The Time of Her Life (32 page)

O
UR
C
OUNTRY
!

B
Y THAT DREAD NAME

WE WAVE THE SWORD ON HIGH
,

AND SWEAR FOR HER TO LIVE

FOR HER TO DIE
.

—
Campbell

Within a year of the dedication ceremony the common idea among the citizens of Washburn was that the stonecutter—imported
all the way from Philadelphia, hurrying the work, eager to catch the train, and possibly with a few too many glasses of beer
under his belt—had chiseled into that smooth granite the mistake “dread name” as opposed to “dear name.”

In the spring of 1882, Leo Scofield, soon after he and his brothers had cleared the woods and begun construction of their
houses on the north side of the square, had written to Mrs. Dowd, who commissioned the statue but who had moved back to Philadelphia
soon after its unveiling, to inquire if he might have the mistaken inscription altered at his own expense. He had attempted
to cast his offer along the lines of being an act of gratitude for her generous gift, but Leo was
only thirty-one years old then, a young man still, without much good sense. He was enormously pleased by the largesse of his
idea—which had occurred to him one day out of the blue—and delighted that he finally had the wherewithal to make such an offer.
A slightly self-congratulatory air tinged the tactlessly exuberant wording of his letter, and he was brought up short by her
reply:

… furthermore, I shall arrange to have the statue removed piece by piece if need be, as it is I who pays out the money each
year for its upkeep, should the inscription in any way be altered. I never shall believe in all the days left to me that the
preservation of the Union was worth the price of the good life of my dear husband, Colonel Marcus Dowd, who left his post
as President of Harcourt Lees College to head Company A. He died at Petersburg. The statue was undertaken at my instigation
only as an honor to him. I shall live with nothing more than despair and contempt for this Union and Mr. Lincoln all the rest
of my life. As my children do not share my sentiments in every respect, however, I have made arrangements to fund the maintenance
of the monument and the fenced area of its surround. I have engaged a Mr. Olwin Grant who lives out Coshocton Road as a caretaker,
and any further questions you may address to him. I implore you, Mr. Scofield, not to raise this matter to me again.

Leo spent several long evenings sitting in the square, contemplating that handsome statue, which towered over the young trees
installed by the Marshal County Ladies Garden Club. It was his first inkling of the fickleness of legend, the ease with which
one is misled by myth. He wrote a letter of deep and sincere apology but did not hear again from Mrs. Marcus Dowd, nor had
he expected to.

He was young and perhaps still a little brash, but he was not an insensitive man, and he applied this glimpse of the possible
effect of grief to his own circumstances, admonishing himself to take all the good fortune of his business and his marriage
much less for granted. The spirit of expansiveness that had characterized his outlook up until the receipt of that letter
was checked somewhat over the year that followed, and as his business ventures grew increasingly complicated, as his house
took shape day by day, as his infatuation with his new wife inevitably grew more complex and profound, he became a man of
a fairly solemn nature.

The three houses built just north of Monument Square in the early 1880s for Leo, John, and George Scofield fronted on a semicircular
drive and shallow common ground that in the summer became a crescent of feathery grass that bent in bright green ripples across
the lawn in the slightest breeze. In time the grass at the inner curve of the drive gave way to a golden velvet moss under
the elms as the trees matured and produced heavy shade all summer long.

The houses were comfortable though not grand. They were well built and nicely spaced, one from the other, and for a number
of years those three south-facing houses marked the northernmost edge of the town of Washburn, Ohio. During the several years
the houses were under construction, and long after, the residential property of those three brothers was known all over town
simply as Scofields, whereas the twenty-odd buildings comprising the flourishing engine-manufacturing business of Scofields
& Company, begun as no more than a foundry in 1830 by Leo’s grandfather, had for some time been referred to merely as the
Company.

The second Sunday of September 1888, on either side of a muddy wagon track that led into the east yard of his new house, Leo
Scofield, at age thirty-seven, planted eight pairs of cultivated catalpa saplings. Six days later, on Saturday the fifteenth,
there occurred the unusual incident of the births—all within a twelve-hour span—of his first and his brother John’s second
child—a daughter and son respectively—and of the third child of Daniel Butler, a good friend and pastor of the Methodist church.
John and Lillian Scofield’s first child,
Harold, born in 1883, had died before he was a year old, so the Scofields’ compound had been childless for some time.

