Emma's Gift (11 page)

“It's running,” he said.

“Yes. Emma said it always did run well. Same as the mantle clock.”

“It oughta stop. Don't you think they oughta stop?”

He had such a strange look on his face that I wasn't sure at first how to answer. “No. I don't think there's anything to a notion like that. I hope they both keep right on for a long time yet.” I thought of Albert Graham suddenly. Would he want them, perhaps, or more of Emma's things? He had every right, of course.

“If they keep runnin', would Emma like that?”

“Honey, she'd have no need thinking on such things. I bet she's so happy to see Willard, she's fairly dancing, and with two feet too.”

But Franky just shook his head. “I think she'd like it.” He didn't say anything else. He just walked away from me.

I had the potatoes in the pot and had started mixing cornbread batter, so I turned back to my fixings. Harry had set himself down on the kitchen floor at my feet, and Berty was still on the counter beside me. There was no sound from Robert and Willy upstairs. Kirk was holding the baby now, and Lizbeth was washing all of their breakfast dishes, silent as a stone. Little Rorey was standing on a chair, fishing one dish at a time out of the rinsepan to dry. Then she would hand her dishes to Sarah, who was standing on another chair, putting things away in the cupboard for me. We were all quiet. Methodical. As if somehow life depended on us just pressing on this way, whether we felt like it or not.

We were all completely unprepared for the sudden crash from the next room. Something heavy, shattering glass. I handed Berty into Lizbeth's wet hands and ran for the sitting room.

Franky stood beside the fireplace. He didn't look at me. He didn't look up at all. He just stared at the fragments at his feet. Emma's beautiful Seth Thomas mantle clock. Ruined.

“Franky!” Lizbeth hollered from behind me. “What in tarnation was you doin' with that?”

“You done it now,” Kirk added. “You know you ain't supposed to touch nothin' that ain't yours, stupid.”

The little boy didn't say a word, just kept staring. I moved closer. Franky didn't move a muscle, didn't make a sound.

“What happened?” I asked when I was close enough to see the tears glistening on his face.

“Mama's dead,” he said. “Now Emma too.”

I stood for a moment, unsure of his thinking. He already knew Emma had died. That clock was one of her prized possessions, precious to her because it had been a favorite of Willard's. But the breaking of it couldn't affect her now.

“Franky—”

“I was just meanin' to wind it. I knowed you gotta wind 'em.”

He shouldn't have touched it. He had no business even trying, and it angered me that he had dared to do so without saying so much as a word to me about it first. But thankfully I had the good sense not to let my anger show.

“I didn't mean to bust it,” he said, looking ghostly white. “I liked Emma plenty good.”

His ankle was bleeding where a shard of glass must've struck him, but he stepped away and wouldn't let me touch it.

“Franky…”

His lips were quivering, and suddenly he turned and fled, past all of us and back to the kitchen.

“Franky!” Lizbeth hollered after him. “You come back in here and help clean up the mess you made!” She turned to me with a frown. “So awful sorry,” she said more quietly. “He ain't thinkin' just right. Was it espensive?”

Before I could answer, I heard the back door slam shut. I ran for the kitchen, hoping I'd be quick enough to see where the little boy was headed. But by the time I reached the door, he was already out of sight.

In a moment I could hear a faint sort of sobbing coming from almost directly under my feet. So I stepped off the porch in a cold wind and looked down through where one of the lattices had come loose from the porch front.

“Franky?”

He was under there, all right. Just where Samuel had found him before, snuggled up to the back wall and crying his eyes out.

“Franky, won't you come out?” I asked him gently. “Accidents happen.”

Kirk was right behind me, having left the baby in the house with Lizbeth. “Get your sorry self outta there!” he commanded. “It's bad enough, what all we gotta think about, without you carryin' on, makin' it worse!”

I looked away from Franky and over to Kirk. “Kirk,” I said, “check the soup pot for me and make sure the oven's got good and warm.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“Go on. Please. I'll talk to him.”

Shaking his head at me, Kirk went back in the house.

