Miracle in a Dry Season

by Sarah Loudin Thomas

  Casewell stepped up to his worktable and handled several scraps of lumber stacked underneath. There were a couple of nice pieces of maple that he thought would be perfect. He set to work on his thank-you gift for Perla and Sadie.

  The next morning, Casewell needed to put aside work on his gift to visit Elizabeth and Evangeline Talbot. Before church, the twin sisters, nearing their seventies, had asked Casewell to stop by Monday morning so they could discuss a project with him. Casewell was curious what they might want him to do—likely something around the old homeplace they’d inherited when their parents died within days of each other. Although the Talbot sisters had sold off the farm equipment and a fifty-two-acre parcel of rich bottomland, they’d kept the rambling farmhouse they’d lived in since birth. Probably the banister needed repair or a doorsill was rotting.

  Casewell pulled up under a large oak with leaves just starting to unfurl. He was admiring the tree when a voice came from the porch.

  “Once they’re the size of squirrels’ ears, it’s time to plant corn.”

  Casewell turned and saw Angie—no, Liza—standing on the top step, smiling at him.

  Strangers often had a hard time telling the twins apart, but those who knew them had no such difficulty. Both were a whisper over five feet tall, with silvery hair braided and twisted into a bun at the nape of the neck. But somehow, Angie’s hair remained perfectly in place, while Liza’s tended to fray and fall in wisps around her face. And while they both had blue eyes, Angie’s had a hint of ice, while Liza’s looked like faded cornflowers.

  Liza had been engaged once, but her fiancé, Frank Post, ran off with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on a tour of Europe in 1902. By the time he came home some thirty years later, everyone had given him up for dead, and Liza was running the farm alongside her sister and father. Once old man Talbot was too feeble to work the fields, the twins did most of the farming themselves.

  “Howdy, Casewell. Come on in. Sister and I have a special order for you.” Liza clapped her hands, looking like a child on Christmas morning.

  Inside, the more staid Angie showed Casewell the large kitchen and the wall where she wanted a cupboard.

  “We’d like to display Mama’s china and a few other things,” she explained.

  “Oh, and a pie safe,” Liza said. “And a potato bin—the kind that tilts out.”

  “But nothing fancy,” Angie said. “This is for practical use. No need for fancy.”

  “It’s our seventieth birthday.” Liza’s faded eyes sparkled. “And this will be our present.”

  “No need to tell our age, sister. And we need a cupboard, birthday or no.” Angie turned sharp eyes on Casewell. “But the price has to be right. We must be good stewards of what Mama and Papa left us.”

  Casewell pulled a piece of paper and a stub of pencil out of his breast pocket. He made a rough sketch of what he had in mind, the sisters looking over his shoulder and nodding along. When it was done to their satisfaction, Casewell penciled a number in the corner. Angie pursed her lips and then gave a brief nod.

  Back in his workshop that evening, Casewell began the actual construction based on his pencil drawing. He often gave thanks for his ability to earn a living doing something he loved so dearly. Smoothing his rough hands over the sawn lumber, he could feel the shape of the furniture rising up to meet him. The smell of sawdust and the rhythm of the plane sliding along the grain soothed him in a deep, soul-satisfying way. He could lose himself for hours in his workshop, missing meals and working until he became aware of the time only after losing light with the setting sun.

  He had pieced together the shell of the cabinet and was settling in to address some of the finer details when he heard a light scuffling at the door. Turning, he smelled the cigarette smoke even before he saw his father leaning against the frame. John Phillips was a tall, lanky man with a shock of white hair that had once been coal-black. Dad’s narrow face, lined from days spent working the farm, stood out starkly tan against his white hair. Although not traditionally handsome, he was striking with an unbending air. Casewell rarely saw him without a hand-rolled cigarette, squinting against the smoke rising past his eyes.

  As his father moved into the workshop, Casewell noted that his limp seemed more pronounced. He’d worked briefly in the mines, but a cave-in took his only brother’s life and left him with a hitch to his gait that served as a constant reminder of what he’d lost. John swore he would never mine again, and he’d held to that promise, even in years when the farm lost steadily and the income from a few months of mining would have been welcome.

