Lilac Spring (14 page)

Softly she exited the room and made her way outside to the veranda. The trees were lush and green, interspersed with the lacy white blossoms of the wild pear trees. It seemed that everything bloomed at once in June, from roses to lilacs, as if they knew how fleeting the season would be.

Loneliness engulfed her. It saddened her to see her father brought so low. Only a few days before, he had been hale and hearty. Now he seemed pathetically weak. Worse than his physical weakness was his spiritual and emotional weakness. He seemed so lost.

Her sorrow fought with her frustration at her father’s attitude toward Silas. How could her father be so unreasonable? Every instinct screamed out to do something, even as her common sense reminded her of her father’s delicate condition.

Deciding she needed to talk to someone, she grabbed up her parasol and told Aunt Phoebe she was going out.

She walked to the parsonage. It was doubtful she would find Pastor McDuffie and his wife alone, so she prepared herself mentally to smile and greet whoever else might be visiting. But the house seemed quiet as she knocked on the screen door.

“Hello there, Cherish.” Carrie McDuffie gave her a wide smile as she opened the door and drew her into the house.

“I’m sorry to come unannounced.”

“Nonsense. We’ve been meaning to have you over since you returned home. How is your father? Arlo will walk down later and pay him another short call.”

“He’ll like that. I told him about Sunday’s sermon, and he seemed to enjoy hearing it.”

“That’s good.” Carrie led her down the corridor to the back porch. “We were just sitting out here, digesting our dinner and admiring the flowers.”

“How nice and peaceful it seems,” Cherish told her as they emerged onto the shaded porch.

“Hello, Cherish,” Pastor McDuffie greeted her, getting up from a wicker rocker.

“Don’t get up. I just stopped by to say hello.”

Pastor McDuffie didn’t heed her, but came over and gave her a warm handclasp. “We’ve been praying for you. Don’t despair.”

She smiled and took the rocker Carrie indicated for her. “Say hello to Miss Cherish, Janey.”

Cherish smiled at their five-year-old daughter, who sat on the steps with a doll. “Hello, Janey.”

“Hello, Miss Cherish,” she said, turning to her and holding up her doll. “See Miss Eliza?”

“Hello, Miss Eliza.” She took her porcelain hand. “How do you do?”

“Fine, thank you, Miss Cherish. I hope you enjoy your visit to the parsonage.”

“Why, thank you. I’m sure I shall.”

“Come, Janey, let’s give Miss Cherish a chance to talk to your papa.”

“But Mama, I want to visit with Miss Cherish.”

Her mother took the girl by the hand. “I’m sure you do. But we’ll come back and talk with her later and maybe have some lemonade together. How about that?”

Cherish watched the two walk away together. She could tell by Mrs. McDuffie’s thickened waistline that there would soon be another McDuffie added to the household. How blessed she must be, with a loving husband and daughter and now another child on the way, living in this beautiful house surrounded by flowers.

“How are you holding up, my dear?” The pastor’s soft question intruded into her thoughts.

She sighed and turned to him with a sad smile. She had meant to be brave and give him a shining example of someone facing her trials with the kind of trusting faithfulness he had spoken about in his sermon.

Now, looking into his sympathetic eyes, she found her own filling with tears. She pressed her lips together and looked toward the garden. The flower beds, coming alive with blossoms, became a blurry green-and-pink-and-lavender landscape.

“That’s all right. Let it out,” he said softly. After a while he handed her a clean white handkerchief.

She took it gratefully. “I didn’t mean to come here and bawl. It’s too fine a day for that.”

“You’re welcome to come here any day and bawl. I’ll make sure to have a handkerchief ready.”

She gave a watery laugh. With a final wipe of her eyes and nose, she said, “All right, I’m finished feeling sorry for myself.”

“Care to tell me about it?”

“Oh, Pastor McDuffie, where do I begin?”

“I suppose you’re worried about your father.”

She bit her lip. “It’s more than that.” She looked down at her hands clasped around the handkerchief. “It’s my fault his heart gave out.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked quietly.

“I upset him frightfully.”

