Miracle in a Dry Season (2 page)

“The chickens have taken a laying fit,” Delilah said as she handed Casewell a slice big enough for two men. “Got to use all them eggs up somehow.”

Although the slice was large, it was so light and airy Casewell made short work of it. He declined a second slice for fear he might appear a glutton.

“Too bad you don’t have your mandolin with you,” Robert said. “A sweet piece of music would be just the tonic to settle that meal.”

Casewell grinned. He would play a piece of music anywhere, anytime, for anyone. Music was the only thing he liked better than a good meal cooked by a pretty woman.

“You’re a musician?” Perla asked.

“Oh, some would call me that, but I mostly just fool around with the mandolin my granddaddy gave me. I guess it wouldn’t hurt your ears.”

Robert laughed. “Casewell is one of the finest musicians in Hartwell County. He’s being modest. We’ll have to get up a dance here before too long—maybe after the spring planting gets in. You put Casewell on the mandolin, George Brower on the banjo, Steve Cutright on the fiddle, and sometimes I pitch in with the harmonica or some spoons, and you’ve got something you can shake a leg to. ’Course, Casewell here likes them solemn tunes that wail. But he’ll save them till everybody’s too tired to dance. Yes sir, mighty fine, mighty fine.”

“Oh, that would be fun,” Delilah said. “We haven’t had a dance in ever so long. I’ll start putting a bug in the ears of all the ladies as they come by the store.” She smiled at Perla. “It’s always up to the women to organize something
like this. The men just come when we tell them and eat up all the food.”

Perla’s smile seemed a little uncertain. She bit her lower lip. “I’m not sure I ought to be dancing,” she said.

“Whyever not?” Delilah asked.

“Well, with Sadie and all . . .”

“Nonsense. And anyway, if you don’t want to dance, you can sit and listen. There’s plenty of ladies who prefer to sit out the dancing and visit.”

“The old ladies,” Robert said with a snort. “And it would serve them better to exercise their feet and let their tongues rest a minute.”

Delilah frowned and Casewell tried to hide his smile.

“Oh, do have a little dignity,” Delilah said. “Perla can help with the food. She has such a knack for cooking, and we always seem to have too much for just us. What she needs is a crowd to feed.”

Casewell stood. “Well, I, for one, would be happy to play and to eat anything Perla cares to cook. Count me in. But for now, I’ll be heading home to tidy up my place before Ma gets back and has a fit over how I’ve let things go.”

“Bachelors,” Delilah said in a way that sounded scornful and affectionate all at once.

Sadie scampered inside to bring Casewell his Sunday hat. He dropped to one knee so she could help settle it on his head. Casewell felt self-conscious and awkward until he looked up and caught Perla watching him. The look in her eyes made him hope, against his better judgment, that she was a widow.

After helping Delilah tidy the kitchen, Perla went to the room she now occupied at her aunt and uncle’s house. Her
gaze drifted from object to object. The quilt her grandmother made lay folded across the foot of the bed, the Bible her mother gave her when she turned eighteen sat on the bedside table, her brush and comb on the dressing table. It was the sort of room she’d always dreamed of calling her own.

Her eyes came to rest on the child napping peacefully on top of the coverlet. Here was something she had not dreamed of. She adored her ginger-haired Sadie, just turned five, but some days being a mother was simply too hard. And now this.

Perla’s mother had agreed that it was probably for the best when Perla suggested going to Wise to stay with her aunt and uncle. “Robert and Delilah have a real nice place. Least it was last time I went out there,” her mother had said, as if that would make leaving easier. “You probably remember the store well enough from when we lived there. You can be a help in the store. Won’t nobody know . . .”

Perla thought back to her mother’s final words before her father drove her—in silence—the six hours from Comstock to Wise. “You hold your head up,” her mother said. “If it weren’t for all that food, I think folks would overlook . . . the child. But take the two together, and it makes everyone uneasy.” Perla remembered her mother stepping forward to take her hand, squeezing it hard. “Daughter, God doesn’t make mistakes, and I say that child and your way with cooking are both miracles straight from heaven. It’s just miracles don’t always feel like it at the time.”

Perla hadn’t wanted to come. She might have even whined about it a little. She’d certainly carried on more than a grown woman of twenty-four should. When her mother released her hand, Perla missed the pressure and the warmth. She’d felt oddly bereft standing there in her parents’ house. She’d tried to tell herself she could always come back.