  Casewell saw the limp but knew better than to mention it. His father didn’t leave much room for weakness in himself or in others. He would not have appreciated his son noticing his discomfort.

  “Your mother is over at the house fussing about,” Dad said, drawing smoke deep into his lungs. He exhaled. “I told her you’re a grown man able to take care of yourself, but she never could leave well enough alone.”

  Casewell nodded, smiling to himself. If Emily Phillips were content to leave well enough alone, his father probably wouldn’t have lived this long. She’d insisted Dad do the exercises that helped him regain the use of his foot. She’d made the garden stretch in the years when income from the farm was thin. And she’d traded her needlework—embroidered pillow slips, handkerchiefs, and baby gowns—for staples like sugar and coffee when the Thorntons had extended as much credit as they could. Casewell doubted his father knew what lengths his mother had gone to in order to keep the family going and knew no one would dare tell him.

  “What’s that you’re working on?” he asked.

  “A cupboard for the Talbot sisters. I plan to have it done before their birthday. It’s their gift to each other.”

  “Don’t know what two old ladies need with new furniture.” He pinched the ember from his cigarette and dropped the stub in his breast pocket. “They’ve made do this long.”

  “They have,” agreed Casewell, knowing better than to get into a drawn-out discussion about the advantages of improved storage for two women approaching seventy.

  “Got anything an old man can do?”

  This was a new development in their father-son relationship. While his father approved of Casewell being a carpenter, he’d not shown much interest in the work itself. In the past few months, he’d begun stopping by to lend a hand. Casewell didn’t mind. His dad didn’t have much to say, and he enjoyed the quiet companionship with a man whose love he’d never been sure of.

  “You can sand down that door front,” Casewell said, pointing with his chin. “I pulled the pieces with the nicest grain.”

  “So I see,” he said.

  They worked in silence for a time. Dad cleared his throat.

  “Before I forget, your mother wants you to come to dinner this evening. She heard you ate Sunday dinner with the Thorntons, and I reckon she wants to know all about that niece of theirs staying with them.”

  Casewell smiled. “Sounds good.”

  “Reckon Emily will be about done messing in your business,” he said. “Good work on that cupboard, son.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Casewell supposed that was about as close as he’d ever come to hearing his father say he loved him.

  That evening Casewell joined his parents for a meal of beans and corn bread. The beans had been cooking all day with ham hocks, and the cornmeal was ground from the Phillipses’ own corn. His petite, dark-haired mother with the smiling gray-green eyes called this a poor man’s supper. It didn’t take her long to broach the subject she was most interested in.

  “So tell me about Delilah’s niece,” she said to Casewell.

  “Well, she sure can cook,” he said and helped himself to another wedge of corn bread.

  “That’s a fine thing in a woman, to be sure,” Mom said. “But what is she like?”

  “She’s pretty—yellow hair and blue eyes, I think. She didn’t have a whole lot to say, but she seemed pleasant enough.”

 
His mother sighed. “Like pulling teeth. Doesn’t she have a child?”

  “Yup, a funny little sprite. I think maybe I talked to her—Sadie, it is—more than her mother. She showed me her doll.” Casewell racked his brain to think of something that would be of interest.

  “And the father?” she urged.

  “Don’t rightly know,” Casewell said. “The child said something . . .” he trailed off, fearing he was wandering into something too much like gossip.

  “Said what?”

  “Well, she’s just a child. There’s plenty of reasons for a woman to be visiting family without her husband.” Casewell folded his napkin and shoved back from the table a notch.

  His mother was not so easily dissuaded. “And how long are they staying? There’s a rumor . . .”

  “Enough, woman,” Dad said. “You’ll have to run down the other hens if you want to gossip about this new girl. Come out on the porch with me, son.”

