The Root Cellar (26 page)

“Yes, today.” Sam’s eyebrows went up.

“Today!” The word sounded like a sigh as Rose trailed upstairs in her dripping clothes. Twenty minutes later, warm and dry in her
pajamas and bathrobe, she sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and eating sandwiches while Grimalkin purred in her lap. She told Sam all that had happened. “And Sam,” she finished, “while I was in that station in New York I saw you. You were in the kitchen playing Will’s song.”

“But I did that!” Sam was incredulous. “I did that a little while ago before the twins went to bed. They were grizzling so I sat them down and I played that song, and I hate to say it because it makes it look as if I really believe your story, but in my mind I saw your face and you were scared, so I was sort of playing for you to hear.”

“I was glad.”

“I don’t know.” Sam scratched his head. “It sounds crazy but you
look
different. You really look as if you’ve been out in the sun for weeks and”—he grinned—“you don’t look as much as if you’d like to throw things at everybody. You’re different.”

“I am,” said Rose. “I know I am. Sam, does your mother hate me?”

“Hate you?”

“Because of the accident and because I was so mean.”

“I don’t think my mother ever hates people. She gets mad. She says a lot of things but it doesn’t last long. It’s not like hating people.”

“Can I go see her?”

“Why not?”

Nervously Rose knocked on the open door of Aunt Nan’s bedroom. Uncle Bob was reading aloud from a novel. He looked up, obviously relieved to be interrupted.

“Come in, come in.” He put down his book. “I’ll go make some tea and leave you two to gab.” He left the room quietly.

Rose did not want him to go. She did not want to be left alone with Aunt Nan. She felt so different from the angry little girl who had written the letter to Aunt Millicent. She couldn’t think of anything to say. And for once, it seemed, Aunt Nan had nothing to say either.

Finally Rose blurted out, “I am sorry about the accident and the letter.”

“I don’t think it was altogether your fault.” Aunt Nan smiled ruefully. “I think I had something to do with it too, Rose. I was foolish and unkind.”

“I shouldn’t have written the letter.”

“I shouldn’t have made you feel so unwelcome.”

“But you didn’t!”

“It’s all right, Rose.” Aunt Nan put out her hand. Rose went over to the bed and shook the outstretched hand. Aunt Nan held it tightly for a moment. She smiled. “I hope now we’re going to take time to get to know each other.”

“Yes, please.”

They said goodnight and Rose went upstairs to bed, and to sleep at once. She was wakened in the night by a loud crash. Everyone except Aunt Nan—who kept calling, “What happened? What happened?”—ran to the windows to see what it was. George got the flashlight and went out to the back porch. “Wow!” he yelled, running back into the house. “There’s a huge tree down, back there, and the rain has turned to ice and it’s really amazing! You know, if the length of that tree is any indication of—”

“Not now, George,” said Sam.

“Thank God it didn’t hit the house,” said Uncle Bob.

“Hi, Rose. Where did you go?” asked the twins.

“Out,” said Rose. She took their hands and led them upstairs to bed.

The storm had stopped by morning. The front yard was littered with branches that had come down in the night. At the back the creek was roaring and the trees were sheathed in ice, glittering in the bright sun, creaking in the slight breeze.

Rose looked down from her window. The big old maple had fallen from the other side of the creek across the glade, coming to rest not two feet from the back of the house. In its path it had knocked down bushes and uprooted
several small trees. Among them was the little thorn tree. The root cellar was completely washed out. It was just a large hole filled with dirty, icy water. Its doors had been smashed by the falling tree. Rose stared down at the devastation in stunned silence. Then she raced downstairs and outside in her pajamas and bare feet. She slipped and slid and crawled over the huge icy trunk of the old maple to reach the little thorn tree. She knelt down beside it, and tenderly, as though it had been a person, she tried to lift it. It was impossible. It was lying with its branches across what had been the cellar, its roots sticking out in a tangle in all directions like the hair of some giant wild man. She felt as though a part of herself had been wrenched from her.

