Chapter 1
When Trudy Was Quite Young
Trudy
They’re at it again,” Trudy whispered to Marcie, her stuffed monkey doll. “I’m supposed to honor them both.”
From the seat underneath the open window, Trudy heard everything in the next room.
“Where do you keep your money?” Mama let go of her voice. “In the bank?” “No, stupid. It failed last year.”
“Oh, I know. You’ve squirreled away your stash in a big safe deposit box and stuck it in a bank vault.”
His laugh sounded sarcastic. “Is that what you’d do, Zoe?”
Trudy had a clue. Every time anybody needed any money, Papa went to the barn. He hid it in the barn. But where?
“What if you die and leave me with the kids? I don’t want anything now, but if such should be our fate, I’d be a penniless widow with a ten-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy to provide for.”
Trudy curled on the bench and stared from the second floor. Before she realized it, she twisted Marcie’s button eyes until they fell off.
“Oh, no. I’ll sew them back on after school,” she whispered to the doll.
“You don’t trust me, William.”
“Zoe.” Papa’s voice had a don’t-mess-with-me sound.
Mama said something else Trudy didn’t catch.
Whack!
Trudy’s hands flew to her mouth. What was that? The noise couldn’t have been a slap. No, Papa wouldn’t hit Mama. Or would he?
Trudy strained her ears...the faint sound of Mama’s weeping. With a fight raging between Mama and Papa, she had nobody to hold onto except Marcie. Trudy’s stomach hurt. Her brother Billy Jack, whose room was across the hall, slept through it.
Trudy wished Papa would die.
~~~
A few days later, Trudy and Billy Jack came home to find smoking embers where their house had stood. Nothing but chimneys remained.
Barefoot and in a torn dress, Mama sat on the ground. She talked to the air in front of Trudy’s face. “William wanted to burn a big wasp nest from the outside of Trudy’s window. He set fire to the house. You remind me of my daughter Trudy.”
“I am Trudy.” It didn’t do any good to tell her.
“What am I supposed to do?” Zoe Cameron, Trudy’s pretty mother, wrung her hands and looked wild-eyed.
Two men carried Papa’s body away in a wagon. He would never return. How he must have suffered in the fire.
~~~
“We can’t sleep in there.” Billy Jack opened the squeaky door of the old sharecropper’s shack.
Trudy sorted through the smelly worn-out quilts stacked on the porch.
“We’ll make pallets. I guess this is the best our neighbors could do to help us.” Mama assembled broom straw and tied it with cord. “Trudy, sweep.”
“Make Billy Jack a broom, too.”
They swept rat droppings and scrubbed the walls.
Trudy found an old dishpan with holes in the bottom. It would be perfect to use for what she planned after they finished sweeping. “I’m glad we have a pretty good garden this year.”
“Sister, you say the dumbest things.”
“No, I mean it, but how am I supposed to practice piano?”
~~~
Trudy’s mother rejected assistance from anybody. Samuel Benton, who lived down the road, helped her when he wanted to and ignored her objections. He and his twin children dropped their spare money in a milking bucket, which they called the dream bucket. It contained a fortune in gold coins.
After the money found a new home in the bank, the bucket served many purposes. It held a marriage proposal to Trudy’s mother from Sam. At the resulting wedding, Bailey, who became Trudy’s stepsister, carried the bucket filled with rose petals, which she scattered on the floor of the church as she walked down the aisle.
With the passing of time, the Bentons and the Camerons discarded it the same way Billy Jack discarded his name and became Will. When Trudy and Bailey redecorated their room, Trudy found the old bucket in the attic.
“Mama, what’s the dream bucket doing up here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We decided to keep our spare money in the carved box Samuel gave me.”
“Since nobody else wants it, I’m claiming it, okay?”
With loving strokes, she cleaned it. At the Mercantile, she bought some metallic paint so she could make it gold, and she tied a blue-ribbon bow on it. She conscripted the bucket back to the call of duty so it could become the sentinel of her heart. What had belonged to others now became hers alone.
