Prologue: The Promise

The sunlight began to fade from the sky, just as the color had long ago begun to fade from our farm. The yard and the vast prairie lands were bleak and desolate. Only the rising and setting of the sun could ever bring beauty to this place. Sitting on the porch wearing only a cotton dress thin from years of wear, I shivered in the breeze. I was just fifteen but felt years older, I was the adult in the house with four children to look after and had been since I was twelve.

Twelve was the year my daddy died and my momma got sick. For three whole years she hadn’t left her room. For as long as she had been ill she hadn’t spoken, not even a mumbled thanks when we brought her meals. Nothing. She had never been a strong woman really. Physically she could work in the fields all day and then come inside and cook dinner, but emotional problems always burdened her.

My father always knew that if anything should happen to him my mother wouldn’t be able to continue, they had met when she was eighteen and for the seventeen years they were married he was her entire world. He was her strength and refuge in every problem she endured and her incentive to wake up each day. When he grew ill my father would weep seeing how much it ‘hurt his Juliette’. One day when he was so sick that he knew any day could be his last he called me into his room and made me promise him that if something happened to him I would take care of this family - no matter what. A week later I dropped a white carnation into the tomb at West Cemetery just as his casket was lowered into the ground and mouthed the words ‘I promise Daddy’ before tossing a handful of dirt into the hole along with everyone else in my family.