Francesca of Lost Nation (20 page)

Chapter 28

The Calm after the Winds

I

t was
uncanny how, during that summer, the weather so often mirrored the emotions washing over Home Farm. When I opened my eyes the next morning, I had never seen such a day. It felt as if all the evil in the world had been scoured away. The sun played hide-and-seek behind fat, puffy clouds. A gentle, northerly breeze softened the air.

Coming out of the storm cellar, I was blinded by the sun. The
garden was a shambles, true, but all the dead leaves and most of the branches had disappeared. I scratched my belly and heard it gurgle in response, informing me it was at least noon. When I discovered that Miss Blossom and RedBird had already been returned to the barn, I realized Francesca was not only up but at it.

I was supremely interested to observe what kind of shape she was in.

“Don’t slam that screen door, Sarah” were the first words out of her mouth. She was certainly in A State. It reminded me of what Matt often referred to as “The Rasps.” He’d explained it as a condition that showed up after “a night of bourbon and bad dreams.” Francesca definitely exhibited a colossal case of “The Rasps.”

She laid her forearm across her forehead. She massaged her temples gently for a moment before running her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Her body was never quite still, as one tic jerkily
followed another. She reminded me of one of Grandpap’s favorite homespun phrases — fidgety as a bug on a cat’s paw.

She glanced at me, then away. Her eyes flickered and darted across the gap that lay between us. “I …” She didn’t finish her sentence, stopping to lick her lips. She sighed then tried again. “I can’t ...” was followed by another sigh. She shook her head stridently enough to loosen some cobwebs and looked me right in the eyes. “I pray I will never behave in this self-pitying, self-indulgent way again. I owe you the most profound apology.” The words were forceful, the voice barely above a whisper.

She stood more erect. “I pray I don’t have to straighten this place out all by myself.” She didn’t give me a chance to respond. “The barn is a shambles. Part of the roof of the Bridal Cottage blew clear to Michigan, and that dog of yours has been barking her fool head off.”

Francesca gasped for breath and rubbed her temples again. She cocked her head. “Did ... Was there ... What happened last night?”

“Here?” I asked stupidly.

“Don’t answer a question with a question,” she said and took a huge swig of water right out of the glass pitcher.

To me, the night’s events were simply a blur, and whether I had dreamed, imagined or experienced any or all of the goings-on was far beyond my comprehension.

“I thought I heard … voices?”
Francesca probed.

I shrugged my shoulders.

Francesca walked to the sink and dipped her face under the running faucet.

“Are you sure nothing unusual happened last night?” Apparently, Francesca didn’t have a clue about “last night.” Thankfully, except for the hangover, she didn’t seem any the worse for wear.

I had battled terror the night before and yet had somehow got us all to safety. I was quite proud of myself, and under different circumstances, I might have crowed a little. However, my tale would have had to include that ugly episode with her and the bottle. Somehow, I was sure she’d die of shame if she knew that I knew.

Come to think of it, there was the possibility that a posse of strangers also knew ... Hang it, once in a great while, the truth is the last thing that needs to be told! Period, exclamation point!

Francesca turned to face me. “How did you manage to ... get us all into the storm cellar?”

I was about to consider which prevarication to give over when the phone rang. Thank heavens. Francesca massaged her forehead with renewed vigor while I answered it.
 

It was Aunt Maude, calling to check on us. The line crackled, snapped and popped so that every other word was almost unintelligible. As I gave her an account of the storm damage to Home Farm seven different times, she oohed and aahed and uttered “Really? No!” about every 26 seconds.

“Is my sister around?” Maude asked, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial level, as though my grandmother could somehow hear her over the receiver.

“Francesca?” I repeated while my grandmother was frantically shaking her hands, no. “Why, she’s outside, cleaning up the vegetable garden. Insisted she didn’t wish to be disturbed. You know how she is about those dumb cucumbers. Will you be home later, Aunt Maude?”

“Yes. You have her call me.”

“I will ... I promise. Love to Uncle Harry.”

“Kiss kiss,” she said and hung up.

“My cucumbers are not dumb,” said Francesca, massaging one hand with the other. “You must have been ... very brave last night. I know I ... we ... couldn’t have survived without your ... thoughtful command of the dire situation.” She was starting to sound a little more like herself.

When she took a deep breath, I could tell she was going to steer the conversation around a corner. “It’s such a beautiful morning. I haven’t seen one like it in the summer for years and years.”

