Good Hope Road Read online

  The rain slowed, the sky seeming to hold its breath as I passed what remained of the Gibsons’ orchard. Mangled sheets of rusty galvanized metal lay wrapped around shattered tree trunks and cracked fence posts. The farm was unrecognizable—the earth bare, the trees sheared off, nothing remaining but twisted trunks and broken branches dangling without leaves.

  Breath caught in my throat. The foundation of Mrs. Gibson’s farmhouse had been stripped clean. Beside the ruined barn lay a pile of splintered boards, a battered refrigerator, what was left of the farmhouse roof.

  I ground the tractor to a halt in front of the overturned well house and killed the engine. I called out Mrs. Gibson’s name, then listened for an answer, afraid to breathe.

  Nothing but the drumming of the last drops of rain on the hood of the tractor and the hiss-hiss of water hitting the warm engine. Near the well, the spray from the pipes died to a weary, noiseless gurgle.

  “Mrs. Gibson?” I hollered, jumping down, my tennis shoes sinking into the mud. “Mrs. Gibson … Is anybody here? Hello …” I climbed clumsily over a pile of broken boards that may have once been part of the yard fence.

  I stopped again to listen. Nothing but the click-click of the tractor engine settling and the throb of blood in my ears. I swallowed hard, my mind racing.

  “Mrs. Gibson?”

  I could see the taillights of her car beneath the collapsed garage.

  “Mrs. Gibson?” The tractor engine coughed, as if it might come to life again, and I jerked sideways, stumbling over a section of picket fence rammed into the dirt like spears. “Is anybody here? It’s Jenilee Lane… .”

  Something sharp clawed my knee as I pushed to my feet. I touched the trickle of blood that ran down my leg and disappeared into my sneaker, tracing a warm trail against the cold dampness on my skin. I pulled my hand away, looked absently at the watery red liquid on my fingers, listened again.

  Silence. Nothing.

  Closing my eyes, I let out a long breath. Maybe she isn’t home.

  A noise whispered through the darkness in my mind. A sound almost too faint to hear. A baby crying. Maybe Mrs. Gibson was home, and maybe one of her grandbabies was with her… .

  I stumbled toward the sound. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” I screamed. “Who’s there? Is anybody there?” I scrambled over a section of the house wall, rushing to the backyard. “Hello … anybody …”

  The sound came again, close by. Not a baby. “A cat,” I whispered, slapping my hand over my heart, catching my breath. “Just a cat.” The sound was muffled, as if the cat might be trapped underneath something. “Here, kitty, kitty. Where are you, kitty?”

  The cat mewed again, leading me toward a pile of rubble.

  “Here, kitty.” I stepped closer. “Here, kitty.”

  “Hello?” The sound of a voice came so suddenly, I jumped backward. “Hello! Help us!” It was the desperate call of a child’s voice.

  I stumbled closer, seeing the opening of a storm cellar beneath the tangle of twisted barn siding and the remains of a pecan tree. Overhead, a huge tree limb dangled perilously from a power line that I hoped wasn’t still live.

  “Are you down there?” I pulled at the debris covering the door. The old boards slumped inward, buckling under the weight of the fallen tree. Dirt fell through the cracks around the edges as I struggled to move the larger limbs. I knelt beside the ventilation grille, my hands clearing away the damp, silty mixture of mud and last year’s leaves. “Is someone down there?”

  “Yes! Help us!” A tiny hand pressed against the ventilation grille. “Hurry! Granny fell down and ain’t wakin’ up. The flashlight’s burned out. It’s dark!”

  “Hang on,” I cried. Tears filled my eyes as in vain I pulled on the trunk of the fallen tree. Oh, please. Please … Letting go in despair, I sank against the pile as the child’s hands beat against the grille.

  “Get us out, please!”

  “I will. I will,” I promised, reaching through the branches and touching the hand on the screen. In the dim recesses below, I could see a little girl’s face, black with dust, her gray eyes wide, terrified. “Wait here. I’ve got to use the tractor to move this tree. Don’t be afraid. I’ll be right back.”

  I heard her call after me and start to cry as I made my way back to the tractor, grabbed the winch line, then slowly returned to the cellar, dragging the hook. The door groaned and sank farther inward as I looped the line around the tree trunk and struggled to secure the hook with cold, trembling hands.

