Sketch: Lavender Libby, 1972

A holiday story of a woman whose life was saved by something, or someone, she is not sure she saw.

(Note: This is the fourth character sketch from my novel, Hiram Falls, presented by professional actors in shows in 2021 by Vermont Stage Company in its production of ‘Winter Tales.’ Lavender is 72. But she doesn’t look it. The audio is by the author.)

December 21, 1972 

Lavender Libby always gets right up in the morning but this morning she lingers, trying to catch the unease that has overtaken her in the cold winter darkness. It’s not a dream, not some jiggery nightmare that sticks with her all day. It’s not that Syd couldn’t come over last night for dinner and a snuggle. It’s something else. Like someone’s watching her. Or listening in. Or talking about her.

Ah, feck. She says, throwing off the sheets and getting up. Lavender is 5’4” tall and solid. Big-boned, as they say. Sweet. But not always. She’s not someone to mess with. Even at her age. An attribute honed by managing the Hiram Falls Lumber Mill for 27 years, coping with loggers pissed at the price she set for their wood all the while them yelling like they were still out in the woods. “Go elsewhere,” she’d say. But they never did and eventually they’d calm down and end their charade.

Lavender is free of all that now. One day seven winters ago, she discovered something she shouldn’t have and, worse yet, she couldn’t talk about it with anyone or even say why she was so pissed off because that’s a secret too big for her to set free. So she walked out, telling Tim Whalen Jr. to send her last check in the mail.

And the next day she went to work with her daughter, Jenna, namesake of Jenna’s Diner. The baking queens. Jenna with her donuts. Lavender with her muffins and pies though it’s her pies they like most.

So here Lavender is in her kitchen, all dressed, her long lavender hair tied in a French braid, taking each of the muffins out of the pans and laying them in the slat-wood boxes her Dad made long ago. Each holds two dozen; each box can be stacked on another without touching the tops. Today: peach, apple and, for the lunch crowd, Leek Parmesan which, if you haven’t tried one, is to die for. In the last box she puts 24 balls of chilled pie dough, each wrapped in wax paper.

Outside now, she loads the back of her l961 special order lavender Rambler wagon, turns and looks up to the stars, takes a deep breath and figures it’s 7 degrees with no snow coming, despite the wind.

As she coaxes her beast of an automobile into first, she again feels a catch, a tweak, somewhere under her ribcage. Ain’t I a mess this morning? she thinks.

At the end of her drive she and the car slip-slide onto the dirt road all packed with snow and ice and sand and snow and ice like it is this time of year and will remain so until the daffodils finally poke up through the oak and maple and beech leaves in a grand showy illusion that it won’t snow again.

Lavender drives down the hill like most of us drive down a hill we’ve travelled every day for more years than we can remember –– too fast and not paying attention. She’s thinking about the day, about the meeting of the Holiday Committee, God bless their souls, where she and Syd and Jenna and Doc Fowler and Tim Whalen and Vera Nash and a few others in town with businesses or wallets or both meet in secret and decide who’s in most need of a food basket or some toys or both because their lives have gone haywire.

She’s thinking all this just when it happens. Coming out of the corner above Helen Thompson’s place, her headlights land on a man standing in the middle of the road, right smack in the center, 100 feet, 90 feet, 80 feet ahead, just standing there, wearing a long black oilskin coat. And no hat. In the moment between her heart leaping up through her nostrils and her brain telling her foot to slam on the brakes she wonders who it is and what the feck he is doing there. Her car is skidding now, the tires furiously trying to bite down on the snow ice dirt road but can’t, and Lavender downshifts into panic. Feck Feck Feck I’m gonna hit him, she thinks, until, at the very last possible moment before inevitability turns to reality, the man moves. Sidesteps right the feck out of the way like a fecking bullfighter. Lavender watches him go by, slow motion like, his grey eyes locked on hers, him smiling, as the car and Lavender pass him and the car finally shudders to a stall. Lavender leaps out to give the man what for, to tell him what an idiot he is, when THWUMP! And she hears a thump whump crash so loud, so deep it goes through her, nearly knocks her over, and she turns to see a giant tree fallen across the road 50 feet ahead, it’s giant branches still throbbing, and she turns back to where the man was standing, to where he was fecking smiling but he’s gone. Not there. Vanished.

