before.

  “I don’t know, Mother,” Seth said after a while, “sometimes I think I really like Veronica, and at other times she seems like she’s about ten years older than me and from a different world altogether. I can hardly believe that I am actually older than she is. When we were children it was different. But somewhere along the way, she seemed to pass me by!”

  The kitchen fell silent for a minute or two. At length Carolyn spoke up. Her tone was thoughtful, serious, her words carefully chosen. She knew her son’s future was at stake.

  “There are youn
g women,” she began, “who feel a sense of power when they can control young men, especially when they can control how those young men feel about them. But I would hardly call that passing you by. I would call it becoming skilled in the ways of the world.”

  “Is that why girls are always flirting, Mother?”

  “One of the reasons, I suppose,” smiled Carolyn. “But it’s also simply from self-centeredness. Girls of character, who are thinking of others rather than themselves, don’t flirt. It has always seemed to me that flirting is nothing but self-preoccupation.”

  “It always makes me uncomfortable,” rejoined Seth. “Some boys like it. I suppose it makes them feel good to have a girl make over them. I wish Veronica would do less of that to me. She doesn’t have to, so why does she do it? Was it that way when you were young too, Mother… I mean, girls flirting with young men and all that?”

  “I suppose it was,” replied Carolyn. “But I grew up in the west of the state in a church where girls were not allowed to be forward and immodest. It was very strict, so you didn’t see as much of it. If my father had even once seen me making eyes at a boy, he would have taken a switch to my bottom and given me blisters. After I married your father and came to this part of the state where the Southern plantation influence is stronger, I was shocked at first. In this culture it seems that most young girls are trained from birth how to flutter their eyelids, and taught a hundred sneaky little ways to set traps for boys to make them notice them. I couldn’t stand it at first.”

  “And now?”

  “I still can’t stand it, especially when I see it directed toward you and Thomas. But I have learned to laugh it off a little more than I once could. Everyone has to decide what kind of person one wants to develop relationships with—self-absorbed people or others-centered people. It’s a dilemma we all have to resolve for ourselves—what kind of people will we surround ourselves with? If young men are attracted to young women who flirt at them, then I suppose they will get what they deserve. If young women are attracted to young men who make eyes at them, they too will get what they deserve.”

  A silence fell.

  “If you and Dad didn’t play these little games,” said Seth at length, “how did you notice each other and get to know one another? How did you realize that you loved each other?”

  “A long story, Seth,” smiled Carolyn.

  “Tell me.”

  “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “Sure… yeah, I do.”

  “When your father walked into a small church in Norfolk where my father was supply preaching,” Carolyn began, “I didn’t notice him and I don’t think he noticed me. I was sitting up front playing the piano lor the service, though my heart wasn’t in it. I just stared at the hymnal and played the notes. I hardly looked up and heard nothing of my father’s preaching during those months after I had returned from the West.

  “It was the low point of both of our lives. I was a young widow. I felt abandoned by God and didn’t care about anything. And you know about your father’s first marriage—”

  Seth nodded.

  “Well, Richmond was still reeling from the series of blows it had dealt in his life. He wasn’t a Christian and had had no spiritual background, except the few ideas people pick up here and there, mostly wrong ideas, just because they think this is a Christian country founded on the puritan values of the pilgrims. But like most people, Richmond had no idea of the practicality of a personal walk of faith. Though I had been raised in the church, I really had no conception of such myself. I called myself a ‘Christian’ and my father had baptized me when I was ten. But I had no idea what it meant either, which is why my first husband’s death shattered me so and left me spiritually desolate.

  “For whatever reason, Richmond wandered into that little chapel one Sunday evening for the service, and sat down in the very back row. I don’t know what he expected—”

  “Was he searching for God?” asked Seth.

  “Of course, in the way everyone is searching for God inside without knowing it. I don’t think he was consciously saying, My life is a mess. I’m lonely. I’m miserable. Aha… God must be the answer—I shall search for him and find happiness and peace! It isn’t usually so definite. Circumstances come in our lives, God makes his presence felt, sometimes subtly and at other times loudly and visibly, and then in one way or another we begin to look up to say, I will arise and go to my Father. But when Richmond walked into the chapel, I think he was just starving for some kind of human contact in the midst of his desolation. The singing of the opening hymn drew him as he walked along on the street outside. He paused, then came inside and sat down. God was drawing him, but he didn’t know it at the time.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He sat through the service staring ahead blankly, and I sat through the service staring ahead blankly. After the closing hymn was done, and while my father stood outside greeting people as they filed out, I got up from the piano and began gathering the hymnals from the chairs to put them in the box where we kept them. It was what I did after every service as the church emptied out.

