From the Relief Society Magazine, May 1949 –

You Might Have Waited

By Fay Tarlock

Seeing Miss Tyndale again was just as Nan Kenny had hoped it would be. Miss Tyndale was coming down the flagstone path from her garden, carrying a tin milk pan heaped with gooseberries, her straw hat tilted back from her perspiring forehead.

“Well,” beamed Miss Tyndale, her smile deepening the wrinkles in her pleasant face, “this is the best surprise I’ve had all summer, and look how you’ve caught me!” She hurriedly set the pan of gooseberries on the path and began smoothing her blue and white gingham apron in a deprecatory manner.

“Don’t take your apron off, please,” Nan called as she came through the white picket gate, pushing her small daughter before her. “I’m going to help you pick the gooseberries.” Nan laughed an amused laugh. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen a gooseberry, I’ll enjoy doing it.” Gooseberries, she thought, had become fashionable. Indeed Miss Tyndale and her picket gate would make good copy for any garden magazine.

Nan stood inside the gate, looking with love on Miss Tyndale’s tall, spare, and still erect frame and on her face, beautiful in its intelligence and serenity. She’s part of the earth, changeless as the seasons, Nan said to herself. Is it escaping the storms of matrimony that has given her this air of tranquility? No, I’ve known married people to possess the same thing. And think of what some of the unmarried ones look like!

Why, she was wondering and when she started up the flagstone path towards Miss Tyndale, has she never married? Sometimes men have no sense.

The two of them sat on the white-railed porch. In front of them, and sloping towards the lake, lay the little town, its roofs almost obscured by the summer green. Outside the town were the orchards and fields, lush and rich with the promise of harvest. When a breeze stirred, Nan saw the silver shimmer of the lake beyond the fields. Back of them, and circling the valley, were the mountains, their peaks purple in the afternoon light. Winkie, Nan’s toddling daughter, ran shouting on the lawn, stopping now and then to pick a Shasta daisy from the border.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Miss Tyndale asked, more in worship than for confirmation. Her brown, gnarled fingers snapped off the step and blossom ends of the berries even as she looked. “There’s nothing like it back in New York, is there?” She dared Nan to contradict her.

“Nothing,” sighed Nan blissfully. “That’s why I have to come back every chance I get. I wanted to see this as badly as I wanted to show off my daughter.”

“I’ve always felt the same way about this town, even when I was a child, not much older than Winkie,”confided Miss Tyndale. She held up a plump gooseberry to the light and polished off a bit of mold with the corner of her blue and white apron. “And it didn’t look the same either,” she added with one of her deep chuckles. “I remember when I was about five, standing out in the yard in front of our log cabin. There were none of the shade trees and orchards you see now, just a lot of pigpens and corrals too close to the house. But I thought it was beautiful, the most beautiful place in the world, and that my heart would break if ever I had to leave it.”

She held up another gooseberry, admiring its green perfection. “I always think,” she said slowly, “that more importance should be given to the gooseberry. With us it begins the cycle of the harvest.” She gave Nana beseeching smile. “I’ll bet you’re wondering how an old lady in her eighties has the temerity to be storing up the fruits of the earth.”

Cutting off Nan’s denial, she went on, “Maybe I haven’t sense enough to realize that I’m old. But when I stop preparing for the winter, I’m done for. As long as I can store up for gooseberry pies, I’m still part of the living.” She scooped up another handful of gooseberries and swiftly snapped off the brown ends.

Years before Miss Tyndale had once said, “The present is far too important to me to waste time dishing out the past.”

But today Nan was hungry for the past and for a more intimate understanding of Miss Tyndale. “You haven’t always lived here on the land, have you?” she asked.

“I haven’t gone too far afield,” Miss Tyndale answered, her eyes still absorbing the summer beauty with pride of ownership. “I lived in Provo for a few years, and once I moved to Salt Lake to work in a shop – but that was before you were born.” She snapped off another stem with sure fingers. “I’ve never wanted to live any place but here.”

“Didn’t you mind, when you sold the old house?” Nan asked the question, hoping it was the right one.

“Not a bit,” Miss Tyndale assured her, “as long as I could live on part of the land. You know,” she confessed, a bit of rue in her smile, “that as I get older I understand some things better. I do believe that I inherited the Englishman’s love for his land. None of my family, not even my father or my brothers born in England, had it as I do.”

“If you had been truly English you’d still be living in the old house,” Nan said, nodding to the big, white painted stone house set in a grove of trees a quarter of a mile away from the cottage.

“No, I’m typically American,” Miss Tyndale declared, a suspicion of conceit in her tone. “I like a raw new home with beautiful shining plumbing. But you should see what they’ve done with the old house.” She waved a gooseberry in the air, her eyes bright with interest. “They spent a fortune remodeling it so that it looks like a gentleman’s estate. But me, I’m glad to be rid of the old fireplaces and big, cold upstairs.”

“Yes, you’re thoroughly American,” Nan teased her. “You have to have everything electric and new.” She looked through the open doorway to the familiar living room. It seemed unchanged from the last visit. On the floor were the rugs Miss Tyndale had hooked; the pioneer-made secretary was still stuffed with New York Sunday Times; the bookcase with the glass doors shielded the books she wanted to read but seldom did. There was the serving table Miss Tyndale had made from a picture frame and the deep leather chair that had been her father’s. Through the rear door Nan could see the electric refrigerator and stove, next to the drop-leaf table made of early Utah pine.

