Chapter Fourteen

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Thursday, September 28, 1995

 

The next morning, Lillianna approached her father cautiously, anxious to avoid repeating her mistake of mentioning his pa’s drinking. “I was hoping you’d tell me about meeting Mom. What was it like falling in love?”

“I met her in Clintwood. When I went with Billy to see Hanna.”

“I figured that much out already. Tell me how you felt and what you thought when you first saw her. Did you know she was the one?” Lillianna smiled.

He shifted his gaze to the window. “I don’t know. I’m not much for remembering the mushy stuff. But yeah, I knew the minute I laid eyes on her. And I was right, too.” He paused, and his grin didn’t hide the sadness in his eyes. “I reckon I learned most everything I know about feelings from Cassandra. And from what little bit I remember about my own mama.”

 

Clintwood, Virginia

Autumn, 1940

 

The Friday after their visit to Crystal Beach, Billy and Calvin left for Virginia. The unusual October weather hung precariously balanced between summer and autumn. It was warm enough for Billy and Cal to camp alongside the road on Friday night. They drove the rest of the way to Clintwood on Saturday.

Calvin was nervous as they pulled into Hanna’s drive, a rutted dirt lane lined on both sides by tobacco fields already harvested. In the nearby sheds, giant tobacco leaves hung to dry. Hanna sat on the front porch waiting with another girl whose dark gaze was planted on Cal over the shortening space of the drive. His breath and his heartbeat quickened. He wished his voice wasn’t so breathy like he’d swallowed too much air, his hands were unstained from farming, and that he’d spent more time digging the tractor engine grease from beneath his fingernails.

They’d barely come to a stop when Billy leaped out of the car and into the circle of Hanna’s arms at the bottom of the porch steps.

Calvin slipped over into the driver’s seat and in the rear-view mirror glimpsed the lines of bewilderment creasing his face. Looking down at his hands he wished, once again, he’d taken more time with his nails. None of his thoughts connected with the face staring back at him from the mirror. Finally, he took a deep breath, then stepped out across the driveway to the stairs leading to the porch.

Cassandra Carter sat in a wicker porch swing, wearing a pink-flowered dress with a white sweater draped over her shoulders. Her dark hair, the blue-black color of coal, fell across her face as she turned toward him. A smile curved her full lips and displayed straight teeth as gleaming as new snow. But it was the fresh-plowed earth color of her eyes that drew Calvin. He held them in his gaze—circular, dark pools like his mother’s, in which he could see the reflection of his own face.

When he thrust his hand forward to introduce himself, he hoped she wouldn’t notice the tremble or the dark crescents beneath his nails.

“I’m Calvin Miller, Billy’s friend, and I’m happy to meet you.”

She stood and held out her hand. Calvin took it, pumped the air between them as if he drew water from a deep well. Nearly as tall as he, she looked directly into his eyes. All the while he couldn’t believe his good fortune. She was so pretty he feared she would evaporate, vanish into the woods before he had a chance to know her.

“Oh, I’m sorry, y’all. Where’d my manners get to?” Hanna laughed as she escaped Billy’s hug to make the introductions.

Hanna smiled, took Cassandra’s hands. “She’s my best friend. Lives over yonder on the farm next to us. This is Billy, Cassandra. The one I been telling you all about. And you already met his friend, Calvin.”

Hanna and Billy strolled out into the woods behind the house, leaving Calvin and Cassandra to fend for themselves. She sat on the swing and patted the space beside her.

Calvin sat, keenly aware of the way her thigh pressed against his own. He was nervous at first and stared up at the porch ceiling, painted a blue so soft it was like a wedge of midday sky had been caught inside its wooden beams. For a moment, he wished he’d met her at a dance where the music was loud, and he could touch her without having to talk. He tried to think of something to say—something she’d want to hear. In his mind, he practiced giving her a compliment about her dress.

“Y’all got any brothers and sisters?” Cassandra rocked the swing with the tip of her oxford.

“Four sisters and one brother. But I don’t see them much.” His voice raspy and thick, Cal wished he could relax and sound more natural. “How ‘bout you?”

“I have three brothers. One older and the other two younger. My sister died. How come you don’t see yours? Don’t y’all live together?” She blinked, and the golden flecks in her eyes seemed to burst wide open with light.

“No. After Mama died... well... my pa... he up and lost the farm. We got spread out all over the place.” He told her where his brother and sisters lived and asked if she’d ever heard of Sugar Grove, Virginia.

“Yeah. It’s not too far from here. Just about fifty miles south and a little bit east. That’s all.”

He found himself telling her about his mother, about the coffin in the window of his grandpaw’s house. “I won’t ever forget it. I know that for sure now. I can see it as plain as if it happened yesterday.”

She, in turn, told him about Elsie Ruth, her eighteen-month-old sister, who died in her arms. Elsie had dysentery, and Cassandra described the way the food would pass through her so quickly and into her diaper, barely changed from when the baby swallowed it. She told Calvin how she felt and how she knew she’d never hold another baby without remembering Elsie Ruth.

