Garden to Keep

Langston Turner Jamie

Description

Elizabeth's story is like that of a garden left untended for too long, with weeds as bounteous as blossoms and stone walkways buried beneath tangled vines and daffodils. Beauty to be found, though amidst much neglect. When betrayal strikes at the heart of her very existence, Elizabeth Landis retraces the path of her life and her marriage, discovering along the way memories both painful to the touch and a joy to embrace. Pruning the garden of her life requires an honesty new to Elizabeth, but offers the promise of mercy...and perhaps even a grace to bestow.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 février 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441204400
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Garden to Keep
Jamie Langston Turner
© 2001 by Jamie Langston Turner
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-0440-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
FOR
BETA GAIL LANGSTON STERYOUS
my sister Betsy
whose life is an ornament of grace
“Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.”
P ROVERBS 31:25–26
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One
1. Against Thy Mandolin
2. Home of Long Tides
3. Whose Hands Shipwreck Vases
4. The Edge of the Receding Glacier
5. Where a Garden Once Was Kept
6. Three Foggy Mornings and One Rainy Day
7. How Lucky, Little Tree
8. Sorrowful Noise Overhead
9. Like a Map of All the World
Part Two
10. Great Expanse of Green
11. Under the Gypsy Moon
12. And Buried It Deep, Deep
13. How Dark the Hemlock Wreath
14. From Silver Aslant
15. One Far Fierce Hour
16. The Blood Flowing Back
17. In Shadowy Silent Distance
Part Three
18. With Low Sounds by the Shore
19. The Birth of the Simple Light
20. Free of Our Bridges
21. In a Room With Paintings
22. While the Sun Walked High
23. What Scent of Old Wood
24. Range After Range of Mountains
25. The Colored Night Around
26. The Trumpet of a Prophecy
Part Four
27. Across the Glittering Sea
28. A Thousand Days of Words
29. Sweet Impossible Blossom
30. The Fall of Your Soft Song
31. Every Farthing of the Cost
32. The Touch of Earthly Years
33. Bringer of New Things
About the Author
Other Books by Author
Back Cover
Part One
Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; There was corn Before my tears did drown it.
G EORGE H ERBERT
1
Against Thy Mandolin
Though the roots go back many years, the story begins to bloom around a kitchen table after Sunday dinner. Not my own kitchen table I’m here as a guest. Let me warn you from the start that this story might make you angry. I know for a fact it defies everything I’ve always believed in logic, justice, self-preservation, equality, recompense, accountability, moderation, common sense. But hear me out. Close your eyes and picture it all with me. We’re in the kitchen of a duplex on Cadbury Street in Filbert, South Carolina. I can see it exactly as it was that day.
The man of the house said grace before we ate dinner. That’s what he called it saying grace. I remember thinking at the time what a pretty word that was grace . It’s a word I hadn’t heard that often. I wondered why I couldn’t have thought of it when we were trying out names for our daughter twenty-five years ago. Grace Landis. That has a shimmer to it, like expensive crystal. But the name Grace hadn’t entered my head when we named our baby, so we finally picked Jennifer, the same name a gazillion other parents picked back during the seventies.
But back to grace. The man said it, and aside from thinking briefly about the sound and feel of the word, the thought going through my mind as I sat at the kitchen table of these two people I barely knew was this: A wasted afternoon . At this same moment an odd scrap of a Bible verse echoed in my mind: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”
I had heard the words at church that morning, a place I rarely visited. How I got there this particular morning is a story I’ll get to later. But the verse struck a chord now. Indeed I was a stranger to these two people or practically so and they had taken me in, though not entirely willingly on my part. I wished I had had the presence of mind, or whatever it takes, to decline the invitation. But I hadn’t, and here I was, stuck for the duration. But don’t whine, I told myself. It’s your own fault. No one forced you to accept this invitation. This was a familiar lecture that I delivered to myself regularly.
I gave the kitchen the once-over before the man said grace. Get a picture in your mind as I look around the blue-and-white plaid tablecloth, the matching dishes imprinted with a border of morning glories, the folded white napkins edged with white tatting, the vase of daffodils, the shiny hardwood floor, the yellow tab curtains at the window, the clock in the shape of a teapot, the gleaming white of the stove and refrigerator, the wall calendar showing a close-up of a pale purple crocus pushing through the snow. If there are such things as clichés in the world of photography, this crocus-in-the-snow image surely must be one. No microwave or dishwasher that I can see.
