James had touched Hettienne’s shoulder. “Everything is fine. You’re waking up. You’ve had an adventure.”
Much worse than an adventure. Fire, and children running. Terrible chaos outside. Was it a dream? Wide awake, she had been striding deep into the wood. Silence outside now, then the mockingbird gargling. Dawn silvered the top of the windows back in the ell. She did not recall a door, no opening, no exiting. Her head felt like a tunnel was blown clean through it. A slick cold clasped her arms. James’s hand steadied her.
“Hardly knows what’s happening, James. My God!” whispered Agnes.
“I know perfectly . . .” she began, but her tongue stopped as if her mind filled with paste.
James watched her, clearly a little disturbed. “Darling. We think it best that we keep this among us for now.” He touched her nose, then circled the kitchen with his index finger. Agnes, James, Hettienne. A finger to his lips. “Sss,” he sealed the circle shut.
“Your mother hates it here enough already,” Agnes whispered.
Now, in the daylight, in this warm kitchen with breakfast cleared, Hettienne shivered. Helen and Margaret closed in on their sister.
“Agnes, you’ve been awfully quiet about all this,” Margaret observed.
“Never quiet; always at it!” Helen quipped glaring at her eldest sister. “Mop in the morning; woodsman take warning.”
“James was sleepless. I was sleepless.” Agnes pinched the air as if she meant to nip Helen and Margaret at their ears. “Why not get to work if all the lights are on in the head?”
“Then, Hettienne, what’s the meaning of this?” asked Margaret. She stamped her foot, and pot lids shook. “Agnes and James are bumbling, and you’re late to breakfast. Out with it!”
Hettienne kept her mouth very full of melon balls. For the first time, it struck her why her father might have fled this place. Just as she was about to swallow, and those three long faces raised expectantly for her answers, a timid rapping startled the flock. Cousin David Ormond sidled into the kitchen from the ell, a straw hat in his hands.
“Aunties!” he called, and the flock abandoned Hettienne.
“More tea, David? Sausage? Biscuits?” offered Margaret. She arced like a bow on the tips of her toes, the biscuits on a green platter held high, waxed paper trembling.
David took a yellow biscuit in each fist and crammed them down in his overall pockets, waving off the fresh waxed paper thrust at him. “Thank you. Thank you. I want to show Hettienne the raft I’ve built. For the fireworks tower. May I steal her? Is she excused?”
The spinsters lifted her food right from her and retreated. Yet with crafty, sidelong glances they watched her as she followed Cousin David. When the two children were gone, Helen shared a long, dark look with Margaret.
“Secrets, secrets,” warned Helen.
“Sss,” Agnes hissed.
- 4 -
They hurried for the lake before Johanna and the other Ormonds knew them to be gone. In a cove shaded by sycamores, hackberries, and flaky red river birches, the original owners of the farm, the Headleys, had built a stone jetty. There David made a worthless but valiant show of brushing off the mossy limestone so she could be seated.
“Where’s this raft?” she asked, looking all about. She could feel herself acting a part, grinning and breathless before him like lovesick girls at Our Lady of the Angels. Yet her head still felt hollow and windy from last night’s episode or spell, whatever the family would be calling it.
At least with Cousin David here she felt the bright possibility of everything returning to summer again, becoming the Headleys’ Emerald Park again, what the farm had been called before the Sheehys had bought it, a place of Old Springfield legend where the only dreams that came true arrived in the daylight and were never bad.
David pointed to the shoreline. Down the shore a raft of logs topped with planking bobbed where it was tied.
“Why not build the raft next to where Uncle Simon started the tower?” The tower and raft both were for the fireworks extravaganza, the first in years, the war being won. The raft was to carry the tower, decked with pinwheels and Roman candles, all of it floated out onto Emerald Park Lake and lit during a planned storm of rockets. Five long years of war, and no fireworks, and hardly any butter or sugar. But this summer, a bounty flooded them from stoked green hills. Now munitions factories were pumping out firecrackers instead of deadly arms.
David’s brow creased. “Ever tried building something with your uncles?”
On David’s face, the rounded high cheeks and narrow chin of the Ormonds were softened as if scrubbed by an eraser. He looked a little like his mother, Aunt Kate Sheehy Ormond, especially when he bowed his head and his brown bangs, which needed a cutting, fell forward. At the back of his hair, tight curls formed a ridge, and just now this fixed, oily patch glinted like the crown of a bronze helmet.
“Must be some headache,” she said. Could she still touch him? She wanted to touch his knee, his handsome, muscular legs packed in those overalls, the fabric stretched with him sitting Indian style. He was three years older than Hettienne, and this summer, more than any before, she desired his approval and affection.
David paused. “Hettienne?” he asked. “Can you tell me what’s going on? Are you ill? Sheehys don’t get ill unless they die. You aren’t dying?”
Oh, how romantic that would be to tell him, yes. Yes, David, I am dying, and this is my last summer with you ever! What would he say then? Would he clutch her to him like a fallen dove?
“Of course not. Don’t be silly!” She watched him, but with her head bowed. He seemed to be gulping at something. “That’s propaganda anyway,” she continued. “What the Aunties say. Of course Sheehys get sick, but then they don’t die every time. And of course most Sheehys are sick when they do die. We don’t get hit by trains or smashed under tractors or fall from castle walls, at least not that often.”
Now he was watching her carefully. His eyes were his father’s, who was not welcomed at the farm, whom Hettienne had only met at Mass at Sacred Heart, caramel, toffee brown, like a hickory leaf at the last of its turn in fall.
“So what was that at dinner yesterday?” David asked. “You had Baby Lilliana so worked up, she wouldn’t nap.”
At the water’s edge in a meadow down the shore from them, a scissor-tailed flycatcher—yellow, gray, black of beak and tail, white of breast—hovered flitting as if standing on that impossibly long X-shaped tail, a miracle. She had never seen the birds, her talismans of July, anywhere but here in the Ozarks. “Do you promise to say nothing at all if I tell you? Not to your mother? Most of all not to Johanna?”
David shrugged. “Sure. Yeah.”
“Swear it,” she said, sticking her pinkie at him. He hesitated; then he latched his pinkie into hers.
Three summers ago, they had discovered Frank Headley Jr.’s diary in the barn loft. Frank Headley Jr. was the last of the Headleys who had built Emerald Park, now the Old Sheehy Place, into a showcase of a farm. The stone stables, the dirt oval horse track, the forty-acre lake, all things the Headleys had built. For holiday summer weekends and private soirees, the Headleys provided johnboats and canoes for rent to flocks of townspeople. They had the waterfall improved with stone pathways. They renovated the property’s original log home into a clubhouse for picnicking. Across meadows of dairy farm strolled prize Jersey cows churning out butter and Edam cheese and ice cream. They opened a winding cave, which thrill seekers could travel seated in a string of refitted mine cars salvaged from one of the