Liberty Loomis

AuthorHouse

Contents

For Simeon...................................vThe Apple Tree...............................1Lastborn Children............................21Farley's Skunk...............................32The Nature of the Beast......................48The Story of Jonah...........................63Jenkins vs. McFadden.........................70The Loomis Legacy............................75Abe Zimmerman................................82Poor Janice Foster...........................88Bobby Cutler.................................100Dear Mayzie..................................108Domestic Bliss...............................114Annie Gets Her Gun...........................128Milk Money...................................140Aromatherapy.................................149"It's All Okay"..............................164Missing Pieces...............................171Secret Number Forty-Nine.....................177August 12, 1957..............................182Atonement....................................188Scaredy-Cats.................................196Countless Lives..............................205Summer's End.................................215

Chapter One

Mayzie removes the lid from the shoebox on the kitchen table and makes a face. Her mother insisted she buy the ugliest nursing shoes in the store because they'd be more durable than the simple white slip-ons Mayzie had her eye on. She'd given in at the time, but now—as she puts the laces into their eyelets—she wishes she stood her ground. From the looks of these Florence Nightingale originals you'd never know that today was actually June 5, 1970. Mayzie crumples the tissue paper from the shoebox and throws it against the wall like a bratty kid pitching a fit.

She hears Harry coming up the porch steps to the farmhouse. He stops to grab the "outside" broom propped near the screen door and begins his meticulous ritual of brushing off his boots and removing every particle of hay and cow manure. Mayzie shakes her head at the painstaking process. It makes no sense at all as far as she is concerned.

When Harry is completely satisfied with his boots he enters the kitchen, pulling the screen door slowly behind him until he hears the latch click. He looks down at his favorite sister and smiles. "Are you gettin' ready for your doctor job?"

"It's not a doctor job, Harry. How many times do I have to tell you? I'm going to work at Loomis Hospital as a nurse's aide."

Mayzie can't help being short with him, even though she knows he means well. He's proud of her, after all. And her parents are proud too because she made the dean's list for the fourth time in a row. Never mind that we're only talking about the School of Home Economics at Cornell University. Cornell is Cornell. It's still the Ivy League, and she's done well for such an ordinary girl from such an ordinary town.

But Mayzie is anxious about her plans for the summer. The last six years at Farley's Lakeside convinced her she can handle being a waitress, but working at the hospital will be altogether different, and she'll miss Becky and Donna.

Harry is not put off. "Well, you will be a doctor soon enough. And then you can help me if Evelyn and Marie get sick again."

"I'd need to be a Veterinarian to help you with the cows. What you need is an animal doctor, not a people doctor. Medical school won't teach me how to treat livestock."

Mayzie wonders why she's annoyed with Harry, who's been her best friend as long as she can remember. She could always count on his sweet freckled face to give her a lift when she was down in the dumps. He's been her knight in shining armor, her big brother confidant, and the only one in the family never too busy to listen to her, its youngest member. She promises herself to be nicer to him.

"Besides, Harry, we don't need a vet with you around, now do we? So tell me how Evelyn and Marie doing today. Are they on the road to recovery yet?"

Most dairy farmers identify their cows with individual numbers tagged to their horns or pierced through their ears. And Charlie Jenkins was no exception. But that didn't stop Harry from giving every cow in the Jenkins herd her own "human" name as well. There were one hundred forty-three names, one for each cow, heifer, and calf. And he never forgot them, never mixed them up. Mayzie used to quiz him when she was younger, to see if he could identify each cow from the number on her tag. Upon hearing the number he would describe the unique black and white patterns on the cow's body and respond with complete accuracy, "Mary Sue, Elizabeth, Bertha, Violet," and so forth.

"Oh, they're comin' along, all right. Marie's eatin' good again thanks to that sugar and molasses I put on her hay. And Evelyn's leg is healing up too. I made a poultice of oatmeal and salt water for it. The swellin's down and the pus is mostly dried away."

Harry is happy about his cows, but he's also worried about Mayzie. He knows her doctor job is weighing on her mind. That's probably why she hasn't been more interested in his animals these past few days. The truth is Mayzie always needs lots of attention.

Harry's whole world pretty much revolves around his farm chores. But he's close to Mayzie and knows that this time of year can be especially tough for her, on account of what happened that summer years ago. It was one of their special secrets, secret number forty-nine, to be exact. Maybe that's what's bothering her now. But she doesn't ever want to talk about it. When he asks her about that man she pretends she doesn't even know what he means, as if she's forgotten the whole thing. But Harry knows better. You don't go forgetting something like that.

"That sure is a pretty dress you got there, Mayzie." He points at the uniform draped across the kitchen chair next to her. "You oughta wear that color more often. It's a good one for your eyes."

Powder blue.

To hell with my eyes, Mayzie thinks. She hates the color and always has. Powder blue gives her the creeps. She'd prefer a white uniform, but only the LPNs and RNs get to wear white. Nurse's aides at Liberty Loomis Hospital wear powder blue, like it or not.

