Rachel's Prayer (9 page)

Pa showed up at about three in the mornin’. I always sleep light, so I woke when I heard Star comin’ back through the snowy yard. I hoped Pa hadn’t let himself get too cold. I got up to throw wood on the fire, and then I went out to the barn in case Pa needed help puttin’ the horse up. He didn’t. Or at least he didn’t want help. But he was stumblin’, mutterin’ somethin’ about some drunk arguin’ and makin’ fun of him in town. I made the mistake a’ saying I wasn’t surprised because wine was a mocker and strong drink was ragin’. And even though those were Bible words out of Proverbs, Pa yelled at me. I helped him to the house, almost surprised he’d let me, and he passed out as soon as he hit the bed. I was glad everybody else was asleep.

In the morning I roused the kids early. Me and Bert and Harry did the chores again while the girls stirred up breakfast. Pa didn’t get up. I didn’t expect him to, but I went to check on him before we left. He looked true horrible, with his eyes all red and uptight lookin’, his hair a crazy stick-up mess, and a scratch on his hand he didn’t know how he got. I couldn’t help thinkin’ of some other words in Proverbs: “Who hath contentions? Who hath babbling? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine.”

I didn’t say it out loud, ’cause I knew he wouldn’t hear it. But I prayed.
Lord, help my pa
.
And help me an’ all my family learn this lesson by example and not by experiencin’ it our ownselves.

“Pa, we’re going to church,” I said. “You wanna come?”

“Not this time, boy. I gotta sleep.”

“All right,” I told him. “We’ll see you about dinnertime.” I didn’t ask him about takin’ the wagon ’cause I didn’t want him to tell me no. And I didn’t want to leave him a horse lest he get to feelin’ stronger an’ think he had plenty a’ time to go after another bottle. So without no more words I went an’ hitched both horses to the wagon, got everybody bundled and loaded the best I could, and headed out for the Dearing church.

“Is Pa sick?” Emmie asked on the way.

“Yep,” I told her without any explaining. “I reckon he is.”

8

Julia

My world had a hole in it without Robert home. We listened to the radio the next few days to hear news of the war, but none of it was good. And then the radio quit on us the way it was prone to do sometimes, and Samuel couldn’t get it going again.

The girls and I sat down for a few minutes every evening to write a letter to Robert or to Willy, Joe or Kirk. Samuel didn’t do much writing, but he would tell me some things to say. We were all worried about George after the kids came to church Sunday without him, and Emmie told us he’d been gone almost all night. Samuel went to talk to him twice, and he seemed better then. Franky told us his father had quit most of his grumbling at them and didn’t disappear like that again.

“He’s prone to weakness,” Franky explained when he came through the snowy timber to finish Pearl Daugherty’s hope chest. “He says he’s doin’ better. He says he don’t need the drinkin’ so much now, if things is goin’ all right.”

Those words bothered me more than I let on. What if things didn’t go right? What then? But I didn’t want to voice such doubts to Franky, who seemed to have enough of his own.

“It scares me, Mrs. Wortham,” he said with an earnest frown. “It’s like he’s givin’ himself permission to act any kind a’ way if we come on hard times or somethin’ don’t suit him. Emmie an’ Berty ain’t said much about it, but they’re bein’ careful around him, not wantin’ to give him no excuse. An’ I don’t wanna be the cause a’ him runnin’ to the bottle again neither. But sooner or later he’ll find somethin’ wrong around me. He always does.”

There were times over the years when George Hammond made me just plain mad. And this was one of them. “Oh, Franky. It sounds like he’s trying to find a way to blame someone else for his own behavior. But we all deal with difficult things, and we can well choose to be sensible about it.”

“I know. But at least he’s doin’ better’n he was. I just hope he listened good to Mr. Wortham, an’ it sticks with him longer’n the last time.”

“I hope so too,” I agreed.

Franky shook his head. “He can be so awful hardheaded. Like he’s got a wall up against what God would do if he let him. I ain’t for sure if he’s really saved, an’ it’s botherin’ me.”

