Sarah's Promise (27 page)

I put miles under me as quickly as I could, and stopped in Auburn for a bite to eat down the street from the Commercial Hotel. It was a clear evening now, and there were flowers in the square.

I thought of the Ensleys and the Plattens as I drove on, but I didn’t try to look them up. Sam had invited me to stay the night so I hurried on to Jacksonville and got there before the kids got to bed. They seemed to have fun climbing on me, and I didn’t complain. Albert had a tutor now who also spent time teaching Thelma hand signs so she’d understand the things Albert was learning to say. I was fascinated, and had Thelma teach me what she already knew. Albert loved it. When I left, he used his hands to tell me he loved me. He’d been catching on quick, just like I knew he would.

Camp Point looked the same as I’d left it, and it was with a strange feeling of loss that I got back into my work schedule. I’d gotten used to being mostly alone, but the Easter vacation had me out of the habit. Now I was missing Sarah awful bad. But she called the first day to hear my voice and know I’d gotten there all right. That helped a lot.

She said they’d have the telephone line to their house before the wedding. I was glad. That would make talking to her folks so much easier once we got back home here. Sarah brought up the idea of a honeymoon again. At first we’d decided against going anywhere on account of the time and expense, but she told me she’d like to do some little thing at least. It would be a lot of fun.

“What would
you
like to do?” she asked. “Is there someplace you’d like to see?”

I knew right away an answer to that. “It wouldn’t be a little thing, Sarah Jean. But maybe for someday. I’d like to visit water so big you can’t see the other side. Where you can go out on a boat till you don’t see no shore no matter where you look.”

“Franky, we should.”

“The ocean’s a long way.”

“There’s a place closer than the ocean.”

The Great Lakes, she was talking about. Lake Michigan especially, because it was the closest. Sarah was a little nervous about the notion of going even that far, but she favored the idea anyway. “Let’s at least think about it, all right? You’re brave enough. It would be quite an adventure.”

We agreed to think on it and pray on it. She said she’d ask her folks to pray on it too. I would’ve loved to jump in and tell her we should do it. But I wasn’t sure yet about the money. It might not be the most responsible way to behave just starting out.

Mrs. Haywood was so glad I was back that she cooked me a whole meal. She was thrilled that Sarah was coming for a visit and offered to put her up at her house since the Bellors hadn’t moved yet.

We’d lost an elderly member of our congregation while I’d been gone. Mrs. Haywood told me about it and said Mr. Willings was taking it hard.

“He’ll be glad you’re in town. The funeral is tomorrow, and he thought you’d want to be there.”

I did, even though I remembered how hard the funeral for Pastor Ells had been. This one, for a sweet elderly lady, was very quiet, with hardly anybody in attendance from outside the church. Pastor Willings did a very good job. Speaking at funerals must be the hardest of all the various duties of a pastor. I knew it wore on Mr. Willings to be a pillar of support for everyone else when he himself was also grieving. I didn’t learn until after the funeral that the woman who died had been a cousin of the deceased pastor and Mr. Willings’s childhood neighbor. That bothered me for his sake, and I looked in on him several times over the next couple of weeks because I was worried for him.

He taught me how to play chess one night. I’d played checkers with my brothers plenty of times when I was a kid, but never chess. I thought I’d be pretty poor at it, but Pastor Willings said I did fine for a beginner. The little carved chess pieces got me thinking about making my own style of set. He said it was a great idea and I oughta get one on display in my store as soon as I could. He thought I’d get orders for that, for sure.

Secretly I worked on the horse carving that the bank had commissioned. And I made shelves for one wall in the store front, though I hadn’t had time to fill them. I advertised in the
Camp Point Journal
the kinds of things I made and the kinds of repairs I did, as well as knife and tool sharpening. To my surprise, that got people bringing me things to sharpen almost as soon as the paper came out, so I had plenty of work.

