A Violet Season (3 page)

“At least someone will benefit,” Ida teased, waiting for her to drink her fill.

“Cat belongs in the barn,” Frank said, as he always did when Ida and Alice indulged her. Ida buttoned her nightgown, then carried Prissy out the back door and dumped the remaining milk at the edge of the garden. Frank was in bed, waiting with his face to the wall. She slipped in behind him, covering herself with the sheet and one wool blanket. Already the nights were warming.

“Are you all right?” she whispered to his back, and he rolled to face her. He slid his hands up under her nightgown and kissed her mouth once, then burrowed his face in the curve between her shoulder and neck, not unlike Jasper when he was tired or frightened. She understood: he was worried, always worried, and he didn’t know what he would do.

O
n the farm, Sunday was never a day of rest. Frank and the boys were up early to feed the animals, milk the cow and turn out the horses. Alice fed the chickens and collected the eggs while Ida stoked the range and cooked breakfast. This Sunday morning, as was often the case, Frank had a reason for not going to church; he needed to finish building the new beds in greenhouse 21, and in any case, the first-calf heifer was so close to calving that he didn’t want to leave her. The barn was far from the greenhouse where he would be working, and the heifer could calve without him, but Ida let this go. Lately Oliver and Reuben had been managing excuses to miss church, too, and this morning they volunteered to run an errand put off all week, picking up empty boxes left at the train station after the last shipping day. Sometimes Ida protested and won the company of Reuben, at least, but this morning she was satisfied to take only Jasper, who would pay Ida and Alice no mind as they talked.

They set off at the usual pace in the old chaise pulled by Trip, the stronger of their two horses, but as soon as they had rounded the bend, Ida slowed Trip to a walk. “If it weren’t for church, your father would have us working round the clock,” she said, easing
into the seat and stretching her limbs. The new nursling was due in the afternoon, and she was keenly aware of these last hours of relative freedom.

“It’s not so bad,” Alice said, looking across Mr. Aiken’s freshly plowed field to his irrigation pond, where a mallard duck and his mate dipped and paddled in the sun. Mr. Aiken’s barn was close to the road, and Alice fanned away the flies and the odor of manure with a postcard she used as a bookmark in her Bible. With every puff of air from the postcard, her wavy bangs lifted from her forehead. She had pulled up her thick hair this morning in an oddly mature topknot, forgoing her usual girlish braid, and Ida saw she was wearing her grandmother’s heart-shaped locket, a treasure Ida had given her as a feeble consolation prize when Frank had declared her schooling at an end.

Jasper, sitting between them, reached for the postcard, and Alice gave it to him.

“Your father worries so,” Ida continued.

“About what?”

“Money, mostly,” Ida said.

“I don’t believe I know anyone who doesn’t worry about money,” Alice said. “It seems no matter how much folks have, they don’t feel it’s enough. Even Aunt Frances. She always has to have the next new thing.”

“That’s true,” Ida said. “She’s never satisfied.”

Alice sighed and she, too, leaned back in her seat and hitched her skirts up to catch the breeze. It was the first truly warm day of spring, as if summer were ambling just behind them on the tamped dirt road.

“I could work with the boys again,” Alice said. “Papa knows I’m strong enough.” In addition to pulling Alice out of school, Frank had told her she was a woman now, and there would be no more boys’ work for her, the kind of work she preferred to do. She would do some of the picking and the packing—seasonal women’s
work—but there would be no more loading the wagon and driving the team to the train at Coburg, no more tagging along to stoke the fires. She was to find consistent work befitting a young woman and contribute to the family’s income.

“It’s not just Papa,” Ida said. “Uncle William and Uncle Harold aren’t willing to give you steady paid work.”

“Why shouldn’t they if I can do my fair share?”

“They should. But they don’t always do the right thing.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Alice said. “What puts them in charge? Papa works harder than both of them, and he knows more about the violets.”

“I would have to agree.”

“How could they be so unfair?”

This wasn’t the direction Ida had hoped their conversation would take. She and Frank had never explained their position to the children. Clearly Alice, at least, had seen for herself the way things were. It was hard not to, when their family lived in the three-room tenant house and William’s family fancied themselves one step below the Vanderbilts.

