Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “Birthdays generally last all day. And could be your little niece or nephew will be sharing your birthday next year.”

  “That might be fun.” As they started back across the field, Jocie looked up at the sky and silently said a prayer for Tabitha and the baby. After all, she’d promised her she’d say the baby prayer. One star had popped out in the blue over their heads. Jocie couldn’t decide whether she should use her first-star wish for rain the way she’d been doing for days now or whether tonight she should make some kind of wish for the baby, so she asked Mr. Harvey, “Do you think it might rain soon?”

  “Doesn’t look too promising for tonight,” Mr. Harvey said as he looked up at the clear sky. “But it will rain. It always has. The Lord takes care of us.”

  When Mr. Harvey said it, Jocie could almost smell the rain in the air even though there wasn’t a sign of a cloud in the sky. So tonight she’d let Mr. Harvey handle the rain getting there as she stared up at the star over her head and wished Tabitha’s baby would be healthy.

  “Do you think it’s wrong to wish on stars?” she said.

  Mr. Harvey smiled at her. “No, I don’t. I’ve been wishing on stars all my life, and the Lord’s been turning those wishes into blessings.”

  “Thanks for letting me come out here with you.”

  “Glad to have the company, Jocie girl.”

  Dusk was falling and more stars began making their appearance in the sky. As they came over the hill, they could see the lights of cars and trucks passing out on the road beyond the house.

  “Looks like an awful lot of traffic out on the road tonight,” Mr. Harvey said. “Hope nothing’s wrong somewhere in the neighborhood.”

  40

  Cassidy woke up with a start and sat up in bed. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might jump out of her chest. At first she didn’t know what had made her wake up. All she could hear was the fan whirring in her window. Cassidy drew in a deep breath and looked across the room at Eli and Elise in their cribs to see if one of them had been what had wakened her. In the dim light drifting in the top of the window she could see the twins both sprawled on their backs, breathing slow and easy in their sleep. They hardly ever woke her up anyway. Cassidy was used to the rattle of their cribs when they turned over or the noises they made when they had a bad dream or something.

  Maybe that was what it was. What had made her wake up. The bad dream. She’d been having it a lot ever since her mama had to buy a soft drink last week in town. But if the dog growling at her had jerked her out of sleep, she couldn’t remember it, and most of the time its big pointed teeth were there in the dark in front of her nose even after she opened her eyes. She didn’t yell much anymore when it happened, because her mama and daddy got upset if she said anything about the dog.

  Besides, nobody got much sleep if she hollered and woke up the babies. And then everybody was upset. Her mama told her just to count to a hundred when she had the bad dream and it would go away. Most of the time it did. Other times she had to yank the cover up over her head even if it was so hot under there she could barely breathe. But she stayed there, sweating and taking quiet little breaths, until the dog would finally give up on her coming out and run away to growl at somebody else.

  She started to count in a whisper that not even Eli or Elise would be able to hear over the sound of the fan. “One, two, three, four, five . . .” But it wasn’t the dog dream. It was something else. Something outside. She stopped counting and got out of bed. She pushed a chair over to the window and stood on it to peer out the window over top of the fan.

  A truck was coming up their lane, and then another one. But it was funny. It was dark, but they didn’t have their lights on. The wheels on the rocks her daddy had put on the lane to their house last month sounded like the dog growling in her ears. And then more dogs were growling.

  Cassidy got down off the chair. She looked at her bed and thought about getting under the covers, but instead she went out to the living room. It was quiet in the house. All the growling was outside. Cassidy peeked out the front window. Now there were five trucks. All trucks, no cars. Two of the trucks drove on past the house toward the field where their apple trees were growing into an orchard. Her daddy’s orchard of hope.

  One of the trucks stopped in front of their yard gate. The next truck didn’t stop, just drove right over their fence and the lilac bushes her mama had gotten from Miss Sally. That wasn’t right. Cassidy wanted to go back into the cave in her mind and just curl up there for a while, but somebody had to tell her daddy. Somebody had to come out and do something about her mama’s lilac bushes. They’d been carrying out the rinse water from their laundry to water them, and her mama talked about the pretty purple blooms that would be on them next year and how good they’d smell. They hadn’t had any lilac bushes in Chicago.

