At about 12:30 that afternoon, Monroe came running through the side yard and knocked frantically on Bobby’s window, his eyes wide open as if he had just seen a Martian. “Let me in,” he said. Bobby opened the window all the way and Monroe climbed across the sill flush with excitement. “Whoa . . . wait till you hear what just happened to Luther!”
“What?”
Monroe put his hands on his head, walked around the room, and exclaimed, “Fantastic! . . . It was fantastic. . . . You should have seen her. Wham, a right cross right on the chin and then bang, she let him have it again with a left hook and another right. Oh, she was great.” Monroe danced around the room demonstrating the fight. “Wham . . . bam!”
“Who?” asked Bobby.
“Anna Lee!”
Bobby couldn’t believe it. “My sister Anna Lee?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not, I saw it. She came down to the pool a little while ago looking for him and she went over and jerked him up by his shirt and told him to pick on somebody his own size. Then she hauled off and knocked him flat on his back. When she got him on the ground she just about kicked the stuffing out of him. He was crying and everything. It was great. You should have seen it.”
“Anna Lee?”
“Yeah, and she told him if he ever bothered you again she’d get Billy Nobblitt on him.”
“My sister?”
Monroe flopped back on the bed. “Boy, are you lucky. I wish I had a sister like that.”
“He really cried?” Bobby smiled.
“Oh, yeah, she had him begging for mercy.”
That night at dinner Bobby looked across the table at his sister with new eyes, filled with awe and admiration. Although nothing was said, their relationship began to change after that day. Gradually, the thought of how wonderful it would have been to be an only child slowly faded away, and they finally quit tattletelling on each other every chance they got. They even began to share their own little secrets. It had only been a slight adjustment but it was to make all the difference in the world. As Dorothy remarked later, “It’s so pleasant not to have the children at each other’s throats night and day. I wonder what happened?”
Although Dorothy was relieved she no longer had to worry about her own children killing each other, from time to time she still worried about Betty Raye Oatman. She had never received a letter from her. Often, she wondered if the girl was all right. She even called the minister out at the Highway 78 Church of Christ, but he had no idea where the Oatmans were.
Betty Raye did not find the envelope that Neighbor Dorothy had slipped into the side of her suitcase until a few days after she had left Elmwood Springs. Inside was fifty dollars in cash and a short handwritten note.
Sweetheart,
Take this and buy yourself a little something special or just save it for a rainy day if you want. Please don’t forget us and come see us again.
Your friends,
Doc and Dorothy Smith
P.S. Drop me a note and let me know how you are doing from time to time, will you?
Betty Raye wanted to write but did not know what to say. But Dorothy need not have worried about Betty Raye ever forgetting them. Although she was being jerked from town to town, she often thought about her time in Elmwood Springs. On the road, she had only been able to go to school periodically and missed more days than she attended. She longed to be in one place, go to one school. She wished she could be like Anna Lee, have the same friends from year to year, and live in the same house. Often at night as they drove through small towns she would see the families on the porches or see them inside having dinner and it would remind her of her time with the Smiths. As unhappy as she was, she never told her mother. Minnie had her own problems.
The Prodigal Son
FOR THE OATMAN FAMILY the summer had been extremely busy. Since May they had been from Nebraska to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kansas, and back again. After an all-night sing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, they finally had a day off from traveling. Ferris was staying at a farmhouse with Bervin and Vernon and Betty Raye was at another house staying with a family of seven. Minnie had spent the night with the Pike family, who were local gospel singers of some note. The next morning she was sitting outside in the backyard, visiting with Mrs. Opal Pike, whose husband was already at work. Besides being a gospel singer he was also a distant relative of the Pike’s Mentholated Salve family and handled all sales in the Carolinas. The two women were drinking iced tea and discussing the problems and pitfalls of being gospel wives. Minnie said, “It’s not always easy having everyone looking up to you.”
“No,” agreed Mrs. Pike.
“You know, Ferris has not always been the good strict Christian he is today. Most people don’t know but he’s had years of on-and-off bouts of drinking and running around, getting saved and then slipping back.”
“You don’t mean it?” said Mrs. Pike.
“Yes. But praise be to God, as of six weeks ago this Tuesday, he’s permanently saved and a new man, and what a blessing. A redheaded faith healer from Mississippi cured him of the arthritis and saved his soul at the same meeting.”
“You don’t mean it,” Mrs. Pike said again as she slapped a mosquito on her arm into oblivion.
Minnie nodded. “Up until that time he had been struggling with a serious crisis of faith. He’d been studying for his Church of Christ ministership certificate through the mail for about three months when he came in one morning after sitting up all night out in the car with his Bible and he just looked terrible. I said, ‘Ferris, what’s the matter?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Sit down, Minnie, I have something to tell you.’ He said, ‘Honey, I want you to know I have struggled and prayed a thousand hours over this thing but no help has come.’ Then he took my hand and held it and said, ‘We’ve got a serious problem. I might have to give up the ministry.’ Well, I got all shaken up inside when I heard that because up to this point it had been his whole life. And I said, ‘Ferris, what is it, is it another woman?’ And he said, ‘No, honey, it’s the prodigal son.’ He said, ‘As hard as I’ve tried to come to terms with it and be in agreement with the Word, I can’t.’ He’d lost his faith over a parable. He said, ‘If a man can go out and raise hell and spend all his money and live in sin and then comes back home and his father throws his arms around him and says welcome home, come on in, and acts like nothing happened, how does that make his other sons feel, the ones that stayed home and worked the farm, saved their money, and lived a Christian life? Why, it would make them feel like all those years of trying to be good didn’t mean a thing to their daddy. They might as well have gone out and had a good time themselves.’ He said, ‘Don’t you see, Minnie? Why should a man try and be good if in the end it don’t matter one way or the other to your daddy? Why be good if, like the prodigal son, you can do anything you want and get away with it?’
“Well, what could I say? I said, ‘Ferris, I see your point. You can’t very well sing and preach something you don’t see the point of yourself, it wouldn’t be right.’ But we had to go on because we was booked and I just kept praying the whole time. Then a few months later we was singing out at a big tent revival and camp meeting in Pelham, Alabama, and I’ll never forget that night. There wasn’t a star in the sky and it was as black as Egypt outside and Ferris is out wandering around and pretty soon he drifts over to this Harper woman’s tent. Now, mind you, he’s seen some of the best preachers and evangelists there is and was pretty much immune to any of them but he wasn’t in there no more than twenty minutes till she came off that stage and grabbed ahold of him and said something to him and he’s been saved ever since.”