Wedding Ring (18 page)

Tessa had already run out of small talk. “Let’s get the fabric and get out of here.”

“It’s in that trunk over there.” Helen pointed to the trunk that held what was left of her husband’s personal effects. Tessa remembered it clearly.

“You’re sure? I thought those were your husband’s things.”

“He was your grandpa. You never think of him that way, do you?”

Tessa was sorry, but she didn’t. Not only hadn’t she known Fate Henry, her mother hadn’t known him, either. For that matter, it seemed that Helen had hardly known him, at least as an adult.

“I guess I don’t, but I should, shouldn’t I? Why do you keep the fabric in there?”

“I’ll tell you when we get downstairs. Your mama might want to hear.”

A month ago, Tessa would have doubted that very much. Nancy had spent her adulthood pruning her Shenandoah Valley roots. But now Tessa thought she might well want to know more about her father. She seemed to know little enough.

“You’ll find the fabric at the bottom of the trunk,” Helen said. “You can bend over, and I can’t. Not so well, anyway.”

Tessa went to the trunk and opened it, lifting clothing and other effects until she was nearly at the bottom. She found the blue fabric, neatly folded along with some other large scraps. She guessed there might be as much as a yard of it left.

She closed the trunk and took the fabric back to her grandmother. “You were right. How long has it been there?”

“More years than your mama’s been alive.”

Tessa wanted to ask more questions. She needed to be asking questions tonight, to remember that other people had lives and sorrows, and she was not alone. But she knew she wouldn’t get answers until they were downstairs again.

She followed her grandmother to the attic stairs and flipped off the light. Then she followed her down to the first floor, moving slowly as Helen took the steps with the care of someone who knew the dangers of a broken hip or ankle.

The coffee was brewing by the time they settled in the kitchen, and Nancy opened a tin of cookies that had been dropped off by a visitor from Helen’s church that morning. “It’s nice to know people are thinking of you, Mama,” she said, as she set the tin on the table.

“Never did think I’d be one of those shut-ins gets a tin of cookies or a pot of chrysanthemums every couple of months from the ladies auxiliary. Never saw myself that way.”

“I don’t know about the chrysanthemums, but the cookies look great.” Tessa reached for one and took a bite. “Chocolate chip.” She remembered with the usual pang that they had been Kayley’s favorite.

Nancy came back with mugs and a pint of half-and-half; then she brought the coffee and filled the mugs almost to the brim. “I’m glad you’re both up. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

“If you’re going to complain about the heat, don’t,” Helen said.

Nancy sat down. “I don’t mind the heat so much now that the screens are fixed. Besides, now if I have a hot flash, I’ve got something to blame it on besides growing old.”

Tessa reached for another cookie. “You have hot flashes?”

“Why? You were hoping for a brother or sister?”

Tessa nearly choked on a cookie fragment. “I gave up hoping for that about thirty years ago. But now that we’re on the subject, I always wondered why you didn’t have more kids.”

“I always thought there’d be plenty of time. Then, one day, there wasn’t anymore.”

Tessa thought there were a few things missing from that explanation, but she didn’t want to probe. This was more than her mother had ever said.

“I always thought you just weren’t sure your marriage was good enough,” Helen said bluntly.

Nancy closed her eyes a moment and shook her head. “The things you say.”

“I don’t have enough time left to pussyfoot around, do I? Anything needs saying, needs saying right now.”

Tessa the peacemaker emerged. “Why don’t you say a few things about yourself then, Gram. Tell us about the blue fabric.” She gave Nancy a short version of her trip to the quilt shop and Helen’s promise of matching fabric. Then she sat back.

“You’re sure you want to hear this?” Helen said. “It might take a while.”

“We’ve got plenty of cookies,” Nancy said. “Plenty of coffee.”

“Since when did you start eating dessert?”

“I don’t smoke. I hardly drink. I need a vice if I’m going to survive a summer with you.” Nancy reached for a cookie and came away with several.

Helen settled in and looked almost eager to begin. “You probably guessed by now that the blue cloth has something to do with Fate, else why would it be in his trunk?”

“That makes sense,” Tessa said.

