Where Lilacs Still Bloom (25 page)

T
he spring floods weren’t bad in 1908, which was good since we had a wedding to plan for, that of Delia and Edmond. On June 16 they spoke their vows at the Presbyterian church, but we had the reception at the house. Rain showers threatened any garden time, and when it began to sprinkle, we moved inside, and I served from the cupboard filled with pastries and pies.

The couple would return to the farm where Edmond had added potatoes to cattle raising, so this marriage was bittersweet. But I set my sadness aside by naming another new cultivar after Irvina, a single purple flower the exact hue I wanted.

Nearly two years old, Irvina already put sentences together and loved the sounds of words her aunt Martha would feed her. “Colossal petunia, Gamma,” she’d tell me as she
waddled along as I weeded and hoed. “Substantial!” Irvina squealed as I moved the grass aside with my hoe.

“Now don’t you be upset by a little snake. They eat mice and are good friends in the garden. But see these strings here? That’s where we have traps set. Danger. So you must, must stay on these paths, all right?” I could’ve kept those traps closeted while she was small, but teaching a child limits was a necessary part of them becoming aware and responsible adults. I might not think that way if she ever hurt herself the way Alice Chapman had, but I couldn’t protect everyone I loved from every harm. I had to accept that.

Delia assured me that she’d come by often and that Irvina could even spend an occasional night with us.

“I surely hope so.” We all sat at the dining room table having dinner after church. Edmond and Delia radiated that newlywed glow. “She’s the only grandchild we have. My girls just aren’t propagating as quickly as I’d like.”

I hated myself as soon as I said it, for Lizzie’s face turned pale, and she excused herself from the table, rose, and ascended the stairs to her room without another word.

“Mama,” Martha said.

“I know, I know. At times my mouth goes visiting from my brain.”

“I’ll go talk with her,” Delia said.

“No, no, it’s me. I’m the one who said it.” I frumped my napkin next to my plate and stood. Frank winked his support,
though I thought how quickly I’d turned a nice day into sour.

“Lizzie? It’s your mother. May I come in?”

I heard crying, then a tentative “Yes” allowing me to enter. One of my wedding-ring quilts lay folded at the end of her bed, and a summer sun shone through the window. A breeze sighed the white curtains back and forth against the handblown glass. The wedding photograph of her and Delia standing before their former husbands sat framed on the small table between her and Martha’s beds. I picked it up and stared at it.

“He was a handsome man, your husband,” I said. “And a good man too.” She nodded, wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. “He’d give me a tongue lashing for saying what I did downstairs. It was the most insensitive thing I could have ever said. I am so sorry.”

“And you’d deserve such a lashing,” Lizzie said, but she had an uplift to the corners of her mouth.

I winced. “Ja, I didn’t think.” I sat down beside her on the bed, hands in my lap. “I was being selfish, thinking of my own heart full of love for Irvina and missing them leaving to go on their own. I have room for other children … but it was thick-skinned of me, words I should have told my mouth not to spew.”

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Mama. I know.” She sighed. “I just miss him so. I’m happy for Delia and
Edmond, I truly am. I adore Irvina. Yet each time I see her, I’m reminded of what I don’t have, what Fred and I wanted but will never be, and sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve that. Did I offend God? Is my punishment that Fred and I would have so little time together, and I’d have a life of teaching music with a broken heart?”

This was that moment when a mother wants more than anything to be wise and give something to her child that will feed her soul and heal it, but we are so impaired, we humans. I sent a prayer that I might think before I spoke. “God doesn’t work that way.” I picked at a thread in my apron. “At least I’ve never known Him to be a vindictive God, but rather one who is tender and loving. He would no more punish you by having Fred die than He’s punishing Martha for not finding a hand to hold.” Was that the proper comparison to make? “God gives us hope.” I paused. “The way I have hope my lilacs will bloom and maybe even one day give me the cultivar I imagine with many petals on hardy stems. Remember where it says, ‘I, even I, am He who comforts you’? That’s what I think God’s about. Sometimes there are troubles. And God is there with us.”

“Then why don’t I feel comforted? And when will this awful hurt ever end?”

It had been three years since Fred’s death, and some had suggested to me, and to Lizzie too, that “it was time she moved on, got over it.” But there was no one time that spoke
to every heart. I hugged her to me, letting her sob into my shoulder. I remembered when she was four and broke her wrist falling when she climbed over a fence to chase a rabbit. The pain was great, but I knew with the bone set and a little laudanum, she’d soon be out racing and running. Heart and soul pain took so much longer to heal, required so much more faith that things would one day be better. I so wanted to give her that faith, and to assure her the pain wasn’t a consequence of anything she’d done wrong—despite the words of Barney Reed. I just didn’t know the words to say.

Martha opened the door, came to sit across from us on her bed. She stayed silent for a time, then said, “Shakespeare wrote that we should give sorrow words,” her voice as soft and illuminating as the afternoon light. “ ‘The grief that does not speak whispers to the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.’ I don’t want your heart to break any further, Lizzie.”

“Me either,” Lizzie said.

Martha reached across to hold her sister’s hands. “Maybe you can put how you feel into words, help another wife who grieves.”

“You’re the wordsmith, Martha.” Lizzie blew her nose into her handkerchief.

“Maybe you could compose a piece of music,” Delia said. She’d come up the stairs and stood in the open doorway. “Maybe that would be a way of honoring Fred.”

“That’s a splendid idea,” I said, rushing in too quickly. “I
mean, a song for Fred. That’s a lovely thought. I think through flowers, lilacs, roses. You … you’re the musician. Martha’s got words, and Delia has sewing and baking to give to others.”

