Faithful Unto Death

"Faithful Unto Death"

on this side of the bars right now, remember; that second trial cost nearly everything your family owned. The list is right there, so it shouldn’t surprise you. My advice is to take your losses and move somewhere else. You’re still quite a young man, with grown children. You can start over, with Roy and Ralph’s help.” “Not Roy. He’s leaving. Says he’s going out west.” Henry tried to keep the sadness from his voice. “Well, Ralph anyway, he’s a good worker. So’s Lottie, for that matter . You’ll do ‹ne.” “What if I don’t choose to leave?” “Your children will suffer. Nobody in Benzonia will do business with you. Not many folks, anyway. They won’t let you join the church.” “Oh, the church. I’d nearly forgotten. Good Christians, all of my loving neighbors.” A bitter silence ‹lled the room. “Henry, have you been to the cemetery yet?” “Cemetery? Why? What do you mean?” “Did your children tell you about the headstone?” Henry shook his head, bewildered by this non sequitur. “Perhaps you should pay a visit to your wife’s grave, then, if you haven’t. Anna grew up in this town, and memories are long. Take my advice; leave town.” “Faithful Unto Death” “ralph, what’s this about your mother’s grave? Chandler wouldn’t tell me.” “We should have written to you, but couldn’t think how to tell you. Someone put a stone on Mother’s grave, and it wasn’t us.” “A stone? What kind of stone?” Ralph was patient, as with a slow child. “A headstone, Father. It must have been Uncle Brainard or Aunt Charlotte. Shall I go with you to see it, or would you rather go alone?” Henry walked down the hill and climbed the low rise to Anna’s grave. All around him were the stones of his neighbors and his neighbors ’ wives. There was a pattern to all of the stones for women who’d been married: “Mary Ann Yoder, honored mother and wife to Joseph.” “Allison James, beloved wife and mother.” 235 Anna’s stone was modest, a light gray granite, and read simply, “Anna A. Thacker, dau. of D. B. Spencer. 1850–1894, Faithful Unto Death.” Henry’s shoulders sagged. He turned and walked down the hill. ralph hadn’t realized how hard it would be to uproot himself from Benzonia. He remembered reading a story in school about a lifesaver. As a boat sank offshore the lifesaver could only rescue one more person. As he’d tried to save the only woman passenger, she had thrust her blanketwrapped infant into the lifesaver’s arms. Even as the waters had closed over her, her eyes had remained locked on the child. Ralph had thought the story rather silly at the time;one baby looked pretty much like another, and women had plenty of them. In his twelve-year-old superiority he’d thought, why didn’t she save herself and just have another one? He looked down the hill, past the hole he’d so laboriously ‹lled in after the elm had fallen in the big storm, across the fruit trees so carefully pruned and trained, across the valley below the house where their sheep had grazed, where the children had sledded in the winter, across the thickets where they’d picked berries, and now he understood that ‹ctional woman. He had no doubt they’d soon ‹nd new land, build or buy another house, plant trees and crops, make a new home. But a much younger Ralph inside him stamped its feet and wailed, “But I don’t want another home! I want this one!” Then there was the sheer belly-wrenching business of preparing for the sale, determining what was actually theirs to keep and what belonged to the bank. The baby Ralph kept whispering that they should remove the things they most wanted and hide them, before the bank’s deputy wrote it into the inventory. After all, it reasoned, there were already two criminals in the Thacker family, or at least two who’d been in jail. Somewhere in the family was a murderer, so why shouldn’t they cheat and save a few treasures from the bank sale? The adult Ralph squelched these thoughts determinedly, for the most part, anyway. The remaining livestock could not be hidden, of course. Lottie’s chickens, the cows, and the two good working horses, Esmeralda now...