2010 Sojourner Leatherwork Flannery O’Conner Award Myra Stull

The 2010 Sojourner Leatherwork

Flannery O’Connor Award

Goes to Myra Stull

St. Louis, MO

Third Place

(Category: High School)

Bio:

Myra Stull was born and raised in St. Louis, and has loved to write for as long as she can remember. Inspired by classics such as Les Miserables and short stories ranging from those by William Sydney Porter to Herman Melville, she is constantly pursuing her love for literature. She hopes to someday publish a collection of her own short stories.

She was homeschooled her entire life, and is entering her highschool sophomore year. Her hobbies include reading and baking, but she is also a passionate singer.

To contact Myra Stull you may request contact information through the contest administrators by sending an email to director@athanatosministries.org.

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The Cabin

by Myra Stull

Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved

The Cabin

By Myra Stull

The cabin stood at the center of the forest, woebegone and forgotten to human eyes. Having been inhabited for the past several years by various foxes, birds and wildlife, it stood, barely recognizable as a place that had once been a building – a house. The roof had been destroyed during a recent storm, and the windows had long ago been relieved of their glass panes.

But it was still there. I stood in the clearing and looked longingly at the place that I had called home for one wonderful winter. Though plumbing, electricity, and heating weren’t among the things that formed my memories of that cabin, I could still say, quite assuredly, that it was there that I learned the most valuable lessons of my lifetime.

But it had all ended so quickly – the late nights by the crackling fire, the cozy and quiet afternoons, the hours of reading and writing – and suddenly I was thrust back into the world. Though alone again, I had not come away empty. They may have taken my home. My name. My very existence. But they couldn’t take my memories, and they lived with me through every storm life held.

They were memories of a woebegone cabin in the woods, which was the first place that I had ever called home, and a warmhearted woman, whom some called strange, but I simply learned to call Janie.

I was eleven years old. A nobody. A nothing. An orphan at best, but not even completely worthy of that title. I was just another piece of dust in the wind, another branch by the walkway, another cry among the thousands. I wasn’t heard and I wasn’t seen. No one cared if I lived or died, and though I had no compelling reason to be partial either way, I kept fighting through the empty winters, the scorching summers, hoping to someday escape from the never-ending circle of loneliness.

In the summer, I would creep up underneath the rich windows in town, after dark had fallen, and lie quietly in the grass listening to the conversations. I would hear of things that I barely knew existed. A wonderful, delicious thing called steak. Raved-over plush pillows. Shoes. Telephones. Families. Homes.

But I knew that they would never be mine.

So I continued walking. Continued wandering, searching for food, sleeping in the woods, and mingling with the other forgotten nobody orphans when I could, to save being picked up by the orphanage managers. But I never went back in with them at night. I would slip away and wander until exhaustion overtook me. Then I would turn my steps towards the dark of the woods, where the only thing that might recognize me were the squirrels and the deer.

But, one night as I entered the woods and lay my head on the forest floor, I heard a noise.

Branches cracked around me all the time, and I had learned to not only be immune to them, but to sleep through the loudest of forest noises. And yet this one was different.

When it didn’t come again, I finally fell asleep. Nightmares filled my dreams, as they often did, and I tossed and turned in the autumn leaves. Nearly every night I saw the same woman’s face in my mind, stooping, smiling, over me, to whisper in my ear.  But before I ever heard the gentle words she would speak, I was hurled out in the snow, and would wake up with my heart pounding.

This time, when I awoke, my heart beating out of my chest, I saw the light haze of morning wafting through the trees.  I sat up slowly, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and trying not to listen to the horrible grinding of my stomach.

A branch broke again. It was a strange breaking that couldn’t be just a squirrel on a twig or a fox prowling the forest. It was heavier than that. In a frightened daze I realized that the snapping never stopped, and something or someone was shuffling through the woods towards me, for the noise became louder and louder.

Instead of fleeing, which is what my brain and limbs were telling me to do, I sat and watched. The strangest shape was making its way through the trees. Hunched over and wobbly, it came closer and closer.  As I began to make it out, I also began to listen to the nagging in my mind, and rose to my feet.

My back was turned to the figure, and I was just putting one foot in front of the other to run,

when I heard a cry.  Turning, I walked hesitantly forward, my heart pumping wildly. As I drew closer I saw a crude but well-crafted cane thrown to one side of the path and a little, rosy old woman lying on the walkway.

