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51

Lizzie

Dallam County,Texas

1951

It was a beautiful afternoon and I was traveling across the Texas High Plains. It had rained the previous afternoon—one glorious inch of water drizzling down over hours. The sun was out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the earth was still damp. I smelled the moisture in the soil as nature’s finest perfume.

The last time I drove down those roads, fences were buried in dust and every plant in sight was dead and withered. But today, mature wheat waved in the wind and newly planted windbreak trees stretched toward the sky around the fields. Life had returned, and it was glorious.

I turned my car off the main road onto the drive, taking a route I hadn’t traveled for so many years—but it was a journey my heart had made a million times. My breath caught in my throat when the farm came into view. The gate had been replaced with a newer style, and beyond it in the distance, I saw a new windmill and that Texas live oak tree, sprawling with new life and thickened branches.

After the trial, I had Henry transferred to a facility in Amarillo. The doctors there weren’t nearly ready to recommend release just yet, but I was hopeful that it would happen one day. That new hospital had a gentler approach anyway, treating Henry with psychotherapy and low doses of sedatives only when he couldn’t sleep. My brother wasn’t the same man he once was—the brain damage wasn’t likely to heal, and combat fatigue was going to be a part of his life for a long time. His short-term memory was terrible, and he still got that glazed, confused look on his face sometimes—often when I talked too fast or dumped too much information on him all at once. The delusions and paranoia were gone, but maybe those problems would return one day too.

I’d take him however he came, and we’d navigate all that together.

And like Calvin once told me, every man needed a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That was why, after the trial finished, I picked up my pen and wrote Betsy Nagle a letter. Henry had been writing her too, so she already knew about his struggles and the trial. I just wanted to see if she knew what had happened to my parents’ old farm.

Way back in 1935, Judge Nagle sold that patch of land for a song to a man who let the place go to ruin for a while. But the desperate times eventually passed, and the judge’s conscience would not let up. In the forties, his finances stabilized again, and he bought the farm back and put some suitcase farmers on it.

Ever since then, a roster of strangers had done a stint on my land, making money for the Nagle family by growing them crops. But the Nagles just so happened to be looking for new tenants, Betsy told me, and her father said I should come right on up to sign a lease.

I had torn Calvin Miller’s heart to shreds, but just as I’d always known, he was a good man—the best man. He wasn’t obligated to give me a single cent of his money when I walked out on our marriage, but he generously gave me enough money to support myself for a few years while I “found my feet.”

I drove all the way up to meet Judge Nagle in Oakden the day I got that letter, only for him to tell me he’d decided not to lease me the farm after all.

“I’m going to sell it to you instead,” he announced.

“That’s very generous, Judge,” I said reluctantly. “But I couldn’t afford it.”

“You haven’t asked me how much I want for it yet.”

I had to assume the way we lost our farm to him had haunted Judge Nagle over the years too, because all he wanted to hand it right back to me was for me to repay the money Henry had originally borrowed in 1933. I had plenty to cover the cost of that farm, plus enough to keep myself going until it was productive again.

Even as I drove through the gate, I could see that my farm needed a lot of love and care, but that was okay—I had never been afraid of hard work. The vegetable beds would need to be rebuilt, but the chicken house was where it had always been, ready to receive new tenants. I was relieved to see electric wires running to the house, and a new lean-to bathroom added at the back too. There would be no more midnight outhouse runs in winter, and no more racing around to light the lanterns, because that house would have electric lighting at last, just as Mother had dreamed.

I parked the car and stepped out to turn my attention to the Texas live oak and the little wooden crosses that jutted out of the ground beneath it, marking the space my parents were laid to rest. Beside it, the park bench I had always feared so much had collapsed. Elsie’s chair needed some love and I wasn’t great at woodwork. That would have to wait until Henry came home.

I started to walk toward that tree, a million images flickering through my mind of the way the farm once was and the way it would be again, now that it was finally ours—mine, and Henry’s too, because he would always have a home with me. I pictured him there in that new barn, tinkering with the engine of a tractor. I pictured row after row of vegetables and chickens roaming the garden, and cows back in the field where that big old pond was, the rest of the farm planted with wheat, tended and sowed and lovingly grown by me and my brother.

This, my soul cried.This was the life you were meant to live.

By the time I reached that oak tree, I was exhausted and I was overjoyed and I was so damned relieved to be home, I could barely take another step. I dropped to my knees and pressed a shaking hand to the dirt above my parents’ resting place.

“I’m home, Mother and Daddy,” I whispered, flattening my palm against the cool, damp dirt. “I’m finally home. And I’m going to bring Henry home too.”

This felt like the end of a very long journey.

This felt like the beginning of the life I was meant to live all along.