The old bucket, now hidden in the chifforobe, was full of precious things— her journal, report cards, letters from her sweetheart, Jeremy, about the interesting things he was doing, some money he’d asked her to keep for him; the pendant and chain from the Gitano, Walthere; a tiny New Testament that had been her grandmother’s; and unusual objects she found as she walked across the farm. She hoped she’d never grow up so much she wouldn’t appreciate a perfect arrowhead, a huge acorn cup, a fossil, a unique twig, or a mussel shell. She also kept one Prince Albert can to remind her where her father had hidden a fortune.
Chapter 2
When Jeremy Had High Hopes
Jeremy
Since before Jeremy dipped Trudy’s beautiful red pigtails in black ink when he sat behind her in the one-room elementary schoolhouse, his heart began beating in time with hers.
They shared wonderful memories. Walking through the farmland, going home with her brother after school so he could sit and do homework with the Cameron kids, smoking rabbit tobacco. Trudy had always been a girl of the earth. He liked to remember sharing their first kiss. She was the first girl he’d ever kissed, the only.
Trudy lay in her blue and yellow calico dress with her full skirt spread across the clover. Her straw hat, with long satin ribbons matching her dress, shielded her delicate face from the sun. Her shoes, kicked off her feet, waited nearby.
He whispered, “Trudy, please marry me.”
He yanked her hat off and pressed his hungry lips against her sweet mouth.
In the dream, Jeremy and Trudy were in their early twenties. He’d never seen a lovelier young woman. He’d dreamed it hundreds of times. And in the dream, his muscles had filled out, he towered over her, and he had to fight his daily stubble. Maybe he’d grow a well-trimmed beard.
He woke in the night thinking of her shiny hair, the sprinkle of freckles across her nose, her peach-colored cheeks, her wide blue eyes. She had the most expressive eyes he’d ever seen. Trudy was an alluring young woman. He liked to remember her shapely body. The pleasure of brushing against Trudy tantalized him.
~~~
Jeremy grew up fast. He was thirteen when Pa spent the day in town and left Jeremy to nurse his mother, who was wasting away from cancer.
“Mama, let me wash your face. The cool cloth will make you feel better.” He felt better, too, when he smelled the lavender soap, instead of the smell of cancer, coming from her breath.
He lowered her shoulders and head onto the pillows. Nothing helped. Mama was dying, and there was nothing he could do to stop her. “Hold on, Mama. Let me get your pan.”
She couldn’t wait. Clots of blood choked her as she spat them from her throat. He cleaned what missed the pan, placed cool wet cloths on her face, tried to hold the pan, and coaxed her to rinse her mouth. He needed five arms.
He expected he’d have a few weeks with her—weeks to watch her suffer— and then she’d go be with her Lord.
Propped high on pillows, she drew shallow breaths. “Leave me be, Jere.”
He watched her until she rested. Quietly he tiptoed outside to sit on the porch and play with his funny dog. A traveling Gitano named Walthere appeared in the yard. “I’m a blacksmith. I’m come to help your father with his shop.”
With the clan he presided over, Walthere settled along the banks of Cohay Creek, which ran through the Smitherlin farm. Walthere became Jeremy’s best friend as well as a father figure. Jeremy loved him.
After the passing of four seasons, the time came for Walthere to lead his caravan of painted wagons to another place. He surprised Jeremy with parting gifts, which included a substantial amount of money inherited from the sale of land in Louisiana, along with a magnificent pendant hanging from a chain. The necklace, which had been in Walthere’s family for two thousand years, had special powers, according to Walthere.
As they parted the final time, Walthere searched Jeremy’s soul. “Young man, you must forgive your Pa for all the times he’s beat you and belittled you. Tell him you have forgiven him before he goes.”
Mr. Sam drove Jeremy, Will, and Trudy to the hospital, where Caleb Smitherlin lay dying from a wound infection. On the way, sitting beside Trudy, he visualized Pa’s angry face, felt the pain of the strop, remembered the times Pa cursed him. He thought of his father cheating on his mama. With his eyes squinting, he could still see the blackness of the day Pa beat him to the point of death. The hatefulness of the man blocked out everything else.
“What’s wrong, Jeremy?” Trudy stroked his face.
Tears rolled down his cheeks onto her hand. “It’s Pa.”
Mr. Sam adjusted the throttle to make the Model T go faster. They finally arrived at the parking lot.
