by Leisha Kelly
“Girls can’t be army cooks,” Bert told her with a scowl. “Some of the men do that.”
“They’d sure let me once they tasted my cooking,” Emmie insisted, and nobody argued. For a little girl, eleven now, she did a fine job in the kitchen.
Rorey’s plaster cast came off, but she still treated the arm gingerly. She liked her new job better than the five-and-dime, but for some reason acted like she still resented Katie over what had happened. But most of what we heard from Rorey was talk of Lester and the wedding. She had hoped he might be home on leave for Christmas. It didn’t look that way now, but they wanted to marry at the next opportunity and not wait. She thought that might be next summer, and she wanted to be prepared. They’d have roses. They’d have red boutonnieres, they’d have crepe paper streamers, and rice for the guests to throw.
Rorey had her eye on a store-bought dress on display in the dry goods store, but it was very expensive, so she thought she might make her own. She decided pretty quickly on a pattern, and one day came home with yards of white fabric and French lace.
“I’ll hafta start right away, Mrs. Wortham,” she told me. “A dress like this takes time.”
I promised to help her, but it would have to wait until after the harvest. We’d have our hands full on both farms till then.
Rationing had started across the countryside, of coffee, sugar, and such. That didn’t affect us as much as it did some people because we were used to not buying much anyway, but I feared the rationing of tires and gasoline would make things slow for Samuel at the station. I wondered whether Charlie could continue to pay his full wage. But Samuel said there was always plenty to do, and Charlie felt he was doing the community a service by keeping the place open. He must have been earning good money with the oil driller. There were several wells in our area and something or other in the news about them nearly every week.
Sam and Thelma spent quite a while hoping I was wrong in my concerns for Albert’s hearing, but eventually they decided they had to know for sure. They took him to see Dr. Clyne, who sent them to a special doctor in Mt. Vernon. And the news they got was bad. Albert’s hearing was extremely poor. There was no explanation, and there was nothing they could do for it. He might have been born that way. They weren’t really sure. But he wasn’t expected to learn to speak without special instruction. And he wouldn’t be able to go to regular school either.
Sam took the news better than Thelma did. “He’ll be good at somethin’, like Franky’s good at somethin’,” he said.
“That’s a lot different, an’ you know it,” Thelma lamented. “Franky don’t have no real handicap! He can talk an’ listen better’n most folks even care to!”
She wasn’t easily consoled. But little Albert was as cheerful as ever, unstacking and restacking the wooden salad bowls I’d let him play with. He even tried leaning them against one another so they’d stand on their sides. And then he merrily plunked one on his head and greeted his mother with an angelic smile. She very nearly cried.
“He don’t understand, Mrs. Wortham.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I tried to encourage. “I think he’s remarkable. To understand as well as he does, and do all that he does, without hearing us. I expect he’s very bright.”
I meant what I said, but I think Thelma thought I was only talking to make her feel better.
About the first of October, we started planning Christmas gift packages. There’d been a notice in the paper to mail by the end of October to be sure the packages would reach the boys overseas before Christmas. Having four boxes to pack was difficult, not because of buying or making the things to put in them, but because of missing our boys so much. Especially Robert. And Joe.
We didn’t know whether to pack Joe a Christmas box or not. We didn’t know where to send it. Emmie came over one day after school, and I expected she’d help me wrap some of the boxes to send. But she ended up just sitting and holding Joe’s box with big tears running down her cheeks.
“Mama,” she called me. “Mama, I already filled it with prayers.”
I think we all did.
Frank had carved little wooden crosses to go in the gift packages. They were cherrywood with designs on the sides. On a stand, so they’d stay upright on a table or a shelf. He made Joe’s different than the others. It was beautiful, with what looked like angel wings behind the cross and curved around its sides. He also had Sarah write out two Scripture verses to put in the box. John 3:16, and the passage in the book of Revelation that says there shall be no more sorrow or pain.
We sent all four boxes, with Joe’s going to the last known address we had for his unit. I knew it might come back. But I prayed it didn’t, especially for Franky and Emmie’s sakes.
That harvest, Frank was in the fields from sunup to sundown, and Sarah was most of the time with him. Harry took off from school, and Samuel got Charlie’s permission to hire Oliver Mueller to stay at the station so he could be home a few days when we needed him most. Thelma’s Sam came out to help. And George worked along with everybody else, at least most of the time.
We’d had plenty of garden harvest too. We put up twenty-six quarts of bread and butter pickles and seventeen quarts of piccalilli relish. Seventy-nine quarts of green beans, eighty-two of tomato juice, and forty-seven of corn. Plus peaches, applesauce, sauerkraut, and all the rest. We gave a share of everything to the food drive our church was sponsoring for the needy. Katie, who had money of her own for the first time in her life, said the Lord was blessing us and our country for the sacrifice we were making.
