Free Where Lilacs Still Bloom by Jane Kirkpatrick

bring anything more than hard work and hope.
    One pollination down, turkey feather and crochet hook; hat back, holding my breath. France to Washington State. Dreaming.
    Hundreds more to go.

F OURTEEN

R UTH R EED
Woodland, 1904
    E leven-year-old Ruth Reed watched her father walk a fine line, and he expected Ruth to walk there too. By day her father worked at the cheese plant. On Wednesday evenings Barney Reed led Bible classes at Woodland homes. A Seventh-Day Adventist, their Sabbath services never turned away people from other persuasions who came to the meetings he officiated with his bushy mustache and tiny glasses he adjusted often on his nose.
    Ruth liked it best when they met at the Fred Lewis homestead on Whelan Road and combined their study efforts with Baptists, Methodists, and others. She listened to the banter and discussion, and afterward her father often told her mother that he’d “get converts yet out of those confused Presbyterians.”
    It was Mrs. Klager that Ruth fancied the most. Thewoman stood tall, and straight up and down. She always noticed Ruth, asking important things like how the tulip bulbs she’d given her were doing rather than commenting on “what a big girl she was becoming” like some of the other mothers did. During the discussions, Mrs. Klager asked probing questions of belief, especially about science and how faith informed it, or vice versa. Ruth didn’t always understand the questions, but she saw how they made her father’s face get red, and he talked faster than normal. Ruth heard that Mrs. Klager had been ill a long time, but she didn’t sound weak at their classes.
    Ruth got another education after classes were over and he had a second piece of pie after they were home. Her father finished Mrs. Klager’s apple pie. Ruth didn’t tell him that Mrs. Klager had made those apples herself, or so she’d heard. Crumbs dribbling on his chin, her father took issue with most everything Mrs. Klager said. “She doesn’t have the slightest worry about messing with Eden,” he told her mother one February evening. “She accepts as gospel the writings of people like Darwin and now this Burbank fellow. She says she gives all that glory to God, but then she messes with plants trying to make a better daffodil or rose.” He chewed the apple pie with his front teeth, like a rabbit might. Her father’s back teeth hurt him when he chewed.
    Ruth didn’t want to see her father more upset. She and her mother had something to tell him, and she didn’t want him saying no.
    “The Baptists and Latter-day Saints and others claiming the Christian faith seemed to have no concern about what Mrs. Klager was saying,” Ruth’s mother said.
    “Yes.” He jabbed the air with his fork. “They apparently like the idea of larger flowers, or in the case of that Burbank, bigger plums and even spineless cacti.”
    “Isn’t that for cattle?” her mother posed. “Perhaps they see it as a way of subduing the animals and earth as God intended man to do.”
    Her father frowned, and Ruth thought right then and there she might as well forget lessons. But he surprised her. “I suppose spineless cacti could mean the difference in places like Australia where cattle needed feed and there wasn’t enough water to grow it. And certainly not having to scrape off those barbs means an easier life for those farmers. But still,” he cautioned her mother, pausing to chew with his front teeth, “it interferes with Eden. Cacti aren’t even mentioned in the Bible. The Burbanks and the Klagers of the world take God’s creation and turn it into naked cacti, and somehow expect the world to accept it as better than what God Himself placed on this earth.”
    “Papa?” Ruth cleared her throat, wanting to stop him before his rant raged on for hours. “Mama and I have something to tell you.”
    “What? What is it, Ruth?” He towered over her like an unhappy teacher.
    “I have a job. Later this spring.”
    “You do? Well,