Good Hope Road Page 4

  Then Jenilee Lane’s voice come through the darkness. Ivy darted off into the shadows and was gone.

  All I wanted was to make Ivy come back. I wanted to lay there real quiet, so she would come out of the shadows again. There was so much I needed to say to her.

  But it didn’t happen that way. Jenilee Lane took my arm, hoisted me up like a sack of potatoes, and dragged me back to the world.

  I’m not sure I was grateful to Jenilee at the time. The first thing I saw when I come out of the cellar was my house torn to bits, my things thrown everywhere, the stained-glass window that Olney brung all the way from New Orleans in 1944 smashed in the dirt.

  “Oh, Olney, it looks like heaven.” I still remembered saying that to him when he hung that window high in the eaves of the house we built with our own hands. The sun glittered through the colored glass dove and sent rainbows into the kitchen as the children ran and played, catching slivers of light like the shadows of butterflies. When I had hard times or bad days, I looked up at that window and it reminded me to be strong.

  All of a sudden, it lay shattered in the dirt beside the root cellar. I wondered how God could let such a beautiful thing be destroyed.

  Then Lacy touched my face, and suddenly that window didn’t matter much. I closed my eyes and prayed that the rest of my babies were all right, and thanked God for my poor little Lacy.

  When we brung her and the rest of the children home to Weldon’s place, and their house was fine, I told myself I’d not dwell on the misery of what happened to my house. When Weldon left to go help folks in town, and the rest of us sat at the dinner table, I told myself again and again that I wouldn’t let myself fall apart over losing my home.

  But I couldn’t look at the children. I couldn’t bear the sadness in the eyes of Cheyenne, Christi, Toby, and Anna. I knew they were thinking of all the good times we had at the old farm, and how there would never be any more now. I knew they felt like something had been stole away from us. I felt that way too.

  It don’t pay to dwell on misery anyway, Eudora.

  Janet popped up like she’d been shot from a gun as soon as the children finished eating. I reckon she couldn’t take the quiet anymore. “Come on, kids, grab your things and we’ll go to the spring to wash up. The power’s out, so we need to conserve what little water is in the storage tank here in the house.” She put on a brave little smile. “It’ll be … an adventure.”

  The other children headed for their bedrooms, but Lacy didn’t move, just sat staring at her plate. She didn’t seem to notice when Janet touched her shoulder. “You too, Lacy. We’ll go down and get all this soot washed off of you, and you’ll feel so much better, all right?”

  Lacy stood up without saying anything, walked to the door, and stood there staring out the screen into the dim, dusty evening.

  Janet’s lips trembled, and she pressed her knuckles to them, then turned and went to the door as the rest of the kids started to gather.

  “You coming, Granny?” Christi called.

  “No, the rest of you go on.” My body groaned at the thought of traipsing down the path to the spring hole. “Just bring me back a bucket of water, and I’ll wash up here.”

  “All right.” Janet herded the kids out the door. “Toby, you get a bucket to bring some water for Granny. Mama Gibson, you just rest until we get back. Weldon said you needed to rest.”

  I didn’t answer, because I had no intention of sitting there doing nothing while they were gone, and I knew Janet would fuss about it. Hard work is sometimes the only way to keep a soul going on, so I set to lighting candles and filling oil lamps around Janet’s house as the evening grew dim. Then I made up the sofa bed, so she wouldn’t go booting any of the kids out of their rooms on my account.

  I sat down for just a minute to rest before they come back, and my eyes fell closed like lead weights. I felt Ivy’s angel there in the room with me. I tried to see where she was, but all I could do was feel her close by.

  The slamming of the porch door jerked me awake just as I finally caught sight of her.

  “I brought some water for you, Granny.” Toby cocked his head, looking at me. I realized I was sitting there on the sofa with my hands reaching into the air. I must have looked like a crazy old woman.

  I grabbed Toby to give him a kiss before he could skitter by to his room. “I was just waitin’ here for a boy to hug.”

  Toby giggled and wiggled away as the rest of them come in the door.

  Janet frowned at the sofa bed. “Mama Gibson, you shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “The kids could have used their sleeping bags.”

