Angel Sister

by Ann Gabhart

  At the time, Kate had been too afraid to ask him what he meant by that. She already got the heebie-jeebies sometimes when she was in the parlor where Lillie Lindell’s portrait hung. She was sure the woman’s eyes were staring at her no matter where she moved in the room. Kate didn’t like putting on the dead woman’s hats either, but sometimes she did it to keep from hurting Graham’s feelings. She never let the hats sit on her head more than a couple of seconds, as if they might still be carrying some trace of the influenza that had carried their owner away from the living world.

  This morning, when Kate and Tori finally pushed through the cedar thickets and trees and came out on the pond bank, the water looked cool and inviting. Kate wasn’t a bit surprised to see Graham and his long-eared hound, Poe, sitting on the east bank of the pond in the shade. As she and Tori walked around the pond toward him, frogs hopped out across the green moss clinging to the edges of the bank and plopped into the water.

  Graham wasn’t fishing, but his pole was on the bank beside him. “Done drowned all my worms,” he told them. “We got here before sunrise and caught me and Poe a mess for dinner, so the rest of them out there are yours, Victoria, if you can get them to bite.” Graham looked up at the sky. “The sun’s already getting high in the sky.”

  “I know.” Tori made a face as she dug a worm out of her can of dirt and scooted it on her hook. “Kate had to go to the store.” She held the can out toward Kate.

  Kate waved it away and set her cane pole down. “You can catch whatever’s left, Tori. I’ll go hunt for raspberries.” She held up her berry bucket. “Mama’s making jam.”

  “Yum,” Graham said as he stood up. “I’ll tell you where some good ones are if you promise to bring me a jar. Of course there might be snakes.” Poe raised his head up off his paws and gave his owner a sad-eyed look to see if they really were leaving such a good resting place.

  “I’m not afraid of snakes.”

  “I wasn’t either till one bit me some time back. My leg swelled up big as a fence post. Probably would’ve died if I hadn’t known some cures. Still goes dead on me from time to time if I don’t drink my adder’s-tongue potion.” Graham stomped his right foot.

  Kate never knew whether to believe Graham or not. He had studied medicine. Had planned to be a doctor like his father before the influenza epidemic interrupted his plans. He did come up with special potions from roots. Not to give to other people, but sometimes when somebody in Rosey Corner had a sick animal, they’d come after Graham.

  Folks said he should hang out a shingle as an animal doctor, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t even take any money for helping the animals. That way the farmers couldn’t get mad at him if the potions killed their livestock instead of helping them, he said. He did sometimes take a jar of beans or slab of bacon. He had to keep food on the table for Fern and Poe.

  Graham wasn’t destitute even though some people thought he was because of the way he lived. Kate’s father said Graham always had cash money to plop down when he bought something at the store. That was more than a lot of the people in Rosey Corner could do right now. The Barclays—Graham’s mother’s family—had money. His grandfather was a state senator, an influential man in Frankfort before he died of grief after Graham’s mother passed on. At least that was what Graham claimed killed him. Kate’s mother said it was a heart attack, that she remembered reading in the newspapers about how Senator Barclay had dropped dead right in the middle of a session of the legislature.

  Kate had no idea how old Graham was. Age didn’t seem to matter all that much to him, as if he’d always been old and didn’t worry about it. The skin on his face was stretched so tight over his cheekbones that it showed tiny red blood vessels tracing a pattern across his cheeks. His shirts hung loose off his shoulders the way they might on a scarecrow in somebody’s garden, and Kate had never seen him when his ankles and some leg weren’t showing below his pants. That was because he wore his daddy’s old clothes, and his daddy had been shorter than him.

  Every other week or so he shaved whenever he decided he should show up at one of the churches, and he just whacked off his hair with his pocketknife when it got down in his eyes.

