Where Lilacs Still Bloom (31 page)

Bobby number three died not long after Martha’s passing, and I wondered if maybe he wasn’t running through the clouds of heaven with her, both young and vibrant and full of life. I grieved that dog and Martha all over again. We didn’t yet have another “Bobby” in our lives, which was good because in 1913, the river flooded with a vengeance. When the rains came, we bundled up the cats in a big box and along with ourselves, carried them to Bertha and Carl’s house on Martin’s Bluff. We went back daily to pull plants, put them in tubs, and set them up on the porch, hoping the water wouldn’t reach them. It rose slowly, but that meant it would probably go down slow too.

Water didn’t rise to the porch level, but it was still a
devastation. I wasn’t sure I had the gumption to start again, hauling out dead grass, mud-caked leaves, my boots squishing for weeks in the drenched soil.

Fritz had a camera, and he took a photograph from the barn looking toward the house. We have it now for the stereopticon, and I can look at that even all these years later and just feel sick inside for all the work that had been washed away. A lake surrounded the house deep enough—and standing in water long enough—that the trees reflected in the water. Frank moved all the cows up to Bertha and Carl’s when the rain poured nearly sideways. We knew the Lewis River, and maybe the Columbia too, would rise. I didn’t feel safe having the bucket boys helping us pull plants while the water rose, and Nelia was in Seattle, and I didn’t have a new high-school girl yet; so we did the work ourselves with help from Edmond and Roy, Fritz and the girls. When we’d done what we could, we moved over to help Emil and Tillie and their family.

I missed Ruth. She was such a hard worker. Ruth taught in Baltimore, and in her last letter, she said she was being courted by a young man who was a cellist. “Mama says we’ll be poor for life as wandering musicians,” Ruth wrote. “She doesn’t understand that as classical performers, we won’t be wandering, but she’s probably right about the poverty.”

As the water receded, it was already May, and Frank and I looked at each other, and he said out loud, “Are you up to this, Huldie? Ready to begin again?”

“What else could we do?”

“Rest. Sell the cows. Visit the Rose Festival in Portland come June instead of trying to remake the garden for Lilac Day.”

“There won’t be any of that this year. The river took those days.”

But I couldn’t imagine not gardening, even with the work that lay ahead. “How would the grandkids know about working and waiting if it isn’t by weeding and hoeing with their grandfolks?”

“I don’t know. But I submit you’d find a way to teach ’em.”

“I’ll stick with lilacs.” I pulled on my boots. “Though I am glad you let it be a choice, something those rivers never give us.”

The garden and being on this farm was the way I kept Martha alive in my heart. Since her death, I’d been working on a lilac to memorialize her. It would be a creamy white with a yellow center. With a sigh, I waded through the water toward the house. I had things to check on in my sun porch. “You’ve lived through another flood,” I told myself, pulling my boots from my shoes. I checked the tubs. It’s what we do.

“I’ve got a good strong back,” George Lawson said. Nelia’s father was at our picket-fence gate. “My daughter wrote, asked that I see if you needed anything.”

“Oh, we’re doing all right.” Frank shook his hand. “Good of Nelia to mention it, though.”

“Your lilacs, did they make it?”

“Most of them,” I said. He stood with hat in hand and was probably not as strong as my wiry husband, though working with bolts of cloth and the leather work he’d expanded into required muscle strength too. Still, he didn’t look well, with a pasty sort of color to his skin. His paunch drifted over his belt buckle like overrisen bread dough on the counter’s edge. He might have a heart attack and die trying to help us. Business might have been off for him, what with Mills Grocery and General Merchandise carrying more readymade clothing. Autos were putting horses out of work, so people didn’t need new harnesses or other leather tack either. “The lilacs didn’t like the transportation from ground to bucket or raft, but they wouldn’t have liked the swimming they’d been doing either if we hadn’t pulled them. Some of the older ones”—I pointed toward two long rows west of the woodshed where the cats slept—“weathered it without being put into buckets. Old, deep roots does it, I suspect.”

“My wife, she used to like lilacs.” His voice caught, and he cleared it. “When last they bloomed in Mississippi, she was just twenty-five years old. Nelia will be that age before long.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nelia told me he never spoke about his wife; had few words for his daughter too. Ducks flying overhead quacked their intended landing. They didn’t have to fly as far with water still standing in pools in parts of the yard. The birds rescued us from words.

“How is Nelia’s lilac doing?” I asked then.

“She has one?”

“Planted on Jasmine’s grave. Years back I gave it to her.”

His eyes dropped. He chewed on his lip. “I … I haven’t been out to Jasmine’s grave. Buried her in the back forest, being she was a Negro and we were new here. I didn’t want attention drawn to trying to find an acceptable place to bury her. Back up in the trees. Don’t know how the lilacs fair in conditions like that.”

“I can go with you and check, if you want,” I said. “They can handle shade but prefer the sun.”

“No, no, I’ll do that. For Nelia. And let you know. But if I can help with the restoring …”

“We accept.” I glanced at Frank to see if he’d object. He didn’t. I think he saw too that here was a man who needed to do things for others.

“Whenever you have time,” Frank said.

Our next big Lilac Day we held in 1915, and it was the biggest and best of them all. One Sunday I had a banker, an undertaker, a chief of police, and a Japanese artist step out of a single car. All those men loved lilacs! But at last we women were getting a little recognition for our horticulture interests too. After all, here they came to my garden. And Lowthorpe School graduated women in landscape and horticultural work,
and they had to know about plants to receive their diplomas. Maybe Cornelia would keep advancing the professional role of women in hybridizing and not just show us as beings who like only the blooms.

