Emma's Gift (24 page)

“Yeah, I'd like it.” He was quiet for a second. “Dad, why don't you like her?”

Such a question. “I like her. I love her, more like. It's just hard to be around her sometimes.”

“Why?”

He didn't remember. Probably a good thing. “She's not very patient with kids, son. And she drinks too much. At least she used to.”

“How come she doesn't write?”

“I don't know.” It wasn't something I really wanted to talk about right then. My mother would visit my older brother in the penitentiary but scarcely give me the time of day. Been that way for years.
“You think you're something, Sam Wortham,”
she'd said once.
“You think you're better than us. But you're nothing but Bible-toting trash.”

How I'd prayed for her. But she didn't want anything to do with God, and she didn't want anything to do with me. Or my children.

“I'm gonna miss Emma,” Robert suddenly said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Me too.”

Juli called us for lunch, and we all sat down to a hodgepodge of things the neighbors had brought that we hadn't had room to carry over to the Hammonds.

“I know what I'm going to make for Joe and Kirk,” Juli announced happily. “And George too, I think. You know the tie Emma made you, Robert?”

He nodded. Cut from sturdy old green drapery, it was one of the nicer ties I'd seen, and with interesting texture.

“There's enough of those curtains left,” Julia said. “I don't suppose they'd mind having matching ties for church?”

“I don't think they ever had no kinda ties for church, Mom,” Robert said.

“Well, then, this'll be just the thing. Maybe I can make the rest of the boys some another time.”

“Mommy made the doll dress!” Sarah exclaimed. “All pretty with rickrack and ruffles! Rorey's really, really gonna like that! Her new dolly's just as pretty as Bessie!”

It was nice to have the kids so excited about giving. It was nice to be able to give. Though we had, by last count, only forty-three cents to our name, we had willing hearts and Emma's legacy.

Julia must've been thinking the same thing. “Emma would be pleased,” she told us. “She said we're always rich when we have faith, so we can always find a way to give.”

I couldn't deny the truth of that. Emma had tried to give me this farm. She might even have her way still, though I couldn't let that concern me one way or the other at the moment. She'd long decided to forgive George Hammond's debt and give him his farm too. She hadn't really held anything to be her own, just had it in her hands as long as she needed it, until someone else needed it more.

We scarcely did anything then but the necessary chores and finishing up our gifts for the Hammonds. And it was a good thing we'd been so diligent with what time we had, because at no later than two that afternoon, we heard something off in the timber. I looked out the window and saw Franky come crashing through the trees. At first I thought something was wrong, but he didn't seem to have anything distressing to report.

“We—we come back early, if you don't mind,” he told me, all out of breath. And I didn't have to wonder who the “we” was for long.

Joe came stepping out of the trees with Berty on his shoulders, followed by Kirk and Lizbeth with the baby, then Willy, Harry, and Rorey all in a line. Everybody but the big boy, Sam. And George.

“Pa said it'd be all right to come back over here,” Lizbeth told me with something distant and strained in her eyes. “He's still plannin' on comin' in the mornin', far as I know.”

“Is everything all right?”

She assured me that it was, though I knew it wasn't. Juli rushed out the back door of the house and helped get all the little ones inside to sit down, unbundle, and warm up a bit.

“How's your father today?” I asked Joe, hoping for more detail than Lizbeth was willing to provide. But it was Kirk who answered me.

“He's got him a bottle. Said he weren't gonna do nothin' but sip off the top, but it's more'n half gone by now.”

“Let's play school again,” Rorey said to Sarah, not appearing touched by the worry burdening her older brothers and sister.

The little girls ran off together, and the little boys were soon scurrying around as well. But Joe was looking heartbroken. “I knew it was better to get the little ones away, Mr. Wortham. You don't mind, do you?”

The despair in him made me wonder what the older kids may have gone through that the younger ones were too little to remember. And I was angry at George for putting them through it again, especially now. “Where'd he get a bottle?” I had to ask, finding it hard to imagine that George would just go off somewhere, especially after I'd brought all his needy children home. And liquor was illegal. Where could it have come from?

