The Memory of Lemon (3 page)

In my mind, you're still a beautiful fifteen-year-old with your whole life before you. You deserve the best.

Love you, for what that's worth—

Dad

P.S. Please write back.

It was too much to take in.

My dad
.

In January, I had gotten a postcard from him with a return address of Project Uplift, a nonprofit group that fed the homeless
in Kansas City. He had abandoned my mom and me when I was in high school. I had mixed feelings about him, to say the least, but still, I didn't like imagining him destitute, without a roof over his head. I had kept the postcard, but hadn't responded right away, not sure what to do.

And then the sour flavor of anger that had tormented me for weeks also brought a surprise gift—a glimpse into my dad's high school days, when his drinking problem had started. I had seen him sneaking sips of whiskey in a neighbor's garage to calm his worries about going to Vietnam.

At the same time that I had this vision, I had been ending things with Luke, my charming, handsome, successful husband with the chronic wandering eye. I realized that I had stayed with Luke for much longer than I intended. But not for the most obvious reason. I hadn't been hanging on to Luke because I desperately needed a male in my life after my father abandoned his family. I had taken Luke back time after time because I had been unconsciously trying to keep my dad's pattern from being mine as well. Love 'em, leave 'em, then fall off the face of the earth.

After I finally gathered the courage to leave Luke and start over, I had a breakthrough idea.

Why not write to my dad?

Now my homeless, missing-in-action father had written me a letter that actually said something. And was from an actual address. Not just a plain white “thinking of you” postcard from a town he was just passing through.

We were having a long-distance connection, the very old-fashioned way.

I typed the address into Google on my iPhone and found
the City Vue on old Route 40. I touched the red locator balloon with my fingertips, as close as I'd gotten to my dad in years, then hugged the phone to my chest.

Dad
.

How many red locator balloons would it take to track his journey from Ohio, over the years, to where he was now? Jack O'Neil, the wanderer.

I held the letter with shaking hands and read it again. This time, a surge of anger surprised me with its intensity.

He had been thinking about
pie
? What about us? His daughter, his mother, his sister, his wife whom he'd left all those years ago. The people who had to pick up the pieces when he fell apart.

But one thing just led to another,
my dad had written.

He was right about that.

After he left, Mom and I lost our house and had to move in with Gran. Mom and Gran's relationship soured.

Aunt Helen never married. Mom refused to move on.

And I won't even get started on me.

Jack O'Neil had been a human wrecking ball, and we were all still picking up the pieces. He had thought only of himself, not the people he said he loved. How could we ever trust him again?

What did he want from us now? Forgiveness? A new start?

I folded the letter and shoved it back in the
envelope.

FEBRUARY 1818

IRELAND

The Wanderer

Eliza Shawcross sat in the morning room, a fine woolen shawl around her bony shoulders to keep out the chill. Even with the coal fire burning in the grate, she could barely feel her feet in their hand-stitched leather shoes. Her feet always seemed to be cold.

Her ash brown hair was parted in the middle with side curls peeping out from under her lace cap, the mark of a married woman. Now in her thirties, Eliza knew she had lost whatever bloom she once had. Although her hair had dulled over the years, her gray eyes remained sharp and clear. Her mouth scraped across her face in a thin, bitter line as she gripped the quill pen, blowing on her fingers to warm them. The Ballykinsale household account book lay open on the desk. Her own black-penned lines
showed the same elegant hand as her late father's. But her attention was elsewhere.

From the long window, she saw the boy raking the front garden, picking up the dead leaves and limbs from the boxwood and holly beds, the aftermath of the previous day's gale. That afternoon, he should start on the back—the pleasure garden and the kitchen garden—where the rigid protection of cold stone walls had saved the plants from the worst of the storm.

Sean O'Neil was a handsome boy, actually a young man now, Eliza had to admit. Chestnut hair, green eyes. A good, sturdy build to him. Intelligent. He could read and write; she had seen to that. And a hard worker, like his parents, and just as Irish, through and through.

His mother, Cathleen, had been a comfort to Eliza, keeping vigil each time a child washed from her body before its time, swept away on that cursed, bloody tide. Bringing her that special tea she brewed with a strip of dried orange peel.

“For a new day, missus,” Cathleen would say each time.

Eliza removed Cathleen's funeral holy card, printed with the image of Jesus pointing to his red heart encircled by a crown of thorns, from where it was hidden under the desk blotter. The priest at the Anglican church in Queenstown would regard this as a vulgar and lurid display of overwrought feeling. “Papist,” he would sneer if he saw it. He would also be shocked to learn that Eliza had paid for these cards as well as the funeral.

