Angel Sister (9 page)

She wanted to promise, but she wasn’t really an angel who could make things turn out right the way Lorena hoped she could. Still the Lord did answer prayers. Kate had to believe he would answer this one. “We can pray about it,” she said.

“Mommy prayed.” Lorena’s words were muffled against Kate’s chest.

“What did she pray?” Kate asked.

“For rain and that Daddy would find work. And for Kenton and me to have something to eat. She prayed a lot.” Lorena leaned back and looked at Kate. “Daddy got mad when he heard her praying.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we were still hungry. He said the Lord didn’t care about her prayers.”

“The Lord always cares.” Kate smoothed Lorena’s hair back from her face.

“That’s what Mommy told me. She waited till Daddy wasn’t listening and then she told me so he wouldn’t get mad. She said that was why I could know an angel would come take care of me when they had to leave me here. That she would pray extra hard. So hard the Lord would have to hear her.” Lorena put her hand on Kate’s cheek. “And he did.”

“He hears all our prayers,” Kate whispered.

“But we have to say them first, don’t we?”

“We do.”

“Will you say them for me?”

“What do you want me to say? To pray?”

“Pray for us,” Lorena said. “And for Mommy and Daddy and Kenton. And for him.”

“Him?”

“That man. He scared me, but I don’t want him to die.” Lorena let her head fall back down on Kate’s shoulder.

“Neither do I. I’ll pray.” Kate laid her cheek against Lorena’s head and stroked the little girl’s back as she softly spoke the prayer words. “Dear Father in heaven. Watch over us and Lorena’s mother and father and brother. Protect them and give them food to eat. And please, please help Grandfather Reece be all right. Amen.”

______

They carried the preacher across the field back to his house on a stretcher that Victor’s father kept at the store just for emergencies like this. The man couldn’t walk. His left side was paralyzed. A stroke, according to Aunt Hattie. She didn’t go across the field with them. Said there wasn’t anything to be done except to try to keep him as comfortable as possible while they waited for the doctor. And pray.

One of the deacons at the church had stood up and offered up a prayer for their pastor while they lifted him over onto the stretcher. Reverend Reece stared up at Victor out of the eye that wasn’t drooping and tried to say something. The words seemed to get all snarled up in his mouth and came out as little better than gibberish. When even Nadine couldn’t understand him, the man’s face flushed red again and he began flailing at them with his good arm.

“Best try prayin’ some calm down on him,” Aunt Hattie said as she scooted back out of range. “Else things is gonna go from bad to worse for him.”

Nadine pushed his arm down and stroked the sweat off his forehead with her handkerchief. “Shh, Father. You can tell us later. Now you have to stop trying to talk and let us carry you home where we can take care of you.”

Carla had to nearly be carried to the house as well. Her sister and brother-in-law got on either side of her and held her up while they helped her walk across the pasture field behind her husband on the stretcher. With each step, the keening wail rising from Carla got a little louder until halfway to the house, Victor’s father looked over his shoulder at her and said, “For the love of all that’s holy, woman, pull yourself together. The man has not quit breathing as yet, but I know not how much more of that sound he can bear.”

Carla stopped walking and clamped her mouth shut for a moment as she glared at Victor’s father before she let out an even louder wail. For a minute, Victor thought his father might drop his end of the stretcher and be done with it, but he clenched his jaw and kept moving forward. Victor was calling up some of the same sort of resolve.

Just the sight of the stretcher had summoned up unwelcome memories from the war when Victor saw far too many of his fellow soldiers carried away on similar stretchers. Of course they were the luckier ones. Others lay out in no-man’s-land with no hope of being carried anywhere as the war between the trenches went on. Then again perhaps the ones who had passed beyond the misery of war to a better place were luckiest of all. At least they no longer had to crouch in the trenches in fear that if they raised their head a fraction of an inch too high a German sharpshooter would end their misery.

Victor blinked his eyes and tried to push the war memories out of his thoughts. He needed to concentrate on helping Nadine and her father now and not think about the war. He didn’t know why the war kept haunting his thoughts lately. It had all happened years ago. It had nothing to do with his life now. Nobody was dying in the mud now. He wasn’t running between the trees of a French forest straight toward the German guns, daring a bullet or a piece of shrapnel to slam into his head or chest. He was in Rosey Corner where he wanted to be.

He was one of the really lucky ones who had somehow lived through the cold and the mud and the artillery fire and made it home to his beautiful wife. They had a good family. They might not have a lot of money, but they had a roof over their heads and food on their table. There was need for a blacksmith’s skills yet a little longer, and if those motor vehicles did push horses off the road, perhaps he could find a way to adapt and learn to pound out and shape some other need besides horseshoes. Garden hoes perhaps, or iron gates. Something useful.

