Garden of Angels (2 page)

One

September 1974

“We walking home together?” Becky Sue asked me as I rummaged through my locker on Friday afternoon. We had just finished up our first week of school and I was in a hurry to go.

“Only if we leave right now,” I told her, slamming my locker door.

“What’s the rush?” Becky eyed my stack of books. “How much homework have you got, anyway?”

Last year’s testing had put me into accelerated classes, Conners’ college prep program. It meant a lot more book work for me. Yet I was glad to be among about twenty in our entire school to be selected for the newly created mix of high-scoring students. I realized that it had fallen to me to do what no female in our family before me had done: go to college.

I said, “Two papers due Monday, plus a current events report for government class. Mr. Kessler wants weekly written reports about current events. He also wants everyone in his class to do a project before the end of the year.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know. Maybe something about Vietnam because there’s lots of material about it.”

“He lost a son in Vietnam. Remember? We were in fourth grade.”

“I remember.” Mama and Papa had gone to Jeb Kessler’s funeral and to the funerals of three other young men from Conners in the following two years. “I just have to think of a good angle,” I told Becky Sue. “I want an A.”

Becky took two of my books and settled them onto her smaller stack. We walked out of the building together and the September heat hit me like a volleyball slammed over the net. The locals called it Indian summer. I just called it hot. The sidewalk in front of our school swarmed with kids. First graders were lined up waiting for cars to pick them up. Conners only had one school bus and it did triple duty, taking elementary kids home first, then middle-schoolers, and finally high-schoolers. I lived about six blocks from the school and Becky Sue lived two blocks farther, so we never had to ride the bus. We’d walked to and from school together ever since we were nine years old.

“Can you come to Byron’s with me tomorrow?” Becky asked. “I’m going to buy Mom a birthday present.”

Byron’s was Conners’ only department store. Short of going to Atlanta, sixty-five miles north, it was the only place to shop in our town. “I reckon,” I said. “Papa’s driving Mama to Atlanta tomorrow for an appointment at Emory Hospital, so I can’t leave until after they’re gone.”

“All the way to Emory? What’s wrong with Dr. Keller?”

“She’s already been to Dr. Keller and he wants her to go to Emory for some tests.”

“What kind of tests?”

I shrugged. “They didn’t say. That puts me and Adel at the house together alone, so as you can imagine, I don’t want to hang around with my sister all day. Maybe we can go to the movies after you buy your mom’s present.”

Two squirrels jabbered at us from overhead tree branches as we walked.

“Is Adel still going to those weekend gettogethers at the army base?”

“Hasn’t missed a weekend in the past seven,” I said. The training base was just outside Atlanta and was full of young soldiers, but that was about all I knew about it. That and the fact that my sister and her best friend, Sandy, drove there once a week for Red Cross–sponsored gatherings with lonely servicemen. Adel had assured our parents that there was plenty of supervision and that everything was conducted in an upright and proper manner.

There were five years and a whole lot of differences between Adel and me. Ever since her graduation, she’d been working at Papa’s bank. Well, Conners Community Bank didn’t really
belong
to my father, but he was responsible for running the place. He’d hired Adel for training as a teller right after she graduated from high school because it was a known fact that while my sister was beautiful, she wasn’t college material.

“Bet she’s got herself a boyfriend at the base,” Becky said.

“Bet you’re right. I mean, what would she do
without
a boyfriend to worship and adore her?”

We laughed about my sister’s popularity. At school she’d been Queen of Everything and had left a string of brokenhearted boys behind her when she hadn’t agreed to marry any of them. “I don’t plan to stay in Conners,” she’d told everyone. “I want to see the whole wide world.” But to me it looked like Conners was where she’d always be. I, of course, was planning on staying in our hometown forever. I loved Conners.

A car full of boys drove past us. The driver honked the horn. J. T. Rucker, a junior and one of our high school’s top football players, leaned out the window. “Hey, Boney Maroney! How’s your sister? She ready for a real man?”

I felt my face flush. “You know any?” I yelled back.

“Come over here, Darcy. I’ll show you my manhood.”

“Get lost, you creep!”

He slapped the side of the car hard, making me jump; he laughed and the car drove off. “I really hate that guy!” I said to Becky.

“Don’t judge all boys by J.T. Take Russell Danby, for instance. Don’t you think he’s cute?”

We’d known Russell since first grade and I’d never thought he was cute. “When did you start thinking Russell was cute?” I asked.

“Ever since third period when I dropped my pencil and he picked it up for me. When our fingers touched, I got a physical shock. I’m telling you, it went right through me. It was like I was seeing him for the first time. My heart went thump-thump and I knew he was the one I wanted.”

I decided not to mention static electricity. Becky Sue was my best friend. She liked a different boy every year. She’d write his name on her notebook cover and go all flirty every time she got within ten feet of him. “So your heart thumped— that’s a dead giveaway if I ever heard one.”

“One day you’re going to fall like a rock for some boy and I can’t wait until it happens. Then you’ll see what it feels like and you won’t be so skeptical of others’ emotions,” Becky lectured.

“Not likely,” I said with a laugh. I didn’t think much of any of the boys at school—they bored me. “But if it happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

We stopped at the place where I was to cut through the alleyway that ran behind my backyard. “Call me in the morning after your parents leave,” Becky said. “Maybe we can see
The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre
.”

“Will do,” I said. I watched her walk off, then turned, cut through a hedge, opened a tall wooden gate and stepped into paradise.

