Land of the Brave and the Free (Journals of Corrie Belle Hollister Book 7)

by Michael Phillips

  Back at the convent I wrote to Christopher again. I would make sure I said nothing this time that I couldn’t send!

  Dear Christopher,

  I apologize for the letter which I hope you received but did not read, and for the telegram. I am sometimes far more emotional than I want to admit, and I feel very foolish. So this will probably be very short.

  I have decided to travel north, to New York State, to visit the place of my early childhood where we lived before going to California. We left exactly thirteen years ago. Most memories have grown dim, but I will know the old farm, and something tells me I need to go there.

  I have sensed for a few days that this is something God may be telling me to do. There are still many questions, and I am still praying about what to do, but I think this may be part of the answer, or perhaps some guidance or answer will come when I am there.

  I don’t know how long I will be. Probably not longer than a week, maybe less. I will then return to the convent. After that . . . hopefully the tunnel will have shortened some so as to see the light at the other end.

  Yours,

  Corrie

  All the way north to New York on the train, I thought about my past, my future, Bridgeville, and Miracle Springs . . . and of course about Christopher.

  How could he not be in my thoughts as much as all the rest? In a way, I suppose he filled more places in my mind than all the rest put together, though I was afraid to look straight at it and admit it. It was too fearsome a thing to admit, because then I’d have to admit that I cared about him a whole lot more than I’d let myself think and admit that I was just like he’d said all young women were . . . that I wanted a man to love me and take care of me and protect me.

  I didn’t want to admit that.

  I’d always wanted to think I didn’t need anyone—even a man. I could do just fine on my own. I could write, I could do things, I could earn money, I even had a pretty decent career as a newspaper writer. I could take care of myself, with or without a pretty face.

  There it was again . . . what Ma’d said to me when I was ten or twelve. I didn’t hold it against Ma for saying it. I’d known before then that I wasn’t pretty. Comely or not, I wasn’t dumb, and I knew what a mirror was for as well as anyone, though I’d never found much pleasure in standing in front of one.

  Maybe that letter I didn’t want Christopher to read had more to do with what I thought of myself than embarrassment over what he might think. Maybe my words to him had scraped the scab off my own doubts about why the convent appealed to me, and opened up the sore spot that had been there underneath all this time, all these years since Ma had told me I wasn’t the marrying sort.

  Had her words hurt more than I’d realized?

  I recall Miss Stansberry quoting Shakespeare, saying that when you protest too much about something and say it doesn’t matter to you, that’s really a way of showing it does. I think I may have said something like that. I’d gone on and on in that letter about the convent not mattering to me in the same way most young ladies might think of becoming a nun. I did admire Sister Janette and the others, and I did want to dedicate myself to Jesus with the same abandonment and fervor they had. But now I wondered if deep down in another place within me there lay some of that very fear I denied I felt—fear of being alone, fear of being an old maid, fear of being talked and snickered about . . . the fear that no one would want me or care about me.

  I loved to write, to express myself, to communicate what I was thinking and feeling. But was part of my desire to be a newspaper writer just a roundabout way—like joining a convent might be for someone else—of making sure I had something to protect myself with so that people wouldn’t look at me and think me strange for not being married?

  Realizing how much I cared for Christopher, and how much I cared what he thought of me, made me vulnerable to all these fears and questions about myself in a whole new way.

  But it was hard to admit you cared what someone thought! The minute you did, the carefully constructed house of self-protection collapsed, and in rushed fears and anxieties and self-doubts and dilemmas of self-worth that you never knew were lurking down beneath the surface!

  It was as if I didn’t know who I was anymore, just like during those first weeks under Christopher’s care. Now, I knew the name Corrie Hollister. I knew my history. I was on my way to the very place where I was born, where I had lived half my life. I could see all the events of my twenty-eight years stretching out from this place, all the way to California and then back again . . . all the way right up to this moment. I knew the events that had gone together to make up what is called my “life.”

  Yet I found myself wondering if I really knew what is most important of all—did I know myself?

  Was I afraid to face that one, that deepest, that most personal truth about one’s self—the horrible fear that maybe no one really does care about you all the way down into the deepest places of your being where no one sees?

  Is that why I hadn’t wanted Christopher to read the letter—because I was afraid it might expose what he thought about me? And just the possibility of discovering that he didn’t care for me in the same way I found myself caring for him was simply too painful a thought to face!

  Yes . . . I was afraid. Not with the kind of fear that a wild bear strikes into you when you’re out walking alone in the forest, but a deep, quiet, lonely sense of dread that no one is there to hear the silent cries of your heart.

  I wanted somebody to hear, to care! I wanted somebody to know me! I wanted to talk and know that I was heard. I wanted to laugh and cry and know that it mattered to someone.

  I wanted somewhere to belong.

  Was it in Washington with my friends and fellow workers with the Sanitary Commission? No. The war was over and all that would change now. That had been something for me to do, but not a place to belong.