He couldn’t expect to get any money out of the whimsical horse heads he liked to shape out of scrap iron on occasion. Those were just poetry for his soul, something to break the monotony of each day burning into the next. A man needed poetry. A man needed confirmation of his worthiness in this world. Something he’d certainly never received from the man he was carrying on the stretcher across the field or from the man holding up the back end of the stretcher. Something lately he couldn’t even drum up inside himself.

Nadine’s father groaned as they carried him up the porch steps. He wasn’t a light man, and both Victor and his father were sweating profusely. Victor had tried to get his father to allow one of the other men in the church to help carry the preacher to his house, but Preston Merritt was too proud to admit another man might be stronger than he was, even if age was beginning to chip away at that strength. His father was breathing hard as they maneuvered the stretcher through the front door Nadine held open for them, then on toward the bedroom.

Carla was not a tidy housekeeper, and dirty clothes covered the rumpled bed and spilled out onto the floor. As they moved into the room, a cloud of gnats rose up from a forgotten plate of brown apple peelings on the table beside the bed. Body odor mixed with the smell of talcum powder and liniment. It was not a pleasant combination. When Carla didn’t follow them into the bedroom and instead dropped down on the couch in the sitting room, Nadine shut the bedroom door to keep out the church people who had followed the stretcher across the field and into the house.

In the next room, Carla kept up her moaning, but with the door shut between them, the noise was bearable. Nadine pitched the dirty clothes off the bed and smoothed the covers as best she could. “Clean sheets would be better, but heaven only knows where to find them in this mess,” she muttered, more to herself than to the two men waiting to put her father down.

They shifted the man from the stretcher to the bed. He was no longer fighting against them, as if he had realized something of what had happened to him. His mouth was still moving, but now Victor thought it might be in silent prayer. At least the Lord would understand his words even if the sounds were as mixed up in his head as they had been coming out of his mouth at the church.

“Thank you for your help,” Nadine told Victor’s father before she began unlacing her father’s shoes. “And I know my father would thank you too if he were able.”

Victor wasn’t so sure of that as Reverend Reece glared up at Preston Merritt with his good eye. It was just as well he couldn’t speak his thoughts. The two men had never gotten along. Even before Victor and Nadine married. It went back farther than that. Farther than Victor could remember.

“No man would do less,” Victor’s father said as he leaned down to roll up the canvas stretcher. He kept his eyes away from the man on the bed. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“That’s kind of you,” Nadine said politely. “But Victor and I can manage now.”

“Right,” Victor’s father said.

Victor didn’t know how a person could put so much scorn into one little word. His father didn’t think they could manage—he had never thought they could manage. Victor curled his hands into fists and thought about slamming him in the face. But what would that prove except that his father was right? He couldn’t manage his temper. He couldn’t manage his drinking. He couldn’t manage his life.

Nadine dropped her father’s shoe to the floor and came over to stand beside Victor. Behind her, Reverend Reece tried to say something, but she didn’t look back at him. She just stood silent beside Victor, as unmoving as one of those trees standing by the water that the psalmist talked about in the Bible.

He had once thought he could do anything as long as she stood like that beside him. He could face down his father. He could face down her father. He could go across the sea and fight the Germans. As long as Nadine loved him, he could stand his ground and be the man she thought he was. That was before the whiskey sirens started enticing him toward the rocky shores that promised to wreck his life.

He tried to shut his ears to their song and hear Nadine’s song instead, but the truth was, he wanted a drink. He hadn’t had a drink for four days, but he needed one now. He was weak. He had always been weak. Not strong like his father. Not strong like Preston Jr. Not strong like Nadine. If he let his feet do what they wanted, they would walk right out of this house and go to that place in Rosey Corner where any time of the day or night a man could get a bottle. It just cost more on Sunday. Both in money and self-respect.

As if his father could read his thoughts, he shook his head before he reached for the doorknob to leave the room. Then he turned back for a moment. “The preacher was right. You won’t be able to keep her. Not the way you’ve been living.”

At first Victor wasn’t sure who he was talking about as he heard an echo from long ago.
You won’t be able to keep her.
That was what his father had said to Victor about Nadine almost twenty years ago. The words had traveled overseas with him, lived in the trenches with him, and still tore through his heart at times. He did not deserve a woman as wonderful as Nadine. He had never deserved a woman like Nadine. But yet she was still standing beside him, unflinching in the face of his father’s scorn.

