Angel Sister (13 page)

“I thank you for Nadine.” Victor reached over and touched Aunt Hattie’s hand on her lap. “And for me.”

“No need for thanks. Your Nadine did more for me than I could ever do for her. She understood that I’d lost one son and that I wouldn’t be able to bear losin’ the other.” Her eyes came back to Victor’s face as she took hold of his hand and squeezed it. “While you might not be my natural born child, you ever’ bit a child of my heart. And I’m proud of the man you turned out to be.”

He dropped his eyes away from hers. “I’m not.”

“You the onliest one what can change that. And you is the one who has to be there for your girls.”

“I don’t know if I can. Not the way they need.”

“They just need you,” Aunt Hattie said softly. “That’s all they’s ever needed.”

“I can’t keep back the bad things.”

“Nobody can ever keep back all the bad things. It ain’t possible for the likes of us. We just has to ride through those bad times together. You need to give Nadine some understanding and not be deserting her when she’s needin’ you.”

“Deserting her? I’m not doing that, am I?”

“That’s somethin’ you have to answer.” Aunt Hattie gave his hand a little shake. “But that ain’t all your trouble. You know they’s gonna come after that little child.”

“I know. Kate won’t understand that.”

Aunt Hattie let out a long sigh. “That’s God’s own truth. Our Kate done thinks she been anointed by the Lord to take care of that little one and I ain’t doubtin’ she has, but there’s some that thinks they’s more powerful than the Lord. Leastways here in Rosey Corner.”

“What am I going to do, Aunt Hattie? I can’t fight my father.”

“We in the same boat on that one, Victor. Mr. Preston’s done wrong about all this. It ain’t right givin’ that baby to Ella Baxter, but that’s what’s gonna happen and there ain’t nothin’ under God’s heaven we can do about it.” Aunt Hattie squeezed Victor’s hand again. “Exceptin’ to help Kate through it, and you can’t do that from the inside of a bottle.”

“Don’t you think I want to quit?” Victor cried. “Don’t you think I’d have already quit if it was as easy as just wanting to?”

“I done tol’ you, child. You can’t do it alone. You’s got to let the Lord help you.”

Everybody kept telling him that, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. As if he could just hold the bottle and his addiction up in the air and the Lord would reach down and grab it all away from him. They hadn’t, none of them, carried the bottle around and tasted its temptations. But it wouldn’t do any good to tell Aunt Hattie that. So instead he said, “And what about Lorena?”

“We’s just gonna have to pray we’s wrong about that Ella.” Aunt Hattie didn’t look too sure that prayer was going to be answered. “Besides, we ain’t goin’ nowheres. We’ll be right here in Rosey Corner if that little baby needs something. And the good Lord watches over his little babies.”

She stood up and so did Victor. “Pray for me, Aunt Hattie.”

She reached up and touched his cheek again. “I already do, child. Ever’ day. And you just remember that in the good Lord’s mighty eyes, we’s all nothin’ but little babies.”

______

The next Sunday morning after their preacher was felled by the stroke, the Rosey Corner Baptist Church met for Sunday school as usual and then walked across the road to have services with the Christian Church.

Nadine didn’t go to church. Carla went in spite of crying and going on all morning about how she wouldn’t be able to bear being at church without Nadine’s father there with her, but when Ella knocked on the door, she was out it in two minutes. Once she was off the porch, Nadine stood in the middle of the sitting room and wrapped the silence around her as she thanked the Lord for the respite from the woman’s constant moaning or harping. It was like waiting on two invalids—one by stroke and one by orneriness.

Nadine told herself she should ask for forgiveness for her lack of charitable thought when it came to Carla, but then again she’d never read the first word in the Bible that said a person wasn’t supposed to face facts. The first fact was Carla was about to drive Nadine over the edge of sanity. The second fact was that Carla wasn’t going to lift a finger to do anything as long as Nadine was there to do it for her.

Praise the Lord, Nadine’s father had started showing some improvement. While he still struggled to speak, he was saying more words that she could understand. Plus he’d gotten back some of the use of his leg and arm so that with help he could get out of bed and sit in a chair. Even before Kate told Nadine what Aunt Hattie said about letting the church people help, Nadine had decided it was time to go home.

Nobody had come right out and told her Victor was drinking again, but enough of her father’s visitors had looked uncomfortable when they tried to make small talk that she’d known. Plus he hadn’t come by since Tuesday. He should have come by to see her even if he didn’t care about her father. What in the world had ever happened to the young man brave enough to walk up on her porch and ask to court her? But of course, it wasn’t her father he was scared to face now. It was her. He knew she’d be furious at him when she saw the drinking signs in his eyes.

