Rorey's Secret

by Leisha Kelly

“What if you was my real mama and not just my neighbor mama? Would I sleep over here all the time then, or would I go and visit Rorey and Berty and everybody sometimes too? Or what if Lizbeth had as many kids as all a’ us, and they was runnin’ around here all the time while she was teachin’ school? We’d have lots a’ messes then.”

  “Emmie, Lizbeth’ll have to quit teaching when they have a baby. She almost had to quit just over getting married.”

  She frowned. “Babies is plenty good. But I hope she don’t quit. ’Cause I wanted to ask her if I could go to her school. I know she wouldn’t call me no dummy. An’ maybe I could learn better there.”

  I was rather aghast. “Elvira Post didn’t call you a dummy. Did she?”

  Emma nodded her head in the affirmative, her little lip just beginning to stick out.

  Katie was shaking her head the other way. “I don’t think that’s what she meant. But one day this week she did say it takes all kinds to make a world, the smarter and the not-so-smart, and we all just have to do our best work.”

  “But Teddy Willis said the not-so-smart was me,” Emmie cried. “An’ she didn’t even scold him, not one word!”

  “Maybe she didn’t hear him,” I suggested.

  “I didn’t hear him,” Katie agreed.

  “Well, he said it! An’ I wanna go to Lizbeth’s school.”

  “Not surprising,” I said, my heart suddenly heavy for her. “She’s a wonderful big sister and I’m sure a fine teacher, but that school is in town, honey. Too far away.”

  “Not so bad far. Me an’ Harry an’ Bert’d go an’ live with her if we didn’t have Pa. I heard him say so once. An’ Franky’d stay here so’s he could work the wood. An’ Rorey maybe too, so’s she could be with Sarah. And then that would leave Willy an’ Kirk, an’ Joe when he come back from the service, an’ they could handle the farm, leastways till they all get married, an’ maybe one of ’em’d stay on even then.”

  “Did your pa say all that?” I asked her, more than a little surprised.

  “Yeah. Only not today.”

  “Well, it may be well and good for him to rest his mind over what would happen with all of you, but you most definitely still have your pa, and I don’t see how that’s going to change for a very long time.”

  “I know. An’ I don’t want it to change, e’cept for goin’ to Lizbeth’s school. But he said you never know ’bout tomorrow. What’s he mean by that?”

  “I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Or why he’d tell it to you, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I still wanna go to Lizbeth’s school. Maybe I could stay with her sometimes even though we do got Pa.”

  I patted her hand, now wondering about her father. It’d been a very long time since we’d heard any talk of him not being there for his kids. “Emmie, honey, I’m not at all sure about you staying with Lizbeth. And that school’s just too far for you to get back and forth every day. I’m sure your teacher wasn’t meaning to call you a dummy or let anybody else do that, either. Most days you like school, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I guess. ’Cept readin’. An’ she’s tryin’ to make me do that all the time.”

  “That’s what schools are for,” Katie told her.

  I was stirring up the batter. Emmie helped me fold the nuts in. “Can I put it in the pan?” she begged. “Can I, please?”

  I almost said no. But it was so important to her. She loved to help in the kitchen. It seemed to be her most favorite thing. She’d choose cooking and washing dishes over most any game you could care to mention. “All right,” I told her. “But let me help and let’s be careful. I want this to look nice for Mrs. Howell.”

  “Mrs. Howell? Who’s she?”

  “The doctor’s wife, remember? Only she’s grieving now because he’s gone on to be with the Lord.”

  She stopped and stared at me a minute. “Does that mean he’s with Mama too?”

  “Yes. With your mama too.”

  It seemed like only yesterday when I’d stood in Wilametta Hammond’s bedroom with my shaking hands helping Mrs. Graham deliver little Emmie. And just a few short months later, Mrs. Hammond was gone. In the years since then, George had gone through spells of being angry at his wife and angry at God. But if there’d been any choice in the matter, poor Wilametta would never have left her struggling husband alone with ten children. Not in a million years.

