Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read online

  The man infuriated. I fairly burned my hoe up the rest of the day, chopping at crab grass, bending instead of squatting to pull weeds, making myself suffer, as though that would remove Barney’s words and their echo of my own. It did trouble me that so powerful a God would let bad things happen. And I often did learn something when a tragedy struck. But did I have to suffer to learn the lesson?

  “Will you be out here all night?” Frank stepped out onto the porch. “Lizzie put a plate back for you. She makes a good meat loaf.”

  “I wanted to finish this plot, get it ready for the annuals.”

  “No. You’ve got a bee under your bonnet. What is it?” He came beside me, touched my shoulder.

  We could hear frogs croaking and cooing of doves settling in for the night.

  “Oh, Frank, Barney Reed … He just said out loud what I’ve been wondering myself, and yet I can’t believe that God would make Lizzie and Delia and their husbands’ families too, and us, suffer just because I’m interested in lilacs and propagating and hybridizing. I can’t believe that doing what I have a gift for cuts against God’s grain. Do I care too much about the garden? Have I ignored my family? Is that why Delia won’t come stay with us?”

  He took the hoe and led me to the swing on the porch.

  “I submit those are questions for the reverend, not for me. Why do those we love have to die while we go on living? Can’t answer that, Huldie. It just seems to be what is. But I do know that your crisp apples keep reminding me that God gave you all the materials and the inclination and willingness to persist. Can’t see that as divine defiance. It’s a gift, and you’d be defying God if you ignored it. That’s what I submit.”

  Could I have loved Frank more at that moment? I vowed to remember as much of our conversation as I could, especially when thoughts of uncertainty snuck in like snakes in the grass.

  I renewed my efforts to convince Delia to come home and to appreciate more my shrubs and the joy they gave me. Lizzie and I made planting notes in my book that Frank rewrote in legible form. I checked the tin labels and compared them to what I observed or witnessed in the lilac nursery as I’d come to think of the rows and rows of plantings. Several of the shrubs were over four feet high, and I had hundreds of starts to pollinate.

  In June, blooms and fragrance permeated the yard, the neighborhood, in fact. Emil and Tillie lived next-door with son Albert and their two girls, Elma and Hazel, and even Elma, only seven, said how nice it was to “smell pretties” every morning.

  Then, two miracles: a double pale lilac, nearly cream, appeared. Lavender Pearl I named it, and if those plants and new seeds gave up that color again, I’d have my first unique variety. Then to my absolute delight, one of the deep purples I’d crossed with the Lemoine presented me a single bloom with six petals! Six!

  “Frank, you’ve got to come here and see this!” I dragged him from the barn to look at that shrub, making a note of the label, my eyes seeking any others with six petals or even five.

  “Imagine, Frank! Six petals!”

  “Good work, Huldie.” He patted my back. “Were you breeding this one for petals? I thought it was the color you went for.”

  “Color, yes, but increased petals, oh my, yes, that too. I’d love twelve petals one day.” I wiped at my eyes. “Imagine,” I said. “Crying over petals.”

  Frank smiled. “Twelve’s a mighty big number.”

  “It’s only twice as many as this one.” I cradled the deep purple bloom in the palm of my hand, fingering the tiny petals, velvet gems; counting and recounting.

  Giddy was too weak a word to describe how I felt.

  “Look here, Frank. These are all the same color. A pale lavender. It’s … I believe I’ve created a new cultivar.”

  Frank walked along that row, lifting the tags, staring, trying to see what I could. “I submit, you’re right.”

  “I know! And now six petals on another. Oh, Frank, it’s working; it truly is!”

  “Your work is what’s working.” He pulled me to him. “All those cultivars started and tossed because they didn’t meet your exacting standards.” He shook his head. “Guess I’d better get those mole traps set so we don’t lose these gems.”

