Hope in the Land Read online

  © 2016 by Olivia Newport

  Print ISBN 978-1-63409-655-3

  eBook Editions:

  Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-63409-657-7

  Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-63409-656-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.

  All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: Faceout Studio, www.faceoutstudio.com

  Published by Shiloh Run Press, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.shilohrunpress.com

  Our mission is to publish and distribute inspirational products offering exceptional value and biblical encouragement to the masses.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  CHAPTER 1

  Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1936

  The steer resisted, but Gloria Grabill had been wresting open the mouths of livestock for twenty-five years. All she required was one spot of weakened resistance along the jawline. Her practiced fingers found it and rubbed the roof of the mouth so the animal would open wide enough for Gloria to shoot in the capsule of aloin and ginger. Immediately, she released the capsule gun and clamped the steer’s mouth under one arm for the few seconds it took to be sure the steer did not spit back her efforts. This was a perfectly good bovine, and Gloria had no intention of sacrificing the meat it would supply her family because indigestion got out of hand and made the animal unwilling to feed well enough to gain weight.

  “Ick.”

  Gloria released the steer and turned to her youngest daughter. “You’ll learn to do that soon enough.”

  “Why?” Betsy’s grimace lingered as she jumped down from her perch on the pasture’s wooden fence.

  “It’s a handy skill. You can’t run a farm if you can’t make a capsule and give it to an animal.” Gloria wiped her hands on the tattered apron she wore when she handled the animals. The steer inched away from her.

  “Polly doesn’t know how to do it,” Betsy said.

  “Polly is Polly.” Gloria opened the gate and gestured for her ten-year-old to walk through. Polly shared her mother’s dark hair and slender nose, Gloria’s gray eyes traded for green, but her mind had mysterious ways. Gloria had every hope Betsy would learn to do what she had just witnessed. If she had realized it would be so difficult for Polly to master the task, she would have started teaching her sooner. There was still time. She was not yet betrothed.

  They walked toward the house, where preparation for the midday meal awaited.

  “I can’t wait for school to start next week.” Betsy’s voice lilted at the prospect.

  This year only Betsy and Nancy would be packing their lunch pails to carry to the one-room schoolhouse. Alice had finished the eighth grade in the spring and would join her three sisters and two brothers in the farmwork and housework over the winter. It was also time for Alice to master the sewing machine and cut out a garment with more precision. The snowy months ahead would give her plenty of opportunity.

  “There’s Daed.” Betsy lifted a hand to wave.

  Gloria touched her daughter’s back. “Run to the house and check on dinner. It’s time to mix the biscuits.”

  “I’ll do it!”

  “Ask for help.”

  “I’ll ask Polly.”

  “Yes. No, wait. See if you can find Lena.”

  Betsy raced ahead, and Gloria paused to await her husband, who rumbled along the lane beside the fence in one of the family’s three buggies. She never liked it when he visited the Swains.

  When he came alongside her, Marlin reined in the horse and jumped down from the buggy seat to lead the horse on foot. Gloria raised an eyebrow and fell into step with him.

  “They’re coming for dinner,” Marlin said.

  “Who?”

  “Who do you suppose? Ernie and Minerva.”

  “Surely Minerva is preparing a meal of her own.”

  “She’s been occupied all morning,” Marlin said. “They were just going to have sandwiches, so I thought they may as well join us for a real meal.”

  “What about their hands?” Gloria pictured her pot of stew and made mental divisions to stretch it to serve more.

  “They’ll have to make do with sandwiches.”

  Gloria let her step slacken to fall a pace behind Marlin and allow herself a controlled sigh.

  Minerva Swain was coming to dinner.

  The back door creaked on the hinges Ernie had been threatening to change for at least four years. In the front room, Minerva closed the latest mail-order catalog and slid it under a sofa cushion. She reached the kitchen just as Ernie opened the faucet on the sink.

  Minerva moved to the icebox. “I had in mind ham for the sandwiches.”

  “You can set out the sandwiches for Jonesy and Collins,” Ernie said.

  Minerva’s brows crept toward each other. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  Ernie had rolled up his shirtsleeves and was scrubbing his arms all the way up to the elbows. Minerva’s stomach sank.

  “We’re going to the Grabills’ for lunch.” Ernie flashed a grin.

  “Did you invite yourself again?”

  “It was Marlin’s idea this time.”

  Minerva blew out her breath. “The two of you always concoct something when you get together.”

  “He’s a good man. I enjoy his friendship.”

  Minerva had nothing against Marlin Grabill except that he was married to Gloria. She’d had nothing in common with Gloria for the last forty years and did not expect to discover common interests in the next forty years. Of all the men on the neighboring farms whom Ernie could befriend, why had he chosen Gloria’s husband?