  “I gave up on having a wife a long time ago,” Kate had overheard him tell her mother once. “No woman I ever met would take on a sister-in-law like Fern. But I pledged to my mother on her deathbed that I’d see to Fern as long as she needed seeing to. I guess Mother must have had a premonition that Fern was going to be damaged by the fever. She laid down sick one woman and got up a whole different one. But that didn’t change her being my sister.”

  Now Graham touched Poe on the head and told him he could stay with Tori. The old dog sank happily back down on the pond bank and dropped his head on his paws as he blew a burst of contented air out of the sides of his mouth. “We were out late last night chasing coons,” Graham explained.

  “Did you catch any?” Kate asked as she followed him around the pond toward some vines growing at the edge of the woods.

  “Naw, not the way you’re talking. Me and Poe, we like to get them up a tree, but then we just exchange pleasantries and all of us go on home. It’s the chase we’re after, not the raccoon.”

  “You can sell raccoon skins,” Kate said.

  “I couldn’t do that. Me and Poe, we’re way too familiar with our coons to want to skin them.” Graham stopped and pointed toward the raspberry vines. “Looks like the birds haven’t gotten all the ripe ones yet. Or me. I ate some for my breakfast this morning before we started fishing.”

  “Now that sounds like a good breakfast.” Kate stepped into the vines to reach for some of the bigger berries.

  “Careful. You’ll get all scratched up. Not to mention those snakes.”

  “Raspberries are worth it.” Kate pulled off a berry and put it in her mouth. “Nothing better.”

  Graham waded into the vines beside her and picked a handful of berries to drop into her bucket. They picked awhile without saying anything. In a tree nearby, a mockingbird was running through his repertoire, and behind them Tori’s hook splashed in the water. Above their heads a red-tailed hawk floated across the opening over the pond and let out a shrill whistle.

  “Life is good,” Graham said as he stared up at the hawk.

  “But not for everybody,” Kate said.

  “Well, no, I guess not everybody can be fishing or picking raspberries on a pond bank, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be happy we are.” Graham dropped another handful of berries into Kate’s bucket.

  Kate didn’t say anything for a minute as she stepped deeper into the berry bushes, carefully mashing down some of the vines with her foot. Then she said, “You and Daddy, did you used to go fishing together when you were kids?”

  “Your daddy is some years younger than me, but he was always hanging around Aunt Hattie’s boy. Bo was about my age. And we both liked hitting a baseball. Your daddy ran after the balls for us. That Bo, he could smack that ball clear to yonder no matter how I pitched it.” Graham looked up and off across the pond as if he could see the baseball flying still.

  “Was Daddy happy then?” Kate asked.

  “Nobody can be happy all the time,” Graham said softly before he shook himself a little, as if to get rid of some sad memory. “But he was happy enough when we were playing ball. Course everything was different then before the Great War and the influenza.”

  “How?” Kate asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess because we were young and full of the future. Bo, he was going to be a great baseball player, and he was on his way before he went in the army and got killed over there. Me, I was going to cure people. That’s why I didn’t go to the War. I was still in school. If it had lasted longer and the influenza hadn’t come along, I was thinking I’d go overseas as a doctor. Help the wounded soldiers.”

  “What about Daddy? What did he want to be?” Kate held her bucket over toward Graham for him to drop in his berries.

  Graham didn’t start picking again
for a moment as he thought about his answer. “He was younger, like I said. He hadn’t come up with what he planned to do. All he knew for sure before the War came along and yanked him away from Rosey Corner was that he loved your mama. I’ve never seen nobody so much in love when he was just a young sprout. Bo and me thought he’d die of lovesickness before he ever got your mama to notice him.” Graham laughed a little. Then his smile disappeared. “I was in love something like that once upon a time.”

  “You were?” Kate was surprised. “What happened?”

  “I had to come home from school to take care of my folks and Fern when they got sick. I guess the girl gave up on me coming back, and she up and married somebody else.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it was probably for the best. No woman would want to live the way I do now, and you know, I sort of enjoy it. Freedom’s a fine thing.” He had a handful of berries again, but when Kate held the bucket over toward him, he grinned at her and popped the whole handful in his mouth.

