“I sure don’t want to have to rely on the government,” George said, clearly uncomfortable with the idea that he hadn’t been able to provide himself.
“I think they’re doing something in Mankato,” Lolly said, “but that’s probably too far away. There’s no way to live here in Valley Junction and work in Mankato. And in the winter—” She shuddered. “That would be a terrible drive to have to make every day.”
“The bad state the economy is in has got to end, I’m sure of that,” George said. “I’d hoped we could wait it out by being prudent with what we had, but we ran out of steam before it did.”
“The drought hasn’t helped a thing, either.” Lolly thought of the carrots that she’d dug up last night. The downpour hadn’t done much to help the shriveled roots that looked more like tiny gnarled orange fingers than like the plump carrots they should have been.
“But it’s got to break. I really think that it’ll end soon.” Colin’s voice rang out confidently in the small room. “God won’t let this go on forever.”
Bud shook his head. “I don’t know. I know it’s not true, but doesn’t it sometimes seem like God has forgotten us? That maybe there’s a little stretch of the U.S.A. that He’s missed? A place called Minnesota?”
“It’s everywhere,” George said gloomily. “Not just here.”
She’d never heard them talk like this before, and her soul stung with their pain.
It did seem like they’d been forgotten, but she’d never gotten to the stage they were at, where they were actually doubting God.
“God is with us,” she said gently. “He is. He was with us before, through those terrible days five years ago, when we thought the world was over.”
“We were right, apparently,” Bud muttered.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” she asked him, covering his hand with hers. She knew he didn’t think it was true. This was just Bud’s way, to blurt out whatever crossed his mind.
“Nah, I guess not,” he admitted. “But you’ve got to admit that God sure does like to test us a lot. And I don’t know why.”
“That’s what faith is all about,” Lolly said. “It’s being sure that even if we don’t understand why things are happening the way they do, that we know there’s a purpose, a goal. God understands suffering. We just have to trust that this is going to work out. We need faith.”
“Oh, I guess I’ve got faith, all right,” Bud said. “I do know that there’s more to our lives than this particular moment, and in twenty or forty or fifty years, I’ll probably look back on this and say, ‘My, but didn’t we have fun.’ Still, I’ll tell you what, if God would like to put a gold mine in our backyard today, I’d be fine with that!”
They all laughed at Bud’s honesty.
“I suppose there’s always the chance that could happen,” Colin said, “but I kind of think we shouldn’t wait for it. Barring a gold mine under the chicken coop, the government will help out more. It has to. There’s too much at stake.” Bruno sat up, his tail thumping in anticipation. “S-t-a-k-e, you goofy dog, not s-t-e-a-k.”
“Like we’ve seen s-t-e-a-k around here lately,” Bud said morosely.
“The time will come when you will eat steak, and maybe you won’t have diamond-encrusted belts and shirts made of silk, but you’ll be fine. I just know you will.”
George sighed. “I’m glad you can be that certain, and while I do trust the Lord, I’m still going to want to see a real dollar now and then.”
Lolly’s stomach twisted. This wasn’t just a theoretical dis-cussion about the effects of this economic depression. This was real life, her life.
They were going to lose the farm, the place that had been their home for their entire lives, the fields that their parents had nurtured and cared for, the house that her father—and mother—had built with their own hands, knowing that a family not only needed each other but something to call their own. They’d chosen land.
“Mom and Dad bought this land and built the old house and then this house themselves,” she said softly. “Mom had been saving her sewing money in a baking soda box in her stockings drawer. Remember how she told the story? Then one day she didn’t get the drawer all the way shut, and their cat pulled the drawer out, found the box and chewed on it. She laughed and said that was one time when she was lucky that she didn’t get paid in paper money. The cat couldn’t hurt the coins, just the box.”
George picked up the story. “Dad had tucked away his ‘summer money’—the extra that he got from clearing out the gophers on the neighbor’s farm. After they knew they were going to get married, they each lived at home and worked, Mom as a teacher and Dad as a clerk at a grocery store, and they saved every penny. They had already chosen this piece of land and drawn up the plans for the house, down to what doorknobs they wanted. That’s what they saved for.”
“Mom told me that they added that to the money they got from their wedding. They were counting every penny.” Bud chuckled. “She said she was horribly disappointed when the banker and his wife gave them the crystal vase. They were so focused on saving money for a home that she didn’t realize how expensive that vase was.”
“That’s the vase,” Lolly said, pointing it out on the corner shelf. “How it’s made it through three children and a rambunctious dog or two without even a chip in it is amazing.”
“This is the only way we were allowed to look at it.” Bud stood up and walked over to the shelf. He put his hands behind his back and laced his fingers together, and Lolly laughed at the memory.
“Our hands had to be locked together behind us,” she said. “That way, she told us, they couldn’t get in trouble. She used to say, ‘One hand watches the other,’ which made Dad laugh every time. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized she was making a play on words for ‘One hand washes the other.’ ”
“I still don’t get it,” Bud said as he walked back to his chair.
