Read Some Wildflower In My Heart for Free Online Page B

only is it my first year at L. K. Drake, Mrs. Hartwell, it is my first year of formal schooling at any institution.” Several of my classmates laughed outright, and Mrs. Hartwell, who very likely interpreted my words as insubordinate, assigned me to a desk in the back corner. She was to be my English teacher as well as my homeroom teacher, and our relationship was not a happy one.
    The smile faded from Thomas’s lips and settled in his eyes. “You do favor Rosie, you know. Anybody else ever said that to you before?”
    I shook my head. “No,” I said. We stared at each other briefly before I turned to leave. He had a kind yet friendly, inquisitive look, though not intrusive. I had grown accustomed to avoiding the eyes of men.
    â€œI meant it as a compliment,” he called as I walked toward the door. “I always looked on Rosie as a real fine lady with a lot of grit and gumption. Pretty gal, too. Don’t think she had curls in her hair like you, though.”
    His words found favor with me, for as a child I had studied pictures of Rosie the Riveter in books and had admired her both as an American icon of wartime fortitude and as a handsome specimen of womanhood, being tall, with strong, well-sculpted features and thick dark hair.
    I stopped beside a display of gardening spades and turned around. I had thought of something. “Did you serve in the armed forces during the Second World War?” I asked.
    He nodded. “Sure did, ma’am. Sure did.”
    â€œWhere and when?” I asked.
    If his answer had been different, I am quite certain that our conversation would have ended there and would never have led, as it did three months later, to our marriage.
    â€œI was in the second wave of forces that invaded Normandy,” he said. “June the eighth, nineteen and forty-four.”
    â€œI see,” I said. “My father was there two days earlier on Omaha Beach.”
    He inhaled sharply, a mannerism that he continues to this day. “Did he…I mean, is he…?” His brow was furrowed, and his gray eyes were the color of morning fog.
    I shook my head. “He was killed exiting the landing craft—before his foot touched the sand.” I opened the door and walked out.
    He followed me out to the car. “I’m sorry about that, ma’am. Your daddy died a hero’s death. Him and all those others like him led the way for the rest of us to get in.” He looked off sorrowfully toward a row of shiny green wheelbarrows lined up on end against the front window, as if seeing a phalanx of small armored tanks. As I opened my car door, he said, “You live here in Filbert, Rosie?”
    â€œI do,” I said.
    Three months later I repeated these same two words in the office of a justice of the peace in Berea. At the age of thirty-five, I knew full well that no human could ever fulfill such grand, sweeping vows, and now sixteen years later, I am still stung by the thought of my cowardly acquiescence. I should have spoken aloud my honest intention: “No, I do not assent to these awesomely abstract promises, but I will be Thomas Tuttle’s wife. I will keep his house clean and decent. I will mend and launder his clothes. I will cook his meals and sit with him in the evenings. Do not ask more of me, for I cannot pledge what these vows demand.” Instead, I answered, “I do.”
    If the reader has never seen a picture of Rosie the Riveter, he may find one on the cover of the March 1994 issue of The Smithsonian , one of the two magazines to which I subscribe, the other being the Atlantic Monthly . I remember clearly the day last year when Thomas met the mailman beside the curb. It was a Saturday, and I was inside hemming a panel of draperies that hung too close to the baseboard heater. I heard Thomas give a whoop and looked out the window to see him hurrying toward the front door waving the new issue of The Smithsonian and shouting,