Chapter 4 #2
One of the boys remembered her keeping bundles of drying herbs hanging from the porch rafters every summer. Another recalled waking one winter night to find half the kitchen crowded with neighbors waiting for remedies during a fever outbreak.
Joseph Halpern had listened quietly to all of it before finally sending the middle boy into the house.
He returned carrying a small wooden box.
Inside rested a worn mortar and pestle, several tiny glass vials, and a pair of porcelain spoons wrapped carefully in cloth.
The middle boy carried the box carefully when he handed it to Miss Owens.
Awkwardly. Almost reluctantly.
Like he understood he was placing a piece of his mother into someone else's keeping.
Joseph Halpern had stood looking down at the box a long moment before saying that if Miss Owens thought it would make a good display, she was welcome to borrow it. Reckoned Mary Alice would've been mighty proud to see it there.
That was what stayed with Wilson as the buggy rolled away from the Halpern farm and back onto the narrow road. Not the box itself.
But the way the boy had handed it over. Careful. Awkward. Trusting.
And the way Joseph Halpern had stood there afterward, saying Mary Alice would've been proud to see it displayed. As if remembering her publicly brought comfort instead of pain.
"Mr. Porter?"
Her question brought him back to the present. "Yes?"
Her pencil hovered over the page. "Did Mr. Halpern say folks started coming to Mrs. Halpern for remedies before or after they moved onto this place?"
"Before," Wilson said. "He said they were still living near the creek then. Folks rode over from all around when fever started making the rounds."
Miss Owens nodded and made the notation. "That's what I thought, but I wanted to be certain." Then she shot him a smile. "Thank you. It's much easier having someone else hear the stories so I can verify my memory."
Wilson nodded and looked back to the road.
He hadn't expected to be useful that way.
Driving, yes. Handling the horse, keeping to the route, judging the usefulness of the old outbuilding. Those things made sense.
But remembering whether a dead woman had tended sick neighbors before her family moved west of town—that was the sort of detail he would have expected Miss Owens to carry alone.
Instead, she had handed a corner of it to him without seeming to notice she had done so. As if she'd decided he belonged in this work beside her.
Wilson found himself oddly reluctant to object to the notion.
A person could get used to being looked at the way Miss Owens looked at folks when they spoke. As if what they said mattered.
Likely that was why people trusted her so easily. She never acted as though the stories belonged to her simply because she was the one writing them down.
The Nortons certainly hadn't treated her like an outsider.
They had welcomed Miss Owens as if she'd been there for Sunday dinner instead of an interview.
Mrs. Norton must have seen them coming from a ways off because she had chairs waiting in the front room, along with a dish of sliced peaches and glasses of lemonade.
She was also ready with more family history than any sane person could keep straight without writing them down.
But Miss Owens hadn't asked her to slow down, only interrupted a few times to ask for clarifications.
The Nortons had lost two sons in the war. One was buried in Tennessee. The other was never brought home at all.
Maybe that was why they spoke so eagerly once Miss Owens began asking questions. Not simply to reminisce. But to make certain their boys were remembered alongside the men who would be honored in Hawthorn's celebration.
Beside him, Miss Owens turned a page in her notebook, scanning back over earlier notes before adding another line beneath them.
Births, marriages, wagon routes, first corn crops, the winter the creek froze hard enough to walk across—everything somehow circled back to the boys eventually.
Miss Owens had followed every turn, writing pages of notes without showing any sign of losing interest in the speaker.
When Mr. Norton drifted too far into a story about the price of nails in '52, she'd gently brought him back to the letters his eldest son had sent home from Tennessee.
When Mrs. Norton became confused over which regiment her younger boy had ridden with near the end of the war, Miss Owens hadn't corrected her outright.
She'd only asked a few more questions until the details settled themselves into place.
Wilson had seen men gentle skittish horses with less patience.
The Millers had been different again.
Clara Miller's house had been crowded and noisy, full of children and peas and family talk, but Miss Owens had seemed comfortable there, just as she had with the quiet Nortons and the wary Halperns this morning.
She had known when to ask and when to wait.
She had known when an old woman near the hearth had more to say than anyone realized.
