Jack didn’t say anything.
“I’d go now if I was you. I’ll box up these supplies you bought. They’ll all be here when you get back. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Jack reached for the wrapped sticks of peppermint lying on the counter and borrowed the store owner’s pencil. He wrote a name on each piece and gave five of them back to him.
The last peppermint stick he put into his pocket.
Chapter Seven
I’m still waiting, Sayer thought. Still watching. Still listening.
But it wasn’t Thomas Henry she was waiting for, and there was no use pretending otherwise. It had been five days since Jeremiah left to fetch Rorie’s potatoes and cabbages. When he hadn’t returned by the third day, Sayer decided not to sit and wonder about his absence any longer. She did the only thing she could do. She took Beatrice and Amity and carefully walked the distance to Rorie’s cabin, looking for him along the way in case he’d had some kind of accident on that war-scarred horse of his—or worse. He had already crossed swords with Halbert, and Halbert wouldn’t forget it.
“Why didn’t he tell us he wouldn’t be coming back,” Amity kept wondering as they walked along. “He likes us, Sayer. I know he does. Why didn’t he tell us? Then we’d know and we wouldn’t have to look for him. I’m scared to look for him. I looked and looked for Thomas Henry, and he—”
“Don’t talk about Thomas Henry!” Beatrice cried, close to tears. “He’s dead! We’re supposed to be looking for Jeremiah, so look!”
But there was no sign of Jeremiah anywhere along the way, and no sign that he had found the potatoes and cabbages Rorie was supposed to have buried somewhere in her yard. She had told Sayer how to find them, but her directions regarding where they were supposed to be were of no help at all. Rorie had apparently put a lot of planning into not making her straw-lined storage mounds high enough to be conspicuous. There were no elevations in the ground that looked out of place, and no visible drainage ditches to keep the rain from running in. None. Rorie must have dug deep instead, so deep that no one else but her would have the slightest chance of finding them.
Sayer and the girls had tramped back and forth over the ground, looking for soft spots or hard spots—anything—until they were in danger of having to return home in the dark if they didn’t leave right away—and in worse danger of having to tell Rorie they couldn’t find her secreted vegetables. Frustrated and weary, they had had no choice but to give up and return home empty-handed.
As expected, Rorie was not happy, especially about the cabbage, and her unhappiness continued, punctuating all their meals and chores and meager rest times from start to finish.
“I ain’t surprised you couldn’t find them, Sayer, but he said he could, on account of stealing so much during the war—well, that ain’t exactly what he said, but that’s what he meant. I told him what I needed that there cabbage for,” she said yet again. She suddenly straightened up from the washboard she was bending over and slapped the pillow slip she had been scrubbing down hard. “Well, he’s done up and beat me, that’s what he’s done. And I’m tired of being in a dither about it. He ain’t coming back, Sayer. And that’s the truth of it!”
Sayer didn’t say anything. She’d learned in the past few days that Rorie didn’t always welcome outside participation in her broadsides, even if she seemingly asked for it.
“Did you hear what I said? He ain’t coming back!”
“There’s no reason why he should,” Sayer said quietly because she didn’t want the girls to hear her. She concentrated on trying to spread a bedsheet on the privet hedge to dry, swatting at a wasp determined to bob in the air around her face as she struggled with the corners. But the sinking feeling she experienced upon hearing Rorie’s most recently revised opinion of the situation—that Jeremiah Murphy wouldn’t be coming back at all—was something she hadn’t anticipated, despite the fact that she had already come to the same conclusion. She had told herself that she had no reason to hope—she had learned the hard way what a difficult thing hope could be. It required believing in the unseen and complete acceptance that she was exactly where God intended her to be. Here. Alone.
“Whatever he might have owed Thomas Henry, I believe he’s repaid,” she said.
“Well, he owes me a word of farewell at least,” Rorie said. “So’s I don’t turn around looking for him every time I hear the least little racket. It’s bad enough I have to listen out for Halbert and that good-for-nothing trash what follows him around night and day. I know that there orphanage Jeremiah was in learned him better than that—just up and disappearing when he told me right to my face he was coming back here. That’s what he said—made a joke of it. He said he was coming back unless he got all simple-headed again or that dang horse of his thought it was in another cavalry charge. He said he’d get me them taters and the cabbage, and he’d be back.”
“Why do you suppose he...?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rorie said impatiently before Sayer could finish the sentence. “Weren’t no reason for him to say he was coming back if he didn’t intend to do it. I asked him straight out if he was taking his leave now. He said he weren’t—my knees is paining me something fierce!”
“I’ll scrub the clothes. You sit down,” Sayer said.
“Are you trying to make me feel useless, girl?”
“No, I—”
“I want my cabbage! And I want to clap that boy upside his head, too, while I’m at it. Making me worry like this. I’m too old to be worrying about some dang man.”
“Somebody’s coming, Sayer,” Beatrice called from the porch, her voice sounding listless and defeated as it had since the morning Sayer had told them about their brother. And finding no trace of Jeremiah on their walk to Rorie’s cabin hadn’t helped.