She
was
furious with him. He couldn’t even stay away from the drink long enough to be there for their girls while she took care of her father. He surely realized she had to take care of her father. He’d have done the same if it had been his father, though heaven only knew neither father had ever gone one step out of the way to help them. Still, they were family and a person had to take care of family. The Lord help her, she’d even have to take care of Carla if it ever came to that. Nadine shut her eyes and said a fervent prayer for Carla’s health. Either that or more patience. Lots more patience.

A small voice inside her head said maybe she needed some of that patience for Victor. Things weren’t easy for him either. Those dreams from the war had come back to torment his sleep. She’d been patient when he’d first come home from France. She’d seen how the war had bruised his soul and understood he needed time and love. Love she was more than willing to give him. It was so good to have him home. To be able to stop worrying that he’d never come back to her.

Sometimes she had heard that echo in his letters from France. His fear that he’d never make it home. But it was Bo who hadn’t made it. Bo who had died in the trenches with the French. Bo who was buried in a cemetery over there. Bo who had always looked so strong and sure of himself even though he was a Negro in a white world. He got a French medal for bravery. They had sent it to Aunt Hattie. People told her she should hang it on the wall, but she took it out in her backyard and buried it as though they’d sent her Bo’s body back in that little box.

She and Nadine searched through the woods for the right rock to use as a marker, and then Graham Lindell helped them carry it home. Nadine and Graham both cried when they laid that stone on the ground over the spot where the medal was buried, but Aunt Hattie hadn’t shed a tear.

Victor hadn’t cried when Nadine told him about Bo either. He was too battle weary. All he’d seen had pushed him way beyond tears. He wouldn’t tell her about it. Not the part that haunted his dreams. He told her how the French countryside looked. He talked about the people he met. How he never got to Paris, but some of the other soldiers in his company had. He even talked a little about how cold it was sitting in the mud and waiting, but he didn’t talk about the things that made him wake up in the middle of the night sweating and flailing his arms. He said he didn’t want to think about it, much less talk about it, but it had kept coming out in his dreams.

So she had whispered words of love in his ear, and he clung to her and loved her in return. Slowly he fought back the terrors of the war, and they stepped forward into their future. He took a drink now and again to dull the ache in his shoulder where he still carried some German shrapnel, but he was home every night rubbing her feet and reading poetry to her and singing silly songs to Evangeline even before she was born.

They had been able to laugh then in spite of his war wounds and her fear of giving birth for the first time. He and Aunt Hattie had carried her through that fearful time as memories of her mother dying in childbirth accompanied each new pain. Now three beautiful girls later, she was just as much in love with him as she had been then, and she had no doubt of his love for her.

Yet something had happened. He was having the nightmares again, and instead of leaning on her, he was going to the bottle for comfort. She didn’t understand it. Nothing had changed except that they were older. Shouldn’t that make it easier for him to lean on her? Had her anger made her back away from him so he couldn’t lean on her?

She didn’t deny that the distance that had come between them was partly her fault, but nothing she did seemed to quell the anger when she saw him turning to the bottle. She couldn’t pray it away. She couldn’t ignore it away. She couldn’t yell it away. It was there, a hard knot inside her chest. And now at this time of crisis he had let the bottle call him again.

Didn’t he know they had no hope, no hope at all, of hanging onto Lorena if he was staying out all night drinking? It was a funny thing but Nadine’s arms seemed to miss holding Lorena more than her own girls. Of course Kate and Evangeline were too old to even consider needing holding, and Victoria was on the way to thinking she was grown up too. Lorena needed her. Nadine hadn’t realized how much she’d missed having a little child in her lap until Kate found Lorena. Not that Lorena was exactly a baby. She was five years old, but she needed loving. She needed holding and Nadine needed to hold her.

It had seemed so simple when Kate brought Lorena home. Before her father and Father Merritt got involved. Why did everything have to get so complicated?

With a sigh, Nadine went to help her father get dressed. When she went in the bedroom, he was already sitting on the side of the bed. “Well, Father, you’re making progress. Maybe you can go sit on the porch today. You’re sure to have a pile of visitors coming by this afternoon.”

“Friday,” he said.

She hesitated a moment before she said, “No, it’s Sunday.” It would do little good to avoid saying it was the Lord’s Day. Somebody would be sure to mention it was Sunday before the day was over. Carla herself would be home full of what they did at church in a little over an hour.

