We packed with the goal of moving in April. On Saturday, moving day, all the relatives and neighbors planned to load furniture and whatnot onto wagons and transport trunks and farm equipment the few miles from the Bottoms to the house on Pekin Road.
It rained the week of our move, cool, shivery rains that didn’t mist like some springs but pelted down with the wind, pushing wet through wool. We watched the Columbia and Lewis, and when the water hit a certain spot on the banks, we started moving cows to higher ground. Most of the farmsteads flooded, and all the farmers had to wait until the water receded before beginning to plant. We had to.
When the water disappeared, life along the river settled down. The air was thick with the scent of newly turned earth and the flutter of pink and white from apple and cherry blossoms that farmers and house Fraus would plant. The high water never lasted all that long, but there’d been major floods in the late eighteen hundreds that ravaged a few weeks. Floods could make a misery of a garden, not to mention be deadly to people and cattle. Rain, which is our constant companion in the Northwest winters, fell as hard and steady as usual on moving day. All our goods were loaded, so we drove them to the new house where we sloshed through foot-deep water carrying things in. Lizzie’s piano had to wait.
I thought all the rain on moving day was a bad omen, but Martha, our studious one, said the ancient Greeks wished for foul weather on an important day so that the gods wouldn’t notice mortals being hopeful and happy. “It’s why people do silly things to couples on wedding days,” she advised me.
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes, because the gods don’t want mortals to be happy on their own; they might come to believe they don’t need the intervention of Zeus or Aphrodite. They’ll get too proud and independent, suffer from hubris.” She looked solemn.
“Hubris.”
“It means prideful, Mama.”
“Lucky for us, then, that we don’t believe in those kinds of gods,” I told her. I held the umbrella over her head as she stepped inside our new home carrying an armful of her many books to the second floor.
Water pooled on the flat areas around the house, but we’d raised it the right amount. There’d be muck and mud in the yard and a darker canvas than I’d imagined.
The sounds that came from outside that first night—the wind in the apple trees, rain pattering on the roof—and the sounds of Bobby, allowed inside, rolling on the carpet instead of a wood floor, were all new. I’d need to integrate them with sounds from memory, of when we’d helped Papa build the house or been there for Mama when he’d died. Frank turned over in our double bed and laid his arm across my belly. “Does it feel like home yet?” he asked.
I was glad the room was dark and no full moon shone through the glass transom above the door.
“Not yet,” I told him. “But it was the right thing to do, I know that. I think the soil is better here, and we’re higher.”
“Can you find peace in this place?”
I patted his hand. “I think I’ll go back and take a look at the old garden tomorrow. Say good-bye to what I’ve left there before I really dig in to this soil.”
“All the important things you brought with you.”
“I know, I know. And the Lord knows my lot. He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places.” I paraphrased the psalm. “But leaving is … difficult. I put roots into that soil, Frank, deep roots. And it’s like I’ve left a limb behind, but I can still feel it with me.”
“Don’t know anything except you that might make me feel that way.”
“I appreciate that, Frank.”
He put his arms around my shoulders, tugged me to him. I hoped he wouldn’t feel the wetness on my face. “You’ll be my wife and mother our children here in this big new house. Make it your own place doing what a woman needs to do.”
“Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”
That’s when the melancholy began.
TWELVE
LIKE WATER
Hulda, 1903
Melancholy seeped in like water filling footprints on a soggy lawn. It was always there beneath the surface that year but didn’t assert itself until pressure was applied.
The children slept in two rooms upstairs, Fritz having his own, the younger girls sharing a bed, with Lizzie sleeping on a small cot in the same room. Frank and I occupied the large south bedroom. From my bed, I could look out onto the yard, a yard that needed a lot of work. The kitchen was bigger, and the dining and living room settled around the six of us just fine, giving us room to play Parcheesi at the round table that had been my mother’s. The china hutch held favorite things like my grandmother’s silver tea service and a valentine from each of her grandchildren and the Haviland china with the green cloverleaf pattern daintily painted around the edges. I was prepared to feel comforted by the memories that surrounded me in our new home.
“Expect a little nostalgia,” my sister Bertha told me as she dusted the hutch after I mentioned feeling sad.
Maybe the sadness began with thinking of my parents too much. They were everywhere in that house, memories like cobwebs catching me unsuspecting. The flood didn’t help my mood either. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, with just a foot of water blanketing the fields, pushing up against the bottom steps of the house. We dug and buried bulbs and moved sludge and debris from around the peonies I’d planted. I saw progress and even decided to shape a garden plot at the front of the house and make it like a flatiron.
“That way when I’m working in that plot, I’ll imagine I’m really getting my ironing done,” I told Amelia who laughed with me as I thought she would. “This planting will be as close to a flatiron as I ever hope to come. Poor Martha,” I added. She’d be left to iron, with her sisters married off soon.
But the usual satisfaction I experienced from my hands on a hoe was missing.
