Deborah Smith - Sweet Hush

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PART ONE

PART TWO

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

DEBORAH SMITH AND HER NEW NOVEL SWEET HUSH

Hush McGillens voice is rich[will] keep the reader hooked.

Publishers Weekly

Truly a charmera lively adventure.

Southern Scribe Reviews

Filled with warmth, humor, and unforgettable characters Youre in for a real treat. Be sure you dont miss SWEET HUSH.

Daily American (Somerset, PA)

Intensevivid setting, rich, three-dimensional characters, and seemingly impossible conflictsa gut-wrenching and heartwarming tale of love, loss, betrayal, and hope.

Romance Readers Connection

Smith manages the characters and the various subplots with grace.

Times Daily (Northwest, AL)

A comforting taleHushs thoughts are stimulating, amusing, colorful, and sometimes heartbreaking. Stories like this dont come along often. Smith shows us the making of a strong woman who will leave an imprint on your heart.

Oakland Press (Pontiac, MI)

The audience will appreciate the richness of the storyfans of Deborah Smith will delight in her latest contemporary tale that sheds a deep light on rural Georgia.

Midwest Book Review

A fabulous hero, a nicely brainy heroine, one red-hot attraction, and a believable plot make for one great bathtub read.

Salisbury Times (MD)

Deborah Smith did an excellent job bringing these two families through a crisis and to an understanding of each other. There were little stories within the overall story which kept the pages turning through the night.

Bookworms Book Review

Also by Deborah Smith

Miracle

Blue Willow

Silk and Stone

A Place to Call Home

When Venus Fell

On Bear Mountain

The Stone Flower Garden

Alice At Heart

Charming Grace

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright 2003 by Deborah Smith

Under The White House Apple Tree copyright 2004 by Deborah Smith All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane Luger

Cover art by Franco Accornero

Warner Books, Inc.

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com

An AOL Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company First Paperback Printing: January 2004

FOR

Chelsea, Amy, Patti, Trisha, Susan, and all the other First Daughters

In your orchard, you welcome all blooming souls,

Green spirits, gold dreams, red passions

Sour Shaws, Auburn Delilahs,

MacLand Tarts, Osmo Russetts, Candler Wilds;

A thousand whispers of trees long gone

Forgotten apples, lost in the earth.

But yours survive, my dear, strong Hush;

Tour hopes beckon, soft and sweet;

Tour trees grow forever, where two hearts meet.

A poem written for the second Hush McGillen, 1899, by her husband

Im the fifth Hush McGillen named after the Sweet lush apple, but the only one who has thrown a rotten Sweet Hush at the First Lady of these United States. In my own defense, I have to tell you the First Lady threw a rotten Sweet Hush at me, too. The exchange, apples notwithstanding, was sad and deadly serious.

Youve ruined my daughter. I want her back, she said.

Ill trade you for my son, I answered. And for Nick Jakobeks soul.

After all, the fight wasnt really about her or me, but about our sorely linked destinies and our respective children and our respective men and our view of what we were put in the world to accomplish with other people watching whether those people were a whole country or a single, stubborn family. Theres a fine line between public fame and private shame. For those of us who have something to hide, holding that line takes more of our natural energy than we want to admit.

So, standing in the White House that day with liquid, festering apple flesh on my hands like blood, I realized a basic truth: The world isnt kept in order by politics, money, armies, or religion, but by the single-minded ability of ordinary souls to defend all we hold dear and secret about our personal legends, armed with the fruit of our lifes work. In my case, apples.

I walked wearily down one of the White House corridors weve all seen in magazines and documentaries. For the record, the mansion is smaller than it looks on television, but the effect is more potent in person. My heels clicked too loudly. My skin felt the weight of important air. History whispered to me, Hush, go home and lick your wounds and start over with your hands and your tears in the good, solid earth. I followed a manicured sidewalk outside into the winter sunshine, and then to the public streets. The guard at the gate by the south lawn said, Can I help you, Mrs. Thackery? as if Id strolled by a thousand times. Fame, no matter how indirect or unwanted, has its benefits.

I could use a tissue, please. I only wanted to wipe a few bits of rotten apple off my jeans and red blazer, but he gave me a whole pack. Hush McGillen Thackery of Chocinaw County, Georgia, rated a whole pack of tissues at the White House guard gate. I should have been impressed.

I put my mountaineer fingers between my lips and whistled up a cab. I took that cab to the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where in the 1950s President Eisenhowers doctors hid his heart trouble and in the 1980s President Reagans doctors hid the fact that our old-gentleman leader had gone funny. It was a safe place to keep family troubles close to the soul and away from the rest of the country. I slipped in past a crowd of reporters with the help of the Secret Service, who hadnt yet heard Id splattered you-know-who with an apple.

I went to the private room where Nick Jakobek lay recuperating somewhere below the shore of normal sleep, his stomach and chest bound with bandages that hid long rows of stitches, his arm fitted with a slow drip of soothing narcotics, which he would sure as hell jerk from his vein when he woke up. I sat down beside Jakobeks bed and cupped one of his big hands in mine.

People had sworn he was the kind of man who could do me no good outside of bed. A suspect stranger, not a Good Old Boy or a swank southern businessman, not One of Us. A man who had never tilled the soil for a living or sold a bushel of newly picked apples to an apple-hungry world or sat around a campfire drinking bourbon under a hunters moon. A man who knew more about ways to die than ways to live. A man so cloaked in rumors and mysteries that even the President couldnt protect his reputation. Without a doubt, people said, Hush McGillen Thackery would never stoop to love that kind of man. after loving such a fine man as her husband.