Angel Sister (15 page)

“Evie!” Kate frowned at her over Lorena’s head. She gave Lorena another hug and put her down. “Don’t listen to old grumpy grouch. She must be getting up on the wrong side of the bed. On the other hand, there’s probably not a right side for her.”

Evie shrugged and yawned as she stretched. “Just trying to warn you.”

“We don’t have to worry about Fern,” Kate said. “That’s not what we have to worry about.”

“What do we have to worry about?” Tori asked as she leaned against Kate for a good morning hug.

“Finding worms if you want to go fishing. Watching you eat your egg with all that ketchup. Yuck! Not enough rain to make the blackberries worth picking. Stepping in chicken doo-doo. Getting tickled by your big sister,” Kate dug her finger’s into Tori’s side and then grabbed Lorena and tickled her too.

Both girls shrieked and ran for the kitchen. Kate gave Evie another mean look. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Not a thing,” Evie said as she pulled off her gown and started getting dressed. “It’s poor old Fern that’s got something wrong with her, and one of these days you may be sorry you didn’t listen to me.”

Kate rolled her eyes at Evie and shook her head before she followed Tori and Lorena to the kitchen. If only Fern was all she had to worry about. It was Ella Baxter she didn’t want to see.

______

After Victor left for the blacksmith shop and the breakfast dishes were washed, Victoria and Lorena dragged Kate out to dig for worms. Evangeline grabbed her book and went to settle in her favorite spot by the window in the front room. Nadine stood in the middle of the kitchen and breathed in the silence after the clamor of the day’s beginning, but Kate was right. It was hot even though she hadn’t fed the fire since she cooked Victoria’s egg. Funny how the heat gathered in the summer and sat down on top of a person, while in the winter when you wanted to feel the heat of the fire, it seemed to scoot out of every crack available and leave you shivering while you cooked.

Nadine poured herself another cup of tea and carried it out on the back porch. She had to go back over to her father’s house. She had promised, but more than that, she plain didn’t trust Carla to properly care for him.

Trust in the Lord and lean not unto thine own understanding.
Kate wasn’t the only one who needed to surrender to that trust right now or the only one to struggle with trusting the Lord enough to turn her worries over to him. Nadine wished she’d brought her Bible out with her. Not that she needed it for that verse. She whispered the words over to herself again.

Trust. That had been so hard to do with Victor overseas. With the newspapers full of stories of battles and death. Artillery shells and sorrow. Of course she hadn’t been the only person in Rosey Corner waiting for news from a loved one, nor had Aunt Hattie been the only one to get the dreaded telegram.

Nadine sat down in the old straight-back chair in the shade of the vines growing up strings on the end of the porch. The climbing vine was one of the few things that didn’t seem to be affected by the hot, dry weather. While the bean vines out in the garden were wilting down in the harsh heat of the sun for lack of water, this vine kept putting out more green curling tendrils. Of course that could be because of the wash pans of dirty water she emptied on its roots several times a day.

She reached up and carefully touched the vine. The leaves were rough and irritating to the skin. But it gave shade and a bit of privacy. Gertie had given her a start of the vine when they bought the house after Victor got home from the war. The vine grew up all around Gertie’s back porch, and Nadine had spent hours in the solitude of that leafy room writing Victor letters and praying for his safe return.

It had been strange living with Gertie and Wyatt. For the first time in her life, Nadine hadn’t had enough to do. She helped with the cooking and cleaning, but Gertie wasn’t an overzealous housekeeper, so there were hours every day with absolutely nothing to do. Nothing except worry herself to distraction. Especially after she lost the baby.

Often as the hours of the day crept by, she thought about boarding a train and going back to Louisville to see if Maudie McElroy might have her attic room for rent and chores for Nadine to do. Those months at the boardinghouse seemed like the only happy time in her life since her mother died. But she stayed in Rosey Corner. It was what everybody expected her to do. Sit and wait. Wait and pray.

She wrote to Victor even when weeks passed without a letter from him. She read every book on Wyatt’s bookshelves. Victor’s mother tried to teach her needlepoint, but Nadine pricked her fingers so often that the “Home Sweet Home” she finally completed was dotted with bloodstains. She still had it stuck away in a drawer somewhere. She went to church and listened to her father’s sermons and felt like an unwelcome stranger, sitting in the familiar pews with her father’s eyes boring into her.

She had no home. No purpose. Her prayers couldn’t even keep her baby safe in her womb. How in the world could she expect them to keep Victor safe halfway around the world?

