by Leisha Kelly
I took a deep breath and swallowed it down. “You will be. If you keep on. You know that as well as I do.”
“Didn’t drinking ever tempt you?”
“I tried it. But it was stupid.”
“Yeah, that’s me. The stupid one.” He stood and walked toward the door. I thought for a moment he was leaving right then, and I wouldn’t have stopped him.
“She’s proud of you, you know. For making something of yourself.”
“You could,” I offered.
“Nah.”
I heard footsteps, and I knew Julia was up. She was in the kitchen with us in a matter of minutes, blinking her eyes and wondering.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked me.
“Nope.”
By the light of the one oil lamp, I could see Edward shaking his head at us.
“Go back to bed,” I told Juli. “It’s all right.”
She turned and looked at Edward, and he sat in the chair again. “She’s probably up missing you,” he told me. “She’s not much like Trudy, you know.”
“Or anyone else,” I agreed.
“I guess if I had what you got, I’d have reason to be faithful. Trudy ain’t . . . she just ain’t your type.”
Juli smiled before she turned and left us.
“I’ll be leaving in the morning,” he said. “You don’t need me here.”
“Visit,” I told him. “If you want to.”
“I might do that. Once in a while.” He fished in his pocket and finally pulled out something small. “Give this to hammer boy,” he said. “I sure hope he comes out all right.”
He pushed a tiny little jackknife across the table to me. “I promise I didn’t steal it. Old man in Ohio give it to me. I helped him get out of a ditch.”
He stayed long enough for coffee in the morning, but he was ready to go before any of the kids were up. He offered me his hand when he went to leave. And that gesture alone meant more than a lifetime of words. He would be back. Sometime. And that didn’t have to be a source of worry.
I wrote to Mother and told her she should be proud of Edward. He wasn’t as hostile as before. If he could quit drinking, find a job, things would work out for him yet. Forgive him, I told her, for stealing the money. He thought he was on a mission, and maybe he was. Maybe it was God ordained, to get us together again, and to bring us Katie.
She wrote me back. For the first time ever in my life, Mother wrote me back.
Please forgive me for lying. I love you. Even if you didn’t think so. Pray for me.
I did. Every day. And for Edward too. As we went on with the life around us, harvesting the wheat and getting by as best we could, I kept on praying. And Franky prayed. Every day he would take the jackknife out of his pocket and pray for the man who’d given it to him.
I started bringing wood to Franky. First to the bed and then to a blanket on the floor or the ground. He sanded little Emmie’s chair that he’d made, and soon she was sitting on it regularly or dragging it along behind her. Then he started carving a wooden cross for Juli to replace the one we’d given away at Christmas. He carved a turtle for Harry, a bug of some kind for Bert. Even though it was weeks before he could walk, he wanted to work. He’d taken the whole business like a man, so I started to treat him like one, regardless of what his father or his brothers thought.
Katie was quiet so often. But we soon discovered she liked to sing. She and Sarah were soon singing together, over in the lilacs or at the base of the apple tree.
I often wondered if Edward had gotten that job with a carnival, and if Trudy Vale had found the success that was more important to her than her own daughter. But especially I wondered where my father might be and what he’d done all those years when we thought he was dead. I never found out. I never had proof that little Katie was actually my sister. But it didn’t matter. We all believed it. We all lived it. And that was good enough.
TWENTY - SEVEN
Julia
Hazel’s funeral was a solemn affair with only church members and her nephews in attendance. I sang the same song I’d sung for Wilametta Hammond, because Delores Pratt said Hazel had remarked on how well I’d done it in such a difficult time. I found it hard to picture Hazel saying a good word about me to anyone. But apparently she truly had. Herman told me she’d called me her friend.
I knew her family would send us home with her hats, because she’d told us that on her deathbed. But I was surprised to learn she had thirty-seven of them gathered over the years. I kept back two or three to wear to church, gave away more than a dozen to the other ladies, and let the girls have the time of their lives using the rest for dress up.
She’d said something about the Hammonds too, but Herman and his brothers weren’t really sure what she’d meant. So they came out to the house one afternoon with Herman’s car all loaded with blankets, old clothes, and food that had been stocked in Hazel’s pantry. It was an incredible godsend. Cloth enough to remake school clothes for everyone. Food enough for four or five meals for a troop their size, maybe more. We gave some to the church, along with some of the dresses, to help the needs of others.
