A Violet Season (10 page)

As they stood at the center of the line, flanked by a sizable family of clothing gesturing nonsensically in the breeze, Ida put an arm around Alice’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “It will work itself out,” she said, trying to feel that optimism herself, but Alice seemed about to cry. What had Ida said or neglected to say? She raised her eyebrows, hoping for a hint, but Alice ducked beneath a wet skirt and disappeared behind the laundry.

*   *   *   

Later that afternoon a letter arrived from Mary’s father. It was addressed to Ida, and she opened it eagerly, for she’d written to the man for several weeks without a reply. But the letter struck her as strange. Handwritten in block letters and merely two lines long, it thanked Ida for her service. It was signed simply “Mr. Gordon,” as if the man had no Christian name.

As Ida and Frank settled into bed that night, she mentioned the letter to him. Frank lay facing the wall as he always did; she spooned against his back, her crooked knees tucked into his. The nights had cooled, and she pressed her chilled feet against the soles of his warm ones. “The letter was very short,” she told him. “He’s not much of a writer.”

“You make too much of things, Ida,” Frank said. He squirmed
to find a comfortable spot, and the bed ropes creaked in their anchors. “He’s lost his wife. Be grateful you heard from him at all.”

Ida pressed her nose into his nightshirt and thought before speaking again. “He’s been paying you, has he not?” she asked. She didn’t want to doubt Frank, but she had seen no evidence of the money herself.

“Don’t worry about that,” Frank said.

“So he’s paying you?”

“He’s paying,” Frank said. “Go to sleep, Ida. It’s late.”

But Ida couldn’t sleep. In her wakefulness, she worried over Alice. Dark thoughts she had no time to entertain in the steady pulse of the workday slunk over her like nocturnal animals. Mary woke after midnight, and instead of nursing her in bed, Ida attempted to escape her fears by taking the baby out to the moonlit kitchen. They sat at the window, where Ida could see, past the empty clotheslines, past the driveway, the smudged shadows of trees and farmland. How peaceful the world was when everyone was at rest. Ida imagined the others who were awake this time of night: the women with infants, the newlyweds, the sick. In her cosmos, tonight, all was quiet. The barn door was latched, the chickens were asleep in their coop, the greenhouses were masked and still. It wasn’t yet time for the stokehouses to be churning out their filthy coal smoke, keeping the violets warm for the winter. A movement on the driveway caught her attention: Prissy on the hunt.

Ida rocked, and Mary’s body fell heavy in her lap. Though Ida rested her head and tried to find sleep herself, it eluded her, and she kept a vigil at the window until the first strokes of light sharpened the edges of the shadows and brought them into focus. Only then did she realize why she wasn’t sleeping. It was the birthday of her lost baby, whose stubby slate stone in the family burial yard bore a crudely carved name and date because she and Frank couldn’t afford a proper marker. She would visit him later in the day and bring him a sunflower, as she always did.

The September day he was born, there were sunflowers growing against the house, and two of them had turned their faces toward the window. The most vivid memory of her labor was the moment she’d noticed those flowers peering in like angels watching over her. She was sure the baby, in his three days of life, had seen them, too—all of the outside world that he’d known. Thinking of him was a relief, for the unnamed tugging that had kept her awake had a name then: Martin Francis, named for her father and for Frank. She bowed her head in sleep and didn’t wake until Frank shook her shoulder, telling her to get up and get breakfast.

*   *   *   

On her walk up to the family graveyard that evening, in addition to her cut sunflower, Ida brought a hoe and a pair of work gloves, for she imagined the place would need some upkeep. It was hidden at the top of the ridge among trees that had grown up around it, so the casual passerby couldn’t see it. Frank occasionally went to visit the graves of his parents and grandparents; the old stone wall was a pleasant, cool place to sit in the heat of the summer and eat lunch. Frances’s babies were all there, and Ida knew she visited frequently. Those small graves were always neatly trimmed, and Frances had set some hardy shade plants along the wall to discourage the weeds. But pulling up saplings and hoeing the bindweed was not Frances’s priority, so Ida, when she went, took it upon herself. She didn’t know whether anyone else bothered to go in. William was so worldly, and Harold so stoic and practical, that she couldn’t imagine they had the sentiment to visit, and Harriet had no family there to mourn.