  Casewell obediently followed his father while his mother began tidying the kitchen. Once outside, Dad fished the makings for a cigarette out of his breast pocket. He held a paper in one hand and shook out the tobacco from a tin with the other. He rolled the cigarette in a single motion, with the practice of years. He licked the edge to seal it and gave one end a twist. He struck a wooden kitchen match on a post and began puffing. His gnarled fingers were yellowed where he’d held a thousand cigarettes.

  Casewell, like most of his peers, had experimented with smoking as a boy. He’d tried corn silks and grapevine and finally tried the real thing when his friend Carl stole the makings from an older cousin. Casewell wanted to smoke like his father, his grandfather, and his dead uncle, but he never could get the hang of it. Smoking didn’t impress your friends when you were hacking and choking. He finally gave up trying and now was grateful a love for tobacco didn’t drive him out on the porch all through the day and in all kinds of weather. His mother didn’t allow smoking in the house, and Dad respected her in that.

  “So this girl is good lookin’, is she?” he asked.

  “I suppose so,” Casewell said. “But there’s likely a husband somewhere, and even if she’s a widow, there’s sure enough a child. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.”

  “True enough. Still, you’re about the right age to think of settling down, and seems like no one around here has caught your eye. Though I’ve seen more than one try it.” He slanted a look at Casewell. “It’s a man’s duty to find a good woman who can raise his children in the fear of God. And your ma probably wouldn’t mind a grand-young’un or two.”

  This was quite possibly the longest speech Casewell had ever heard his father make. And he was surprised the man seemed to advocate for him to get involved with a woman he barely knew.

  Casewell wanted to marry and have children. He thought of it often. But no woman had quite come up to his standards. He was looking for a God-fearing woman who would keep the house and raise well-behaved children. She needed to be smart enough to carry on a good conversation with him and to teach the children until they were old enough for school. He’d taken notice of a young lady or two over the years. Even now he recognized that Melody Simmons probably wouldn’t mind if he came calling, but pretty as she was, she was kin to the worst moonshining clan in the county. He aimed to stay clear of that bunch. And he certainly didn’t want a woman with notions about working outside the home. Lately it seemed like all the women his age either married young or were “liberated.”

  The country was changing rapidly. While the Korean War had ended, Joseph McCarthy had the whole country on alert for Communists, and that Marilyn Monroe was setting a terrible example for women everywhere. Such things seemed very far away to Casewell. There were places back in the hills where folks still didn’t have electricity or running water. Casewell didn’t have a television set, though his parents had one, and he’d watched a few programs with them. He liked the westerns—The Lone Ranger and Dragnet—where the good guys won out in the end.

  Casewell leaned against the side of the house and fished out a toothpick. “You’re right, Dad, it is time I settled down, but even if this Perla is available, there’s more to it than that.”

  “Right enough. Just thinking out loud.”

  After that the two men stood in silence and watched the light fade from the pasture and the woods. A deer walked into the far edge of the field and grazed her way down toward a pond. Casewell would have been willing to bet she had a fawn stashed somewhere nearby. But you’d never see it. He’d walked right up on fawns that he didn’t see until he almost stepped on them. Nature knew how to protect her young.

  At home that night Casewell found himself replaying the afternoon he’d spent with Perla and Sadie. There wasn’t much to it, but what he did remember agreed with him. Perla behaved like Casewell tended to think a woman ought. She’d been mostly quiet, tending to her daughter and the meal. And as he’d noticed before, she was easy on the eyes. Now that he was beginning to think of Perla as perhaps more than just a guest passing through, he realized that he’d done very little to engage her in conversation. He and little Sadie had talked more than he and Perla did. Well, if Perla’s visit lasted long enough, he’d have to remedy that.

  3

  THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, Pastor Longbourne invited Casewell to play along with George and Steve during the service. They struck up a rousing version of “I’ll Fly Away” that had even the staid Presbyterians tapping their toes. He saw Sadie stand up and dance a little before her mother coaxed her back into the pew. After church, the musicians were swamped by well-wishers, and Casewell watched Perla climb into the Thorntons’ car as townsfolk blocked his path to the door.