But of course it was the child his father spoke of today. Victor frowned at him and asked, “What difference does it make to you? She’s just a little girl in need of a home.”

“I’ll not have you trying to turn some gypsy child into a Merritt.” He opened the bedroom door and stalked through the house to the porch with a curt nod of his head to acknowledge the people clustered in the front room around Carla. He’d go home to sit alone on his porch or in his parlor with a glass of water while he waited for the daylight to come on Monday morning so he could go back to the store and count his bolts of cloth or the cans on the shelves or figure the worth of the gallons of gasoline in his pump.

Victor shut the door and turned to Nadine.

“What are we going to do about Kate?” she asked.

“Nothing’s been decided yet.”

“We can’t fight your father.” She kept her voice low. “Or mine.”

“We’re not going to think about it now. Right now we’re going to take care of your father. We’ll worry about tomorrow when it gets here.” Victor put his hand on Nadine’s shoulder.

“That’s what I told Kate the first day she brought Lorena home. But tomorrow always comes. Always.” She looked close to tears. But then her father was making a gurgling noise, and she turned from one worry to another as she hurried back to his side.

She pushed a pillow under his head and wiped the sweat off his face with an edge of the sheet. “The doctor will be here soon, Father.”

The man on the bed groaned and flailed his arm against the bed as if he knew the doctor would be of no help. He was trapped in a body that no longer did what he wanted it to do.

Nadine looked up at Victor. “Tell Kate I need her to help me clean up in here.”

“What about the child?”

“She’ll be all right with Evangeline and Victoria. They can play with her.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Lorena. I was thinking about Kate.”

“Why does everything have to be so hard?” Nadine sighed and her shoulders drooped. Then she pulled herself together and said with more assurance in her voice, “No one will come to take Lorena away today. Tomorrow may come, but it’s not here yet.”

______

One day at a time,” Nadine repeated under her breath after Victor left. That was how the Bible said a person should live. After all, life was uncertain at the best of times, and no one knew how many days he or she was going to be given. How many times had she heard her father preach about the man who had all his storerooms filled and thought his future was guaranteed, only to find out death held no regard for man’s plans? The only place to lay up treasures was in heaven.

Still, no matter where a person put his treasure, that person never started out the day expecting it to be his or her last, unless perhaps he was marching into battle or she was laboring to bring a child into the world. Certainly her father had not expected to look death in the eye when he’d risen out of bed that morning to go preach to his people. Now he was back in the same bed unable to even ask for a drink of water. What would the man do without his voice? What would the church do without his voice? He had been their leader since before Nadine could remember.

But she couldn’t worry about the church now. Not with so much else to worry about. Not with her father grunting again and struggling to sit up.

She put her hands on his shoulders and gently but firmly pressed him back down on the pillows. “You can’t get up. If you try, you’ll fall and what good will that do you? You might end up with something broken.”

He reached over to grab his useless hand. He shook it at her, then dropped it to point at his mouth. She had no problem interpreting his meaning. He was already broken. She mashed her mouth together to keep from showing the pity she felt for him before she spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. “You can’t change what has happened. You won’t make it better by fighting against the truth of that.”

He looked near explosion as he balled up his good hand into a fist. She didn’t flinch away from him. He had never hit her. He had always used words to punish her. A frown and a few well-chosen words from him could still turn her into a guilty child afraid to speak. Just as she’d been afraid to confront him in the church.

No such qualms had stopped Kate. If Nadine’s father lived through this stroke, Nadine would hear about that. If he remembered. Perhaps the stroke would wipe away that memory. Unfortunately Father Merritt’s memory would stay crystal clear. And he too had sided against them.

Kate tapped on the bedroom door before she opened it and slipped inside. Her eyes barely touched on her grandfather on the bed before she whipped them away. “Daddy said you needed me.” Her face was pale and pinched looking.

“I do. I’m sorry, but you know Evangeline would be useless at helping me clean up this kind of mess.” Nadine spoke in a low voice with her back to the bed.

Kate looked around. “Yeah. Evie would be gagging and holding her nose for sure.” She wrinkled her own nose. “So what do we need? Soap? Water?”

“A bucket of hot water and some cold water in a glass for Father.” When Kate started to turn away to get the water, Nadine stopped her with a hand on her arm and whispered, “Is Lorena all right?”

“Tori’s playing paper dolls with her,” Kate said, and then her face twisted as she tried to keep back tears. “They can’t give her to Mrs. Baxter, Mama. They can’t.” Pure despair washed across her face. “Can they?”