The weeks became months. The months passed into another year. Winter gave way to spring, and still the war went on. No one had thought the fight would go on so long once the Americans got over there, but the Germans were dug in along their lines. The Allies were dug in along their lines, and there they sat. In the mud, Victor wrote. He was ready to do his duty, to fight for freedom, but at the same time he was miserable, sleeping in the trenches, fighting the body lice that lived in his uniforms, doing his best to keep his feet dry so he wouldn’t have trench foot. He didn’t write about the soldiers he saw die, but every time Nadine read a battle account in the newspapers, she could see Victor on the front lines, falling for his country.

She lost weight. She lost interest in reading anything except the news accounts of the war. She missed James Robert. She missed her father, who was the same as lost to her with Carla standing between them. She missed the baby she should have been nursing by now. She missed Victor. She missed the Nadine she’d always been. The Nadine who could handle things. The Nadine who did what had to be done. But now there was nothing to be done. Nothing but wait.

Gertie told her she had to quit letting her imagination work overtime. That she could just as easily imagine good things like the war ending and Victor coming home. Aunt Hattie carried food to her and sat with her until she ate it. Her father sought her out on Gertie’s back porch and preached at her. But Nadine stayed in her valley of shadows.

It was a relief, even a blessing, the day Victor’s father showed up at Gertie’s early in June to order Nadine to be at the store at eight sharp the next morning to wait on customers while he unloaded some new stock. He stared at her with his hard eyes and said, “It’s time you started earning your keep.”

“Father!” Gertie gasped and half rose up out of her chair on the back porch where she and Nadine had been shelling peas. “Nadine is eating our groceries. Not yours.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Nadine.” Father Merritt turned cold eyes on Gertie. “God only knows you’ve never earned your keep. Can’t even supply poor Wyatt with an heir.”

Gertie sank back down in her chair. She picked up a pea pod that had been caught in her skirt and stared at it a moment before she shelled out the peas and dropped them in the pan beside her chair. She kept her eyes on the peas in the pan as she said softly, “I’m not past childbearing age. The Lord might yet bless me with a child.”

“Not likely,” Father Merritt said.

Nadine looked between them and thought she should say something to take up for Gertie, who had been so good to her. But she didn’t know what to say, the same as she’d often not known what to say to her own father in the face of his unkind spirit.

But Gertie came up with her own retort. Color burned in her cheeks as she looked up at her father. “You could be right. Perhaps it’s the Lord’s punishment on you. A judgment. If Victor doesn’t make it home, then you’ll be the one without any heirs.”

Nadine’s heart turned to stone and sank inside her at Gertie’s words. She was speaking out loud Nadine’s darkest fear. It was all Nadine could do to keep from clapping her hands over her ears and running off the porch.

“He’ll come home,” Father Merritt said.

“You can’t know that.” Gertie’s face was beet red now as she defied her father. “You aren’t God. You can’t control what happens over there the way you think you can here in Rosey Corner.”

“He’s a Merritt. He’ll come home.” There wasn’t even the shadow of doubt in Father Merritt’s voice. “When the war ends, he’ll be back.”

“Press Jr. was a Merritt.”

For a second Nadine thought Father Merritt might strike Gertie, but he just mashed his mouth together and turned back to Nadine. “Tomorrow morning at eight. Sharp,” he said before he stomped off the porch and went around the house without another word.

Gertie told Nadine she didn’t have to go, but Nadine wanted to go. She needed something to occupy the hours. She needed something to think about besides the battles going on in France. She wanted to be where she could hear Father Merritt telling people Victor would be coming home, because when he said it, Nadine could believe it.

She worked every day the store was open. She and Father Merritt sometimes went hours without speaking a word directly to one another, but that suited Nadine just fine. There was plenty of talk. People were in and out all through the day, sharing their problems, their worries, their caring. And slowly she began walking out of the shadows.

The store wasn’t like the church where she’d worshiped with most of the people in Rosey Corner at one time or another, but the same feel of community was there. The people liked one another. They cared what happened to the people who lived next door. They cared about Nadine. Always before, she’d thought people were nice to her because she was the preacher’s daughter, but there in the store they looked her in the eye and smiled at her and asked after Victor. And they cared. Not because she was anybody’s daughter or wife, but because she was one of them.

