Lillian Shipton surveyed the wind beaten garden with solemn brown eyes and muttered to herself as she shook her head. She picked up a bent vine heavy with pods and frowned at the broken stem. Another week and the pods would have been fat and round, but last night’s windstorm had torn the vines from the network of rope supports that held them off the ground and piled them into broken heaps in the dirt. I guess there’s nothing for it, these peas must be picked.
She shouted towards the barnyard. “Billy! Grab a couple of pails and bring Nell. We’re going to have to pick all these peas so I can get them canned this afternoon.”
A tall skinny boy sporting a crop of brown hair and an Alfalfa topknot, poked his head around the corner of the barn. “Nell’s over gathering eggs. I’ll help her get them inside and we’ll be right over.”
Lillian nodded and smiled at her younger brother. Bill was a good kid and a big help. He’d be along as quick as he tended to Nell and the eggs.
While she waited, Lillian’s thoughts drifted back to last night at the Lindale dance and young Ben O’Sullivan. A smile softened her face and her eyes sparkled. She’d tell Mom this afternoon, before Ben showed up at supper time, but just for a little while longer she hugged the knowledge to herself. That very special understanding that Ben was going to ask Dad for her hand. Oh, the excitement of it all! She loved Ben with a passion few, except her mom, realized the serious young girl possessed. A middle child, between three older sisters and a younger brother and sister, Lillian had assumed the role of family cook almost from the day she was able to reach the kitchen table. Neither her mom nor her elder sisters had cared much for kitchen duty – as they referred to it – and they’d happily surrendered that domain to Lillian.
* * *
Ben O’Sullivan sat on the front porch of the old log house where he’d lived with his mom and dad and two younger brothers for the entire 20 years of his life.
In his hand he held a letter he’d just picked up from the shiny aluminum mailbox that stood like a sentry at the front of the driveway leading into the O’Sullivan farm.
Well, if that ain’t a helluva thing. Ben read the message one more time just to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood. He knew full well he hadn’t but just in case.
Mr. Benjamin O’Sullivan, we have reviewed your medical records and our previous disqualification has been overturned. You are hereby ordered to report to the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec on 29 May 2001.
Back in December Ben had made up his mind that with two younger brothers fully capable of taking on his share of the farm work, it was time to set aside personal ambitions. Several of his school friends were already in Afghanistan on Canada’s latest peacekeeping mission and Ben figured it was time he stepped up to serve his country. He’d caught a ride into Edmonton with Frank Miller the following Monday and while Frank took care of business Ben took care of all the paperwork required at the recruitment office. The rejection letter, citing his less than perfect eyesight, had arrived two weeks later and had been a major blow to Ben’s ego and his morale. Eventually though, he’d made peace with the decision. That had been over a year ago, and just last night, on the 30th of April, at the dance where he’d taken Lillian Shipton to celebrate her 18th birthday, Ben had asked her to be his wife and she’d accepted.
Now what was he supposed to do?
* * *
Lillian fairly danced through the front door of the Shipton farmhouse when Ben dropped her off after the dance. Finally, after all the years of waiting, the fairy godmother’s wand had waved in her direction.
She’d met Ben O’Sullivan in first grade and from the day he grabbed onto the braids her mother had woven out of her thick brown hair, there’d never been anyone else for Lillian. Oh, it had taken several years of scrapping and competing at everything from fishing to baseball, but Ben had finally realized that his first grade nemesis was in fact the love of his life and Lillian had been waiting ever since her 16th birthday for him to finally declare himself.
Last night, on her 18th birthday, when their parents’ arguments of “you’re much too young” would at least be partially appeased by the fact that everyone expected Ben and Lillian to marry one day, Lillian’s dreams had come true when Ben popped the question.
* * *
Three weeks. She and her Ben had had three weeks together after their marriage before he shipped out to Afghanistan. Two months later an IED took his life. and Lillian never remarried. She’d never had the desire or the need, and as for children of her own, well, if she’d never physically given birth to any, she’d helped raise a large family of them and besides, all her nieces and nephews were the children of her heart, because she’d known tragedy even before fate had taken Ben away from her. Maybe the steel forged in her soul by the earlier tragedy was the reason she even survived the second and the echoing sounds of the IED blasts that were all she could hear for days—no, weeks—after his death.
The third oldest of five sisters and three brothers, fate had decreed that she’d taken an even more active role in their sibling’s lives than did most big sisters in large families. When Lillian’s older brother Edward had died with his wife Alice in an auto accident leaving their three-month-old daughter Katherine, Lillian’s parents had come closer to breaking than Lillian would ever have thought it possible for humans to come and still recover. No parents should ever have to bury a child and even at seventeen, Lillian understood that as much as her own heart ached, her parents’ grief was distinctly different from hers. She’d stood outside her parents’ door and heard her mother’s sobs in the darkness of the night after the funerals.
She’d known instinctively that her parents would never truly heal; they’d simply find a way to make peace with this new reality that had so brutally torn her family in two—eventually. She could think of no way to help, other than to take as much off her mother’s shoulders as she possibly could. Katherine was barely past newborn. Irene, the family youngest, was only three. A holding baby and a toddler were more than enough for any woman to handle, especially one who’d just buried her oldest child. So it was that Lillian came to be her younger siblings’ self-appointed substitute mother. The bonds between herself and her younger brothers and sisters were tied with double knots. Family was her raison d’etre.
Still, she had no wish at all to remain at home, the old maid daughter, sister, aunt, dependent on family for the roof over her head and the clothes on her back. Ben would be ashamed of her. So when the grief of his passing dulled enough such that she could actually hear voices and follow conversations again, she took the widows’ military benefits she was entitled to as Ben’s wife and invested them in the best business education she could obtain. The concentration necessary to graduate from Wharton School of Business summa cum laude further helped reduce the echoing blasts of the IED she couldn’t stop hearing. As a professional woman, and because hearing Ben’s name stabbed her heart anew every time someone called her O’Sullivan, reminding her she was a Mrs. without her Mr., she’d kept the Shipton name, and after a successful career in the stock market—so successful she’d retired at forty—she’d spent the next seven years as a roaming family trouble-shooter. How she always knew which family member needed her and when remained a mystery to all, especially since the Shiptons were a large and far-flung clan, spread over a large geographical area. Sometimes she wasn’t sure herself, but she’d learned long ago not to argue when that inner voice told her, you’re needed. Go.