The Braxtons of Miracle Springs (3 page)

During his year in Miracle Springs, Christopher had come to know almost everybody. But as soon as we returned from our honeymoon we wanted to do some visiting around the community.

Christopher had a pastor's heart, even though he was no longer a pastor. He wanted to know everyone, know their problems, know what their families were like, know what the men did, how he could pray for them.

He said that the time would come when we would become more and more occupied with our own lives. Right now we had the time to do some calling and to reach out together. He said that marriage signified a transition point when, after years of thinking mainly about ourselves, it was time for us to look outward and begin sharing life with others—each other first, then other people God might send our way.

“I want us to use every opportunity the Lord gives us to the utmost,” he said one day when we were talking about it. “Later on, when we have a family that will keep us more occupied, and when we'll be busy keeping up a home and tending a garden, then we won't be able to spend as much time with people.”

So throughout the rest of the spring and summer, usually on Saturday or Sunday, and on some evenings, we'd try to visit someone.

As I said, we both knew most of the people in and around Miracle Springs already, and Christopher had worked for many of the men upon occasion. But it was different now visiting with these people as man and wife. There was a whole new dimension to it. Just as Christopher and I were getting to know each other all over again, so too were we as a couple going through that process with other people, many of whom I'd known half my life.

Now I was a woman rather than the fifteen-year-kid who had wandered into town, orphaned—I thought—and bewildered, with two brothers and two sisters in tow. The sensations were so new and different. Especially the sensation of being
Mrs
. Somebody—Mrs.
Anybody
—for that is surely not something I'd ever expected to be called during all those years!

Everyone seemed glad to see us!

When we'd ride up in the buggy to someone's house, they would greet us and invite us in for tea and something to eat. Overnight it seemed, I wasn't a little girl in anyone's mind, but a grown-up lady. I couldn't help wondering if I'd ever get used to it! Maybe I'd been growing up more during the last few years than I realized. I suppose your personal maturing is not something you can see very clearly through your own eyes as it is happening.

When we called upon Avery and Harriet Rutledge one Saturday morning, Rev. Rutledge was in bed. I thought it strange right off because it was late in the morning, and I knew Rev. Rutledge had always been an early riser.

He got up and came out to visit with us a while along with Harriet and their eight-year-old daughter, Mary. But his face was pale, and you could see he didn't feel very well.

“Avery is still finding himself bothered by last winter's influenza,” Harriet explained.

“I don't know what it is with this bout of it,” sighed Rev. Rutledge, sinking tiredly into his chair. “It keeps coming back to pester me. I just can't seem to recover completely.”

“Then we shall pray for you all the more diligently,” said Christopher. “In fact, would you mind if I prayed right now?”

“Certainly not.”

“Father,”
Christopher prayed,
“we do not understand
sickness. But we know you are good and love us.
We ask that we would allow our infirmities always to draw us closer to you. We all pray now for
our dear brother Avery, that your healing and comforting and energy-giving hand would be upon him, and that you
would restore him to the full vigor of your life within him.”

“I appreciate that, Christopher. It is nice to be on the receiving end of prayer, for a change. I am going to enjoy having you around. This is quite a young man you've found for yourself, Corrie,” he added, turning to me with what smile he could manage.

“I know that,” I said. “I am more grateful to God for him every day!”

“Good. And you just keep thanking God for him, even when he does things to irritate you,” rejoined the minister with a glance and smile toward Harriet.

“Surely you never do that to
your
wife,” remarked Christopher with a grin.

“Never intentionally. But you know how thickheaded we men can be sometimes.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” rejoined Christopher seriously, his grin now turning to a knowing nod.

“Those are the times we need patient wives who don't give up on us. I've had one of the best,” he said, looking lovingly toward Harriet. “And I know you do too,” he added, with another glance and smile toward me. “I've known this young lady for many years, Christopher, and I know of her spiritual fiber probably as well as anyone. So I would say to you, as I did to her—you've found yourself quite a young lady.”

“I am more thankful to God than you can imagine,” replied Christopher.

“Thank you, Avery,” I said, embarrassed but appreciative of his kind words.

“Tell me,” the minister went on, “now that you are married and settling in to your new life together, what have you found to be the reaction to your most unusual engagement—if you could call it that—and your decision, Christopher, to work for Corrie's father a year?”

Christopher and I both looked at each other and laughed.

“How do you mean—other people's reactions, or our own?”

“Both.”

“Well, speaking for ourselves, if we had it all to do over again, I don't think we would change a thing. What would you say, Corrie?”