Colin grinned at Lolly as her brother continued, “Well, do you? One hand does wash the other.” He shrugged his shoulders in defeat. “So why do people keep saying it?”
“It means that if you do something nice for me, I will probably do something nice for you,” George said. “It’s not about washing your hands.”
“Then why—oh, never mind.” Bud reached down and took a soggy piece of brown cloth out of Bruno’s mouth. “Does anyone know what this used to be?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s my work glove,” Colin said, waving away the wet scrap of fabric that Bud offered him. “No thanks. Bruno can have it. It doesn’t seem to have all the fingers on it anymore, so I can’t think it’s worth saving.”
Lolly stood up and directed Bruno to the door. “Out. Now.”
“Come on, Lolly,” Bud said. “He wasn’t doing anything.”
“Right. Not much. Just drooling on the floor and leaving shreds of Colin’s glove under the table.” She scowled at her brother.
“So?”
“So do you think he’s going to pick the pieces up?”
“Just leave them there. He’ll eat them sooner or later,” Bud answered cheerfully. “Or you can grind them up and use them in our meat loaf.”
Meat loaf. The world was falling apart and her brother was talking about work gloves and meat loaf!
❧
Colin walked down to the river. The recent rain seemed to have revitalized the mosquitoes, and he swatted them away impatiently.
George’s news put an entirely different face on his situation. The mail-order groom fiasco was reduced to just that—a fiasco. They could live through that. This was more important.
A sense of urgency pounded through him, even if the Prescott family seemed to be resigned to the loss. There had to be some way to save this farm. There was a family heritage on the line. He couldn’t let it go without doing something.
The family needed some
way of sustaining itself until the economy righted itself. It might be a year. It might be ten.
What could he do to help them? He had money back in New York. Or at least he might have. When he’d left in June, he hadn’t exactly taken care of all the loose ends that would result from his sudden departure. No, he’d just assumed someone would clean up after him. He shook his head as he thought back to the life he had led.
But the point was that he had been financially secure. He had money. The problem was how to get it to them. He knew they wouldn’t accept it from him, even as a loan, and certainly not as a gift.
No, it had to be more than that.
He sat on the pier, and immediately the swarm of mosquitoes surrounded his head and arms. God must have had something in mind for them, but right now Colin couldn’t see the purpose. They were like the depression and the drought. Somehow they fit into God’s grand plan, but just how, he couldn’t see.
One thing was becoming very clear. He couldn’t stay here. Every bit of food he ate and every drop of water he used in washing hastened the demise of their home. He had to leave, and quickly.
Unless he could help them.
He weighed his options, such as they were, and only one option seemed possible.
If he was going to find a way to help them, he couldn’t do it here. Perhaps if he went back to New York, he might be able to think of something.
Plus there was the very real fact that his separation from Lolly might make him work even that much harder to resolve the problem.
The mosquitoes were relentless. They bit through his clothes, attacked his eyelids, and crawled along his ears.
“This might help,” Lolly said as she sat down beside him. “It’s a mixture I make up, but mainly it’s just citronella oil. We use it when the mosquitoes are bad, like they are now.”
She opened a small bottle and poured some out in her hand. With practiced moves, she wiped it over his face and the back of his neck, and then his hands. “Run your hands over your trousers and ankles, too,” she advised.
Almost instantly the pesky insects dispersed. “Thanks,” he said, as she recapped the bottle and put it back into her pocket. “They were about to send me back to the house. I don’t think I could have borne being out here with them much longer.”
Lolly’s legs dangled over the edge of the pier, and she swung them back and forth. “They can be insistent, that’s for sure.”
“That’s true.”
The sun was high in the sky, baking off the last remnants of the rain from the day before. Only along the water’s edge, where the sun hadn’t penetrated entirely through the woods, had he been able to smell the humid reminder of the shower.
“It’s very pretty here,” he said, watching the river’s surface reflect the bright daylight in a mottled display of gold and bronze and taupe.
“I love September trees, but they’re a bit sad, you know.”
“September trees are sad?” He glanced at her, but she was smiling faintly at the opposite shoreline.
“Of course. This is the end of summer, the last stretch of time when they know they’ll have their leaves. Come October, the leaves will begin to fall, not a lot at first, but it’ll start.” She stopped suddenly, and he thought he knew why.
“Are you thinking about this October?” he asked.
She nodded, and he saw a tear slide down her cheek. “I know what I have to do, except I don’t know how to do it. Everything in my life is changing. I don’t even know if we’ll stay here in Valley Junction.”
“Will you all stay together?” he asked, putting his hand over hers.
“I don’t know. George is very fond of Ruth, and I’d thought they’d end up getting married eventually—once he knew I was seen to.” Her face reddened, and she added very quickly, “But without a home or a job, that won’t happen. He wouldn’t ask her to live on Relief.”