  Was it at the Convent of John Seventeen with the Sisters of Unity? Perhaps it could be. But in my deepest heart I did not think so. There were tight bonds of unity with the sisters. I would never forget them and would always consider them among my dearest friends. But I was not one of them. Not because I wasn’t Catholic, but that I didn’t feel called by God to set myself apart in the same way they had.

  Could it be here, in this town toward which I was riding? There had at one time been a home there, a place to live and grow with my family. But it could not be so again. Pa had left before we had. Ma was dead. No kin of ours were left—that I knew of anyhow—no friends, not even a handful of acquaintances who might remember Ma or Pa or us kids. No, this place had stopped being a place for the Hollister and Belle clans to belong when we’d pulled up stakes and left thirteen years ago.

  Then why was I going there?

  Maybe I needed to go to the very spot where life had begun for me in order to find out once and for all just where I did belong. Was it for this time, these next days, that God had prompted me to leave Washington and to pray and reflect about my life and future? Is this where the rest of my life was to begin—now, from here, where the first half of my life had begun twenty-eight years ago?

  What was God getting ready to show me?

  It was two days later when I walked out of the boardinghouse in Bridgeville where we’d lived so long ago, and began to make my way through the town.

  The northbound train had arrived late in the afternoon. I purposely didn’t try to look around after arriving, but made my way straight to one of the two boardinghouses in town. I wanted to save my impressions for the next morning.

  That evening I’d thought a lot about what I was doing, and I’d prayed and asked God to use this time to bring things back to my memory that he wanted me to think about. I asked him to make a daughter of me he would be proud of. I asked him to wash and cleanse away any last pieces of my childhood that were still clinging to me like a bit of dirt that he didn’t want soiling my clothes anymore. I asked him to give me a grown-up’s eyes about my whole life—about what had happened he
re so long ago, and about all that my life had been since. I asked him to give me his eyes to see, not only my life, but inside my deepest self.

  So when I went out early the next morning, I was full of a sense of anticipation and expectancy, wondering how God might be going to answer all those prayers, and how he was going to use this time full of memories to put my youth behind me.

  Bridgeville wasn’t a large town, then or now, but it had changed some and I could tell it was growing. There’d been no rail line back then, of course. There were new buildings and stores and homes, but most of it I recognized as unchanged. As I made my way out, all the stores were just opening, and people were busy cleaning windows and putting things in their displays and sweeping off the board walkways in front. Most of the men nodded or tipped their hats at me. I didn’t recognize anybody as I made my way along the main row of storefronts.

  Suddenly I stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Right in front of me was a big red-painted sign hanging across the sidewalk with the words “Belle Hardware.”

  I’d completely forgotten! Grandpa Belle’s cousin’s store! But I remembered it as a tiny little place without much of anything in it, and I thought it had died out years ago.

  I walked inside and up to the man who was sweeping the floor in front of the counter.

  “Morning, miss,” he said.

  “Good morning,” I replied. “Are you . . . are you Mr. Belle?” I asked timidly.

  “No,” he laughed. “There’s no Mr. Belle here.”

  “But what about the name?”

  “Just the name of the store, miss. Nothing more.”

  “How did it get the name?”

  “Beats me. That was the name on the front when I bought the store five years back.”

  “Did you buy it from Mr. Belle?”

  “No, from a fellow named Smothers. He’d had it for five years, and he didn’t know of no Belles associated with it either. But it’s been the name of the place all this time, so both he and I figured there was no reason to change it. Why you asking, miss?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” I said. “Belle’s my middle name, that’s all. I thought maybe there was some relation.”

  “Not likely, miss.”

  Slowly I walked back outside, disappointed. I suppose something inside me had hoped to find some link to the past. Being totally isolated, cut off from your childhood is an empty feeling. To be completely whole you need to feel the connections to your roots, places and people and events from out of your past. And as I walked through the town, a part of me so desperately wanted to touch my own past, to get back to it somehow, to get “inside” those former times again, to relive what I felt then, but through the perspective and spiritual awareness of an adult. Somehow, to complete the wholeness of adulthood, I needed God to reopen my childhood to me in a way that joined the two into one.

  Part of this was seeing and touching all these familiar places, remembering what I had felt so many years ago. I walked out of the hardware store, stopped, and leaned up against a pole standing at the outer edge of the walk holding up part of the store’s sign. Unconsciously I stood there a moment, my arm draped around the rough piece of wood, my fingers rubbing at its cracks and the roughness of its grain. Suddenly my fingers remembered something! But it wasn’t here, not on this pole!

  The next instant I was running along the boards, my shoes making a loud clomp, clomp, clomp! To the end of the row of buildings I ran, then across the dirt street, right on the sidewalk on the other side, and to the end of the street . . . to the livery stable.

  There it was! I ran straight to it, nearly out of breath. Out in front sat an old wood watering trough, still full of dirty water, with a long rail for tying up horses behind it. I ran to the end of the rail.

  The day was so clear in my memory it could have been yesterday! Pa had come into town with Zack and me. I was seven or eight. Zack must have been only five or six. I can’t imagine that Pa would have given him a knife when he was that young, but wherever he got it, he had it that day. Pa went into the livery. I remembered his voice as clear as day now, saying to me, “You stay here, little girl, an’ watch yer brother.”

