The Glory Wind Page 13

  And then, without planning to, I found myself telling Raedine all about that terrible last day—what I’d said to Gracie and what had happened afterward. By the time I got to the end I was crying again, but at the same time I felt like a weight had fallen away from me.

  “So, you think it’s your fault Gracie was in that field?” Raedine said.

  I nodded, choking on the hurt in my throat.

  “What about me? What if I hadn’t needed stockings and I’d never sent her out the door that morning? Or what if your mother had had a pair and she didn’t have to go to Guthrie’s for them?”

  Raedine’s hands took hold of my shoulders and she paused until I looked up at her. Then she went on.

  “What if Mrs. Guthrie never had a son, or her son didn’t give her stockings for her birthday? Or, how about if Roy’s mother never met his father and he was never born so I was never going to marry him? What about all the other things that had to happen beforehand?”

  My heart had been beating furiously with the guilt and shame of my confession but it began to slow as Raedine spoke.

  “Luke, you’ve got to believe and understand this. A thousand things—more than a thousand things—all worked together to put Gracie in that exact spot at that exact moment. Unless you can find a way to make yourself responsible for every last one of them, then you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about.”

  Relief flooded over me as I saw the truth in Raedine’s words. And it was more than what she said that freed me. If she’d shown any sign that she thought it was my fault, well, it would have finished me right then and there, but there was nothing like that.

  “I’ve been trying to figure it all out,” I said after a bit.

  “You and me both, kid.” She reached toward the wine glass but drew her hand away without picking it up. “Maybe we can put our heads together and come up with something.”

  I’d carefully rehearsed what I was going to say so as not to make Raedine feel any worse than she already did. But now, it was gone—every word of it. Turns out, I needn’t have worried.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that you’ve heard all the talk around town. Half of them want to make Gracie into some kind of angel and the other half are busy painting me as the devil himself.” She shook her head. “I guess I didn’t help that. I’ve given them lots to talk about, right from the beginning.”

  “You mean because you weren’t married?” I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how impertinent the question was, but Raedine didn’t seem offended.

  “That was the start of it, all right. It’s true I wasn’t married to Gracie’s father, but that didn’t mean I didn’t love him. And he loved me—and Gracie!” Raedine said, lifting her chin a little. There was a spark in her eyes but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  “He wanted to marry me,” she continued. “He would have too; he just never got the chance. See, Gracie’s father wasn’t…free…to marry at the time, but he was going to take care of that, as soon as he came home from the war. Only, he never did come home.”

  “Gracie always said he was a hero,” I said, remembering her announcement the first day we met.

  “That was true, Luke. He did die a war hero. And you know what? My heart was just as broken when he died fighting overseas as if he had been my husband. But he wasn’t.” Raedine looked down, until her eyelashes nearly touched her cheeks. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He was someone else’s husband. And she was the one who stood by the casket and the graveside and was surrounded by sympathy and comfort, while I laid on the floor in my tiny apartment and wondered if I could even get my next breath and tried to think of who would take care of Gracie if I couldn’t.

  “I had to do all my crying and hurting in secret. I was pretty good at keeping secrets by then, but that sorrow was the hardest one to hold onto. It seemed it could just lay me at its mercy any old time it wanted to. I wished I could hide away but I couldn’t because I had a child to feed and care for, and that’s the only thing that kept me going most days for a long time.

  “But by and by, two years had passed and the hurt had gone into a kind of numb ache, and I made up my mind that I was going to get out of there and make a new start and somehow give Gracie the things she didn’t have. Like a father. And I may not always have gone about looking in the best ways, but if I harmed anyone, I like to think it was only me. I don’t know if God punishes folks for hurting themselves.”

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked her, somehow surprised that she’d mentioned Him.

  “Of course I do. Why, just look at the way the world is put together—everything with its own job and place. I don’t pretend to know much about most of those things, but it’s always been clear to me that this all had to be designed.”

  “Do you think God planned what happened to Gracie too?”

  Raedine looked up, looked right at me. She sighed. “Well, there sure are plenty of folks around here who believe so. Roy’s mother, for instance, and she didn’t waste a minute persuading him this was all a judgment against me. He denied it of course, but I could see the fear in his eyes and I knew he would never feel quite the same way about me again. So that was that. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in more than a month.”

  She looked so sad and lost that I wished I had something helpful to say, but there were no words in me. It was a relief when she gave her head a little shake and started to talk again.

  “You know, Luke, I can’t help wondering who these people think they are, going around claiming to know what God is up to. How could they?

