Where Lilacs Still Bloom

  “Your voice; it’s stronger. Are you all right?” Martha asked.

  “Not yet, but I will be. Listen.” I patted the bed that the girls might sit. “Burbank thinks how we behave toward plants makes a difference in their growth, their future, their very features. He thinks plants can be convinced to change, that it’s part of their God-given nature. Not something Darwin believed in at all.”

  Frank’s eyes shone with tears as he said, “That doesn’t sound very scientific of him.”

  “Science isn’t about only university training or conducting research in sterile laboratories or even keeping notes in certain ways so others can replicate your work. That’s not what Mr. Burbank is about, Frank. He’s about … well, here, let me summarize.” I took a deep breath and had enough air. “He wants better fruits and flowers, not just crisper vegetables—and he says that the work of creating better plants will help people think of nobler efforts in life, bring richer foods to people around the globe, instead of bullets or bayonets. All things are connected. His work touches the soul as well as soil.” My children looked dazed by such scientific words spouting from my mouth after so long a time of tears. “Don’t you see? He knows flowers are important too. He does the Lord’s work.”

  “So do you, Mama.” Lizzie patted my hand. “So do you.”

  I sighed and sunk back onto the pillow. “And it’s time I got around to do more of it. Just as soon as you girls get married off! I hope June sounds good to you both?”

  Lizzie and Delia looked at each other. “That’s perfect,” they said in unison. “Will you be strong enough?” Delia asked.

  “I will be.”

  That became the promise I made to myself.

  THIRTEEN

  FOREIGN INFLUENCE

  Hulda, 1903

  Burbank’s newest work in California made me want to get better—that and the weddings. Then Frank did something I wished my father had been alive to see.

  “I sold a couple of cows,” Frank told me in November. Rain poured down the gutters, and the patter on the roof at times drowned out our words. I washed up the evening dishes, the first time in a long time I felt strong enough to stand that long. In the evenings I kept my feet up, quilting, reading, looking at seed catalogs. I couldn’t do much real creating with the same varieties I always had. Crossbreeding demanded new life.

  “To cover the wedding expenses next year? Two cows? Well, we can give each of the couples a nice gift to help them get started.”

  “I submit, that’s not what I had in mind.”

  I looked at him. “What, then?”

  “You’re most alive when you’re in that garden of yours. That’s where and how I want to see you. So let’s just say I want to buy them for self-preservation: mine.”

  “Buy what? I thought you were selling cows?”

  “Those lemon lilacs.”

  “Lemoine?” I could barely catch my breath.

  “Whatever they’re called.”

  “But, Frank.” I sat down at the table, my hands still wet with dishwater. “They’re so expensive and so … I mean breeding them won’t result in better food for someone. They’re … ornamentals.”

  “I watch how flowers make you feel. I don’t understand it, but I don’t want to get in the way of it either. So I’ve sold two cows, and we’ll invest in … beauty.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” My father had said Frank couldn’t support my efforts, but he was wrong. Maybe Frank wasn’t encouraging my work for the reasons my father would have, to pursue a dream, to meet a challenge; but he was willing to risk with me.

  “Just tell me how to find that catalog with the lemons in it. I looked high and low for it. Thought I’d surprise you and order them myself.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t.” I held his face in my soapy hands and kissed him. “Now I have the pleasure of choosing them and anticipating their arrival. Oh, Frank.” I hugged him, kissed him hard. “You are a good, good man.”

  “So you say,” he said, then kissed me back.

  “How did you even know about it?” I asked my oldest sister, Bertha. She and Carl had come in to town to pick up supplies, and we shared a cup of tea. Later we went out to the flowers and talked as we weeded.

  “Frank spoke to Carl about a heifer. So much expense,” Bertha said. “Think what that money could do for the Johnson family or that Smith child or the tailor’s girl who looks like a waif. I can’t believe Frank would let you spend that kind of money. On flowers, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You should be happy my husband wants to indulge me so your husband can be indulged. He bought the cows.”