“What did you do that was so terrible? You’ve hardly been home long enough to get into too much trouble.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? ‘Cherish always does what she is supposed to. She is such a credit to her family,’” she mimicked. “It seems as if all I’ve discovered since I’ve come home is how black my soul really is.”

Then it came out. She told him all she’d been feeling for Silas for as long as she could remember, Silas’s reticence and his final capitulation, and her father’s violent reaction.

“I never dreamed Papa would be so against anything between Silas and me.” She sniffed. “I mean, in many ways it would be a natural thing, wouldn’t it? I’ve practically grown up around him and the boat shop. Silas is perfectly able to take things over when Papa…when Papa gets too old.” Tears threatened again at the thought, which seemed all too real now.

“Instead, here he’s run Silas off the yard. Now he’s laid up for who knows how long. He’ll need constant attention for some weeks at least, and who is supposed to run the shop?” She looked at McDuffie’s gentle face, not expecting an answer.

He seemed to sense that, since he didn’t reply right away. Instead he picked up his large, worn Bible and opened it. He began to read from Matthew, a passage familiar to Cherish about the lilies of the field. He ended with “‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’” He closed the book.

“Let’s pray, shall we?” He laid the book down, took both her hands in his and bowed his head, shutting his eyes. His voice continued gently, and gradually Cherish’s heart felt peace. He prayed for her father, for his recovery, for reconciliation be
tween him and Silas. He prayed for Silas, that he would find the road chosen for him of God. And finally he prayed for Cherish herself.

“Grant her Your grace, Lord, to see this through. We know You have a purpose in all this, that all things ‘work together for good to those that love You, to those who are the called according to Your purpose.’”

When he’d finished praying he sat back and regarded her for a few moments. “It’s tough falling in love, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “I never thought it would be. It seems I’ve always loved Silas. Since the first day I met him. Can a five-year-old fall in love?”

“A five-year-old can love.”

“The more I read First Corinthians thirteen, the worse I feel. My love seems to fall so short. It seems since I got back all I’ve been doing is trip over myself trying to get Silas to notice me—to notice the woman I’ve become—and the more I strive to do so, the more childishly I behave, until…this. I know you’ll probably say, like Silas, that I had nothing to do with my father’s condition, but you didn’t see him that day in the boat shop. I’ve never seen him in such a rage. It can’t have done his heart any good.”

“You know the Bible says that Christ’s love has already been poured out into our spirits by His Holy Spirit.”

She nodded, again recognizing the verse.

“When you begin meditating on that, you’ll begin to see how you can have the charity described in First Corinthians. Let me ask you something else.” He held up a hand. “Don’t answer me right away. It won’t have an easy answer.”

“What is it?” she asked, feeling her heart accelerate at the steady way he was looking at her. She knew that look. It meant a spiritual question was coming that she wouldn’t like.

“Would you be willing—truly willing—to accept God’s will in this situation between you and Silas and your father?”

She licked her lips. “You mean, would I accept it gracefully if I knew it wasn’t God’s will for Silas and me to be together?”

“That’s right.”

“I have asked the Lord to have His perfect way in my—our—lives. But it seems ever since I did, I’ve been receiving crossed signals. Sometimes it seems so clear that the Lord is showing me that Silas returns my feelings, and other times it seems I’m ‘kicking against the pricks,’ as Saul was,” she ended ruefully.

He smiled in understanding. “If you’ve truly given it over to the Lord, He will show you the way. He understands your frame, your weaknesses, and He’ll work through them. You just wait on Him now and have patience.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I think I’m going to come to hate that word.”

“Don’t. It’s a beautiful word. ‘But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.’”

By the time she left the parsonage, Cherish felt strengthened in her spirit. The Scriptures had reminded her that the real battle was a spiritual one—that it would be won only on her knees, waiting patiently for the Lord to do His perfect work.

S
ilas woke in a sweat. He flung off his sheets and blankets, feeling stifled in the closed, smelly shack. Across it he could hear Tobias’s breathing, each intake of oxygen sounding as if it could hardly make the journey up his nostrils.