  I danced a jig and went inside to call Delia to tell her. I stopped before I lifted the receiver. How could I share such an achievement when my daughter was so low? Yet weren’t these moments of accomplishment intended to interrupt the trials we couldn’t stave off or even understand? But some people took the joys of others and compared their own lack, making their melancholy deeper. It startled me that I didn’t know Delia well enough to anticipate how she’d respond.

  I finally decided to call Delia late that afternoon when the day’s labors had tempered my enthusiasm a bit.

  “I’m pleased for you, Mama. You’ve worked so hard.” Her tone was as flat as a frying pan, and I wished I’d kept my tongue.

  “Not sure how hard I’ve worked, but I’ve been persistent at least.” I kept my voice cheery. “You’ll like the color.”

  “You are that. Persistent, I mean.”

  “Which brings me to another reason I’ve called. Please, Delia, reconsider and come home.”

  “Everything’s fine here, Mama,” Delia said. “I help move the cows with Edmond in the morning so I get good exercise. I can make it to the phone, and Dr. Alice lives down here on the Bottoms, so she’s only minutes away now. She has a car. We’ve gone riding a time or two, and she’s come for dinner.”

  “But we don’t have a car, so it’ll take us longer to get there, to be with you.”

  Silence.

  “Just think about it.”

  “I’ll think. But Alice is good at what she does.”

  I knew God loved and cared for us, guided us through the storms, found us when we tried to hide. But I questioned too, took to my weeds with a vigor, swatting at my desire for certainty and to make things happen as I wanted them to. I could protect a flower, but I couldn’t protect my children.

  Alice Chapman was more than her doctor; she was a skilled friend, able to protect her better than her mother. Perhaps she didn’t need her mother.

  “She doesn’t want to sell,” Lizzie said over dinner one night. It was June, and the lilacs had faded. I’d carefully collected seeds from the deep purple with six petals to cultivate in my sun-porch nursery and had cultivars of my Lavender Pearl heeled in and growing in tubs to be planted. “She’s hanging on to the farm as a way of keeping Nell Irving alive.”

  “I think Lizzie’s right, Mama,” Fritz said. “She cries when I come there, and we walk the fields. Selling those cows would be one more loss. She pets them like Nell Irving did, scratching behind their ears like they was big dogs.”

  “Were big dogs,” Martha corrected as she passed the sliced ham to her father.

  “Were big dogs. What’d I say?”

  “Was.”

  “You knew what I meant,” he said.

  “The discipline of good grammar speaks to who you are, Fritz. When you apply for a job, you’ll want to put your best foot forward to take a step up,” Martha said. “So you must speak every day as though you have the highest command of the language.”

  Fritz sniffed.

  “She says that to us in school too,” Ruth said. “I think she means well.”

  Martha suppressed a grin.

  Ruth didn’t speak up all that often, and I saw her words as commiserating with Fritz. He did too and saluted her with two fingers above his forehead, then forked back into his ham. Nelia watched the interaction without a word. The child was so well behaved one could almost overlook her.

  “As I was saying. Frank, I wonder what would happen if you talked with Edmond and suggested it might be time to sell the cows. Delia’s due any day.”

  “It’s a good herd,” Frank said. “Makes her a good living if the prices stay up for cheese. Maybe time with our Delia helps Edmond miss his brother less, both young people, grieving.”

  I ignored my husband’s
wisdom and decided he’d need more attention before he’d be an ally. We finished eating, and I washed dishes with a vengeance, nearly scrubbing the green leaf edging from one of my mother’s Haviland plates. I should save them for special meals, but what was the point of having lovely china if used only once a year at Christmas? “If Edmond didn’t come out and milk those cows, she’d sell them. What’s she going to do after the baby comes? Besides, is it acceptable that she has morning coffee and suppers and dessert with a hired man?”

  Lizzie smiled. “I’m surprised at that coming from you, Mother. You’ve never paid attention to what people think.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Have you asked her to come live with us after the baby is here?” Martha sat at the table, grading student papers. Ruth and Nelia were upstairs, reading, I hoped.

  “Of course. But see how long it took Lizzie to return, and that was after I asked a dozen times.”