  Somebody got out of one of the trucks. Somebody—or something. It didn’t have a face. Only something like a pointy white pillowcase with holes for eyes. White floated around the rest of the thing the way it did around ghosts on the cartoon shows. But under the white, down on the ground, were boots. Cassidy stared at the boots and knew it was one of those men her mama and daddy had talked about after she and her mama had gone to town shoe shopping. Her daddy had called them cowards hiding under sheets, and her mama had frowned and said it was like the men thought the Lord couldn’t see under their hoods. That they could do whatever they wanted as long as nobody saw their faces. But of course the Lord could see through anything.

  Other ghost men came up behind the first one, and Cassidy raced toward her parents’ bedroom.

  “Daddy,” she whispered as loud as she could. Fans were running in their room too, so she was almost to the bed before her daddy heard her. “Daddy!”

  He sat up but didn’t reach for the light. “What’s the matter, Cassidy?”

  “The ghost men are here. The ones you’ve been talking about,” Cassidy said. “The ones that think the Lord can’t see them when they do bad things.”

  She could tell her daddy and mama were looking at each other. They were afraid. The same as she was. The opening to the cave was still there in her mind. She could crawl inside and nobody could reach her. But what if they came after her? What if they reached their white arms in and pulled her out and fed her to their dogs? She hadn’t seen any dogs, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “Shh, baby, it’ll be okay,” her daddy said. “You stay here with your mama. I’ll take care of everything.” He was on his feet with his pants on already.

  Her mama reached over and pulled Cassidy tight against her a few seconds before she got out of the bed and began getting dressed. “How many?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cassidy said. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was going to have to go into the cave. It was the only safe place. But she didn’t want to leave her mama behind. And she knew her mama wouldn’t go in the cave with her. “I saw five trucks. Some went down in the field. One ran over your lilac bushes, Mama.”

  Her mama stopped in the middle of putting on her shoes. “Over the fence?” She didn’t wait for Cassidy to answer her. She looked at Cassidy’s daddy and said, “Maybe we should call the sheriff.”

  “As if that would do any good,” her daddy muttered.

  “Brother David said it would. He said the sheriff wouldn’t be part of any of this.”

  “About the only thing we can be sure of, Myra, is that your Brother David isn’t out there under any of those sheets.”

  Then Noah was at the bedroom door. “We can’t call anybody. The phone’s dead.”

  Again Cassidy felt the fear in the room like a live thing trying to eat them. She inched into the entrance to her cave. She could still hear her mama and daddy and Noah, but it was like she sometimes heard her mama and daddy’s voices at night through the walls. Muffled and soft. A private sound.

  “I love you, Myra, more than life itself,” her daddy was saying.

  “Don’t go out ther
e, Alex. Just stay in here and they’ll go away.”

  “You know they won’t.”

  Her mama was almost crying. “You can’t fight them, Alex.”

  Cassidy inched farther into her cave. Even Noah didn’t come after her.

  “I’m not fighting anybody. I’m just going out there to see what they want.”

  “You know what they want.”

  “This is our land. They have no right to be here.” For a second her daddy’s voice was louder. Then it was softer again. “It’ll be all right, Myra. You take care of Cassidy and the twins and talk to the Lord for us. Isn’t your Lord supposed to take care of us?”

  “I am praying, Alex. Oh, dear Lord, sweet Jesus, I am praying,” Cassidy’s mama said.

  Noah went with her daddy. Cassidy could see him from where she’d inched inside the cave. He didn’t tell her to come out the way he usually did. So maybe it was okay for her to be there. But then her mama was peering back at her, reaching for her.

  Her mama didn’t yell like Noah always did. Her voice was soft, the way it was when she sang to Eli and Elise when she put them to bed, but it was very close. Cassidy could feel her mama’s breath on her ear. “Cassidy, darling, you have to stay here with me now. I might need you to help me with Eli and Elise. You’ll have to go play with your dragons another time. Not now.”

