Land of the Brave and the Free (Journals of Corrie Belle Hollister Book 7)

by Michael Phillips

  “Is the minister still here?” I asked. “Rev. . . . hmm, I guess I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Rev. Gilman?”

  “That’s him,” I answered.

  “No, he passed on, oh, I’d say five or six years back. He’d retired from the pulpit four years before that. He was an old man.”

  I nodded. “I suppose so. He seemed pretty old as I remember him, but I thought he’d still be alive.”

  “We got a young preacher now. He’s all right, I reckon. Little too much fire and brimstone for me, though.”

  We chatted a little more, I said I’d come back and talk to him about dinner, and then I left, thinking I’d walk to the other end of town and visit the church.

  About halfway there, along a street that ran perpendicular to the main street, I saw the sheriff’s office. Without even thinking about why, I found myself crossing the street and heading toward it. By now there were people and horses and wagons about, and I had to cross with care. The town was busier than I’d remembered it. A few people nodded or smiled or greeted me, but most folks seemed to be about their business and didn’t seem too concerned about a stranger in town.

  I shuddered momentarily as I walked through the door, taking in the wanted posters on the wall opposite, and the iron bars of the jail cell down a corridor to the right. A young man about my own age sat at a desk in the middle of the room. He glanced up as I entered.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” he said. “Something I can do for you?”

  “I’m just visiting in town,” I answered, not even knowing quite why I’d come here, maybe just to satisfy any lingering anxieties about the past. “Have you heard of a Drummond Hollister?”

  The man shook his head slowly and thoughtfully. “No,” he said, still mulling the name over. “No . . . don’t believe I have.”

  “Or a Nick Belle?”

  “Nope. Never heard of neither of them. Why? They causing you some kind of trouble, young lady?”

  I smiled. “No, no trouble. I just wondered if you’d heard of them, that’s all.”

  “Should I have?”

  “No . . . probably not,” suddenly thinking about how I could get this young sheriff or deputy from thinking any more about Pa and Uncle Nick. “What about the Catskill Gulch gang?” I asked.

  Now his face showed an instant recognition, and he let out a long whistle. “You bet I heard of them! Who around here hasn’t, though none of them have been seen for twenty years. What’s your interest in varmints like that?”

  “Just curiosity. What did they do?”

  “What didn’t they do’s more like it. Mostly they was robbers, though there was killing that went along with it.”

  “Are . . . are all of them still wanted?”

  “Nah, most of the warrants got canceled when old Judd’s son went into Catskill and turned in all the loot.”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” I said.

  “Judd, he was the ringleader. Well, I guess when he was on his deathbed he told his son everything that had happened on one of their big bank jobs, including where they’d stashed the money. When he died, his son didn’t want no part of it. He found the loot, turned it in, and told the sheriff there everything Judd had said. Cleared up most of the warrants, all except for two fellers they never found . . . let’s see what were their names—the two the sheriff figured had done most all the killing.”

  “Do you remember the names?” I asked, hardly able to keep from showing the nervousness I felt inside.

  “I forgot—let’s see, I think I got it here someplace.” He opened a drawer and sifted through a bunch of papers, then pulled one out and held it up.

  “Yep, here it is,” he said. “Only two Catskill boys still wanted—Jesse Harris and Big Hank McFee . . . a couple of nasty coots, those two are.”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I couldn’t wait to tell Pa and Uncle Nick!

  “Those are the only ones?”

  “Yep, though neither of those boys, or none of the old gang, for that matter, have been around here in a coon’s age that I know of. You sure you’re just curious?”

  “Yes, that’s all,” I said, then thanked him and left.

  I didn’t know why I’d asked about Pa and Uncle Nick. I suppose I’d been thinking about Pa ever since the livery stable. I was glad I did, though. This news would bring him such a sense of relief.

  Now that I was thinking about Pa again, I realized that day Zack and I’d come into town with him was the last day I remember doing that. Maybe that’s why it had come to me, because by the next month he was gone, and Zack and I didn’t see him again until that day outside the Gold Nugget in Miracle Springs.

  People talk about things going around in circles. Here I was in the very town Pa had left twenty years earlier, standing right in the very sheriff’s office where wanted posters about Pa and Uncle Nick had once hung up on the wall. Now I had come back, Pa’s own daughter, just like a great big circle that stretched all the way out to California and back.

  Pa and I’d talked plenty that first couple years we were together about the pain his leaving had caused me. Zack hadn’t faced what it had done to him inside until that year after he’d joined the Pony Express. Both of us had said some pretty strong things to Pa about the hurt it had caused us.

  But it’s funny, the older you get the less hurtful become the things that other people have done to you, and the more you regret the words you’ve said to others that caused them pain. And now as I walked along through the town, snatches of conversations, words, images, and faces began to come back to me, all related to Pa’s leaving us as he did. But there wasn’t any pain I felt for what Pa’d done to me or to Ma or to our family. That had all been taken care of long ago for me. I could no more hold anything against Pa than I could hold it against Ma for dying. I loved them both too much for that! The pain I felt was for Pa himself, knowing how bad he felt for what he’d done.

