Roses (49 page)

“As long as it’s not the cotton-growing variety,” her mother responded.

One Saturday morning shortly after her brother was born, her mother took her to Woolworth’s to buy “something special, but
within reason,” she qualified. Rachel did not hesitate. She knew her heart’s desire and searched out the seed rack in the
hardware section of the store. When her mother joined her, she had already selected five packets of vegetable seeds whose
glossy covers promised perfectly developed produce.

She had thought her mother would be pleased. The entire purchase amounted to fifty cents. But she pursed her lips and frowned.
“What are you going to do with those?”

“Plant a garden, Mama.”

“You don’t know anything about planting a garden.”

“I will learn.”

When she got home and her father inspected her purchase, her mother said, “Now, William, let Rachel plant her garden by herself.
No helping her. If it turns out well, the full credit should go to her.”
Or the failure,
Rachel read in the pointed look she gave her father. She could not understand her mother’s displeasure. It was the first
time in all her growing-up years that she appeared unwilling to support and encourage her endeavors.

But she did not fail. She carefully read the packets’ instructions and the dictates of gardening books checked out from the
library and followed them to the letter. Working each day after school, she hoed up the Bermuda grass in a ten-by-ten plot
at the side of the house and flooded it with pans of boiling water to kill the grubs and nematodes. To enrich the soil, she
scooped manure from the neighbor’s chicken pen and hauled sand by the bucketful from behind the row of track houses where
she lived, to work into the caliche-striated ground. Already she had scoured the garage and dump ground for containers to
serve as planters for her seedlings.

“What in the world—?” her mother exclaimed when she saw the mishmash of tin cans and cutoff milk cartons lining the windowsills
of her room.

“I’m germinating seeds for my garden,” Rachel explained brightly, to make the unusual frown disappear between her mother’s
thinly plucked brows. “The sun comes through the window and warms the soil and seeds sprout and they grow into plants.”

The frown stayed in place. “When you water them, see that you don’t make a mess, Rachel, or that’s the end of the project.”

She did not make a mess, and that spring, she entered her garden as her science project. “Well, I’ll be damned,” the awed
science teacher said when he surveyed her handiwork at judging time. “Now do you swear that your father’s foot didn’t help
dig this plot? That his hand didn’t pull up Bermuda grass, shovel in compost, and erect this chicken-wire fence?”

“No, sir. I did it all myself.”

“Well, then, young lady, you well deserve the A you’ll be getting. Your folks should be proud of you. They’ve got a farmer
in the making.” She was nine years old.

The next spring, her expanded garden was even more successful, producing a bounty for the table that not even the produce
from Zack Mitchell’s grocery store could equal in taste and quality. It was that success that decided her father to take her
for her second visit to Howbutker in the pivotal summer of 1966. Rachel was never to forget the conversation—or, rather, the
argument (rare for her parents)—that she overheard concerning his decision. It was mid-June, and she had gone outside after
supper to water her plants from a hose attached to a faucet beneath the kitchen window. Because the swamp cooler was on the
blink and the kitchen window was open, she heard her mother demand, “Just what do you aim to prove by taking Rachel to Howbutker,
William? That she
is
a Toliver of the cotton-growing variety? That her interest in tomato plants and okra stems from something she’s
inherited
?”

“And why not?” William argued. “Suppose, just suppose, that Rachel
is
another Mary Toliver. Suppose she has the makings of running Somerset once Aunt Mary is gone. Why, that would mean the plantation
could stay in the family. It wouldn’t have to be sold.”

Rachel heard the ring of a utensil thrown into the galvanized sink. “William Toliver, are you crazy? The money from that farm
is going to buy us a better house. It’s going to ensure that we have a decent old age. It’s going to let us go traveling and
buy you that Airstream trailer you’ve always wanted. It’s going to get you out from behind that meat counter so that you don’t
have to work the rest of your life.”

“Alice…” William sighed. “If Rachel does have the Toliver blood, I can’t sell her birthright—what’s been in the Toliver family
for generations.”

“And what about Jimmy’s, I’d like to know?” Alice’s voice quivered. “What about
his
birthright?”