I helped her roughly to her feet, her eyes squinting in a smile the entire time. She pushed her glasses back on her nose and thanked me for the cane which I handed back to her.

She smiled at me. “That’s very sweet of you.” She nodded her old head, and I saw a perfectly coiled white bun resting in splendor on the top of her head. No one had ever called me sweet before. I didn’t know what to say.

Half of me was wondering why such a nice lady was out in the forest, falling over root and rock, while the other half of me was very glad that she was there. I was curious, and there was a feeling in me that I would gain nothing by running. This woman seemed different. She wasn’t here to catch me or to hurt me.

She stuck out a thin but healthy hand, still smiling, and said just two words. “I’m Janie.”

“Huh?”

I looked at her hand, but didn’t put mine out. My stomach growled.

“I imagine you’re hungry. That’s just why I fell, you see, I’ve been longing to have some company, and there you were, just waiting to be invited over. Are you hungry?”

I nodded, my eyes large in my head, and before I could protest, she had wrapped one arm around me and was leading me down the path. She was chirping quietly the whole time while I walked with her, the wind blowing through my threadbare clothing and my feet sore from the harsh ground.

“I’ll whip up something – no doubt Sandy’s let Penny in without my permission, and I’ll have to shoo her out of the chimney, but it won’t be hard to start up a fire. There, and I’ll put on the kettle, and it’ll screech in no time…”

Her high-pitched voice soared lightly up among the treetops as she led me farther into the forest, through parts into which I had been too frightened to venture. And yet they weren’t so frightening with this adorable old woman who called herself Janie.

Brushing aside a thick curtain of evergreen branches, we emerged in a little clearing in which stood a humble, one-room cabin.

As I approached the cabin with her, the door swung open.

“Sandy!”

A yellow Labrador, barking happily, ran out the door past me, and started racing in circles around the clearing. Once in the cabin, the old lady banged inside the fireplace and hollered up the chimney.  Eventually a beautiful parrot came flying out, only to land on the door handle so that the door could not be shut.

The animals almost made me laugh – something I hadn’t done in a very long time – and I stroked the soft feathers on Penny’s head, which she seemed to like very much. Her feathers were so delicate and plush, so soft compared to where I daily lived, slept, walked – what I daily touched.

I stood motionless, the door swinging slightly behind me, and the little lady blowing on the hot embers in front of me. A warm feeling came over me. I don’t believe the woman had stopped speaking since I first helped her up, and now she chattered on about nothing in particular, expecting no one to respond.

A rabbit sat in the corner of the room behind a rocking chair, and a kitten was curled up on the small bed in another corner. They were so calm and gentle.  Walking slowly over, I picked up the kitten in my arms. It slept on, purring quietly as I scratched behind its ears.

It was a heavenly sound.

Then the tea kettle began boiling, and in short order there were two pieces of cornbread and two steaming cups of tea on the rickety table in the center of the room before the fireplace.

“Well, now! Isn’t this a cheery feast?” She laughed and pushed the table towards the bed I was sitting on. She then pulled a stool up to the other side and took my free hand in hers. I bowed my head with her, but I didn’t exactly understand why.

“Thank you for the cornbread, the tea, and this lovely company,” she said happily, her eyes shut and her hand clamping mine. “Amen.”

Her eyes flew open and she grinned at me as she took the warm cup between her hands and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I still can’t decide if I’d rather have chamomile or green, but I do think this green is good. How about you?”

I shook my head, confused. How could she like green? All it was to me was the color of grass and summer leaves. “What’s chamomile?”

She seemed astonished that I could ask such a thing, but she didn’t try to explain. She leaned over the table and scratched the kitten’s head that I was holding.

“Have you ever slept on a mattress?”

“I’ve heard of them.” I said quickly. “I’ve heard they’re very nice.”

She nodded and urged me to drink up the tea and eat up the bread, although I didn’t need to be asked twice. “And a coat? Do you have one?”

“No.” I said between bites.

She had a perpetual grin on her face as she served me another piece of cornbread. It was the best thing I had ever eaten.

“Well, I have company, but until now it’s been nameless,” she said as she folded her hands and smiled at me across the table. “As you know, I’m Janie. And you?”

