Mine to Tell (2 page)

Grandpa had kept his hand on my shoulder, a tremble in his grip that hadn’t been there moments before. I’d never felt his hand before, so I just stood there, thankful, yet still choking on frightened gulps. “Simon’s wife just left,” he whispered down to me. “I know you probably don’t understand that, but he’s pretty upset. More so than usual.”

I didn’t know what that had to do with wanting to bulldoze Julianne’s house down. Simon’s wife, my great-aunt Ida, had always been an aloof woman, one who had never seemed happy, so the fact that she was gone didn’t seem like it should make any difference. But maybe it did and that’s why my great-uncle Simon became so mean before he died. His brows were in a permanent furry knot over eyes that bored holes into the ground wherever he stalked. Great-Uncle Levi was different. He was invisible—a Christmas card once a year and nothing more. He’d left the area long before I was born and lived elsewhere, leaving the family shame behind with us.

Mama was quiet while I was thinking, as if she was looking back in time, too. Whatever it was she saw, it must not have changed things, because she sighed and continued. “I imagine those two boys were a handful for your great-grandmother, them being some other woman’s children and all.” She brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen into her face. She ducked her head and used her shoulder to swipe the curl back, her hands never losing a beat as she continued to shell the peas. “You know how boys are, your brother being a good case in point.” She smiled, Paul Junior’s bullheadedness no doubt in her mind. “The farm Isaac had back then wasn’t as big as what we have now,” she continued. “Just that eighty acres those old houses sit on, hers and his.”

I knew Isaac had lived in the family house, a large two-story farmhouse surrounded by a barn, a corn crib, an outhouse, and a chicken coop. It had been kept up well over the years, and it had been our home when I was tiny, until my father bought more land that attached to that eighty acres and built us this new home not far away. Julianne’s house stood near Isaac’s. Near enough to not be out of sight, just out of touch.

“They stayed plenty busy, I imagine, with the farm, the two boys, and Isaac’s preaching all the time.” Mama became quiet again. I glanced to the side with just my eyes, trying not to move my head so I wouldn’t interrupt her. I wanted to ask about the notes I’d found as a girl in the monstrosity of a family Bible we kept on a stand in the family room. Yellowed sheets covered with sharp, angular cursive were tucked within its pages, the penmanship so pointed I’d always thought it was yelling at me. I wondered if they were written by the Reverend Isaac. Sermon notes maybe, but I didn’t ask.

Then Mama took a deep breath and went on. “When your great-uncle Simon was about thirteen, your great-grandmother up and left. Isaac had been on the preaching circuit and he’d just returned. Simon told me little was said when Isaac got home. He’d come in late, Julianne fixed his meal, and then she was gone. By morning she was nowhere to be found.”

My mind raced with a thousand images of my great-grandmother’s face as she left…or fled, whichever it was. I could hardly breathe as I waited for Mama to tell me more, tell me why and where Julianne had gone.

“There was a note. It was to Isaac. No one would have known about it except he’d kept it.”

What did it say?
I gasped in my mind, my eyes wide, my fingers shelling peas with the speed of a professional gardener.

“One of the boys found it after Isaac died, in an old tin box in his bedroom.” There was disgust in her voice, resentment that I’d detected in her defensiveness for years.

I stopped messing with the peas and turned to my mother. “So you think…” The words were barely out of my mouth and I could see by the look on her face exactly what she thought.

“Annabelle, that note said, ‘I have to go. It’s important. Julianne.’ ”

She resumed shelling peas with a fury while the impact of the brief statement soaked in.

“But she came back,” I exclaimed, figuring she had, since I knew she’d lived in that little house for years. “She did whatever was important and then she returned. There’s nothing horrible about that.”

I felt Mama tighten, and I knew I’d stepped out of place. No one defended Julianne. In fact, Paul Junior often used her name as a synonym for an insult. “She’s done a Julianne,” he liked to say. He probably didn’t know what had happened back then either, but he was the sort that liked to squash little bugs, be the final word on any subject, and deliver judgment on any offense that wasn’t his own. Paul Junior was older than me by three years, but we’d been striving like Jacob and Esau from the moment I emerged from the womb. He was trying to keep me in my place, the place all Crouse women belonged.

