A Home for the Heart

by Michael Phillips

  The moment I woke and saw the sun shining through the window, all the previous day’s doubts seemed to be a hundred years in the past.

  It was a good thing too—I was about to be married!

  We had scheduled the wedding for ten o’clock in the morning. By Thursday we’d decorated the church with the greens we’d collected. There were blue candles about the church in a few tall candleholders we’d borrowed, except in the front where three white candles stood. All the chairs next to the center aisle had blue ribbons tied to them, so that the aisle was bordered with blue as you walked in and looked down it toward the front of the church.

  On Friday, right in the middle of my melancholy doubts, we’d taken all my wedding clothes into town to leave at Mrs. Gianini’s. Saturday morning the other women in the family—Becky, Emily, Almeda, Aunt Katie, Ruth, and little Joan—all got dressed at home and then drove into town with me about nine to help me get ready at Mrs. Gianini’s. We left the house to the men. Christopher stayed up at Uncle Nick’s until we were well on our way to town.

  As I was getting dressed, my mind kept flitting in and out of the present, almost as if I were somewhere else. I was aware of all the fussing about me. I’d heard somewhere that brides always looked pretty, so I wasn’t distracted too much by the oohs and ahs I kept hearing from everyone.

  It seemed that my mind went through everything that had happened during the last two years, since that day when I had awakened at Mrs. Timms’ to see Christopher’s face staring down so tenderly at me. Then there was all the time at the farm, while I was getting better . . . then all our letters . . . then his time here . . .

  I felt like I was in a dream—everything going on around me was muted. I carried on conversations with everyone and laughed and went about the business of getting ready, but at the same time my memory kept bringing images and pictures and conversations with Christopher into my mind to think about.

  Gradually, however, the present began to gain the upper hand.

  I had Ma’s embroidered handkerchief with me, and I tucked it inside the dress—I wanted it close to me. I would carry her white New Testament through the ceremony and would hand it to Rev. Rutledge for him to read the scripture from.

  After I was dressed, Becky and Emily were fixing and decorating my hair and putting ribbons and little white daisies in it. I was sitting in front of the large mirror at the dressing table. In it I could see the reflection of Almeda and Mrs. Gianini talking on the other side of the room. I wondered if they remembered the first day we all came to town and spent our first hour around Mrs. Gianini’s table eating apple pie and wondering what was going to become of us.

  Again I found myself lost in reflections, until suddenly I heard Becky announcing to everyone else that I was all done and ready to meet my husband.

  Hearing her say that word shocked me back to the present quicker than anything!

  I stood up. There looking back at me from out of the mirror was someone I hardly recognized.

  It couldn’t be me! The lady in the mirror looked so grown-up and almost . . . pretty!

  A silence fell over the room.

  Almeda walked slowly toward me. Her eyes were full and sparkling. She hugged me gently, careful not to rumple my dress.

  “Corrie,” she said, “you are so beautiful. How I wish we had some way to preserve this moment forever.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Our eyes met. We loved each other so much!

  “I am so proud of all you have become, dear Corrie.”

  Only a moment more we stood. Then, realizing this was no time to start weeping, we both looked away. Suddenly Mrs. Gianini and Emily and Becky, followed by Ruth and Joan, all came around to hug me, too, and to wish me the best. Then we all went into Mrs. Gianini’s sitting room.

  It was about twenty minutes before ten. Just a minute or two later, Pa arrived with the buggy.

  “You all ready?” he asked as Mrs. Gianini let him in. “The church is filling up mighty fast. Gonna be people standing all around the walls the way it looks.”

  With final words and hugs and kisses, and a few tears, all the other women went with Pa.

  “I’ll be back for you in ten minutes, little girl,” said Pa to me with a wink, then closed the door behind him.

  Suddenly I was left alone in the quietness of Mrs. Gianini’s house.

  Slowly I walked about, trying to breathe deeply, thinking about so many things. It was right here, I remembered, while Mrs. Gianini was working on those first dresses for us girls, that Almeda and I had had our first real talk about God and how he works in people’s lives. I had been so young then. I had understood so little about what being a Christian meant.

  Fragments of that conversation came back to me now as I walked about the empty rooms of the house.

  “Jesus didn’t talk much about the outward things a person did,” I remember her saying, “but about the inside, what a person is like in his heart.”

  I smiled as I remembered her saying that there were other things about living with God she hoped she would have the chance to tell me about someday.

  Well, she had. We had had so many treasured and important talks together.

  I remembered how I’d felt during those first years getting to know Almeda, and how she had helped the hunger to be closer to the Lord grow inside of me. I had wanted so much to be good, to be close to him, to know what truth was, and to obey him.

  So many years had gone by since then—years of learning and growing and deepening my understanding of God’s work in my life.

  Slowly I got down on my knees. I didn’t care if I put an extra crease in my wedding dress—I just had to give my Father thanks for the wonderful years of my youth he had given me. He had been so good, so protective, so generous. I wanted nothing more than to be all the more completely his every day . . . for the rest of my life!

