Where Lilacs Still Bloom Page 17

  “That’s a splendid idea,” I said, rushing in too quickly. “I mean, a song for Fred. That’s a lovely thought. I think through flowers, lilacs, roses. You … you’re the musician. Martha’s got words, and Delia has sewing and baking to give to others.”

  “And Fritz has the river,” Martha said. “We each received something different to help us through our sorrows.”

  “And our celebrations too,” Delia added.

  “I will compose a piece, for him and for me.” Lizzie lifted her chin.

  “Music cleanses the soul of the pain of daily living,” I added. “That’s an old German saying my grandmother used to tell me.”

  “I thought it was that music washed away the ‘dirt’ of daily living,” Martha said.

  “We can adapt,” I told her.

  “Adapt. Yes.” Lizzie straightened her shoulders, wiped her dark brown eyes and smiled. She’d make it. That’s what mattered.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE POWER OF PASSION

  Hulda, 1908

  Fritz took a job on the river working for a dredging company. I confess to a disappointment in that. I knew he was intrigued by the river’s personality—wild and raucous one river mile and then a flotsam holder meandering about the lazy bends the next. But I could see what dredging did to a river and how it changed the beds and banks.

  “Ma,” Fritz told me when I complained. “It’s progress.” He shoveled pickled beets into his mouth, then wiped his face with his napkin. “No different than the railroad. That banked-up area that borders us now acts as a dike, and with the tracks, it certainly has changed things.”

  “Yes. The trains rumble our beds at night. I’m hoping that dike will keep the river out of here when it rises, that’s the only reason I sold them the right of way. Well, that and the farmers and shopkeepers need the transport for business.”

  “Maybe it will keep the Columbia out in June floods, but the Lewis on the other side, that’s always the problem with winter runoff. When they build a dike there, then you’ll be nice and safe between two high earth walls.” Fritz pointed his fork at me.

  “Will they do that, you think, build a dike there along the Lewis?” I sat beside my son. “How would it get paid for?”

  “Farmers will tax themselves, I submit. We’ve talked about it at the creamery meetings.”

  “A tax for a dike I can see, Frank, but I don’t see any value in the government paying to bring those dredges up the river farther. Every time they do, and those steamships too, the water pounds against the banks and breaks them down. We’ll be sitting on top of the river before we know it. Or right next to the dike, if what you say is true and they build one. Not sure I like that.”

  “Don’t complain to us,” Frank said. “Complain to the government.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Good thinking, Dad.” Fritz and Frank exchanged pleased looks for having put me off in another direction than at them.

  My son was a handsome boy, and he had a fair number of girls twittering at him after church on Sunday, but he was like a fly at the honey pot, not wanting to settle too close for fear of getting caught. That was good. It was bad enough he worked away from home when we had plenty for him to do on this place. I looked at his hair and realized he hadn’t asked me to cut it before church, yet it looked good. Fine, actually.

  “Who cut your hair?” Martha and Lizzie both looked at their brother, just noticing too, I suspect.

  “Joe Picard. He’s got two chairs at his new tonsorial parlor.”

  “Pretty good job, I guess.” I felt sadness that my baby boy had chosen someone other than his mother to look after his cutting like that.

  “Progress, Ma. Just like steamships going up the river.”

  That night I composed the letter that the men in my life sniffed about me doing. I wrote to both the government and the newspaper editor at the Woodland Echo about the damage of wakes, whether from steamships or dredges, and how farmers were affected. I’d never heard back from Cornelia about my request for her to write an article about the lilacs, so I’m not sure why I thought a letter about dredging would persuade anyone to do anything, but I could at least try. Luther Burbank seemed to think my words were full of enthusiasm. I wrote and rewrote until late into the night, burning more kerosene than I should have. But the light of day is for propagating plants, while ideas often bloom in the dead of night. “Sow your seed in the morning and do not be idle in the evening,” Ecclesiastes advises.

