A Violet Season (5 page)

By midafternoon, Ida could see that Joe’s arms were tiring. His sleeves were rolled above the elbow, and under his gritty skin, his tendons rolled and stretched like straining ropes on a pulley. He frequently paused to dangle his arm and then shake it before reaching for the next cutting.

“You’re tiring,” she said. “It’s a long day.”

“I never realized how hard you had to work to grow these little
flowers,” he said. “I don’t imagine any boy who gives them to his sweetheart has any idea.”

“When you get home tonight, allow yourself a steaming-hot bath,” she said. “And rub some liniment on that arm.”

“Thank you. I surely will.”

“You’re a good worker,” Ida said, gazing up the row at some of her neighbors, whose pace had slowed considerably since morning. The Hoskins boy had gone home at noon for lunch and hadn’t returned.

“I’d be happy for steady work here this season,” Joe confided. “The caretaking job at the church isn’t much.”

A few minutes later, Norris wandered up the aisle to ask Ida how Joe was doing. His shirt was nearly as fresh and ironed as it had been this morning, and his vest was buttoned snugly. Like William, who kept to the books and avoided the workers, Norris had taken on an air of superiority. William, at least, knew the business.

Ida saw Frank enter the greenhouse at the far end, his hat low on his forehead. He had a habit of pulling on the brim when he was angry or frustrated, and she worried over what had happened this time. She prayed he would not walk up their way.

“Mr. Jacobs is doing quite well,” Ida told her nephew, playing her subservient role for the sake of keeping the peace. “He’s picked up the rhythm. Be sure to have him again.”

“The rest of this week and next,” Norris said, nodding at Joe, who thanked him.

“Norris!” Frank called out, and taking larger than usual steps, he strode toward them. Frank was almost a head shorter than Norris, and Ida was embarrassed for him, making a show in front of the workers.

“We’re missing a dozen buckets. Where’ve you put them?” Frank demanded. “I’ve got four workers waiting and no cuttings!”

“Why don’t we talk about this outside,” Norris said in a voice
that mimicked William’s. It might have been funny if not for the threat to Frank’s livelihood underlying everything Norris said or did.

“Why don’t you just get your goddamned job done,” Frank said. As he turned away, Norris caught his upper arm. Frank shook him off and drew back as if to throw a punch, and as Norris flinched, Ida blurted, “Frank!” With a swift backswing, Frank pounded his fist on the side of the wooden bed, and Ida felt the vibration in her own hand. Then he yanked his hat low and pushed past Norris.

It had always been like this with William and Harold, though the indignity of taking orders from Norris was worse still. Frank knew the plants better than either of his brothers and certainly more than his nephew. William and Harold were better with the accounts and sales and shipments, but it was Frank who was always the first to catch the start of the rot and eradicate it before it took a whole bed. It was Frank who experimented to find the best mixture of manure and soil, and Frank who regulated the amount of water and sun and shade and the temperature the plants needed. Frank grew a perfect crop nearly every season, and without a beautiful, hardy crop, there would be no accounts to figure, no sales to make, and nothing to ship. But Frank was the youngest brother, the one who could be bullied, the one who owed them and who didn’t have to be taken seriously. He seemed to believe that one day he would prove himself to his brothers, but Ida was certain that no matter what he did, he would never be granted their respect.

Ida felt done for the day, but she and Joe, who had lain quietly on the board throughout Frank and Norris’s drama, had another bed to plant. Ashley was about to wail. Outside the greenhouse windows, Reuben and Jasper were running back and forth in a game that Jasper found hilarious. He kept toppling over, which appeared to be the part Reuben enjoyed most, but Jasper would be tired soon. When Ida left, Joe would be obliged to finish the front of the bed for her.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Joe. “I’ll see if I can find Alice to help you finish up. You’ve been very understanding today.”

“It’s a pleasure to work with you, Mrs. Fletcher. What say tomorrow you take this job and I take care of the children?” he joked. “My joints sure would thank you.”

“Ah, but you’ll bicycle home in an hour or so, and I’ll be tending the children all evening,” Ida said. As if he had been cued, Ashley opened his mouth and let out a full-lunged cry of hunger.

“I see your point,” Joe said.

