Past Forward- A Serial Novel: Volume 6

by Chautona Havig

  “And you think that’s a good thing for a child to do?” Becca’s discomfort with it showed in every confused word.

  “I think it’s normal to this life. Maybe not to someone who lives in an apartment in the city, but for here… yes.”

  Becca strode toward the north east pasture, leaving Willow alone with the struggling animal. Ragged breaths told her the ewe suffered, but despite the animal’s obvious pain, it lay there in silence. “I’m so sorry you’re hurting. I’ll take care of it as soon as I can.”

  The animal’s eyes stared at her. Guilt slowly crept into her heart as she knelt there, helpless to alleviate the ewe’s suffering. “I think I’d feel better if you’d bleat or something. I remember reading about sheep and their silence in pain, but I didn’t really understand it. It’s like Jesus—silent before the slaughter. When God chose a lamb to represent His Son—wow. It’s just one more little thing that gives such an amazing picture and most of us never get to see it.”

  The sheep closed its eyes, panting heavily. Willow couldn’t stand to see the obvious misery any longer. She stood and roamed about the pasture, looking for anything strong enough to help her. A rock—just large enough to give her hope of success—lay half buried in the dead grass. Her feet and hands dug to free it.

  Surprised at her reluctance to do what was necessary to alleviate the animal’s pain, Willow stood over the ewe, rock raised over her head, and prepared herself for the unpleasantness. Her eyes slid in the general direction of the house, but didn’t see Laird. A car whizzed past, distracting her just as she started to knock the sheep senseless. Again, she took a deep breath and raised her arms over her head. As she started to heave the rock once more, Laird’s voice cut through the semi-silence. She shoved it away from the sheep and let it fall to the ground.

  “Laird! I didn’t see—” The boy stepped through the fence. “Oh… I didn’t think of you coming down the highway.”

  “What were you doing with the rock?”

  “Was going to knock her out so she wouldn’t feel the pain.” Willow took the gun from him and pointed to a tree a dozen or so yards away. “Why don’t you go stand over there?”

  “Are you really going to shoot it?”

  “Well, I can’t let her suffer.”

  The boy stared at the wound. “A vet—”

  “Couldn’t save her. Go on. I don’t want to get in trouble with Aggie for having you too close to it.”

  Half a minute later, a shot rang out. Willow opened her eyes and beckoned for Laird to bring her the shovel. The boy gestured as to whether he should dig where he was, but she shook her head calling, “Too far to drag her. Just bring it here.”

  They took turns digging, but the toll it took on her gloves prompted Willow to send him back for work gloves. “They’re in the barn hanging on a peg right inside the door.”

  Twice she stopped digging and stared at the slow ruination of her gloves. Twice she continued, eager to finish. Laird and Tavish took turns digging when Kari cried for food, and Willow sent the boys home for lunch while she worked through, taking a bite of burrito that Becca brought her between shovelfuls. Even with all the help, it took them nearly until dinner time to dig a hole deep enough for Willow’s satisfaction.

  As the three of them shoveled dirt into the grave, Willow glanced at Aggie’s boys. “You know what I just realized?”

  Laird spoke for the exhausted shovelers. “What?”

  “Someday, this could be Liam, Lucas, and me. Aggie is pretty blessed to have you two.”

  Laird seemed to stand a little straighter between shovelfuls, but Tavish shook his head. “She doesn’t need us for stuff like this. We don’t have stuff like this, and the stuff she needs us for is always stuff she wouldn’t have if she didn’t have to raise us.”

  She didn’t respond for a minute or two, but as she thought about it, she stopped working, leaning on the end of the shovel. “I heard Aggie say once that the only reason she regretted getting to have you guys was how it happened. She said she felt almost guilty every time she thanked the Lord for you.”

  Laird paused mid-throw, allowing his shovel to drop to the ground. “Only Aunt Aggie could thank God for having her life turned upside down.”

  “And mean it,” Willow added with what she suspected was a little too much emphasis.

  Laughter filled the air, leaving white puffs around them as Tavish said, “Yeah… and she’s probably got a hymn about that too.”