  Certainty makes one say things firmly. The county road was at risk of being undercut by the banks washing away every time a steamboat docked. I fully expected that before long, during spring flooding, the river would come over the banks and take out the road, and then the county would have to buy new land for a new road, whether the farmers wanted to sell their land or not!

  I finished with, “Some will say, let those who own the land fix the banks; and others will say, let the county take the matter in hand and fix it; but I say, let the steamboat company and the government fix our banks; they should be the ones to do it.”

  I signed my name, Hulda Klager. Not Mrs. Frank Klager, but with my own name. I also didn’t change the “I” to “we” in the letter, which a good wife ought to, but I was willing to own my opinion and not stand in the shadow of Frank’s. The truth is, I didn’t expect the Echo to publish it but felt better for having put the words on paper. Maybe that’s why Barney Reed felt compelled to tell me what he thought now and then; it just felt better even if it didn’t change anything.

  That summer I pulled weeds, snipped suckers, replanted cultivars, made notes in my book, and watched steamboats dock daily. Sometimes I stood as they approached and scowled as the wake pushed into land, lapping at the black earth, tumbling chunks, exposing roots that before long would have no dirt beneath them and the shrubs would sink into the river. If we had a big flood, those banks would crumble like week-old cookies.

  I’d given up hope of having my words read by others, but then one morning Delia called and said I should open up the Echo. “They published your letter, Mama.”

  “Did they?” I felt a flush of satisfaction. “I wonder what the neighbors will say.”

  “Oh, Mama, you did it so the neighbors would say something!”

  She was right, of course. But I suggested that it was “a way of giving voice to lots of people’s concerns. If we farmers agree to tax ourselves to build a dike, then why shouldn’t the steamboat companies do likewise to fix the banks?”

  “Won’t Fritz be put out that you’ve chastised his employer?” Delia said.

  “Fritz and your father urged me to write it.”

  “I hope he doesn’t get upset with you, Mama.”

  “Oh, he’ll survive,” I said with just a twinge of regret. “We Klagers do.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  TRANSFORMING

  Hulda, 1908

  Roy Mills of Mills Grocery and General Merchandise began showing up at our porch on his “way to the docks” he told us, but he had to drive a distance, so his suggestion that we were somehow on his “way” lacked the ring of truth. At first, he just chatted with Frank or me about the weather, the road conditions and how they might affect the new Model T introduced by Henry Ford. He was a tall, good-looking man, maybe in his early thirties. Clear thinking from what I could tell, with a good head for business. He spoke Chinook, he told us, and conversed with the few Chinook Indians left in the region who bought things at his store. He spoke with dignity about them, not demeaning the way some of our neighbors tended to toward that race.

  Once, Roy asked if I’d consider selling him some of my cultivars for resale at his store.

  “Why, she gives half of her stock away,” Frank told him. “She’d undercut your sales.”

  “Just thought I’d ask.” Roy took a second cookie from a plate Lizzie offered him. “If you ever do decide to wholesale them, I hope you’ll keep my store in mind.”

  “Oh, I will. I’d want my neighbors to h
ave first crack at them.”

  “Any real money in plants comes from catalog sales, I submit. Cooley’s is a big distributor, near Salem.”

  “We’ll go to them, then, when the time comes. After we give a fair number to Roy here.”

  Later we all sat on the porch, Lizzie, Fritz, and Martha included, and laughed about sending Lizzie off to Seattle to play piano at the new nickelodeon opened there. “You could play for hours and get to see free movies,” Roy teased.

  “I hear there are more than eight thousand open across the country,” Fritz said. “You could travel on your music.”

  “Yes, and all I’d have to do is find another job so I could afford to live in Seattle.” Lizzie fanned herself as yellow jackets buzzed in the flatiron plot. “No, I’m a Woodland girl with excursions to big cities and mountains.” She told Roy then of her climb up Mount St. Helens. “Maybe when Woodland gets a nickelodeon, I’ll see about playing. Until then, I’m happy to have my students, even if my mother is the worst one.”

  “Do you ever compose?” Roy asked.

