The Truth About Love and Lightning (21 page)

Lily felt more at peace somehow, as if someone were watching over them. She had no nightmares when she went to sleep, only gentle dreams, of blue skies and soft breezes, of eagles soaring above as she held her son’s hand. She never saw her father’s visage again, but she didn’t expect it. He had told her what he needed to tell her. If he had anything more to say, he would find a way to give her the message.

Winter arrived in a blanket of snow several days before Christmas, and Samuel Henry Winston arrived as well after a quick and uneventful labor. He had grown big enough to face the world, indeed, at eight pounds and six ounces. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, the boy looked much like his mother, although she insisted he favored his grandfather. “He already looks wise beyond his years,” she said, although Cooper remarked that “every baby looks like a wizened old man.”

While Lily rested with Sam bundled beside her, Cooper ran around town with cigars, proudly announcing the birth of his son. A steady stream of visitors made their way out to the farmhouse, wishing to see the child and present Lily with a host of handmade baby gifts. “They feel guilty,” Lily told her husband behind their backs, “for the seeds of doubt they sowed in the beginning.” Even the cruelest hearts melted once they met the boy. He was a good-natured baby, calm and quiet, so peaceful in fact that sometimes Lily had wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with him.

“Maybe he’s just stoic, like his mother,” Cooper suggested. “He’s got a quarter Otoe-Missouria in his blood, you know.”

“I do,” Lily said, “and someday he will know it, too.”

Sam had also inherited a birthmark shaped like a raindrop. It sat at the nape of his neck, and Lily thought of it as a kind of talisman, passed down from her father. Hank had once borne a similar mark on his shoulder, or so Nadya had told her, though Lily only remembered a scar where a mole had been removed. “It brought him luck at first,” her mother had said, “before it caused us almost unbearable grief.”

Lily hoped that the birthmark would be a blessing for Sam, a tie to past generations. How she wished her parents were around for her son. But Hank had died far too young, not long before Lily and Coop had married. “He gave too much of himself, trying to help strangers and make a life for us. It turned his body old beyond his years,” her mother had said by way of explanation. Nadya hadn’t stayed at the farmhouse much beyond the wedding. She’d departed soon after, heading back to her village in Bulgaria to live with her widowed cousins. “They are like sisters and they need me. This farm and the house belong to you now,” she had told Lily with tears in her eyes. “Fill it with laughter and love, and never waste a precious moment wanting anything more than you have.”

Lily missed them both, but she felt her father’s presence. She knew without a doubt that Hank’s spirit had protected Sam the night of the lightning strike and would continue to watch over him. The birthmark, she decided, was simply a reminder of that.

By the time he was six months old, Sam’s eyes had turned the color of pewter, and that wide silver-gray gaze seemed to intently watch everyone and everything as he took in the world around him, often putting a tiny finger to his chin and pressing his rosebud lips together as though contemplating something far too powerful for one so young.

When he was old enough to walk, Lily would take Sam outside, where he would toddle beside her around the farm. She liked to point out the bright red cardinals pecking at seeds, the caterpillars creeping across fallen leaves, and the row upon row of walnut trees that had been in the Winston family for two generations. Sam would listen as she shared stories about his grandfather Hank, who wore an eagle feather in his hair and turquoise around his neck. “He needed to make his own mark on the world, so he left the reservation to perform on the stage,” she told her young son, even if he couldn’t yet understand. “It was said that he could make it rain, just like his grandfather before him.”

Little Sam would clutch her hand, never smiling and rarely blinking, simply staring up at her as she spoke. When he seemed tired from walking, she would spread a blanket on the grass near the duck pond, where he would sit and contemplate the boat his father had carved him from the wood of a walnut tree. He would glide his fingertips across it as though memorizing the knots and the grain and the grooves dug by the blade.

“Do you know what that is?” she would ask, and he would nod. “It’s a boat,” she would prompt, “B-O-A-T.” Which only made him cock his head and give her a funny look as if to say, “Of course it’s a boat,” although he said nothing.

“Our boy’s a thinker,” Cooper remarked to his wife, neither of them entirely sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, considering they were farmers and not philosophers. But they loved him with every fiber of their being.

