Mawz had picked so many jack-in-the-pulpits for her it was years before they grew back, and they never did grow back as plentiful. In some spots they never grew back at all. Mawz was the only jack-in-the-pulpit True would ever allow herself in life, and it became a bare spot on her heart. It wilted on the front porch that night and withered at the root and never bloomed again in her for her mother or Mawz, or any other potential mate in town, or any other person at all, really, except maybe Frainey Swampscott, but that was purely from animal instinct. There had been no explanation from Cozy, the night was a tornado with no warning—it hovered high high for the moment to tail and touch down and destroy, and whistled back up into thin air as swiftly as a splinter.
True had good cause to pound her Drell fist on her Minton palm, to stomp her Buckett feet and wail a Lope cry, but she did none of that that night or ever. On her face she fastened a smile as taut as barbed wire and from that night on it was the only expression she allowed her mother to see; and for Mawz she didn’t even bother to fasten the wire to fenceposts, she’d give him the whole spooled bale. From that night on if she saw Mawz approaching 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 he never touched bark, and doing so convinced her mother that she was safely out of those woods. Cozy never told her the truth and True never asked to know, and deep in that gulch of unknowing is where mothers and daughters perish.
Bull Engersol’s passing was a hushed ordeal. It was the following summer on the very day that the annual dance at the Grangery would have fallen, had the annual dance not been canceled, had the last summer’s dance not been the last summer dance, the last dance of any dances. It was Mawz who told Luddy Upland that Bull had gone riding out beyond the ridge above Grunts Pond, that he had been startled by a snake by a bear by a snapping limb by a funnel cloud by a gunshot, he wasn’t sure, but the horse spooked and the saddle straps snapped and Bull’s hitting a rock headfirst spelled doom. Mawz said he took a guess as to where his father had ridden and followed his trail like a good little Indian and found poor Papa on the ground with his brains spilling. Mawz said Bull didn’t have his best friend Remedial Bliss there to roll that rock out of the way so his head wouldn’t hit it. Mawz said, Luddy said, that Bull had always said he’d meet a no-good end for reasons he’d rather not say, and so he did, and Luddy said Mawz said ‘nuff said.
Bull’s passing was a snake a bear a snapping limb a funnel cloud a gunshot, and following it not too many cold winds after was the lowering of Cozy’s pine box in the ground to an eternal destination unknown. True slung her barbed-wire smile around the gulch in the ground where the box was placed. Jubilee held her hand and Threesie Lope kicked the first clod of dirt in for her. Kennesaw was there, Hunko, too, Frainey, Zebeliah, Carnival had dug the hole, the Soyle sisters stood around it with Onesie and Twosie, Knotsy felt faint and collapsed into the arms of Elementary Hurlbutt, he was still vertical then, or was it Luddy Upland, one of them in any case, they kept an eye peeled for any movement behind any distant tree, the quickest swish of a horse tail that might be Mawz, but as far as they knew he never showed.
How two people could keep their distance in a small town is a big mystery with few clues to follow. True never once stood face to face with Mawz again from the day he asked her to a dance to the day he took his last step, it was thirty years or more, that’s a lot of trees to hide behind. True’s youth crested in fewer years than it takes an apple sapling to bear its first fruit, and the skin around her eyes and mouth was as tight as her resolve to make a life for herself free of pink velvet ribbons and foot warmings and foolish dreams. She threw off her girlhood like a pair of dancing slippers and took up the thick woolen socks of practical contentment, tending her own garden, seeding her own rows, and partaking of social interaction only when there was the remotest hope of delivering a good tongue lashing.
It was in those years of growing old fast and growing cold faster that True started her tradition of serving tea to Kennesaw Belvedere on his birthday, of admonishing Jubilee Aspetuck to stay a minimum of two family portraits away from her brother lest they become the picture of ruin, of giving Hunko Minton what-for for whatever reason on a daily basis, and of staying one suspicion ahead of Threesie Lope at all times.