  “Delia isn’t me,” Lizzie said.

  “Has she said something?” I turned to her. It was nearly four months since we’d buried Nell Irving and Delia had carried on alone.

  Lizzie shook her head. “No. And while she might want to stay out there with her cows, and she does, if she thought it wasn’t good for the baby, she’d be open to an alternative. Knowing she wouldn’t be alone when the baby came … Maybe that would be enough to get her here.”

  “I’ve proposed that to her.”

  “But you’ve put it as though it would be good for her and for you. What about being good for the baby?”

  She had a point. Frank and I went up to bed. I looked out the window. I loved summer when at nine o’clock in the evening, it was still light enough to see color and shape. Birds-of-paradise bloomed outside the window, their red beaks sentinels to the petunia beds beyond.

  “Lizzie said she told her sister she wished she’d come home sooner after Fred’s death. You’d think Delia would listen to Lizzie, if not her own mother.”

  “I agree. But her coming here would cause quite a rearranging of the household. She might want to save you from that misery.”

  “What misery?”

  “Of having to tell Ruth and Nelia they need to go back to their families.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Those girls need us. Ruth needs her confidence built up, and she needs piano lessons, and she needs to know she’s important, and she needs exposure to a few other ways of seeing the world than the myopic view of her father. Besides, Martha’s the best teacher ever, and those girls need the best teacher ever, not stuck upriver where Ruth’s parents live. And Nelia, bless her, she’s smart but doesn’t know it, and she needs time for healing from a great loss I don’t even know, and her father rarely talks to her and would have her living way up the Lewis River, and both of them are attending school and doing well because they’re here in town, and—”

  “You need them,” Frank said.

  I startled. Do I? “Yes, yes, I do, and not just for the work they do,” I said. I needed them for the way they made me feel when I pointed out the intricacies of horticulture and gardening and linked it to life. I loved seeing their faces when I spoke an encouraging word or honored their incomparable souls. I couldn’t imagine working in that garden alone, even though I disappeared there with people working by my side. I needed them to be excited and blessed and healed by the blooms as I was.

  “I submit, Delia doesn’t want to see you lose those girls. She knows how much they mean to you and how much you’ve meant to them.”

  I sat down on the side of the bed. “But Delia’s our daughter. Of course she’d come first.”

  “Delia has a tender heart, Huldie. She might be thinking of those girls as much as her own child.”

  Frank was right, and it grieved me that I hadn’t thought of it myself. “We could put all three girls in our bedroom and put Ruth and Nelia in the back room. It’s almost big enough for a couple of cots.”

  “Three females in one room? One with a baby on the way? Hulda.” Frank shook his head. He stripped down to his underdrawers and crawled into bed. The nights were warm, so only a flannel sheet covered us. I drifted my linen nightgown over my head, tugged out the long braid I slept with, and crawled in beside him. Frogs croaked near the birdbath set below the window.

  “I can’t put the girls out in the tack room with Fritz, for heaven’s sake.”

  “No one’s asking you to. You’ll think of something.” Frank yawned. He fell instantly asleep.

  I lay awake, fiddling with my braid’s end hairs. Frank’s soft snores filled the room. The Thompson clock downstairs ticked loud enough for me to hear it giving rhythm to my prayers. There’d be a solution. I just had to trust.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  LAUNCHING LIFE

  Hulda, 1906

  An odd series of short and long rings shrilled from the phone. It meant someone tried to reach as many people as possible. Delia’s baby! I ran down the stairs and grabbed the receiver. “Alice Chapman’s been injured bad,” Jennie the phone operator said. “She was out in her garden and forgot she had a mole trap there, and it snapped her hand nearly off. Her husband’s been called back from Kelso, but if you were hoping to see her at her office today, don’t go. Nobody knew how to drive that car, so she tried to drive it with one hand. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “What can we do?” someone on the line piped in.

  “Who can go there and drive her to meet Dr. Chapman? Take them to the dock so she can get to Seattle and St. Joseph’s?”

