Rachel's Prayer (22 page)

I dropped my rake completely that time. “What do you mean?”

“You wanna know if I understand God better? The answer is nope. If you’re talkin’ ’bout my head, I don’t understand him at all. I don’t know half what I used to think I did. Sometimes I just got to shake my head and ask him what in the world he’s doin’. But the heart’s different. Maybe my head’s all turned around, but my heart knows he’s got us in a good place, and we’re gonna be all right one way or another. He’s bringin’ us up through things the way he does so we’ll question, and look for him, and find peace. He keeps drawin’ us closer, so we grow up like the Word says and not be babes anymore. Does that make any sense?”

“I think so.” He’d given me a double answer. Can we understand God? No. Can we grow in understanding? Yes. At least that’s the way I understood it. I picked up the rake.

“You’re somethin’ special, Sarah Jean,” he said suddenly. “Why? Why do you think so?”

“’Cause you wanna know, that’s all. That’s somethin’ special.”

He went back to his work, but I had a hard time concentrating on the haying. I kept thinking about Frank on the Ferris wheel looking out over the blue sky and talking about mountains and hills breaking forth in song. I knew it was Psalms he’d been quoting, or at least I thought it was now, but it stuck in my mind like a gift.
Frank thinks
I’m
special? Frank, who understands temptations and distractions and being drawn closer into the peace of God?

I felt like writing my brother another letter. I felt like asking him,
Did you know? Did you know when you told me to help Frank that I’d be doing my own wandering mind a favor?

That night, when everything was quiet and I was supposed to be in bed, I tiptoed down the stairs and found Mom awake in the sitting room, on her knees in front of the rocking chair.

“Are you praying for Robert?”

“Yes, honey. And Joe and the rest. And you. All of us.”

I went and sat beside her. “Something’s happening to me, Mom.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m looking at Frank different. I think he’s looking at me different.”

She was quiet. I hadn’t expected that.

“You’re not going to ask me any questions?”

“I don’t know what ones to ask yet. Would you like to tell me more?”

“I wouldn’t say anything to anybody else. I’m probably just being silly. But we’ve been talking kind of deep. We don’t talk like kids anymore. But that’s how I used to feel. Like I was just a kid, and he was just a kid. Rorey’s brother.”

“I guess he’s more than Rorey’s brother to all of us by now.”

“You really like him, don’t you, Mom?”

“He’s a good man. One of a kind, I think.”

“We’ve been talking about God.”

She smiled. “I’m glad.”

“I’ve been talking to Robert about God too. In my letters. He says he’s called. But I think we all are. Frank and me just as much as Robert and Rachel. Just in our own ways. Does that make sense?”

“It makes plenty of sense.”

“I’m not as scared about things as I was. I mean for Robert. There’s plenty of other things to worry about, I guess, but I think Frank’s right that Robert’s going to be okay.”

She hugged me. And I didn’t feel like I needed to say anything else. Mom had heard what she needed to hear. And whatever she thought I meant about Frank was all right with her. She trusted me. She trusted him. Most of all, she trusted God.

22

Julia

A year ago I wouldn’t have imagined so many changes. Both of the girls out of school. Robert overseas. And Samuel working in town, of all things. I wondered at Sarah a little, because she worked like she was trying to take her brother’s place. But rather than wearing her down too much, she seemed to like it. And Katie helped me all she could when she was home. Things were a little better than I expected, but that’s just like God to work things out better than we know to plan.

In the back of everyone’s minds were the unanswered questions about Joe. We hadn’t heard anything at all from him or from the war department, and it was hard on all of us. Especially George, but he seemed to be doing all right now. He worked his farm like he had been before and was right in the middle of everything going on with his family again. Many times he sat back and listened to Rorey go on and on about what she wanted at her wedding.

“You can have what you fancy if you save your money, girl,” was about the only thing he had to say about it.