“There’s some things you just know are gonna be with you forever. I would have changed places with her if I could. She was so little. Never had a chance to live. Or to love anyone. It wasn’t fair, Calvin... I’d already lived fourteen whole years.”

“I’m glad you couldn’t swap places with her.” Calvin smiled and lowered his gaze.

“Sometimes... well... I hold my breath and try to imagine being dead, like Elsie Ruth. Leaving her body behind and going someplace without it. Do you ever think about things like that, Calvin Miller?”

He nodded, but she didn’t expect him to answer and he knew it.

“I keep wondering what it would be like to have wings or live in the clouds. But I don’t rightly know if I believe everything they teach me in church about pearly gates and streets lined in gold. Do you think your mama’s in heaven, Calvin?”

“I don’t know anything about heaven. I never been much on church stuff, but if there is such a place, for sure, my mama’s there. There was never a better woman.”

“I guess we all have to figure out what we believe in for ourselves.” She laughed.

It was the most beautiful sound Calvin had ever heard.

“But I couldn’t tell the preacher or my ma and pa that. They’d give me a licking for sure. I like to believe Elsie Ruth is part of the earth. That grass and roses are growing out of her little body.”

Calvin nodded and told her about his own little sister, Nellie, and the way he still saw her red hair and tiny face framed by the train window. He had no idea why he talked so much. As if someone had turned a knob inside him, Calvin told her everything he’d never told anyone before, things he didn’t even know he thought about.

Mesmerized by the way she opened and closed her hands when she talked, Calvin thought it a kind of sign language. Her whole body came alive, like a flower opening itself after the rain. Watching her was no effort to his eyes, like observing a branch swinging or a seagull in flight. Behind her, the darkening sky glimmered with living things, with moths, mosquitoes and the last of the season’s lightning bugs, bright orange and magical.

Hanna’s parents had invited Cassandra and the boys for dinner, and they gathered around a big old oak table with seven of her brothers and sisters, but Calvin couldn’t eat much. It wasn’t even that he was nervous, exactly. He just longed for more time alone with Cassandra.

That night, as they sat talking on the porch, Calvin discovered happiness could appear out of nowhere when you least expected it. Happiness was something you stumbled on, reached for and picked up quickly to hide near your heart. Cassandra Carter made him happier than he’d been since his mother carried him to the window to study the stars.

“I have to go home now. It’s getting late, and my folks will be worryin’.” Cassandra stood, turned toward the steps. “My pa’s real strict. Come to church tomorrow. There’s a picnic afterwards at my house.” She moved closer to him, her eyes pleading. “Everyone’ll be invited. Just come. Please.”

He reached out and took her hands, felt a pulse vibrating. Was it possible? Could she feel the same way he did? “I’ll be there. But... let me walk you home at least.”

“Just to the other side of the bridge. You’ll meet my ma and pa tomorrow. At church. It’ll be better that way.”

The sky filled with so many stars it made him dizzy if he looked up for too long. The moon hung big and orange, like a child’s drawing. They walked in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing and the occasional crack of a branch beneath their feet. Cassandra shivered, and Calvin put his arm around her shoulders, and they synchronized their steps, for the first of many times, across the wooden bridge of the creek that separated her father’s tobacco farm from Hanna’s.

On the other side, she kissed his cheek. When she waved, her small olive-skinned hand sliced an arch through the sky. She ran the few yards to her front porch while Calvin stood, listening to the thump of her steps as she climbed the porch stairs. He touched his cheek where she’d kissed him. Had he imagined it?

There was something extraordinary about this girl, different from the other girls he knew back home. Or maybe something about her made him different. He had confided things he never said to anyone. His breathing quickened again at the thought of her. Calvin knew he already loved Cassandra Carter, and he would until he died or got too old for loving, even if he never saw her again.

Before he could stop himself, he thought about desire. About how it lived within you and yet was something separate, something that came to the surface when it chose to, without your permission, at a moment when you least expected to find it. He’d never made love with a woman. He’d thought about it, but never even came close to the actual act. But desire mixed with his hope now, and for the first time in his eighteen years, he tasted the deep and exquisite pain that comes from that mingling.

Calvin ran back to Hanna’s house, taking long strides and leaping up to touch the low branches of the trees. He wanted to experience what it was like to have the air launch him upward, toward the stars. Filled with yearning, he ran so quickly he almost believed himself weightless and able to fly straight up to the moon.

He and Billy spent the night in the barn behind Hanna’s house. Calvin didn’t sleep much, and at midnight, when he stepped outside to look at the sky, a thread of milky clouds formed a ring around the moon. The night was so quiet he could hear his own heartbeat.

When morning finally came, the sky opened to the color of bluebird eggs, and its light lifted the mist from the fields. Still hours before church, Calvin lit a cigarette, the first one since he arrived, but stubbed it out. White smoke suspended in the air like a spider’s web while a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying his heart off with it.