Four Seasons of Romance (3 page)

“Picking posies are we, Miss Woods?” the teacher asked.
“And when you ought to be focused on your studies.
Not what
I would expect from one of our best students. What would your father say?”

A flush rose instantly to Catherine’s cheeks. She nodded
meekly.

“Teacher,” Leo said, raising his hand. He was determined to
take responsibility for his action, even if it meant an afternoon in the dunce
cap.

“Not a word, Mr. Taylor,” the teacher said, and something in
her tone made Leo fall silent.

The damage was done. Leo’s playful gesture had made
Catherine look a fool.

That day at recess, there were whispers on the playground
that something was about to happen. Catherine played with her usual flock of
girls, and the other children milled about, each hoping for something exciting,
and they were not disappointed. Leo approached Catherine, his head hung in
shame.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

Catherine, who had been laughing and smiling a moment
before, became cold, then turned to face him as a hush fell over the
playground.

“You,” she said, her voice dripping with poison. “You have
been nothing but a nuisance since you moved here. You’ve done nothing but make
me miserable.” Her voice was building in volume and intensity as the other
fourth graders watched, mesmerized. “I want nothing to do with you. Leave me
alone, Leo Taylor. I wish you were dead!”

Those words plowed deep into Leo’s heart like a revolver
bullet.

*

To Leo’s disappointment, Catherine and he were in separate
classrooms during fifth and sixth grades, at opposite ends of the hall in the
little red schoolhouse. Sometimes, Leo wondered whether Catherine had asked her
father to pull a few strings with the school board and arrange it that way
intentionally. At the same time, they were still in the same school and hardly
strangers to each other.

During those years, Leo cultivated a taste for adventure,
earning a reputation as a
daredevil,
taking about any
dare other students threw his way. He started it to get Catherine’s attention,
but before
long,
he was doing it purely for the
thrill, the adrenaline pumping through his body, the taste of his mouth gone
dry with danger.

Leo’s newfound hobby didn’t come without a cost. In fifth
grade, he jumped off the school roof, breaking an ankle, which didn’t keep him
down for long. The bone had barely mended when he pedaled a bicycle over a
makeshift ramp, jumping over two barrels. When he came home with scrapes and
cuts, his mother was rarely there, and even when she was, Deborah usually had
other things to do.

Leo hadn’t seen his parents happy together in ages; they
hardly talked anymore. Rumors spread that Deborah Taylor had been seen with
various other men around town, but Leo refused to believe them, and when the
other kids tried to spread this malicious gossip, he shut them up with a fist
to the face.

Meanwhile, Catherine devoted herself to her studies. Ever
the model student, she earned top grades and showed skill at both mathematics
and writing. Josiah was proud of his daughter; whom he wanted to get the best
education money could buy, yet he wanted Catherine to make a good wife for a
proper man. Elaine displayed every report card on the dining-room table and, as
far as Catherine was concerned, made far too much fuss.

During those years, Leo kept an eye on Catherine even though
her words that day on the schoolyard stayed with him. Because he cared for her,
Leo honored the request to keep his distance, but he was never far away. He
knew the time wasn’t right to kindle a friendship but also knew he’d never
forgive himself if something happened to her.

Then, one afternoon in 1937, it nearly did. On their walks
home from school, Leo often followed several yards behind Catherine, splitting
their ways eventually—she’d turn right to climb the hill to the Woods estate;
he’d turn left to cross the railroad tracks. But by keeping in step behind her
most of the way, he knew he had her back should anything go wrong.

It was a warm spring day toward the end of their sixth-grade
year, the kind of day when the air smells like clover honey, and the wind bends
the newborn grass. Leo saw Catherine through the clearing, her brown hair tied
in two long braids (the way she’d been wearing it lately). She was about to
turn right when Leo saw a flash of color as someone else had appeared from
behind the trees.

“Hey there, Heidi.
Nice braids.”

