Return to Franklin Hill Read online

  The back door slammed and Ellie strolled into the kitchen after scuffing her feet on the braided rug. Grace watched her, feeling the slow release of another small ache that she had been carrying since she’d left her sister years before. Ellie was fresh air in Granny’s large sunny kitchen. “Finally up, huh? You need to borrow a comb?”

  Grace smiled, wiped sleep from her eyes and then hugged her sister. Ellie stood taller than Grace with wavy hair the color of dark chocolate. Her warm brown eyes were crinkling now at the corners from years of smiles. Ellie, her calm, strong sister, to the best of Grace’s knowledge, had never voiced a mean-spirited thought or even had one cross her mind since the age of eight. Ellie was her protector and her advisor but was never shy to voice her opinion.

  Ellie and Granny spent the next half hour updating Grace on the nieces’ graduations, nephews’ football triumphs and the latest divorce in town while Grace plowed through the egg, more biscuits than she knew was wise and a generous serving of Granny’s fried potatoes. Ellie’s four children were growing and moving on with life, no longer the toddlers Grace remembered.

  “If you still want to look at that house on Woolsey Trail I can get a key from Jeannie at the drugstore.” Ellie watched Grace carefully.

  “Gracie, you know you are welcome to stay here as long as you like.” Granny was patting her again, settling her in the nest more firmly with each warm touch. Grace cleared her throat.

  “I’d drive you crazy, Granny, prowling around at midnight. I’ve lived alone too long.” She knew the family pattern. Care until it hurt, and then care some more.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll make some curtains for that old house or you’ll have every peepin’ Tom in town coming around.” Grace and Ellie began to clear the dishes. Granny added in a slight undertone, “And a few women looking to check out the latest competition for Lance Curtis.”

  Grace arched a look at Ellie as they moved to clear the dishes. Who the heck had a first name like Lance and lived in Franklin Hill?

  Four days later, Grace hauled boxes around the bedroom of the brick house only a few miles from her family, but still within easy reach. When Ellie had brought her out to see the house, she had tried to hide her dismay at the too-well lived-in look of the place. The grease spots in the kitchen, sticky cobwebs on the ceiling and torn wallpaper in the front hall all contributed to her serious reservations. But as rentals went in Franklin Hill, it was cheap, convenient to her new office, and most importantly, available. The grass was freshly cut and the walkway had been swept. The house had drawn her in with a bank of diamond-paned windows on either side of a chimney, the realtor’s promise of hardwood floors and a bay window. It looked homey. From the outside, at least. After seeing the inside she’d thought that mostly it just screamed “dirty” but still she liked it.

  The morning Grace had accepted the keys, Ellie returned with buckets, sponges and cleansers and a slick stack of paint samples from Franklin Hill City Hardware. Ellie had tsked over the mess with Grace and then they had both ventured into a basement that might have starred Vincent Price.

  “Is this the part where the guy with the hatchet shows up?” Grace asked from the top step while practical Ellie matter-of-factly replaced the one light bulb on the stairs. Finally, Grace had flatly refused to deal with the basement, pointing out a broken curtain rod, knowing that would distract her older sister.

  Late that afternoon, her square-jawed brother-in-law, Timothy, pulled into the driveway. A load of laughing teenagers piled out of his dingy brown SUV, a chaos of willing help. He gave her a brief hug and started commanding the troops. They worked until midnight, and as they cleaned, scraped, sanded, and painted Grace entertained them with stories about working in a city so large no one knew you by name. Sustained by icy beer, Coke and an astounding succession of pizza after pizza, the crew transformed the neglected little house.

  She returned to the house early the next morning. The smell of fresh paint mixed with the crisp air as she opened windows. She stopped and frowned at the back yard, leaning on the kitchen sill. It was once a comfortable garden, now completely overgrown. Honeysuckle strangled the fence line with a mix of something that looked itchy to her way of thinking. Undoubtedly poison ivy. She could see aged chrysanthemums peeking out from under weed-clogged borders, burgundy and yellow among the ragged dandelions. A giant, ancient lilac scraped the side of the house, long since gone to seed, and empty peony stems staggered from fall rain. Well, it was something to work with and would keep her occupied. All she needed now were ten stray cats and she’d fit the description of old maid well and thoroughly. She went back to the boxes, wondering if Granny Stillwell would share some of her prolific lily of the valley to plant on that shaded hill.

