Free Heaven by V.C. Andrews Page A

differently than I had before.
    Many of them lived beyond Winnerrow, scattered a bit higher on the hills, but not really in the mountains like we were. Often at night when the wind was still, I’d lie awake and think I could hear the pickaxes of those dead miners who’d been trapped underground, all trying to dig their way out of the very mountain that was topped by our own cabin.
    “Can you hear them, Tom?” I asked the night when Sarah went to bed crying because Pa hadn’t been home in five days. “Chop, chop, chop … don’t you hear em?”
    Tom sat up and looked around. “Don’t hear nothin.”
    But I did. Faint and far away, chop chop chop. Even fainter, help help help! I got up and went out to the porch, and the sound was louder. I shivered, then called to Tom. Together we drifted to where the soundcame from—and there was Pa in the moonlight, shirtless and sweaty, swinging an ax to fell another tree so we could have firewood, come this winter.
    For the first time in my life I looked at him with a kind of wondering pity. Help help help echoed in my brain—had it been him crying out, had it been? What kind of man was he anyway, that he would come in the night to chop wood without even stopping in the cabin to say hello to his wife and children?
    “Pa,” called out Tom, “I kin help ya do that.”
    Pa didn’t pause in his swing that sent wood chips flying, just yelled: “Go back and get your rest, boy. Tell your ma I’ve got a new job that keeps me busy all day, and the only spare time I have is at night, and that’s why I’m chopping down trees for you to split into logs later on.” He didn’t say a word to indicate he saw me beside Tom.
    “What kind of job have ya got now, Pa?”
    “Workin on a railroad, boy. Learnin how t’drive one of them big engines. Pulling coal on the C and O … come down t’the tracks tomorrow about seven and you’ll see me pull out …”
    “Ma sure would like t’see ya, Pa.”
    I thought he paused then, the ax hesitating before it slammed again into the pine. “She’ll see me … when she sees me.” And that was all he said before I turned and ran back to the cabin.
    On my coarse pillow stuffed with chicken feathers I cried. Didn’t know why I cried, except all of a sudden I was sorry for Pa—and even sorrier for Sarah.

four
SARAH
    A NOTHER C HRISTMAS CAME AND WENT WITHOUT REAL gifts to make it memorable. We were given only small necessities like toothbrushes and soap. If Logan hadn’t given me a gold bracelet set with a small sapphire I wouldn’t even have remembered that Christmas. I had nothing to give him but a cap I’d knitted.
    “It’s a terrific cap,” he said, pulling it down over his head. “I’ve always wanted a bright red hand-knitted cap. Thank you very much, Heaven Leigh. Sure would be nice if you’d knit me a red scarf for my birthday that’s coming up in March.”
    It surprised me that he wore the cap. It was much too large, and he didn’t seem to notice that I’d dropped a couple of stitches and that the wool had been handled so much it was more than a bit soiled. No sooner was Christmas over than I started on the scarf. I had it finished by Valentine’s Day. “It’s too late for a red scarf in March,” I said with a smile when he wrapped it around his neck—and he was still wearing that red cap to school every day. If anything could have made me like him more than his devotion to that awful red cap, I don’t know what it would have been.
    I turned fourteen in late February. Logan gave me another gift, a lovely white sweater set that made Fanny’s dark eyes blaze with envy. The day after my birthday Logan met me after school where the mountain trail ended; he walked me to the clearing before the cabin, and every day after until it was spring. Keith and Our Jane learned to love and trust him, and all the time Fanny plied her charms, but Logan continued to ignore her. Oh, falling in love at age fourteen was so exhilarating I