Until the Harvest (27 page)

Mom dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “I think they figured things out quite a few years ago. It just took them until now to do anything about it.” She gazed out the window into the distance. “Sometimes you have to wait, so as not to hurt someone you love.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Barbara said and then looked embarrassed. She took a bite of chicken and looked at her plate.

Mom patted Barbara’s arm. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, and while I thought I’d tell Henry later, he might as well hear it, too.”

Henry felt his appetite ebbing. This couldn’t be good. He eyed the dried apple pie cooling on the counter. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

“When I married Henry’s father—Casewell—I already had Henry’s older sister, Sadie. Henry knows that much.” She leveled her gaze at him. “What he doesn’t know is that I was never married to Sadie’s father.”

Henry was washing a bite of bread down with milk, and he snorted the liquid into his nose. He coughed and swiped at his
face with his napkin, finally standing and finding a paper towel to blow his nose. He turned around and stared at his mother. He knew Sadie was his half sister, but he’d never thought to ask about her father. He’d just assumed he’d died. Or something.

“I’m sorry, Henry. I should have waited until you swallowed.”

“Why? You waited about twenty years, what’s another thirty seconds?”

“Come sit down and finish your supper. I know this is a surprise to you, but as you can imagine, my story is likely to be a comfort to Barbara.”

Henry staggered over and slid into his chair, all thoughts of pie gone from his head. Barbara held her fork as though she’d forgotten about it. Her eyes were fixed on his mother.

Mom turned her full attention on Barbara. “I made a bad decision because I fancied myself in love. Maybe I was, but it still wasn’t right. I don’t know how you feel about Henry.” She glanced at him. “Or he about you, but I want you to know that God can use anything for His purpose, and good will come of this. I feel very confident about that.”

Barbara laid down her fork, and a tear tracked her cheek. “I . . . thank you for telling me. I thought it was only bad girls like me that got into this kind of trouble.”

Mom squeezed Barbara’s arm. “We’re all bad girls. It’s just some of us are forgiven. I don’t know where you stand with God, but if you ever want to talk about it, I’d be glad to listen.”

Barbara nodded her head and crumpled her napkin in her hands. “I don’t know why you’re being so good to me.”

“Because so many people have been good to me throughout my life. And God has been best of all. Now, let’s finish up before this food gets cold.”

Henry picked up his fork and stuck a bite of chicken in his mouth. He chewed mechanically, staring at his mother. “Does Sadie know?”

“She does. She remembers before Casewell became her father, so I explained it as best I could when she was younger.”

“What about Grandma?”

“Yes, and she had qualms about me marrying her boy, but she forgave me.”

Of course she did. Frank and Angie probably knew, too. Seemed everybody knew but him. Of course, he could have asked. He hesitated, then blurted his next question.

“What did Dad think?”

“He judged me for it when he first found out, but after we—well, we got to know each other better that summer the drought was so bad, and we overcame a lot together. I think it made our marriage all that more special, having to work so hard to understand each other.”

Henry didn’t know what shocked him more—that his mother had an illegitimate child before she married or that his father married her in spite of it. “I’d better be getting on back to Grandma’s,” he said.

His mother gave him a knowing look. “I guess this is a lot to take in. Here, let me give you some pie to share with Emily. You might even talk to her about all this. She’s a wise woman.”

Henry nodded and waited for the dessert, then drove to Jack’s instead of the farm. He wasn’t going to drink or talk to girls, he just wanted to get lost playing his fiddle. As he made the turn away from home, he remembered that his whole point in going by the house was to talk to Barbara about whether or not she wanted him to marry her. He wondered why Sadie’s father hadn’t married his mother, and anger welled up in him. He’d like to tell that jerk a thing or two.

The anger dissipated. Yeah, like maybe his kid would want to tell him a thing or two one day if he didn’t marry Barbara. The weight of his situation settled back over him. Why did his father have to go and die and start this whole mess? He should
be halfway through the semester at college and hearing from Dad how proud he was to have a son earning a degree. He should be planning to come home for the summer to work on the farm and help in Dad’s woodshop. He should be doing a lot of things. Contemplating marriage to a girl he barely knew wasn’t one of them.

The sounds of the hospital filtered into the dim room where Margaret sat holding Mayfair’s limp hand. She’d slept a little through the night and thought it must be morning by now but didn’t have the energy to try to find out for sure. She’d been sitting there long enough to recognize certain sounds and patterns in the hall. The squeak of a nurse’s shoes, the beep of a monitor in the room opposite, the murmur of people talking, as though lowering their voices would stave off illness or even death.

She opened her mouth to speak to Mayfair again, but talking to her hadn’t done anything, and she suddenly didn’t have the energy to try again. She released her sister’s hand just as she heard a new sound outside. It was somehow bigger and brighter than anything she’d heard up to this point. Not the rush and rumble of an emergency, more like the joy of a party. Margaret turned toward the door.

“Here you are. Beulah called to let us know Mayfair was sick.” Emily bustled into the room, flipped the curtains all the way back, and snapped on a light. Perla appeared right behind her. “No need to sit here in the dark. It’s a beautiful morning. Now tell us how Mayfair is.”

