by Amy Sorrells
“Lord, I miss her so much. How long will my heart hurt this way?” he said aloud, running his finger across the photograph before setting it down. And yet he feared letting go of the ache would mean he was letting go of her.
Losing Molly, along with the impending loss of the church, made James wonder over and over whether what he’d felt two decades ago in college was truly a calling to the ministry, or if it had simply been the blind idealism of youth. His roommate, Steve, had been a member of one of the last remnants of the Jesus People movement. James had gone to a couple of coffeehouse meetings with Steve, reluctantly at first. But soon, the campfire-like comfort of acoustic music and the poetry of the plain-language Scriptures swept him up into the world of evangelism. Until then, church had been a brick building where folks went on Sundays to feel shame about the things they’d done the week before, and the Bible—King James the only one he’d ever seen—read like a Shakespearean play everyone seemed to understand except him. By the time James had reached his sophomore year, a professor of New Testament studies—Dr. Ernest Wilcox—took him under his wing and believed in him in a way that made James believe in himself for the first time in his life. Wilcox convinced James he not only could be but should be the Lord’s vessel, a man destined to save people, congregations, towns.
“So much for that,” James said, half to God and half to himself, as he looked out the window and watched the dust from Shelby’s truck still settling on the road. Waves of midsummer corn and soybeans swayed as far as he could see.
He’d had plenty of reasons to leave the ministry: the aging congregation, the devastation when he’d realized so many of the younger families were leaving for Higher Ground—the ironic name of the megachurch down the road. He struggled, too, with reconciling his ministry with his own natural propensity to doubt, not that he wondered whether or not God existed, but rather the fear that God is who he says he is, and James’s own sense of inadequacy in light of that. He’d have left the ministry sooner were it not for Molly’s encouragement to stick with it, the elders’ beseeching him to stay, and the fact that something about the endless fields around Sycamore ultimately, at the end of a long day of ministry, steadied him. Swaths of crops reaching toward the sun were interrupted only occasionally by a chippy white farmhouse and a barn, or a rogue collection of grain dryers and silos. Despite everything, the seasons kept changing: spring followed winter, fall followed summer.
“If you’re going to haul me all the way to the boondocks, you better buy me a place I can keep myself busy fixing up while you’re off tending your sheep,” Molly’d said to him when he secured the head pastorate position at Sycamore Community Church. They knew the town of Sycamore in west-central Indiana was home to less than five thousand people according to the last census, and that the closest major town with groceries and hospitals, fast food and other signs of modern civilization was over an hour away.
“Maybe we should wait for an offer from someplace closer to Atlanta,” he’d said, even suggesting he work at a coffeehouse or landscaping company in the meantime.
But though Indiana wasn’t her first choice, Molly had been up for the adventure of something totally new, a place they could call their own. “You won’t know if it’s where you’re supposed to be until you give it a shot,” she’d said.
So James had accepted the job and been happy to oblige her desire for a farmhouse. Being a pastor’s wife was difficult enough, and he had been determined not to let the lifestyle or small-town life squelch her hopes and dreams.
“Would you look at that,” Molly had said when they’d toured the clapboard home with the Realtor.
James had looked, and hard, at the peeling paint, the rotting places in the siding, the slight bend of the front porch posts beneath the weight of the sagging shed roof.
“I wish I’d had such a view growing up,” she’d said inside, putting her hand up to the window, glass wavy with age. Her own parents’ home back in Atlanta was a Tudor revival in Druid Hills, one of several breathtaking mansions in a row. She’d had views of precisely trimmed boxwood gardens, swimming pools, and rose gardens. By contrast, the 1880s Victorian farmhouse on the outskirts of Sycamore came with a wraparound porch and half a dozen acres of wide, untamed, open fields running alongside a sandy creek and covered in wild blue lupine, oxeye daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink joe-pye weed. Several hundred more acres belonging to Stuart Granger surrounded them. Granger’d been close to tearing the place down altogether and planting more corn and beans in its place—that is, until the Realtor had found it and James and Molly had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
They had made a fine and cozy life for themselves within the aging walls, except for the sound of coyotes at night—which had disturbed Molly until he finally bought a gun, if not to actually shoot them, then at least to aim in their general direction and scare them off. The fact that Molly had been an artist, the intuitive, naturally gifted sort with no formal training and completely unaware of how much her work moved people, had helped ward off the initial isolation of the move. She’d always felt more comfortable in a hardware store than most men, and she had a knack for going to flea markets and roadside antique shops, finding something awful anyone else would toss into a junkyard and turning it into something marvelous. A rusty piece of iron fencing became a charming window covering. A weathered flower box became a sturdy container to keep towels neat and straight in their bathroom. Old shutters linked together became a screen for the fireplace. She enjoyed restoration so much she eventually had her own booth at one of the local antique stores and occasionally sold her pieces at seasonal art festivals. They’d bought the old blue pickup truck a few years back to haul her work to fairs and flea markets across the state, and sometimes beyond to Ohio or Illinois.