We never got the money for shoes that year. Sarah wore Katie’s and Katie wore Sarah’s. The boys all passed theirs along to the next one smaller. Sam Hammond traded work to a neighbor for an old pair of boots, and Lizbeth was wearing what used to be her mother’s. So Rorey’s were the only ones we had to cut the toes in, because Lizbeth’s old ones were far too big. I pieced some sturdy canvas and glued it over the hole we’d made to give her toes some room, even spreading it with wax to keep the water out and polishing it the same color. She hated it, but I picked out one of the best hats to be only for her, for church or for school, and made her a fancy dress using some of the nicest cloth Hazel had had. Then she felt better.
Franky stayed with us all that fall and well into winter. When he could finally walk, he had a dreadful limp and couldn’t seem to stay up for long, having more problems with his knee than anything else. But he’d go out and look at Emma’s old wheelchair and tell me how glad he was that his leg wasn’t worse.
“Emma done what all she set her mind to do,” he said. “She told us make the most a’ what we got. An’ everybody’s put on this world with somethin’, even if it’s nothin’ but hardheaded determination.”
He was determined, all right. Determined to read. He worked for hours trying to keep a b straight from a d and an m straight from a w. Finally by Thanksgiving, he was writing his name. Correctly. It thrilled him, though his brothers were less than impressed.
“Harry can do that,” Willy teased. “Prob’ly Berty could too, in a day or less if we was to show him.”
They didn’t understand the times we had, Franky and me, sitting and reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Red Badge of Courage. Schooling Franky was a fun adventure, even though I wouldn’t let Lizbeth help much, so she could study on her own to get ready for that test for the teacher training scholarship. I was proud of her.
And proud of Franky. He could add in his head faster than I could on paper and recite poetry he hadn’t heard in three years. I didn’t mind reading to him, because he understood every word and was always thirsty for more.
Sometimes I felt bitter at Edward for the carelessness that left Franky with a limp that didn’t want to go away. Sometimes I was angry at George too, for failing to recognize the gift that Franky was to all of us. It was Franky’s own sense of duty that had him going back home before Christmas, not because George was missing him being there or asking him to come around.
But I never forgot the Lord’s firm reminders to me. Seventy times seven. I even talked about it to Katie late one night when she was crying and questioning why her mother had left her behind without ever trying to contact her since. We prayed together, to forgive.
And I started leading a church choir, along with Juanita Jones, now that Hazel wasn’t around to complain. Sarah and Katie were the only young children to sing in it, and they sang like
angels.
A week before Christmas we got a card from Samuel’s mother and one from Katie’s grandmother on the same day. We made them both paper doilies and pretty Christmas cards of our own design. Katie stuck in a smiling paper doll “just because.”
Despite my worries, God continued to provide, and I learned again to relax and expect him to. The blackberries had been enough to give us a taste of jelly through the winter, and I canned wild greens, along with what we could from the garden and peaches from Louise Post’s tree. We had apples too, though not as many as some years. And walnuts and hickories. Samuel helped George butcher two hogs and two goats and brought home some of the meat. One day Joe and Robert both came home with a squirrel.
We survived. More than that, we were blessed. We even ended up giving Sukey’s calf to a family in town who was far more desperate than we were. A mother and six children came to our pastor for help after having nothing to eat for two days and no way to get anything. The father had gone away to work a barge on a river down south and was killed in a freak accident on his third day there. His family’d had no garden, because the mother had been sick. They had no animals, not even chickens, because they’d already eaten them or sold them for flour to make bread. We ended up taking them a meal most every Sunday we came into town. We had little. But it felt good to give. Emma had known that. Thank God she had passed it on.
Thank God for the opportunity to know Hazel and George and Edward and all the other difficult people we’d ever had to love. God knows what he’s doing wrapping up the crazy mix he put on this earth.
“We wouldn’t know sweet if it weren’t for sour,” Grandma Pearl had once told me. “Wouldn’t know the answers without any questions, nor God’s saving hand without something to be saved out of.”
Such is life. A parade of opposites. A jumble of trials, punctuated by moments of the purest bliss. Love and conflict. Laughter and sweat and tears. We saw so much of it all, bringing up little Worthams. And Hammonds. And it was good. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Leisha Kelly is a native of Illinois and grew up around gardens and hardworking families. She and her husband, K.J., live in a 130-year-old house with two homeschooled children and a golden retriever.