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Letter from Belleau Wood

By Mary Lou Cheatham

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Chapter 1

When Trudy Was Quite Young

Trudy

They’re at it again,” Trudy whispered to Marcie, her stuffed monkey doll. “I’m supposed to honor them both.”

From the seat underneath the open window, Trudy heard everything in the next room.

“Where do you keep your money?” Mama let go of her voice. “In the bank?”

“No, stupid. It failed last year.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve squirreled away your stash in a big safe deposit box and stuck it in a bank vault.”

His laugh sounded sarcastic. “Is that what you’d do, Zoe?”

Trudy had a clue. Every time anybody needed any money, Papa went to the barn. He hid it in the barn. But where?

“What if you die and leave me with the kids? I don’t want anything now, but if such should be our fate, I’d be a penniless widow with a ten-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy to provide for.”

Trudy curled on the bench and stared from the second floor. Before she realized it, she twisted Marcie’s button eyes until they fell off.

“Oh, no. I’ll sew them back on after school,” she whispered to the doll.

“You don’t trust me, William.”

“Zoe.” Papa’s voice had a don’t-mess-with-me sound.

Mama said something else Trudy didn’t catch.

Whack!

Trudy’s hands flew to her mouth. What was that? The noise couldn’t have been a slap. No, Papa wouldn’t hit Mama. Or would he?

Trudy strained her ears...the faint sound of Mama’s weeping. With a fight raging between Mama and Papa, she had nobody to hold onto except Marcie. Trudy’s stomach hurt. Her brother Billy Jack, whose room was across the hall, slept through it.

Trudy wished Papa would die.

~~~

A few days later, Trudy and Billy Jack came home to find smoking embers where their house had stood. Nothing but chimneys remained.

Barefoot and in a torn dress, Mama sat on the ground. She talked to the air in front of Trudy’s face. “William wanted to burn a big wasp nest from the outside of Trudy’s window. He set fire to the house. You remind me of my daughter Trudy.”

“I am Trudy.” It didn’t do any good to tell her.

“What am I supposed to do?” Zoe Cameron, Trudy’s pretty mother, wrung her hands and looked wild-eyed.

Two men carried Papa’s body away in a wagon. He would never return. How he must have suffered in the fire.

~~~

“We can’t sleep in there.” Billy Jack opened the squeaky door of the old sharecropper’s shack.

Trudy sorted through the smelly worn-out quilts stacked on the porch.

“We’ll make pallets. I guess this is the best our neighbors could do to help us.” Mama assembled broom straw and tied it with cord. “Trudy, sweep.”

“Make Billy Jack a broom, too.”

They swept rat droppings and scrubbed the walls.

Trudy found an old dishpan with holes in the bottom. It would be perfect to use for what she planned after they finished sweeping. “I’m glad we have a pretty good garden this year.”

“Sister, you say the dumbest things.”

“No, I mean it, but how am I supposed to practice piano?”

~~~

Trudy’s mother rejected assistance from anybody. Samuel Benton, who lived down the road, helped her when he wanted to and ignored her objections. He and his twin children dropped their spare money in a milking bucket, which they called the dream bucket. It contained a fortune in gold coins.

After the money found a new home in the bank, the bucket served many purposes. It held a marriage proposal to Trudy’s mother from Sam. At the resulting wedding, Bailey, who became Trudy’s stepsister, carried the bucket filled with rose petals, which she scattered on the floor of the church as she walked down the aisle.

With the passing of time, the Bentons and the Camerons discarded it the same way Billy Jack discarded his name and became Will. When Trudy and Bailey redecorated their room, Trudy found the old bucket in the attic.

“Mama, what’s the dream bucket doing up here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We decided to keep our spare money in the carved box Samuel gave me.”

“Since nobody else wants it, I’m claiming it, okay?”

With loving strokes, she cleaned it. At the Mercantile, she bought some metallic paint so she could make it gold, and she tied a blue-ribbon bow on it. She conscripted the bucket back to the call of duty so it could become the sentinel of her heart. What had belonged to others now became hers alone.

The old bucket, now hidden in the chifforobe, was full of precious things—her journal, report cards, letters from her sweetheart, Jeremy, about the interesting things he was doing, some money he’d asked her to keep for him; the pendant and chain from the Gitano, Walthere; a tiny New Testament that had been her grandmother’s; and unusual objects she found as she walked across the farm. She hoped she’d never grow up so much she wouldn’t appreciate a perfect arrowhead, a huge acorn cup, a fossil, a unique twig, or a mussel shell. She also kept one Prince Albert can to remind her where her father had hidden a fortune.

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