“Just exactly that,” I replied. “Christopher is so much a part of the family already, and he and Pa and Almeda are such friends and know each other so well—I can't imagine getting married when all the people involved are still more or less strangers. I agree—I wouldn't change a thing. The longer two people wait, the more they go through together, the better they get to know one another's families . . . the stronger the marriage will be in the end. We're only sorry that Christopher's parents weren't able to be a part of our happiness.”

“What about your family, Christopher?”

Christopher and I glanced soberly at one another.

An uncomfortable silence had already begun when Christopher finally answered. “That is a long story, Avery,” he said. “I think we'd best save it for another time.”

“And what about other people,” asked Harriet, trying to bring the conversation back to happier subjects. “How have they reacted?”

Once more Christopher and I looked at each other, and this time we could not help smiling.

“Everybody thought it was the most peculiar thing they'd ever heard of,” I said, laughing.

“They thought we were downright crazy would be more accurate!” added Christopher.

Harriet now laughed, too.

“You've got to admit it was a little unusual,” she said, “as much as I admired you for it.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed Christopher. “But the normal and usual ways of doing things don't always lead to the best results. I learned that sad-but-true fact from the church I pastored in Virginia.”

“I would say just the opposite is usually the case,” added Rev. Rutledge.

“Exactly,” rejoined Christopher. “Sometimes you have to do the unusual if you want to make a difference in the world.”

“I take it you're such a man,” said the minister. “You want to make a difference?”

“You bet I do!”

“How?”

“I want to make a difference in how people think about God and how they live their Christian lives. Surely as a minister you've felt the same thing—”

Rev. Rutledge nodded as Christopher went on.

“—that people are so prone to consider their Christianity just one little aspect of their lives—and perhaps not even the most significant aspect—like a dress shirt they get out and put on once a week, rather than as the dynamic, life-giving, challenging, thought-provoking, obedience-prompting foundation for every breath they breathe twenty-four hours a day.”

As Christopher spoke his blue eyes glowed with the passion he felt for his faith. I was reminded all over again why I loved him so much and how thankful I was that the Lord had saved us for one another. To marry a thorough one-hundred-percent Christian like Christopher would have been worth waiting for until I was fifty . . . or even sixty.

“Of course I have felt it,” replied Rev. Rutledge. “I've got to confess, however, that early in my ministry I was probably such a one myself.”

“I can hardly imagine that of you,” said Christopher.

“Thanks in large measure to the challenging honesty of Corrie's father one day at a memorable Christmas dinner,” Rev. Rutledge went on, “I was awakened to just the need you speak of.”

“I've heard nothing about it.”

“Ask Drum to tell you. I've never stopped being thankful to him for it, and we've been fast friends because of it. In the years since, I have indeed experienced that same desire to wake people out of the lethargy I was myself in for a number of years. I suppose it is the fate of the minister to feel that tension. It is clear you still have the heart of a pastor beating within you.”

“I do,” admitted Christopher. “It is not that I have any future ambitions toward the pulpit, but I do love people and can think of no greater calling than to be involved with them, especially, as I said, in helping them to think of their faith as something more alive and real than many do. I don't miss the preaching, but I do miss the pastoring. That's why I say yes, I want to make a difference in how people think—and why I don't mind doing the unusual once in a while, if it will help.”

Christopher paused for a moment

“But more than all that,” he went on, “what Corrie and I did in waiting that year, I felt, was the right and wise thing to do. I don't necessarily believe in doing things
just
to be different. Even though I'm still young, I've learned not to rush God. Sometimes it seems that the slower I go, the more I am in his will. I've had to be there to pick up the pieces more times than I have liked for people who have rushed into business moves, marriages, and all manner of things. In my experience, haste usually breeds recklessness. Time is a great counselor.”

We continued visiting a while longer. The Rutledges asked us about our plans, and we told them of the living arrangements we'd decided upon.

A brief lull in the conversation came, and Rev. Rutledge gave a little involuntary sigh. He hadn't meant it to be seen, but it was clear he was feeling fatigued from our visit. We stood to excuse ourselves as Harriet glanced toward her ailing husband.

We said our goodbyes to Avery, then Harriet saw us to the door. She put the bravest face on it she could, but as we left, both Christopher and I knew she was concerned.

Almeda and I always had a good time when we worked together in the kitchen. One spring day we were baking bread, and while our hands mixed and kneaded and pounded, we got to laughing and reflecting on the time back in 1853 when she had taken me to San Francisco.

“Oh, I wish I could show Christopher the city,” I said, kind of dreamily.