Some years earlier Leo had given up the idea that he and his wife, Audra, would have children. His wife was twenty-nine years
old with this fourth pregnancy, and through the early months they both had dreaded and expected another miscarriage. They
had been married for eight years when Lily was born. The planting of those young catalpa trees was only a coincidence, of
course; Leo hadn’t intended any sort of commemoration, but in spite of himself he developed a superstitious interest in the
welfare of those trees. He had started them himself from seed six years earlier, and they were just barely established enough
to transplant. Several days after his daughter’s birth, when it was clear she and his wife and the other mothers and babies
were thriving, his brother John and he walked the lane he had created, staking the saplings when necessary to guide them straight.

“And on the ides of the month, John,” Leo said. “It’s an amazing thing! All the Scofields are born on the ides of the month.”
Leo’s birthday was March fifteenth, and his youngest brother George’s was the fifteenth of October. John’s birthday was February
fifth, when he would turn thirty.

“Well, but this is September, Leo. The ides of the month was on Thursday. On the thirteenth, this month.” But Leo wasn’t paying
close attention, and John himself, not born on the ides, was just as happy to be a little disburdened of “Scofieldness.” He
followed along, helping his brother. “But this is really something, isn’t it, Leo?” John said. “Here we are. Two
papas
. Only three days ago, Leo—three
days
ago!—we were… fancy-free. We were just
not
papas.”

Leo glanced sharply at John but didn’t reply for a moment. John was a tall, elegant figure among the little sloping trees,
which were leaning this way and that. Leo himself was one of those men no more than average height who are somehow imposing
because they possess an inherent certainty, a lack of hesitancy, an easy assumption of authority. “No, you’re right
about that, John. You’re right about that. Three days ago we were only two
husbands
.”

John had squatted to secure the burlap around the spindly trunk of one of those young trees, and he aimed a considering look
Leo’s way and finally grinned, acknowledging the edge of chastisement in his brother’s voice and feeling a genuine joyousness
spike through him at all his sudden connection to the wide world. “Ah, Leo. Don’t you think this’ll make a good husband of
me? Don’t you imagine I get a clean slate now? The first baby… Leo, that nearly killed Lillian. And me, too.” John’s ebullience
abruptly fell away. “But Lillian was just… It was like she had broken. That was it. That was what she must have been feeling,”
he mused. “But I was so stupid. I was just scared to death. I didn’t know what it took… That poor little boy. Poor Harold!
I couldn’t
do
anything to help, though, Leo! It nearly drove me crazy to see Lillian so sad.

“But this one’s so… he’s so
lively
, Leo. Why, he hardly stays still a minute. Healthy as a horse! And I haven’t even raised a glass to toast their health. I
haven’t touched a drop, Leo. And I won’t. I won’t.” Then John fell back into his usual wry tone, which signified that it was
at the listener’s own peril to take him entirely seriously. “I’ll start all over with the lovely Lillian. And I can, you know.
Because at least
she
loves me more than you do,” he said, but with a lilting, teasing cadence.

Leo watched John a moment as he stooped to hammer in a stake at an angle that would pull the rope tight, and he thought that
even in so small a task his brother was graceful in the uncommon way with which he was at ease in his own body. “There isn’t
anyone in the world who doesn’t love you, John. But that might not be such a good thing,” he said, and he was quite serious.

“You’re harder on me than anyone, Leo. Even Dan Butler’s not so stern!” John straightened up and exhaled a short laugh, leaning
his head back to take in the pale sky. “You’ll have to go a little easy on me, you know. I’ve got to get used to it, still!
It’s wonderful that they’re all healthy. As
strong as can be. Lillian… and Audra and Martha Butler… everyone doing so well.
All
of them,” he said. “I can hardly believe it!” They moved along, carefully wrapping the tender trunks before they looped and
staked the guide ropes.

Leo had left the planting late because it had been an edgy summer and so dry that he had to haul water until the middle of
November to irrigate that double row of saplings. The memory of June, July, and August merged into a blur of heat. The days
had stretched out dry and hot, eventually falling into unsettling yellow green evenings preceding night after night of crackling
thunder and hailstorms that lingered over the town with great bluster but produced very little measurable rainfall.

