Mine to Tell Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for Colleen L. Donnelly

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Other Books You Might Like

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Mine to Tell

  by

  Colleen L. Donnelly

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Mine to Tell

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Colleen L. Donnelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Diana Carlile

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Historical Mainstream Edition, 2014

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-002-4

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-003-1

  Published in the United States of America

  Praise for Colleen L. Donnelly

  “A compelling story that pulls you in from the beginning, and carries you along.”

  ~Lori Robinett, author

  “This is an enticing yet unpredictable book. Colleen Donnelly has created a smooth read with enough mystery I could not put it down. …I would totally recommend this book!”

  ~Lois Horstman, writer and critique partner

  “Annabel finds that learning about Julianne means learning and facing some truths about herself.”

  ~Carolyn Branch, librarian, author, editor

  “Thought-provoking, multi-generational, overshadowed with mystery and hard questions. Just how well should family secrets be kept? And what lies at the core of love?”

  ~Ericca Thornhill, author and critique partner

  “A story of intrigue, mystery and dark secrets. It pulls you in from the beginning and you won’t want to put it down…. The author’s ability to portray true to life characters and show such attention to detail allows you to easily capture the moment and live the story as it happens piece by piece.”

  ~Sherri Minick, theatre production manager,

  critique partner

  Colleen’s multiple awards for her short stories, include: 2nd Place, Mighty Mo Award, 2008; 1st Place, Jim Richardson Memorial Award, 2010; 1st Place Ozarks Writers League Award, 2012; Honorable Mention, Ozark Creative Writers Nostalgia Short Story; and Honorable Mention, Mighty Mo Award, 2012

  Dedication

  To my mom,

  who was so well read

  she made an excellent critique partner.

  And to my local critique group,

  who made me work harder than I ever expected.

  Chapter 1

  “Have a long life, peace be to you,

  and peace be to your house.”

  “Mama,” I said the day of my twenty-first birthday, “would you please tell me about my great-grandma? I’m plenty old enough now, don’t you think?”

  I was about to begin my senior year in college, I had just bought my first brand-new 1988 Ford Pinto with money I’d earned myself, and I was nearly engaged. I was old enough for these sorts of adult pleasures and responsibilities, but somehow to Mama I was never old enough for the story of my great-grandmother, the one I’d always sensed I was supposed to know, but the one she’d kept back when I’d come to her with questions.

  I stepped alongside her, grabbed a handful of the fat, wet peapods she was shelling for our supper, and began helping. I snapped the pods open, crisp, green-smelling spray filling the air above my fingers. I watched my hands and waited, willing Mama to speak, to go on and tell me about Julianne Crouse, my great-grandmother, the black sheep of our family.

  Mama always became agitated when I asked about Julianne as a girl. She’d stiffen, and turn defensive, and go on and on about how much better off we’d all be if someone had just burnt Julianne’s house to the ground. She’d tell me with bunched eyebrows how that building was a reminder of our ruined reputations, and it was a miracle any of us Crouses could hold up our heads in the community. I always stayed quiet when Mama wrung her hands over our reputations and Julianne’s house. It was there because it was supposed to be. I knew that, even as a child. I just didn’t know why.

  I was aware Mama carried on a little extra about it to quell my curiosity because I was drawn to that boarded-up two-story house as if it were made of icing and gingerbread, not just wood, paint, and unanswered questions. Weathered slats nailed at hideous angles across Julianne’s windows and doors were like harsh judgments, protecting the rest of us from a woman my great-grandfather had said needed to be censured. No one ever questioned him, even though he was long gone. His proclamation passed from him through his sons, to my father, and finally down to me, the very first female in Julianne’s lineage, the one who was forbidden to be like her, the one who felt called to know why.

  As a girl I’d bicycle the narrow dirt road from our new farmhouse to hers and weave along the outside of the spiked fence that surrounded the abandoned structure, knowing I needed to slip past that barrier and get closer to the house, at least near enough to peer through the boarded-up windows to see what was in there. But vines, weeds, and thick grass Mama swore was full of snakes kept me from crossing over to Julianne’s porch, to her windows, and eventually to those secrets I believed were there waiting for me. Mama reprimanded me relentlessly for lurking outside the overgrown building, but I never could stop myself. It was a calling. I felt it. And even though snakes, weeds, iron fences, and Mama’s threats kept me from walking up to the house, they didn’t keep me from feeling there was a story in there, the truth about my great-grandmother, something I was born to hear.

