0800722329 by Jane Kirkpatrick Read Free Book Online Page A

not let rock her into comfort. When she enters, she touches the back of the chair three times, looks out each window, straightens the curtains I’ve sewn, returns to the chair to sit. Only that chair. When I ask her why she does those things, she laughs and says, “You know.” And so I do.
    I have my own rituals. I must say the Lord’s Prayer three times each morning and each evening before I fall asleep. If I fall asleep mid-prayer, when I wake I must begin again and add a fourth time. In the morning, I must lie awake going over all the terrible things that might happen in the day. If I do, I believe that the Lord will have heard me planning, taking care of my sisters and my brother, preventing their deaths by drowning in the Calapooia or from standing too close to a fire. If I hear the chop of the axe outside the window, I quickly imagine my brother’s death so that it might not occur. I imagine a difficultcrossing on Kirk’s Ferry that my father takes daily to act as postmaster. That I survive each death of those I love gives me confidence to join the day. When I see Nancy, my heart beats steadily instead of the racing as it often does, for we are kindred spirits.
    She was in the white children’s school with me, taught by Mr. Rogers, and together we attended the Sunday school class taught by Mrs. Whitman. A tiny woman, sweet as honey with hair the same color. She began each fall class of Sunday school with the Twenty-Third Psalm, and I wished that Mrs. Whitman and dear Nancy had been with me during the hostage time, as we could have recited together “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” We were all in the valley of the shadow of death but in different places that November day of 1847. No one who wasn’t a part of that terror really understands the nightmares or the moments of searing loss that return unexpected. I think now they are memories of our powerlessness and betrayal, when our world went from being safe and protected and adventurous to the day we began wearing fear and uncertainty like a too-heavy cloak. To take it off exposed us to a fearsome vulnerability, but wearing that cloak slowed us, kept us from moving forward into a life God planned for us.
    Nancy and I lost touch after that terrible November. The Osbornes escaped after spending a perilous night under the floor at the Whitman mission, breathing shallow as a bat so that the Cayuse stomping over their heads, all full of blood lust from their killings, didn’t find them huddling there. Mrs. Osborne had the measles with a terrible fever, and a week or so before they’d buried their baby who died of that disease. But her illness was the only reason they had been close enough tothat safe room with time for Mr. Osborne to pull the boards up and shove his family and himself under to safety.
    It seemed a miracle that her family appeared in South Brownsville not long after we did, attending my father’s church. Her father occupied half the bench in our little congregation and he’d snore and fall off the backless seat, making a racket. No one uttered a word, as my father insisted on absolute attention and a strict code of silence but for his words that often pelted me like hail. I confess I did not hear much of what he spoke of. I had no fear of hell, really. I’d already been there. And some days I wasn’t certain but that I lingered at that gate again.
    The real secret Nancy and I shared was in how we tried to resolve the nightmares and anxieties, which we did that spring day after her rituals and our winding the yarn into balls. “If you weren’t there, there isn’t much another can really tell us about what to do, isn’t that right, Eliza?”
    “Absolutely. Mama used to tell me that we did the best we could, that the Lord looked out for us, but I still wonder why he didn’t look out for the others. I mean, what did we do that we deserved to live when they