When he began to speak, it was hardly the unintelligible babbling of most children his age. Sam parceled out his words, using them only when he had to, mainly when he needed assistance. “Cookies,” he would say to his mother and point to the green glass jar on the counter. Or, “Pencils, please,” when Lily had put them away in a drawer too high for him to reach.

When Sam was four years old, he would often slip out of the house unnoticed, and Lily would go on a mad hunt for him, afraid he’d gotten into a pen with the pigs or fallen into the pond, chasing after the ducks.

Soon she realized what he liked most to do was visit the walnut grove and sit beneath the trees. Sometimes he would fall asleep leaning against a trunk. When she found him curled up amidst the roots, she would gently shake him awake and ask, “What’re you doing out here, baby?”

He’d say simply, “I was talking to them, Mama.”

Lily would ask, “Who?”

Sam would inevitably answer, “The birds,” or occasionally, “The trees.”

“And do they ever talk back?” she would inquire.

He would bob his dark head, his gray eyes so earnest. “Yes,” he would answer as Lily brushed dirt from his knees and bits of bark from his hair. “They tell me how happy they are that I’m here.”

“They do?”

“Yes, and they give me things.”

“What things?” Lily had wondered. That was when she had learned about Sam’s secret hiding place. He had apparently been stashing his treasures in the burned-out hollow at the base of the walnut split by lightning years ago after Hank and Nadya had first moved to the farm.

“See,” Sam said as he stuck his hand into the hollow, withdrawing the bright blue shell of a robin’s egg, a slightly battered but intact cardinal’s nest, and a large white feather that surely had come from a hawk or an eagle.

Lily felt a catch in her throat as she held the feather. “Which of your friends gave you this?” she asked.

“The wind,” he replied before he took it from her and tucked it away. “Sometimes it even whispers my name.”

“I see.”

Had Lily been any other woman—had she been raised by any father other than Hank Littlefoot—she might have merely believed her son had a fanciful mind and liked to tell tales. But Sam had no ordinary lineage. Maybe the gift Hank had mentioned in her vision was an ability to communicate with nature. Whatever it was, Lily wasn’t about to pooh-pooh it.

“Do you ever notice, Mama,” he went on as she took his hand and led him toward the house, “that if you’re sad, the sky will turn gray?”

“No,” Lily said, surprised that a boy of four could utter such a statement. “Does that happen to you?”

“Sometimes,” he said solemnly, squishing up his face. “Like when Toad got run over by Daddy’s truck. I cried and cried and so did the sky.”

Lily blinked, recalling the morning several weeks before when the big toad that lived in their front yard—and which Sam had adopted and named—had met his untimely demise. And, yes, Sam was right. It had rained that day. She had consoled her son with a Popsicle on the back porch, and as he’d sadly licked the icy treat, the sun had disappeared behind a bank of gray and a soft drizzle had fallen, strumming on the roof and plopping into puddles near the railing.

He squeezed her hand, having noticed the frown on her face. “Don’t worry, Mama. The sun always comes back out when I find something else to be happy about,” he professed and let go of her to race toward the house, leaving Lily to stare after him, wondering just how much of his grandfather’s and great-great-grandfather’s blood he had flowing through his veins.

Seventeen

1960–1965

The first time young Sam Winston laid eyes on Gretchen Brink was during Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church in Walnut Ridge on a sticky and overcast summer morning, though he had been made aware of her existence well before that. Her father, Dr. Brink, was the only farm veterinarian within a fifty-mile radius and came out to the Winstons’ place whenever they needed help delivering a calf or inspecting a sickly hen. Sam genuinely liked the doc, who always patted his head and acted amazed at how tall he was getting. He also knew that Gretchen had two blind baby sisters and that her mother was, according to gossip, “a sharp-tongued harpy.” Sam’s own mom would sometimes come home from town and mention to his dad that she’d bumped into “that awful Annika Brink. She’s so brusque with those poor little girls. How does her husband stand her?”

Sometimes when Dr. Brink visited the farm, Sam tagged along so he could hold the vet’s black bag or, if he was lucky, watch him check a horse’s teeth or rub salve on a cracked hoof. “You remind me of my Gretchen,” the vet had told him one day. “She’s an observer, too, and quite compassionate.”