“What you don’t know yet is that he give it to me himself, when I was nearly twenty. That wasn’t so young in those days, not so young as it is now. I wasn’t a pretty girl, but there were still men who had their eye on me. There was only one man I wanted, though, and he didn’t have a blame thing to give me. Or at least he didn’t think so.”

Tessa cradled her coffee mug and looked over the top at her grandmother. An hour ago she hadn’t been sure she could face the next moment of her life. Now, in the coffee-scented kitchen, her grandmother on one side, her mother on the other, the world looked a little different.

She wondered if this was what Mack missed so deeply, this sense of caring and being cared for simply because one existed in the same time and place as people who shared life stories, a forgotten past, bloodlines. Was his need so very simple?

And no matter how hard she fought it, was hers?

1940

O
ver the past two years, Delilah had slowed down considerably, unable some mornings to rise from her bed. In the winter of ’38 scarlet fever had swept through the area and taken two children and an old man up closer to the river. Delilah had been sick for days, and Helen had nursed her faithfully. Once the fever broke, they had all expected her to recover quickly, but the malaise dragged on.

Determined to get better, Delilah had tried special herbal teas, even resorted to the local custom of “powwowing” with a practitioner who lived on lower Fitch. The old woman had stood at her shoulder and in a loud voice repeated words that sounded like they came straight from the Bible. Then she asked Delilah to plant and tend a garden of bleeding heart outside the kitchen door. But the mysterious incantation didn’t help, and the flowers didn’t thrive, because Delilah didn’t have the strength to nurture them.

As a last resort, Cuddy borrowed money to take his wife to a doctor in Washington, D.C., but the doctor wasn’t encouraging. He explained that the problem was Delilah’s heart, probably as a result of the fever. The doctor told Cuddy that only a miracle would cure her now.

As the months of ill health had stretched into years, Helen and her brothers had taken over most of Delilah’s chores. Weak and frighteningly pale, Delilah still cooked dinner and supper and did a bit of the cleaning. But Helen cooked breakfast, tended the vegetable garden and did most of the canning alone or with the help of her aunts. She slopped the hogs, milked the cow, fed the chickens and did all the washing and ironing.

She was a woman now, but there was precious little time to think about what that meant. Young men visited; she chatted with them at church, or when families and neighbors gathered to make apple butter or butcher hogs in the fall. But there was no time to worry about her future. For the time being her future was in Toms Brook, caring for her mother.

Helen had another reason for patience. Her world was a narrow one. Other girls mourned the absence of strangers in their isolated corner of the world. The boys they had grown up with interested them less than boys they would never know. But Helen didn’t care if all the boys in the world were waiting just over the mountains. She knew who she wanted.

She just had to convince Fate Henry he had enough to offer her.

On the morning before Christmas, Delilah hobbled into the kitchen and made shooing motions with her hands. “I feel up to this now, Lenny. I told you I’d make the peanut brittle, and I will.”

Helen reluctantly moved away from the stove and its welcome heat. Her mother looked even paler than usual, but Helen knew that no amount of coaxing would send Delilah back to bed. She had made peanut brittle every Christmas season that Helen could remember, even during the worst days of the Depression before Cuddy got his job at the feed store. The peanuts always came by mail from family down in southeastern Virginia; the sugar for holiday baking was put aside, a little at a time, throughout the year. There had never been money for fancy Christmas presents in the Stoneburner household or a belief they were necessary, but Delilah had always tried to make the holiday special.

“I was hoping you’d let me do it this time,” Helen said. “I need to learn, don’t I?”

“You could make it with your eyes closed. And I’m tired of doing nothing. Never did think I’d end up as useless as a scrawny old hen who can’t lay an egg.”

“You’re not useless, Ma. You just need to rest and get better.”

Delilah looked her daughter straight in the eye. “That’s not gonna happen. We both know it, and it’s time we all stopped pretending things are different from what they are. I’m having more bad spells, and the medicine the doctor give me isn’t doing a thing for me anymore. Truth is—and I want you to hear this—I don’t think I’ll be with you next Christmas. So just one more time, I want to do this myself.”