  “Move away from the door!” I shouted. “I’m going to pull this branch off now. Hang on! You’re almost out. You’re almost out.” Almost out. Almost out. Almost out … I stumbled to the tractor and turned on the winch. The winch pulled tight, then strained, dragging the tractor down in the front, making a low grinding sound. I closed my eyes, hoping… .

  Then the tractor lifted, and the tree trunk tumbled free of the root cellar. The little girl inside pounded on the door again, trying to force it open.

  “Hold on, I’m coming! Get away from the door!” I rushed clumsily through the maze of debris, imagining the heavy door crashing through the opening, or the branch overhead falling from the power line. Wrapping both hands around the cool metal of the cellar door handle, I threw my weight against it and opened the door halfway, as far as the mangled hinges would allow.

  A cat hissed and dashed through the opening into the sunlight, then disappeared. Propping the door with my knee, I reached into the cellar. Tiny hands clasped mine, and the girl scrambled through the narrow passage. She threw her arms around my waist and clung to me.

  “Where’s your grandma?” I held her away and looked into her silt-covered face as the door shifted against my knee. Tears fell from her white-rimmed eyes, turning the silt to mud, drawing lines toward her mouth as she struggled to form words.

  “In-inside.” She motioned to the cellar. “She fell down when … when the door blowed shut. She won’t talk. Sh-sh-she don’t wake up.” The cellar door shifted noisily on its hinges, and she jumped, screaming and grabbing handfuls of my T-shirt.

  “Get that board over there,” I said, pushing her away from me. “Come on now, we have to get your grandma out. Get me that board so I can brace the door. It’s all right.” But I wondered if it would be.

  She moved finally, tripping, then scrambling through the mud on her hands and knees, whimpering as she brought the board back. Overhead, the power line groaned, and she screamed, jerking her hands up to cover her ears.

  “It’s all right. It’s not going to fall,” I said, sounding stern. The cellar door creaked and shifted in the wind as I braced it and started down the steps. “You hold this door,” I ordered, taking her hands from her head and placing them against the door. “You hold right here, but if that tree limb moves overhead, you get out of here. You understand?”

  She stood motionless, staring into the darkness below me, not hearing.

  I smoothed her dark, mud-streaked hair away from her face, making her look at me. “What’s your name?”

  “L-Lacy,” she answered, her eyes vacant, as if her mind had gone somewhere to hide.

  “O.K., Lacy,” I said, trying to sound calm. “You hold this door. If it blows shut, or anything happens, you run down the road and get some help. Go about a mile and a half that way to the Millers’ place, you understand?”

  She nodded, but I wondered if she heard. I wondered if she was capable of finding help if the worst happened. She didn’t look more than six or seven years old.

  She braced her hands against the door, sobbing as I descended through the thin sliver of light into the darkness below.

  The air, thick with dust and mildew, caught in my throat as I stared into the void. “Mrs. Gibson?” I whispered like a miner entering an unstable shaft. “Mrs. Gibson?”

  A groan came from somewhere below.

  I followed the sound, feeling my way down the uneven rock stairway as pieces of mortar fell from above and clattered downward, then lan
ded in water. I barely heard them against the pounding of my own heart, so loud it seemed it would bring down the ceiling and bury us alive.

  “Mrs. Gibson?”

  Another groan. I reached the bottom of the stairs and my tennis shoes sank into water that smelled of dirt and old grease. Bending down, I crawled through the cool inky liquid, feeling my way along the slimy ooze on the floor, knowing she was close now. “Mrs. Gibson. It’s Jenilee Lane. I’m here to help. Can you hear me?”

  “Mmmm …”

  I heard her moving nearby. Reaching out, I felt her arm. I held on, inching closer, hearing the water ripple as she shifted her body. I felt her try to rise, then sink against the floor again. Overhead, the door creaked dangerously, and I glanced at the shuddering sliver of light on the stairway.

  “Watch the tree limb, Lacy,” I called, trying to sound calm. My mind whirled at the idea of being trapped in the watery darkness. “Mrs. Gibson?” Gripping her shoulders with both hands, I shook her with a new sense of urgency. “We have to get out of here. The door is hanging by a thread up there.”