  “I will,” another voice said. It wasn’t Delia, but I wondered if she was on the line.

  A few other arrangements were made as the community rallied around their only doctor. A neighbor offered a prayer, and together we said, “Amen.”

  Poor Alice. Delia would have to come here now. We could deliver that baby. I’d had all mine at home without a doctor. My sisters had too.

  Delia counted on Dr. Alice, though. They were friends. Delia might think Alice needed her and want to stay even closer.

  A week later, Dr. Alice returned from the hospital, her hand removed, thus ending her surgical career.

  “Alice and I buried her bag of medical tools behind her house,” Delia told us. I was at the farm fixing soup she could eat the next few days. Her legs were swollen, and she could hardly bend over to fill her cat’s dish she was so large with child. I poured milk that Edmond brought in. The cat lapped happily by the stove. Edmond remained, drinking a cup of coffee as he leaned against the dry sink. He seemed at home in Delia’s kitchen.

  “Why bury perfectly good medical instruments?” I petted the cat, now swishing against my legs.

  “It’s illegal to have doctor tools if you’re not a doctor,” Delia said.

  “But her husband is. He could have used them.”

  Delia was quiet. “Maybe it was her way of putting that past behind her, burying what could never be again. I’m not sure. But she asked me, and I was pleased to help her. She’ll be moving, both of them, to Kelso. I’ll miss her.”

  “So our town will be looking for a new doctor,” I said.

  Delia nodded. I noticed a caring look Edmond gave to my daughter—and how his face turned the color of a geranium when he saw that I was watching him, watching her.

  “I read a piece in Woman’s Home Companion,” Ruth said as we fixed breakfast. “Martha said it would be all right to read the magazine.”

  “I’m sure it is. That’s a good periodical for young ladies as well as for older ones.” I sliced bread, and Ruth toasted it, spearing the finished slice from the triangular-shaped tin set over the heat of the wood stove. She buttered each slice as she talked, her voice clear and firm. Quite a change from when she’d first come here.

  “She says we need to step out on our own, be good neighbors. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe … maybe it’s time for me to return home. I could come in with my father a few days a week and still help with watering and such, but that would give you more room, at least this summ
er. Maybe Miss Delia would come home.”

  My heart ached with her words. “Were you listening at the door the other evening?” I shook my finger at her, but not sternly. “That’s not polite, you know.”

  “No, oh no. Nelia and I have both talked about this. We’re getting old enough. I’m fourteen, and Nelia is eleven already, and well, things have changed for you and Mr. Frank, Mrs. Hulda. That magazine article just made me think that I might be ready for a change too.”

  “I need your help, Ruth.” My heart pounded. “And you need the money and the lessons.”

  “If we weren’t here, though, Delia could have our room all to herself. She and her baby.”

  I scrambled the eggs, bought time. Finally, “That’s kind of you, Ruth, to make this offer. I … I’ll have to talk with Mr. Klager about this.”

  Ruth might be ready, but I wasn’t sure Nelia had a place to go to that wouldn’t send her back into that old sadness. And Delia didn’t want to come anyway. I could end up alone.

  The idea came to me while I planned a Fourth of July gathering in the garden. I suggested to my brother and his wife that Tillie could use Nelia’s help with their toddler, and I could pay Ruth extra—as Frank approved—so she could pay them for room and board. I’d still have her help, she’d be saving still for schooling, and my adoptive family would be on the other side of the fence.

  I also enlisted more “bucket boys” again. The seven- and eight-year-olds came after school and hauled buckets from the pump to the hundreds of plants, pouring a ladle of water on them, one by one.

  “They get a nickel an afternoon,” I told Frank. “And this way Delia won’t think she has to be out there working the garden. She’ll see we have plenty of help. Nelia and Ruth can keep them in line, Martha too.”

  “That could be full-time work, I submit. My dad used to say: ‘one boy’s a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all!’ ”

  “Oh, Frank, they’ll behave.”