Angel Sister (6 page)

“You were?” Kate was surprised. “What happened?”

“I had to come home from school to take care of my folks and Fern when they got sick. I guess the girl gave up on me coming back, and she up and married somebody else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, it was probably for the best. No woman would want to live the way I do now, and you know, I sort of enjoy it. Freedom’s a fine thing.” He had a handful of berries again, but when Kate held the bucket over toward him, he grinned at her and popped the whole handful in his mouth.

Kate laughed. And behind them Tori yelled that she’d caught a fish.

______

It was hot in the blacksmith shop. A man couldn’t bend iron without heating it to the right stage for the work. That meant fire in the forge year-round. Sweat soaked Victor’s shirt and rolled down his face as he shaped the horseshoe on his anvil with his ball-peen hammer. Horses’ hooves came in all sizes and shapes, and making shoes to protect their feet and legs was an art. Some of it could be learned, according to his uncle Jonas, but the best blacksmiths were born with a natural instinct and feel for the iron.

Victor didn’t think he was born a blacksmith. He’d never thought about shaping iron for a living before the war, even though he liked hanging around his uncle’s blacksmith shop when his father didn’t need him at the store. His great uncle, actually. His father’s uncle by marriage.

Uncle Jonas was a big man, broad as an axe handle across the shoulders, and as good-hearted as he was strong. He could swing the heaviest hammer with one hand with ease. Victor never imagined being able to do what Uncle Jonas could do, but Uncle Jonas let him start shaping the iron as soon as he was big enough to swing a hammer. Victor liked bending the iron to his will. Still, he never planned to use what Uncle Jonas taught him. Not until after everything changed in 1917.

The year he turned nineteen started out fine enough. He was looking forward to graduation, and life seemed full of endless possibilities. His mother talked incessantly about sending him to school back in Virginia. She wanted to turn him into a man of letters. A writer or a teacher perhaps. She had dreams for him the same as his father had had for Preston Jr. His father had no such dreams for Victor. He expected him to finish out his senior year and then start working in the store. A man couldn’t expect to spend his whole life buried in books.

Preston Jr. had been enrolled in Centre College over in Danville, but that was different. Preston Jr. had been going places, and he needed not only the book learning but also the contacts with the right people who would someday help him get elected governor. Nobody was going to elect Victor to anything, which suited Victor just fine. He didn’t want to run for office, not even for mayor of Rosey Corner if there had been such a position.

That’s what people sometimes said his father was. Unofficially. Unelected. But Preston Merritt knew what the community needed. Hadn’t he lived there all his life? Didn’t he see virtually every person in Rosey Corner most every week? Some of them every day. So he knew what was going on. The only other man some people set forward as leader of the community was Preacher Reece.

Victor’s father laughed at that idea. Preacher Reece might know spiritual matters. If somebody wanted to know about getting to heaven, then by all means that person should knock on the preacher’s door. But if that same person wanted to get something done, say, on the road through Rosey Corner, then he’d better show up at Merritt’s Dry Goods Store and talk to Preston Merritt.

Victor put in his time at the store on Saturdays and after school, but he didn’t plan on spending the rest of his life working there. He might not know what he wanted to do with his life, but he was sure it was something finer than measuring out flour and keeping count of the pickles in the pickle barrel. That was thinking his mother encouraged.

The day after he turned nineteen early in February, Victor heard his parents arguing about it. He’d never heard his mother cross his father before. In fact they rarely spoke to one another beyond an occasional polite inquiry after the other’s health. But his mother stood up to his father for Victor’s future. She had her inheritance and she would use it how she wished, and that was to see that Victor was properly educated.

She had her heart set on his going to the College of William and Mary in Virginia where all the men in her family had been educated. Victor planned to get her to compromise on a college in Lexington. That way he could come home to help his father in the store on Saturdays and, more importantly, to see Nadine.

It was funny when he thought back on that time now how blind they’d all been. In Europe countries were bombarding one another and men were dying, but none of it seemed to have much to do with America. And nothing at all to do with Rosey Corner. They read the accounts of the war in the newspapers. Every man who came into the store that January railed against the German submarines attacking neutral ships. They thought something should be done when Germany sank the US liner
Housatonic
in February that year, and most of them backed President Wilson’s call for Congress to pass a bill allowing the merchant ships to arm for protection.

