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It wasn’t that Raine minded rubbing Nathan Jackson’s broad shoulders. No, not at all. Nathan had beautiful shoulders, all shades of brown with undertones of pink and gold and smooth play of light and shadow over rounded muscle and sharp planes of bone. She loved the feel of his smooth skin under her hands, the firm curve of muscles, the little noises he made when she pressed just right, palms and heels, thumbs and fingers.
It wasn’t his muscles she minded.
It was the salve.
It was the pungent smell of camphor burning her eyes and making her squint and tear, making her throat feel raw, and causing her nose to tingle so she would wonder whether she would ever be able to smell normally again. To make matters worse, her hands would be coated with the thick oily stuff and the smell would follow her around no matter how many times she washed, whether Nathan and his sore muscles were in the room or not. It would be stuck in her nose.
Wishing for the tiny little jar to be empty already wasn’t going to help her either. He would just go buy more.
She tried not to complain. And since she had to stand behind him to massage his sore shoulders, it was easy enough to keep Nathan from seeing her face all twisted up while she tried to breathe through her mouth.
When she was done or her hands were tired or Nathan just got fidgety, she would wash her hands and he’d pull a tee shirt on over his warm sticky shoulders. Then he would go his smelly way, inhabiting every room of their house, the aroma lingering like a ghost. And she’d spend the rest of the day trying to remember not to complain or move away from him quite so automatically when he walked into the room.
Once, early in their relationship, they had met in a nice little café for lunch. She arrived first and found them a table before the café began to fill up. Facing the door, she had the advantage of seeing Nathan first when he strode through the door, all unconscious grace and that wonderful smile that was light shining out of darkness. He was close enough to see his eyes crinkle up at the corners as he smiled, and she was about to get up and give him a hello kiss, when she was suddenly derailed by a sharp, pungent vapor that assaulted her nose. She coughed into her hand and then realized with no small horror that the smell had come with her tall, handsome boyfriend.
She could hardly fail to recognize the sharp tang of camphor. She was a medical resident, after all. And she was more than passingly familiar with many naturopathic and folk medicine trends, especially given her boyfriend’s passion for both topics.
Had she been warned that her sexy boyfriend was going to be a walking cloud of camphor stink, she might have chosen the outdoor seating. It was too late now, and the little bubble of space that had begun to form between them and the other diners was becoming a bit embarrassing. But between his ATF team and her hospital, time they could find to spend together was precious, so she kissed him and tried to make her way through lunch like nothing was bothering her.
But finally, she had to put down her salad fork.
It didn’t take him long to notice. Or perhaps it was the way she sat with her fist beneath her nose.
“Too much?” he asked.
It never even occurred to her that he might have been referring to the size of her salad. Instead she blurted out “How can you stand that smell?” horrifying herself and probably anyone who happened to overhear.
He blinked at her.
Of course, she considered guiltily, Nathan’s fellow ATF agents, his teammates, his crazy little band of brothers, had probably already put him through the ringer. She didn’t know them well at that point, but she had seen how they didn’t pull their punches with regard to each other. Even then she knew the cloud of camphor was hardly going to go unnoticed or get by without being roundly mocked. He probably didn’t need her criticism spoiling their time together, too.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered out guiltily and called on all the consideration she had, reminding herself that Nathan was a fine and handsome man, a good man, and a decent one. And she could do a better job of appreciating that.
But then he surprised her.
The smile that slowly spread across his face, rueful and good-natured in turns, melted her horror into something entirely different.
“Did I ever tell you about my gramma?” he asked, putting down his own fork.
His smile got wistful.
Fact was, Nathan didn’t really like to talk about himself much. So between the temptation of learning more about him and what made him into the man he had become, and the way his eyes, lifted to hers, got all big and round and earnest, Raine could hardly resist.
She shook her head. No, he had not told her about his gramma. And she became all attention, breathing through her mouth so as not to let the camphor vapors distract her—and hoping she was being subtle and considerate enough that he didn’t notice.
She watched his eyes, all velvet brown and framed in curling lashes, as his focus drew farther and farther away until he was no longer looking at her, not really. His voice, rich and vibrant, painted the picture for her in vivid strokes of a tiny sharecropper’s cottage deep in Alabama, with white laundry blowing on the line and cotton fields all around. Nathan’s granddaddy had been a sharecropper back in the day, but between his gramma’s hiring out for washing and cleaning, the egg money from the chickens, and all the scrimping and the saving, they had raised up six children—one of them Nathan’s mama—and eventually managed to buy that tiny cottage surrounded by cotton fields. The fields got sold to a corporation, and Grandaddy found a better job. But the house stayed with Nathan’s gramma and granddaddy.
It wasn’t much to look at, Nathan knew, looking back, but when he was a little boy, it was a kind of paradise. He spent a lot of summers there, he and his sisters both, while Mama and Daddy traveled.
