Of Ripeness & The River

By Mary F. Burns

in 1894, down the dark hill the woman runs, her child bound in a towel tight in her arms. Behind her, flames break through the windows of the house. Ahead, down by the river, men sleeping rough lean into a campfire. She doesn't falter, her feet seek the path. She knows the men will help--the same ones she'd fed at her back door the other day. What she doesn't know is that one of them will save her, and give her back her voice. And her voice will echo over a hundered years of life, war, loss and love---with singing words that shimmer on the surface of two rivers flowing through Time and the Midwestern plains, until Time itself is full and round and ripe--and another young woman hears, and finds her own voice again.

 

in 1982, Clare Yates returns home, defeated but determined to start over after leaving her lover in San Francisco. She teaches English at a large state university in a very small town. One day, she opens the diary of Jack London and finds something that tells her what she always thought was true--she has lived another life, in a different place and time. She decides to go looking for proof of that life, hoping for renewal and redemption. Then, "he" comes back to town, and it's as if nothing has changed. Only, everything has. A literary roman a clef ("story with a key") of sweeping personal and emotional intensity.

 

Readers say:

"In Of Ripeness & the River, Mary Burns moves us back and forward in time seamlessly with language that is at once lush and fresh. This is a story of a woman finding her voice through time but it is also the story of time itself, a tale of the interconnectedness of all things--history, loss, love, living and death, second chances. Two rivers flow timelessly and the midwestern plains sing in the background of this novel that is also grounded in the stories of Jack London and his life and writing. This book is a great read." – Valerie Hastings, author of Searching for Dandelion Greens

 

"In this extremely tender novel of loss and reconciliation, novelist Mary F. Burns once more uses two stories set in different time periods with her characters in close relationship. Very beautiful written and totally engrossing!"  -- Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart, The Players, Claude & Camille

• Language: English
• Publisher: Word by Word Press
• Release date: Aug 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201395483

Mary F. Burns

Mary F. Burns writes historical fiction, including an historical mystery series featuring the artist John Singer Sargent and the writer Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee). She is a member of and frequent speaker for the Historical Novel Society, as well as the Henry James Society and the International Vernon Lee Society.  Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (BA/MA English Lit); J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law. She lives in San Francisco with her husband. Before she wrote novels, her career focused on media relations, corporate communications, crisis communication consulting, and event organization. As an independent scholar, Mary has focused her studies and writing on Vernon Lee, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. Her novels frequently include noted authors as characters, such as Jack London, George Sand, John Singer Sargent, Vernon Lee, and Henry James. Her literary essay “Reading Mrs. Dalloway” was published in 2020, and the Henry James Review published her paper on Vernon Lee and Henry James in the Winter 2023 issue. She has presented papers at various academic conferences: The Sargentology Conference, York University, 2016; Henry James Society Annual Conference, Trieste University, 2019; Vernon Lee: Aesthetics & Empathy at Churchill College, Cambridge, 2022; Keynote Speaker, Teesside University Postgraduate Conference 2023: Ethics, Literature, Culture. Her website is www.maryfburns.com Mary F. Burns writes historical fiction, including an historical mystery series featuring the artist John Singer Sargent and the writer Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee). She is a member of and frequent speaker for the Historical Novel Society, as well as the Henry James Society and the International Vernon Lee Society.  Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (BA/MA English Lit); J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law. She lives in San Francisco with her husband.

Book preview

1

August 1982

A University Town along the Kishwaukee River

DeKalb, Illinois

Sunday Afternoon

The river sang, saturating the summer air with a calm and deep yearning as it thrummed its way around the curve that embraced the white house at the end of the street. Inside by the open window, Clare Yates stared at a blank piece of paper in front of her, fountain pen in hand, and waited for the words to come.

Waited, called, urged, yelled—fell silent. Again. It wasn’t going to happen. Poetry eluded her; words shimmered at the edges and disappeared.

She gave up, shoved the blank paper aside, and with a sigh of resignation, reached for her paperback copy of  Jack London’s The Road, which she would teach to her freshmen classes in the Fall semester, just weeks away. Better get started now.

She wasn’t expecting to like it, but slowly the voice engaged her—cocky, irreverent, boyish yet also wise beyond his seventeen years—and with a formidable vocabulary that was both lyrical and sly. He was describing an encounter with a kind farmer’s wife and her disabled son—he’d come to her back door to beg for food. She read the line aloud.

She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it that I yearned to appropriate.