  “I don’t know what Carl was thinking. That money has a better place to go. The whole point of having a herd is that you grow it from your own animals.” Bertha plucked a dried leaf from my hair. “The same is true for flowers, or should be.”

  “Yes, but occasionally you have to introduce new blood. That’s all I want to do with these lilacs. I still have others I started from the bushes Mama brought with her. I’ll be using them to pollinate with too.”

  “But all the way from France! What would Mama think? That you’re getting uppity.”

  Uppity? Mein Gott im Himmel. This is what my sister thought of me?

  I weeded a bit more, then said, “Beauty matters, Bertha; it does. God gave us flowers for a reason. I think so we’d pay attention to the details of creation and remember to trust Him in all things big or little, no matter what the challenge. Flowers remind us to put away fear, to stop our rushing and running and worrying about this and that, and for a moment have a piece of paradise right here on earth. God offers healing through flowers and brings us closer to Him.”

  “Oh, Huldie, really? You think that? It doesn’t sound … Christian at all.”

  “When those Johnson young people died in the pond last summer, don’t you think the bouquet of flowers we brought gave some small comfort to their parents? And when I planted tulip bulbs on those young people’s graves after the parents asked, don’t you think imagining those blooms covering their loved ones each spring gives them hope?”

  “Maybe. But such expense on frivolous—”

  “Living things offer solace, Bertha. I can’t remove the poverty of the Smith children, though I try, I do. Frank and I support the deacon’s fund. But when I brought Mrs. Smith fresh-picked vegetables last summer and included a bouquet of my lilacs, it was the flowers she went to first. She inhaled their scent, and for a moment as she buried her face in them, I think she forgot about the misery of her drinking husband and the rags on her children. She needed that moment to gain strength from those petals to face her life as it is. A moment of joy is no small thing to give another.”

  I couldn’t always talk Bertha down, but I seemed to this time. “It’s no different than how you feel about music,” I continued. “A song sung that fills a heart with gratitude or splendor or wonder is as good as food at times. Flowers do that too, and I think it’s worthy work to bring a more unusual flower for others to discover, to somehow weave that special scent into the memories of their living. Why it seems to me when I smell sauerkraut, my mind immediately goes to Mama.”

  Bertha laughed. “Mine too.”

  “And when I smell a daffodil, I think of Frank and a day he watched flowers consume me. And lilacs remind me of a time he offered to make my metal marking tags. It was his way to be a part of what I love so much. He will always be there with me when I smell a lilac, no matter what might happen to him. And if I die first, then he’ll have the flowers to remind him of what we did together. Or maybe it’s the smell of cows that will remind him of our lives together. I don’t know.” Bertha wiggled her nose and smiled. “I just know that I feel closest to heaven when I’m out here in this garden, and if, as a result, someone finds comfort in what they see or take away, then to me, that’s not an indulgence, it’s a … calling. A passion, Papa called it.”

  I felt my face grow warm.

  “Papa did?”

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nbsp; I nodded and stood. Bertha and I are the same height, and she nudged me with her shoulder then. “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have said what I did about the Johnsons and that Lawson girl. I do feel the same about music,” she said. “It’s just that Carl would never pamper me the way Frank does you, and I guess I’m a little, well, jealous.”

  “Carl loves you to death.” I put my arm around her waist. “There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for you.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I’m afraid to ask, in case he wouldn’t.”

  Frank and I settled for seven Lemoine. Seven was really all we could afford of the Syringa vulgaris variety. We placed the order, then waited. It’s what a gardener does.

  They arrived on board the steamship Toledo, a new competition to the Mascot that had ruled the Lewis River for years. The cranes warbled in the fields and sunbreaks pierced the clouds that Friday, March 4, 1904. I will never forget it.

