Дэвид Балдаччи - Wish You Well

They worked for a while longer in silence, until Louisa straightened up and rubbed at her back. “Body’s telling me to slow down a bit. But my body wants to eat come winter.”

Lou stared out at the countryside. The sky looked painted in oils today, and the trees seemed to fill every spare inch with alluring green.

“How come Dad never came back?” Lou asked quietly.

Louisa followed Lou’s gaze. “No law say a person got to come back to his home,” she said.

“But he wrote about it in all his books. I know he loved it here.”

Louisa stared at the girl and then said, “Let’s go get us a cool drink.” She told Oz to rest some, and they would bring him back some water. He immediately dropped his hoe, picked up some rocks, and started heaving and whooping at each toss, in a manner it seemed only little boys could successfully accomplish. He had taken to placing a tin can on top of a fence post and then throwing rocks at it until he knocked it off. He had become so good that one hard toss would now send the can flying.

They left him to his fun and went to the springhouse, which clung to one side of a steep slope below the house and was shaded by leaning oak and ash trees and a wall of giant rhododendrons. Next to this shack was a split poplar stump, the tip of a large honeycomb protruding from it, a swell of bees above that.

They took metal cups from nails on the wall and dipped them in the water, and then sat outside and drank. Louisa picked up the green leaves of a mountain spurge growing next to the springhouse, which revealed beautiful purple blossoms completely hidden underneath. “One of God’s little secrets,” she explained. Lou sat there, cup cradled between her dimpled knees, watching and listening to her great-grandmother in the pleasant shade as Louisa pointed out other things of interest. “Right there’s an oriole. Don’t see them much no more. Don’t know why not.” She pointed to another bird on a maple branch. “That’s a chuck’s-will-widder. Don’t ask me how the durn thing got its name, ’cause I don’t know.” Finally, her face and tone grew serious.

“Your daddy’s momma was never happy here. She from down the Shenandoah Valley. My son Jake met her at a cakewalk she come up for. They got married, way too fast, put up a little cabin near here. But I know she was all set for the city, though. The Valley was backward for her. Lord, these mountains must’ve seemed like the birth of the world to the poor girl. But she had your daddy, and for the next few years we had us the worst drought I ever seen. The less rain there was, the harder we worked. My boy soon lost his stake, and they moved in with us. Still no rain. Went through our animals. Went through durn near everything we had.” Louisa clenched her hands and then released them. “But we still got by. And then the rains come and we fine after that. But when your daddy was seven, his momma had had enough of this life and she left. She ain’t never bothered to learn the farm, and even the way round a frying pan, so’s she weren’t much help to Jake a’tall.”

“But didn’t Jake want to go with her?”

“Oh, I ’xpect he did, for she was a real purty little thing, and a young man is a young man. They ain’t ’xactly made’a wood. But she didn’t want him along, if you unnerstand me right, him being from the mountains and all. And she didn’t want her own child neither.” Louisa shook her head at this painful remembrance.

“Course, Jake never got over that. Then his daddy died soon after, which didn’t help matters none for any of us.” Louisa smiled. “But your father were the shiny star in our days. Even with that, though, we watched a man we loved die a little more each day, and there weren’t nothing we could do. Two days after your daddy was ten years old, Jake died. Some say heart attack. I say heartbreak. And then it was just me and your daddy up here. We had us good times, Lou, lot of love twixt us. But your daddy suffered a lotta pain too.” She stopped and took a drink of the cool water. “But I still wonder why he never come back not once.”

“Do I remind you of him?” Lou asked quietly.

Louisa smiled. “Same fire, same bullheadedness. Big heart too. Like how you are with your brother. Your daddy always made me laugh twice a day. When I got up and right afore I went to bed. He say he want me begin and end my day with a smile.”

“I wish Mom had let us write you. She said she would one day, but it never happened.”

“Like to knock me over with a stick when the first letter come. I wrote her back some, but my eyes ain’t that good no more. And paper and stamp scarce.”

Lou looked very uncomfortable. “Mom asked Dad to move back to Virginia.”

Louisa looked surprised. “And what’d your daddy say?”

Lou could not tell her the truth. “I don’t know.”

“Oh” was all Louisa offered in response.

Lou found herself growing upset with her father, something she could never remember doing before.

“I can’t believe he just left you here by yourself.”

“I made him go. Mountain no place for somebody like him. Got to share that boy with the world. And your daddy wrote to me all these years. And he give me money he ain’t got. He done right by me. Don’t you never think badly of him for that.”

“But didn’t it hurt, that he never came back?”

Louisa put an arm around the girl. “He did come back. I got me the three people he loved most in the whole world.”

It had been a hard trek along a narrow trail that often petered out to harsh tangles, forcing Lou to dismount and walk the mare. It was a nice ride, though, for the birds were in full warbling splendor, and flowering horsemint poked up from piles of slate. She had passed secret coves overhung with willow and corralled by rock. Many of the coves were graced with cups of frothing springwater. There were neglected fields of long-vanished homesteads, the broomsedge flourishing there around the rock bones of chimneys without houses.

Finally, following the directions Louisa had given her, Lou found herself at the small house in the clearing. She looked over the property. It appeared likely that in another couple of years this homestead would also surrender to the wild that pressed against it on all sides. Trees stretched over the roof that had almost as many holes as shingles. Window glass was missing at various spots; a sapling was growing up through an opening in the front porch, and wild sumac clung to the splintered porch rails. The front door was hanging by a single nail; in fact it had been tied back so that the door always stood open. A horseshoe was nailed over the doorway, for luck, Lou assumed, and the place looked like it could use some. The surrounding fields, too, were all overgrown. And yet the dirt yard was neatly swept, there was no trash about, and a bed of peonies sat next to the house, with a lilac behind that, and a large snowball bush flourished by a small hand-crank well. A rosebush ran up a trellis on one side of the house. Lou had heard that roses thrived on neglect. If true, this was the most ignored rosebush Lou had ever seen, since it was bent over with the weight of its deep red blooms. Jeb came around the corner and barked at rider and horse. When Diamond came out of the house, he stopped dead and looked around, seemingly for a place to hide quick, but coming up empty.

“What you doing here?” he finally said.

Lou slid off the horse and knelt to play with Jeb. “Just came to pay a visit. Where are your folks?”

“Pa working. Ma went down to McKenzie’s.”

“Tell ’em I said hello.”

Diamond thrust his hands in his pockets, bent one bare toe over the other. “Look, I got things to do.”

“Like what?” asked Lou, rising.