My mother’s gardens were the most spectacular for their size in all of Georgia. On the acre and a half behind our house, she had created magnificent beds and planted stands of trees that had no rival. Mama urged growth from the earth the way God spilled sunlight on the South. It was said that Joy Quinlin could coax flowers from a stick poked in the ground. I believed it. She was president of the local garden club, as her mother had been before her. And it was my wish to be president of it one day too. So I read gardening books and I learned the names of every plant in the yard. I knew when they bloomed, what diseases and insects attacked them, what remedies to use to fight blights and infestations. To me, Mama’s gardens were holy, and I felt closer to God when I was in the yard than when I was in church.

The yard was meticulously laid out with terraces and paths that boasted annuals, perennials, vines, bushes, a pond and a special section resplendent with a variety of roses. In the spring and throughout the summer and fall, the yard was alive with color in every shade of the rainbow. In the center of the yard, Papa had built a gazebo and a path that led to the pond. The pond was rimmed with rushes, and in the spring, water irises. Water lilies floated on the water’s surface. A wooden bench beside the pond was encircled with peony and camellia bushes. Morning-glory vines spread over rocks like delicate fingers.

When I was a small child, my mother would walk me through the yard and point to the different flowers and tell me their Latin, common and sometimes old-timey folk names. She would point and say, “Now, the maiden pink attracts butterflies, Darcy.” Or she’d stop in front of a particular flower to say, “Those are four-o’clocks because they only come out in the afternoon.” Or, “Look, Darcy . . . there’s a love-lies-bleeding.”

On our garden walks, Mama used to tell me, “Angels live in gardens, Darcy.”

“Where?” I would ask, looking around for the white-winged beings I saw drawn in my Sunday school papers.

“Close your eyes and breathe deep.”

“All I smell is flowers, Mama,” I would say.

“Not so. That’s the breath of angels. And the stirrings you hear in the leaves are their wings brushing past.”

When I was four, I believed her. When I was seven, I knew better. But now that I was fourteen and looking out on Mama’s gardens, I again believed that angels lived here.

Whenever Mama planted, I helped. I liked to dig in the dirt—unlike Adel, who hated getting her hands dirty. The fresh loamy smell of the earth, the sound of summer rain, the scent of newly mown grass, the sight of sunlight speckling the trees sometimes brought a lump to my throat and made me want to cry for the sheer joy of seeing such beauty.

I balanced my books on my hip as I passed through the yard. Fall was coming. Despite the humid heat, I could see fall’s telltale signs in the foliage of the trees and the withering clusters of summer flowers. I went up the back steps, across the screened porch and into the kitchen. I dropped my books with a thud onto the table, where Mama was sitting, sipping a cup of coffee and staring out the window.

“Don’t clatter so, Darcy. You sound like a herd of elephants coming through.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You got a headache?” I went to the refrigerator and pulled open the door.

“No,” Mama said. “And don’t hold the door open. Get something and close it.”

I thought Mama’s behavior peculiar because she usually wanted to hear all about my school day. I would sit at the table and eat a snack, and she’d work on the beginnings of dinner while we talked. I glanced around and realized she hadn’t started preparations. “What’s for supper?”

“I haven’t started supper yet.”

“Can I fix something for you?”

Mama sighed and rose from her chair. She came around and touched my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to snap at you, honey. I just have a lot on my mind. Forgive me?”

“You can be grumpy, Mama. It’s allowed.”

She cupped my chin, gazed down into my eyes. She looked sad, and it caused my heart to skip a beat. “I’ll start supper while you talk to me,” she said, turning toward the stove.

I launched into a telling of my day, but I could not forget how she had looked at me and how it had tugged at my heart.

I came to the breakfast table Saturday morning and was surprised to see Adel already there. She almost always slept in on Saturdays. Papa was reading the paper and Mama was making waffles. “Morning,” Papa said.

I scraped the chair across the linoleum and Adel shot me an intolerant glare. “Morning, all. Missing out on your beauty sleep, aren’t you, Adel?”

“I slept fine,” she said. “Although I don’t know how. Your radio blared half the night.”

“I fell asleep with it on. Sorry.”

Our rooms were down the hall from each other. Adel had claimed Grandmother’s big upstairs bedroom after she died. I had been eight, and up until that time Adel and I had shared the smaller, middle bedroom. Adel’s room had its own bathroom, while I used the one across the hall, which was just as well because she kept drawers full of cosmetics, hair sprays and perfumes. There would have been no room for my meager collection of stuff. Yet when Adel had moved out, I felt adrift and lonely. “I need the space,” she had told me, then shut the door and left me to grow up on my own.

Mama and Papa’s room was over the back porch, part of the new addition to the house when they’d married. Their space was far away from the noise of Adel’s and my rooms and had large windows that looked down into the backyard gardens.

Papa folded his paper and buttered the waffle Mama had put on his plate. “We’ll be staying over in Atlanta tonight,” he said. “Adel, I expect you to take care of your sister.”

“But Sandy and I are going to the dance at the base tonight. It’s all planned.”

“Can’t be helped,” Papa said. “You’re responsible for fixing supper and breakfast tomorrow.”

“I don’t need her to
baby
-sit,” I said indignantly. “I’m fourteen!” I sure didn’t want Adel sulking around and being hateful to me for twenty-four hours because she couldn’t keep her date.

“It’s not open for discussion,” Papa said in the voice he used when he was finished with a topic. He cut his waffle with the side of his fork and took a mouthful.

Adel and I exchanged desperate glances, each for different reasons. “Becky Sue asked me to spend the night and I said I’d check with Mama, but that I figured it would be all right,” I blurted out. While it wasn’t exactly the truth, Becky and I had been having sleepovers since the third grade and our presence in each other’s families was frequent and interchangeable. “Can I, Mama? That way Adel can keep her date and Mrs. Johnson can watch out for me.”

“We’ll have the car,” Papa said.

“Sandy’s driving,” Adel said quickly.