Coldwater Revival: A Novel (29 page)

Nobie’s eyes popped wide when he saw the bill. He shook his head with vigor. “Can’t take this money, ma’am. Didn’t tote your bag but a nickel’s worth. A nickel’s all I have coming.”

“Of course, it’s all you can charge. But what about the next time I need you to carry my luggage, or take a sack of groceries home for me? What if I have no money and can’t pay you? This dollar is an investment in the future.” Nobie twisted his mouth to the side. I knew my words were as unclear to him as a coin in a mud puddle. “I’m asking you to take the money, and when I need you again, you will have already been paid.”

Nobie’s keen mind snapped to attention. His eyes squinted as he asked, “What if you use up your dollar’s worth, and still want me to help you? Then how will I get what’s coming to me?”

“Well—I guess at such time, I’ll just have to fork over another dollar. Sound fair, Mr. Percher?” Nobie thought a moment, then gave his head a tentative nod. “But, Nobie, before we become business partners, I have a favor to ask of you.”

He looked at me long and hard, cold suspicion crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Just what kind of favor’re you needing?”

“I’d like you to call me Emma Grace. That’s my name, and since you’ll have to keep up with all our money transactions, we should be on a first-name basis, don’t you think? You’ll be our bookkeeper, and I’ll depend on you to let me know when I owe you more money. Does that seem fair?”

It must have sounded all right to Nobie. He turned around and headed toward the train station without saying another word. I thought I heard him whistling a clever tune, but perhaps it was just the wind.

Thirty-seven

Across the space of time it took to cart my luggage in his rackety old wagon, Nobie Percher stole my heart like a runner sliding into second base.

“He was so cute, Granny, doffing his cap and bowing like I was royalty or something.” Fondness rippled my words into weak, breathless giggles. As I expounded on his gravelly voice and trunk-hard demeanor, Granny’s shoulders bounced a bit. She lifted her spectacles, swiping wetness from her jolly eyes. A vision of Nobie’s lean shabbiness tiptoed across my memories, sobering me a bit. “You think we could do something for Nobie’s family? Maybe take them some food or help out with the babies? I could do their washing for them.”

Granny’s coffee cup halted midway to her mouth. Then came the look—the one I’d come to dread during my residency in Galveston years earlier. That look that made me question if I’d put my clothes on backward or spoke the Portuguese tongue and Granny couldn’t understand me.

“Ye can’t jest barge into a person’s home like that and take over. Ye have to be invited. People have their pride, ye know. Nobie’s mother appears to have taught her young’uns about honesty and hard work. Ye don’t want to be upsetting the apple cart, Emma Grace, or doing somethin’ that would embarrass them.”

After Granny retired for the night, I stood at the kitchen window, pondering her words. Best I tread lightly with the Percher family. Find a way to help them without denting their dignity.
Will you show me how, Lord?

The excitement of my first train ride, my first glimpse of the wind-scoured sea as we crossed over the bay today, and meeting Nobie had me keyed up and unable to sleep. I leaned against the sill, viewing the night curtain that had dropped earlier in the evening. The outside of the window was warty as a tree toad; weathered to gray and peeling patches of paint. Yet the inside frame bore shellac that rivaled the smoothness of Olly hair. ’Twas a picture of my life after God sanded guilt from my heart and coated it with a velvet glaze. Was it any wonder that I had found my way to Granny’s porch steps after Gavin’s attack? ’Twas in the place that I had come home to God.

The wild wind blew, howling between frame dwellings and whining down the parlor stovepipe. While the trades raged, layers of crushed-shell lifted from the pavement and swirled in clouds of pallid dust. I prayed for calmer breezes, knowing I would have to postpone my venture to the beach until they abated. I yearned for the sea: its stiff blow of wind; the kelp floes that bobbed between the breakers; and my feathery friends that found nourishment on its doorstep. I conceded that an even greater obsession tugged me to the sea: the tin in which I had buried Tate’s note. I had to know if he’d discovered it, and if so, why had five years passed without a word from him?