  Chapter 195

  The back door slammed shut as Willow burst into the kitchen. Aggie glanced up, a question in her eyes—a question that Willow didn’t notice. She shrugged out of her coat and rushed from the kitchen without a word. Lorna appeared a minute later, giggling. “Aunt Willow ripped her jeans. You should have heard her muttering all the way through the living room and up the stairs.”

  “I missed that.” Aggie grabbed Ronnie and pulled him from the fence surrounding the woodstove. “No. Stay away from the fence.”

  “But—”

  Aggie’s eyebrows drew together. “Don’t argue. What do you say?”

  The little boy’s chest heaved as if suffering a life-ruining disappointment. “Yes, mommy.”

  “Go find Ian.” Just as Ronnie stepped from the kitchen, Aggie called after him, “And stay away from the fence in there too.”

  From the way the child slowed his steps, Aggie knew she’d guessed right. She stared at the clock and then called for Ellie. “Can you go get the biscuits? They’re done.”

  The girl raced outside and returned minutes later with a basket of biscuits wrapped in a towel. “I still want to try them in the woodstove sometime.”

  “Let’s try it with cookies or something non-essential first.” She heard Willow admonish Ronnie to leave the living room fence alone and tossed her towel on the counter. “Or wait until Willow can watch us.”

  Willow stepped into the kitchen and her eyes sought Aggie. “I just told Ronnie to stay off the fence in there. Hope that’s okay.”

  “Do what you’ve got to do. That kid has been trying to land himself in the hospital since birth. Did you know he rolled off the bed at three days old and with me sitting right there?”

  “Oh, boy. Did you wonder if it was a foreshadowing of life to come?”

  Laughing, Aggie shook her head. “Nope. I knew it was when Libby said, ‘Yep. He’s Luke’s son all right.” As she dragged Ronnie back in the kitchen and ordered him to sit at the table she added, “I thought I knew trouble with Cari. I thought wrong. And yes, I have apologized to her.”

  As Willow washed her hands, Aggie’s voice rang through the kitchen and into the rest of the house. “All things are ready; come to the feast. Come for the table now is spread…”

  She stood at the stove, dishing pea soup into bowls and mugs and stopping the boys from taking handfuls of biscuits. “One per bowl of soup, boys.” Her eyes sought Aggie. “You’d think after hearing it every. single. time. we have soup, they’d get it. Four years of hearing it.”

  “Mom Tesdall says that boys have lousy hearing and terrible retention due to the extra thick skulls required to help them survive childhood.”

  Laird snickered. “Sounds like something Aunt Libby would say.”

  “They probably heard it from their mother.” Aggie glanced around her. “I haven’t seen Vannie. Where is she?”

  “Probably upstairs annoying the baby so she’ll wake up.”

  Aggie’s head whipped around and she glared at Laird. “Rephrase with a more charitable inference.”

  The boy glanced at Willow before he sighed and said, “She’s probably upstairs waiting for Kari to wake up.”

  “Well, I’ll take your bowl.” Aggie set it on the warming shelf of the stove. “You go get her. Treat her better than you would your best friend.”

  Minutes later, giggles filled the living room as Laird and Vannie stumbled through the house and into the kitchen. “I’d offer you my chair, but I don’t have one. Perhaps my favorite counte
r to lean against?”

  “You’re silly!”

  Aggie rolled her eyes at Willow. “I will never understand him.”

  “That’s what makes me interesting, Aunt Aggie. If you could understand me, what would you think about all day?”

  “I wouldn’t think. That’s the point,” Aggie insisted as she passed Vannie a biscuit. “I’d have a little time each day for my brain to rest.”

  As Laird crumbled his biscuit over his soup, earning him a wrinkled nose from Vannie, he shook his head. “Idle brains are—” A glance at Aggie made him pause. “—a blessing for overburdened aunts?”

  “Got that right.”

