Where Lilacs Still Bloom (7 page)

I
sat by the fire and read my seed catalogs, especially noting the lilacs. I must have sighed out loud because Frank looked up from the notes he was working on for the cheese cooperative and said, “What?” He served as secretary for that group, his penmanship like artist’s drawings, the letters so perfectly shaped. He learned his lettering in Germany, where he was born and lived and attended school until he was eighteen and came to America.

“Oh, just these Lemoine lilacs Cooley’s says it can import upon request,” I said. “They have to come from France.”

“Now I suppose you want what, a more purple lilac?”

“Well, that. Or one that could withstand an early frost. Or better yet, that cream lilac.” I closed the catalog. I could just imagine the color of snow blooming against black stems cradled with shiny green leaves. It would take years turning a
pale purple into cream, especially without a lighter lilac to breed to it. Lemoine had a white. “Can’t you just see bushes covered with creamy-looking flowers?” I could. They were as real to me as the rain that fell outside the window. “Why, I bet people would actually come by to see a creamy-white double lilac with twelve petals.”

Frank grunted, but he put his pen down. “Why would you want people tramping through your garden?”

I shrugged. Maybe that was prideful, but sharing beauty isn’t bad. “I’d give them starts if I was fortunate enough to develop a new variety.”

“Twelve petals? Pretty ambitious, I’d say.” Then after a pause, he said, “What would they cost, your French lilacs?”

“Oh, way more than we have money for.” I scratched Bobby’s neck as he lay at my feet. “It’s just a daydream, Frank. A girl likes to have her dreams.” I thought of my father.

“You’ll make gains with the lilacs you have.”

“True. But you can only go so far with mediocre stock. Lemoine are well regarded, and with careful hybridizing, I’d love to see what I could do with them.” I picked up the catalog again and found the drawing of hydrangeas Cooley’s carried.

“How many would you need?” Frank said.

“Oh no. It was just a daydream, Frank. Truly.”

We really couldn’t afford expensive French plants just for pleasure like that. Fritz outgrew his shoes and needed new
ones, and the girls planned a summer wedding, and we never knew how much milk the cows would give or what price the cheese would bring, even with the cooperative’s stabilizing help. Besides, we’d just bought the house my father had built, closer to Woodland proper, away from the Bottoms. We didn’t have money to spare as we planned to move into that house and have the wedding reception there. We were raising Papa’s house up three feet to weather the floods. No money or time to spare for hybridizing. And I’d be transplanting from our Bottoms farm to the house on Pekin Road so that was plenty to keep me busy.

“Could you get enough starts that if successful, you could sell them in a catalog?”

“Oh. No. I don’t think so. No. I … I wouldn’t do it for money. Just forget it, Frank.” I turned the page. I didn’t know why he was being like this, suddenly promoting my interest in plant breeding. Had I spoken too often out loud about my girls leaving home and the emptiness I thought that would bring?

He got up and stood looking over my shoulder, reaching down to push back to the page I’d been perusing. “So, how many would you need?”

“Fifteen,” I said before I could stop myself. “You couldn’t do much with fewer than fifteen. And I’d have to order a white one, hoping it shades to cream along with ones known for hardiness and a few with a heady scent. Five of each kind
would do it.” I caught my breath and my senses. “No, Frank, we really can’t afford—”

“Yes, we can. I bought a new bull two years back; I guess you can buy a few posies.”

“But the cost—”

“We’ll sell a cow,” he said. “Carl’s been wanting that heifer from Daisy and the bull. She promises to be a good milker. If he still wants the heifer, you can order your lilacs. All the way from France.” Carl’s my sister Bertha’s husband and Frank’s best friend.

“Oh, Frank, you are the dearest man alive!” I stood and kissed him, then over my shoulder I saw the boxes I’d gathered to pack up for our move. I stepped back. “No. I can’t justify the expense and neither can you. I won’t have it.”

His neck colored red with my pronouncement. The wife isn’t supposed to have the last word, but I spoke the truth.

“You may be right.” Frank shrugged. “You usually are. All right. I won’t talk to Carl.”

I felt a twinge of regret with my certainty. My persuasive powers sometimes worked against me.

That night I dreamed of a creamy lilac, the color of pale butter. And when I awoke, I knew that’s all there’d be, just the dream of one.

Y
ou gots to let this child go to school, sir,” Jasmine told the tailor in his Woodland shop. “She need brain work. Missing that’s why she behave so bad. She coming up with things to trouble you and me and her too.” Jasmine knew she ought not speak up to the man who had been her employer for years, but his head was buried in cloth, worryin’ over competition of store-bought goods, and she feared he’d forgotten about his Nelia. She had to stand for the child. She couldn’t stand well with her aching hips, but a body must do what it must for the happiness and well-being of children.

“There are plenty of books at the house for her to read,” he said. “She’d probably be asked to leave school by the second day anyway, since she behaves so badly.” He glared at the child. “Cutting up perfectly good clothes. The child’s possessed.”

“No sir; ain’t no possession. There a smart girl inside, and
she need ways to challenge her mind so it can get out without harming her. Or us.”

“Then set her to work cooking. Mrs. Runyan can use the help. You too, can’t you?”

