A Violet Season (4 page)

“I’m not,” he said. “I had a fine year, but my calling is elsewhere.” He must have sensed what she was thinking, for he added, “Folks think my father must be disappointed, but he knows you can’t enter the ministry without hearing the call.”

“I’m sure your parents will be very proud of you no matter what route you take,” Ida said. “Even if it turns out to be farming,” she added, and he laughed.

“My mother thinks I need the fresh air,” Mr. Jacobs said. “But I’m afraid I wasn’t studious enough to have ruined my health in the library.”

“Well, they’ll do their best to ruin your back up on the farm,” Ida said, and though he smiled at her, she heard the unintended bitterness in her voice. Frank’s back had been ruined, both literally and figuratively. But her brothers-in-law had a reputation of being generous with their workers and the community. In fact, if anyone were known for being harsh, it was Frank. Ida made an excuse about the laboring cow and said a quick goodbye to avoid further embarrassing herself.

*   *   *   

When Ida and Alice arrived home from church, Frank reported that the heifer was restless. But Ida had dinner to cook, and the cow might labor for many hours. They had their Sunday dinner, as usual, at two o’clock—today a loin of pork from the Mortons’ farm with last year’s potatoes, from which Ida had cut many eyes, and some new asparagus, a sure sign that summer was coming. By three o’clock Ida and Alice were back at work, cleaning the kitchen and collecting the week’s dirty clothing to soak in a tub of soapy water in preparation for Monday’s laundering. The new nursling arrived at four, as Ida was scrubbing the last soiled trousers for soaking. She had just enough time to dry her hands on her apron, hang it behind the back door, and smooth her hair before greeting her guests.

The nursling’s aunt and uncle stood on the stoop with the infant wrapped in a white knitted blanket. He came with a basket containing two sheets and another blanket, some diapers and dresses, a soft little hairbrush with a cherrywood handle, though he hardly had a hair on his head, and four glass feeding bottles with removable nipples made of India rubber. The aunt later took great care to explain how to clean these properly. This laborious process included sterilizing the bottles in the oven for a quarter of an hour and then, once they were filled with cow’s milk, steaming them for thirty minutes to kill any germs. Ida couldn’t imagine ever using them.

Alice served them a cup of tea and some cake, and they sat at the kitchen table, the baby in the aunt’s lap, and talked pleasantly for the better part of an hour. The baby’s name was longer than he: George Ashley Higgins King III. The family called him Ashley, a fitting name, for his skin was gray as ash. They spoke of his mother at some length, as if they felt it important for Ida to know he was loved and missed and must be given superior care.
She assured them she would write Mrs. King often regarding his progress. Then the conversation shifted to other topics; they had questions about the farm and Ida’s children and Underwood itself, for they had never traveled north of West Point. Finally the baby began to fuss, and after his aunt jostled him on her lap for some time, his wails became more insistent. The aunt looked directly at Ida and said, “May I watch you?”

“Of course,” Ida said, standing. “Alice, would you clean up, please? Perhaps Mr. King would like to read the newspaper.” Then she ushered the aunt into the rear bedroom.

When they had closed the door behind them, the aunt handed Ida the baby for the first time. He weighed barely more than a bowl of bread dough. Ida tried not to show her surprise. She laid the bundle on the bed and unwrapped the infant from his blanket. Indeed, there was almost nothing to him. Though he was two weeks old, he looked like a newborn, without a pinch of plump on his arms or his legs. He had too much skin, which wrinkled at his forehead in generous folds. Only his mouth seemed big; she could see clear back into his red throat as he screamed.

“Please, you may sit here,” Ida said to the aunt, gesturing to the edge of the bed, and the woman sat primly, fingering her skirt as she watched Ida carry the baby to the rocker in the corner.

“There, there, love,” Ida said as she loosened her undergarments to release her breasts, already dripping at the sound of the baby’s cry. Ida cupped his head in her right hand and, holding his body the length of her right forearm, guided him to her left breast. He choked and fussed and flailed his arms. He sputtered and pulled his face away and wailed some more. Ida dared not look up at the aunt. “There, there,” she said, and tried again. Her milk fell in large drops on his cheeks and his bare head, and she slowly rocked and stroked the fragile top of his head with two fingers. He smacked his lips then and rooted about, searching for her nipple. When she guided it again into his mouth, he sucked and gurgled before pulling
off and gasping, then sucked again and pulled off again, on and off, choking and wailing until she managed to settle him in for as much as two minutes before he arched his neck again and sneezed. Ida laughed then and looked at the aunt.

