Morning Glory (44 page)

Calvin Purdy dropped Will at the end of his driveway.

“Thanks a million, Mr. Purdy.”

“No thanks necessary, Will, not from a GI. You sure you don’t want me to take you the rest o’ the way on up’t the house?”

“No, sir, I was always partial to this little stretch of woods. Sounds good to walk through the quiet alone, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure do, son. Ain’t no place prettier’n Georgia in May. You need any help with them crutches?”

“No, sir. I can manage.” Leading with both feet, Will worked his way out of Calvin Purdy’s ‘31 Chevrolet while Purdy retrieved Will’s duffel bag and brought it around, then laced it over Will’s shoulder.

“Be more’n happy to take your duffel up,” Purdy repeated accommodatingly.

“’Predate it, Mr. Purdy, but I kinda wanted to surprise Elly.”

“You mean she doesn’t know you’re comin’?”

“Not yet.”

“We-e-e-ll, then I understand why you want to go up alone... Corporal Parker.” Grinning, Purdy extended his
hand and gripped Will’s tightly. “Anytime I can give you a lift or be of any he’p, just holler. And welcome home.”

After Purdy pulled away, Will stood for a moment, listening to the silence. No cannonade in the distance, no bullets
thupping
into the earth beside him, no mosquitos buzzing, no men screaming. All was silence, blessed May silence. The woods were in deep leaf, heavy green weighting down the branches. Beside the road a patch of wild chicory created a cloud of blue stars. Nearby a clump of wild clover startled, livid in the heat of its summer blush. Some creature had feasted on a smilax vine, spreading a scent like root beer in the air. A yellow warbler did a flight dance, landed on a branch and sang its seven clear, sweet notes, eyeing Will with head atilt.

Home again.

He moved up the driveway beneath the arch of branches that allowed the azure sky entry. He tipped his head and admired it, marveling that he need not cock an ear for the sound of distant engines, nor squint an eye in an effort to identify a wing shape or a rising red sun painted on a fuselage.

Forget it, Parker, you’re home now.

The driveway was soft, the air warm, his crutches poked holes in the red earth. They must’ve had rain recently. Rain. He’d never much cared for rain, not in his early life when he’d lived mostly in the open, certainly not on the Canal, where the damned rain was ceaseless, where it filled foxholes, turned tent camps to fetid quagmires, rotted the soles off sturdy leather boots and fostered mosquitos, malaria and a host of creeping fungi that grew between toes, inside ears and anyplace two skin surfaces touched.

I said, forget it, Parker!

The odd thing was, though he’d been Stateside for six months he still couldn’t acclimate to it. He still scanned the skies. Still listened for stealthy movement behind him. Still expected the telltale clack of two bamboo stalks rubbing. Still flinched at sudden noises. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. The air here had no mildewy smell, instead it held a tang of wild tansy which seemed familiar and welcoming and very native. During his drifting years whenever he’d caught
a cold he’d brewed himself a cup of tansy tea, and once when he’d gashed his hand on a piece of rusty barbed wire he’d made a compress of it that cured the infection.

Walking up his own road amid the smells of tansy and smilax, he let the fact sink in: he was home for good.

At the sourwood tree he stopped, let his canvas duffel bag slip down and lowered his left foot to the ground. Real, solid ground, a little moist maybe, but American. Safe. Ground he’d shaped himself with a mule named Madam while a little boy sat and watched, and the boy’s mother brought red nectar and a baby brother down the lane in a faded red wagon.

He resisted the urge to drop his crutches and ease onto the bank where the grass was green-rich and wild columbine blossomed. Instead, he shouldered his bag and moved westward toward the opening in the trees where the clearing lay.

Reaching it, he paused in surprise. During his stretch in the South Pacific, when he’d pictured home, he often saw it as it had first been, a motley collection of scrap iron and chicken dung beside a teetering house patched with tin. What he saw today made him hold his breath and stand stone still in wonder.

