Free A Violet Season by Kathy Leonard Czepiel

treated her request for work for Alice with more urgency. She nearly asked Oliver to take her back to Anna Brinckerhoff’s shop.
    Oliver shrugged. “Soon as he’s ready. He’s a quick study.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so,” Ida said, and she gripped the edges ofher hat as the breeze taunted it. She looked up to check the progress of the next threatening cloud.
    “Well, that’s what he says. Maybe he’s wrong,” Oliver said. Noticing, as she had, that the cloud was bearing down fast, he slapped the reins and clicked his tongue at Trudy and Trip. “Slow old devils, ain’t you,” he said, but Ida pointed out neither his crude language nor his bad grammar.
    “Did you hear Avery is home?” Oliver asked her.
    “No!” Ida said. What else was she unaware of, stuck in her own backyard every day with the children?
    “He’s sick in bed,” Oliver said. “Yellow fever. He never even made it to the battlefield; caught it on the docks.”
    “That’s awful!”
    “I’ll go see him. Maybe tomorrow,” Oliver said. “Wish I could have gone.”
    “What, and caught yellow fever?”
    “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I feel like I missed something big. Now it’s over already.”
    “You’ll have other opportunities,” Ida said, praying one of them wouldn’t be war.
    For a time they rode in silence, while the lower clouds roiled like bluing in the laundry water and bulbous thumbs of iron gray stirred them from above. Ida and Oliver held their peace through the outskirts of the village. It wasn’t until they were nearing home that Oliver spoke again.
    “George and I have been talking, Ma,” he said. He had worked himself up to making some kind of announcement.
    “About what?” she asked.
    “A business plan. When the season’s over, next spring, we were thinking . . .” Ida waited, expecting him to have yet another rash idea like prospecting for gold in the Klondike. “We thought we’d head out to Boston. George’s uncle has a fishing business, and he says he could use our help.”
    “That’s a difficult life,” Ida said. “And a dangerous one. Harder than what we do here.”
    “No, George’s uncle wants us to run a market for him. He’s opening his own, and he’d still go out and do the fishing with his crew. He needs us to run the business.”
    “What do you know about selling fish?” Ida laughed.
    “I’ve caught a few nice bass and a lot of sunnies,” Oliver replied with a self-deprecating smile. “Look, Ma, sometime I’ve got to strike out on my own. It’s Boston or New York. I can’t stay here all my life. The city is where things are happening!”
    “I quite agree,” Ida said. “You can’t stay here. I hope you won’t.”
    Oliver pulled inadvertently on the reins as he turned to her, and the team stopped in the middle of the road. “I thought you were going to argue with me all the way home,” he said. “I was scared to say anything.”
    “Have you said anything to your father?”
    “Not yet. I told you first.” This news warmed her, and then she felt ashamed, competing with Frank for Oliver’s affection.
    “I think it’s time I tell you more about the farm,” she said.
    Oliver clicked to set the team walking. Ida hesitated then. Frank wouldn’t want some of this said. But something had shifted, she realized, as she sorted the words she could use. Her loyalties were with Oliver, not Frank. She didn’t know what was happening to her husband, what he was thinking or why he was behaving as he was, but if it came to choosing between what Frank would want and what Oliver needed, she would choose her boy. Perhaps that had always been true, and she had simply never been tested before.
    “Your father,” she began, then thought better of opening there. “Your uncles have been holding a grudge against your father for nearly thirty years.”
    “I know that,” Oliver said. “He doesn’t own his share of the farm. Why not?”
    “When he was about sixteen, your father