  “No, now, it’s all right,” I said. “They need to be safe in their own beds tonight, and I’ll be fine here. Don’t imagine I’ll sleep much, anyway.”

  Janet shooed the kids down the hall, then headed for the kitchen. I knew she had to be feeling pretty wore out, or else she would have argued with me more.

  Lacy didn’t follow the other kids to the bedrooms. Instead, she curled up on the other side of the sofa.

  “Come here, sweet one,” I whispered. If she heard me, she didn’t show it. She just drew her legs up to her chest and hugged a pillow instead of me. Staring out the window, she looked like my sister, Ivy, her dark hair like the pitch of night, and her big gray eyes like the last shadows of the day. My heart ached, and I wished things were different between me and Lacy, the same way I’d always wished things were different between me and Ivy.

  A mud swallow flew against the window, looking for a place to roost, and I startled upright. Lacy didn’t move.

  “Ssshhh,” I whispered, taking the quilt and wrapping it around her shoulders. “It’s just an old mud bird. It’ll go away in a minute. You’re all right.” But Lacy wasn’t all right. She hadn’t been all right since her good-for-nothing mother dropped her off at Weldon’s two months ago with some excuse about how her and my son, Cass, were having problems and needed time to work things out.

  Patting Lacy’s back one more time, I swung my legs around, rocked once, twice, three times, then heaved myself to my feet. My body ached like I’d been on the old Case tractor plowing all day with no power steering. A groan yanked from my lips, and I reached out to catch the arm of the sofa bed to keep from toppling over.

  “You all right, Mama?” Janet called from the kitchen.

  “Yes. I’m all right.” My head whirled and sparks flitted in front of my eyes. I took a deep breath, waiting for my eyes to clear. “I’ll be there in a minute and help you get the dishes done.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mama.” I knew Janet would say something like that. She didn’t much like me in her kitchen.

  My head cleared, and I walked to the kitchen, shuffling the way I do when my knees are like old plow handles and my joints are rusted shut. The living room tile was cool as ice against my feet. I had told Janet when they were building the house that tile would be darned uncomfortable. “Wish I had my house shoes. Don’t suppose there’s any knowing where they are.”

  Janet shook her head, scraping some drips of gravy off the gas stove. “No, Mama, I don’t suppose there’s any telling where your house shoes are now. We’ll pick you up a new pair in a few days when the roads are cleared and we can get to someplace to shop.”

  “Good thing that stove is gas, else we wouldn’t of been able to get supper cooked with the power out.” I recalled that I was the one who convinced Weldon and Janet to put a gas stove in their new house instead of one of them fancy, flat-surface electric ones.

  Janet stiffened a little. She didn’t like being reminded about the stove, I guess. Sometimes I rubbed her the wrong way without even meaning to. I stood there for a minute trying to think of what would be good to say. “Lacy don’t seem any better.”

  That rubbed her the wrong way too. Maybe she thought I meant it against her, because she’d been taking care of Lacy these past two months along with her own four youngest children.

  “I know,” she said.

  “It’
s just hard, I reckon, all that’s happened to her. She’s had a hard life so far.”

  “I know.”

  “When it gets a little better, we can take Lacy up swimmin’ at the state park on Lake of the Ozarks. We could just load up all the kids and go have a picnic one day.”

  Janet thumped the spoon against the frying pan, even though there wasn’t anything stuck to it. She stopped for a minute and just stood there, her shoulders stiffening as she looked into the dishpan.

  I put some plates in the sink, trying to think of what to say.

  She dropped the spoon into the dried-up gravy in the frying pan and put the back of her wrist to her forehead, drawing in a long, ragged breath. “God, Mama Gibson, how can you talk like it’s just another normal day? Do you even realize what happened today? There’s no telling how bad things are in Poetry. There are no phones, no electricity, probably no way for help to even get here.” She turned slowly and looked at me, her face a mask of weariness. “Things aren’t normal and they’re not going to be.”

  “I know that.” I wondered what kind of an addle-brain she thought I was. I’m old, not stupid, I thought, but I said, “I’ve gone through enough bad things in my life to know that it don’t help to sit and cry. You just have to do your best to go on like normal. That’s the only way things get back in an even row.”