  Kate laughed. And behind them Tori yelled that she’d caught a fish.

  9

  ______

  It was hot in the blacksmith shop. A man couldn’t bend iron without heating it to the right stage for the work. That meant fire in the forge year-round. Sweat soaked Victor’s shirt and rolled down his face as he shaped the horseshoe on his anvil with his ball-peen hammer. Horses’ hooves came in all sizes and shapes, and making shoes to protect their feet and legs was an art. Some of it could be learned, according to his uncle Jonas, but the best blacksmiths were born with a natural instinct and feel for the iron.

  Victor didn’t think he was born a blacksmith. He’d never thought about shaping iron for a living before the war, even though he liked hanging around his uncle’s blacksmith shop when his father didn’t need him at the store. His great uncle, actually. His father’s uncle by marriage.

  Uncle Jonas was a big man, broad as an axe handle across the shoulders, and as good-hearted as he was strong. He could swing the heaviest hammer with one hand with ease. Victor never imagined being able to do what Uncle Jonas could do, but Uncle Jonas let him start shaping the iron as soon as he was big enough to swing a hammer. Victor liked bending the iron to his will. Still, he never planned to use what Uncle Jonas taught him. Not until after everything changed in 1917.

  The year he turned nineteen started out fine enough. He was looking forward to graduation, and life seemed full of endless possibilities. His mother talked incessantly about sending him to school back in Virginia. She wanted to turn him into a man of letters. A writer or a teacher perhaps. She had dreams for him the same as his father had had for Preston Jr. His father had no such dreams for Victor. He expected him to finish out his senior year and then start working in the store. A man couldn’t expect to spend his whole life buried in books.

  Preston Jr. had been enrolled in Centre College over in Danville, but that was different. Preston Jr. had been going places, and he needed not only the book learning but also the contacts with the right people who would someday help him get elected governor. Nobody was going to elect Victor to anything, which suited Victor just fine. He didn’t want to run for office, not even for mayor of Rosey Corner if there had been such a position.

  That’s what people sometimes said his father was. Unofficially. Unelected. But Preston Merritt knew what the community needed. Hadn’t he lived there all his life? Didn’t he see virtually every person in Rosey Corner most every week? Some of them every day. So he knew what was going on. The only other man some people set forward as leader of the community was Preacher Reece.

  Victor’s father laughed at that idea. Preacher Reece might know spiritual matters. If somebody wanted to know about getting to heaven, then by all means that person should knock on the preacher’s door. But if that same person wanted to get something done, say, on the road through Rosey Corner, then he’d better show up at Merritt’s Dry Goods Store and talk to Preston Merritt.

  Victor put in his time at the store on Saturdays and after school, but he didn’t plan on spending the rest of his life working there. He might not know what he wanted to do with his life, but he was sure it was something finer than measuring out flour and keeping count of the pickles in the pickle barrel. That was thinking his mother encouraged.

  The day after he turned nineteen early in February, Victor heard his parents arguing about it. He’d never heard his mother cross his father before. In fact they rarely spoke to one another beyond an occasional polite inquiry after the other’s health. But his mother stood up to his father for Victor’s future. She had her inheritance and she would use it how she wished, and that was to see that Victor was properly educated.

  She had her heart set on his going to the College of William and Mary in Virginia where all the men in her family had been educated. Victor planned to get her to compromise on a college in Lexington. That way he could come home to help his father in the store on Saturdays and, more importantly, to see Nadine.

  It was funny when he thought back on that time now how blind they’d all been. In Europe countries were bombarding one another and men were dying, but none of it seemed to have much to do with America. And nothing at all to do with Rosey Corner. They read the accounts of the war in the newspapers. Every man who came into the store that January railed against the German submarines attacking neutral ships. They thought something should be done when Germany sank the US liner Housatonic in February that year, and most of them backed President Wilson’s call for Congress to pass a bill allowing the merchant ships to arm for protection.