At Gramma and Grandaddy’s, there was no sleeping in and no sitting around watching TV. Gramma rousted them out of bed for breakfast almost as soon as the sun was up. A person could count the passing of the days by the food Gramma put on the table. If it was Sunday, they rose to fluffy buttermilk griddlecakes before squirming into their best clothes—including hats for the girls—and after careful inspection, and in Nathan’s case the occasional trip back to wash overlooked smudges or behind missed ears, hustling out the door to church. On Saturdays, bacon and eggs tempted Nathan and his sisters to the table before Gramma put them to work all morning setting the house to rights, top to bottom. They dusted, scrubbed, scoured, and put out fresh linens. Saturday afternoon, Gramma did the baking. And she didn’t like having the children in the way. Nathan liked to stick close by the door in the shade of the porch just in case bowls and spoons needed to be licked or hot, crusty yeast rolls needed to be sampled, all golden and dripping with butter. The rest of the week was grits and cereal, sometimes cold with milk and sometimes oatmeal or farina. During the working week, Gramma shooed Nathan and his sisters out from under foot and all the way out the front door just as soon as the breakfast table was cleared.
Nathan didn’t mind the work much, and he didn’t miss the TV. Instead, he spent the long mornings chasing butterflies and grasshoppers through the knee-high grass at the edge of the road, waving at tractors raising up brown clouds out of the dirt roadways, and swinging up into the branches of the stunted, gnarly cottonwood trees by the creek. Sometimes he crawled under the front porch and lay there in the cool, like generations of old hound dogs had, and spy on his sisters, their hair done in complicated twirls and beads, wearing bright summer dresses and playing silly girl games in the yard. Sometimes he joined them. He was a fair hand at jumping rope. Sometimes he coaxed them into tossing a ball back and forth or a game of keep away. But it was always the girls against the boy. Not that he minded. Sometimes he just read books in the shade by the porch.
One thing was near certain: come lunchtime he’d get scolded.
“Honestly child, I don’t know how a body can get so stained up and filthy in just a few hours out of doors. Go wash up ‘fore you come to the table. Face and hands both, you hear?” Delivered in one long breath while the edge of her white and many-times mended apron fluttered at him to hurry him along.
“Yes, ma’am,” he’d say dutifully and try to look shame-faced about his hard-earned grass stains.
At the bathroom sink, he could grin into the mirror and listen to her muttering in the hall and along into the kitchen, then the clink of dishes and pots and pans. And then she’d start giving order to his sisters.
He’d hustle through washing, but he was always last to lunch.
There would be a short grace thanking the Lord for all the good they had and asking him to protect them all and especially Nathan’s mama and daddy as they traveled. Lunch was leftovers from last night’s supper and suppers before that eaten cold: fried chicken, slabs of ham, biscuits or white bread and strawberry jelly red as jewels, fat squares of yellow cheese cut off a big block, round spicy discs of summer sausage, and cold slices of cucumber and green peppers, or juicy tomatoes on bread slathered with butter. Then came Gramma’s canned peaches or some cut-up fruit in little off-colored ceramic bowls. The bowls were like everything in the house, well-worn but well-cared for. Meant to last.
After eating came dishes. Nathan’s mama and daddy didn’t hold with the notion of girls’ work and boys’ work. They all ate the food, so they all had to clean up. So Nathan did his share of the work in an all-fired hurry, flinging himself about the little kitchen stacking the dirty dishes, swiping the flour-sack dishcloths across the scrubbed plates, round and round, climbing up and down the stepstool to put cups and glasses, dishes and silverware away in the cupboards and drawers, swishing the straw broom across the worn linoleum. He imagined himself the Tasmanian Devil, whirling crazily. But the few times he really tried out his best Tasmanian Devil imitation, he was told to stop being so annoying—this from his sisters—and to watch where he was going ‘fore he broke something—this from his gramma. So he kept that part to himself.
The heat of the afternoon kitchen sent him bursting back out through the door, forgetting and letting the screen door slam behind him, drawn like a magnet to the little creek that meandered nearby. He’d pull his sneakers and socks off in the cool shade of the bushes and cottonwoods along the bank and wade up and down, wiggling his toes in the cool water, and holding up his pant legs that never stayed cuffed up no matter how he folded them. He scanned for minnows and crawdads and salamanders or toads and frogs. He usually came back soaked, having slipped off some wobbling stepping stone and fallen on his britches in the water. He didn’t mind that either. That was what the sunshine was for, drying him off while he lazily watched clouds drift by, keeping one eye out for Grandaddy’s car.
