Herbcraft
Violet Schafer
Newlyweds would put bunches of dried lavender under their mattresses to ensure marital passion.
Lavender
Tessa Evelegh
It was late when we got to bed that night, and while I was very happy that McQuaid would soon be out of a job, I was already rehearsing what I had to tell Melissa when she got up the next morning. But she’s a tough, resilient young woman, and I was confident that with the right support and lots of love, she’d come through, and that she and her mother would work things out. I was also relieved that McQuaid’s investigation was over, except for a few loose ends and the inevitable paperwork. I could stop worrying about being stranded at the altar or forced to go on my honeymoon with Hark. None of which meant that I was easier in my mind about the marriage. I don’t have any personal experience to go by, but I suspect that weddings and honeymoons are a lot easier to orchestrate than the long haul.
If all you’re interested in is the mystery, you’ve come to the end of the story, more or less, and you can put this down and go on about your other business. But there’s one more chapter, and if romance is your cup of tea, settle back in your chair and I’ll tell you about the wedding.
On Friday, Bertha Reppert and Betsy Williams appeared at the shop around nine, full of their usual enthusiasm, irrepressible good humor, and boundless wealth of herbal ideas. We hugged, sat down for tea, caught up on all the gossip, and then got serious about what needed to be done.
“It doesn’t look like a problem,” Betsy assured me, when we had glanced over the list of gardens we’d been given permission to pillage. “As long as there are plenty of willing pickers.”
“The Merryweathers are glad to oblige,” I said. “It’s Josephine that’s kicking up the fuss.” The storm had wobbled into the western Gulf of Mexico, and bands of showers would soon be moving in from the east. The Weather Channel was predicting severe tidal flooding, the police had closed the JFK Causeway to South Padre Island, and Galveston was filling sandbags. It wasn’t clear just how bad things might get in Pecan Springs, but it was beginning to look like a wet and wild weekend.
“So what’s a little rain?” Betsy said confidently, tossing her brown hair. “We’ll wear boots and ponchos. Anyway, we need to get the flowers this afternoon and evening, if possible. It takes twenty-four hours to condition them before we start to arrange.”
Bertha didn’t bat an eye when I told her about my mother’s cake catastrophes. She pushed her big owly glasses up on her nose and said, “Listen, China, I’ve been in worse situations. Have I ever told you about the time we planned to feed lunch to a hundred and fifty and—” We were off on one of Bertha’s amazing hair-raising herbal adventures.
Ruby drove Bertha to my house to bail my mother out of her cake-baking jail, while Betsy rolled up her sleeves, assembled the available Merryweathers, and put them to work gathering flowers and herbs before Josephine got serious. She reminded the pickers to cut the stems on a long slant, remove the lower leaves, and plunge the plant materials in warm water as soon as they were cut. As the buckets were brought in and stored in the kitchen of our tearoom, she misted the flowers, then closed the door so they could rest quietly in the dark until the next day.
If you’ve ever done flowers for a wedding, you know how much work it is, and Betsy is a perfectionist. In her hands, everything is done with exquisite attention to detail, and the result is elegant and sophisticated. Late Saturday morning, as Josephine (now a full-bodied, self-willed hurricane) lashed the windows with sheets of rain, we cleared the tables in the tearoom and Betsy and her flower arrangers settled down to work. They started with the boutonnieres for the men and then went on to the bridal chaplets of ivy, rosemary, and white roses. When those were finished, they turned to the tussie-mussies—handheld herbal nosegays in which each plant has a special significance—for the women guests. As each piece was completed, it was misted, bagged in plastic, and refrigerated. Then they worked on the large floral arrangements for the altar and the smaller aisle markers, using boxwood and myrtle, mint, mugwort, ivy, roses, ferns, and lilies. I provided a dozen rosemary topiaries I’d been saving for the occasion, and those were decorated with pinks and lavender and tied with white ribbons.
Then Betsy put her arrangers to work making wonderful tussie-mussie style herbal bouquets for Ruby and me, following the traditional language of flowers. Each one was centered with a single perfect white rose from Winnie’s garden, symbolizing love and desire, and surrounded with mint for joy, myrtle for passion, lavender for devotion, sage for health and long life, southernwood for constancy, rue for vision, thyme for courage, ivy for faithfulness, and of course, rosemary—the marriage herb—for love, remembrance, and fidelity. Finally, they fashioned the groom’s flowers: sprigs of rosemary and sage, a ruffle of parsley, and a tiny white rosebud. If the flowers spoke truly, McQuaid would live long and be healthy, be constant and loving, and not talk back to the boss.
