A Home for the Heart

by Michael Phillips

  We also couldn’t help wondering, each of us in our own way, whether we could be enough for each other—whether we were truly what the other person needed. This was hardest of all to talk about, because it was so deep and so personal and involved so many painful self-doubts. More than once the awkwardness and quiet grew between us, and we had to struggle our way back to the point of being comfortable talking again.

  Opening up your innermost self can sometimes be about the hardest thing in the whole world to do! Making a commitment that’s got to last every day for the rest of your life is a pretty fearsome thing!

  Dear Christopher,

  As the last year gradually passed, and now as we approach the day we have awaited for so long, slowly I am finding the ecstasy of what has happened between us wearing off. You were right in what you said to me earlier about feelings fading. I do not mean to imply that you are less special to me than always. Never! Only that I am becoming more accustomed to being around you. I am accepting our living in such proximity and our eventual future together as more normal.

  I think it must be a good thing. Don’t you think that being married is hard for some people—after the newness of it wears off, I mean—because it is so different from anything they knew before? I have heard it said by some that they wake up after weeks or months of being married and don’t recognize their husband or wife because they are so different from the person they knew before.

  With this change I see within myself is coming a more relaxed feeling about writing and talking to you. I know I don’t have to explain every moment that I love you, and I don’t have to explain in endless detail every feeling I have.

  I am so glad we are learning some of these things before the stresses of marriage. I know there will still be a multitude of new things to learn. But the more we have behind us now, the more easily those future lessons will come to us.

  And in all we are learning, of course, all that matters is that we become more like Jesus.

  Do you understand me at all? If not, we can talk about it tomorrow, or after you have read this.

  The joy isn’t fading, just the urgent necessity to tell it all to you every second, the “restless urge to write.” Even if we didn’t see each other for a month and never wrote all that time—though I would miss you terribly!—nothing between us would change. We would just walk up to one another at the end of that time and quietly smile as we looked into one another’s eyes, and then one of us might just say, “You too, eh?”

  We would know without the need of words.

  Anyway, that’s how I feel right now. Don’t blame me if I say something completely contradictory tomorrow. Women have to reserve that prerogative for themselves, you know!

  Corrie

  Dear Corrie,

  What you raised in the letter you wrote me about people changing after getting married is so true. I encountered this time after time when I was in the ministry.

  The reason, I am convinced, is the artificial nature of the relationship between most betrothed couples. They rarely have the opportunity to see and relate to one another under normal life circumstances. Thus, they are always on their best behavior.

  Unfortunately, one’s best behavior is the worst of all possible preparations for marriage. A man and woman ought to see one another on their worst behavior and then decide whether they want to be married or not.

  That is why I feel so good about our present circumstance. They are anything but artificial. Your father’s bringing me here to work and live has reduced the artificial quality even further. While I was living at Mrs. Gianini’s I was still, in a manner of speaking, a visitor, a guest. But no more. Ever since I began working in the mine I have been here all the time, truly part of the household. There has been no hiding any of myself from you—as we painfully discovered a time or two!

  But on to another subject you touched on in your letter—one I have been thinking and praying about for years. You write, “all that matters is that we become more like Jesus.” But what might that really mean? Suddenly I am thinking through the implications of that prayer more than I ever have in the past.

  Does it mean people will notice me someday, that I will be a famous pastor or will occupy a prestigious pulpit? If we follow the Lord more closely, will we “prosper” according to the ways of the world? Will more people read your words and listen to my voice?

  No, I think not. All this is a false way of looking at it.

  Being like Jesus isn’t something the world—even the Christian world—can always recognize. I may never be well known. (Why would I want to be anyway? Yet sometimes vain ambitions cannot help flitting through the mind of any man!) I may never be popular. I may never even be well thought of. No movement may spring up around me. The world may never see anything of value attached to the name Christopher Braxton.

  In marrying me, Corrie, you may be destining yourself to a life of ignominy. Are you sure you know what you are doing!

  Perhaps the Lord will call us to give our lives to the service of a mere handful of people. But if that is the job he gives us, then that is enough. What could be more thrilling or more fulfilling?

  Right now I feel more fortunate than anyone in the world! I love you!

  Christopher

  Dear Christopher,

  Can you believe we’re actually going to be married?

  Sometimes I can’t! I’m scared, excited, nervous, anxious, and thrilled about it—all at once.

  We have learned so much and grown in so many ways together. That won’t stop, will it? We mustn’t let it. I want always to grow . . . with you.

  I must stop. This has been short, but I never get tired of talking to you and telling you that I love you.

  I do love you, Christopher . . . so much!

  Corrie

  Chapter 49

  The Blue Lace Dress

  After Pa had given his official answer and Christopher had made his official proposal, you’d think the excitement would have died down for a while. But if anything it picked up all the more.

  Suddenly there was a wedding to plan for!