“I dunno where he got it,” Joe confessed. “He ain't been no place. I jus' hope he ain't got another'n hid back.”

I was hot inside, and I knew Julia could tell. She was looking at me with worry.

“Samuel, what are you going to do?”

“I'm going over there.”

“He ain't gonna listen to you,” Joe said. “Nobody but Mama could keep him sober. If his babies can't do it, nothing can.”

Those were hopeless words, and I didn't want to acknowledge how true they seemed. If George wouldn't abstain for all his children who needed him so much, why did I think he'd hear a word I said? But I wanted to see young Sam as much as George. He'd been to Buzz Felder's, less than a quarter mile from town. Might he have brought his father liquor? Could he have?

“Samuel…” Julia started to say something but stopped.

“I need to talk to them,” I said. “I won't be gone long.”

But Lizbeth shook her head. “Be all right if you'd stay a while. Keep 'em from hurtin' each other.” She didn't say anything else. She just walked off, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes. The poor girl, over here like this with all her younger brothers and sisters to take care of. Christmas Eve. God help her.

I walked that mile faster than I'd ever walked it, or so it seemed to me, seething the way I was inside. How could he do this? Bad enough the way he'd already been, but to pour drink on top of it! No wonder Juli was angry at him! No wonder his boys hadn't trusted him! But was Sam part of the problem in this? It was hard to believe.

I saw somebody moving around in the farmyard when I first approached and thought it was George, as big as he was. But it was young Sam, pacing around like he wasn't sure what to do with himself. For a moment I wondered if he might have been drinking too.

“What'd you come for?” he shouted. “Ain't no use you comin'! Might as well go to Mr. Post's an' get him to haul all the kids he can to Dearing! Mrs. Gray might take some of 'em, an' Mrs. Pratt, an' Pastor hisself, one or two apiece maybe, and if you'd—”

“Sam.” I wasn't sure what I'd say to him, but it was clear how distressed he was. Crying, the tears surely cold against his angry, red face.

“He hit me,” he said, “an' shoved me out the door an' tol' me to go with the rest of 'em, not to stay around him no more.” He looked toward the house, the pain and something almost like hatred suddenly vicious in his eyes. “I oughta kill him. Oughta trounce him good.”

Oh, how right Lizbeth had been. “Sam, none of that will help him. I expect he even knows he deserves it, but it wouldn't do nothing but make things worse. Did he ask you to bring him a bottle yesterday?”

“Me? You think I'd do it? You think I'd help him go stinkin' crazy even if he did ask me?”

“No. I just—”

“He used to beat us. When Mama was off anywhere or outside or anything, he'd be drinkin' an' cut loose on us afore long. But she slugged him good one day, and I oughta do the same thing—”

“But it was her getting him to church that stopped the drinking, wasn't it?”

“Maybe so. But she slugged him first. Made him go.”

“Your father gave his heart to God, didn't he?”

“We thought so.”

“He did. I know. And it'll be God to get him through this. Will you believe that with me?”

He was shaking. “I don't know. I don't know if nothin'll get us through.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “It doesn't seem so, when you're in the middle of things, but he's here with us. He's going to help your father and all of you. Trust him, all right?”

“You don't know what it's like.”

“No. Not with your mother dying, I don't. But I know about the drinking part of it. My father would come home violent, till one night he left us altogether. My mother drank too, and soon got us a stepfather as bad as she was. I pretty much learned to stay out of their way. But your father's different. He already knows better, down inside somewhere. He knows God cares.”

Young Sam was quiet, looking down at his snowy boots.

“Will you go inside with me and talk to him?” I asked.

“He don' wanna talk to me no more. He done tol' me that.”

“It's not up to him. Nothing's up to him right now. Not until he gets himself straightened out.”

