Spring's Gentle Promise (21 page)

It was heartbreaking, especially for Mary. There was no way she could help her plants now. She left them to the elements, canning what she could as soon as it was ready.

I was thankful for the crick for the sake of the stock, but even the crick was lower than I’d ever seen it before.

There wasn’t much to harvest that fall, but we went through the motions. I did manage to salvage a bit of grain that I hoarded away carefully for next spring’s seed.

Surely next year would be different. We’d had dry spells before, but they’d never lasted for more than a year or two. We all set our jaws and readied ourselves for another slim winter.

William celebrated his first birthday. Or rather, we adults celebrated for him. He did seem to enjoy the occasion. We had a whole houseful over, almost like old times again. Nat and Lou and their family came along with Avery and Lilli. The house was alive and full of laughter and cheerful chatter, and William laughed and clapped and chattered right along with us.

No fuss was made, but each family brought simple food items with them. Lou had a big pot of rabbit stew and some pickled beets. Lilli brought deviled eggs and a crock of kraut. With the roast chicken Mary prepared in our kitchen, we had ourselves quite a feast. There was even a cake for the birthday boy—and some weak tea for the adults.

Sarah appointed herself William’s guardian. She hardly let the rest get a chance to hold and cuddle him. But over her protests he did make the rounds. He was walking now, faltering baby steps that made everyone squeal with delight and William beam over his own brilliance. He seemed to know just how smart he was and spent his time toddling back and forth between eager, outstretched hands.

It was a great day for all of us, but when it was over and a thoroughly exhausted William had been tucked into bed, a sense of dejection seemed to settle over the house. It was as though we had been released from our prison for one short afternoon and had then been rounded up and locked up again. The day had been a reminder of how things had been, and maybe each of us secretly feared it would never really be that way again.

We didn’t speak of it, but we all knew it was there—a fear hanging right over us, seeming about to consume us, to hold us under until we ran out of air or to squeeze us into a corner until we stopped our struggling.

I didn’t like the feeling. I wanted to break loose and breathe freely again. I wanted my wife to sew new dresses and cook from a well-stocked cupboard. I wanted my son to have those first little shoes for his growing feet, toy trucks and balls to play with. I wanted Grandpa and Uncle Charlie to be able to sit around the kitchen table and sip slowly from big cups of strong coffee.

For the first time in my adult life, I wanted to sit down and weep in frustration. And then I looked across the table to where Mary sat mending work socks. They had more darning than original wool, and I saw the frustration in her eyes. By the stubborn set to her chin I knew she was feeling the same way I was. It put some starch in my backbone.

“Why don’t you leave that for tonight?” I suggested to her. “It’s been a busy day.”

I went to the stove and shook the coffeepot. There was just a tiny bit remaining. I poured in more water from the teakettle that sang near the back of the stove and set the pot on to boil.

“Bit left there yet,” I said to Grandpa. “Why don’t you and Uncle Charlie finish it up?”

Grandpa nodded without much enthusiasm. He was feeling it too.

I took the sock from Mary’s hands, laid it aside and then led her up the stairs to our room.

We didn’t talk much as we prepared for bed. As soon as we were both ready, I lifted our family Bible down from the shelf. We always read together before retiring. There was nothing new about that. What was different was the way I was feeling deep down inside.

“Would you read tonight?” I asked Mary.

She took the Bible from me and turned to the book of Psalms. Given a choice, Mary always turned to the Psalms. She began with a praise chapter—one that was meant to lift my spirits and bring me comfort. It should have done that for me. I had much to praise God for. But tonight—tonight the praise seemed all locked up within me. Mary hadn’t read far before I was weeping.

I would never be able to explain why. Maybe I had just been carrying the hurts and the worries for too long, I don’t know. Maybe I’d been trying to be too brave to protect the rest of my family. Anyway, it all poured out in rasping sobs that shook my whole body. Mary joined me and we held each other and cried together.

After the tempest had passed and we were in control again, we lay for hours and talked. Just talked, until long into the night. I don’t know that we solved anything, but we lifted a big burden from each other. We shared our feelings and our fears. We joined, strength with strength, to weather whatever lay before us.