A thought came: Perhaps I should visit the ship docks and inquire of Tate’s employment. I thought it futile since he was probably on the far side of the sea, fulfilling his dream to sail its perimeters and view its enchantment. Had he found true love … somewhere on a tropical isle? My heart thrummed a frantic drumbeat as I imagined Tate with his woman, lying on the beach; arms entwined as they shared love beneath the moonlight. Had she borne Tate a child? I turned from the window and shook my head, as though I could dislodge the troubling pictures from my mind.

After visiting with Granny the next morning, I ambled to the kitchen and packed a lunch while she watched me from the parlor.

“Where ye off to, sweet-pie?”

“I don’t want to wait until afternoon to go to the beach. I promise I’ll be home before dark, but don’t worry if I don’t get back until late afternoon. Okay?”

“Tell ye what … I’ll make us some dumplings for supper. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds wonderful. Love you, Granny.”

With quickened heartbeat and anticipation pulsing through my veins I raced down the steps and aimed my excited feet toward the ocean.

Maybe I’d not lost Tate, after all.

Sea breezes wallowed beneath my petticoat and would have hoisted it over my head had I not pressed my skirt with a firm hand. As sunshine melted into my scalp, it spread a toasty sense of well-being over my body. Today was a mild, sit-down-in-the-sand kind of day. If I were in Coldwater, I would have completed my chores by now, and would be riding Old Jack to Holly’s house, six miles down the road. After Karen and Kade smothered me in hugs, we’d play together until one, or all of us, collapsed in an exhausted heap.

As I crossed an expanse of deep, loose sand, I played tug-of-war with the sea: drawn to its embrace, yet pulling back from its allure. My first priority was to locate Micah’s dune. Afterward, I would bask in the ocean’s soft green mysteries. The sea and I would become one again, even if its wetness covered but the tips of my toes.

Would I spy Tate on the beach? I wondered. Would his tallness face the water as it had in years past? Would his gaze be latched to the horizon where golden sun mated with glimmering sea? Or might I spy him near the water’s edge, his eyes searching for the girl with whom he had danced the dance of love?

I tracked through hillocks of grit and granule, most unfamiliar, for they were not the drifts of my brother’s treasures. My head was full of fanciful dreams as I poked and prodded, discovering all too soon that the sand dunes of my memories no longer existed. Five years of tides and rain, storms and windfalls had reshaped the terrain, sculpting it into unknown valleys and flattened ridges. Micah’s baby elephant dune—once protected by taller, mightier peaks—had disappeared. I spent hours among the pallets, scratching and digging with my hands, but to no avail. The altered landscape was as foreign to me as the thought of giving up.

As the sun scuttled lower in the flushed sky, my gaze turned to the sea more often. The barren shoreline appeared a lonely place. There were no couples strolling hand in hand. And nowhere did I see a lanky giant, staring at the far side of the sea. There were only terns and waddling gulls on the rummage for scraps of leftovers. ’Twas disheartening to know that if I returned to the beach every day for the rest of my life, I might never spy the ebony-haired youth of my dreams.

Muscles in my back and limbs flared with rekindled flames. I had strained in a bent-over position far too long. Gathering my lunch pail and jacket from the ground, I set out for Granny’s house, determined to return on the morrow and accomplish my goal. As I walked the outlying dunes, I recalled the first time I saw Mr. Panduso, plodding a slow path of certainty, his hands clutching a bouquet of flowers. He had removed his hat and bowed his head, and then placed the flowers on a peak of sand. Tate said he did this daily.

