“Too far south for bougainvillea.”\u00a0 That was Ted, his tone absolute, the week before he and Jessica got married.<\/p>\n
Jessica had not replied at the time, but brought the bougainvillea anyway, taking cuttings from her mother’s garden.\u00a0 She still remembered that afternoon, the sun dancing on the path while every corner was filled with moss and shadow.\u00a0 Mysterious, Jessica had thought, seeing it as if for the first time, when it was to be her last.\u00a0 But she had grown up with the bougainvillea’s cascade, crimson down a white wall, and would not call any place that was without it home.<\/p>\n
“You’re wasting your time,” Ted said, when she planted the cuttings along the verandah of a house where everything was new for both of them, the echoing interior and the flat expanse of paddock he called a lawn.\u00a0 “The first frost will kill them.”<\/p>\n
The first frost hadn’t killed them, but the cuttings struggled for several seasons.\u00a0 The summers were hot and dry, relentless as the nor’west wind, the winters arid and cold.\u00a0 Jessica found it a strange, bleak country when she first arrived, not without an austere beauty, but hard, and moulding the men and women who lived there into its own pattern.<\/p>\n
Despite Ted’s predictions, the bougainvillea took hold.\u00a0 Jessica could not have said how, herself.\u00a0 Sheer willpower, perhaps \u2013 on her part, and the plant’s.\u00a0 Soon everyone wanted it, as decoration for weddings and any number of other, special occasions.\u00a0 They would drive for miles to get it, jolting up the long drive that Ted refused to seal.\u00a0 “Keeps the time wasters away,” he said, and would disappear at the first slow mutter of an engine up their hill.<\/p>\n
It was Jessica who went to meet the visitors, standing beneath the coronal of bougainvillea with the door flung wide behind her.\u00a0 She always kept the door open to let air flow through, and in the afternoons she would sit on the verandah and look out to brown hills and the slash of pale sky.\u00a0 But what she saw was branching green, and the fern filled shadow of northern afternoons.<\/p>\n
Margaret had loved the bougainvillea too.\u00a0 She was their only grand-child, orphaned during the War, and always said that she would be married beneath the bougainvillea’s bravura colour \u2013 one day, when she was grown up.\u00a0 Jessica had smiled, and seen it happening \u2013 one day \u2013 in her mind’s eye.\u00a0 Even after Margaret went away, first to study and then to find work, Jessica kept her room clear.\u00a0 Margaret had liked it plain, and would never have any curtains at the window.\u00a0 She wanted to look out to the ocean, stretching away, and have the sun creep through to wake her in the mornings.<\/p>\n
“But what about at night?” Jessica asked once.<\/p>\n
“Then I can count stars,” Margaret had replied, quite seriously.\u00a0 “Or watch the lights of the fishing boats.\u00a0 They dance, you know, when the wind blows.”<\/p>\n
She had written from overseas about lights dancing: the lights of New York along Broadway, and streaming out beneath Brooklyn bridge.\u00a0 It was odd, Jessica had thought, how someone from so remote an area could fall beneath the spell of such a vast city.\u00a0 The pace of life, Margaret had written, was fast, and Jessica tried to imagine it all \u2013 the dancing lights and the skyscrapers, and streets where the cars crawled like ants, but her mind rebelled.<\/p>\n
She had always been sure that Margaret would come home one day.\u00a0 In the meantime, the letters with New York postmarks were news in the district, important enough for Johnny Kahu to bring up the long drive in person.<\/p>\n
“Nice fat envelope this time,” he said to Jessica one day.\u00a0 “There’ll be news in it.”<\/p>\n
He was right, there was news in it.\u00a0 Jessica stood by Margaret’s window for a long time afterwards, looking out.\u00a0 She was aware of Ted standing in the doorway, waiting, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn, not yet.<\/p>\n
How big the sea is, she thought.\u00a0 The horizon seemed a very long way out, stretching into a forever that you could never touch, but only follow, as Margaret had followed.\u00a0 So far away, thought Jessica, looking, so far \u2026<\/p>\n
“Margaret’s married,” she said, without turning around.\u00a0 “She’s met someone in New York, and they decided not to wait.\u00a0 They got married in the registry.”<\/p>\n
Ted said nothing.\u00a0 After a moment, she heard him walk away, and then the creak of the screen door as he leaned against it, putting on his boots.<\/p>\n
Margaret, thought Jessica.\u00a0 Our little girl.\u00a0 She turned and looked at the room, the stillness of it, and the long waiting.\u00a0 There was a blue jar on the dresser, with a chip in it.\u00a0 Jessica still remembered the day Margaret had spent all her pocket money buying it \u2013 she hadn’t cared that it was chipped.<\/p>\n
“Think how it’ll look with the bougainvillea in it,” she’d said, her face bright with vision.\u00a0 “Just like a picture in a magazine.”<\/p>\n
And now she lived in New York, where her vision brought colour into other people’s lives, doing set designs for Broadway shows, and arrangements in glossy periodicals.<\/p>\n
Jessica wondered if Margaret had even considered coming home, or giving them the chance to go over there and see her married.\u00a0 She asked herself whether she would have had the courage to go so far, but didn’t know the answer.\u00a0 She never would know now.<\/p>\n
There was a table on the verandah, at the end enclosed on three sides by glass; it had come from the school and there were years of ink stained into the wood.\u00a0 Jessica set the blue jar down and filled it with bougainvillea.\u00a0 Crimson spilled over blue, and water reflections rippled across wood.<\/p>\n
“She’ll never come back, you know,” said Ted.\u00a0 “Not now.”\u00a0 He was standing on the front steps, but wouldn’t come any further, not with his work boots on.<\/p>\n
Jessica looked at him, her hands still resting among carmine flowers, each one fragile as hope, growing in a harsh climate.\u00a0 “She might,” she said.\u00a0 “One day.”<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
(c) Helen Lowe<\/p>\n
Published in Bravado 15, <\/strong><\/em>2009<\/p>\n Highly Commended, Thames Intermational Short Story Competition 2007<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n To celebrate Christmas-New Year\u00a0 I am posting a mix of fiction and poetry by myself and others that I feel fits the season in some way. Starting with Helen Rickerby’s Burning with Joan of Arc<\/em><\/strong><\/a> on Tuesday—and she also featured my poem Christmastide<\/strong><\/em><\/a>—I have followed with A Norwest Season<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Howard Thurman’s “When the song of angels is stilled …<\/a>” <\/strong><\/em>on Christmas Day <\/strong><\/em> and a Keri Hulme poem<\/strong> <\/a>yesterday. Heartland<\/strong><\/em> is the first prose work—and I hope you enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Heartland “Too far south for bougainvillea.”\u00a0 That was Ted, his tone absolute, the week before he and Jessica got married. Jessica had not replied at the time, but brought the bougainvillea anyway, taking cuttings from her mother’s garden.\u00a0 She still remembered that afternoon, the sun dancing on the path while every corner was filled with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2921"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2926,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2921\/revisions\/2926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}