Sam was older than Gretchen by a year, seven to her six. Though there were a dozen children in the Sunday school class that mixed first and second graders—four boys and eight girls—Sam spotted Gretchen right off the bat. She had the brightest blue eyes he’d ever seen and a riotous tangle of golden curls, but that wasn’t what made him pay attention.

When she turned her smile upon him, even in passing, it was like bathing in the brightest light. And just the way she said, “Hello, how are you?” seemed less akin to lip service than actual kindness. She even inspired apparent politeness from the rowdiest boys in class, the ringmaster of them being a kid named Frank Tilby, whose dad was the town’s sheriff. While Frank unmercifully tugged the other girls’ pigtails and untied neat bows on the backs of their dresses, he curiously left Gretchen Brink alone.

Sam wondered if it was Gretchen’s sweet demeanor that kept her untouched by the cadre of unruly boys, or if the other kids were just giving her a chance to blend in. Perhaps she’d get her pigtails tugged once the newness had worn off.

On the first day that Gretchen appeared, their teacher, Mrs. Macabee, whom they all called Mrs. Mac, strolled into the church’s basement wearing the most hideous bird’s nest hat, causing the other kids to titter. Gretchen merely smiled angelically and offered up, “Why, that’s the prettiest hat I’ve ever seen.”

Normally, Sam would have pegged such a remark as a lie but it wasn’t, not the way that Gretchen said it. He could tell that she meant the
feeling
behind the words, if not the words themselves. When Mrs. Mac beamed and said, “Why, thank you, sweetheart,” Gretchen looked as pleased as if she’d won a prize at the county fair.

Sam usually avoided making friends. He liked being alone. But he was magnetically drawn to the soft-spoken girl with the magical smile. After several Sundays of observing her, he’d hoped to find a way to casually sit beside her. But Mrs. Macabee insisted on arranging them in half circles around the chair from which she read them Bible stories, and the boys never settled on the same side as the girls. Though he was hardly a chicken, Sam’s palms got clammy at the thought of being the only male seated somewhere between all those ruffles and bows.

Sam did pick a wooden chair as far away from the other boys as he could. He didn’t like how they acted like clowns the moment the teacher left the room. They would gang up on each other, punching arms until one of them turned red-faced and teary-eyed and cried, “Uncle!”

Though they rarely, if ever, picked on Sam. It was more like they avoided him altogether. He figured it was because he was taller by half a foot and unflinching. There wasn’t much that scared him, not loud noises like fireworks or thunder and lightning. Not even the snakes or spiders that made his usually composed mother shriek, “Cooper! Come get this thing out of here!” No one really talked to him unless they had to, and he didn’t worry about that.

Sam actually liked listening to Mrs. Macabee when she read them the fantastical tales that sounded less like truth and more like fiction. It reminded him of the stories his mother shared before his bedtime, most of them involving animals, like wolves, eagles, and bears, many with human characteristics. But then, they were mystical spirits.

When Mrs. Mac began describing the Garden of Eden, Sam closed his eyes, picturing Adam and Eve with the snake slithering down from the tree, whispering to Eve that she should eat the forbidden fruit.

“Why didn’t the snake talk to Adam?” Sam asked when Mrs. Macabee paused for a breath, causing all the children but Gretchen to snicker.

Mrs. Mac gazed at him slightly cross-eyed through her rhinestone-studded horn-rims. “Because it was Eve the devil wanted to tempt,” she explained, hands clasped above her ample bosom. “After all, she was the weaker sex, born of Adam’s rib.”

“What if she was just hungry?” he suggested.

Mrs. Macabee opened her mouth to respond, but Gretchen shot up out of her seat, making a statement of her own.

“My mother says that men are the weak ones,” Gretchen announced with a shake of pale curls as the rest of the class grew hushed. “They don’t like hearing the truth, and they’re never satisfied with what they’ve got. You know the commandment that says, ‘Don’t want what your neighbor has’?” she asked, and Mrs. Macabee nodded, big hat bobbing like a boat caught in riptide. “Well, my mama says that men do it anyway, especially if the neighbor has a car that’s extra nice or a wife with very large bosoms—”

“That’s quite enough, Gretchen,” Mrs. Macabee interrupted, and she waved a paper fan across her bright red face. “Your mother certainly has an interesting take on the Lord’s word.”