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Even if Nothing Else Is Certain

By Amy Willoughby-Burle

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Chapter 1
Ruby

March 1937

Spring in Certain, KY was like stepping through a thin spot between this world and another one. Maybe spring was like that everywhere, but I wouldn’t know having not been anywhere else. Here it was like one season overlaid on the next and if you looked you could almost see them rippling on top of each other. Some people might have thought they saw the product of the wind, but I knew better. I was good at seeing the blending of what was and what could be.
Bare tree limbs and muddy ground were overlaid with patches of too green grass and outlandish yellow daffodils that always seemed like they’d popped up too soon. Or like some child from the future had dropped them as she ran home. Pear trees bloomed billowy white like snowballs made of flowers and the pink blossoms of the Redbud tree burst open, too excited to wait for the rest of spring.
That was me. I was a Redbud blossom, a billowy white pear petal, a yellow daffodil finding myself out of step with the rest of the world around me. Putting on a show to cover the fact that I had no idea where I belonged. Growing up an orphan will do that to you.
I wanted to think that the lingering years of economic depression were a thin spot. That at any moment we would step out of this time and into something better. The Hazard Herald told of rebounds in the economy dashed by a new recession. Wasn’t that the epitome of getting kicked when you were down. Just when things started to get better, they got worse again.
My Gramma had told me about the thin places between this world and heaven. She believed Certain was one. Heck, she believed that the living room was one. Anywhere you wanted to see Heaven was a thin spot according to her. I could wait a little while for Heaven, but I sure did feel like something was on the horizon. I felt like I was about to stick my hand out in front of me and part a curtain onto a different world.
My Gramma wasn’t technically my grandmother. I didn’t know anything about my first family. They’d left me at a church in Lexington when I was a baby and I’d grown up in the orphanage there. Well, I spent the first five years of my life in the huge stone, four story building with so many rooms I was lost half the time. There were so many children I couldn’t know them all, but it was the loneliest place I’d ever been. Everything was clean because we all had to clean it. And there were fancy paintings on the walls and everyone’s clothes were pressed. The caretakers spoke very properly and the teachers tried to make us into clever citizens. But it wasn’t home. Thankfully, God had taken me out of there and sent me to live with who I call, because they were, my real family. Gramma and Grandpa. They were older when they took me, but I didn’t care. They were my family. So, I’d really grown up in Certain and that cold stone place in the city became only a bad dream whose edges were mostly blurred if I didn’t look too closely.
Our cabin in Certain was small, our clothes were wrung out in a wash basin and hung to dry on a string tied between two trees. My dresses were mostly clean and often somewhat wrinkled, but they were warm and smelled of sunshine. You couldn’t get lost in our four rooms if you tried and there wasn’t a fancy thing to be seen for miles around. It was the most magical and perfect place I could ever want.
Now, for the first time ever, though, it felt lonely. Grampa had been in Heaven for some time, but Gramma had only passed just last year. I still expected her to greet me when I woke up every morning with a smile and a call of “Good morning, my Lovely.” She’d called me that all my life and even though I was twenty-nine, and a grown woman getting more grown by the day, I still miss that childhood name.
Gramma had always made me feel loved and special and she was the one who introduced me to the most magical things of all. Books. Books were a thin spot as well. Except they were a thin spot you could touch, open up and press to your face, smell and feel and fall asleep with under your pillow where their words drifted off the page and into your dreams.
I didn’t want the realism of some of the newer authors. I knew all too well how life could knock the wind out of you and drop you to your knees. It was a gift that our little library here in Certain was filled with cast-offs and donations of well-worn old books read so many times the words were a little lighter on the page somehow. And shouldn’t that be what a library was anyway, the preservation of imagination across time.
Proud to be a Packhorse Librarian with The Works Progress Administration, my saddlebags were filled so tightly with fantastical beings and other worlds that it was a wonder Patty didn’t sprout the wings of a griffin or a unicorn’s horn as we traveled along the Hell for Certain creek delivering peepholes into other places born of imaginations so wild I didn’t see how the mere mortals they inhabited could even fall asleep at night without floating right out of their beds, through their windows, and into the moonlit night of possibility.