Franky hadn't moved.

“Honey, I know you didn't mean to. It's awfully cold out here. Won't you please crawl on out? We can sit inside.”

He turned his back to me and curled up in a ball.
These Hammonds,
I thought.
What is it about them, anyway? For their thinking to get so befuddled, Franky and his father both.
I knew it was the grief doing it to them. But I resented it almost like Kirk did, because you had to stop what you were doing, just to save them from themselves. You couldn't even do your own grieving. You couldn't take the time.

“Franky?”

He wasn't paying any attention to me. So I got on my hands and knees in that snow and crawled underneath, thinking to pull him out the way Sam had. But something in his choked sobs stopped me. He was calling on God.

“Franky?”

“I didn't mean to hurt 'em, Jesus. I didn't mean to do it. I wish that Mama and Emma ain't never had 'em no clocks. Then I couldn't hurt 'em none. Then I couldn't bust things up.”

I crawled in quickly and laid my hand on his arm. “Oh, honey, you didn't hurt them. The clock had nothing to do with any of that.”

“But I busted Mama's clock too,” he sobbed. “I knew she was gonna die. It's true what Arthur Whistler told me. And it's my fault! I know it is!”

“Franky—”

“I wanna be dead too!”

“No, you don't.”

He grabbed me so suddenly that I almost fell on my side. He was clinging to me so tight it hurt, and crying into my collar. He seemed small as a baby just then, and if I could've stood in that crawl space I might've picked him right up and carried him inside.

“Franky…”

He didn't even seem to hear me. “Jesus,” he was crying. “Jesus. Jesus.”

I had to take a deep breath. “Your mama and Emma are with him now,” I whispered. “And they're happy.”

“I don't want 'em to be mad at me…”

“They're not! None of it's your fault.”

“But I know—”

“No. Honey, you just heard some foolish tale, that's all.”

He looked up at me. “But they died!”

“Because they were very sick. You had nothing to do with that. Do you understand?”

“Kirky and Joey and all them is gonna hate me.”

“No, they won't. Not if they have the slightest bit of sense about them. That's enough of all this. It's too cold to stay out here. Come in and help me with your little brothers.”

He sat up and wiped at his face with his sleeves. “Why do they need help?”

“
I
need your help, honey. Just to play with them and keep them occupied and happy for a while. Please?”

When he nodded, I sighed with relief. We came crawling out from under there and went straight for the kitchen. Franky took Berty's little hand importantly and pulled him toward the sitting room door.

“C'mon, Harry,” he said. “You too. Let's play Injuns in here.”

I stood by the warm stove for a minute and looked down into my soup pot. All these kids. All these needs. I'd managed to get one of them to dry his eyes and come out from under the house. But what about the next problem? And the one after that? Could I really handle half of what would come upon us now, what with funerals to deal with and the long winter after that? And Christmas. Lord have mercy. I wasn't strong enough to carry all this, not even with Samuel at my side.

EIGHT

Samuel

Louise Post saw me coming and hollered for Barrett with something frantic in her voice. I guess she figured I wouldn't be walking two and a quarter miles across fields and snowdrifts to their place if something weren't wrong.

“It's Emma, ain't it?” Barrett asked as soon as I was close enough. Louise stood behind him, scrunching up a dishtowel in her hands.

I told them everything—about Mrs. Hammond's passing, and Emma, and the children all over at our house, and the way young Joe and I had found George. “I'm going to need your help,” I said then. “Got to get word to Albert and the Hammonds' relatives and the preacher.”

“I'll take you,” Barrett said.

“Mercy me!” Louise exclaimed. “How's Lizbeth managing? And Julia?”

“Best as can be expected, I guess.”

“You better hurry on,” Louise commanded her husband. “Don't be waitin' a minute to get that preacher out to 'em. He'd be comfort at a time like this.”

I was almost surprised to hear her say it. The Posts were not churchgoers and had always resisted Emma's attempts to influence them in that direction.

“Emma told me she didn't want the undertaker,” Barrett added solemnly.