  “Where’s Rose?” Ernie asked, reaching for a towel to dry his hands.

  “Out with her friends.” Minerva removed ham from the icebox and laid out sliced bread. The farmhands still needed their lunch.

  “Too bad,” Ernie said. “I think she rather enjoys the Grabill girls.”

  “There are so many of them.”

  “That’s part of the fun.�
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  “They haven’t even been to high school.” Minerva slapped four sandwiches together and put a bite of ham in her mouth. The sandwiches were nothing fancy, but she would rather stay home and nibble ham and bread than sit at the Grabill table.

  “Relax, Minerva,” Ernie said. “It’s just lunch.”

  She stiffened, hating it when Ernie told her to relax. The sandwiches obscured the tin plate, and Minerva filled two clean milk bottles with water. If Ernie had come in from the field, his two hands would not be far behind. She covered the sandwiches with a fresh towel and carried them to the makeshift back porch table, created by two wide planks balanced on half barrels, before inhaling a muttering breath and returning to the kitchen.

  “We should go,” Ernie said.

  “I have to get dressed.” Minerva pushed past him and crossed the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong with what you’re wearing?”

  Minerva glanced at the everyday cotton print dress and kept walking. “It’s ordinary.”

  “This is an ordinary day and an ordinary lunch.”

  Minerva rolled her eyes and continued into the bedroom. After a quarter of a century together, he still did not grasp that she would not leave the farm in a common day dress.

  Polly winced and made a grab for the red hen. “Is this the right one?” The hen squawked and flapped out of reach.

  Seventeen-year-old Sylvia finished pulling a hand rake through a layer of chicken litter. “You can’t let her use her wings.”

  Polly knew that. Her mother had been saying the same thing since Polly was six. It was ridiculous that she still tried to pick up a chicken from underneath and leave its wings free to protest.

  Sylvia abandoned the litter collection and moved toward the hen on the floor of the poultry house. “We still need to check her feet.”

  While Polly scratched the side of her face, Sylvia swooped toward the red hen, swiftly confined its wings, and tucked the bird between her rib and arm. Sylvia used a couple of fingers to still the feet and get a good look.

  “She’s just dirty.” Freed once again, the hen flew up to the highest roosting bar.

  This had been the only poultry shed when Polly was little. When she was ten, her mother had pushed out one wall and enlarged the shed. Two years later, Polly’s father and brothers erected a second shed larger than the first, and three years after that added a third. Now the Grabills had four interconnecting sheds that opened onto a common yard where the chickens could peck at the ground in search of cracked corn and kitchen scraps.

  “How many hinkel do you suppose we have now?” Sylvia asked.

  Polly’s calculation was swift. “Two hundred and sixteen.” She did not count the three chickens she was fairly certain were destined for the Grabill supper table later in the day.

  “I don’t know how you do that.” Sylvia mixed some clean straw into the litter beneath the roosting bars.

  “I don’t know how you remember which one needs to have her feet checked,” Polly said.

  The numbers involved in keeping poultry never challenged Polly. It was the chickens themselves that stymied her. Her mother insisted her daughters check the eyes and feet of the chickens and inspect for lice on a regular basis. But to Polly a chicken was a chicken. Sylvia and Alice were the ones who could tell them apart. Like any farmer’s wife, her mother had begun keeping chickens for the eggs and meat that fed a growing family. First there had been eight children, two sons and six daughters. Cousin Lillian had arrived when Betsy was small, and then the two daughters-in-law, and then two grandsons. By then a bit of egg money on the side had become a thriving business that brought in needed cash.

  The coop’s wire mesh door opened, and Polly and Sylvia both rotated toward the arrival.

  Lena leaned in. “Dinner is almost ready. You might want to start washing up.”

  “I’m famished.” Sylvia darted out of the coop.

  Lena cocked a head at Polly. “Everything all right?”

  Polly shrugged. “As all right as it ever is.”

  “Dinner will help. Then maybe you’ll have a breather.”

  Polly nodded.

  Barely a year younger, Lena was the sister who knew Polly best. At twenty and nineteen, and of marriageable age, they still slept in the same double bed they had shared through their childhoods. Polly had always assumed she would be the first Grabill sister to marry. Now she was not so sure.

  Lena held the coop door open. “Coming?”

  “In a minute.”

  Henry Edison kicked at the tire on the old automobile.

  Immediately he retracted his foot. The tire was not at fault—for now. Attacking it in frustration might only cause one more thing to go wrong. Even in the middle of a severe economic depression, Henry did not know anyone who drove a car as old as his. Sometimes it seemed as if he spent half his time on the side of the road trying to coax the ancient Ford into motion again. Success generally resulted from a mixture of guesswork and vague memories that he’d heard that sound or seen that color of smoke before.