“Maybe I should go into town,” I ventured. “We’ll need the stuff for the roof, and we could use some veggies, now that the garden’s demolished. I could hitch Miss Blossom to the pony cart.”

Francesca grunted.

“I could call Abraham to come in the taxicab,” I offered.

Francesca went to the ice box and poured herself a tall glass of orange juice.

“Yes,” she said, “you could do that. But we should go together; there will be people needing our help.”

There are no secrets in a small town, where all things are known and most of them are dissected at great length with relish. Small-town intimacy assumes advice is welcome, even when not solicited. There was no way anyone knew about Francesca’s toot the night before. How could they? However, the fact of Matt having left was a whole ‘nother enchilada.

Her relationship with Matt had been common knowledge. And as far as she was concerned, whatever judgment they’d encountered face-to-face as a couple was infinitely preferable to sneaking around. She usually made the bold choice and accepted all the consequences.

I was more than relieved that Francesca had apparently decided to wade back into life. A little like me at the pond, she was ready to waggle in the shallows. Fine; I would waggle with her.

It wasn’t going to be easy with so many treacherous traces of Matt hiding innocently around and about. A perfect example was the floogle horn on the driver’s side of the pickup. Francesca and I stared at it as she started the engine, and she brushed her fingers tentatively across its base twice. Her face took on a sad, faraway look.

Then, she whistled, and Babe came running, vaulting into the cab of the old truck like there were coiled springs in her legs.

“Good girl,” whispered Francesca, kissing the dog’s silky ear.

Babe responded with a wet kiss to Francesca’s nose.

Francesca cleared her throat and sounded the floogle once, twice.

*
     *     *     *     *

Lost Nation had been hit hard by the storm. Shop windows had imploded along Main Street. A hundred-year-old elm in the park had been upended. There was an army of people cleaning up everything from broken glass to underclothes still in their plastic packaging to rusted oil cans escaped from the town dump. 

Francesca cruised around for a few minutes before stopping in front of Abraham’s place, a small, two-story frame house with a stoop in the front. One of the pillars that held up the overhang was bent practically double.

Abraham’s eldest son, Jefferson, was a huge and chiseled young man who dwarfed his father and brother. He was mightily strong and tough as nails, and he had an almost eerie knack when it came to building things. When he drew up plans for additions to houses, he already knew where support beams had to go and how large the windows could be without weakening the structure. Weirdly, he’d never had any formal education beyond high school, where he’d been a math whiz.

He’d already taken measurements of the damage and come up with a plan to brace the bowed pillar until it could be replaced.

We found Abraham in the front room and pitched in to help him clean up the broken dishes, torn sheets, wayward tools of all descriptions and half a piano bench.

“Good to have you back among the living,” were his only words to Francesca.

This rather cryptic comment startled my grandmother, but she said nothing. For once, I was smart enough to keep my lips zipped. But the thought struck me … Could Jefferson have been one of the mysterious visitors?

We spent the rest of the morning making sure our friends and neighbors had adequate food and water. We lugged supplies alongside the Porters, the Tycorns, the Blackfeathers and assisted Doc Gearneart with plaster casts and stitches. At lunchtime, we made trays of sandwiches and passed them out along Main Street. By afternoon, Francesca’d been accepted back into the fold — like the prodigal son returned. Some couldn’t hold back an I-told-you-so-tinged remark, but most people cared more about righting the storm damage and seeing to their kith and kin than they did about Francesca’s love life. The winds that ripped through Lost Nation in the middle of the night were actually a blessing for us — they focused the town’s energy on a new set of mind-boggling circumstances. My grandmother had always been an ally of Mother Nature, and in turn, Nature had taken care of her.

One man’s curse is indeed another woman’s blessing.

On the way out of town, Francesca pulled up in front of the jailhouse. She just sat and stared out the windshield for a long time. Then, after looking carefully up and down the street, she entered the
office. Through the window, I could see her address Sheriff Dan, but I couldn’t hear anything.

He started to speak, and she held up her hands to stop him. She turned away from him and picked up a magazine, waving it around her head like a Samurai sword. Then, she turned toward him and said something that must have been a question, because he responded with a shake of his head. She said something else then, something that made Dan Mosley shut his eyes tight and exhale deeply. He took her shoulders and shook them ever so gently, talking calmly. She nodded once. Then, he kissed her forehead, and she turned to come back out to the car. And although Francesca never revealed the gist of that conversation to me, I knew they’d spoken of Matt.