“I can’t ever go back,” she whispered.

Sam’s voice behind her asked, “Is that your tree?”

“Yes.” Rose clenched her fists so tightly that her nails made deep red marks in her palms. “I didn’t even say good-bye,” she said dully. “I didn’t say anything. I just went.”

Sam didn’t speak, but they went back into the house together. Rose went to wash Louisa’s dress—as much with tears as with water. “I never thought I’d never see them again,” she mourned, but even as the words formed she knew that she had known. At the back of her
mind she had known all the way home from Washington. “I wish I’d said good-bye,” she whispered sadly.

That day Uncle Bob organized the house and Rose had no time for grieving. He rearranged the pots and pans in the kitchen. He started a master grocery list so that he would not have to figure out a new one every time he went to the store. He made a work list so that everyone would know exactly what his, or her—he looked meaningfully at Rose—job was without being told. As Sam said sometime later in the day, “He’d organize our dreams if he could find out what they were.” And all the time Uncle Bob was making lists at the kitchen table, Aunt Nan was shouting orders from the bedroom. Finally, Uncle Bob rebelled. “Your job,” he pronounced, “is to lie still and sleep and rest. The house is outside your jurisdiction from now until the baby’s born. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Aunt Nan meekly.

But in the following week, everyone was surprised to discover that Aunt Nan, despite her apparent disorder, had been running things in a regulated fashion, and there was a good deal of argument and confusion despite Uncle Bob’s lists.

Rose stayed out of the arguments. She went to school. She did the things beside her name on the lists. She told stories to the twins and she tried valiantly to spend her days in the present
while dreams of the past filled her nights. She dreamed of coal dust and trains, of tramping the roads, of Peter Maas and Augustus Delfinney. She dreamed of pale soldiers and rows of hospital beds. She dreamed of Will and Susan—always of Susan. She missed her sorely. She could not bring herself to make friends at school, not yet.

One afternoon she got a pencil and paper and went into Aunt Nan’s bedroom. “Would you like me to write down your book for you?”

Aunt Nan’s face broke out in a broad smile. She told Rose where to find the chapters and notes. At first they were both self-conscious about the work, but as the afternoon progressed they began to get used to each other. Aunt Nan did most of the talking—about the book at first, but afterward about the baby to come, about the boys and Uncle Bob, and about Christmas, which was only two weeks away.

“How I hate being in bed with Christmas coming.” She sighed impatiently. “Dr. Best says I’m to be allowed in a wheelchair for Christmas dinner, but I can’t do a thing to get it all ready. And the kitchen in this house is such a perfect Christmas kitchen. I love Christmas. Well, this year we’re having a baby for Christmas even if it isn’t due until January. And getting this book done is a wonderful present. I have to thank you for that, Rose.”

Privately Rose thought the story, which was called
Polly Learns to Ride
, was silly, and sometimes, unbeknownst to Aunt Nan, she changed a few lines.

One afternoon, when she read out what they had written the day before, Aunt Nan said, “I like the way that scene goes. I don’t even remember writing it.”

“I put that in.”

“You did what!” Aunt Nan nearly jumped out of bed. “Don’t you dare rewrite my story!”

Rose went white. “Well, it’s better. You said so yourself.”

They glared at each other angrily. Then, to Rose’s consternation, Aunt Nan’s eyes filled with tears.

Rose was stunned. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“It’s just that you’re so like your father.” Aunt Nan shook her head. “How angry he used to make me! I’d make something, and if it wasn’t just the way he thought it should be, he’d change it. ‘Well, it’s better this way, Nan,’ he’d say. He was just as prickly and difficult as you are.”

And as you
, Rose thought to herself, and almost laughed out loud with sudden delight. She did not tell Aunt Nan she had once thought she had come from another world, without having had a mother or father, but she thought about it a lot over the next few days. And about
what Will had said in the orchard about belonging. The words “as prickly and difficult as you are” had somehow brought her into Aunt Nan’s family.