Nadine had no answer for her. Instead she folded her arms around Kate and held her tightly for a moment as she smoothed down her hair. “Shh, sweetheart. Nothing’s going to happen today.” She pulled back away from her. “Nothing that hasn’t already happened.”

“Mrs. Baxter asked me where Lorena was.” Kate looked worried. “Like I should have brought her to her.”

“No, no. Nothing’s been decided. Besides, Mrs. Baxter has her hands full with Carla right now. Is Carla still carrying on?”

“I don’t know. I came in the back door through the kitchen. I didn’t want to walk through all the deacons on the front porch. Thought they might be praying, but it sounded like they were just talking about needing rain. Out in the kitchen Mrs. Baxter was talking to Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Spaulding about doing dishes or something. None of them were praying either.” Kate frowned a little. “Shouldn’t they be praying?”

“I’m sure they’re praying in their hearts just as we are.” Nadine peeked over her shoulder at her father, who was breathing easier and seemed calmer. She sighed. “I suppose I should go see if Carla wants to come sit with Father. After all, she is his wife.”

At Nadine’s suggestion that Carla come into the bedroom to sit with her husband, Carla threw up her hands and went limp in a near faint. “Oh, Nadine, I couldn’t. I simply can’t bear to see him that way. Your father so strong and now stricken down and twisted by that awful woman’s evil words. It’s more than I can bear.”

“No one’s to blame. Strokes just happen.” Nadine didn’t know why she wasted her breath. Nothing she could say would keep them from blaming Aunt Hattie for angering her father to the point of collapse.

Carla sat up straighter and glared at Nadine. “You heard her. Standing up and defying him in his own church. The shame of it. She’s the one who should have been stricken down.”

Nadine opened her mouth to defend Aunt Hattie again, but then she could almost hear Aunt Hattie whispering in her ear.
Let it go, child. Better me than our Kate.
What Carla said made little difference anyway. Nadine clamped her mouth shut and pulled in a slow breath. “Father is going to need a lot of care,” she said.

Carla let out another moan and covered her face with her hands again. Ella Baxter pushed in front of Nadine. She murmured a few comforting words to Carla before she frowned over her shoulder at Nadine. “Leave her alone. Can’t you see how distraught she is?”

Nadine stared past Ella at Carla. The woman was disgusting and useless. Nadine had never liked her, even before the day she came home from school and found her settled into her father’s bedroom. Mrs. Orrin Reece. Nadine had never forgiven her father. Not because he had married the woman, although that was bad enough, but because he had not bothered to tell Nadine. Instead, Carla met her at the front door with the news and an infuriating smirk as she stood there, blocking Nadine’s way into her own house.

Nadine had heard rumors about her father and Carla that year as she finished out high school. Victor himself warned her of the possibility of a romance between them, but she didn’t believe him. She hadn’t wanted to believe him. Not her father and Carla Murphy.

Carla had been a devout member of the Rosey Corner Baptist Church since before Nadine was born. In attendance every time the doors were open. Unmarried, she claimed, because her widowed mother who suffered from a nervous condition depended on her, the eldest daughter, to help her at home. Then her mother had passed on, and Carla had needed her pastor to comfort her through her grief. Comfort that had grown and entrapped him.

“How could you?” Nadine had demanded of him that day when she found him in the backyard stepping off the garden spot for James Robert to dig up.

He paused and turned to her as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. “How could I what?”

“Marry that woman. Without so much as a word to me. To us.” Nadine threw out her arm to include James Robert, who was leaning on his shovel and digging a hole in the ground with his eyes. “Is that all the consideration you can show us?”

Her father’s eyes narrowed on her. “Control your emotions, Nadine Glynn, before your lack of restraint carries you into sin. I have married Carla Murphy. She is now your stepmother and you will treat her with respect.”

“Carla Murphy will never be any kind of mother to me.” Nadine spat out the words.

He matched her fire with coldness. “That is your choice. We all make choices. Some good and some bad. I will pray for your choices.”

Suddenly everything was crystal clear to Nadine. “You’re talking about me and Victor, aren’t you? That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? A way to punish me.”

“Wrong choices always bring their own punishment.”

He had certainly found out the truth of that, Nadine thought now as she went back into the bedroom. Nadine had married Victor the day after graduation and followed him to Louisville where he hired on to help build Camp Zachary Taylor before he enlisted. When he was shipped to France, Nadine had come back to Rosey Corner, but she’d never gone home again. Instead Gertie and Wyatt had opened their home and their hearts to her. James Robert had left the day after Nadine married to go live with Orrin Jr., who had bought a farm in Indiana. Nadine’s father was left alone with his choice. It had not been a particularly happy one.