She walks over to where he stood. Not a trace. In the road, no footprints. Snow bank undisturbed.  “Hey!” she yells, just to let the air out of her lungs. “Where are you?” Silence. Her anger dissipates. Replaced by worry. Confusion. “Hey! You! You OK?” Silence.

She stands in the cold silence a few seconds more. But the man is really not there at all. Almost like he hadn’t been there at all. So Lavender walks back to the car, tentative now, wondering what just happened, wondering if she is losing her fecking mind, thinking about how she’s been seeing things lately, hearing things, like the other day when she walked into the barn and saw one of her old horses standing in the stall and then looked again and the stall was empty. Of course it was; the horse has been dead for 20 years.

She gets into the car, starts it, puts it into reverse and spins back up the road all the way to Ned Bartels’ barn, where she turns around to go to the diner the long way. When she gets there, she calls Tim Whalen Jr. He’s asleep.

“Sorry to roust you, Tim,” she says, even though she’s not sorry at all. “This is Lavender.”

“I know who it is for gosh sakes. Everything OK?”

“No. Helen Thompson’s fecking elm tree came down across Lincoln Hill Road. If I’d been a few seconds sooner would have come right down on top of me. Get the forest crew out there lickety split, because someone’s gonna come barreling down that hill right into it.”

Say what you will about Tim Whalen Jr. and how he runs the Lumber Mill but he’s the best fire chief Hiram Falls has ever had. He jumps out of bed into his overalls the moment he hangs up. He tells his wife, Suzie, who’s also the dispatcher, to get the forest crew up there as soon as they can, that he’s on his way with one of the mill trucks and a handful of chain saws and some fluorescent signs.  “No siren, Suzie.”

Lavender hangs up and flips on the Diner’s ovens and the fry-a-lator, gets out the pie fillings she’s cooked the day before — more flavorful on the second day — and starts rolling out the pie dough on the steel table.

Jenna comes in.

“Morning, Ma.”

“You’re even later than I am this morning.”

“My aren’t we in a good mood?”

“Agitated.That’s all.”

They work in silence. They know how to do that. Jenna rattles around doing what you do to get ready for the likes of the Hardy Brothers and the Norton twins, the loggers and mill workers and carpenters and plumbers and farmhands and a host of others with big appetites who are too lazy, too lonely or too inept to make breakfast themselves. “Maybe they just like the fecking food you cook,” Lavender said one night when Jenna was feeling tired and cranky.

The ovens hot, Lavender slides in all the pies and sets the timers. She breaks the silence.

 “Strangest thing,” Lavender says. “Came around the corner above Helen Thompson’s place, and there was a man just standing in the middle of the road. Imagine that. Almost hit him. And when I stopped to see who it was and find out what the feck he was doing standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night, I heard a crash like you can’t believe and you know what it was? That old elm of Helen Thompson’s cut loose; fell right across the road. It would have killed me if I hadn’t stopped.”

“Who was the man?”

“That all you care about? I mean, aren’t you glad your Mom wasn’t killed?”

“Yep. But you’re here aren’t you? Who was the guy?”

“I don’t know. Never seen him before. And here’s the really weird part. He disappeared. Gone. Poof. Just like that.”

“Hmm.”

“Looked all over for him. Not a trace.”

“Maybe it was Ben Nash’s little pal?” Jenna says with a laugh.

“Oh, hush. That man’s brain is all fecked up from his accident. Besides, we aren’t supposed to know about that.”

 “Hmm. You call Tim?”

 “Of course,” Lavender says. Then she smiles. “Nothing could be finer than to wake that man up in the middle of the night.”

“You still pissed off at him?”

“Try working for him for 27 years.”

 “Hmm.”

The two are silent for a while more. Jenna rolls her Mom’s story over in her mind. It unsettles her. Worries her. “You sure you saw someone, Ma? That doesn’t make any sense.”

 “I told you, I saw someone. Standing in the middle of the road. Plain as day. He was fecking smiling at me. Then he disappeared.” I shouldn’t have told her, Lavender thinks.  Now she’ll think my brain is getting as fecked up as Ben Nash’s.

After a while, Lavender says, “You remember we got the Holiday Committee coming this morning, right? And tomorrow’s cooking day.”