Leo knew the voice instantly: Thomas McCaffrey.
Unfortunately, for the students of Woodsville Elementary, Tom hadn’t become
less a bully in the two years since he’d humiliated Arthur
Yarger
.

“I said, nice braids,” Tom sneered.

“I heard you,” Catherine said. “Why don’t you go pick on
someone your size?”

Thomas had put on a bit of weight, so this was easier said
than done.

“Is little Catherine Woods a goat herder now?” Tom teased.
“Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?”

“Can it, Thomas,” Catherine said. “If you want to sing
nursery rhymes, go find some first graders to play with.”

He blocked her path. “
You calling
me stupid?”    

She stared him straight in the eye. “Boys who pick on others
are usually the most stupid kind.”

Leo marveled at her tenacity: just as she’d done two years
before, she had no problem telling off Tom. But Tom
did
have a problem;
angrily, he pushed Catherine to the ground.

Leo rushed forward. In one swift motion, he pounced on
Thomas and pummeled him with all his strength.

“Leo!” Catherine shouted.
“Stop!”
           

But Leo didn’t stop, emotions pumping through him, the
pent-up frustrations of his unrequited love unwinding through violence.

Using all her might, Catherine succeeded in pulling Leo off
a whimpering Thomas, McCaffrey’s left eye already swelled, his nose smeared in
blood. He wiped his lip on his sleeve and staggered off as Catherine stared at
Leo and shook her head.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she said.

Leo’s hand was stung “How about ‘thank you,’ for starters?”

“Look, I appreciate your looking out for me, but there was
no need for violence. I could have handled it.”

They watched as Thomas retreated, limping and wiping the
blood off his nose. One punch or even a threat might have done the job—then,
Leo was not one for moderation.

“Poor kid,” Catherine
said,
her
voice full of sympathy for the boy who had pushed her down only moments before.
“You really went to town on him. It’ll take weeks for his face to heal.” She
turned and started to walk up the hill to her house.

“May I walk with you?” Leo asked.

Catherine appraised him for a moment. “If I say no, are you
going to beat me up too?”

“I don’t hit girls,” he said.

She sighed.
“Fine then.
Come
along.”

Leo walked Catherine home for the first time that afternoon.
For a long while, they trudged in silence. Leo was the first to speak. “Maybe
you’re right. Maybe I went overboard with Tom, but I was just trying to help
you.”

She was silent. High on the hill, she could see the peak of
her house. “I’ll go the rest of the way alone,” she said, turning to face him
and pointed at his bruised knuckles. “You’ll want to put some ice on that, I
imagine. So it doesn’t swell.”

Without another word, she continued up the hill as Leo
watched her go. At that moment, his heart was swelling far more than his
knuckles. It was still too soon for a friendship and far too soon for anything
more, but in that single statement, Leo glimpsed something he’d barely dared to
dream: Catherine cared.

*

By the spring of 1938, Leo’s parents were no longer
together, a small-town scandal, seeing as it was the first recorded divorce in
Woodsville since 1929. Ellis moved out, and Leo stayed with his mother, who
left him to his devices. She was lenient and neglectful, though Leo never saw
it that way. It was everything Catherine had predicted when she first laid eyes
on him that day in fourth grade—that his family wasn’t “respectable,” that he
came from a broken home.

But things were changing in the way Catherine viewed the world
and Leo in particular. She was finishing the seventh grade, and the next year,
she and Leo would matriculate to the brown-brick high school down the road.

Their bodies were changing rapidly as Leo became a tall,
lanky youth with broad shoulders and muscular arms. As for Catherine, she often
startled herself when she passed a mirror. A little girl no more, she bloomed
with charm and elegance. Her clothes fit her differently, and her mother had
even bought her a cotton bra with the newly introduced “cup size.” It was
foreign to Catherine who felt nostalgic for the days when she could simply
throw on a blouse.