Harry, Bert, and Emmie were back to school in September, but George let Harry skip a lot of days to help with the farm despite Franky’s objection. I could see both sides of that issue and didn’t offer my opinion at all. Emmie came telling me that their teacher was starting a drive to collect cards, games, and records for the USO. We didn’t have much to give of that kind of thing, but Katie bought a box of cards, a jigsaw puzzle, and a checker set from the five-and-dime for her to contribute. Sarah and I started spending an hour in the evenings knitting sweaters and headwear for the Red Cross. We knew that what we made would go to military camps and hospitals, so I prayed for the soldiers as I sat knitting. Emmie liked to join us at that when she was at our house. She said she’d like to be an army nurse some day, or better yet, a cook to feed all the men.

“Girls can’t be army cooks,” Bert told her with a scowl. “Some of the men do that.”

“They’d sure let me once they tasted my cooking,” Emmie insisted, and nobody argued. For a little girl, eleven now, she did a fine job in the kitchen.

Rorey’s plaster cast came off, but she still treated the arm gingerly. She liked her new job better than the five-and-dime, but for some reason acted like she still resented Katie over what had happened. But most of what we heard from Rorey was talk of Lester and the wedding. She had hoped he might be home on leave for Christmas. It didn’t look that way now, but they wanted to marry at the next opportunity and not wait. She thought that might be next summer, and she wanted to be prepared. They’d have roses. They’d have red boutonnieres, they’d have crepe paper streamers, and rice for the guests to throw.

Rorey had her eye on a store-bought dress on display in the dry goods store, but it was very expensive, so she thought she might make her own. She decided pretty quickly on a pattern, and one day came home with yards of white fabric and French lace.

“I’ll hafta start right away, Mrs. Wortham,” she told me. “A dress like this takes time.”

I promised to help her, but it would have to wait until after the harvest. We’d have our hands full on both farms till then.

Rationing had started across the countryside, of coffee, sugar, and such. That didn’t affect us as much as it did some people because we were used to not buying much anyway, but I feared the rationing of tires and gasoline would make things slow for Samuel at the station. I wondered whether Charlie could continue to pay his full wage. But Samuel said there was always plenty to do, and Charlie felt he was doing the community a service by keeping the place open. He must have been earning good money with the oil driller. There were several wells in our area and something or other in the news about them nearly every week.

Sam and Thelma spent quite a while hoping I was wrong in my concerns for Albert’s hearing, but eventually they decided they had to know for sure. They took him to see Dr. Clyne, who sent them to a special doctor in Mt. Vernon. And the news they got was bad. Albert’s hearing was extremely poor. There was no explanation, and there was nothing they could do for it. He might have been born that way. They weren’t really sure. But he wasn’t expected to learn to speak without special instruction. And he wouldn’t be able to go to regular school either.

Sam took the news better than Thelma did. “He’ll be good at somethin’, like Franky’s good at somethin’,” he said.

“That’s a lot different, an’ you know it,” Thelma lamented. “Franky don’t have no real handicap! He can talk an’ listen better’n most folks even care to!”

She wasn’t easily consoled. But little Albert was as cheerful as ever, unstacking and restacking the wooden salad bowls I’d let him play with. He even tried leaning them against one another so they’d stand on their sides. And then he merrily plunked one on his head and greeted his mother with an angelic smile. She very nearly cried.

“He don’t understand, Mrs. Wortham.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I tried to encourage. “I think he’s remarkable. To understand as well as he does, and do all that he does, without hearing us. I expect he’s very bright.”

I meant what I said, but I think Thelma thought I was only talking to make her feel better.

About the first of October, we started planning Christmas gift packages. There’d been a notice in the paper to mail by the end of October to be sure the packages would reach the boys overseas before Christmas. Having four boxes to pack was difficult, not because of buying or making the things to put in them, but because of missing our boys so much. Especially Robert. And Joe.

We didn’t know whether to pack Joe a Christmas box or not. We didn’t know where to send it. Emmie came over one day after school, and I expected she’d help me wrap some of the boxes to send. But she ended up just sitting and holding Joe’s box with big tears running down her cheeks.