Clare shook her head. Such economy in his writing, such a subtle turn with that one word—appropriate. From sympathetic observer to scheming con man in a flash. She made a careful note, in pencil, in the margin of the page.

And that other word—yearned. Why did that touch her so?

She heard Jane get up from the rocking chair on the front porch. The old wooden boards creaked under her bare feet as she came to the window, smiled, leaned in. Jane had just turned thirty, two years younger than Clare, dark with olive skin and black eyebrows, smooth black hair pulled into a thick braid. Their Irish fathers were brothers—Jane’s father had married a Sicilian woman, where Clare’s father had fallen for a tall, pale Norwegian, bequeathing to their daughter fair hair and skin verging on translucence, her eyes light blue rimmed with gray.

Think I’ll walk out to the farm stand, Jane said. The tomatoes are really good this year, and we’re all out. She cocked her head. Wanna come?

Clare put a finger in her book, held it against her chest. Thanks, no, she said. I might take a walk in the other direction. But aloud, Any idea how many we’re feeding tonight? It was Sunday, end of the weekend.

They both smiled and Jane’s brow crinkled. I think three, she said, but you never know. She straightened up from the window, spoke as she turned away. There’ll be enough. Clare wondered, briefly amused, if she meant people or food. Maybe both.

Clare had a gift for finding stray students and a certain kind of faculty member, lost in the small university town all during the year, but especially at the end of a hot summer, stranded between terms—she gathered them like the last, large, dusty blackberries hiding under browning leaves of bushes that edged the endless cornfields. They were the seekers and the shy; the curious and the confounded; and in Clare’s river-enfolded white wooden house with the shady front porch, the long dining room table with mismatched chairs, and the kitchen sparkling and humming with the industry of nurture, they found a place to be.

She leaned back in her chair and thought about the word yearning. Jack had used it; she felt it strong inside herself, turning and turning. Yearning and yearning in the widening gyre, the falcon does not hear the falconer... the substituted words in Yeats’ most celebrated poem seemed somehow fitting, more meaningful to her, now, here, at this moment in her life. I yearn, I yearn.... She looked up at the framed print that hung above her desk, a charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent of a forty-three year old William Butler Yeats—her distant relative from a generation or so ago, whose branch spelled the family name wrong, according to her father. He doesn’t even look twenty, she thought, much less more than twice that. He looks like Skip. Change the Bohemian floppy bow and fitted coat for a denim work shirt...Skip Oakley, twelve years ago. I was twenty then.

She set The Road down, picking up a bookmark to slip into the pages, a bookmark that was a postcard she’d bought at the Art Institute in Chicago. She looked at it thoughtfully. It was a painting by Whistler—a young woman dressed in a gown of white, her long brown hair undone and mussed, white flowers falling from her hand (a symbol, she’d read, of virginity deflowered)—the girl looked dreamy, or perhaps stunned. Clare had always found it a disturbing image, like many of Whistler’s women. Something about the look on her face touched a nerve. And yet, it was compelling. Her fingers twitched, that feeling to write tingled again—but no, it had been too long since a poem had formed in her mind and run out through her fingers—she didn’t believe in it, that feeling. Not anymore. She put the postcard in the book, closed it and set it down.

She moved away from her desk and walked to the front door, which was open, and stood looking out through the worn, wooden screen door at the quiet street, grassy lawns and sidewalks uneven with old tree roots below. Her house was at the bottom of a dead end street, where the Kishwaukee River whispered and gurgled as it rounded a bend in the meadows that bordered the cornfields.

This was not the university side of town, which had few children, no laundry hanging on lines in backyards, and where late-model cars hid in the garages and the garage doors were always closed. When Clare had fled San Francisco six years ago and returned here, she had chosen this older house near the river, deep in the Town side of the Town and Gown divide, where the lawns were strewn with bicycles and toys, and neighbors sat on porches late after dinner. During the long summer days, garage doors yawned wide as men and boys moved in and out with purpose and tools and yard machinery. She rented the house at first, then was able to pull together loans and savings for a down-payment.  

She took a tentative step outside. There was a stir in the air, as happens sometimes in late August—a hint of the Autumn to come. She looked up at the clouds—a mackerel sky, her mother would say, with a wistful yet satisfied smile, pointing to the mottled shapes strewn across the pale blue like a shield thrown, a wedge of shadow and light. Clare suddenly wanted to talk to her mother, be with her—but her parents were away from home, a long-planned vacation to England and Ireland. They wouldn’t be back for some weeks. She tried to shake off a creeping sense of loneliness.

