A Hopeful Heart and A Home, A Heart, A Husband

by Lois Richer

  “Maybe if you pitched in,” he muttered, “things would get done a little faster around here.”

  She threw him a frosty look and kept moving, swallowing the short succinct phrases that would have explained exactly how long she had pitched in and how tired she was of being the one responsible for everyone and everything.

  Maggie showered and dressed while her mind roved over the newcomer once more. Where had he come from? she asked herself again. No farmhand she had ever known wore snakeskin boots. And his hands were clean and well cared for, as if he’d had more than one manicure in his lifetime.

  Hours later Maggie had more questions than answers about one Grady O’Toole. She snuck a look over her shoulder, watching as he patiently showed another knot to Katy. He was good with kids, that’s for sure!

  And not bad with barns, either. The horses had been curried as if by a professional, and their stables were fresh and clean. He’d repaired two fence posts and moved some bales into the barn. Maggie had also noticed the filled water troughs for the chickens and seed scattered in their yard.

  Katy’s high-pitched giggles forced Maggie’s stare away from Grady and toward the front of the house where Kayleen sat sipping ice tea in the shade. Her mother had a smug look of satisfaction on her face that sent prickles of worry up Maggie’s backbone.

  “Bother,” she muttered, rubbing her grazed knuckles as she tossed the wrench to the ground where it couldn’t do any more damage. “Why won’t the thing start?”

  “Problems?”

  She jumped, banging her head on the metal hood as she whirled around to glare at Grady, who stood grinning behind her.

  “I wish you wouldn’t creep up behind people,” she gritted, sucking on her throbbing, grease-stained knuckle. “And yes, you could say there’s trouble. I need to finish seeding and this stupid tractor refuses to move.”

  “Let me look,” he said, smiling, edging her aside.

  “Why?” Maggie demanded. “Do you know something about farm machinery that I don’t?”

  He grinned that breathtaking smile that made her knees weak. “Oh, is that what this is? Farm machinery.” He flicked a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I thought it was something off the ark. Like maybe an ossified woolly mammoth.” He took another look at the decrepit piece of metal. “Or maybe a dinosaur.”

  Maggie slapped her hands on her hips, rapidly losing patience with his amused derision. “Which only goes to prove you know nothing, absolutely nothing about farming,” she grated. “It isn’t that old.”

  “Listen, lady—” he grinned, bending to pick up the wrench “—I grew up on a farm and I’ve fixed more machinery than you’ve ever seen. And nothing—” his brown eyes flicked derisively over the tractor “—nothing was ever this antiquated.”

  “Well, it’s all I can afford right now,” she told him defensively, hunching down on the grass to wait as he tinkered. “New tractors are expensive. They don’t grow on trees.”

  “There are all kinds of programs available for farming operations to purchase equipment,” Grady informed her softly. He half turned to peer down at her quizzically. “Why don’t you apply for one?”

  Maggie snorted. Ha! A lot he knew. “Don’t think I haven’t,” she muttered, thumping her sneaker against the ground with force. “I’ve filled out more forms than I ever want to see again in this lifetime. Even the tax department doesn’t have that much information on this place.”

  “And?” He crooked one eyebrow at her. “Where’s the new tractor?”

  She hung her head, resting it on her knees as the sun beamed down on them. Maggie hated telling him. Hated saying the words that denigrated her and her family, especially after she’d spent the last five years slaving over this farm.

  “We’re too debt heavy,” she murmured. “I’m carrying some pretty big loans already.”

  She didn’t mention that most of those loans stemmed from her husband’s last purchase before his death. If they had a good year, Roger spent every dime. And the last dime he’d spent had been a doozy. All to acquire a piece of land that she didn’t want, couldn’t sell and hadn’t the resources to farm. Inevitably she had ended up digging in deeper and deeper to cover more and more debts.

  “If you factor in the transient nature of my staff and the accidents they’ve had around here lately…” She tilted her mouth down in wry self-mocking. “Well, I suppose no one in their right mind would lend money to this operation. I’m just not a very good risk.”

