Dust Eva Everson (story reading txt) 📖

kitchen, thinking I’d head back into Westley’s bedroom—our bedroom—then stopped and, instead, went to the front of the house where I’d snooped two months before. Back to the living room, the serene opulence of it drawing me like a moth to the flame.

As always, the room’s lighting was subdued. The hushed hues of dusty rose and olive green greeting me. Welcoming me. I walked over the thick rugs to the piano, again taken by the old photographs, most particularly the one of a young woman with sleepy eyes and a wispy head of hair piled atop her head.

“My grandmother,” a voice from behind me said. I turned to see my mother-in-law standing in the wide arch of the doorway. “Her name was Hillie. Hillie Lenore Jones Martin.”

I had picked up the silver-framed photo, holding it gently between my fingers, but I returned it to the piano with a clunk. “I’m sorry, Mrs.—Mom. I wasn’t trying to be nosy.”

“Don’t be silly.” She walked over, picked up the photograph, and then handed it back to me. “Our house is now your house, no? She was a real beauty, wasn’t she.”

I nodded. “How long ago was this taken?”

“Nineteen twelve. An interesting time in women’s history, did you know that?”

I shook my head. “I never did that great in history class, I’m afraid.”

Mom’s chin rose an inch. “Then you should learn, Allison. Our history is what shapes us. Even the history of those women who came before us—or, I should say, especially those who came before us.”

I looked at the photo again. Studied it. My goodness, but the woman was a beauty. “Maybe it’s the black-and-white photo—I don’t know—but there seems to be such a softness about her. A gentleness.”

“Hardly. She was a tough one.” Mom laughed before motioning to the sofa behind us. “Come here and sit down and I’ll tell you all about Hillie Martin.”

I placed the photo back on the silk scarf that protected the piano from its sharp edges, then joined my mother-in-law on the antique sofa with its carvings of swans’ necks within the wood frame. Mom had turned pensive, it seemed, and I could tell she loved her grandmother Hillie very much. “Is she still alive?” I asked.

Mom patted my knee. “Oh, no, no, no. Hillie died back in … 1970.”

“You called your grandmother Hillie?” I grinned. “I call my mother’s mother Grand.”

Mom returned the smile. “Hillie was always just …” She shook her head slowly, her smile fading to the place where memories become sweet and tender. “Hillie.”

I turned toward this woman I wanted so desperately to feel a closeness to. One who, other than right before the wedding, seemed to want the same from me. “Tell me more about her.”

She sighed. “It’s interesting, I think … that you should be drawn to her photo.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Hillie … well, Allison, when Hillie married my grandfather back in 1912, she had no idea, really, what she was getting herself into.”

Nineteen twelve. The year of the photo. Confusion clouded my thinking and the room seemed to grow dimmer. “Do you think I have no idea—”

Mom waved a hand in the air as though she was erasing a blackboard. “No, no.” Then she chuckled. “Well, no more than any of us know what we’re getting into when we’re first married.” Her brow shot toward the curls sweeping over her hairline. “I know I sure didn’t.”

I glanced across the room toward the photograph. “And Hillie?”

“Hillie … well, let’s start at the beginning. My grandmother was born in 1889. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

“Wow. That’s … nearly a hundred years ago.”

“When she was sixteen,” Mom continued without acknowledging my math skills, “she went off to school and got her teaching certificate. Now, you have to understand that a lot of women in Hillie’s social standing back in those days didn’t do things like that. But Hillie was determined, I suppose, to make her own way—her own mark—in the world.”

“Her social standing?”

“Her father—my great-grandfather—was a businessman in Savannah. Not wealthy, but certainly not hurting. When I was a little girl, we used to visit their house and …” She smiled again. “I used to pretend I was a princess and the house was my castle.” Her hand fell lightly to her breast before she continued. “Well, one day Hillie up and decides she’s going to be a teacher and there was no stopping her. After a while, Hillie took a teaching position and then, one by one, her younger sisters started having beaus and getting married. And, the way she told it to me was this: she got to thinking she’d never get married because of her lazy eye.”

“Her—?”

“Look closely at the photo. You’ll see it. One eye is what they call lazy. So, about that time Hillie’s best friend—I never got her name, I don’t think—tells her that she read in the want ads about a widower farmer with five young children living on the outskirts of Baxter who needed a wife for himself and a mother for his children. And Hillie—who knows what possessed her—wrote to the man and the next thing you know he comes by train to Savannah to marry her.” Mom pointed toward the piano, then stood, walked over, and turned on the antique lamp to shine a light on the subject of her story. “This lamp was hers, you know.”

“No, I didn’t …” How could I?

“It was an oil lamp, but Benjamin wired it for me after Hillie died.”

I clasped my hands in my lap. “He’s very handy.”

“He is,” she said, picking up Hillie’s photo, caressing it. “Hillie and my grandfather—his name was Isaac—married in the middle of my great-grandfather’s protests and my great-grandmother’s anguish. They’d not so much as kissed before they went straight to the justice of the peace and got married, then boarded the train and headed for Baxter.”

“They’d never kissed?”

“They’d not even held hands, Hillie told me.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine. “Goodness.” Waiting to sleep together I could relate to. But holding hands?