The Star Garden

  “Mama,” the girl said, “I’ve been thinking about art school for over a year. I haven’t known Aubrey Hanna for six months. He’s more a whim than schooling. And it is a short time. I’ll be home. You let the twins go off and Rebeccah went clear to Mexico before she came home, and Rachel’s in town minding Uncle Harland’s children. Why, once they were there at school, you didn’t see the twins for months on end and you sent letters to them, and they to you, and I can do that, too. It’s no different than the twins, Mama. And a far sight better than what Esther did.”

  Stone-faced, Savannah said, “You’ve no call to say anything about Esther, Mary Pearl.”

  Mary Pearl drew herself up and took a deep breath I could hear. “I’m not running away and I’m not going to get killed. I’m doing this in front of you, not scheming behind your back writing to some fellow you wouldn’t approve of. Seems to me I’ve got two things you do approve, and all I’m doing is choosing them, one after the other. Couldn’t very well marry first and then go off to college. Why, it might be a lot of fun to walk a circle around our parlor and take Aubrey’s hand and be married. But those folks wrote all the way from Wheaton that they want me to come. You always told me to look at the doors opened by the Lord and go on through.”

  Savannah had tears running down her face. “You’re sassy.”

  “Rebeccah went and taught in Mexico.”

  “Mexico is less than half the distance to Illinois. If you must go to college you can go to town,” Savannah said. “Rachel will have to mind you as well as the children. And maybe Mr. Hanna’s affections won’t be turned sour by your silliness. Wheaton is too far away!” Savannah said, then abruptly went into her house.

  Mary Pearl stood in the yard, her mouth open, as if she were stunned that she hadn’t won her point with her mother. She followed Savannah like an obedient chick. I followed after Mary Pearl. Granny had already made herself at home in the kitchen, and was sitting with a cup held out while Rebeccah poured tea into it. Rebeccah lighted up and started to say hello to me, but then turned her eyes away.

  I was fixing to ask Savannah to sit and talk with me when Granny cut through the bad air in the room as easy as you please, saying, “You girls know I’ve come to the evening of life. I’ve made up my mind about some things and I’ve done some poor living. It ain’t much, but I see this youngest girl is about to bust out on her own and I got something for her to do—”

  Savannah turned around and said, “Mary Pearl isn’t on her own, Mama Prine. There’ll be no ‘busting out’ while I’m drawing breath.”

  Granny waited a moment and then said, “Well, that’ll be or it won’t, but your dying won’t change it a whit. The girl’s growed and I got something needs doing before I go. I put in my time here on this land. I aim to write my memories only I can’t do more than a X for my own name, and she’s got a knack for putting down words. I want Mary Pearl to write my memories for me as I recollect ‘em.”

  Mary Pearl’s face went from puzzlement to dread. “Oh, I’m no hand at that kind of thing,” she mumbled. “Rebeccah has finished her schooling; she’d do better.”

  “I want you to do it. And I’m yer eldest elder. You got to do as I say, this one time. These young folks galloping around like they got no thought for the old folks—it’s the only thing I’m asking and I don’t ask much. Now settle down a while. Learn some respect before you leave home. And learn how things used to was, when it was hard, and how your folks lived, and a poor living it was. I he’ped you with your letter, you can he’p me with mine. You fetch a quill and paper. Take down ever’ word. We’ll start directly.”

  “Today?”

  Granny sipped her tea. “Needs sugar,” she said.

  Savannah seemed to be mulling this over. Myself, I didn’t know Granny had a wish of this nature, and I wondered why she hadn’t asked me to do the writing for her. She’s so beside herself so much of the time, there was no way to figure if this was some carefully derived plan or just another notion that she’d tire of in an afternoon.

  Savannah turned to Mary Pearl and said, “You heard your grandmother. Fetch some paper. You may use a real nib if you’d like, instead of a feather. Look in the top left drawer in the secretary.”

  Granny nodded. Then she said, “Send her by Sarah’s parlor every afternoon when her chores are done. Might take all summer. Longer, maybe. She can go when it’s done.”