Flowers! Everywhere, flowers... and all of them blue! Gay, uncivilized blossoms, clambering unchecked without a hint of order or precision. How like his Elly to sow wildly and let rain and sun—Will smiled—and all those years of chicken manure do the rest. He scanned the clearing. Blue— Lord a-mercy, he’d never seen so much blue! Flowers of every shade and tint of blue that nature had ever produced. He knew them all from his study of the bees.

Nearest the house tall Persian blue phlox bordered the porch, thick and high and tufted, giving way to Canterbury bells that bled from deepest royal purple to a pale violet-pink. At their feet began a rich spread of heliotrope in coiled blue-violet sprays. Against the east wall of the chicken house a clematis climbed a trellis of strings. There, too, began a carpet of long-stemmed cornflowers, as deep and true as the sky, continuing along the adjacent chicken-yard fence in a wall of royal color. At the shady border beneath the trees, pale violets began, giving way to deep-hued forget-me-nots which ranged
in the open sun, meeting a spread of blue vervain. On the opposite side of the yard a wooden wagon wheel had been painted white and stood as a backdrop for a stand of regal larkspur which covered the blue spectrum from purple to indigo to palest Dresden. Before them, much shorter and more delicate, a patch of flax-flowers waved in the breeze on fernlike stems. Somewhere in the conglomeration purple petunias bloomed. Will could smell them as he moved up the path, which was bordered by fuzzy ageratum. Where that path led around the back of the house a new pergola stood, laden with morning glories, their bells lifted to heaven. Birds darted everywhere, a chirping cacophony. A ruby-throated hummingbird at the morning glories. Wrens lambasting him with music from the low branch of a crabapple tree, and appropriately enough, a pair of bluebirds near one of the gourds. Spotting them, he smiled, recalling Donald Wade placing the bluebird figurine on the windowsill for just this reason. Well, they had their bluebirds now.

And bees... everywhere, bees, gathering nectar and pollen from the sea of color they loved best, humming, lifting on gauzy wings to move to the next blossom and join their wing-music to that of the birds.

Only as he neared the house did Will find a ruddy splash. Several feet off the last porch step stood a washtub, painted white, bulging with cinnamon pinks so thick they cascaded over the sides—crimson and heliotrope and coral and rose—so fragrant they made his head light. On the porch steps lay a cluster of them, crushed, wilted. He picked them up, held them, smelled them, glanced around the clearing before depositing them where they’d been, carefully, as if they were the trappings of a religious ceremony.

He raised his eyes to the screen door, mounted the steps and opened the screen, expecting any moment to hear Elly or the kids call, “Who’s there?”

The kitchen was empty.

“Elly?” he called, letting his duffel bag slip from his shoulder.

In the answering silence wands of sunlight angled across the scrubbed floor and climbed the mopboard. The room
smelled good, of bread and spice. On the table was a crocheted doily and a thick white crockery pitcher filled with a sampling of flowers from the yard; on the windowsill, the bluebird figurine. The room was neat, orderly, clean. His eyes moved to the cupboard where a white enamel cake pan was covered with a dishtowel. He lifted a corner of the cloth— bars, unfrosted, half-gone. He tucked a pinch into his mouth, then poked his head into the front room.

“Elly?”

Silence. Summer afternoon silence, stretching into Will’s very soul.

Their bedroom was empty. He stood in the doorway imbibing familiarities—the Madeira lace dresser set, a slipper-shaped dish holding bobby- and hair-pins, a stack of freshly folded diapers... the bed. It was not, he discovered, disappointing to arrive to an empty house. He’d had so little time alone. These minutes, reacclimating, seeped within his bones in a wholly healing way.

Neither was anyone in the boys’ room. The crib, he noted, had been moved in here.

Back in the kitchen he cut an enormous square of the moist golden bars and took a bite—honey, pecans, cloves and cinnamon. Mmmm... delicious. He anchored the remaining piece in his teeth and stumped to the door, then outside.

“Elly?” he bellowed from the top of the steps, pausing, listening. “Ellllleeeee?”

From beyond the barn a mule brayed as if objecting to being awakened. Madam. He headed that way, found the beast but no Elly. He checked the chicken coop—it was clean; the storage sheds—their doors were all closed; the vegetable garden, it was empty; and finally the backyard, passing under the pergola with its bonnet of morning glories. Nobody at the clothesline either.