  That afternoon he went to see the Talbot sisters so that he could get their opinions on a few finishing touches for their cupboard. After giving him the information he needed, Liza and Angie insisted he stay and visit with them. They produced a pot of tea, and Casewell found himself sitting on a sprung sofa, trying to balance a teacup on his knee. With his mother’s Sunday dinner in his belly and the twins’ prattle in his ears, he had a hard time staying awake.

  Casewell tried to pay attention as Liza turned her blue flannel eyes on him.

  “We’re not fond of gossip,” she said. “But since you’re a single man, you probably ought to know about that Perla Long.”

  Casewell jolted awake.

  “Now, Liza,” cautioned Angie, “we oughtn’t to say anything until we know for sure that she’s a harlot. It could just be mean talk over a pretty woman.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Liza said. “Just because Melanie Saunders says she’s never been married doesn’t make it true.”

  “And the Bible is clear about carrying tales,” Angie said.

  Casewell felt as if the sisters were playing a game of badminton as they gently batted their bit of gossip back and forth in front of him. Angie turned to Casewell and gave him a tight smile.

  “Pay no attention to us,” she said. “Scandalous stories travel faster than plain ones, and we have no business telling you anything we’re not sure of. Perla is probably a lovely young woman and Melanie Saunders is jealous.”

  Casewell had a dozen questions but didn’t see his way clear to ask any of them. Liza apologized and turned the conversation to peonies and whether the ants they attracted were necessary to make them bloom, or if it was safe to knock the little pests off. As soon as he could do so politely, Casewell told Liza and Angie he’d have their cupboard for them by Thursday and took his leave.

  He pondered what the sisters had to say about Perla. He was strongly opposed to gossip, but he couldn’t very well unhear what the Talbots had said. He also couldn’t think of a way to determine if what they had hinted at was true, short of asking Perla herself, and that he would not do. Casewell toyed with the idea of dropping some hints around his mother so that she might be inspired to do a little digging, but that felt wrong, too. Regardless, he found Perla Long somewhat less attractive at bedtime than he had when h
e’d awoken.

  Casewell worked hard to finish the Talbot sisters’ cupboard that week. The unfinished thank-you project for Perla and Sadie sat on the corner of his workbench. He worked around it for a couple of days and then packed it into a crate and pushed it under the bench. He’d get to it once the paid work was out of the way.

  On Thursday Casewell loaded the finished piece of furniture into the back of his truck with the help of his father and carefully cushioned it with old quilts. He drove slowly over to the Talbots’, smiling to himself. It was a fine piece of work, and he was glad the twins would have it. He charged them less than he could get elsewhere, but the Talbots weren’t up on the current cost of handcrafted furniture, and he suspected they might faint if he charged what it was worth.

  Liza and Angie were waiting for Casewell on their front porch, hands clasped and faces eager. Liza leaned out to see better as Casewell and his father began unloading the base of the cabinet. Angie frowned at her sister and stood up a little straighter.

  As he lifted the furniture free of the tailgate, Dad stumbled slightly and Casewell had to lunge to take the bulk of the weight. Dad grunted and seemed to recover himself, so Casewell shrugged it off, supposing that neither of them were getting any younger. It was nothing.

  “That’s the bottom part, isn’t it?” Liza asked.

  “Of course it is,” Angie said. “The top is still in the truck. Open the door for them.”

  The sisters got in the way only a little as they tried to help the men bring both pieces of the cupboard into the kitchen. The two men settled the base into place and then centered the top against the wall. It fit perfectly and Casewell stood back, a twin on either side, to admire his work.

  Liza sighed. “It’s perfect.”

  “Well, nothing is perfect, but it’s mighty close,” Angie said. “Now let’s see how it works.”

  The two women began placing rose-strewn china plates on the open shelves. A teacup in its saucer went in front of each plate. Then a teapot with sugar and creamer found a home on a doily on the far right side of the serving board. Once everything had been placed, the twins stepped back to check the overall effect. Liza sighed again but apparently did not feel the need to speak.