  She worked unloading boxes and suitcases from her hatch-back wagon, the steps getting steeper with each climb. When the moving truck arrived and slowly backed up the winding driveway, stopping a bit too close to the narrow garage, she was ready.

  “Does everyone in this town know you, Miss?” the squinting driver asked, handing her the clipboard for a signature on the form indicating “Goods Received In: Acceptable, Fair, Poor Condition.” She circled “Acceptable” and hoped that she hadn’t really seen a broken chair come across the threshold. The driver went on, “I got directions at the gas station. You must be the only one moving in way out here.”

  “It’s a small town.” She added silently, “Really, really small,” hoping once again that she wouldn’t regret this decision.

  Grace spent the day arranging furniture and making trips to the hardware store: closet shelves, picture hooks, a new light for the back porch, wallpaper glue and a home magazine she would read and then stuff away with good intentions of high decor gone bad.

  She pulled dusty wooden shelves out of the linen closet and took them to the back porch to clean. Approximately thirty seconds after she had wiped grime across her nose and under one eye, she heard a quiet “Harrumph” from across the yard. She looked up at the fence line and saw a broad-shouldered man watching her. He wore the regional costume for a man of his generation, a pair of dark-brown Dickies and long-sleeved field shirt, some wear showing on the cuffs. She could see a neatly folded handkerchief in his pocket. He would not have been out of place if it had been 1949.

  “You know, there’s ivy on that fence. Probably don’t want to touch it.” He leaned against the chain link from the other side. She watched him as he grabbed a vine and pulled.

  “Don’t bother me none, but it tears my brother up, weeping sores an’ all.” He tossed the vine back toward his own yard.

  Grace rubbed her hand against the dirty towel she’d been using to scrub the shelves. She stuck it out quickly and introduced herself. “Grace Phillips. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Just moved in.”

  “Norm. Brother Ed is over yonder with the dogs.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Old Man Bouche that owns this place doesn’t do much to keep it up, but if you need somethin’ fixed, just holler in our backdoor. We’ll take care of it for you.” He eyed her new jeans and sweatshirt, looking doubtful about her ability to manage any home repair more challenging than wiping shelves. “We do most of the work for him when somethin’ falls down. Saw you looking at the garden. Needs some help, don’t it?” He grinned, the edge of the plug of tobacco tucked in one wrinkled cheek. “The wives tried to keep up with it, but it got to be too much after a while.”

  Grace looked over Norm’s shoulder toward the two small grey houses sitting on a slight rise. Long clotheslines stretched across a sunny side yard where two small women stood hanging sheets. She blinked. The two were dressed exactly alike. From the bright purple sweaters they wore to the matching purple running pants and tidy white tennis shoes, they matched. Their hair was piled high in duplicate platinum coiffures, violet scarves covering the arrangements while glittering jeweled hairpins held the sculptures in place. They turned in unison and waved. Perfect pink-lipstick smiles lit their faces. It appeared that Norm and Ed were not
only married to sisters, but that those sisters were twins.

  A stocky man, a head shorter than Norm but probably the same weight, approached the fence to stand near his brother. Ed favored the pinstriped railroad overalls that her grandfather had always worn, over a blue chambray shirt. Only the crisp white handkerchief peeking from the shirt pocket matched his brother’s.

  Norm inclined his head slightly. “Ed.” It was an introduction of sorts. Grace hid her laugh. These men weren’t profuse conversationalists. She had a feeling that Norm had covered more territory with her this morning than he did most days. She offered her hand. Ed nearly broke it with his firm grip.

  “That’s ivy there.” He nodded toward the fence and then stepped back casually.

