Julia's Hope

by Leisha Kelly

  Sarah brightened up to think that she might have an important job ahead of her. But I wondered about books and things, and asked Juli what Robert would be needing.

  “Mrs. Post said he could share till this year is out,” she said immediately, but didn’t tell me what we’d have to have by fall. Pencils and paper tablets for both kids, at the very least. We’d have to have money.

  I felt unsettled, letting myself think about what was coming and all the things we’d need. New shoes for both kids, but especially Sarah, who pulled hers off every chance she got because they were starting to pinch her toes. And coats, good heavy ones, to keep the kids warm on the walk to school. We’d had coats for them last winter, but had left them behind, not having room to carry something that had come to be too small anyway.

  Julia had told me when we left Harrisburg that we had the whole summer to watch God provide for us before fall. At the time, I thought she was just trying to brighten me up a little. But she’d really believed it, and we’d seen a lot provided, there was no doubt about that. But there comes a time when God expects a man to find his way, set his hands to some work, and make an honest buck.

  I had to look for a job. Had to, no matter how much needed to be done on Emma’s farm. But I knew it might take a miracle to find a job. Two men from Emma’s church had been south of here somewhere working in a mine, but they’d lost their jobs. Everybody was laying off, and nobody was hiring.

  I was still thinking such thoughts when we got home. I was anxious to get to work again on that fence, thinking that the sooner it was finished, the sooner I could hunt for something with pay involved. But Emma didn’t favor working on the Sabbath, just like I’d figured, and it seemed best to respect that, at least as far as she could see me.

  So I took the kids to the barn to see the kittens I’d discovered that morning. And despite my worries, I was glad we were here and glad I was a father, when I saw my kids’ smiling faces down in the hay, getting so completely involved in the wonder of life. I’d thought the mother might not like us hanging around so close, but she didn’t seem to mind the kids at all. She just lay there, receiving a nursing kitten and Sarah’s gently petting hand equally well.

  While they were still in the loft, I set to work on Emma’s chair. I’d drawn out what I wanted to do, but I hadn’t figured out how I’d manage the problem of mounting the chair over the wheel axle and have it stable without being clumsy as an old cart. I decided I’d get to that after I had the chair part made.

  I was using a design of simple slats, like Rita McPiery’s porch swing, only smaller. I found some boards I thought I could use once they were cut to size. But I didn’t want to do any cutting right now. The kids would hear that and come to see what I was up to, and I wasn’t ready for explanations yet. So I went hunting for nails of a size to do the job right. It wasn’t easy to find any less than eight penny, but when I did, I pulled them carefully out of the boards and stored them in an old chipped cup I’d found in the straw.

  Mrs. Post had sent us home with leftovers, and Julia wanted to return the favor and have the Posts over sometime. I pulled nails, thinking how that might seem to them, to come over here and eat yard greens and whatever else we might have around. They’d given us coffee, good and black, and it had tasted better than candy to me. What would they think of us, digging up the blue-flowered chicory for Julia to grind and roast and pour into their cups?

  Maybe the Hammonds would understand such things. Maybe they did it themselves. But Posts and Hammonds seemed a world apart. One appearing to be well off and the other maybe as poor as we were. Considering that, I didn’t feel so bad toward George Hammond. I even said a prayer for him before going back up to the house that night.

  Mr. Post and his grown son, Martin, came just after breakfast the next morning, ready to help me with the fence. They acted as if it were nothing at all for them to be so willing to help.

  “That’s the way people do things around here,” Barrett said. “At least they used to. And they still should. If folks’ll help raise a barn, they oughta be willin’ to help with anything else when there’s a need. And Emma gettin’ her cows back is worth it to me.”

  That comment took me by surprise. Did everybody know that Hammond still had some of her cows? And that she’d never been paid for any of them?

  “Got me some good cattle off the bull Emma give me,” Post explained. “Figured I owed her one brung home. The one I promised is third generation. Come from real good stock. She’ll be good for you, no lie.”

  Maybe Post didn’t know about Hammond. His was generosity repaying generosity. I could picture Emma giving away a bull; it was just the kind of thing she’d do.