  Slowly, Savannah nodded just once, then several times, as if this were going to keep her girl at home and safely married off before she turned eighteen, but it had to be weighed against the constant exposure to my surly influence. I tried to picture Mary Pearl sitting still for hours every afternoon, quietly writing Granny’s words. I thought of Savannah steaming and angry, every moment Mary Pearl did it.

  “Mama,” I said. “If you wanted me to write this out for you, I’d a-been happy to oblige. All you had to do was ask.”

  “I know it,” she said. “I asked who I wanted, that’s all.” Mary Pearl straightened three sheets of paper and opened the ink, pen raised. “Let’s start now.”

  I looked up and caught Savannah’s eyes darting from my direction. I said, “Would you take a walk with me, Savannah?”

  “I have weeds to pull, while the ground’s wet from the rain.”

  “Let’s pull ‘em, then,” I said. She took off for the yard and I followed her fast as I could, for she seemed to be trying to outrun me. We worked in the flower bed a good long time without speaking. Finally I said, “That wild broom is about to take over the place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “most of them have got more root than top.”

  I could see Albert, Chess, and Clover having a talk, and I saw that Albert saw me and Savannah talking, too. I said, “Well, maybe there’s a point to that, though. We all sort of do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe I’m sort of a desert weed, like that. Not too fancy on top, but ornery enough and tough, and roots long enough to hold out. You know I’ve never been a genteel sort. But I never thought of myself so cantankerous or mean you couldn’t trust your children with me.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You said I was a poor influence on ‘em. It isn’t the kindest thing I’ve heard, Savannah.” I knew she took care to be honest. Somewhere deep inside, she had meant those words. Mud soaked into my best driving gloves, but I didn’t mind wasting them in the hope of settling the hard words between my best friend and me. I jerked out a clump of chokeweed, and some kind of a round dumpling came up with it, looking like an onion with bark. I waited a long spell, pulling a few more brooms until I caught a finger-sized cholla in the middle of one. The fiery needles of it went through the leather of my gloves.

  Savannah said, “You’re taking out the bulbs, too. I just planted those! That has to go back in, blunt side down.”

  Thinking she should have weeded before she planted, I said, “I believe April planted hers last fall.”

  She snapped, “These are daffodils. They are supposed to be planted in spring. It’s about time something here went the way it was supposed to.”

  “Well, Savannah, we had spring in February. The people that write those gardening books all come from England where it’s cold and rainy. You can’t—”

  “I can, and I will. I’d just like for once to have flowers instead of weeds.”

  “Won’t the javelinas eat ‘em up before they bloom?”

  “No.”

  “What’s got into you lately?”

  “Not a thing except wanting life to be lived in a good and righteous order. I’ve been too soft on those children. Too soft on myself. Pure lazy, letting them go off instead of schooling them myself. I did what came easiest, instead of what was right.”

  I felt myself twist inside. What did any of us do, except keep body and soul together the best we could in the Territories? Did Savannah think she could fight the weather with a daffodil root set out like a feast for rabbits and rodents? I said, “Y
ou had eight children. You did all anyone could have done. I thought I’d been helping you.”

  She chopped away at the ground, going over a place she’d already weeded, smoothing and straightening the soil as if it were a bed she was making. When she didn’t say anything for quite a spell, I said, “Esther was prey to a criminal. It isn’t anyone’s fault she got killed.”

  “I’d prefer not to speak of my departed daughter just now.”

  “You can’t hold Mary Pearl back from leaving home because of what happened to her sister. She’s grown. The tighter you hold her, the harder she’ll strain.”

  “She’s betrothed. She’ll leave home on the arm of her husband.”

  “You have any more of these daffodil roots? They might do in a clay pot up on the porch rail, if they got watered regularly.”

  “I’ve planted all I got.”

  I sat back on my haunches. “All right.” She’d spent the lot on a sure-to-fail flower bed. Planting food for rabbits and wild pigs.