They ran inside, up the stairs, and to Pa’s room, where nurses and a doctor crowded around the bed. Pa’s noisy breathing sounded irregular.
A nurse pulled Jeremy to the bedside. As he took Pa’s hand, tenderness flowed from within him. “Pa, I forgive you.”
Pa’s eyelids fluttered. A smile twisted the corners of the dying man’s lips. He stopped breathing. After half a minute, Caleb Smitherlin heaved one final breath.
Jeremy turned away and looked into the faces surrounding him. “Where’s Mama?”
The doctor issued an order to one of the nurses. “Take this young man to his mother’s room.”
~~~
Jeremy, having lost his parents and receiving nothing from his relatives but resentment, needed help to manage the farmhouse and blacksmith shop. He supposed he could get himself to school.
Full of self-affirmation, Jeremy stood in the cemetery. I took after my mama. I’m nothing like Pa and his crazy brother.
“You’re bad seed just like my sorry brother Caleb.” Uncle Zeb jerked the strap of Jeremy’s overalls. “Your ma was never nothing but a weakling. She was a drain on Caleb. If she’d been a stronger woman, he might not have been the bad man he turned into.”
Jeremy knew how it felt to bleed from being whipped with a razor strop. Scars across his upper back remained tender from the time when Pa believed Jeremy had sneaked off to spend the night with Trudy Cameron. Pa wouldn’t believe what actually happened. Jeremy, Trudy, and her brother had been caught in a sudden storm and couldn’t go home. Trudy had hurt her ankle.
While his uncle berated him as they stood beside his parents’ new graves, Jeremy stared at the mounds of fresh dirt. If he said or did something amiss, Uncle Zeb would take him behind a tree on the edge of the cemetery and administer corporal punishment.
“Look at me, boy. I’m talking to you. Show me some respect.” “Yes, sir.”
“Caleb didn’t make no arrangements for you to be seen about. You ain’t got sense enough to know what to do. You ain’t dry behind the ears yet.”
Jeremy nodded, trying to look bland, as the rage heated within.
“If you’ve got any ideas about moving in with me and my old lady and all my youngun’s, get it out of your head. I ain’t got money to feed another mouth.”
Jeremy held his thought like a trump card.
“I know what you was about to say. You’ve got your pa’s stuff and money. That’s enough of a reason right there not to want to take you in. You’ll expect me to save it and drive you to school every day. You’ll look to me to support you in a style me and my family ain’t accustomed to. Next thing I know you’re gonna want to go off to college. If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.”
Jeremy’s eyes wandered toward the Cameron-Benton family. He folded his arms and placed his right hand behind his left elbow so he could flutter his fingers in a slight wave to Trudy and Will.
Uncle Zeb—Jeremy had a private joke of calling him Uncle Zed—Pa’s older brother, had nursed a grudge their entire adult lives, because Grandpa Smitherlin had helped pay for Caleb’s blacksmith shop. That was one point. Furthermore, Zeb must have feared that helping Caleb’s son would endanger his own meager possessions.
“Listen here, boy. Half that blacksmith shop belongs to me.”
The boy got his courage up. “How much do you think it’s worth?”
Uncle Zeb’s eyes widened. “Surprised you’d ask me. Two hundred dollars.”
Jeremy pulled out five twenty-dollar gold pieces from his pocket. “Take this.”
Zeb held out his hand.
“This is half the value of the shop. Now we’re even.”
“I don’t believe in taking money from nobody, specially a young smart aleck, but right’s right. Glad we’ve settled up.” Zeb held the coins tight in his fist as he walked away.
The cemetery emptied except for Jeremy standing over his parents’ graves. Now an orphan, no longer a child, he walked home. He traveled on the road instead of through the normal shortcut in the woods, in case his uncle or his cousins decided to waylay him so they could empty the contents of his pockets and, even worse, slash his throat.
That afternoon, he arrived at a new level on the mountain he was climbing toward adulthood. More than ever, he would need to look after himself, and more than ever, he’d have to decide what was right or wrong…what was prudent and what was stupid.
He asked God to send an angel to watch over him.
~~~
Many nights Jeremy had lived as though he were alone, but never had he felt so lonely as he did the night after he buried his parents. His closest friends— the Camerons and Bentons—must have believed he went home with Uncle Zeb....
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