  Cassidy didn’t know why her mama said that about the dragons. There weren’t any dragons in her cave. But it might be nice if there were. Then Cassidy could get on one of the dragons and ride it out and let it breathe fire on the ghost men outside.

  “Cassidy.” Her mama’s voice got a little louder as she lifted up Cassidy’s chin with her hand. “Do what I say. Right now! I need you paying attention.”

  Cassidy always minded her mama. She reached a hand out of her cave and touched her mama’s hand. Her mama gripped her hand so tightly that it hurt.

  “I’m afraid, Mama,” she said.

  “I know, sugar. You just think on how much the Lord surely loves us and keep helping your mama pray that he will watch over us.” Her mama held her hand even tighter for a moment before she said, “Now we’re going back to your room to see about our babies.”

  Cassidy’s mama opened the bedroom door. The trucks outside must have turned on their headlights, and now bright beams of light snaked in through the windows and bounced off the mirror on the wall behind the couch. Men were yelling outside, but Cassidy couldn’t hear her daddy or Noah saying anything.

  Her mama didn’t go through the door. Instead she pushed it back shut against the light and got down on her knees beside Cassidy. “We’re going to play a game. We’re going to play hide-and-seek with those lights out in the living room and crawl under them to your room. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Cassidy said. “But are those lights trying to find us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not, but we can play anyway,” her mama said as she got down on her hands and knees and opened the bedroom door again. “Follow me.”

  It was funny crawling after her mama. Cassidy sometimes played crawling games with Eli and Elise, but her mama never did. Her mama was always tall and in control. But of course, Cassidy knew her mama wasn’t playing a game now. She just didn’t want the ghost men to see them.

  They were almost to Cassidy’s bedroom door when there was a loud bang outside. Her mama stopped crawling and said, “Oh dear God, have mercy on these your children. Please, not guns.”

  Eli began whimpering in their bedroom. Elise would be crying too in a minute. She always woke up and cried when Eli did. But Cassidy’s mama acted as if she didn’t hear Eli. She stayed down on her hands and knees and crept over to the window off the porch where the least light was coming in. Cassidy didn’t hesitate. She crawled after her. When her mama peeked out the window, so did Cassidy.

  Back in the bedroom, Eli was crying a little louder and now Elise was joining in. In a few more minutes both of them would be standing up, shaking the sides of their cribs and screaming. But Cassidy’s mama didn’t even look over her shoulder and call out a soft word of promise to the twins.

  Her mama was so stiff beside her that for a moment Cassidy thought she must have gone off into her own cave. But then Cassidy’s daddy was talking out on the porch, and her mama let out her breath.

  “This is my property. You have no right to be here,” Cassidy’s daddy was saying. His voice was strong and steady. And he looked strong, standing there on the porch staring out at the ghost men. Noah stood behind him, in his shadow.

  The men out in the yard made a half circle around the porch. Cassidy started counting, but when she got to seven and thought that was all of them, more stepped out of darkness beside the trucks up into the light. They carried big flashlights that they pointed at her daddy. He had to hold his arm up above his eyes to keep the lights from blinding him.

  The man standing in the middle, right on the rock path that led up to the steps of their porch, answered her daddy. “We’ve come to tell you that you are the one who has no right to be here.”

  “This is my land,” Cassidy’s daddy repeated, his voice still strong and a little louder than it had been.

  The man on the rock path paid no attention to what her daddy said. “Sell your land back to the one you bought it from. That way no one will have to get hurt.”

  “He wouldn’t buy it,” Cassidy’s daddy said.

  “We’ll convince him. We have many convincing ways.” The rest of the men took a step closer to the porch as the man in the middle spoke. “Many ways. Ways you won’t want to know about.”

  “You’re trespassing. Now get off my land,” Cassidy’s daddy said.

  “We’ll leave. This time. But remember we can come back and next time we might not be so polite.” The man paused a moment before he went on. “We hear you have a beautiful wife.”