Daylight was slipping. From the top of the ridge, Ida paused to look west toward the river. She couldn’t see it from this saddle, but pink and orange streaks of cloud whorled behind the old tree on Halfway Hill. She turned east and hiked to the edge of the woods, the hoe over her shoulder.

As she approached the trees, she heard the sound of low voices, and she paused, surprised. Who would be up here at this time of day? Sometimes the workers came into the shade for a break, but they had all gone home. Perhaps it was Norris with his friends—or a girl? She distinctly heard a girl’s voice. She stepped into the woods and looped north a few yards, hoping the trees would conceal her movements. She thought how foolish this was, sneaking about. If she startled Norris and a girl, what of it? They shouldn’t be up here alone anyway.

But it was Alice’s low laugh she heard—a laugh so scarce of late that Ida’s immediate response was joy. Then anger. She gripped the hoe tightly and maneuvered closer behind the cover of the trees. There they were, sitting on the wall with their backs to her. Not touching but sitting a foot apart, their heads leaned toward each other. Alice and Joe Jacobs.

Ida felt dizzy with anger, then worry. She thought of circling around and entering the graveyard as if innocent of their presence, but the humiliation that would cause Alice presented a risk Ida wasn’t sure she wanted to take—the risk that she might interfere with the start of something. She wasn’t certain she could trust them to maintain their good reputations. After all, they were hidden up here together, when Alice should be at home with her sewing or a book. However, under the present circumstances, it was not a development to be discouraged. Joe Jacobs was a respectable young man from an educated family with a secure future.

In the next moment Ida scolded herself; all the two young people were doing was sitting on a wall and talking. Still, she stood motionless behind the trees. She wanted to visit her baby, to touch the earth at the foot of his stone and say a few gentle words to him, but he would wait for her to come again. She laid his sunflower on the musty earth at the foot of the chestnut tree in front of her and took care to step silently, cutting directly north out of the woods and down the hill to home. Alice, she hoped, would follow shortly.

D
espite her best intentions, Alice found herself smitten with Joe Jacobs. A few days after they planted together, he said hello to her in passing on the driveway, touching his hat and smiling; he seemed truly happy to see her. She nodded quietly, but her heart was galloping, and it took all her will not to look at him again as she walked toward the house. After that, she began to act foolish, watching for him to arrive in the morning and offering to run errands to the greenhouses in hopes of seeing him there. Once her mother caught her standing on the footstool at the window over the sink because she thought she had seen Mr. Jacobs. “What in heaven’s name are you so eager to see?” her mother asked, and Alice lied so quickly and easily that it astonished even her: “A beautiful cardinal, but it’s gone now.” After that, she promised herself she would be more discreet.

It was a long while before she could get close enough to him again to speak, even at church, but one day when she carried lunch pails over the ridge for Oliver and Reuben, there he was, washing his hands at the pump. “Good morning, Miss Fletcher,” he said. “You’ve caught me a mess.” He shook the water off his hands and dried them on his trousers. “Heading down to twenty-five? That’s where they are. Let me help you.” He took one of the pails, and they walked on together.

“I understand things get busy around here in the fall,” he said.

Alice feared her voice would crack when she spoke. “Yes, it does. Starting with the New York Horse Show. It’s always a rush to supply it so early in the season.”

“That would be something to see, the horse show,” he said.

“It would,” Alice agreed. “I’ve never been, but I hear it’s grand. I imagine the horses are quite different from Trip and Trudy.”

“Oh, probably not all that different. Just used to doing a different job,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Have you ever been to New York?”

“No,” Alice admitted, feeling childish and unsophisticated. She was sure he had been dozens of times, probably with the pretty girls from Princeton who knew where to shop and where to have lunch, like her lucky cousins across the lane.

“You should go sometime. It’s something, I’ll tell you. Huge and loud and crazy. You feel like you’re at the center of the universe.”