Cathleen and her husband were two years gone, killed by a runaway team of horses hauling barrels of salted butter to the Queenstown harbor. The butter had been seen to first, the kegs passed hand to hand down to the dock and onto the ship,
while the O'Neils bled to death in the street. Eliza could only imagine how long they lay there before that shabby priest with the whiskey breath came to administer their last rites. Mr. Shawcross had their bodies taken in a cart for burial in St. Brigid's cemetery.

So it was in Ireland these days. Catholic. Protestant.

Looking at the holy card, Eliza again felt the pain for what she was about to do.

She had never been a beauty, and Eliza knew that Charles Shawcross had married her as much for her father's estate as for the small personal charms she could claim. On the rare occasions when he came to her at night—in yet another attempt to produce a child—she gritted her teeth, even as she opened her body. It was always the same. He patted her much as he would a skittish horse he was about to mount. Then he turned her on her side in the dark and lay behind her. Without a word, he pulled up her linen shift, his hot breath on the back of her neck. He never spoke her name. Perhaps he pretended she was someone else.

She was a brood mare who couldn't foal. Yet Eliza still did her woman's duty. The promise of a child made this bearable. When it was over, he gave her a kiss on her cheek, then went back to his room. She slept alone.

Eliza got up from the desk and stood in front of the fire, holding on to the mantel as if for strength.

Her husband had started looking at the boy with more interest than was seemly. Sean had assumed his father's duties as head gardener of Ballykinsale shortly after Mr. O'Neil was gone, and he had performed admirably, impeccably, from the first. Anyone could see that.

“He needs my guidance,” Mr. Shawcross had said once again as he helped himself to kippers and boiled eggs at breakfast that morning. There was always an explanation for his seeking out the boy, offering a word of advice, a manly pat on the shoulder that had begun to linger like a caress. The boy didn't see what was coming. Maybe her husband didn't, either.

“I'm riding to Queenstown today, my dear,” he had told her, sipping his tea from a thin china cup. “There's a man with a promising dapple gray that I've had my eye on.”

“Shall I tell Cook to keep supper warm for you, then?”

“No, no, I'll dine in town, and be back after you're abed.”

And so the time had come. Eliza rang for the maid. “Please ask Padraig to have the pony cart ready in an hour. I'll be taking Sean with me on an errand to Queenstown. Then please go to the attic and bring down my large leather case to Mr. Shawcross's room.”

It was a risk to involve the maid, but the valise was too bulky for Eliza to manage on her own.

With a feverish energy, Eliza unlocked the linen press in the upstairs hall and removed a small bag of gold coins from the back of a drawer. In her husband's dressing room, she gathered two linen shirts and a paisley cravat. A silk waistcoat from their courting days. A fine broadcloth coat in bottle green that her husband had not worn in years and would not miss. A pair of breeches now too small for him. Silken hose and fine leather dress shoes. A warm woolen muffler she had knitted him for Christmas and he had yet to wear. She placed it all in the valise.

Slipping into the gardener's cottage, she quickly gathered what few clothes Sean possessed. He was already wearing his
good boots and a thick sweater. She took Cathleen's coral brooch and Thomas's pipe so Sean would have something to remember his parents by.

Padraig brought the pony cart around the circular front drive, where Eliza waited in her bonnet and cape. Sean helped her into the cart, and she handed the reins over to him. He didn't notice the large valise behind the seat, but “hee-yupped” the pony to canter down the drive.

At the dock in Queenstown, Sean took the valise from the back of the pony cart and handed it to Eliza.

“No, this is for you,” she said. “And this.” She handed him the bag of coins. “Keep it safe.”

The boy looked shocked and scared.

“Mr. Shawcross wanted to surprise you,” Eliza said, “and it looks like he did. After what happened to your parents, we want you to start fresh in America. You'll have clothes, money, and this.” She gave him a letter of introduction, which she had written in the style of her husband. Who would know so far away?

“Keep it safe, by your heart,” she said, steeling herself as she folded the letter and put it in the small leather case that had been her mother's.

“Missus,” Sean said in a whisper, his eyes brimming with tears.

—

When the
Eleanora
sailed out of Queenstown for New York, hours later on the afternoon tide, the snow was coming down in thin petals, like the blossoms of the Ballykinsale whitebeam savaged by the gale.

Eliza leaned on Padraig, trampling the white blooms into the snow as she hobbled from the stable yard to the kitchen, wracked with silent grief. The startled cook settled her before the fire and poured her a mug of hot, sweet tea flavored with a strip of lemon peel and laced with brandy.

Slowly Eliza came back to herself. She took another sip. It would do. But it couldn't begin to thaw the cold place that had settled in her heart.