Gertie begged her to quit at the store when the first people in Rosey Corner came down with the influenza late in 1918. In France, the American doughboys had charged out of the Allied trenches and stormed the German positions in September, pushing the enemy back, but while there finally seemed to be reason to hope the Germans were going to be defeated, influenza was killing people all over the world. Even in Rosey Corner.

School was dismissed until further notice, and church services were canceled. People stayed home behind closed doors to shut out the disease, but it spread relentlessly. Victor’s mother came down with it early on. From the first cough, nobody had any hope that she’d recover. In spite of Aunt Hattie’s sitting with her every minute and spooning medicine down her throat, she died a week later.

Victor’s father closed the store for the burial, but once the grave was closed he went back to the store. He said people had to have a way to buy what they needed. Not that the store had very many customers. Few people ventured out to the store either because they were too sick or they feared coming into contact with those who were. No household was spared. Not even the doctor or his family, as Dr. Lindell and his wife were early victims, and Fern nearly died. Graham was the only one in his family to escape.

Nadine didn’t get sick. Not even a slight case. For a little while, she thought Father Merritt was coming down with it, but he fought it off. He said it was the cold water baths he took every morning that warded off the influenza. At times Nadine thought she and Father Merritt and Graham Lindell were the only people in Rosey Corner who weren’t coughing and down with the ague. Even Aunt Hattie came down with it in spite of the garlic amulet she wore around her neck.

Graham and Father Merritt carried groceries to the houses where every family member was sick. Graham cared for their animals and helped bury those who died. Nadine wore paths between Gertie’s house and her father’s house and Aunt Hattie’s as she cared for the sick. From her sickbed, Aunt Hattie told Nadine how to brew a concoction of herbs and roots to strengthen the sick. Whether that was what did it or whether it was their prayers or a combination of the two, Aunt Hattie, Gertie and Wyatt, and Nadine’s father and Carla began showing improvement every day until by the first of the year the worst of the epidemic was over in Rosey Corner.

The war was also over. Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The war had ended a few weeks earlier than that for Victor when fragments of an exploding shell imbedded in his shoulder. Nadine didn’t receive his letter telling her about his wound until weeks after the Armistice, and then she didn’t know whether to shout with joy or cry because he was hurt. The joy won out. A breath of relief swept through her that he was only wounded and not one of the thousands who would never come back across the sea from France. Like Bo.

When she told Father Merritt about the letter, for just a second she imagined she saw a reflection of her joy in his face, but if so, he would never admit to it. “That means he’ll be in one of those field hospitals over there,” he said with the usual growl in his voice as he peered at her. “Better not stop praying yet, Nadine. The hospitals over there are full of the influenza the same as here.”

Nadine didn’t duck away from his eyes the way she sometimes did. Instead she looked straight at him as she said, “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll never stop praying for Victor, but he won’t catch it. He’ll be home. And soon.” And this time Father Merritt looked to be the one who needed to believe her.

Now Nadine took a last sip of her tea and threw the dregs left in the cup on the roots of the vine. As she stood up to go to her father’s house and be a dutiful daughter, she wondered if she had stopped praying for Victor. At least the right kind of prayers. Had she let other worries, other duties, push in front of her first duty to her husband? Were her prayers only for herself?

She prayed he wouldn’t drink. She prayed she would be able to bear up under the shame of having a husband who spent money they couldn’t afford on alcohol. She prayed the girls would be protected from that shame. But she should have been praying for Victor. That the Lord would remove whatever was tormenting him. Victor didn’t want to be pulled away from them. She could see that in his misery on the mornings after he allowed himself to go down the alcohol trail. But still he went, and some part of her couldn’t forgive that. Perhaps that should be her prayer. That she could be more forgiving.

As she stepped down off the back porch to head down the road to her father’s house, she saw Kate, Victoria, and Lorena digging for worms in the hard dry ground out by the barn. She called to them that she was leaving, and they ran across the barnyard to give her hugs. She held Lorena an extra minute, and the child leaned into her hug, absorbing every bit of it. Inside her heart Nadine was praying,
Dear Lord, spare us hard testing
.

It was a prayer she kept praying as she left them and went around the house to walk up the road. But it wasn’t a prayer she had any assurance would be answered. The Bible assured her the Lord never tested anyone beyond that person’s ability to bear whatever happened. As long as the person was trusting the Lord and leaning not on her own understanding. That was what she needed to pray. To have the kind of trust she could only receive from the Lord. Yet in spite of her prayer, she felt burdened down with so many reasons to worry. Lorena. Kate. Her father. Victor.