  “So I’ve heard.” Grace replied. She jumped at the clang of the ancient black phone on the kitchen wall. “Excuse me! Nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder as she ran for the house and the ringing phone.

  Homer Emerson, her new boss and the superintendent of the Franklin Hill R1 School District sounded relieved when she picked up the line. He had called to invite her to the school Fall Festival on Friday and make polite inquiries into how she was finding things. He hoped she was settling in and that her furniture had arrived. She had it on good authority from Granny Stillwell that Homer had been running the school office alone for some time. Several weeks ago, Nadine Pile, the assistant administrator, had scandalously run off with a man nearly half her age, who took her gambling in Las Vegas, swept her off her high-heeled feet and married her at the Elvis Chapel. They were still talking about it at the Bread House Cafe on Saturday mornings. Grace hung up, wondering what one wore to a fall festival. She hoped blue jeans were de rigueur in Franklin Hill.

  The house was a small one, but still twice the square footage and warmer than the apartment she had left behind. That cold, anonymous place had never felt like a home. It was only a hotel room she slept in at night after grueling hours in the office. In her little house, the arranging, scooting and dragging of furniture had ended with her living room containing two overstuffed chairs and ottomans, their accompanying end tables and a flat-screen television she had no idea how to hang on the plaster wall. A sleeper sofa rested in what Granny Stillwell would call the parlor, with a coffee table rescued from Ellie’s garage attic.

  The dining room with the large bay window held her cherry table and sideboard, salvaged from the garage sale of a friend, who was convinced the gleaming pieces were worth nothing. Grace wrestled with herself over paying the $200 the woman was asking, knowing full well that the set should sell for many times that amount. Her friend, satisfied with the price, had cocked her head and looked puzzled. “Why would I want that old thing when I can have something new?” Grace kept her opinions to herself and paid the money. It was the best deal she had ever made. When guilt thumped at her, that small frowning angel on her shoulder didn’t speak, but nudged and pushed and probed. Finally, Grace quietly wrote out a check to the local food pantry in her friend’s name, trying to soothe her guilty conscience.

  The other rooms of the house contained odds and ends she had picked up along the way, that had called to her from flea market, garage sale or antique shop. Someone always seemed to have something of value that she could use. The result was a comfortable mismatch that had a certain charm.

  The steep stairs up to the second floor of the little house were covered with a narrow wool rug in a deep red, a copy of an expensive oriental runner. Timothy, Ellie’s ever-patient husband, had carefully centered and anchored the carpet, even fussing over the fringe, concerned that she would trip over it and sail down the steps. It effectively covered the uneven varnish and paint stains from some careless tenant of past years. Now the hand rail gleamed with polish and cleaning, inviting the greenery she would weave there at Christmas to scent the house for the season.

  The upper rooms were a surprise of open space and large windows. Two bedrooms sat on either side of a hall bathroom in typical Cape Cod style. The hardwood floors were buffed and polished to a bright shine, along with the gently worn wood in the window seats of the larger room. When she looked out the window, a large red maple parted its leaves to show a dense stand of evergreen covering the hills. Dotted amongst the dark green were a few small houses and a patchwork quilt of fields, lined on one side by the railroad tracks which connected towns across the state and followed the River’s course. The River and the railroad had determined everything in Franklin Hill in the century following the founding of the town. If it didn’t come by water, it was brought in by train. People and their parcels had been dispersed into the countryside of softly rolling hills.

  She looked out across the landscape and remembered her great aunt telling her of walking to the old schoolhouse which all Franklin Hill children had attended, crossing down into the river bottom, past the railroad tracks. Aunt Mary had taken that walk with her older sisters through the field every morning, including the day of the Big Accident.

  Back in those days, trains came through the town twice every weekday and once on Sunday. Franklin Hill was prosperous and goods moved in a constant stream to supply growing towns along the River.

  The morning Aunt Mary remembered, the engineer’s voice had carried across the field, through the early mist to the school children of Franklin Hill.