But it was the rare man in America who was ready to pack his knapsack and head across the ocean to help fight the war. Even when the newspapers reported the German Foreign Minister Zimmerman’s telegram to Mexico proposing an alliance against the United States, most of the men in Rosey Corner still thought the war would stay overseas and never touch any of them.

Victor read the war news in the papers and heard the talk at the store, but he didn’t worry about it. He was young and in love, and thoughts of Nadine filled his head. He jumped out of bed every morning with a smile on his face. It didn’t matter what his father said to him. It didn’t matter what her father said to her. At least not to Victor. Nadine wasn’t quite as sure about that.

“Give me a few more weeks to let him get used to the idea,” she told Victor when he asked if he could come to her house to call upon her.

“He’s never going to get used to the idea. He doesn’t like me. He’s never going to like me.” Victor didn’t see any use dancing around the truth.

Nadine frowned at Victor. They had stolen a few minutes to talk outside the school before classes started. “What a thing to say! Of course he will like you once he gets to know you better. Right now he thinks you’re like your father.”

“If that’s true, he’s the only person who ever thought that,” Victor said. He moved in front of her to block the cold wind off her face.

She had her hands tucked inside the sleeves of the black wool coat one of the church members must have passed down to her. It was too short and showed a wide band of her dark blue skirt sticking out below it. She had let the hood of the coat fall off her head and the wind was blowing strands of her long honey-brown hair across her face. Her nose was red and her beautiful blue eyes were tearing up either from the chill wind or the stubbornness of their fathers.

Victor’s hand shook a little as he smoothed back one of her curls. She was so lovely that it was all he could do not to reach out and fold her in his arms and kiss her. But Miss Penman, the head of the school, frowned on romantic embraces between students, so he restrained himself. “If only I could write a poem that would do your beauty justice.”

“Beauty is only skin-deep,” she whispered.

“Not in your case. You are beautiful inside and outside, through and through, and I love you completely. Desperately. With every inch of my heart and soul, and I always will to my dying day.” He wasn’t sure behind the school building was exactly the best place to first profess his love to her, but he didn’t wish his words back.

Her eyes widened and she sounded breathless as she said, “I don’t know what to say.”

He smiled down at her. “I could suggest a few words. Three notable ones if they are there in your heart.” He lightly touched the wool of her coat over her heart.

She looked truly distressed that she couldn’t say the words of love he so wanted to hear. “It’s just that I can’t imagine what my father will say. Or do.”

“Why worry about what your father will say? Why not worry about what you want to say?”

She dropped her eyes away from his. “The bell is going to ring in a few minutes. We should go inside.”

Victor put his hands on her shoulders to keep her from turning away from him. He hesitated and then pushed out his next words. “I hear your father has been visiting Carla Murphy.”

Her eyes shot back to his with a flash of anger in them. “What do you mean by that? My father visits people in Rosey Corner all the time. They ask his spiritual counsel. He is a preacher. It’s his calling to help people.”

Victor held his hands up and stepped back. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just repeating something somebody told me.”

“Well, you shouldn’t listen to gossip. Maybe you should read in the Bible what James says about the dangers of an unbridled tongue.” She whirled away from him and stormed toward the front of the school.

He waited a few minutes before he followed her. Perhaps he had been wrong to speak of Carla Murphy and the rumors going around Rosey Corner. Obviously Nadine wasn’t ready to surrender her spot in her father’s life to another woman. Obviously she wasn’t ready to step into the spot Victor had wide open in his own life for her.

He hesitated on the steps into the school and thought about not going inside. He wanted to go down to the stable, get his horse, and ride away from here. To Frankfort or Lexington. Anywhere away from Rosey Corner. Anywhere away from the anger in Nadine’s eyes.

How could she be so angry with him when he’d just told her how much he loved her?

He went on into the school just as the bell rang. He wouldn’t let her think he was a coward who spoke of his love and then ran away when she didn’t speak of her own love in return. He had loved her for many years with not so much as a glance his way from her. He wouldn’t give up so easily. He’d fight Preacher Reece for her if he had to, but first he’d reread the book of James in the Bible so next time he’d be readier to bridle his tongue and only say the right things to her.

Something he wasn’t sure he’d ever learned to do, Victor thought now as he brought his hammer down and hit the horseshoe on his anvil. He missed the intended spot by a fraction of an inch. That’s what he got for letting his mind wander away from his work.