  “But surely your parents…”

  “They help as much as they can,” she told him quietly. “But my dad had triple bypass surgery in February. He’s still recovering and in no condition to come back to the farm. Even if the doctors would okay it. Which they won’t.” She shrugged, glaring at him angrily. “Anyway, this is my job and my problem—not theirs.”

  He studied her intensely for several long, drawn-out moments before turning away. “We’ll just have to pray that this thing works then,” he murmured.

  “It needs more than prayer,” she told him.

  “There is nothing more than prayer,” he answered quietly, and then buried himself under the hood.

  Maggie thought about that bit of theological wisdom while Grady worked silently for the next few minutes, grunting as he twisted the wrench several more turns. His hands flew over the engine, touching this and tapping that until everything seemed to meet his approval.

  “You broke off some wires,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “I think I’ve got it. At least for now. Go ahead and try.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows, well aware that no two-minute diddling with this engine was going to start it. Shaking her head, she jumped up into the seat anyway and turned the ignition. To her surprise, it coughed wildly for a moment and then caught, sputtering away. Loudly, it was true. But still running.

  “I don’t believe it.” She exhaled, swiping a hand across her cheek to push away the strand of hair that clung. “Bessie’s almost purring.”

  “’You will pray to Him and He will hear you,’” Grady quoted, winking. “You just need a little faith, Mrs. McCarthy.”

  “Faith. Right.” Maggie didn’t want to think about faith right now. Faith was the evidence of things hoped for. She wanted to see a little evidence that her faith was working! “Yes, well,” she mumbled as she put the machinery into gear and eased up on the clutch, checking once over her shoulder to make sure the seeder was following properly behind, “I’ll remember that. You can tackle some of the odd jobs around here. I’m going to do some more seeding,” she called. “See you later.”

  “Yeah, later,” Grady muttered, watching as she bounced along in the old metal seat. He rubbed his hands on the oily rag with little success. “Bessie? Whoever would call that hunk of junk a pet name?”

  “My daughter would,” Kayleen answered, chuckling behind him. He turned to find those intense blue eyes fixed on him. “Maggie is usually able to find joy in the smallest thing. Which is good, I suppose, given that she hasn’t had much happiness lately.” Her eyes brightened. “I’m just so thankful that you came along, Grady. You picked the best possible time.”

  “I didn’t exactly plan to come out here,” Grady muttered, staring down at the tiny woman.

  “Of course you didn’t.” She chuckled again, wrapping her arm in his and leading him toward the house. “But God works in mysterious ways, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I guess He does,” Grady agreed dazedly, wondering if he should blame God for his stupid decision to hang around this run-down, dilapidated place.

  “Now, you’ve just time for a cup of coffee and some of my fresh blueberry pie before you’ll need to gas up the truck and drive it out to the field,” Kayleen told him briskly. “Maggie will need more seed by then. Nobody’s idle when it’s seeding time. Come and sit down, boy.”

  Grady sat, although he couldn’t remember the last time someone had called him “boy”. Not that it mattered; he rather liked it. Made him feel
as if he belonged. He glanced around, wondering suddenly what the twins were up to.

  Keeley was busy vacuuming; he could see her pushing the machine back and forth across the worn living room carpet. But Katy wasn’t anywhere nearby.

  “You’ll be needing to take the old three-quarter-ton out to Maggie,” Mrs. Davis informed him, one finger tapping against her chin as she considered that. “It’s already loaded, I think. Probably yesterday. Katy’ll go with you and show the way. I’ll send a bite along for Maggie. And her sun hat.” She shook her now-silver head. “She won’t stop till the field’s done. Not if she can help it. And she’ll be burned to a crisp by noon. She has the fairest skin of all my children.”

  Grady politely inquired after the rest of the family and learned that the Davis family had four daughters. The rest seemed to have left home for high-powered careers well away from the bucolic life of the farm.

  “Maggie never went to college. She married Roger two days after she graduated from high school. And when Roger wanted to farm, Dad and I decided it was time to let the younguns take over. They got a loan and bought us out and we moved to town. Roger’s parents died three years ago. Car accident.”