  “Run, you kids, Run!” the voice had called out frantically, over and over again, as he wildly blasted the sharp whistle. And they had run without question, something desperate in his voice, the warning cutting through the fog, propelling short legs to flee the roaring freight train. The younger children wailed in terror as the shriek of metal and buckling of iron tracks sounded across the hollow. The ground trembled, older children grabbed their siblings and carried them away from the horror of the noise and rumbling earth. They ran, not daring to turn and see the disaster unfolding behind them. Her aunt told of a small boy, snatched up by two hulking farm lads when he froze on the spot, paralyzed by his fear. The black monster came toward them, rolling and tumbling down the hill, out of the fog. The boys swept the child along between them, propelled by the engineer’s anguished cry, “Run! God help you children, run!”

  Down on Carson Street, the workers in the hatchery just a block from the train station stopped working when they heard an odd noise, above the persistent chirping of the chicks. The windows of the hatchery began to crack and shatter from the force and vibration. Someone called out, “New Madrid has gone again!” remembering stories handed down of the great earthquakes during the winter of 1811 and ‘12

  At a memorial service several days later, the citizens of Franklin Hill turned out to honor the sacrifice of that engineer and celebrate him as a hero. Every child of the town attended in their Sunday best, safe and unharmed. Overturned metal cars lay in the bottoms, tossed there like so many discarded playthings. Coal, cattle feed, and remnants of new Ford trucks destined for Kansas City littered the ground for many months following the accident. Not long after, the myth began circulating of a man walking the tracks at night with a railroad lantern swinging in the dark, warning the children to “Stay away! Stay away!” Franklin Hill was a town of stories and the engineer’s legend was secure for generations to come amongst the rural school children.

  Grace decided the larger upstairs room would function best as her office. She doubted there would be wiring for her computer, but her small day bed would accommodate a guest in a pinch, leaving room for her desk and a bookshelf. More volumes would fit in the parlor downstairs. She put Dickens and Twain in their accustomed order on the shelves and carefully arranged her collections of Frost and Dickinson on another. The coffee table books from Australia and Scotland were shelved again, lying on their sides, titles exposed for curious eyes. She stacked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works with some other favorites, “A History of Ireland” and a few hardcover English mysteries. Freshly dusted gilt-edged spines winked in the bright room, giving her a feeling of satisfaction. Four framed pictures fit perfectly above the b
ookcase before the attic ceiling began to angle upward. A covered cushion for the window seat, a pillow, a knitted throw, and it would be perfect. She eyed the two lone electric outlets in the room and decided to fool herself into thinking it would be warm in winter as well. Another trip to the hardware store for a space heater and another dent in her savings account. She sighed and thought of the endless hours of work to build up that account before she left the City. Her payment was the calm that had filled her when she reached the town limits of Franklin Hill.

  The front door banged, jarring her from her library daydream. She heard Ellie call her name up the stairs.

  Ellie was juggling two stuffed grocery bags. How she had opened the door was a mystery to Grace. “What’s all this?”

  “Pantry items from Granny Stillwell’s house. She still puts up tomatoes and makes jelly, you know. You won’t go hungry this winter.” She staggered back toward the kitchen with her load. Grace followed her, attempting to grab a tilting bag with a frustrated, circumvented motion. Life with Ellie was like that. She would endeavor to do every darned thing herself and no help for it. “Damson plum jam, gooseberry jelly, green beans, stewed tomatoes and...” she triumphantly pulled a waxed-paper bundle from the top of the second bag, “potato bread!” Grace grabbed the jars as she tossed them to her to place in the cupboard that closed with a Hoosier latch. Granny Stillwell’s potato bread, toasted, with butter and a cup of hot tea was a winter delicacy. Her mouth began to water.

  “Have any tea towels around here?” Ellie shook her head at the one Grace offered from her back pocket and pulled open doors and drawers until she found the neatly stacked linens. She turned and wiped the dirt from Grace’s blinking face.

  “As you can see, I was busy.”

  “Did you meet Norm, Ed and the wives?” Ellie tossed the towel on the counter and moved to finish the unpacking.

  “Do the wives have names? They were wearing—"