It was this latter endeavor that consumed True and made her braid grow gray with care. Onesie Lope was a jumpy girl who flinched at the slightest belch or hiccup. And Twosie was endurable company until she opened her mouth and last week’s mutton got re-served. Threesie, however, was as close to True in temperament and steely coolness as if she had herself been on the blown-out end of a punctured romance and had grown tired of the whole game of mating. To True’s knowledge there had been no boy in town sniffing at the hem of any one of the three Lopes. They were in fact known among the boys as hear no evil, speak no evil, and pure evil, though no one dared utter this to them directly.
Threesie was the one of the trio who could go too far with a look, a prank, a complaint and not stop until she had covered more ground than a winter howler, and this charming attribute was what many considered to be the reason than not even a distant cousin wanted to sled down her hills. True admired this. She had, in a way, become like her own mother, taking comfort in Threesie’s disdain for the other half of the human equation. But True wasn’t entirely cozy playing Cozy; she knew too much about her own heart to trust that Threesie had come upon her abjuration of all things male in an un-prodded manner. Some boy at some time somehow pulled some stunt that sent Threesie reeling, and True would wonder all her life who the wounder was.
Threesie claimed she came upon her spinsterhood as one would a case of childhood mumps, a random contagion settled upon her with a fever and a rash and an incurable aversion to warm feet. Twosie insisted that Threesie had never been sick a day in her life, and as sure as the Lopes had tripe last Tuesday, as evidenced by what accompanied Twosie’s testimony, Threesie had, at the age of ten, convinced Mawz Engersol to pledge their friendship in a bond of saliva, and having done so, she was convinced that once their spit had spun together, he would never drool over any other girl in town again.
To Threesie’s dismay, Mawz was already dry in the mouth when it came to True Bliss. When True watched him horsing in the fields, his tongue felt stiff and heavy; when the girls went tumbling and he was watching her, there was an unexplainable bubbling in his innards, and afterwards he’d have to excuse himself and dive into Grunts Pond to cool down.
Threesie didn’t make Mawz’s juices flow. Not one of the Lope triplets had that ability. Ask Frainey Swampscott, who knew a thing or two about the strange attractability of animals, and she’d opine that it was because the Lopes were born in a litter, and anyone born in a litter had little chance of becoming anything other than a pet. Frainey used to say that it wasn’t a surprise that the Lopes shared more with the animal kingdom than the righteous one, after all, their mother, Whinnie, looked like a horse, and their father, Boyle, acted like its ass. It was hard to argue with such logic, at least as far as Whinnie Lope was concerned, for she had thick fetlocks like a mare and a face made for a feed bag, and although none had ever observed her in her birthday suit, it was not an unreasonable hunch that the mane trailing down her neck gave purchase to a tail. Whinnie Lope was also tall. Inhumanly tall. Taller in fact than the horse that threw Bull Engersol, seventeen hands tall at least and a few extra fingers thrown in. Frainey went so far as to surmise that Bull Engersol’s horse may have indeed been Whinnie Lope’s father, and there was no denying she had its eyes and hooves.
Unfortunately, no one ever got around to proving this, and any hope of doing so ended with Bull Engersol. By the time Mawz found his father’s mount wandering riderless in a field of buttercups and black-eyed Susans, he wasn’t concerned with asking for or notifying the stallion’s next of kin, he was more eager to bury it on top of True’s true father, so whatever Whinnie’s equine link may have been remains as much of a guess as Bull’s spook. As to Boyle Lope, what can you say about a horse’s ass, except that you always have to clean up after it. Pure manure, Zebeliah would say to Frainey about her theory, but it was hard to refute the fact that the only buzz of excitement the Lope triplets ever attracted was from flies.
A person cannot undo the turnings of time anymore than a rock can throw itself. True Bliss took to wearing her braid as a lariat roping her head, grayer as the years advanced, tighter as each new season for jack-in-the-pulpits bloomed and spent. The Lope girls came to accept their unloveliness as a tree split by lightning finds the wherewithal to go on, and as long as the sap flowed through their veins they could endure the scars and gnarls that erupted on their limbs.