  She answered with a weary moan and muttered something I couldn’t understand, and then said, “… angels,” as she tried to shrug my hands away from her shoulders.

  “No, now, come on,” I said, amazed by the force of my voice. “Lacy is waiting up there, and she needs her grandma. You wake up and come on with me. We’re going up these stairs.”

  Her words were only partially audible. “… wait for Ivy … to come back …”

  “We have to go now! There’s no help coming! We have to go now!” My voice boomed against the confines of the cellar. I wrapped my arms around her chest as far as they would go, trying to raise her by sheer force of will, but she only slumped against me, knocking me against the wall. I shook her hard, trying to think of anything that would convince her to get up. “There’s a tree limb hanging over Lacy’s head, and it’s going to fall on her! We have to go!”

  “Lacy?” she muttered, coming to life again. “W-where’s Lacy?”

  “She’s upstairs,” I said, encircling her with my arms again. “Come on, we’ve got to go now. Can you stand up if I help you?”

  “I th-think …” Her voice sounded clearer and she slid her arm around my shoulders, swallowing a whimper of pain. Slowly, carefully, we climbed to our feet and moved toward the stairway, toward the light.

  Overhead, I could see Lacy’s face in the doorway. The door broke free from one hinge and bits of mortar clattered downward. Lacy drew back, then leaned inward.

  “Move back, Lacy,” I called. “Stand back out of the way and hold the door handle, all right? Your grandma’s fine. We’re coming.”

  Beside me, Mrs. Gibson groaned and slumped forward, her weight shoving me into the wall beside the steps. My head crashed against the uneven rocks, and a sound like thunder rattled through my brain. “Come … come on, Mrs. Gibson.” I shook my head as my vision dimmed around a swirl of sparks. “We’re almost there. We’re almost out.”

  She straightened again, and we struggled upward, one step at a time, her feet dragging behind mine, my legs buckling under her weight until we reached the doorway. Bracing my back against it, I pushed it upward as far as I could, then helped Mrs. Gibson squeeze through.

  “Move out of the way now, Lacy.” I coughed, choking on the last breath of musty air as I climbed into the sunlight, and we crawled away from the cellar, then fell into the wet grass, gulping in the fresh air. Numbness spread over me and the edges of my vision dimmed again. The rushing sound in my head grew louder.

  Beside me, Lacy scooted into the hollow space between the exposed roots of a partially collapsed tree, and pulled her legs to her chest, hugging herself and shivering. “M-Mr.Whiskers,” I heard her say, her voice an uncertain whisper.

  “All this for that … darned … cat.” Mrs. Gibson’s words seemed far away. “I should have stayed in the cellar instead of going up to get him. Darned cat.”

  From the road I heard a siren. A volunteer fireman’s pickup squealed into the driveway as blackness slowly circled my vision. The blue-gray afternoon sky faded like a kaleidoscope closing. I felt Mrs. Gibson’s fingers over mine, cool and trembling.

  “You’re a brave girl, Jenilee Lane,” she said, but in my mind the voice was Mama’s. Mama used to say that to me, but she was wrong.

  I had never done a brave thing until that day. And I thought I never would again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Light pressed at the center of my vision like the headlamp of a train rushing into a tunnel. A single bright light, burning. I tried to close my eyes to make it go away.

  “Jenilee. Come on, Jenilee.” A voice drifted through the whirling noise in my head. “I need you to wake up and talk to me.” The light shined in my eyes again, and I felt someone’s fingers prying open my eyelids.

  Confused, I raised my arm and shoved the hand away. “I’m …” The word scratched against my throat like sandpaper. A hand touched my face again, and I pulled back, trying to remember where I was and what was happening. “I’m … I’m all right.” I blinked hard, my vision still blurry, clouding the wreckage of Mrs. Gibson’s farm. Even through the fog, the awful reality of what had happened was impossible to ignore.

  I tried to focus on the face that hovered over me, partially hidden beneath a Hindsville Volunteer Fire Department ball cap. The voice was familiar, but he had a thick white beard that made him look like …

  He smiled. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I look like Santa Claus. I’ve got to get this beard shaved off.”