  I paced, barely able to keep my hands at my sides as Frank picked up the bundle wrapped in burlap and carried it to the wagon. The horse stomped his foot and twisted at the smell, I suspect, earthy and moist and all the way from France. Once home, we slowly removed the burlap as though laying open a treasure recently found. There lay seven spindly lilac stems with a few leaves flattened like winter’s leaves.

  “Don’t look like much.” Frank frowned.

  “No, they don’t. But neither did our babies when they arrived all bare and pink,” I said. “Let’s get these heeled into the ground.” And we did, the roots taking hold in this new land that had been my parents’.

  When the buds opened a few weeks later, I realized that two of the Lemoine wouldn’t work; the leaves and buds were too small. “Those will have to go,” I told Frank.

  “They will?” He looked grief stricken.

  “I need to start with the strongest and best. We have to cut our losses.” He nodded, swallowed hard.

  That left five to pin my hopes on.

  I made my way with magnifying glass, crochet hook, and turkey feather, moving the first pollen from the Périer to one of my own lilacs that I’d noted was the closest to cream. Such a tiny hope, that pollen. I wondered if Luther Burbank felt such anticipation wrapped inside anxiety and caution as he did his work. “Please don’t let me make mistakes,” I prayed. “Please, let me do this right.” Then to the plant, I said, “Come on, tiny pollen. Give Hulda Klager the best you’ve got.”

  I knew that it would take years before we knew if what we had invested would bring anything more than hard work and hope.

  One pollination down, turkey feather and crochet hook; hat back, holding my breath. France to Washington State. Dreaming.

  Hundreds more to go.

  FOURTEEN

  RUTH REED

  Woodland, 1904

  Eleven-year-old Ruth Reed watched her father walk a fine line, and he expected Ruth to walk there too. By day her father worked at the cheese plant. On Wednesday evenings Barney Reed led Bible classes at Woodland homes. A Seventh-Day Adventist, their Sabbath services never turned away people from other persuasions who came to the meetings he officiated with his bushy mustache and tiny glasses he adjusted often on his nose.

  Ruth liked it best when they met at the Fred Lewis homestead on Whelan Road and combined their study efforts with Baptists, Methodists, and others. She listened to the banter and discussion, and afterward her father often told her mother that he’d “get converts yet out of those confused Presbyterians.”

  It was Mrs. Klager that Ruth fancied the most. The woman stood tall, and straight up and down. She always noticed Ruth, asking important things like how the tulip bulbs she’d given her were doing rather than commenting on “what a big girl she was becoming” like some of the other mothers did. During the discussions, Mrs. Klager asked probing questions of belief, especially about science and how faith informed it, or vice versa. Ruth didn’t always understand the questions, but she saw how they made her father’s face get red, and he talked faster than normal. Ruth heard that Mrs. Klager had been ill a long time, but she didn’t sound weak at their classes.

  Ruth got another education after classes were over and he had a second piece of pie after they were home. Her father finished Mrs. Klager’s apple pie. Ruth didn’t tell him that Mrs. Klager had made those apples herself, or so she’d heard. Crumbs dribbling on his chin, her father took issue with most everything Mrs. Klager said. “She doesn’t have the slightest worry about messing with Eden,” he told her mother one February evening. “She accepts as gospel the writings of people like Darwin and now this Burbank fellow. She says she gives all that glory to God, but then she messes with plants trying to make a better daffodil or rose.” He chewed the apple pie with his front teeth, like a rabbit might. Her father’s back teeth hurt him when he chewed.

  Ruth didn’t want to see her father more upset. She and her mother had something to tell him, and she didn’t want him saying no.

  “The Baptists and Latter-day Saints and others claiming the Christian faith seemed to have no concern about what Mrs. Klager was saying,” Ruth’s mother said.

  “Yes.” He jabbed the air with his fork. “They apparently like the idea of larger flowers, or in the case of that Burbank, bigger plums and even spineless cacti.”

  “Isn’t that for cattle?” her mother posed. “Perhaps they see it as a way of subduing the animals and earth as God intended man to do.”

