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March 1762
SILAS LOVED THE way his daughter had grown, rather like a colt, all legs and awkward arms. She would soon be a woman, and most likely as lovely—almost as lovely—as her mother, but for now, although she was already nigh on seventeen years of age, she still had the gangly charm and indeterminate grace almost of a young boy.
She could have been one of those Shakespeare heroines Master Ormsby had often told them about, one who dressed up as a lad and went undetected about men’s work. Portia and her quality of mercy speech had always moved Silas. He could see Louise dressed in the robes of a solicitor, standing before the court in Venice, speaking those lines, with everyone who listened seeing her as a young man, for Silas had long known that people generally saw only what they expected to see.
He caught the eye of his wife, who sat spinning beside the fire and gave the slightest twist of his head. She understood immediately, of course, and turned to watch their girl, intent on untangling a particularly bothersome skein, her tongue protruding slightly from between her full lips. It looked like a happy worm peeking out from the fire-brightened apple of her cheek.
Silas knew Louise would find it hard to forgive him if he drew her thus. He certainly would not suggest the worm! But he had to capture her determination, her tenacity, and yes, her vulnerability.
He had a whole array of sketches of her, showing her growth.
Across the room from him, Brand pored over his latest project—his dream of bringing water from the plenteous spring north of the town between here and the Garner settlement. Unfortunately, the water would need to be routed across or possibly through an intervening hill. Silas doubted Brand could talk the other men of the town into digging a sufficient waterway, but Silas would be loath to underestimate the boy. He had already sketched a very serviceable wooden piston pump to be powered at first by men at times of need. Brand had concocted the idea three summers before when the river dwindled to little more than a trickle during a dry spell, although the water flowing from the spring had remained plentiful. Silas found the scratching of the chalk on Brand’s old school slate a comforting sound.
“We should have brought a pair of wide-tailed beavers with us from our former home, Brand. They could have built a dam across the Mee-too-chee and saved us all that digging and pumping.” He avoided looking at his wife for fear he might break into laughter, which would have offended Brand’s sense of purpose.
“There is a beaver dam at the head of the valley, Father.” Brand stretched his shoulders back. “That is why we had so little water three summers ago and why we need my pump. The beavers are most effective builders. They saved almost all the water for their homes.” He went back to his skritch-skritch-skritching. A few minutes later, he lifted his head. “I doubt they would bother with my pump. It will provide enough water for the town, but there is no place high on these hillsides to form one of their lakes.”
"We can walk to the spring," Louise told her brother. "There is nothing wrong with buckets."
"It would be better, though, to bring the water to the center of the town, to the green. That way no one family would have to walk too far to gather it." His young voice held no room for doubt.
That matter settled, Silas laughed to himself as he drew his two children side by side, each of them busy at an important task, Louise with her tongue sticking out slightly, Brand running his hand through his always unruly hair, causing it to stand even more on end than usual. When he was a white-haired old man, Brand would no doubt look something like a dandelion just waiting for a breeze to waft its seeds across the town.
Louetta had mentioned something much like that on the previous night as the two of them lay in bed before sleep. "When our Brand marries," she had said, "can you imagine the head of hair on his first child? It will doubtless spring every which way." And they had laughed quietly at the thought.
Brand sat back of a sudden. "We could form a lake here in town."
Silas waited. Brand had that certain look of concentration that had always meant he mulled over ideas, accepting some and discarding others. "Yes," Brand finally said. "We can dig out the land around and above the spring and form a depression that will gradually fill. The dirt we dig out can form an earthen wall below the spring. We could plant it with—" He looked at his mother. "Are there plants that will hold the soil to keep it from washing away?"
She thought a moment and nodded, but before she could speak, Louise proclaimed, "Flax seed. We have more than enough from last year’s harvest. Two years growth, and nothing will wash away your barrier."
She and her brother exchanged a hand clasp, as if sealing a bargain.