“Papa did something to make them angry a long time ago, and they’ve never forgotten it.”

“What did he do?”

“Oh, Alice.” Ida sighed. “Never mind what he did. It was a youthful mistake, but they haven’t forgiven him. As a result, they own the farm, and he merely works on it.” They were nearing the Four Corners already, and in a quarter of a mile they would enter the village and pass their neighbors walking to church. So Ida told Alice outright: “Your father is going to want you to marry soon.”

“Has he said so?”

“No. But I know what he’s thinking. He’s worried about us all, and when he thinks of you, he’s going to think it would be best if he could find another man to take care of you. Do you have your heart set on anyone?”

“Mama, I’m only sixteen!”

“I was sixteen when I met your father,” Ida said, and when Alice shook her head, Ida said again, “I know what he’s thinking.”

Jasper stood to reach for a white moth flying in front of him, and Alice caught him before he toppled off the seat.

“Claudie’s brother, maybe,” Alice said, sitting back.

“Why Claudie’s brother? Because that would make her your sister, or because you actually like him?”

Alice shrugged. “He tried to steal a kiss once.”

Ida looked into Alice’s brown eyes. “I’m asking what
you
want. Not which boy wants you.”

“I would rather work than get married. For now, at least.”

“It’s hard to find work off the farm right now. You know that.” Ida would have liked Alice to become a teacher. She was a good reader and writer, and she was patient and gentle with the younger children. But Frank wouldn’t budge on the question of her finishing school in order to teach. Every day she spent at school, as he saw it, was a day of income lost. “I’ll do my best to find you something,” Ida said. “Let’s not be late to church.”

They drove into the village past neatly arranged blocks of houses, nearly every one flying an American flag in support of the war against Spain. Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber were closing the front gate of their boardinghouse, and the two women greeted each other. Mrs. Schreiber’s climbing rose canes were covered with tight new buds, and her irises, wrapped in their translucent green casings, were about to make a purple show. Mrs. Schreiber wasn’t much for the violets, however. As the nation had begun to emerge from its five-year depression, many of their neighbors had noted the fortune of the Fletchers and the other violet growers and had constructed greenhouses in their backyards, sending their small harvests to the city for a reasonable profit. But Mrs. Schreiber, though she was one of the most accomplished gardeners in the town of Underwood, had shown no interest in building a greenhouse. Instead, her backyard
was full of herbs, which she reached via narrow mowed paths winding through unmarked beds. On breezy, moist summer days when one walked the village sidewalk, a startling aroma sometimes rose from her lot, and passing her house felt like walking through a fragrant curtain. Ida had seen Mrs. Schreiber’s rear garden just once, when Dr. Van de Klerk’s prescription of bed rest and a shot of liquor had not eased Frank’s back trouble. Mrs. Schreiber’s cayenne poultice had mended him well enough to return to work in a week, and with the continued use of her remedy, his back had pained him less since.

Up the street, they passed Dr. Van de Klerk himself. Though he was respected in town—and needed—he was not particularly friendly, and as usual, he was walking with his head bowed. Ida and Alice did not say good morning. As they pulled the chaise up to the horse shed, their neighbor Mr. Morton was helping his young wife, Jennie, several months pregnant, to step from his carriage onto the horse block in front of the church, and the seamstress Anna Brinckerhoff and her lawyer husband wished Alice and Ida a good morning.

The Dutch Reformed Church’s dominie, Horace Jacobs, was back from New York City, where he had attended a meeting of missionaries to China. Ida expected he might preach on that this morning. The Scripture—read by his son, Joe, recently returned from seminary at Princeton—was from Matthew’s account of the Last Supper. Ida tried to listen, but the passage was too familiar, and her attention wandered to Dominie Jacobs’s son himself, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year, since he left for his studies in New Jersey. He had grown more poised in that time and now conducted himself with authority in the pulpit. Joe Jacobs had always taken after his mother, thin and energetic; but her features, which Ida had once seen in the boy, were hard to discern in the man with the trim mustache and the reading glasses. Ida thought about the life this young man could expect, following his father’s calling as a
scholar and a minister. Though it was not a financially promising life, it was secure. No one would let the dominie’s family starve, and the profession came with the sort of respect Ida could only dream of for her sons.