Silas turned away from the noise, placing the pillow over his ears to stifle the sound.

His dream was still too vivid to his senses. He’d been dreaming of Cherish, of holding her in his arms. He tried to blot out the image. He had to forget her. He must. Look at your plight, he told himself sternly.

Each day he’d been looking for work unsuccessfully. It suddenly seemed as if he was a pariah. He was starting to get desperate. He’d always earned his keep, never been beholden to anyone.

Once thoughts of work got into his mind, the feverish worries began, and he knew the rest of the night would be spent tossing and turning, trying to recapture that blessed oblivion of sleep.

The next morning, leaving Tobias snoring blissfully, Silas, not bothering with even a cup of coffee, let the cats out
and set out for the village. He’d been avoiding it, preferring to look for work in the neighboring towns. But whenever he’d passed it, the looming cannery along the wharf beckoned him.

The last thing he wanted was to lower himself to apply for work in that barnlike warehouse. From shipwright to cannery worker. He kicked at the rocks in the rutted road. Familiar anger built inside him at the injustice. But it had no outlet, nor ever would. Whom could he be angry at but himself?

He glanced up at the sky, the promise of a gloriously warm day in its pale blue expanse above the evergreen trees. Already at six in the morning it was fully light.

He could be mad at God, Who’d made him, Who’d taken his parents away from him at an early age, his home…but he couldn’t even work up anger at Him. Somewhere, deep down, Silas felt he deserved everything he was getting. He’d done something wrong and now he was being punished.

He walked resolutely down the main street. Already fishermen were about, walking onto the docks, preparing to set off, calling to each other in a friendly manner.

“Hey, Silas, what’re you doing down to the wharf so early?”

He lifted a hand in greeting, but didn’t stop to chat.

“How’s Winslow?” another asked.

“Better,” he answered, keeping his pace steady, straight to the cannery. There was only one cannery in Haven’s End, which had opened just last year, as had many others along the coastal towns. It packed herring for the sardine industry.

As Silas entered the long building set over a wharf, the smell of fish hit even more intensely than along the docks themselves. The interior was a large, damp, cavernous space. Already it was filling with workers, many of them Portuguese and Irish immigrants.

Well, he was only one generation removed from immigrants himself, he told himself, thinking of his Frisian parents as he crossed the wet floor. He asked someone for the manager and was pointed to a side door leading to an office.

Five minutes later he donned a full-length black waterproof apron and was pointed to a long table to stand between others dressed similarly, and set to work to clean and cut herring at a third of the salary he’d been making at Winslow’s.

He shut out all thoughts from his mind but the job before him. He would survive this, just as he’d survived leaving home at the age of twelve, just as he’d survived being kicked out by Winslow. He’d achieve his dream yet. It might take longer, but he would achieve it.

By the time Silas arrived at Tobias’s shack, his legs felt like rubber from standing so long, his fingers were stiff from holding the herring with one hand and wielding the knife with the other, the skin of his hands was red and puckered from hours in salt water, nicked here and there from the sharp knife, and he smelled as fishy as the warehouse.

He went immediately to the well and began hauling water for a bath. Tobias was nowhere to be seen. The fire had gone out, so Silas rekindled it. He kicked off his filthy boots, and as soon as the water was barely tepid, he filled a tin tub that had been hanging on a hook on the exterior wall of the shanty, ignoring the cats, which came whining and rubbing against his legs.

“Sorry, I’ve got no fish for you. I might smell as if I do, but I left it all in the steaming vats.”

As he shed his clothes, he saw with disgust a shower of tiny silvery scales fall from them. The apron hadn’t been enough to protect him from the millions of scales he’d scraped off the fish.

Quickly he stepped into the tub and scrubbed himself from scalp to toes. As he was dunking his head into the water to rinse away any remaining scales, the door banged opened. He lifted his head.

“Hey, Silas, that you?” Tobias’s slurred voice came across the room as he leaned his scrawny neck forward to peer at him.

“Yes,” he answered shortly, annoyed by the interruption of his privacy. He was used to the solitary boat shop where he had the place to himself in the evenings.

