Hidden Places (30 page)

‘‘Even better. Open it up and see, Eliza.’’

I turned it upside down and rifled through the pages as she had done.

‘‘Merry Christmas! And God bless us, every one!’’ Aunt Batty cheered as three one-hundred dollar bills floated out. We had found more money than I needed in only two books!

‘‘Well, would you look at that?’’ Aunt Batty said suddenly. Gabe had pulled
Treasure Island
off the shelf and a letter had fallen out of it.

‘‘What is it?’’ I asked her.

‘‘Remember that last letter from Matthew you asked me about? Here it is! I hid it in one of his favorite books.’’

The envelope she handed to me was limp and as thin as tissue paper. Matthew had written it on stationer y from a hotel in France:

April 14, 1918

Dear Aunt Betty,

Thank you for writing and telling me the news about my mother.I’ve seen so much death over here that I suppose I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. I loved her. And she never stopped loving you and me, did she? Please take care of Sam for her sake, okay? And for my sake, too. Don’t let his father destroy him like he destroyed everyone else.

Love now and always,
Matthew

But finding the letter wouldn’t help me unravel the mystery of whether or not Gabe was Matthew Wyatt. Except for the signature, the letter was typed. I slid it back into the envelope and tucked it inside
Treasure Island
again.

‘‘Here’s your money, Toots,’’ Aunt Batty said, pushing the bills into my hands. For a moment I was too overwhelmed to speak. I had enough for the mortgage! More than enough.

‘‘I...I’ll pay you back. I promise....’’

She waved me away. ‘‘Oh, I don’t want it back.’’

‘‘No, I can’t take this unless you make it a loan. I intend to pay you back just as soon as I sell our fruit.’’

She walked away from Gabe and me and stood gazing through the front window as if deep in thought. ‘‘Tell you what, Toots,’’ she finally said, facing us again. ‘‘I’ve always wanted to own Walter’s Pond. Will you sell it to me for five hundred dollars?’’

‘‘Gladly,’’ I said, wiping tears of relief. ‘‘You have a deal.’’

That’s when I took a good look around for the first time and noticed that Gabe had finished the kitchen roof and cleaned up the mess. The wainscoting could have used a coat of paint, and Gabe’s carpentry would never win first prize at the county fair, but Aunt Batty could use her kitchen again.

‘‘How long ago did you finish here?’’ I asked Gabe.

He shrugged. ‘‘Month or so ago.’’

I stared at Aunt Batty in wonder. ‘‘Yet you didn’t leave me? You stayed with me?’’ That seemed like an even bigger miracle to me than finding the money.

‘‘You needed me, Toots,’’ she said. ‘‘You and those wonderful kids of yours. How could I leave all of you?’’

‘‘But...but you’ve worked so hard for me all this time...and you didn’t have to.’’

She pulled me into her arms. ‘‘It isn’t work when you love someone.’’

On the day that the mortgage was due, I walked into Mr. Preston’s bank and handed him the $528.79 Frank Wyatt owed him. Mr. Preston looked shocked. And a little disappointed.

‘‘Well, Mrs. Wyatt, how about that? Frank Wyatt must have kept a few extra bills stuffed under his mattress, eh?’’

I remembered finding the money amongst the pages of Ebenezer Scrooge’s story and smiled. ‘‘That’s really none of your business, Mr. Preston.’’

I drove home feeling happier than I had in a long time. But trouble was determined to hound me. Wouldn’t you know that as soon as I overcame one crisis, the next one would rear its ugly head? This time the weather turned against me. Gabe had loaded Aunt Batty’s radio onto the pickup truck and driven it up to my house for all of us to enjoy. That’s how we heard the announcement— the weather bureau had issued a frost warning for our area that night.

‘‘Uh-oh, that’s bad news,’’ Aunt Batty said, shaking her head. ‘‘A frost could kill the blossoms. And no blossoms means no fruit.’’

‘‘Smudge pots!’’ I said, remembering. ‘‘My father-in-law used to set up smudge pots in the cherry and pear orchards if there was going to be a frost. He’d fill them full of oil, float a corn cob in each one for a wick, and let them burn all night.’’

