Nobody's Child (2 page)

“Goodbye, Peppermint.” He paused, then squeezed her hand one last time. “I just flew out the window.”

The moonlit spark in his eyes faded, and with it, her last chance to share a secret pain.

With a long gentle sigh, Daddy let go.

D
ECEMBER 24

“You can't stay here,” Uncle Jack said, waving a pudgy hand toward the pasture, then pointing at Laura Ann. “A mortgaged farm with no means of support.” He huffed, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stomped out of the front yard of the farmhouse. “Just like your old man. Stubborn and stupid.”

Auntie Rose straightened up as to object, and then shrunk back, head lowered. In words too soft for Uncle Jack to hear, but perhaps for Laura Ann's benefit, Auntie Rose spoke up in her meek way. “We just buried my brother, Jack. Let him rest.”

The seven visitors at Laura Ann's side drifted apart. Preacher Armstrong and his wife followed Uncle Jack to his car, parked nearby. As if to summon a dog, the elderly preacher hesitated at the yard gate and shot a glance back at Auntie Rose, motioning with his head toward the automobile. A clear message, but Auntie Rose stood her ground.

Preacher Armstrong's iron gaze melted for a moment, confronted by her disobedience, but then he set his hands on his hips and spoke a second time.

“It's time to go, Rose,” he commanded. His own wife nudged him with a loud huff, and then headed for the sedan where Jack
stood, door open to the rear seat. Preacher stood alone a moment longer, eyes on Auntie Rose and shaking his head, then retreated to the car.

Pamela Culpeper approached Laura Ann, extending a hand in fellowship. “Ed and I can be reached any time. You too, Rose. You call if you need anything. Hear?”

Laura Ann threw her arms around Pamela's neck in a tight hug. “You've done so much already,” she said, and then took Pastor Culpeper's extended hand in a long embrace.

“She's serious,” Pastor Culpeper added. “We know you'll find a way through this, Laura Ann. Let us help where we can.”

“False hopes.” Preacher Armstrong's voice broke the cold night air like smashing icicles. “Don't be messin' with God's design, Laura Ann McGehee. No matter what Culpeper says, you listen to your uncle.”

“God's design?” Pastor Culpeper shot back, turning away from Laura Ann. Pamela put a hand on his shoulder, but he moved forward to the yard gate, his eyes riveted on Laura Ann's family preacher. “His design is that she trust Him for all her needs. That's a message you might have shared at Angus's grave today, Phillip.”

“False hopes,” Preacher reiterated, pushing his wife into the backseat. “Face the facts, Culpeper. Angus is dead. That girl's life on this farm is over. It's time to move on.”

Pastor Culpeper shook his head. “The word that comes to mind is
grace,
Phillip. Wouldn't hurt you to show a little. Like now.”

Preacher tarried at the rear door, shrugged, and then ducked into the car.

In the silence of the tense moments that followed, Laura Ann watched her surly uncle kick frozen clods with his dress shoes where he stood in the drive beyond the fence. The frozen red-brown mud, a palette of country color, reminded her
of earlier times this very day. Red clay, the soil of a fresh-dug grave, steaming in the bitter afternoon air at Preacher's church in Alma. The brown of Daddy's simple casket, lowered into the ground he'd loved so much.

“Don't mind them,” Auntie Rose pleaded, her eyes glistening. She reached out and laid a hand on Laura Ann's forearm. “But I'm worried about you, sweetheart. Not for now — I mean, I know you have food and transportation for a while, but what about — “

“The bank?” Laura Ann interrupted.

Auntie Rose nodded. A solid band of grey streaked the middle of the part through Auntie's brown hair, one of those odd hygiene items that sent Uncle Jack into a rage. If he saw it, he'd drag her from the porch, berating her for “skunk stripes.” Laura Ann reached up and adjusted Auntie's hat, pulling it down a bit in the front to save her a repeat embarrassment. Auntie Rose's lips pursed in her look of submissive resignation, a silent “thank you.”

“I have a backup.” Laura Ann pulled her aunt close, shielding her only blood relative against the bitter chill of Christmas Eve. “You'll see,” she added in a whisper, lest Uncle Jack hear. “Pastor Culpeper's right. God will provide.”

Auntie Rose released Laura Ann's hands and took her in a tight hug. She held on as if she'd never let go, perhaps struggling to hang on to the only home she'd ever loved. Laura Ann gripped her tight, watching Uncle Jack from over Rose's shoulder as her aunt clung to her, a prolonged hug that cried out, “Please, let me stay.”