EARLY SPRING 1820

AUGUSTA, KENTUCKY

When the viburnum—the wayfaring tree—bloomed a creamy white, it would be time to prune the roses, but he wouldn't be there to do it.

Sean O'Neil threw the last of the boxwood clippings into the bonfire. He had once again restored order to the garden, a sun-warmed refuge from the dark wildwood on either side of the river and as far as the eye could see in the hills beyond.

He could clear his head in a garden, where the sunlight could make its way in and the plants could breathe.

He straightened up, brushing the debris from the linen shirt he wore like a smock. When he arrived in New York, his clothes had been the clothes of a gentleman, but his old work boots told a different story. Soon, he had sold the fine bottle green coat to a tailor and had bought instead a dead man's buckskin trousers at a market stall. They better fit his new life.

Traveling on a flatboat from New York to Philadelphia, he had kept his letter of introduction safe in all weather, and there had been all weather, such like he had never known in Ireland.

Melting heat, sodden heat, dry heat. Bone-jarring cold, rain that fell sideways, waterspouts on the river.

But the letter from Charles Shawcross had opened doors at the Bartram family's botanic garden across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. He would have liked to stay there and study the native plants that the Quaker John Bartram had brought back from his travels. In the Bartram garden, Sean had seen the beautiful magnolias, mountain laurels, azaleas, and rhododendrons flower in spring and the sugar maples, black gums, viburnum, and sumac blaze with color in autumn, a world of difference from the plants he had learned to cultivate at home.

He could have learned so much.

But there was always that bit of unpleasant business about being Irish, and Sean had had to move on.

And now he had to move on, yet again, from Ezekiel Peabody's garden in this little village on the banks of the Ohio River, although this was not about Sean's accent or his clothes or the presumption that he was as low as a Negro.

The herb woman had come that morning to dig the last of Mr. Peabody's comfrey root, the plant Sean knew by the Gaelic name
lus cnámh
. The root was black, but its inner flesh was almost stark white. She once used it to make liniment to ease the old man's aches and pains. But no more. Mr. Peabody had been dead a fortnight.

Peabody's son and his wife now occupied the home—and the
garden. They had brought their slaves, a housemaid called Sullah and her husband, Pompey. Pompey was a quiet, hardworking man, but he was no gardener. He couldn't tell comfrey, with its bell-shaped lavender flowers, from sage, or
sáiste
. Sean hated to think what the garden would look like in a year's time.

But it was not his problem.

The new Peabodys did not want a gardener.

The young Mr. Peabody had been kind enough to suggest a man he knew in Queen City who might have need of one, a physician who owned a fine house, one Daniel Drake, who also happened to be Irish. Sean hoped Queen City was bigger than Augusta and friendly to people of his kind.

At least Queen City wasn't wilderness.

This big raw country was not to his liking. It was wild like the worst of gales, and he never knew what next would blow into his life. It kept him on edge.

When the flatboat left in late afternoon for the forty-mile, all-night trip to Queen City, Sean helped the herb woman tie up her mule on deck between the bales of tobacco and hemp. She untied her baskets of potions and tinctures and her gunnysacks of roots and herbs and set them on the deck. She regularly made the trip to Queen City to sell her medicines and see her daughter, Sarah, recently married.

Together, Sean in his buckskin and the herb woman in her straw bonnet and heavy wool shawl stood on the flat deck, feeling the river run its westerly course beneath their feet.

Sean marveled at the flocks of brilliant green parroquets that glittered in the buttonwood trees, those tall, pale trees with the
peeling bark that he knew as
craobh sice.
Their pale yellow flowers dropped silently into the muddy green water.

When they floated by cattails that grew in marshy areas where little creeks fed into the river, he counted scores of blackbirds with red and yellow markings on their wings.

As night fell, the lanterns in the forecastle shone their dim light on the dark river water. Sean had heard tales of giant fish and turtles that could snap off a man's leg. The flatboat kept close to the steep banks. If they hit a sandbar, the men would use the long poles to move them away to deeper water. If they hit a snag and capsized, it was a shorter swim to shore.

Sean sat on the plank deck, his back against his valise, packed with everything he owned in the world.

Abigail Newcomb, the herb woman, sat next to him, smoking her clay pipe. He was grateful for her calm, steady presence. He stole a glance at her, her face shadowed by the bonnet. There was something that reminded him of his missus, who had been so kind to him in Ireland. Mrs. Shawcross and the herb woman might be around the same age, he thought.

Someone played a banjo for a while and sang a few mournful songs, but then got tired and put the instrument away.

Sean and the other passengers were left with the sounds—and the terrors—of the night. The scream of a big cat from somewhere up in the hills made Sean's skin prickle.