If memory serves, the last time True Bliss ever ate her own words was the summer Threesie Lope picked every last jack-in-the-pulpit from here to the end of forever and left them on True’s front porch with a soot-signed note reading “ME.” True was not accustomed to getting either flowers or notes, disdained the folly of both in fact, and viewed the freshly wilting blooms with their bulbous onion roots as not only unsought but unsightly. The note, which said nothing more than “ME” in handwriting that would put a chicken to shame, was no more welcome than the hooded pinks in their greenery, and if she knew who “ME” was, she’d sure give him or her the evil eye.
It was too early in the morning to be finding your front stoop festooned with an abundance of nature not to your liking, and whoever was the culprit or culprits to lay all these pulpits on her porch must have done so in the cool before sunrise because the petals were only just starting to curl when she opened her front vestibule door at dawn and found them. Someone creeping to her house in the wee hours—this was not good. Had she known that it was Threesie Lope, the only Lope triplet she liked, but the Lope triplet she trusted least, True would have marched across two fields to confront her friend, given her a piece of her mind and a slap. But True had no way of knowing that the jackanapes was Threesie, so the words stayed on her tongue and the sting remained on her palm.
True Bliss was not a woman who liked to waste a good tongue-lashing. It galled her all day that she didn’t know whom to blame for the pile on her porch. It galled her when she mashed the screen door into the mound, it galled her as she kicked every last leaf down her steps, the slime on her boot galled her, the sludge on her steps galled her, the mush pile of it all galled her to such distraction that she didn’t even have the wherewithal to clear away the mess. It sat in the sun at the foot of her steps and baked the day away until it turned into a smear of slimy sludge, and the evening breeze lifted the funk of it and wafted it through her front parlor oriel and shoved it up her nose. Some people conjure up the past by biting on a cookie, but True required more substantial means to put her mind back where she had come from, and there’s nothing more substantial than a stinky odor on a hot summer night to send yourself running for cover.
Once long ago True had expected Mawz Engersol to tap-tap-tap on the opaque glass of her front vestibule door and escort her to the New Eden Grangery for the annual summer dance. It was the last summer of summer dances, it was the last dance of all dances, though no one could have known that then, and it was the last summer that True was in the high flush of her life, at the tail end of young, and not quite into the next uncertain age. She was upstairs in her bedroom in front of the small oval looking glass on her washstand admiring in its reflection the crest of her youth, prettying herself with a pink velvet ribbon, which she carefully threaded through her braid. It was a warm night, not steaming, and she left the high collar of her blouse unbuttoned to catch what cool there was; she’d finish the fasteners when she heard Mawz tap. In those days, True hummed. Little tunes that eddied in her imagination and ruminated in the air of her throat. Mawz was due at eight, but the clock at the foot of the stairs in the front entry hall had chimed eight nine or ten minutes back, and True became aware that her feelings had a look she wasn’t too pleased with, that even this slight annoyance caused the skin around her eyes and mouth to pinch like milk skim. She tried, and succeeded, to hum the annoyance off her face and smoothed back her features to where they had lain serene; she felt a ripple of air on the pink of her neck and it was rejuvenating, and if Mawz Engersol were to arrive at this very moment he would see her now at the happiest she had ever looked in her life.
The air downstairs had a stifle to it, and her mother was the cause. Cozy was in a snit that her daughter was in a pet, mooning over a suitor and a summer dance. Whether it mattered that he was a cousin or a suitor plain and simple was debatable to True; her mother’s foul mood didn’t need a rational reason to fuel it anymore than a witch needs a broom to make soup. Cozy was a Bliss and her departed husband was a Bliss and her daughter was a Bliss two times over for more reasons than she could count and Mawz Engersol had Bliss in his bones and all this Bliss was probably too much Bliss to go around for her mother’s liking. And then of course, there was the other thing.
