Where Lilacs Still Bloom

  “Congratulations, Nelia,” Martha said. “We all knew this would happen.”

  “Did you? I wasn’t certain.”

  Fritz laughed. “I’ve never known you not to be certain. You’re like Ma, here, in that.”

  Nelia grinned. “A nurse,” I said. “We’ll have a nurse in the family.”

  Fritz frowned at that, and I took it as a subtle statement that he didn’t consider Nelia as a part of the Klager family.

  “I guess all that nursing at school has paid off,” Martha said.

  “Nursing at school?” Nelia looked surprised.

  “All the times we teachers call on you when there’s a cut or sprained ankle and the child is crying and distressed. I call that nursing, and we always think of you.”

  “I guess it is. When I get to go with them to Dr. Hoffman’s office, that feels like real nursing. Sometimes I even get to hand him needles and thread, for sewing stitches. I think I could even do it myself.”

  One of the tabby cats swished his tail against Nelia’s legs, then plopped down next to Bobby.

  “You’ll be leaving us,” I said. “But we’ll get good work out of you before you go. Now scat. Get those clothes changed and head back out here. We have a dozen things to do before the next Lilac Day.”

  It was what they’d started to call the spring event when people came to Woodland to see the blooms close to Mother’s Day. This year, 1912, there was no article by Miss Givens, but people would come anyway. Woman’s Home Companion had run a short piece last year about the garden. But because the article had pictures included, I thought we might have ourselves a crowd.

  Nelia skipped back upstairs. Both Martha and Tillie, who had once worked for Dr. Hoffman as a nurse, had written letters for Nelia, and so had Dr. Hoffman himself. All of Woodland in a way had played a part in the success of Nelia’s future. In Ruth’s too. That girl would graduate from the Peabody Institute, and Frank and I planned a trip to Baltimore. Martha would go with us while Fritz stayed and watched the farm, looked after Bobby, the cats, and the cows.

  Cornelia planned to join us and visit Snyder gardens and a few others back east. I wished Nelia could come, but she’d be off to Seattle, anxious to get her scholarship details into place. After supper, Martha complained a little of a headache and said, “I believe I’ll go upstairs and lie down.” That’s what she said, just like that. She held her head, and I asked if she wanted a hot water bottle or something, and she said no, that she just needed to rest.

  In the morning, she was late coming down to breakfast, and I shouted up the stairs. I hadn’t heard any stirring from her room, and Nelia was already dressed and off to take her acceptance letter to show her father.

  “Ja,” I said. “He’ll be happy as a tailor with a new batch of cloth.”

  I did wonder if Nelia’s father might object to having her go so far away, but then I’d recalled a similar pondering about Ruth’s father letting her move to Baltimore and how that worry had been wasted; he’d been pleased she could pursue her music interests.

  Nelia left, and I called up again and said to Martha, “Don’t piddle around now, come have breakfast, and we can talk awhile before we face those flowers.” I turned a few pages of a catalog, looking at the exotic ornamentals calling to me for next year, when I heard the clock chime and realized Martha had still not come downstairs.

  “What’s with you?” I walked up the stairs. She wasn’t usually a hard sleeper, though with her twenty-six, we didn’t talk much about her sleeping habits. I knocked on her door, and when there was no cheerful, “Come in,” I pushed it open.

  “Martha,” I said. She lay with her face turned away on the bed, and I touched her shoulder gently. “Do you still have a headache?”

  Her body felt cool. And still. Deathly still. I shook her, but there was no movement.

  “Mein Gott im Himmel,” I said. “My God in heaven, keep her safe,” I whispered, then loudly went to the window and shouted for Frank. “Frank! Come, at once! It’s Martha!” My voice broke speaking her name, and I felt the tears well up.