  Janet shook her head and put her hand over her eyes while the dishwater started to boil. I reached over and took the pan off the burner, then dumped the water in the sink and added some soap.

  “We’ll be all right.” The picture of my shattered stained glass come into my mind, and tears started to seep from my eyes. “We’ll be all right. What we need to do, soon as morning comes, is start cookin’. We’ll get some of that beef out of the deep freeze—if the power don’t come on pretty soon, it’ll be ruined anyway—and we’ll take a couple of big pots, and we’ll start makin’ chili. We’ll take it down to the armory for the folks there. Folks must be hungry and cold, and hot food will taste good to them. Maybe Weldon can take a meal out to the little Lane girl.” I felt bad for not offering to do it myself, but I was afraid that seeing my house again would be more than my heart could bear. “She ought to be checked on. She got a pretty good whack on the head pullin’ me out of the cellar.”

  Janet stopped crying and looked at me like my ears had sprouted corn. I imagine because she’d been hearing me complain about the Lanes for fifteen years, and she couldn’t get used to me showing concern.

  “Well,” I said, by way of explaining myself, “I just want to make sure that no-good father of hers don’t come home and get cross with her for helping us. You know he don’t allow that tractor off the place. One time I saw him drive right by on his tractor and leave two old ladies stuck in the ditch in the snow. If he’d been there during the tornado, we’d of died in the cellar probably.”

  “Mama. Don’t talk like that.”

  “Well, it’s true. But I ain’t dead, so I want to cook chili in the morning and take it to the armory.”

  “Weldon said you need to rest. The only reason you’re not at the hospital is because we can’t get you there.”

  The way she talked to me like a child ruffled my feathers. “I’m not a cripple, and I’m fine. I ain’t sittin’ on no couch all day tomorrow when there’s work to be done. We’ll cook chili and we’ll take it down to the armory and serve it up to the folks.”

  The muscles in the side of Janet’s jaw twitched, but she smiled at me the way she might at an ill-behaved child. “You don’t need to be at the armory, Mama. We can cook tomorrow if you want, and I’ll take it down there.”

  “I’m goin’ to the armory tomorrow if I have to load that chili in the wheelbarra’ and push it there on foot.” No one can accuse me of not having pluck. I’ve always had plenty of pluck. “There is no way on God’s earth I would ever sit on the sofa all day wallowing in my own misery when there is work to be done.” I stood back and looked her hard in the eye, so she’d know she might as well make plans to go to town. I wasn’t going to back down. I couldn’t.

  There had to be a reason I didn’t die in that cellar, and maybe this was it. Maybe there needed to be someone around after this storm who could help folks pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go on—somebody stubborn like me.

  Janet sighed and shook her head while I finished the last of the dishes and set them on a towel. “I can’t talk about all this right now,” she muttered tiredly. “We all just need to get to bed.”

  I felt bad for arguing. Didn’t seem like we should be arguing on a day when we’d been spared from death’s door. “I thought I’d wait up for Weldon.”

  Her shoulders started to shake as she turned away. “There’s no way to know when he’ll be back. There’s no way to know anything.” She didn’t say anything more, just walked off down the hall looking tired.

  I stood alone in the kitchen, then walked outside to the bucket of water to clean up. Closing my eyes, I sat in a drift of moonlight and rubbed the cool, fresh water over my arms and legs. I took in a draft of air, smelling the mineral spring, thinking of how I used to love to visit the spring by moonlight.

  I smiled at the memory, almost forgetting where I was, almost losing the terrible picture of the day. It didn’t seem possible that such destruction could be real. Everything was so silent now. But even the quiet told me the night wasn’t right. No katydids churring, no whippoorwills singing, no coyotes calling out to the heavy orange moon. Nothing was the way it should of been.

  I went inside, slipped off my shoes, and climbed into the sofa bed beside little Lacy. In the moonlight her face looked peaceful, like sleep had taken her away from all that was. I closed my eyes and hoped it would take me away too.

