Francesca of Lost Nation Read online

  FRANCESCA

  Of Lost Nation

  A Novel

  Lucinda Sue Crosby

  Morris Publishing

  Special thanks to Editors

  Laura Dobbins and Elizabeth McAdams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Lucinda Sue Crosby

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  First printing February 2010

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact [email protected]

  Designed by Laura Dobbins

  Editors:

  Book Editor Elizabeth McAdams

  Beaumont Hardy Editing

  [email protected]

  Contributing Editor Laura Dobbins

  [email protected]

  Printed in the U.S.A. by

  Morris Publishing

  Kearney, NE 68848

  1-800-650-7888 or

  [email protected]

  www.morrispublishing.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-4507-0167-9

  Companion Song

  A song called, “Stories They Could Tell,” has been selected as a companion piece for “Francesca of Lost Nation.” The author of this book, known as Cinda in music circles, co-wrote the song with Grammy Award songwriter and Bluegrass recording artist Carl Jackson. It is performed by Christian artist Renee Martin and arranged by Jackson.

  His eyes are dimmed with age; his speech is slow

  He can’t remember half the things he used to know

  His golden years have come and gone but still he lingers on

  Alone and lonely in a world he used to own

  Not the fault of the man he outlived his useful span

  CHORUS: Oh the stories he could tell

  The comings and the goings of a long life’s ebb and swell

  And if we cared enough to ask him, he might dare to dwell

  On the stories he could tell …

  Her hair is iron gray; her hands are still

  All her pretty things are listed in her will

  Her mind at times is fooled, she thinks her son is off at school

  Confused about the family she used to rule

  Not the fault of the man he outlived his useful span

  CHORUS:

  BRIDGE: Some day we’ll be right where they are

  Watching out the window for that one familiar car

  As young’uns crawl upon a knee, the future weds the past

  For an hour of the present that flies by too damn fast

  CHORUS:

  © 1999 Lucky Cinda Music (ASCAP) and Colonel Rebel (ASCAP)

  To learn more about this concept or to purchase the song, please visit: www.LuckyCinda.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To HB who first recognized the promise of this work and to LD who helped bring it from the possible into the real.

  For and to

  Francesca and Babe

  with love and a thousand thanks

  Foreword

  M

  y name is Sarah, which is a Hebrew name and translates to the word “princess.” Of course, my German-American family was actually Presbyterian.

  As a young girl, and throughout much of my life, I had the honor and privilege of knowing and loving a most remarkable, graceful, vigorous, resilient, eccentric, stubborn and fascinating woman.

  She was never petty. She was never dull.

  This is our story.

  Chapter 1

  Morning Music

  I

  write of a morning in Eden … or, more precisely, in Lost Nation, Iowa in June of l947.

  A pale melon of sun peeked over a strand of rolling hills and, safe and sleepy in my bed, I could hear our red-shouldered hawk calling to its mate.

  It was another sunrise, a heavenly first-of-summer dawn of the most memorable year of my childhood. Adventure awaited me. The ancient oak down the hill beyond the weathered split-rail fence begged a climbing. I could also hear the cool depths of the fishing pond whisper my name. But first, the aroma of sweet cornbread, just done, tickled my nose. All other plans would have to wait.

  In the glory of my nine soft years, I loved the unfolding of this new day. I could already hear my father’s off-key hum as he shaved himself. My mother, I knew, had been awake one whole hour, making magic in the kitchen on her vast black stove. She cooed to it and wooed it like a lover and in return, it always delivered up to her fine hands a golden bounty: Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing, sourdough griddle cakes and Sunday chicken dinner with au gratin potatoes. Better than a pirate’s treasure. Better than a king’s ransom.

  My room was white-washed pine. The wood floor was covered with a rug woven by my Grandmother Francesca’s graceful hands. I remember the many months she worried over it. On my eighth birthday, when she presented me with her prize, I received it with a proper reverence. No queen ever got more on coronation day, so delicate were the stitches, so fine and pearly the threads.

  I never called her anything but Francesca, for that was her name to me. Not Grandmother, not Nanny, or Gran, not even Frances … but Francesca. Especially Francesca when the giggling got to us. My grandmother was regal. She was leggy and gracious and full of life.

  Since it seemed that Francesca must be awake on this fine day, I slipped from underneath an ancient coverlet that was light as air. It had belonged to Great-Great Grandmother Mendenhall, and I loved its worn softness. I tiptoed down the hallway to Francesca’s boudoir.

  Of course, it was really just a bedroom, but Francesca’s spirit made it seem much grander. Armfuls of summer blossoms cascaded out of old wine decanters. I can still remember the faintly odd scents which filled the air: Witch hazel; rose sachet and spice oranges, all capped by the aroma of lilac powder.

  In the same way I did each morning, I tapped lightly on her door, once, twice, three times. I heard her stretch lazily, rustling under her often-washed sheets. A low voice called out softly. “Who is it?”

  And I answered, in as stately a voice as possible, “Madam, your chariot awaits!” With the tingling anticipation that I felt every morning at Francesca’s private chambers, I listened for the invitation. Heart beating, toes curled under, I finally heard the words that never failed to delight me: “Come in, Sarah. I have missed you all night long.”

  As I opened the cracked walnut door, which smelled of lemon oil, I was blinded by the sunlight that streamed in through open-weave curtains. Francesca never pulled drapes against the outside world.

