“I know,” I said. “Just think what kind of a man he must have been to love books so. Yet now it is too late to find out. It’s sad in a way.”
“We won’t be able to know him more personally. But it may not be altogether too late.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I find it intriguing how much you can learn about an individual by the kinds of books he or she reads,” said Christopher. “I’m already anticipating the chance to pore through the Henderson treasure trove—not just for the books and the authors themselves, as much as I will love that, but also to learn more about our loving benefactor.”
July fourth came and everyone was in high spirits.
Rev. Rutledge had pretty much recovered from his spring illness and, while moving more slowly than he used to, presided over the events with a great smile on his face. Who could have appreciated the formation of a library more than a minister or a teacher? He and Christopher and Mrs. Nilson the schoolteacher could hardly wait to see the library completed so as to get all the rest of the books out and onto the shelves that would be their new homes. Rev. Rutledge, of course, had already seen most of them because Mr. Henderson had named him executor of his estate.
“Just like old times, isn’t it, Drum?” Rev. Rutledge called out to my father as we all arrived. “Who’d have thought we’d still be raising buildings together after all this time?”
“I doubt they’ll let either you or me up on the roof like we were on the new church back in ’53,” rejoined Pa with a laugh. “We’re getting too old for that kind of thing!”
“Well, I’m at least going to pound as many nails as I can,” said the aging minister. “For me, a library will be almost as good as a church.”
“Amen to that!” added Christopher, jumping out of the wagon and then helping me down.
Everyone who came brought a shovel from home. As wagons rolled in you could hear the clunking and clattering of shovels bouncing around in back. By the time everything was ready, there must have been three or four hundred shovels!
We got the tables all set up with the food spread out first, then everyone moved to the south side of the town hall where the new wing was planned. Rev. Rutledge gave a short speech, then everyone crowded in with all their shovels. I don’t think there was an inch of ground that wasn’t about to be broken into.
Rev. Rutledge gave the signal, and with hundreds of shouts and hollers everyone dug into the ground to try to scoop up a piece of the dry earth to turn over.
The ground was hard and hot, but that didn’t stop the shouts and the enthusiastic digging. Then followed a great cheer from everyone, and we stood back to look at what we had done.
All of us working together had barely managed to scoop two or three inches off the top. But the ground had been broken and the brown grass and weeds scraped off—the new library begun!
We all retired to the tables for our Fourth of July feast. All the women had outdone themselves—there were almost as many full plates and platters as there had been shovels!
After we were through eating, I excused myself, walked to the wagon, got my sketchbook, and began walking up the slope east of the church building.
“Hey, where you going?” Christopher called out, running after me.
“For a little walk,” I answered.
“Want some company?” he said as he reached my side.
“If you don’t mind, Christopher, let me have ten minutes to myself. Then come up and join me, and I’ll show you why.”
“Ten minutes, then,” he said, leaning down to kiss me, “but not a minute more!”
I continued on up the hill, then took my seat on a familiar rock and began my drawing.
It had been my tradition, every year at the town picnic since the very first one when I was only sixteen, to climb up this hill overlooking the town and draw a sketch of what I saw. I now had more than ten of those sketches, and every year you could see how Miracle Springs was changing and growing.
Now I drew in a long breath and gazed out over the scene with contentment and satisfaction. How it had changed since Zack, Emily, Becky, Tad, and I had arrived here with Mr. Dixon, young and bewildered, not knowing a soul and having no idea what was going to become of us.
Not only had the town changed. So had all the people.
Most of all, I thought, how I had myself grown and changed!
I could hardly believe it—I was a married woman!
Would I ever get used to the thought?
Looking out over the town like this always reminded me of so many things that had happened over the years. I suppose that was one of the reasons I kept doing it—I liked to rekindle the memories. I never wanted to forget a thing I had experienced in my life, good or bad. Everything goes in to contribute to the people we are—a character stew, Zack said his friend Hawk had called it—and I didn’t want to forget what the Lord had put into mine.
I laughed to myself as I heard one of Alkali Jones’ high “hee, hee, hee” laughs! It might not have been quite as energetic as it once was, but he sure had been happy lately since giving his heart to the Lord. When they weren’t talking about the new library, folks in town were talking about that.
I took out a pencil and began to sketch the town and its surroundings, beginning with the church as I always did. Not really so much had changed since last year. There were no new buildings, nothing that would appear on my paper. The biggest change was within me. I wondered if those kinds of things made a difference in the way a person drew.
The ten minutes passed quickly. Before I knew it, I glanced up, and there was Christopher striding toward me with a smile on his face.
“I told you—ten minutes!” he said. “What have you been up to?”
He knelt beside me and looked at my paper, then I flipped back the pages and showed him all the rest, starting with the one where down at the bottom, in my sixteen-year-old hand, were the words: Church Dedication, Miracle Springs, 1853.