I nodded, not sure how to answer those concerns. Franky’d always been one to wonder about a person’s eternal well-being, but his father found such talk simply annoying more often than not. “I’m not sure what we can do except pray for him. I know he’s heard the Word. I know he’s prayed both with Samuel and the pastor.”

“Yeah, but I’m not so sure if he done that of his own true heart, Mrs. Wortham, or ’cause they expected it.”

His strange, almost silvery eyes looked hurt. It was easy to picture him again the way we met him, as a scrawny, sad-faced eight-year-old, lonely in the middle of a big family, with deep questions nobody tried to address.

“Frank, only God knows for sure. All we can do is pray that your father long to walk close to God now and do right by his family.”

He looked down at the floor. “I know. I need to let it go from my mind and get on with the business a’ the day. I guess Pa’s right sometimes that I let my thinkin’ get in the way a’ my doin’, but most the time I manage to do both at the same time all right. I guess I’m just in a test when it comes to trustin’ right now.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

He looked at me with question. “You do?”

“Very much so. Samuel and I agreed we would trust Robert in God’s hands. But it’s not been one bit easy for me the last few days.”

“That’s just natural.”

“And it’s the same way with you.”

He smiled, just a little, and I was glad if I’d managed to set his mind to ease some. I thought it good that he’d come over. We hadn’t seen as much of him this week as we usually did. He was taking responsibility for his younger brothers and sisters very seriously, and it seemed a little strange not to see him every day. Franky had been a welcome feature at our house for a long time.

Before he left, Franky dictated to me a letter for Joe, who wrote to him fairly regularly. Joe’s last letter had come from the Philippines. He’d been sick, and though he gave us no details, he sounded less than pleased about being there. Franky encouraged him that all things were for a purpose and would work out for good in the end. I couldn’t have managed a better letter myself.

Then he asked me to add a line in my next letters for Kirk and William. He never had quite as much to say to them. They’d never been close. But he wanted to be faithful to communicate with them regularly anyway.

“Can you stay to dinner?” I asked.

“No, ma’am. I promised myself I’d pretty much stay t’ home this week ’case I’m needed, then next week we’ll see. I won’t let the work go, though, I promise you. I’m takin’ the back of a chair with me to carve on after supper.”

“All right, Franky.”

I watched him scrunch his hat down over his ears and head out across the timber with a chunk of wood under his arm. His limp seemed very pronounced as he stepped over snowdrifts on the unshoveled path, and I sighed, feeling heavy for him and not sure why. Franky always handled himself so well. He didn’t see himself as handicapped at all. He didn’t let anything slow him down.

I was glad Franky had chosen to be home more. For one thing, he made his younger brothers and sisters get off to school whether they wanted to or not, which was something Willy and their father had never concerned themselves about. It hadn’t been a problem with Emmie or Bert, but Harry and Rorey had always missed far more school than they should. But not a day this week so far, and that was Franky’s doing.

Franky had always loved learning, despite his troubles with it. I decided to ask Sarah to borrow a few books from the teacher for me. I hadn’t been teaching Franky regularly for almost two years, and it’d been far too long since I’d read him anything. I thought he’d appreciate the opportunity next time he was over.

The next day, Sarah came home with an atlas of the world, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, and
In His Steps
by Charles Sheldon. I had to smile at those choices, especially when Sarah told me the teacher had decided on them herself. This new teacher certainly understood our needs better than the last one, who had insisted on sending me little stories at the primer level “to help the poor boy read.” After so many years of trying, I honestly didn’t know if anyone could do that. None of the teachers since Mrs. Post had been willing to give Frank their time after hearing of our previous efforts. But the primer stories were ridiculous boredom to him.

Franky loved a story to make him think. He could soak up words and thoughts like a sponge, even when the rest of the family scarcely understood what was being read. It was a mystery to me, and something I’d taken to the Lord many times, that Franky could be so brilliant and yet hopelessly lost when faced with a written page.

But it was a greater mystery and a frustration that George Hammond still failed to appreciate his son. He’d chosen years ago to see only Franky’s difficulties, and no amount of time or persuasion had been able to open his eyes to the gifts.

