This is from a historical fiction novel I am writing about my Mother’s life, as I imagine it may have been. One thing is unmistakable about the woman who to me was “Mama”. She was so careful about exposing her thoughts and feelings, we figured her left hand never knew what her right hand was up to. Timelines and basic facts are usually true, except where I have no clue!
Prologue
Maydelle was standing alone, looking out across the long open fields between her and the railroad track. The storm had just broken. It had almost quit raining. The sky was no longer so black and foreboding. Still, from the front porch of the farm house, she could barely see the train tracks where the highway to Taylorsville crossed the railroad bed. She was waiting, rather impatiently by now, for her daddy and big brother Ellie, to get back from the Catawba Tuberculosis Sanitarium. Her mother, Katherine, was a patient there and they had made the two-day trip on the train for a weekend visit. It was hard on little Maydelle, both the waiting and the mystery surrounding her mother’s illness. She was just too young to understand that her mama might never come back home. She had heard the train and knew, at least, her father and brother would be home in just a few more minutes.
She was daddy’s little girl, being the only girl with two older brothers. It was bad enough with her mama gone, but without her daddy either, she was completely miserable. Her daddy left just Friday afternoon on the 5:00 pm train and was due home any minute on the Powhatan Arrow, the crack train of the Norfolk and Western Railways.
The train passed right by the farm and it was barely a thirty minute walk from the railroad flag stop at Davis Junction to the farm house. And for half that distance, Maydelle knew she would be able to see them, as there was an open field all the way to the tracks. They would just walk down the rail bed to where the Taylorsville road crossed. From that crossing, it was only another fifty feet to the road to the farm house.
The house where she was born needed a new coat of paint. Her Daddy had promised to paint it before her mother came home. Maydelle was hoping the painting would start any day now. Mama had been gone so long. Her father was a little distracted, right now, but Maydelle knew he would get the boys started on the house any day now. He just had to. Mama had to come home soon. He had built the house about two years before she was born. It had not been painted since it was built, now over ten years ago. She had been born there. Only Ellie and Johnnie had been born before the house was finished.
Normally, the train didn’t stop at Davis Junction, but her daddy had made arrangements for it to let them off there that day. It wasn’t a local train and normally only stopped at major stations, but he had persuaded the station master in Taylorsville to arrange the stop before he made the first trip to Catawba many months earlier. Now it was routine when they were on board. The old Taylorsville highway ran down the side of the tracks and weaved its way back and forth across the tracks the two and one-half miles between Taylorsville and Davis Junction. Maydelle had never ridden the train, but she had taken the highway in her daddy’s buggy to go eastward to Taylorsville several times and made the trip regularly to visit her grandfather and cousins and uncles and aunts in Olive Garden, just three miles west, past Davis Junction, on many occasions.
It was over 100 miles by train to Catawba, just beyond Roanoke, and she had never been that far in her life. It was 1920. The roads were still used mostly for horses in rural Prince Edward County, but her grandfather had a motor car, a Model “T” Ford and her Uncle Wallace, his oldest child by his second wife, often made the trip to pick them up for Sunday dinner when it was too cold for them to make the trip by buggy. The family had lived there with Poppa Harvey’s before the house here on the farm was finished.
By having the train stop at Davis Junction, which was a little less than a mile west of the farmhouse road, instead of taking him on to Prospect Station, the next regular stop, over four miles east of the house, Frank Cunningham managed to save himself and Ellie an extra hour of walking. As soon as they got home, they would hitch the buggy and ride over to Poppa Harvey’s.
Since her mother had been at Catawba, Maydelle always had Sunday dinner with her grandfather, his new wife, Violet, and their four children, of which Wallace was the oldest. Her mother was one of two children by his first wife. After Katherine’s mother died, ironically of tuberculosis, Poppa Harvey, her grandfather, had remarried. She loved the visits, especially getting to see Voncille, who technically was her aunt, even though she was only a year or two older than Maydelle. She always felt more like Voncille was her sister and not an aunt. She was definitely her best friend in the whole world.
After what seemed much longer than the 15 minutes it normally took to walk from Davis Junction, a lone figure came into view. It was a long way to where the lone person was, and it looked more like Ellie than her daddy, but Maydelle couldn’t understand where her daddy was. They always walked together. Maydelle immediately started running towards what appeared to be her brother as fast as her little legs could carry her. The raindrops were getting thinner and thinner and getting a little wet sure did beat the waiting.
Ellie stopped when she was about 30 yards away and put his suitcase down. She could tell by his long face he didn’t have good news. Maydelle slowed and waited for Ellie, who ran up and swooped her up in his arms. Ellison Cunningham was a tall boy for his fourteen years and next to little Maydelle, he looked more like her uncle than her brother. The Cunningham men were among the tallest in the area. Her father was over six foot two and Ellie was likely to be at least as tall.
“Hey, Susta” Ellie greeted her with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “How you been?” He always called her Susta. He would do that as long as they both lived.
“Where’s Daddy?” Maydelle asked, half demanding, half begging.
“He had to stay with Mama, Susta. She ain’t doing very well. He should be home in a day or two, but he asked me to give you a big hug for him” he said, hugging her as much for the loss he was feeling inside and knowing how it was going to hurt this sweet little person too, than just for his father. Ellie had basically told the truth, but he kept it back just how bad things really were. He knew it was unlikely that his mother was going to make it another day. For all he knew, she might have already passed away. She had been hanging on to life for the last few days, just because she knew her husband and oldest child were due for a visit. But his daddy would have to be the one to tell Maydelle. Ellie knew he just couldn’t.
Maydelle lived the rest of her childhood with her grandfather, Poppa Harvey, and his family as there were only boys at her house and her father felt this was best for her development. But, she never recovered from what was, for all practical purposes, the loss of both parents at such a tender age. It scarred her immensely for the rest of her life and deeply affected the way she reacted to the world, her future husband and how she later raised her own children.
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