Sayer stood on tiptoe, trying to see down the path, her heart sinking yet again because the new arrival wasn’t a man on horseback. It was a wagon, one pulled by a brace of mules and loaded down with something, judging by the progress it was making up the steep incline. A number of men and women followed behind it on foot. There were no children in the party, a fact that didn’t bode well for Sayer.
“Well, it looks like they finally got here,” Rorie said. “I didn’t think it would take them so long once Halbert lit a fire under them. Of course, I didn’t think it would take so long for somebody on a horse to go over to my place and get my taters and cabbages, neither— Are you ready for this?” she suddenly asked, nodding in the direction of the approaching visitors.
“Yes,” Sayer said firmly. “I am. There’s nothing I need to explain about Jeremiah Murphy being here, not to anybody, especially not to Thomas Henry’s friends and neighbors.”
“The preacher and his wife, too,” Rorie noted in the event that Sayer had missed their presence in the group.
Sayer gave a deep sigh, knowing for certain that she was indeed expressing a prayer this time. She thought it was good that she and the girls looked reasonably presentable, though if she were truthful, their clean dresses and neatly braided hair had nothing to do with Rorie’s anticipation of the arrival of these people, and everything to do with the hope that Jeremiah hadn’t left them for good and he would keep his word to Rorie and come back again.
She glanced at Rorie. “Are you praying?”
“I am,” Rorie said. “And I ain’t stopping until they get here. Maybe not even then.”
“Good,” Sayer said.
“You ain’t done nothing wrong, honey.”
“I know. But they’re not like you. They’ll be afraid to go against whatever Halbert has told them.”
“Well, then, we just have to get ourselves to remembering what happened to Goliath and have a little faith.”
Sayer gave a weak smile, and Rorie reached out to pat her gently on the arm.
Beatrice and Amity
came to stand beside her, and the three of them walked out to meet their visitors, waiting quietly until the wagon rolled into the yard and the people on foot caught up. Several of the men immediately began to unload it.
Mrs. Tomlin, the preacher’s wife, reached Sayer first. Sayer had always felt a certain kinship with the woman, because neither of them was mountain born and raised.
“We brought your supplies with us, Sayer, honey,” she said, fanning her sweaty face with her hand and trying to catch her breath. “That Benton was going to let them sit around down at the store, but I said no. Sayer and the girls would be needing these.”
“Supplies?”
“All the things Thomas Henry’s friend bought the other day.”
“Oh,” Sayer said vaguely, exchanging a look with Rorie.
The preacher’s wife looked up at the sky. “Beautiful day,” she said. “One of the first things I noticed about the high country. The sky is always so fine the higher up you get, don’t you think?”
“Closer to God, I reckon,” Rorie put in.
“Yes, that’s it exactly, Mrs. Conley,” the preacher’s wife said. She turned her attention back to Sayer. “I am so sorry to hear Thomas Henry has been killed, my dear,” she said with no preface to warn Sayer of what she was about to say. She realized then that Jeremiah had been doing more than buying supplies.
“When Benton told me about it, I just sat down and cried. You and Amity and Beatrice—you all have been waiting so long for him to come back from the war. Little Amity used to tell me at church about how she’d go stand on the path down to the buffalo road or there in the cabin by the window to watch for him. So sad. So very sad. We would have been up here sooner, Preacher Tomlin and I, but we wanted to give you the time to tell the girls and everything. And it’s good Mrs. Conley’s here. You don’t want to have to go through something like this alone. I think—”
“Where do you want the boxes, Sayer?” Willard Perkins interrupted to ask.
“Oh...” Sayer began, still trying to process everything the preacher’s wife had been saying.
“Don’t be worrying her with things like that, Willard,” Mrs. Tomlin said. “Just take them into the cabin. Put them on the floor somewhere out of her way. She and Mrs. Conley will see to them later.”
Willard took the wooden box he was carrying and did as he was told.
“Will you try to bring Thomas Henry home, Sayer? I know it would be a dear price to do it, but maybe your uncle would arrange it for you. As I recall, he was very fond of Thomas Henry,” the preacher’s wife said gently. She put her arm around Sayer’s shoulders, and without warning, Sayer could feel the tears coming, just when she had believed she was all cried out.
“I don’t—know where he—” She took a deep breath. “I can’t—”
She stood there, tears rolling down her cheeks. There was nothing else to say. It seemed she would never get used to it—the sudden realization that Thomas Henry was lost to her. But she knew in her heart she wasn’t crying just because of that. She was crying because of her own shortcomings, for her failure to be the kind of wife—widow—Thomas Henry deserved. Thomas Henry was dead, and she was consumed with worry about another man, not because of his friendship with her deceased husband, but because of the man himself, the man of rare smiles who teased Rorie mercilessly and who made handkerchief dolls and cracker pudding. The man who stood up to Halbert Garth.
“We were afraid that might be the situation,” Mrs. Tomlin said. “Oh, here’s my husband to have a word with you, my dear. I believe what he has to say will give you comfort.” She moved away, but she kept a discreet distance, just in case Sayer’s weeping worsened enough to unsettle him and she needed to intervene.