  Her father frowned, and Ruth thought right then and there she might as well forget lessons. But he surprised her. “I suppose spineless cacti could mean the difference in places like Australia where cattle needed feed and there wasn’t enough water to grow it. And certainly not having to scrape off those barbs means an easier life for those farmers. But still,” he cautioned her mother, pausing to chew with his front teeth, “it interferes with Eden. Cacti aren’t even mentioned in the Bible. The Burbanks and the Klagers of the world take God’s creation and turn it into naked cacti, and somehow expect the world to accept it as better than what God Himself placed on this earth.”

  “Papa?” Ruth cleared her throat, wanting to stop him before his rant raged on for hours. “Mama and I have something to tell you.”

  “What? What is it, Ruth?” He towered over her like an unhappy teacher.

  “I have a job. Later this spring.”

  “You do? Well, that’s resourceful of you.”

  “I’ll be able to pay for my own piano lessons.”

  “Piano lessons, eh? You have a talent for that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There’s no better lesson than learning to give your best to your employer. So what will you be doing?”

  “Helping Mrs. Klager,” Ruth said.

  “Mrs. Klager?” He glared at his wife.

  Her mother said, “Two of the Klager girls are getting married, and she needs additional workers. Mrs. Klager was awful poorly last summer and nearly died.”

  “God punishes when we’re wayward,” he said.

  “But not all trouble is punishment, you said that yourself,” her mother said. “When you lost your job in Ontario and we had to come to America, you said it was God’s plan.”

  He squinted at Ruth. She stepped back, swallowed, let her mind drift.

  Ruth saw Mrs. Klager’s garden as shapes of color just as she noticed the shapes of most of her world.

  She’d been attracted to the Klager yard the very first time she rode with her family past the picket fence. “Look there,” she’d pointed.

  “It’s not polite to point,” her mother said.

  “But see? That garden in front of the house is shaped like a flatiron.”

  Her father had slowed, and the vibrant colors clustered inside that household shape made her wonder what the names of all those blooms might be. She saw a woman bent to the tall grasses and three other girls with hats and gloves working silently together, backs up, then down; kneeling, then standing; hoes digging, then offering a leaning post. A wind chime of laughter floated toward Ruth and her parents as t
he horse plodded by. Ruth twisted to watch the women as their buggy rolled past. Imagine, people working together without hearing, “Keep your head up; don’t look down so much. Pick up your feet; you walk like an elephant. Take your fingers out of your mouth. Straighten up.” These were daily admonitions from her father, and her mother repeated them when he wasn’t present, adding a few of her own. Her mother spoke more softly, but the piercing felt as painful. She knew they wanted the best for her; she trusted that. She thought this might be how they expressed their love for her, wanting to shape her into the perfect girl. But she wasn’t, would never be, the shape they wanted.

  “Get your father a cup of coffee.” Her mother’s words brought Ruth back. To Ruth’s father, her mother said, “Perhaps Mrs. Klager having a need our daughter can meet is part of God’s plan as well. And it pays for the lessons.”

  “She’s not a good influence, eh?”

  “I can think for myself, Papa. It’s being charitable, helping another. You say we should. That way I can stay and go to school here in town. I won’t have to—”

  “No, no, now that goes too far. You’ll continue to go to school as we plan for you. What would people say if you worked and lived in town instead of on Martin’s Bluff?”

  “But I can’t work the Sabbath,” Ruth said.

  “She needs more experiences.” Her mother poured cream into her husband’s cup. “And staying with the Klagers is a way to do that.”

  “What’ll you be doing? How does all this happen without my knowledge?”

  “Watering plants, Papa. Carrying buckets. It’s good work. I’m strong.”

  Her father sipped his coffee. “We’ll see. Let’s go home now.” He put the pie plate in the sink. “A snake to worry about, eh? Right in my own backyard.”

  Ruth didn’t know if he referred to her or to Mrs. Klager.