Where was Pa? I searched my mind to see if I could hear Pa’s voice anywhere in the house. But it wasn’t there. All I could hear were feminine voices. Where was Pa? Had he already left?
When did Pa leave? And why now, with Ma the way she was?
I could see Ma now . . . she was plump . . . of course, she was carrying Tad. . . . Pa must have just left.
Now there was another voice . . . someone else . . . was it Pa? Maybe he hadn’t left, after all!
No, it wasn’t Pa. It was a stranger’s voice. No . . . not a stranger . . . a woman . . . a friend . . . I could hear someone talking to Ma . . . I was listening . . . but . . . now I remembered! I wasn’t supposed to be listening. They didn’t know I heard! And . . . the voices were talking about me!
As all these fragmentary thoughts tumbled through my brain, I continued to make my way back and forth through the old silent farmhouse. I passed the closet a few feet inside the back door. It’s where Ma’d kept brooms and boots and some of our coats. The closet door was ajar. My eyes fell on it, stared for just a second or two, and then a huge stab of pain slammed icily into my heart, and I suddenly remembered the conversation that had been gathering itself in the back of my mind.
I slumped to the floor, leaning against the jamb of the half-open closet door, my eyes filling with tears as the words came back to me now as clear as the first time I’d heard them.
“. . . but Corrie wasn’t even what you’d call a pretty baby. Why, her brother Zack was prettier’n she was.”
“Now, Aggie, you mustn’t fret over her.”
“But you know, Alma, I just gotta figure how to lead her a different way than I’ve gone. Her expectin’ she’ll be gettin’ married and everything that goes with it someday, it’s gonna cause her too much heartache.”
“Corrie’d be as apt as us, or any other young woman, to marry and settle down.”
“She ain’t the kind men take a shine to, Alma.”
“ ’Sides, her bein’ pretty or not has nothin’ to do with what you’re thinkin’ right now, and you know it.”
“I reckon you’re probably right, Alma, but I’m anxious for her just the same.”
“I think I know exactly what’s bothering you, Aggie. It’s Drummond, isn’t it?”
It got so quiet before Ma answered, I remember nearly going faint from holding my breath so long. My legs were nearly numb from standing so still behind the closet door the whole time they were talking. When Ma finally did answer Mrs. Lucas, all the words from before and the ones I now heard all combined to pierce my heart quicker than any needle into the skin, and left me bleeding inside from the ache I heard come with her words.
“. . . I suppose you see right into my mind, Alma,” Ma replied slowly. “I’m just plain scared for my little girl. I don’t want her puttin’ no high expectations on marriage, with it bein’ such an unpredictable thing as it’s been for me.”
“Corrie’s special, Aggie. She’s not like you and me. The Lord put somethin’ different inside that girl of yours, that’s plain to see.”
“I know you’re right. Maybe it’s on account of seeing that and loving her so much that I don’t want no man ruinin’ her life before she finds out what that special thing is.”
“If the good Lord above put it there, then he ain’t gonna let no man ruin it.”
“Just the same, I’d rather she didn’t take no chances, and the sooner I can convince her that marriage ain’t for her, the sooner I’ll rest easy.”
“Aggie, you’re too deep in your own feelin’s right now. Look at you—you’re nearly ready to have that baby any day, you’re tired, you’re afraid, you don’t know where your man is. You can’t be thinkin’ clearly at a time like this. Ain’t no one who’d expect you to. This ain’t no time to be tellin’ Corrie things that’ll make her feel hard toward her pa. She’s too young right now to understand any of this.”
I had come home from school earlier than expected that day. I’d gone into the house looking for Ma to tell her I wasn’t feeling well, but couldn’t find her anywhere. Heading back outside, I heard voices, and then was startled by the sound of my own name!
Seized with fear and uncertainty, I had jumped into the closet, which was right beside me, and closed the door as best I could just as Ma and Mrs. Lucas walked in from the backyard, still talking about me. I stood there, frozen as their voices fell upon my ears, and continued to listen to every word.
My naive broken little heart did not understand what they were saying. Some of the words went only into my ears, others penetrated right down into deep places. . . . Not pretty . . . gonna cause her heartache . . . ain’t the kind men take a shine to.
I felt an agonizing ache in my heart. I wasn’t even sure why. Did it have to do with what Ma had said about me, things she’d said about Pa, things I’d heard her say at other times about our life?
I did not know that Pa would not be returning. That realization would not come till later. I thought he was away for only a short spell. He’d gone away several times in the past.
But Ma’s words and the whole tone of her voice made me realize that something had come up all of a sudden to seriously change our whole life. Though I didn’t understand, I knew it would never be the same again.
When I began to feel the impact of Ma’s words, my eyes swelled with tears, and an uncontrollable urge swept through me to burst out in sobs. I could not keep it back. Suddenly the hurt I was feeling inside became greater than the fear of discovery.
I lunged from behind the door to make my escape out the back door—where, I didn’t care. I just had to get outside, into the fresh air, to run and cry and then run farther and never come back.