When she sat down beside Babe and me, she only said, “I know you were watching us, Sarah. And I appreciate your concern. But you must learn that some things in life are private.”

With that, she started up the engine and roared out of Lost Nation.

Chapter 29

The Ties that Bind

T

he next few days were just like all the other summer days I’d ever spent on Home Farm. Yet they were so very different. There was a tension in the house, a division, as though the silver thread that attached me to my grandmother had been stretched almost to the breaking point.

She worked like a dog in the garden, at her roses, in the orchards. She telephoned Maude and Harry to assure them yet again that we’d gotten through the storm and that everything was hunky-dory. She even repaired the roof of the Bridal Cottage with no one to help except Babe and me. She cooked and canned and cleaned like a woman possessed. But she never whistled any more. She smiled fleetingly once in a great while, but there was vacant space behind her eyes where the joy of living used to well up and overflow. The mere fact of being alive had ceased to invigorate her way of being in the world.

She read the newspaper from cover to cover and spent hours poring over the aviation news. She spent time alone in her room. And although she never mentioned it one way or another, she was relieved that I’d stopped knocking at her boudoir door in the morning. I knew somehow that I wasn’t welcome there, that Francesca needed time alone with her grief, time to heal. That was the most awful part, I think—our morning ritual had disappeared from our lives. How I longed to take her café au lait and kiss her forehead. But I never mentioned it, and neither did she.

She continued to drink in the evenings but never got drunk again. She rarely listened to the radio and never offered to play cards. She’d lost interest in the swimming hole. Or at least if she did go, she didn’t include me.

It was like living with a stranger.

My dog and I got to acting jumpy, especially at night. Babe would prowl around or worse, suddenly take off through the house, barking to beat the band. I began to notice how the timbers of Home Farm creaked in the wind and had a bad habit of settling into new positions only after midnight.

The only person Francesca could bear to be around for more than a few minutes was Dan Mosley. I don’t believe they ever spoke of Matthew. In fact, they never discussed anything important at all, to my knowledge. He’d tell her how pretty she looked, and she pretended to believe him. She gave him recipes for Starr and made him fresh lemonade. He revealed the latest news about the arsonist: Someone resembling him had been spotted in
South Dakota and/or Indiana, which meant he was probably out of the area. Weirdly, his mother’s name had been Sarah, so just in case ... Dan was adamant we should have some male protection. Francesca dismissed such “trivialities” with a wave of her hand and led him outside to see her rose garden.

It wounded me to see her loneliness so obvious and aggravated. I was lonely, too, but at least I had Babe to comfort me. Francesca had just closed herself off, shut herself down, as though the mere idea of contact with another human being, even me, was enough to scrape away the thin scab that was attempting to form on her smithereened heart.
 

My grandmother rode flat out almost every day. RedBird was always soaked with sweat by the time they got back to Main House from God knows where. Francesca whispered in RedBird’s ears whatever terrible and sad things were struggling for the upper ground in her soul. I realize now she was in the grip of a grand depression, and I was absolutely powerless to ease her suffering.

We got a letter from Daddyboys and Mommy on August 6; it provided a bit of relief to our dour household. It was full of glad tidings and excitement, and I was tickled by his funny, grand style. Felt guilty about it too.

We’re hopping over to London on the aero plane, my dears. Too trala for words. After another two weeks seeing the sights, we’ll be cruising back to New York in early September. Gad! It’ll be merveilleux to see Lady Liberty and have a real old-fashioned hamburger!

We’ve been advised that school in
Manhattan begins second week of September. Sarah can enroll there and attend for a week or two before finishing out the term in Lost Nation as we discussed. And there’ll be so much shopping! All my lovely women will have to find us a pied-a-terre tout-de-suite and furnish same forthwith! We can’t wait to see the two of you! You’d better plan to rendez-vous on or near September 5. Mr. Toynbee’s booked us all in at the Waldorf Astoria. Ha! Won’t we be the toasts of Manhattan!

Your mother and I have grown expansive with our travels (mostly around the midsections) but there will be time enough for watching our
weight when we’re living on the income of a starving writer. That’s me, my dears.

I had a whale of an idea just yesterday. I should pen a how-to manual on fixing cars, complete with diagrams and lots of stories about Lost Nation’s eccentric automobile Armada. Mr. Toynbee jumped at the idea and is searching, even now, for a book publisher.

