Free Angel Sister by Ann H. Gabhart Page A

Virginia. She wanted to turn him into a man of letters. A writer or a teacher perhaps. She had dreams for him the same as his father had had for Preston Jr. His father had no such dreams for Victor. He expected him to finish out his senior year and then start working in the store. A man couldn’t expect to spend his whole life buried in books.
    Preston Jr. had been enrolled in Centre College over in Danville, but that was different. Preston Jr. had been going places, and he needed not only the book learning but also the contacts with the right people who would someday help him get elected governor. Nobody was going to elect Victor to anything, which suited Victor just fine. He didn’t want to run for office, not even for mayor of Rosey Corner if there had been such a position.
    That’s what people sometimes said his father was. Unofficially. Unelected. But Preston Merritt knew what the community needed. Hadn’t he lived there all his life? Didn’t he see virtually every person in Rosey Corner most every week? Some of them every day. So he knew what was going on. The only other man some people set forward as leader of the community was Preacher Reece.
    Victor’s father laughed at that idea. Preacher Reece might know spiritual matters. If somebody wanted to know about getting to heaven, then by all means that person should knock on the preacher’s door. But if that same person wanted to get something done, say, on the road through Rosey Corner, then he’d better show up at Merritt’s Dry Goods Store and talk to Preston Merritt.
    Victor put in his time at the store on Saturdays and after school, but he didn’t plan on spending the rest of his life working there. He might not know what he wanted to do with his life, but he was sure it was something finer than measuring out flour and keeping count of the pickles in the pickle barrel. That was thinking his mother encouraged.
    The day after he turned nineteen early in February, Victor heard his parents arguing about it. He’d never heard his mother cross his father before. In fact they rarely spoke to one another beyond an occasional polite inquiry after the other’s health. But his mother stood up to his father for Victor’s future. She had her inheritance and she would use it how she wished, and that was to see that Victor was properly educated.
    She had her heart set on his going to the College of William and Mary in Virginia where all the men in her family had been educated. Victor planned to get her to compromise on a college in Lexington. That way he could come home to help his father in the store on Saturdays and, more importantly, to see Nadine.
    It was funny when he thought back on that time now how blind they’d all been. In Europe countries were bombarding one another and men were dying, but none of it seemed to have much to do with America. And nothing at all to do with Rosey Corner. They read the accounts of the war in the newspapers. Every man who came into the store that January railed against the German submarines attacking neutral ships. They thought something should be done when Germany sank the US liner Housatonic in February that year, and most of them backed President Wilson’s call for Congress to pass a bill allowing the merchant ships to arm for protection.
    But it was the rare man in America who was ready to pack his knapsack and head across the ocean to help fight the war. Even when the newspapers reported the German Foreign Minister Zimmerman’s telegram to Mexico proposing an alliance against the United States, most of the men in Rosey Corner still thought the war would stay overseas and never touch any of them.
    Victor read the war news in the papers and heard the talk at the store, but he didn’t worry about it. He was young and in love, and thoughts of Nadine filled his head. He jumped out of bed every morning with a smile on his face. It didn’t matter what his father said to him. It didn’t matter what her father said to her. At