  Mama looked up from the peas she was shelling, her eyes doing that thing they did that made me wonder if she really didn’t hate my great-grandmother as
much as she claimed. Mama had done her part to restore our reputations by making sure she was an exceptional farm wife. She wore functional, belted dresses beneath plain aprons, kept her hair in a simple curled style, and never stepped out of line. But it was in moments like this that the glimmer of a woman inside the façade showed through. It never lasted long, and I wondered if maybe I only imagined it. She’d taken on living above the family humiliation like it was part of her duty when she married my father. She had a higher calling, and she adhered to it. Mama became an exemplary Crouse wife to atone for Julianne’s errors, and now that I was getting older, I was expected to do the same.

  She picked up a few more peas. Only the soft snap of pods being forced open and the kerplunk of round peas being dropped into the bowl could be heard. Mama had been wearing the Crouse shame so long it was like an actual thing, a mantle she had to pass on to me when I was grown. I waited in silence, old enough now to be inducted into the family shame, at an age where I was to be readied to do my part to live it down.

  “Well,” Mama finally began, “you are getting older.”

  I drew myself up. I was fairly tall. Tall and slender, with long, straight, blonde hair. I fancied myself in the image of Julianne, whose picture I had discovered years ago in an old box beneath my parents’ bed. Every other ancestor’s picture was on our family room wall, each face stoic, secrets hidden behind their blank stares, warning me I’d better not do what my great-grandmother had done. But Julianne’s image was different from theirs. It was lovely. Her gentle eyes were set in a fair complexion that looked back at me, beckoning me to discover what secrets, what truths, and what sins lay behind them.

  Her hair in the photo was light-colored, like mine, shaping her face like a tilted halo. She wore it swept back, long straight hair swooping down from a side part and joining at the back in…in what? A loose bun, maybe? I never knew. I had tried on occasion to sweep my hair back like hers, but Mama was always on to me in a minute and made me “fix it right,” telling me to either let it hang loose around my shoulders or pull it back into a ponytail.

  Mama cleared her throat, yanking my thoughts back to the kitchen. I held my breath as my hands worked at the peas.

  “Your great-grandfather, Isaac, besides working the farm his old house sits on down the road, was a circuit preacher. They called him Reverend Isaac, and he traveled around to itty bitty congregations and preached whenever he could. It was impossible for him to make it to all of them on Sunday mornings, so some had their services on other days. He’d make great sacrifices by going from one to the other, sometimes being gone two or three days at a time.”

  She reached into the basket at her feet and scooped out great handfuls of peas she’d picked that morning, dropped them into the colander in front of us, then ran cold water over them. I stared down at the basket, glad there were lots more to shell so she’d have plenty of time to continue. I even slowed down, wanting to make sure I heard the whole story, hoping to put to rest the questions that had been floating around in my imagination for years.

  “He must have been quite a man to carry such a load. He had two boys from his first marriage to take care of, too, your great-uncles Simon and Levi. He was a widower. But of course he remarried, married your great-grandmother, Julianne, intending to make his family proper again.” Mama’s head began to shake back and forth as she watched her hands. I knew it wasn’t the peas she was worrying over. It was the Reverend Isaac, his great sacrifices, his new bride, and those two boys.

  No one had ever told me Simon and Levi weren’t blood relatives, but I’d figured it out when I was little. A neighbor man had shown up and unloaded a big yellow bulldozer outside Julianne’s empty house. My great-uncle Simon was out there directing him toward her spiked fence, waving him forward so he could plow through it all. I latched onto my great-uncle’s leg, my eyes glued to the bulldozer. My parents were there too, trying to pull me off him, but Simon had overalls on with lots of loops and pockets, so I dug in and hung on while I begged him to stop the man with the bulldozer.

  “Get her away from here,” Simon shouted at my father. “She’s going to get hurt!”

  It was Grandpa Samuel who stepped forward and stood beside me. He’d always been quiet, solemn, distant, and I was surprised to feel his hand on my shoulder as he spoke above me. His voice was soft against the roar of the bulldozer and my wails, but it was powerful, more powerful than the machine, more powerful than my screeches, and more powerful than his older brother Simon’s insistence that the house be torn down.

  Suddenly the bulldozer’s motor was cut. The silence that followed was deafening, only my sobs filling the air.

  “It’s a part of us,” I heard my grandpa tell Simon as he nodded toward Julianne’s house. “Like it or not, it’s us.”

  Simon’s leg began to tremble in my grip. I leaned my head back and looked up at him as pain in a thousand aches rippled across his face. He shoved me away. I plastered myself to Grandpa Samuel as Simon wheeled from us.

  “A part of you, maybe,” he made one last parting shot at my grandfather, “but nothing of her is a part of me.”

