Authors: Leisha Kelly
But Frank thought the idea completely unrealistic. “You know they’d never take me, Mrs. Wortham. Besides, I’m needed too much on the farm right now.”
I almost argued that perhaps his father and younger brothers were more capable than he thought, especially with George doing well again lately. But there was a cloud of doubt edging the back of my mind, and I let the matter go.
Sam and Thelma surprised us considerably by saying that they were considering moving clear up to a town called Camp Point, where Thelma’s Uncle Milton had offered Sam a job. “We’d have a little more money for a bigger house,” Thelma told me. “And we’d be closer to the deaf school that’s up that way.”
Camp Point was still in Illinois, but it seemed like a very long way, and they’d be almost fifty miles from the school for the deaf one of the doctors had mentioned to them. But that would be better than the hundred and eighty or so from here. Even though Albert was much too young for school now, I was glad they were taking his needs seriously. Still, I was concerned about how the rest of the family might react to the idea of them being so far away.
“That’s why we’re telling you now,” Sam said. “If we go, it won’t be till spring, and by then everybody’ll have time to get used to the idea.”
“Children grow up and move on. That’s life for you,” George said. If the idea of his oldest son moving more than two hundred miles bothered him, he didn’t let on about it, much to Thelma’s relief.
“I feared it would upset him terrible,” she told me when we were alone later. “I think that was worrying Sammy a little too.”
But the one who was upset the most was Emmie. She absolutely loved having Georgie, Rosemary, Albert, and baby Dorothy around us all she could.
“It ain’t fair to think that after they have the new baby, they might be takin’ it far away from us,” she complained.
“They’d visit,” I assured her. “And we’d find a way to visit them too.”
“Would you really, Mrs. Wortham? If your family was to go an’ visit Sam an’ Thelma, would you take me?”
“I imagine we’d take whoever wanted to go. We’ve operated like one family for so long, I don’t see why we would change it now.”
“Thanks,” Emmie told me with a hug. “I wanna be able to call you Mama forever.”
We were very glad to get letters from Kirk, which were coming from England now. But he told us almost nothing of why his unit was there or what he expected next. He spoke angrily against the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese. And he spoke mournfully of loneliness for home.
“I can’t wait to get hay in my hair again,” he wrote. “I think our blackberry-lined creek and plowed fields is the prettiest place in the world.”
I wondered if Robert, somewhere in the Pacific, thought so too. It bothered me considerably not to have gotten a letter from him since early August. Unless there were letters on the way, he hadn’t written since July. But I knew he couldn’t write every day. And when he did write, the letters now would be a long time reaching us.
I prayed for him daily, but it seemed increasingly to be at night when I felt I had to pray the most. I would find myself waking at all hours, unable to rest again until I got up to pray. Sometimes I would go to his box of letters and pull out the latest one or one of the many beneath it and read it by a candle’s light, lingering over every word and then returning to prayers again. Sometimes I was driven to the mantelpiece in the sitting room, just to take his picture down and hold it a while.
Samuel caught me at it more than once, and at those times I felt a little foolish, but Samuel said I wasn’t being foolish at all. Looking at me with his tired dark eyes mirroring my cares, he would ask me one simple question.
“Why do you think
I’m
not asleep?”
Thelma and Sam’s fifth baby was born one year from the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. Because of that, they changed their minds about calling her Irma Lee and instead named their little girl Pearl.
Mom was really, really glad that we got word of the birth after it had already happened. Thelma’s aunt Dina was visiting, and she and Thelma’s mother were the ones to deliver the baby. We drove into Dearing to see them that afternoon. Mom had made a pretty new baby blanket, and I made a bib like the one Mrs. Graham had made for Emmie when we were little kids. Katie brought store-bought baby booties that had been in the window at the five-and-dime. And Emmie, who liked cooking better than sewing, brought a big pot of chicken and dumplings to feed everybody. Thelma’s mother just couldn’t believe she’d made dumplings by herself.
The very next day we got letters from Robert. Two of them, but they’d both been written in October.
