Land Sakes

by Margaret A. Graham

  © 2005 by Margaret A. Graham

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3916-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  For Alvera J. Mickelsen,

  writer, teacher, speaker,

  who spends herself unstintingly in helping

  other people succeed.

  In memory of Nancy Lee Bates,

  who left the world better than she found it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  1

  The spring of the year is always beautiful in the mountains of North Carolina, and I hated to think this would be my last to see the blooming of the dogwood trees and the greening of the slopes. My heart was broke. I had been the housemother at Priscilla Home for many years when the board ups and decides I should retire. There was a bunch of new people on the board who did not know doodly-squat about what was best for the ministry.

  Priscilla Home is a Christian place for women who abuse drugs, and although I was a couple years shy of seventy, I felt plenty fit to keep on as housemother. In fact, I had thought I was set for life. You never know, do you? I loved those women, and through the years I had kept up with a lot of the ones who had graduated from our ten-month program. Many of them told me I had made a difference in their lives.

  Ursula, the director of Priscilla Home, had decided to go to seminary, so the board did offer me her job. “Esmeralda,” the young whippersnapper of a vice president told me, “the work of housemother is too demanding on a woman your age, but we would like you to take over as director.”

  “No, that’s not for me.”

  He upped the ante. “Of course, there would be a 25 percent increase in salary.”

  “I’m not interested, thank you.”

  That just goes to show you what greenhorns were on that board. They know I have got only a eighth grade education. I couldn’t handle the bookkeeping, letter writing, or all that computer stuff. Besides, my heart was in helping them women one-on-one, day in and day out, not sitting in the office answering the phone and shuffling papers.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. Financially, I was strapped. Never dreaming the board would do this to me, I had bought a car for Pastor Osborne. He’s the pastor of my home church, Apostolic Bible, in Live Oaks, South Carolina, and for years he had been driving around in a two-door rattletrap of a compact. With three adopted children he needed a four door, but on the salary he made he could never afford one.

  Ever since I came to Priscilla Home I had dreamed of the day when I could afford to buy a decent car for the Osbornes. For a long time it was only a dream. You see, when I was living in Live Oaks, I had lied to get Maria, a homeless woman, admitted to the hospital, and since I never get away with any lie, after she died, the hospital charged me with her medical bills. Only after I had paid off those bills did I see my way clear to buy a car for the Osbornes.

  I called Elmer, my friend who runs the hardware store in Live Oaks, and asked him to shop around for a four-door, low-mileage car for the pastor. Elmer wanted to help too, so he loaned me the money at the rate of interest he was getting on his money market account.

  I still had nine more payments on the Osbornes’ car when my Chevy died. Too many trips up and down the Old Turnpike had tore it up. In the mountains, a body needs a four-wheel drive, so I found a secondhand Subaru in good shape and got a bank loan to pay for it. After that, it was nip and tuck, making payments to Elmer and to the bank, but by the skin of my teeth I was managing until this thing came up with the board.

  I had no place to go. The Osbornes were renting my house in Live Oaks; I couldn’t ask them to move. Besides, I needed the rent money they were paying me. Even with the rent money, my Social Security, and the three hundred a month I got as housemother, I was barely making ends meet. Having to leave Priscilla Home meant I would lose three hundred dollars’ salary as well as free room and board. I tell you, the board could not have picked a worse time to pull the rug out from under me.

  I went into town and put in my application at all the restaurants, the stores, and even the fast-food places, but nobody needed help. I checked the classifieds for an efficiency to rent in town. There was only one, and it was dirty as a dog bed.

  The board told me I could take my time about leaving because the new director would need my help learning the ropes. Nancy, a nurse and a Priscilla Home grad, had been my assistant for three years, so she would replace me as housemother.

  The fall before all this happened, Barbara Winchester had come to Priscilla Home, roaring down the driveway in a red sports car. She pulled to a stop in back and stepped out dressed like a movie star—high heels, dark glasses, the whole bit. No resident is allowed to have a car at Priscilla Home, so pretty soon I took her keys, which didn’t set too well with her.

  Barbara kept telling me, “I’m the heiress of the Winchester fortune, and the only reason I’ve come to Priscilla Home is to keep Father from disinheriting me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Surely you’ve heard of him—Philip Winchester? He’s on the Fortune Five Hundred list. They call him Florida’s Citrus King. He owns big companies in the States and has mining interests overseas.”

  Well, when you’ve been in this work as long as I have, you take stuff like that with a grain of salt.