“And it’s Christmas,” she remembered. “They love Christmas here. I wish I could find something truly amazing to do for Christmas.”

The Christmas Kitchen

O
ne afternoon, about a week before Christmas, Rose was alone in the kitchen. She was sitting in the old rocking-chair by the window thinking that Aunt Nan was right: with its low ceiling, its wooden walls, and its old fireplace, the kitchen looked like a picture on a Christmas card. She was wondering idly how many people had cooked their Christmas dinners in the fireplace, when an eddy of wind came down the chimney and curled itself around the charred ends of wood in the grate. It stirred up a tiny flame. The flame took on a shadow which became a bigger flame and, in seconds, there was a roaring fire from two steadily burning logs. A huge black pot hung over them and out of the pot steam was rising, carrying the most delicious spicy odors out into the room.

Little by little, as if in a magic show, the room changed. Along the back wall, instead of
Aunt Nan’s modern range, there was an old-fashioned black wood stove. Pots were hanging from hooks on the walls, and onions and dried apples and chunks of bacon were suspended from the ceiling. A tall Welsh dresser, with blue and white plates arrayed on its shelves, stood beside the front door, and there was a long, scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the room. Then Susan appeared, humming to herself as she rolled out dough with a large, wooden rolling-pin.

Rose sprang from her chair. The scene faded and she was alone again, the little eddy of wind stirring the ashes in the cold grate. She slumped back into her chair.

“Susan,” she whispered, “it’s true. Being a person is very hard.” And she heard, like an echo in her head, “That’s so, Rose,” and could not help smiling.

With a sigh, she went over and made a fire in the fireplace and then began to set the table, the image of Susan bright in her mind. An idea was forming.

At dinner she announced that she was going to make an old-fashioned Christmas dinner, as her present to the whole family.

“Can you cook?” the twins asked.

“Of course,” she said. She knew how to cook sausages, mashed potatoes, French toast, and cabbage salad. On the rare occasions when
her grandmother and she had been in their apartment in New York, if her grandmother had gone out on the maid’s night out, Rose had been allowed to make dinner for herself. She had learned how to make the meals she liked best. She didn’t think cooking anything could be all that difficult. After all, she reasoned, I learned to be a blacksmith and nothing in the world could be harder than that.

George was outraged, Uncle Bob was dubious, Aunt Nan thought it was a fine idea.

“Why don’t you go down and talk to old Tom Bother? I’ll bet he can remember old-fashioned Christmases. And ask him to come and share it with us.”

Rose did not think Old Tom’s memory would go back far enough for what she needed. So she asked him if he had a cookbook from his mother.

Old Tom climbed up to his attic, rummaged around, and came down with two—his mother’s and his grandmother’s.

Rose immediately picked up his grandmother’s book, dated 1857. “That’s what I want!” She was delighted. She invited Old Tom for Christmas dinner and took the cookbook home.

To her dismay, most of the Christmas recipes were for game birds with rich sauces concocted from ingredients measured in scant
teacups, and pats of butter the size of an acorn or a thumb. There were six recipes for chestnut soup, three for calves’ foot jelly, and fourteen for oyster dishes. Rose took the book back to Old Tom and together they chose a menu of things that did not appear too difficult to make and that the book assured them “all the best households” would include.

Old Tom said he would buy the goose as his present for the family. Rose was going to get the potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and cranberries, and the things Old Tom called trimmings. As the book said mincemeat took a month to “ripen,” she decided to buy that, but she was determined to do the rest of the baking herself.

Uncle Bob remade his lists so that Rose’s name was beside dinner every night. “Need the practice,” he told her. After four days George rebelled. “Last night we had sausages and mashed potatoes and cabbage salad.” He pounded his fist on the table. “That means tonight we’re having French toast and bacon and cabbage salad. Tomorrow we’re going to have sausages and mashed potatoes and the next night French toast. I know what we’re going to have for Christmas, and I don’t want sausages and mashed potatoes and cabbage salad for Christmas dinner.”