Over on the counter beside the porcelain sink, which is also white, I note a ceramic canister set shaped like little cottages, with the residents’ names over each ivy-draped front door: Sugar, Flour, Tea, Coffee. Beside these sits a shiny silver percolator with a little glass bubble knob on top, the kind my parents used before the days of coffee makers. Well, well, here we go, I’m thinking Sunday dinner at the Retro Cafe.
When the prayer was over, the woman, who was wearing a bibbed apron over a light blue dress, proceeded to take the lids off the hot casserole dishes and lift the foil wrap from the meat platter. Her husband looked at me and said, “Hope you’re hungry, ma’am,” and I smiled back and said, “It smells delicious.” That’s me, polite all the way. All kinds of scathing, critical things can be running through my mind, but you’d never know it from the outside. My mother taught me good manners to a fault. You mention my name to anybody, and probably the first word they’ll think of is polite . Polite Elizabeth Landis.
Or dumb . Here’s what a roommate of mine used to say in college every time I took on something extra: “For being so smart, Elizabeth, you sure are dumb.” Laurie thought she was funny, and sometimes she was. “The word is no ,” she would say in an exaggerated drawl. “Here, let’s practice it, honey. Watch me do it.” And she’d say it again. “No-o-o-o. See there, easy as pie. Now you try it all by yourself, darlin’.” All of this was dripping with sarcasm, of course.
So every time I end up doing something I really don’t want to do, Laurie rises in front of me like some cantankerous genie, shaking her finger and her head at the same time. “The word is no,” she says to me. “For being so smart . . .” And I’ll always interrupt her and think, Yeah, yeah, I know. I sure am dumb. And the funny thing is, although I see Laurie regularly, floating around and wagging her finger, I don’t even know where she is now. I do know one thing, though. Laurie would consider dumb much too mild a word to describe the story I’m getting ready to tell.
I had already seen her that Sunday, of course twice actually. The first time was when I stepped into the church that morning, and the second was when I agreed to come to dinner. “For being so smart, you sure are dumb,” she said both times. Laurie’s eyelashes and bangs touch each other, both of them long and dark, the way I knew her in college.
So back to the kitchen on Cadbury Street. It’s a mild February Sunday afternoon, and from where I sit, I can see the dark filigree of bare tree branches through the kitchen window. The sky is pewter gray in the open spaces among the trees but brighter, the white of beach sand, higher up where the sun hides behind a curtain of cloud.
Contrary to what Laurie always said, I am not dumb. I want to get that settled early on to eliminate dumbness as the reason for what I’m leading up to. Back in high school, in the “Senior Prophecies” issue of our school newspaper, somebody wrote this about me: “Elizabeth will continue her career as curve wrecker in college courses such as Advanced Electrodynamics and Metaphysical Philosophy,” two subjects I never even saw listed in my college course catalog. For sure I never took them. Once Laurie said to me, “How come you always make A’s? That’s dumb.” It wouldn’t have done any good to point out the irony in what she said. She would’ve said, “Irony? What’s that? That’s dumb.”
So okay, I’m smart. Maybe not off-the-chart smart like a bona fide genius, but somewhere at the upper end of the scale. Maybe not summa-smart but for sure magna-smart. To say schoolwork came easily is an understatement. So there’s Elizabeth Landis in a nutshell. Smart and polite, a combination that implies another characteristic boring. I would never write a book with a main character like me. Nobody would read past the first page.
My polite exterior hides some pretty snobbish attitudes, though. For instance, I categorize people into two groups Aware and Unaware. Every now and then I’ll come across someone I’m not sure about, and if I can work up my courage I might test them with a joke: A guidance counselor tells a father his kid is in the lower fifty percent of the class, and the shocked father says, “I knew he wasn’t in the upper fifty percent, but I never dreamed he was in the lower fifty.” If somebody responds right to that joke, I know he’s Aware. And it’s not just if the person laughs; it’s more in how he laughs.
And so, instead of finding myself outdoors playing tennis on this nice February Sunday, which would probably be my first choice after a very long dark winter, or browsing in a bookstore, which would be my second, I’m sitting at a kitchen table