The Secret

Chapter Four

                      © 2013 by tore56789 (GOS) All rights reserved.

He observed as they drove out the gate, (that evening in 1978) it was like the windscreen wipers were fighting the breeze, to push back the rain with their rubber skirts. He could see trees too which hadn’t been stripped clean by the season’s cold, shifting back and forth crazily, like swing-dancers from the 20s.  Because of conditions, driving was slow along the road.

“So who is with your husband now?”

“My Kelly and Ann, Father.”  The woman replied softly, mannerly, in an American accent.  She was a big build of a woman, with a gentle face.  The sort you could imagine baking apple pies in the kitchen, and yet making time to read bedtime stories to her children.

“It must be tough for them?”

“I reckon, they’re happy, their father’s going to be with the Almighty soon.  So he won’t be suffering no more.”

He nodded, and said softly, “I understand.” He knew of the family’s history.  They had come from some town on the East coast of the Unites States. (Or at least that was where they were living before coming over.  But he had gotten the impression too they had been several places around the US, before settling there.  As well as living in a small town in the Wyoming prairie, where his wife came from)

Then about three years back, they had moved into her husband’s home, which had been left to him by his mother.  After she passed away about a year previous, following her husband two years before.  He knew the woman’s husband had some job in the military –and got early retirement due to some accident.  He didn’t know a lot more than that.  He couldn’t dismiss the fact either that this woman’s whole family hadn’t gone through their fair share of suffering.

The priest realized he had been by his mother’s side when she passed away.  But hadn’t been around when his father died, as it was his predecessor who had been here then.

“So what will you do now Mary Ann?”

“I reckon stay around, work the land, just as we have been doing all this time.  Might be a tad tough on the kids a spell?  But they’ll adapt.  Pitch in what they can.”

He nodded.  He could well believe this woman.  Who with her broad shoulders, never give up attitude, was like the pioneering woman who went off in wagons West to make a new life for themselves with their husbands. And through sickness and death, they toiled on to make that dream a reality.

As a follow on: Mary Ann wasn’t a pretty woman, or plain, either, but what he spotted very quickly, she was a good woman and a devote Christian.  And who made up for not attending mass on Sundays –because of her husband’s poor health –by reading the Good Book to her family.  She was also one with a strong stiff upper lip approach to life, which she had desperately needed to keep the family together –through the downs more than ups.  She might have been regarded a bit on the strict side with her two girls, but that was acceptable in the 70s.

To the priest she seemed to be a woman who rewarded goodness, but who came down hard on bad.  And for that very reason kept a firm old fashioned wooden spoon over the mantelpiece to advertise this sentiment to her children.  He knew all this about her from his first visit there two years before.  When she had asked him to come out and bless their home, and break bread with them afterwards.  And that had been the first of many visits.

The one thing he left with from that first visit was how beautifully mannered her two daughters were, when they curtseyed for him when he entered their home, to how they ate their meals, silently, only speaking when spoken to –all proof what a gentle and kind people they were.  It didn’t matter if they had any wealth or not, as their true wealth was in their generosity, and sharing the little they had without expecting anything in return.

Just then, he saw they had reached the small muddy winding road to the left, which lead up to the farm.  Trees still swayed around, he saw from the passenger side.  If he had been truly honest back then, his worst fear was the woman’s old Morris Minor might have broken down, and stranded them both out in the middle of nowhere on that crazy night –where it looked like some ungodly forces were at work trying to stop them travelling the twenty or so miles to their destination.