If you didn’t see Grandaddy’s car come winding up the road, a cloud of road dust shining around it in the late afternoon sun like a tarnished brown halo, then you could surely hear it rattle and lurch, rumbling and rocking along the rutted road. Nathan and his sisters would run to the short space of yard allotted to be the driveway, all chattering at once. Then Grandaddy’s tired, work-worn face would instantly transform, lit up with a wide grin, the papery crinkles around his eyes forming a frame for the twinkle. He’d throw an arm over the nearest two children and say “Help me to the house, for I’m tired from workin’ all day to feed all these young ‘uns,” same as he said to his own children all those years ago. And along the way, from the pockets of his stained old coveralls, he’d fish out peppermints or sourballs, or a little bag of licorice whips. “Don’t show your gramma,” he’d warn. “And don’t eat ‘em ‘fore dinner.”
Routinely, Nathan obeyed the first directive and ignored the second.
The only blemishes on this perfect paradise were that the shallows of the creek were full of mosquitoes as well as tadpoles. The grass was full of chiggers and brambles, and somehow his bare legs would always find poison ivy before the first week at Gramma and Grandaddy’s was out. The first sign of itching prompted Gramma to bring out an old blue piece of crockery that housed her special salve. Part liniment, part anesthetic, Gramma’s salve was made up of skunk grease, bear fat, and magic dust, or so Gramma said. But it smelled so strongly of camphor, Grandaddy swore it would cure the common cold. It soothed itches, dried up poison ivy, cooled off Gramma’s “heat headaches”, calmed coughs, eased stiff muscles, opened up stuffed-up noses, and let Gramma always know where the rascal wearin’ it was hidin’ hisself—since it was usually Nathan or Grandaddy who had to wear the smelly stuff.
Raine never got tired of hearing Nathan talk about those summers, no matter how many times he told the same story. But she didn’t love the tales as much as she loved Nathan telling them. In his voice she heard the echo of a small boy she wished she had known. She could hear echoes of Nathan’s gramma herself when he imitated her tsk and tut and sigh as her crooked fingers slid across his skin, the salve cool and soothing to itchy, sun-baked skin. How she sang old timey church songs and radio songs, her off-key cracking voice so soft that Nathan never did hear the words proper. How she muttered her astonishment that “ANYBODY could get poison ivy THERE” or twitched her fingers into the skinned-knee holes in his jeans. Or the stories she sometimes told him about his mama and his uncles and aunts when they were little boys and girls.
And oh how Nathan’s face could shine in the telling. It warmed Raine like a little sun inside. And she was content to let him talk for as long as he had a mind to.
But it didn’t take many tellings before she figured it out. She was a smart girl, after all. She didn’t need to be a federal agent to put the clues together.
She knew that Nathan didn’t’ understand for a number of years why his mama and daddy couldn’t take him and his sisters with them as they traveled around to march and speak at rallies and protests across the country. It wasn’t until years later that he saw the news reports, the protests, and swift and brutal retaliations from police and soldiers and came to understand what an assassination was that he understood why he and his sisters were sent off to Gramma’s for safe keeping or why phone calls from his parents were so intermittent and so brief—and so important.
He was man enough to admit that it took him several more years to realize how brave his parents had been and how strong their belief in the citizen’s responsibility to stand up for a just and fair government. By then his parents had broadened their focus to a wide variety of social causes, not just causes that affected the black community.
He was a full grown man and out of college before he got past the anger of that little boy inside him wondering why his parents had to take such risks or why he and his sisters weren’t important enough to keep their family at home and together, why Mama and Daddy chose rallies and protests over summer with their own kids. By then Nathan had lost his mama to one of those retaliatons, and his daddy was in the claws of cancer and not likely to win his battle.
Raine admired all the more how somewhere in all that crisis and injustice, somewhere in the pain of losing them, Nathan discovered his balance. He found in himself the tenacity of purpose his parents had shown. And he chose a path that honored both his parents’ beliefs and his own, acting every day on his citizen’s right and his obligation to stand up and fight for justice. And like his Mama and Daddy’s, Nathan’s path brought its own share of self-sacrifice.
But summer at Gramma and Grandaddy’s was an oasis in the present as much as it had been in the past. It was a kind of sacred memory for Nathan. And for Raine, too, in the telling. It was a bubble of brightness and endless summer, safety and kindness, chicken suppers, cold sweet tea and shoo fly pie, hands rubbing in homemade liniment, and a cracked warm voice singing low.
Watching his face and listening to him tell the old stories, Raine deduced all on her own that for the time it took for Gramma to apply salve and liniment and ointment to his hurts and bites and scratches and sing old songs and tell stories about summers long past, a little boy shipped off to his Gramma’s and Grandaddy’s because there was no place for him at his parents’ side knew, for a short moment, what it was to be the most important person in the universe.
The smell of camphor reminded Nathan of that.
But it still stunk.
Raine would never, ever, disrespect those memories of Gramma and Grandaddy. And she would never get tired of rubbing Nathan’s beautiful shoulders. But she was pretty sure there were plenty of other ways to make Nathan feel like the most important person in the universe.
Raine was a smart girl, after all, and she had no shortage of ideas about how to do that.
If they were lucky, she thought, trying them all could take the rest of their long, long lives.