He picked up the horseshoe with his tongs and laid it back in the coals. He was glad Haskell Jenkins had left the heat of the shop to wait outside in the shade for Victor to have the shoe ready for his horse. He wouldn’t have wanted Haskell to see him make such a boneheaded strike.

He rubbed the sweat out of his eyes with his shirtsleeve. His shoulder ached. He rotated it to loosen it up, but that just made the ache go deeper. He stared over at the shelves where a bottle was hidden in behind a pile of rags. It was less than half full, but that would be plenty to dull the pain.

He shut his eyes and pulled in a long breath. He held the air in his lungs as new beads of sweat popped up on his forehead, but he didn’t let his feet move toward the shelves. He wouldn’t pick up the bottle today no matter how much his shoulder hurt. He’d hurt worse. Lots of times. And he’d told Kate to tell Nadine he’d be at the supper table that night. Nadine wouldn’t believe it was true, but she’d bake the raspberry pie anyway. She was a far better woman than he deserved.

He loved Nadine as desperately as ever. Much more even than that day he’d first admitted his love, but he kept failing her and falling short of being the man she should have. What had happened to him that made him keep doing the things he knew he shouldn’t do and kept him from doing the things he should?

Maybe her father was right. Maybe he did have a demon inside him. A demon that only the bottle could quiet. Or maybe his father was right that some men were born with moral courage while others had to search for it wherever they could find it. Be that inside the pages of a book, with a gun, or in a bottle.

Victor shut his mind to the call of the bottle and lifted the horseshoe out of the coals. It was yellow hot, and this time when he hit it with his hammer, the iron shaped just as he intended.

______

That night Kate’s father kept his word and came home to eat a piece of raspberry pie warm from the oven. There wasn’t even the hint of alcohol on his breath, and the tired lines on his face vanished when Kate’s mother stepped over behind him at the table to massage his sore shoulders.

After supper Kate’s mother and father settled down in the next room with their books while Evie and Kate cleaned up the kitchen. Tori got to go on out and play since she’d caught the fish for their supper. Kate started to point out that she deserved the same consideration for getting briar scratches and chancing snakebites when she climbed into the middle of the raspberry vines to pick the berries for the pie, but she didn’t want to hear how Evie would moan and cry if she got stuck doing the dishes alone. So Kate just gathered the dishes off the table without a word. Outside the neighborhood kids were yelling as they played kick-the-can. A good group must have gathered out in the Merritts’ front yard the way they did almost every evening.

Kate looked at the pile of dishes and sighed. “Everybody will be gone home before we get all these dishes done.”

“You’re too old to play kick-the-can and hide-and-seek anyway.” Evie gave her a look. “When are you going to start acting your age?”

“Never, I hope. Hide-and-seek in the dark is fun. Unless you run into the clothesline. That’s not much fun.” Kate put her hand on her neck and made a choking noise before she picked up the dishpan and held it out toward Evie. The enamel had chipped off in places, leaving thin black spots, but so far it hadn’t sprung a leak. “It’s your turn to wash.”

“No, it isn’t.” Evie backed up a few steps as if she thought the pan might bite her.

“I washed last night. It’s my turn to dry.” Kate kept the pan held out toward Evie.

“Well, maybe so, but please will you wash again?” Evie held up her hands and waggled her fingers. “I filed and buffed my fingernails this afternoon, and dishwater will ruin them.”

“Yeah, yeah, and your big date with Gorgeous George is coming up.” Kate set the pan down on the cabinet and got the teakettle off the stove. She put the cake of lye soap in the pan and poured the water in on top of it to make the most suds. She hated not having sudsy water when she washed dishes.

“You’ll melt all the soap,” Evie told her.

“You don’t like the way I do it, you can wash them yourself.” Kate set the teakettle back on the stove with a thump.

“Stop that fussing, girls,” Mama called from the next room.

“Yes, ma’am,” Kate answered.

“Now see what you’ve done,” Evie said under her breath. “Upset Mama. And when everything was going so nice tonight.”

Kate started to smack Evie in the face with the dishrag. She could almost see the soap bubbles landing in Evie’s red hair and her eyes popping wide open, but Kate dropped the rag into the hot water instead. She didn’t want to disturb the peace of the evening. Evie was right about that much. Besides, just thinking about it was almost as good as doing it.