  Grandpa Samuel said nothing. He just waved his arm, made kind of a loop in the air with his hand, and I heard the bulldozer’s engine flare up again. The man backed it in a half arc and then revved the motor enough to chug the monstrosity up the ramp and onto the trailer bed it had come on. In a matter of minutes the destructive machine was gone, and Julianne’s house was still standing.

  Grandpa had kept his hand on my shoulder, a tremble in his grip that hadn’t been there moments before. I’d never felt his hand before, so I just stood there, thankful, yet still choking on frightened gulps. “Simon’s wife just left,” he whispered down to me. “I know you probably don’t understand that, but he’s pretty upset. More so than usual.”

  I didn’t know what that had to do with wanting to bulldoze Julianne’s house down. Simon’s wife, my great-aunt Ida, had always been an aloof woman, one who had never seemed happy, so the fact that she was gone didn’t seem like it should make any difference. But maybe it did and that’s why my great-uncle Simon became so mean before he died. His brows were in a permanent furry knot over eyes that bored holes into the ground wherever he stalked. Great-Uncle Levi was different. He was invisible—a Christmas card once a year and nothing more. He’d left the area long before I was born and lived elsewhere, leaving the family shame behind with us.

  Mama was quiet while I was thinking, as if she was looking back in time, too. Whatever it was she saw, it must not have changed things, because she sighed and continued. “I imagine those two boys were a handful for your great-grandmother, them being some other woman’s children and all.” She brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen into her face. She ducked her head and used her shoulder to swipe the curl back, her hands never losing a beat as she continued to shell the peas. “You know how boys are, your brother being a good case in point.” She smiled, Paul Junior’s bullheadedness no doubt in her mind. “The farm Isaac had back then wasn’t as big as what we have now,” she continued. “Just that eighty acres those old houses sit on, hers and his.”

  I knew Isaac had lived in the family house, a large two-story farmhouse surrounded by a barn, a corn crib, an outhouse, and a chicken coop. It had been kept up well over the years, and it had been our home when I was tiny, until my father bought more land that attached to that eighty acres and built us this new home not far away. Julianne’s house stood near Isaac’s. Near enough to not be out of sight, just out of touch.

  “They stayed plenty busy, I imagine, with the farm, the two boys, and Isaac’s preaching all the time.” Mama became quiet again. I glanced to the side with just my eyes, trying not to move my head so I wouldn’t interrupt her. I wanted to ask about the notes I’d found as a girl in the monstrosity of a family Bible we kept on a stand in the family room. Yellowed sheets covered with sharp, angular cursive were tucked within its pages, the penmanship so pointed I’d always thought it
was yelling at me. I wondered if they were written by the Reverend Isaac. Sermon notes maybe, but I didn’t ask.

  Then Mama took a deep breath and went on. “When your great-uncle Simon was about thirteen, your great-grandmother up and left. Isaac had been on the preaching circuit and he’d just returned. Simon told me little was said when Isaac got home. He’d come in late, Julianne fixed his meal, and then she was gone. By morning she was nowhere to be found.”

  My mind raced with a thousand images of my great-grandmother’s face as she left…or fled, whichever it was. I could hardly breathe as I waited for Mama to tell me more, tell me why and where Julianne had gone.

  “There was a note. It was to Isaac. No one would have known about it except he’d kept it.”

  What did it say? I gasped in my mind, my eyes wide, my fingers shelling peas with the speed of a professional gardener.

  “One of the boys found it after Isaac died, in an old tin box in his bedroom.” There was disgust in her voice, resentment that I’d detected in her defensiveness for years.

  I stopped messing with the peas and turned to my mother. “So you think…” The words were barely out of my mouth and I could see by the look on her face exactly what she thought.

  “Annabelle, that note said, ‘I have to go. It’s important. Julianne.’ ”

  She resumed shelling peas with a fury while the impact of the brief statement soaked in.

  “But she came back,” I exclaimed, figuring she had, since I knew she’d lived in that little house for years. “She did whatever was important and then she returned. There’s nothing horrible about that.”

  I felt Mama tighten, and I knew I’d stepped out of place. No one defended Julianne. In fact, Paul Junior often used her name as a synonym for an insult. “She’s done a Julianne,” he liked to say. He probably didn’t know what had happened back then either, but he was the sort that liked to squash little bugs, be the final word on any subject, and deliver judgment on any offense that wasn’t his own. Paul Junior was older than me by three years, but we’d been striving like Jacob and Esau from the moment I emerged from the womb. He was trying to keep me in my place, the place all Crouse women belonged.