  The minute he was gone, Zack pulled out his knife and started to scratch and carve away on the rail. I was afraid he’d cut his finger off, and then it’d be my fault. But he handled that knife better than I’d figured he could and had his job done in less than five minutes.

  “Let me try, Zack,” I’d said.

  “You can’t do it. You’re a girl.”

  “I can too. Give me the knife,” I replied, then grabbed it from him. But before I could get much done I heard Pa’s voice saying he’d see the man inside next week, and then his steps coming back toward us. I quickly folded up the knife and handed it back to Zack, who stuffed it into his pocket.

  Now, more than twenty years later, my fingers ran through the grooves Zack had made, as weathered with time as the wood itself, and the awkwardly shaped letters that spelled out the words: Z – A – C – K.

  I smiled at the spelling. And yet before my finger had completed the C – O – R – R, which was all there was of my own name, a great lump filled my breast and tears flooded my eyes.

  I don’t know why. The memory was a happy one. But something about reliving it so vividly brought such a stab of nostalgic melancholy that I could hardly stand it. So many feelings came pouring into me as my fingers caressed the ancient letters whittled out of that tie pole—arguments I’d had with Zack through the years, and happy times too, but you usually remember more of the hurtful things you did to other people, and tend to forget what they did to you. I remembered Zack’s and Pa’s differences and Zack’s leaving home, and then that day he came back. Even as I was hearing Zack’s five-year-old little voice talking to me and Pa from that day outside the livery in New York, I was at the same time seeing Pa and Zack in each other’s arms the day Zack returned from Nevada, saying words to each other that no one else ever heard.

  The memory was too full. I could hardly take another moment of it! Blinking back the tears, I turned and walked back toward the town and away from the livery, struggling to draw in deep breaths to steady my emotions. I hadn’t counted on God’s answering my prayers in such a personal and emotional way!

  I walked slowly down the main street, grinning inside as if I had a secret, almost expecting everyone to know me, memory after memory now coming to me. In spite of the changes, everything was so familiar. I felt as if I were walking in two worlds at once, fully conscious and awake and being both a twenty-eight-year-old and a seven-year-old at the same time. I even felt things in both a seven-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old way, which made my tears and the lumps in my stomach and throat and chest all the more keen and vivid.

  I walked along, hardly noticing the shop windows I passed. Off in the distance I saw the white spire of the church rising above the other buildings. I wanted to see the church. There were memories there too, good ones. I hoped it would be open. I began making my way toward it.

  As I passed the General Store, I glanced inside. A balding man was arranging some cans in the window. I continued on, then stopped. I turned for a closer look. I recognized him! His head was bald now, and his cheeks were more plump, but there could be no mistake.

  I hurried inside. “Mr. Alexander?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he replied, glancing up from where he stood bending toward his window display case.

  “Do you remember Agatha Hollister?” I said.

  He straightened himself up, screwing his face up into a thoughtful expression. “No, young lady,” he said slowly, “can’t say as I do.”

  “How about Nick Belle?”

  Immediately his face lit up in recognition. “Not likely I’d forget him!” he said. “Oh, you must mean Aggie Belle,” he added quickly. “Nick and Aggie—sure, I remember them. Went to school together, sat in Sunday school together. Why? They some relation of yours?”

  “Agatha was my mother,” I said.


  He turned and walked toward me, busily looking me over from head to toe. “You don’t mean to tell me,” he said slowly, “that you’re . . . you’re—”

  “Corrie,” I finished for him.

  “Corrie! That’s it. Aggie’s little girl!”

  “That’s me,” I said, smiling.

  “No fooling! I haven’t heard a thing about you all since you packed up for California. How is your ma?”

  I told him she’d died on the way across the desert.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Corrie. How about your uncle . . . you ever get onto his trail?”

  “We found him, and our pa. We’re living with them.”

  “All you kids . . . living with those two wild men,” he said, half in question, half in disbelief.

  I laughed. “They’re not wild, and we’re not kids anymore, Mr. Alexander. Uncle Nick’s married, Pa’s remarried, and even little Tad’s twenty years old.”

  A cloud passed over his face. “Well, they were wild enough years ago,” he said. “Nick gave my father such a bad time in Sunday school, and then the older he got, the wilder he got.”

  “He’s as nice a man as you’d ever want to meet now,” I said.

  “Well, you tell him hello from Jeb Alexander next time you see him, Corrie,” he said. “Not that he’d be likely to remember a little kid he thrashed a time or two. But it was a long time ago, like you said, so you give him my best.”

  “I will. Did you know my father too?” I asked.

  “No, can’t say I did, not well at least. Saw him around town of course, after he and Aggie were married. But then Nick got himself in that trouble, then your pa was gone too . . . you know how it was. So I reckon I never had the chance to know your pa real well.”

  We talked for several more minutes. I told him what I’d been doing and why I was there. He was real friendly and invited me to have dinner with him and his wife before I left town.