  “So I picked them up one by one and carried a stack to the box to one side, then went back for another handful. When I was about halfway done I looked up, and there was a man sitting in the back row staring at me. I’d thought I was all alone and it startled me to see someone else there… and looking right at me.”

  Carolyn paused and smiled as she recalled the incident.

  “‘Would you like some help?’ said the man, standing up and beginning to gather the hymnals from the last row of chairs.

  “‘Sure,’ I said.

  “And silently we finished stacking the hymnals in the box. Then I looked up and smiled and said, ‘Thanks.’

  “He smiled back. I expected him to leave. I turned to walk back to the piano to gather up my things. But when I turned around again, he was still there.

  “‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ he said.

  “‘No, go ahead,’ I said.

  “‘Is that true, what the man said a little while ago… you know, about God knowing each one of us personally, really knowing us, and wanting the very best for us if we will just let him give it to us… is that really true? I’ve never heard someone say anything quite like that before. I mean I’ve been to church plenty of times, but I’ve never heard anyone make it sound so personal—just between us and God, if you know what I mean?’

  “‘To tell you the truth,’ I answered with a shrug. ‘I don’t know if it’s true. A year ago I would have said it was. Now I don’t know.’

  “He nodded, but didn’t ask me what I meant. I guess he thought it was my own business. He had troubles of his own.

  “‘All right then… thanks,’ he said, smiling at me in a sad way. I could tell he was disappointed in my answer. I wish I had something more positive to say. But I couldn’t lie. Right then I didn’t know if it was true. I didn’t know if anything was true. But the poor man looked so dejected as he walked out of the church, I felt sorry for him. He met my father coming back inside. They shook hands and exchanged a few words, then the stranger walked out and away into the night.”

  “That doesn’t sound anything like Dad,” said Seth in surprise.

  “You’ve got to remember, at the time he wasn’t much older than you are now. He was only twenty-four and was miserable. Remember, he had recently returned from England where he’d been married and then went through a terrible divorce. His older brother had also recently died and he had come back to help your grandfather with Greenwood, something he had never planned to do. His whole life had been turned upside down, just as mine had. So I had nothing to offer by way of encouragement.”

  “It doesn’t sound like the two of you were in very good shape,” said Seth.

  “We weren’t,” laughed Carolyn. “But God was at work.”

  “What happened next?” asked Seth.

  “I didn’t think too much of the incident all week, until
the next Sunday evening. About halfway through the service I happened to glance out into the small congregation and there was the same man sitting there listening intently to my father. This time when the service was over, he didn’t wait for me to pick up half the hymnals alone. As soon as most of the people were gone and I got up from the piano, he stood up from his chair and started collecting the books in back and carting them to the box. We met about at the middle of the church.

  “‘Thanks again!’ I said, I suppose with a little more friendly expression than I’d been wearing the week before.

  “‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied, smiling too.

  “‘Have you figured out the answer to your dilemma?’ I asked.

  “‘Not yet,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘But I’m still trying. Actually,’ he went on, then sat down in one of the chairs in the front row like he was in no particular hurry to leave, ‘I have been thinking about it a lot. That’s why I came back, hoping I would hear something tonight to shed a little more light on it. But to tell you the truth—he added, lowering his voice and glancing back toward the door, ‘I thought tonight was a snoozer. That was one of the most boring sermons I’ve ever heard!’

  “I couldn’t help laughing. I had been listening to my father three or four times a week since I had been old enough to keep quiet through the service. I had heard some of the same sermons a half dozen times. He didn’t have to tell me that sometimes they could be boring!

  “‘But,’ the man added, ‘I have not been able to get out of my mind that phrase from last week, that God knows us, and will do his best for us… if we will let him. Do you realize what a remarkable thing that is? It would be the most revolutionary news ever in the history of the world. All through the centuries, men have expended such effort and expense, not to mention bloodshed, in the name of religion, supposedly to find the truth about God. Yet here is the simplest formula imaginable that would explain the entire human affair. That is why I must find out if it is true. Do you think this man knows, this pastor here? You work for him… at least you play his piano and pick up his hymnals, you must know something about the man—do you think he really believes what he said last week?’