  Now began to echo through my ears things I had said to Pa that day not long after we’d gotten to California when Pa had flown off the handle to Uncle Nick for talking to us kids about Ma. It felt like a knife going straight into my heart to hear my own words.

  You’re a mean man . . . maybe we all oughta just leave just like you left Ma. If it weren’t for you, Ma’d still be alive. You ran out on her. You deserted us. . . . I hate you for what you did to Ma!

  “Oh, God, forgive me for those awful things I said!” I whispered, not even trying to keep back the tears.

  All I could think was how sorry I was for Pa. He was the one who faced the worst pain of all from what had happened—the pain of guilt. And I had only made it all the more agonizing for him by the things I’d said!

  Somehow being right here, coming out of the sheriff’s office, brought it all so close to my heart. I wanted so badly to be able to put my arms around Pa right then and tell him how much I loved him!

  I wondered how old Ma and Pa were when they were married and lived here together. Probably about my age now. I think Ma was twenty-four or twenty-five when I was born. Now I was twenty-eight. When you realize you’re as old as your parents were when you first have memories of them, it opens your eyes to lots of things. All of a sudden you find yourself inside your parents’ skin looking at things from their point of view. All your life growing up they are separate from you and you see things only through your childish eyes. But then that day comes when suddenly you realize what it all felt like—for them.

  There’s a lot of growing up that happens in that moment.

  Maybe more than at any other time in life, you suddenly realize what your ma or pa felt, especially what they might have felt about you. That’s a pretty grown-up adult thing to be able to feel.

  As I walked through the streets, thinking about all this, I realized that Ma and Pa were near my own age when they lived here right after I was born. Somehow that made them so real and close to me—for the first time in my life in just this way. I felt so close to Ma, even though she’d been d
ead for thirteen years. And I felt so close to Pa after leaving that jail, even though he was three thousand miles away, and suddenly I could hardly stand to be away from him for another second!

  I breathed in deeply and brushed away a few remaining tears. I’d nearly reached the church.

  I walked the remaining fifty yards or so, climbed up the four steps, and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Slowly I opened it and went inside.

  The church was empty and still and dark. I glanced around. It was all so familiar, especially the smell. A thousand things came flooding back the instant my nostrils took in that first breath. If anybody had asked me a month before to describe the church we’d gone to when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been able to so much as tell one thing about what the inside even looked like. Now everything came rushing back. The windows . . . the carpet, still threadbare in the same spot . . . the third pew on the right that was rickety from not sitting flat on the floor . . . the room where we kids had had Sunday school.

  I sat down on the left side, where all the pews and benches were firmly on the floor. I just sat there in the solemn quiet, not thinking so much of God but just letting the flow of sights and sounds and memories wash past me, looking and listening and watching as they went, but not reaching out to grab at any of them for a closer look.

  Gradually all the images faded and the quiet silence of the church came in and filled up all the places of my mind with the sense of God’s presence.

  I sat a long time. At last I began to pray.

  “God,” I said quietly, “whatever else you’ve got to show me while I’m here, whether it’s about Pa or about Ma or Uncle Nick . . . and especially about me, open the eyes of my heart to see what you want me to. Lord, I do pray for Pa and for all he’s gone through. Help him to know how much we all love and care for him.”

  I stopped. As much as I did love Pa, the thought struck me even as I was praying for him that my visit here wasn’t mostly about him. Things had been settled between him and me a long time ago.

  Mostly, I realized, it had to do with me. “Lord,” I prayed again, “I know you’re speaking to me, maturing me, showing me things, and preparing me for my life ahead. I know you’re putting the past of my childhood behind me and that’s why you wanted me to come here. I know there’s probably lots of reasons you wanted me to come here, but help me to see the main thing about myself that you want me to see. I want to look forward from now on, and not have to look back anymore. Show me what you want to show me, and help me be who you want me to be.”

  It was enough to pray. I had to let God do the rest.

  I got up. It was time to go visit the farm.

  It was two hours later when I slowly approached the house that had been my home for fifteen years of my life.

  I’d gone back to the boardinghouse for a while, then rented a horse from the livery stable and ridden the two miles out into the country farmland.

  I was surprised at how familiar everything was. I thought I had forgotten what the area looked like. But being here again, just as had happened everywhere I’d gone in town, suddenly the sights were as recent as yesterday.

  Once out on the road out of town, all looked just as it had been. I felt as if I could have been walking along at fifteen with one of my younger brothers or sisters. I passed the farmhouses and barns of many neighbors whose names now began to come back to me.

  I passed the lane off toward the house of our nearest neighbors, what we used to just call the Lucas place. Alma Lucas was Ma’s best friend, especially after Pa left, though about all I could remember of her was trying to talk Ma out of going to California. “A fool’s errand,” was what she called it. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, Agatha Hollister, to head off west with five young’uns!”

  Just thinking of her and her friendship with Ma brought Mrs. Lucas back more closely to my mind, and I began to remember her more vividly. I turned the horse and guided him down the lane to their place.

