His words barely registered beneath her haze of alcohol and grief. He strode from the porch and wrapped her in a hug.
“I have something to tell you,” he said into the top of her head. He tilted her chin up and wiped her face with a kerchief he pulled from his pocket.
“Jack?” Gram’s sharp voice sliced through the quiet.
Gram stepped onto the porch.
“I need to speak with you,” Gram announced, leaving no room for argument.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” her father whispered, giving Jude a peck on the forehead.
He walked away, following Gram into the house. Jude wondered what he’d been about to say.
Jude never heard her father’s confession.
Twenty-four hours later he was dead.
Chapter 5
1932
Sophia
The first time Sophia saw the woman, she thought she was selling bibles. Course, who in their right mind went to someone’s barn to sell bibles instead of their front door? Furthermore, who sold bibles in a white linen dress on a dusty country road? But being nine years old, Sophia didn’t bother with such rationales. Her child’s mind was like a dream mind - anything could make sense.
“You lost?” Sophia asked her when she didn’t see a stack of bibles clutched in the woman’s pale hands.
The woman tilted her head to the side and stared at Sophia with eyes like the little ice crystals that formed on the pond in winter. They glittered in the sunlight, and for an instant seemed to vanish all together, replaced by a bright whiteness that slid into eternity, no bottom to speak of.
“Sophia!” she had turned at her mother calling from the kitchen and when she turned back the woman was gone. Sophia ran deeper into the barn, peered behind the old milk crates, but no sign of her. She would have scoured the woods, but her mother’s call came again, shriller this time and Sophia knew if she kept lunch waiting, a switch might be in order. She ran back to the house, breathless and asked her mom and her two brothers if they’d seen her.
“Who?” Grimmel asked, spooning more pickle relish onto his plate.
“The lady in the white dress,” Sophia told them, grabbing extra strawberry jam for her toast when her mother turned back to the stove.
“I didn’t see anyone,” Grimmel shrugged.
Sophia’s brother Timothy ignored her all-together as was his habit. Since turning fifteen the previous February, Grimmel and Sophia had been reduced to children, and Timothy elevated to their father’s farm hand - in other words an adult. He rarely spoke to Grimmel and never spoke to Sophia except to boss her around.
“Sophia, I don’t have time for child’s play today. I’ve three pies to bake for women’s garden club tomorrow, a whole load of wash thanks to your mud antics last week and a year’s worth of cucumbers to jar. Eat your lunch and then you’re to go down to Hilda’s farm to collect apples.”
“But Mom, I talked to her. I’m not makin’ it up. I swear.”
Sophia’s mother turned and gazed at her daughter with a stare bordering on frustration. She pursed her lips and sighed.
“Timothy, when you’re done with lunch, check the sheds and the barn for this woman.”
Timothy looked up from his lunch, surprised. He started to argue, but his mother silenced him with a look.
“Yes ma’am,” he told her.
Satisfied, Sophia scarfed down her lunch and set off for Hilda’s. She was not keen on picking apples, but Hilda’s barn cat Gray had birthed a litter of kittens three weeks before and Sophia jumped at every opportunity to play with the little furballs.
That night, when daddy returned from town, he tucked Sophia into bed. In the summer, she and Grimmel slept on the screened porch. At night, the heat of the day settled into the land to feed the plants, and the air came alive with the sounds of darkness.
“I hear our good friend the Barn Owl,” Sophia’s dad whispered, his eyes twinkling in the light from the kerosene lantern at her bedside.
Sophia listened and sure enough the familiar screech greeted her. The cry rose amidst a melody of night song. Crickets and tree frogs and night birds all had their voices in the mix. The scent of grass and hay and the mossy smells from the pond mingled together. Years later Sophia would find herself transported home to nights on the farm when any of those sounds or smells found her.
“Mama says you saw a woman on the farm today?” her father chided her, gently.
Unlike Sophia’s mother, her father treated his only daughter with a tenderness that revealed their secret bond. Since birth, Sophia’s father doted on her. Not as his princess, but as the special child. The child who appeared in their life as a gift after they believed only Timothy and Grimmel would grace their home. She stole into the world like the quiet mist that floats across the pastures every morning, sliding from her mother’s womb with barely enough time for Heather to sit up in bed and announce that her water had broken. Daddy delivered Sophia with his own two hands. He still told the story of the caul that sheathed her face and neck and how he and Mama were afraid to cut it away. Finally, for fear that Sophia might suffocate, her daddy ripped the milky red veil from her face and welcomed the first wild cry of his baby daughter.
“Yes, she wore a white dress, and I thought she was selling bibles, but then she didn’t have any bibles.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yes, well,” Sophia paused. “I tried to anyhow, but Mama called us for lunch.”
“Hmmmm….” her daddy scratched the stubble on his chin and looked into the night thoughtfully. “Not a neighbor then? Hilda’s granddaughter, maybe, Sarah?”
“Daddy, Sarah is hardly a year older than me and we’ve only played a thousand times. I think I’d know if it was Sarah.”
Her daddy chuckled and shook his head. He kissed Sophia lightly on the forehead.
“Well if you encounter her again, you ask her name and then you come straight to me, okay?”
Sophia nodded, but when she saw the woman again, her father was dead.
September 1934
Her daddy died on a beautiful autumn day when the leaves fell long and soft and piled in great heaps of copper at the edges of the road. Sophia remembered the blue ribbon that her mother tied in her hair that morning, insisting that Sophia look fine for the Sunday brunch that the Church of Nazarene held every September. She remembered the chalky smell of the old woman who hugged her close when they led her mother away from the picnic to a shadow at the side of the church. She remembered most of all the look on her mother‘s face as the joy drained out. First the light left her eyes and then the soft rise of her mouth fell and turned down and her chin quivered. Sophia could not hear her cry, but for years, her memory would conjure a stream of fat tears rolling over her mother’s cheeks.
A farm accident, they called it. Daddy suffered a heart attack and fell off his tractor. He was run over by the disc-harrow - the part that chopped up the weeds. At twelve years old, Sophia understood what that meant - pain. When a boy at school told her that detail, Sophia kicked him in the shin as hard as she could and ran the four miles home.
She didn’t go to the farmhouse, but to the barn where she hid in the little loft and wept until dusk. When she finally peeled her tired body from the dusty floor, she saw the woman for the second time.
Somehow, without making a sound, she had climbed into the loft. She sat on her knees, her legs tucked beneath her in the same white dress. Sophia looked first at her startling gray eyes, and then she took in every detail of the strange woman who had not spoken a word. Her long auburn hair was loose and flowed over her shoulders, and her face looked soft and pale. Sophia thought if she touched it, the woman’s skin would feel like milk does when you dip your fingers in it. Her features were small as was the shape of her body from her breasts to her hips, but she was not a girl. Sophia knew girls, and this was a woman. She thought of her daddy then and cried.