  Like I said, Barbara came in the fall of the year with a dozen suitcases full of designer clothes, enough shoes to open a shoe store, lots of jewelry, and, hear this—imported thermal underwear! Seeing all that stuff, I figured she was making big bucks selling drugs.

  She didn’t fit in at first. But one day, after being at Priscilla Home a few weeks, she took a bunch of them clothes down to the laundry room to wash and then went outside to smoke. Some time later, I was in my room when I heard Nancy screaming, “Barbara, get in here!” She sounded historical, so I hurried down there.

  Barbara got to the laundry room about the time all the rest of us did. Nancy was beside herself! “Barbara,
look at this,” she said and held up the thermal underwear that had shrunk to the size of my hand. “You’ve ruined your clothes!”

  “Oh?”

  Nancy kept pulling one designer outfit after another out of the washer—pantsuits, silk blouses, sweaters—some had shrunk to Barbie-sized clothes, and all the colors had run together.

  “You musta never washed clothes before,” somebody said.

  Holding up a tiny cashmere sweater to her chest, Barbara admitted, “I’ve never washed a dish, much less clothes.”

  Seeing all that swanky wearing apparel reduced to doll clothes was bad, but it was also just about the funniest thing that had ever happened at Priscilla Home. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

  “One size fits all!” somebody piped, and that did it! Barbara fell out laughing, which set us all off. I tell you, we were historical!

  That broke the ice; it made Barbara one of us. Since she had no work clothes, she asked me to let her look through the secondhand stuff we have in the clothing room. Of course, she had plenty of the good stuff left to wear on occasions that called for such. As for the ruined thermal underwear, she framed them, and they’re still hanging on the wall of the craft room.

  Over time, Barbara learned a lot more than how to wash clothes. Nancy showed her how to load the dishwasher, run the vacuum cleaner, etc. The cooks taught her how to stir the grits, fry eggs, and roll biscuit dough. Driving the little snow plow was her specialty. All winter long, every time it snowed, Barbara zipped up and down our driveway like a house afire.

  That girl beat all I ever saw. It tickled her pink, learning how to do stuff, and many’s the time she said she wished her mother could come to Priscilla Home. She said her father told her that his wife didn’t know how to do nothing.

  It was strange the way Barbara talked about her mother. She never seemed to know much about her firsthand. If Barbara’s family really was rich, maybe she hadn’t lived at home a lot; maybe she’d been shipped off to boarding school and summer camp most of her life.

  Although prayer and Bible study were all new to Barbara, over time she took to it. Albert Ringstaff, who was not only our neighbor but also our Bible teacher, came every morning to teach our Bible study. That man never tired of the questions the women asked, and I never heard anybody explain things as good as he did.

  One snowy afternoon Barbara and I were in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, when we got talking.

  “Miss E., all my life I’ve had this kind of funny feeling deep inside… I can’t explain it. I loved to party, but after all the good times were over, I still had this feeling that didn’t go away.”

  “You know, Barbara, God draws us to himself one way or another. Maybe that feeling bugging you has been him drawing you to himself—bringing you here so you could hear about him.”

  She laughed and got up to dump the peelings in the trash can. “In my case, he wasn’t drawing—he had to drag me up here to these sticks!”

  I’m not the teacher Albert is, but by the time we got all those potatoes peeled, I felt like I had done my best.

  In the late spring when the board dropped that bombshell on me, Barbara was awful upset, as were the rest of the women. They wrote letters to the board, and when the board didn’t answer, it was all I could do to keep them from walking out.

  Barbara was pitcher-pumping me. “Let me call my father’s lawyers. They’ll file an age discrimination suit against this place.”

  I put the quietus on all of that, told them the Lord was in this and we’d just have to wait to see what he had in mind.

  Even though I truly believed the Lord had his reasons for my being let go, my heart was aching. I didn’t want the women to know how bad I felt, because it’s like Splurgeon says: “One downcast believer makes twenty souls sad.” What crying I did, I did alone in my room. And, working about the house and yard, I let loose, singing the songs of Zion in a voice that sounded like a whooping crane in mating season. The girls got a lot of fun out of my singing, and it did as much for me as it did for them.

  But Barbara kept harping about her mama. “I want her to meet you, Miss E.”

  Then one day her mother’s secretary called and told Barbara her mama was going on this cruise and needed a companion.

  “A companion?” I asked. “Why does a grown woman need a companion?”