It had been a season that was not much good for planting, and a season that had produced a sort of communal unease, transforming
the nearly simultaneous births in mid-September of Lillian Marshal Scofield, Warren Leonard Scofield, and Robert Crane Butler
into an event that seemed less remarkable than inevitable. And the unwavering alliance of those three children took on the
same quality of inevitability. Lily and Robert and Warren were rarely apart from one another during all the waking hours of
their early youth.

But during the first months following his daughter’s birth, when the heat finally loosened its grip and September led into
one of those autumns of rare clarity in which everything seems to be in perfect balance, Leo made grand plans for his garden.
In late November he stood in the wagon yard on a chilly but glorious day so dazzlingly clear that the air itself was charged
with a blue translucent brilliance. He stood still and imagined the plot transformed. He became lost in the idea of abundant
flowers, blooming bushes, towering trees.

The catalpas stood in fragile regulation, spare sticks once their leaves had dropped. They looked forlornly tenuous on the
clear-cut acreage where the Scofield brothers had built their three houses. But by the time Lily was seven months old the
following spring and those shoulder-high saplings finally
budded and then leafed out, Leo privately exulted at their survival of the unusually brutal, snowless winter.

Leo Scofield was a good businessman, always a little skeptical, a trifle suspicious by nature. But he wasn’t at all prone
to melancholy; his brooding followed a more pragmatic course—he might fret persistently, for instance, about a minor innovation
to a Scofield engine or an antiquated valve design. But it was quite in character, in late April of 1889, when he was a year
closer to forty years old than to thirty-five, that the notion of the future flying toward him was only exhilarating. He wasn’t
at all troubled by the idea of his own mortality. He walked the rutted track between those newly planted trees and imagined
his daughter’s wedding procession making its way along a raked gravel avenue beneath the catalpas’ eventual leafy canopy under
an overarching clear blue sky.

And during the years of Lily’s childhood it was a great pleasure for him on the hottest summer days to sit in his fledgling
garden, stunned by the Ohio heat and the salty yellow scent of cut grass, with her light, fluting voice ringing out above
her playmates’ as she directed her cousin, Warren, and little Robert Butler in some game she had devised.

Leo was continually surprised by and enamored of the solace of the domesticity he had happened into, and in a span of twenty
years he transformed that scrubby patch of land into his idea of a replica of an English garden made up entirely of plants
native to Ohio. The catalpa trees, however, didn’t mature exactly as he had hoped. In fact, he realized three years too late
that he had intended to plant an avenue of yellow poplars—stately, flowering trees known locally as tulip trees. But when
he had firmly fixed on the idea of his garden, had planned the east yard entrance, and had described the tree he had in mind,
asking around town where he might find it, it was probably in the description of the tree’s flowers that he had gone wrong.
Leo never gave up the private notion, however, that the misinformation he had received was purposeful, that there might be
someone in the
world who was amused at his expense, and with solicitous pruning he coaxed the catalpas to assume a more elegant shape than
was their unbridled inclination.

As the years passed, Leo came to like the pungency of a blooming catalpa, which was heavily sweet but elusive at a distance,
drifting over the garden unexpectedly. He admired the tree’s soft green, heart-shaped leaves, its abundantly frilled flowers,
as showy as a flock of tropical birds in the rolling landscape of central Ohio. Daniel Butler, who had done missionary work
in Brazil and Cuba, said that in midsummer, when the vining trumpet creeper overran the arbor, dripping with deep-throated
red-orange blossoms, the entire garden took on a look of the tropics. Leo had nurtured that flowering vine from a single cutting
he had taken from a plant growing on a pasture fence—just a slip of stem cut on the diagonal and wrapped in a handkerchief
he had moistened in the ditch alongside the road. The afternoon he had rounded a bend and come upon the glorious trumpet vine
cascading over an unpainted board fence, he had paused for a long time before he had stooped to dampen his clean handkerchief
in the brackish water. He was careful of his dignity, and his fascination with and cultivation of his flower garden was the
only frivolity he allowed himself.