Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read online

  I’d never heard her this frantic.

  “Lizzie, calm down. What’s happened?”

  “Fred’s been complaining about his stomach hurting for the past week, but he didn’t want to take time off work to go to the doctor. I thought it was what he ate at one of the pavilions, something he wasn’t used to. This morning, he collapsed on the steamship. They’re not sure what it is. The doctor there said … Oh, Mama, he looks awful, all pale and clammy and moaning. He’s in so much pain!”

  Tears thickened her voice.

  “Dr. Alice is on her way?”

  “Yes, yes, but you come too.”

  “We’ll be there as fast as we can.”

  I rushed out to the barn where Frank sanded new stakes for my starts and told him to harness the horse, we had to go to Lizzie’s. The zinnias had made their debut, dotting the greenery with yellows and pinks.

  Frank dropped what he was doing to harness the horse, while I went back out to cut dahlias and the willowy cosmos for their purple color and a few of the zinnias, whose blooms would last a long time. I wrapped the stems in a damp cloth, finishing as Frank brought the buggy around from the side of the barn, and I stepped up into it.

  “Now I wish we’d gone ahead and gotten that vehicle,” I told Frank, “so we could get there faster.” I lifted the flowers to my nose and inhaled, the aroma inviting an exhalation of prayer in the covered buggy. “She sounded so upset.” I reassured myself. “Dr. Alice will have good words for them.” I inhaled again. “It’s probably minor. Food poisoning, maybe.”

  Frank looked at me. He knew me as someone who spoke the truth, but when it came to my children, I sought optimism even in the face of challenging facts. The sound of Lizzie’s voice haunted.

  I let my mind wander. The horse trotted along the Lewis River, which was running strong from spring freshets. Clumps of riverbank slipped into the water as the river looked to undercut the banks, the water moving ever closer to the road. I wondered if one day that road would just disappear, consumed by high water and the dredging done by the government to allow more and larger steamboats to come farther up the river. We watched a steamboat dock, and I could see the bank give way, ever so slightly, but it would happen with every steamer docking. So much good soil going to waste. I could do nothing about it now, but being incensed about it took my mind from my child’s painful voice.

  As we approached Lizzie and Fred’s home, I noted Dr. Alice’s car already there along with another buggy. Frank tied the horse to the picket fence and helped me out, and we rushed inside.

  Fred’s brother, Edmond, stood with Lizzie in the hallway.

  “Lizzie.” Frank opened his arms to our daughter.

  She raised her eyes and moved her crying from Edmond’s shoulder to her father’s arms. Edmond’s eyes were red too, and he rubbed at his nose, his eyes not wanting to make contact with any of us.

  “So … how is he?” I laid the flowers on the table and removed my hat, scanning the room for the doctor.

  “He’s gone.” Lizzie said.

  Edmond nodded toward the bedroom, and I approached the door.

  “Gone? You mean he’s—”

  Before I could knock, Dr. Alice stepped out, pulled the door shut behind her. She shook her head at my questioning eyes, hugged me briefly as she walked to Lizzie and Frank. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie,” she said. “So sorry. Appendicitis. Must have burst a few days ago, and he’s been fighting the infection ever since.”

  “If only he’d gone to see you when I told him!” Lizzie said, anger her first visitor in grief.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Dr. Alice said. “We never know with these things. It might well be that the first sign of the burst was when he mentioned the pain, and by then it would have been too late. I’m so sorry.” She touched my daughter’s shoulder, but let Lizzie’s family be her comfort in this storm.

  “Can’t you do something?” I asked.

  “Nothing, Mrs. Klager.” To Lizzie, she said, “If you want to know for certain, I can perform an autopsy, but—”

  “It won’t bring him back,” Lizzie wailed.

  “No, it won’t.”

  I opened my arms to take my daughter in, wrapping her with love scented with my garden’s blooms. Her crying renewed, and I held her, prayed it would bring her relief, that I’d know what to do, what to say.

