When the Morning Glory Blooms (10 page)

My tongue was as loose as the shutters on the west side of the house. It occurred to me to watch how much I said. But something about Puff prompted me to trust him as I had few others. He turned my way, as if waiting for the next chapter of the story.

“The day came when, to the clucking of neighbors’ tongues, Uncle Raif chose to leave the arable acres fallow and divide his time between his orchard and art.”

Puff nodded. “Art’s a fine thing.”

“That plan lasted six months, from what I gathered in Aunt Phoebe’s journals. In order to eat, he sought work in town in his original profession as a bookkeeper. The orchard that awaited him at the end of the day balanced his disappointment at being bound to a desk.”

“Desk wouldn’t be my choice either.”

Songbirds and insects played among the weeds and grasses. I hadn’t listened before that moment. “For all the buckets of water my aunt and uncle hauled from the creek to quench the thirst of panting saplings, for all the effort it took to protect
their ‘young’ from marauders—leaf-hungry insects and curious deer—I wish I could have thanked them.”

We sat on the porch of a house less vulnerable with its thick-trunked sentries and leafy parasols shading it from what would soon be relentless summer heat. I imagined the full cycle of seasons in that setting, as entertaining to watch as an infant learning to crawl.

The spring wildflowers that hugged the feet of the bridge seemed to enjoy the morning that Puff and I shared over coffee. They danced and sang.

“Did you hear that?” Puff asked with wonder, his voice almost whisper soft. “I believe them wildflowers is saying to us, ‘Look what God done all by Hisself! Ain’t we something?’ Now, a God as creative as that must surely have a plan, don’t you think, to take good care of any of His childrens living on this propity?”

I looked at the back of Puff’s head, as he sat several steps lower. His hat lay beside him so the quickening breeze could blow a breath of kindness on the beads of sweat that dotted his thick neck. Not the image of an ordinary angel. I supposed his halo was safely tucked in his pocket, to keep it from sliding off his damp, bald, ebony head.

“How old are you, Puff Crawford?”

“Can’t tell ya ’zactly. Somewheres around the other side of fifty, I believe. Why?”

“You’re almost twice my age, but four times wiser.”

We carried the conversation this far before he turned to face me and said, “Got an hour or two tomorrow I don’t know what to do with.”

A claim a person could read clearly through fog at dusk!

“Sure would like to spend some time clearing brush out of that orchard. ’Course, I wouldn’t want to take that pleasure away from you, if you had your heart set.”

“Do you really think those trees are worth saving?” I was not prepared for the look on his face.

“Ain’t we all?”

If anyone could breathe life into that exhausted old orchard, it would be Mr. Percival Lincoln Crawford.

“I seen blossuns out there.”

“You did, Puff?”

“That’s all you need to feed your hope. Ain’t going to see all the fruit itself right away. Just a few blossuns. That be enough.”

For you, Puff. But enough for me? Clearly my faith had room to grow
.

Puff returned to wherever it was he lived. I spent the rest of the day pawing through the meager supplies in my kitchen in an effort to create something filling and worthy of Puff’s appetite.

I was grateful for the handful of dried apricots I’d saved from the previous Christmas. I’d been living on very little. Too little. But now it was important to me to try to keep up with Puff’s generosity.

That proved impossible.

When I opened the back door the next morning to draw from the backyard pump water for the day’s needs, I nearly tripped over a headless chicken and a basket of eggs on the back steps. The chicken was fat and healthy-looking, except for being dead. Puff obviously knew something about raising chickens.

Meat for supper. And eggs for breakfast. The apricot braided bread resting under a towel in the kitchen was a widow’s mite by comparison.

When Puff entered the yard from the orchard path behind the barn, I was sitting on the steps, ankle-deep in scalded,
damp-smelling chicken feathers. He tipped his hat to me before removing it and pouring his first ladle of pump water over his glistening head. Two more ladles for his throat before he spoke. By that time I’d divested myself of the majority of stray feathers clinging to my work apron and hurried into the kitchen to cut Puff a slice of bread and pour him a cup of coffee.

“Might I trouble you for—” He stopped at the sight of the butterless bread on the plate in my hand.

“I should have asked yesterday, Puff, if you wanted sugar for your coffee. I’d offer cream, if I had it to give.”

“No need. Your coffee don’t need no doctoring. That for me?” He nodded toward the fruit bread. He’d taken a bite before I finished answering. “You’re a fine cook, Miz Morgan.”

“Thank you.”

“I wonder if I could trouble you for a needle or something.” He held out his left hand to me, palm up. In his lion’s paw hand there was a splinter as big around as a knitting needle.

“Oh, Puff!”

“Looks worse than it is.”

“Do you want me to pull it out, if I can get a grip on it?”

“That be best. I tried. But my fingers is on the clumsy side for chores like this.”

I’m curious now why I would remember some of these details. I clearly recall how the man’s blood flowed down the ravine in his hand and halfway down his upraised arm after the splinter was removed. I could almost see a rough nail where the thorn had been and feel the awesome force of Blood spilled for me almost nineteen hundred years before. I didn’t deserve it  . . .  but there it was.

It shook me to see the blood. I’ve never been squeamish, a fact that would serve me well, down the road. But knowing
Puff’s injury was a direct result of his wanting to help puts me in awe to this day.