Once Molly settled in, she made quick friends with their nearest neighbor. At the time, Laurie Burden had a husband who was mostly absent and was expecting her first child. Dale Burden was a commercial truck driver, and Laurie confided to Molly she was glad for Dale’s trips. Molly had voiced concerns about the way Dale treated Laurie over the years. Once their older boy, Eustace, was born, that probably added to the challenges of the marriage. Because of James’s late nights getting to know his congregants, Molly was often alone and Laurie was lonely. The Burdens’ second son, Noble, was born about three years later, and Molly spent as much time as she could helping Laurie with the two little ones.
And then Shelby arrived.
“I’m pregnant!” Molly had hollered at him from the front porch, waving a pregnancy test before he could even get out of his car, five years after their wedding. As soon as she’d gotten through the queasiness of the first trimester, Molly began work on the nursery, which she’d identified as such on that first day they saw the house. She’d built a window seat, valances, and shelving and painted the whole room creamy white before hanging framed pictures of vintage storybook pages on the walls. She refurbished a rusty, but exquisite, chandelier with pink-and-white glass to hang from the center of the ceiling, and she’d had a love seat with a heart-shaped back she found at a garage sale reupholstered in pink-and-white gingham.
“If this girl turns out to be a boy, what are you going to do?” James had laughed.
“I guess he’ll have to learn to like pink.”
Her intuition had been confirmed when Shelby hollered her way into the world and had not quieted down since, at least not until the accident two summers ago. Before that, Shelby hadn’t minded at all the fact that she lived in a fishbowl of a world, on display for the congregation from the moment Molly and James had crossed the threshold of the giant, carved oak doors of Sycamore Community Church with her for the first time when she was only four weeks old. She cooed and gazed her way into the hearts of everyone, singing “Jesus Loves Me” a cappella with a microphone at the age of three and a half. From there, she sang whenever and wherever she could, whether at school and voice camps and competitions, or on Sunday mornings.
But
when the accident happened, the singing stopped. And James was left with a dying church, a screen door banging shut, and dust settling over the road like sadness settling on his heart.
4
The whir of the cooling tank stirring the milk muted as Noble shut the door and secured the latch for the evening. A hawk circled over the high knoll that dipped down to the creek, past the Hortons’, and soared over Granger’s fields beyond. The bird’s wings pushed silent against the invisible air as it searched for a vole or rabbit for its dinner. If Noble looked out over the cornfields, stalks high as his shoulders, he could imagine himself in Kansas or Oklahoma or anywhere besides Sycamore, imagine being so far out and so in the middle of nothing that no one would know who he was or where he was from. Nearby, most of the cows had finished their dinner of silage and were headed, single file, back to the pasture on one of a half-dozen paths of trampled grass, evidence of their mindless instinct to follow each other.
“Just like the rest of Sycamore,” Noble said aloud. He recalled the times they’d gone to church and he’d heard Reverend Horton talk about God having a plan for everyone, something about a future and a hope. But if everyone in the myopic little town was content with following everyone else, how could any of them know they were living out God’s plan? He might not know much, but he knew life was more than just following the leader. Besides that, the last thing he ever wanted to be was a dairy farmer or anything else remotely like his father. Sure, friends like Brock and Tiffany had been high school sweethearts, married a month after graduation, and made a decent living in town. But Noble had been—he realized now—foolish enough to want college and a real job in the city, where he could walk to the coffeehouse and read his books or the newspaper, and play his guitar for small crowds at the corner bar in the evening. He’d wanted to be a poet, a writer, a musician, dreams his truck-driving father hadn’t hesitated to squash at every opportunity.
“You need to do something so you eat more than beans, Noble. Think I like driving a truck all hours of the night, being on the road, sleeping in the cab, coming home and milking those blasted cows? I don’t, but it lets you and your big dumb brother and your mama eat, now don’t it?”
Noble learned early on never to disagree with his father. Disagreement resulted in a beating with a belt, and a couple of those and a child learns quick to avoid it at all cost. He figured instead of belligerence, he’d prove Dad wrong with good grades, get a scholarship, and then he wouldn’t be able to refuse Noble that. He was well on his way toward achieving his goal until the fall of his junior year, when instead of an 18-wheeler showing up at the end of the week, a set of divorce papers came for Mama.
Sometimes Noble sat late at night playing his guitar on the front porch, waiting for Eustace to fall hard asleep so he’d be safe and sure not to wander. He’d play the chords and imagine the corn an audience at the Ryman Auditorium or the Grand Ole Opry, familiar with them only from pictures he’d seen on the Internet. In some ways, he wished he was like Eustace, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. He had long imagined his brother speaking like a regular brother, the squabbles they might’ve had in the haymow, one-on-one basketball games played after dinner until all the sunlight faded and they could hardly see the rim before going inside, singing with him as he played his guitar, the syllables and sentences that might be rolling around in his head but never emerged.