“You’re English,” Nan decided, loath to leave the subject. “You’re the reserved type.”

“Not reserved, shy,” Miss Tyndale corrected her. “Why, once when I was a child Mother sent me over to Mortensons’ to borrow something, and do you know what I did?”

Nan shook her head.

“When I got into the house, they asked me to sit down. I sat down so frightened I forgot what I came for. At noon when they set the table for dinner they invited me to eat. I knew I should go home, but I didn’t know how to refuse. After dinner I went back to my chair. I guess I’d be sitting there now if Mother hadn’t sent an older brother after me.”

Miss Tyndale’s face was momentarily sad, as if after all these years the gaucheries of the child still troubled her.

“I can’t imagine your being that shy.” Nan moved closer to share the same bowl for her cleaned berries. She felt close to Miss Tyndale in spirit and wondered if now was the moment to ask her the question she had long wanted answered. She was aware that the moment might not come again.

“Didn’t you, when you were a girl, ever want to leave this?” she extemporized, moving her hand in an all-inclusive gesture. “I can understand now why it would satisfy, but when I was younger it didn’t mean a thing.”

Miss Tyndale’s hands were still for the first time, her voice very quiet as she said, “That’s one of the reasons I’ve always admired you, Nan. You weren’t afraid to go away on your own. You made a place for yourself and found what you wanted in a strange world. Now, look what you’ve got.” She gestured towards Winkie, busily engaged in stripping a hollyhock.

“Of course I wanted to go,” she replied, coming back to Nan’s question, leaving the gooseberries still idle in her lap, “but I didn’t know how to do it.”

“You should have married someone who would take you away,” Nan did her best to give her words a casual sound. “It would have been easy then.”

Resuming her work, Miss Tyndale smiled. “I don’t believe I ever thought of it like that. Anyway, I’d have had to come back sooner or later.” She settled comfortably back in her chair and indulged in another of her deep chuckles. “Come to think of it, I might have gone away. I almost had a chance.”

It was hard for Nan to keep from crowding the edge of her chair. “Tell me about it, please,” she asked, politely hiding her eagerness.

“Well,” Miss Tyndale said, “if you can stand a garrulous old woman a while longer, I’ll tell you the story.”

Miss Tyndale flashed a smile that on anyone else would have been described as cryptic,on her it was half amusement.”One day,” she began, “my youngest brother Ned came home from school with a friend. They must have been arguing, for the friend insisted I was going to marry Tom Wallcrist.”

“Who was Tom Wallcrist? I never heard of him,” Nan cut in.

“Tom Wallcrist was a young man with a plodding gait and a plodding heart, but he had a spark of fire in him.” Her smile this time was for some secret memory in her heart. “Ned,” she said, taking up the story again, “didn’t like the idea of my marrying Tom. He came rushing in, all upset.

“I was in the kitchen, down on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor. ‘Jen,’ he said, his face tortured, ‘you aren’t going to marry Tom Wallcrist, are you?’

“I didn’t know exactly what had gone on, but I guessed. More to comfort him than anything else, I said as I wrung out the mop cloth, ‘I wouldn’t marry Tom Wallcrist if he was the last man on earth.’

“That satisfied him. He rushed out to his friend and said, ‘Jen isn’t going to marry Tom Wallcrist. She says she wouldn’t do it if he was the last man on earth.’”

“What happened then?” Nan was breathless with curiosity.

“Nothing.”Miss Tyndale said, matter-of-fact. “I was mortified for a minute, then I dismissed it as childish nonsense. You know how everyone talks in a small town. Within an hour I’d completely forgotten it. I didn’t even think of it, when a man called me from the gate that evening.

“I went out to see, and there was Tom. He was standing stiff as a rod on the other side of the fence. I walked up to him, but before I could get out a ‘good evening’ he stopped me by saying, ‘You might have waited until I asked you!’ He didn’t say another word, just turned his back and walked away.”

“But didn’t he come back?” Nan insisted.

“No, he didn’t.” Miss Tyndale scooped up a last handful of berries, her wrinkled face bland. “He left town right after that. He went out to Colorado and did right well in the cattle business – or so I’ve heard.”

“Oh, dear,” Nan’s voice was a wail, “it shouldn’t have ended that way. You should have gone after him and explained.”

“What was there to explain?” Miss Tyndale’s voice was some eighty years mild.

“You should have gone after him anyway,” Nan insisted.

Miss Tyndale’s laugh was free from remorse. “Girls didn’t ‘go after men’ in those days. Anyway, I’d have been too shy to say anything.”

So that was it! Nan saw it all in swift comprehension. Miss Tyndale had been too shy. I should have known it, Nan told herself. She wanted to call Winkie and say, “Look long upon this face. In her you have touched hands with the past.”

Winkie, she realized, was too young. She could only hope that in the years to come, some remembrance of Miss Tyndale’s face, some inflection of her quiet voice, or some fragrance from her garden would remain.

With swift compassion, Nan took Miss Tyndale’s wrinkled face between her strong young hands and kissed the startled lady on her furrowed cheek.”I’m glad you stayed,” she whispered, her voice constricted with emotion.

Miss Tyndale’s usually steady hands were shaking. “I declare,” she said, “I didn’t know it was so late. You get that child of yours and we’ll go in the house for a cookie.

“You know,” she told Nan as she led the way into the house, “I think the view of the valley is even prettier from the living room this time of day.”