The Mulberry Tree

The money never mattered to Jimmie. No one understood that. To him, it was just a by-product of the game. “It’s like all those peels you throw away after you’ve made jam,” he’d say. “Only in this case the world values the peel and not the jam.” “Poor world,” I said, then Jimmie laughed hard and carried me upstairs, where he made sweet love to me.

It’s my opinion that Jimmie knew he wasn’t going to live to be an old man. “I’ve got to do what I can as fast as I can. You with me, Frecks?” he’d ask.

“Always,” I’d answer, and I meant it. “Always.”

But I didn’t follow him to the grave. I was left behind, just as Jimmie said I would be.

“I’ll take care of you, Frecks,” he said more than once. When he talked of such things, he always called me by the name he’d given me the first time we met: Frecks for the freckles across my nose.

When he said, “I’ll take care of you,” I didn’t give the words much thought. Jimmie had always “taken care” of me. Whatever I wanted, he gave me long before I knew I wanted it. Jimmie said, “I know you better than you know yourself.”

And he did. But then, to be fair, I never had time to get to know much about myself. Following Jimmie all over the world didn’t leave a person much time to sit and contemplate.

Jimmie knew me, and he did take care of me. Not in the way the world thought was right, but in the way he knew I needed. He didn’t leave me a rich widow with half the world’s bachelors clamoring to profess love for me. No, he left the money and all twelve of the expensive houses to the only two people in the world he truly hated: his older sister and brother.

To me, Jimmie left a run-down, overgrown farm in the backwoods of Virginia, a place I didn’t even know he owned, and a note. It said:

Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me. And remember that I love you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, remember that I love you.

J.

When I saw the farmhouse, I burst into tears. What had enabled me to survive the past six weeks was the image of that farmhouse. I’d imagined something charming, made of logs, with a stone chimney at one end. I’d imagined a deep porch with hand-hewn rocking chairs on it, and a lawn in front, with pink roses spilling petals in the breeze.

I’d envisioned acres of gently rolling land covered with fruit trees and raspberry bushes—all of them pruned and healthy and dripping ripe fruit.

But what I saw was 1960s hideous. It was a two-story house covered in some sort of green siding—the kind that never changes over the years. Storms, sun, snow, time, none of it had any effect on that kind of siding. It had been a pale, sickly green when it was installed, and now, many years later, it was the same color.

There were vines growing up one side of the house, but not the kind of vines that make a place look quaint and cozy. These were vines that looked as though they were going to engulf the house, eat it raw, digest it, then regurgitate it in the same ghastly green.

“It can be fixed,” Phillip said softly from beside me.

In the weeks since Jimmie’s death, “hell” could not begin to describe what I had been through.

It was Phillip who woke me in the middle of the night when Jimmie’s plane went down. I must say that I was shocked to see him. As Jimmie’s wife, I was sacrosanct. The men he surrounded himself with knew what would happen if they made any advances toward me. I don’t mean just sexually, but in any other way. No man or woman in Jimmie’s employ ever asked me to intercede for him or her with my husband. If he had been fired, he knew that to approach me and ask that I try to “reason” with Jimmie would likely earn him something far worse than a mere dismissal.

So when I awoke to Jimmie’s top lawyer’s hand on my shoulder, telling me that I had to get up, I immediately knew what had happened. Only if Jimmie were dead would anyone dare enter my bedroom and think that he’d live to see the dawn.

“How?” I asked, immediately wide awake and trying to be mature. Inside, I was shaking. Of course it couldn’t be true, I told myself. Jimmie was too big, too alive, to be . . . to be . . . I couldn’t form the word in my mind.

“You have to get dressed now,” Phillip was saying. “We have to keep this secret for as long as we can.”

“Is Jimmie hurt?” I asked, my voice full of hope. Maybe he was in a hospital bed and calling for me. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. Jimmie knew how I worried about him. “I’d rather have my foot cut off than have to deal with your fretting,” he’d said more than once. He hated my nagging about his smoking, about his drinking, about his days without sleep.

“No,” Phillip said, his voice cold and hard. His eyes looked into mine. “James is not alive.”

I wanted to collapse. I wanted to dive back under the warm bedcovers and go back to sleep. And when I awoke again, I wanted Jimmie to be there, slipping his big hand under my nightgown and making those little growling sounds that made me giggle.

“You don’t have time for grief right now,” Phillip said. “We have to go shopping.”

That brought me out of my shock. “Are you mad?” I asked him. “It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ve arranged for a store to open. Now get dressed!” he ordered. “We have no time to lose.”

His tone didn’t scare me in the least. I sat down on the bed, my big nightgown billowing out around me, and I pulled my braid out from under me. Jimmie liked for me to wear old-fashioned clothes, and he liked for my hair to be long. After sixteen years of marriage, I could sit on my braid. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t have time now—” Phillip began, but then he stopped, took a deep breath, and looked at me. “I could be disbarred for this, but I made out James’s will, and I know what’s coming to you. I can hold off the vultures for a few days but no more. Until the will is read, you’re still James’s wife.”

“I will always be Jimmie’s wife,” I said proudly, holding all my chins aloft in the bravest stance I could muster. Jimmie! my heart was crying. Not Jimmie. Anyone on earth could die, but not Jimmie.