I swallowed and clutched the kitten tighter. Sighing, I hung my head quietly, feeling very small and inconsequential compared to this very kind Janie.

“I’m nobody.”

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t pity me. Her grin may have faded slightly, but not her happiness. She leaned over as if she were telling me a secret, even though we were in the middle of a cabin, in the middle of the woods, at least a mile from anyone’s hearing.

“Well, I’m nobody too,” she said joyfully in my ear. She leaned back over and patted the table. “But I figured that even nobodies have to have names. So I decided to keep Janie even when everything else got dropped, you know, so I’m not a complete nobody. I’m just Nobody Janie.”

“But, no one’s ever called me anything – I think. At least not anything nice.”

“Then you need a good name, for even that scatterbrained parrot has a name.”

Then, in a long gaze, Janie swept me up and down with her eyes, seeing the tangles, matted brown hair, the thin, spindly arms and legs, the bare feet, and the pale skin. She sighed and tapped the table.

“So my thinking goes like this – I hoped for a guest and here you are. I’m sure there are fancier names, but, I’m wondering, why don’t we call you Hope?”

When we were done with tea, she fixed up the most comfortable thing I had ever slept on, and I fell into the first peaceful sleep I had had for a very long time, content with a full stomach, a kitten curled up beside me, warm feet, and something that I had never had before – a name. Hope.

I said it over and over in my head the next morning, lying on the floor, warm and rested. Nothing inside of me wanted to leave, so I lay there wondering whether or not I should get up.

Someone was talking outside the door, and for a few minutes I thought that Janie was talking to herself. I lay there happily, trying to hear what she was saying. But my heart skipped a beat when a young man’s voice responded.

I heard only a few words, but just enough to make me afraid that someone had come to take me to the orphanage, once and for all.

“I can’t stall the new boss forever, Janie. I don’t mind ya’ here, but…”

Janie responded, but I couldn’t hear her. Her voice was so soft, like a bubbling brook in the springtime, and its faintness blended in with the rest of nature’s sounds.

“Just sayin’ – he’s bound to find out.”

I jumped up from the quilts, and ran to the one window at the back of the cabin, prying it open and preparing to flee through the woods.

Then I heard him mount his horse and gallop off. Letting my hands fall from the window, I breathed a sigh of relief.  Quickly, I dove back under the blankets, and that is how Janie found me when she swung open the door and heralded in the morning sunshine.

She was a spunky old lady, and for whatever reason the horseman had come, I didn’t worry about it for a second longer. For there was oatmeal over the fire, and the cabin was flooded with sunshine, and all seemed warm and safe.

We spent the day chatting as Janie measured, cut, and sat stitching in her rocking chair. She wouldn’t see me another minute in my threadbare clothes, and I made no attempt to object to something new. I never had extra clothes, only those that fit me at the time, and having just one new dress would be more than wonderful.

I could hardly stand still as Janie pinned and fitted.  And with Sandy’s bursting through the door at intervals to run around the both of us in a furry of golden hair, the work didn’t go any faster.

Janie gave me a bath that night by the fireside, scrubbing until it hurt. But for the first time in my life there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere on me. I went to bed “squeaky clean,” as Janie said, and that night the kitten, the rabbit, and Sandy joined me on the floor, and we slept soundly together, a comfortable warm mass of softness.

For several days, I spent my time being pricked and poked, until finally Janie slipped the most beautiful dress over my head.

I look back now and see that it was only a cotton dress, with no lace or trim, and only four small, brown buttons. But to my young eyes, this first new piece of clothing, hand-stitched by Janie, was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. It was more beautiful than any of the clothes hanging in the shop windows uptown.  That’s because it was mine.

Janie stood up and surveyed me with a contented air of accomplishment. “So what’s next, Hope?”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“Now that you’ve got some proper clothing, I say we do something new to occupy us, since it appears that you plan on staying a while – to which I have no objections.” She laughed and headed towards the table where three books were sitting in a stack.  “How about reading?”

“I can’t read.” I said matter-of-factly, as I brushed down the front of my dress with pride, and felt the bumps of the braids that Janie had done wet the night before, tied with brown ribbons.