The moment wouldn't last. Preacher said something to Uncle Jack that she couldn't hear. His countenance soured and he dropped a rock, then stormed through the fence gate, headed straight for Auntie Rose. As he approached, a quiet young man to Laura Ann's left stepped forward, planting himself in Uncle Jack's way.

“You're not on duty, Ian,” Uncle Jack said.

Ian locked eyes with Uncle Jack. “Far as you're concerned, I am. Don't try something you'd regret, Mr. Harris.”

Laura Ann could see the pulse pounding in Ian's neck, only a few feet away. Yet he seemed so calm, an impenetrable barrier between Auntie Rose and her thundering husband. How many years had she watched him stand up for underdogs in class or in town? Now her friend stood up for Auntie Rose. And for
her.

Lowering his gaze, face red, Uncle Jack spun about, kicking at the air, then walked straight to his car. He lingered at the driver's door, half-open, nearly yelling his next words. “It's a sad day, Preacher, when a husband's authority is undermined this way. Don't you think?”

Laura Ann watched Preacher's head bob up and down. Muffled by the closed door of the car, only one word stood out. “Sad.”

Jack took his seat in the car. Moments later, the horn blared—Jack's first line of defense when he didn't get his way.

“Let him go,” Laura Ann begged. “I'll drive you home later.”

“You know Jack,” Auntie Rose replied with a sniffle, dabbing her nose with a crumpled napkin. She smiled a pasted-on “See? I'm happy!” resignation that Laura Ann often saw below a bloodied cheek or swollen eye.

“You don't have to leave, Auntie Rose. This is your home too. Please. Stay a while.”

Rose shook her head. Her chin quivering, she pushed away. She squeezed the hands of the Culpepers, and Ian, the young lawman who'd taken a stand. The shake of her head as she left screamed stories of suffering, of betrayal and abuse.

The car door slammed behind her, and chunks of slag flew out from behind Uncle Jack's wheels when he spun away. Pamela put an arm around Laura Ann as they watched the sedan make its way across the pasture and up a frozen hill in the darkness.

Ian turned to face them as a sense of calm returned. “I'm sorry it came to this, Laura Ann. You didn't deserve that. Especially not today.”

“I'm not sorry,” she replied. “You saw my life for what it is. All of you did. But thanks for stepping in.”

She caught Ian's eye, and he nodded, with the hint of a smile. “Call me if you need anything. Promise?” His eyes spoke words of comfort he'd left unsaid.

“I will,” she replied.

Ian's smile faded with his next words. “Now that your dad's not here to stand up for her, I'm afraid Rose won't have a day of peace.”

Laura Ann folded her arms against the chill and turned to watch the last glimmer of red lights heading over the ridge. “No.” She shook her head. “She won't. And neither will I.”

D
ECEMBER 25

Cows' breath fogged the air inside the barn where the big creatures pushed their heads into feed stalls, maneuvering for first position to reach Laura Ann and a fresh flake of hay. Oblivious to her pain, two-dozen Black Angus woke to a new day like they did every winter morn, pushing and shoving for their five a.m. feed. Warm breath spewed damp clouds in the bitter cold predawn air of Christmas Day.

Laura Ann took her time as she tore at the hay from her perch above the cattle in the loft, holding each section of the bale to her face before she dropped it to hungry beasts. She breathed in memories of summer. Clover, dried in crisp pale-green shamrocks, flecked the bale with its sweet flesh, a cow dessert. Straws of timothy—cow salad — held the bales together with their
pithy shoots, miniature stalks the grass equivalent of sugar cane. Every bale carried Daddy's touch. From the first fertilizer and lime application early in the season, to the roaring slice and crush of the mower-conditioner in June, Daddy crisscrossed that pasture time and again, year after year, to prepare the meal she would serve each morning all winter long. Love, laid up in long grassy bales, fed Angus beef stock, their second-best source of income after the tobacco.

Every bale carried her touch too. She and Daddy put up hay the “old way,” square bales plopped one by one from the back of an old red McCormick baler, forty-pound bundles of hay thrown by Daddy up to her on the wagon, then stacked in the barn by Laura Ann. Each summer she pitched as many as ten thousand bales with Daddy, laboring in barns hot as ovens, sweat drenching her shirt and layered in the prickly grime of hay dust. Hay elevators creaked over rusty rails, bearing bales from wagon to Laura Ann, where she stacked for hours, a girl piling up forty-pound blocks. Those were summers filled with flies, barn snakes, mice, aching shoulders, blistered hands — and Daddy, encouraging her with the daily reminder that “hard work is the essence of the good life.”