I was almost giddy at delivering Peter Pan and Wendy, Dorothy and Toto and her band of friends, Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger and precocious Peter Rabbit and cohorts into the hands of the children along my route.
And the house I knew that would relish them the most was also the house where my best friend, Mattie Barrett, lived. She’d been Mattie Mobley up until about two weeks ago when she married Certain’s widowed grizzly bear, Daniel. Talk about a magical tale.
I was content as I rode across the fields and through the creek beds delivering my books. Even coming up the craggy leg of The Hell for Certain Creek toward Mattie’s house I told myself I didn’t want anything else but to bask in the glow of my friend’s happiness. I was fine being single and living alone. Being a working girl doing an important job. Being beholden to no one and free to come and go as I pleased.
Who was I kidding? I did like being independent, but it was the being alone part that wasn’t optimal. And I was doing an important job, but it wasn’t the one I dreamed of.
I ducked through the canopy of tangled tree limbs that made a gateway of sorts into Mattie and Daniel’s yard. I was greeted by a half dozen hens and one ornery rooster all coming up to me for the snacks they’d become accustomed to while Mattie and Daniel were on their honeymoon and the kids were staying with their Aunt Ava.
“Yes,” I said to them, pulling a small bag of feed and seeds out of my saddlebag before I dismounted. “The food lady is here.” I sprinkled the food onto the ground, eliciting much clucking and bonking as they called to each other about the food right in front of them.
It took all of about three seconds for the children to come running out the front door of the small cabin making even more noise than the chickens. Ella, Marie, and Hugh came racing toward me clambering for their books.
“Here you go,” I said, handing them my best selections of the fantastical and magical.
Marie held The Wind in the Willows tight to her chest as if the book was already making itself at home in her heart.
Marie’s older sister, Ella, held her hands open ready to receive whatever story I had for her as well. “What did you bring for me?”
“It’s called Peter and Wendy,” I said and placed the book gently in her hands. “It’s just about the best thing in all the world.”
Ella shifted the book to one hand and touched the dark green cover and golden lettering with the other “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It looks magical.”
“It is,” I said, raising my eyebrows and lowering my voice to a whisper. “Fairies, pirates, and boys who can fly.”
Little Hugh piped up. “I want to fly.”
Who doesn’t, I thought and patted him on the head.
I was so busy talking to the kids that I hadn’t even noticed my friend, Mattie, walking toward us until she spoke.
“Beware Captain Hook” she said and bent her fingers forward to make a hook with her hand. She laughed and drew me into a hug. “I missed you, Ruby” she said.
“I missed you, too,” I said, hugging her tightly and then pulling back with my hands on her arms giving her a once over as if I hadn’t seen her in months. “How was your father? How was Asheville? Did you love it so much you didn’t want to come back?”
My secret fear.
“It was lovely, but of course not,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “There’s nowhere else I want to be but here.”
I admit I was terribly relieved. I had worried that spending time back in the city, back with society and fancy clothes would remind Mattie of just how little we had here in Certain these days. Times were rough all over the country still, but I doubted anywhere was as bad off as we were. But then again, when you’ve never had two nickels to rub together in the first place, bad off is relative.
Daniel walked up beside her then and put his arm around her waist. He kissed the top of her head and nodded to me. “Thank you for feeding the chickens, Ruby. You got some eggs I hope.”
“A plenty,” I said. “For one lonely person anyway.”
Mattie smiled a small knowing smile at me. “You’ll find your love; I have no doubt. In the last place you expect to find him I predict.”
“That could be anywhere then,” I said, since I wasn’t really looking.
“Maybe you’ll find him along the creek on your way home even,” Mattie said and chuckled.
“I bet I will,” I said. “I’ve always wanted a bunny rabbit of my own. Then again, I’ll most likely find a toad like the one in the book I brought for Marie.”
“You can kiss him and turn him into a prince,” Mattie said. “Like I did.” She elbowed Daniel who only looked at her adoringly.
“That’s a whole different book,” I said, and sighed.
Mattie giggled loose from Daniel’s sweet hold and put her arm around me. “You’ll see the value of love, yet. I promise.”

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