“We’ll make it, Josh,” Mary dared to promise.

“I still have the loan payment to make,” I confided. “I only have a small portion of it saved, and I’ve no idea how I’ll get the rest.”

“We have more livestock.”

“I hate to sell—”

“But we’ll build the herd again. After the rains come—”

Always. Always that was our answer. Things would be better. We’d be back on our feet—after the spring rains came.

C
HAPTER
22
Hope Upon Hope

I
NEVER WEPT OVER our situation again. Not that I viewed tears as weakness. Maybe I hurt so deeply that I knew tears would not ease the pain. Or maybe I came to a higher level of faith. For whatever reason, I never came near to tears again.

I sold off more of the livestock. There really wasn’t much choice, but it pained me to see the herd I’d worked so hard to build less than half its former size. With the sale of the stock, plus what I’d managed to tuck aside and a bit of Mary’s hard-won egg and cream money, we somehow managed to make another loan payment.

But that meant there was little money to tide us over the winter months. I took my rifle and hunted grouse and rabbit and managed to add a bit to the stew pot. Mary talked of butchering a few chickens, but she hesitated. We’d already used all the old hens and all but two of the roosters.

“It’s sort of like killing the goose that laid the golden egg,” Mary commented to me. “We need those eggs—both for ourselves and to sell in town.”

I knew Mary was right, so we held off dipping into the flock further.

Then I thought about the piece of treed crick bottom on the Turley land, and I decided there might be a bit of money in cord wood. Mary clutched at the idea right away, her eyes shining.

“What a wonderful idea, Josh!” she exclaimed. “But I do hope the work won’t be too hard on you.”

“It’s not the work that worries me,” I admitted. “We’ll need to find a buyer before it means any money.”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find somebody,” she enthused. “Everyone needs firewood—even in hard times.”

It turned out that we were able to sell it. All I could cut, the buyer at the lumberyard said. It seemed that he had some kind of connection with city folk and shipped the wood out by rail car.

But the earnings were a mere pittance. Took me two or three days of back-breaking labor to make enough to buy flour and sugar. Rumors were that the man from the lumberyard made himself a pretty good profit just to act as go-between. It bothered me some, but I felt I had little to say in the matter. I kept at it. At least it might see us through another winter.

I used Barney and Bess for the skidding, alternating them day by day. I didn’t have the feed or the chop I normally would have been feeding my horses, so I liked to rest them as much as I could. Chester was a bit too light for the hard work or he would have done his share, too.

Somehow we managed. It was tough, but we all were able to keep body and soul together. I was thankful for that much.

The second winter of scanty snow came to an end. When the patches of dirty drifts melted, I was back on the land again.

It didn’t take as long as usual to do the spring work. I didn’t have enough seed grain to plant all of the fields. There was no use working up those that couldn’t be planted. The soil would just erode even more.

Mary planted her garden too. She had carefully kept every possible seed so she wouldn’t need to buy. She even exchanged some with neighborhood women. All together, she managed to get a reasonable garden in the ground. She knew better than to even start drawing water from the well. There simply wasn’t enough there. She saved every bit of dishwater and wash water that was used, though, and carefully doled it out to her plants.

I had never seen anything like the dust storms that came that year. They rolled up from the west, raising hopes that maybe a rain cloud was on the way, and then blew in with nothing but flying dirt and empty promises. Dust lay over everything. Whole fields seemed to be airborne, swirling madly about us. Mary came to hate the dust even worse than the wind.

Along with the dust came the grasshoppers. There wasn’t much for them to eat, but they seemed to flourish anyway. I knew even without walking through the fields that there would be
no
crop this year. I went back to cutting cord wood.

Near the end of August Uncle Charlie took sick. It was a Sunday morning, and Mary had our breakfast on the table and William all ready to go to church. Uncle Charlie still hadn’t made his appearance. It wasn’t like him. He lingered in bed now and then, having spent a restless night, but never on a Sunday morning.

We sat down to the table, our eyes on the stairway, thinking surely he’d be showing up at any minute.

Mary turned to me. “Do you think you should check, Josh?” she asked.

William pounded his spoon impatiently on the table and called in his babyish lisp, “Eat time. Eat time, Unc’a Shar-ie.”