2

A
T
HOME
,
IT
TOOK
C
ASEWELL
all of twenty minutes to move his boots from the chair by the fireplace to the rug by the door, hang up some clothes lying around his bedroom, and sweep the living room and kitchen. Thanks to the Thorntons and the cat, there weren’t any dishes to wash and he decided to leave the dusting. His mother would be sorry if she didn’t have something to do when she came to check on him.

Not that she would ever criticize him one way or the other. No, that was his father’s job. Casewell had been trying to please his father for decades. It wasn’t that his father was unkind; it was more a matter of not knowing what he was thinking—good or bad. Casewell tended to suspect it was bad.

Chores done, Casewell walked across the backyard to a stout little outbuilding that he had designed and built. It had a wide ramp leading up to the door so he could drive his tractor in and out. Heavy beams above were open so he could slide boards up there for storage—he could even put together a makeshift second floor that would hold boxes or cast-off tools he wasn’t ready to part with. One side of the building held the
tractor and tools he needed for farmwork. The far side held his woodworking tools—his treasures.

Casewell stepped up to his worktable and handled several scraps of lumber stacked underneath. There were a couple of nice pieces of maple that he thought would be perfect. He set to work on his thank-you gift for Perla and Sadie.

The next morning, Casewell needed to put aside work on his gift to visit Elizabeth and Evangeline Talbot. Before church, the twin sisters, nearing their seventies, had asked Casewell to stop by Monday morning so they could discuss a project with him. Casewell was curious what they might want him to do—likely something around the old homeplace they’d inherited when their parents died within days of each other. Although the Talbot sisters had sold off the farm equipment and a fifty-two-acre parcel of rich bottomland, they’d kept the rambling farmhouse they’d lived in since birth. Probably the banister needed repair or a doorsill was rotting.

Casewell pulled up under a large oak with leaves just starting to unfurl. He was admiring the tree when a voice came from the porch.

“Once they’re the size of squirrels’ ears, it’s time to plant corn.”

Casewell turned and saw Angie—no, Liza—standing on the top step, smiling at him.

Strangers often had a hard time telling the twins apart, but those who knew them had no such difficulty. Both were a whisper over five feet tall, with silvery hair braided and twisted into a bun at the nape of the neck. But somehow, Angie’s hair remained perfectly in place, while Liza’s tended to fray and
fall in wisps around her face. And while they both had blue eyes, Angie’s had a hint of ice, while Liza’s looked like faded cornflowers.

Liza had been engaged once, but her fiancé, Frank Post, ran off with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on a tour of Europe in 1902. By the time he came home some thirty years later, everyone had given him up for dead, and Liza was running the farm alongside her sister and father. Once old man Talbot was too feeble to work the fields, the twins did most of the farming themselves.

“Howdy, Casewell. Come on in. Sister and I have a special order for you.” Liza clapped her hands, looking like a child on Christmas morning.

Inside, the more staid Angie showed Casewell the large kitchen and the wall where she wanted a cupboard.

“We’d like to display Mama’s china and a few other things,” she explained.

“Oh, and a pie safe,” Liza said. “And a potato bin—the kind that tilts out.”

“But nothing fancy,” Angie said. “This is for practical use. No need for fancy.”

“It’s our seventieth birthday.” Liza’s faded eyes sparkled. “And this will be our present.”

“No need to tell our age, sister. And we need a cupboard, birthday or no.” Angie turned sharp eyes on Casewell. “But the price has to be right. We must be good stewards of what Mama and Papa left us.”

Casewell pulled a piece of paper and a stub of pencil out of his breast pocket. He made a rough sketch of what he had in mind, the sisters looking over his shoulder and nodding along. When it was done to their satisfaction, Casewell penciled a
number in the corner. Angie pursed her lips and then gave a brief nod.

Back in his workshop that evening, Casewell began the actual construction based on his pencil drawing. He often gave thanks for his ability to earn a living doing something he loved so dearly. Smoothing his rough hands over the sawn lumber, he could feel the shape of the furniture rising up to meet him. The smell of sawdust and the rhythm of the plane sliding along the grain soothed him in a deep, soul-satisfying way. He could lose himself for hours in his workshop, missing meals and working until he became aware of the time only after losing light with the setting sun.

He had pieced together the shell of the cabinet and was settling in to address some of the finer details when he heard a light scuffling at the door. Turning, he smelled the cigarette smoke even before he saw his father leaning against the frame. John Phillips was a tall, lanky man with a shock of white hair that had once been coal-black. Dad’s narrow face, lined from days spent working the farm, stood out starkly tan against his white hair. Although not traditionally handsome, he was striking with an unbending air. Casewell rarely saw him without a hand-rolled cigarette, squinting against the smoke rising past his eyes.