  “What happened to Roger?” Grady mumbled, his mouth full of pie.

  “He’s gone now.”

  That was the second time someone had spoken of Mr. McCarthy as missing, Grady noted. Curiosity tweaked his tongue.

  “Gone where?” His eyes widened. “Do you mean he ran off and left a woman with two daughters to run the place?”

  “Didn’t exactly run off.” Kayleen smiled sadly. “He died. Five years ago. Heart attack.” She carefully pleated the red-checked cotton of her skirt with fingers that were rough and worn from hard work.

  “Sorry.” Grady murmured the word perfunctorily as the pieces of the story fell into place.

  “Yes, it was a sorry situation. Particularly when Maggie found out he’d cashed in his life-insurance policy. There was no money. Nothing. She scraped herself up and moved on, just as we knew she would.” Kayleen’s eyes were filled with tears. “She hugged and kissed her babies and then got on with her life, but it’s been rough.”

  “But what did he do with the money?” Grady asked softly as he patted her thin shoulder awkwardly. “Whatever he bought, couldn’t she return it?”

  Kayleen jumped to her feet and dashed the tears from her eyes, shaking her head while her eyes avoided his. “Here I am gabbing, and Maggie is probably waiting for you to bring some more seed. She’d be furious if she knew I’d told you all this. She likes to keep her affairs private.” Kayleen’s voice dropped to a whisper Grady could barely hear. “Only, lately, I think it’s gotten to be just a little too much. She’s young and pretty and this place is wearing her into the ground. She’s almost desperate to get away. Oh, I’m so afraid she’ll make another mistake.”

  The tiny woman was lost in her private thoughts, her mind miles away, and Grady left the kitchen without speaking. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know about Maggie McCarthy’s personal life; he did. But some things were too private to share with another. If anyone could understand that, it was Grady.

  He spent the next thirty minutes finding the truck and making sure it was loaded and ready to go. If he was lucky, the clutch would hold until he got it back here.

  “Katy! Come and help me out.” He stood in the yard and bellowed for all he was worth. A few seconds later the little girl appeared in the door of the barn.

  “Come on,” Grady called out. “You’re going to show me the way to the field your mother’s working in.”

  Katy dusted off her hands agreeably and climbed in to the rickety old truck. “What’s she seeding?” Katy asked, her chin jutting out as she studied him.

  “Canola. At least, I think it is.” When he’d checked inside the seeder earlier today, Grady had recognized the tiny black seeds that were crushed to make margarine and oil. The same stuff was in the back of this truck. “Ready?”

  “Uh-huh.” Katy peered out the window like a wise little man until they came to the first corner. “Turn right here. We go about a mile west.”

  Grady nodded, shifting the noisy gear into third as they bounced along the rutted track. “What were you doing in the barn?” he asked, risking a look away from the road to her shining face.

  “Cleaning the sheep’s pen. I think the babies are coming pretty soon. The mother is huge. Her name is Bettina.” She grinned happily, one arm wrapped around her middle. “I love animals. You can always ask them all the questions you want and they don’t care. Not like adults.”

  Grady smiled at the sourness she inflected on the word adults. “What do you want to ask adults?” He kept his eyes on the road ahead and let her think it over.

  “Tons of stuff. Like, do viruses get sick?” She twisted her fingers together and stared at the configuration. “And why is it called a paramecium if there’s only a single organism? It shouldn’t be a pair of anything.”

  “Okay.” Grady nodded, hiding his smile. “That’s logical, I suppose. What else?”

  “Well, I was wondering…” Katy murmured, frowning as she tilted her mussed blond head upward. “If you turn the monitor off on the computer, does the screen saver still work?”

  Grady couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, Katy. I don’t know. But I think so. It’s a program built into the computer that tells it if the keyboard has been inactive for a certain time. If it has, it signals the screen saver to come on. Even if you turned it off, the keyboard would still be inactive, so it should still work.” Grady puffed up his shoulders, proud of his response. “I think,” he muttered after several minutes of intense scrutiny from those deep blue eyes.