  Martha’s body lay before us in an open casket. Frank sat bowed over on a low chair, his hands clasped between his knees, their grip broken only when he reached to wipe his eyes with his forearm. Delia shushed Irvina, who asked, “Why won’t Auntie Martha get up?”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” people said as they spoke to us in hushed tones. Such simple words, meant to be kind, sympathetic, and yet they couldn’t begin to breach the pain. Martha’s death sliced through me like a pruning knife: sharp, leaving a clean cut open and exposed to all the elements. What was the word Nelia used? Incarn, the growing of new flesh over a wound. It would take a very long time for that to happen. New words, that was Martha’s talent, teaching us words.

  “Let’s go outside. Take a short walk,” Nelia said. Martha had been in the parlor for more than a day now, first taken from her bedroom to the undertaker, then returned in the casket.

  “No, no. I have to stay with Martha. I have to. If I’d gone up to check on her, maybe I could have saved her. Called Dr. Hoffman. I might have.”

  “No, you couldn’t have,” Nelia said. “Dr. Hoffman said it was likely an aneurism or maybe a brain tumor, but nothing he could have done anything about, or you either.”

  “She worked too hard in the garden. I worked her too hard. She said she had a headache. I should have told her to lie down sooner.” No last good-byes like Lizzie had with her Fred. More like Delia’s not being able to tell Nell Irving her last thoughts nor his to her. He left this earth without his knowing how much he was loved. Martha wouldn’t know that either.

  “Mama.” Delia covered my hand with her own. “You have to believe that her death wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one’s. Seeking blame, even blaming yourself, robs you of strength you need. To carry on. To do what Martha would want you to do.”

  “What’s that? Worry over my lilacs? What are lilacs compared to a daughter?” I so hoped Martha knew that, but had I ever told her? Were these bad things happening to my children because I wasn’t a listening mother, learning from the tragedies befalling us?

  Dr. Hoffman patted my shoulder. I looked up at him and spoke aloud my questions. “No,” he said. “No. Bad things happen, and we learn from them, but they do not happen so that we will learn. God is a good God. Martha’s death is not a consequence of anything you did or did not do. It’s what is.”

  Yet I looked for something or someone to blame, though I knew it would keep me grieving her life with guilt rather than remembering it with gratitude.

  Nelia said, “Remember, you told me that Martha said we should give our sorrow words.”

  “I … I can’t find the words.”

  “Scripture, Mama,” Lizzie said. “We’ll find comfort there.” Lizzie picked up the family Bible and read passages from Isaiah and Jeremiah about God as comforter and the planner of our lives, “plans for good.” I said the phrases over and over in my mind. Plans not to harm but to give a future and a hope. Martha’s students and their families came and sat for a time. Lizzie played softly on the piano. It seemed to me that the music comforted Lizzie as words couldn’t. I lost track of time, and then Lizzie brought in rose of Sharon. “It’s a healing balm, Mama. You said so yourself.”

  “Look what blooms on this April day,” said Nelia. “Martha liked this flower, didn’t she? Would you like me to put it next to the casket?”

  “No, I’ll put the flowers in her hands. It’s how I wish to remember her.”

  Nelia walked with me to the casket, where Fritz stood. I pulled the flowers one at a time from the vase and nestled them into Martha’s still hands, then patted them as my lips trembled. I gasped getting my breath. Frank slipped in between Fritz and me and took me in his arms. We held each other, lost together, parents outliving their child. The deepest of hurts.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  REPLANTING

  Hulda, 1912–1915

  We did not go to Baltimore. Instead,
we sent a letter to the Snyders telling them of Martha’s passing and that we must stay here. I had looked forward to visiting the conservatories of the East, walking through Arnold Arboretum at Harvard and a new site Cornelia had been invited to in Locust Valley, New York, called Munnysunk. Munnysunk was a private tree arboretum bought by a man with wealth, it was said, but who felt empty. Until he began to plant and protect rare trees, and that had filled him up. I loved trees almost as much as lilacs and other ornamentals, but mostly I liked the idea of meeting someone who cared deeply about plants and wasn’t puffed up about himself. Certainly a man who named his farm Munnysunk would have a sense of humor. But it would have to wait. We weren’t entitled to joy with Martha’s death.

