When the Morning Glory Blooms (9 page)

Isn’t it amazing how hope can so quickly grow stale when it is exposed to doubt? I vowed not to let that happen again.

God called me to the task. He’d accompany me through it.

Ivy—1951

Ivy laid down her pencil and flexed her fingers. The pillow Anna had suggested for the small of her back helped, but no cure existed for a hand cramp except to stop writing.

“What task, Miss Anna?”

“Hmm?”

“To what task did you feel called?”

“Oh, I’ll get to it.”

The longhand story already filled several pages of the steno pad Ivy had purchased at the five-and-dime. How far would they be into the notebook before Ivy knew where the tale was headed? How long before she even knew if the words were true or a brilliant work of senile fiction?

Did it matter?

Anna’s face boasted more color than Ivy had seen in a long while. Her eyes danced with her memories, real or imagined.

Ivy could think of worse ways to spend her late afternoons and occasional evenings. Trapped between the broken springs on the seedy, tweedy davenport her father liberated from the alley-dump behind the dry cleaner. Stuck to the chrome and vinyl chair at the table in the perpetually humid kitchen. Writing airmail letters she didn’t dare send. Taking out all the truth and writing them again.

If she kept Anna talking, rarely a challenge, she could forget what was happening in her body and on the side of a Pacific Rim mountain or in a rice paddy across too large a body of water.

“Weren’t you afraid to stay in that big house alone, Anna?”

“Hmm? No. Alone, I was used to. An expert at it, you might say.”

“And how old were you then? When you first got the house?”

Anna smiled. All her own teeth. Beautiful. “Mr. Rawlins was a poor judge of just about everything. I was all of twenty-seven when I took over Morning Glory.” She hoisted her body straighter in the chair. “But don’t you write that! It’ll throw people off. It wasn’t Morning Glory when I got it. That came later.
They
came later.”

“They?”

“The morning glories. You been getting adequate sleep, Ivy? You’re having a hard time following a simple story.”

Ivy pressed her lips together. Swallowed a reply. Picked up her pencil and wrote.

7

Anna—1890s

Even now, when I think of it, my shoulders and back and knees and hands ache with the effort it took to scrub away the neglect in the house brought on while lawyers argued and paperwork floundered. A thousand trips to the pump in the backyard for yet another bucket of water. A year’s supply of tallow soap.

Many nights, I crawled onto my straw tick near the fireplace in the day parlor too exhausted to pull the blanket over my body. Rebellious muscles then began the nightly ritual of releasing their tension, searching valiantly for a comfortable position in which to sleep. I awoke as stiff as a woman three times my age, but plowed back into the task as if I had more than a self-imposed deadline.

The color came every afternoon when the clouds were busy elsewhere. The rich bands seemed to appreciate my efforts to keep “their” windows sparkling clean. An onlooker would think me daft, but I often dropped my washrags and scrub brush when the prisms of light visited. I stood in the middle of them, in the middle of God’s promise to me, gaining strength for the next chore and the next and the next.

One of those days, a knock sounded on my front doors at the very moment I returned inside from tossing the last bucket of scrub water into the yard behind the kitchen. I dried my prunelike hands on my work apron, then quickly removed it on my way from the back of the house to the double doors in front.

“Heard you was movin’ in,” the man said without even a how-do-you-do.

“Yes,” I said, offering an outstretched, waterlogged hand in greeting. “I’m Anna Morgan. And you are  . . .  ?”

“Percival Lincoln Crawford, ma’am.”

I cannot tell you how far my mind traveled in those few moments, inventing explanations for the circumstances under which a newborn, now a full-grown man with tattered coveralls and a sweat-stained hat, would have been given the name
Percival Lincoln Crawford
. Did he sense my rabidly wandering thoughts?

“Lincoln ain’t my real middle name,” he explained, as if that were the most curious part of his story. “I give that to myself, being as I never did like the name Clarence, and being as Mr. Lincoln was someone I’m proud to share a name with.” He whipped his hat off his head as if he’d just remembered he was speaking with a woman.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Crawford.”

“Most people who call me something decent call me Puff.”

“Puff?”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

“Do you smoke? Is that the reason you’re named—”

“Oh, no ma’am! God done broke me of that! You can be sure!”

His agitation startled me. I hadn’t meant to rile him. I was looking for a rationale behind his nickname. “Forgive my asking, Puff.”

“Oh, you got a right. You got a right, that be sure.”

“I do?”

“Well, now, you don’t want to be hiring someone with a tobacca habit, I don’t imagine.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Crawford.” And I genuinely was, strangely enough. “I’m not in a position to hire anyone right now.”

“But you surely do need help, if you’ll pardon my pointing that out.” He wore a grandfatherly expression. “You got outbuildings that seen better days. If you don’t get some paint slapped on this house you might as well hang a sign inviting insects and such. And I might of killed myself coming up these steps, what with them rotten boards, which if they ain’t tended to could drop a person clean through to kingdom come.”

I smiled, which he seemed to take as an invitation to continue.

“Your garden out back ain’t about to produce beetle manure if it don’t get planted.” His voice trailed off after the word
manure
, his eyes dropping to the hat he held in his hands. Was he concerned that he’d offended my “sensibilities”?