Sayer furtively wiped away the tears and forced herself to look directly into Preacher Tomlin’s weather-beaten face. The years of circuit riding from mountain community to mountain community to perform whatever church services were needed had left him as brown and leathery as any farmer. His tanned face stood in stark contrast to his snow-white hair.
“Sayer, I’m here to hold a memorial service for Thomas Henry,” he said without prelude. “I am about to go on my circuit ride again, and if you’re up to it, it is my intention to leave you with the comforting memory of the people who cared about him paying their respects to him and to his family. If this endeavor seems rushed to you, I do apologize. It’s because I don’t know when I’ll find another opportunity. I’m setting out early the day after tomorrow. There are a lot of weddings to be performed since the war ended and the boys started coming home. It might be months before I get back this way again. I was wondering if we might gather in Mr. Garth Senior’s private place of prayer?”
Sayer frowned. “I...don’t know where that is.”
“It’s up on that ridge yonder,” Preacher Tomlin said, pointing toward the steep slope on the west side of the cabin. “Beyond the line of trees. I can find it all right, I believe. I helped him clear a path to it when I first came here to preach. I believe he paid me a true compliment in showing it to me. It was his own place to pray—a kind of natural alcove on a huge outcropping of rock overlooking the valley. Do you know your Bible verses, Sayer? Psalm 46? Verse 10?”
“‘Be still and know that I am God,’” Sayer said, recalling it from memory. Every cabin in these parts had Preacher Tomlin’s list of favorite Bible verses tucked away in the family Bible, and Mrs. Garth had been no exception. Sayer had read them to her over and over in the final month of her life.
“That is exactly right. Be still. And know. I believe this to be such a place for that experience because one is encouraged to do just that. It wasn’t significantly overgrown even back then, and I don’t expect it to be now—very rocky ground, you see. I anticipate finding it much the same. It was Mr. Garth Senior’s idea of what a church ought to be—God-made instead of manmade. Not that he didn’t do his part for the one we all built down below for the rest of the community. This was his personal place of worship, if you will, and I would have to say it is one of the most holy ‘churches’ I have ever been in. Incredible beauty—one ridge after another all the way into Tennessee. He said it was a place where you could see God’s handiwork with your own two eyes, and when he went up there—when we went up there—well, it makes you forget your troubles, and we need that today, don’t we? I’m certain we can accomplish access in no time at—”
He abruptly stopped talking because, incredibly, Jeremiah Murphy was riding slowly into the yard, nodding to the men and touching the brim of his hat to the women as he passed—as if he were completely unaware of their keen interest in him and he hadn’t been the topic of all their conversations since his purchases at the general store.
“Jeremiah!” the girls cried, breaking away from Sayer and running to greet him.
“This is Thomas Henry’s friend, I believe?” Preacher Tomlin said, studying Jeremiah with as much interest as the rest of his party.
“Yes,” Sayer said, watching as Jeremiah rode on toward the barn.
“I am very eager to speak to him. Excuse me for a moment, Sayer.”
“Well, this ain’t what I was hoping for, I can tell you that,” Rorie said at Sayer’s elbow as soon as the preacher was out of earshot. “Now what are we going to do?”
“Nothing,” Sayer said. “It’s too late.”
“I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I keep thinking I have to make some kind of big fool plan to move people around where I think they ought to be—when it’s clear I ain’t no good at it. Just look at this! We might as well have sent out play party invitations and served Jeremiah up on a silver platter. And I reckon they’ll pick him clean—drag him back to them things what trouble him so and make his hands all shaky. All we need now is Halbert showing up—but that weren’t no suggestion,” she added, looking heavenward. “Jeremiah!” she suddenly yelled in one of the strong
er versions of her voice, hobbling past the preacher to get to the head of the line. “I’m wanting to have a word with you!”
Sayer stood watching Jeremiah, who had been leaning down to speak to the girls, both of whom were all but bouncing up and down with delight at his return. She saw him grin at Rorie’s well-heralded approach—though he was trying hard not to. He immediately headed her off by holding out the sack he had tied to his saddle. Rorie eyed it suspiciously, then snatched it away and looked inside. In a moment, she gave a happy cackle of laughter—apparently forgetting all about her earlier threat to clap him upside the head.
Jeremiah dismounted, despite his proximity to Rorie, and waited for Preacher Tomlin to reach him. He had yet to even look in Sayer’s direction, but the relief she felt at his safe return was nearly overwhelming. He was so tired; she could see how weary he was. She wanted to talk to him, to make sure he was all right. She wanted to make him sit down at the table so she could feed him. She wanted him to sleep, to rest.
And oh, dear Lord, she wanted him to stay.
“It’s an admirable thing,” she heard Preacher Tomlin say in his booming back-pew voice. “The kindness a hardened soldier is capable of when it comes to his comrades. I suppose it was a pact you and Thomas Henry made—each would see to the family of the other if one of you fell.”
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