Even after True had given Threesie the pink velvet ribbon from the night she never went to a dance, and Threesie promised to always cherish it, to never lose it, to never give it away, only to claim so many years later that she misplaced it who-knows-where, True never would be certain that her friend was really her friend. All of life was puss in the corner to Threesie Lope, a fakeout that got another mouse trapped, and True suspected that as far as Threesie was concerned, maybe Frainey had a point about the Lopes and their animal heritage, and that deep down in the cesspool of the Lope family genes, all cute little mice were really rats.
Threesie was slippery with another feint, too, a fooling, a fakeout behind True’s back. She was careful to keep secret that once a year she helped Mawz Engersol keep a mourner’s ritual, out on the ridge above Grunts Pond where he had built a mound of boulders over the tomb of Bull and horse. Once a year on the anniversary of his father’s spooking, Mawz would roll another stone over the hole to force the bones down lower. Threesie hoped to win him over at last; she helped him pick jack-in-the-pulpits to lay upon the rocks to rot, and following his lead, she dug down deep in the pit of her feelings for him and ushered onto the spot her spit to join his. In thirty years of silent service, she hoped Mawz would finally say to her the words she longed to hear from him, but he never did say boo. Instead she only heard him utter one sentiment ever, and he’d say it every year, over and over, to the bones beneath the stones: if only it wasn’t true … if only it wasn’t True … if only it wasn’t: True. Threesie didn’t need a prospector’s map to understand the lode buried in that claim. She had horse sense enough to accept when she’d been pussed. Mawz was forever on the threshold of True’s front porch with jack-in-the-pulpits in a mound to take her in his arms to a dance. He was never more than a stone’s throw from that night all those summers ago. And no one had been more careful in all the years since to keep True away from the man who broke her heart than this man who broke her heart. Such a hard rock was his fidelity to True that it finally beat Threesie’s heart into something approaching human. And so to Mawz she gave a sign, not in words, not with spit, nor with claws drawn or manure piled high, that the girl his grief was tied to was still as tied to him.
It was a snake a bear a snapping limb a funnel cloud a gunshot that lay to rest the spook that haunted Mawz Engersol. Buzzards had come early to snack on him in the small hours of his annual pilgrimage thirty years to the day, and Threesie didn’t feel right leaving her armfuls of jack-in-the-pulpits on top of him where the birds would only scarp away the blooms to peck at his guts. She carried the mound down the ridge and across two fields and laid them on True’s front porch as gently as she might a baby, she rummaged a scrap of brown paper from the burn can in the yard and with soot on her finger wrote the letters M and E and tucked the note under the neck of a pink bloom.
By that evening, fatigue would wear down True’s gall to a nub and air the raw wound at the root of all those rotten blooms. In the morning had she known it was Threesie she would have marched across two fields and given her friend a piece of her mind and a slap. But by nightfall, her tongue had lost its urges and her palm was too busy as an eye sop to swing itself. It was days and days before Luddy Upland found the desiccated bits on the rocks on the mound on the ridge, and he told Kennesaw to tell Carnival to tell Jubilee to tell Threesie to tell True.
What he kept to himself was a slender bit of business that only a ghoul would find comforting. There was a hand there; it had fallen between two rocks, out of reach of pecking beaks, where maggots weren’t turning it white it was going black. Luddy poked it from its crib and saw a clot in its craw, a flash of color that wasn’t blood. The stiff blackened fingers held something soft in a grip that wouldn’t let go. It was a pink velvet ribbon. Luddy thought of prying it loose, thought of burying it, thought of leaving it alone. In the end, he let nature make the decision. He’d found the hand there with the ribbon in it, so maybe that was the way it was meant to be. Mawz Engersol spent his life just out of reach of that ribbon, stopping himself from grabbing it, and once he’d had it, he’d had it. Luddy figured Mawz would have left an entirely different impression on folks if only it wasn’t true.