Lost Love's Return by Alfred Nicols

Author:Alfred Nicols [Nicols, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alfred Nicols
Published: 2021-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Blessed by Friendship

Peter moved in with Emma in her room behind Eva Nell Winstead’s dress shop. Although P.W. and Lila were not unkind and made it clear that they were still welcome to work at Montgomery Mercantile, the tension was apparent between Emma and Lila, and Peter felt embarrassment around his mother. Peter found work at a local sawmill and Emma started a seamstress business, capitalizing on her experience in the garment factory in Hattiesburg.

Ever the loving father and realizing the cramped circumstances of the room behind the dress shop, P.W. soon helped them purchase a forty-year-old house in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Glasper. P.W. was not sure it would be big enough for them, if they had a large family. But Emma had let Peter know she’d “had all the young’uns she intended to have.”

Throughout the 1920s, Peter and Emma managed to be proudly independent. Sawmill wages were good by the standards of the time, and Emma did well with the seamstress business she ran out of their house.

Then came the Great Depression. Even then Peter and Emma fared better than many families of the time. Ever the hard-driving one, Emma went into high gear with her seamstress business. This was a time for keeping hand-me-downs and almost-rags held together for the wearing, and her sewing skills were in high demand. Peter had earned favor with the sawmill owners, and when production was shut down, they hired him to keep the equipment looking decent in hopes of a sale. Fortunately, years went by without it selling.

~

Late on a chilly morning in 1933, at a low point in the Great Depression, Peter was alone in the maintenance shack of the long-idle sawmill, smoking one of his newer brier pipes, and pondering his future. The owners had finally sold the equipment and he was to be terminated when it was moved out. Unemployment stood at 25 percent and jobs were almost nonexistent.

His best friend Dennis Langley arrived on the scene in his tan Buick. Sitting down in a chair across from Peter, he looked uncharacteristically serious. Peter was confident Dennis knew he was about to be out of work, since there was little that happened in the county that escaped him.

Dennis’s father had been the largest stockholder in the Bank of Glasper when it was chartered in 1897. In 1927, upon the death of his father, Dennis and his sister had inherited this stock and Dennis took over as a very conservative president of the only bank in the county.

Dennis had graduated from Vanderbilt and married a prominent Episcopalian classmate from Atlanta. Peter had joined the Army right after high school and married a hard-shell Baptist, who had dropped out of school after the tenth grade, never venturing further from Glasper than the nearby Hattiesburg. There had been little chance that their wives would be close.

Yet neither Flask nor Money Clip had a closer, truer friend. They relished every opportunity to fish together, sometimes merely sharing a few nips and reliving the experiences of their youth.

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