Delilah rarely minced words, but this was the first time she had addressed her impending death head on. Helen swallowed hard. “You can’t get better if you say you’re not going to.”

Delilah managed a weak smile. “The Lord and I are up to date on this one, Lenny. And he’s telling me to get my affairs in order. I’ve been given this one last Christmas, and I’m gonna make use of it.”

Helen felt tears rising, but she knew that her mother would hate to see her cry. “Well, nobody makes peanut brittle nearly as good as yours. So I’m sure not going to stand in your way, even if I think you’re wrong.”

“You go on, now, and put the decorations on the tree. Your daddy’s right proud of it. Cut down the best one he could find. You go on up to the attic and see what’s there to make it pretty.”

Helen made her way up to the attic with a heavy heart. Despite what she’d said, she knew her mother was right. Delilah was thin as a broom straw, and her hands shook so badly she had given up piecing quilts, although she still spent time each day at the quilt frame, where she could rest her hands as she worked. Helen pieced for her now, and Delilah quilted the results.

All except the wedding ring quilt. Helen planned to quilt that one herself, just as soon as it was finished. She had pieced more than two thirds of the oval sections since she first learned to quilt, but she had been choosy about fabrics, only using those she really liked or those with sentimental meaning. As the ovals had progressed and she had seen that nearly all of them contained different shades of blue, she had decided she needed one unifying fabric to bring the quilt together. She would use that fabric as connectors and a scalloped border.

She was in no hurry, though, because the man she wanted to marry hadn’t yet asked her.

In the attic she found the box of Christmas ornaments. There weren’t many. She and Tom had cut stars from colored paper and tin foil and hung them with bits of yarn. Last year Obed’s girlfriend Dorothy had given them tissue paper bells to hang, and Obed had bought three glass ornaments made in Germany as a present for Delilah. Cuddy, who liked to whittle, had made a primitive village to put beneath the tree.

This Christmas Helen had a surprise for her mother, too. At night, while Delilah was sleeping, she had made tiny quilt squares from Delilah’s favorite patterns, backed them and filled them with cotton batting, to hang on the tree. She knew Delilah would be pleased.

On this, her mother’s last Christmas.

Helen sat on a pile of boxes and rested her face in her hands. She did not want to accept Delilah’s prediction, but she knew it was the truth. What would she do once her mother was gone? Once he married Dorothy, Obed, who had a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps constructing overlooks and picnic areas on Skyline Drive, would move back home, and Dorothy would come to live at the Stoneburner farm. Helen liked her well enough and knew she was a hard worker. Dorothy would make sure that Cuddy was taken care of and the chores were done. Obed would run the farm with Tom’s help. The farm would be shared by the two young men when Cuddy died, and since they had different skills and talents, the land would be in good hands.

But what would Helen do without her mother’s love and guidance?

Eyes red, she descended the stairs at last with the box in her arms and took it into the living room.

Fate Henry was standing there, hat in his hands, looking as if he was afraid he might be shooed away.

“Fate.” Helen put down the box, and her hands went to her brown hair, hoping it wasn’t filmed with attic cobwebs. She was just glad she’d taken the time last night to put the short strands in pincurls.

“I just stopped by to borrow Tom’s new ax. I want to show Uncle Sammy. He needs a new one.”

Helen saw exactly how transparent the excuse was. Sammy Claiborne was so tightfisted, he would gnaw a tree like a beaver before he would invest in a new ax.

“I know Tom’ll be proud to loan it to you,” she said.

They stared at each other. Fate was easy to stare at. He had grown into his lanky long legs and wide shoulders. His curly black hair was short and slicked back over a high forehead, giving his eyes more prominence. They were green and heavily lashed, an adornment in a thoroughly masculine face. There wasn’t a girl anywhere near Toms Brook who hadn’t noticed him, but Fate seemed oblivious to every one of them.

Except, possibly, for Helen.

“You been doing all right?” she asked, reminding herself not to straighten her dress. It was an old one, but the green print suited her. She had made it herself and trimmed it with pique right off the bolt. It was worn now, but as pretty as anything in the Sears catalog when it was new.

“Sure. How about yourself?”