Grandpa forgot his worry long enough to have a good chuckle at William. Mary stopped the boy from banging his spoon, and I looked toward the stairs again.

I went on up then, and there was Uncle Charlie on the floor beside his bed. He must have been trying to get out of bed when he took a fall.

It scared me, I’ll tell you. It frightened all of us. We abandoned our plans for church. Grandpa and I lifted Uncle Charlie back onto his bed, and I saddled Chester and headed out for Doc.

By the time we got back, Uncle Charlie was conscious and rational. He still wanted to go to church, but Doc said he had a pretty nasty bump on the head and was to stay in bed for a few days. Besides, it was already too late for church anyway.

After Doc had done all he could to make Uncle Charlie comfortable and left a bit of medicine for him, Doc and I walked down to the kitchen. Mary had poured a cup of morning coffee and set it at the table for him. She’d fed William, but the rest of us still had not had our breakfast. The familiar morning oatmeal had not improved with age, but we ate it anyway. It did fill the void.

Doc sat down for a neighborly visit. He told Mary of new babies in the community—even shared the secret of a few on the way, and told of people in town moving in and those who were moving out. He even shared bits and pieces of world news— things that we would have been getting out of the newspaper had we still been receiving one.

And then he turned his attention to William.

“Your boy sure looks healthy,” he said to Mary, and Mary beamed.

“Come here, fella,” Doc called to the toddler, and William trotted over to be lifted up on Doc’s knee.

“You ever see one of these?” Doc asked and dangled his stethoscope before William. I don’t suppose there was a kid in our whole area who hadn’t played with Doc’s stethoscope at one time or another. And it had fascinated every one of us, too. William was no exception. He turned it around and around in his hand, then tried to stick the smooth, round end into his ear.

We all laughed.

“So you’re going to be a doctor someday,” commented Doc. “But you’ve got it backward. This is what goes in your ears. Here, hold still.”

He helped the little fella with the instrument, and William’s eyes grew wide with wonder. I had a pretty good idea that he was hearing absolutely nothing, but the feeling of something holding his head from each side must have intrigued him. He sat perfectly still until Doc removed the ear pieces.

“Well, I’d best be running,” Doc said at last. “Someone might be needing me.”

He lifted William to the floor and reached for his hat. “Yes, sir,” he said, his eyes still on William. “You’re a nice, big boy for two years old. Almost two years old,” he corrected himself. “Your mama has taken real good care of you.”

I walked with Doc to get his team. It was an awkward moment for me. I hardly knew where or how to begin.

“Doc,” I finally blurted, “in the past we’ve always paid you cash for your visits, but I’m afraid—”

Doc stopped me before I could even go on. “I know how things are right now, Josh,” he returned confidentially. “We’ll just put this here little visit on your account.”

“But I don’t have an account,” I reminded him.

“You do now,” said Doc, “and don’t you go worrying none about it either. You can take care of it just as soon as you get another crop.”

Doc came three more times to visit Uncle Charlie. On his last visit Mary had a little chat with him too. It seemed her suspicions were correct. She was expecting our second child.

I should have been happy—and I was. But this time I was worried too. How would we ever feed and clothe another child? William was already doing without things he should have had— and he was better off than most of the children in our area. Lou passed on to him many of the things Jonathan and Timothy had worn.

But in spite of morning sickness again, Mary was happy. It fell to Grandpa to entertain young William until Mary was able to be on her feet. I was still busy with cutting wood and unable to give much assistance in the house.

Uncle Charlie got steadily better, to our great relief. By the time William celebrated his second birthday, Uncle Charlie was again able to join us at the table. By then Mary was feeling much better, too.

There wasn’t any crop to harvest, so I just kept right on working in the woodlot. Now and then the lumberyard owner would pop by and have the wood loaded onto a truck and hauled to the railway yards. He’d pay me each time he made a pickup, and I tried hard to put some of it aside. But there wasn’t much of it in the drawer when I went to count up the money. I’d needed to spend most of it for necessities throughout the summer and fall. I would have to sell stock again. Even with the sale, I wondered if it would be enough to meet the payment. My heart sank at the thought.