A clump of dunes near the seawall bore a familiarity the others lacked. Fearing another letdown, I entered the remaining congregation with but a smidgen of hope. Wind blew through the dunes on warm rushes as I plowed my toes through a hundred more piles of grit. Having become more deeply discouraged, I aimed my feet toward Granny’s house. ’Twas then my foot nudged a stone or possibly a shell. I thought to kick it from sight, but stopped and inspected it instead. The tip of a broken twig—just a speck of brown in an ocean of gray sand—stood upright in the ground. I dropped to my knees and dug with passion, my hand grazing a tin that rested twice as deeply as it did the day I planted it.

I pried the can from its burrow and wrestled with the lid, my gaze spying the note exactly where I placed it five years earlier. Though I had memorized every word, I read and reread the missive, feeling disappointment, frustration, and relief—all in the same moment.
So—Tate didn’t have a way to contact me, after all.

How, then, would I ever find
him?
I whispered the question over and over, but no one heard me save a complaining seagull on a nearby clump of grass. While the bird trooped his territory like a sentry on guard duty, I lay my head in my hands and cried at the sad ending to my love story.
I don’t know how to find him, Father. I don’t even know if you want me to find him.

Time sauntered by and dusk now whispered over the narrow brim of day, telling me it was time to leave this place. But my hollow heart wouldn’t depart until I had appeased its hunger for answers. And so I fed it the only food I had: the vacant, barren years that lay before me, and the dreams I’d only just begun to believe in again. I could think of nothing else to stuff into its yawning, empty mouth.

The true answer came as I walked the path to Granny’s house. It traveled first to my heart, calming its hectic beat. Then it settled in my mind like a roosting hen, calling a halt to all my fretting. ’Twas the greatest pleasure of all when it plugged into my soul like a finger in the dike, stopping my flow of fear and disappointment. The answer brought peace and deep assurance with it, for I now believed that if Tate and I ever found each other again, it would be at the doing of my heavenly Father.

Granny poured herself a cup of breakfast coffee and a cup of tea for me. The winds slumbered quietly now and sunshine warmed the kitchen, cozying up an intimate warren in which to breed our morning chitchat.

Granny had visited Coldwater twice in the last five years. I thought her more lovely every time I saw her. Her hair was snow white now, the color of rainless clouds on a summer day. She was still a mountain of a woman. Perhaps an old mountain that stooped a bit near the crest. A mountain that had added girth with the seasons, explaining the reason Granny’s knees crackled and popped like the bark of a thawing cottonwood whenever she eased herself from a chair.

“Do you recall my friend Tate?” I asked her. “You never met him, but right before Elo came to fetch me home, you told me to invite him over for Sunday dinner. Remember?” I nibbled on a flaky biscuit, though I had already gorged myself to puffiness on eggs, bacon, grits, and country-fried potatoes.

Granny cupped her chin and tapped her nose with her pointer finger. She appeared stumped for a moment, but then the puzzle pieces fell into place and she smiled, her memory proving true once again.

“Yes’m, I do. He was to come for Sunday dinner but you and Elo had to go home. Ye never did get to offer that invite, did ye?”

“No—and I never heard from him again. Not after the day he and I went to Kempner Park. I really liked him. Wish we could have exchanged addresses, or at least told each other our last names.” I could hear Granny’s thoughts as though she spoke them aloud:
If wishes were horses …

“’Tis a pity, Emma Grace. Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.” Granny blew into her cup and sipped gingerly on her coffee. “What did yer young man look like, sweet-pie?”

My face must have lit up. I felt warmth spread across my cheeks, down my neck. Granny noticed as well, her eyes widening behind her thick spectacles and a sly smile smoothing wrinkles from her puckered lips. But, for once, she let the moment pass without uttering a single naughty word.

“He’s real tall—like Elo. And his hair is blacker than midnight. Tate’s probably the most handsome boy I’ve ever met.”

“What about Gavin? Didn’t I hear ye say the same thing ’bout him?”

“Granny …!” My voice warned her not to speak of the man I hoped to forget. “Yes … he was handsome too. I’ve sort of come to believe that it’s my right to be surrounded by attractive men, what with Elo and Nathan … and Papa.”