He reached over and touched the Bible they left on his bed now. He didn’t try to read it by himself, but every once in a while he’d open it up and point to something for Nadine to read aloud to him. Once or twice it had even seemed to be a passage he might have intended to point out at the time. “Carmel,” he said and then looked irritated.

Nadine picked up the shirt she’d ironed the night before and helped him shove his stroke-affected arm into the sleeve. “Carla has gone to church.” For a second Nadine imagined the same whisper of relief blowing across his face that she’d felt when she’d seen Carla out the door.

As she worked his trousers on his legs, she kept up a steady stream of chatter, about how much they were surely missing him at church. By the time she got his socks and shoes on, her hair was sticking to her forehead and rivulets of sweat rolled down between her breasts. She sat back on her heels in front of him to catch her breath and try to cool off by fanning herself with her apron.

He surprised her by reaching out and touching her cheek. “Amen.”

“I’m on my knees and I need prayer. We both do,” she said.

He held his hand up in the air and shut his eyes. His lips moved but no sound came out, but somehow she knew he was praying for her and not for himself. The stroke had changed him. He was cross and irritated by his inability to do what he wanted to do, but at the same time he didn’t fight against her help. He didn’t stare displeasure at her or frown condemnation down on Kate. Instead he had reached out to Kate with gentleness and forgiveness. Two things Nadine had not often seen in her father. Nadine wondered if he knew why Kate had asked for forgiveness. Did he even remember anything about Lorena and what had led to his stroke?

When he opened his eyes, she said, “Amen. And thank you, Father, for praying for me. I know the Lord will help us both.”

She waited until he was situated in the big rocking chair in the next room before she pulled a chair up in front of him and said, “We need to talk before Carla gets back.”

He shook his head a little before he said, “Need rain.”

“Yes, we do, but listen, Father, I have to go home.” He shook his head with more vigor, but she kept talking. “You’re getting better. Dr. Blackburn said so when he was here Friday. So it’s time for me to go home. My girls need me. Victor needs me.”

She stopped and pulled in a breath, waiting for the frown that always came when she said Victor’s name. But this time her father didn’t frown. He just looked sad and maybe even a little scared as he stared down at his hands in his lap.

She reached over and touched his arm. “I’m not deserting you. I’ll be back every day.” When he looked up at her, she added, “Carla will be here and Elbert Hastings and Bob Smith are going to take turns sitting with you at night for a few days. They’re like brothers to you. Good brothers.”

“Amen.” The word sounded sad.

She felt guilty, but she couldn’t tell him she would change her mind. She couldn’t change her mind. She had to go home. She was needed there too. Perhaps even more than here. When she started to stand up to go straighten the bedroom, he reached out and grasped her arm. “Read.” He let go of her arm and picked up his Bible. It fell open in the middle and he turned a few of the whisper-thin pages before he pointed at one of them.

“Isaiah 40,” she said as she took the Bible from him and sat back down. She had no problem picking out the verses he wanted her to read. They’d been marked by him some time in the past for a sermon perhaps. “‘Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding.’”

She stopped, but he motioned her to go on. “‘He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.’” She laid the Bible still open to Isaiah back in his lap. “Oh, to be an eagle soaring with the Lord’s power.”

“With . . . ,” her father started but couldn’t find the word he wanted. He clasped his hands together and pulled them up in front of his chest and slowly straightened the fingers of the stroke-crippled hand until he could hold his hands together in a position of prayer.

“With prayer,” she said for him. “I think we just had church, Father. Thank you. The Lord must have given you that sermon just for me.”

He smiled with half his face. Dr. Blackburn had warned her that the muscles in the face were often the last to make any recovery after a stroke. Then he lifted his hands, even the crippled one without help, and floated them in front of him. “God makes right,” he said.

“He’ll make you all right again,” Nadine said.

“Right here.” He put his fist over his heart.

“Amen,” Nadine said. She went to the bedroom and stripped the sheets off the bed. When she dropped them on the floor, she wanted to drop down on top of them. She was so tired. She had only slept a few hours here and there all week. But she pushed aside her exhaustion and pulled out the clean sheets and spread them on the bed. She had to keep moving. Keep trying to do what had to be done. Keep hoping the Lord would give power to the faint and strengthen the weak. Keep praying that she could look past her anger and somehow find a way to be strong enough to help Victor. To be there for her girls. To protect Lorena.