Bodily changes brought emotional ones. Like all teenagers,
Catherine started to see the opposite sex differently, and that’s when she
began to desire Leo’s attention. He noticed that she was looking his way much
more often than she used to. Soon, she called a truce to her longstanding
dislike of Leo. Not sure of the reasons for the internal change, Catherine
began to seek his company.

Leo was delighted with Catherine’s transformation. The
summer before their eighth-grade year, they spent hours together playing in the
rivers and hiking the hills on the north side of town, Leo digging pounds of
clay from the riverbanks and fashioning her different trinkets, paperweights,
dolls, and figurines. During those long, lazy afternoons, they noticed that
both of them were good at making each other laugh.

Catherine was a spoiled and demanding princess, but Leo
loved her enough to let her get away with it. Once, he even made her a laurel
of flowers twisted together with strips of clay.

“What’s this?” she asked.

He set it gently on her head. “If you’re going to act like a
queen, you need a crown.”

She gave him a playful shove but wore it for the rest of the
day.

Leo showed her how fun it was to do things only boys were
supposed to do, like skipping rocks and climbing trees. In the warm summer
rains, they scampered through the forest together, playing in the mud. After
the storms passed, Catherine always showed up on her back porch, breathless and
covered in sludge from head to toe. Her mother chastised her thoroughly, but
Catherine had never felt better.

No one ever waited at home for Leo. Though he was only
thirteen, he never had to be back at a specific time, and he certainly didn’t
need to keep his clothes clean. Leo enjoyed his independence, though, and that
summer, for the first time, he made Catherine long for the same thing.

Nothing like Catherine’s parents or their cloistered
friends, Leo was like a character in the novels she adored: brave, if a little
reckless, adventurous, and unpretentious. In short, Catherine found him
irresistible.

One early morning in the summer, Leo was tossing pebbles up
at Catherine’s window. They had agreed on a system—he threw pebbles from a safe
distance to get her attention, so she could slip outside without her parents
knowing.

Catherine woke to the familiar sound of rocks against the
windowpane and dressed quickly, grabbing two apples on the way out the door.

“I got us breakfast.”

“Perfect.” Leo pocketed the apples. “We’ll need it.
Ready for an adventure?”

She
nodded,
her cheeks pink with
promise.

He took her deep into the river valley, over the rolling
hills outside town where they had gone scavenging together many times, but
never ventured far before.

“Where are we going?” Catherine asked.

“Today, we’re searching for crystals and arrowheads,” he
said.

They stopped to munch on the apples,
then
began to poke around, picking up rocks and sticks and looking for Native
American artifacts.

The sun was high in the sky when Leo found it, a perfectly
preserved arrowhead left by the
Abenaki
Indians
decades ago. Leo ran his fingers across the blade, still sharp. The arrow had
been chiseled out of bright-white stone.

“What’d you find?” she asked, coming up behind him.

He opened his fist and presented the arrowhead with pride.

“Beautiful,” she said, reaching out to touch it.

“It’s yours,” he whispered.

At the time, it seemed an odd gift for a girl. She usually
wanted hair ribbons or rock candy, but it was different and that was something
she could appreciate.

That night, she dug deep in her drawer and found the first
sculpture Leo had given her, a brittle lump of clay, barely holding together.
She wrapped it lovingly with the arrowhead in a swatch of pink silk. If Cupid
struck, Catherine liked to think this was the first of his arrows.

*

Despite their differences, Leo and Catherine grew close,
starting eighth grade that September buoyed by the simple, sweet joy of the
summer they’d whiled away together. They were thirteen, and for the first time
in their acquaintance, they were friends, their differences molded into
strengths.

Catherine was a good student—practical, intelligent, and
persevering. Leo was an artist and a dreamer, preferring to sculpt with clay or
play sports rather than study. Leo brought out the child in Catherine—the
opposite of what her parents expected of her. She, in turn, grounded Leo and
helped him focus while encouraging his natural talent for sculpting. Thanks to
her tutelage, he passed his classes. The more time they spent together, the
more temperance Leo showed, reining in his urges for the daring and extreme.