But I’d stood cramped in the closet too long, and as I ran out into the hallway, my legs crumpled underneath me. I tried to jump up again and scramble to the back door. But the next instant Ma and Alma were at my side, as surprised to see me as I was horrified to have been found out. When I realized I had no place to go, I turned my face to the floor and wept.
The memory of that moment twenty years before became so vivid as I sat on the closet floor again, I found myself filled with all the same emotions again, reliving every second as though it had been yesterday. I was no longer conscious of the separation of past and present. . . . In the huge, silent, stillness of now I was in that closet once more, consumed with every fear and doubt a little girl could feel when the whole world around her seems as if it is collapsing.
I hardly know how she did it in her condition. But Ma somehow managed to sit herself down on the floor beside me, right between the closet and the back door, then draw me into her arms and begin to weep with me. Tight in the embrace of each other’s insecurities and confusion, we held on to each other for what seemed an eternity.
I’d never felt so close to Ma. Held tight to her bosom, it seemed the safest, most secure place I’d ever known, in spite of all the words I’d just heard. Each of us carried into that precious exchange the deepest despairs of our hearts. Though Ma was a full-grown woman, it was as if we became one, as little girls, as women. Age suddenly didn’t matter—each of our uncertainties pouring out in tears, staining the moment with an indelible mark of bonding that would remain in the treasured places of my own being forever.
Tears seem to give the soul that peculiar strength to endure. Emptied and spent, we made no attempt to leave this special moment that had been given us at this lonely time. When or how Alma Lucas left the house, I do not remember. Everything faded into the feeling of Ma’s arms tightly clinging to me.
Like waking from an endless dream, my thoughts were blurred and timeless. Slowly I became aware of being wrapped in my own embrace on the closet floor, feeling weak and vulnerable, yet strangely at peace within myself.
As my eyes cleared, I recognized once again the wooden-planked floor beneath me. I was sitting just where Ma and I had sat twenty years earlier.
Regaining my senses, I stood, reminded once more of the stiffness in my legs
that had caused me to fall on that earlier day. I began walking again through the house, to the now dilapidated kitchen this time. One would never know that a large family had ever lived here. But I could recall everything vividly, now with such detail. Our days here were happy . . . and it had been a good home.
That day we wept together, and in the simplicity of Ma’s sharing her hurt and compassion with me, she gave me one of the greatest gifts a mother could ever pass on to her child—especially a daughter. I didn’t see it then as clearly as it began to come to me now. She had planted a seed in my heart that no deprivation or circumstance could destroy. As a seed lying deep within the soil, waiting for the spring rains and warm sunshine to germinate it into life, so lay buried in my heart the love given to me that day by the one who had passed on her life to me—one who would come to see her own dream die, even as the life ebbed out of her on the hot Nevada desert.
Yet, true to her character, Ma knew the only thing to do was to stand up, shake herself off, and move ahead. She did not know that her day in the desert was coming. Pa may have left, but she would look ahead with a hopeful optimism. There was no time to be lost on what could have been. She knew you had to forge ahead if you were going to succeed at anything.
Ma had never been a complicated woman, yet she was a thoughtful and sensitive one. She didn’t go deep into explaining things and was pretty matter-of-fact about how to get on in life. She said what she had to say, and did what she had to do. I reckon some might even have said she was stubborn because she struck out on her own the way she did.
But Ma wasn’t one for wasting time, or for lamenting things lost and broken. She was like the people who laid the foundation stones of this country we had just finished fighting to preserve, and I was right proud of her determination and courage. Ma fought for this great land, too, just by trying to get across it and get free from her past. She was a brave woman.
I suppose in her own way Ma was the one most responsible for me becoming the writer I was, even though her means of encouraging me toward keeping a diary in the beginning had a hurtful side to it. How often had I recalled her words to me two or three years after the incident with her and Mrs. Lucas and the closet: “When a young woman’s not of the marryin’ sort, she needs to think of somethin’ besides a man to get her through life.” That was right around the time she started telling me I ought to keep a diary.
I didn’t think a whole lot about what she’d said until I was fifteen and we were on our way west. And then after Ma died, the words continued to come back to me more and more often. And that’s when my journals began.
But now, in the very home where I’d first overheard her talking to Alma Lucas about my looks and my not marrying and all the rest of it, somehow it all began to widen and grow in new directions in my brain.
We never talked again about that day. I think Ma was so torn up about Pa leaving that she just didn’t know what more to say to me. Now that I was up there close to the same age as she had been, I knew how awful it must have been for her. She had no idea how she was going to take care of all us kids, but she was powerfully determined to keep us together. How providential it all seemed now, though I still can’t understand why God let Ma die.
Well, maybe I don’t really feel that he let her die. As a child, I suppose that’s how I saw things—God letting, or allowing, bad things to happen to people who seemed to deserve more. I had even thought such things, and even been angry with God about Ma’s death, after we’d gotten to Miracle Springs. Ma dying the way she did . . . it just didn’t seem right. Then to find out that Pa was still alive made me terribly confused about things for a long while.
And now I could see that Ma did exactly what she wanted to do. No one made her decide to take us all west. No one took her life from her. She went because it was a choice she wanted to make—not because she was stubborn and independent but because she knew what she was supposed to be doing. She knew that potential peril lay ahead . . . but she was always one to keep moving forward.