“She did come back,” I insisted again. “The house, her little two-story house. That’s where she lived after that, right?”

Mama made an effort to calm herself. “Yes, she came back. A couple of weeks later. Enough time for Isaac to get so hurt and angry that he divorced her in his heart. Simon said they were eating when she came in. It was night and late. She probably thought the boys would be in bed, but they hadn’t kept good schedules without her. So they were sitting there when the door opened. She looked at each of the boys, her face incredibly pale, whiter than the wall behind her. Little Levi jumped up to give her a hug but Isaac made him sit back down. She never looked at Isaac. Simon said she carried the little cloth bag she had with her into their bedroom and closed the door.”

“Clearly she never intended to be gone for good,” I mused aloud.

“Won’t know that without knowing why she left in the first place,” Mama answered rather tartly. “Whatever her reasons, Isaac kept them to himself if she ever told him, leaving us with his word and incidental evidence to come to our own conclusions. Anyway, I guess he got up from the table and went back to their room and closed the door after she’d gone in there. Simon said he and Levi couldn’t hear much, just the two of them talking, their voices raised but Julianne’s different than usual, her voice just wasn’t quite right. Then their door burst open and Isaac stormed back out. Not long after that, Isaac turned a shed they had into that little two-floor house and moved her into it.”

“That must have been weird for her,” I said. “It makes me feel sorry for her.”

“You can’t do that,” Mama snapped. “She clearly did wrong.”

“But she left for a reason she said was important. Maybe it wasn’t wrong at all.”

Mama was so quiet I couldn’t even hear her breathing. Finally she rested her hands on the edge of the sink and looked me in the eye. “Simon said there was another man.”

“But how could he know that?” I cried.

“Isaac never preached again. Does that tell you something?”

“I still don’t believe it.” My heart wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t know my great-grandmother, yet I did. I’d felt her all my life. She was lingering like an unsolved mystery, an unfinished tale, an argument that needed to be resolved.

“Simon said your grandpa’s the proof. He was born nine months after her disappearance,” Mama whispered.

My mouth fell open, and the kitchen and the peas we’d shelled spun away into a sickening spiral. “He could still be Isaac’s,” I whispered, visualizing the ramifications of what Simon had said.

Mama looked at me, a flicker of apology in her eyes as she shook her head.

If this was true, we weren’t Crouses. We were something else, someone else, and this farm we were on was ours by squatter’s rights, not by inheritance. Now I understood why she insisted someone should burn that house down. Maybe Simon had left it there after he’d tried to tear it down to remind us we were bastards. Maybe Grandpa Samuel and my father had left it there in defiance, even after Simon was gone, trying to believe that we weren’t. And Mama. She’d given her adult years to seam this family together, to prove, to whoever cared, that her husband and her children truly were Crouses.

“What happened to her? What happened to Isaac?” I asked, still reeling from my loss of identity, a cold hollowness settling inside.

“Isaac died eventually.”

“She was still alive when he died?” I asked.

Mama nodded. “She was, but she stayed in her own house, even with him gone. The boys were pretty well grown by then, so it didn’t matter much where she stayed. Then, one day she disappeared again. She left another note that one of them found when they went to check on her. That time it just said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve written more for later. Love, Your mother, Julianne.’ Apparently that’s when Simon boarded up her house. Left everything the way it was when he realized she was gone.”

“ ‘I’ve written more for later.’ What did she mean by that?”

“Just more explanations she’d send later, I assume. In a letter or something.”

The kitchen became quiet then, Mama and I lost in our thoughts. Finally I looked over at her. “I understand Great-Uncle Simon’s hurt,” I said. “His life is like a really bad farce of being left behind by women. His mother died, his stepmother left twice, and his wife took off.”

Mama stared back at me. I couldn’t tell if she was upset about what I’d said, or just sad.

