“I’m so sorry to have caused all this trouble.” She covered her face with her hands.
The kitchen smelled of live yeast, flour, bacon, peppery sausage gravy, and cantaloupe. Hettienne cupped all those soothing smells to her.
Like a flock, the three sisters nestled forward, and their long arms swooped around her shoulders and waist.
She let them lower her hands, and Margaret then lifted Hettienne’s chin. “Oh, dear child. We sisters agree. This staring, this rhyming, the gaps. It is just manifestations of the change.” Her voice dropped to a low whisper. “From girl to woman. Sheehys change hard.”
The spinsters all nodded.
“Agnes, I swear, sent the moon awry,” said Aunt Helen.
Not at all ready for the circle into which she had just been admitted, Hettienne shuddered. “I’m hungry,” she managed. Lightning fast, fried potatoes, sausage, milky coffee, and the remains of a pyramid of melon balls—orange, green, and red—flashed before her. The sisters hovered while she ate.
“Why’s your Uncle James look so dreadful, Hettienne?” Margaret asked.
Because, Hettienne realized, he had been up half the night with her. She recalled awakening in the pit of the night seated on a chair in this kitchen, roasting by the ancient stove which smelled of charred metal. A grill of flickering orange, and there was James kneeling, staring up at her.
James had touched Hettienne’s shoulder. “Everything is fine. You’re waking up. You’ve had an adventure.”
Much worse than an adventure. Fire, and children running. Terrible chaos outside. Was it a dream? Wide awake, she had been striding deep into the wood. Silence outside now, then the mockingbird gargling. Dawn silvered the top of the windows back in the ell. She did not recall a door, no opening, no exiting. Her head felt like a tunnel was blown clean through it. A slick cold clasped her arms. James’s hand steadied her.
“Hardly knows what’s happening, James. My God!” whispered Agnes.
“I know perfectly . . .” she began, but her tongue stopped as if her mind filled with paste.
James watched her, clearly a little disturbed. “Darling. We think it best that we keep this among us for now.” He touched her nose, then circled the kitchen with his index finger. Agnes, James, Hettienne. A finger to his lips. “Sss,” he sealed the circle shut.
“Your mother hates it here enough already,” Agnes whispered.
Now, in the daylight, in this warm kitchen with breakfast cleared, Hettienne shivered. Helen and Margaret closed in on their sister.
“Agnes, you’ve been awfully quiet about all this,” Margaret observed.
“Never quiet; always at it!” Helen quipped glaring at her eldest sister. “Mop in the morning; woodsman take warning.”
“James was sleepless. I was sleepless.” Agnes pinched the air as if she meant to nip Helen and Margaret at their ears. “Why not get to work if all the lights are on in the head?”
“Then, Hettienne, what’s the meaning of this?” asked Margaret. She stamped her foot, and pot lids shook. “Agnes and James are bumbling, and you’re late to breakfast. Out with it!”
Hettienne kept her mouth very full of melon balls. For the first time, it struck her why her father might have fled this place. Just as she was about to swallow, and those three long faces raised expectantly for her answers, a timid rapping startled the flock. Cousin David Ormond sidled into the kitchen from the ell, a straw hat in his hands.
“Aunties!” he called, and the flock abandoned Hettienne.
“More tea, David? Sausage? Biscuits?” offered Margaret. She arced like a bow on the tips of her toes, the biscuits on a green platter held high, waxed paper trembling.
David took a yellow biscuit in each fist and crammed them down in his overall pockets, waving off the fresh waxed paper thrust at him. “Thank you. Thank you. I want to show Hettienne the raft I’ve built. For the fireworks tower. May I steal her? Is she excused?”
The spinsters lifted her food right from her and retreated. Yet with crafty, sidelong glances they watched her as she followed Cousin David. When the two children were gone, Helen shared a long, dark look with Margaret.
“Secrets, secrets,” warned Helen.
“Sss,” Agnes hissed.
- 4 -
They hurried for the lake before Johanna and the other Ormonds knew them to be gone. In a cove shaded by sycamores, hackberries, and flaky red river birches, the original owners of the farm, the Headleys, had built a stone jetty. There David made a worthless but valiant show of brushing off the mossy limestone so she could be seated.
“Where’s this raft?” she asked, looking all about. She could feel herself acting a part, grinning and breathless before him like lovesick girls at Our Lady of the Angels. Yet her head still felt hollow and windy from last night’s episode or spell, whatever the family would be calling it.
At least with Cousin David here she felt the bright possibility of everything returning to summer again, becoming the Headleys’ Emerald Park again, what the farm had been called before the Sheehys had bought it, a place of Old Springfield legend where the only dreams that came true arrived in the daylight and were never bad.
David pointed to the shoreline. Down the shore a raft of logs topped with planking bobbed where it was tied.
“Why not build the raft next to where Uncle Simon started the tower?” The tower and raft both were for the fireworks extravaganza, the first in years, the war being won. The raft was to carry the tower, decked with pinwheels and Roman candles, all of it floated out onto Emerald Park Lake and lit during a planned storm of rockets. Five long years of war, and no fireworks, and hardly any butter or sugar. But this summer, a bounty flooded them from stoked green hills. Now munitions factories were pumping out firecrackers instead of deadly arms.
David’s brow creased. “Ever tried building something with your uncles?”
On David’s face, the rounded high cheeks and narrow chin of the Ormonds were softened as if scrubbed by an eraser. He looked a little like his mother, Aunt Kate Sheehy Ormond, especially when he bowed his head and his brown bangs, which needed a cutting, fell forward. At the back of his hair, tight curls formed a ridge, and just now this fixed, oily patch glinted like the crown of a bronze helmet.
“Must be some headache,” she said. Could she still touch him? She wanted to touch his knee, his handsome, muscular legs packed in those overalls, the fabric stretched with him sitting Indian style. He was three years older than Hettienne, and this summer, more than any before, she desired his approval and affection.
David paused. “Hettienne?” he asked. “Can you tell me what’s going on? Are you ill? Sheehys don’t get ill unless they die. You aren’t dying?”
Oh, how romantic that would be to tell him, yes. Yes, David, I am dying, and this is my last summer with you ever! What would he say then? Would he clutch her to him like a fallen dove?
“Of