Should she take that walk? But where to? And why? You’re absurd, she told herself, why is not a question to ask about a walk. But she stood, inert, uninterested. Nothing matters, some voice said. Anymore, it added after a moment. Nothing matters anymore. Unbidden, Emily Dickinson spoke to her.

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Clare turned and went back into the house. She didn’t hear the river whisper to her of something on the move, of words and sounds in motion.

Jane had come home with more than tomatoes for dinner, found Clare reading again at her desk, and merely smiled as she swept by on her way to the kitchen. By late afternoon, tantalizing aromas of onions, tomatoes, Italian sausage and bell peppers were stealing into Clare’s consciousness, followed an hour later by the buttery almond fragrance of peach pie. She glanced at the clock: almost six. She’d made some headway with the Jack London book, but she felt she was beginning to lose interest. Hoboes jumping on and off trains, avoiding the bulls—the hobo word for railroad guards—getting caught and jailed for vagrancy, for begging, for just standing on the sidewalk with no work and no home—times were tough toward the end of the last century. Times are still tough, she thought, for lots of people.

She reached for a manila envelope that had been delivered a few weeks ago—she hadn’t gotten around to opening it—from The Palimpsest Society of Des Moines, Iowa. Her research on Jack London in early June had yielded a reference to a verbatim reprint in the Society’s magazine, in 1926, by London’s widow Charmian, of his diary of 1894, from which he drew the experiences that would become The Road, published in 1906—but even that edition hadn’t been widely available until about a dozen years ago. She’d thought that maybe the original would yield more substance, and also style differences that would be useful to work on with her students; it was worth a look.

She paged through the stapled Xerox copy of the magazine article, paused at four pages of grainy black and white photographs showing Kelly’s Army of hoboes on the march from California to Washington, D.C., a massive protest about unemployment. One showed London’s face with its signature crooked grin just peeking out of a lower right-hand corner. The diary had weekly entries, sometimes several days in a row of mere notes and brief sentences, sometimes with long gaps, starting in February and ending abruptly in June, upon London’s arrival in Chicago. He never made it to Washington.

One entry date caught her eye—April 30, 1894—her birth date, but nearly sixty years before she was born.

Monday Apr. 30. Booneville, Commerce, Val. Junc., Des Moines. I walked 15 miles into Des Moines, arriving in camp in time for supper. The Army is encamped at the stove works situated about a mile & a half east of the state capital. In Val. Junction I met a detective belonging to my society. Also a fine lady. We all slept inside of the works. A great many intended to sleep by the fire but a fierce thunder storm arose & there was a grand scramble for shelter.

Clare set the papers down and took up The Road, searching for the corresponding place in Jack’s published version of his diary. She found the same date and place names—it was the same entry, but without the mention of meeting a detective belonging to my society, or the phrase, Also a fine lady. Clare knew Jack had been a member of the all-male Bohemian Club in San Francisco, so that might be the society he referred to, although he wouldn’t have been a member  when he was seventeen. But that other phrase—something faint and deep resonated with those words. When a man like Jack notes down that he met a fine lady, that meant something—something more than it appeared to be.

But it felt like even more than that. She quickly skimmed the pages from the original diary for the entries around April 30th, and read how Jack’s feet were killing him, with multiple blisters, shoes that had no soles, and then no shoes at all—and how he and other renegade types took their own boat and oared it down the Des Moines River and its tributaries, down to Keokuk, where it meets the Mississippi, stopping overnight on the shore and begging for food along the way.

Her heart pounded as she read his account, and her mind was flooded with a sensation like remembering—but what could it be that she was remembering? She closed her eyes and saw a scene—one that she had seen many times before—a recurring dream fragment, in which a woman in long dark clothes runs down a hill away from a burning house, a baby in her arms, heading toward a riverbank where hoboes crouch around a campfire. That was all—over and over, the same scene had played through her dreams for years.

She carefully laid the papers on her desk, took a deep breath, and stood up. This is nuts. There’s no connection here, there can’t be. This isn’t reality, it’s mere coincidence. It means nothing.

It means nothing, she repeated under her breath. But a tiny rivulet of something like hope arose from her heart, and she wondered if she could trust in it, somehow.

2

October 1893  

A Country Town along the Raccoon River

Valley Junction, Iowa

Mary Ferguson put a hand to her aching back, stretching backwards to ease the pressure from the baby she carried. Won’t be long now, her mother had told her, placing a hand on her daughter’s round belly. The child has shifted low, into position. That’s good. Her mother had smiled reassuringly. Mary tried to smile back; this was her first baby, but her mother had ushered many other women’s children into the prairie life of Iowa. She should trust her mother’s experience.

