Bessie Stubblefield led a simple life, but she wasn’t a simple woman. She’d never been more than a hundred miles from Carlinville in her whole life, but that didn’t keep her from knowing the ways of the world.

Bessie’s great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Yoder and his child bride Nora Mae, first stepped foot on Logan County on a sweltering August day in 1839. Benjamin was a hard man. He suffered no nonsense. He ruled his household and Nora Mae with a firm hand. There was no time for sentimentality or the foolish ways of women. His duty as he saw it, first and foremost, was to fear God and secondly to provide for his family, and come hell or high water, that’s what he did.  The morning he loaded up their meager belongs onto the wagon; he cracked the whip, whistled to the mules and never once looked back at their little Kentucky homestead.

Though sweat, grit and shear determination, Benjamin and Nora Mae followed the North Star from the muddy Ohio River into the wilderness. They hacked and clawed their way through undergrowth of cocklebur, fireweed and oak saplings on Indian trails no wider than a cow path. The day Benjamin urged his mule team around the last bend in Sparks Ferry Road; Nora Mae broke into a convulsion of sobs, at the sight of a few bedraggled cabins inhabited by ragged men and women so dirty and malnourished they looked like scarecrows.

As a little girl Bess would listen wide-eyed and amazed to Pap’s tall tales about Benjamin and the Yoder clan fighting off war parties of marauding Indians and how they’d made a life for themselves in Carlinville. At the conclusion of every story, Pap would say, “They never took charity from no man. What my grandpa got he earned from the sweat of his brow. You remember that, Bess. Yoder’s don’t take charity.”

When Bess was lonely, overwhelmed, and the drudgery of daily life seemed just too much to bear, when she needed help, when she would have begged on hands and knees, Pap’s words would come thundering back, “Yoder’s don’t take charity.” Those words were etched in her mind. Not once in all the long years since Johnny died and she was left to raise Georgie alone did she accept charity.

 All Bessie knew, ever wanted to know, was the comfort of family and friends. Why then did the Heavens rain down so many sorrows?  

At the tender age of fourteen Bessie lost her mama. She left school and abandoned her studies to look after Pap and the young’uns. No time left for little girl dreams and baby dolls.

None of that mattered a lick the day she met John Stubblefield. Bessie knew the minute she laid eyes on her handsome Johnny that he was the man she was going to marry. No woman ever loved a man more than Bessie loved John. They were going to be together forever and live happily ever after, just like the fairy tales promised---but then, the unkindest cut, the cruelest blow of all, four months after their wedding vows, her handsome Johnny went off to war, leaving a pregnant wife crying at the train station.

Johnny kissed her lips and dried her tears vowing with a heart full of longing to come back to her and the baby. That’s the only promise he ever broke. Johnny never came home to Bessie and he never saw their little Georgie. His ashes were scattered to the winds on a bloody beach in Normandy.

Perhaps, it’s all for the best, she would console herself. 

Bessie and Johnny’s baby boy was a special child with large hazel eyes and snow-white hair---such a beautifully wrapped package. That’s how Bessie thought of her little Georgie, as a gift straight from God. But behind those hazel eyes and his sweet, lazy smile, was a mind that would forever reside in the murky realm of childhood innocence. Georgie would grow in stature and strength, but in his mind and heart he would forever be a child. He would never marry, never have a family of his own, and never leave his Bessie.

***

Bessie felt the first flurry of raindrops against her cheek as she hobbled down the crumbling, concrete steps of her old, red brick, house on Boundary Avenue. Ominous black clouds churned, boiled and bubbled across the vast expanse of the Midwestern sky, congregating into a malignant mass of power, threatening to rain down hail and all manner of destruction upon the azure hills of Logan County.

It was a short, three-block walk from Bessie’s house to the center of Carlinville, but on a day like this with the wind pitching to and fro, it might as well have been a trek across the wide-open prairie.

Bessie tucked her head tight against her chest, braced for the coming gale, and struggled down the sidewalk. A white knuckled hand clutched a rain spattered envelope to her bosom, her other hand was smack-dab on top of her plastic rain bonnet.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Bessie mumbled, painstakingly mounting the post office steps, “I should have closed the upstairs windows.”

Bess didn’t close the windows. She had to strike while the iron was hot. 

“Sherry Payne, 21346 Newberry Court #3, Oaklawn, Illinois 60455”, Bessie whispered under her breath, rechecking the scrawled printing. “I’m sorry sweet girl, but you have to come back. I’m sorry.”

Sorry ... Sorry ... Sorry, that one word echoed and vibrated in and out of Bessie’ thoughts.  For all Bessie’s stubborn pride and self-determination she was waging a battle she knew she could never win---the passage of time and old age.

“The Good Lord allots each one of us just so much time on this earth, Bess.” That’s what Pap had said when her mama died. Bessie knew this to be true; she’d known it gazing down at Mama’s face as she lay motionless in her coffin and she knew it the day the doctor had said, “The tests don’t lie, Bessie. I’m so sorry.”

She was sorry all right, but not for herself---not to be leaving this vale of tears, but her heart ached for Georgie.

Bessie took a deep breath and slipped the envelope into the letterbox and turned slowly toward the heavy oak doors. “Lord have mercy,” she exclaimed, gazing skyward through the etched glass windows.

“Good morning, Bess,” Gina Goodyear said, ducking into the post office for cover. “Did you ever see such a deluge?” she laughed, running her fingers through her tousled brown hair.