“Why don't you?” said Almeda.

My head shot up. Suddenly it dawned on me that there wasn't any reason I shouldn't.

I mentioned the idea to Christopher the very next time he came down from the mine. He thought a trip to San Francisco sounded like a great idea.

“In fact,” he said, “why don't we take the others along with us?”

“Who . . . everyone?” I asked.

“Anyone who wants to go.”

“Oh, what fun!” I exclaimed. “Do you really mean it, Christopher?”

“Of course I do.”

I was so excited at the prospect! We brought it up at breakfast the very next morning, and before the hour was out, my brothers and sisters and Christopher and I were planning a trip to San Francisco for the first week of May.

Anticipation mounted to such a pitch over the next four weeks that the night before our departure I could hardly sleep. We were all up by morning's light and bustling around getting dressed and packing our bags. Zack had made arrangements for his friend Laughing Waters and her sister, Shell Flower, to meet us in Sacramento and go to San Francisco with us. Zack had met Laughing Waters, whose father was a chief of the Paiute tribe, while he was riding for the Pony Express in the Nevada territory back in 1861. Now she and Shell Flower were living in California. And Zack was so anxious to get to Sacramento that he was up before all the rest of us!

Almeda prepared a big breakfast for our send-off. She and Pa were in lively spirits, joking and laughing. I couldn't tell if they wished they were going or were looking forward to being alone—alone, that is, with our half-sister Ruth, who was now ten, with energy for two or three girls her size.

“You think you can handle this unruly mob, Christopher?” Pa asked as he buttered himself a biscuit.

“I don't know, Drum,” laughed Christopher. “Being still a newcomer to the West and a stranger to San Francisco, I intend to let the others lead the way.”

“I reckon Corrie and Zack'll keep you outta trouble.”

“Time was when Corrie practically lived in San Francisco,” put in Almeda, as she poured out a round of coffee into several empty cups.

“I wouldn't say that,” I protested. “Although I suppose I did make quite a few trips back and forth.”

“City's changing fast, Corrie,” added Pa. “California's still growing. People are still coming here even though the gold's slowed up. How long's it been since you was in the city?”

“Hmm,” I said, “let me see. It must have been just before I went back East during the war . . . probably sometime in 1863.”

“Four years—yep, I'd say you'll likely see plenty you don't recognize.”

“Please, can I go too, Ma?” said Ruth in a pleading voice to Almeda.

“I'm sorry, dear—this trip is only for the grown-ups. We'll take you when you're older.”

“You and Pa aren't going,” objected Ruth, “and you're the only grown-ups. The others are my brothers and sisters. Well,” she added looking around, “maybe
Christopher's
a grown-up.”

Everyone at the table laughed.

“How does that make you feel, Christopher,” asked Pa, “to be thrown in along with me?”

“I suppose in a youngster's eyes, the years between us aren't so many.”

“Twenty,” added Pa, who was fifty-two at the time. It hardly seemed possible, but Almeda would be fifty next year herself.

“Only nineteen,” corrected Christopher. “There's not
that
much difference in our ages, especially to a ten-year-old.”

“You're right—you're practically an old man!” laughed Pa.

“It's for the
young
grown-ups, dear,” said Almeda to Ruth, still laughing.

Half an hour later we piled all our bags into the wagon. Pa climbed up in front to take us into Miracle Springs. The waves and goodbyes to Ruth and Almeda, standing by the door, continued until we were out of sight.

The southbound train was due to pull out at 8:43. We were all standing on the platform, waiting impatiently at 8:20. A shrill whistle sounded in the distance about 8:32, followed a minute or two later by sight of the big black steam engine rolling slowly into view.

More handshakes and goodbyes followed, this time with Pa.

We all boarded as mail bags were unloaded and loaded and as the engine took on water. By nine o'clock the five of us were seated together—Christopher and myself, Zack, twenty-eight, Becky, twenty-four, and Tad, twenty-two—chugging south toward Sacramento.

Zack would take us all to meet Laughing Waters and Shell Flower this afternoon. They were both living and working in a large school, and we had been invited to join them for dinner. Then they would join us for our outing to the city.

It turned out later that Laughing Waters' sister changed her mind about going. Even though she had been more a part of the white culture than Laughing Waters, she was more than just a little shy about the adventure we had planned. But there was no way Zack would let Laughing Waters stay behind. He had been looking forward to being with her again even more than visiting San Francisco!

We would all spend the night in the same boardinghouse where Christopher and I had gone for our honeymoon, where we had made arrangements by mail a week ago, and tomorrow morning be off for the city.