  Willow sat at the table, her farm supply catalog open before her. Liam tugged at her shirt as she filled out the order form, writing each letter with exact precision in pencil before tracing over each word in ink. Vannie tried to engage Liam in a game of “roll the ball,” but the boy seemed to be coming down with a cold and wanted no one and nothing other than his mother.

  As she raced through the kitchen to the back door, Kenzie bumped into Aggie, causing her pencil to slide across the paper. “Sorry!”

  “Not a problem.” Willow reached for the eraser. “No, Liam. You have to wait. I need to order these jeans.”

  A minute or two later, Vannie spoke. “Um, Aunt Willow…”

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you ordering? Did you say jeans?”

  “Yep.” Willow glanced up. “Why, do you need anything while I’m at it?”

  “No…” Vannie’s eyes slid to Aggie. At Aggie’s nod, she continued. “Why are you filling out an order form?”

  The question made no sense to her. Why would anyone fill out an order form? “So that I can buy them…”

  “Why not just grab some in Brunswick or go to Rockland? I think even the feed and seed in Fairbury has some.”

  A familiar tingling hit the base of her neck. This would obviously be another “Willow does things weird” scenario. “Because we’ve always ordered them from Grangers. I like them. They fit. The company has good customer service. When I find a place I like, I stick with them.”

  Aggie winced as her baby gave her a jab in a tender spot. She rubbed her belly and pointed to the number at the top of the form. “Why not call, then? It’d be faster…”

  The idea of calling to order jeans, or anything else for that matter, had never occurred to her. “Well, I don’t know. But if I did that, I’d find an excuse not to walk to the mailbox to post this. The boys like our trips to the mailbox, and it’s so warm today!”

  “You could check the mail—see if there is anything for you in there…” Vannie bit her lip. “I’m not criticizing, really. I just wondered.”

  “We get so little mail that walking to check it more than once a week is a bit excessive. He doesn’t stop more than a couple of times a week usually.” She grinned at Aggie. “Besides, it’ll give you guys a break from us for a little while.”

  “Give you a break from us is more like it.”

  Before Willow could protest, Ellie stepped into the room with an algebra book in one hand and a notebook in the other. “Aunt Aggie, I just can’t figure this out. It doesn’t make any sense.” The girl opened the book to the correct page and pointed to a lesson in graphing. “Every time I do the problem, I get it wrong. Almost every time it’s wrong. I think I could get an A if I just wrote down the opposite answer from the one I come up with.”

  As Vannie tried to explain the process, Willow read the instructions and frowned, flipping the page back and forth. Vannie stopped mid-explanation. “What’s wrong?”

  “Where’s the third column?”

  Both girls stared at her. “What third column?”

  “When I did graphing—lots of fun, by the way—I had three columns. This one,” She pointed to the book. “—and this one, but then I had one here too to write down the points I found. It prevented me from mixing numbers as I put them on the graph.”

  “That’s probably what you’re doing, Ellie. Try one that way.” Vannie glanced at Willow. “Where were you when I was doing these? I hate these things.”

  “Hating it is a good way to ensure you make lots of mistakes.” Willow added another pair of jeans to her order. “Mother always said we should try to learn to like things we have to do anyway.”

  Aggie stood, pressing her fist into the small of her back. “Do you like everything?”

  “Not even close. Mother didn’t either. But trying helps keep the things we don’t enjoy from becoming bugaboos.”

  Before Aggie could respond, her pocket buzzed. “Maybe that’s Luke. He said I might have to bring the older kids over to help.” She stepped into the pantry for a bit of quiet as she answered the phone.

  Vannie, Ellie, and Willow exchanged alarmed glances as Aggie wailed, “Oh, no!”

  A strange hush fell over the house as Aggie talked to Luke. Only her muffled words and the occasional snap of firewood in one of the stoves broke the silence. Liam and Lucas stood on either side of Willow, staring up at her with wide eyes. Ellie slipped from the room with her books under her arm, and Vannie leaned her arms on the table and dropped her forehead on them. Time seemed to hover as if waiting for permission to continue. By the time Aggie stepped from the pantry, Willow had begun praying for the Milliken family, certain that Martha must have finally lost the battle for her life.