  “I wish you’d go with me.” Cornelia had taken the train from Sacramento as soon as she got my letter telling her of Martha’s death. “It would cheer you. We could go after the lilacs stop blooming; there’d still be plenty to see.”

  “No. Lilacs in bloom are what we wanted to see, and now that’s gone. They’re gone. Or almost. But you should go. Hear Ruth play, and tell her we are so sorry to have missed it. I’m so pleased she made contact with the Snyders. She gave them a start from the lilac we sent her off with, so now they have more than one Klager variety in their garden.”

  Cornelia nodded. “I believe Ruth has been of help to them. Or at least to Bill’s mother.”

  We spoke of these things while I showed Cornelia around the garden, pointing out new bushes, brighter colors, and shaded hues that I liked and would crossbreed for. She told me that the Snyders were thinking of selling and moving to Massachusetts. Mr. Snyder had been offered a teaching position at Harvard, and Shelly thought she could find purpose in volunteering at Arnold Arboretum, which the university maintained and used for study. In between the conversations about families and life, we’d stop and discuss a bloom, or I’d tell her a story about the plant or its planting. Martha’s name often came into it, and when it did, I ached inside, a weight like rocks settling on my heart and threatening to crush. Sometimes it was hard for me to breathe, I missed her so. The previous sons-in-law had been close to that age at their deaths too. I feared for Fritz, for Ruth, for Nelia, my nieces and nephews, and wondered why Frank and I had been left to live past our youth.

  “So unless you come now, you won’t get to see the Snyder garden,” Cornelia said.

  “What? I’m sorry. My mind wanders of late.”

  “If the Snyders move, you’ll miss their estate. What about next year? Should we try for a Luther Burbank visit? I could check his schedule. That wouldn’t be such a long trip.”

  I shook my head. I had no interest in leaving my garden except to put blooms on Martha’s grave.

  Bobby number three died not long after Martha’s passing, and I wondered if maybe he wasn’t running through the clouds of heaven with her, both young and vibrant and full of life. I grieved that dog and Martha all over again. We didn’t yet have another “Bobby” in our lives, which was good because in 1913, the river flooded with a vengeance. When the rains came, we bundled up the cats in a big box and along with ourselves, carried them to Bertha and Carl’s house on Martin’s Bluff. We went back daily to pull plants, put them in tubs, and set them up on the porch, hoping the water wouldn’t reach them. It rose slowly, but that meant it would probably go down slow too.

  Water didn’t rise to the porch level, but it was still a devastation. I wasn’t sure I had the gumption to start again, hauling out dead grass, mud-caked leaves, my boots squishing for weeks in the drenched soil.

  Fritz had a camera, and he took a photograph from the barn looking toward the house. We have it now for the stereopticon, and I can look at that even all these years later and just feel sick inside for all the work that had been washed away. A lake surrounded the house deep enough—and standing in water long enough—that the trees reflected in the water. Frank moved all the cows up to Bertha and Carl’s when the rain poured nearly sideways. We knew the Lewis River, and maybe the Columbia too, would rise. I didn’t feel safe having the bucket boys helping us pull plants while the water rose, and Nelia was in Seattle, and I didn’t have a new high-school girl yet; so we did the work ourselves with help from Edmond and Roy, Fritz and the girls. When we’d done what we could, we moved over to help Emil and Tillie and their family.

  I missed Ruth. She was such a hard worker. Ruth taught in Baltimore, and in her last letter, she said she was being courted by a young man who was a cellist. “Mama says we’ll be poor for life as wandering musicians,” Ruth wrote. “She doesn’t understand that as classical performers, we won’t be wandering, but she’s probably right about the poverty.”

  As the water receded, it was already May, and Frank and I looked at each other, and he said out loud, “Are you up to this, Huldie? Ready to begin again?”

  “What else could we do?”

  “Rest. Sell the cows. Visit the Rose Festival in Portland come June instead of trying to remake the garden for Lilac Day.”

  “There won’t be any of that this year. The river took those days.”