On sudden impulse, Silas turned the paper over and drew one of his most enduring memories, of Louise, no more than three, perched on Brand’s still-narrow shoulders, clinging like a baby possum to his hair, and Brand with his hands holding her fat little legs firmly where they stuck forward beneath his ears.
~ ~ ~
JUNE 1785
FATHER HAD BEEN dead for more than four years. Louise Martin Breeton sat behind the counter at her husband’s dry goods store and opened the leather pouch Father had bequeathed to her. Business was long over for the day, and Louise had shut the door rather firmly, hoping no one would have the temerity to open it. This was the first time since Father’s death that she had felt the courage to open the leather pouch. Now seemed a good time, for her husband Frederick had taken the wagon up the valley and would stay the night with his Uncle Willie and Aunt Nell—and all their dogs. Albert, her nine-year-old son, was out and about somewhere—she never seemed able to keep up with him, although he generally was home when it was time to eat.
The two girls were supposed to be at their studies in the back room where the family lived, but for now Louise did not make the effort to check on them. Her mother would see that the girls fulfilled what was expected of them. Louetta Tarkington Martin was certainly better than Louise at drilling them in their studies. Had she not taught Louise her alphabet before there ever was a schoolhouse? Louise could almost remember the feel of a slate in her little hands when she just a tiny tot, as well as the ways they had counted stones and fingers and flowers and people in the lane.
Even though her time was somewhat limited, she took a moment before she opened her father’s leather pouch, just to think about him. The term great-hearted did not even begin to describe her father.
She thumbed quickly through the stack, happy to see that there was no reference to the two sons she had lost so soon after their births. At least this latest babe seemed hale enough to survive, to thrive. She rubbed her swelling belly and whispered the child’s name. “Chastity.” She knew, somehow, that she carried a girl within, and the babe responded with a vigorous kick. If someday she had a son, she prayed that he would be just like his grandfather.
The babe inside kicked her again. Perhaps, she thought, this girl will carry the spirit of Silas Martin. Chastity. Yes, she would be a strong girl and someday a strong woman.
Then Louise moved her attention back to her father’s drawings.
The first drawing in the stack, labeled The Leaving, must have shown the town they had come from, somewhere up north. She wished she knew the name of that town, but not one person had ever even breathed the name, despite the fact that Homer Martin had been dead for what? A dozen years?
Had Mother ever been so young? Had Brand ever been so gawky? The two of them near a cabin, mother standing over the body of the bear she had killed, Brand holding a knife almost longer than his skinny arm, guarding the porch, his hair as usual splaying every which way, his eyes intense. Louise knew the story well, for Brand had oft told her about the day he first met Father. She would give this drawing to Brand’s wife, Parley.
She paused when she came to the faces of two men drawn side by side—well, a man and a boy—obviously father and son. There was something wrong with the hidden side of the man’s face, but his eye, the only one shown in the drawing, looked kind. She turned it over. There was no inscription, no identifying initials, even. Just her father’s strong S M. Not even a date. She shook her head. That was not like Father at all to give so little detail. The boy looked a bit like a younger version of Mister John Martin, the leader of the community, but that could not be, for this boy’s father—the man in the drawing—looked nothing like Homer Martin. Well could Louise remember that man’s narrow forehead and pugnacious jaw.
As she finished with each sketch, she laid it face down on the wide oak counter, the better to keep them all in order. She and her father were both sticklers for order. It had served her well as the wife of Frederick Breeton. Her husband trusted her implicitly—as well he might!—to do the arranging and the ordering of the store, for she never misplaced a bar of tar soap or misspent one of the new liberty dimes.
She laughed aloud when she found the sketch he had made of the brand new schoolhouse. Brand had been so proud of having helped the men with the building of it. This drawing showed Brand with his arm spread out, as if to say Look what I have wrought. She set that one atop the ones she intended to give to Parley. Parley and Brand would both cherish it. It would go well with the picture of Brand on the porch.