A few men visiting acted like they were dragged by wives. Yet here stood four men who felt big enough, I guess, to show up without the crutch of a woman at their side. They all talked easily about varieties and didn’t just take in the aroma but studied the blooms, commenting on how “this one’s dark red on the outside and lighter on the inside. I’ve never seen that before.” Or, “Look at how the petals incurve and then come out with handsome buds. Exquisite.” Thus from the artist whose name I had trouble remembering. Ja-sue-o is what his colleagues called him.

“My Favorite,” I said.

“I can see why,” the banker said.

“No, I’ve named it My Favorite. It’s one of my unique varieties.” They each asked for starts. They’d driven from Seattle and Lynnwood and surrounding areas and had read about the garden from a piece of Cornelia’s that was rerun in the
Seattle Times
.

“There is much interest in lilacs in the Seattle area,” the artist told me. He painted flowers, he said, and lush gardens too. He was soft spoken and walked through the garden with his hands clasped behind his back.

“I looked for your varieties in Cooley’s catalog,” the
banker said. “Didn’t find any there. How come? Don’t you have several unique cultivars?”

“About fourteen now.” We sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. Frank rejoined us, letting Delia give the current cluster of visitors their tours. Lizzie would have come, but her youngest son, Roland, born the previous July, had the croup, and with the cool breeze, she’d decided to stay home. Delia would give the update on Lizzie’s rhododendrons and their showy blossoms. Even Fritz led a group of young women along the paths. He knew as much about the lilacs as the rest of us. Peals of laughter bubbled up from his charges like steam from a teapot. He was having too much fun, I thought. I wasn’t sure if he was the best tour guide. Might have to change that for next year.

Cranes warbled in the distance, and I missed not being able to see those lanky gray birds with the railroad grade so high, but as Frank often said, that was progress. What I was seeing with Fritz was progress too, but I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“You really ought to think about letting a couple of the nurseries distribute them.” The banker’s determined voice brought me back to the moment.

“I like meeting the people who get my starts.”

“True enough,” the banker said. He had a big mustache and an even bigger belly. Corpulent, Martha would say if she were here. “But others are deprived of the beauty you’ve designed. Think of how many more might enjoy the fruit of
your labor. Hundreds may come here, but thousands would buy from the catalog.”

“I’ve been trying to get her to do that for years,” Frank said.

“Think of it as … diversifying. You have this operation, your garden right here where people come, leave you donations as I see it, and you get the pleasure of seeing who will take one of your little pets home.”

My face felt warm. I did think of the flowers as my pets, loved them like I loved each Bobby and my cats.

“You have your goal for that operation.”

“Bigger blooms, hardier stalks, richer color, and finer fragrance.” I repeated the phrase often enough on my garden tours.

“Exactly. Then you have your outreach division, where you sell starts to nurseries, and they develop them a few years and market them as shrubs to an even wider range of enthusiasts. They might never meet you, but they’d likely be pleased to tell their friends they had a Klager lilac.”

“One day, when you traveled to Seattle or back east, you could walk into a garden and see your lilac there, planted by someone else but that your hands had a part in.” This was the chief of police speaking now.

“This could be a very anomalous time for you,” the artist said, bowing slightly each time he spoke.

I wondered what Martha would have said about the word
anomalous
. That did mean exceptional, and in my plant world meant something out of the order of things, just what I was always looking for, hoping the next anomaly would take me closer to my longed for twelve petals.

The undertaker hadn’t said much of anything, but he nodded now and rose to collect a few more specimens from the tubs where we’d cut starts before Lilac Day began. He returned and said, “You’ve given me an idea, George.” He nodded to the banker. “I think I’ll start these and give one to each family at the time of our service to them, as a sort of memorial to their loved one. My work”—he turned to me—“it’s filled with stories told when people are grief stricken and weakened by loss. They let me into their lives in the most intimate ways, dressing and caring for their loved one, something that used to be done at home.” I thought of Martha and how we’d bathed her body and dressed her, choosing the right dress, weeping as I gently brushed her cheeks, prayed over her, all acts of reverence honoring her life. “So giving them a plant that they could put in the ground as a remembrance, I think that would be a good thing, and a reverent thing to do. I do love the cut flowers,” he said. “But these will last past the present misery.”

After they left I told Frank, “I think it is time to talk to a couple of nursery people. Cooley’s catalog is in Portland. You could sell the cows that way and not have to work so hard.”

“Those cows are my pets,” Frank said. “But it would be
good to think ahead, getting ourselves a nest egg so we could hire help. What with the war in Europe, if we get into it, Fritz might have to go.”

“Oh no. I don’t like thinking of that.”

“Don’t, then. Think of all those people who’ll find your lilacs in the catalog. Get the names of your varieties registered, Huldie. Then we’ll take a drive to Cooley’s and see what they say.”

We rocked away the evening, quietly together, thinking. It was more the undertaker’s view of things than the banker’s that had me considering selling my pets, allowing others to nurture them and list them for sale. I wanted people to experience the fruit of my labor, and I guess it was selfish of me in a way to keep them to myself, only letting them go when I could see to whom they went. Lilacs didn’t really belong to anyone, even if they had a registered name with Klager preceding each one. They were gifts meant to grow in gardens all around the country—however they got into the new caretaker’s hand.