"You think so? I don't like it at all—any color would be better than this one. And get a load of these!" She picks up the half-laced nursing shoes and bangs them back down on the table. "Can you believe I let Mom talk me into getting them?" But she knows Harry is only trying to be nice. "I'm sorry for taking my bad mood out on you, Harry. The truth is I'm worried about whether I can handle this hospital job. On top of that, I'm gonna miss everybody at the hotel.

"And I miss Jesse too, dammit, even though it was my bright idea that we go our separate ways until next semester. The truth is I'm worried that he'll forget all about me by the time we get back to Cornell. It's been almost three weeks since we've seen each other, and I haven't heard from him even once." Mayzie pauses, staring out the screen door past Harry at nothing in particular. He waits quietly. In a few moments she looks back at Harry.

"But hey, I shouldn't be complaining like this. I'll be fine once I get used to the hospital job—really I will. So please don't tell Mom and Dad about this. They'll worry for no good reason and then they'll say I shouldn't be planning to go to medical school if I can't even handle being a nurse's aide. Promise me you won't say anything to them?"

"Jesse won't be forgettin' you, Mayzie. You got no worry there. Nobody could forget you. And you got yourself a promise about not tellin' Mom and Dad. Wild horses won't get it outta me—is this gonna be one of our special secrets?"

Mayzie laughs as she nods. "Sure, Harry, why not?"

Harry and she had a long history of keeping secrets. Most were about their childhood misdemeanors, like where they hid the last piece of strawberry pie or who smashed their mother's green depression glass candy dish into a hundred pieces on the kitchen floor or how Clara's beautiful Cinderella doll ended up with a decidedly short haircut.

When Mayzie was about four years old, she invented a signal to let Harry know she had a new secret to tell him. She got the idea from Grandpa Bob's story about the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys. She would yank Harry's sleeve to get his attention and then, in rapid succession, would cover her ears, her eyes, and her mouth with her hands. That was his cue to meet at their hiding place in the lilac bush behind the farmhouse.

The lilac bush was over a hundred years old. Grandpa Bob's father planted it in 1868, on the backside of the house in the corner between the sitting parlor and the summer kitchen. It turned out to be an ideal spot for a lilac bush to flourish, sheltered from January's harshest blizzards and August's deadliest heat by two sides of the farmhouse. The bush grew to an enormous size, as tall as the two-story house itself, with numerous "trunks" and branches the diameter of a grown man's arm. Mayzie and Harry would climb the strong limbs, pretending they were in a massive treetop that was sitting right on the ground, having been severed from its trunk by some catastrophic storm.

Their hiding place was deep inside the lilac bush, close to one wall of the house. A natural spacing between the branches had created a cave-like room with an arched ceiling of green heart-shaped leaves. There was enough headroom to sit comfortably, although Harry had to squat a little when he stood. The floor of packed dirt measured about eight square feet, which was just large enough for their picnics. Mayzie kept the area clear of dead leaves with an old whiskbroom that Emma had discarded. They stored the broom along with a red and white checked oilcloth inside a metal chest that Harry had retrieved from the town dump. The oilcloth was used to cover the ground when it was wet or cold, and the chest doubled as a table for their lunch pail and thermos.

Harry recorded every one of their "official" secrets in a black and white composition book. He made a hole in its back cover to attach a pencil on a string. The book was protected from the weather by a heavy-duty plastic box that Charlie Jenkins had given Harry one Christmas for his rock collection. Harry had a habit of picking up stones around the farm. He was forever on the lookout for ones that were interesting or unusual. It wasn't long before his collection outgrew the box. But that didn't matter to Harry, because he preferred to keep his stones where he could see them all the time. He arranged them in neat rows on a shelf in his room according to size, shape, and color. And the plastic box turned out to be just the right size to hold the composition book with its dangling pencil, an extra pink eraser and a plastic pencil sharpener. They kept the box in the chest with the whiskbroom under the oilcloth.

Mayzie was not allowed to write any secrets in the book, because Harry said her handwriting was too messy, but they both signed their names on the inside cover. It read,

Our Speshal Secrits June 10, 1954 Harold Robert Jenkins, age 9 May Zinnia Jenkins, age 4.

Each secret was numbered, dated, and briefly described. Most of Mayzie's contributions were about some mischief she'd gotten into, whereas Harry's secrets were more apt to be about uncomfortable things that happened to him, like when the boys at school teased him for talking to a squirrel on the playground.

Harry and Mayzie accumulated fifteen to twenty speshal secrits every year. Most were recorded during the summer months, when the lilac bush was open for business. They'd documented over a hundred secrets by the time Mayzie was twelve and getting too old for such childish ceremonies. Harry was disappointed when his little sister stopped giving him the monkey signals, but they continued to share important confidences with each other from time to time without writing them down in their composition book.

Harry remembered every secret in their book by its number. Even Mayzie knew some of the classic ones, like number twenty-one, July 15, 1955. Mayzie left Beth's bicycle in front of their father's pickup truck next to the farmhouse. Beth and Clara were over at the McFadden's place hanging out with Sara Ellen. Of course Mayzie didn't have Beth's permission to play with her bike while she was gone. In fact, she had strict orders to keep her hands off.