“Mama,” she called me. “Mama, I already filled it with prayers.”

I think we all did.

Frank had carved little wooden crosses to go in the gift packages. They were cherrywood with designs on the sides. On a stand, so they’d stay upright on a table or a shelf. He made Joe’s different than the others. It was beautiful, with what looked like angel wings behind the cross and curved around its sides. He also had Sarah write out two Scripture verses to put in the box. John 3:16, and the passage in the book of Revelation that says there shall be no more sorrow or pain.

We sent all four boxes, with Joe’s going to the last known address we had for his unit. I knew it might come back. But I prayed it didn’t, especially for Franky and Emmie’s sakes.

That harvest, Frank was in the fields from sunup to sundown, and Sarah was most of the time with him. Harry took off from school, and Samuel got Charlie’s permission to hire Oliver Mueller to stay at the station so he could be home a few days when we needed him most. Thelma’s Sam came out to help. And George worked along with everybody else, at least most of the time.

We’d had plenty of garden harvest too. We put up twenty-six quarts of bread and butter pickles and seventeen quarts of piccalilli relish. Seventy-nine quarts of green beans, eighty-two of tomato juice, and forty-seven of corn. Plus peaches, applesauce, sauerkraut, and all the rest. We gave a share of everything to the food drive our church was sponsoring for the needy. Katie, who had money of her own for the first time in her life, said the Lord was blessing us and our country for the sacrifice we were making.

Emmie asked me to help her put together a “Food for Freedom” scrapbook for a contest at school. She was excited about that project and drew a lot of her own pictures or cut them from the newspaper and colored them with Crayolas. We didn’t have any glossy colored magazines at our house, so Emmie was thrilled when Katie brought her copies of
Harper’s
and the
Saturday Evening Post
. She said she’d let everybody read them who wanted to before she cut one thing out.

Bert spent every bit of his free time studying books with information about all the places war reports were coming from. Philippines. Savo Island. Tulagi and Guadalcanal. He wrote a letter to the
Times Leader
telling about his brothers and urging everyone to pray daily and contribute to the war effort in every way they could. The editor printed his entire letter with a heading calling him a “fine, brave boy doing his patriotic duty.” Then, after Bert followed that letter with another letter two weeks later, a man from the newspaper office drove out from Mcleansboro to meet him and his father. They asked if Bert might be permitted to write every week with updates about his brothers, or calls for people to participate in the local war drives, or anything encouraging he should choose to include.

Bert was glad to do it. And he got the school involved, using short pieces from other students in some of his articles. Kirk was writing to us more regularly again, and sometimes Bert shared bits of his letters too. The editor at the
Times Leader
called Bert’s articles “Letters from an American Boy” and put them on the same page of the paper every time. George took the whole thing rather sourly. He said he was proud of Bert, and yet he didn’t like the well-meaning inquiries he got from people when he went to town. He didn’t want to talk about the war. He didn’t want to talk about his boys who were in the war. He just wanted to be left alone.

November drifted in cooler, and Samuel and George started making plans for butchering time. Sarah put in applications at a couple of places of business, but even though Katie and Rorey had had no trouble getting jobs, Sarah wasn’t hired. Samuel wanted her to think about attending the teacher’s college. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she went with her father to inquire about classes beginning with the spring semester. She’d been a fair student, but I think she was worried about being able to handle the college material. One day she hit upon an idea and told me about it, but I wasn’t quite sure whether she was serious.

“I could read the textbooks to Frank,” she said. “And then have him explain it all to me. I think I could make a passing grade then.”

“Sarah,” I tried to tell her. “You’ve always made passing grades. You were a good student in school.”

“But college will be harder, and I doubt I’d understand half of what I read about, or remember it, either.”

I don’t know why she was doubting her own ability to such an extent, but I didn’t have any problem with her asking Frank for help, if that’s what she wanted to do. I thought Frank might like the opportunity to hear college textbooks. I even asked him if he might want to consider attending the college too. I had no doubt he’d do well hearing the lectures, and Sarah could help him with the written material.