“Is he getting anything?” the aunt asked.

“He is, just a bit,” Ida said. “Did he take the bottles?”

“Not well,” the aunt said in a timid voice. “The doctor recommended them, but he never took to them.”

“We’ll give him a rest and then try the other side,” Ida said. “I think he’s going to do fine.” And it was true. When she shifted the baby to her other breast, after a fussy moment, he latched on and nursed himself to sleep in a few minutes’ time.

“That’s more than he’s had to eat in all his life,” the aunt said with a nervous smile, and Ida, still rocking, gave her a reassuring nod.

The woman and her husband didn’t know what to do after that, with the baby full and asleep. It was getting on to suppertime, and though Ida’s family had had their large meal, she invited the pair to stay. They asked instead where they could find a hotel. They would stay the night and call again in the morning.

The baby lay beside her that night, and Ida slept lightly, waking often to see that he was breathing. What had seemed a manageable challenge that afternoon haunted her in the night hours, when worries lay their ceiling low over her. He must nurse some more, he must gain weight at once. What if he were to perish in her care? At the slightest whimper, she pulled him close, and he suckled briefly before falling again into his own fitful sleep.

So when the heifer began her frightful lowing—an extended moan, leaping high at the end—Ida was already awake. Frank got up and pulled his overalls over his nightshirt and stepped into his boots without any socks and trudged out to the barn. The baby and Jasper didn’t stir, but Ida couldn’t bear it, imagining how the poor heifer felt. Finally she, too, put on her wrap and pulled on Oliver’s old boots to join Frank in the barn.

This heifer, the daughter of their milk cow, had never calved before, and she was clearly anxious. Whereas she usually greeted Ida with a nuzzle, tonight her eyes bulged fearfully and seemed to see nothing. She had lain on her side, and from time to time she lashed her legs so hard against the stall that Ida thought she would knock it down. But Frank knelt at the young cow’s side, his head close to hers, and mumbled nonsense in her ear as he stroked her tawny neck. When he saw Ida in the lantern light, he glanced up but made no move to leave the heifer’s side. He simply said in a quiet voice, “You can see the hooves. She’s coming along.”

Ida peered over the stall’s edge, and the astringent smell of amniotic fluid rose up. The heifer strained her neck and lowed again, and Ida could see the two pointy black hooves of the calf poking through the tender, fleshy opening of her birth canal.

“Poor girl,” Ida said, coming around to her head again, though she didn’t reach in to touch her. Frank continued his stroking and his low murmur, words meant only for the heifer.

“Are you going to help her out?” Ida asked, wondering if he would rope the baby’s legs and pull it into the world.

“Give her some time,” he said, and ducked his head to the heifer’s again.

Much as she felt for the cow and wanted to see her through, Ida knew Frank would call if he needed help. It was more important to stay with the baby. Reluctantly, she left the heifer to her labor. In the house, Ashley was sleeping soundly, a tiny bean of a baby in the middle of a great mattress.

Not long after, as the room lightened before dawn, Ida heard a final squawk from the barn, then quiet. Her heart quickened, waiting for word. Twenty minutes later, Frank returned with the news that a female calf had been born. He sat on the edge of the bed and mussed his short-cropped hair with wet hands; he had already buried the placenta in the woods, to keep predators at bay, and washed at the outside pump. He might have caught a few minutes
of sleep before his day began, but as he dropped his hands to the mattress, the baby yapped in disapproval, then latched on to Ida’s breast ferociously and suckled for several minutes. Frank stared at Ida and the baby, his face slack with exhaustion. Then he stood and padded barefoot into the kitchen.

Not half an hour later, Ida rose to join him, and by the time Ashley’s aunt and uncle came to call, the household was awake and at work. They said they imagined the baby looked a mite better than he had the afternoon before, and though Ida felt considerably worse, she was relieved at the suggestion. After the aunt kissed Ashley a tearful goodbye and they took their leave, Alice watched them depart from the kitchen window.