Emmie asked me to help her put together a “Food for Freedom” scrapbook for a contest at school. She was excited about that project and drew a lot of her own pictures or cut them from the newspaper and colored them with Crayolas. We didn’t have any glossy colored magazines at our house, so Emmie was thrilled when Katie brought her copies of Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post. She said she’d let everybody read them who wanted to before she cut one thing out.
Bert spent every bit of his free time studying books with information about all the places war reports were coming from. Philippines. Savo Island. Tulagi and Guadalcanal. He wrote a letter to the Times Leader telling about his brothers and urging everyone to pray daily and contribute to the war effort in every way they could. The editor printed his entire letter with a heading calling him a “fine, brave boy doing his patriotic duty.” Then, after Bert followed that letter with another letter two weeks later, a man from the newspaper office drove out from Mcleansboro to meet him and his father. They asked if Bert might be permitted to write every week with updates about his brothers, or calls for people to participate in the local war drives, or anything encouraging he should choose to include.
Bert was glad to do it. And he got the school involved, using short pieces from other students in some of his articles. Kirk was writing to us more regularly again, and sometimes Bert shared bits of his letters too. The editor at the Times Leader called Bert’s articles “Letters from an American Boy” and put them on the same page of the paper every time. George took the whole thing rather sourly. He said he was proud of Bert, and yet he didn’t like the well-meaning inquiries he got from people when he went to town. He didn’t want to talk about the war. He didn’t want to talk about his boys who were in the war. He just wanted to be left alone.
November drifted in cooler, and Samuel and George started making plans for butchering time. Sarah put in applications at a couple of places of business, but even though Katie and Rorey had had no trouble getting jobs, Sarah wasn’t hired. Samuel wanted her to think about attending the teacher’s college. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she went with her father to inquire about classes beginning with the spring semester. She’d been a fair student, but I think she was worried about being able to handle the college material. One day she hit upon an idea and told me about it, but I wasn’t quite sure whether she was serious.
“I could read the textbooks to Frank,” she said. “An
d then have him explain it all to me. I think I could make a passing grade then.”
“Sarah,” I tried to tell her. “You’ve always made passing grades. You were a good student in school.”
“But college will be harder, and I doubt I’d understand half of what I read about, or remember it, either.”
I don’t know why she was doubting her own ability to such an extent, but I didn’t have any problem with her asking Frank for help, if that’s what she wanted to do. I thought Frank might like the opportunity to hear college textbooks. I even asked him if he might want to consider attending the college too. I had no doubt he’d do well hearing the lectures, and Sarah could help him with the written material.
But Frank thought the idea completely unrealistic. “You know they’d never take me, Mrs. Wortham. Besides, I’m needed too much on the farm right now.”
I almost argued that perhaps his father and younger brothers were more capable than he thought, especially with George doing well again lately. But there was a cloud of doubt edging the back of my mind, and I let the matter go.
Sam and Thelma surprised us considerably by saying that they were considering moving clear up to a town called Camp Point, where Thelma’s Uncle Milton had offered Sam a job. “We’d have a little more money for a bigger house,” Thelma told me. “And we’d be closer to the deaf school that’s up that way.”
Camp Point was still in Illinois, but it seemed like a very long way, and they’d be almost fifty miles from the school for the deaf one of the doctors had mentioned to them. But that would be better than the hundred and eighty or so from here. Even though Albert was much too young for school now, I was glad they were taking his needs seriously. Still, I was concerned about how the rest of the family might react to the idea of them being so far away.
“That’s why we’re telling you now,” Sam said. “If we go, it won’t be till spring, and by then everybody’ll have time to get used to the idea.”
“Children grow up and move on. That’s life for you,” George said. If the idea of his oldest son moving more than two hundred miles bothered him, he didn’t let on about it, much to Thelma’s relief.
“I feared it would upset him terrible,” she told me when we were alone later. “I think that was worrying Sammy a little too.”
But the one who was upset the most was Emmie. She absolutely loved having Georgie, Rosemary, Albert, and baby Dorothy around us all she could.
“It ain’t fair to think that after they have the new baby, they might be takin’ it far away from us,” she complained.
“They’d visit,” I assured her. “And we’d find a way to visit them too.”
“Would you really, Mrs. Wortham? If your family was to go an’ visit Sam an’ Thelma, would you take me?”
“I imagine we’d take whoever wanted to go. We’ve operated like one family for so long, I don’t see why we would change it now.”
“Thanks,” Emmie told me with a hug. “I wanna be able to call you Mama forever.”
We were very glad to get letters from Kirk, which were coming from England now. But he told us almost nothing of why his unit was there or what he expected next. He spoke angrily against the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese. And he spoke mournfully of loneliness for home.
“I can’t wait to get hay in my hair again,” he wrote. “I think our blackberry-lined creek and plowed fields is the prettiest place in the world.”
I wondered if Robert, somewhere in the Pacific, thought so too. It bothered me considerably not to have gotten a letter from him since early August. Unless there were letters on the way, he hadn’t written since July. But I knew he couldn’t write every day. And when he did write, the letters now would be a long time reaching us.
