Homefires

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

DEDICATION

 

 

I dedicate this book to the preachers’ families of the world. You will recognize in many of my
Homefires
characters your own selves, your children (the PKs), kin, and indeed, those of your flocks. I especially want to honor the parsonage wives, who keep the homefires burning. Who must shift her perception when change comes. And come it does. Moving time comes around swiftly and surely. And once again, amongst a new set of strangers, you find yourself scrutinized, criticized, ignored, or designated to a pedestal from which you will ultimately topple. But then more often than not, you find yourself welcomed with open arms and that makes it all worthwhile. Your focus remains firm as you protect, sometimes with your very life and sanity, your children and your “high-called” husband. Because you know with God-given woman’s intuition that without you behind him, the man of the cloth’s proverbial row to hoe would be rocky. At the same time, you learn to love each new flock as family and include them in your realm of protectiveness. You will also relate to the successes and the failures of those with feet of clay. The humanity. The despair and the exultation. The loneliness and the sometimes overwhelming needs laid at your feet. You meet each challenge with mercy and grace because you, too, are called.

To beautiful Janeece Wallace, not a preacher’s wife but this preacher’s wife’s armor bearer in years past, who inspired me so deeply that I named my main character after her. Janeece is one of the most loving, generous-hearted of our flocks’ women, who nurtured me in my young years, who taught, through example, what real forgiveness and mercy is. What unconditional love is.

To Betty Wallace, the faithful one. To Joyce Griffin, who literally carried me during some of my darkest times.

To Dr. Wayne Miller and his wife, Leslie, for your faithful friendship and encouragement throughout the years. For sticking with us through “thick and thin” when all sometimes seemed lost.

To my own pastor husband, Leland, and our parsonage passel of PKs, I give my heartfelt love and thanks for a life filled with surprises and adventure. It was never dull and always interesting.

In memory of Rev. Danny Wallace, gone much too soon but who left a legacy of beauty and grace for future generations to follow. My parents, James and Dot Miller and my grandparents, Mamie and Will Stafford, who, even when I was unlovable, loved me unconditionally.

To Father God, who made us who we are and forgave our glaring mistakes and blessed our triumphs with the reminder that we “are beautifully and wonderfully made” by Him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Homefires
is fiction. My characters spawn from composites of folks I know and have known throughout the years of my own glass house journey. The actions and words are pure fiction. These of the church “family” remain tightly bonded to my heart in a unique, enduring way that transcends time and distance. Muses for my
Homefires
characters include Eleanor Payne Mitchem, Joyce Griffin, Rev. Bob and Patsy Roach, Roger, Mike, and Jimmy Miller, Karen Bradley, David and Susan Harvey and children, Kaleigh, Lindi, Ashley and Trey, Pam and David McCall, Angie Harvey and Angela Callahan, James and Dot Miller, Will and Mamie Stafford, Alice and Mary Latimer, the late Wayne Matthews, Barbara Ann Newell and daughters Desiree, Lou, and Cindy, Fay, and Cynthia Wiggins, Nathan and Kay Stafford, a passel of kin and a host of others, too many to name. These are the ones who made an indelible impact on my life in my best and worst of times. Each of you loved your parsonage family unconditionally and validated us.

I took the liberty of using fictitious names for settings such as Solomon, South Carolina, as well as other upstate towns. Same with church and school names. I loved every minute of dipping into a smorgasbord of fantasy places and people.

I also love that, in writing, I can reach out and offer hope to those who have “blown it.” I can, through my characters’ examples, let them know that there is no “hopeless” situation and that anyone who has the remorse, repentance, faith, forgiveness, and determination to hang in there through the devastation, will soon rise above those black clouds into a glorious world of sunshine. Help is always there, dear ones. One must only reach out for it.

Be blessed, reader. Sit back and enjoy the warmth of
Homefires
.

PROLOGUE PRESENT

The gravedigger has been at it for at least an hour now. I watch from my car, across the road from the church cemetery where generations of my family rest, separated by six feet of sod from May’s warm sunshine. My father’s foot marker flanks the newest mound. The digger toils as I observe, experiencing a grief no less than when the earth first opened for the faraway casket that will, tomorrow, change its resting place to here. Twenty years have not dulled my loss. The little village church, where I learned about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, overlooks the activity maternally, as she did me when I was a small child.

Melancholy thick and black as old used motor oil floods me and the little girl inside yearns to resurrect. She flounders toward a time when truth was what the preacher said and Mama and Daddy made everything all right. To when the Holy Trinity simply
was
and Heaven was as real as MawMaw’s Sunday kitchen feasts. To when loving felt so good, it was like getting feather-tickled all inside and bore no risks.