“Puff, I would like nothing better than to have some help around here. And I can see that you are a man of vision as well as energy. But I am simply not able to pay. Currently. If my circumstances should change, where might I contact you?” I added the question to give him a shred of hope. He looked as if he could use it. Subconsciously, I must have spoken the words to give
me
hope that my financial picture might indeed one day accommodate a hired man.

“You can ask around about me.”

“Where, Puff? Do you live in town?”

“Just ask around. People knows me. G’day then, ma’am.” He doffed his hat to me and bowed slightly before turning to leave. I couldn’t help but smile when in his descent he gingerly
avoided the rotten boards on the steps. He glanced back. I nodded that I’d noticed.

I say that an answer knocked at my door that day. I just didn’t know it at the time.

I slept a weary but satisfied sleep that night, ignoring the emptiness, enjoying the fact that the emptiness was clean and smelled delightfully fresh. Left to my own devices, I would have stayed nestled in my makeshift bed far longer the next morning. But one can hardly sleep through the sound of hammering right outside one’s door. I’d slept in my clothes, so I bounded up immediately, without the need to dress.

“Puff!”

“Yes, ma’am?” He removed a fan of nails from between his front teeth. “Did I start too early for you?”

I surveyed the work he’d already begun on the steps. The old boards had been removed. I slept through that? The first of several sawmill-fresh planks was well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture on my front porch.

How could he have misunderstood? Didn’t I make it clear to him? Was he—the precious soul—unable to mentally comprehend what we’d discussed the day before?

“Puff, I cannot pay you!”

“Yes, ma’am. I know that.”

I knelt on the top step and took the hammer from his hands as gently as I could, praying that my actions and words would not be perceived as condescending. “Puff, please understand. I haven’t money enough to feed myself, much less hire you to do this work.”

“I understand that. Yes, I does.” He took the hammer from me and resumed using it to pound nails into the wood. Two
mighty blows per nail. His strength would have been frightening if he hadn’t been humming at the time.

“Mr. Crawford!”

He looked up at the formality.

“How much for the lumber?”

“Man at the mill needed a couple of chickens. I had me one or two to spare. You got your new steps.”

“But  . . .”

“Now, listen  . . .” He stood to his full height—well over six feet—slapped his hammer into a loop in his belt, and crossed his tree-trunk arms across his chest. “Are you tellin’ me that if God ’structed me to do something good-deedlike for someone who needs it, you’re gonna stand in my way?”

The fact that I was still kneeling at the top of the steps made his question all the more humbling.

Did I intend to stand in God’s way? My heart longed to be generous with Puff, not take from him. But it appeared I was being called to receive. Would I do so grudgingly or graciously? One response would bless Puff. The other would not.

“Then, I thank you for your kindness, sir.”

His grin threatened to carve a permanent fissure connecting his ears. I didn’t count them, but couldn’t help noticing that Puff was missing a few teeth. He filled in the gaps with joy. Beautiful.

He helped me to my feet. Sighing with an unusual, unexplained contentment, I left him to his work.

Coffee was all I had to offer him. I’d not taken time to bake anything for many days. But I do make an acceptable cup of coffee.

By the time I carried two cups of coffee to the porch, Puff was sweeping the repaired steps free of sawdust, his job completed. He received his cup with a nod of appreciation.

The sun had just pulled free of the treetops, brushing the eastern edge of every leaf and limb and blade with spun gold. It moved me that words were not necessary to bridge the space between us. The scene itself spoke loudly enough.

Too long I’d failed to fully appreciate that—in addition to the house that screamed its barrenness—I’d also inherited responsibility for the land on which it sat. The land—richly upholstered, all forty acres of it, with a narrow band of woods along the sides, a neglected orchard across the back, and profuse fields of wildflowers in front. The tree-shaded house itself sat three hundred yards back from Stony Creek and its namesake, Stony Creek Road, which ran parallel to the creek and then crossed it on a rough, slightly more than wagon-wide bridge.

“When the original shingles were laid on this many-gabled roof fifty years ago, two decades before Lincoln’s war”—I emphasized the connection—“the house towered over the griddle-flat landscape, Puff.”

“I can picture it.”

“This imposing building was as out of place as people like me feel in the community.”

He looked askance at me. “People like you?” His chuckle shook his shoulders.

“But the maples and oaks and pines and cottonwoods Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Raif planted on this once-bald property have certainly matured, haven’t they? Branches, not shingles, claim sky-brushing dominance.”

“You got a way with words, Miss Morgan.”

His own forced a smile long absent. “Aunt Phoebe’s journals and reports from the town’s self-appointed historians tell me what the place looked like before the wagon tracks at the end of the lane were pressed into a semblance of an actual road,
before the town took root where the creek joins forces with the river.”

“Four miles downstream.”

He must have walked all four miles before dawn.

As Puff and I sat sipping coffee and drinking in the scene, I let my imagination take me to the early days, when the wind blasted unimpeded against this grand house, when relief from the sun’s rays came only in the form of infrequent clouds. “No wonder Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Raif were in such a hurry to get shade trees established, as well as the orchard, even at the expense of the wheat fields Raif intended to farm.”

“Wheat?”

“My uncle expected to raise wheat here.”

“I heard that. I did.”