High Plains Hearts

by Janet Spaeth

  “Are you saying you’ll take the job?” Ric leaned across the table and clutched her fingers eagerly.

  The photograph fell to the table. The answer was on her lips before he finished. And when she answered, her heart spoke.

  “Yes.”

  The trees whispered among themselves, and Ric sat on the grounded end of the teeter-totter, letting the cool June breeze wash over him.

  “God, I think we did it.”

  He spoke softly, although no one was out this late. He hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking of what awaited him in Wildwood.

  The congregation at Resurrection had insisted he fulfill his commitment to Shiloh, made before the flooding had occurred. As the youth minister who worked with children from the time they were infants until they graduated from high school, he’d been torn between his responsibility at the church and his promise to work at Shiloh, but Pastor Mike, the head clergyman at the church, had encouraged him.

  “You need a break,” he’d told Ric.

  It was probably true.

  The flood had crept in, slowly at first—a few inches in this basement, low-lying yards taking on water. At last the Rock River had been overwhelmed and left its banks entirely.

  Wildwood had just under 30,000 residents, and it hadn’t garnered the attention recent flooding had in larger cities, like New Orleans or Nashville.

  As a smaller community, Wildwood was at a disadvantage in recovery. The folks who drove the refuse trucks, the electricians who had to replace each electrical box, the technicians for the cable company—all were struggling in their own homes, trying to get them back to normal.

  His second-floor apartment hadn’t been damaged, but the lower level had been affected. He’d worked day and night, not just in his building but wherever residents had needed help.

  The chore seemed endless. Even in his dreams, he hauled out damaged belongings, power-washed basements, and swabbed walls with bleach. Perhaps more important was the task of keeping the children of Wildwood occupied while their parents toiled on, trying to balance post-flood cleaning with attending to their day jobs.

  There was so much work.

  And yet each day still had only twenty-four hours, and every human body needed sleep.

  He lay back and rested his head on the red-painted board of the teeter-totter. The enamel was flaking off, a sign of its heavy use this summer. When he stood up, his back, he knew, would be covered with crimson flecks.

  “You are good, God,” he said aloud as he surveyed the sky above him. Without city lights to challenge the brightness of the stars and the moon, the glow overhead was astonishingly reaffirming.

  The same sky covered them all—from the greatest cities of the world to this little camp in the plains of North Dakota.

  He’d felt guilty enjoying his time at Shiloh while his flock toiled on, but now he could return with the promise of help.

  He would come back with hope.

  It was in short supply lately in Wildwood. People were getting tired, and the full impact of what they’d lost was finally gnawing its way into their hearts.

  Plus there was so much to do. The day before he’d left for Shiloh, he’d met with the Parenting with Christ study group in the church. Once the most vibrant class in Resurrection’s offerings, its membership had dwindled to only a few couples.

  “It’s just so hard,” one of the young women said with a sigh. “I want to do this, but we need—my children need …” Her words had trailed off as she’d fought tears.

  It always seemed to circle back to this. Did they do this? Or that? What got short shrift? Life was now unbelievably complex.

  But Lily, even though she undoubtedly didn’t realize it, would take much of the burden from their shoulders. Just knowing their children would have a safe, secure place to go would be one less worry as they labored through rebuilding everything that made their lives.

  Right now she had, understandably, no idea of the scope of the job ahead of her. But he had seen her expression when she saw the teddy bear, bedraggled by the floodwaters.

  Her heart had spoken so loudly that he heard it.

  He smiled at the stars sprinkled overhead, a vast array of silver white lights in a black velvet sky.

  Whatever God had planned for him was making him very happy.

  And it was tied in with a young woman whose eyes, when she forgot her own worry, sparkled like the very stars above him now.

  “Thank You,” he said to the One who had created the celestial display, the curtain of heaven itself. “Thank You.”

  Todd crowed with delight when Lily told him they were moving to Wildwood. “There’ll be boys there,” he said with assurance. “Boys who will be my friends.”

  That hand on her heart squeezed again. Her son needed friends.

  “There’ll be boys there.” Lily stroked his reddish gold hair. “And they’ll be needing friends. You’ll be just the ticket.”

  “Just the thing God ordered, huh?”

  Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. But ordered for whom? For her? For Todd? For the children of Wildwood?

  “Time for bed,” she said, standing up.

  For once Todd didn’t argue. “I know exactly what I’ll dream about,” he told her as he pulled on his pajamas. “I’ll dream about Wildwood and all my new friends there, especially Ric. He’s way cool, Mom.”

  “He’s very nice,” she commented, steering him toward the sink. “Now brush your teeth and then into bed with you, young man. Busy day ahead!”

  Within minutes Lily was tucking in her son. “Say your prayers,” she reminded him.

  “I already did.” He beamed at her.

  “You did? When?”

  “I’ve been praying a lot since I got here. Ric says any time I want to talk to God, I just have to pray.”

  Lily smiled at her son. “I’m sure God is glad to hear your voice.”