The actual physical pains began right around my birthday. We Thiels usually gathered on a birthday for feasting and storytelling, and this year everyone planned to come to our yard. I had the bright idea to try out new recipes that we might use for the weddings. I’d begun baking early in the week, trying to disregard the discomfort that settled beneath my stomach. I thought I did a good job of it and knew that soon the kitchen cupboard would be stuffed with cakes and cookies, jams and jellies, fresh bread and cheeses too.
“Mama, you’re holding your side funny,” Martha said. She rolled pastry dough and spots of grayish flour stuck to the frizz at her temples. Martha always looked like she should be Bavarian royalty with her huge piercing eyes, olive skin, and a regal bearing that settled on her shoulders whether she was reading a book or rolling out pastry. “Are you all right?” she’d stopped her work and just stared. “You look so pale.”
“Oh, just a female complaint, I suspect. Nothing to worry over.”
By the end of the week, I couldn’t get out of bed because my side and stomach hurt so. Frank called Dr. Alice Chapman, the only doctor we had. I didn’t like doctors and wasn’t sure about a female one. Frank insisted someone see me. The short woman arrived with her black leather case. It helped to know her husband doctored people too, in Kelso, down the road, so she might have gotten medical information from him. She pressed and prodded at my abdomen as I lay on my bed where I could look out over the flatiron planting. Frank stood beside me, holding my hand.
“What do you think, Doc?” he asked.
“Not sure what to think,” Dr. Alice told him. She asked us to use her first name. She was young, but she carried herself like one with years of experience. She wasn’t much older than Lizzie, I guess. “Has your flow stopped?” she asked directly.
Frank’s ears turned red as a rose, but he didn’t make his escape as I thought he might and should have.
I frowned. “Perhaps so.” Though until she mentioned it, the thought had not occurred to me. I wasn’t that old.
Dr. Alice thought surgery might take care of the problem, but I would have nothing to do with that. No cutting. It was bad enoug
h I was here in my own bed with a visiting doctor seeing the cobwebs in the corners.
She gave me potions, but as the summer wore on and I didn’t get better, the girls decided to postpone their weddings. I felt terrible about that, and it added to my malaise. I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that this was my ending, that forty was as old as I would get.
“Don’t think like that,” Frank told me as he sat beside me on the bed. The log cabin quilt I’d pieced lay folded across my feet. Outside the window I could see the end of the daisies from my mother’s old bed, but I couldn’t view the lilac nursery from my window, all the new starts I’d transplanted lined in rows. I didn’t even have the strength to rise and look after the bushes I’d started. I think that worried Frank more than anything, that I had no energy even for flowers.
“Maybe my time has come.” I wiped at tears. “The children are almost grown. They’ll be leaving this nest before long. Perhaps this is all the Lord has allotted for me to do.”
“You don’t have the creamy-white lilac yet.” Frank brushed damp hair from my forehead. “And I thought you wanted one with a bunch of petals, not just a measly four.”
I smiled. “You remembered that boast.”
“I never thought of it as a boast. I submit, when you say you’ll do something, you always accomplish it. It is just a matter of fact—and time.”
“I haven’t accomplished anything without help, and now I never will.” I was so weary of looking at the flowers on the wallpaper, so disheartened by the aching and needing Martha’s or Lizzie’s or Delia’s assistance for everyday things like using the chamber pot. I was so weak I couldn’t even make the privy.
I looked back over my life, and what had I accomplished? I’d shaped an apple toward a little more crisp. I’d produced a brighter yellow daffodil that only I could really see the difference in. I’d seen a happy smile on a child’s face when they inhaled a rose. But what were these moments in the scheme of things, when people devoted their lives to curing disease, to living in foreign lands looking after the less privileged. “What have I really done with my life, Frank? And now, it’s likely over.”
I saw the worry in Frank’s face, the way his eyes pinched. I guess he’d never seen me discouraged. I didn’t know what discouragement would look like either, but now I was it, discouragement in the flesh, facing the reality of a life lived with little meaning except for giving the world four fine people who might go on to do great things even if their mother hadn’t.
Frank said he didn’t call Amelia, but someone must have because she arrived from Vancouver, the whirlwind older sister ready to set things straight and get me out of bed. It was a few days after I’d spoken with Frank and admitted the paucity of my life, the failure to contribute to the betterment of mankind. I’d done nothing “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God,” as Scripture challenged us to do. If anything, I’d been prideful thinking my flowers contributed to a hurting world in a healing way.
“What’s gotten into you?” Amelia punched at my feather pillows, sniffed. I knew they needed cleaning. “You’ve sprawled in that bed long enough.”
“I can’t get up. I’m so weak. And nothing seems worth doing. Seasons come and go whether I do anything or not.”
“Well, of course they do. But that doesn’t mean you don’t do it too.”
“I’ve given what I had to give. Martha and Fritz practically take care of themselves, and they know what Frank needs, and they tend to him. The girls will marry. What is there left for me to do, really? And now I can’t even have any more children—”
“Did you want more?” Amelia asked.
I shrugged. Frank and I hadn’t wanted any more than four, but now, knowing that I couldn’t have any more children just added depth to my confused weariness.
“No sense crying over spilled milk,” Amelia said.
“I’m not crying,” I said, although tears spilled from my eyes and I wiped them with the handkerchief Frank replaced each morning.