He loved his brother. He really did. It was just that people were hard to love in general, and especially when they needed so much more than most. When they arose, Noble tried to push thoughts of wishing Eustace weren’t around out of his mind. He tried not to let himself imagine the freedom of not being responsible for someone else’s whereabouts, of coming and going like other kids his age who were out making a place for themselves in the world. He tried not to think about how much he hated Dad for leaving, hated the last three summers for their droughts, hated the fact that he had no say in the price they got for each gallon of milk, and hated small towns for the way they made a person who they were instead of the the other way around. If he was destined to care for Eustace and the farm the rest of his life, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d learned a long time ago not to count on a father, whether earthly or heavenly, to get him out of Sycamore.
Daily bread was one thing.
But deliverance, well . . .
Deliverance was a whole other matter.
Noble trudged up the hill from the barn and saw Eustace’s hulking frame out in the pasture, his old dingy white ball cap sticking out above the backs of the group of brown cows under the far grove of cottonwoods. He watched as Eustace doted on Dolly, hunching down with his bulky, double-jointed limbs at odd angles as he maintained eye level with her and the rest of the herd. Sometimes the way Eustace interacted with them—and they with him—reminded Noble of a preacher with his people gathered around him waiting, ears perked so they wouldn’t miss a word of whatever silent wisdom Eustace imparted to them. When Noble and Eustace had been younger, their father’s temper flared every time the cows came near the barn for milking time. Both boys would stand back and cringe as Dad whipped the cows, sometimes drawing blood, into the milking barn. His fence training was no less vicious. Eustace would begin flapping his arms, his mouth open as if he wanted with all his heart to scream, but no sound came out, and slowly he’d crumple to the floor and begin to sway back and forth, face still contorted until finally a velar cry filled the room. Noble had long before learned how to hold back the tears that throbbed against the backs of his eyes, and which if let loose would bring a beating to them both. But Eustace, he never could contain himself. And even Dad seemed to know a beating wouldn’t wipe the misery from his son’s face, so he just left him there to howl. Eustace could often be found on evenings like that curled in the corner of one of the calving stalls, or on warmer nights out in the field pressed up tight against the side of whichever cow had borne the brunt of their father’s anger.
He couldn’t talk, couldn’t swim, couldn’t find his way home if he walked more than a foot off their property, and couldn’t even read. But Eustace had the astonishing brawn to lift and bale hay all day long, the patience to tame the most skittish of farm animals, and the ability to design unique contraptions, everything from his elaborate butterfly collection with handmade shadow boxes and delicate pins holding down the fragile wings, to battery-powered vehicles from Dad’s old Erector sets, to a new and more efficient system of pulleys and lifts to transfer hay bales from the wagons into the highest parts of the haymow.
One summer when Noble was in middle school and Eustace in high school, Dad left for a particularly long trucking job. The boys and Mama handled the milking as they always did, the cows sauntering gingerly into the barn as if anticipating the sting of a beating at any minute. Eustace, always bothered by the fright in the whites of the gentle cows’ eyes, began walking alongside them from the fields to the barn.
Noble watched Eustace use a stick to make marks in the muck along the way where a shadow or piece of fence or something caused any of the cows to startle. By the third day of this, Noble had grown annoyed with the obsession, which seemed vain at best and a distraction from the real work that needed to be done, especially when Eustace began collecting scrap wood and panels from wherever he could find them—the dump, or from someone they heard was tearing down an old barn.
Within a couple of days, Eustace had built a sort of chute at least thirty yards long, which smoothed over and eliminated the stressors and provided a sturdy boundary alongside them. At the next milking, Eustace shooed the cows into the chute, and they proceeded to the barn—to Noble and Laurie’s amazement—without jumping or startling or balking at all. When Dad returned from his trip, he raged when he saw what Eustace had done. But after one milking, even he was impressed at how docile the cows had become, practically lollygagging into the barn.
Noble shook his head at the memory, took off his gloves, and wiped his hands on his work pants. Bringing Whitmore’s s
urviving cows over shouldn’t be too difficult. Eustace would make sure they felt at home. The worst would be training them to the electric fence, but even then, Eustace had a way of taking the barbarousness out of the process.
He looked up to see a plume of dust rising on the road to the north, and Shelby Horton’s truck sailed past. He watched it until he couldn’t see it any longer.
As much as he wanted to get out of Sycamore, that girl was the one thing capable of making him want to stay.
5
If it hadn’t been for the fact that the only way to and from Shelby’s house on the dead-end road was to drive past their dairy, and that she gave Eustace a ride to the Tractor Supply the days he worked there stocking shelves, Noble’d hardly know a thing anymore about the girl he grew up with and had come to love. The times he did see her working the registers, she barely acknowledged him, as if he was just another customer to ring up. Besides singing together at church until the accident, had she forgotten all the times they played as kids as their mamas talked and sipped cold drinks late into the evening? All the times they’d pretended to get lost in the corn rows, caught enough lightning bugs to make small lanterns igniting with alternating flashes of yellow, drank milk by the ladle straight from the cooling tank? She’d even seemed to forget they were each other’s first kiss, giggling under the full summer moon the night they’d dared each other to let their lips touch.
The summer before the accident they’d snuck out of their homes after midnight to hike to the waterfalls, an unlikely and beautiful spot hardly anyone knew about at the far edge of Stuart Granger’s property, before the creek turned and curved under the two-lane highway that led into town.