  All the other women in my life were even more excited than I was, I think, about getting everything ready for the wedding. Almeda, Aunt Katie, and Mrs. Gianini were all involved, of course, as well as Becky and several other friends, like Mrs. Shaw. Knowing that Emily would be coming back north for the wedding added even more to everyone’s enthusiasm.

  I guess you would say I was the center of attention, like brides always are. But in another way I felt strangely detached from all the bustle, like it was happening to someone else. I just wanted to be with Christopher, to walk and talk with him, or to be by myself so I could write letters to him and read the ones he’d written me.

  Sometimes all the fuss didn’t seem worth it. Why couldn’t we just get married and get on with starting our life together? And then there was the nervousness too. How could I think of actually being married, and not be nervous?

  On another level, of course I was tingling with excitement. Oh, there was so much to do—working out the ceremony itself with Rev. Rutledge, planning food to have in the town hall afterward, making arrangements for after the wedding and the time Christopher and I would be away . . . and of course the wedding dress. That took the most planning and the most work of all!

  Becky and Almeda and I started talking right away about what I should wear for the wedding. Aunt Katie offered to let me wear the dress she’d worn in her wedding. I remember so well how nice Almeda had been, even though she loved Pa, when we thought Katie was going to marry him. She’d entered right in and had Mrs. Gianini make a dress for Katie.

  Almeda said I could wear her dress from Boston, but I didn’t want to look that fancy. I remembered what Ma used to say when she married Pa. She said she had only two dresses. When one was dirty, she’d wear the other. So when it came time to get married, she had worn the one that happened to be clean.

  I asked Pa if he remembered what Ma wore on the day they’
d been married. He got a kind of dreamy, faraway look in his eyes and said, “I wasn’t looking at her dress, Corrie. I figured she was just about the most beautiful girl in the whole county.”

  He stopped and looked me over up and down, then smiled and nodded his head up and down.

  “You remind me a heap of her, Corrie Belle,” he said. “You’re looking more like your ma every day. She’d be more’n a mite proud of the woman her daughter’s become.”

  “Thank you, Pa.”

  He hugged me, and I savored the moment, especially knowing that before much longer I wasn’t going to be a Hollister anymore. It was just about the nicest thing Pa could have said to me right then, because for some reason I’d been feeling real close to Ma lately. I really wanted Ma to be here sharing this time with me. I think Pa did too. Sometimes when I’d look at him staring at me, but kind of right through me, I knew he was seeing Ma in me, and then he was looking at me for both of them, thinking what their little girl had grown up to be.

  The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I wanted a wedding dress that I would be able to wear for other occasions too. I knew that’s what Ma would have done. She was always so practical. Since I’d made two dresses recently, I decided to make a wedding dress myself—with help, of course, from Becky and Almeda and Mrs. Gianini.

  I went to the General Store several times to look at fabric, but I couldn’t find anything that exactly struck my fancy. Mr. Bosely told me he was expecting a new shipment in a few days.

  Four days later, when I was working at the Supply Company, little ten-year-old Jefferson Bosely came in. His pa had sent him over to say there was some new cloth goods to look at. I went over to the General Store with Jefferson, and when I saw the sky-blue lace fabric, I knew it was what I wanted. When I picked it up, I was surprised it was so soft.

  The very next day I took Becky and Almeda in to see the material, and they loved it too. We all sat down to look at patterns, and by the end of the day we had all the supplies we would need. I couldn’t wait to get started on my dress!

  I worked on it all through February and into March, mostly by myself, but getting help and advice from the others as I needed it. The dress took shape as the weeks went by, almost as if it were the calendar whose progress marked the days until April 3.

  Since the fabric was sheer, I needed to make a lining to wear inside it. The full skirt didn’t stick out at all, but hung down straight and simple, in gentle folds. I made a plain bodice with buttons down the front. The full sleeves matched the fullness of the skirt and ended in a simple cuff.

  The dress didn’t need any trim because the lace fabric, though simple in one way, possessed an elegance all its own. There was a stand-up white collar, and Almeda suggested a white satin belt that came to a point at the top and the bottom right in the center. Almeda embroidered blue flowers for the sides of it. She said that for other times I could make a darker blue belt, but that for the wedding nothing would do but white satin. Down the front, the buttons were pure white, matching the collar and belt, and looking like a straight string of perfect round pearls.

  When the dress was finished and I’d tried it on a dozen or more times for all the little additions and tucks and alterations, we took it to Mrs. Gianini’s for final approval. She made one or two further tiny alterations that nobody but a dressmaker would notice. Then we left it there, where I would get dressed before going to the church.

  Chapter 50

  Box of Memories

  The week before the wedding, Becky and I went out into the hills to collect greens to decorate the church. There had been so much to do that my thirtieth birthday had come and gone without much fuss.

  Becky and I had grown close over the past year. We both admired each other for different things. A respect and love had grown between us since I’d returned to Miracle Springs that was richly unlike anything I’d felt with anyone else, I think, other than Almeda and Christopher. No more was she just my little sister, but a true friend.