“Yes sir, we needs help. But that don’t free that mind to find a path that take it to good things, higher things. You not getting her schoolin’, that same as neglecting a tree and letting it die for lack of watering.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” The man stood, scissors in hand. Nelia hovered beside Jasmine, her shoulders pressed into the woman’s fleshy side.

“Maybe see if they’s a place she could board in town. Stay there and go to school ’stead of boarding with the Runyans way up the Lewis River.” Mr. Lawson had moved them to a faraway logging outpost with a single boarding house, while he stayed in Woodland, sleeping in the back of his shop. He rarely saw his daughter. Jasmine supposed this was as safe a place for her as could be with Mrs. Runyan being the only white woman around, the rest being Indians and loggers who weren’t all that talkative, but not hurtful either. But the time had come for change.

“She start cutting up other people’s things, and we have to move anyway, then what?”

“All right, all right!” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Jasmine and the girl began the long walk back home, smelling the sweet scent of lilacs coming from the west. “I
sure like them smells,” Jasmine said. “Can you smell them, child?”

Nelia shrugged. She took the woman’s hand and clung to it. “Yes, child, you just hang on to me. I be your tree till your daddy find someone to help you get you some roots of your own.”

He needed to do that fast. Jasmine didn’t think she was long for this world with age and ailments ready to settle on her wide shoulders.

“Let’s take a walk toward that lilac smell, child. See what else might grow in that garden. Maybe we take that heavy cloak of sadness you wearing and lay it flat, plan a picnic on it with lilacs blooming all around us. You like that, child?”

The girl nodded as Jasmine stroked her hair. The past held Mr. Lawson hostage, but Nelia still had a chance to heal.

I
didn’t relish all the adjustments necessary to turn a new landscape into the comforts of home, but my parents’ yard was a canvas I could paint with flowers. I set rows of lilac starts to add to theirs as soon as I knew we were moving. A ginkgo tree already flourished there, planted years ago. I pictured an umbrella tree and magnolias to grace the property. I tried not to think about this having been my parents’ house. I tried not to think about the fact that my girls were going to be married at the Presbyterian church and celebrate in this yard and how much I’d miss them afterward. I’d have my birthday in May, and I would be old. I tried not to think of turning forty.

We packed with the goal of moving in April. On Saturday, moving day, all the relatives and neighbors planned to load furniture and whatnot onto wagons and transport trunks
and farm equipment the few miles from the Bottoms to the house on Pekin Road.

It rained the week of our move, cool, shivery rains that didn’t mist like some springs but pelted down with the wind, pushing wet through wool. We watched the Columbia and Lewis, and when the water hit a certain spot on the banks, we started moving cows to higher ground. Most of the farmsteads flooded, and all the farmers had to wait until the water receded before beginning to plant. We had to.

When the water disappeared, life along the river settled down. The air was thick with the scent of newly turned earth and the flutter of pink and white from apple and cherry blossoms that farmers and house Fraus would plant. The high water never lasted all that long, but there’d been major floods in the late eighteen hundreds that ravaged a few weeks. Floods could make a misery of a garden, not to mention be deadly to people and cattle. Rain, which is our constant companion in the Northwest winters, fell as hard and steady as usual on moving day. All our goods were loaded, so we drove them to the new house where we sloshed through foot-deep water carrying things in. Lizzie’s piano had to wait.

I thought all the rain on moving day was a bad omen, but Martha, our studious one, said the ancient Greeks wished for foul weather on an important day so that the gods wouldn’t notice mortals being hopeful and happy. “It’s why people do silly things to couples on wedding days,” she advised me.

“Oh, is it?”

“Yes, because the gods don’t want mortals to be happy on their own; they might come to believe they don’t need the intervention of Zeus or Aphrodite. They’ll get too proud and independent, suffer from hubris.” She looked solemn.

“Hubris.”

“It means prideful, Mama.”

“Lucky for us, then, that we don’t believe in those kinds of gods,” I told her. I held the umbrella over her head as she stepped inside our new home carrying an armful of her many books to the second floor.

Water pooled on the flat areas around the house, but we’d raised it the right amount. There’d be muck and mud in the yard and a darker canvas than I’d imagined.

The sounds that came from outside that first night—the wind in the apple trees, rain pattering on the roof—and the sounds of Bobby, allowed inside, rolling on the carpet instead of a wood floor, were all new. I’d need to integrate them with sounds from memory, of when we’d helped Papa build the house or been there for Mama when he’d died. Frank turned over in our double bed and laid his arm across my belly. “Does it feel like home yet?” he asked.

I was glad the room was dark and no full moon shone through the glass transom above the door.

“Not yet,” I told him. “But it was the right thing to do, I know that. I think the soil is better here, and we’re higher.”

“Can you find peace in this place?”

I patted his hand. “I think I’ll go back and take a look at the old garden tomorrow. Say good-bye to what I’ve left there before I really dig in to this soil.”

“All the important things you brought with you.”

“I know, I know. And the Lord knows my lot. He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places.” I paraphrased the psalm. “But leaving is … difficult. I put roots into that soil, Frank, deep roots. And it’s like I’ve left a limb behind, but I can still feel it with me.”