“Pasties are the best kind of supper for a passel of kids. Easy to pick up in their hands. Good to eat hot or cold,” I say to keep sound in the room.
Into the oven goes the Dillards’ supper and I top off our cups of tea. Sadie looks near normal. She even got a tinge a blush back in her cheeks from rolling pastry. I don’t go on with my story right away and she reminds me like I hoped she would.
“You was telling bout the rosebush.” She rinses her floured hands in the bucket and wipes em on a towel and sits back at the table.
“I was, won’t I?” I add a log to the stove, then join her at the table.
“Now, I see a lotta flowers in my life grow natural on the mountainsides. Willis would hunt for new ones to surprise me. Once, when he was third day out hunting ginseng on Wolf Trap Ridge, he come up on a old farm he don’t remember passing before. Windows all busted out. Floorboards rotted. Chimney crumbled to dust, he said. And in that yard, right by the door, choked by a patch of jewelweed, he saw a rosebush with one tiny bud on it. It had to be brung up from the valley cause it won’t native to here.
“Willis dug the whole thing up, careful to keep dirt round the root ball. Then he put it in his sack beside the ginseng, it taking up space where more seng could go.
“Well, that evening, I was glad to see Willis get back from the woods safe. Hunting ginseng is crazy cause lazy fools do terrible things when the money plant comes in. They steal from the hardworking and don’t think twice. I cooked possum stew and a pan of angel biscuits for him, and I sat right next to him while he scarfed down three bowls of stew and six buttered biscuits like a starved man. He tells me bout the hunt and the pretty views he saw that made his heart swell.
“After his belly’s full, I go to spread out the seng roots to dry, and he said, ‘Now hold on, woman. Don’t you snoop in that bag yet. I got you a surprise.’
“Well, Sadie, I got tickled as a kid at Christmas to think of Willis thinking of me when he’s far off. When he pulled out that rosebush with one red flower, I cried at the beauty of something that come so far so I could see it.
“‘Smell it,’ Willis said. He looked as proud as if he made the smell in that flower with his own two hands. And I did. I sucked in that perfume till Willis said, ‘Slow down! You gonna use up all the sweet,’ and we laughed.
“Willis wrapped the dirt round that bush with a wet rag, and next morning he planted the little bush on the side of the house. He picked the sunniest patch of ground around. He got down on his knees and dug a hole in the loamy earth. We don’t know if the little rosebush will like it here, but it won’t from Willis not trying. He watered it. He put coffee grounds round it. Worked in manure. When cold weather come for sure, he piled wood chips on top to keep it warm. I never did know where he learned to do all those things for a rosebush from the valley.”
I hold up my hand and say, “Hold on, sugar. From the good smell, the pasties are done and I don’t want em to burn.” I pull the golden-brown pies out of the oven and set em on top to cool. The house don’t smell like roses, but pasties is good on a chilly day. This recipe come over from my Cornwall kin by way of Ireland and is good and filling.
Now I come to the tender part of the rosebush story. Sadie and me feel the sad grabbing us before I even start the telling.
“Willis died that winter, don’t you know. I didn’t see it coming till it was too late. A fever come on so fierce, and he throwed up blood and turned jaundiced. Some folks say it was yellow fever, but there won’t no proof to speak of. It was yellow fever that got Mother Jones’s husband and her children, too, before she turned hero, but I don’t know what kinda fever got my Willis.
“We can’t bury him right away cause the ground is froze. Since they was close, Walter and Gladys found a kind spot in their hearts and come to help ready Willis for his burial. They keep him in his pine coffin in their lean-to where me and Mama and Daddy lived once upon a time.
“One day next spring, after Willis got put in the ground in the Hickses’ burial plot, I felt a lonely heartache and it won’t stop. The heartache grabbed me with cold wiry fingers and squeezed hard. I prayed to the Lord for relief but feel guilty taking His time from important things. I prayed Willis don’t look down from heaven to see me feeling sorry-assed for myself.
“Sadie, right then I stood straight up from this kitchen table filled with the light of hope. I walked out into the springtime I won’t paying a bit of attention to. I walked round the side of the house to that patch of sunshine like I was pulled by the Holy Spirit. I don’t have a choice cept to go where my legs carry me.
“The wood chips was still bunched round where that rosebush was, and I got down on my knees. I remember how bad my hands shaked over that bush cause I don’t wanna find it dead under there after all the love Willis poured on it.
“But, hallelujah! What I saw was little nubs of life on them branches. Proof of the Lord’s promise of salvation. Oh, Sadie, a piece of my Willis growed in my yard!
“Quick, I got chicken wire and put it over and round that bush so critters don’t eat at it. I watered that bush. I loved that bush, and it loved me back. It give me roses every summer since.”
My voice is raspy from telling the rosebush story. Sadie’s boohooing and I’m boohooing, and we both gotta blow our noses on snot rags. It’s a good kind of cry we do for all kinds of reasons, and we stand and hug each other, washed clean on the inside. Every woman needs to be loved like my Willis loved me.
I end my story like always. “There won’t a speck of reason why that rosebush come up in the spring. Sun too puny. Winter too cold. Air too thin. It grew cause Willis and me loved it.”
The light’s come back in Sadie’s eyes. “Can I see it?”
“Course you can, honey. Let me get my water bucket and you give it a drink.”
In the autumn afternoon, the old rosebush is a marvel. I feel Willis here even more than where his pine coffin lies in the ground. The blooming’s long done for the season, but there’s one tiny bud showing off. Sadie gasps and clutches her heart, tender as I ever saw her. I say, “I think this here’s for you, honey.”
She whispers, “I wish I had a man who give me roses.”
“Don’t give up on that, sugar. You got a long stretch of living in front of you.”
“I do?”
“Won’t say if it won’t true.”
I break the stem, careful not to get stuck, and inside I put it in a blue milk of magnesia bottle.
“This’ll come home with you tomorrow. It might open up if it’s got a mind to. It’s a late bloomer in the cold, so it’s shy. Right now we gotta deliver supper to some hungry children.”
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