A Pattern For Debby: A Story Of Life, Love, & Loss

A Pattern for Debby: a story of life, love, & loss

Authors: Diana Bell with Katherine Kelly

Published by Information Sleuth™

Lubbock, Texas

Copyright 2015 by Katherine Kelly

All rights reserved.

Published July 2015

Edited by Deirdre Kelly Trotter

Cover Photo and Cover Design by Deirdre Kelly Trotter

Cover Art Copyright 2015 Deirdre Kelly Trotter

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission by Katherine Kelly, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

What readers are saying about A Pattern for Debby:

Crying . . . put myself in her place. It’s captivating and makes you feel like you are there with them going through all their sadness and joy? It’s great. Couldn’t put it down. L. A.

"Enjoyed A Pattern for Debby very much. Kept my attention from beginning to end. I cried. P. L.

A great read. Enjoyed it so much. E. A.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

A Little History

Connect

Chapter 1

I sat in the dirt, cradling Jon’s head in my lap. Already his handsome face was deathly white.

As I pulled off the blue tie and unbuttoned his shirt, a little fountain of blood spurted up from a hole in his chest. He would bleed to death in a few minutes unless Mam could stop it. I pressed my fingers into the wound, willing the blood to stop, wishing it was my own bad blood that was flowing away—the blood of a Stowall—instead of the blood of an innocent man. Mam came back with the poultice which she applied and in a short time the bleeding eased up and turned darker, almost stopped. Mam laid her hand on his side and said his heart was still beating, but feeble.

* * *

I am a hill woman, and my language shows my lack of schooling. But in the school of life, I think I have learned my books from cover to cover. Life was all packaged up for me right here in the hills: sex, love, crime, religion. I have been nowhere else, nor ever wanted to be. There are many patterns for life and it was a long time before I could pick out my own pattern, but when I did, I fell into it naturally and happily.

Part of hill life might seem bare and ugly to an outsider. If you travel through the Ozarks you will still find some log cabins with lean-to kitchens. You will see barefooted children and hound dogs in the dooryard, and women working beside their men in the fields, but our lives do have purpose and beauty. Even when I was a mite of a girl I could see the beauty in everything, and I was always reaching out for more of it, more learning, more understanding of the purpose back of it all.

Of course, there was the obvious beauty all about me: a profusion of wild flowers in the woods and along the creek bottom meadows, the cardinal, the blue jay, the brown thrush with its wide fan-wings spread, and the sparkling streams that burbled down the hillsides to cross the red clay road.

Then came the dull seasons when it seemed Nature had destroyed all she had created, but that wasn’t so. When the color and bloom were on, you were distracted from seeing the form and structure. But when the petals fell and the leaves dried, you could see the pattern plain enough. Nature might rest a spell, but she never destroyed the pattern, and she would pick up her needle and thread again—come spring.

Beauty lives on, even in winter—only the form is different. When you look up, you see the pattern of bare limbs etched against a lead colored sky, broken at the edges by the violet, crimson and saffron colors of the sunset. In the quiet, you can hear the faint rustle of leaves where some small animal has denned in a hollow tree, or the scrape of a squirrel’s tiny feet on tree bark, or the sound of winter birds pecking at the seed pods on dry weeds and grass straw peeking out of the snow.

Looking closely at a dried seed pod or a brown leaf, you can see the delicate tracing of the pattern that created it, and so it is with the patterns of life. When you are young, the whole of life looks like a cluster of bright blooms, and you rush to gather them for fear that if you don’t pick them right away, you’ll be left with a handful of dry stems and stamens. It’s only when you are old and dried yourself that you can see the design, and you know that someone besides yourself had a hand in it all. Nothing is colorless or lifeless on this earth, for the pattern and purposes are there.

When I was a child, I molded images of the things I knew and drew pictures and likenesses of folks that made Mam proud. I used the materials at hand—red, blue veined clay, pokeberry juice for painting, and ink balls found under the oaks for drawing and writing with a quill pen. When I was about ten, I began to scribble rhymes on the backs of my school tablets or any scrap of paper I got hold of. I read them to Mam who couldn’t read a line, and she thought they were mighty fine.

I’d be right proud, honey, if you could git the education I didn’t. By the time they got a public school here, I was big enough to go to work and couldn’t go to school, but I’m bound you should go straight through the eighth grade, she’d tell me.

I found out early that life isn’t all beauty, and it was Pap who made me acquainted with the fear and ugliness that was close by all the time. We children both loved and feared our Pappy. He had a broad back, long legs, and a hawk nose above his whiskers. His thick black hair was parted in the middle and his eyes held a black fire that could gather you in with warmth or throw off sparks like a sassafras log in the fireplace—if he was riled.

When he was in a good humor, he would dandle us on his knee and sing, Frog went a-courtin. He could do a lot with a pocket knife—whittle out wooden dolls and bowie knives, or make popguns from alder stalks and whistles from green hickory limbs. I looked up to Pap a lot—when I was six years old.