Here was a drawing, even more detailed than the previous ones, of Mother holding her favorite wooden cup in her hand. Louise could clearly see the top of the intertwined initials, L and S. Louetta and Silas. Her father’s wedding gift to Louise had been a cup that twined her L with an F for Frederick. How she treasured that cup, and she could see in this drawing that Mother felt the same way about her L and S cup. How could Father have captured feelings so succinctly?
The funny thing was, Louise could see in this drawing—in all of them really—the love her father had felt for them all. How had he done it?
When she came to a spate of drawings of herself as a young girl, though, she groaned. She looked as gawky as Brand had on that cabin porch. Almost without thinking, she took a thick handful of them, well more than two dozen, and consigned them to the fire still burning at the end of the room.
The only reason she saved the sketch of her untangling that obstreperous skein of yarn was that it showed Brand beside her with his hair standing on end the way it always did. Louise loved her big brother. Despite the teasing he had done over the years, he had always been there to stand up for her. And he had been such jolly good fun when she was tiny, letting her ride on his shoulders up to the meadow, even though she must have near wrenched his hair out by the roots. It was her earliest memory, watching the world over the top of her brother’s head.
She took that picture—the one of her and the yarn—and turned it over to lay it on the growing stack to her left. What she saw on the back of it left her in tears. Father had drawn her as a tiny child astride her brother’s shoulders. She and Brand both sported wide grins. How like Father to know what was important.
Except for those growing-up sketches of her.
Chastity kicked her again and Louise had a moment’s pause. Had she been too quick to burn the evidence of herself as a gawky girl? Someday, perhaps, Chastity might have need to know that girls grew and changed, that awkward stages did not last. It had been a mistake, she knew without a doubt. She should have kept every one of her father’s drawings.
He had been such a fine man. Martin’s Village would never again see his equal, not as an artist, not as a father or a husband, not as a man.
Louise bent her arms on the store counter, lowered her forehead onto them, and cried as she had not in the past four years.
She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Mother," she sobbed, "I miss him so."
"Show me his pictures, for I can see that is what has put you into such a state."
Louise drew herself up, turned the stack upright, and went through the drawings again, one at a time.
At the end, Mother said, "Did you find the hidden pocket?"
"What do you mean?"
Louetta Tarkington Martin reached across in front of Louise and drew the leather pouch to her. "Your father showed me this just once many years ago." She bent the heavy leather in such a way that a slight opening showed. "Here, and here, and then lift this and press that."
The drawing inside was one of Louise and Frederick on their wedding day—the day Parley and Brand had been married as well. All four of the newlyweds fairly jumped from the page, so great was their obvious joy in each other.
This time, both women cried, but their loss was sustained by a deep love for this father, this husband, who had planned such a lovely surprise for the two of them.
~ ~ ~
LATE JUNE 1814
CHASTITY LOOKED ACROSS the room at her sister, Faith, whose pregnancy was so greatly advanced, and who should have been well past the usual nausea each morning. "Did you get any sleep at all last night?"
"This babe cannot come soon enough for me this year," Faith said. "I think I have slept not a whole night through ever since the beginning of this pregnancy."
"Do not wish it over too soon," Chastity chided her. "You may find the babe will keep you awake more after its birth than she does now before her birth."
"Are you so sure it is a girl?"
"Of course it is a girl. Look at the way you carry her." Looking around for something to take her sister’s mind away from her aching back, she brought forth the portfolio that had been in her keeping every since their mother’s death. Louise Breeton had reminded her children often of how her father, Silas Martin, had used the sturdy satchel as a portable desk on which to sketch the daily life of Martin’s Village.
Chastity could not remember Grandfather. He had died four years before her birth. She recalled the stories about him, though. "Here, Faith, help me look through these drawings one more time."
Faith laughed aloud. "You will soon wear them out if you look through them many more times." Still, she dropped into the chair next to Chastity and helped go through the sketches one by one, commenting on many of them, especially the ones of their mother and Uncle Brand as children.