“What will you do when you get one that won’t nurse, Ma?” she asked.

“I hope I never shall,” Ida said.

“But what if he hadn’t nursed last night?”

“Eventually he would have died,” Ida said. “But he’s going to be all right now, aren’t you?” she cooed to the baby in her arms, knowing that her words were really a prayer.

S
hortly after Ashley’s arrival, Frank brought home a few burlap sacks of new violet cuttings. That evening Ida and Alice got to work, pulling or slicing off all but the top two or three leaves, pinching off early roots, and discarding damaged runners. The work was important, for the cuttings they prepared would grow the next year’s violet crop. While the cuttings took root in raised beds outside, the men spent the month of June plowing up new soil and harrowing in manure. The resulting mixture was shoveled into the freshly whitewashed greenhouse beds.

In a few of the greenhouses, the plants had been allowed to set their own runners, but the job of planting eight thousand cuttings in each of the remaining twenty greenhouses was monumental. It called for the help of most members of the family, as well as a good number of hired workers from the village, mostly older children who were out of school and women who would set aside their housework to earn a dollar a day. Even with extra hired hands, planting was a two-week job.

They began the first week with the greenhouses behind Harold’s house in the old wheat field. It was an expansive level spot where they had constructed eighteen of their twenty-nine houses in three neat rows running north and south, a lesson they’d learned after building
the first three houses east-west on the hillside. These newer houses were pitched sixteen inches higher at the south end to allow the hot water from the stokehouse on the north end to rise and the cool water to flow downhill to the furnace. The heat would keep the cool-weather violets just warm enough to make it through the winter.

This time of year, of course, no heat was needed, and to allow the air to circulate while the workers were planting, several glass roof panels were raised on a pulley system, the ropes tied off on large nails in the adjoining packing house. Each greenhouse had a single aisle down the center with deep beds full of fresh soil, which should be free of harmful nematodes that could stunt the plants. The beds began at thigh height and stretched back to the walls farther than any man’s reach; planting the rear half of the beds required the assembly of narrow boards on which the workers would lie in order to access them.

This first morning Harold instructed the boys and the men to climb up on the boards and plant the rear of the beds. The women and the girls would stand in the pathways and plant what they could reach from there, a job that, despite the stooping, was easier on the body and could be interrupted to tend to the children and the meals.

Experienced planters were assigned to help the inexperienced; Ida was paired with Joe Jacobs, the minister’s son. He had never been out on the boards, so Ida showed him how to hook his board on the heating pipe that ran along the wall and secure it to the bed frame at the lower end, then inch himself sideways up the slanting plank to the rear of the bed. There, he must balance on elbow and hip and reach down into the bed to set the plants in the fresh soil. He wobbled precariously on his way up the board, and Ida assured him, “It feels impossible at first, but you’ll soon feel stable. No one ever falls.”

Joe waved his upper arm in the air for balance as he shifted his weight. “Most find it easiest to bend the lower leg—that’s right,” she said.

“They didn’t tell me this would be a circus act,” he said.

“It’s a business,” Ida told him as one of the boys set the first bucket of cuttings at her feet. “We can’t waste the space for lots of walkways. Every foot of it needs to be planted.”

“Mowing the church grounds is looking pretty good right now,” Joe said. “What do I do next?”

The men came along to set the planting grid with a spiked wooden bar that left holes in the soil ten inches apart, ten wide and four deep. Then Ida showed Joe how to set his trowel in each hole and make room for the cuttings. She set to work on her own planting, reaching her arm’s length into the beds to the point where Joe’s plants would have to meet her own. Next to them, Oliver helped the Hoskins boy through his first day; Joe and Oliver exchanged some talk about the war. Two of Oliver’s friends—Claudie’s brother Avery and Alan Harris—had already enlisted and were headed to Tampa.

While Ida worked, Jasper amused himself with a pile of dirt and a wooden spoon outside the greenhouse door for a good long time, but by nine-thirty Ashley was beginning to squirm and fuss in his basket. Ida set her work aside and took him to the house for his nursing. While she was gone, Alice took her place at the beds with Joe. Later Ida nursed the baby again while she ate her lunch of bread and cheese and strawberries from her garden; then he slept soundly until two o’clock and amused himself by contemplating the light and shadow above him for a half hour before he began to fuss again.