“Don’t mind me.” The old man waved a hand in his direction as he weaved across the room to his rocker. “You just go ahead with your bath. I’ll just set myself down here. Feeling a little woozy….”

The rocker creaked under his weight. With a sigh Silas finished his bath, giving himself a final rinse with the remaining water. He gritted his teeth, seeing a few tiny scales still fall from his hair into the used bathwater.

He wrapped himself in a threadbare towel and dragged the tub toward the door. On an impulse he looked across at Tobias, who sat rocking, looking out the window toward the bay. “Would you care to have me fix you a bath?” It would certainly improve the air quality in the little room.

“Oh, no, thanks, boy. Much obliged. Never take one.”

“No, I didn’t suppose you did.”

Silas began to feel a little like his old self once he was dressed in clean clothes, his wet hair combed back. He sliced some bacon from a slab he’d bought on his way home and set it on a frying pan, putting the scraps in a dish for the cats. They immediately swarmed around it.

“Hungry?” he asked Tobias.

“Naw.” The man mumbled something and felt around in his pocket for his tobacco. Soon the smell of pipe smoke began to mingle with that of the frying bacon.

Silas tended the bacon and cracked a couple of eggs into the pan. As they cooked, he set his work clothes in the tub and rinsed them out. He hung them on the line outside, where they flapped in the ever-present sea breeze, and he hoped they’d be dry by morning.

He sliced some bread from the loaf he’d bought and sat down to eat. He didn’t feel any real appetite, but knew he had to eat to keep his strength up. As thoughts of the morrow emerged, he pushed them back. He knew from experience that it was better to deal with only one day at a time. He dug in to his food.

After a few moments Tobias got up from the rocker and came shuffling over to the table. “Reminds me of the smell
aboard a Grand Banks schooner, coming into the galley for a good hot breakfast ’fore going out in our dories.”

“You were on the Grand Banks?”

“Yep.” He screwed up one eye as he scratched the gray stubble on his jaw. “Let’s see, that was in the summers of sixty-one and sixty-two. Fleets were down, most of the young men gone to the Great War.”

“My dad was on the Grand Banks.”

Tobias eyed him appraisingly. “Was he now? Mebbe I knew him.”

Silas shook his head. “I don’t think so. His vessel went down in ’61. The
Laurie Ann.
”

Tobias nodded slowly. “Seem to recall that name. What a shame. Lot o’ good men went down on those banks.”

“Yes.” His father had been one of them.

“So you never fished the banks yourself?”

“No. Came up here to apprentice at Winslow’s yard.”

“I set out to sea when I was a lad. Worked up to able seaman.” Tobias leaned back in the wooden chair, a faraway look in his eyes. “That was the life—a rough one, make no mistake, but a good one. Ah, well.” He took a puff from his pipe.

“You sail on any clippers?” Silas asked with interest. He wished in many ways to have been old enough to have worked on those great, sleek sailing vessels.

“Did I sail on the clippers! I sailed on the
Flying Cloud
in ’53 during the great race ’tween us and the
Hornet.
” He chuckled. “The
Hornet
had left New York two days ’fore us, but we caught up. We never reefed sail nor furled the spanker in all hundred and five days it took us to reach ’Frisco. The
Hornet
beat us by about forty minutes, but it took her a hundred and six days to make the trip.” Tobias cackled at the memory, slapping a palm down on the table. “There were a lot of wagers placed on those two ships.

“We didn’t stop in ’Frisco long, just enough to unload our cargo, load her with ballast and off we went to the south Chiny coast to pick up tea.”

Silas pushed his empty plate aside and sat back to listen.

“On another trip ’round the Horn, she did eighty-nine days and twenty-one hours. Our captain believed the only way to sail a ship was to pile on as much sail as he could and keep it there as long as possible. Sometimes we had as much as six thousand square yards o’ canvas above us.”

“You must have seen some rough weather around the Horn.”

