October in the Earth

by Olivia Hawker

Love is a thing that’s given, not taken. This is something I know far deep inside, in the quietest part of my soul where loneliness can’t reach, where even fear can’t touch me. I guess I’ve always known, but it’s easy to forget when all your life you’ve heard the same voices shouting that love is obedience, love is a debt unpaid.

The birds of the air sow not, neither do they reap, I mused, yet the Father feeds them.

we’d be faced with another Ludlow Massacre, with miners’ wives and innocent children gunned down in a storm of violence.

Folks that take from you without ever giving . . . they don’t love you none, no matter what they say.

“But if the giving doesn’t feel like enough, if the giving doesn’t bless you as much as any blessing from the Lord ever could, then maybe you’re giving to the wrong person. And giving even more—that won’t solve the problem. It’ll only burn you out, in the end, and leave you empty of everything.”

A great black weight of grief pulled me back to the earth. I could feel the world reassembling itself; the cabin came together before my burning eyes, the log walls fitting themselves into place, the floor definite below my feet, the bouquet in its green vase filling the air with a cloying sweetness. And the granny woman kept her hand on mine, holding me tightly, lending me her strength.

Wow! Just wow!

I asked myself what that feeling was—the roaring blaze that had taken the place of my former shame, burned all my meekness away. It was anger, I realized with a thrill of wonder. It was outrage. And it made me feel more righteous and mighty than I’d felt in all my life before.

What could any obedient woman really do if the Lord’s own mouthpiece took her aside and whispered, Thou shalt?

Oh, I thought, and thought, just as Anne-Celeste recommended, and I thought a little more till I wished I could shut my head off like the light switch. Blink!

No one ever tells you how easy it is to up and go. Just like that, I was free.

Maybe there isn’t much difference between fear and rejoicing. Maybe it’s all the same wellspring of awe. Maybe we decide whether the water tastes of joy or despair once it’s in our mouths and we’re already swallowing it down.

it was June in the sky but October in the earth.

maybe, after all, it’s not the view that’s beautiful or ugly. Maybe what counts is the way you look at it.

Two Dels seemed to war inside me—one wild and new, eager to learn what shape she would take in the world beyond the Cumberland. The other was the old Del—who, to my fury, still sought to be as meek and obedient as she’d been raised to be.

What’s the point of living life on the straight and narrow if it only gets you—” “What you got. A broken heart.”

Below the surface, I’d wrapped my arms around my body, as if by main force I could keep myself together—as if my arms were a shield or a steel cage strong enough to protect my heart.

“If the old world has ended, that just means we’re free to make a new world. And we can make it after any pattern we choose.”

“Every hobo looks out for his fellows,” Louisa said, “by minding his behavior in accordance with these rules. So pay attention, because if you break the code, you could muck things up for yourself and for every hobo who’ll come through town after you. Once a town has been spoiled, and the folks no longer trust us, there’s not much hope of finding work, or even a bit of charity.”

we break no laws and cause no trouble. Hobos are strictly forbidden to take advantage of any vulnerable person. That includes women and children.”

“Above all else,” she said, “no hobo will ever interfere with the duties or the comfort of any worker on the trains or on the tracks. Trains are our best hope for getting from place to place—from one paying job to the next. If any of us sours the train workers, or earns a reputation for theft, the gig will be up for all of us. One bout of hell-raising can ruin an entire city for weeks or months at a stretch. If ever the linemen come to distrust a hobo, you’ll find a long, weary road ahead of you, rebuilding that trust.”

We ran from the bulls—the hostile cops who patrolled the railyards.

“wherever they come from since, they’re here, all right. Lots of ’em, too. Seven, eight—I don’t know—but they got clubs and they ain’t afraid to use ’em.

I could feel the vibration of the approaching engine. It gave a harsh metallic moan, and then the shuddering black hulk came around the bend, all snub nose and gnashing wheels, its coal breath heaving out into the oppressive sky.

Even the pure blue arch of the sky seemed to rise from us, and I would have stopped the world from turning, held back the aging of the day, but it wasn’t in my power, and anyway, nothing ever lasts.

the dark banner of the engine’s smoke fattened and trailed above her head, smothering the stars.

We watched the town fly past, then the unlit mystery of the prairie lands, which rippled out from our vantage point like the gentle waves of a pond when a pebble is tossed into its heart.

that don’t mean I don’t hold to whatever’s good and true and sacred. If this life has taught me anything—if this emergency has taught me anything, and I pray to God it has or else what’s it all been for—it’s convinced me that the fellows up in the pulpits don’t have a bead on the good and the true and the sacred. They bluster and shout and do their best to impress their flocks with their own importance, but that was never the Savior’s way. If you want to find what’s really sacred, you got to get out into the places where the Savior dwelled. And He never hung around listening to no preacher; I remember that much from my Christian days.”

She was good—good right through to the heart, not because she saw some advantage to herself in kindness, but merely because kindness was her natural state.

The walk was pleasant even in the late-summer heat, for an irrigation canal ran swift and green beside us, filling the afternoon with a rich, spicy fragrance, and the cottonwoods that drank deep of the canal offered the windy mercy of their shade.

If a person wants to do good in this world, he should do real good—not force a fellow who’s down on his luck to sit and swallow a load of preaching before he can swallow a bite of food. Either you want to feed the hungry or you don’t. And I don’t believe folks who live off the labor of the poor ought to skate by feeling smug and comfortable about themselves just because they’ve given a hobo a slice of bread or a spoonful of cough syrup. That doesn’t outweigh the damage these rich folks have done—are doing, every day.”

She extended a hand. I took it, and the light of the moon was inside me, running all through me

board-sided mercantiles with their painted signs fading away to a whisper.

A black density of stone rose up to one side—the flank of the Rockies—and over that bastion a cascade of light spilled like a waterfall. It was the Milky Way, the stars in all their bright infinity. It was a road I swore I could follow from my heart to the fullness of Heaven.

Like the name of God, it was a truth too perfect for my tongue to shape, too enigmatic for my heart to understand.

the lazy summer would go on forever and so would we, in our quiet campsites with only the crackle of firewood and the coo of the brown doves, and Louisa’s laugh, or her voice when she sang, as she sometimes did, out of nowhere, purely because her heart longed for music.

To drive back her grief or reason it away was as far beyond my strength as to halt the stars in their courses and send them spinning in the opposite direction.

It’s love that reminds us who we really are. It’s love that holds the world together, even when everything tries its best to fall apart.”

love is a thing that’s given, not taken. If the love is real, then giving is enough.

The final manuscript came in at one hundred thousand words long, but I wrote at least two hundred fifty thousand words trying to fine-tune the concept and the characters, trying to get Del and Louisa just right.