Chapter Eleven - Lisa
I was really nervous the first time Cody came to my house. Going to see him at Goliad was one thing, but having him right there on my own turf was nerve-wracking.
He took his hat off when he came indoors and nodded his head when I introduced him to Mama, proper as could be, and I think that impressed her. She couldn’t smile very well anymore, but I saw the light in her eyes that meant the same thing. I don’t think he ever knew how much that meant to me.
I showed him the vegetable garden and then took him upstairs to show him my room. I think that was probably the hardest part of all. Your personal space is, well, personal, you know. Nobody had ever set foot in there except me and Mama and Jenny. No guys, ever.
Cody didn’t know that, of course, and I didn’t particularly feel like telling him.
He came inside and glanced around, his eyes pausing briefly on the seven teddy bears on my bed and no doubt noticing how much I liked pink and white things. Then he saw something that interested him.
“What’s that about?” he asked curiously, looking at the painting above my desk. It was a portrait of Queen Victoria on her wedding day, with flowers in her hair and a long white dress.
“That’s Queen Victoria. Haven’t you heard about her?” I asked.
“No, can’t say that I have, honestly,” he admitted.
“I’ve always admired her so much. She liked to paint watercolors, you know, and she loved her husband so much that after he died she still had his clothes laid out for supper every night for the rest of her life, and she was buried in her wedding veil,” I said. Cody gave me one of his little half-smiles, and I couldn’t tell whether he thought the story was silly or sweet.
“She does sound like a beautiful lady,” he agreed.
“Oh, she was. She’s my hero,” I said.
He didn’t seem to think the portrait called for any more comment, so I don’t actually know what he thought of it himself. Instead, he went over to the bookshelf and ran his finger along a few of the paperbacks. They were mostly my collection of Scarlett Blaze romances, but not all.
He pulled a book from the shelf and I came closer to see what he was looking at. Tristan and Isolde, by Joseph Bédier. One of my favorite stories of all time, even if it was kind of obscure nowadays.
“What’s this one about?” he asked, looking at the back cover.
“Oh, surely you’ve heard that story before, haven’t you?” I asked.
“I’ve heard of Tristan before, but I don’t know anything about him,” he said.
“Hmm. Well, it’s fairly long in the original but I can tell you the gist of it, anyway, if you like,” I said.
“Sure,” he agreed.
“Okay, then. A long time ago, there was a young man named Tristan, and he was the most handsome and noble of all the knights in Tintagel. Now it so happened that his uncle, the King Mark, had been at war with another kingdom for many years, and at last they made peace by agreeing that King Mark would marry the daughter of his enemy. But since the ocean was wild and the way was treacherous, Mark sent his beloved nephew Tristan to escort the young lady home. The Princess Isolde was unhappy with the idea of leaving her home, and of having to marry an old man like King Mark, but the herbalist of the king’s court had given her a drink which would cause the two people who shared it to fall in love forever. It was meant to be a comfort to her, to help her find some happiness in her new life, and she was told to drink it with Mark when she arrived in Tintagel. The Princess had finally given up and accepted her fate, but on the way across the sea she spoke to Tristan often, and fell in love with his brave and noble heart. Therefore she took the potion that was meant for King Mark, and poured it into a golden cup, and asked him to share a drink with her, as people sometimes did in those days. So then he fell in love with the Princess forever, and he could never take back his heart, nor she hers,” I said, speaking with what I thought was the proper storytelling flair.
“I bet King Mark didn’t like that very much,” Cody said sardonically.
“No, I’m afraid things didn’t go so well for them. I’m sure it must have been awful, to be always in love with someone you knew you could never have,” I said sadly.
“So what finally happened?” Cody asked. He was trying hard to pretend he wasn’t interested, but I knew him too well by then.
“People say different things, so I guess it depends on who you choose to believe,” I said.
“What do you think happened?” he asked, and I laughed a little.
“I think somehow or other Tristan found a way to be with his princess, and they lived happily ever after, of course,” I said, and he smiled.
“I like that story,” he said.
“Yeah, me too. It’s one of my favorites,” I agreed.
I think sometimes Cody has a certain streak of Tristan in his own heart; a love for honor and chivalry, for glorious last stands and victories won against impossible odds in the very jaws of defeat, and yes, even for the kind of love that lasts forever. It’s one more thing I love about him.
In fact, the only thing that marred the whole summer from my point of view was that he never said he loved me. I was pretty sure he did, deep down, but he never would say it, and I was too afraid to be the one who said it first.
Oh, I know how I felt. I really loved him, or at least I thought I did. Things might have started out as a sweet memory, colored with daydreams and romanticism, but it was way beyond all that, now. He was all I could think about; all I wanted to think about. If I let myself go there, I’d be lost all the time in gooey dreams about fairytale weddings and babies that looked just like Cody, and the kind of happily ever after stuff that hardly ever comes true in real life.
He was my treasure and the very heart of my heart, whether he knew it or not. I wanted to join together with him like two drops of rain on a window glass. I wanted to become one body with two hearts, like Albert and Victoria, like Tristan and Isolde, and a hundred other couples I’d read and dreamed about all my life.
There was nobody I could talk to, though. Jenny would have thought I’d lost my mind from reading too many Scarlett Blaze novels, and Mama couldn’t answer me. I had to keep it all to myself, like it or not.
I would have given my left kidney to be able to read Cody’s mind right then, but I didn’t dare come right out and ask him if he felt the same way about me. Because if he didn’t, then my heart was going to break right in two, and nothing would ever be the same. They say the first cut is always the deepest, and you better believe it’s the truth, too. Cody was the first one I‘d ever felt that way about in my whole life, and it terrified me to even think about the possibility of losing him.