Laura Ann held another flake of summer above jostling black heads, its color stopping her: the dry crumbling remains of a pasture flower. Red pain. In it she saw Daddy, pitching a bale to her in August, his last day throwing hay. The bale missed the wagon and he fell, knees buried in fresh-cut grass, bent over in a horrible cough.

Laura Ann dropped the hay, tumbling into the face of a heifer that pressed against bovine sisters for a meal. She stared at her hands, the red of Daddy's blood on her fingers a vivid memory. Like the crimson that splattered his hands and mouth that day in the hay pasture when they first met his disease. It started that afternoon, in the dog days of summer. Daddy's end.

Minutes later, she shoveled more feed to swollen mothers who would drop calves within weeks. Corn, more of Daddy's labor, nurtured new life in a circle she'd been part of for twenty years. She shoveled from bins that stood brimful with brilliant yellow cobs, laden by a father who wheezed through every load they'd gathered this past September. Nights were shorter then, with no strength for talk, unlike the years of her past with a vigorous daddy who loved their evenings together after a full day in the field and wood shop. Nights spent reading stories to each other from dozens of books, their favorite escape.

A cat nudged her leg, drawing her back from the memory. Black purring nuzzled against her ankle. Laura Ann shoveled cobs to another waiting mouth, then took the barn cat in her arms, one of a dozen pets she'd never named. Arched in a bony inverted “U,” the cat purred as she stroked black fur, her hand raising crackles of static as she rubbed from head to tail. The barn cat pushed its head between her arm and side, seeking some warmth in the folds of a dusty brown barn coat, layered in hay dust from a thousand cold mornings in the loft.

September had transitioned from the gathering colors of fall and bounty of yellow corn, to the beige of hospital corridors, pale blue of doctors' scrubs, and the white of paper. Sheaves of paper. Documents to sign, authorizations to treat sickness that might recur, waivers, addresses, and always — promises to pay. “No insurance?” a voice asked nearly every day, incredulous. Day by day, she bore the epitome of hospital shame: a patient without health insurance. Too poor to buy a policy, unqualified for Medicaid because they owned a farm. Day by day, Daddy fought the disease while she battled the healthcare bureaucracy.

Laura Ann set the cat down and walked along the feed trough, scratching heads. Dusty and spattered in dried mud, the Angus acknowledged her with a brief look up or the wink of a wet eye, and then crunched away on the next cob or flake of dry
grass. She dove her fingers into warm thick hair between black ears, scratching hard, working her fingertips down long faces toward wet dripping noses.

“Merry Christmas,” she wished each cow as she made her way along the two dozen pregnant mothers, the last of Daddy's once proud herd. The fog of bovine breath enveloped her in a cow cloud as she ran her hands over massive black foreheads with hair dense as carpet, this her ritual morning goodbye.

Laura Ann knelt in the living room at the base of their meager Yule tree. Despite the water in the feed bucket that held the tree, fragrant needles cascaded to the floor at her touch. Death found its way into every facet of Christmas.

Three packages waited under the tinsel and lights, wrapped in paper she'd horded each year and stored for future gift opportunities. Three packages — but only one she'd wrapped herself. Laura Ann's hand lingered at the first parcel. Pamela's handwriting adorned two of the gifts, part of her helping way. Weeks before his slide into the end, with Pamela's help, Daddy took the time to make sure his daughter had something waiting under the tree.

Laura Ann took the first gift, a thick heavy one. A perfect bow, creased paper folds, and neat tape cuts were Pamela's signature wrapping. No doubt she'd prepared the gift while sitting with Daddy through long painful days while Laura Ann worked the farm.

She released the bow and folded it with the ribbon in a pile, her annual rite of thrift. Dissecting the tape joint like a surgeon, she disassembled the paper, determined to save it for yet another year. This wrapping was holy, the dressing on her last gift from him.

The heft of the gift, and the embossing she felt below the paper, left no doubt as to the contents. She slipped the wrapping free to expose this year's dream, a leather-bound copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Her lifelong favorite, three precious books bound in one.