“Oh, yah. I went down to Brickman’s last night; the turkeys are in and they’ve already started the cooking in their fancy-dancy new ovens. We’ll do our usual, the stuffing and veggies and relish and pies and muffins. Got enough for 72 this year. Patti and Rina and Grace are coming in to help us. We’re all set. Which pies you want for the meeting?”

“Wild blueberry.”

“Hmm. Guess Syd must be coming.”

“Hush you.”

“How you two getting on?”

“Fine.” Jenna waits for more in the silence, but Lavender volunteers nothing.

Syd is Syd Coyne. Lavender’s pal. They’ve been going out ever since Syd’s wife left him a few years back to find her bliss elsewhere. She didn’t even leave a note. Just packed her bags and left while Syd was at work. What pissed Syd off the most was that she took their brand new Waring blender.

When Lavender heard Syd’s wife left him, she took him a wild blueberry pie, his favorite, and soon the two were dating, much to the town’s delight. They never thought much of Syd’s wife. But they never stayed the night at the other’s house since neither liked to talk in the morning and neither liked to hear someone else’s weird noises coming from the bathroom first thing in the day.

One late night, returning from Syd’s house, Lavender drove by Orion Black’s place and noticed that all the lights were on. She thought it odd. Odder still was that they were still on the next night, too. So Lavender stopped. She had known Orion since school days, knew he lives alone, so she didn’t think twice about pounding on his door in the middle of the night. She heard him shuffling around, bumping into a table and then a chair, swearing, and finally coming to the door in his PJ’s.

Lavender thought he might have gotten into the cider, but what she discovered was that Orion was as blind as a shovel. He had no idea his lights were on. And Lavender discovered that no one knew he was blind except the delivery boy at Brickman’s Market. So Lavender decided right then and there that she’d make Orion a meal each week. And one morning, after fishing, she and Syd stopped by with a basket of almost still wriggling brook trout and Lavender fried them up in lard with some ramps and garlic and dill and pepper and the three of them agreed it was the best breakfast ever.

And that got Lavender to thinking: How many other people in town were blind, or were in trouble or were down on their luck and needed a little joy? And before long she started the Holiday Committee with the aim of filling the bellies of the hungry in town at their loneliest time of the year. And each year she makes sure that everyone keeps it quiet and that no one knows who is behind it all.

So here it is 10 a.m. sharp, the breakfast crowd gone, and Jenna flips the diner’s sign to closed. Syd arrives, gives Lavender a kiss on the top of her head and joins the committee hugging the big round corner table that looks out over the falls of Hiram Falls, today all sparkling from the mist that’s coated the hemlocks and pines and oaks.

The committee members insist on whispering even though the diner’s empty. One says Quincy Miles Babcock’s leg has fully healed and he’s back as lead sawyer at the mill. Everyone’s pleased to cross his family off the list. And Eva LaBonne has gotten married again but the new one is actually gainfully employed and adores each of her four children.

They are distressed to hear about others not so lucky. And soon they’ve reached 72 so the meeting shifts to logistics. Tim Whalen Jr. confirms he’s got a dozen volunteer firemen – sworn to secrecy – to do the deliveries and to make sure to leave the baskets on the porch or at the front door and to knock and skedaddle so the recipients aren’t embarrassed.

All that settled, they swoop into the blueberry pies, each wondering how anything could taste so fresh and so wonderful in the winter.

Lavender isn’t thinking about the pie. She’s been wanting to tell everyone about how she nearly got killed by an elm tree this morning, about the man standing in the road who disappeared. But she doesn’t. Not with Tim Whalen there. They might think I’m losing my marbles, she thinks. And maybe I am. Maybe I am. Or maybe it’s just a miracle. Lavender is unaware that if she had said something, Doc might have told her about his experience with the man long ago. Or Vera might have told them how she saw the man, the man Ben’s been talking to all these years, and now she knows that her husband isn’t going crazy.

But Lavender doesn’t say anything and as the still-warm pie melts in her mouth, she thinks of Anya Lapsa and how surprised she is going to be tomorrow as she stares out her curtainless window in her tiny house on Mt. Riga hoping the car coming in is her husband finally come home. But instead a pair of strapping young firemen will hop out, set on her stoop a big box of food and a bag of presents all wrapped for her boys, and they’ll drive off into the winter’s night before she even gets to the door, just as her boys come bounding down all excited to see a bag full of presents with their names on them.