  “He is! Ric said so. Oh, guess what else? He also says that God is my friend. So I think that I should be God’s friend, too.”

  “I guess the way to be His friend is to help His other friends, right? Maybe even those who don’t know about Him?” She smoothed a stray lock of hair off his forehead.

  A broad smile brightened his face. “And that’s why we’re going to Wildwood, right? To help God’s friends?”

  Once again the wonder of it all swept over her. Why was she asking God to send her an angel when she had this gift of her son?

  She nodded and spoke with difficulty over the tears in her throat. “Yes, honey. That’s it.”

  And she understood why her heart had spoken so clearly about accepting the call to Wildwood.

  There was something about Ric, too—something that made her worn-out heart dare to hope. What it was, she couldn’t identify, but it was an interesting feeling. Yes, that was it.

  It was interesting.

  Somehow the mechanics of moving Lily and Todd to Wildwood were done, and within two weeks they were on their way to their new home. Her few belongings had been transported to a storage unit near her mother’s house in Mandan. Ric had engineered the myriad of details so that all she had to do was put Todd in the car with her and drive the four hours to Wildwood.

  Lily loved the North Dakotan landscape. From the flat lands to the gently rolling low hills and on to the Badlands, it reminded her of her childhood; of times that were calmer and less threatening. To her, it would always be a place of refuge from the irrational ways of the world she had come to know.

  She had spoken to her mother before leaving Shiloh, and her mother’s words echoed in her ears: “Chicago isn’t everywhere, and Douglas Newton isn’t every man. There are good places and good people all over the world. Don’t let one bad experience spoil your enjoyment of life.”

  The gradual rises of the grasses and the cultivated fields nearing ripe heights lulled her further into the serenity she’d felt at times at Shiloh, and the reason for her trip fell from her thoughts as she let her eyes soak in the vista
of green and gold that surrounded her.

  Until a sign announced the turn for Wildwood. Within moments, she was there.

  The main street was heavily populated with cars near what seemed to be a hardware and building supplies store. A truck parked in front of it was being loaded with pallets of drywall.

  Not all the stores were open. Some were closed, and a grayish white film on the bottom two or three or even four feet of the plate-glass windows mutely told the story of the fate of their interiors.

  A parking lot had been turned into a makeshift mobile home park, and she remembered what she had learned in preparing for the move—that these had come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA had brought them in for families whose homes needed extensive repair or, in a few cases, had been too damaged to be fixed.

  Lily slowed and checked the map Ric had drawn for her. According to his directions, if she stayed on this street and then turned left at the park, she should soon be at Resurrection, the church where she’d be working. Barring that, she was to follow the white steeple that towered over the abundant elms that seemed to grow everywhere in Wildwood.

  The turn took her through a residential area. And nothing, absolutely nothing—not even the full panoply of photographs that Ric had laid out before her that day in Shiloh—had prepared her for this.

  It wasn’t so much the devastation that she saw—in fact, there was little to see immediately—it was the total sparkling cleanliness of the neighborhoods contrasted with the piles of rubble and debris that lined the road.

  In house after house, people carted out wheelbarrows full of unrecognizable materials and dumped the ruins on the already crowded berms.

  She was prepared for this—somewhat. The townspeople were still taking care of the damaged materials in their houses. Ric had given her a report that had explained it.

  The flood had come in the middle of April, and the residents had been forced to leave. They’d been out of their homes until mid-May or later. Before they could move back in, they had needed to pump the water out of their basements and remove not only the items that had been soaked, but furniture and appliances that had been flooded and carry them to the curb. Toys, clothing, games. Chairs, couches, and tables. Furnaces, washers and dryers, freezers. Drenched carpeting and drywall had to be torn out and dragged to the streets’ edges.

  The infrastructure of the city had to be back into place before the debris pickup could begin. Trash removal had just begun in some parts of the town earlier in the week.

  All services had been affected. Even electricity, usually taken for granted, had become a luxury as each inundated home’s electrical box had to be replaced.

  It was too much to take in.

  What happened, though, brought unstoppable tears to her eyes.

  Each of them looked up at her car as it crept down the street. And then, pausing in their work, they squinted against the sunlight toward her and smiled and waved.

  How could they? How could they possibly be so cheerful and happy when their lives were on the edges of the streets, soaked with floodwaters?

  The church was easy to find, thanks to Ric’s instructions. The white clapboard building was topped with a spire that seemed to point directly to heaven, although, as Lily reminded herself, that was precisely the reason for making it that way.

  Resurrection, like the houses she’d seen, was spotlessly white—and finally it dawned on her. Many of the houses and businesses she’d seen looked so bright and fresh because they’d just been painted. The insides, however, were torn apart and damaged.

  If she was looking for metaphor, she was certainly in the right place.

  “Mom?” Todd’s sleepy voice jolted her back to reality. “Are we there yet?”

  “Yes, tiger, we’re here.”

  She turned off the car’s engine and leaned over the seat. “Are you awake?”

  It was a silly question. Todd had the most amazing ability to require only thirty seconds to bring himself from a deep sleep to full wakefulness. It was a quality she’d envied since his babyhood.

