Beauty From Ashes (33 page)

“You gonna be out there to think some?”

“Oh, Eve, don’t make me 437 cross, please. I don’t want to feel cross today of all days. I want to be—me. Is that so hard to believe? If anyone knows how hard it is for me to say good-bye to this place, it should be you.”

“It is me. An’ all I want to do is remind you that you don’ need to say good-bye today. We sleepin’ tonight at the Wyllys’. We kin all come back.”

Her heart reaching toward Eve more than Anne meant it to do at this difficult moment, she tried to think of something to say that might calm Eve’s worry over her. For she surely wasn’t going to add to the faithful woman’s concern by sparring with her. “I’m sorry, Eve, if I sounded cross. I’m not. Not a bit. You’re right, of course. We aren’t leaving St. Simons quite yet. I just need time alone out there in those woods where I used to go when—when—was

“When what, Mama?” Selina asked.

“When I needed to give myself a good talking to,” Anne said. “I need to do that now, so don’t come looking for me. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Pete said. “And I’ll see to it

that no one does, Mama.”

Anne had no sooner found her favorite old fallen log in the Park and settled herself on its cushion of thick, green moss when memories of another, much earlier visit to this very spot sent her thoughts into the one direction she least needed them to go. To John! To another day when Anne had fled the house, years and years ago, even before they’d all moved down to live at Hamilton. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember exactly why she’d thought that day that she needed to give herself a good, spine-straightening talk, but the memory rushed back today, and for an instant she felt downright scared. She could all but hear the same crackle and twig-breaking sound John’s boots had made on that earlier day as he hurried this way and that through the trees, calling her name, hunting for her—the sound of his steps wandering because he always had trouble finding her favorite old fallen log.

“John!”

Her call to him today was almost a scream. On that

long-ago day John had come carrying 439 Lovey in his arms, his happy smile lighting the shadows in the woods. The squirming puppy had yapped, wiggling to get down in the leaf mold and pine cones and fallen twigs. The last memory she cared to experience this minute was his gift of the dear little dog, Lovey, and his joy—even his pride—that the usually arrogant, unsmiling James Hamilton had actually given John the pup.

“The future is what matters now,” she said aloud today, her voice sounding as strange and old and stiff as the dead, topless devil’s-walking-stick over by the nearest hickory tree. There had been no life in that straight old stick in years. There had seemed to be no life in Anne Fraser, but now she was about to set out on the riskiest venture of all— alone—without John. Without Papa. Even without helpful, always present Lovey. Soon after John went away, a rattlesnake’s bite killed Lovey. John lay in the churchyard under a thick slab of granite. He’d been there so long, stains were appearing around the letters that formed his name. Would she—could she—bear one more visit to his

grave before she left to live in Marietta, some three hundred miles away from the sun-and-shadow-streaked churchyard where lay so much of her own life?

After fingering the tiny, pale green moss flowers growing on the old log where she sat, she spoke aloud again, her voice no longer dry and stiff: “Stop it! You’re here to settle in your own mind once and for all, Anne Couper Fraser, that you are going away from this Island to live in a house that will be yours and only yours. To begin a new life. Not to leave behind what you don’t have anyway, but to begin again. To begin again. You cannot leave John or Papa or Mama or Annie or Isabella or even Lovey behind because they all still love you, and where they are now, they could even be waiting for you in your white-light house when you get there!”

Unable to sit any longer, Anne jumped to her feet and stood, looking around the red and yellow leaf-lit woods, watching the light from the sun pick out this and that familiar St. Simons tree or wild shrub—looking. Looking for what? For whom? She had firmly forbidden anyone to search for her and wished suddenly, with all her heart, that she

hadn’t. “God? God, do I believe 441 John and Papa and Isabella and Annie and Mama live now where they know what’s happening to me down here? Do I really believe that? Or am I feeling so frantic because what I really believe is that they’re all over there in Christ Churchyard just where we buried them in their separate graves? Do I even believe they’re alive somewhere—anywhere? Somewhere in the Bible it says, `Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.` But do I believe anything except that I’m alone with no one left to help me? With dear ones like Pete and Fanny and Selina and John Couper and Eve here only for me to look after them? To find a way to pretend, for their sake, that I don’t miss John anymore? To find a way to smile often and be me again with no one to help me?”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks now, and her voice was the lost voice of one woman crying out—alone—to no one!