  “She’s got no reason to traipse across half the country to a place we’ve never been, living with total strangers whose character we don’t know. You know about artists. She’d be consorting with bc-heminas”

  “Bohemians? Mary Pearl isn’t going to consort at all. I know the girl.”

  “Better than I do, I suppose?”

  I kept quiet for a bit, then I said, “Well, there once was a girl I met, all of nineteen. She come across this rusty feller still living with his folks out of a third-hand wagon without six bits to his name. He had nothing and no future, no meat on his bones and no education, nor was he too pretty to look at. She’d barely met him, too, hardly long enough to know what his character was, but she sized him up and on his say-so decided to take off to the worst badlands in North America, and then had to fight Indians the whole way to get to where he was leading her. He didn’t even know where he was going. He just came to a place one day and said, ‘this looks likely,’ and drew a square and put up a shack. On top of that she had to live with his mother and all his brothers and a sister, and have her first baby in that shack out in the desert. Her pa told her not to go but she was headstrong and all. She wouldn’t be turned away. Just up and went off, like she knew what she was doing.”

  “Those were different days.”

  “But you decided how you wanted your life to be and went and did it. That’s all.”

  “Albert told her she can go. My opinion—”

  “Matters, plenty. Now, I reckon I have warmed up to where I can say what I ought to say. That is, that I’m sorry if I’ve caused you trouble with your children. Never for the life of me would I have set out to do that if I’d thought that was what was happening. I thought—well, that maybe—”

  “There’s more than that.”

  “Well, I know. I should have told you she wrote to the college. I forgot about it in the fear of her maybe dying and I’m sorry for it.”

  “I have come to see that you have been partly raising my children all these years. Now you have this fellow Udell wanting you to marry. You’ll have your own life, then. You don’t need my boys taking lessons every day. And it’s so much farther away, I couldn’t let them go alone—”

  “Is that all? Why, you’ll teach them just as well. But any marrying’ll be on the pantry shelf for a few months. I’m going to town for a while. Going to try my hand at this college business, too.”

  She sat up stiffly, spade in midair. “Well. I see. Well, you go on, then. That’s fine. That’s just fine.” She rose and went to the house without another word.

  By the time I got in the house she had gone to the bedroom and closed the door.

  In the parlor, Mary Pearl sat taking notes from Granny. Rebeccah was mending a leg on a pair of boy’s pants. Ezra and Zachary hunched over slates at a small table, working arithmetic. “Hey, Aunt Sarah,” they said as one. I waved to them and followed Savannah’s footsteps to her bedroom door, opening it without knocking. Savannah sat in a rocker, facing the east window, staring hard and rocking. She twisted a handkerchief around her fingers.

  A framed print of her mother and father in wedding clothes hung on the wall near a highboy. A finely quilted, double-stitched topper was on the bed, just as straight as if it were sewn to a box—no sagging ropes on their frame. I felt as if I’d snuck into a church, and needed to be quiet. I whispered, “Are you going to tell me what you’re so angry about, or do I have to stand here and guess at it the livelong day? I’ve got chores to do, a heifer having her first crooked tail this morning, and weeds of my own to pull.”

  “For years, Sarah, you have filled my children’s heads with fanciful tales of faraway places. Got them imagining all kinds of things. Romantic notions of … of passion!”

  I felt some pride in what learning had happened under my parlor roof. Many enjoyable hours in the board swing out back, where one after the other of our children recited poems and long division aloud.

  She said, “That’s what led Esther to take off with that Spaniard, simply because he made love in letters to her for a few months. Why, she didn’t know who he was. It’s what’s led Mary Pearl to want to take off across the country—”

  “Now, wait a minute. Joshua is across the country, too, studying medicine.” He s a man.

  “She’s going to be a woman. What’s wrong with drawing some pictures?”

  “She’s got a life already cut out for her.”

  “Savannah? Are you sure you aren’t just angry that I’m going, too?”

