Free Return to Harmony by Janette Oke Page B

very young, but I remember, child. Oh yes, much as I would like to forget, the memories are etched deep upon my mind and heart.”
    Bethan stood and looked into her mother’s eyes, saw the dark gaze turn inward. One hand continued to stroke Bethan’s hair, but she doubted her mother even knew what she was doing. Moira’s accent became more pronounced as she continued, “I remember well, with a child’s clarity and a child’s pain. I remember how the coal dust settled on everything, turning even the rain a sodden gray. I remember how my father’s hands would never clean up completely, no matter how hard he scrubbed. Nor his face, with the wrinkles deeper than they should have been for a man his age, all darkened like veins in the earth with dust from the mine. I remember dear sweet Harry, my eldest brother, and how he coughed his life away. I remember how we stood at the graveside, my poor mother weeping as though it were her own life that lay in the coffin with her eldest son, and how my father swore then and there we would find a place to live where the sky was blue and the air was clean and the life was worth living.”
    “And so you came here,” Bethan said quietly.
    “Aye, that we did.” Moira’s gaze refocused upon her daughter.
    And a smile formed, one which was so full of love that it made Bethan’s own heart ache. “And I met your darling of a father, and had this angel of a daughter, whose face shines with the light of heaven, and who worries me to distraction with her addled ways.”
    “I don’t know who’s the addled one,” Dylan announced, his heavy boots treading into the kitchen as the screen door slammed behind him. “But I sure do smell something that’s near about overdone.”
    “My biscuits!” Moira leapt up and raced for the stove. She used her apron to open the door, fanned away the smoke, pulled out the pan, and pronounced, “And not a moment too soon.” She turned about with, “I’ll thank you to go clean yourself up, sir. You look as though you’ve brought half the pigsty in with you.”
    “You’re welcome,” Dylan said with a deep bow, offering Bethan a wink and a glimpse of his easy grin, then ambling out.
    Moira’s gaze followed her son from the kitchen. “How that boy can manage to smile, with him barely a year from conscription, is a mystery I shall never unravel. Not in all my days.”
    Bethan felt the same chill every time mention was made of the war in Europe, the one people were already calling The Great War. Most of the time it seemed so distant from Harmony—the papers occasionally predicting how the United States was bound to become involved was about as close as the conflict came. That and the difficulty in buying things like fuel oil and rubber parts. Otherwise, the war might as well have been on the moon as far as their town was concerned. “But Dylan’s only just seventeen,” Bethan heard herself protest. “The war can’t go on so long that he’d be taken.”
    “Your words in God’s ears,” Moira sighed, lifting a lid and stirring the contents. “Now come over here and help me, daughter. Reach up and get me the big serving bowl—yes, that’s the one. And tell me what it is you heard the teachers say about Jodie.”

    After a discussion that continued all through dinner, Bethan was sent to find Jodie and deliver the news. It being Wednesday and Wednesday being market day, the Harland Apothecary was still open to serve outlying farmers. Jodie was there behind the counter with her father, as she was almost every afternoon and all Saturday. She was very matter-of-fact about her work, as she was about much of her life since her mother was gone. The apothecary was the only place, she told Bethan, where her father showed much interest in life or spoke more than a few words. It was nice to be able to talk with him, even if it was only about his business. Plus she loved the work and the smells, she went on, and besides, anyplace was better than the