“That’s why he tried to tear down Julianne’s house when I was little.” My voice rose a notch, I matched its intensity with my eyes as I gazed at Mama. “He wanted to get back at his wife and both of his mothers. That didn’t work, so then he tried destroying Julianne in person by claiming she was a bad woman. And even though he’s gone, he’s still doing it to you and me, too.” He was a hurt little boy in an angry old man’s body, and he wanted someone to atone for it. Someone like my mother or me, since his wife hadn’t. And Great-Uncle Levi was no better. He hadn’t stuck around and made everyone miserable all these years, but his absence was akin to a judgment. He’d left all of us behind and left my grandpa Samuel, Julianne’s only son, the natural heir to her disgrace, with all of the shame.

I turned back to the sink and picked up a fat green pod and snapped it open. Three healthy round peas glistened as I shoved them out with my thumb.

“Annabelle.” Mama’s voice was strong. “Promise me you’ll honor your family in everything you do, especially for your father and Grandpa Samuel’s sakes.”

I looked at her, beyond her, actually, to the faces of my father and grandfather. Their staid demeanors, the crinkles that eroded the skin beside their eyes from years of empty smiles, their expressions going through the motions while their hearts never did. Then my focus returned to her, my mother, the perfect woman for them, one who had committed herself to a flawless existence, a noble effort that still had never eased their shame or Simon’s anger. They were passing the mantle to me now, a tightrope of ceremonial right living, one that demanded I become invisible so the Crouses could try to forget their shame and hang onto their identity.

I dropped the peapod and turned to my mother. The tired desperation in her eyes was too severe for me to say what I wanted. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her instead, assuring her I would guard my ways. But in the back of my mind was that voice that had been there all my life. It sounded like me, but I knew it was Julianne. I needed to listen to it. I needed to hear what it said, and somehow so did they.

Chapter 2

“And your desire shall be toward your husband…”

“And that’s Isaac.” I pointed out my great-grandfather’s picture to Trevor. “He was a preacher…for awhile. When I was little I referred to him as ‘the old man in the picture, with the big eyebrows and angry eyes.’ Mama’d get so mad at me! You should have heard her shriek.” I looked up at Trevor, his face so handsome that my heart fluttered just like it had the first time I’d seen him. I stopped talking and admired his nearly black hair, his angular features, and the boyish gaiety that lightened his dark eyes. I wanted to reach up and touch him, run my hand over the hollow of his cheek, take a momentary break from telling him about my family.

I was home for the weekend from Cincinnati, where the two of us went to college, and he’d come with me. He was officially my fiancé now, a proposal that had burned a permanent smile onto my face. We’d just announced our engagement to my parents, and I’d followed that by dragging him to the family room to explain the menagerie of ancestral photos on the wall, the one of Julianne in my hand.

“And this is my great-grandmother, Julianne,” I said raising her picture so he could see. I held it close to my face so he would catch the resemblance. He nodded and glanced away. “You know those two old houses down the road? Hers and Isaac’s? I’ve pointed them out to you before. I thought we’d go down there later and really look hers over.”

It had taken years for me to brave the overgrown jungle around Julianne’s house after Mama’s promise of snakes. But then with puberty came an unexplained impetus to see inside that house, and one day I’d suddenly crossed it, high quick strides taking me through the deep grass to the small sagging porch that framed her white wooden door. I remember standing there at her front door and lifting my hand to touch it. I ran my fingers over the places where the paint had chipped, over boards that were nailed across it, acknowledging it as the last physical barrier between her life and mine. I felt close to her, standing there, but I never went farther. I’d turned around and looked across the deep grass I’d just passed through, approving the weeds that had parted like the Red Sea where I’d crossed. But then I saw what I could never have seen from outside the fence. A path. A real path. Grass flattened and parted by someone other than me. Someone who walked near the house fairly often. Julianne? A shudder trickled up my spine, and I bounded off the porch and across the yard faster than I’d come into it. I didn’t look back. My impetus was gone.

“What do you think?” I asked, tugging on Trevor’s sleeve. “I’ve never been in Julianne’s house, but I’ve always wanted to. You want to go with me?” I’d told him some of our family history while we were dating but not the whole of it. In fact, being away at college had swept my history into the past, and the prompts I’d always felt to know my great-grandmother had waned. But now I was here again, standing next to the man who’d asked me to marry him, and my heritage was important once more. I needed to know it. Trevor needed to understand it. He needed to hear as much as I knew, and my great-grandparents’ photos were a good way to break him in.