With all these flowers and the warm temperatures, undoubtedly the honey would be running. He’d walk down the orchard to see, to pass the time reacquainting himself with the bees while waiting for Elly.

The earth wore a mantle of heavy grass but he made his way easily with the crutches, following the overgrown
double-trail compacted long ago by Glendon Dinsmore’s Steel Mule. Everything was as he remembered, the hickories and oaks as green as watermelon rind, the katydids fiddling away in the tall redtop grass, the dead branch shaped like a dog’s paw, and, farther along, the magnolia with the oak growing from its crotch. He topped a small rise and there lay the orchard on the opposite hill, steeping in the warm May sun, smelling faintly of other years’ fermented fruit and the flowering weeds and wildings that bordered the trees and surrounding woods. He let his eyes wander appreciatively over the squat trees—peach, apple, pear and quince, marching around the east-sloping hill as if in formation. And along the south edge, the hives, rimmed in red and blue and yellow and green, as he’d painted them. And halfway down... a... a woman? Will’s head jutted. Was it? In a veiled hat and trousers? Filling the saltwater pans? Naw, it couldn’t be! But it was! A woman, working in fat yellow farmer gloves that met the cuffs of one of his old blue chambray shirts whose collar was buttoned tightly and turned up around her jaws. Toting two buckets in the boys’ wagon. Bending to dip the water with a tin dipper and pour it into the low, flat pans. A woman—
his wife
—tending the bees!

He smiled and felt a surge of love strong enough to end the war, could it have been harnessed and channeled. Jubilantly, he raised a hand and waved.
“Elly?”

She straightened, looked, looked harder, lifted the veil up, shaded her eyes... and finally the shock hit.

“Will!” She dropped the dipper and ran. Flat-out, arms and feet churning like steel drivers. “Will!” The hat bounced off and fell but she ran on, waving a yellow glove. “Will, Will!”

He gripped his crutches and stumped toward her, fast, hard, reaching, his body swinging like a Sunday morning steeple bell. Smiling. Feeling his heart clubbing. His eyes stinging. Watching Elly race toward him while the boys spilled out of the woods and ran, too, taking up the call, “Will’s home! Will! Will!”

They met beside a rangy apple tree with a force great enough to send one crutch to the ground and Will, too, had she not been there to clasp him. Arms, mouths, souls combined
once again while bees droned a reunion song and the sun poured down upon a soldier’s hat lying on the verdant ground. Tongues and tears, and two bodies yearning together amid a rush of kisses—deep, hurried, unbelieving kisses. They clung, choked with emotion, burying their faces, smelling one another—Velvo shaving cream and crushed cinnamon pinks—joined mouths and tongues to taste each other once more. And for them the war was over.

The boys came pelting—“Will! Will!”—and Lizzy P. toddled out of the woods crying, left behind.

“Kemo sabe!
Sprout!” Will bent stiffly to hug them against his legs, circling them both in his arms, kissing their hot, freckled faces, clasping them close, smelling them, too— sweaty little boys who’d been playing in the sun long and hard. Elly warned, “Careful for Will’s leg,” but the hugging continued in quartet, with her arms around Will even as he greeted the boys, everybody kissing, laughing, teetering, while down the lane Lizzy stood in the sun, rubbing her eyes and wailing.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were comin’?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

Elly wiped her eyes on the thick gloves, then yanked them off. “Oh, lorzy, what am I doin’ with them still on?”

“Come here.” He snagged her waist, kissed her again amid the scrambling boys, who still had him shackled and were peppering him with news and questions: “Are you stayin’ home?... We got kittens... Wow, is this your uniform?... I got vacation... Did you kill any Japs?... Hey, Will, Will... guess what...”

For the moment both Elly and Will were oblivious to the pair. “Oh, Will...” Her eyes shone with joy, straight into his. “I can’t believe you’re back. How is your leg?” She suddenly remembered. “Here, boys, back off and let Will sit. Can you sit on the grass—is it okay?”