Beneath the Apple Leaves(69)
At night, Andrew turned his focus to old passions—reading veterinary texts and plotting a better future, the words of his father replaying, reminding him to take care of his family. But he had two families now, the attachment to this home growing stronger in equal measure with the burdens to help them. And so he studied; he wrote letters to his mother full of promises for a better life. And he tried not to believe that the tasks were as useless as a bird without wings.
Over the frigid months, the house sighed with waiting, with the cold that shuddered from the wind and the sour moods under its rooflines. Outside, under the weight of blowing wind and thick flakes, the great apple tree drooped, the old bark moaning as its branches divided and hung as a canopy over the hidden roots. Tips of wizened limbs jutted closer to the house, picked like fingers at the peeling paint, the nails tapping, tapping, tapping like a bored child at a school desk.
And so winter carried into 1918 with a steady and unrelenting weariness—a heavy, dull cold that settles into the limbs and numbs the appendages and wonders if warmth will ever be known again.
PART 4
The military masters of Germany . . .
filled our unsuspecting communities
with vicious spies and conspirators.
—President Woodrow Wilson
CHAPTER 34
In April 1918, the thaw came quickly and without notice, started in the night and raised temperatures so robustly that by morning the earth heated from the inside out.
Steam rose across the hills, thickened into fog along the valleys and pulled high on the sun’s strings to the heavens. The robins and bluebirds appeared from the smoking landscape, chatted loud enough to make up for their winter absence. Mourning doves darted in chase between the whitening birch trees. Red-winged blackbirds clung to the old reeds and cattails along the thawing creek, their weight bouncing the spindly stalks up and down like a greased well pump.
Between the brambles, the black raspberry prickers glowed purple and the grapevines twisted brown with barky texture. Forsythia budded green with a promise of yellow and the pussy willows grew furry pods soft as rabbit paws. Striped crocus erupted in sunspots between clusters of daffodils. The land bloomed; the land sang and spread its aroma of birth and renewal.
Andrew Houghton emerged from the house, smelled the nimble scents of warm snow melting into musty loam. He leaned his neck back, his skin soaking in the natural warmth, the first heat uninspired by a coal stove or a burning log in more months than he could count. And within the balminess, the cells of his body ignited and the rush of energy made weary limbs suddenly alive and young and drunk on spirit. Coatless, he stepped off the footpath and sank six inches into the ground. “What the . . .” Using his left leg as a brace against the stone, he sucked his buried foot from the soupy mud and squinted at the melting, oozing, grassless landscape.
Andrew rubbed his forehead and chuckled incredulously. The screen door slammed and Wilhelm mirrored Andrew’s entrance with a full grin to the bright sky until his nephew placed a hand of warning to the man’s chest and pointed to the flowing ground. Wilhelm scratched the stubble at his chin, the light shining it silver, and he shook his head, a resigned laugh coming from the throat. “Ah, Christ.” He shook his head again and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll be damned.”
But mud or no mud, the hard, deep, black winter was over and with each inch of rising sun the lips curved upward and the nostrils widened and they paused in their work just to relish the glory of the turned season.
The apple tree shook off the last ridges of snow, and with a sigh and flicker the limbs outstretched and unbent, took woody claws off the house and quieted the unending tapping. Eveline tied the clothesline to the heavy trunk and patted the bark, noticed for the first time the word “Lily” etched into the side. And she peeked at Andrew heading to the lane and wondered with a tickle if he had carved the word.
Wilhelm and Andrew stepped discriminatingly from exposed rock to old wood just to keep from sinking into the black, sliding land. The snow melted in pools, overflowed into the grassless dirt, cut eddies and lines like plow marks through chocolate. The dip in the drive filled with rushing black water, the sludge piling into dams forcing the water to cut into the gravel, widening the gap to an impassable river.
Andrew pushed back his cloth cap and put his hand to his bent knee in assessment. “We could rebuild the lane a hundred times over, but the water’s going to come through. No stopping Mother Nature.”
Wilhelm nodded. “We’ll build a bridge. The only way. Think the Muellers would give us a hand?”
“I’ll speak to Pieter.”
The sun warmed their backs as they stood shoulder to shoulder overlooking the expanse of weather-beaten land, but there was hope and the mud did not appear a curse but a symbol of movement, a sliding away of all that was old and rotting and cold.
*
Lily did not mind the walk. The spring sudden and light, making her want to live under the sun and put the dreary days of gray and frost behind forever. Small gnats and a few new flies buzzed around her neck, but she paid them no mind, let them tickle her skin until they moved on to find the cows, horses and pigs newly released from the barns.
She swung the empty basket back and forth near her hip, her arms now unstrained from carrying the food she had dropped off with Mrs. Sullivan. Nice old woman, Lily thought. With her daughter away so much, Lily was happy bringing the woman food now and then. She liked being near the widow, the way the house always smelled of cinnamon and seemed to be filled with sunshine even on cloudy days. She was a woman who when she hugged you she hugged you. Squeezed you so tight that her warm nature and kind spirit soaked into the skin and you didn’t want her to let go. Lily wondered what it must have been like for the Sullivan children to grow up in that kind of home. Wondered what it would feel like to be hugged like that since birth, made to feel that you were the very thing that kept the Earth aligned in the universe. If she ever had children, she’d hug them every day, just like that. Lily smiled then. Every day, she thought. They’d know they were the sprouting angel wings in her eyes.