Ida washed her hands at the pump, then sent Alice to finish her job and watch Jasper. Ida carried Ashley up to Frances’s veranda. Cook was sitting there peeling a kettle of potatoes. The only live-in help at William and Frances’s house, she could always be counted on for a refreshing dose of irreverence.

“She’s been out there all day,” Cook said, nodding toward Frances, who was wandering her cutting garden in a calico apron and an expensive straw hat, deadheading the spent roses, then stepping back to admire her work. Like Ida, Harriet had been working in the greenhouse all morning. But not Frances.

Ida shifted the weight of Ashley’s head up her arm and settled herself deeper into Frances’s lawn chair. Despite her annoyance, she was grateful to be sitting in the shade of the arbor, which was covered with grapevines and wisteria. Frances had designed the veranda after the one at her parents’ summer home in Newport. The flat stones, which had been pulled from the woods or hauled from the earth when the house’s foundation was dug, had been placed by a skilled stonemason from across the river. Their odd facets fit together like the markings on a tortoiseshell. The stone stayed cool until late in the day, when the low sun from the west ducked under the arbor and gave it a warm soaking. Frances had arranged groupings of wicker chairs and tables for garden parties and informal gatherings, and it was here that Cook sat paring and Ida sat nursing.

It wasn’t long before Frances noticed Ida’s presence. Picking up her basket, she strolled over to the veranda. “He’s a hungry one, isn’t he,” she said, stepping into the shade and removing her apron, which she draped over the back of an empty chair.

“He’s doing fine,” Ida said. “His mama is quite satisfied.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“She answers my letters faithfully. She misses him terribly, but she can’t nurse him herself. He’ll be staying awhile longer, I reckon.”

“How many times have you nursed him today?” Frances asked as she sat down. She took off her hat to fan her face, then replaced it with its long pin. She asked the question casually, but she was unable to mask its real intent. Cook glanced up at Ida, her paring knife never pausing.

Ida took a deep breath to calm the undertow of anger. She mustn’t let it pull her in deep with her sister-in-law. Let the men do battle; she would remain civil. “I nursed him at six this morning, at nine-thirty, and at noontime while I ate my lunch, which brings us to this, his fourth nursing,” Ida reported. “He’ll nurse again before supper and before going to sleep, then again late in the evening. If I’m lucky, he’ll wake just once in the night.”

“It’s been so long since Norris was a baby,” Frances said. “I can hardly remember.”

“It’s a gift that we forget,” Ida said. “I sometimes think God makes us forget so we’ll go on populating the world.”

Frances drew her chin back at this and then looked away. Ashley opened his mouth to yawn, and Ida took the opportunity to switch him to her other breast.

“Each time you nurse him, it takes you how long? Half an hour?” Frances asked.

“Twenty minutes or so,” Ida said.

Frances nodded. She was looking down the hill toward Frank and Ida’s shabby tenant house, its roof shingles curled up at the
edges like a little girl’s hair. Beside it, the chicken coop hunched among the wandering hens, pick-picking all day in the grassless yard.

“Discounting your earliest nursing, then, you’re taking nearly an hour out of your workday to nurse the baby,” Frances said.

“I nursed him over my own lunch break,” Ida said. “And generally I would say forty minutes total for the day is the most I’ve lost. Perhaps you should log my hours like a factory timekeeper.”

Frances focused her gaze directly on Ida, though Ida had noticed she was reluctant to do so when the baby was latched on.

“You can’t possibly believe I’m not doing my fair share of the work,” Ida said, and in the swell of this thought, she added, “when you yourself have been out here fussing in your garden all day.”

Later she thought if it hadn’t been for this last snap at Frances, she might have escaped with a scathing glare. But as soon as she said it, she knew she had crossed some invisible boundary. There were always boundaries with Frances. Knowing where they were was the trick. In hindsight, Ida speculated that she might have known where this boundary was and crossed it with intent, simply for the satisfaction of holding Frances’s hypocrisy up before her. Perhaps if Cook hadn’t been there to hear it, that would have made a difference. In any case, the next day at lunch, Frank took Ida aside and told her that William and Harold had decided she would have to make up for her nursing time by working an extra hour after supper each night until the planting was done. That evening Norris knocked on their door before the dishes were washed and said two final beds needed to be finished in greenhouse 7. He looked directly at Ida as he said it, but Frank stepped forward and took his hat from the peg by the door and said, “Oliver and I will be right down.” Norris turned to go, and Frank muttered a curse, which Ida couldn’t be sure wasn’t directed at her.