As often as not, Franky’s presence seemed to trouble George, though he’d freely acknowledged that his son bore no real fault for it. He’d wanted Franky away from him, out of his house for a while, when the boy was only fifteen. And he’d never truly asked him back. I hoped that didn’t cause friction between them now.

But George’s willful loss had been our gain. Franky was quiet and considerate. He loved us, maybe because we understood him, at least most of the time. We wanted him around as much as he’d care to be. I’d dreamed more than once that he was my own son. And for most practical purposes, since his mother died, he might as well have been.

The rest of January got bitter cold. We were snowed in a couple of times, though never badly enough that we couldn’t make our way through the timber to the Hammonds, or them to us if need be. The girls and I looked up the Philippines in the atlas once when Emmie was at our house. She was amazed to see just how far from us Joe really was. But we weren’t sure where Kirk was stationed. He’d said his unit was moving and his next letter would give an updated address, but the next letter hadn’t come.

Samuel finally got the radio working again. We listened to the president’s stirring speeches and the sobering war news. A local radio announcer signed off in the evening with a plea to buy war bonds. I wished we could. But we didn’t have a dime to spare yet.

Samuel was confident there would be work enough when the weather warmed. He intended to find something extra, though I thought with the farm and the woodwork he’d have his hands full. But I think he expected to leave most of the business with Frank and get something else to pull in extra money. We heard that a couple of coal mines might reopen south of Marion. And in some areas, there were plenty of jobs as industries called for more workers to supply our troops, but I didn’t want him to go far. I didn’t really want him to leave the farm for work at all.

I could be happy just living off what the farm could provide. We’d managed to survive the worst of the thirties that way, though we’d come here with nothing but hope. I felt blessed here. But Samuel was ready for more. A way to get ahead, not just get by. I was a little nervous of what that might mean. I prayed that WH Hardwoods would prosper and Samuel and Franky would both have all the work they could handle with that and the field crops.

When we’d lived in Pennsylvania, Samuel’d had a good job at a manufacturing plant. Good pay. And I knew he could do that kind of work again. But it was the distance he’d have to go that bothered me. We’d either be without him or have to consider moving, and I couldn’t imagine that. This was our life, where we were planted by God, for the Hammonds’ sakes as well as our own. In my mind, there were still both families to consider.

But I didn’t need to be worrying over such things. Maybe it was a test of trusting, like Franky had said, and I needed to trust the Lord and my husband to know and choose what was best for all of us.

February started off just as cold as January had been. We let Whiskers in the house at night because he still didn’t seem like himself. The poor old dog would curl up on my feet or go and push his nose under Sarah’s hand and then go back and lay in front of the fire again.

“He’s just not feeling well,” Sarah told me again.

And then one morning, Samuel rose to find the dog dead, still lying there at his place by the fire. He had Whiskers up and out of the house before I could encounter the body, but I was sad over it just the same. Whiskers had been a friend. A good dog, never any trouble. Sarah was crushed. A little to my surprise, she got into a pair of her brother’s overalls, rolled the pant legs so they wouldn’t drag, and went to help her father bury Whiskers.

When they got back inside, she sat down with paper to tell Robert about it.

I wondered what he’d think of so many letters from us. In the winter evenings, we had time to write them. But the arrival of a letter from him could stop me in the middle of whatever I was doing. I couldn’t wait two seconds to open those envelopes and see what he had to say. He always gave us some idea of how his training was going and what Willy, who had carried his mischievous streak right along into the service with him, was up to. We savored every letter, passing it around and sometimes reading them out loud. And then I stored them all in a box on our chest of drawers. I’m not sure why. I guess I just needed them handy in case I wanted to read them again. Sometimes, late at night, I would take a letter out of the box and walk about the house, praying for Robert with his letter in my hands. I felt close to him then. Like he was just upstairs, asleep in his own bed.

Whenever Franky came over, I would read for a few minutes from one of the books the teacher had sent. I usually saved the atlas for when Bert or Emmie were there too, because they liked seeing different places of the world, though Bert had read enough of the school’s books to be familiar with most of the places I looked up.