Confessions From a Farmer's Wife by Caroline Way

Author:Caroline Way
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contempory fiction, coming of age story, redemption, Book of Job.
ISBN: 978-1-937573-32-4
Publisher: Greenbrier Book Company

Part Two

His wife said to him, “Are you still

trying to maintain your integrity?

Curse God and die.”

Job 9:2 (NLT)

Twenty-two

December 1940

My shoes beat a steady rhythm on the ice. Tap, tap, tap.

Harder, with my heels this time. Tap, tap, tap.

Again, harder, and harder still. Tap. Tap. Crack!

Water seeped through the break in the frosted ice. It made a clear glass-like surface, allowing me to see the mix of twigs, stones, and brown muck of the creek bottom. In the summer, the mud would squeeze between my toes as I entered or exited the creek. I would laugh or squeal in disgust and wriggle all digits until the offending mess rinsed free.

I could not feel my toes.

I wished I could not feel more.

A lot of time had passed since that first encounter on the bank of Miller’s Creek. I was no longer six. He was no longer eight. I sat in the same spot where we first met and had met together many times since that life-changing day. To say I wanted his legs to appear as he sat next to me, and for his feet to tap the icy surface next to mine, is inadequate. Yearned, ached, needed—all of these too failed to meet what it was inside me.

My thoughts turned to Cora Miller, and the speculation that her death had not been an accident. I wondered how old she might have been. Laura and I had spent several days one summer searching the local graveyard for her resting place in order to find out. We had failed to find it; something easily explained if Cora had been Catholic. Had Cora been older or younger than my nineteen years? Maybe the same? I supposed it made no difference as I contemplated what might have led her to such a desperate act. Laura had woven a rather tragic and romantic tale of lovers divided by a cruel fate only to be reunited in death. We had read Romeo and Juliet that year. I smiled in spite of what I was feeling as I pictured Laura gesturing in her grand melodramatic style. The smile disappeared quickly.

I knew what had driven Cora Miller to do it, if indeed it was not by accident that she had slipped beneath the crystalline waters of the creek. She had not really wanted to die; she only wanted to stop feeling. I know I did.

For so long, my life had been idyllic. Certainly, from the distance of memory, I know where the imperfections lie, but in the light of what had come to be, those days were perfect, innocent—adolescent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.