M
ostly to keep her mother quiet, Alice had begun stitching some linens that she would bring to her marriage to some unknown man. In the meantime, her mother had said it would be good practice in case she found Alice intermittent work as a seamstress. Ida had already attempted, without success, to find her a position as a clerk in one of the village shops—the cobbler’s, the tailor’s, the pharmacy, the mercantile—but with the economy creeping along, those jobs were more likely to go to young men or to older women with families to support.

Alice worked slowly, not because sewing was difficult for her; she’d been doing the household mending with her mother since she was seven, and she had already sewn some of her own clothing and some of Jasper’s. But she did not want finished linens to suggest to her parents that she was ready to wed. She did not want to draw her father’s attention away from the planting and toward her in any way. So to keep herself bent to her needlework, she had chosen an elaborate design for the scalloped edging on a set of pillowcases. The floss for the edging was the color of peaches, and when she was through with that, she would embroider tiny clusters of leaves on every scallop in two different shades of green.

She brought her sewing to Claudie’s house one July afternoon,
hitching a ride into town with Uncle William, who would pick her up when he’d finished his business. Alice and Claudie sat on the screened porch at the back of the Pruitts’ house, half in sun and half in shade. Claudie’s mother made them a pitcher of sweet lemonade and brought them two glasses with frosted P’s etched on them.

Avery had sent a letter home from Tampa, Claudie said, reporting that he and Alan Harris and hundreds of other young men were waiting to be shipped out to the fighting in Cuba any day. He’d mentioned a huge bottleneck at the docks. “He’ll probably run anyway once he hears a gunshot,” Claudie said, pulling a sapphire thread as long as her arm through the fabric of her sampler. She couldn’t be bothered to rethread her needle too often, preferring to deal with the unruliness of a long strand. “Bet you he’ll be home soon without having seen a lick of fighting, and then he’ll spend the rest of his life acting like a war hero.”

Alice wasn’t especially fond of Avery herself. He was boastful and paid no attention to what those around him said and did. Still, she always felt Claudie was too hard on him. She would never speak of Oliver that way.

“My father says it’s not the same as the Civil War,” Claudie continued. “He really is a hero. You can tell because he hardly talks about it.”

“I reckon it’s different when the war is fought at home.”

“I’ll say. Had you even heard of Hawaii or Guam before this?”

“They were on the map at school,” Alice said.

“Oh, school,” said Claudie. “You’re lucky you don’t have to go back. It’s silly I have to finish when all I’ll end up doing the rest of my life is laundry and cooking and mending.” She flipped over the muslin to pick at a tangle that had stopped the thread.

“You’ll have a more interesting life than that,” Alice said.

“Why on earth would I?”

“I just know you will.”

“Well, then I’ll have to marry a man like Mr. Brinckerhoff who’ll let me run my own business and take me on trips to see the world. He’s handsome, don’t you think?”

“He’s old!”

“I think he’s handsome, for an old man. Don’t you think men get handsomer as they age, as long as they don’t get fat?”

“Claudie Pruitt, you’re not going to marry an old man!” Alice cried, though she loved Claudie’s outrageousness.

“Better than marrying someone like Norris,” Claudie said. “No offense to your family, Alice, but he’s a pest.”

“Why? What’s he done now?” Alice asked, her head bowed to her sewing. It was tricky to line up the graduated stitches around the scallops. Each time she paused to react to Claudie, the stitches lost their uniformity. She considered snipping them out and starting over.

“He’s asked me twice to the church social this week alone. It was my impression that when a lady says no, that should be the final word on the subject.”

“Persistence is flattering, isn’t it?” Alice asked.

“Not in this case.”

Alice paused to shrug the tension from her shoulders. A breeze rustled the leaves of the poplars in the Pruitts’ backyard.

“I’m not getting married until my late twenties,” Claudie announced, pulling her blue thread long again. She was making a sampler of a peacock that she had drawn herself with colored pencils on the muslin. It was completely impractical, Alice noted, and completely like Claudie, who could afford to be impractical. Her parents would happily support her for as long as she wished and would help her make the best possible match when the time came. Or even no match at all. Alice pinched her needle and hunched over her work again.