Free Dedicated to God by Abbie Reese Page A

console her daughter with a gift of clothesline and clothespins so that the little girl could be like her mother. “It didn’t help at all,” she says. “I just cried.”
    When her father lost his job, Virginia experienced her family’s downward spiral as an economic crisis. Her father began to unravel. When he filed for bankruptcy, signs emerged of his fragile grip on reality, his declining mental and emotional state. One day, the family packed their car and abandoned their home and most of their belongings. Her mother sold a few items to neighbors before the move, thinking she would replace what she sold after they resettled; she could not know then that they would never establish a stable family life again. “In those days that was a great disgrace,” she says of her father’s bankruptcy. Since Sister Joan Marie’s older sister helped their father pack the car, Sister Joan Marie remembers they found room for all of her sister’s collections. The car packed full, Sister Joan Marie was told to select from her possessions only what she could hold on her lap. She took one doll from her collection.
    In time, Sister Joan Marie gleaned the backstory of her father’s sad life: He was one of twelve children, and his mother died in childbirth when he waseight years old. His older sisters took care of the infant. Meanwhile, he and the other middle children were neglected. “Nobody loves you but your mother at that age,” Sister Joan Marie says. Her paternal grandfather was portrayed in these stories as holding his children to impossible standards; he had overcome the dark years of the Depression in spite of the extra mouths and because of the many hands, his offspring toiling on his potato farm. “He worked them to death,” Sister Joan Marie says of her paternal grandfather. Her father bonded with one of his brothers, who got a job on the railroad feeding coal to motor the train. In another tragic blow, her father’s favorite brother was killed in a train accident. Still an adolescent, he ran away during World War II, lying about his age so that he could enlist in the military. A country boy with an aversion to rules, he clashed with authority. He made whiskey out of potato peelings and was about to face the expected repercussions from the military for his misbehavior when another brother who was “good to him” testified that he had lied about his age to get into the army. He was discharged.
    Like his siblings, Sister Joan Marie’s father did not want to work as a farmer, a result of their hard labor in their father’s fields. “My father especially wanted to be a big businessman, and that was his ideal,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He had worked himself up to this.” After the financial collapse, Virginia bounced between the family’s temporary shelters, including a campground one summer in Indiana, and her maternal grandmother’s home in Kansas. At times, it seemed she was a character in a fairytale, inhabiting a campground complete with a backyard forest to explore, and a Hansel and Gretel–like cottage whose tenant kept pet raccoons and raised a blue jay named “Perculator.” The owner trained the bird with milk and bread to land on her finger. “To us it was like a miracle,” Sister Joan Marie says. Other times, Virginia was reunited with a patriarch who was succeeding either at business or at drink.
    Her mother taught her children the Golden Rule. “As long as we were with her, it was okay,” Sister Joan Marie says. Her father often left to search for work; his reappearance disrupted the calm and was “emotionally upsetting,” Sister Joan Marie says. “And Mother always said, ‘Forgive him. Forgive him.’ ” Once, her parents left their three children for a few days with a caretaker, maybe a neighbor, Sister Joan Marie says. Her parents did not explain in terms that registered to their youngest child where they were going, or why. “I think they said they’d give us each a quarter if we