While all this was going on, Bertha and my mother had shifted into high gear. By early Saturday evening, before we left for the party at the Pack Saddle Inn, they had produced not only the bride’s cake—a three-tiered beauty decorated with lavender, rosemary, and tiny rosebuds—but the groom’s cake as well, dark and rich and nutty. We’d already agreed on a menu centered around a sandwich loaf that could be easily sliced, a delicate tuna-cream-cheese mousse, a tomato-rose-hip aspic, herbed fruit skewers, and plates of herbal goodies supplied by volunteer Merryweathers. On Sunday, when it came time to lay out the food table in a room adjacent to the Garden Room, Bertha put down a snowy white tablecloth, then arranged cloth-draped boxes of different heights to display the food and flowers. One of her favorite expressions is “and just one more!” so when everything was finished, the reception table was delightfully crowded with an abundance of food and flowers, candles and crystal and mirrors, and fruit and flowers and herbs tucked into folds of the cloth.
That was the good news. The bad news was that Josephine made landfall on Saturday night just south of Corpus Christi, moved inland toward San Antonio, and then showed no inclination to go anywhere else very soon. Which meant that here in Pecan Springs, the flash-flood warnings were posted on Saturday night and the rain bucketed down at the rate of an inch an hour for most of Sunday—a bad-hair day to end all bad-hair days. Embedded in the bands of rain were thunder showers as well, which meant even heavier rain and a display of pyrotechnics now and again. The road to New Braunfels was closed by noon and the road to Gruene shortly thereafter, and the Pecan River began to show signs of rising over its banks and flooding the park. By the time we loaded the food and flowers into the vans and out of the vans and through the downpour to the Garden Room, we were drenched and ragged-looking.
And yes, the work party included the bride, and the groom too. We couldn’t let our friends have all the fun, could we? McQuaid drove one of the vans and Blackie drove the other, while Ruby, Sheila, Leatha, and I toted and hauled. We were finished by two, which gave me barely two hours to throw Ruby’s nightgown and a few other things into my honeymoon suitcase (a gift from my mother), then shower and change and make myself pretty. It’s a good thing I didn’t let Bobbie Rae talk me into the Bride’s Getaway, though. All that beauty would have washed off while I was slogging through ankle-deep water with my arms full of boxes, half of my fingernails broken off, the other half chipped, and my hair draped like a wet floor mop over my head. It took Ruby’s and Leatha’s combined efforts to make me halfway presentable.
And the wedding itself? Well, it was quite an experience. The herbs and flowers filled the room with a rich fragrance, and hundreds of votive candles flickered softly against the gray rain sheeting down the windows. As people gathered, Sheila played “Lavender’s Blue” and “Greensleeves” on her CD player. Ruby wore a simple blue ankle-length tunic, and Leatha, whom I had asked at the last moment to give me away, was dressed in soft mauve silk. I stepped down the aisle to the measured beat of the Bridal Chorus. Maude Porterfield, the oldest Justice of the Peace in the state of Texas, remembered to turn up her hearing aid for the occasion but forgot to take “obey” out of the ceremony. Wearing his Mexican wedding shirt, McQuaid stood firm and solid without his canes throughout the ceremony. I took my place beside him, feeling as brides have always felt at such moments, full of an unruly joy slightly dampened by a clammy stage fright.
But all the anxiety vanished when he bent to kiss me, wrapping both arms around me and pulling me close, kissing my lips, then burying his face in my shoulder. My arms went around his neck and we stood, eyes closed, forgetting everyone else, finding shelter in each other. It wasn’t the embrace of passionate lovers (that would come later) but of beloved friends, grateful that they had at last found sweet sanctuary after the harrowing journey of the past few months. We held one another until Brian, sitting in the front row beside Melissa and her mother, said plaintively, “When are they gonna
quit?
I want some cake!”
That brought down the house. A ripple of laughter went across the room, echoed by a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning outside, as if the powers that be had said Amen and Let’s get on with it, gang. McQuaid kissed me again, brushed a tear off my cheek, and then released me. He turned to Brian and held out his hand.