Christopher gazed and pondered each one in order, nodding and smiling occasionally.
“This is wonderful, Corrie,” he said at length, after he had gone through them all. “It’s a whole visual history of Miracle Springs.”
“They’re only sketches,” I said.
“But don’t you see? They capture a moment of time that will never come back, and all together . . . what a story they tell!”
Suddenly his eyes shot open wide.
“I have just had the greatest idea!” he exclaimed.
“What?”
“What would you think,” said Christopher excitedly, “of making frames for each one of these and then displaying them on a wall in the new library? I can see it now—A History of Miracle Springs As Seen Through the Eyes of Corrie Belle Hollister.”
I laughed.
“I might agree,” I said, “as long as there is one small change made.”
“What’s that?”
“As seen through the eyes of Corrie Hollister Braxton!” I said.
Now Christopher laughed.
“I don’t suppose I’m thoroughly accustomed to the change yet, either!”
I put aside my sketch pad and we talked for five or ten minutes more. Then suddenly it came to me how today’s scene was most different from all those that had come before. Whether it would be suitable to hang in the new library, I suppose Christopher would have to decide. But my yearly drawings were first of all for me, not anyone else, and so I would draw it as I saw it.
“Sit here, Christopher, right on my rock,” I said, getting up and taking my sketch pad with me further up the hill about fifteen or twenty feet. “Just gaze out over the town like I was and tell me what you see.”
Christopher did exactly as I’d said while I sat down and resumed my drawing. As he spoke, with his back turned to me, I did my best to reflect what Christopher saw.
Thirty minutes later I was done.
I got up and brought it down to show Christopher. I handed him the pad to inspect my work.
There was the town spread out in the background. And in the foreground, on my rock with his back turned, sat Christopher himself. It was a drawing of him looking down upon the picnic scene below.
“I finally realized what is new about the town this year,” I said. “It’s that you are now in the picture . . . and I am learning to see through your eyes as well as my own.”
Chapter 28
A Conversation With Becky
As much as both Christopher and I loved being on Pa and Almeda’s property as part of the Hollister/Braxton community, we were conscious of the need to be ourselves in the midst of it.
Especially since I knew that Christopher was trying to figure out what we ought to do with our lives if Pa did decide to shut down the mine, we were more aware than before that we were a separate family from the others. I suppose that is part of learning what it means to be married—realizing that a new family has begun, that suddenly you are the husband or wife rather than the child.
For us the realization was more gradual than for some young people like Mike and Emily, because we were still living as part of Pa and Almeda’s larger family. Yet we wanted to learn how to be a family of our own too.
Through the summer we began to eat a few of our meals alone together in the bunkhouse. There was no kitchen, or even space for one, but we fixed up the corner of the large space into a sitting room with a table and a small sideboard for dishes. Then we brought meals once or twice a week out to the bunkhouse in a warm cast-iron pot. I cooked a few simple things on the top of our stove, and of course I could boil water for tea and coffee.
Every once in a while, too, we’d invite some of the others out to “our house” to have supper with us. We had Tad and Zack and Becky, even Pa and Almeda by themselves once, and it was fun to be able to be the hostess and to serve them at our little table.
Becky came over to have dinner with us after church one Sunday in early August. Christopher and I were particularly playful and happy that day. The three of us took a ride together, then came back and ate in our little bunkhouse.
Gradually Becky grew quieter and quieter. I didn’t know why at first. But when Christopher went outside for a minute and almost immediately tears came into my sister’s eyes, I soon found out.
“Becky dear—what is it?” I asked, reaching out my hand across the little table and placing it on hers.
“Oh, Corrie,” she said, “seeing you and Christopher together, so happy, talking and smiling and having so much fun—I can hardly stand it. I’m just so afraid it’s never going to happen to me, that I’m never going to get married.” By the time she was through saying that, she was sobbing long, stored-up cries.
I got up and went around to the other side of the table, sat down beside her, held her, and let her cry as long as she needed to.
“How did you feel, Corrie,” she asked, “when you were my age and didn’t know if anyone would ever love you enough to marry you?”
Suddenly it was all so clear, and I couldn’t help feeling bad for the effect that the happy day Christopher and I had enjoyed had had on her.
“Oh, Becky,” I said, “I’m so sorry we’ve made it difficult for you!” I put my arm around her and gave her a hug.
“You didn’t make it hard,” said Becky through her sniffles.
“I am still sorry we weren’t more sensitive to what you were feeling. And I should have been, because I have had plenty of those same thoughts myself.”
“So how did you keep it from making you depressed?”
“I suppose I got it into my head early in my life that I wouldn’t marry,” I answered. “That isn’t to say that I didn’t struggle with it, but I learned to accept it.”