Mom was thrilled, even though the letters had taken so long. Robert was fine, and he said Willy was too. They were on Guadalcanal, the American stronghold in the Solomon Islands. We were glad because we’d heard that a war correspondent named John Hersey reported such overwhelming American superiority there that the Japanese offensive was doomed.
Robert didn’t say anything about doing any fighting. He did say he missed us very, very much and kept praying Rachel’s prayer every night for God to make us stronger in this time of being apart. “Pray for me when you think of it,” he said. “I don’t get to sleep as easily as I used to.” We wrote back to tell him that we thought about him all the time and were praying for him every single day, morning and night.
Christmas was strange without him and the older Hammond boys. We made cookies like we usually did, and I hoped the Christmas boxes had all been delivered and that Robert and the others were enjoying the things we’d sent. Joe, too. Our letters to him were not coming back, and neither had his Christmas box. We were all hoping that meant he’d been found somewhere and surely we’d be getting word soon enough.
On Christmas afternoon when Ben and Lizbeth and Sam and Thelma and all the kids were over, we played out the story of Christ’s birth with our little nativity set like we’d been doing for years. But Emmie and Georgie had the angels flying not only to the shepherds at Bethlehem but also to Kirk in Europe and Willy, Robert, and Joe in the Pacific islands, because they couldn’t be with us.
Just about everybody wrote all of them a Christmas letter or drew a picture to send. Frank told me what he wanted to say, and I wrote it down for him. He had good ordinary letters for the rest, but for Joe it was the whole Ninety-first Psalm.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“’Course I’m sure,” he said. But he didn’t give any explanation.
I just about cried when I was writing it down. All of the wonderful promises of protection in that chapter made me think that Frank surely had renewed hope for Joe, and I was very glad. “There shall no evil befall thee,” it said. And “he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
I liked those words, and I kept them turning around in my mind in the next few days. But I couldn’t help wondering more about Joe. If he could, he’d have written to us by now, I was sure of that. So he must be somewhere where he couldn’t write. But if the army knew where he was, they’d surely have told us he wasn’t missing anymore, and they hadn’t done that. So where were our letters going?
We’d heard about the Mcleansboro boy who had been declared missing after Pearl Harbor. Everybody’d thought he was dead; only he was found later alive and well. Such confusion could definitely happen. So I wondered if maybe Joe hadn’t already been found and there’d been confusion about getting word to us. Maybe a letter had been sent and gotten lost somewhere.
Rorey had several days off over the holidays, and she made good progress on her wedding dress. Secretly I was still hoping she’d change her mind about marrying Lester, though it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I tried to tell myself maybe the service would change him a lot and he’d come back a lot more well-mannered than he’d left. She was still hoping they’d be married in the summer, though nobody knew for sure when he might be coming home.
Kirk was now in North Africa. We learned that when we got his newest letter the first week of January, and it came as a complete surprise. He said mail from us was always encouragement right when he needed it. And he asked if one of us could please write to a friend in his unit who hardly ever got any letters. Katie said she’d been thinking about writing to more servicemen anyway, so she sat down and wrote a letter that night. She ended up writing that young man, whose name was Dave Kliner, every week.
Hearing from Robert and Kirk again and not getting Joe’s Christmas box back had made me feel better about everything. Dad said Oliver Porter had heard a report that the Germans were losing ground in Europe and the Japanese were backing down in the Pacific. Maybe the war would be over soon after all. I hoped it’d be over by Valentine’s Day because that was plenty long enough for our boys to be away from home. And when they got back they’d be glad to see that the whole country was doing better because of their efforts. There were jobs now. We had some money.
I was so hopeful. I wasn’t feeling the heavy weight that I’d been feeling before. I was just sure everything was going to be all right.
But the next week changed everything. January twelfth my parents got notification that Robert had been wounded. That was hard enough, but it had happened almost two months ago, and we didn’t even know. He’d been put on a hospital ship that was docked in Hawaii now. And they said he’d have to stay in Hawaii until he was well enough to be moved to the continental states.
