Beauty From Ashes (18 page)

When March first rolled around, Anne called her three girls to her room at Hopeton for a little talk. Pete, as usual, had already guessed her reason.

“In nine days Grandpapa will be ninety-one,” Pete said.

“But he’s too sick, I think,” Selina said, “for another big birthday party.”

“Yes,” Anne said. “But we’ll make Grandpapa’s heart feel fine just because he’ll be able to see us all on his birthday.”

“Mama,” Selina said out of the blue, “John Couper told me we’d have our own home again someday.”

Surprised, Anne asked, “John Couper told you that, too, Selina?”

“Yes, Mama. He said he thought a little girl my age needed to be sure she’d have a home of her own again someday. What does being thirteen have to do with it?” Selina wanted to know. “I’d be happy if we had a home again even if I was an old woman like Fanny or Pete!”

Anne laughed softly. “Or an ancient woman like your mother.”

“I certainly do have a wise brother, don’t I?” Pete asked with a grin.

“Me too,” Selina piped.

“Don’t you think you also have a wise brother, Fanny?” Anne asked her middle daughter.

“Yes, ma’am,” Fanny said. “If John

Couper doesn’t think he’ll get 231 Selina’s hopes too high. Is there something happening we don’t know about, Mama? Do you and John Couper know something you haven’t thought it’s wise to tell us yet? Even Pete?”

“We don’t know anything at all definite,” Anne said, a slight frown creasing her forehead, “but your brother has started me dreaming again. He has a way of instilling faith in me. At times even enough faith to believe we just might have a place we can call our home again.”

“Mama? I certainly do like it when we have meetings like this with nobody here but—us,” Selina said.

“So do I,” Anne whispered, untangling one of Selina’s long, thick, dark curls. “And we’ll have other meetings, dear. Lots of them. Right now, I need to have a meeting with Eve. Send her up here, please?”

“Which means,” Pete muttered, “that we, dear Sisters, are being dismissed. Eve hopes we have a place of our own someday, too. She told me yesterday she’d be happy anywhere if June was there. Mama, why do you suppose we never think about whether the colored might be in love with each

other, like other people?”

“For goodness’ sake, Pete,” Selina said with emphasis. “I never thought about it at all until this minute!”

“And it isn’t going to be the subject of another meeting because I know you’re stalling, Eena.”

“Sometimes I think about the times you and Pete told me my papa often called me Eena,” the girl said.

Anne hugged her youngest daughter, who remembered so little about John. “He certainly did call you Eena, child. But if he were here with us now, he’d be suggesting in no uncertain terms that you quit thinking up ways to extend our meeting and bring Eve to me. I need to talk to her. I do have Grandpapa Couper on my mind.”

“Do you think he’s—dying, Mama?” Selina asked.

“No, I don’t think that at all. I just know we’re going to be with him when he turns ninety-one, and this is the very last time I’m going to tell you to send Eve to me. Now, scoot, all of you.”

A few minutes later, when Eve 233 slipped quietly into the Hopeton bedroom Anne shared with Pete, Anne thought she looked worried.

“You’re here,” Anne said. “And is that a frown on your face? Did Selina blab to you about why I sent for you?”

“She jus’ tell me you worried ‘bout Mausa Couper cause it be nearly his ninety-first birthday.”

“Eve, pull up that rocker and sit down with me a minute.”

“Eve sit down to talk to you, Miss Anne?”

“Yes. What’s so strange about that? I need to ask you something important.”

“Yes’m.”

“This is no time for a noncommittal yes’m. Don’t just stand there. Sit down with me.”

Not quite certain that this, after all the years they’d been together, was the first time she’d ever asked Eve to sit down, Anne was determined not to allow Eve to dwell on it—one way or another. “What else did Selina tell you?”

“Nuffin. But I woke up with a new knowin’

dis mornin’.was

“And what, pray tell, is it that you `know` now?”

“Eve got a knowin’ that your heart be heavy over Mausa Couper.”

“You agree, I’m sure, that Papa will want all the family he has left to be right with him on his ninety-first birthday. It—it could be his last one, Eve.”

Eve nodded agreement.

“I wanted to see you alone because I have an important question to ask you. How can you be so sure when you have a knowing that it’s really true? Don’t you ever wish for something so hard that it might just seem like a knowing?”