  “People have too much pride, if you ask me. They can’t stand to say they don’t know something—especially when there’s a chance to judge someone else.

  “The minister and his wife were kind enough to call on me after…what happened, and a few others came by, but then there was no one. I can tell you those days were long—and the nights felt like they had no end.”

  Her words cut into me, though I know she hadn’t meant them to. I thought of the times I’d known I ought to go and see her—and there she was, just aching for someone to talk to, but I hadn’t gone. It was tough to shove aside the remorse and swing my attention back to what she was saying.

  “I even went to church one Sunday,” she continued, “just wanting to find a little comfort, thinking there might be some kindness there. But all I felt in that building was the excitement of people who thought they might see me fall on my knees and confess or repent or something. I might have known, really, and saved myself the humiliation if I hadn’t been so desperate. After all, these are the people who can sit around forgetting everything they’ve ever done wrong in their own lives, while they smugly talk about how Gracie disappearing was some kind of punishment God is using to slap me.

  “I know I haven’t lived the best life I could have, but I’ll go to my grave without ever being sorry I had Gracie, so if that’s what they were waiting for they’ll be waiting a long time.”

  And then she said it—the thing I’d been waiting to hear. Something my heart could embrace and hold onto as true.

  “All these people jabbering on and on, speaking for God, like they know exactly what He meant. Both sides are guilty, as far as I’m concerned, whether they’re claiming what happened was a miracle or a punishment. I don’t know much about faith, but I do know it’s not some kind of guessing game.”

  I let Raedine’s words sink in. She seemed to understand that something important had just happened for me because she stopped talking and just stood there, waiting quietly.

  I’d never really given any thought to what faith was before that moment. It seemed an abstract thing, something you couldn’t define or touch.

  I’d thought faith was what you believe and that was it. But I suddenly saw that believing was only a part of it. After all, belief is something you think—but you can be mistaken in your thoughts. And you can change your mind and stop believing something, so faith must go past that. Faith must be
a kind of trust that doesn’t need to understand something to know it’s so.

  It’s strange, that the least likely person around opened the door for my heart to find the answer it needed.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s been a year since Gracie disappeared. I think most folk around here expected that something would turn up someday—a bone, a piece of cloth, a clump of that wild curly hair…some scrap to prove that there was once a little girl named Gracie Moor.

  Nothing has.

  Everyone thought Raedine might leave town—after all, Junction hasn’t exactly thrown its arms around her, but she’s still here.

  I asked her, one afternoon while we were sitting out on her back step eating wild strawberries, why she stays.

  “I’ve got no choice,” she said. “When that tornado took my Gracie, it took my options too.”

  “Do you think there might still be…something… found?”

  “You know what, Luke? I really don’t. The first months I waited and hoped for just about any little thing that would make it all final. But I’ve stopped believing anything will ever be found.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Why can’t I leave?” She paused, examining the red berry stains on her fingertips. “I can’t leave because I need to see that field when I go out my door every morning. I need to look into Gracie’s room and see the bed she slept in and the window she pressed her nose against. I need to be where there are things to remind me that I once had a little girl. I can’t take a chance that she’ll fade away into a shadow in my mind—until I start wondering if I might have dreamed it all.”

  I wanted to ask her, that day, if she was very lonely, but the words wouldn’t form. I suppose she must be, though she always seems oddly content when I stop by. Maybe she’s made up her mind that this is her life and that’s all there is to it.

  The first months after Gracie was gone I spent a lot of hours in the Circle of Truth. At the start, I’d lie there and swallow down as much as I could to keep from bawling like a girl, but there were times I couldn’t help it. Other times I’d close my eyes and pretend Gracie could hear me, and I’d talk to her about anything I wanted to, and tell her how much I missed her.

  Now, I like being in the Circle because it reminds me of the things Gracie and I did together—the games we played and the things we talked about. If I close my eyes and lie back and listen hard, sometimes I can almost hear her laughter rippling through the warm summer air.

  Also by Valerie Sherrard

  PICTURE BOOKS

  There’s a GOLDFISH in my Shoe

  There’s a COW Under My Bed

  JUVENILE NOVELS

  Tumbleweed Skies

  Watcher

  Three Million Acres of Flame

  Speechless

  Sarah’s Legacy

  Sam’s Light

  Kate

  SHELBY BELGARDEN MYSTERIES:

  Searching for Yesterday

  Eyes of a Stalker

  Hiding in Plain Sight

  Chasing Shadows

  In Too Deep

  Out of the Ashes