Kate followed Nadine back into the bedroom with the water. Nadine raised her father’s head and tipped the glass up as though giving a small child a drink. He tried to swallow it, but most of the water dribbled out of his mouth onto his shirt.

“Hand me that handkerchief off the dresser,” Nadine told Kate.

After Kate brought the handkerchief to Nadine, she stood beside the bed and stared up at the ceiling, then down at the floor before she closed her eyes for a moment as if to gather courage. When she opened them again, she finally looked straight at her grandfather’s face. “I’m sorry, Grandfather,” she said quietly. A tear edged out of the corner of her eye. “I am so sorry.”

Nadine tensed, ready to grab her father’s arm if he swung it at Kate. She had no idea what her father might do, but then to her great surprise, an answering tear formed in his good eye, and he reached for Kate’s hand. He grasped it as if he had caught hold of a lifeline and tried to speak, but none of the sounds added up to words. Kate brushed away her tears with her free hand and listened intently. “You want me to get you something?”

He nodded his head, a look of relief in his eyes that someone had tried to understand. He made more noises as he frowned with a growing look of frustration at their inability to understand him.

“I bet I know,” Kate said with a smile. She gently freed her hand from his and picked up the Bible off the table by the side of the bed. She let it fall open in her hands and read, “‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’” She looked from the Bible to her grandfather. “That’s one of your favorites, isn’t it, Grandfather? The Lord must have guided my eyes to it for you.” She closed the Bible and laid it on the bed beside him.

He pushed a burst of air out of his lungs as he wrapped his hand around the Bible, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a twisted smile, but a smile nevertheless. Nadine could almost see the calm washing over him. He opened his mouth and an actual word came out. “Amen.”

By the time the doctor arrived, she and Kate had cleared out the dirty clothes and dishes containing bits of food long forgotten. Nadine had put a bowl of vinegar and water in the window to deodorize the air. The small room trapped the afternoon heat, so she had helped her father out of his suit pants and shirt and sponged his chest and legs with cold water.

It had been years since she’d seen him without his clothes, and he looked diminished lying there in only his underwear. Hours ago he had been in control of his world, ready to impose his will on those around him, and now he was an invalid unable to even empty his bladder without assistance. She had tried to help him as matter-of-factly as possible, but it wasn’t something a father wanted his daughter to help him do.

Dr. Blackburn pinched her father’s arms and legs and poked the bottom of his left foot with a needle. No response. He prepared a draught of medicine and showed Nadine how to hold her father’s head so that all the medicine wouldn’t slide out the wrong side of his mouth and down on the bedcovers.

At the doctor’s suggestion, Nadine propped pillows behind her father so that he was in more of a sitting position. “That will help him breathe easier,” Dr. Blackburn said as he put his instruments back into his black bag.

It did more than that. It also seemed to restore a modicum of her father’s dignity as he reached down with his good hand and pulled a sheet across his legs and lower body. He still could not speak, but it was obvious he had no trouble understanding the words spoken to him.

Dr. Blackburn pulled up a chair close to the bed and sat down. “You’ve been with me in enough sickrooms to know that this is not a good thing, Brother Orrin.” The doctor, who was almost as old as Nadine’s father, had kind eyes and a caring bedside manner. He always looked a bit rumpled, as though he didn’t have time to worry with his personal needs when so many people needed his care.

Nadine’s father laid his right hand on the Bible still beside him on the bed and inclined his head a bit.

“However, there are many cases where people do recover some of their faculties, and there is no reason to believe that you won’t be one of them. After a time of rest and with the prayers of your people, I would not be surprised to see you regain some use of your arm and leg.”

Nadine’s father pointed toward his mouth and made an attempt to speak. Still no words they could understand.

The doctor shook his head a bit and looked sad. “It’s very trying for you, I know. Not being able to communicate with your voice. You may even feel you are saying the right words in your head, but they aren’t coming out of your mouth right. Time and rest may help that too. Lean on the Lord, Brother, and look to him for your strength.” Dr. Blackburn’s eyes didn’t waver as he stared straight at the man on the bed. “I won’t lie to you. The days ahead are going to be very difficult, but you are a man strong in the spirit. I believe you will get better. You must believe that too. Miracles do happen, but in the Lord’s own time. Not our time.”

On the way out, the doctor stopped to treat Carla for her nervous attack. As Nadine watched him listening to her heart, soothing her with his words and stirring up powders that were probably nothing more than sugar in a glass of water, she thought it would take more of a miracle to get Carla off the couch than Nadine’s father out of the bed. But then as the doctor said, miracles did happen.