Straightening her glasses on her nose, and holding the first book up to her eyes, she squinted as she read the title. “Then I dare say we start.”

Within days I began to see the alien symbols becoming letters, which became words, which, in time became sentences. And to this day the best thing I have ever read were the first three words that I sounded out under Janie’s understanding teaching.

“In the beginning.”

On day eleven, when I could finally see those words clearly, I looked up at the old lady who was hovering above me.

“I suppose everything starts at the beginning, doesn’t’ it?”

“It does.”

“So is my beginning here?”

She laughed and hugged my shoulders. “No, Hope. Your beginning was a long time ago. Your beginning was as a baby, just like everyone else’s.”

I shook my head. “But I was.. …nobody. Back then I was just another thing with all the other things that fill the world. Couldn’t this be my beginning? I’d like to think that I became someone when I came here.”

Janie turned from me and I couldn’t see her face, but I saw her glasses in her left hand as it fell to her side, and she whispered under her breath. “And now you’re Hope.”

The horseman came back many times, but Janie always left me in the house, and I never dared ask who he was. In time, I think he figured out that I was there, but this didn’t bother him. I watched him through the crack in the door, and as the first flurries began to fall, I noticed that his face grew more tense, and his eyes bleaker. He didn’t laugh anymore, and he didn’t smile at Janie like he used to.

He came again, one last time, the day of the first big snow fall, and I heard him call something back to cheerful Janie as he rode off into the woods.

“He’s said many times – he’s making the rounds thoroughly in the spring. If I were you, I’d go while I could.”

“But where?” Janie said hopelessly.

He shook his head. “I can’t keep you safe forever. As far as he knows, well, you’re not here. But you’re out of a house and home if boss finds you.”

He galloped off and Janie shook her head, sighing. I went back to the cornbread that I was supposed to be learning to make, and as she walked through the door and shut it tightly, I noticed a limp in her step and a slight sense of fear about her. It was the saddest that I had ever seen her.

But the minute she saw me she brightened up. “Hope! How’s the bread?”

I admit, it wasn’t much to talk about, but Janie would have none of that. We ate it for lunch.

Every night I was warm, and every day I was well fed. If I didn’t know any better I would’ve thought that I was in Heaven. But the times when Janie dropped the cup and it shattered, or when I misread words, or poked my finger with the needle, or spilled the writing ink on the table, I knew that I wasn’t in heaven, just a place almost as nice. Just almost.

Twice while I was there, Janie went out for the day to town, bringing back baskets of food, but once we were snowed in there was no opening the door, much less leaving the cabin except to let Sandy out in the snow.

I learned to sew, to write, to read, to cook and bake over the winter months in that tiny cabin at the center of the forest. As the snow piled up in deep drifts and didn’t begin to melt for what seemed an eternity, I began to forget about the man on the horse. Janie didn’t speak of him, and we spent many more hours laughing and telling stories by the fireside than we did spending a second thinking of him. Or, at least I did.

I was to learn that Janie’s life was fading, and that soon her very existence would be nothing more than the empty cabin in the woods.

“Are you very old?” It came out of my mouth one night before I could stop it, and Janie laughed in glee.

“Not as old as I could be,” she answered finally. “But just to satisfy your curiosity, I’m at least seven times older than you are.”

For a while I counted on my fingers, then I puckered up and thought for a while, but I never really figured out how old she actually was. I was content to know that she was old – and why that brought contentment, I can’t say. Maybe it was just knowing that I could ask her anything and she would answer me, that really gave me comfort.

As the snow began dripping slowly from the branches, the memories of my nobody life were like distant dreams. The nightmares hadn’t come since I was with Janie, and I stopped wondering who the lady in my nightmare was. I know now that she was probably the only memory I had of my childhood before my life on the streets – but if my beginning was with Janie, then my childhood wasn’t important, because back then, I was a nobody.

Janie kissed me goodnight and she never thrust me out in the snow, so I didn’t worry that someone was going to come along who would. My faith was in this dear, old lady who fell one autumn day in the woods just so she could have a bit of company.

But the fluttering calendar soon said January, and Janie told me that we were in a new year. February slipped by, as did March. And one day, the snow was gone.

As the winter passed, Janie did less and less, and more days than not her white hair was about her shoulders and she laughed as she said that she didn’t want to put the effort into putting it up. I know now that it was just too painful for her to raise her arms long enough to wind the coil meticulously and pin it in place.