I prayed for him daily, but it seemed increasingly to be at night when I felt I had to pray the most. I would find myself waking at all hours, unable to rest again until I got up to pray. Sometimes I would go to his box of letters and pull out the latest one or one of the many beneath it and read it by a candle’s light, lingering over every word and then returning to prayers again. Sometimes I was driven to the mantelpiece in the sitting room, just to take his picture down and hold it a while.
Samuel caught me at it more than once, and at those times I felt a little foolish, but Samuel said I wasn’t being foolish at all. Looking at me with his tired dark eyes mirroring my cares, he would ask me one simple question.
“Why do you think I’m not asleep?”
23
Sarah
Thelma and Sam’s fifth baby was born one year from the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. Because of that, they changed their minds about calling her Irma Lee and instead named their little girl Pearl.
Mom was really, really glad that we got word of the birth after it had already happened. Thelma’s aunt Dina was visiting, and she and Thelma’s mother were the ones to deliver the baby. We drove into Dearing to see them that afternoon. Mom had made a pretty new baby blanket, and I made a bib like the one Mrs. Graham had made for Emmie when we were little kids. Katie brought store-bought baby booties that had been in the window at the five-and-dime. And Emmie, who liked cooking better than sewing, brought a big pot of chicken and dumplings to feed everybody. Thelma’s mother just couldn’t believe she’d made dumplings by herself.
The very next day we got letters from Robert. Two of them, but they’d both been written in October.
Mom was thrilled, even though the letters had taken so long. Robert was fine, and he said Willy was too. They were on Guadalcanal, the American stronghold in the Solomon Islands. We were glad because we’d heard that a war correspondent named John Hersey reported such overwhelming American superiority there that the Japanese offensive was doomed.
Robert didn’t say anything about doing any fighting. He did say he missed us very, very much and kept praying Rachel’s prayer every night for God to make us stronger in this time of being apart. “Pray for me when you think of it,” he said. “I don’t get to sleep as easily as I used to.” We wrote back to tell him that we thought about him all the time and were praying for him every single day, morning and night.
Christmas was strange without him and the older Hammond boys. We made cookies like we usually did, and I hoped the Christmas boxes had all been delivered and that Robert and the others were enjoying the things we’d sent. Joe, too. Our letters to him were not coming back, and neither had his Christmas box. We were all hoping that meant he’d been found somewhere and surely we’d be getting word soon enough.
On Christmas afternoon when Ben and Lizbeth and Sam and Thelma and all the kids were over, we played out the story of Christ’s birth with our little nativity set like we’d been doing for years. But Emmie and Georgie had the angels flying not only to the shepherds at Bethlehem but also to Kirk in Europe and Willy, Robert, and Joe in the Pacific islands, because they couldn’t be with us.
Just about everybody wrote all of them a Christmas letter or drew a picture to send. Frank told me what he wanted to say, and I wrote it down for him. He had good ordinary letters for the rest, but for Joe it was the whole Ninety-first Psalm.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“’Course I’m sure,” he said. But he didn’t give any explanation.
I just about cried when I was writing it down. All of the wonderful promises of protection in that chapter made me think that Frank surely had renewed hope for Joe, and I was very glad. “There shall no evil befall thee,” it said. And “he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
I liked those words, and I kept them turning around in my mind in the next few days. But I couldn’t help wondering more about Joe. If he could, he’d have written to us by now, I was sure of that. So he must be somewhere where he couldn’t write. But if the army knew where he was, they’d surely have told us he wasn’t missing anymore, and they hadn’t done that. So where were our letters going?
We’d heard about the Mcleansboro boy who had been declared m
issing after Pearl Harbor. Everybody’d thought he was dead; only he was found later alive and well. Such confusion could definitely happen. So I wondered if maybe Joe hadn’t already been found and there’d been confusion about getting word to us. Maybe a letter had been sent and gotten lost somewhere.
Rorey had several days off over the holidays, and she made good progress on her wedding dress. Secretly I was still hoping she’d change her mind about marrying Lester, though it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I tried to tell myself maybe the service would change him a lot and he’d come back a lot more well-mannered than he’d left. She was still hoping they’d be married in the summer, though nobody knew for sure when he might be coming home.
Kirk was now in North Africa. We learned that when we got his newest letter the first week of January, and it came as a complete surprise. He said mail from us was always encouragement right when he needed it. And he asked if one of us could please write to a friend in his unit who hardly ever got any letters. Katie said she’d been thinking about writing to more servicemen anyway, so she sat down and wrote a letter that night. She ended up writing that young man, whose name was Dave Kliner, every week.
Hearing from Robert and Kirk again and not getting Joe’s Christmas box back had made me feel better about everything. Dad said Oliver Porter had heard a report that the Germans were losing ground in Europe and the Japanese were backing down in the Pacific. Maybe the war would be over soon after all. I hoped it’d be over by Valentine’s Day because that was plenty long enough for our boys to be away from home. And when they got back they’d be glad to see that the whole country was doing better because of their efforts. There were jobs now. We had some money.