When something firm and warm and living gripped her shoulder, she gasped, whirled around, eyes wide with fright. There stood Eve, smiling the tenderest smile Anne had ever seen on the bright-skinned,

lovely face.

“Eve don’ disobey you often, Miss Anne,” she said softly. “Leastways not when she know you gonna fin’ out. I disobey you dis time. I done been not ten feet away the whole time you been out here in de Park.”

“How dare you go against my wishes?”

“You—you ain’t eben a lil bit glad to see me?”

Anne threw both arms around her servant and cried harder, louder than she’d cried in years. Eve said nothing. Her arms tightened only so much around Anne’s jerking shoulders, and the two stood there as the last sob exhausted itself.

In the silence that surrounded them when the weeping ended, not even a squirrel barked from far off or nearby. No bird chirped. Not a pine cone fell to the ground. Nothing moved. For one of the few times in both their lives, neither woman heard one single sound in a stand of thick St. Simons woods.

“Eve,” Anne whispered at last. “Is this what it’s like to be—dead?”

“No’m. It ain’t like this.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m standin’ here wif my arms 443 ‘roun’ you. I knows it’s you an’ you knows it’s Eve. I’se livin’, so this ain’t what it’s like to be dead.” Smoothing Anne’s hair back off her forehead, Eve whispered, “Ain’t you glad Eve come after you out here?”

Anne tried hard to smile. “Yes. Oh, yes, but what are we going to tell the children when we get back to the house? They all heard me forbid anyone to follow me. Even Big Boy heard.”

“Oh, dey ain’t nobody lef’ at Lawrence, Miss Anne.”

“What?”

“Eve didn’t run after you right when you hightail it away out here to the ole Park. I done talk all ob ‘em into believin’ it do you an’ me good to walk back to the Wyllys’. Jus’ take our time an’ walk along, so’s you won’t get tired. The girls agree that the fresh air an’ walkin’ be good for you. Dey done took the picnic basket an’ gone to the Wyllys’ with Big Boy.”

Anne gave her a quick look. “You did that without consulting me?”

“Yes’m. Me an’ you got a new life

to lib together. We got to get you feelin’ strong an’ perky again—soon. Ain’t dat right, Miss Anne?”

Part of Anne was cross with Eve for having sent Big Boy and the carriage away. Part of her wanted to hug her again. After her ordeal in the woods, the walk would surely be welcome. The walk and no questions from her daughters.

“I wish I knew myself half as well as you know me,” she said. And then realized she was really smiling at the woman whose knowledge of her could always be trusted. The smile came easily. “Don’t say a word,” Anne went on. “Maybe it’s just our odd way, but it seems to me as though, without any effort, you’ve turned me around so that I can see again—at least a little way ahead. Eve, do you believe that I believe my loved ones are all with God now and that they know, as He does, what’s happening to me?”

“If I didn’t believe dat about you, Miss Anne, I wouldn’t believe it ‘bout nobody nowhere!”

“All right, then. How do you like the sound of this? I am certain that the letter from Lawyer Bentley will reach us any day. The letter telling me it’s—time.”

“Time?” 445

“Yes. Time to begin our new life in Marietta, in the white-light house I’m expecting to heal me. From Hopeton, after Christmas, we’ll go to Hamilton. I was dreading it, but now I think I need to see the place once more. After all, Eve, we were at Hamilton when John left me. We can board a steamer for Savannah from there just as soon as I find out about the Marietta house. Am I making sense? Do you have one of your knowings that Lawyer Bentley’s letter will come soon?”

The merest flicker of a frown crossed Eve’s face. “Not yet, I don’ have. But you makin’ good sense, Miss Anne.”

“And tomorrow morning, I want you to ride with me in the carriage over to Christ Church. Just you and me. I’ll probably bawl like a calf, but I have to tell John good-bye. And Papa and Annie and Isabella and Mama. I have to tell them all good-bye, Eve, so don’t try to talk me out of doing it.”

“No’m.”

“All right, let’s start walking.”

“I know you feel like a big load done roll

off your shoulders, Miss Anne. We walkin’ too fast.”

