Return to Harmony (4 page)

Then she remembered all the pleasure she had seen on the elderly man’s face and knew that somehow, even when the disappointment cut at her, it was right.

Bethan breathed a deep sigh and hurried to keep up. She had to agree with Jodie after all—Sherman was a fine name for the old gentleman’s dog.

From the hillside they could look out over the bordering pines and see the church steeple. It was a reassuring sight, as they were fairly certain that if they were to actually ask permission, neither of their mothers would have allowed them to wander so far. But both girls loved the hillside meadow, although for different reasons. Bethan loved the flowers and the sweet smell and the cooling breeze, not to mention the excitement of having some place which was theirs and theirs alone. Jodie loved that as well, but mostly she loved the grand view and the closeness of the sky. The world’s borders were much bigger up on the hillside than down in Harmony, and tomorrow seemed much closer at hand.

An old picnic hamper, missing one of the lids and thus designated as ideal by the girls, was covered by a patched kitchen towel. A small tea set of real china, Jodie’s Christmas present from two years back, was set up on the remaining lid. They sipped fresh cider and munched cookies from Moira’s kitchen.

Their refreshment completed, the girls settled on the bank surrounded by wildflowers and knee-high grass. Bethan looked up from the daisy chain she was forming to study Jodie’s progress. It was just as she thought. Jodie’s chain was already longer than her own. Nor did Jodie have trouble getting the loops to stay together. Bethan’s own chain kept coming apart at the links.

Bethan sighed and went back to carefully maneuvering the stems into place, the tip of her tongue barely showing between pursed lips.

Lifting her chain in the air, Jodie broke the silence. “Look,” she invited proudly, rising to her feet. “It’s three feet long.”

Bethan raised her eyes. “Not three feet,” she dared to dispute softly. “Three feet would touch the ground.”

“Well, two feet,” Jodie responded stubbornly. “Almost three feet.”

Bethan nodded silently. Maybe it was. She wasn’t sure.

Jodie settled back beside Bethan and declared, “Your eye’s getting better.”

Bethan winced inwardly. She hated having people talk about her weak eye.

“Bet it’ll be perfectly acceptable soon,” Jodie went on.

Perfectly acceptable was one of Jodie’s new expressions. Bethan thought Jodie was in danger of wearing it out. Almost everything that summer had been either perfectly acceptable or totally deplorable.

Bethan worked another loop and said nothing.

But Jodie seemed oblivious to Bethan’s discomfort about the topic. “Do you still have to wear the patch?”

“Almost every evening and a lot of other times at home,” Bethan admitted quietly. “I hate it.”

“Well, I think it’s getting better,” Jodie said, reaching for another daisy. “You hardly notice the turning anymore.”

“Doc Franklin doesn’t think it is,” Bethan said, revealing part of her very worst fear. “He wants Momma to make me wear it all the time. Even at school.”

Jodie stopped her looping. The seriousness of her expression told Bethan that Jodie understood what wearing it all the time would mean. Already the kids loved to make fun of Bethan, at least when Jodie was not around to defend her. To make her wear the hated eyepatch at school would be disastrous.

Jodie returned to her work with a snort. “What does old Doc Franklin know anyway? I say it’s getting better, and that’s final.”

In spite of herself, Bethan smiled. It was good to have a friend like Jodie. Very good.

They worked on in silence, each deep in thought. At length Bethan dared to voice her most secret concern. She had never discussed it with anyone before. Not even with Jodie. “Do you think—” Bethan hesitated, then hurried on, “Do you think a man might want to… to marry me, even with my eye?”

Jodie looked surprised. “If he didn’t, he’d be a dolt,” she responded hotly, using one of her more colorful descriptions.

This was good news for Bethan. She very much wanted to believe Jodie’s declaration.

But Jodie continued to stare at her. “Do you really want to get married?”

Bethan was shocked. “Of course.” All girls wanted to marry. It was part of becoming—well, a proper young lady. If she didn’t marry, what else could she do? Become a spinster? Spinsters were talked about behind discreet hands, even if they did make fine librarians or teachers.

“I might not get married,” Jodie stated.

Something in Jodie’s tone told Bethan her friend had given this a lot of thought. “Why ever not?”

Jodie carefully fastened the next loop in her chain. “If you get married, you have to do what your husband wants,” she said frankly.

“So?” That was simply the way things were.

“I don’t want somebody else telling me what to do with my life,” replied Jodie. “I want to chart my own course, make my own path, be my own person, like Miss Charles says I should.”

Yes, Bethan reminded herself. Miss Charles certainly said things like that, though Bethan had never really understood just what the teacher meant by those statements.

Jodie’s dark eyes gleamed. “I’ll have her as my main teacher this year. Isn’t that great?”

“I guess so.” Bethan was not as taken with the new teacher and her wise words as Jodie seemed to be. Teachers were not high on Bethan’s list of favorite people—maybe because she didn’t feel like she was high on theirs. Besides, Miss Charles was already old. Probably close to forty or at least thirty, and she wasn’t even married.

“I think she is so wonderful!” Jodie enthused. “She says, with my intelligence I can be anything I want if I just put my mind to it. She thinks I should be a teacher. But I want to be something different.”

“Like what?” Bethan challenged, forgetting about her chain and letting it get entangled in her lap.

“I think,” Jodie said, a faraway look on her face, “I’d like to be a scientist.”