  “Mother has spells of light-headedness.”

  “I see.” I was tired and excused myself to get ready for bed.

  There’s nothing quite like a good hot bath to ease body aches and pains. As I sloshed around in the tub soaping up, I wondered if anybody in Live Oaks knew I was leaving Priscilla Home. I hadn’t even told Beatrice. She and Carl spend their time traveling in that RV they got. It would have been nice to pick up the phone and call her, but Carl has never bought a cell phone, which is one thing I will never understand. Now and again, Beatrice will call me from a pay phone or write a letter. The last letter I got from her she told me to write in care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. They were staying a while at a campground there.

  I turned on more hot water and lay back in the tub, feeling cut loose from everybody I loved. Beatrice—she’s like a sister to me. We’ve known each other all our lives, and since neither of us have any near kin, we tell each other everything. I could write to her to give her this news, but it would be better to wait until I knew what I was going to do. Hearing the board retired me, Beatrice would most likely get historical.

  But me? When you’ve lived as long as I have, it takes more than a bump in the road to make you go all to pieces. It’s like Splurgeon says: “All sunshine and nothing else makes a desert.” A bump in the road shakes you up so you don’t rest on your laurels.

  Sometimes it’s better not to have nobody to talk to but the Lord. I didn’t have to tell him how much I loved Priscilla Home, and he knew the good I could do there. But I told him if he had somebody who could do it better, I could handle that, if only I wouldn’t get jealous.

  I’ve been disappointed before. A few years back I had feelings for Albert Ringstaff. He is one dear man, a gentleman from the word go. Smart too. Before he retired, he tuned pianos for concert maestros, as he called them, and traveled all over the world. Now he lives up on the mountain, where he has a big place and a guesthouse.

  Albert came here as a widower, and in time he became the only man I had ever been interested in since my Bud died. But I came to understand that the Lord had something better for me than marrying Albert. Anyway, Albert’s highbrow music and friends would have proved to be not my cup of tea. As it is, I have had work to do for the Lord, and he has give me souls for my hire. It don’t get no better than that.

  But you never know what’s around the bend, do you? Women my age are dropping like flies, so I’d have to be boneheaded not to know I was getting close home. As much as I looked forward to getting there, I did want to make the most of the time I had left. If Priscilla Home was the end of the line for me, coasting the rest of the way home would be the hardest thing the Lord ever had me do.

  When the new director arrived, she made it clear that she could handle this work without any help from me. A body don’t hang around where they are not wanted, so I started packing. As I was folding my underpants, my glasses fogged up. Lord, we’re coming down to the wire. Where do we go from here? I decided I better put down a deposit on that dog bed of an apartment in town, but I really didn’t want to.

  I had wiped my eyes and started packing my winter clothes when Barbara came to my room. “Can I help?” she asked.

  “No, just sit down and visit with me.”

  “Had a letter from Mother’s secretary.”

  “Your mama has a secretary?”

  “Oh yes. I don’t suppose Mother has ever written a letter in her life. At least, she’s never written one to me.”

  “I like to write letters, myself,” I said. “I have this friend I’ve known all my life, and we write letters back and forth all the time.”

/>   Barbara stood up and looked out the window. “Father said he has never known my mother to have a friend.”

  “Oh no? How old is she?”

  “She’s in her sixties.” She turned away from the window. “According to Dad, Mother only likes dead people.”

  I dropped the blouse I was holding and stared at her. “What?”

  “That’s right, dead people. He says she likes to know where they’re buried and how they died, so she travels all over the country visiting cemeteries.”

  What kind of a wacko is this?

  “Miss E., Mother is going on this cruise, and she needs somebody like you to go with her.”

  I laughed. “She does, does she?” Barbara’s feeling sorry for me; wants to help me out, I thought. “Well, Barbara, I may be a lot of things, but one thing’s for sure, I am not no nurse.”

  “She doesn’t need a nurse.”

  “Didn’t you tell me she has spells of light-headedness?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Well, with all the money your family has got, it seems like you would hire a registered nurse, somebody like that.”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s not what she needs.”

  “Well, your daddy will be traveling with her, won’t he?”

  “Dad never goes anywhere with her.”

  “I see.” I was beginning to get the picture. Here’s a bubbleheaded woman who has not got much of a marriage and has not been much of a mother. I have not got much patience with a woman like that.

  “Where’s she going on this cruise?”

  “Alaska. The ship sails from Vancouver.”