“Oh, yes’m. But dem times I find out it wasn’t a knowin’ ‘cause dem times it don’ come true.”

“Isn’t there any other way you can tell?”

“Why you axin’ me dis?”

“I’m just asking because I want to be sure. Isn’t there ever a time when you know something so surely that you have a—sign of some sort?”

“Oh, yes’m. When it be true, I feels it in my blood and also in my bones.”

“I don’t call that a very clear 235 answer, do you?”

“How you gonna git closer to yourself than yo’ blood an’ bones?” After waiting for an answer from Anne that didn’t come, Eve asked, “You got a knowin’ ‘bout yo’ papa, Miss Anne? You ain’t neber had no caul ober yo’ face, has you?”

“No, and that’s why I’m pinning you down this way. I need to know if I’m just so scared my father’s going to die soon, I only imagine that I—I know one way or another.” When Eve said nothing, Anne pressed her. “Can’t you tell me something to help me?”

“Not wifout you bein’ borned wif a caul.”

“Have you had any kind of knowing about my papa? Does your blood or your bones give you even a hint about him?”

“Miss Anne, you is changin’. Dat’s fo’ sure!”

“Why do you say a thing like that?”

Eve’s grin was sly. “‘Cause it not be like you to ax me somepin you admit not to know yo’self.”

“Is that really true? If it is, I’m ashamed of myself, but I’ve asked you now and I

beg you for an answer. Do you have a knowing about my father?”

“No’m.”

Without meaning to, Anne brightened a little. “You don’t? Do you think that means we’ll have the sweet old darling around yet awhile, trying to keep us all cheered up?”

“Only de Lawd, He knows a thing like dat, Miss Anne. Sometime a body as old as Mausa Couper’s, it gonna wear out.”

Anne let herself fall back in her rocker. “Eve, Eve, you are an enigma.”

“What be a ‘nigma, Miss Anne?”

“In your case it merely means there’s no explaining you to anyone, certainly not to me. I did ask an impossible thing of you, though, didn’t I? And you could have said `what is an every-nigma` instead of `what be a ‘nigma.`”

Now they both laughed. “Yes’m, I coulda said that.”

When Anne got up, Eve jumped to her feet and laid one hand on Anne’s hand already extended to her.

“We are friends, Eve. Could I thank you for that?”

On another musical laugh, Eve 237 said, “You kin eben thank me fo’ breathin’ if you feel like it, Miss Anne.”

Two full days before Papa’s ninety-first birthday on March 9, no plans for any kind of celebration were under way. Anne had only to look at the wasted old body to know her papa would never leave his bed again, but still he tried to greet her with a weakly lifted hand, a crooked smile, and a hoarse, effort-filled whisper of her name.

“Annie, beloved Annie. You’re here this morning—in time.”

For Anne, no words came at first. She could only sit on the side of his old bed, which James Hamilton had moved from Cannon’s Point to the large, sunny room where his father would sleep once it had been decided, right after Mama died, that the old gentleman could never again preside as master of his beloved St. Simons home on the banks of the Hampton River. “He’ll be far more comfortable in his own bed,”

James Hamilton had told Anne then. “We all intend to make his time with us as good as possible with our mother gone.”

Kind, good, stuffy James Hamilton, Anne thought as she kept stroking Papa’s thin, brown-spotted hand, its dark blue veins so visible there seemed to be no skin over them. Would she ever be able to share the easy, tender affection with her brother that she sensed so clearly, even back then, between her son, John Couper, and all three of his living sisters? She pushed back the thought. She did know James Hamilton’s kind heart and she trusted it. Such almost irrelevant musings were only an excuse to avoid facing what she saw so starkly in her papa’s pale, shrunken features.

He was leaving her. Papa, who had always been there, eager to give her his strength, his worldly goods, his laughter, his heart, was leaving her.

“Oh, Papa,” she said desperately, “you know, don’t you, that every minute with you is a treasure to me?”

“Aye, lass,” he whispered. “Aye. I’ve always known about you, my Annie. And”— his faded blue eyes brightened a bit—“dare

we hope your fine son will surprise us 239 again this year for my birthday?”

John Couper! She must write to her son at once. The instant she could leave Papa. John Couper would never forgive himself if he didn’t reach Hopeton in time. In time? This must not be! She reworded the terrifying thought: John Couper must reach Hopeton in time for Papa’s birthday on March 9.