“Ladies don’t become scientists,” Bethan said emphatically.

“Some ladies do,” Jodie shot back.

“Not… not in Harmony, not in North Carolina.”

For a moment Jodie seemed at a loss, then her chin lifted stubbornly. “Then I’ll be the first,” she said firmly.

Seeing the determined look in Jodie’s eyes, Bethan felt sorry she had let their talk develop into an argument. “You can be a scientist if you want to,” she conceded, then added softly, “if they let you.”

For one moment Jodie’s eyes became even darker at the challenge. But her expression softened when she looked at Bethan. “What about you? Don’t
you
have dreams?”

“You mean at night? Sure.”

“No, silly. Not sleepy dreams—
dreams
. For the future.”

Bethan shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then she brightened. “Sure. Have a nice husband and raise a nice family.”

Impatiently Jodie dropped the daisy chain to the ground beside her. “But what else?”

“Why does there have to be something else? It’s the nicest dream I know.” Bethan looked out over the village, wondering why it was so hard to make her best friend understand. “I do think about it sometimes. Well, a lot, I guess. I wonder which of the fellows we know might… might fall in love with me and ask me to marry him.” She showed Jodie her dimples. “I hope he’s nice—so I’ll love him back.”

“Listen, you don’t need to marry one of the dolts from here—even if you do only get married. You could marry anybody. All you need to do is get that eye of yours fixed up, and you’d be the most beautiful girl in town.”

Jodie looked so sure of what she was saying that for one moment it was almost easy for Bethan to believe her. “You really think so?”

“You ought to find yourself somebody special,” Jodie assured her with conviction.

Then Bethan’s courage wilted, as always happened when someone talked about how she looked. “Somebody who loves me
will
be special,” she said, her voice now quiet and subdued as she stared out at the town below.

But when she looked back at her friend, she saw Jodie was not listening. She too gazed out over the horizon. “I’m going to do something exciting with my life, just you wait and see. I’ll be somebody who goes places and does things, like Miss Charles says.”

“But you can’t,” Bethan protested.

“Why ever not?” Jodie bristled.

“You’re going to be a lady,” Bethan pleaded. “And you’re my best friend.”

“I can be a lady and your friend and still be anything I want.”

“But what if… what if it takes you away from here?”

“That’s exactly what I want. To go out and have adventures and see places.”

“But what about me?” Bethan wailed.

“You’ll marry a rich man who’s famous, and you’ll have a big house in some
fabulous
city—maybe in the same city where I will be living—and have servants and furs and flowers and a shiny new automobile and—”

“I don’t care about any of those things,” Bethan protested.

“All I want is to be a good Christian and to find a good man to be my husband and have a family, and I’ll be happy. And I don’t
ever
want to leave Harmony.”

Jodie stopped. “I don’t understand you, Bethan Keane.”

“And I don’t understand you, Jodie Harland.”

They looked at each other in utter confusion.

THREE

THE INSTANT JODIE AWOKE
, her heart was racing with excitement. Today was her first all-school spelling bee, and tomorrow started Thanksgiving holidays! Two of the very best things in the world coming together at once. It was almost more than she could bear.

She slid from the bed, pulled the flannel nightie over her head, folded it and placed it under her pillow, then moved across the wooden floor with its scattering of braided rugs to start her morning wash. It took both hands to lift the big white pitcher with the blue ring around the top. In spite of her carefulness, the water sloshed onto the old chiffarobe as she poured it into the bowl. Bowl and pitcher were chipped from generations of use, the glazing spotted with age, but Jodie had never stopped to think about the imperfections. She splashed her face, breathing in the sweet scent of morning.

Humming an excited little tune, she dressed and brushed her dark hair only because her mother would notice if she came down for breakfast without having done so. Her mother always noticed the small things. Her father seemed to notice nothing. Her mother would take one look at her, see whether her face was washed and the thick brown locks brushed, and if not send her back up to do double the strokes. Somehow she even seemed to know when Jodie did less than the required fifty.

Jodie did not like her face. Which was probably why she did not like any small chore that meant looking into her mirror. She felt her features were too sharp. All planes and angles, her mother had once said, and then smiled away the comment and took her off for a sweet and a cream soda as well. Her mother, Louise Harland, was both comforting and intelligent, which to Jodie’s mind was a very special combination.

Her impatient strokes at her hair slowed as her mind went back to a conversation with Bethan the day before. As they had walked to school together, Jodie had asked, “What do you think is the most important thing in the world?”

Bethan was slow in replying. “You always seem to ask such strange questions.”

“I’m just wondering.” She passed her satchel of books to her other hand. “What do you think is absolutely indispensable?”

Bethan shrugged, clearly unsure exactly what the word meant. “How could you ever pick one thing?”

“I could,” Jodie announced. “I think it’s
words
.”

Bethan stared at her. “Words?”

Jodie felt triumphant, as though she had just discovered one of life’s great secrets. “Think what it would be like if we didn’t have words. We couldn’t talk to each other. We couldn’t learn about things. We couldn’t tell each other how to do something or read about it. We’d be lost. Totally devastated.” She walked a few steps farther before concluding, “That’s why it’s so crucial to be a good reader.”

“I’m finding all sorts of hard words in the Bible,” Bethan acknowledged slowly. “I try and try, but I can’t seem to learn all the words I need. Why can’t we use the easy ones?”