I hadn’t seen anything at all from Milton Pratt since the night I turned him down about his store. But I knew he lived around here somewhere, and I went past his empty building uptown every once in a while and thought about him. I hadn’t meant to do him wrong. I hoped he didn’t feel that I had. But everything about the Bellors’ place was what I needed, even down to the neighbor across the street, and I was certain that of the two I’d made the right choice.

Mr. Pratt surprised me one afternoon by marching right into the store. I didn’t recognize him at first. He walked in leaning heavy on his cane, ignored my greeting, and started inspecting everything I had in there. I just let him look. Finally he come close to inspect what I was working on, my wedding gift for Sarah, and I took a better look at him and realized who he was.

“Kinda empty in here,” he told me.

“I’m workin’ on that.”

“You know what you need?”

Inventory, of course. We’d just established that fact. But I waited to see what he would say.

“You need six or eight stoves and a whole row of lamps up against the wall.”

I had to set down the chisel I’d been holding. “That’s not exactly what I’m working toward here.”

“I can see that, but you’ve got the room. And I’ve got renters who don’t want what’s left of my inventory. They’re putting in fashions, and they want everything out of their way.”

I almost turned him down flat, but I had to remind myself that things were different now. This wasn’t Sam’s arrangement, and I was already the boss here, which wasn’t gonna change. Maybe I could help him, and it would make the place look stocked like a business ought to. That could help both of us, if we could agree on details.

“Ain’t got the ready cash to buy your stock outright, Mr. Pratt, but I could sell it for you if you give me a commission rate. Then all you’ll have to do is get it here and come and collect when I make a sale for you, or I can bring you your money if you’d rather.”

It didn’t take us two minutes to make an agreement. He said he’d be happy to come and collect, but he didn’t have a way to move anything. Could I do it with my truck? I agreed, hoping I wouldn’t regret this. His remaining stock wouldn’t fill the place, but it would take up plenty of room. Hopefully, it would sell pretty quick, and as each piece left I could fill the empty spots with more of my work as I got it finished.

Carving took time. Especially the detailed figures and the finer large pieces of furniture. Realistically, I knew it’d be months before I could make enough to really fill the store, and that was only if I didn’t sell many of the pieces as I was going along. So I could see Mr. Pratt’s inventory as a blessing. For both of us. And maybe another friendship too. He said we oughta seal the deal over a sandwich and coffee at Miller’s, and I agreed. While we were there, he introduced me to everybody in the place and told them what we were planning to do.

Sarah and her father were due in only three days. But I spent one of those days moving stoves and lamps in my truck. Mrs. Haywood thought the whole idea was wonderful. Mr. Pratt was on hand to watch me and give me quite a bit of opinion, and while he was at my shop again, Mrs. Haywood brought us lemonade.

She took it on herself to write on paper the agreement between Mr. Pratt and me. That was the first time she thought to question how I was keeping books. When Mr. Pratt was gone she asked how I was handling that. By then I knew her pretty well. I showed her my ledger book. It wasn’t real good, I knew that, but I could make sense of it, and I knew Sarah would be able to because she was used to how I’d done before.

But Mrs. Haywood was pretty stumped. I had simple symbols for everything. The work I did, every kind of furniture, days of the week, even utilities and other expenses, so I had some record of everything coming in and going out. She thought it confusing and completely dependent on my memory, which was right.

“Takes me a long time, especially with invoices,” I admitted. “But I been settin’ a mark down prompt an’ not missing nothin’ so far as I know. Sarah’ll write it all down her way after we’re married, an’ it’ll be clear to anybody. But I’ll still hafta keep track a’ the day-to-day for her, so I know I gotta make it work.”

“You’re something of a marvel, you know that?”

I told her Sarah’s system was prettier. She didn’t figure totals in her head like I did, but it didn’t take her near so long to write them down.

“I can’t wait to meet her.”

“You’ll like her. Everybody does. She’s real special.”

“She must be,” Mrs. Haywood said, taking a long look at one of my carvings. “She’s found a way to hook a real prize.”

I shouldn’t have said nothing at all, but I was surprised enough that the words come out before I could stop them. “
Me
a prize? Are you kiddin’?”