  Post gave me an inquiring look and then nodded his head, as if he’d decided on something important. “For an hour or two of labor,” he suddenly said. “I’d be willing to stick her in with old Beau and get her bred, if that’s what you want.”

  “Bred?” How would we manage it? A cow giving birth! Julia would be thrilled, but I felt weak in the knees. “For a couple of hours labor?” I had to ask, still stunned by the man’s offer.

  “I could use me some help in the field,” he told me. “Fact is, I’ll need a lot a’ help all season. Wayne Horne moved all the way to Missouri, and my boy here’s done got him another plot a’ ground, plus a pair a’ twins to keep him busy. I hired me a couple a’ boys that used to work the Scranton mine, but I’m needin’ another hand.”

  I just stood there, surely looking dumb, trying to keep from falling over or bawling in front of the man. Another answered prayer, that a job would just walk up to me this way, without me even having to hunt for it. Why would God do such a thing? Why would he care?

  “You mean you’re offering me work, just like that?”

  Barrett gave me a nod. “I’ll swap you fencin’ for roofin’. Then you give me a hand awhile, and I’ll see you get yer cow and calf. After that, if I like the way you work, I’ll call on you time and again, for cash.”

  I reached my hand to Mr. Post. “Thank you,” I managed to say. “You’ll like my work. I’ll make sure you do.”

  He smiled a wide and toothy smile. “That’s what I figured. We ready to get started?”

  The Posts worked fast. And Barrett talked the whole time.

  “I hear they’re gonna close Lake Creek 4,” he told me. “Won’t be no workin’ mines in the whole state ’fore long! Dad blum shame! Used to set records, we did, for coal ’round here. My cousin Edmund at the New Orient says Illinois’s got more coal than all the rest of the world put together. Don’t know ’bout that, you know, but one sure thing is the world ain’t buyin’ much of it right now.”

  I wondered about Dewey, who’d said he was considering applying for work at the Paulton mine. What would he do now?

  “They say there’s a bank closin’ down in Marion,” Post went on. “I been keepin’ my eye on ours. Can’t trust it to be there forever. You get any money, hang onto it. Pays to keep your cash hid in days like these.”

  He stopped and looked at me, silent for several moments for emphasis. “Don’t know how things was where you come from,” he said. “I hear some places is fine. But ’round here, a lot of folks is sinkin’ on account of the mines. Affects ever’body one way or another.”

  I looked to the yard, where I could see Juli planting potatoes. She seemed to be hopping about, rejoicing in things just the way we had them. Did she really understand how bad things were? Barrett said the whole area was affected. Bad times were everywhere.

  The worrying made me so tense that I forgot how happy I’d been just moments before when offered a job. How can Post afford to be hiring men? He must be even better off than he looks. But will it last?

  “Take a look next time you’re in there at that Dearing store,” Post went on, not realizing the effect he was having on me. “Prices is gone way up. And they say I might not get thirty-five cents a bushel for my wheat this year. Could be some kinda winter.”

  I se
t an old post down hard in my fresh-dug hole and wiped the sweat off my forehead. “Get much snow around here?”

  “Oh, Lordy!” Post proclaimed. “Snow! I seen it to my belt and more. ’Course, that ain’t every year. Now’s the time to think on them things, though. Got wood cut?”

  “Not much.”

  “There’s time. You can always do that when you ain’t got nothin’ else to do. Emma still got that nice little kerosene heater in the sittin’ room?”

  “No. I haven’t seen a kerosene heater.”

  “Prob’ly gave it away when she moved. That’s Emma for you. Heart a’ gold.”

  I’d thought plenty about wood for the cookstove and the fireplace, but it hadn’t occurred to me that we might need more heat than that.

  “You’re gonna need that outhouse shored up,” Post said, changing the subject. “It’s leanin’.”

  “I’ll get to that after the fencing.”

