*
Reverend Sam smiled broadly when he found me shivering on his front porch.
“Come in,” he said in greeting. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew I was coming when I hadn’t known it myself until half an hour ago. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was there with him, the person who seemed interested in the real me when no one else in Hickory cared to find out who I was deep inside.
Wordlessly, I followed him down the dark hall to the anteroom. Despite the fact that I knew the skeleton was there, my heart still threw an extra beat when I saw it. Those hollow bony eyes seemed to follow me as I crossed the room to Reverend Sam’s inner office.
I sat down across from him and he immediately reached for my hands. I put my chilled fingers in his warm ones. After a moment, he let go of me and sat back.
“Did you finish the book?” he asked.
I had to smile because that was exactly the subject on my mind. I nodded.
“How did it end?”
I thought about how to answer the question. “The character, Francie, grows up during the story. Many things happen to her and she’s strong and tough and ultimately changes for the better.”
“How does the tree fit in?”
“The tree is … well, it’s sort of like her. Like Francie. It gets chopped down and battered and bruised, but it keeps on growing.”
“The tree is a metaphor,” Reverend Sam said.
“Exactly.”
“Would your mother have liked that ending?”
I thought about my mother. I had no idea how she would have felt about the ending as far as Francie was concerned, but I knew she would have loved that the tree remained standing. “My mother loved trees,” I said. “There was a park not far from our house and she would go there sometimes just to look up at the tall trees. Our yard was very tiny and had only a few scrubby old trees in it. So…” I had a sudden idea.
“Your face just lit up,” Reverend Sam said.
“My husband is building a house for us,” I said. “There are a lot of trees on the property already, but maybe we could plant another. A special one. For my mother.”
He smiled. “Lovely,” he said.
I thought of the property, trying to remember it well enough to figure out the best place to plant a tree.
“Your marriage is good?” Reverend Sam interrupted my thoughts.
I looked him in the eye. “No,” I said. “It’s not good, actually. It’s not good at all.”
And then, in the safety of that quiet little office, the skeleton standing guard outside the door, I told him everything. How I’d been engaged to the man I loved and foolishly cheated on him with Henry. I told him about the pregnancy and how Henry had asked me to marry him. How no one in Hickory seemed to like me. And although he didn’t conjure up my mother on this visit, or offer advice, or say much of anything other than murmurs of sympathy and understanding, I left feeling far stronger and freer than when I’d arrived.
31
When I arrived home from seeing Reverend Sam, I found the mail scattered on the floor beneath the slot in the front door. In the scattering of envelopes, I spotted the one I’d been waiting for: a response from the North Carolina State Board of Nurse Examiners. I tore it open and grinned to myself. Your application to sit for the North Carolina state board examination for graduate nurses has been accepted. The letter suggested some hotels near the exam site for the three days in March when I would need to be in Winston-Salem, and my heart began to skitter with excitement. I’d be five months along by then. Would it be all right for me to take a train at five months? I thought so. I knew my pregnancy wouldn’t be the biggest obstacle to my taking the exam, but I was going to take that exam, by hook or crook.
That evening, Ruth, Lucy, and I sat at the dining room table to decorate the shoebox-sized boxes Henry had brought us from the factory. He’d also brought a much larger box, this one sealed and seemingly heavy, which he’d carried upstairs to Lucy’s room.
“Just some things for Lucy,” he’d said when I expressed curiosity about the box, and Lucy had given me a look that told me whatever was inside it was none of my business.
The next hour or so had to be the most congenial I’d spent with my new in-laws since my arrival and I wondered how much of it was due to the sense of calm I’d carried with me since seeing Reverend Sam that afternoon, as well as my happiness over the upcoming nursing exam. Ruth, Lucy, and I complimented one another’s designs as we glued the lace and beads to the cardboard boxes and we chatted endlessly about what we’d cook to put inside.
“We should all make fried chicken,” Ruth suggested, “and deviled eggs. That would make it easy on us rather than coming up with three different dishes.”
“Everyone’s going to be making fried chicken, Mama,” Lucy complained. “I’m terrible at it, anyway. I think we should each do our own individual specialty.” She patted a ribbon into place on the lid of her box. “I can make meat loaf, though I guess I’d have to really stretch the meat because of rationing. And I can make my famous red velvet cake for dessert.”
“Well, darling daughter,” Ruth said, “where will you find the sugar and food coloring for your famous red velvet cake?”
Lucy shook her head in annoyance. “Rationing gets in the way of everything!” she said.
My specialty had always been chicken parmesan, but I thought I’d best stay away from Italian food for this event … and every other event as well. “I can make stuffed ham,” I said. I knew we could get a ham from one of the local farmers.
“Stuffed ham?” Lucy scoffed. “How on earth do you stuff a ham?”
“Everyone in Baltimore makes stuffed ham,” I said. “They don’t make it here?”
“Never heard of such a thing.” Ruth cut a length of lace to fit the sides of her box. “How is it done?”
“Well,” I said mysteriously, “first I need an old pillowcase. Do we have one?”
They laughed. “You’re pulling our legs,” Lucy said.
“Not at all. You cut the bone from a ham and make deep slits through the meat, then stuff the slits with greens and tie the whole thing up tight in a pillowcase. You boil it for about half an hour in water that’s been seasoned with loads of spices, and then chill it. It has to be served cold or it won’t look pretty.”
“All the food has to be cold,” Lucy said. “Or it will be anyway, by the time the bidding is over on the boxes.”
“When you cut the slices, each one has streaks of stuffing in it,” I added.