My first recollections of ugliness were in that sixth year, the day the peddler came. Joe and Arthur, two of my older brothers, and I had been playing Indians with the bows and arrows Pap had made for us from hickory limbs. We had meandered, wading the spring branch until we came to the rock tater house that was right near the road. We liked to climb up on this rock house and look down onto the road. It was hard to see the road unless we climbed on the house. A lonesome road it was then and weeds grew tall between the ruts while they waited for a traveler to creak by in a wagon or buggy or for a neighbor to walk by toting eggs to the store in a water bucket. Bushes crowded close to snatch a body’s bonnet.

Sometimes passersby would stop to palaver with us awhile and that took us out of our narrow world of woods and fields, chores and play. You never could tell when something exciting might happen either—like a stranger coming along or a mad dog. In a way, they were in the same category, for either one would have scared the daylights out of us.

We heard the peddler’s shoes crunching on the rocks long before he came into sight. Then, there he was, a man trudging along with a big sample case strapped to his back. He wore store-bought clothes, a white shirt with a pin stripe and shiny collar. There was no doubt about what he was—and Pap hated peddlers.

The peddler was hot and tired. He sat down on a big rock beside the road, took off his black hat and fanned himself with it. Strands of sandy hair fell wet over his forehead and his sandy mustache dripped sweat, for it was midsummer in the Ozarks. He unstrapped the sample case and let it slide to the rock beside him then leaned over and unbuttoned his gun-metal shoes.

We could tell the minute his pale eyes spotted us where we stood behind some bushes, but he didn’t speak. He was giving us time to look him over before he tackled us—he knew mountain folk all right.

Finally, he said, in the direction of the bushes, Hi young ‘uns! The bushes moved and dry leaves rustled when we shifted our bare feet, but none of us answered. I reckon he hadn’t expected an answer the first time, for he waited a minute then said more confidently, You young ‘uns live hereabouts?

Joe and Arthur stepped out from behind the bushes to stare at the stranger. I followed. Pap had warned us to have no truck with outlanders, which was a word he brought over from Tennessee when he’d come here as a boy with his folks. Now it meant anybody who hadn’t grown up in Redbud Ridge.

Especially he meant peddlers; he said they had no call to go traipsing through the hills a ‘tempting the women folks to buy fripperies they had no need for. Once when Pap hadn’t been about, Mam had taken some saved up egg money and bought pink soap, talcum powder and a bottle of vanilla from a peddler. We’d kept the pink soap on the shelf for a long time just to look at and smell—but we never heard the last of it from Pap.

I don’t believe Joe, the oldest, would have cracked a word, but Arthur, the bold one, making his voice gruff to imitate Pap’s, blurted out, What’s yer business, Mister Outlander? Arthur had it down pat.

The peddler’s face split in a wide grin as he slapped his knee, Spoke outright like a man! I reckon that calls for me to show my business. He slid the case around on his knees, opened the lid and there it all was—rows of soap, colored liquid in bottles and a passel of other pretties.

He fished around in the case and brought up a bottle of green liquid which he shook so it foamed. Shampoo for the hair. Smells purty, too. Got a sight of other arti-kurls yore Maw might like, too.

Yes, I thought, Mammy would like them but it wouldn’t do her a mite of good. I didn’t tell the peddler that, though; I wanted to look at them as long as I could. He laid the bottle back in its nest and came up this time with three stacks of striped candy which he fanned out in his palm enticingly.

It was a rare occasion indeed when we had candy at home. My mouth watered, but it wasn’t my place to speak up. I’d learned right early to give first place to my brothers; men folks came first. But while I waited for them to make up their minds, I twisted my pink calico skirt in my hands like a dishrag. Finally, Arthur couldn’t stand the strain any longer.

I’ll show ye where we live for that there candy. Pe’pmint sticks, ain’t it?

A path led from the road up to the clearing where our house stood, about halfway up the hill. You couldn’t see the house from the road in summer when the trees were leafed out. Arthur started out up the path, his legs below Pap’s cut-down britches were sturdy as a mule’s. His black hair shocked up on his head, his sparkling black eyes and his thick strong body pulling the hill without effort reminded me so much of Pap. His disposition, too, was Pap’s all over again.

Joe was different from Arthur, different from any of us. His eyes were blue, sometimes grayish, depending on the colors he wore. His fair hair curled on the back of his neck like a baby’s. Old women were always running their fingers through it and remarking on how pretty he was and who in the world did he look like? The rest of us had black or brown hair and eyes, and our skin coloring was apricot, mostly. Joe’s skin was fair with a few freckles, his body thin, and his disposition gentle. It was my brother Joe I depended on for protection—even from Arthur.

The peddler followed Arthur. There were wet spots on his shirt