You know, I worked hard my whole life and always felt dissatisfied with the lot I’d made for us all. I felt that I was remarkable, that we all were remarkable and that we should be leading remarkable lives.

Frances, dear, you were always OUT THERE somewhere fine, marching to the beat of an ancient and mythic orchestra few others knew existed, let alone heard. In a way, you were the reason I never quite gave up the ship. I am going to buy you the most expensive dinner and the largest bottle of champagne in NYC.

I can’t tell you what it means to me to finally be able to do ... everything. I feel like a kid again. It fills me with pride (I might to have resize my hat). So, I offer you, my dearest loved ones, the sun and the moon. I’m working on the stars!

Lovelovelove,

Daddyboys

Francesca broke into tears and ran outside, slamming the screen door hard in the process. I didn’t follow, but I did watch her anxiously (and surreptitiously) for the rest of the afternoon. 

What a tribute Daddyboys had written to his mother-in-law! And they were so true, the things he’d poured out from his heart to hers. I wondered if her pain had been eased.

Later, I discovered it hadn’t.

“We’ll have to get you packed.” She started in on me with an attitude.

“Don’t you mean ‘us?’ We’ll both have to get packed?” I asked meekly.

“No. I said exactly what I meant, a habit more human beings should cultivate.”

“You’re thinking of not going to New York.” It was an accusation, not a question.

“I never considered going in the first place,” she said, thrusting that jaw out.

That wasn’t true, of course. And it made me mad.

“Well, if you’re not going, I’m not going!” I stamped my foot for emphasis.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sarah,” she warned. “Of course you’re going. And I’m staying. And that’s that! There’ll be no more argument about it, as I find the process too unpleasant to belabor.”

We were in the kitchen, drying lunch dishes. Babe stood up from the cool floor and cocked her head at our raised voices.

“You’re running away from me again. I don't understand why,” I hurled at her retreating back.

We really got into it then.

Francesca whirled back around. “It’s none of your damn business, Sarah. You are a child, and I am an adult. I have recently experienced something rather humiliating, and I think it’s best we don’t share
...” she dragged that last word out. She was oozing sarcasm by now. “... My most intimate feelings. It isn’t appropriate. And God knows, I’ve indulged in enough inappropriate behavior recently to last me the rest of my life.”

My voice rose a couple of octaves as I blurted out a response.

“Don’t say that! It isn’t true. You said love was never inappropriate.”

She opened the ice box and grabbed a bottle of hard cider. I had come to recognize the terrible wounded look that came into her eyes. Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.

“I have spent my life living in a certain way. I believed that I ... knew what was right for me. What was right for all of us. I considered life to be my friend, not my enemy.”

She stopped and took a swig straight from the bottle.

“I gave up on all-consuming love while still in my teens. I’d read about that kind of passion often enough. But I was never going to experience it. And so, I poured my passion into life.”

Francesca recapped the bottle and replaced it in the ice box, all the while gulping down some huge emotion.

“Life let me down. I’m not about to stagger off to New York, dragging my woe behind me, and rain on everyone’s parade. I couldn’t bear to see the pity in my family’s eyes. I’m not sure I could survive it.”

Hot tears welled up in my eyes.

“You’re selfish,” I cried out. “You’re sad, and I don’t know how to help you. We used to share everything together. Now, you only make me feel awful ... like you don’t love me anymore.”

She raised her face to say something, but I screamed her down.

“
No
! Don’t say anything!” I felt like sobbing now, but I managed to strangle the words out. “You lectured me all my life, and I believed in you. I trusted you! But you’re just like everybody else. You don’t mean what you say. You’re a fake. And Matt was, too.” My grief was wild now. My arms gestured madly, and my body shivered. “But even so, I’ll always love you, even if you don’t love me.”

With one last raging howl, I ran up the back stairs and slammed myself inside my room. I cried so hard, my stomach hurt.

I don’t have any idea how long it took for my personal storm to begin ebbing. My gasping sobs had been reduced to hiccups when I heard a hesitant knocking at my door. I didn’t have the strength to tell her to go away.

Francesca came in carrying a tray of iced coffee and home-made cookies. She set the tray down at the end of the bed and without a word, she sat beside me, gathered me up in her arms and held me.

That was all. She didn’t say anything or try to explain or make excuses. She just held me.