Cozy had instructed her daughter from an early age not to trust men, not to like them, and for pity’s sake not to wallow in the moonlight with them; the male of the species is a ruination to every female—if Eve hadn’t been so selfless and not shared her apple with that man, that business in Eden might never have turned the world topsy. Cozy had warned her daughter from an early age to mind her apples around just about every boy in town she knew, because every boy in town she knew was related to her in more ways than she realized and it was time the related stopped relating. Keep away from Kennesaw Belvedere and Luddy Upland and Hunko Minton, not that that would be a sacrifice, from Carnival Aspetuck (if he could keep himself away from Jubilee), and more than anyone, don’t go near Mawz Engersol, I’m warning you, Cozy said more than once.
For many years, True did as she was warned, kept her distance kept her composure kept herself out of moonlight shadows and other equally iniquitous environs, if she saw a boy she crossed to the opposite side of the street, she swam on the far shore, she climbed trees in a part of the forest where no boys had touched bark, and doing so Cozy was convinced her daughter was safely out of those woods. True had sense—Cozy’s side of the Bliss family was the side that had sense—so why her daughter should suddenly forsake good sense for a dance, for a man, for a man she knew was her cousin, made no sense to Cozy, it only incensed Cozy, it gave her illest humor license to sully the air in the house with a sulfuric rage. No daughter of hers was going to fall victim fall prey fall in love with an apple from the same tree, not again, if she had to poison it so be it she’d do it, the blood in town was so thin already it wouldn’t take much to slip bitter in. Upstairs a pink velvet ribbon was threading through a braid and the braid was coiling a head in a crown draping over a slender shoulder hugging a slightly sloping spine to tie its owner to a suitor who didn’t suit her who shouldn’t suit her who mustn’t suit her. Cozy never told her exactly why.
Everyone had laughed and whispered and counted on whatever fingers they had the years it had taken for Cozy and Remedial to multiply; it was Remedial’s thirst for hard cider that threw cold water where heat needed to seep, it was Cozy’s hard shell that kept her husband from plunder, it was the cycle of the moon, it was too much chervil, it was everything a small mind in a small town can tell itself when it doesn’t want to know itself know the truth—no one knew for certain, but it was surmised that Remedial was not True’s father, it was surmised that True’s real father was Remedial’s best friend, Remedial’s best friend as everyone knew was Bull Engersol, and Bull Engersol was Mawz Engersol’s father, and if the rumor that had always run through town like a stink of sulfur was true, Mawz was coming to woo his own half sister and neither knew it.
True was upstairs with a pink velvet ribbon and a misconception. A young man was coming to squire her to a dance, a young man whose nervous tic she mistook for a wink, a young man she winked back at and made all his world turn violet. She had known Mawz since he was born, she was born before he was, she was a rose already when he was but a bud, she had always sensed in him a kinship that went beyond the schoolyard, it was barnyard from an early age, though neither understood the attraction. She’d watched the change in him from boy to man, she’d seen how much stronger it made him on horseback, how his snug fit in the saddle was a sight to rein in. Their fathers had been best friends first and cousins second, they fished and horseshoed and hijinxed together, Bull gave Remedial his first slug of cider, it hooked him like a trout. If Remedial needed an extra hand to pull a stump, to roll a rock, to seed a row, Bull was always the pal he could count on to do what needed to be done if he wasn’t up to it. It was Bull who found Remedial after True was born, face down in Grunts Pond, cold as a stone, his last bender laid him flat. After that, Bull looked out for True like a father would—from a distance. No wonder. Even before their friendship, Engersols and Blisses had cut up the earth and dribbled their seedlings for as many generations as corn has kernels (what family in town hadn’t farmed the same lands together?), but a girl likes a boy because he’s a boy she likes, whosoever farmed with whom is irrelevant, he had one eye blue and one eye brown and that’s all she needed to see. She liked his eyes; they were crossed, but kind. And they liked her; she loved that. She was Cozy’s daughter, sensible as a dollar in most matters, but on this one point she wouldn’t make change: if she danced well with Mawz Engersol, she’d marry him.