She laughed. “Don’t you know what a catch you are? A handsome young man, so smart and talented. You’re an artist, plain and simple. And you’ve stirred plenty of talk among the young ladies in town. It’s a good thing that girl of yours is coming up to be seen with you. That’ll calm things at least a little.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never had the interest of no girls except Sarah. She was the one that got other people’s attention. I knew there were prob’ly boys back home that would still try to woo her if they could. But me? The girls hadn’t never looked my way because they remembered me as a backwards misfit like when I was little. That was a hard picture to change. But here, I was the stranger. That explained a lot, because mystery adds its own interest.

“I thought you’d want to know the kind of talk that’s started about the new bachelor in town,” Mrs. Haywood said. “Don’t be surprised if you get the young ladies coming in viewing your work.”

“Thanks for the warnin’.”

“What’s this?”

She laid her hand on the large piece of walnut leaning against a workbench. It was only half shaped, with the beginnings of the flowers I envisioned chiseled into the center. “It’s my wedding present.”

She looked at me funny for a moment and then smiled. “For Sarah, you mean.”

“Yes, ma’am.” It would become a tall double-arched headboard with a full bouquet of mixed flowers, their stems all intertwined. I’d known for a long time that Sarah would like a handmade headboard on our bed in our new house together, and I knew she’d like this. But I’d have to hide it when she come up.

“Beautiful,” Mrs. Haywood told me.

“It ain’t yet. But I aim to make it that way.”

She said something about Sarah being mightily blessed and then asked me if she’d ever told me about her late husband. She had, but not very much.

“He was a carpenter. Helped to build quite a few of the houses in town. He would have loved your work.” She smiled. “He was also the handsomest man that ever lived.”

I smiled too. It was nice to think of Mrs. Haywood still so much in love with her departed husband. Sad, of course, but somehow blessed all at the same time. She offered to bring me a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, but I turned her down and took her out for a sandwich. And she said she could help me with my bookkeeping until the wedding.

“Only if you let me pay you.”

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t take me long and I’d enjoy it.”

“I ain’t workin’ nobody for free.”

She looked over her glasses at me. “All right then. A sandwich every week and you come over and move my furniture whenever I want to clean.”

Because it was Mrs. Haywood and we already had a pretty good arrangement between us, I couldn’t do nothing but agree. I was obligated to let her help, she said, because I was already doing most of her yard work and errands and that was more than enough for the reading she did. She agreed to do something else for me too. Sarah and her father would want to look over every inch of the store and the house. I needed a place to hide the headboard while they were here.

“They won’t be into my things,” she said, “even if they’re in my home.”

She offered to let me hide the headboard in her basement, and once I got it over there she covered it with a couple of sheets. Then I just had the regular tidying to do, getting the sawdust swept out of the workshop and everything looking as nice as I could. I already had a feather mattress in the corner to sleep on as long as I was living in the back shop, and I thought I’d see about borrowing another one from Mr. Willings so Mr. Wortham could stay in the shop with me.

“Why don’t you both just come here?” Mr. Willings offered when I asked him. “You’re not quite equipped for guests till you can get in that house.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t know what Mr. Wortham would think either, so I decided I’d just leave it up to him. I told the Bellors when my company’d be coming, hoping they’d have things cleaned up and looking nice, but I had no control over that. They’d been to Carthage, Mr. Bellor told me, to see about the house there. It was April already and he was leaving his job here and starting his new one in May, so they oughta be moving. But there’d been problems with the house they’d thought they were getting. So now they were looking at another one.

“I know,” he said with a worried look. “Our papers say you take possession May first. We’re just hoping, praying, that we can be in the new place that fast.”

It wouldn’t seem fast to me. I’d been waiting since February. But I could understand if they were dealing with a completely different piece of property now that things’d be delayed.

“You got time yet,” I told him.

“Not enough, it doesn’t seem like. We’re packing. Won’t take us long to move when we get in our new place, but the house we want is still lived in. We’ll have to wait till they can move.”

“Did they say when?”

“Not yet. Could you see clear to give us an extra month if we need it?”