  “Always somethin’ to do, ain’t there?” He laughed and looked over at his son, who’d been working the whole time without saying a word. “Martin’s got to fix his brand-new porch! Brother-in-law come and hit smack into the corner of it with his Chevrolet coupe! Ain’t that the richest! And him thinkin’ he’s a dandy one too!”

  Martin didn’t look too pleased with the mention of it. I told him I’d help him if he needed it, since he was helping me. He nodded his appreciation before walking to his father’s truck for a barrel of nails.

  “That’s a good boy,” Barrett told me.

  “I can tell.”

  “Hang it all if his wife ain’t got him goin’ to church, though.”

  Julia had sent Robert to school that morning with his lunch wrapped in newspaper, so I was a little surprised to see him walking home before noon.

  “Teacher sent us home,” he told me after climbing up on our board fence. “Said she had a toothache.” He watched us for awhile, apparently waiting for the Posts to get out of earshot.

  “She’s an odd teacher, Dad,” he confided. “Made us all sing in our chairs first thing. And she made me recite the alphabet like a little kid, just to see if I had decent teachin’ where I come from. We didn’t even say the pledge till right before we left.”

  “Everybody has their way of doing things,” I told him. “It doesn’t sound all that bad.”

  “There isn’t but seventeen of us in the whole school! Five of ’em are boys about my age. I like that, but Mrs. Post said it’s a terror having so many boys. Only four girls, Dad, in the whole school. They don’t like it neither, I can tell, getting picked on.”

  “Maybe you’ll have to look out for them. Make sure the other boys don’t give them such a hard time.”

  “Then they’d be giving me a hard time, Dad. Orville Mueller already said I was a shrimp. I sure don’t want him callin’ me no sissy.”

  “You have to do what’s right, Robert.”

  “Aw, Dad. It’s bad enough just being new.”

  “Think about it. Think how you’d feel if one of those girls was your sister. And she’ll be there next fall. Maybe things can improve a bit before then.”

  “Maybe Orville Mueller won’t be back. He’s big enough to get a job, Dad. Maybe this is his last year.”

  “Still, think of what I’m saying. Most of the boys will be back. Sometimes it takes just one to teach the others a better way of doing things.”

  Robert was quiet awhile, thinking. “Mrs. Gray said something like that in Sunday school. That we can change things just by doing what we should.”

  “A pretty sound lesson.”

  “But Dad, Teacher stops ’em whenever she sees it. The other times, I can’t do nothing. It’s before school or after, mostly. And the worst of ’em are the ones bigger than me.”

  He was in a dilemma, and I knew it. I didn’t want to condone anyone getting tormented. But I didn’t want him coming home with black eyes either. “Do your best is all I can say right now. We’ll pray on it.”

  “Does God want me to fight, Dad?” he asked. “On account of the girls?”

  “That’s not the best way. Not usually.”

  “Willy said the only way to stop Orville Mueller is to offer a fight. But there isn’t anybody willing to do that.”

  “He’s big, then?”

  “Yeah. And mean. He pulled Esther Cohen’s hair and knocked her books in the ditch.”

  “There’s not much brave or tough about a bully.”

  “Maybe not. But there’s plenty of fearsome.”

  I gave his shoulder a pat, not sure what else to tell him. After a long pause, he looked into my face like he was trying to judge the sort of reaction he’d get from what he was about to say.

  “I almost went up to the front in Sunday school, Dad,” he said. “When Mrs. Gray asked who wanted to give over their heart to God. She said we could come up and announce to the world that we was gonna be used for good works, not bad.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Nobody else went, except Mrs. Gray’s daughter. And some of the boys were snickering and carrying on. I couldn’t, Dad, not being so new, or I’d never get any friends.”

  “You’ll have to consider what kind of friends you want.”

  Robert just looked at me for a moment, then hopped down from the fence without another word and started for the house. I glanced over at the Posts, who were working about twenty yards away. I thought that maybe I should have said more, that maybe Robert needed to hear what a good boy I thought he was.

  No, I decided. He needed to walk off, thinking. And then decide for himself where he stands.

  I would have prayed on it right then and there, but Barrett Post had dug another hole, and I had to hustle to drag the post up from where it fell in the weeds.