  When I reached the farmhouse, I dismounted and tied the horse to a rail in front of the house, then walked up onto the porch. I knocked.

  A minute or two later a man appeared. I didn’t recognize him, and he didn’t seem to know me.

  “Is Mrs. Lucas at home?” I asked.

  “Alma?”

  I nodded.

  “No, she ain’t. She’s upstate t’ her brother’s. His wife fell sick an’ she’s tendin’ her.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and turned to go. I paused on the first step and glanced back. He was still standing there watching me.

  “Who’s living in the place next up the road?” I asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “How long’s it been empty?”

  “ ’Bout a year. It’s fer sale, miss. You need a run-down ol’ farm?”

  “No,” I smiled, then turned and walked back to the horse.

  A minute or two later I was back on the road, and I soon reached the lane leading to our old place. A “For Sale” sign was stuck in the middle of the pasture in front of the house. It looked as if it had been there a long time.

  I approached the house. Grass and shrubs were grown up all around it, and the house looked lifeless and vacant and cold. And silent. Even as I rode up, I could remember the sound of voices and running and laughter and cows and pigs, and Ma’s voice calling out now after one of us, now after another, all filled the air in the ear of my memory. I heard all the sounds of life with part of my senses, even as the steady clomping of the horse’s feet beat out an empty cadence in the silent air surrounding the desolation that our old home had become.

  I stopped and just sat there in the saddle. The sounds in my mind faded. Only the silence remained. What a contrast to the place at Miracle Springs! Except for Ma’s dying, the life that used to be here wasn’t really gone—it had just moved . . . all the way across the continent!

  Life still existed there . . . but not here. It had left. The spirit of the place had departed, and only the shell remained. Was this what happened when someone died—the body staying but the soul going to heaven? I felt so strongly as I sat there that the life that had once been here was now elsewhere.

  I dismounted and tied the reins to a shrub next to the porch. I walked up the steps. My boots sounded so loud. I tried the door. It was locked. I stuck my face up to the window and shielded the sun’s reflection with my hands, but there wasn’t much I could see inside.

  I wished I could get in. I stepped down off the porch again and slowly walked around to the side.

  Suddenly I remembered. The storm window that wouldn’t latch all the way! It couldn’t be, I thought, not after all this time!

  I was running now, toward the back. Even as I ran I could almost feel the years falling off, and by the time I was by the back door, I was seven again, imagining little Zack running along behind me.

  “The window, Corrie . . . we can get in the window. Boost me up, Corrie, I can get in!”

  We’d used our “secret entrance” hundreds of times, Zack climbing up first onto my bent knee, then me stooping and getting my shoulder under his rump and hoisting him high enough that he could fiddle with the broken latch and shove the window up and open wide enough for him to scamper through. I was alone now, and though feeling inside like a seven-year-old, I still had the grown-up body of a twenty-eight-year-old. As I slowed from my run and found myself standing in front of the memorable window, I was surprised to see that it wasn’t so high anymore. I could reach it easily all by myself.

  Everything in the back of the house was run-down and overgrown, weeds and shrubs climbing up against the cracked boards and peeling paint of the house. Several boards of the back porch were loose, a couple were missing altogether, and some of the windows had cracks in them.

  I reached up and tried the shutter. The same broken latch was still there! I jiggled it. The latch was so rusted through that a piece of it broke off and fell in the dirt at my feet. I swung back the shutter, then squeezed all the fingers of both hands unde
r the sill of the window.

  It gave! With a scraping sound, I shoved the window upward as high as my arms could reach. Then almost in the same movement I jumped up, stuck my head and shoulders through the opening, scraping with my feet against the side of the house to find a crack or ledge to hook the toe of my boot into. Struggling with my arms inside and my boots against the boards, I inched my torso through the open window, hardly conscious of scraping my knees almost raw in the process.

  Then all at once I tumbled through, landing in a lump on the floor. I sat up and looked around. I was sitting inside my old bedroom!

  I sat there in the silence for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes. Everything was so quiet and still. The feeling that descended upon me was not a sadness but an overpowering sense of nostalgia. It was almost a warm feeling, and I just drank it in, letting it fill me with an old and pleasant enjoying of the past.

  There was a smell I recognized, and the memories and words and images that came with it were so rapid in their passing through my brain that I scarcely had time to concentrate on any single one.

  Slowly I rose, then walked from room to room throughout the house, almost on tiptoe, as if to make any sound would be to disturb the peacefulness, the holiness of the memory. There was even a sense of being in a graveyard, of not wanting to disturb the dead. Here in this place, Ma was as alive as I’d felt her in years. The memory of her filled every room, and therefore she was alive within me, within my mind, and that memory was sacred to me.

  “Oh, Lord,” I silently breathed, “thank you for making this possible. It is so good to be here again, to see the house, to remember Ma, to remember Zack and Becky and Emily when they were so young. Take care of them all, Lord. I love them so much! Show me what you have for me, God. Open my eyes here, to my own past, to myself. Whatever you have for me . . . speak to me, Lord. I desire to hear your voice, to grow, to have your finger probe into the deep parts of my heart so that none of my being is hidden from your gaze.”