Alice was going to protest that she liked it here just fine, but before she spoke, she realized that wouldn’t make a good impression. Mr. Jacobs would think she had no ambition, that she was only a simple farm girl who would be happy spending her life picking violets and stoking the range and wringing laundry. Then she couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she kept quiet. They walked the last few steps to the door of greenhouse 25, where she could see Oliver and Reuben halfway down the aisle, watering the plants.

“Well, here we are,” Mr. Jacobs said, and handed her the lunch pail he’d been carrying. “Nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you, too,” she said, hardly knowing where she was finding the poise to speak to him, so struck was she by the fact that he was paying her any attention at all.

After that encounter, she became much worse, not only watching for him all day, every day, but unable to stop thinking of him. She looked forward to Sunday mornings, when she was certain she would see him again. Though he always greeted her in a friendly
way, he greeted others, girls and boys, women and men, with the same friendly demeanor. He never read the Scripture again, so she didn’t have the opportunity to sit and listen to his voice without having to think of what to say.

Then a miracle happened. She ran across him in town one day, and he walked with her all the way from the pharmacy to Claudie’s house, a considerable distance. She’d been to visit Claudie and had offered to walk to the village to pick up a prescription of Avery’s. It was Claudie’s time of the month, and she wasn’t up to the errand. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have occurred to Alice to offer to do a personal favor for Avery. Certainly, before he had gone off to the war, she’d have avoided doing anything that might encourage his attentions. But this afternoon she had sat with Claudie on the coverlet at the foot of his bed and read to them both from their childhood copy of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. They had all read it before, and they probably wouldn’t have read it again, at least until they’d had children of their own, except that Avery had requested it. Alice remembered being teased by Oliver and Norris when she was younger for having the same name as this Alice; they would shove things at her—a can of oil, a mud ball—and demand, “Drink this!” or “Eat this!”

As she’d read aloud this afternoon from the book, so well loved that its binding was split, she’d found herself enjoying the story in an entirely new way. Alice the character was not unlike any of them. She had fallen into a world in which all the rules had changed, and she couldn’t be sure who she was herself. In their world there were no talking caterpillars or rabbits in waistcoats, but there was work and war and all the unexpected worries of adulthood, and it was good to escape them in the pages of a book and to know that its heroine would eventually wake up and grow up happily.

Avery had sat in bed with a stack of four pillows supporting him, though as Alice read, he continually shifted from one hip to
the other, trying to find a comfortable position. The yellow tint of his skin hinted at the jaundice he’d suffered; Claudie had said even his eyes were yellow when he first came home. Worst of all, he was a different young man. There was no sign of the boyish bravado that had spurred him to leave. Now he held himself like an old man who understood things of which he could not speak.

Alice had read for an hour; Claudie had refused to take a turn, saying Alice had a more pleasing voice, and Avery had agreed. Finally he had asked for some medicine, and when Mrs. Pruitt had come to administer it, she’d discovered it was nearly gone. Alice had offered to walk into the village to refill his order.

In the pharmacy, she ran into Joe Jacobs. The pharmacist had just filled her order and handed her the paper bag when she turned and nearly bumped into him, standing close behind her.

He said he was picking up something for his mother, but would she wait a moment, and he would accompany her to the Pruitts’? “Of course,” she said calmly, though she felt like leaping in the aisles among the apothecary jars.

It was a late-summer day; the sun had lost some of its power, though it was still warm and inviting. Alice walked as slowly as she could without dallying, and Mr. Jacobs matched her pace. She had never had the true attentions of a young man. Avery had once caught her by surprise at the Pruitts’ back door and said a few words—she couldn’t remember what, she’d been so flustered—then pecked at her like a chicken, and she’d ducked and run, so his kiss had bumped on her shoulder. At a church picnic the year before, a younger boy in whom she wasn’t at all interested had monopolized her conversation for half an hour before Oliver had rescued her. And for a few days at school once, a boy a year ahead of her had passed her some notes. She hadn’t replied, and the notes had stopped.