Gabe was already on his feet. ‘‘I guess we’d better get started before the temperature drops.’’

All six of us bundled up and set to work. Becky and Aunt Batty gathered up corn cobs while the rest of us hauled hundreds of pots out of the attic of the apple barn and loaded them onto the back of the truck. But when we went to fill them from the big fuel oil tank we discovered that it was nearly empty. There was no place to buy more oil this time of night, either. I was so upset I couldn’t think straight.

‘‘Listen, it’ll be all right,’’ Gabe soothed. ‘‘We don’t have to light them yet, and we don’t have to fill them to the top. We’ll just put a little oil in each one and I’ll stay up and refill them when they start to burn out.’’

I remembered the story in the Bible about the widow and her kids who were in as big of a fix as I was in. God told her to have faith and just keep filling all the jars she had with oil, and the jug didn’t run out until she was all finished. I guess Aunt Batty’s prayers must have helped us that night because that’s exactly what happened with my oil barrel. Gabe kept filling smudge pots about half full, and even though I kept expecting the big drum to run dry any minute, it never did. We set out all the pots near the most vulnerable trees, then I sent Aunt Batty and the kids to bed. Gabe and I each had an extra gallon container full of oil and after lighting the pots sometime after midnight, we stayed up all night refilling them.

The hardest part was staying awake. By five o’clock in the morning I felt tuckered out. I topped off all the pots that needed it, then climbed into the pickup truck to rest for a minute and warm myself up. I had just leaned my head back and closed my eyes when Gabe opened the passenger door.

‘‘May I join you?’’ he asked, rubbing his hands together to warm them.

‘‘Sure, climb in.’’ I started the engine and let the heater warm us both up. ‘‘You’d better talk to me,’’ I said, closing my eyes again, ‘‘or I’m going to fall sound asleep.’’

‘‘Why don’t you go home and go to bed, Eliza? I can finish by myself. It’s nearly dawn.’’

‘‘No,’’ I yawned. ‘‘We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel now, and it’ll be a regular juggling act for you to keep all those fires burning by yourself.’’

Gabe chuckled. ‘‘There were times tonight when I felt like one of those guys in the circus who has to balance a dozen plates at a time and keep them all spinning.’’

‘‘While riding a unicycle,’’ I added, laughing with him, ‘‘and not letting any of them fall and break.’’

‘‘But we did it,’’ he said with a contented sigh. ‘‘We should congratulate ourselves.’’ He stuck out his hand, waiting for me to shake it. I hesitated, then stretched out my own hand and gave his a quick shake. Gabe’s skin was rough and calloused, his grip rockhard. We touched only briefly, but it sent a shiver through me that went all the way to my toes. I hoped he hadn’t noticed how rattled I was.

‘‘Are you warm enough?’’ I asked. When Gabe nodded I shut off the engine. The sudden silence rattled me even more so I started chattering, just like Becky does. ‘‘You know, all the time my father-in-law ran this place I never realized how demanding it all was. I had my own chores to do in the house while taking care of the kids, so I never gave much thought to what went on out here in the orchard. I know it took the two of them to get everything done, though. Frank had to hire help for a while after...when it was just him.’’ I stopped as abruptly as I started.

‘‘May I ask you a question?’’ Gabe said after a pause. He sounded so serious it scared me.

‘‘You can ask, though I can’t promise I’ll answer.’’

‘‘You never talk much about your husband,’’ he said. ‘‘Your kids are starting to talk about him and I think it’s helping them grieve for him. But I’ve noticed that you don’t. You hardly even say his name. You avoided saying it just now when you were talking.’’

‘‘That isn’t a question.’’

‘‘I know. I guess the question is ‘why not?’ But that’s really none of my business.’’ He sighed. ‘‘I’m tired, so I’m wording this very poorly. What I really want to tell you is that if you ever need to talk...If you ever want to talk about Sam...I’d be very happy to listen.’’

‘‘Thank you.’’

Gabe waited. The long silence became uncomfortable. I knew he expected me to pour out all the grief and sorrow I had stored up for so long, but I had nothing to say. He finally broke the silence first.