“That’d be up to Aunt Mary.” William spoke as if that were the end of the matter. “For goodness’ sakes, Alice, it’s only a
visit
. This interest of Rachel’s might be a passing thing. She’s only ten. Next year she’s liable to be interested in boys or music
or Lord knows what else when she realizes how pretty she’s becoming.”

“Rachel has never been interested in girly things, and I doubt she will ever understand how pretty she is.”

Rachel heard the decisive sound of a chair scraping away from the table. “I’m going to take her, Alice. It’s only right. If
the girl has the calling, I don’t want to keep her from it. She deserves a chance to find out. That’s all I’m giving her.”

“And your conscience a chance to ease itself, if you ask me. By giving Rachel to your aunt, you can make up for taking yourself
away from her all those years ago.”

“Aunt Mary has already forgiven me for that,” William said, sounding injured to the bone to the little eavesdropper beneath
the window.

“If you take Rachel to Howbutker, you’ll be making a mistake we’ll all regret, William Toliver. Remember I told you.”

That June, outfitted exactly like her great-aunt in a pair of khaki slacks, bush jacket, and straw hat from the DuMont Department
Store, Rachel did not miss a day accompanying Mary out to the disputed plantation. She had never seen anything as breathtaking
as the row after row of green plants stretching to the end of the world. A feeling stirred way down inside. “This is all yours,
Aunt Mary?”

“Mine and those who came before me, those who took the land from the trees.”

“Who were they?”

“Our Toliver forebears, yours and mine.”

“Mine, too?”

“Yes, child. You’re a Toliver.”

“Does that explain why I like growing things?”

“It would appear so.”

Aunt Mary’s short answer further shed light on the reason her father had given her beforehand for making the visit. “You’re
a Toliver, honey, the genuine article. Not like Jimmy or me or my father. We all bear the name, but you and Aunt Mary carry
the blood.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you and Aunt Mary have inherited a certain ancestral force that has characterized the Tolivers since they founded
Howbutker and built Somerset.”

“Somerset?”

“A cotton plantation. The last of its kind in East Texas… quite a bit larger than your garden at home.” Her father had smiled
at her. “Your great-aunt has run it since she was a young girl.”

The visit occurred within the three weeks that the cotton was in bloom, and Rachel stayed rapt with wonder from the sheer
beauty surrounding her as she and Mary rode out among the blossoms on the two gentle mares kept on hand for inspecting the
fields. Mary explained that each flower would fall after only three days, turning from creamy white to pink and finally to
dark red. She even taught Rachel a little ditty she’d learned in childhood concerning the short life span of the cotton blossom:

F
irst day white, next day red,

Third day from birth, I’m dead.

Mary explained how a cotton plant works… how its miracle unfolds. First buds appear after five to six weeks of the plants
coming up, and then these buds become flowers. The flower falls, leaving behind a small seed pod known as the boll. Each boll
contains about thirty seeds and up to half a million fibers of cotton. It is the fiber that’s important, the white stuff that
bursts out of the boll when it matures and splits open. The value of cotton depends on the length of its fibers, the color,
the feel, and the amount of trash remaining in the white heads. The longer the fiber, the more valuable the cotton.

Rachel drank thirstily of Aunt Mary’s knowledge, which it seemed she took no particular pains to have her great-niece imbibe.
Nonetheless, she was clearly impressed that Rachel’s interest never wavered, and by the end of her two-week stay, Rachel’s
skin, already tinted with the lush Toliver cast, attested to her keeping pace with her great-aunt’s activities in the cotton
fields under the hot, languid sun.

“So your father tells me you’re set on being a farmer when you grow up,” Aunt Mary commented when they took a lemonade break
on the porch of a house referred to as “the Ledbetter place.” It was used as her great-aunt’s office but looked nice enough
to live in. “Why?” she asked. “Farming is the hardest work in the world, oftentimes with very little reward for the effort
expended. What’s so appealing about getting your hands and clothes dirty?”