  “I have so many questions.” Katy sighed. “Keeley says I drive everyone crazy with them and Mom calls me ‘Twenty Questions’ when I ask too many. But sometimes I just hafta know. Ya know?” She peered up at him questioningly.

  “Well, why don’t you ask your mom? I’m sure she could help.” Grady decided the second thing he’d repair on this truck would be the shocks, if vehicles had shocks back when they made this wreck. His backside ached something furious.

  “Mom’s usually too tired when she gets done working on the farm. Once she fell asleep when I was reading to her about El Salvador.” Katy grinned, her happy state restored once more.

  “That was my social project at school,” she told him seriously, her eyes glittering with excitement. Grady watched the way her head tipped back proudly. “I got an A.”

  “Wow!” He gave her a thumbs-up with a grin. “A’s are pretty cool. I don’t know anything about your dad, and not much about El Salvador, either, but you can still talk to me.” In fact, Grady told himself, he enjoyed his discussions with the girls very much. They were articulate and very well informed, but like all kids, they had boundless curiosity.

  “My dad’s been gone for a while. I don’t remember him very well, but I bet he loved us.” Katy’s voice was tiny, her face begging him for reassurance.

  “Of course he loved you,” Grady replied, wondering why he’d started this. “Fathers are like our Heavenly Father. They always love their daughters. That’s because girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.”

  Katy stuck out her tongue. “Yuck! That’s Keeley. I’d much rather be made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” she told him. “That’s more interesting. And babies. I like to learn about babies of all kinds. Don’t you? Hey, we’re going in the ditch!”

  Grady straightened the wheel with difficulty as he tried to quiet his ragged breathing and pounding heart.

  “Er, where do you learn about babies, Katy?” Grady asked the question, thinking of Keeley’s hours on the computer and the various information that was available on the Internet.

  “In the barn, of course.” She sounded disgusted. “You can’t believe the storks bring babies if you live on a farm. Besides, we don’t have any storks in Alberta! I’ve already seen two calves and eigh
t kittens being born this year. And Nettie—that’s Keeley’s horse—is going to have a foal pretty soon.” She peered up at him in concern. “You see, what happens is…”

  “Uh, Katy, we’re here.” Grady heaved a sigh of relief, praying that she’d abandon the topic now.

  His relief was short-lived as the little girl bounded from the truck and raced over to her mother who sat in the tall grass at the edge of the field, a long green stem between her teeth.

  “About time you got here,” Maggie muttered, getting up to dust off her jeans. “I called Mom on the radio ten minutes ago. I want to get back to work.”

  Grady saw the tiredness etch her pretty face and tugged out Kayleen’s care package. “Here. This is lunch from your mom. Why don’t you relax with it and your coffee while I fill the seeder?” When she would have objected, he held up one hand. “I’ve done it before. Don’t worry.”

  “Mom, Grady and I were talking about where babies come from.”

  Grady heard a startled cough from Maggie interrupt Katy’s high-pitched voice. He wheeled to find Maggie’s bright eyes staring right at him. He could feel the heat rising to his cheeks and would have looked away but she wouldn’t release his gaze.

  “You talked about what?” Maggie asked, her voice husky from the coughing. She took another sip of the steaming coffee.

  “Babies. I ‘splained it all to him,” Katy told her mother.

  “I see,” she murmured. As he watched, Grady saw a wicked gleam of teasing fill her eyes. “Didn’t he know about babies, then?”

  “Nope.” Katy fiddled with her mother’s hair for a moment. “Why don’t you have more babies, Mom?” Katy stopped suddenly, her eyes narrowing speculatively. “Unless you’re too old?” she quizzed.

  “Katy,” her mother protested, face bright with color.

  Maggie continued in a soft tone. “Honey, I have two daughters and I’m very happy with them. If that’s all God gives me, then I’m thankful.” She hugged her daughter tightly, brushed a kiss against the dirt-smudged cheek.