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The Painted Table(79)

By:Suzanne Field


A song she heard on the radio a few days ago has since been maddeningly stuck in Saffee’s head. Pouring more remover into the bucket, she absentmindedly sings,





Sometime an April day will suddenly bring showers

Rain to grow the flowers for her first bouquet

But April love can slip right through your fingers

So if she’s the one don’t let her run away . . .





CHAPTER FORTY-SIX



JOANN’S NOTEBOOKS





Saffee pulls a box from beneath the bed and removes a pile of spiral-bound notebooks. Her fingers are sore from working so long on that stubborn carved vine. Today she will give them a rest. She turns pages of familiar handwriting that ranges from neatly penned to scrawls of jumbled emotion. Hatch marks slash through paragraphs deemed unacceptable.

Saffee skims the rambling “essay poem” Joann had written after attending the Miller’s Ford sewing club—“rhythms of boisterous chatter . . . raucous undercurrent . . . guttural pieties . . . boorish sticks and stones . . . rude cacophony . . .”

She shudders at the display of criticism. What insidious powers had countermanded Joann’s gifted mind so that a few women gathered to gossip had prompted this troubled torrent? She quickly exchanges the notebook for another and reads curious lines entitled “Night, From Under a Table.”





Benches bar the world; benches mark the dark.

A snore. A rustle. The last ember falls.

Who whispers there?

Will Someone come?

Or will she always be alone?

Pull the blanket tight, child.





Saffee can only guess what the words refer to. Any reference to a table must indicate the Norway table. Why would her mother have spent the night under it?

The cover of another notebook reads, “Herein lies evidence to hang, beatify, or bore.”

She grins. There was no denying that Joann could sometimes be witty. Inside, she reads a scathing account of her altercation with the minister and subsequent withdrawal from the church. A poem follows:





My days are troubled and few

Am I but a flower that fades?

Is there not hope for a tree cut down to sprout again?

Its root may grow old in the earth

Its stump may burn

Yet, at the scent of Water it will bud!

Oh, God! Hide me!

Conceal me ’til your wrath is past that I may not be burned

Find my transgressions sealed, O God

My iniquity covered over

My flesh pains; my soul mourns

Your holy fire purifies





The last line is scrawled to be almost unreadable—





Or is the inferno meant for me?





Saffee rereads the muddled words. Does “a tree cut down” refer to the wood of the Norway table as well as to Joann herself? By scraping away the desecrating paint from the dead table, Saffee hopes, like the poem says, to make it “sprout” and “bud” again. The process is giving her, too, a sanding and scrub, stretching her to bloom. Yes, Jack was right.

Oh, Lord, forgive my lack of love and sympathy for my ill mother. For years I practically denied her existence. Remove my own ugly, self-centered layers—and thanks for not using a wire brush! Bring forth new life in me. And the table. And Mother.

Although she is emotionally exhausted, Saffee moves on and finds what she has been hoping for, a poem called “The Vine.” It is dated shortly before the fateful Thanksgiving Day now so indelibly stamped into family memory. A catch in her chest makes her momentarily hesitate to read what might trigger the emotion of that night, but she is too curious not to.





The vine, that vigorous vine

has gone astray

Has become foreign to Him

The outcast vine grows with the tares





Shoots, planted by abundant waters

Spread branches turned toward Him

And commune with the stars

Roots, turned toward others

Will not thrive

Joy, sorrow

inextricably

intertwined





He will pull up the roots

Cut off the fruit

Leave it to wither.

The vine, that vigorous vine

has gone astray

Has become foreign to Him

The outcast vine grows with the tares





It seems possible that the table’s carved vine had suggested these words. Considering what happened in the Petersons’ yard, Joann must have meant them to be literal. That night it seemed as if she were fulfilling some personal directive to uproot the plants, the “tares.”

Saffee reads the enigmatic poem to its conclusion, aware she will never fully understand words sprung from Joann’s delusions:





The pruning shears

will come

must come

The cast-out branch is thrown into the fire!

I cling to the vine!

The pruning shears

will come

must come

“I give unto them eternal life; they shall never perish, Neither shall they be plucked from my hand.”





Saffee whispers, “Oh, Lord, I pray that in spite of her delusions, Mother knows that You are the Vine, and that You are truth.”