  But it was the rare man in America who was ready to pack his knapsack and head across the ocean to help fight the war. Even when the newspapers reported the German Foreign Minister Zimmerman’s telegram to Mexico proposing an alliance against the United States, most of the men in Rosey Corner still thought the war would stay overseas and never touch any of them.

  Victor read the war news in the papers and heard the talk at the store, but he didn’t worry about it. He was young and in love, and thoughts of Nadine filled his head. He jumped out of bed every morning with a smile on his face. It didn’t matter what his father said to him. It didn’t matter what her father said to her. At least not to Victor. Nadine wasn’t quite as sure about that.

  “Give me a few more weeks to let him get used to the idea,” she told Victor when he asked if he could come to her house to call upon her.

  “He’s never going to get used to the idea. He doesn’t like me. He’s never going to like me.” Victor didn’t see any use dancing around the truth.

  Nadine frowned at Victor. They had stolen a few minutes to talk outside the school before classes started. “What a thing to say! Of course he will like you once he gets to know you better. Right now he thinks you’re like your father.”

  “If that’s true, he’s the only person who ever thought that,” Victor said. He moved in front of her to block the cold wind off her face.

  She had her hands tucked inside the sleeves of the black wool coat one of the church members must have passed down to her. It was too short and showed a wide band of her dark blue skirt sticking out below it. She had let the hood of the coat fall off her head and the wind was blowing strands of her long honey-brown hair across her face. Her nose was red and her beautiful blue eyes were tearing up either from the chill wind or the stubbornness of their fathers.

  Victor’s hand shook a little as he smoothed back one of her curls. She was so lovely that it was all he could do not to reach out and fold her in his arms and kiss her. But Miss Penman, the head of the school, frowned on romantic embraces between students, so he restrained himself. “If only I could write a poem that would do your beauty justice.”

  “Beauty is only skin-deep,” she whispered.

  “Not in your case. You are beautiful inside and outside, through and through, and I love you completely. Desperately. With every inch of my heart and soul, and I always will to my dying day.” He wasn’t sure behind the school
building was exactly the best place to first profess his love to her, but he didn’t wish his words back.

  Her eyes widened and she sounded breathless as she said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  He smiled down at her. “I could suggest a few words. Three notable ones if they are there in your heart.” He lightly touched the wool of her coat over her heart.

  She looked truly distressed that she couldn’t say the words of love he so wanted to hear. “It’s just that I can’t imagine what my father will say. Or do.”

  “Why worry about what your father will say? Why not worry about what you want to say?”

  She dropped her eyes away from his. “The bell is going to ring in a few minutes. We should go inside.”

  Victor put his hands on her shoulders to keep her from turning away from him. He hesitated and then pushed out his next words. “I hear your father has been visiting Carla Murphy.”

  Her eyes shot back to his with a flash of anger in them. “What do you mean by that? My father visits people in Rosey Corner all the time. They ask his spiritual counsel. He is a preacher. It’s his calling to help people.”

  Victor held his hands up and stepped back. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just repeating something somebody told me.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t listen to gossip. Maybe you should read in the Bible what James says about the dangers of an unbridled tongue.” She whirled away from him and stormed toward the front of the school.

  He waited a few minutes before he followed her. Perhaps he had been wrong to speak of Carla Murphy and the rumors going around Rosey Corner. Obviously Nadine wasn’t ready to surrender her spot in her father’s life to another woman. Obviously she wasn’t ready to step into the spot Victor had wide open in his own life for her.

  He hesitated on the steps into the school and thought about not going inside. He wanted to go down to the stable, get his horse, and ride away from here. To Frankfort or Lexington. Anywhere away from Rosey Corner. Anywhere away from the anger in Nadine’s eyes.