  Henry opened the hood and assessed his risk for getting burned or zapped if he touched anything. He couldn’t afford to keep this car running. He also couldn’t do his job without it.

  If he could have found any other job, he wouldn’t be doing this one, and he wouldn’t be stuck on the side of a forsaken farm road in Lancaster County. The truth was that Henry was not doing this job either—not yet. He was on the payroll, and he’d been through two weeks of intense instruction on how to conduct interviews and keep his records organized, but he had yet to begin gathering data.

  When Henry began attending college courses, he expected to finish four years later and launch into business. Weeks after his first lecture, the stock market crashed. Only by half starving himself and working three insufficient part-time jobs had he managed to hold his degree in his hands after seven years. Even once he graduated in the spring, he worked Saturdays at a drugstore fountain where people were more likely to drool over the potentialities than to actually order anything. The pay barely covered the rent for one room in a boardinghouse, while debts for everything else piled up. Finally the owner decided he couldn’t afford to keep Henry on at all. Twenty million people were on relief, and college degree or not, Henry became one of them.

  Henry ruled out radiator trouble. He had put enough water in before leaving Philadelphia, barely sixty-five miles away. A loose connection? He peered at the possibilities.

  A woman had held this job before Henry, which did not speak well for its worth, and the wage was barely above subsistence. But it was a government job, and surely that would mean something eventually. The Depression could not last forever.

  If the engine trouble was anything serious, Henry would be in trouble until his first pay caught up with him. Despite four examinations, the coins in his pocket added up to the same sum every time.

  And it was lacking every time.

  A truck rumbled toward him. Was it better to keep his head over the engine and look as if he knew what he was doing or to look up and appear helpless?

  Henry leaned in, readjusting connections and tapping major sections of the engine. The truck passed.

  Then Henry climbed in behind the wheel. For several long minutes, he held still and listened to his own breath. He arranged the levers and pressed the buttons—and the ignition caught! The clatter the engine made was far from reassuring about its performance, but the car went into gear and responded to acceleration.

  According to the map he’d been given, Henry didn’t have much farther to go.

  CHAPTER 2

  Why do you have such trouble getting along with Gloria?” Ernie pressed both hands into the truck’s steering wheel. “I’ve never understood that. She’s always been more than nice to me.”

  Minerva turned her gaze outside the passenger window. There was no point in answering Ernie’s question. She had tried many times over the years to be polite about it, yet his befuddlement persisted.

>   If she said she and Gloria simply had nothing in common, Ernie would point out that they were both farmwives and mothers and both grew up in Lancaster County and had known each other since the day they started school together.

  If she said they were just too different because Gloria was Amish, Ernie would say that was one of the reasons he enjoyed Marlin Grabill. It made things interesting.

  If she said they had never been close, even when they were in school together, Ernie would say friendship takes tending.

  Minerva was not looking for friendship with Gloria Grabill. Why couldn’t Ernie understand that? The competitions to get the best marks in school, to win the spelling bees, to take home the needlework ribbon from the county fair—none of that had been friendly rivalry. Minerva was never so relieved as she was on the final day of eighth grade because she knew Gloria would not continue on to high school in town and Minerva would. Freedom tasted sweet.

  “The tractor is giving me trouble,” Ernie said. “I’m hoping to get through the fall harvest, but we’re going to have to do something before spring.”

  “You’re so good with the machinery,” Minerva said. “You’ll keep it going for a long time.”

  Silent, Ernie shook his head as he swung the truck onto Grabill property. Minerva’s stomach clenched.

  Ernie reached across the bench and covered Minerva’s hand with his.

  “Lunch will be fine, Min. Just relax. Enjoy yourself the way you used to when we were first married.”

  She had never enjoyed herself when Gloria was around. Of that Minerva was certain.

  “We were poor as could be in those days,” she said. “Just starting out. Taking a mortgage on an abandoned farm. Thinking of the future with such hope.”

  “We didn’t have much, but we were happy,” Ernie said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Minerva said. “You had the boys, and you taught them everything you knew. Now we have a daughter to consider. I’m only thinking of Rose.”

  Ernie glanced at her, his eyes clouding over, and withdrew his hand.

  Minerva should not have mentioned the boys.

  The terrain dipped and the Grabill house came into view. Bushes grew through the wire fence along the lane, making the place prettier than it deserved to be. The cluster of structures at the end of the lane marked the heart of the farm: the clapboard house, the old barn, which was now a stable just for the horses, the new barn, the silo, the haphazard additions to the poultry area.