<< Go Back

A Christmas Measure of Love

By Linda Brooks Davis

Order Now!

August 1910

Other girls measure their heights, waistlines, and bosoms. I measure my scars. And wonder why my pa never loved me.
Eighteen years old today, I’m perched alone on a parlor settee reserved for the birthday girl. Adelaide Fitzgerald, my benefactor, has invited the daughters of Glover County, Oklahoma’s socially elite to celebrate at Broadview, her grand estate on the banks of Rock Creek.
Trouble is, when these precisely coiffed young women were girls romping at garden parties, I was toiling in a cotton field across the way.
These party guests boast fathers who are bankers and lawyers and doctors. But I can claim naught but Walter Sloat for my pa—a scoundrel, a criminal, a former sharecropper who never lifted a hand in the fields. He expected Ma and me to do his share of the crop tending and accept his abuse when we returned home.
The mother of one of the girls steps behind her daughter and straightens her sash at the back. And a tingle crawls up my spine.
Ma and I never wore sashes. Instead, we earned slashes across our backs for the words we spoke in defense of the other. Pa never was one to withhold the horse whip.
I look around at the fine furnishings and remember the shack I once called home. It still sits on a forgotten piece of land to the north of Broadview—a horseshoe of sorts—formed from two severe bends in Rock Creek. I grew up on that land, working neighbors’ fields and doing my best to ease my ma’s sorry life.
One of the party guests catches a hangnail on her frock’s frill and cries out. Her mother runs to her and whisks her off to ease her discomfort.
Not a one of these girls knows the first thing about pain beyond skinned knees. But I could tell them a thing or two.
Pa beat me to the edge of death when I was thirteen.
Neighbor Ella McFarland saved my life and moved me to a cottage in the woods this side of Rock Creek. She taught me to read, and when she married, her friend Addie took me in as her ward and provided every advantage—all of it without a single coin from my own pa.
I’ll soon be off to college, leaving behind the vastly different houses I’ve called home. Rock Creek flowsbetween them, slashing an indelible line between the life I once knew and the one I enjoy now.
Margaret Gallagher, Addie’s housekeeper, brings out the birthday cake and places it just so in the middle of a round oak table. Covered in icing and sugar sprinkles, the concoction appears touched by angels’ hands, and in a way, it is. It’s a product of a real angel’s toil in the truest sense.
You see, Maggie stood in for Addie’s dead mother as a wet nurse. And when Addie’s father died, she remained on as a mother of sorts to the heiress.
Maggie’s own daughter’s off who knows where doing who knows what. For that I’m grateful. That woman would stir up a whirlwind beneath Addie’s roof this day.
They say I’m now a woman full grown. Truth be told, I was full grown years ago. A girl who walks into a cotton field when she’s but six stumbles upon womanhood earlier than others.
“Just look at the cake, Lily.” Addie joins Maggie at the party table in the wide entry hall. The properly attired mothers tuck their chins and peer at me from under pencil-arched eyebrows. Perhaps they know my background after all.
I rise at Addie’s bidding and smile. A ready student, I’ve learned to hold my spine straight, my shoulders back, and my chin high. Proper decorum begins with proper posture, Maggie says.
Maggie’s more than a friend. She’s like family. She’ll help me pack for my trip south soon. I’m enrolled at the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, Texas. I’ll return home at Christmastime, but what’ll I find? And who will I have become?
Will Addie host a Yuletide party like this one?
I hope not. I don’t know these girls. They don’t even know my last name. They’ve never asked. I’m not one of them. Never have been. We have as much in common as one of their lap dogs and a billy goat.
If the CIA girls are like these, what business has one such as I enrolling among them?
Were I to expose the marks that hide beneath my high-necked, long-sleeved blouse, these girls of delicate sensibilities—and those at CIA for that matter—would surely draw away. If they spied the shack on the other side of Rock Creek, they’d gasp at the commonness.
While the girls and their mothers chatter, I cast my gaze out Broadview’s front window of beveled glass. Ma’s out there somewhere with Pa and my brother Donnie. Maybe miles away, but I know as sure as the sun’ll come up in the morning. She’s not forgetting I’m eighteen at last.
# # #
These mothers with necks as stiff as wooden geese and their cookie-cutter daughters close ranks around me. Maggie slides the handle of a cake knife into my palm and wraps her hands around mine, steadying my sudden tremor.
But then Ella Evans arrives with her six girls in tow. They’ve traversed the wildflower-strewn rise to the west that separates Evans property from Broadview. Set in a copse of oak, walnut, and elm trees, their cottage housed Ella and me before she married Andrew Evans the last day of 1905.
Ella, Addie, and I’ve strolled along the rise arm in arm with snow lying over the the wintertide’s prairie grass. With wildflowers casting their seeds to the spring wind. And with autumn’s russet and amber leaves corkscrewing in miniature whirlwinds.
We’ve met in Addie’s and Ella’s gazebos, and we’ve swam Rock Creek in summer’s heat. I’ve called Ella my friend five years now, but I’ve loved her since the first day I pulled a cotton sack between rows of McFarland cotton.
Ella welcomed me with the kindness of a saint and stuffed my sack with cotton from her own. And Addie—oh, my friend Addie. She’s put off her dream of starring in an opera in Italy all these years. For me.
Ella and Addie are naught but royalty to me.
Ella swirls through Broadview’s front doors with her six daughters--the five orphaned sisters Ella and Andrew adopted and one girl of their own. Their organdy and batiste summer dresses in shades of pastels set off the four stair-step sisters’ blonde locks and the dark tresses of the younger two.
The sun has painted Ella’s cheeks rosy-peach and her girls’ in shades of pink. Petite Ella twirls her broad-brimmed hat atop the hall tree and turns with her fists at her waist in mock distress. “You’d start the party without us?”
I catch a glimpse of Ella’s twin brother Cade in her commanding stance and through the set of her jaw. And my heart turns a flip.
“Of course not.” Addie shoos the Evans girls into the frilly fold. “Now we can begin. Happy Birthday to Lily!”
The guests sing the birthday song, and Ella and Addie eye me with the sort of light I remember in my mother’s eyes.
I’m Lily Sloat, and I can feel Ma’s arms around me.

Order Now!

<< Go Back