For a second she felt guilty as she remembered one of Grandfather Reece’s sermons about sin and how if a person thought about doing something wrong in his heart it was the same as doing it. But he was talking about big things like murder and adultery. Not a smack with a dishrag. The Lord would surely understand how a sister could drive a person batty enough to think about doing something a little bit wrong sometimes.

Kate washed the glasses and set them in the drain pan for Evie to dry. In the living room Mama laughed. Maybe at something in her book or something Daddy said. Kate didn’t know which. She couldn’t hear what her parents were saying over the clank of the dishes in the dishpan, but it was still a good sound. She smiled in spite of the pile of dishes and the games going on outside without her. She even tried to make peace with Evie. “You and George going to a movie Friday night?”

“Probably,” Evie said as she twirled the dishtowel up inside one of the glasses. The towel squeaked against the glass. “But don’t be trying to get George to invite you to ride along. This is my date. You want to have a date, you get your own boyfriend.”

“You can have George. I don’t want him or any other boy.” Kate made a face.

“Aren’t you ever going to grow up, Kate? You’re fourteen. Plenty old enough to get sweet on a boy.” Evie picked up one of the plates and dried it off. “Maybe sometime we could have a double date. Me and George and you and . . . let’s see.” She thought a minute. “How about Harry Winters?”

“Harry Winters! I wouldn’t walk across the porch to see him. He uses his fingers instead of a handkerchief to blow his nose.” Kate shuddered.

“That’s disgusting.” Evie frowned at her.

“Really disgusting.” Kate washed a bowl and then held it up toward the light coming in the window behind them to see if it was clean.

“I mean you telling me that. Ladies don’t talk about those sorts of things.” Evie picked up another dish to dry. “So maybe not Harry. Who do you think is good-looking? Besides George, that is.”

Kate bit her lip to keep from saying the only thing good-looking about George was his car. That would just make Evie squawk and then there would go the peace of the evening down the creek. So instead she shrugged a little and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

She ran through the boys in the neighborhood in her head, but she couldn’t imagine wanting to
date
any of them. They were all right for playing baseball or catching frogs in the creek or seeing how many gooseberries they could eat without getting the sour shivers, but certainly not for sitting close and holding hands the way Evie and George were always doing. Kate had even caught the two of them kissing. That was really worrisome, thinking about George maybe ending up her brother-in-law. A worry her mother obviously shared, because she was always reminding Evie there was more than one fish in the sea.

Kate was thinking about trying to change the subject to how many fish might actually be in the sea—it had to be in the millions—and how there were probably lots of fish nobody had ever seen, but Evie spoke first. “There’s got to be at least one boy who makes your heart go thumpity-thump.”

“Well, maybe if we were seeing who could run the fastest.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.” Evie sounded disgusted.

“I know.” Kate scrubbed the fork she was holding until it shone before she went on. “But gee whiz, Evie, I’ve known these boys forever. And most of them have no idea how to carry on an intelligent conversation. I’ll bet they’ve never even thought about how many fish are in the sea. They just want to talk about the latest prank they pulled or about where the best hunting spots are or their dogs. Actually I like talking about their dogs.” She laid a handful of washed utensils in the drain pan. “I wish Bullet hadn’t gotten run over. But even when they do talk about their dogs, none of them are half as much fun to talk to as Graham.”

“I don’t know what you see in that crazy old man.” Evie shook her head at Kate as she picked out all the forks to dry and put in the drawer before she did the spoons.

“He’s not crazy. A little odd maybe, but definitely not crazy.”

“You couldn’t prove that by me.” Evie waved her towel back and forth while she waited for Kate to finish washing the mashed potatoes pan. “What in the world do you talk about with him? Besides how many hats his mother had.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anything and everything. Birds, old Poe, freedom. Fish in the sea.” Kate handed Evie the pan and picked up the skillet. They were almost through, and the noise level outside was as strong as ever. Nobody had gone home yet. “The past. He tells me things about when Daddy was our age.”

“He’s got to be lots older than Daddy,” Evie said.

“I guess so. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know things about Daddy when he was growing up. We know things about the little kids around here.” Finally Kate had the skillet clean. She fished around in the bottom of the dishpan for any utensils she might have missed.

Evie wiped off the skillet and set it down on the cabinet beside the stove. “He doesn’t look like he’d know much of anything about anything.”

“Funny. I think he looks like he knows about a lot of things. Things I don’t even know to ask about, but that maybe I will someday.”

“You’re not normal, Kate.”

