The Steep and Thorny Way(47)

I peeked again across the grassy grounds, toward my mother and stepfather’s picnic spot. I found them chatting with other members of our congregation. Mama glanced once my way, but then she returned to her socializing, neatening a lock of hair that had fallen out of her chignon.

I wandered into the graveyard with the horns and the drums of “The Yankee Doodle Boy” ringing in my ears and vibrating up the bones and muscles in my calves. The grounds grew cooler. Or, at least, the chill of silent graves spooked me into imagining a drop in the temperature.

We treated our dead in grand style in Elston, with polished gray obelisks and thick marble headstones marking the names of the deceased, from our Oregon Trail pioneers to those who died in recent years from the Spanish flu and other calamities. The conjoined graves of our former reverend and his wife lay to my right, no more than ten feet beyond the iron archway. I saw their surname, YORK, carved in block letters that felt smooth and solid beneath my hand, as well as the matching date of their deaths: October 8, 1918. The flu had snatched them both in the middle of the night when the pandemic ambushed Elston. Those two gentle souls—people who could have counseled and comforted me at the moment—had turned to dust, while the physician who couldn’t save them still roamed the earth.

Tears burned in my eyes, for I remembered Mrs. York pulling my parents aside after church one Sunday morning during my second year at the schoolhouse. Her face was lined in soft wrinkles, and she had kind blue-green eyes shaded by a homespun bonnet. She stood no more than four foot ten, and yet she possessed a sturdiness to her voice that made her appear six feet tall.

“I’ve heard about Hanalee’s troubles in school,” she had said to my parents. “I know Mrs. Corning ignores her whenever she raises her hand.”

My parents couldn’t disagree, so Mrs. York wrapped her arm around my bony shoulders and told them, “Bring Hanalee to our house one afternoon each week. I used to be employed as a schoolteacher myself. I’ll ensure she’s as least as smart as the other children in that school, if not smarter.”

The Yorks’ names on the gravestone blurred from view. I tucked my chin against my chest and allowed myself to cry—a good, shoulder-shaking bawl that other people might have heard if the brass band wasn’t now blasting “The Star-Spangled Banner” across the church grounds. I couldn’t even bring myself to venture farther inside the cemetery and visit Daddy’s grave. I just stood there and sobbed, tears dripping to my chest, and I missed everyone with all my heart: the Yorks, my father, my mother, Laurence, Joe, Fleur, even me—the former me who never would have lingered in a church cemetery, pondering if she should dare put Clyde Koning into one of those graves.

“Hanalee?” said a voice I knew to be Fleur’s.

I raised my head and found my friend standing at the entrance of the graveyard, dressed all in white. A breeze played with the airy sleeves below her shoulders, making the fabric flutter up and down. Red geraniums encircled the crown of her straw hat, and I knew she would smell as sweet as the petals.

“You’re back,” she said, stepping toward me.

I wiped my eyes with a knuckle. “Yeah, I’m back.” I gave a sharp cough and cleared my throat with grunts that resembled the thumps of Mildred’s whiskey still.

Fleur crossed her arms over her chest and walked toward me through the grass in her white Mary Janes. “Why’d you run off with Joe like that? Why’d you tell everyone you were eloping?”

“Uncle Clyde . . .” I took a breath, unsure where to begin. “We had a terrible falling out. I took off toward the woods, and I kept on running . . . with Joe.”

She stopped in front of me and laced her fingers through mine. I, indeed, smelled the perfume of geraniums.

“I need to tell you something,” she said, her voice small.

I swallowed. “What is it?”

“Laurence . . . he warned me that if you . . . if you came back . . .” She sighed and looked up toward the sky, stretching her eyes wide, which I knew to be her way of stopping herself from crying.

I squeezed her hand. “What did Laurence say?”

“He told me . . . I could never . . .” She blinked. “I could never see you again.”

“What?”

“He said, you and Joe . . . what you did was so wrong. A boy—a boy like him . . .” She held my hand tighter. “A girl like you . . . together.” She puckered her lips, as though her words tasted sour. “The Wittens came over this morning and told him they found you two together, sleeping on their property, and—”

“It was only sleeping, Fleur. Uncle Clyde got mad because I insinuated that he killed my father. I ran off with Joe so Clyde wouldn’t hurt either of us.”

She rubbed the inner corner of her right eye and looked up at the sky again. “They want to kill him so badly now. Robbie hates himself for not hurting Joe this morning when they found you. He said that if either of you came back . . .” She cupped a hand around her chin to keep it from quivering. “Laurence grabbed me so hard and made me swear I wouldn’t see you again. He left bruises on my arm.”

“Where?”

She lifted the butterfly wings of her sleeves and showed me purple marks the size of two thumbs, one per arm.

“Oh, Fleur!” I took hold of her elbows with the softest touch I could muster.