  Becky had watched all that went on with me and Christopher during the year, and now she told me that she hoped Pa would do the same thing for her when her own special young man came along.

  “In fact,” she said as we talked about it that day out in the woods, “I’m going to insist that they both do it!”

  I laughed over my armful of ferns. What would Christopher think to hear that his marriage apprenticeship plan had its first convert?

  I thought more and more about Ma that whole last week before the wedding. I wanted so much for her to be there to share my wedding day.

  Then it occurred to me that even if I couldn’t have her with me, maybe I could have something of hers.

  When Ma died out there on the desert, we had buried her, and the wagon train had just moved on. When we got to Miracle Springs, we had emptied the wagon into Pa and Uncle Nick’s cabin, and most of Ma’s things had just become what we used for living. But there had been one little box of her personal belongings. When we’d found out who Pa was, I had given him the box, thinking he would want it. I hadn’t seen that box for years.

  That night, I asked Pa if he still had it. He smiled and nodded.

  “If you can wait a day,” he said, “I’ll fetch it for you tomorrow.”

  The next day he arranged for us to go for a ride up into the hills, just the two of us. He brought along the box. It was about eight inches long, about five wide, and three inches deep.

  After a long ride, we stopped at a clearing where the trees opened up. We tied the horses to a tree, then walked over to some fallen logs and sat down together.

  Neither of us spoke for a long time. I knew Pa wanted to talk to me, not just show me what was inside the box.

  We’d had lots of memorable moments together, Pa and me. We loved each other just about as much as I figure a father and daughter can. And now that I was going to get married in a few days, this was one of the most memorable moments of all. He’d already given away one daughter, so this wasn’t the first wedding of the family. But I was Ma and Pa’s firstborn, and that put a special kind of love between us. I know too that Pa wanted to tell me the kinds of things that Ma would if she’d still been alive. I felt Ma’s presence that day stronger than I had since I’d visited Bridgeville.

  “There’s some things in this box that remind both you and me of your ma, Corrie,” said Pa at last. “A couple of them you might want to take with you on your wedding day.”

  He paused and took in a breath.

  “But more important,” he went on, “I want to tell you something about your ma. I don’t reckon I can say anything you don’t know, but I gotta tell you anyway.

  “It ain’t been easy on any of you losing a ma like you did. All of you’ve had to figure out how to deal with it as best you could, and I don’t suppose that right at first I was too much help. But after a while we figured out how to get by pretty good, and I’m sure Aggie’s as thankful for Almeda’s being part of our lives as all the rest of us are.

  “Anyway, I know your ma’s proud of you, Corrie Belle. I’ve told you that before, but it’s important you hear it again now. She was a fine, honorable, hard-working, faithful, brave woman, and I know she saw a lot of herself in you. Even before I left, she told me that you reminded her of herself.

  “And your ma’d be proud of the kind of man you’re fixing to marry. A lotta girls marry fellers who’re better looking than Christopher or who’ve got more money than him. Girls marry fellers for a lot of reasons different than why you love Christopher. But I know both your ma and me consider you a pretty wise and level-headed young lady to be able to recognize a man with the kind of fiber your Braxton’s got. Aggie’d like him a lot, you can be sure of that. I can just see the two of them laughing and carrying on together.”

  A few tears began to creep quietly down my face as Pa spoke.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I wanted us to come out here so we could look at the things in this box and remember your ma together one last ti
me before your big day.”

  Slowly he removed the lid, holding the box on his lap. Together we peered inside. One by one he took all the items out, handed them to me, and told me something about them.

  “I’m sure grateful to that Dixon feller for having the good sense to save these things before he buried her,” mused Pa as he held up the few simple pieces of jewelry that Ma’d been wearing when she died.

  “This here’s the wedding ring I gave her the day she married me,” said Pa, holding up the small gold band with one tiny diamond. He gazed at it several long moments, sniffed a time or two, blinked his eyes, then put it back in the box.

  “I gave her this brooch on our first anniversary,” he said. “Wasn’t much—we didn’t have money to spend on nothing expensive—but she always wore it like it was worth a thousand dollars.”

  He went on, showing me an embroidered handkerchief, some receipts that meant nothing to me that had to do with the farm in New York, some letters, several other smaller pieces of jewelry, and some other small trinkets and little cloth items that I recognized immediately, though I hadn’t seen them for years.

  “When I first saw these things after you got to Miracle,” he said, “it was late one night. I held every one of them in my hand and remembered your ma. I don’t mind telling you that I cried over every one of ’em. I’d probably be crying again right now, if I wasn’t trying so hard not to. . . .”

  “Oh, Pa!” I was crying enough by now for both of us!

  “Seeing the letters was hardest of all. It was like hearing her voice again, like she was alive. Most of them were letters she wrote to me but never sent because she’d had no place to mail them to. Oh, Corrie, they were like knife wounds in my heart! She never stopped loving me, and it was years before I could forgive myself for what I’d done. And then here’s the letter, too, from Nick, the one that gave her the idea to come West.”