“Annie—Annie.” His halting speech was so weak, so feeble, she leaned down nearer his mouth.

“What is it, Papa? I’m right here holding your hand.”

“You must find—your own home, gir-rl,” he said weakly, but with an authority she’d seldom heard in his natural voice. Papa seemed almost to be ordering her. “And—never stop—dreaming. I dreamed—as a boy back in Scotland. Dreams need wor-rk to come true. They also need —daring. Dare, Annie, lass. And I promise to talk it all over with your John, when I get to where the lad is.”

“Papa!”

The barest smile lit his thin face. “John and I always did enjoy—conferring. We’ll confer

about your own home. And, Annie, you can also count on my namesake, John Couper.”

“Did he tell you at Christmas when he was here that he vows he and I will find a place for me that’s mine?”

A steady peace almost eased his speech, an unexpected, odd certainty. “No. He did not. But at my time of life, a mon knows.”

The skeletal hand to which she clung seemed suddenly to drop, to grow heavy. Peering at his face, she saw him frown. He was struggling with that hand, but not a muscle moved.

“Papa!”

The sunken, nearly toothless mouth fell open.

“Papa!”

Not a word passed his helpless lips. He could no longer speak.

As Anne dashed from the room, faithful Johnson rushed in to be with his master. Anne hurried to find James Hamilton.

Off and on through the entire day of March 9, Jock Couper’s ninety-first birthday, one after another of Anne’s girls and each of James Hamilton’s children except Alexander and

Hamilton, who were away at school, 241 went to their grandfather’s bedside to mumble or hurry through some kind of birthday greetings.

“He may not even know they’re in the room. He may not even know when you go in, Pete,” Anne said to her eldest daughter, “but Dr. Holmes says there’s a chance he can hear and still think.”

“Fanny swears he can hear us, Mama,” Pete assured her mother as they both stood waiting in the hall outside the sickroom. “You know Fanny loves the whole idea of nursing, and she’s read a lot of books about people who’ve had an apoplectic seizure. Grandpapa is partly paralyzed, we know that. He may never talk again, but he just may hear what we say.”

“Don’t you dare even mention that he won’t be able to talk to us again, do you hear me?”

“All right,” Pete said in a tone of voice she might have used to a child. “I won’t mention it again. But I think it will help you to know that I’m practically inside every thought you have right now, Mama. It’s downright scary even to think your father may die. Don’t forget, I know how that is, even though I was a lot younger when we lost

Papa.”

Anne’s eyes shot her daughter an almost angry look. How, at a time like this, could Pete even think of bringing up such a thing? And then she reached for the girl’s hand. “I’m sorry, but for a second I wanted to smack you. You’re right to remind me, though. Of course you know every dread, every thought I’m having. I needed you to say that. Thank you, Pete. I’m trying.”

Day dragged after day with no change in Papa’s condition. He ate nothing, spoke not one word, moved no part of his body. But thanks to Johnson—himself surely well into his eighties now, Anne thought—Papa was never left alone. When Johnson slept some at night, Pete or Fanny or Anne or Caroline Couper took up a watch by the bedside. Each watcher did his or her best to speak words of comfort or cheer. Sometimes someone just told a joke or repeated any phrase that might grab his attention if, indeed, normally communicative Jock Couper could hear and understand.

Anne slept little but was seldom alone either in her father’s room or just outside in the upstairs

hall. In a chair pulled up beside 243 Anne’s favorite little rocker, brought over from Lawrence when she and her family moved into Hopeton, Eve usually sat beside her, leaving only long enough to bring food and a hot drink for them both. A pattern began to form as the hours wore on through each day and night. When someone left the sickroom, it became only natural to stop long enough by Anne’s rocker to tell her what had been said to her father. To shake his or her head sadly in answer to the question in Anne’s eyes. Papa had shown no sign of hearing.

“I told Grandpapa about my new litter of rabbits,” Fanny said, “and how I’d nursed the scrub of the litter back to health. That I weighed the little fellow this morning and he’d gained half a pound!”

Even young Rebecca Isabella Couper, James Hamilton’s daughter, who grew prettier every day, stopped to tell Anne that she had talked and talked about the shared birthday party when she and her grandpapa laughed so much last year the day he turned ninety and she turned six, old enough to eat at the adult table for the first time. “I thought once he might be going to smile,” the