“Doing fine.” She pointed to the box. “I’m going to put these on the Christmas tree. Do you have a tree this year?”

“Uncle Sammy don’t believe in ’em. I think he’s just too busy to cut one down, and Gus, well, he’s not around much these days to do it. I tried one year myself, but there weren’t nothing to put on it.”

She knew by now that Fate’s years with the Claiborne family hadn’t been particularly good ones. He had not been treated as a son or a hired hand, but somewhere in the middle, with no rights at all. He would not inherit so much as a cup of dirt from the Claibornes, nor would he ever be paid as much as someone outside the family might earn. He was grateful to them for taking him in during hard times, but she also suspected he missed the real love and family he’d never had.

She wanted to give that to him, if only he would let her.

“Why don’t you stay and help me decorate this one?” she said. “It won’t take long. Just a few minutes.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

Her breath caught. She had been fully prepared for him to say no. She wasn’t sure what to do with yes.

She grabbed the box for something to do, but Fate took it right out of her arms. “Of course I wouldn’t mind. I could use some help,” she said.

“Here, let me.”

She did, more flustered now that their wrists had brushed. “I got something else to put on it, something upstairs. Will you open the box and set stuff out while I run up there?”

“Sure.”

She came back a few minutes later with the quilt squares she’d made. He had set everything in neat little piles, stars in one, the carefully wrapped glass ornaments in another. The tinsel they had saved strand by strand in an old Farmer’s Almanac was laid neatly at the base of the tree. He was looking at the small cache as if he’d never seen such fine things.

“We had a Christmas tree every year in Oklahoma.” He looked up and smiled, his teeth even and white. “Nothing much to put on it, but it was pretty anyway.”

“Did you like Oklahoma better than Virginia?”

“I didn’t belong there, either.”

Her heart squeezed painfully. “You belong here, Fate. Just not with those Claibornes.”

He smiled again. “What’s that you got?”

Shyly, she opened her hands to show him the quilt blocks. “Nothing much, but I made them for Mama.”

He took one of the squares, a tiny Jacob’s ladder, and squinted at it. “You could put all these together and make a doll’s quilt.”

“I like making quilts better than just about everything.”

“Have you made many?”

“I guess.” She wasn’t sure what came over her next, why she was suddenly so bold, but she added, “I’ve been making a bride’s quilt for years and years. It’s called wedding ring.” She tried to look nonchalant.

“Why’s it taking so long?”

“Oh, I only use material that means something to me. And right now I’m waiting ’til I can buy some of that blue cloth they have down at the store in Toms Brook. But I need yards and yards, so I have to wait a while.” She shrugged.

“Blue cloth?”

The cloth she yearned for was particularly pretty, a robin’s egg blue with white threads criss-crossing at intervals. She haunted the store on her rare trips to town, foolishly hoping the price might come down. So far, though, it was still more expensive than she could afford, even now that Delilah insisted she keep any money she made from selling eggs. If she used it to back the quilt—and that was what she hoped to do—she would need many yards. And at fourteen cents a yard, it was much more expensive than dress fabric usually sold for, nearly twice as much.

“Just something I’m waiting for,” she said. “I’m just being foolish, that’s all. And I guess there’s no hurry, being as I’m not about to tie the knot.”

She began to unwrap the glass ornaments and Fate stepped in to help her. They talked about where to put them, about what was happening in Europe now that England and Germany were at war, about whether they might get enough snow tomorrow so that Cuddy could hook up their old plow horse to the sleigh. But Helen was afraid her talk of the wedding ring quilt hung suspended in the air about them, waiting to swoop down and frighten Fate right out of the house forever. Her fear that she might have scared him away for good ruined the rest of their time together.

Christmas morning seemed like a present all its own. Helen didn’t know if Delilah had told Tom and Obed what she’d told her, or if Cuddy himself knew how short his wife’s time on earth was bound to be. But whatever had been said or not said, everyone in the family seemed to try harder to be kind and respectful to each other.

Tom and Obed had grown into good, strong men. Obed’s wild streak had been tamed by hard work and a pretty woman. He announced at breakfast that he planned to ask Dorothy’s father that evening if he could marry her.