Free Then Came Heaven by Lavyrle Spencer

Cass had taught all his boys everything they knew about crops and engines and animals and carpentry and the thousand unforeseen repairs a farmer has to face in a year of running a farm. But most important, he’d taught them how to love a woman—not the showy kind of love that could mask a hollow core, but the faithful, undecorous kind that stood by, no matter what, with few words and fewer arguments, but a constancy that was immutable. Above all, Cass and Hedy’s children knew security, because through all the toil of birthing fourteen kids, and walking the floor with them when they were sick, and putting food on the table for them when they weren’t, and worrying where the money would come from for the oldest one’s shoes, and how the bills would get paid during the years when the crops were lean—through all this they loved each other, and those kids knew it.
    Cass, a man of few words, had once told Eddie, “You only marry once. Pick her right and treat her right and you’ll be happy.” It was as close to philosophizing as Cass had ever come, but Eddie had followed his father’s advice.
    They both knew this as they drew apart and Cass asked, “Why didn’t you let one of your brothers ring that bell?”
    “I couldn’t, Poppo. Krystyna would’ve wanted me to ring it.”
    Cass had his hand folded over Eddie’s collarbone, and squeezed it so hard he broke a couple of blood vessels. But Eddie was as honed and hard as his old man and hardly noticed.
    “She was like one of our own, your Krystyna.”
    “I know, Poppo.”
    They were still standing that way, struggling to think of something to say, when Irene Pribil came up, asking in a shy, retiring way, “Have you eaten anything, Eddie?”
    “No, I’m not hungry, Irene.”
    His mother said, “We should make coffee though.”
    “Yes,” Irene added, “and there’s cake.”
    Where the cake came from so fast, Eddie couldn’t guess, but he wasn’t surprised: these women thought food was the antidote to any crisis. They brewed egg coffee and before the first cake could be cut another arrived from a neighbor woman, Mrs. Berczyk. It was followed by other foods from other neighbors—a platter of deviled eggs, a roaster full of sliced roast beef and gravy, some pork chops over scalloped potatoes, fresh-baked buns and poppy-seed coffee cake, potato salad and sliced tomatoes from somebody’s garden. Near closing time, Mr. Kuntz from the bakery brought over the last of his bismarcks and glazed doughnuts that hadn’t been sold that day. Pete Plotnik came from the back door of his meat market across the alley and brought three rings of Polish sausage. The women warmed them and laid the foods out on the kitchen table that Eddie had made for Krystyna as a wedding gift. He had painted it white and she had trimmed the backs of the four matching chairs with fruit decals she had bought at Lloyd Berg’s hardware store. They had figured that whenever they had more children he’d make more chairs in his little workshop in the backyard.
    But there would be only these two little girls, the ones upon whom, at that very moment, the women were forcing plates of food, and who sat down dutifully on the front porch with a bunch of their cousins at a miniature table and chairs that their daddy had also made.
    Lucy ate only a piece of cake.
    Anne ate nothing.
    One of her cousins, a girl a few years older than Anne, stood beside her chair with an arm around the younger girl’s shoulder, patting her on the shoulder the way she’d seen the aunts do, while Anne stared at her food in silence.
    Adults sat on the porch rails with plates on their knees, and on the wide porch steps, and inside the tiny living room on the piano stool and the overstuffed maroon horsehair sofa, and even out in the yard on the wooden platform surrounding the pump that wasn’t used anymore.
    Afterward, the women washed dishes, and the men stayed with Eddie, who asked six of them to act as pallbearers—three of