“That’s a mean thing to say. And after I washed the dishes for you when it was your turn.” Kate wrung out the dishrag and carried the pan to the back door to sling the dishwater out in the yard. When she came back in the kitchen to put the pan under the cabinet again, she said, “Besides, maybe I’m the normal one and you’re the one who’s not normal.”

“I don’t think so.” Evie carefully hung her dishtowel on the rack on the side of the cabinet and then gave Kate a pitying look.

Kate balled up the dishrag in her hand. She could probably hit Evie right in the nose with it if she tried. She shut her eyes and counted to five and made herself shake the rag out and lay it on the cabinet to dry. “Who’s got red hair? That’s not the normal color. Most people have brown hair like me.”

“Hair color doesn’t make you normal or weird. Besides, my hair is pretty. Everybody says so.”

“Okay. But who cries like a baby when they don’t get their way even if they are sixteen?” Kate said. “Who needs somebody to go with them to the outhouse after dark?”

“Now who’s being mean?” Evie’s cheeks flushed red and her lips trembled.

“Not mean. Truthful. I guess that’s one of my weirder characteristics. Not trying to hide from the truth.”

“Oh, go on outside and play with your little friends,” Evie said with a wave of her hand. “Just be careful and don’t let Fern or the gypsies get you.”

Kate made a face at Evie. “The gypsies like redheaded girls, and they don’t care whether it’s dark or daylight. They grab whatever they want whenever they want it.”

The color drained out of Evie’s face. “They don’t really, do they?”

“No, not really,” Kate relented. “They just steal apples off your trees or clothes off your clothesline.”

“Fern does that.”

“True, but Graham always brings whatever it is back or trades you something better for it.”

“It’s still wrong to steal. That’s one of the Ten Commandments.”

“But remember she’s not normal. Like me.” Kate stuck her tongue out at Evie.

“You’d better not steal anything.”

“What is the matter with you two? Stop it right now.” Mama was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

“Sorry,” Kate said quickly and slipped out the back door before her mother could make her go to bed early. She wasn’t worried about Evie getting in trouble. Evie never got in trouble. It must have something to do with being the oldest and so ladylike with that pretty red hair like their Grandmother Reece had had, the one who had died when Kate’s mother was twelve.

The next morning after breakfast Mama gave her a talking to about how sisters were supposed to try to get along, and how it wasn’t nice to say things that got other people scared and how wouldn’t it be good if they could have just one night when nobody was upset with anybody else.

“Yes, ma’am.” Kate ducked her head, stared at the table, and tried not to think about Evie gloating in the next room because Kate was in trouble.

“Your sister should be your best friend,” Mama said. “I always wanted a sister. Brothers are all right, but a sister, she can understand things about you without you ever saying a word. It’s like your heart divided and made another person.”

“Twin sisters maybe.” Kate looked up at her mother. “Evie and me aren’t twins.”

“You don’t have to be twins to love one another and help one another. Remember, sisters are a gift and a blessing.”

“Yes, ma’am, I do love my sisters, but nobody can get along with everybody else every minute of every day, can they?”

“I suppose not. At least not without the help of the good Lord.” Mama smiled and reached across the table to pat Kate’s cheek before she stood up.

Kate hid her sigh of relief that the sister lecture was over. She got up too and went over to look at the jars of raspberry jam lined up on the windowsill. The light purple jam seemed to absorb the sunlight hitting the jars and then bounce it out into the kitchen. There were only five jars. Even the biggest wild raspberries weren’t much bigger than the tip of Kate’s little finger, so it took a lot of picking to have enough for jam. “You want me to take Graham his jar of jam this morning? I promised him one for showing me where the best raspberries were and helping me pick.”

“You can later, but first take one up to Father. He’ll be at the church praying over his sermon this morning.”

Kate picked up one of the jars and let her mother kiss her cheek before she went out the back door and cut through the field behind the house toward the church. She hoped her grandfather would be too deep in the Scriptures to want to pray over her this morning. She didn’t really mind the prayers. Everybody needed prayers, but sometimes he went on and on until her knees got numb.

Kate climbed the fence in behind the church and looked over toward the back door. It was closed. That was a sure sign Grandfather Reece wasn’t at the church yet. She’d go around to the front door and sit on the steps to wait for him. The steps would be in the shade this time of the morning.

When she came around the corner of the church building, a little girl was already sitting on the steps. She looked up at Kate and said, “Are you an angel?”