Faithful Unto Death

The Next Generation

He felt, rather than heard, the long silence, and looked up. Harriet smiled at him, a little sadly. “Oh, I know, she wasn’t my aunt. I didn’t know her, and I needn’t know what secrets she may have had.” Their eyes met. Slowly, Ralph nodded. Hattie began to stand up, to fetch one thing or another that women feel a meal requires, but Ralph laid a hand on her arm to stop her. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it.” Hattie sat back down. “Not a thing. We really don’t need another thing.” The Next Generation leroy, michigan, summer 1917 charlotte limped across the dooryard, trying to control the trembling of her lower lip. The ache in her foot was sickening; she imagined she could still feel the point of the nail as it punched into the bottom of her bare foot, into that place between ball and arch, where the tendons ›ex and slide with every step. Almost worse than the ache was the terror. People who stepped on nails sometimes got lockjaw, a terrible sickness that you never got better from, and you died in frightful agonies, so all the women put on their black Sunday clothes and hats and came to church and whispered and looked at each other meaningfully. Lockjaw was probably worse than scarlet fever or even cholera, Charlotte thought. In addition to the pain and terror, Charlotte was ashamed of herself. Here she was, seven going on eight, old enough to take care of baby Francis who was just beginning to walk. Gale, only a year older, was able to help with the haying, the milking, and the potato harvest. She had been named for her aunt Lottie, Papa’s younger sister. “You’re much prettier than your aunt,” her mother had told her privately ,“but you’ll have your work cut out for you to turn out as brave and true as she.” Now here she was, she repeated in disgust to herself, a great big girl, stepping on nails like an ignorant baby and nearly crying about it. This thought, rather than steadying her, made her eyes ‹ll. Furiously she 268 dashed her forearm across her eyes, took a tremulous breath, and walked right into Grandpa Henry. “Here, here,” he chided gently, catching her by the shoulders.“You’re not crying, are you? A big girl like you?” “No,” she gulped, “I’m just . . .” she ›oundered, not really knowing just what she was going to do. “Grandpa, I just stepped on a nail like a stupid baby and what if I get lockjaw and we don’t have any money for a doctor, and if I die I’ll miss the spelling bee!” Her worries became jumbled in her own mind, and she wasn’t sure whether her foot felt better or worse. Grandpa Henry patted her on the back, his brow furrowed in thought about how he might comfort her. He brightened and turned Charlotte so that she faced the barn. “Do you see that weathervane up there? On the west end of the barn?” Charlotte nodded, somewhat put out by the foolishness of the question . Of course she saw it; she saw it every day of her life. It saw her out of sight nine months of the year as she set off down the dirt road with Gale on the walk to school. It welcomed her back in the afternoons, glinting, in the winter, in the sideways light of the setting sun. It had a bit of glass embedded in it that sometimes shown like it had a tiny lantern inside. Charlotte had secretly thought of this homely object as a benign presence in her life, something that watched over her like God but didn’t demand that she be good in return. “I got that weathervane at the state fair oh, maybe ten years ago. We got the prize for new potatoes; it was just a ribbon and a couple of dollars , but a fellow had a booth there with brass weathervanes and boot jacks. Well, we already had a boot jack, don’t you know.” He chuckled in that annoying way that adults often had when they said something that wasn’t, in Charlotte’s opinion, the least bit funny. Charlotte didn’t understand the point to Grandpa Henry’s ramblings , but his voice was comforting nonetheless. She noticed with some surprise that her foot didn’t ache as deeply...