“Oh, maybe,” Anne said, slowing her steps. “I think hurrying has become a habit with me. Sometimes it’s as though I’ve been rushing ever since John went away. And don’t ask me why. I’ve always believed almost everyone could, if she looked hard enough, find something to be happy about—to look forward to. It’s been so long since I’ve looked forward to—anything, I think I’m hurrying to find a way to be the way I always was.”

For a time neither spoke. Eve walked a little ahead and to one side, keeping an eye out, Anne knew, for snakes. Finally, Anne said almost longingly, “I must have told you about the new lady friend I met in Marietta. Her name is Louisa Fletcher. She and her husband run one of the nice hotels there. I felt almost like the old me when I was with Louisa. She makes me think a lot of Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler. She’s a Northerner and owns no—people. Doesn’t believe in it. I think she’s partial to me, too, even though Pete blurted out that I’d need cabins because I do own—people.”

“If I gotta be owned by somebody, 447 I be glad it’s you.”

“Well, I suppose I should thank you. Instead, I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise not to try to trick me with it someday.”

A glance at Eve revealed that the good smile was flashing. “Mausa John, he tol’ me once he didn’t believe niggers tricked white folks any more than white folks tricks niggers—and each other.”

Anne began laughing softly. “My John really told you that?”

“As I live an’ breathe.”

“Eve, I do believe he knows what I’m doing—this minute. Even what I’m thinking. You spoke the words, but the man made me laugh just now, almost the way he used to.”

“Mausa John still be good at makin’ you laugh, if you only listen.”

“Yes. Yes, I guess I do need to listen more. Aren’t you curious to know about the secret I mentioned just now?”

“If you wants me to be.”

“I do. And this is the secret, if it is a secret. I suppose most people who know me already

know what I’m about to tell you.”

“Tell me anyway, Miss Anne.”

“If you’re glad it’s I who own you, you’re not half as glad as I am.”

“Why, you reckon?”

“Because I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you now, or anytime, as long as I live on this earth.”

Not one of her daughters objected when Anne announced at breakfast at the Wyllys’ that Big Boy would be driving her and Eve to the churchyard—just the two of them.

“I need to say some good-byes,” she said. Her voice, she thought, sounded almost as cheerful as she meant it to be. “Eve has agreed to humor me. You see, girls, being at Lawrence again in some way helped free me. I’m already making plans for us to begin our new life in Marietta—just as soon as I know when the white-light house will be ours to live in.”

“I wish we could go on to Marietta even before Christmas,” Pete said. “Then we might be able

to have our first Christmas in that great 449 house.”

“You know as well as I, Pete, we have to hear first from Lawyer Bentley.”

“What if Fanny and I don’t like it as much as you and Mama do?” Selina asked.

On a laugh, Pete answered, “Oh, I’m not a bit worried about that, little Sister. Anyway, Mama loves it and Mama’s the one who counts.”

“We all count,” Anne said. “And if I know Eve and Big Boy, they’re out front waiting for me now with the carriage hitched to the team, ready to go.”

Eve had already made up her mind to follow Miss Anne’s lead on their trip over to the churchyard. If Miss Anne felt like just sitting there on the carriage seat beside her the way she was now, without talking, Eve would keep still too. But keeping still didn’t need to keep her from praying to the Lord for this woman beside her who would, during the next hour or so, have to face one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Because only the Lord knew when, if ever, they might come back again

to visit St. Simons Island, it was certainly no secret to Eve that Miss Anne could be about to pay her last visit to Christ Churchyard, to the graves of her papa, Mausa Couper, Miss Rebecca, pretty, bright Annie, and Miss Isabella—and to the grave of Miss Anne’s beloved husband, Mausa John.

Eve caught herself just in time to keep from blurting out: “How you gonna do that, Miss Anne? How you gonna say good-bye to the man you loved more than your own life?”

She did catch herself. Eve didn’t speak the words, but she felt almost afraid, almost angry, that she was the one who had to be right there nearby while Miss Anne tried to do what no woman ought ever to have to do—walk away for perhaps the last time from the covered-over hole in the ground where they’d put the body she didn’t know how to live without.

I could not live long without feeling the hard, safe strength of June’s arms holding me in the night, she thought. I could not. I’ve learned how to do some mighty hard things. Not that. Why, there’s no place a body can run even to feel for the warmth and smoothness of a husband’s skin against yours. I even wonder, does she still reach her arm across