  With that, she fumed. Tears ran from her eyes, though she brushed them away bitterly as she said, “I can see that these bo-ho—whatever you called it— ideas have all come from one place. Your parlor, and all those books, most of which do not teach moral virtue but complicated thinking, graying of righteousness. Very little is godly in that library of yours. Far more is … I believe in simplicity and godliness. Honesty and cleanliness. Hard work. Girls ought to be warned against romantic notions, not fed them. This tainting of my youngest daughters is your doing.”

  “Well, I don’t rightly know what to say, Savannah. You never brought it up before.”

  “It never got so out of hand before.”

  It was true I believed in looking past the horizon. I couldn’t see how an apology was going to change what had been done over years past, in the nature of reading Homer and Groves and all the rest, in my book room. I said, “And that’s your last word on it?”

  “It is.”

  When I got to the door I turned to her, her face only half visible as she rocked that chair in bitter strokes. The wooden joints of the chair gave angry squeaks faster than the ticking of the clock I could hear from their parlor. I’ve had plenty of hurt in my life. Been angry enough to eat a two-by-four plank of wormwood with a bowl of nails for dessert. This here was different. This was the only sister I’d ever known, my best friend in the world, turning away from me for being who I was, after all the times she’s stood by me for the same reason, too. After all we’ve shared, from head colds to peach preserves, this is the end of it all. There had never been any word to me about what to let her children read. And hadn’t I just been thinking Charlie might not have gotten himself into such a fix marrying Elsa Maldonado, if I’d kept my children away from Shakespeare? I took a deep breath. There was a fragrance of rosemary from the sachets in the drawers on the air, but the room was cold. None of what Savannah was angry about could be undone. Don’t reckon I would if I could.

  I held the door open one extra second, said, “Suit yourself, then,” and left without closing it. I heard the rhythmic squeaking hesitate for just a moment, then I went out the front door.

  Out in the yard, Clover and Albert stood at the wagon talking to Chess. I climbed into the seat. “I’ll come back to get Granny after supper.” Albert watched me, wrinkled his brow and nodded sadly.

  Chess chucked the reins and we went up the road. He said, “Figure out what Miss Savannah’s got stuck in her craw?”

  Finding it h
ard to open my mouth to say the word, I muttered, “Yup.”

  “Get ‘er fixed?”

  “Seems Savannah is pure sick and tired of the cut of my clothes.”

  “Tarnation.”

  “Suppose it won’t matter, then, to be two miles farther down the road. Udell’s building you and Granny each a room. I told him I’d marry.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “Yup.”

  “When?”

  “He gave me a session of college as a marriage gift. I’m going to town to try my hand at that college for a bit. Then I’m coming back and marry him. I gave my word.”

  “College. Well, I’ll be.”

  May 13, 1907

  Mary Pearl comes over every afternoon and takes down Granny’s words. They are hushed-up about it, too, and the girl says she’s sworn to secrecy by her grandma. She stays late, sometimes. We fix supper or sew, and Elsa and Mary Pearl have returned to being friends. Far as I know, Mary Pearl has not sent her letter to Aubrey yet though he’s been scarce. I am of the mind that if their love is true, it will hold.

  My mama told me she wouldn’t have me doing the writing for her, as I had too many chores already, and she said she didn’t want me to read her memories until she got put in the ground. I laughed and asked, did she think I’d be shocked and embarrassed, and she said, “Maybe so.”

  Mary Pearl said there was nothing left of her mother’s flower bed. Javelinas have been a torment since those daffodil bulbs went in the ground, and they have had a puma lingering around hunting javelina dinner. I stared down the road toward Albert and Savannah’s place, thinking about those bulbs, and how she knew it wouldn’t work and still insisted on planting them.

  Chapter Twelve

  May 25, 1907

  April is lying in! I got her letter yesterday. Gilbert and I came to town soon as we could. She had summoned a midwife, so comforting words and watching the other children may be all I can offer her. What a blessing to have a real midwife at hand. Naturally, Gilbert disappeared right away. He heard one yell out of April and decided he’d be spending his time with Harland until it was all over and done.