  George Hammond got himself busy in the field next to us that day with his horse-drawn plow, preparing the ground to plant before Emma could change her mind about it. His boys Willy and Kirk came to take Robert fishing after supper. And some folks I’d never met came up the road in a green-painted wagon, offering us a spice cake and asking to see Emma. Covey and Alberta Mueller, they said. And they stayed into the night with Emma, talking up a storm. They seemed nice enough, and Julia was pleased to have their company. But I couldn’t help thinking about a big boy named Orville Mueller. The bully. Was he their son? What might he be doing while his folks were away?

  I got so restless that I finally took Sarah off to the pond, where the boys were still fishing. They’d caught seven and were trying to decide how to split them three ways.

  “Just take the extra,” I told the Hammond boys. “You got a bigger family.”

  When the Hammonds left, Sarah started dancing around me in the moonlight. “Tell a story, Daddy,” she begged. “Right out here in the wide open.”

  I sighed. I was so full of thoughts about neighbors and bullies and the coming winter snow, but I sat on an old log and gathered my girl on my lap. Robert plunked his fish into an old bucket and sat beside me.

  “There was a certain polliwog named Alice,” I began. “And Alice lived in the mud at the bottom of a little bitty pond.”

  Sarah laid her head against my chest, and Robert stared out over the pond in front of us. “Are you making this one up, Dad?” he asked.

  “Yeah, this one.”

  “Hush, Robby,” Sarah scolded. “Daddy, go on.”

  “Alice the polliwog lived way down deep in the mud. She only had two problems. Winter and a bullfrog named Ogelvie.” I took a deep breath, wondering how they tolerated my dumb little tales. After all, it wasn’t hard to tell them. I just said whatever came to mind.

  “Alice had made a nice house with mud walls and a mud floor and had everything just how she wanted it. But when winter came she was much too cold. And when Ogelvie the bullfrog came, he always leaned on one of her walls and knocked it right over. Then she’d have to work as fast as she could to fix it back up again. And Ogelvie never helped.”

  Robert picked up a stick. Sarah closed her
eyes.

  “One time, the winter was so cold that the pond froze all the way to the bottom. The mud was thick and hard to move in. Alice stayed home, huddled under seventeen blankets just to stay warm. But Ogelvie was tough and strong, and he hopped right out in that cold, hard mud all the way to Alice’s house and asked her for tea. And when he was drinking it, he leaned back on her wall and knocked it right over. Alice was mad. Really mad. But the bullfrog just laughed and went away.”

  Robert glanced up at me, then pulled out his pocketknife and commenced to whittle. I kept expecting him to outgrow my storytelling and leave it for Sarah alone to hear. But this hadn’t happened yet.

  “Poor Alice had to get out from under her blankets and into that deep, cold mud. She had to fix her wall before the cold froze up her whole house. She worked real hard, and all the while she thought how good it would be to have a nice friend. Not like Ogelvie, who always broke down her walls. Not like the fish either, who just swam away or else tried to eat her for dinner. She thought and thought about that and almost had her wall finished when she heard a little cry coming from the path outside. She didn’t want to stop, but she did anyway, even though her house was getting colder and colder. Somebody was crying, and she had to know who, to help them if she could.”

  I shifted Sarah onto my shoulder and she snuggled against me.

  “Alice found a little polliwog even smaller than herself,” I went on. “He was crying because a big bullfrog had leaned on his house and broke it all to pieces. There was no way he could fix it. ‘You can stay in my house,’ Alice told him. And the little polliwog was so happy that he helped Alice fix her wall. Then they went inside and snuggled under the blankets and found they were much warmer together than they were alone. They didn’t even mind Ogelvie as much anymore, because now when he broke a wall, there was someone to help fix it. It’s more fun that way, everyone knows.”

  I stopped. Robert was looking at me strangely. “Is that the end?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Some story.”

  “Thanks.” I stood up, lifting Sarah with me. She opened her eyes, but closed them again immediately. “Bedtime,” I told her. “Let’s get back to the house.”