Amelia plopped on the side of the bed. “What you need is a new project. Something to consume you again, the way your daffodils always did. And the roses. Don’t you want to check on your apple hybridizing, try something new? Your lilacs?”
“What does it matter?”
“Dr. Alice says it’s your mind keeping you down now, not your body.”
“That’s why I don’t like doctors. They talk too much.”
“It’s what she told Frank, and it’s what he told me. We’re worried about you, Hulda. I try to imagine what Papa would say to get you up. Or Mama.”
I did too, but they were silent.
She patted my hand, stood for a moment, then left. She’d thrown out her lifeline, and I’d failed to grasp it.
Nearly a month passed, and I still hadn’t died. I had strange dreams, though, and more than once I looked out my window and could have sworn I saw a small child, a girl, slipping in between the magnolia and the cypress, crouching beneath a lilac bush. But I was likely daydreaming myself into a garden I didn’t have the energy to walk to. I had an appetite, which grieved me sorely since any self-respecting person who had admitted she’d given all she could surely didn’t need to respond to the smell of fried potatoes or the aroma of apple pie rolled out at Delia’s hands.
I heard Amelia’s voice in the hall, then the sound of her footsteps. I noticed that everyone had a distinct sort of walk, and I could name them now, even before Fritz stuck his head in the room, or Amelia as she did now.
“Still think you have nothing to offer?” My sister offered a cheery smile.
“Don’t.” I just wanted to be left alone.
She stepped into the room. “I found this book, written about that famous plant man you so like.”
“Luther Burbank?”
“Yes. That’s his name.” She handed me the book. Inside she’d stuffed a sheaf of papers titled “Proceedings: International Conference on Plant Breeding and Hybridization, 1902,” published by the Horticultural Society of New York.
“Where did you get this?”
“I wrote to them. Or rather Frank told me I ought to. We thought … that is, we decided it might be of interest to you. There’s a paper there, presented by Luther Burbank himself.”
“About his poppy work?” I sat up in bed. “His daisy efforts?” I’d read of his crossbreeding a Chrysanthemum leucanthemum that grows wild in the West with Bellis perennis, a small English daisy with larger flowers and shorter stems. He’d written of his work, rejecting, sowing, rejecting, and finally crossing a newer generation daisy with a German daisy, the Chrysanthemum lacustre, that produced a huge flower, but still not a blaring white like the kind he said he wanted. It made me think of my creamy lilac that would never be. Some of the articles of his efforts were printed in the Los Angeles Times, and later I would read a few others in Popular Science Monthly magazines. But his real interest was in developing foods that would ship more easily, bloom earlier so we’d have longer seasons. He hadn’t been interested in flowers much, except how they could teach him what to do with vegetables.
“I have no idea what he wrote about,” Amelia said. “I just know he presented a paper of some kind. You read about it.”
I picked up the papers she handed me and sighed as I paged through until I saw Burbank’s name. Even that didn’t inspire me.
“I’ll read it later.” I put the pages on the bedside table. “I’m just so tired.”
But later that evening, the book sitting there called to me. I read about Burbank’s efforts and that he had at last found what he looked for. He’d named the daisy for the California mountain, Shasta. “He’s going to sell the seeds himself.” I sat up straighter, called out. “Frank?”
“What? Do you need something? I’m just about to put the dog out in the shed.”
“When you come back in, come right up.” I kept reading, and when Frank arrived, I told him, “He says it’s the perfect flower as it’s simple, modern, inexpensive, eas
y to grow, and yet has international ancestry. He used Japanese daisies and English ones and good old American ones that are considered weeds by many. They just grow wild in the meadows. But see here.” I pointed to a drawing included in the Horticultural Society paper. “Look at the size of the bloom. It’s huge, bigger than your palm. And he’ll sell the packets for only ten cents each.”
“We could order them in and have them in the spring. For the girls’ weddings.”
“Of course. They’re getting married next …” I realized there was no date set. They were waiting for me to be better. “Let’s say … June.”
I realized what I’d said and leaned back on the pillow. Weariness returned, but Dr. Alice had been right. What kept me low wasn’t my body, but my mind. I knew my girls were entitled to begin their lives with their husbands, to have what Frank and I had. Luther Burbank’s successes with flowers—not just for food production—inspired me. Even he could see that ornamentals carried as much dignity and usefulness as tomatoes, kale, or corn.
“Good to see you thinking the girls can send the invitations.” Frank undressed for the night. The window was open, and I could hear sandhill cranes making cooing noises in the field between the house and the Lewis River. Soft and settling-in noises.
“It’s time.” I pushed myself up and with his help arranged the pillows so I could continue reading the paper and saw that Mr. Burbank had written a new book about his efforts and the role of the environment in addition to the natural characteristics of a plant. “Can we spare a dollar for Burbank’s book?” Frank nodded, happy I think that something interested me at last. “Mendel doesn’t hold that the environment has much influence at all,” I said, “but Burbank disagrees. He thinks everything can be changed.” I looked up at Frank. He was smiling. Lizzie and Delia had come in, Martha behind them.