  Did George still miss her so dreadfully as he used to? Why would he start talking about what his kids would do without him? Especially in front of his seven-year-old daughter? Oh, it made me wonder.

  I might have said something more to her. She might have said something more to me. But we suddenly heard a noise behind us and turned to find Samuel standing there, leaning against the door frame. I almost dropped the batter bowl.

  “Samuel Wortham! What in the world are you doing up?”

  “I wanted another drink of water, but it sounded like you had your hands full in here.”

  “Dad, I could’ve gotten it,” Katie told him.

  “It’s all right. I’m doing all right.” Slowly, more gingerly than I’d ever seen him walk, he made his way to the table and sat at the nearest chair. “If you wouldn’t mind, just set it here in front of me, Katie.”

  She hopped to get it in a hurry. And I didn’t know whether to be delighted for him or dreadfully upset. “Dr. Hall is not going to be very happy with you,” I said. “I can tell how sore you are by the way you walk.”

  “Yeah. But it doesn’t help anyone to have me stay in that bed.”

  “What if you’ve torn open that cut on your leg? Or aggravated something else—”

  “Shhh.” He took a slow drink of his water and then managed a smile. “I believe I hear Mrs. Pratt singing with some kind of drummer outside. Not a bad sound.”

  “Samuel . . .”

  He looked at me and took a deep breath before speaking again. “I think Sarah’s right. We ought to be in the house of God tomorrow.”

  I set the bowl down. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m still here. After a barn fell on me, Julia. I ought to be going to worship.”

  “But Dr. Hall said—” The look in his eye stopped the rest of my words before they could come out of my mouth.

  “He said I’d be all right. Didn’t he?”

  The doubt in me was suddenly squeezing at the pit of my stomach. “He said he’s expecting so. That we’d be right to believe so.”

  “There you go. Then we ought to thank God.”

  “But . . . we can do that here.”

  “I want to be in church. I don’t want to sit here making people fret. We never miss. Imagine, Julia, if we’re not there. They’ll be thinking it’s serious.”

  I stared at him for a minute. “It was serious, Samuel. It is serious. Pastor knows how serious it could have been! And you don’t have to do anything because of what people might think. They’ll pray for you. They’ll understand.”

  “I want to go.”

  His eyes looked so weary. His breathing still pained him, I could tell. And I had no way of knowing whether he was still dizzy, except that he’d been holding onto the wall as he came in. “Oh, Samuel, are you sure? You’re supposed to stay in bed.”

  “I’m sure. It’s not like I have to walk the whole way or mount a horse.”

  “You must be the strongest man in the world,” Emmie told him.

  Samuel disagreed. “I imagine your father’s having to be pretty strong right now, sorting it through in his mind what to do from here.”

  “Are you gonna help him make a new barn?”

  “He’ll have help.” That was all Samuel would say about it. But I knew it’d be quite a while before he was ready for that kind of work. He was pushing things to be sitting in the chair in front of us.

  “Maybe I should get you back to bed.”

  “Just a minute,” he said slowly. “Let me sit here a minute till I get my legs on again.”

  Emmie laughed at him. “You can’t take your l
egs off! Nobody can take their legs off!”

  “You’re dizzy, aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “It’ll pass,” he said with a quiet voice.

  I tried to be happy about him getting up, that he was feeling well enough to. But he wasn’t well enough. And I wasn’t happy at all. I tried to help him back to the bedroom when he was ready, but he wouldn’t lean on me. He steadied himself in the doorway again, but that was all. He tried to act like it was nothing for him to get up and stroll around, but he couldn’t hide the pain in his face.

  “Oh, Samuel! How can you be so stubborn? We were just telling Sarah about obeying what the doctor had to say.”

  “I know. I just thought it over a little more. If I stay in bed, Juli, it’ll scare the children.”

  “It’ll scare them worse if you hurt yourself.”

  “Help me drag the bedroom rocking chair into the kitchen.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be off in the bedroom, Julia. But Thelma and the baby are using the rocker in the sitting room.”

  “You need to go back to bed.”