“And Fritz has the river,” Martha said. “We each received something different to help us through our sorrows.”

“And our celebrations too,” Delia added.

“I will compose a piece, for him and for me.” Lizzie lifted her chin.

“Music cleanses the soul of the pain of daily living,” I added. “That’s an old German saying my grandmother used to tell me.”

“I thought it was that music washed away the ‘dirt’ of daily living,” Martha said.

“We can adapt,” I told her.

“Adapt. Yes.” Lizzie straightened her shoulders, wiped her dark brown eyes and smiled. She’d make it. That’s what mattered.

F
ritz took a job on the river working for a dredging company. I confess to a disappointment in that. I knew he was intrigued by the river’s personality—wild and raucous one river mile and then a flotsam holder meandering about the lazy bends the next. But I could see what dredging did to a river and how it changed the beds and banks.

“Ma,” Fritz told me when I complained. “It’s progress.” He shoveled pickled beets into his mouth, then wiped his face with his napkin. “No different than the railroad. That banked-up area that borders us now acts as a dike, and with the tracks, it certainly has changed things.”

“Yes. The trains rumble our beds at night. I’m hoping that dike will keep the river out of here when it rises, that’s the only reason I sold them the right of way. Well, that and the farmers and shopkeepers need the transport for business.”

“Maybe it will keep the Columbia out in June floods, but the Lewis on the other side, that’s always the problem with winter runoff. When they build a dike there, then you’ll be nice and safe between two high earth walls.” Fritz pointed his fork at me.

“Will they do that, you think, build a dike there along the Lewis?” I sat beside my son. “How would it get paid for?”

“Farmers will tax themselves, I submit. We’ve talked about it at the creamery meetings.”

“A tax for a dike I can see, Frank, but I don’t see any value in the government paying to bring those dredges up the river farther. Every time they do, and those steamships too, the water pounds against the banks and breaks them down. We’ll be sitting on top of the river before we know it. Or right next to the dike, if what you say is true and they build one. Not sure I like that.”

“Don’t complain to us,” Frank said. “Complain to the government.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Good thinking, Dad.” Fritz and Frank exchanged pleased looks for having put me off in another direction than at them.

My son was a handsome boy, and he had a fair number of girls twittering at him after church on Sunday, but he was like a fly at the honey pot, not wanting to settle too close for fear of getting caught. That was good. It was bad enough he
worked away from home when we had plenty for him to do on this place. I looked at his hair and realized he hadn’t asked me to cut it before church, yet it looked good. Fine, actually.

“Who cut your hair?” Martha and Lizzie both looked at their brother, just noticing too, I suspect.

“Joe Picard. He’s got two chairs at his new tonsorial parlor.”

“Pretty good job, I guess.” I felt sadness that my baby boy had chosen someone other than his mother to look after his cutting like that.

“Progress, Ma. Just like steamships going up the river.”

That night I composed the letter that the men in my life sniffed about me doing. I wrote to both the government and the newspaper editor at the
Woodland Echo
about the damage of wakes, whether from steamships or dredges, and how farmers were affected. I’d never heard back from Cornelia about my request for her to write an article about the lilacs, so I’m not sure why I thought a letter about dredging would persuade anyone to do anything, but I could at least try. Luther Burbank seemed to think my words were full of enthusiasm. I wrote and rewrote until late into the night, burning more kerosene than I should have. But the light of day is for propagating plants, while ideas often bloom in the dead of night. “Sow your seed in the morning and do not be idle in the evening,” Ecclesiastes advises.

Certainty makes one say things firmly. The county road
was at risk of being undercut by the banks washing away every time a steamboat docked. I fully expected that before long, during spring flooding, the river would come over the banks and take out the road, and then the county would have to buy new land for a new road, whether the farmers wanted to sell their land or not!

I finished with, “Some will say, let those who own the land fix the banks; and others will say, let the county take the matter in hand and fix it; but I say, let the steamboat company and the government fix our banks; they should be the ones to do it.”

I signed my name, Hulda Klager. Not Mrs. Frank Klager, but with my own name. I also didn’t change the “I” to “we” in the letter, which a good wife ought to, but I was willing to own my opinion and not stand in the shadow of Frank’s. The truth is, I didn’t expect the
Echo
to publish it but felt better for having put the words on paper. Maybe that’s why Barney Reed felt compelled to tell me what he thought now and then; it just felt better even if it didn’t change anything.

That summer I pulled weeds, snipped suckers, replanted cultivars, made notes in my book, and watched steamboats dock daily. Sometimes I stood as they approached and scowled as the wake pushed into land, lapping at the black earth, tumbling chunks, exposing roots that before long would have no dirt beneath them and the shrubs would sink into the river. If we had a big flood, those banks would crumble like week-old cookies.

I’d given up hope of having my words read by others, but then one morning Delia called and said I should open up the
Echo
. “They published your letter, Mama.”

“Did they?” I felt a flush of satisfaction. “I wonder what the neighbors will say.”

“Oh, Mama, you did it so the neighbors would say something!”

She was right, of course. But I suggested that it was “a way of giving voice to lots of people’s concerns. If we farmers agree to tax ourselves to build a dike, then why shouldn’t the steamboat companies do likewise to fix the banks?”

“Won’t Fritz be put out that you’ve chastised his employer?” Delia said.

“Fritz and your father urged me to write it.”

“I hope he doesn’t get upset with you, Mama.”