Rachel thought of Billy Seton up the street, who, almost from the time he could walk, so everybody said, had not been without
a baseball mitt in his hand. It was no wonder, then, that he went on to play for the New York Yankees, making everybody in
Kermit proud. “Born to play the game,” they said, and that’s how she felt about farming. She couldn’t imagine not having a
garden. There was no place else that made her as happy. She didn’t mind getting her hands and clothes dirty. She
loved
the feel of rich, moist dirt, the sky over her shoulder, and the wind in her hair, but most of all she loved the miracle
of the first sight of green breaking through the soil. There was no other feeling like it. It even beat the magic of Christmas
morning.

“Well, Aunt Mary,” she answered, a swagger in her tone akin to the way some men hooked their thumbs under their suspenders
when they were proud of themselves, “I reckon I was born to be a farmer.”

A smile hovered around Aunt Mary’s finely shaped lips. “Is that so?”

When her father came to collect her, she said, “It was wonderful, Daddy,” and looked at her great-aunt with hopeful eyes.
“Next summer, Aunt Mary? In August—during harvest?”

Mary laughed, exchanging a glance with William. “Next summer, in August,” she agreed.

I
n the next few years, she was to overhear many arguments under the kitchen window in regard to her annual two-week visits
to Howbutker.

“William, can you
believe
your aunt’s letter? How dare that woman ask us to send Rachel to her for the summer! How selfish can she be? I don’t see
enough of my daughter as it is, and here she’s asking that we let her have Rachel for her entire vacation!”

“Not her entire vacation, Alice. Only the month of August. Aunt Mary is nearly seventy years old. Why can’t we humor an old
woman? She’s not going to live forever.”

“She’ll live long enough to steal my girl from me. She’s driving a wedge between us, William. I’m so tired of hearing Aunt
Mary this, Aunt Mary that. She never speaks of me in that adoring tone.”

Under the window, Rachel listened, her conscience squeezed in contrition. No, she never did, she admitted. She heard the hurt
in her mother’s voice and vowed she’d show her more love and appreciation.
But, oh, please, Daddy, let me go to Aunt Mary and Uncle Ollie for August
.

The argument ended in a compromise that nonetheless left her mother tight-lipped as the family car pulled away bearing Rachel
to Howbutker for the month requested. It was Rachel’s fourteenth summer. The agreement, laid out by her mother, was that she
could spend this August with her “daddy’s kin,” but next summer the whole family would go on a trip together with “no Howbutker,
no Somerset, and no Aunt Mary.”

It was during her fourteenth summer that Rachel first laid eyes upon Matt Warwick. She had often heard of Mister Percy’s grandson,
but he was always visiting his grandmother in Atlanta during the two weeks she was in town. Matt’s mother had died of cancer
when he was fourteen, and his father had been killed before that in a war. She remembered feeling sorry for the boy who’d
been orphaned but considered him lucky to live in Howbutker and be looked after by such a wonderful old man as Mister Percy.

Her father said that Mister Percy was immensely rich—a lumber magnate—with large timber holdings all over the country and
Canada. Matt was learning the family business and taking to it like a sail in an ocean breeze—rather like her, she thought.
He was supposed to be handsome and likable and unaffected, and she was eager to see what all the praise was about.

They met at Matt’s nineteenth birthday party. Rachel had a new dress for the occasion, selected with Uncle Ollie’s unerring
eye. It was a dress of white piqué scalloped at the neckline and hem and set off with a green sash belt. Rachel had never
owned such a dress. She felt very ladylike and grown up in her first stockings and abbreviated high heels with her hair dressed
specially for the party in a cascade of white daisies and green ribbons.

Aunt Mary and Uncle Ollie were waiting at the foot of the stairs when she came down, both gazing at her in pride and affection.
Rachel beamed back, tamping down a niggling guilt at the memory of her mother’s accusation:
You think you’ve become too good for us, Rachel
.

No, Mama, that’s not so!

Don’t tell me you don’t prefer being with your rich aunt and uncle in that big mansion of theirs to living with your mother
and daddy in our little house—or that you don’t favor that snooty little burg of Howbutker over Kermit.

Oh, Mama, you’ve got it all wrong! I love both places
.