Late Bloomer
By Deborah Holt Williams
The iris and lilies and daisies are done,
their flowers have found their freedom.
I wish they’d last. I’m sorry they passed.
I’d happily water and weed ‘em.
The days grow gray. Garden colors? Away,
just when we really need ‘em.
But wait! In a blink, all summery pink,
blooms a welcome clump of sedum!
[An excerpt]
By Golda Wolfe
This is an excerpt from an unpublished novel. All rights reserved. No use without permission.
Some 70 years after the winter when Aspen changed, an old man with straight white hair that grazed his collar bones opened his door to a stranger, something he rarely did.
“Randall Johnson?” she had sweetly inquired.
“Please, call me Many Houses,” he said, extending his hand in greeting. “I haven’t been called Randall Johnson for a very long time.”
Many Houses had looked forward to his visitor’s arrival. After ignoring her written requests to meet for three years, he felt it was time. To tell her what she wanted to know. Parts of it, at least. No one had ever shown any interest. And he was very old.
She was a woman in her 30s. Although the old man’s blue-green eyes were clouded with gathering blindness, he discerned that she was plump. And blond. She shifted cautiously between the cranky coils sprung from the upholstered armchair he had directed her to take — as if there’d been a choice of seating. “Careful, that chair can bite,” he had cheerfully warned, as she sat between its jaws. A small recorder rested on her wide thigh, the side table providing too small a surface to hold it, the anticipated cup of cowboy coffee, and the plate of Lorna Doones his Earth Angel had bought for the occasion.
After settling in she introduced her reason for making the trip, and when she observed that her host was ready to proceed, segued into asking him to tell her how he had met Sam Ross and his wife Charlotte Blum.
“I remember the day very well, but let me get to it the way I do,” he said.
“They were on their honeymoon, time you’d think they wanted to be alone. I guess that with all the foreigners in town, Mrs. Ross — Charlotte — was bound to run into people she knew from back home,” he began. “She always insisted I call her Charlotte. One day Charlotte saw this man named Friedl at the Aspen ski school. Wouldn’t you know? He’d been her ski instructor in St. Anton? That was some coincidence to meet him again, on her honeymoon in Aspen.
“It wasn’t until long after we became really close friends that she told me what Friedl told her had happened . . . To her father.” Many Houses bowed his head and put up his hand to ward off further questions on that subject.
“. . . And then to find out that Professor Ross—Sam— knew Friedl too, from the 10th Mountain. Friedl joined up just so he could teach our troops how to ski. He’d come to the U.S. after escaping from Austria, after the Anschluss, the reunification—”
“Yes, I know what that is,” the listener replied mildly.
The Majestic Malleable stove presided over the space between their chairs, turned to face one another, conversationally. The Majestic was a cast iron contrivance the color of butter and, though it was about 100 years old, it worked as good as it ever had. Many Houses did not have the heart to replace it because the warmth it gave was a happy reminder of the day Charlotte and Sam hauled it back from Grand Junction. Sam complained the whole time. Charlotte loved that monster.
It was a day in June when Many Houses was entertaining his visitor, but the Malleable was stoked because the original log portion of the house where they were talking was bathed in Rocky Mountain springtime cold and gloom. The stove, which burned wood as well as coal, was multitasking by heating a battered tin coffee pot on one of the electric coil burners it was also equipped with. The pot rattled soothingly.
“Do you cook meals on this stove as well?”
she asked.
“Oh, I might look old, but I stay modern. I get a new stove about every 50 years,” said Many Houses. “The one I cook my supper on is in the kitchen.” He nodded his chin toward a room unseen, around a corner. “In there’s the GE they — she — bought in 1975. I guess I’m almost due for another.”
“Sam Ross knew the guy!” Many Houses said, picking up the thread of the previous conversation. “Seems everybody in the 10th remembered Friedl because he was one of the good ones.” The woman, whose name was Greta Knauss, grimaced. He could not have noticed her expression, it was so slight.