  “What does it look like? Is that it? Where are we going to live? I thought it was a trailer. That’s not a trailer. That’s a church. Are we going to live in a church? What’s that smell?”

  “Whoa!” she said, laughing. “Okay, Question Man, let’s take them one at a time—not that I remember them all, but let’s see how I do. First of all, this is a church, and I doubt we’re living here. You’re right, Ric said we would live in a trailer, although I think ‘mobile home’ is the preferred term.”

  She opened the car door, and a breeze carried in the faint waft of something she vaguely remembered.

  Todd wrinkled his nose. “Yuck. Something stinks.”

  “Well, let’s not say anything about it quite yet. Why don’t we go inside and see if Ric is there?”

  The lure of seeing his friend from Shiloh did the trick. Todd dropped the subject of the rogue smell and bounded to the door of the church.

  Lily saw him stop suddenly, and when he turned, his face was squeezed in disgust.

  She joined him and, at the open door, understood. The smell was nearly overpowering. Although the windows in the narthex were all open and fans were blowing air outside, the smell was pervasive.

  “That’s what a flood smells like.” Ric spoke behind them, and Todd turned to him with a grin and propelled his little body into Ric’s welcoming arms.

  “What is it?”

  He looked at her directly. “Sewage. The drains didn’t work for obvious reasons, and sewage backed up into homes, businesses, churches, on the streets—you name it.”

  “What’s sewage?” Todd asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Lily said smoothly. “Or we’ll talk about it later. Take your pick.”

  He nodded. “Okeydokey. But it sure does smell stinky.”

  “I agree,” Ric said. “Later this afternoon I’ll give you the grand tour of Wildwood. First let me show you your new home and give you a chance to get your bearings.”

  “Sounds good. Should I follow you in my car?” Lily asked.

  “You don’t have to. We can walk. It’s right back here.” He motioned for them to follow him.

  They walked through the area behind the sanctuary and back out into the bright sunlight. He led them around to the area behind the building.

  “There it is. Hope you like it.”

  A mobile home was set up in a small clearing beside the parking area. Next to it was a small recreational area with swings, a slide, and a merry-go-round.

  “From FEMA?” she asked, thinking of the homes she’d seen in the parking lot near downtown.

  “No, this belongs to the denomination. The district brought it in for us to use. Is it all right?” Ric asked.

  Two thoughts came to her simultaneously. The first was how small the home was, but when she quickly calculated the size, she realized it was about the same as her apartment in Chicago.

  Her second was to notice the trees that sheltered the small home. She hadn’t known how hungry she was to live next to trees or plants of any kind again after spending those years in the large apartment complex that had been their home in Chicago. There had been a single anemic tree in the courtyard and some carefully cultivated plants, but nothing natural.

  Todd raced toward the playground and jumped on one of the swings. “Is this for me?” he yelled at Ric.

  “It’s for you and for any other children who want to use it,” Ric answered. “It belongs to the church.”

  “I love it,” she said simply.

  “But you haven’t seen the inside. Come on. Let’s take a look at it.”

  The interior was clean and plain. There were no heavy draperies on the windows, only light yellow cotton curtains that billowed in the faint afternoon breeze. The furniture was utilitarian, not stylish but workable. And instead of lush carpeting, slightly worn throw rugs covered the linoleum.

  “It’s not much, I know,” Ric began to ap
ologize, “but it’s—”

  “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

  “It’s not what you had in Chicago, I know.”

  She ran her hand over the scarred gray dinette table. “And that’s why I like it, Ric.”

  He didn’t say anything, but she sensed that easy acceptance that was so much a part of Ric.

  “I’m not ready to talk about it.” The answer to his unspoken question seemed to blurt itself out in the warm summer air.

  “I understand. And I want you to know that if you decide you need to talk about it, and you want to talk to me, I’ll listen.”

  Lily shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll ever talk about it. This isn’t … Oh, I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Have you talked to God about it?” Ric’s question was soft.

  “He knows.” Her voice sounded bitter, and she instantly regretted it. “I didn’t mean it that way. I talked to God so much while I was in Chicago that I’m sure He got sick and tired of hearing from me: ‘Oh, there she is again. What’s her problem today?’ ”

  “You don’t mean that.” Laughter edged its way into his words.

  “No, I don’t. Not really. But we’re not here to talk about me anyway. We’re here to help God’s friends.”

  Ric tilted his head. “ ‘God’s friends’?”

  Her smile came back as she looked out the window at Todd gleefully zipping down the slide. “That came from Todd. According to him, we’re all God’s friends. He said he learned it from you at Shiloh.”

  Ric joined her at the window. “He learned it from me? Oh no. I learned it from him. I learned it from him and from every child I’ve ever come in contact with. And each day I learn it again.”

  He turned to her and smiled, and once again Lily saw the warm blue of the North Dakota sky in his eyes. “I’m glad to have you here … friend.”

  Lily felt the welcome all the way into her heart.