  But I couldn’t imagine not gardening, even with the work that lay ahead. “How would the grandkids know about working and waiting if it isn’t by weeding and hoeing with their grandfolks?”

  “I don’t know. But I submit you’d find a way to teach ’em.”

  “I’ll stick with lilacs.” I pulled on my boots. “Though I am glad you let it be a choice, something those rivers never give us.”

  The garden and being on this farm was the way I kept Martha alive in my heart. Since her death, I’d been working on a lilac to memorialize her. It would be a creamy white with a yellow center. With a sigh, I waded through the water toward the house. I had things to check on in my sun porch. “You’ve lived through another flood,” I told myself, pulling my boots from my shoes. I checked the tubs. It’s what we do.

  “I’ve got a good strong back,” George Lawson said. Nelia’s father was at our picket-fence gate. “My daughter wrote, asked that I see if you needed anything.”

  “Oh, we’re doing all right.” Frank shook his hand. “Good of Nelia to mention it, though.”

  “Your lilacs, did they make it?”

  “Most of them,” I said. He stood with hat in hand and was probably not as strong as my wiry husband, though working with bolts of cloth and the leather work he’d expanded into required muscle strength too. Still, he didn’t look well, with a pasty sort of color to his skin. His paunch drifted over his belt buckle like overrisen bread dough on the counter’s edge. He might have a heart attack and die trying to help us. Business might have been off for him, what with Mills Grocery and General Merchandise carrying more readymade clothing. Autos were putting horses out of work, so people didn’t need new harnesses or other leather tack either. “The lilacs didn’t like the transportation from ground to bucket or raft, but they wouldn’t have liked the swimming they’d been doing either if we hadn’t pulled them. Some of the older ones”—I pointed toward two long rows west of the woodshed where the cats slept—“weathered it without being put into buckets. Old, deep roots does it, I suspect.”

  “My wife, she used to like lilacs.” His voice caught, and he cleared it. “When last they bloomed in Mississippi, she was just twenty-five years old. Nelia will be that age before long.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Nelia told me he never spoke about his wife; had few words for his daughter too. Ducks flying overhead quacked their intended landing. They didn’t have to fly as far with water still standing in pools in parts of the yard. The birds rescued us from words.

  “How is Nelia’s lilac doing?” I asked then.

  “She has one?”

  “Planted on Jasmine’s grave. Years back I gave it to her.”

  His eyes dropped. He chewed on his lip. “I … I haven’t been out to Jasmine’s grave. Buried her in the back forest, being she was a Negro and we were new here. I didn’t want attention drawn to trying to find an acceptable place to bury her.
Back up in the trees. Don’t know how the lilacs fair in conditions like that.”

  “I can go with you and check, if you want,” I said. “They can handle shade but prefer the sun.”

  “No, no, I’ll do that. For Nelia. And let you know. But if I can help with the restoring …”

  “We accept.” I glanced at Frank to see if he’d object. He didn’t. I think he saw too that here was a man who needed to do things for others.

  “Whenever you have time,” Frank said.

  Our next big Lilac Day we held in 1915, and it was the biggest and best of them all. One Sunday I had a banker, an undertaker, a chief of police, and a Japanese artist step out of a single car. All those men loved lilacs! But at last we women were getting a little recognition for our horticulture interests too. After all, here they came to my garden. And Lowthorpe School graduated women in landscape and horticultural work, and they had to know about plants to receive their diplomas. Maybe Cornelia would keep advancing the professional role of women in hybridizing and not just show us as beings who like only the blooms.

  A few men visiting acted like they were dragged by wives. Yet here stood four men who felt big enough, I guess, to show up without the crutch of a woman at their side. They all talked easily about varieties and didn’t just take in the aroma but studied the blooms, commenting on how “this one’s dark red on the outside and lighter on the inside. I’ve never seen that before.” Or, “Look at how the petals incurve and then come out with handsome buds. Exquisite.” Thus from the artist whose name I had trouble remembering. Ja-sue-o is what his colleagues called him.