I returned to the oddly comforting task of plucking feathers off our supper. Every stubborn pinfeather—so thornlike and intrusive—reminded me of the price Puff was paying in the orchard. I had nothing but my gratitude to offer in return. How could he be content with that arrangement?

It’s a wonder I didn’t harbor a moment’s fear in Puff’s presence. I suppose, in light of my vulnerability and the remoteness of the property, some might think me foolish for not having been afraid of a show-up-at-the-front-door-unannounced man of his size and strength.

But there was the look of heaven in his coal-black eyes. No denying. I always felt safest when he was on the “propity,” as he called it.

“You planning to take on boarders?” he asked one day between strokes of the ax as he split and I stacked firewood.

“In a way.”

“Be mighty tough away out here. A far piece for someone who works or is visiting in town. Don’t know as you’ll get many takers.”

“I believe the setting is appropriate for my purposes.”

He stopped, buried the ax head into the end of a piece of old apple trunk, and leaned on the handle. “You on a mission, ain’t you,” he stated, rather than questioned. His perception unnerved me. “A mission from God, ain’t it?”

“Now, Puff, how would you know that?”

“Your hands are on your stacking work but your mind and heart is someplace else entirely. You got plans for this place, I’ll bet my shirt, not that I’m a betting man  . . .  anymore. Big plans.”

I started a new row of cordwood, my work gloves saving me from the rough bark and splinters. “Sometimes my dreams
gallop like a racehorse, and reality follows unconcerned as a snail.”

“You going to tell me more?” he asked, choosing an unsplit maple log on which to sit. “My back’ll thank you if it’s a long, long story that requires my full attention.”

I laughed, as I often did in Puff’s comfortable presence. Though I hadn’t intended to, I confessed the whole preposterous scheme. He nodded along the way. “Uh huh. Is that right?” He scratched his stubbly chin from time to time. But he never once ridiculed my idea.

That endeared the man to my heart forever. That and the one tear that accompanied his closing comment: “I’ll help you all I can.”

Good thing I had no close neighbors to witness and wag about what happened next! Before I thought about my action’s wisdom, I gave him a bear hug that “purt near snuffed the life right outta” him. That’s how Puff told it.

He was the first person from whom I received encouragement rather than resistance.

In days to come, it would often feel as if he and the Lord were the only ones on my side. But considering how powerful they both were, I guess the odds were still in my favor.

Ivy—1951

“Puff sounds like he was a wonderful man, Anna.”

She smiled as serenely as age would allow. “One of God’s favorites, I’m sure.”

“Was he your  . . .  your beau?”

“Puff? Heavens no! He had his own sweetheart. And I had mine.” She reached one knobby hand toward the other and
twirled the simple gold band that rested loosely on her ring finger, held captive by the protective distortion of a swollen knuckle.

Ivy wondered when Anna would be ready to tell that chapter.

She turned her pencil eraser-end down and tried to rub out a smudge in the margin of the notebook page. The action chewed through the paper. Someone would have to convert these scribbles to a legible form if anyone but Ivy were to read Anna’s story.

“Now, where was I?”

“Puff encouraged you to keep going. Was he right to do that?”

“More often than not.”

8

Anna—1890s

The orchard cleanup took several days rather than the hour or two Puff didn’t know what to do with.

He stood at the back door. “Miz Morgan?”

“Are you all finished?”

“Good as I can get it for now.”

“I can’t thank you enough. I took a walk out there yesterday afternoon before it rained. You’ve done wonders!”

“If it gets a little attention, an orchard’ll perk right up, just like people do.”

“I hope we’ll get some fruit this fall.”

“Maybe sooner. I believe that one row of trees is plums. May see some of them before summer’s spent.”

“Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Oh, look at me. What kind of hostess am I? Would you like to come in?”

He hesitated. “I probably should head on home soon. Just wondered if you needed help hauling in the furniture.”

“What furniture?”

“That what’s out in the barn.”

“There’s furniture in the barn?” I brushed past him and out the door, heading across the yard before I realized how rude that must have seemed. Puff pounded right at my heels.

He reached around me and lifted the heavy iron bar on the double-wide barn door. It swung open with a sigh, as if an ample woman’s flesh had been released from a corset. It took our eyes a few moments to adjust to the dark.

Big and empty and padded with many years’ accumulation of straw dust, cobwebs, and pigeon droppings, the barn smelled of age and disuse, of old hay and long-absent animals. I was almost relieved not to find tables and chairs and beds in such an environment. Imagine eating breakfast on a table recently cleared of bird refuse!

Sunlight found its way into the barn in tiny, intense rays that squeezed through cracks between the barn boards. The windows—those on the ground level and those high above in the peak—were either shuttered or caked with what might turn my stomach, were I to speculate.

Puff was yards ahead of me in optimism, heading for what I assumed was a tack room beyond the horse stalls.

Another door creaked open at Puff’s touch. It was pitch black in this internal room, affording me no clues to its contents  . . .  or its inhabitants, either.

Something squeaked and scurried farther into the dark abyss. I was grateful I didn’t have to beg for light, since Puff was already lighting a lantern.

It was a moment or two before I was conscious of what the light illuminated. All the items were covered with yards of heavy canvas tarp, but many of the outlines were unmistakable. A camelback sofa. No, two. Several chairs. A long, heavy-legged table. A tall, flat, wide piece—perhaps a headboard. And many mystery pieces, disguised both by the tarp and an assumed layering of items.