That was a week ago, and the baby still lay heavy, like a ripe melon in the field, but a melon with feet and hands that kicked. She—Mary was convinced there was a daughter waiting to be born—even woke up Sean, heavy sleeper as he was, as Mary lay with her stomach against her husband’s back, resting a little sideways for support. What wouldn’t she give to sleep on her side, or her stomach, again?

Today she sat, mostly sideways, at a small rolltop desk that Sean had made for her as a wedding present; in its cubbyholes and smooth-working drawers she kept her pens and ink, her notebooks and paper for writing. A separate little nook held her favorite books of poetry: the Sonnets, Tennyson, Whitman. She reached for a particular small book, one her mother had ordered from Boston for her birthday in September: The Poems of Emily Dickinson. A radical new poet—and a woman. The cover was part dove gray, part dark gray, with a wavy line of gold embossed between the two shades, and a decoration of gray daffodils against the light gray leather. She opened the book with great care, it was already getting worn, she had read it so often, and murmured aloud the first words her eyes fell upon: 

A Route of Evanescence 

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald 

A Rush of Cochineal –

If only I could write like that, she thought, and felt the baby move inside her in response. She brushed away a curl of dark hair that had fallen across her forehead. She closed the book and took up a pen, dipped it in the inkpot, and held it, poised to write, over a fresh sheet of off-white paper.

Time herself holds an inward breath

Awaiting the chiming of a universal bell

She doubled over with a sudden sharp pain as a rivering gush of fluid between her legs wetted her bloomers. It’s time. Mama!

The baby girl slid into the world as easy and quick as a molded custard onto a plate.

Katherine Mary Ferguson, the girl’s father breathed on her softly as he said the name, his Old Country lilt softening the consonants and lengthening the vowels. She had been bathed and wrapped warm in a cocoon of hand-woven blankets, and he received the brilliant-eyed child from his wife, already sitting up and eager to see her daughter. His hands held her firmly, work-roughened hands, but also sensitive, intuitive—he was a master carpenter. His artfully carved leaves and whorls and flowers adorned many a wealthy house in Des Moines and the grand stairways of more than one government building in the state’s growing capitol.

The brisk autumn wind rattled the windows, but the house—they called it River House—was well-built and warm. Sean had added a second floor over the Summer, with a broad central staircase that rose to two bedrooms set back from a hallway overlooking the entrance below. Mary’s mother preferred to keep her small room off the kitchen, where she stayed when she visited, so the young couple had taken full possession of the rooms above—now, with baby Katherine Mary in the crib in their room.

She’s entirely too wee to call her by those long names, Sean said. Katie she is, then? Mary nodded, smiling; it’s what she had called her daughter, in her heart, from the moment she felt her move about inside her womb.

Sean had ambition, and aspirations to become  someone to be reckoned with in the town; he’d married into the established, well-regarded Davenport family—the luck of his heritage, he always said, that he fell in love with Mary, and she loved him back. Mary’s mother, a widow with a handsome fortune, welcomed the hard-working young Irishman as her daughter’s suitor, and they all got along famously.

A week or so passed, and Mary’s mother announced her intention to return to her own house, in the city proper, some fifteen miles from where Sean and Mary lived in Valley Junction, which was near the Raccoon River.

Mama, you’ve been so wonderful to stay all this time and help, Mary said as she sat nursing the baby. A hard frost had lightly covered the land during the night, and the day was crisp and clear and sparkling. Looking out the window, she saw Sean and the hired man bringing the carriage to the front of the  house from the barn, to take her mother home. Through the thinning branches and down the hill, she caught a glimpse of the river, sparkling on its rushing way south.

Oh, this little one is so happy and calm, her mother said, coming over to stroke the baby’s fuzzy head, there’s been little for me to do. She straightened up and sighed. It’s time I was back to see about my own affairs. Her husband—Edward Davenport, of the Rock Island Davenports—had entrusted his business, a private bank, to her; even before his death, she had been as keen a board member as any man in town. She was now president of the board, and had been putting off meetings while staying with Mary and Sean.

Mother and daughter embraced each other tightly, and Mrs. Elizabeth Davenport left to retrieve her suitcase and prepare for the ride home.