  “I’ll let Tom Chatterson know,” Dr. Alice said, clearing her throat.

  The sound of the undertaker’s name was my trigger. “We can take care of things,” I said, then asked, “Can’t we?” Lizzie nodded, wiped at her eyes with the handkerchief I handed her. “Edmond, I’m so sorry. You’ll let your parents know.” He nodded, and I watched grief take hold of him, his only brother gone. “He’ll lie in our parlor,” I said. “I’ll contact the reverend. The women’s group will bring food. What’s that girl’s name with that lovely voice? She could—”

  “Huldie—” Frank touched my shoulder.

  “What? Things need to get done.”

  “In their own time.” Frank pulled both his daughter and me into the steadiness of his arms. “Lizzie needs time,” he said. He kissed the top of Lizzie’s head, then mine. “She has to do this on her own.”

  I nodded. But what mother doesn’t want to relieve her child of suffering? It was easier to bear my own loss of a mother and father than to watch my daughter endure the anguish of a lost friend, lover, husband. She’d turn twenty-five on July 6. So young to be widowed.

  “Do you want me to let Delia know?” I asked her.

  She nodded yes. “I tried to call but couldn’t reach her. Jennie said she’d keep trying her.”

  I slipped from the safety of Frank’s arms and went to the phone. I knew as soon as I put the call through that Jennie, the operator, would know, and so would the others on the line. But that was a good thing too, because neighbors could begin helping as they did: bringing food, doing chores; praying for Lizzie as they washed their dishes, fed their cows, dug in their gardens. People would come to sit with my daughter, speaking little, but being present. They’d do whatever they could; but nothing would bring Fred back.

  Our new pastor, Angus Kenzie, performed the service. He spoke of a plant’s cycle of life, from seed to sprout to bloom, then fading away to nurture the soil. I loved the image and thought I might return to it often as I helped my daughter grieve. He spoke of youth—Fred was but three years older than Lizzie—reminding us that death comes to all, and who is to say that a shorter life on this earth is any less abundant than one who has lived many years. Frank squeezed Lizzie’s hand; I had my arm around her as she sat between us. We were two old stakes propping up our delicate sprout, hoping we’d be enough to bring her toward her next season of blooming.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

  Hulda, 1905–1906

  We invited Lizzie to move back in with us, but she said no. She had to find a way to live without Fred and returning to “grandpa’s house,” as she called it, would only delay that journey. Lizzie turned down an invitation to move in with Delia and Nell Irving too, which in a shameful way made me feel better about her declining to live with us. My daughter wanted to be strong, and I was proud of that; just disappointed that I couldn’t buttress her when life’s winds were clearly tossing her about.

  Fortunately, Fred had purchased a small insurance policy, something people didn’t always do in those days, giving Lizzie resources and time to make decisions about how to go on.

  She had her garden and her music. As the days turned into weeks and months, I’d come by her house, and we’d garden together. After pulling weeds, it was time to harvest, to can beets and snap peas and pick apples and make sauce. We chopped cabbage for sauerkraut, the cabbage heads as big as basketballs and with fall, picked squash and pumpkins, some of which the neighborhood children used for their Halloween parties. Fritz helped pull the pumpkins and predicted an early winter from the cold autumn winds.

  Her garden was bountifu
l, and she spoke one day as we stored potatoes in baskets in the shed behind their house about how strange it was that so much life should come from such a small plot of ground.

  “It doesn’t take a lot of space to grow enough to feed a family.” I regretted in an instant that I’d brought up family. Delia had just told me that she carried a child due next July. She didn’t know how to tell her sister and asked if I would. I’d put it off too.

  “Delia has lovely news.” I picked up a potato and studied it.

  “What would that be?”

  “She and Nell Irving are expecting.”

  I thought there was a hint of hesitation, but then she said, “Are they? Why didn’t she say?”

  “She didn’t want to upset you.”

  She nodded. “I’m happy for her.”

  “I know you are. You can tell her that. She didn’t want to—”

  “Fred wanted a family, Mama. We just ran out of time.”

