May the Circle Be Unbroken, Chapter 1

I laid awake listening to the sound of the rain on the tin roof, willing the rain and the night to never stop. For I knew that when the morning came, I would have to rise and go about the business of livin' in a world which no longer included my Mama's lovin' presence. I would have to keep on keepin' on and I just didn't know where or how I was going to find the strength to do so. My Mama had been a Godly woman, but had caught the sickness, anyway. It had gone to her chest and like an unwanted house guest, had stayed there, wearing out its welcome out until late in the night. I sang church hymns to her and laid cold, damp cloths on her feverish, too hot to the touch forehead, assuring her that we would go for a walk together along the heavily ferned gully of our pebble-bottomed creek, letting the clear water cool our feet and feeling that soft moss between our toes. "Jus' you wait and see, Mama. The summer is goin' be fine."

Mama didn't make it til Summer. She died on a sunny Wednesday morning, in May of the year 1931, a few weeks before my tenth birthday. I wasn't the oldest daughter in my family. Vida was the oldest. So, how come it all fell on me? How come she didn't pull her weight? She just laid up in the bed with her magazines a dreamin' of someplace out west called Hollywood that I didn't think sounded so great, anyway.

Charles was the only boy and there were plenty of folks comin' out of the woodwork to offer him a place on their farm. He was snapped right up and poor Daddy and us girls were left to fend for ourselves. Daddy was a proud man and it had laid him low to lose his dear Hattie. He was a war hero and I could still scare off those raggedy Walker boys from up the way with his old gas mask if  I needed to. Those damn Germans had gotten their revenge on my Daddy and many of the rest of the men of the Rainbow Division, the 42nd. They had been gassed in the Argonne Forest of Northeastern France, and he had lost a lung, while over one hundred thousand of his comrades in arms lost their privilege to breathe again, at all, ever. Seeing as how my Daddy had been one of the chosen few to survive the battle where more Americans lost their lives than in any single battle in American history, I was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had come on home and he could still work like a mule, one-lunged, and all.

I loved school and was a good student. Miss Winters praised my well-practiced cursive handwriting in particular. I knew what a luxury it was to be able to go to school and continued making the long walks to the little one room school house in our town, Rose Hill, as long as I could. I would drag my little sister Lea along with me in the early mornings whether she wanted to go that day or not.

But, one pretty spring day when I was 14, I walked past one of Daddy's tobacco fields on the way home from school. Daddy was leaning against the wooden fence, gulping for breath and soaked to the skin in his own sweat. Our horses, Pet and Polly, had made their way to a grassy patch and were chewing happily and the plough lay idly to its side behind them. "Daddy, are you OK?"