"I have thought to give the satchel to my husband," Chastity said, when they had reached the last of the drawings. "He could use it in his business."
"What of these, though?" Louise indicated the tidy pile.
"Help me find a length of linen to wrap them in. That will keep them safe."
No sooner had they wrapped and tied the bundle than Faith felt the first of her birth pangs.
The bundle of drawings lay on the sideboard unnoticed for two days while Faith struggled to bring forth her child. She barely heard the clanging of the bell alerting the villagers to a fire in the church. She was aware only of her sister and the midwife and the pain, the agony.
AFTER THE FUNERAL, Chastity was so caught up in the daily work of caring not only for her own children but of Faith’s three sons as well as little Hope who had against all odds survived, she thought little of her grandfather’s sketches. Hope was the first baby baptized in the newly-rebuilt church. Chastity never looked at the drawings again, for they reminded her too much of that last happy day she had spent with Faith, and she could not remember that day without recalling what had come immediately after it.
Years later, just before she died at the age of one hundred and three, she asked Cleusa, her great-granddaughter, to take the sketches and treasure them.
~ ~ ~
“WOW,” MADDY SAID. “THIS one from 1752 is incredible.” She walked around with a sketch of three women in conversation.
“They must be great friends,” Melissa said. “Look at how intent they are on each other.”
“I wish I knew what they were talking about,” Sadie said.
“I can’t make out the title.” Rebecca Jo said. “Can you read it?”
Maddy pushed her glasses up farther on her nose and pulled the drawing a little closer to her face. “It’s blurry, but I think it says Importance.” She held the drawing out to Ida. “Am I right?”
“I believe so,” Ida said. “It’s a strange title.”
“Not so strange,” I said. “It sounds like Silas had his priorities straight.”
"It looks like the women had their priorities straight," Dee said, "for them to be concentrating on each other so completely. I think it’s marvelous."
“This one looks like his wife, Louetta,” Glaze said, pointing to one of the figures. "Those cheekbones of hers are so distinctive."
“And Mary Frances,” Ida said, but she sounded dubious.
“I don’t think that’s Mary Frances,” Glaze said. “She’s turned to one side, so it’s hard to tell, but the chin is wrong somehow.”
"I bet she’s the woman in that harvest sketch," Pat said. "The woman we couldn’t identify."
Maddy grinned. “The third one is Miss Julia, for sure.”
"They kind of remind me of the three of you." I indicated Sadie, Rebecca Jo, and Esther. "When you’re all working at the library at the same time, I’ve seen you huddled together like that."
The three of them laughed, but I could tell they seemed pleased with the comparison.
~ ~ ~
JUNE 1997
WHEN SHE PULLED into Martinsville, nobody looked at her and said, "There’s Charlie Ellis come back home." Nobody paid any attention to her at all, in fact. Not that she expected them to. The first people she saw were three old women marching along the sidewalk, talking their heads off and laughing like something was hysterical. One of them looked like one of those fat crayons they made for little kids, all yellow. The other two just looked old.
She wondered where everybody was. She had to drive two blocks before she saw another person. She knew there was a bed and breakfast place in town, but she didn’t want to stop and ask about it. She’d passed a B&B on the road down the valley, something with a rooster on the sign, but she didn’t want to stay there unless she absolutely had to. If they had chickens there, she’d pass.
She decided to just drive up and down the streets, sure she would find the place. She’d get settled in, maybe get cleaned up. It was almost time for lunch. They’d be able to tell her at the B&B where she could eat.
She finally found the Azalea House Bed and Breakfast. Nice tree out front, with a bench next to it. Too bad it wasn’t in a back yard. She couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to sit out by the street like that, like they were on display.
Once she’d registered and gotten all the information she needed, as well as a huge cup of coffee, she cleaned herself up and headed out. Might as well get adjusted to the place, she thought. There’d be time tomorrow to locate the people she was looking for. As she walked down the front stairs, she heard a rooster crow. At least it sounded like it was pretty far away.