“Come here, partner,” he said. When Brian joined us, blushing beet-red, McQuaid stepped aside so the boy could stand between us. Then, holding hands, the three of us turned to say thank you to our families and friends as the triumphant notes of the Ode to Joy rang through the room. It was a glorious moment, and if the day had ended there, everything would have been hunky-dory.
It didn’t.
By the time McQuaid and I had hugged and kissed everybody, snacked, cut the cake, and toasted one another with punch and glasses of bubbly—all to the delicate melodies of a Celtic harp—the wind was bending the trees double, the rain was pouring down in torrents, and the electric lights had gone out. Pecan River, now the color of frothy chocolate milk, was roaring past the windows of the Garden Room like a miniature Niagara. Awestruck and murmuring, the guests gathered to watch as limbs and whole trees, a shed roof, and a Porta-Potty were ferried downstream by the churning waters.
The Whiz had just said, “Wow, this is getting serious,” when Linda Davis, carrying a flashlight, came into the room. She held her hands up for silence.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said, when we had quieted down, “but the police have just closed the River Road. I’m afraid we’re all going to be here until it’s reopened.”
“Oh, no!” Ruby exclaimed. “When?”
“When the police say so,” Linda said. “It could be a while, unfortunately. The flood waters are chewing up bridge footings.”
“The police?” Lurel asked. “But the chief is here! And so is the county sheriff. How could they do such a thing without notifying
them?”
All eyes went to the groom and his best man.
Blackie shrugged. “Not my job.”
“Don’t look at me, either,” McQuaid said. “The highway department is in charge of road closings.”
“I’ve got to get to a phone,” Hark said urgently. “The biggest natural disaster story in decades, and I’m missing it!”
“Looks to me like you’re right in the middle of it,” Sheila remarked grimly, as a flock of shingles swooped like errant blackbirds past the window.
“The phones are out,” Linda said to Hark, “but I’ve got a cell phone in my office.” To the others, she said, “It looks like we’re stranded, folks. Sorry—but at least we’re all in the same boat.” Loud groans from the exasperated guests. She shrugged ruefully. “Sorry about that. Please hang tight. We’ll try to make your stay as comfortable as possible.”
“Comfort be damned!” the Whiz exclaimed hotly. “I’ve got a court date in the morning! I’ve got to get back to San Antonio.”
“And Bertha and I need to get to Austin tonight,” Betsy said. She looked at her watch. “Our plane leaves at seven tomorrow morning. We’re due to catch a connecting flight in Houston.”
“Houston!” Charlie Lipton hooted. “With this storm, the entire city of Houston will be running a couple of days late.”
At the mention of the plane, McQuaid looked at me. “Hey, hon, what time is our Hawaii flight?”
My answer was lost in the explosive sound of breaking glass. We all jumped, and Leatha clutched Sam’s arm with a shriek of surprise. At the far end of the room, away from the guests, a massive live oak limb had smashed through the window. Rain and wind howled in.
Linda, like a woman in charge of her safari, raised her voice. “That’s it, folks. We’re outta here. Into the hall, away from the windows. Come on, everybody move!
Now!”
“But the cake!” Leatha cried. “We can’t leave the cake. It’ll be ruined!”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Leave the cake, Mom. You can always bake me another one.”
And that was the end of the wedding reception—ofncialty, that is. I would like to report that the National Guard dispatched a helicopter to airlift McQuaid and me to Austin in time to catch our plane to Hawaii, but that didn’t happen. (The airline canceled the flight and found seats for us on a plane leaving on Monday afternoon.) We spent our wedding night in the Honeymoon Suite of the Pack Saddle Inn, a crimson-flocked room of mammoth proportions with a large mirror, discreetly draped in red velvet, on the wall opposite the waterbed, which was roughly the size of Canyon Lake. Blackie had risked life and limb to retrieve my suitcase from McQuaid’s truck, so I at least had Ruby’s honeymoon nightgown. It got rave reviews from McQuaid before it fell in a heap on the floor and we fell into bed together, naked but legal, to make waves. We didn’t bother to undrape the mirror. That’s the virtue of having lived in sin before you’re married. There are no disappointments, no uncomfortable discoveries, no unwelcome surprises.