“It will take time, but one day she’ll begin to take up her life again. Oh, the pain will still be there, but it will lessen. One day she’ll begin to remember the good things about her life with Teague.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Lincoln.” Vonnie smiled, dabbing at her eyes. “She’ll need your friendship.”
“She’ll have it.” Eugenia said, patting Vonnie’s arm.
A moment later, Vonnie knocked lightly on her mother’s door. When there was no response, she opened the door gently.
“Mother?”
The shades were drawn down tight. It took a moment for Vonnie’s eyes to adjust, then she saw her mother half-reclining on a fainting couch in the corner.
“Mother, the service will begin in half an hour.”
Cammy hadn’t dressed yet. Her hair hung in a tangled mat over her shoulders. She looked as if she had aged twenty years in the past twenty-four hours.
“Pastor Higgins is here, and all our neighbors and friends. You should come downstairs.”
“I can’t…I can’t go through this.”
Vonnie knelt beside the couch, her fingers gently reaching to stroke her mother’s trembling hand.
“You must, Momma. They’ve been so good to come, to offer their help and sympathy.”
Cammy turned lifeless eyes on her. “What good will words do? Teague is gone. Nothing will ever be the same again.”
“I know you feel that way now, Momma, but you can’t hide up here for the rest of your life. As painful as this is, we have to face it, together.”
“I can’t be with those people. Not now—please, leave me be.” Vonnie’s patience was stretched to the breaking point.
“Momma, Daddy wouldn’t want you to behave like this. He’d want you to be strong, to trust God. You know Daddy trusted without question. He’d expect us to do the same.”
Cammy covered her eyes with her hand and held a sodden handkerchief to her trembling lips. “He shouldn’t have left me.”
“He didn’t have a choice. He didn’t want to die, Momma!” She took Cammy’s hand, holding tightly. “God will give us the strength needed.”
Cammy began to sob, and Vonnie was sorry she’d been sharp with her. She had spent most of her life with Teague Taylor, and part of her was gone. She had every right to grieve. Vonnie had been a gift from God. Cammy believed she would never have a child. Then one afternoon she had stumbled across a dying woman. A dying woman who had given her a child. Her parents had doted on her. The three had become nearly inseparable. Vonnie understood that her mother would grieve deeply, but this retreating to her room, to inside herself, distressed her.
“I’ll help you get dressed. What about the blue? Daddy loved the blue dress on you.”
Vonnie began to search through the armoire for the new dress she’d made her mother in the spring. “I sewed it special for Easter, remember? And Daddy commented on how nice you looked in it.”
“Vonnie—”
“Try, Momma. The burial is in thirty minutes. You’ve got to be there.” She took a deep breath, fighting back tears. “For me.”
Resigned, Cammy got up, visibly weak from not eating.
She managed to get dressed and brush her hair into a semblance of order. She leaned heavily on Vonnie’s arm as they descended the stairs. Mrs. Lincoln was in the foyer and saw them first.
“Cammy,” she murmured, stepping forward to meet them. “Teague would say you look like a bluebonnet in the summer.”
“Oh, Eugenia.” Cammy broke down, walking into her friend’s arms.
Vonnie let Mrs. Lincoln take charge of her mother, watching them go into the large parlor together. Murmurs of condolences floated out to her as Vonnie retreated outside.
The sun was shining, a light breeze. She lifted her eyes to the heavens and whispered, “You’re going to have to help us get through this. I know Daddy’s there with You, but this is so hard for us.” A peace filled her and for a moment she imagined that she felt Teague’s firm hand on her shoulder, urging her on.
Moving toward the family cemetery, which Teague had prepared in a grove of birch trees about a hundred yards from the house, she gathered her fortitude around her like a shroud. Teague’s parents were buried here. They’d lived with Cammy and Teague until their deaths, when Vonnie was three. And Great-Aunt Alice and Uncle Sill were here. Vonnie pushed open the gate, pausing momentarily as the gaping hole in the ground where her father would be laid to rest jarred her senses. The ranch hands had been busy this morning.
Tears sprang to her eyes. She sagged against the gate as the enormity of the past twenty-four hours hit her.
She clung to the weathered boards, her lips moving in silent prayer. Now, as never before, she realized the comfort of being a child of God. How could anyone go through life without the love and strength that only He could give?
She remained at the grave site, grieving alone. When she started back to the house, the funeral party was already spilling out onto the lawn, parting to stand aside as six pallbearers carried the freshly planed pine casket toward the cemetery. Cammy, still firmly in Mrs. Lincoln’s control, followed her husband’s body, a linen handkerchief to her eyes. Vonnie watched the strangely quiet procession make its way across the wide lawn.
Ed Hogan had come. Teague had bought feed from him for years. The Newton sisters were there because they were simply good neighbors. Cammy had taken a kettle of chicken soup to the sisters when one had come down with pneumonia last year. Teague had gone with her and cut a cord of firewood when he noticed their supply was running low.
There was Pastor Higgins, and his wife Pearl, and Franz and frail Audrey. Hildy Addison, Mora and Carolyn were there having arrived last night to be with her.
And then there were the Baldwins. They’d come as a matter of courtesy rather than friendship. It would have looked impolite if they’d been missing, since most of the town had seen fit to pay their condolences.
The five men stood well back from the group now circling the casket. Andrew, two years younger than Adam, had disliked Teague intensely. Vonnie knew he’d had a crush on her since school, but he’d detested her father. They’d been in the same class throughout their childhood. He and Adam had even fought over her once when they thought P.K. wasn’t looking.
Her eyes slipped to the woman who was standing beside Adam. She should be standing by him, not Beth. He should be by her side, to console her, to hold her, to love her…. Her thoughts stopped short. Beth was one of the nicest women around—kind, even tempered. Vonnie couldn’t find it in her heart to resent Beth’s place beside Adam.
“Dear friends,” Pastor Higgins began as the assemblage gathered closer to the open grave.
Vonnie moved to one side of Cammy as Mrs. Lincoln closed in on the other. Cammy clung to Vonnie’s arm like a lost child.
“We are gathered here today to say goodbye