  I heard Pa’s buggy drive up again. I glanced up at Mrs. Gianini’s clock on the wall. It was four minutes till ten.

  When I stood, there were tears on my cheeks. I was so full of God’s love right then that I could not begin to keep it inside.

  A moment later the door opened, and there stood Pa. He just stood there and stared at me, then slowly walked forward.

  “I didn’t have a chance to tell you a few minutes ago,” he said, “but you are a beautiful bride, Corrie Belle.”

  “Oh, Pa,” I whispered, barely able to make my voice work. Then I hugged him tight.

  “You afraid?”

  “No, Pa . . . just very, very happy. I was thinking of all God has done for us.”

  Pa nodded. “He’s looked out for us all mighty well, all right.”

  He paused, then added, “And there’s a young man waiting over at the church who wants to have a chance to look after you too. So . . . you ready to go?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  We turned and walked outside to the buggy. Pa helped me up, and we rode slowly to the church without another word. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in the streets. Everyone was inside the church.

  He pulled up outside. Music was already playing, filtering out through the building from the little pump organ the church had bought and that Harriet played for the services.

  Hearing it, realizing that everyone who knew me in the whole town was inside waiting . . . for me, sitting there with Pa all alone in the still morning air . . .

  Suddenly my heart started to pound.

  This was it, I thought. The moment had come!

  It was a beautiful spring morning, fragrantly warm but not yet too hot. The sun was bright but still only about halfway up the sky. A few clouds hung about in the blue, and it seemed as if the organ music was floating straight up to them.

  Pa looked over at me and smiled. Then he got out the other side of the buggy, walked around, looked up, and stretched out his hand.

  I took it, relishing in the feel of his tough, hard-working skin which yet was able to grasp a woman’s hand in the most tender manner
possible.

  I stepped down to the ground, and slowly we walked across the grassy meadow to the church.

  Pa stopped me at the bottom of the steps. He turned toward me.

  “There’s only one last thing I got to tell you, Corrie Belle,” he said, “before I give you away and you’re a Hollister no more.”

  He paused, reached into his pocket, left his hand there.

  “I know what you told me about Christopher and the diamond ring and what you told him. So he’ll be giving you a small gold band on your left hand. But before we go in there, I want to give you your ma’s wedding ring, the same one I slipped on her finger the day I married her.”

  He now withdrew his hand from his pocket, holding the ring I had seen in the box several days earlier. He took my right hand in his, and slipped it gently onto my fourth finger. It fit perfectly.

  “Let this remind you, Corrie, every day you live, that your pa and ma loved you more than they could ever say. You have been the best daughter to them that ever a girl was.”

  “Oh, Pa . . .”

  I had tried so hard not to cry this morning. But it was no use. I could not keep the tears back now!

  “Now you be as good and loving a wife to that man in there as you’ve been a daughter to me, and you’ll have a happy marriage.”

  “Thank you, Pa. I love you so much!”

  “I love you too, Corrie Belle Hollister.”

  He smiled broadly, then offered me his arm.

  I took it. We turned and slowly walked up the steps together, pausing one last time at the top.

  We looked at each other, smiling in a way that expressed more than ten thousand words could ever say. Then together we drew in a deep breath and let it out as if in final preparation.

  Pa reached for the door, opened it, and . . . we stepped inside.

  Chapter 53

  A Home for the Heart

  It was probably six or seven minutes after ten.

  The instant they heard the door creak open, every expectant head in the church swung around toward it.

  Harriet had been watching for us, and the moment we appeared in the doorway, the chords of music changed into the Wedding March.

  Pa closed the door behind us. My heart was pounding so, yet the only feeling I can remember being aware of for the first few moments was the skin of my mouth stretching wide in a smile I couldn’t help. There sat a hundred faces all smiling toward us, and what could we do but return them?

  We stood at the back of the church two or three seconds as the wedding music began, then slowly Pa started to move forward down the center aisle with me at his side, still clutching his arm for dear life.

  With small slow steps we walked . . . there was the blue ribbon stretching out down the center of the church on both sides of us. . . .

  In the front row, Almeda was looking back toward us as we came, smiling wide with tears in her eyes. We were starting to pass smiling faces now, so close I wanted to stop and greet each person!

  The organ was loud, Pa was standing so straight and tall and proud. Slowly we made our way forward. . . .

  In my memory of that wonderful day, as I walked down the aisle—though it could have taken no longer than a minute—it was as if my whole life since coming to California replayed itself before my inner eyes . . . then mingled with the words Rev. Rutledge spoke and the vows Christopher and I made later.

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. . . .”

  We had arrived in California alone, in search of a future we could not see. Our pa had been waiting for us, though we didn’t know it right at first.

  It could not have been more fitting than for me to be with Pa for these final seconds of my unmarried youth. He and no one else represented the beginning of my life in California, and now here he was sending me off to begin the next season of my life.

