Free Angel Sister by Ann H. Gabhart

did you used to go fishing together when you were kids?”
    “Your daddy is some years younger than me, but he was always hanging around Aunt Hattie’s boy. Bo was about my age. And we both liked hitting a baseball. Your daddy ran after the balls for us. That Bo, he could smack that ball clear to yonder no matter how I pitched it.” Graham looked up and off across the pond as if he could see the baseball flying still.
    “Was Daddy happy then?” Kate asked.
    “Nobody can be happy all the time,” Graham said softly before he shook himself a little, as if to get rid of some sad memory. “But he was happy enough when we were playing ball. Course everything was different then before the Great War and the influenza.”
    “How?” Kate asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I guess because we were young and full of the future. Bo, he was going to be a great baseball player, and he was on his way before he went in the army and got killed over there. Me, I was going to cure people. That’s why I didn’t go to the War. I was still in school. If it had lasted longer and the influenza hadn’t come along, I was thinking I’d go overseas as a doctor. Help the wounded soldiers.”
    “What about Daddy? What did he want to be?” Kate held her bucket over toward Graham for him to drop in his berries.
    Graham didn’t start picking again for a moment as he thought about his answer. “He was younger, like I said. He hadn’t come up with what he planned to do. All he knew for sure before the War came along and yanked him away from Rosey Corner was that he loved your mama. I’ve never seen nobody so much in love when he was just a young sprout. Bo and me thought he’d die of lovesickness before he ever got your mama to notice him.” Graham laughed a little. Then his smile disappeared. “I was in love something like that once upon a time.”
    “You were?” Kate was surprised. “What happened?”
    “I had to come home from school to take care of my folks and Fern when they got sick. I guess the girl gave up on me coming back, and she up and married somebody else.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Well, it was probably for the best. No woman would want to live the way I do now, and you know, I sort of enjoy it. Freedom’s a fine thing.” He had a handful of berries again, but when Kate held the bucket over toward him, he grinned at her and popped the whole handful in his mouth.
    Kate laughed. And behind them Tori yelled that she’d caught a fish.

9
    ______
    It was hot in the blacksmith shop. A man couldn’t bend iron without heating it to the right stage for the work. That meant fire in the forge year-round. Sweat soaked Victor’s shirt and rolled down his face as he shaped the horseshoe on his anvil with his ball-peen hammer. Horses’ hooves came in all sizes and shapes, and making shoes to protect their feet and legs was an art. Some of it could be learned, according to his uncle Jonas, but the best blacksmiths were born with a natural instinct and feel for the iron.
    Victor didn’t think he was born a blacksmith. He’d never thought about shaping iron for a living before the war, even though he liked hanging around his uncle’s blacksmith shop when his father didn’t need him at the store. His great uncle, actually. His father’s uncle by marriage.
    Uncle Jonas was a big man, broad as an axe handle across the shoulders, and as good-hearted as he was strong. He could swing the heaviest hammer with one hand with ease. Victor never imagined being able to do what Uncle Jonas could do, but Uncle Jonas let him start shaping the iron as soon as he was big enough to swing a hammer. Victor liked bending the iron to his will. Still, he never planned to use what Uncle Jonas taught him. Not until after everything changed in 1917.
    The year he turned nineteen started out fine enough. He was looking forward to graduation, and life seemed full of endless possibilities. His mother talked incessantly about sending him to school back in