  “I want a chair where I can lean my head back. But I want to be out around everybody.”

  I shook my head. “You can be so awful bullheaded.”

  He smiled. “So can you. In a good way. Please, Juli. Help me get the chair.”

  He was breathing hard, holding on to me a little tighter. I knew I needed to get him settled somewhere. “Will you just sit on the bed and let me move the chair? Then if you feel like getting up again in a while, it’ll be ready for you.”

  “All right. Fair enough.”

  He sat on the bed. But as I was pulling the chair, he slowly lay back and closed his eyes. I stopped immediately. “Samuel?”

  “It’s all right. Just getting my legs again. This room kind of whirls, you know.”

  “Oh, Samuel.”

  He peered over at me. “Need help with that chair?”

  “I’ll move the chair. Don’t you budge. Not one inch! You just stay put a while. Do you hear me?”

  He smiled. “Yeah. A while. Okay.”

  He sounded so exhausted. Why couldn’t he see that he was scaring me just as much by getting up as he did when he lay so still?

  “I love you,” he whispered. “Thanks.”

  “For what?” I asked, giving that rocker a push through the doorway.

  “Being bullheaded.”

  I looked up, and he winked at me.

  He did get up and sit in the kitchen after a while. I got him a pillow for behind his head and almost had a conniption when Georgie ran in and jumped on him and set the chair to rocking.

  Delores walked in just as I was lifting Georgie off, and she took him out of my hands. “We’re gonna have to get out an’ go home,” she said. “I can sure see that. Are you all right, Mr. Wortham?”

  “He’s just a little fellow,” Samuel answered her.

  “Maybe so, but he’s still too big to be climbin’ over banged-up ribs,” she replied. “Now, Georgie, you’ve gotta leave Mr. Wortham alone. He’s been hurt. You know that.”

  “Mommy!” he wailed, reaching toward the sitting room doorway.

  “Nope,” Delores said immediately. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was feedin’ the baby again. Tell you what I saw, though, while I was out there lookin’ around. Mrs. Wortham’s got some ground cherries over past the well. You reckon she’d mind if we went and picked a few for her?”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I protested.

  “Nonsense. It’d be our pleasure. Wouldn’t it, Georgie? You know how to pick ground cherries, don’t you? Aren’t you Grandma’s big boy?”

  He nodded with his little lip hanging out a bit. “Georgie big.”

  Delores helped herself to a couple of bowls. I wondered what the ground cherry plants would look like by the time Georgie got finished with them, but right then I didn’t care. As long as the boy was occupied, that was fine with me.

  Bert came hobbling into the kitchen, leaning heavily on one of Emma Graham’s old canes. He looked like he’d napped again. His hair was sticking straight up on one side.

  “You think Pa’ll be back tonight?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. But I expect at least some of the bunch will be here. They may be too tired to fix their own supper, and I’ll bet if Willy and Kirk get hungry, they’ll finish off whatever’s left of the lunch we sent, long before suppertime.”

  He didn’t say anything else to me, only went over and sat next to Samuel. The skinny oak cane slid to the floor with a clunk. “I sure am sorry, Mr. Wortham,” he said with one hand fumbling down unsuccessfully for the crook of the cane. “I didn’t want nobody to get hurt.”

  “I’m sure it’s a lesson learned,” Samuel told him. “Don’t worry about it now.”

  “Are you doin’ all right?”

  Samuel didn’t look all right sitting in a rocker in the kitchen with his head leaned on one pillow and another pillow against his side. But he wasn’t about to tell Bert anything that wasn’t positive. “Coming along fine,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I was just sitting here thinking it was time I put my hand to something around here and quit wasting the day.”

  “Samuel—” I started to protest.

  “Now just relax,” he told me. “I didn’t say I’d be running races. But if you could bring my polishing bag, maybe Katie’d carry me everyone’s shoes and Bert and I could get them all shined up for tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked him. Katie stood, waiting for his response.

  “We can manage, can’t we, Bert?” he said. “Polishing’s a good sit-down job.”