Mom tried not to, but she cried. I know it was hard, thinking of Robert two months hurt with none of us by his side. If there’d been any way, she’d have taken off for Hawaii that very afternoon. But there was no way. I cried too. I prayed and prayed that he’d be able to travel real, real soon. That it wasn’t so bad and he’d be home.
But we didn’t even know how bad. I guess that was the hardest thing. Two weeks passed before we had any more details. Dad had gotten a man from the war department to help him get in contact with the hospital in Hawaii, and he found out that Robert had four bullet wounds across his back and one leg. It would be a while before they’d be able to move him again. Dad came home that day looking like I’d never seen him look, ever. It scared me. It scared Mom. He told us everything he knew, and Mom and Dad hugged each other for a very long time, and then they both got on their knees and prayed.
That night Rachel came to our house. She cried, and we hugged her, and she cried some more. She said she’d sell everything she had to get to Hawaii, and Dad told her he felt the same way, but so far nobody could go. The very same day Eugene Turrey came looking for Rorey in the drugstore to tell her that Lester had been wounded too.
It felt like the whole world was coming to pieces. All of my fears about Joe were back again, plus heaps of extra fears for Robert. Rorey was so frazzled she couldn’t hardly work. They hadn’t been able to find out anything about how Lester was doing.
I worried terrible. So many things could go wrong if someone was shot in the back. So many vital parts were packed inside us there. I almost got mad at God because we’d been praying all along. But Mom reminded me that the Bible says “many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.”
“I don’t understand it,” I told her. “Robert was getting closer to God. Why didn’t God protect him?”
“I’m sure he did,” Mom answered me. “I’m sure he’s with him. But, honey, it’s a sinful world. Painful things happen.”
I felt bad to be talking to her about it. I knew she was hurting too. But I couldn’t quite let it go. “But, Mom, it shouldn’t be like that.”
“It won’t always be. One day he’ll set things in order with his coming. There may be no way to understand it all until then, but God promises to bring us out of every affliction and trial. He’s with us, and he makes us stronger.”
I could see the tears in her eyes even while she was trying to encourage me. And I knew God was making my mother strong. I didn’t think I could ever handle something like this so well as she was handling it. She cried, sure. At the strangest times. Stirring a supper pot or fixing a steam treatment for Berty’s awful cold, she might suddenly be wiping away tears. But she was strong enough to help all of us and not get mad at God even one little bit. So I didn’t let myself get mad at God either.
But it was hard to pray. It was hard to put together any words at all except “Heal my brother. Bring him home.” So I kept praying that. But it seemed like there ought to be something more. I prayed for Joe and Kirk and Willy, of course. I prayed for Lester. But besides that, I couldn’t seem to manage anything else. So I pulled out one of Robert’s old letters, and I prayed Rachel’s prayer again, over and over.
God give us peace in this time of being apart. Make us stronger . . .
Rachel came over a lot now, hoping we’d heard more word about Robert. But usually we didn’t have anything new to tell her. She started sewing him a shirt. And knitting socks. And a wool hat. All presents for when he came home.
She and Katie and I got really close, and I kept trying to include Rorey, but she would pull away from us half the time and go to see the Turreys.
I kept hoping in that time that Willy would write to us and give us details, if he knew them, about what had happened. But Willy didn’t write. I guessed he was just used to Robert adding in messages for him at the bottom of his own letters. He’d almost never written anybody. And then I thought how awful William must feel about Robert and Lester. So I wrote to him, hoping it would help him feel better. I included the best assurances I could that they’d surely be all right.
I mailed that letter on January twenty-eighth. The next day, Mr. Hammond got a letter saying that William had been wounded in action. Apparently it had happened the same day as Robert. The letters were even dated the same. No one knew why Mr. Hammond’s letter had taken so much longer getting to him.
He didn’t take the news like my mother had taken the news about Robert. The day the letter came, Mom had sent me over to the Hammonds’ with chicken soup for Berty because he was still home from school not feeling very well. I’d been crunching through the sparkly frozen timber, walking fast because of the cold, with my mind lost in my thoughts. But I heard yelling when I got close to the Hammonds’ house, and I knew something was wrong.