Fresh Hope in Kansas
After finding my stepmother’s scrapbook following her death, I realized that things I’d only heard snatches of suddenly made sense, inspiring this story.
Zela Richardson carefully smoothed the skirt of her new blue suit and glanced at her watch. The gold Bulova was her most expensive possession, paid for by long hours picking cotton in the Arkansas delta where her uncle worked as a farm manager, or picking strawberries on rocky Ozarks hillsides.
Ralph noticed the look. “We’ll eat in Fredonia,” he said. “Then we’ll be in Augusta by 2:00, like I told Brother Norris. You can enjoy being single for another couple hours.”
Zela smiled at the joke and looked out the window at endless rolling pastures, a few trees shading square white farmhouses or clinging to an occasional creek bank. Not much to see compared to the Ozarks, she thought, but pretty in its own way.
It was only her third trip to Kansas, and now she was going to live there. She had spent seventh and eighth grade in El Dorado with an older cousin who had taken an interest in her when Mama died. Zela had loved the large brick school and the library. But after two years, Papa wanted her back home, especially since there was talk of war.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war, local boys started receiving draft notices. Alvin had signed up before his came. No sense letting those pesky Germans beat the British, he had said, and he wanted to do his part. Alvin had been coming around a lot ever since Zela returned from Kansas, and before he left for the Army, he came over, a small package bulging in his pocket. Suddenly it had dawned on her she would really miss him. Awkwardly different from his usual jolly demeanor, he had held out the package. “You and I, we’ve been good pals,” he had said. “Maybe when I get back . . . well, I got this for you.” The small velvet case contained a single strand of pearls.
But Alvin hadn’t come back. There had been cards and funny little V-mails, and then there weren’t any more. One afternoon, his mother had walked up the lane and wordlessly showed Papa a piece of paper. Zela knew it was something awful, for Papa to leave work in his carpentry shop and come to the garden where she was hoeing beans. “I’m sorry,” Papa said. “I know you thought a lot of Alvin.”
After the war, there had been a few other young men, but not another one like Alvin. As her sisters married their returning soldiers, Zela was left to help Papa, now nearly seventy years old, keep up the home place.
Everyone always said the four LeMarr boys from the other side of the mountain ought to link up with the Richardson girls. There had been walks home from social events and revival meetings, but then there was the war. Ray was wounded in the battle that killed Alvin, but Ralph joined the Marine Corps instead of waiting to be drafted to Europe. He made it through the battles of Saipan and Okinawa and served in occupied Japan after the atomic bomb. Then he returned to the Ozarks and married Zela’s sister Joie.
Zela kept busy helping Papa and helping with nieces and nephews, including Ralph and Joie’s daughter. She kept house for Joie after the painful miscarriage of a second child, and rejoiced with them when they had another daughter nine years after her sister.
After several dry seasons had ruined farms, Ralph and two brothers-in-law had found work in Kansas aircraft factories. The others returned to Arkansas when things improved, but Ralph had decided to stay with the steady job, moving his family to a rented farmhouse outside Wichita. Joie begged to join an Assembly of God church, and Ralph got saved. Much to the relatives’ surprise, he gave up smoking, drinking, and even his favorite activity, square dancing, which Pentecostal folks frowned upon.
Little Cindy, born in Kansas, was two years old when Joie began having terrible headaches. Doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, and surgery was unsuccessful. Knowing Joie would not live long, Ralph had moved the family back to Arkansas near her sisters. He rented a small dairy farm and, once again, Zela was needed to help.
Joie’s death left Ralph with a teenager, a four-year-old, and an enormous medical bill. After a hard year, he decided to leave the girls with family and work in Kansas again. As he left, he had thanked Zela for her help and promised to keep in touch. She was a little surprised to receive regular letters with news about his job, church, and the farm work he did to earn room and board. She was even more surprised when, visiting his daughters on a long weekend, he asked her out for a drive.
“I’ve been thinking,” he had said. “I know you cared for Alvin. And I miss Joie. But I think we’ve learned to care for each other, too. I’ll be out of debt soon, and I can rent the farmhouse again. Would you consider marrying me and moving to Kansas and helping me raise the girls?”
It had been a bit funny, certainly not a romantic proposal. But Zela had to admit her options for marriage and family were getting limited. And with a shock, she realized she did care about Ralph. He was a hard worker, that much she had seen for herself as he farmed and cared for Joie. He was nice-looking, if you didn’t count a family tendency toward thinning hair. And his letters had shown her he loved the Lord. She said yes.
Now here they were, headed for Kansas in mid-December with an appointment to stop at a preacher’s house and get married. They would have a few months to get settled and plant a garden, and the girls would join them when school ended.
In spite of her nervousness, Zela was looking forward to it all. In less than an hour she would be married, with a ready-made family. She was eager to reconnect with her cousin she had lived with years ago, and to join the church. At Joie’s funeral, the pastor’s wife had seemed so nice. The landlord’s wife, Charlotte, had written a letter describing the good garden spot near the house and offering to introduce Zela to neighbors whose children would be in school with her stepdaughters.
Life hadn’t turned out the way she had envisioned that long-ago day when Alvin gave her the pearls, still packed carefully in the cedar chest Papa had made. Full of quilts and embroidered pillow cases, the chest was tied firmly with her bedroom furniture in the back of Ralph’s blue Chevrolet pickup truck. They’d get a car when the girls came, he said.
No, she wouldn’t have planned it this way. Nobody had welcomed World War II. Ralph hadn’t planned on selling his little Ozarks farm to cope with drought, nor the loss of Joie, nor the medical bills. But with a sidelong glance at the work-hardened hands on the steering wheel and the slight smile on Ralph’s face, she felt fresh hope that, through God’s grace, somehow it had all come right.