3

August 1982

DeKalb, Illinois

Sunday Evening

Voices, low-pitched and laughing, could be heard approaching, then footsteps on the walk, the steps, stopping at the door.

Hello? Anyone home?

Clare heard Jane answer before she could even draw breath to respond.

C’mon in, you guys, Jane called from the kitchen.

Clare went to the door of the study. She willed away the confusion and excitement of the last half hour—Jack London and her dream—and composed herself to greet her guests.

Hey Thomas, hey Kyle, she said, leaning in for a hug as two young men paused in the hall. She felt that Thomas held onto her a little longer than usual, and she instinctively tightened her arms around him, holding him close. You okay? she murmured, and a quick shake of his head confirmed her intuition. His light brown hair was cropped short on the sides but long on top, with a few stray curls that he frequently pushed back from his eyes. He pulled out of the embrace and turned to pick up his cello case without indicating more, and stepped back to greet Jane, who was drying her hands on a dish towel.

Me next, said Kyle. He was shorter than Thomas, and slender, his Japanese father’s heritage in his clear dark eyes and very long, very black hair; but both boys were slender, even skinny. In the few months that Jane had been staying with Clare, she had put a lot of effort into feeding them, to little apparent effect. Kyle was a pianist, and his grip on her midriff made Clare gasp.

Sorry, sorry, Kyle said, letting go. He grinned. Don’t know my own strength. He nodded a greeting to Jane, who was hugging Thomas.

You ready for this year? Clare said, and watched out of the corner of her eye as Jane and Thomas headed off for the kitchen together—they had bonded quickly, soon after Jane arrived. Come on into the living room, tell me what you’ve been up to.

They walked down the little hall and turned into the spacious living room, filled with light from the bay window that opened to the side lawn, facing the river, and from windows fronting the porch, though shaded by a large oak tree. Clare flipped the switch to start the ceiling fan, to pull in the cooling drafts from the river, and gestured to Kyle to sit where he liked. She chose one corner of the leather sofa, which faced a custom wood coffee table, with the bare grates of the fireplace beyond it. Kyle settled into the other corner, talking excitedly.

...place in Vermont, like a music retreat in a way, out in the country. People were practicing in barns and under trees and all over the house, which was huge, like, four stories with a really long attic space. I got to stay in one of the little what do you call them dormer rooms? With the little roof sticking out? It was kind of hot during the day but really beautiful at night, you could look out and see the moon shining down on the fields, and there were owls at night, and chickens, I mean, chickens in the barnyard...and I learned some new things, Satie... Still talking, he jumped up from the sofa and headed for the piano on one side of the room. It was a Bosendorfer grand, a family piano that had found a home with Clare when she bought the house.

Kyle sat on the bench and paused a moment, his face alight with appreciation. I love this piano, he said, then placed his fingers gently on the keyboard. The solemn, mournful opening notes of the first Gnossienne drifted about the room. The early evening light warmed the colors of the walls, the wood floors, their skin.

Absorbed in his playing, Kyle didn’t hear the quiet approach of another dinner guest on the front steps. But Clare heard the person pause, perhaps listening to the gorgeous sound, until the last note died away.

The screen door opened and a clear high voice called into the house.

I’m here, okay? It’s Sarah.

Clare smiled and called out a greeting. Hey, Sarah! she said. C’mon in!

A tall young woman with cropped blond hair appeared in the doorway. Clare looked at her with surprise.

You’ve cut your hair!

Kyle pounded out a loud fanfare on the piano, grinning as Sarah acknowledged the introduction with a bow, then pirouetted neatly into the room, landing softly on the couch next to Clare. She mussed her short hair with one hand.

After wearing it pulled back all summer long, Sarah said, I finally decided, what the heck, might as well cut it off. There was a tiny wobble of uncertainty in her voice.

It looks terrific, Clare said immediately, and brushed a stray lock out of the younger woman’s eyes. That felt like my mother, she thought. Let us see your pretty face.

You didn’t do it yourself, did you? Clare asked, eyeing the haircut; it looked professional.

Sarah shook her head. I went to the fancy salon, you know, on Third Street?

Clare nodded and looked up as Kyle came back from the piano and sat on the chair across from them.

I’ll probably need a haircut before classes start, he said, shaking his head and letting the long strands of black hair fall any which way, except that it always fell perfectly straight. Sarah laughed and made some remark that fell into the background of Clare’s hearing as she drifted off, thinking about the strange fine lady and Jack London.

Did you ever think you had lived a different life, in a different time, years ago? she asked abruptly, interrupting