She relied on me to get water from the pump those early spring days, and she was quiet much more than she had been. She would look longingly out the window, and I heard her whispering on many occasions that this was her home, and it would be until she would cross the river to her final home.

I asked her who the horseman was. She said he was just a friend. That’s all. No more, no less.

But one early spring day, the young man came back.

Janie hobbled out the door as he dismounted. His face was solemn and almost fearsome.

“They’re coming tomorrow. I heard boss say so. They’re going over every foot of land – there’s no way he’ll miss a single bit of it like his dad did. His granddaddy may have let you live here, but I know boss, and he ain’t his granddaddy.”

“Oh, he might have a good heart,” Janie responded, wrapping her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and pushing her glasses up on her nose.

The young horseman shook his mop of dark brown hair. “I’ve seen him in a rage over just one cow of the neighbor’s being on his property. If he finds an old cabin and an inhabitant with it, you’ll be in for worse than the cow. But if you leave now, I might be able to work something out later and you can come back.”

Janie sighed. “I have nowhere to go. I have no one but Hope, and I certainly can’t pull her away just when she needs a home the most.”

The horseman pleaded. He begged with Janie, pacing back and forth on the thawing ground. But in the end, he mounted his horse and smiled dismally at her.

“I can’t say I didn’t try. If you’re here tomorrow, you may end up with no home at all, Janie.”

Janie shut the door tightly and melted up against the wall. She saw me, but that didn’t brighten her spirits. Her face was pale and her glasses were clutched tightly in her left hand. She shook her head and walked towards the bed.

“Put the kettle on, will you, Hope?” She breathed a long sigh and lay down on her back, staring up at the ceiling. “Jacob was a good man, he was. His son was a scatterbrain who let me live here rent free just because he was too lazy to figure out anything else. But his grandson…”

I fixed her tea as she spoke quietly to me, to herself, to the ceiling. The kitten had grown over the winter into a fine cat, and she climbed up my shoulders as I sat at the table and curled herself around, batting at my hair.

“His grandson is – oh, I don’t know, for I’ve never met him. But something tells me that his heart is a selfish one. My small patch of life has no meaning to him – not if it’s on his land.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked quietly, very confused and scared, but trying not to show it. I had been in worse situations as a nobody, and I had always made it through. But I was worried about Janie. I loved her – she was all that I cared about anymore.

Janie shook her head weakly. “I cannot move, Hope. I can’t go anywhere. You – you could go, but where?”

“You’re all I have.” I whispered. “If this is your home, then it is mine.”

A tear trickled down Janie’s face and she shut her eyes as the rabbit hopped up beside her. She let her hand fall to stroke the soft, white fur. She breathed slowly and silently and I sat waiting.

“I’ll pray,” she whispered finally. “I don’t know how he’ll miss this patch of land, but all I can do is pray that he does.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how to pray.” I said quietly. “I’ve never.. really.. prayed before.”

Janie’s eyes flew open, and she sat up on the bed.  For a moment she was her old, spunky  self. “Then I believe it’s high time you do!” She shook her head smiling, “Praying isn’t hard. And I dare say you’ve heard me do it many times. Why, Dear, it’s your name in action.”

“My name? Hope?”

“Yes.” Janie breathed, lay down, and shut her eyes again. “Hope.”

I tiptoed quietly out the door into the clearing, knowing that the fresh air would calm me.

I had heard someone else pray once – besides Janie at the table – and it was an old man in one of the rich houses one summer. He spoke very quickly and he used a lot of long words that I supposed were only for the rich, because Janie never used them. I tried hard to remember what he had said.

“Oh…” I breathed, trying to remember the “gracious Heavenly Father,” part. But I couldn’t, so I let that part go and just said, Father.

I was standing on the edge of the woods then, in the twilight, looking back at the place where I had found my life. I was pacing back and forth hoping that my prayer wasn’t too shoddy, for even though I didn’t understand a lot of what Janie said, I did understand that the next day someone would come to make us move out unless we prayed that he didn’t.

And Janie was right, praying was easy.