Miss Owens had taken the family Bible and Nathan Miller's war tintype with the same care she'd shown Miz Scruggs's keepsake box.
Not because they were valuable in dollars. Because she'd shown how much she cared about their stories, they had trusted her with them.
Even now, a small crate of Norton keepsakes rested on the seat between them. Letters announcing the deaths of both sons. Jared Norton's canteen and pocket watch. Charlie's worn pocketknife and lucky silver coin. Two family Bibles carefully wrapped against the dust.
And tucked safely beneath the seat sat Mary Alice Halpern's box of medicinal tools alongside Joseph Halpern's wartime roll book and parole papers.
Another rut set the buggy bouncing unceremoniously and her arm flew out automatically to protect the artifacts in the crate beside her.
Wilson's fingers tightened slightly around the reins.
Everyone's story matters.
She had said it as if it were the plainest truth in the world. Maybe it was, to her.
To Wilson, the notion sat less comfortably. Some stories were best left where they had fallen. Buried deep. Remembered only by those who couldn't help the remembering, not polished and displayed for other folks to study.
A man's service might belong on a roll of honor if it had actually been clean enough to stand there.
His own did not.
Beside him, Miss Owens shifted her notebook and frowned down at the page. "Was it Howie who remembered the herbs hanging from the porch rafters? Or Thomas?"
"Howie," Wilson said.
She made another note, then sent him a quick, grateful look. "Thank you."
It was a small thing, that look. It shouldn't have rested in him the way it did.
Wilson focused on the road ahead.
He almost missed the lane that led to the old outbuilding.
The trees and brush that had once bordered the drive now threatened to overtake it and had left a much narrower lane.
Weeds grew high down its center, brushing the underside of the buggy as the horse picked its way along the rutted track.
The animal tossed its head once at a cloud of gnats rising from the brush, but settled again beneath Wilson's hands.
Miss Owens closed her notebook and tucked the pencil inside. "I assume this is the road leading to the building Daniel mentioned?"
"It is."
She wrinkled her nose. "It doesn't appear to get much use."
That was an understatement. "Not much need for folks to come out this way."
A hint of a smile touched her mouth. "All the better for us then."
Was that a note of teasing in her voice? Wilson guided the horse around a washout, then slowed to round a sharp, narrow turn. Once they'd completed the turn, the outbuilding came into view.
At one time it might have served as a storage shed or even a small barn.
Now it leaned hard to the east, the roof caved in along one side and weeds grown high enough to swallow most of the lower boards.
A patch of sunlight poured through a gap where half the back wall had given way.
Vines climbed one corner and disappeared beneath warped shingles.
Miss Owens, who'd leaned forward curiously, was silent a moment. "Oh."
Wilson almost smiled at the single word.
It did look worse than he'd expected.
He pulled the horse into a patch of shade near a scrub oak and set the brake. "Let me look it over first."
Miss Owens glanced toward the leaning structure. "Then I'll get started setting out our lunch while you do."
Wilson nodded once before climbing down and tying the reins, then circling the structure at a distance, studying the lean of the walls, the sag of the roof, the condition of the boards that had stayed off the ground.
The front corner was no good. Too much rot where rain had pooled.
The roof boards were near useless unless they only needed kindling.
But the west wall...
Wilson stepped closer and pressed his boot against one weathered plank. It held.
He scraped at the edge with his pocketknife.
Gray outside. Sound beneath.
Behind him, he could hear her vigorously stomping her feet.
He looked back and swallowed a smile. The very proper schoolmarm was tromping down a weedy patch near the buggy with the abandon of a colt turned loose in spring pasture.
A moment later she'd finished. She brushed at her skirt, resumed her proper demeanor, then spread out a picnic blanket and set the hamper on it.
He continued watching from the corner of his eyes as he studied the building. Rather than setting out the food as he'd expected, however, she returned to the buggy and retrieved her notebook and pencil.
When she headed his way, he frowned and met her gaze directly, "I thought you were going to set out the food."
She didn't stop walking. "It's done, or at least everything but opening up the basket."
Wilson considered arguing, then decided it wasn't worth the breath.
"Stay where the ground's clear. Watch where you step, some of these fallen boards still have nails in them."