  Beside Cassidy, her mama went stiff again.

  “You leave my family alone.” Cassidy’s daddy sounded mad now. He stepped toward the edge of the porch. Noah grabbed his arm.

  Cassidy’s mama began whispering, “Dear God, put your hand between him and the evil out there. Oh, dear Lord, I beg you.”

  The white ghost hoods shook as the men in the yard began making a horrible sound like the way the rocks screeched when the shovel scraped against them in the holes Cassidy’s daddy and Noah dug for the trees. Back in the bedroom, Eli and Elise were crying louder and yelling for their mama in between sobs.

  “A man should take care of his family,” the white ghost man said. “Take them back to where you came from. We don’t want your kind here. You’ve been warned. Next time there won’t be any talking.”

  The men flicked off their flashlights and began melting back into the darkness beside their trucks. Truck doors opened and shut. When they were all gone except the man on the path, that man said, “One last thing. You should have listened when the people around here told you trees wouldn’t grow in this ground. At least not nigger trees.” Then he too disappeared into the darkness.

  Cassidy’s mama waited until the trucks backed up over her flower beds again and went through the fence back to the road before she went to get the twins. She picked Elise up and hugged her before she handed her to Cassidy and went to get Eli. Cassidy stayed right beside her mama, moving when she did, stopping when she did. She smelled her mama’s perfume and felt the moisture of perspiration on the skin of her arm. Cassidy held Elise and told her to stop crying, but she kept hold of her mama too. If she didn’t do that, she might just fall into a deep black hole and never come out. She glanced around in her mind for the opening to her safe cave, but she couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter. Her mama would never let her take Elise in the cave with her.

  When her daddy and Noah came in off the porch after even the sound of the trucks had disappeared into the night, Cassidy’s mama hugged her daddy so tight that Eli, who was mashed between them, started crying again. Then they all huddled together, and her mama said they should say a thanksgiving prayer. />
  “And why’s that?” Cassidy’s daddy said as he pulled away from Cassidy’s mama. “What’s there to be thankful about in all this?”

  “We’re all here together. The Lord took care of us. He kept us safe in his hands.”

  “If we’re in his hands, he must be clenching his fists, mashing the very juice of life out of us.”

  “Alex! Stop that kind of talk.”

  “You know they tore up our trees.” His voice sounded funny, not like her daddy at all.

  Cassidy’s mama was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “Maybe we should go look.”

  And so they went together down to the orchard field. All of them. Her daddy led the way, walking a few steps in front of Noah, who put Eli up on his shoulders. Eli didn’t pay the first bit of attention to how quiet the rest of them were and whooped with delight to be walking outside in the moonlight. Cassidy’s mama carried Elise, who laid her head down on her mama’s shoulder and fell back to sleep. Cassidy matched her steps to her mama’s and kept her hand where it brushed her mama’s arm.

  She’d slipped on her shoes, but she was still in her nightgown that used to be blue but now was faded out to almost white. She wondered if she would look like a cartoon ghost to anybody watching. Her arms and face would disappear in the dark of the night, and it would look like just a white dress walking along. A ghost girl like the ghost men.

  She turned her mind away from that thought. She didn’t want to think about the ghost men. But when they got down to the orchard field, it was hard to keep from it. The trees were no longer standing up with their little leaves reaching for the sky. They were mashed and broken.

  Her daddy stood at the gate into the field for a long moment, as if he could keep it from being true by not walking into the orchard. His orchard of hope. Their orchard of hope.

  Finally he said, “They drove the trucks over them. Didn’t even have enough honor about them to pull them up. Just let their trucks do their dirty work for them.”

  He went into the field and knelt down by one of the broken trees. Cassidy remembered that one. It had been the biggest tree, the one her daddy always gave two dips of water because it was going to be the tree leader to show the other trees how to grow and make apples. Tears rolled down Cassidy’s cheeks. She’d helped her daddy water these trees and wrap their trunks to keep the rabbits from eating them. She’d walked through them, imagining them tall over her head loaded with apples. And now they would never grow.