Winter Is Not Forever (2 page)
Grandpa—
The owner of the farm where Josh grew up and the only father Josh has known.
Uncle Charlie—
The quiet yet supportive brother of Grandpa. For many years they have run the farm and the household together.
Willie—
Josh’s boyhood friend. They shared many adventures and a strong personal commitment to their faith.
Camellia—
Josh’s first love, though he soon realized that his faith and her faithlessness were not compatible.
Mr. and Mrs. Foggelson—
Camellia’s mother and father. He was the local schoolmaster and raised concerns with his teaching of evolution. She had been a Christian until her marriage.
“H
AVE YOU DECIDED YET
?”
Willie’s insistent voice demanded my attention. I swiveled around to get a look at him, for the words didn’t make any sense to me at all.
“What do you plan to do—after graduation?” he prodded. “Are you gonna be a minister—or what?”
Or what?
my mind echoed in frustration.
What?
I had been asking myself the same question over and over, just as Willie was asking me now. And I still didn’t have an answer. Graduation was only a month away, and it seemed that I was the only one in our small town school who didn’t know exactly what to do with life after the big day. It wasn’t that I hadn’t given it a thought. In fact, I thought about it most of the time. I prayed about it, too, and my family members kept assuring me that they were praying as well. But I still didn’t have an answer to Willie’s question, except to say honestly,“No—I don’t know yet.” And I’d been saying that for a long, long time.
I must have been frowning, and I guess Willie understood my dilemma. He didn’t wait for my answer—not in words, anyway; instead he went right on talking.
“God has different timing for different people, and with a reason,” he mused. “That doesn’t mean that He hasn’t got your future planned out. When it’s time—”
I quit listening for a minute, and my mind jumped to other things. Willie already had his future clearly mapped out. God had called him to be a missionary; Willie would leave for a Bible school in the Eastern United States at the end of the summer.I envied Willie, I guess. “It must be a real relief to know what God wants you to do,” I muttered under my breath.
“I still can’t believe it,” Willie was saying when I tuned back in. “I mean, most of my life—at least what I can remember of it—I’ve been goin’ to school, day after day. And here we are about to graduate. I just can’t believe it! It doesn’t seem real to me yet.”
I twitched my fishing pole as if I were trying to stir up some fish. Actually I was just thinking about Willie’s words. It did seem strange. We had done a great deal of talking over the years about how glad we would be to graduate and leave the old school behind, and here we were on the brink of graduation and I didn’t really feel glad about it at all. In fact, I felt rather scared. I never would have dared to tell any of the fellas how I was feeling—we always crowed about the day that we’d be freed from “prison.” We’d run and holler and toss our caps in the air. I knew we’d have to do it to carry on the tradition. A fella was supposed to loathe school and be more than glad to be rid of it, but at the same time I got a funny feeling down in the pit of my stomach whenever I thought about graduation.
I mulled over Willie’s words and squirmed on the creek bank, pretending to have a kink in my back from sitting in one spot for so long waiting on a fish to decide he was hungry. I wiggled my pole again and noticed that I’d lost the bait off the hook. I hoped Willie didn’t notice. I didn’t feel much like fishing anymore, and I didn’t want to be bothered with baiting my hook again. Still, I wasn’t ready to head for the house yet, either.
I couldn’t remember much about life without school, just like Willie had said. When I was honest with myself, I knew I’d miss the daily lessons, the recesses, the access to books. Maybe I’d miss it a whole lot, but I wasn’t about to share my thoughts with anyone—not even Willie.
’Course, Willie needn’t worry,
I reminded myself, almost enviously.
Come fall, he’ll be off to a new school, new books, and new friends.
I squirmed again.
“Here,” said Willie, “lean against this stump for a while.” “Naw,” I responded slowly, casting a glance at the sky. “It’s almost time for chores anyway. And the fish sure aren’t bitin’today.”
Willie’s eyes twinkled the way they did when he was trying to hold back something that made him want to laugh. I had seen the same look on his face when our teacher held his book upside down when lecturing to the class, and when Agatha Marshall took a bite of her sandwich and ate the ant that had been crawling on it, and when we tied Avery’s shoelaces together as he lounged on the school grass waiting for the bell to ring.
I looked at Willie suspiciously now.
“Never seen fish bite without bait, Josh,” he said, the twinkle openly showing in a grin now. “You haven’t had bait on that hook for the last half hour,” Willie informed me with a chuckle.
“So why didn’t you tell me?” I threw at him, trying to sound miffed.
Willie sobered. “Didn’t think you cared about fishin’.Your thoughts have been off someplace else all day.”