George was at the table. We kicked the snow off our boots, shut the door behind us, and took off our coats before he even looked up.

“Get out.”

He was drunk. I knew from the way he was sitting, the way his words came out, before I even got close enough to see his eyes.

“I thought you were going to give the kids Christmas.”

“I will. I'll be there.”

“Uh-huh. Do you think this is what they needed? To see you like this and come running back, scared of what you might do? What is that, George? What are you trying to do?”

He slapped his hands down on the table and then his head down on them. “I didn't mean to scare nobody.” He looked like he was going to cry.

Young Sam stood and stared at him, clearly surprised that he wasn't raging.

“Where's your bottle, George?”

He looked up at me, shaking his head. “I—I finished it. I chucked it out the window.”

“Got another one?”

He shook his head. “You wantin' a drink or aimin' to take it from me?”

“Where is it, George?”

“I'm gonna need it. I—I ain't meanin' to be drinkin' all the time now. Jus'—jus' fer a day or two. I done told you I couldn't handle it. Ever'body knows that. Can't nobody expect me to—”

“People expect you to care for your children, George. I expect you to.”

I moved for the cupboards, and he jumped up. “What're you—”

“Just looking for your bottle. Where'd you get it?”

“Frank Cafey brung it after you left yesterday. He unnerstands me. He knows what I was a-needin' to manage with all them kids, jus' lookin' in their sorry faces.”

“Frank doesn't know anything. But he'll know soon enough not to be spreading his poison like this. You know better, George. You know exactly what Wilametta would want from you.”

He sunk back down in his seat as if I'd hit him. “I know. I know. But I can't. I can't do it. I ain't able—”

“Where's the bottle, George? For Wilametta's sake.” I opened one cupboard, then another, and then found it in the third. Some cloudy-looking home brew in a quart jar sticking up behind the tea and baking soda. It didn't take me long to have it open and poured into the remains of Lizbeth's filthy dishwater.

“Wait a minute! Wait!”

“I'm doing you a favor. Maybe you'll sober up and be in some kind of decent shape by tomorrow.”

“I hate you, Sam Wortham.”

“No, you don't. You don't know what you think right now.” I lifted the soupy dishpan and handed it to Sam. “Dump it outside for me.”

The boy's eyes were fairly glowing with appreciation. He moved to the door quickly, avoiding his father's reaching hand trying to catch him by one arm.

“I wasn't meanin' to be drunk, now you know that,” George blubbered. “I was just—”

“I don't want to hear it right now. I'll be talking to Frank Cafey and letting him know that if you decide to defy the law and all rational sense it may be your business, but if he gets himself involved in it again he'll have me and your boys to face.”

“You're a hard one, you're hard…”

Something about those words kindled the rage in me. “You're the hard one, George Hammond! If you'd been looking at your children's faces when they came back over to us today! Lizbeth and Kirk and Joey looking like they hadn't a hope in this world. You've given them nothing to stand on. You're their father, for God's sake—”

“Shut up! Just shut up! Leave me alone.”

“No. I'm sorry if I seem hard to you. I know you're grieving, but you're going to do right by those kids so far as it's in my power to see that you do! I'm staying right here until you sober up, and then you're coming home with me, like it or not, to give them a decent Christmas. If we have to trounce you like your boy said, that's the way it's going to be.”

NINETEEN

Julia

I wasn't sure I could break the gloom off everybody this time. Even the younger children who'd gone playing were more solemn than usual, sensing what the older ones felt. Rorey stood grimly upbraiding Sarah's doll for some nameless infraction, and Harry and Bert were crawling up the staircase on their knees, in retreat from some unseen foe.

Lizbeth, who'd carried a cloth bag in addition to the baby, now sat with the bag between her feet. She leaned forward in the old kitchen chair and started to cry.

“Oh, shoot.” Kirk got up and moved away from her, clear to the other room where he wouldn't have to see. But Joe scooted his chair up close, and I wondered if I should leave them alone or try to help him comfort her.