So after praying very, very hard that he wouldn’t come, I said Amen, like Jane did, and went back to the house. Janie’s eyes were still shut, and I believed she was asleep. What I didn’t realize was how fervently her prayers were rising from that old, faithful heart.

I fell asleep that night, hoping very hard, and never once giving up those hopes. But I slept poorly. I tossed and turned, and the nightmare came back. The woman’s face was almost there with the precious whisper when she thrust me out in the snow, and I woke up with my heart pounding.

Janie was asleep, so I crept towards the door, dragging my quilt behind me. I opened the latch – which was never locked – and breathed a sigh of relief when I felt the cool, fresh air rushing in. It had taken some getting used to sleeping in a room, and deep down inside I was happy once again to be out in the open at night.

Sandy had come out with me, and she was all play and no sleep as I tried to curl up on the ground by the cabin in the clearing. I shushed her, patting the ground to get her to sit; I did everything to quiet her, but she just ran in circles all the more. She kept me up for a long time, running down her energy, until finally she quieted and we fell asleep in a warm heap by the door.

I felt the sun in my eyes before I heard Sandy barking. I rolled over in the dirt, pulling the quilt over my head and not wanting to wake up. But I couldn’t escape it. So I pried my eyes open, but gasped and began  scrambling when my ears caught the noise of a party on horses, before my eyes saw the men.

“We’ll circle ’round left, boss.” It was that same voice – that horseman. Our horseman. But a fierce one responded, and I was too frightened to move.

“No – I say we turn right, so we turn right.” He growled. “Come on boys!”

The evergreen branches parted before I could get to my feet, and seven horses stopped dead in their tracks. The fierce voice laughed aloud.

“A cabin! Who in tarnation?” The horses circled the cabin, and soon I was looking at the front legs of a perky chestnut mare. Our horseman was with them, but he didn’t breath a word.

“Who are you?” The man on the mare leaned out of his saddle and made a hideous face at me. His face was scarred and worn, and several teeth were either chipped or gone.  His breath smelled of whiskey. “You’re an orphan.” He said, answering his own question. “Just like the two boys I found at the edge of my property with the cows this morning.”

He laughed an evil laugh as I shook my head. “I’m Hope!” I cried desperately. “I’m not an orphan.”

“Got any parents?”

I slowly shook my head and he laughed again.

“Then you’re a low-down orphan, trespassing on my property. Get her on the horse, boys. We’ll take her to the orphanage.”

But the door of the cabin swung open and I had faith as Janie weakly hobbled out to face the seven horses and their riders. She didn’t look terrified, as I most surely did, with two hands of steel clamped on my arms. She pushed her glasses up her nose and smiled at our horseman.

“Good morning,” she said brightly. The horsemen were stumped. Even the fierce one had to catch his flying thoughts. But when he caught them, there was no loosing them again.

“What!” He breathed in disbelief. “This your cabin?”

Janie nodded, smiling steadily at me. I was frightened, but as she smiled at me I began to hope that everything would be okay.

The fierce one looked around slowly, and his eyes narrowed. “Get a move on it, Boys.” He nodded towards me. “Take her, Bill.”

“’Kay, Boss.”

The man, who apparently was Bill, lifted me roughly onto the horse. Our horseman began to speak, but boss made a movement towards his belt, and he was silent. Janie put out a loving hand.

“But that’s Hope! She’s not an orphan.”

“Isn’t she?” Boss mocked. “You never had kids, Janie. You and I both know that.” Suddenly this fierce man seemed to remember exactly who Janie was. “She’s an orphan, and she’s going back right where she came from.”

Bill turned his horse, and began to head out of the clearing. The tears were streaming down my face and I was fighting to get out of Bill’s grip, but his hands were too strong. I twisted my head back and saw the smiling, weak form of Janie standing in front of our cabin. She waved a hand.

“I love you,” she called. It was the first time she had told me that. She had done everything to prove that it was true – but that spring morning I knew that she truly did.

Bill dropped me off a short time later in front of the brick building. I tried to run, but he grabbed my arm and marched me inside. I was fighting with all I had.

“Who are you?” a tall lady behind the desk asked.

“I’m Hope!” I cried. “I live with Janie!”

I saw Bill shake his head, and the spindly lady took my arm from Bill.  “Who’s Janie?”

My mouth was open, but it only proved to let the tears fall in. I couldn’t speak. “She’s nobody.” I whispered. “Nobody but ….”