I jerked up my empty hook and set about wiping it carefully on the grass and removing it from the line. Willie let me work in silence until I had finished with my fishing gear.
“You still bothered about Camellia?” he finally ventured as we picked up our gear and started down the trail to the farm.
“Camellia?” My head swung up at her name.
Willie held my eyes with a steady gaze. The question was still there, unanswered. I couldn’t hide much from him, and I sure did need someone to talk to. I decided to stop playing games.
“I guess so—a little. I mean, here we are, almost finished with school—and I’ve been praying and praying, and trying an’ trying to show Camellia that the Bible is right, no matter what her pa says, an’ she still won’t even listen to a thing I have to say. She’ll be done with school, too, Willie, and then she plans to move off somewhere and take some training to be a decorator—”
“Interior designer,” Willie corrected.
“Interior designer,” I amended with a shrug. “Who knows who she’ll meet or what she’ll get herself into in some godforsaken city somewhere—”
“New York,” said Willie. “Her pa says New York. If you wanta learn from the best, then you need to go to New York.”
“New York? That’s even worse than I thought!” I raged. “That’s about as wicked a city as there is.”
Willie just nodded his head solemnly.
We trudged on in silence, me wrestling with the idea of Camellia alone in a city like New York. Then Willie cut into my thoughts again.
“You still care about her, Josh?”
For some reason the question caught me wrong. Of course I cared about Camellia! She was a friend, wasn’t she? And we were commanded to care about—or love—everyone, weren’t we? Willie knew the Bible as well as I did. He knew I was supposed to care about Camellia.
“That’s a dumb question!” I threw at Willie. “We’re
supposed
to care. I’ve been praying for Camellia for years now—Nat and Lou have been praying, too. We all—”
“That’s not what I mean, Josh, an’ you know it,” Willie cut in. “Do you still like Camellia?”
I wasn’t prepared to answer that. In the first place I didn’t see that it was any of Willie’s business, even if he was my friend. In the second place, though I didn’t want to think about it at the moment, I wasn’t sure of the answer myself. Did I still care for Camellia—as a girl, not as just a human? I had given up any special friendship with Camellia because she and I did not have the same spiritual values. In fact, Camellia declared that anything to do with religion was silly and superstitious. She didn’t even believe that God existed, she said. Religion was a crutch for insecure people. But I believed with all my heart that God not only existed but had sent His Son to die for
me
, for my wrongdoings, and that He had a special plan for my life. How could I even consider a special relationship with Camellia? I couldn’t, I knew, but I kept hoping and praying that Camellia would become a believer and then—then—Now, here we were at school’s end, and still Camellia would not even listen to my side of the argument. There was more than one reason why graduation bothered me.
Willie did not pursue the question.
“Are you coming to town for the social tomorrow night?” he asked.
It was a church social—one of the few activities meant just for our age group, and they were always fun. Aunt Lou and Uncle Nat saw to that. Several teenagers from town had started coming to church as a result of the socials that Uncle Nat organized. Most of the young people eagerly anticipated the monthly socials, and I enjoyed them, too. At any other time I would have answered Willie with an enthusiastic, “Sure, I’ll be there,” but instead I mumbled, “I’ll see.”
“Well, sure hope you can make it.” Willie shifted his pole and the one fish he had caught into his left hand so he’d have his right one free to untie his horse from the hitching rail.
I hadn’t been very good company, and suddenly I felt ashamed because of it. It wasn’t Willie’s fault that Camellia still wasn’t a believer, and it wasn’t Willie’s fault that I still didn’t know what God wanted me to do with my life, and it wasn’t Willie’s fault that graduation was quickly approaching with its unsettled questions. Willie had no more control of the ticking clock than I did. I had no right to be owly and disagreeable with Willie.
I tried hard to shift my troubled thoughts to the back of my mind and bid my friend the kind of goodbye he deserved.
“Thanks, Willie,” I said, and then didn’t quite know how to finish. “Thanks for coming out.”
I saw the twinkle in Willie’s eye again.
“Sorry the fish weren’t biting.”
“Next time I might even try using a little bait,” I teased back. “Though at least now I don’t have fish to clean and can loaf a bit before chorin’.”
Willie looked down at the one fish that dangled beside his saddle. A mock frown crossed his face.
“I think I might just stop off and present a fish to Mary Turley,” he said, “and invite her to the social tomorrow night.”I wasn’t sure if Willie was serious or not.
We both laughed and Willie moved his horse off down the lane.
“See you tomorrow night, Josh,” he called back to me.I answered as he knew I would. “I’ll be there.”