  Ivy’s angel come sometime in the dark of midnight, sometime when my mind was drifting through dreams of the old days. She stretched out her hand to me and tried again to tell me something, but the wind started to blow, pulling me away.

  In the darkness, breath come rushing into me like the swoosh from a passing train, howling on its way to someplace, the wheels thumping over the track in a rhythm. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

  I thought about Olney, and where he might be on one of those trains, and when he might drive it back to the station here and come on home to me and the kids.

  I sat up in the bed, trying to remember what was real. It was all such a blur… .

  Those thoughts went through me in less than a minute, and then the clock struck nearby, and I realized it shouldn’t be there so close to my bed, and I realized I wasn’t in my bed. I was on a sleeper sofa, and the room around me was Weldon’s living room, and Olney had been dead for fifteen years. The thumping of the train against the track was only my heart pounding and the howl of its passing just a memory. Only the breath was real.

  I took in another long, slow draft of air and smelled the oil lamp burning atop the woodstove nearby. Eudora, you’re seventy-eight years old, and trains don’t run through Poetry anymore, and a tornado come yesterday and blew your house away, and Ivy’s been gone for sixty years.

  It was a lot to understand in the depth of night, just waking from a dream.

  Beside me, Lacy stirred and made a soft little cough.

  “Ssshhhhh,” I whispered. “It’s all right, sweet one.” I knew the sound each one of the grandchildren made when they coughed, and when they sighed in their dreams, and when they laughed. I worried about them, even when they didn’t need it. But lately, Lacy needed it.

  I rested my cheek atop her head and whispered to her, even though I knew she was sleeping. “All the babies are all right. Toby, Cheyenne, Christi, and Anna are asleep in their beds down the hall, and their older sisters are far away at college. Your auntie Elaine’s in Michigan with her two girls, and you’re right here with me.” I didn’t mention Lacy’s father, my son Cass, and his wife. I wasn’t sure what to say. They were living somewhere near Tulsa, last I knew.

  When I had counted them all and I kne
w where they were sleeping, I let out a long, slow breath. “That’s what really matters—that all of our babies made it through the storm. Compared to that, an old house don’t mean much.” I whispered the words like a prayer, then sent them to God on the oil-scented smoke from the lamp. I watched it float around the ceiling for a moment, then disappear.

  I tried to close my eyes and sink again into the quiet darkness of sleep, but instead I lay thinking of my house. Something my papa used to say come into my mind: When your heart wants to grow heavy, it is always best to remind yourself of other folks who have got it worse.

  “I wish I had my notebook to write that down,” I whispered close to Lacy’s ear. I often wrote them old memories in my notebooks, because sometime after my seventy-eighth birthday, I begun to notice I was getting forgetful, like my mama did when she got old. I didn’t tell any of the kids about it, but the notebooks helped me keep my mind straight. Now even they got snatched up by the wind.

  Somewhere there’s a grandmother whose arms are empty tonight, I reminded myself, and she’s wishing all she lost was her house and some dime-store notebooks. Somewhere there’s an old lady who’s lost everything, and maybe her memory ain’t just a little gone, but gone so completely she can’t even remember what she’s lost… .

  My eyes drifted closed, and sleep must of come on me. It come in quiet, peaceful, like the moment I looked into the face of Ivy’s angel and saw the door to heaven. The moment before Jenilee Lane come into the cellar, called my name, touched my hand, and pulled my soul back into my body …

  A noise startled me awake, and I saw someone moving in the shadows of the lamplight. My mind fluttered around like a bird trapped in the barn loft, not quite sure how to find a way out, or whether it wanted one. “Weldon?” I whispered. “Is that you? Is everything all right in town? You been gone for hours.”

  “Things are bad, Mama.” He sighed wearily. His shoulders sagged as he opened the old chest by the fireplace and started pulling out blankets. “I just came to get what blankets and medical supplies we’ve got here. We’re still pulling survivors out of the collapsed houses and buildings in town. There should be some search dogs here in the morning, we hope. Nineteen tornadoes touched down all over the tristate area, so there’s damage everywhere. Roads are closed, hospitals are jammed. Help is slow in coming. We’re just doing the best we can to dig ourselves out and take care of the injured.”