  Aggie’s eyes met Willow’s. “So… I think we might need to get those hotel rooms after all.”

  “Why is that? If you need to stay, stay.”

  “It’s worse than we thought. The house was open during the worst of the cold.”

  As if on cue, Kari let out a wail upstairs. Vannie jumped up. “I’ll get her.”

  “We have pipes burst in the basement and the furnace overheated being on for so long with the doors open or something like that…” Aggie rambled almost non-stop as she processed the information. “Luke says it’ll be a week or more before he gets everything fixed.”

  “So it’ll be a week. At least here the kids have room to play and exist without being on top of each other.”

  A protest from Cari erupted in the living room. “That’s my spot! You can’t just take it!”

  One eyebrow rose as Aggie went to deal with the issue. Willow called after her, “At least here she has a spot. There wouldn’t be one in a dinky hotel room.”

  Three couples crowded around the kitchen table, talking. While Willow nursed Kari, Aggie and Becca compared RSVPs to the guest lists. “Barney said to expect thirty in addition to any RSVPs. He has a list of who he thinks will be there from the Mission.”

  Luke and Chad compared furnace options and tried to work out which pipes would need to be replaced. Chad pointed to the sketches before them. “If you hadn’t kept track of every pipe and wire you found…”

  “I didn’t gut things to the studs, though—not in most rooms. We could have some wonky stuff in places we don’t know. You know how those older houses are. When they added plumbing or electrical, they did all kinds of weird stuff.”

  Josh stared at both groups and sighed. “Once again, I am clueless as to what you guys are talking about. I’d be better off discussing floral arrangements or bridesmaids dresses.”

  Without a second of hesitation, Luke nodded. “Nothing wrong with that. Someone needs to understand females and translate for the rest of us.”

  Laughter erupted around the table, startling Kari. She fussed until Willow calmed her again and nudged her to resume nursing. Willow pointed to the list. “What about flowers? Is that all squared away? You said something about not being able to get them all in dried.”

  “I found some at a wholesale market. I had to buy way more than we needed, but at wholesale prices, it wasn’t much more than buying exactly what we needed at retail.” Josh scribbled a few things down on the “to-do/to-buy” list. “Didn’t get the ribbon we need, though.”

  “I was thinking about that,” Willow mused. “I think we should wrap them with
strips of muslin first before the ribbon. That’ll make it a smoother surface for the ribbon.”

  Becca’s head snapped up. “No!”

  “Okaaay…”

  “Sorry.” Becca blushed. “I mean that I want the ribbon to be the muslin. How cool would that look if we tore the strips? It would look rustic and—”

  Josh hugged her, his lisp growing even more pronounced as he said, “Great idea. My girl is a genius.”

  The couple exchanged glances. Willow watched as Josh questioned Becca without a word and she silently implored him—for something. As it turned into an impasse, she spoke up. “What is it? Something’s going on.”

  Josh sighed. “I—Becca—we wondered if she should invite Adric and Jael. It’s awkward, but we don’t want to offend him by not inviting him. I mean, without him, who knows how long—if ever—it would have taken us to meet.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Lass…” Chad’s eyes met hers across the table.

  “Do you trust me, Chad?”

  “Weeeelll…” He winked before adding, “I do. I just don’t want to make Jael feel awkward.”

  “And you think I would do that.”

  “I think,” he began with evident caution, “you sometimes assume that people think with the same rationale as you do. No one says there should be a problem. But you never know when someone—even yourself—will discover a weird jealous side you don’t expect to be there.”

  “Give me some credit. I’ve got accustomed to people making no sense and have learned to adjust.” At his raised eyebrows she added, “For the most part.”

  Aggie stared at the list and frowned. “So much to do, and you have to finish the Cheltenham house by the end of the month!”

  “We’ll manage. I’ll call Mac and see—”

  “I declare winter break. We’re taking two weeks off now and then just Christmas Eve and Christmas. That’ll help. The boys are yours whenever you need them—Vannie and Ellie too.”