Risks.
That comes with the homefires I keep burning.
Homefires
. Such an innocent word.

The shovel’s
ping
against rock jolts me. A small gust of warm air flavored with honeysuckle and tiger lilies ruffles my hair and I inhale deeply, my dull gaze following a jagged stone spooned from earth’s gaping hole.

Fact hits me broadside – there is no crawling back into childhood’s shelter. Tears gather to blur and mix earth tones.

Thwump.
I blink away moisture. The shovel now lies beside the earthen orifice.

The gravedigger’s shoulders square off with the red-clay horizon. He pauses to loosen a black scarf tied around his head and uses it to wipe his wet brow. Gloved hands grab hold of firm sod and sinewy arms hoist him up, up until his dirty broganed foot swings over the earth’s solid edge and he laboriously climbs out. He turns stiffly to wave at me – asmall gesture like
the tip of a hat that says, ‘it’s finished.’ For him, it is. Not for me. For me, it just begins.

I hear his pickup’s roar as it fades into the distance. I settle my arms over the warm steering wheel, loosely hugging it.

Another beginning.
The thought does not lift me. Rather, grim resignation seeps into me.

I take a deep breath and sit up straighter. Thing is, this time, I know I can do it. The old paralyzing fear now has little power over me. I learned long ago not to say, “I could
never
live through that.” Seems either Fate or the Devil himself eavesdrops because most of those
never
s came to pass. Little by little, over the years and through circumstances, that curious, finely tuned mechanism inside me grew more and more resistant to threats and dangers. I’m not saying I’ll never be afraid again – like I said before, I avoid the word
never.

At the same time, I know one thing as well as I know oxygen’s necessity: nobody else can give me peace. I alone am responsible for it. Another truth: a higher power has and will keep me sane and alive through anything that befalls me.

I shove sunglasses over my small, tilted nose, my best facial feature. The genetic thing that sculpted mine small and straight and – to quote my daughters – spared them from the large Romanesque nose dominating their father’s squared off face, softened only by a Kirk Douglas chin cleft.

Kirk Crenshaw: my hero. Kirk calls me a romantic. I suppose I am. Sometimes, he says it like it’s good. Other times, when his words seem edged in cedar, they are more an accusation.

“I’m tired of apologizing for living,” I’ve said to Kirk more than once, because that’s what it is – living.
Being.
My otherworldliness is both blessing and curse. Lord knows I’ve tried and tried to harness the thing that lopes away with my imagination. Just when I think I’ve got it licked, I find myself, mid-task, drifting off to some faraway time or exotic place and writing scintillating dialogue...until Kirk snaps his beautiful male fingers in my face and mutters, “Earth to Janeece...earth to Janeece. Where
are
you?”

I usually end up apologizing. Then, I resent it.

Because Kirk doesn’t apologize for living. Ever.

Yet, I refuse to be a scorekeeper.

I’d rather work on me. It’s easier.
Safer.

The spiritual me knows I must forgive to be forgiven. Another part of me is on guard against a vulnerability that hovers, has hovered over me, for as long as I’ve breathed.

And today, for some reason, that
placelessness
lusts for me. I push the button that raises the car windows and then flip the air conditioner on high, suddenly irked with my stupid, excessive introspection. Air’s too heavy as it is.

“You take things too seriously, Janeece,” Kirk loves to say, adding, always, a sharp little tweak to my nose or chin. “Let’s talk about something lighter.” I turn my head quickly to the side, muting some irritated response.

Perhaps I
am
too serious. Perhaps it’s just Kirk’s way to preserve levity and drive back any need to analyze himself. Kirk loves to soar above troubled waters.

I don’t know.

All I know is that I love my husband. That, too, is unalterable. I should know. I park my car at the cemetery and walk slowly to the open sepulcher

Inhaling earth’s fecund smell, I blink back tears that blur the chasm. The open grave, the dirt...it’s too real...too, too real. I didn’t think it could ever hurt this much again.

I was wrong.

PART ONE

1960-73

CHAPTER ONE

 

Kirk Crenshaw and I graduated from Chapowee High on Monday and wed on Saturday. That we were broke as convicts had no bearing on our full-blown, genuine church wedding. Shoot
no.
Mill village friends and family swarmed like a colony of ants in the little Chapowee Methodist fellowship hall, arranging food offerings, while my two attendants decked me out in the ladies rest room.