Novel Excerpt #2

August 1952

She bent to close the low windows in the sitting room as the wind picked up, pushing aside white curtains worn thin and soft from washing. The parching daytime heat of late summer was giving way to an evening storm. Hopefully the rain would be light; they didn’t need any damage to the fruit, nearly ripe on the trees.

William coughed in the boys’ room down the hall. He’d caught a cold and was having trouble shaking it. She was trying to keep him inside during the preparations for harvest so he didn’t get worse. Small luck of that, she sighed. The five-year-old’s adventurous spirit would be the death of her. Last month he’d tumbled off his uncle’s tractor; thank God he hadn’t been crushed under the wheels. When he was only three he’d fallen asleep in the barn behind a row of apple bins and they hadn’t found him until long after dinner hour. She loved every hair on his blond little head, but she didn’t know how much more she could take.

And now this. This new worry, pressing on her from the inside out.

As she went about the evening chores, her thoughts circled around like a dog chasing its tail. She washed, dried, and put away the dinner dishes and thought about it. She swept the wide planked wood floors of the back hall and tidied the pile of shoes and thought about it. Checking on each of her children in their beds, she couldn’t help but think about it.

She pulled the thin summer coverlet over James and Michael, who at eight and twelve still slept as actively as they had at Willy’s age, throwing the quilts back in their boyish dreams of running and climbing. It was early in the evening for them to be asleep, but they’d had a long hard day of helping in the orchard. It sometimes seemed too much to ask of them, especially since school had started before Labor Day this year; going to school on weekdays like boys and working in the orchard on weekends like men had to be hard, but it couldn’t be helped. Willy was curled up in his cot on the floor, nestled in a circle of sheets and blankets like a puppy. One door down, Mary was sleeping on her side in the big bed with her hands folded under her cheek, looked like an angel compared to her big brothers. She’d outgrown her crib, but didn’t have a bed of her own to sleep in yet. It worked right now for her to sleep in their bed but when John returned they’d all have to shuffle around again.

And the dog in her mind continued his ceaseless circling, coming back around again to her one big worry, constant and palpable.

Finally at leisure to sit in the front room, she reached over and turned on a lamp. Night fell quickly in the upper valley. She tore a sheet of paper out of James’s school notebook and leaned over the small table next to her chair.

What to say? How to write him? Her face, so carefully composed and even a little hard during the day, had begun to crack in places. The exhaustion, the worry, the loneliness began to show in the droop of her eyes and the lines around her mouth. She wanted to do right by her family, but it was becoming harder and harder to know what that was. When she was a little girl, it had been easy to know what was right. She would watch her mother and father work hard in their orchard, attend Meeting on Wednesdays and Sundays, share with neighbors and Friends what little they had during Depression years. Things were scarce but sureness, of faith and family and simple living, abounded. Even as her parents followed the Friends way of letting her learn about their faith through observation, depending on God’s guidance rather than their instruction, she’d found her way. She’d chosen a spouse from in Meeting, stood up to proclaim their vows together, felt the Spirit of the Lord move within her.

Now, though, the Spirit had been silent at Meeting for so long. She still believed that God was within her, as in every person, but He was hard to feel. Other emotions had taken over, more desperate and immediate and demanding. She tried so hard to practice peace and love to those around her. Life just wouldn’t be peaceful to her in return. The blank paper in front her was an unknowable future, shadowed by storm clouds at the window and her own doubts.

“Dear John,” she began.