So I dithered and worried and daydreamed and hoped and prayed and generally lived on an emotional roller-coaster of uncertainty for a while. Then came the night when my life changed forever.
It started out like any other day. We went fishing at the gazebo for an hour or two, and I listened to him talk about how he might have to sell off the rest of the cows if it didn’t rain soon. He’d got to where he talked to me a little more about things like that than he used to. I could tell how much it worried him, but short of becoming an expert in cattle futures and commodities trading, or learning how to change the weather with a snap of my fingers, I didn’t know of anything I could do to help him or to make things better. All I could do was listen if he felt like talking, and hope that it would take his mind off things.
Miss Josie made supper that night as usual, and when the sun started to go down, I thought we’d probably watch TV for a while or do something ordinary like that. But Cody had something else in mind.
“Come on, Lisa; let’s go for a walk,” he told me, and I was glad to join him. I thought at first he might be taking me to the bunk house for some reason, since that’s the way he headed. But no, he went right on past that, around the back side of the lake and over the wooden bridge where
the big mimosa tree grew.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked, when he still didn’t slow down.
“Just wait; you’ll see,” he said, with a smile in his voice.
Back behind the orchard and the lake there was the steep sandstone knob of Mount Nebo, which I’d seen from a distance many times but never climbed, and when Cody turned off the main road onto a narrow track that ran sharply uphill, I began to get some idea of where we might be headed.
Nebo is easily the highest point within several miles, and in spite of the cool air I started to get a little sweaty and breathless on the steep slope. We finally came out onto the flat top of the hill, and immediately found ourselves face to face with a cemetery. It had a wrought iron fence around it and tall, massive headstones with lichen growing on them, and three gnarled old cedar trees that looked like they’d been there since dinosaurs walked the earth. The arch over the gate said Nebo.
I stopped.
“You wanted to bring me to the cemetery?” I asked, staring at it skeptically. As much as I loved Cody, I couldn’t help thinking taking me on a date to a graveyard was more than a little creepy.
“No, not that,” he said, laughing.
“Then what?” I asked.
“This,” he said, leading me past the cemetery and up onto a little bit higher piece of ground not far past it, at the very summit of the hill. There was a rocky outcrop, more or less flat, and he sat down on top of it, looking west. The sun was just setting in a blaze of glory, golden and red across the rolling landscape. The bare top of the hill left the view wide open, giving us a breathtaking vista.
“It feels like you can see forever from up here, when the weather’s nice. I used to climb up here a lot when I was a kid, whenever I wanted to be alone. It always seemed like I had the whole world down there at my feet,” he murmured.
“It’s beautiful,” I agreed.
“It’s my most favorite place in the whole world. I thought you might like it up here, since you love landscapes so much. Maybe you could paint it sometime,” he said, and I laughed, because that was exactly what I’d been thinking.
“You know me way too well, boy; you’re starting to read my mind,” I told him, and for a little while we sat in companionable silence. Neither of us was in any special hurry to leave, so we sat there and watched until the light faded away and the stars came out, thick as diamond dust across the sky.
It’s been said that love and beauty are linked forever in the soul of man, and that’s why boys always yearn after beautiful things, and know not for what they wish, nor why. Maybe that’s truer for some than for others, but I think for Cody it’s always been so. I may never know for sure, but I believe that sitting there beside me in that high place under a canopy of shining stars is what finally opened his heart.
“I love you, Lisa,” he said after a while, in his quiet, offhanded kind of way.
I almost thought I’d misheard him at first, it was so unexpected. Then I decided that yes, he’d really said it.
“I love you too, Cody,” I said, very tenderly. I felt like I’d waited forever to hear those words from him for the first time, and to be able to say them myself.
“Do you really? Not just saying it cause I did?” he asked, half jokingly.
His voice was teasing, but I could sense how serious the question was and how desperate he must have felt at that moment to know that I really meant it. I would have felt the same way myself, if the shoe had been on the other foot.
“I love you more than anything in the world, Cody Lee McGrath, my dearest and only one,” I told him, and squeezed his hand. I heard him sigh with a mixture of relief and happiness, and then he kissed me.
“I want you to have something, Lisa,” he said, taking his Avinger High ring off his finger and slipping it onto mine. It was too big to fit, of course, but I figured I could put tape around the band or maybe wear it on a necklace if I had to.
It might be only his high school ring, but in some ways a ring is always a ring, poignant with symbolism. I knew Cody knew that just as well as I did. It was an implied promise, of a sort, even if it was a very dim and shadowy one. I knew that wasn’t lost on him, either. He could be awfully subtle when he wanted to be.
“I’ll never take it off,” I whispered, and that was another oblique hint of a promise yet to come. I knew it was a kind of game we were playing, and that in some ways it wasn’t a game at all. But the Great Romance always feels like a game, even when the end in view is very serious indeed.
We didn’t say much on the way back down the hill, and as soon as we got back to the house, I found some tape in the bathroom and thickened the band enough so I could wear his ring without it slipping off. It was gold, with a dark red garnet; Cody’s birthstone. On one of the side panels was a cowboy holding the reins of a horse while he knelt in front of a cross, and on the other side was a Texas flag and a Confederate flag with the poles crossed, and below them the caption Texas Rebel. And so he was, in so many, many ways, I thought to myself.
I’m sure Miss Josie couldn’t have kept from noticing the ring on my finger, but she was the soul of discretion and said nothing at all about it.