By this time I’d walked through every room of the house two or three times. It had been long enough. I was ready to move on.
The key was still inside the back-door lock, but I didn’t want to open it and leave the house unlocked. So I went back to my bedroom and climbed back out through the window, jumped down onto the ground, then closed the window and the shutter as best I could.
I walked back around to the front of the house, untied my horse and headed out across the pastureland. I knew I had at least one old friend that would likely still be here—if it was standing.
Three or four hundred yards from the house, between two huge expanses of pastureland, stood a small wood made up mostly of pine and fir, with a few scrub oak mingled in. In the very middle of this tiny forest was a grassy clearing of roughly forty or fifty yards in diameter. In the very middle of the clearing stood the most majestic oak tree there had ever been in all the world.
As I made my way along the path through the wood and then emerged into the clearing, true to my childhood remembrance, the great contorted mass of trunk and branches and leaves presented the appearance of filling all space. For several moments I sat there, just soaking in the silent presence of the clearing, empty of all life, with the huge giant rising up out of the grass at its center and then towering above it all. Ma had told me of her coming here as a child (for Grandpa Belle’s farm stood adjacent to ours) and playing with Uncle Nick or sometimes just reading here alone.
In this, as I suppose in many ways, I had followed in Ma’s footsteps and had spent more hours in this very place than I could count.
I dismounted and made my way out across the grass. Twenty years had only added to the oak’s stateliness. Approaching the mighty giant, I was somehow conscious of being in the company of a faithful, though silent, old friend. As it had on many occasions before we had left New York, my aged companion now gave its patient and unspeaking support as I walked in under his protective umbrella of covering. I thought the special presence and comfort I’d felt here as a child had come from the tree itself, but now I realized that all along it was really from the presence of One much greater.
I eased myself onto the ground and leaned back against the rough bark. A whole new flood of memories came over me, mostly times of laughter and fun with my sisters and brothers. At other times, too, I’d come here to think something through that I couldn’t quite understand. I suppose Pa’s not coming back caused all of us, except Becky and Tad who were too young to remember, to face silent hurts of our own of different kinds. I found myself wondering if Zack had ever come here to think, as I did. It was interesting to find myself here once more for the same reasons—though having more to do with Ma’s presence in my mind than Pa’s. Yet it could not help but be different this time. I was no longer a mere eight- or ten- or thirteen-year-old girl as I had been back then.
I was still thinking about Ma, I realized, though Ma was never the kind of woman who talked about a lot of these things; just her very life, and how she lived it, spoke to me of her heart and character. The seeds she planted within me had gone deep into the core of my being. The circumstances of her life, the way she handled the adversity that had come her way, acted like a harrow of truth, always keeping the topsoil of my heart broken and fertile.
But sometimes seeds get planted in the hearts and minds of young children that parents don’t intend to plant. Weeds get sprinkled in among the good things, and sometimes what grows up in a young life is a mixture of flowers and nice-smelling things along with weeds and thorns and brambles. Sometimes parents don’t even know what seeds they are planting—both good seeds and bad ones. Then the child grows and the seeds sprout roots, and whatever grows—flowers and thorns—remains there for a long time.
Seeds get planted wrong, too. A seed that a parent plants, thinking it to be a flower and fully intending it to be a flower, might turn out to be a weed or a thorn. And if the parent knew, he would be heartsick. But by then it’s too late and the r
oots are down too deep to get out. Children can be responsible for lots of the things they think a parent did, or the seeds a parent planted and let grow in wrong ways. A child’s perception can change a flower seed into a thorn seed, and it’s the child who’s responsible for seeing it wrong rather than the parent for actually doing anything wrong.
All day long, something had been sticking inside me, poking and jabbing at my mind. I didn’t know what it was, but now that I was here underneath the big oak tree, thinking of my mind and heart being like a garden where seeds are planted—both good and bad—the things Ma had said to me kept coming to me. I began to realize that a seed had been planted within me long, long ago that maybe had been acting like a thorn all this time, and was now poking at me from inside. Maybe this was God’s way of helping me to see it and pull it out, roots and all, so that flowers could grow in my garden instead, just as he intended.
For years I had been hurt by what Ma had said about me not being the marrying kind, thinking that meant there was something incomplete or wrong with me. I know she didn’t mean it like that. She’d been trying to plant a good seed of what you’d call realism. And also what she said about me not being too pretty. Now that I’d remembered the words that had passed between her and Mrs. Lucas, she hadn’t exactly said that anyway. She’d said I wasn’t a pretty baby, but then I don’t reckon a baby’s too pretty. Ma sure didn’t mean to plant a seed that’d get stuck down inside me to keep flowers from growing. But it got planted anyway and then watered and helped to grow by all the talk later about diaries and not marrying and maybe teaching school.
Ma was just trying to help me prepare for life and not depend too heavily upon a man—as she had done with Pa, only to be left alone with five kids to raise. But I often got confused about what she was really saying to me. I was afraid to just ask her.
Land of the Brave and the Free Page 24