  “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”

  Pa and I had been through a lot together. It had taken a while to put the past behind us. As we walked down the aisle toward my future, it was hard to believe we were the same two people who had looked at each other in bewilderment outside the Gold Nugget, neither of us, in those initial seconds, even knowing who the other was.

  Oh, Lord, I thought, how much you have blessed us since that day!

  It was such a feeling of fulfillment to now be a grown woman, yet still his “little girl,” like he sometimes called me. What a feeling of safety and protection to have a loving father at your side. No wonder God used that very word Father to describe himself.

  “My dear departed wife, Agatha Belle Hollister, my wife Almeda Parrish Hollister, and I, Drummond Hollister, all do.”

  As we inched forward in the midst of all the faces, the only one missing was Ma. I knew Pa was thinking of her too.

  “When a woman’s not of the marryin’ sort, she needs to think of somethin’ besides a man to get her through life.”

  Oh, Ma, I thought, if only you could see me now! Would you be proud of me?

  And I knew she would. Knowing it gave me a warm feeling inside.

  “I reckon you’ll do all right, though, Corrie.”

  How many times had I heard those eight simple words of Ma’s in my memory. Just being reminded that she believed in me had gotten me through some rough times of self-doubt.

  You ARE here, aren’t you, Ma? I thought.

  As I did, I realized that she was just as much a part of this day as Pa was . . . and that she was smiling as she looked down from heaven upon her daughter, now a bride, though neither she nor I had ever dreamed such a day would come.

  “Do you, Christopher . . .”

  It was my father—this man walking beside me now—that I had discovered first after arriving in this place fifteen years ago. But soon other people began to become part of my life and growth.

  Almeda—she was Mrs. Parrish to me then—was the first spiritual friend I’d ever had. She helped get me started along the pathway of life as a Christian. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had she not been there during those early years when I had so much to learn! God would no doubt have found some other way to teach me about himself, but I’m glad he used her!

  “. . . take this woman to be your wedded wife . . .”

  Almeda once called me a daughter of grace back then. It was another of those things, like Ma’s words, that stuck with me and helped me figure out who I was supposed to be as I grew up.

  How well I remember the day she and Pa were married!

  As they said their vows to each other, I could hardly believe what was happening. Now I was about to say those very same words myself.

  That was even harder to believe!

  “. . . to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health . . .”

  It wasn’t long before my sheltered world began to expand. As I started writing, and as my faith grew roots, the hunger to know the truth began to deepen inside me—both personally and as I wrote. I met lots of people and found myself in many circumstances that I suppose were mighty unusual, even frightening, for a girl my age. I did some things that women just didn’t do. My hunger for truth had led me on many trails I never expected, but I was thankful for them as I looked back.

  “. . . to love and to cherish, till death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”

  My twenty-first birthday, after I had been in California five and a half years, was a turning point in many ways. I think that’s when I first began feeling like I might be an adult before long. As much as I’d done by then, I still didn’t feel quite grown-up. But that’s when I began to think there might be hope for me yet!

  That was when I began to think seriously about what place God might have for me in his world and in his plan—as a grown woman someday, not just as a girl.

  Where was he taking me? What was he going to do with me? I began to ask those kinds of questions in my early twenties.

  I suppose
that’s when I first began wondering what and where “home” would be for me once I was grown—though I didn’t start thinking of it in just that way for several more years.

  “Do you, Cornelia . . .”

  For so many years I assumed I would spend my whole life as an unmarried woman. I had been used to the idea from before I could remember, so there was no real shame in it. I never thought of myself as a future old maid. I thought of myself as God’s daughter who would live my life in companionship with him rather than with a husband and a family. It was an exciting prospect, not a depressing one.

  Loneliness never worried me. I didn’t even think about it. There were many times when I was lonely. But what did occasional loneliness matter when God was my Father and I was where he wanted me to be?

  As writing led me into politics, rapidly my world expanded. Though heartbreak was part of it too, soon I was involved in important things and meeting important people. The whole country was filled with opportunities to write about things that really mattered . . . from one sea to the other.

  “. . . take this man to be your wedded husband . . .”

  Then came the war, and shortly thereafter the incredible, fateful letter from President Lincoln. Before I knew it I was on my way to the East Coast. The war and my two years in the East gave me a wider perspective on so many things that I might not have been able to get any other way.

  But how could I have known at the time that I would be gone from home for so long?

  So quickly I was thrust into the very middle of that dark night of our nation’s history, a night much longer and bleaker and redder with blood than any would have imagined.

  It was during that time, while at the Convent of John Seventeen, that I began again, just as I had at twenty-one, to ask God about my future—about what he had in store for me, about where my home really was.

  Little did I know that he was preparing me, even then, to meet the one who would soon be the answer to that time of questioning.

  As my thoughts strayed back across the miles to the California that had been my home, and as I thought about my early days in New York in what had been my birthplace, my very first home . . . I was aware that it was not toward either of these places that my heart was bound.