As we sat, I thought how different it had been for my younger sister. Everyone had just assumed Becky would marry. If anyone would marry in our family it would be her, not me. She had always been prettier than me. She was lively and fun and gay, and from the time Becky was fifteen boys were taking an interest in her. She had had plenty of young men callers, but no one that she’d ever been serious about. Now here she was almost twenty-five, with no serious suitor in sight. I hadn’t even realized how anxious Becky had been growing over it as the years passed.
“Accepting it—that’s the hard part,” said Becky.
“Becky, I am sorry,” I said. “I realize now that it must have been difficult for you with Christopher and I being so close all the time and so happy together. It has been, hasn’t it?”
Becky nodded, her eyes still wet.
“I always thought I would be married by now,” she said.
“I guess I hadn’t stopped to think what it was like for you.”
“It was different with you, Corrie. Like you said, you didn’t expect to be married. Sometimes I didn’t even think you wanted to get married.”
“I struggled with it too,” I said, “though probably not so much as you.”
“I’ve dreamed about being married and having a husband and family ever since I can remember,” Becky said. “You had your writing and travel, but there’s nothing else I’ve ever wanted but a home and family of my own. And now—”
She stopped and glanced away, eyes filling again.
“Now . . . now it’s hard trying to accept the fact that it may never happen.”
“Oh, Becky, you’re still young to be saying that.”
“I’ll be twenty-five in a couple of months, Corrie. I’ve got no prospects. There really never have been any serious prospects.”
“I was twenty-seven before Christopher and I met. He was thirty.”
“It was different with the two of you—surely you must see that. Neither of you are like most young men and women.”
“Only in that I wasn’t looking for a husband,” I said. “But if God brought us together at twenty-seven and thirty, surely twenty-four isn’t so old that you should despair.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Becky sighed. “But it still seems more and more hopeless all the time. Oh, my heart yearns to find a man for me like Christopher is for you, but there aren’t very many around.”
I couldn’t argue with her. The Lord had indeed been good to me.
“You are fortunate, Corrie.”
“I know. You’re right, and I am very thankful to the Lord,” I said.
“What makes it all the more difficult is that I don’t want to go through life lamenting the fact that I’m not married. If this is my lot in life, I want to make the best of it.”
“You make it sound so horrid not to marry.”
“That’s how it seems to me, Corrie.”
“I don’t consider my life horrid up till last April,” I said. “I enjoyed my life before Christopher came along.”
“But like I said, you are different.”
“I don’t think I’m that different, Becky. Besides, there are worse things in life than not being married.”
“Like what?”
“Like being married to someone it wasn’t God’s will for you to marry,” I answered.
Becky was silent a moment, contemplating what I’d said.
“When Emily married it wasn’t so bad because I was still so young,” she said at length. “But when Christopher came, even though I said nothing to you, I admit that I had to battle feelings of jealousy, wondering why it was you instead of me who had a man that loved you. It didn’t seem fair. You had never sought it or wanted it, yet you had the most wonderful, godly man in the world. And I have desired it and prayed for it, yet I’ve never met a man of Christopher’s caliber in my life. I tried to pray for you, and truly I wanted you to be happy. Yet just being around the two of you hurt so deeply.”
“I’m so sorry, Becky.”
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about, Corrie. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was my own attitude that wasn’t right. Eventually I took it to God, and he has helped me. But it remains difficult because those feelings of wanting to be married are still there.”
“Has the Lord given you any
peace at all about it?” I asked.
She thought a few moments.
“One good thing that has come of it, I suppose,” answered Becky, “is that at least I now know what kind of man to pray for. If I had never known Christopher, some other man might have come along who wasn’t half the man of God he is, and I might have married him when possibly the Lord had someone better waiting for me—my own Christopher Braxton.”
“Just like my Cal Burton,” I suggested.
Becky smiled. “He was a dashing, good-looking man, Corrie. You can hardly be blamed for being taken in.”
“You know, I just realized as I spoke Cal’s name,” I said, “that they both have the same initials—C. B.”
“Like yours,” added Becky, “Corrie Belle.”
I laughed.
“That, too! But what I was thinking was how similar the false can sometimes be from the true—just like fool’s gold and real gold. At first glance they can look just alike. With people too, the false can mimic the true. If you’re not careful, you can be taken in.”
I stopped and shuddered involuntarily.
“What is it, Corrie?” asked Becky in alarm. “I’ve never seen such a look on your face before.”
“It just suddenly dawned on me how close I may actually have come to marrying Cal without even realizing it at the time. If I had been anxious to marry, as many girls my age would have been, just think of the miserable life I could have made for myself. Worst of all—I’d have never met Christopher!”
Again I trembled and tried to shake the thought away. “Come on, Becky,” I said, “let’s take a walk. I have something I want to say to you.”
We rose and went outside, then linked arms and walked slowly away from the bunkhouse toward the stream and up in the direction of the mine.
Chapter 29
The Lord Is a Faithful Life-Companion
The Braxtons of Miracle Springs Page 12