  I might have argued that the arm movement could aggravate Samuel’s ribs or that looking down at shoes might be a little hard on his aching head when he should be leaning it back, but Bert was smiling at the idea and I let it go. Maybe it would do them both good to be applying their hands to something. Especially Bert. And surely Samuel would know to quit if he got too tired.

  Just as I expected, we heard our truck coming back around suppertime. Robert came in and got the milk bucket. He was so pleased to see his father sitting in the kitchen that I thought maybe that was why Samuel had done it. It took a load off Robert’s mind just to see Samuel out of bed. He and Willy went to start the chores together. I thought I caught a glimpse of Harry out the window, and I could hear Rorey on the porch, but she didn’t come in. And it wasn’t long before young Sam came walking through the door with his son on his shoulders and his mother-in-law following along behind.

  “I oughta take my family on home,” he told us. “There ain’t enough thanks to be said for what all you done for us, but—”

  “It’s just time,” Delores finished for him. “Time we had Thelma in her own bed and little Georgie back over t’ home again.”

  “Are you sure the doctor would want Thelma up and traveling so soon?” I asked with genuine concern. “It’s not even been a full day.”

  “She’s healthy,” Delores assured me. “Don’t you worry. Sam can carry her to the car, and once we’re home, I’ll have her straight to bed. I can stay a whole week, maybe two, an’ she won’t have to lift a finger.”

  I had to admit it might make things a bit easier for us. “You’ll at least eat something here first, won’t you?” I asked them. “So you won’t have to fix something as soon as you get in the door?”

  Sam and Delores both agreed. And Delores took Georgie in with his mommy and baby sister. Young Sam turned around a kitchen chair and sat in it.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow to see what I can do to help Pa,” he said. “Ben an’ Lizbeth stayed over there even though he didn’t want ’em to ’cause he’s takin’ all this pretty hard, worryin’ for winter an’ everythin’ else. He tried to send us all back over here, but Lizbeth wouldn’t leave him alone.”

  I well remembered George’s despairing behavior after losing Wilametta. He’d wanted to be alone then too. He’d taken to drink and co
me very close to suicide. But this was nothing like that, surely. A barn and outbuildings, and even the animals, were nothing like losing your wife. But I could tell it was bothering young Sam too.

  “I’d a’ stayed if it weren’t for Thelma an’ the kids,” he told us. “Kirk an’ Rorey wanted to too, but he made ’em come on over. Said he didn’t want ’em in the house all night smellin’ the smoke, but it ain’t that bad.”

  “Are Ben and Lizbeth planning to stay the night?” Samuel asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll be all right, then. For now.”

  “I don’t think Lizbeth’ll go nowhere ’long as Pa’s depressed like this.”

  “He won’t stay that way,” Samuel maintained. “It’ll come out all right.”

  “I sure hope you’re right, Mr. Wortham. He’s feelin’ pretty bad about you too. I oughta stop over there on the way home an’ tell him you’re up. That ought to ease his mind.”

  “You do that. Tell him I’m going to church in the morning and he ought to come too.”

  I was warming up leftovers when Delores came back in the kitchen and started pulling plates down from the cupboard.

  “How many here tonight, Julia?”

  I had to count. “Five of us, plus seven Hammond children is twelve. Then there’s Sam’s four plus you. That makes seventeen, right? Of course, Rosemary won’t need a plate and Georgie ought to have a small one. The one with the rooster, please.”

  “Goodness,” she said with a laugh. “That is a houseful.”

  “I guess we’re used to it around here.”

  I started hearing footsteps on the porch and knew it was Franky coming in. He had a different sound to his walk than any of the other boys. He opened the door and came in just as young Sam was telling Samuel about finding what was left of the spade and the posthole digger in the remains of the burned-out barn.

  “Maybe they’ll be all right if we get some handles made,” Sam was saying. “And there ought to be more to salvage where the east wall was. Lot a’ tools was hanging up there.”

  “I can make handles,” Franky said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I told Pa,” Sam acknowledged. “But he wasn’t wantin’ to talk about that.”

  Franky didn’t respond.