  “Yes, you did. You’ll love again, you know.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “No, I think I’ll be all right alone. I could take in a girl so she can attend school in town. But I’m not sure I could live through the death of another husband.”

  “Grief is the price we have to pay for loving,” I said. “I hope one day you’ll discover that it’s worth it.” I thought how easy it was for me to say that. I’d lost my parents but none other with whom I was close. Comforting Lizzie, I felt like I walked on lily pads and could sink to the bottom of the lake with one misstep. But at least she accepted the news of Delia’s pregnancy well, and that’s what I told Delia when I saw her later in the week.

  Rains began in earnest in mid-October that year, 1905, the heavens crying with us for Lizzie’s loss. Lizzie allowed us to be with her in her small home, but she never came to the farm. In late November she joined us at Delia and Nell Irving’s for Delia’s birthday celebration. I saw that as progress. Nell Irving had developed a cough with the rains, though I suspected barn mold. Frank often coughed in the winter months too. Lizzie smiled as Delia spoke of the baby and offered to sew up a baptismal gown, if she’d like. Delia was delighted. I heard Lizzie chuckle that evening at something her uncle Emil said, the lilt in her voice giving me hope.

  As weeks wore on, it worried me that Lizzie still found reasons not to come to our home, not for Sunday dinner, not for celebrations. She visited her uncles and aunts, spent a weekend in Kelso with an old school chum, taking the sternwheeler that Fred had worked on. But she had not entered our home since the day Fred was buried.

  I told Frank of that concern as I brushed my long hair, then braided it before slipping beneath the quilts. The temperature had dropped below freezing, and I shivered beside my husband. “I wonder if the memories of Fred’s courting, their sitting on the porch swing, brings too much pain,” I said. “Even her wedding memories are woven into our home.”

  “It takes time, Hulda. Give her that. You’re so patient with your plants. You just have to be patient with people.” Frank yawned.

  “I’m patient. It’s been almost six months. I just want her back, the Lizzie I knew. She didn’t talk about that sternwheeler trip. Do you suppose that brought back bad memories of him getting sick? Or good memories of our family trip? What do you think, Frank? Good memories or bad?”

  I spoke into silence, listening then to the even breathing of a man sound asleep.

  “I submit good memories,” I spoke for him. “I submit that’s what you’d say if you’d stayed awake to speak, and one day those memories will bring her comfort. They must.”

  In the spring of 1906, I came by Lizzie’s after shopping in town. We had tea. I told her they’d begun construction on the railroad that would run between us and the Columbia River, with a big dike built up to run the track on. I’d sold them the right of way three years before. “We’ll be craning our necks to see the cars when they roll on by us,” I said. “That roadbed will be fifteen feet high.” But I thought the train bed could well keep out the Columbia River water when it rose, too, and I hoped my lilac bushes would be tall enough by then to block any ugly view of transportation progress. We’d still have to weather the annual high water from the Lewis River to our east in a wet year.

  “That’ll change your view, won’t it?”

  “I suppose. We won’t be able to see all the way to the Columbia from the upstairs window, but change is inevitable,” I told her. “Oh, here, I brought you this.” I handed her a store-bought bar of soap that she sniffed.

  “Lavender.”

  I thought she winced at the scent. What was I thinking? She’d carried lavender on her wedding day.

  “Ruthie’s mother makes soap too, but these came from Seattle. I like the heart shape, don’t you?” I cursed myself again for my mention of hearts. “Can I fry up an egg or two for us for an early supper?” She shook her head no.

  She stood, and I saw that her clothes hung from her frame like a dishtowel over the back of a chair, shoulders so bony.

  “You should go home, fix supper for Papa and Martha and Fritz. While it’s still light out.”

  “Oh, they’re fine with my being here with you. Fritz does his homework by lamplight, so I suspect he doesn’t mind eating by it. And after I clean up, there’s just enough time to do a little quilting or look at my seed catalogs before bed. I’m still reading the material I picked up at the fair.” It seemed that everything I said today could be a fuse to a painful explosion.