  Lizzie looked startled. “I … occasionally put some notes down on paper.” She blushed. I’d heard her working on a piece I thought might have Fred in mind.

  “You seem a natural for that.” Roy stared at her.

  “Do I?”

  Then we were no longer all of us on that porch. Lizzie and Roy had drifted into each other’s eyes and gone to a faraway place. I looked at Frank; he smiled, shook his head as though to warn me not to speak a word, and all was silent. Only the panting of Bobby on the porch broke the reverie of a summer dusk.

  Until Fritz coughed and said he wondered what lands the president planned to include in the West for conservation purposes, a subject so far from the composition of the heart that Frank and I looked at him, speechless. Sometimes I wondered about my children and their strange timing. Surely they didn’t get that from Frank and me.

  A new doctor came to town that summer, Dr. Carl Hoffman. He was young, tall, tireless from what I heard. He owned a car too and stayed at the same boarding house as Roy Mills did, the only one in town. Dr. Hoffman stopped by to speak with Frank about cars—or so he said—but I noticed he also accepted lemonade offers from Lizzie and remained on the porch long after the cookies were gone. She could do worse than Dr. Hoffman, I thought. But I liked that Roy Mills too.

  Ruth graduated from high school the following spring and earned a chance to study music in Baltimore of all places, at the Peabody Institute. I confess I found as much pleasure listening to her practice as playing on my own. Music floating through the open windows, while I pruned and seeded, was soothing to me. I’d miss that music, as well as anticipating Ruth’s arrival home from school, lifting a bucket as soon as she greeted Tillie, changed her clothes, then crossed the field and fence to our garden, Nelia close behind her. Her contributions to the success of my growing garden were many, and I had already worried out loud to Frank about how I’d get all those lilacs and the mushrooming additional bulbs and shrubs watered every week without her.

  “We’ll manage. Add more bucket boys.”

  I asked Ruth if she’d like to hold her graduation party at our house. She hesitated. “Emil and Tillie offered. I—”

  “Well, of course, that’s fine. We can help them.”

  “It’s just that my father …”

  “Yes. I know. He thinks my garden is a den of iniquity.”

  “Oh, not that strong, Mrs. Hulda. He’s mellowed, seeing as how I haven’t asked to go to school in the sciences or anything.”

  “Nothing wrong with science.” I puffed up my shoulders. “Perfectly compatible with faith, always has been.” I didn’t want Ruth to feel torn, so I changed the subject and asked what we could bring to Emil and Tillie’s.

  On the day of the party, I looked from Emil’s backyard across the fence to the lilac orchard to see the sun glint against the windows of the sun-porch nursery. I took the view in, as though new to me, and found it pleasant.

  “You’re responsible for the scholarship,” Ruth told me as she came to sit beside us on dining room chairs brought outside for the occasion.

  “Not in the least.” I patted her knee. “You earned that honor yourself. You and Lizzie. She was the one who made all the connections. You have a gift for music, the raw seed that can be improved upon.”

  “But if you hadn’t allowed me to live with you … if you hadn’t paid for my piano lessons, I might never—”

  “Yes, you would have. You have a strong heart, Ruth, and a giving one. I’ll never forget your willingness to move so that Delia could come home. Even without those piano lessons, you’d have endured, kept going. I know that.”

  “I wouldn’t have had any school recesses, though.” Her eyes twinkled, and her wide face that I’d once considered homely was firm and filled with light, suggesting good health on her ample bones. We had that in common, Ruth and I, though she had enviable copper hair, straight and thick, while mine was frizzy and brown as dead moss.

  “You’ll do whatever is necessary,” I assured her. “Persistence and prayer, that’s the motto for a good life.”

  “You’ve taught me how to do that, Mrs. Hulda. You know how I enjoy seeing the shapes of things, rectangles and flatirons and circles and whatnot? Well, you’ve shaped my life. I’ll be forever grateful.”

  I was humbled speechless.