  “Doc Howard?” I started to laugh, but the movement made my head whirl. I rubbed the ache, feeling a swelling where I’d hit the wall. “I thought you closed down the vet clinic and went fishing for the rest of the month. Aren’t you supposed to be resting after that heart surgery?”

  Doc shrugged off my concern, leaning over to examine the bump on my head. “Naw, I’m fine now. I heard about the tornado on my weather radio, and I headed for town. I figure, I may be a horse doc, but I’m better than nothin’.” He touched the lump on my head, and white-hot spears shot past my eyes. “You do have a nasty lump here. Something hit you in the head? Do you think you can sit up?” The words rumbled from somewhere deep in his barrel chest, taking me back to the days when the vet clinic was a haven for me, a place apart from Mama and Daddy where I felt protected from the mess at home. For just an instant, my mind settled on the idea that it was three years ago, before Mama died, before I left Doc Howard’s to get a real job that would pay the bills at home.

  I blinked hard, and the illusion went away. “Uhhhh.” A groan rattled past my lips as he helped me sit up. My head reeled and white sparks zipped through the air in front of me. I stared dizzily at Mrs. Gibson, who was resting against a tree with a compress on her head. Lacy was curled in the hollow of the roots, watching me with a distant expression. I wondered what she was thinking.

  Doc Howard took a compress from his bag. “This cold pack’s for horses, but it’ll do.” He tried to put it on my head.

  “I’m O.K.,” I told him. “I just bumped my head.”

  Beside me, Mrs. Gibson nodded. “We’ll be all right. You’d best get on to Poetry.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” His voice turned grave. For the first time I heard the emergency radio in his truck—frantic voices, a constant stream of cries for doctors, ambulances, rescue dogs, and bulldozers.

  “Is it bad?” I whispered as Doc leaned close, gathering his medical supplies.

  He seemed not to hear, or he didn’t want to answer. “You two ladies look after each other,” he said, loudly enough for Mrs. Gibson to hear. “Neither of you needs to go to sleep. Go to sleep after a whack on the head, and you might not wake up, understand?”

  I nodded.

  Mrs. Gibson answered, “Yes.”

  He closed his vet bag. “Stay off the road. You may see more emergency vehicles coming from Hindsville. They’ve called in all available personnel from the surrounding towns. Th
is is one of the few roads that isn’t blocked with downed lines or flooded at the low-water crossings.”

  Mrs. Gibson laid her hand on his arm. “Have you heard anything about Weldon and Janet? Weldon would just be closing up the pharmacy, and Janet would be finishing up at the school for the day. They’d be picking up my grandbabies from the after-school care—Toby, Cheyenne, Christi, and Anna? Can you check on them? Will you send back word that they’re all right? Oh, my Lord, they have to be… .”

  Doc Howard patted her hand sympathetically. “I’ll try, Mrs. Gibson.” But the tone of his voice said more than the words. His eyes met mine for just an instant, and his expression went to the pit of my stomach like a razor. In all the years I’d worked with him at the vet clinic, I’d never seen him look so afraid.

  Beside me, Mrs. Gibson put her hands over her face and began to cry.

  Pulling my knees to my chest, I watched Doc Howard hurry to his pickup. The truck squealed from the driveway and disappeared over the hill. I stared at the spot where he had vanished, wondering what he would find… .

  I don’t know how long we sat there. Finally Mrs. Gibson stopped crying. Nearby, Lacy curled into the tree roots and fell asleep. Mrs. Gibson prayed quietly, asking God to protect her son, Weldon, and her daughter-in-law, Janet, and their four kids, telling Him she couldn’t bear another death in her family. I supposed she was talking about fifteen years ago, when her husband had a heart attack on the tractor and died right there in the field.

  I didn’t remember much about it, just lots of cars parked up the road and people dressed in dark clothes gathered on the Gibsons’ lawn. Daddy caught us watching and sent us inside, saying it was none of our business. Mama was crying on the sofa, because both of my grandparents had been buried just before that, and all of that death was more than she could bear.

  Mrs. Gibson stopped praying and looked at me. I wondered if she was making sure I was awake, or if she thought I should be praying, too.

  I didn’t bother to tell her that praying wouldn’t do me any good. God and I always seemed to have different ideas about how things should be. And God always got His way.