Margaret started to speak, but instead of words, a wailing sob burst out of her. Perla stepped forward and wrapped both arms around her shoulders, rocking as Margaret sobbed. She tried to catch her breath. She was astonished by the violence
of her tears and her inability to stop them. She gasped and felt her nose running on Perla’s sleeve. She was horrified and embarrassed and hated to think of anyone seeing her like this, but she was powerless to stop.

And in that moment Margaret felt something release. She was powerless. There wasn’t a thing she could do to fix Mayfair. She couldn’t make her parents love her any more than she could make Henry love her. And yet, somehow, here were people who did love her. Two women who were no kin to her had come to her aid. They came to offer what they could, even if it was only a shoulder to cry on.

The crying eased, and Margaret took a deep, stuttering breath. The air was like cool water washing over her heart. She hiccupped, and Emily handed her a tissue as Perla eased her grip. Margaret blew her nose and blinked at the two women.

“I guess you needed that,” Emily said.

Margaret managed a weak laugh. “Maybe I did.”

Emily looked around the room. “This is the same hospital we brought John to when we found out he had cancer.” Her eyes clouded. “I felt like crying, too.” She exhaled a huff of air and stood up straighter. “But that was a different day and a different situation.”

She smoothed Margaret’s hair back from her hot forehead, and Margaret thought she might dissolve beneath the older woman’s hand. But there was strength, too. She took another breath, this one steadier than the last.

“She’s in a diabetic coma. They’ve done what they can to bring her sugar levels to normal, but her brain swelled. Is swelling. I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s causing the coma, and they”—she choked a little—“they don’t know . . . when she’ll wake up.”

Margaret had started to say “if” but thought better of it. Perla hugged her again, and Emily moved to the bed where she
took Mayfair’s hand. She leaned over and spoke into the girl’s ear. “We’re here to keep your big sister company, Mayfair. You relax and have a nice rest. We’ll take good care of the chickens and of Bertie until you feel better.”

She stood and stroked Mayfair’s arm, then her cheek. Perla pulled a chair closer to the bed so Emily could sit, then sat on the foot of the bed. Margaret took up her sister’s other hand again, and the three women sat like that talking about the farm and life and plans for the future for the next hour. Margaret thought that if Mayfair had been awake it would have been one of the happiest hours of her life.

Henry played far into the night, losing himself in the music. Around three or four in the morning he grabbed a nap on a sofa in Jack’s back room, then headed for the farm sometime after sunrise. He hoped Grandma assumed he’d spent the night at home in spite of Barbara’s being there.

Instead of going into the house when he got to his grandmother’s, Henry went out to milk Bertie and feed the chickens. He was surprised to find that no one had gathered the eggs. Mayfair always did that. He collected almost a dozen into his ball cap—they were laying better now that the weather was warming up—and headed for the house, balancing eggs in one hand and carrying a bucket of warm milk in the other.

He kicked at the front door when he got there, trusting his grandmother would hurry over and open it for him. Nothing. He kicked and waited. Still nothing. He finally set the bucket down, opened the door, and managed to get everything inside.

“Grandma,” he hollered.

The house was silent. Where could she have gone? He walked into the kitchen trying to avoid knocking off the dirt on his shoes. He got the milk and eggs situated, then checked the
house over. No Grandma. And no note or anything else to tell him where she’d gone.

He heard a sound at the front door and went to check it out. Barbara stood there, peering in through the glass.

“Where’d you come from?” Henry asked as he opened the door.

“I walked over. Beulah Simmons called this morning, and I thought—well, it don’t matter what I thought. She called to get your mother and grandmother to go to the hospital to sit with that girl.”

“What girl?”

“The sister of the girl that works for your grandma.”

“Mayfair? What happened?”

Barbara shrugged and took a tentative step toward the sofa as though not sure she’d be allowed to sit. “She’s sick, I guess. Perla said she passed out or something, and Clint carried her to the hospital. Your mother left, said she was going to get your grandma and head over there.” She fiddled with the zipper on her jacket. “I got kind of nervous over there by myself and figured maybe you’d stayed back. Now seems like you didn’t know about it at all. Wonder why that is?”

She looked up through her eyelashes, and Henry felt frustration rise. Why did he have to get mixed up with a girl like this? He truly was a fool.

“I can’t babysit you. I need to get over there and find out what happened.” He moved toward the door and then stopped. Could he leave Barbara here? Should he take her along? She was his responsibility now—sort of.

“Why don’t you call and see what you can find out?”

Henry stopped his dithering. Well, that wasn’t a half-bad idea. He found a phone book and dialed his grandmother’s black rotary phone. He listened to the whirring and then the ringing. He got connected to the right floor, and a nurse brought
his mother to the phone. She filled him in on Mayfair’s condition and said he should pray. She didn’t ask where he’d been. Henry wished she’d asked him for something, maybe to go out and use the old hand plow to break up the garden for planting. That would be easier than sitting here fearing the worst.

He hung up the phone and turned to Barbara who, he noticed, had dark circles under her eyes. “Mayfair’s in a coma from her diabetes. Mom says we should pray.” Barbara nodded like he was passing along any other message. “They’ll be home by bedtime.”

Henry still had his jacket and boots on, so he removed them and then stood, arms akimbo, trying to decide what to do next. He remembered the milk.

“You know how to strain off fresh milk?”