  “I’m so glad we did that, Mama, went to the exhibits and all. You can’t know.”

  “Are you? Good.” I brushed a curl off of her face, as I did when she was young. “Good memories are essential when we’ve lost someone. After your grandma Thiel died, I couldn’t even garden, my heart was so empty. Your father helped me out by reminding me of little things we’d done together: wash eggs, shuck corn, boil rhubarb into sauce until I thought I’d faint. She always whipped up soups and took them to neighbors whenever there was need. And she told wonderful stories, like about her mother and the flannel-wearing geese.”

  “Oh yes, when she’d plucked them all thinking they were dead, and they were just under the influence of mash. I can just see her sewing up red flannel to get them through the winter.” She sighed. Even that image didn’t bring relief.

  “I’ll always remember Fred sitting on that porch swing at our old house,” I said. “How shy he was about putting his arm around your shoulders.”

  “You and Papa were staring out the window!” From the icebox, she took an eggless cake I’d made and brought over earlier in the week. We often had to cook without eggs through the winter until the chickens took the spring light to heart and started doing what they were supposed to and began laying again.

  “Yes, we did watch. It was our duty.”

  She smiled then.

  “And I appreciated his help in the garden the year I was so sick. Oh, I know he came to be closer to you, but I did like the effort he put into the mulching.”

  She laughed at that, then fiddled with her fork. “It’s been nice, your visiting these past months, Mama. I know you’ve had to neglect your garden.”

  “It’s what a mother does.” I’d stopped asking her to come to the farm, as doing so brought a rush of tears pooling in her brown eyes.

  “It’s taken me some time, Mama, and I’ll need more, I know. I have good memories. But what I lost were the dreams Fred and I had together.”

  I imagined for a moment—just a moment—the emptiness I’d feel if I outlived Frank. We’d accomplished so much of our dreams—to have a family, to work side by side on the land, to give to our community. We had more things to do, and I thanked God we were still well enough to do them.

  “The best way for me to help Fred live on is for me to do those things.” She looked out the window of their kitchen, and I felt her leaving me, going away. “We were going to travel to New York or London or even Shanghai.”

  “It’ll be different, but you can still feel his hand at your elbow, h
elping you along, by accepting what the rest of us want to give you.”

  She turned to look at me. “Those are perfect words to say to a woman’s grieving heart.”

  My face grew warm. I was pleased to have brought comfort to my daughter.

  But then I wondered if she prepared me for a journey away from us, that her distance from the farm these past months was prelude to a longer separation that might take her to the real Shanghai, away from Woodland forever, because the memories here eclipsed her soul. My heart pounded.

  “I’ve something to ask.” I held my breath. This was it. The last leaf to fall from the branch. “Could I come to the farm tomorrow and help you winterize the garden, dig up the tulip bulbs, spread straw over the plots?”

  “What? Did I hear you right? Do you think you’re ready?” Oh, what a foolish thing to say! “Yes! Yes, of course. I … I thought you might never. I mean, it seemed you’ve been avoiding it.”

  She nodded. “I have been. But the lavender soap made me realize I can’t ignore the past. I have to incorporate it, breathe it in, then take it with me. ‘There is a time to weep and a time to laugh.’ Isn’t that in Scripture?”

  “Ecclesiastes,” I said.

  Her smile wasn’t as wide as a rhododendron bloom but more beautiful. “Well, I think it’s time to start laughing again,” she said. “Besides, I want to breathe on the rhodies, make them bloom, and I want to see how the purple lilac crosses are coming. It’s been too long since I’ve looked at the apples of my mother’s eyes.”

  “That would be you.” I squeezed her hand across the table. “And Delia and Martha and Fritz and your father. Don’t let my time with those blooms ever convince you differently.”

  I hummed to the horse on my way home. It was Lizzie’s rhodies and the lavender that would bring her back, and that was as it should be. A loved garden blooms hope above all.