‘‘I think one of the things that makes it so hard for your children is that their father is so completely gone. There aren’t any pictures of him, no belongings of his lying around anywhere in the house, no sign that he ever existed except for these clothes you loaned me or maybe what they see of him in each other—like the color of his hair or his eyes.’’

‘‘That was my father-in-law’s doing. He did the same thing each time one of them died—he erased every trace of them. There aren’t any pictures of his wife or other sons, either.’’

‘‘But Frank Wyatt is dead now. You could bring Sam’s memory back if you wanted to.’’

‘‘I don’t. I think it’s better this way.’’ I felt close to tears and I didn’t know why. How could I admit to Gabe that the sadness I felt whenever I thought of Sam or mentioned his name was caused by guilt, not grief?

‘‘Do Becky and Luke get their red hair from him?’’ he asked quietly.

‘‘No. From my mother.’’ As soon as I’d told him, I was sorry. If he started asking me about her, the dam would break for sure. Thankfully he didn’t. He was still stuck on Sam.

‘‘I can’t help wondering what your husband was like. I have a fairly clear picture of what his father was like—but not him.’’

I realized that I didn’t have a clear picture of Sam either, and I’d been married to him for nine years. The truth made me angry and it loosened my tongue because I knew that the fault wasn’t mine or Sam’s—it was his father’s.

‘‘Sam never had a chance to find out who he was,’’ I said in a trembling voice. ‘‘He stuffed all his dreams and all his feelings down inside himself and lived his entire life trying to be the son his father wanted him to be, trying to please him. I say ‘trying’ because you could never please Frank Wyatt. He never saw all the things you did right, only the one tiny thing you did wrong. He was like that man in the Bible who tries to take the speck of dust out of someone’s eye. I heard a preacher talk about that verse one time. I happened to be near a logging area, and I had just seen all those huge piles of logs everywhere. I could imagine that miserable man in the parable with one of those beams in his eye and I knew that it must have hurt him a lot. A speck of dust in your eye is bothersome enough.

‘‘Then I met my father-in-law,’’ I continued. ‘‘He had one of those big old beams in each one of his eyes, and they blinded him. He couldn’t see Sam—he couldn’t even see his grandchildren. All he ever did was criticize, and he never showed them one ounce of love or gratitude or approval. Even worse, those beams caused Frank so much pain that he lashed out all the time, like a wounded animal. I almost envied Sam when he died and he could finally get away from his father. I’ve always hoped the Good Lord himself was waiting for him on the other side and that Sam would finally get to hear
someone
say, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ ’’

Gabe was very still. The engine made a ticking sound as it cooled. Then Gabe said quietly, ‘‘My father was the same type of man.’’ I didn’t move, didn’t say a word, afraid he wouldn’t continue if I did. ‘‘The thing is—’’

But then Gabe did stop. He shook his head, and his whole body seemed to shiver as if he couldn’t bring himself to talk about the man. I understood. I couldn’t talk out loud about my daddy, either. We had both reached a wall we weren’t willing to climb.

‘‘Hey, the sun’s coming up,’’ he said suddenly. ‘‘Maybe we can finally let these fires go out.’’

He climbed out of the truck and walked around to lean against the front fender on my side, facing the sunrise. I climbed out, too, and stood beside him, stretching.

‘‘I’ll run into town today and buy some more fuel oil,’’ I said. ‘‘Then we can fill all the smudge pots to the top and let them burn on their own tonight.’’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gabe looking at me. He was biting his lip, trying not to smile.

‘‘What’s so funny?’’ I asked, facing him square on.

‘‘Your face. It’s covered with soot. You look like Al Jolson.’’

I couldn’t help smiling. ‘‘So do you. We could start our own traveling minstrel show.’’

Gabe laughed as he pulled a bandana from his pocket. ‘‘Here, hold still. I’ll wipe it off for you.’’ He held the back of my head with one hand and began dabbing my face with the handkerchief. We stood just inches apart, closer than we’d ever stood before, and my heart began thumping foolishly. All of a sudden Gabe stopped wiping. I made the mistake of looking into his eyes the same moment that he gazed into mine. His were as soft and warm as melted chocolate. His hand still held my head and he pulled me gently toward himself, finally closing his eyes as our lips met.