The bike would have survived the illicit use if Mayzie had only returned it to its safe place on the porch where Beth kept it. But she wanted to park it like a grownup. She'd seen cars lined up in single file along the street curbs in Livingston Manor. So when her mom called her in for lunch, she "parked" Beth's bicycle directly in front of her dad's old Chevy pickup truck by the side of the farmhouse.

Unfortunately, Charlie Jenkins finished lunch before Mayzie, and he was in a hurry to get to Wilson's hardware store to get a part for his hay baler. He didn't see the bike, since it was only slightly taller than the truck's front bumper. He drove right over the poor thing, dragging it halfway up the dirt road and past the barn before he noticed something was awry. The bike was mangled beyond repair. But Harry never gave Mayzie up, no matter how suspicious Beth was that her little sister was somehow responsible. Harry sure knew how to keep a secret all right.

* * *

Harry was always different, as far back as Mayzie could remember. He was smart enough, in a peculiar sort of way, but he didn't see the world like most people. He usually kept to himself. Other kids his age made fun of him because of his strange manner, so he didn't have any close friends, other than Mayzie, that is.

Harry managed to learn the basics of reading and writing, and there wasn't anything he couldn't memorize, as long as it interested him. But school was a sorry frustration for him most of the time. He pretty much stopped attending classes altogether when he was about fourteen.

The Livingston Manor school district and the Jenkins family worked out a plan to deal with the situation. Harry wasn't getting anywhere with what the local school had to offer so they arranged for him to enter a vocational training program forty miles away. That lasted six months. Harry hated the program almost as much as he hated the long drive. Charlie and Emma Jenkins could see their son was miserable. Enough was enough.

Harry wasn't any good at running machinery, stocking grocery shelves or filing papers, but he had a natural talent for taking care of animals. So he became a fulltime farmhand, milking cows, collecting eggs from the henhouse and nursing sick calves and heifers back to health. Charlie welcomed his son's help, but couldn't shake his deep down disappointment that Harry would never be capable of running the farm on his own, after Charlie was gone.

Charlie and Emma were beside themselves with joy when Harry was born in 1945. He was their hope for the future. It's not that they didn't love their two daughters dearly, but Clara and Beth were unlikely candidates to take over the farm that had been in the family for three generations. The Jenkins had planned to have three children in all and hoped that at least two would be boys.

Baby Clara was first on the scene, arriving a week after Grandma Clara Jenkins broke her neck when she fell out of the apple tree in the front yard. She was trying to rescue her beloved tomcat Dandy who'd been chased up the tree by their yellow-haired farm dog, Max.

Emma witnessed the debacle from the kitchen window over the sink and waddled to the tree in horror, as quickly as her swollen pregnant body allowed. Max was still barking at Dandy, who now clung to one of the tree's highest branches. Apples were dropping all around the broken ladder and onto Grandma Clara, but she made no move to dodge them. Her arms and legs lay lifeless next to her body in contorted, unnatural positions. She struggled to breathe as Emma knelt next to her, screaming for Max to be quiet.

Grandma looked at Emma and grimaced. One side of her mouth opened. "Ask Charles to get Dandy out of that tree." She sounded like she was under water. Emma was sobbing by now, but she tried to reassure the dying woman. Her tears fell onto Clara's twisted old face. Emma dabbed at them with her apron, and in the next moment, it was over.

Charlie was almost incapacitated with grief at his grandmother's death. Clara Jenkins had raised him from infancy, taking over after his mother Anna died from childbirth fever. Charlie's father George never remarried and never regained the happy-go-lucky spirit he had when his beautiful wife was alive. Grandma Clara had watched with sadness as little Charles climbed on his Dad's lap, tugging at his beard, only to be placed gently but firmly back on the floor and told to go play outside.

It wasn't that George was cruel, exactly, but he built a wall between himself and the rest of the world. It seemed to Clara that her son was trying to protect himself from getting hurt again. But Clara wasn't comfortable talking to George about his behavior, in spite of its impact on her little grandson. There was too much work that needed doing to waste time trying to extract George from his doldrums. He'd have to snap out of it on his own. In the meantime, Clara tried to make it up to Charles as best she could. Charles was what she called him—it was her father's name—though he was "Charlie" to everyone else.

Grandma Clara was the matriarch of the household, even after George married Anna. George continued to work the farm with his father Bob, but he became more sullen and withdrawn with every passing year since Anna's death. Grandpa Bob became more of a father than a grandfather to Charlie, taking him under his wing, teaching him how to drive the tractor, run the hay baler, and hook up the electric milking machines.

Charlie was twenty when his father was killed in a farm accident. George took a nosedive down a hay chute onto the barn floor. Grandpa Bob was scrubbing the milk cans in the milk house nearby when he heard his son's skull hit the concrete. There was nothing he could do.

Clara was not convinced George's death was accidental, nor was Bob. If George had lost his footing, after all, he wouldn't have landed smack dab on his head. But some things are better left unsaid, so they never mentioned the possibility, even to each other, that their hapless son may have ended his own sad life.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Liberty Loomisby Susan Denman Copyright © 2012 by Susan Denman. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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