“She told me too. Way back in June, I guess.”

“What about Wilametta? George say anything to you about that?”

“I don't think he's framed it in his mind to consider.”

“He can't afford them things done, anyhow,” he told me with clear sympathy. “We can do for him. That's what neighbors is for.”

I was glad for Barrett. Though his wife was already fretting for all those children and exclaiming for Emma, a dear friend, he hitched his team to his forty-year-old sleigh and continued talking to me about arrangements.

“Too much a' today gone to 'complish much, after lettin' folks know. Better plan on payin' respects tomorrow. Don't be worryin' about the graves, Sam. Me an' Clement'll take care of it. We done it in the wintertime b'fore.”

Barrett was ready to go right away, and I sat beside him, glad the snow had stopped again but wishing his team could manage to move faster. He wouldn't push them, though, because it was hard work pulling us through the drifts. But at least it was faster than walking.

“You makin' the coffins?” Barrett suddenly asked as we passed Grover's Corner, hardly recognizable in the snowy white.

I hadn't thought on that, though Lord knows I should have. “I'll have to do Emma's. She asked me to, though at the time I was hoping it would never come up.”

“Yeah, she said you was good with wood. Ever since making her that chair.” He nodded. “Might as well plan on Wilametta's too. George and his boys hadn't oughta be worried on somethin' like that. Got wood enough?”

“I don't know.”

I wondered that he could be so matter-of-fact about it all. But he and his brother, Clement, had buried their parents, their sisters, a brother, and two children.

“I'll bring you some good pine out tonight,” he promised. “Louise'll have a batch of food cooked up by then, I'd wager, so's none a' you have to think about cookin'.”

Right then, I couldn't even imagine being hungry. “We thank you for your help.”

“Ain't nothin' but neighborly. Ain't a soul round here that wouldn't do what they could for Emma. And Wilametta—criminy! Thinkin' on George is enough to sorry anybody! Sure hope her family can take in them kids.”

That was a strange thought to me. Why wouldn't he expect the children to stay with their father? Because of what I'd told him? Sure, George was a mess. But I'd be in an awful shape too, if something happened to Julia. There was no reason to expect that he wouldn't come around. Was there?

“Wilametta was the glue, Sam,” Barrett told me, as if he'd heard my thoughts. “George ain't none too bright upstairs. Might seem like he gets along all right, but he ain't never been good on decisions. Wilametta used to work side by side with him when she could. She'd be the one always tellin' what to do.”

I'd seen her doing that very thing. But I'd thought it more bossiness than necessity. Why wouldn't George know what to do on the farm he was so familiar with? They'd been living there almost twenty years, and he more than that, as a kid years before.

“Need to keep an eye on him,” Barrett continued. “He gets ahold a' any drink, he'll really fall apart. Can't handle it. Some say his father was the same way afore him, an' his grandfather too. Hate to say it, but Wila makin' him go to church was a good thing on account of it stopped the drink in him. They'd a' never made it this far, otherwise.”

He sighed. “Prohibition ain't stopped them that wants to brew an' sell it themselves, you know. There's plenty a' liquor out there, if you know where to find it. Pity the folks that drinks the stuff they makes nowadays, though. 'Nough to strip the linin' right out your gizzard, you know what I mean?”

I just nodded, and he rode in silence a while, until Covey Mueller's house came in sight. Another large family, but their house was far bigger than Hammonds'.

“Might as well stop and give them word,” Barrett said grimly. “If we could get the telephone line out this far, we wouldn't have to go to town. Ain't likely to ever happen, though. Nobody wants to do all that work for a few a' us farmers out here.”

Covey and Alberta reacted about the same way Louise had. Barrett stayed to talk a minute, but I was anxious to move on. The quicker we got into town, the quicker we could get back, and I was plenty worried for Julia and the kids.

“Some folks wait till thaw,” Covey said, not meaning a bit of disrespect. “When my aunt Mabel passed on, they closed her up careful in a shed till they could get at the ground. 'Course, that was northern Minnesota.”