She sniffled, and he handed her his handkerchief. She took it and wiped the tears away, even as new ones were replacing them.
He didn’t interrupt as she continued.
“And Bud—I don’t know what we’ll do about Bud. He’s a bit of a loose cannon, if you know what I mean. He’s a good kid, but he needs someone with him to keep him contained. So I guess that he’ll go with either Bud or me, or both of us.”
She shook her head. “We’ll all be together still, I guess. I have no skills, and neither does Bud. George can do all sorts of things, but it’s a matter of someone hiring him. And what are we supposed to do? Just go on the road, like hoboes?”
She gasped. “Oh, I didn’t mean that! Colin, please, please, forgive me!”
He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb, and looked into her river-dark eyes. “Not a problem.”
She still looked so horrified at what she’d said that he laughed. “Lolly, dear, please stop worrying. I wasn’t offended by what you said. I know what you meant. Having to sell the farm is traumatic. It’s not just a loss of some property. It’s a loss of an entire lifestyle.” Lolly still appeared so aghast at her words that he did the only thing he could reasonably do. He took her in his arms and kissed her.
Again, and again, and again.
He was never going to leave.
❧
They walked back to the house, their fingers intertwined. Although they hadn’t spoken of love, Lolly knew that for her, at least, her heart had been given over entirely. She loved him, and yet she was afraid of it.
Yesterday, it had been different. Yesterday, the depression hadn’t come up to their door and walked right in. Yesterday, their tomorrows were the next step in the line of years.
They stopped on the edge of the field. The farm was framed in golden sunlight, set against a backdrop of a natural shelterbelt. From here, no one could tell that the world had ground to a sudden and ugly stop at this very spot.
Even love couldn’t cushion this blow.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, his grip tightening on her hand.
“I want to remember it always, just the way it is now,” she whispered. “One day I will tell my children about this place, about the love that was built into the floorboards and the walls and the ceilings, and about how a man came here, at the end, and what he brought to my life.”
As long as he stood beside her, she was strong.
“You saved my life,” he said. “In so many ways, you saved me. My kind-hearted woman.”
He let go of her hand and spread his fingers across her cheeks. His thumbs ran over the bones under her eyes, and traced down the side of her face. “Lolly,” he said. “Lolly.”
She was astonished to see his eyes brimming with unshed tears.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and then she laughed shakily. “Aside from knowing that we’re losing our home?”
“How can our lives be so beautiful, and yet so torn apart? How can I choose this day to tell you, when I know that your world has been pulled from under you—”
He paused.
“Tell me what?” she prompted.
“That I love you.”
nine
The last days of summer slip through my fingers like kernels of wheat, dried in the sun. So this is the harvest of my love? Lonely days become even lonelier. Once one knows love, a spot becomes created for it in the heart, and whenever love is gone, that place is an aching abyss. My soul aches for him. My heart cries for the love we knew. Where does love go? Does it die, like the last grasses of August?
“I told her that I love her.” There. The words were out in the open, ready to take on their own life.
He felt better, knowing that he wasn’t keeping a secret from Lolly’s brothers. It had kept him sleepless almost every night for the past two weeks, worrying about whether it was right not to let them in on his feelings for their sister.
“No fooling!” Bud clapped Colin on the
back.
“What did she say?” George asked, not looking up from the pile of boards from the back barn that he was pulling nails from. Not having been used in several years, it had fallen into disrepair. Now that the utility shed was down, he was attacking the back barn, too. “Bud, you have to be more careful when you put the lumber over here. If you don’t take the nails out first, someone, like me, is going to step on one and drive it right through his shoe.”
“Sure.” Bud pulled another board off the nearly dismantled barn and tossed it toward George.
“Didn’t you hear me? Look at this!” George held the offending board in front of him and pointed at a nail sticking out from the side of it. “Take the nail out before you put the board on the pile. Put the nail in the can.” He shook the can of nails. “Here. Goes in here.”
“Why don’t you show me how?” Bud asked with a sideways grin at Colin. “Show me what you mean.”
“Yeah, you think I’m going to fall for that?” his brother grumbled as he pulled the nail out and dropped it into the can and then neatly placed the board on the stack.
“You just did.” Bud laughed and George rolled his eyes.
He couldn’t leave this family, Colin thought. He’d have to think of some way to stay here and help support them, both financially and emotionally. He owed them at least that much.
And the fact was that he was in love with Lolly. It still took him by surprise how quick and effective the process had been. He had, truth be told, lost his heart when he’d opened his eyes and seen her leaning over him, her hair that would not stay put falling around her face, her dark gray eyes searching his face, her fair brow furrowed with concern.
She had, from that day on, moved into his heart, completely and fully. How could he even think about leaving here? About leaving her?
“So what are your intentions toward my sister?” Bud asked as he tugged yet another board free and pitched it, nails still in it, onto the pile that George had just straightened. George rocked back on his heels and glared at Bud.
“What?” Bud asked George innocently.
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