“Wicked gales. One time our ship was dismasted, and we had to put up in Valparaiso for a few days. Still made it to ’Frisco in a hundred and thirteen days.” He grinned. “Only to lose most of our crew to the gold fields.”

“You weren’t interested in panning yourself?”

The old man worked his lips in the gap where his front teeth used to be. “Naw. I found after a few days ashore I got homesick for the sea. It was a hard life. Climbing up that rigging in all kinds o’ weather. I never made more than fifteen dollars a month.” He grinned. “Pretty much spent it all after a few days in port. Wine and women.”

“You never married?”

He shook his head slowly. “I was married to the sea. Besides, there wuz plenty o’ willing women in port. I’ve known women across the globe, from Chiny women to Portugee and everything in between.” He scratched the edge of his jaw with the end of his pipe. “Naw, a sailor’s life and a wife don’t mix.”

The older man’s conversation soon returned to the ships. “Those were the days. Ships were sharp and their captains knew how to get the most out o’ their sail.” He cleared his throat in disgust. “Before these great hulking cargo ships that look more like washtubs—no royals, a stumpy topgallant and an engine to raise steam in port. Nothing like the clippers.”

Silas rose, taking his plate to the dishpan. The momentary euphoria of hearing about the great days of the clippers had evaporated, leaving a vague depression. Had the days of sail truly passed, and with it the days of the great ship designers—the McKays and Webbs, those celebrated names of shipbuilding?

Had Silas simply been born too late?

Cherish came in to check on her father. The doctor still had him on sedatives much of the time to keep him resting quietly. He was awake at the moment and smiled when he saw Cherish. “I’m glad you’ve come, my dear.”

“Anything you need, Papa?” she asked with a cheerful smile as she came to sit at the edge of the bed.

“Your smile is more help to me than all these pills and potions Doc Turner leaves me,” he said, with a motion toward the bottles on his bedside table.

“He just wants to see you better.”

“I feel better already.”

“Well, you need to rest a while longer,” she said, smoothing the coverlet under her hand.

“I don’t know how long I can leave the shipyard unattended. How long have I been sleeping away the days, anyway?”

“Only a few days. But Dr. Turner was adamant. You mustn’t strain yourself for many weeks yet.”

He grimaced. “And what about the shipyard? Am I supposed to lie abed and watch it fall to pieces in the meantime?”

“Papa, you know I can take care of things until you’re well enough to come down yourself.”

He pressed his lips together, looking away from her. “If only Henry had had the decency to stay. I don’t suppose we could summon him back for a while. Maybe I should talk to Phoebe about it….”

“Papa! Haven’t you heard anything I said? What about me? Don’t you think I know something about the work that goes on there? Don’t you think I could manage for a few weeks? After all, you’re right here. I could ask you anything I’m not sure about, and I could report everything at the end of each day.”

He still made no answer, but she could see by the drumming of his fingertips on the coverlet that he was becoming agitated.

“Papa,” she pleaded softly. “The most important thing is that you get well. You know you mustn’t worry about things down at the yard. Who can watch over things better than your own daughter?”

“Are you sure Henry wouldn’t come?”

“Papa, he has a job. He can’t just drop everything and come back here.”

“If only…”

“If only what?”

“If only you were already married to someone like Warren Townsend, then he could look after things until I recuperate fully.”

“Papa! What does he know about shipbuilding?”

“He knows about business. He’s a good, honorable man. His father is interested in expanding into shipbuilding. What could be better than an alliance between our two families?”

She refrained from answering, remembering the doctor’s strong admonition against upsetting her father. “Well, Papa, I’m not married to Mr. Townsend, so can you make do in the meantime with my sole expertise?”

He turned to her at last with a smile. “I know you’re trying to help. All right, then, you go down to the yard and see what the men are doing. The dories should be finished up by now. They can be delivered. We need to collect the payment. There are some bills outstanding that must be paid. Others can wait. I’m sure if we explain things to the bank, to our creditors, about my being laid up, extensions will be made…”

She could see once again her father’s worry building. “All right, Papa. I’ll see to everything. I’ll be back this afternoon to report to you. Now, can I bring you anything before I go?”