Joe Jacobs was followed in the pulpit by his father. As the sermon began, it became clear that Dominie Jacobs would not speak about his recent experience in the city at all. Instead, he gestured to the communion table, where the bread and grape juice, serving for wine in deference to the Temperance Society, lay waiting under a white linen cloth. He read again the words of Jesus as told by Matthew: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.” Then he began his sermon on the war with Spain.

In February, a devastating explosion on the U.S.S
. Maine
in Havana Harbor had created a furor. Many Americans had long felt the Cuban people should be independent, but Spain had refused to let its colony go. Now the big newspapers were insisting the
Maine
had been sunk by Spanish forces, and war had been declared. Women who had lost their fathers and uncles to an earlier war stood by helpless as their sons took up the call: “Remember the
Maine,
to hell with Spain!” Just days ago, Commodore Dewey’s forces had sunk Spain’s entire squadron in Manila Bay.

This war, Dominie Jacobs told his congregation, was not one the nation had asked for. But it had become unavoidable and therefore must be fought. “Christ sounds no call to arms,” he said. “The trumpet of war is not in His hand. But when war comes, Christ sounds the call to the Cross, that the men who must fight, and the women who must weep, may learn from Him to accept their bitter cup because it is inevitable, and to endure their sacrifice because it is for the sake of others.”

Ida looked around the church at some of her neighbors—the Pruitts, the Ellerbys, Nora Hoskins, the Harrises, and a few of
the Negro families—all of whom had sons the same age as Oliver, boys eager for a chance to fight. The men nodded at Dominie Jacobs’s message, or tilted their heads in thoughtful agreement. But old Mrs. Walker stared out an open window with a defiant scowl. Her son—a decorated member of the U.S. Colored Infantry—had been buried in the churchyard thirty-five years ago. She and most of the other women already knew too much about sacrifice.

Unlike his son, whose voice took its calming undertones from Mrs. Jacobs, the dominie spoke with a forceful bass. He was much more imposing in the pulpit—a broad, double-chinned figure in black who lowered his head to regard his congregation over his glasses as if skeptical of their intentions—than he was in person. The few times he had visited their family, Ida recalled being surprised by the tenderness of his private prayers. He had sat at her sickbed when she lost her second baby and placed his large, cool hand over hers, and before he had spoken a word, the resonance of his voice had hummed in his chest, as if he’d been about to sing rather than to pray. Ida had felt some force of life in that visceral sound—something untapped, unspoken, so that the words of his prayer had seemed inadequate afterthoughts to what had been conveyed in that first private moment.

Despite her reservations about the war in Cuba, Ida found herself drawn in the same way to his earnest appeal this morning. Yet she could not abide the thought of her own boy answering the call to war. By the end of the thirty-minute sermon, which lasted far longer than Jasper could sit still, Ida was spent. Communion was served, and at last the congregation rose to sing the closing hymn. It was one of Ida’s favorites, “He Leadeth Me, O Blessed Thought,” which she remembered her mother playing. On the Sundays of Ida’s girlhood, after dinner they had stood around her mother’s piano and sung hymns in four parts: her father’s wavering voice on bass, her mother on tenor, her sister Grace on soprano
because she had trouble carrying the harmony, and Ida on the alto part. She slipped into the alto line now, and Alice glanced at her in irritation, then picked up the soprano more forcefully. Ida’s mother’s locket gleamed in the hollow of Alice’s throat. As they sang in harmony, Ida felt the weight of homesickness for her own parents, long dead. She pressed on, singing the low A’s deep in her chest, and as the congregation bowed their heads for the benediction, she wiped her eyes.

On their way out, Ida and Alice greeted the dominie at the door, then wished young Mr. Jacobs good morning.

“Are you home for the summer?” Ida asked him as Alice hurried off in pursuit of Jasper.

“Actually, I’m home for good,” he said. “I’ll be doing odd jobs here at the church, and I’ll be working on your farm.”

“My goodness! You’re not returning to seminary, then?”