“But?” I was being led down a corridor into a dim and crowded room with dozens of beds lined up on either side.

“But mine,” I whispered, choking on my tears. “We were nobodies together.”
The lady pulled out a paper and started writing on it as she scanned me up and down with her laser eyes. “Short, relatively healthy…” She said to herself as she wrote. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Hope.” I whispered with my eyes closed.

“No, your name.”

“Hope!” I shouted.

She shook her head pitifully, as if I was crazy. “Of course everybody here is hopeful Deary, but I just need your name.”

The tears were so heavy in my eyes that the lady was just a blur before me. I leaned up against the wall and dropped my head in my hands. I didn’t respond.

She took the paper and muttered to herself. “Another nobody.” And she walked from the room and shut the door behind her.

But I knew that I wasn’t a nobody anymore. I was a nobody with a name, and when you have a name, you are somebody.

And I was Hope.
I was transferred to an orphanage in the neighboring town, and I lived there for four years, no one daring to adopt me, as I was cruel and threatening to every set of parents that I met. I didn’t want parents – I wanted Janie. I ran away when I was sixteen, and by then looked old enough so that no one threatened to carry me back to the brick building.

Stepping outside of the orphanage gates was heavenly. Running down the sidewalk I felt the wind in my hair and watched the sun peek up over the horizon. It was autumn again, just like the one years ago when I found myself taken in by a lovely old lady. I was making my way through the waking town, towards the one neighboring that I had known so well in my childhood.

Some time later, I began to recognize my surroundings and I retraced my steps to the woods, praying, as Janie had taught me, that she would still be there. But as I stepped through the clearing I saw the woebegone cabin, roofless and shattered. I called for Sandy, but she wasn’t there. The rabbit, the kitten, the parrot – they were all gone.

And so was Janie. I stood stunned in the wind, which had turned cold. The tears were trapped somewhere inside me and I was too hurt to let them out.

We’d prayed that Janie could stay in her cabin. Why hadn’t God heard?

A horse galloped up behind me and I watched as a man dismounted. It was our horseman, a few years older – though still very young – and a little more solemn. He looked at me in surprise as he stopped in his tracks on his way to the cabin.

“What are you doing here?” he said quickly, taking a step back towards his horse. I shrugged my shoulders listlessly, though I knew very well why I was there, and tried to speak past the lump in my throat.

“I’m visiting my home.” I said quietly. “I’m Hope.”

He smiled as I said that and walked towards me. On the way he kicked up a piece of rotten roof and watched it fly off into the woods. “I remember you.”

“You too.” I responded, walking around the cabin.

There was no use re-hashing. No use blaming him for my being taken back to the orphanage – it would only make a fight and I had enough enemies as it was. He wasn’t to blame anyway.

There was still something I wanted to know, though. But before I could ask he began speaking again.

“I loved this old place. The little fireplace. Sandy and the parrot. The way she made tea every morning and night.”

I jerked my head up. “How do you know?”

He sighed. “About nine years ago Janie found me, just like she found you. I was eleven. My daddy worked for Boss’s daddy. But I was a lonely kid – my Mom had died. No siblings.”

The horseman seemed unable to go on. He let his head fall back and he gazed up at the dark, foreboding sky.

“I came over here every day for two years. Every day. That’s why I had to do what I did.”

I shook my head, not understanding. “What’d you do?”

He let out a laugh, but it wasn’t one of happiness. “I’ll tell you what I did – I made sure Janie lived in her cabin as long as she needed to. Sure, Boss fired me. But I paid the rent that Janie couldn’t pay, and I came over every day. Just like the old times.”

The tears started coming then, in a rushing, pitiful stream that ran down my face. “Thank you.” I said quietly between sobs. And in my heart I knew that my childhood prayers hadn’t gone unanswered.

We left the cabin behind us that day. Chad helped me mount the horse and we rode off through the woods together, leaving our childhood home in the middle of the forest, where it could sit at rest until the last board of the last wall melted back to the dust from which it had come.

Janie had given both of us the greatest gift of our lifetimes.

Hope.

So, when our first daughter was born we picked a wildflower from the graveyard and set it up by her crib, remembering the name Janie and how wonderful it would be to speak it again.

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