  As Ruth tended to her parents and spoke to other guests, Frank and I balanced teacups on our laps. Was it wrong to claim a part in giving that girl her good start, or at least for having nurtured her God-given gift of music? I didn’t think so. I smiled to myself. Her father was always wary that what I did with my apples and roses and lilacs affronted God. But Ruth’s music wasn’t unlike that process. Born with a gift, the piano lessons focused that talent, and the Peabody Institute would do even more refining until the richness of original intention rang out across a concert hall to bless us all.

  “You’ll come to Baltimore when I graduate, won’t you?” Ruth had come back over as we prepared to leave the party.

  “All the way to Baltimore? Oh, I don’t know. That would be quite a trip.”

  “It would be.” Her voice thickened with the sadness of reality.

  “We’ll think about it,” Frank said. “If not for your graduation, well, maybe some other time. You keep us posted about when you’re playing, and I submit, one day we’ll be there in the audience applauding.”

  “Will we?” I asked Frank after she’d left us. “Would we really go to Baltimore to hear her? The only trip we took far away was to Chicago for the fair. Course I’ve hopped from Germany and Papa took us back and forth to Wisconsin, but I was too little to remember much of that.”

  “Why not? We just have to plan for it. Maybe sell a cow or two.”

  “Nineteen twelve. That’s when she finishes at the Peabody. We could target that year.”

  “Yes, we could,” Frank said, and his confidence kept away the sadness that Ruth’s leaving brought. “Stop in Chicago and visit my family, too.” It was a journey to look forward to.

  “I want to give you something,” I told Ruth as the afternoon shadows deepened and birds flittered in the cedar trees. “You worked hard and long last year, and we’ve had more successes thanks to you.” We’d tended a big vegetable garden and canned and pickled until we saw jars of beets in our sleep.

  We walked back across the fence and stood in my garden as I handed Ruth a box, the setting sun bringing out the auburn base of Ruth’s hair. “You can plant it wherever you wish, but I want you to know that it’s yours, given in gratitude for your generosity these many years. It’s a brand new variety.”

  The starts were taken from the set of my Magical Three Lemoine. “I’ve called it Dark Dense Truss, Ruth.”

  “Is this the one I admired last spring?” Ruth asked. “I wasn’t asking for—”

  “I know. But yes, it’s the one you liked.” The root ball was wrapped loosely with damp rags.

  R
uth tenderly touched the stem. “I … I’m honored. Thank you.”

  “You’ll have to report back to me, because one or both of them might just come up with extra petals. They’ll look much better when they’re planted.”

  “Oh, it’s fine, wonderful, Mrs. Hulda. I was just thinking of where I’d plant it, you know, where I can watch it and take care of it.”

  “I’ve thought of that. I think you should plant it where it will mean something special to you. Woodland has enough rain and sunshine that they’ll survive almost anywhere here, and I hear they do well in Baltimore too.”

  She stared, thoughtful. “I’m going to take it home and plant it outside the kitchen window, where my mother can see it every day. A new variety. That’s special.”

  I winced. Ruth’s father might not like that. I said as much.

  “But this is my gift to give my mother,” Ruth said. “Papa won’t say anything against generosity, Mrs. Hulda. That’s a very Christian thing.”

  “Of course he won’t, dear.”

  And to Barney Reed’s credit, he didn’t.

  The next morning I told Frank, “I want Ruth to have another variety. One to plant in Baltimore.”

  “Not sure how that’ll work.” Frank sipped his coffee. “She’s going to be living in a dormitory.”

  “They must have gardens there. And lawns around the school buildings. Surely she can find a place.”

  “Patience, Huldie. Send it to her when she’s had a chance to get settled before she has to worry over a plant.”

  I knew he was right, but somehow the waiting annoyed. I was becoming impatient in my old age of forty-six. But I listened to him as a good wife should.

  Our lives went onward with me continuing to work on my lilacs. We kept the bucket boys, changing as they grew older or tired.

  “You tell the same stories you told us, Mama,” Martha said. “They’ve heard about grandma’s geese and their red flannel suits a dozen times.”