  She didn’t “put any faith” in drapes. Sunlight and moonlight were made welcome to fill her boudoir however they pleased.

  “It’s going to be hot today; I can already tell,” said Francesca with a sigh.

  My grandmother thrilled to the spring rain, to the winter sleet and snowdrifts, but she disdained the humid, baking days of the Iowa summer.

  “Well, we’d better begin what we’re about while I still have a breath left in me,” she said and then sighed again.

  That’s when I kissed her, right on the top of her gray-brown head.

  “I’ll bring café au lait,” I promised, already skipping to the narrow rear stairway to the kitchen.

  My mother was standing in front of the black stove, whispering encouragement.

  “I need you to be just a little hotter now. Yeeesss … my, my, that’s perfect.”

>   Without interrupting her flow of praise, Mother pointed to a rosewood tray in the center of a long trestle table. Covered with a fine lace cloth and set with see-through porcelain cups, the tray looked like an outsider. It was a touch too exotic, a touch too elegant for a farmhouse … much like Francesca.

  The dining set was a part of the honeymoon treasure Francesca and my grandfather Cox had brought back from New York City.

  Cox and Francesca were married for many years. High school sweethearts they had been, different from one another and from everyone else in Lost Nation. They argued and danced and high-kicked their way through life like a pair of matched grays. Francesca was always the wood nymph, cool and moon-covered; Cox was the imp gambler, reckless and roguish. They lived honestly together, yet there was a separation, too, if that’s possible … each respecting above all else the right of the other to grow. Their marriage wasn’t a match made in heaven by any stretch, but it was lively and full of surprise.

  Cox died in 1943, and I’m not sure that Francesca wasn’t still mad at him for leaving. Her father had warned her forty years earlier that would happen, and it galled Francesca that Cox had eventually proved the old man right, even if it took untimely death to do it. Francesca was no fan of “untimely death.”

  Mother was at the stove, cooking, and I heard her humming the words to one of my father’s favorite tunes: “Cool Water.”

  Her voice, unlike Daddyboys’ raspy, wrong-noted instrument, was low and firm.

  She poured coffee from the spotted-metal pot into the two cups on the tray and added warm milk still smelling of hay and cow. From the tin breadbox, I snuck two crumbly squares of cornbread and topped the feast off with a crock of butter. I kissed my mother then and hugged her.

  She hugged me back in the sweet but dismissive way mothers do when their minds are occupied. That’s when it struck me that something wasn’t quite right in the house this morning. But for the life of me, I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I took up the tray — swept it up, really — and with a great flourish and a curtsy, I took the meal Mother had prepared for Francesca and carried it carefully up the back stairs. Then, with one foot in front of the other, I made my way down the center of the hallway. It was important, staying to the center. I never wanted to offend one side by showing too much attention to the other. For the same reason, I sat on all the chairs in the parlor, even the scratchy horsehair sofa, in rotation and never wore a shirt more than one day at a time.

  I set the tray on the floor by Francesca’s door and knocked again.

  “Madam, your morning sustenance.”

  “Do come in,” said Francesca as she opened the door for me, taking the heavy tray and setting it on the delicate walnut dressing table by the window.

  There were thirteen antique silver frames on that table, each one containing a photograph of members of our family. The only one not represented in the collection was Francesca’s own sister, Maude. My grandmother had a prejudice where Maude was concerned, and it didn’t do to ask about it. All you’d get for your trouble was a frosty stare. No, it didn’t do at all.

  As we nibbled and sipped, I watched Francesca finish her morning toilette. She was wonderfully long-limbed. As a girl, her legs had been judged the best in the county by the group of boys she’d grown up with. But she would have preferred to have had the beautiful face of her sister Maude and often said so. (I would have traded mine for Maude’s too, for that matter.)

  But even in her workaday outfit of any old shirt and patched cotton trousers cut off at the knees for coolness, you couldn’t get around Francesca’s lithe shape and queenly bearing. I’d seen pictures in LIFE magazine of Princess Elizabeth, the future monarch of England. But I thought Francesca was much better suited to the job, both in appearance and personality.

  I sat on the bed and watched as Francesca brushed her bobbed hair in her usual off-hand manner, despairing of the wisps that formed around her forehead in the humidity.

  Francesca had taken to wearing her wedding ring around her neck on a gold chain. She fingered it contemplatively as it caught the light from the window. She sighed and turned abruptly to face me.

  “Is there something odd going on in the house this morning?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  So she’d noticed it, too. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because Francesca was as canny as Sherlock Holmes.

  “Listen,” she said.

  We could hear my father’s scratchy baritone struggling:

  “Quand il me prend dans ses bras

  Il me parle tout bas… hmm hmm la da da di…

  La vie en rose …”

  Now that was certainly odd, since Daddyboys — that was my father’s nickname and how I referred to him — was a true-blue Country Western music fan. His all-time favorite was Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It must be a mystery,” said my grandmother, teasing me, because she knew I didn’t like to be in suspense. I always wanted to find out right away what was going on. I thought my mother had been acting occupied while cooking breakfast. Now my father was singing strange songs. It was all too puzzling.

  “Let’s talk to Daddyboys right this minute,” I said.

  Patience was a quality I possessed only in dribs and drabs. Francesca, on the other hand, was a great one for the proper thing in its proper time, and she had the patience of a stone carving.

  Christmas presents on Christmas morning, never Christmas Eve. Lunch after noon, never before, no matter how much your stomach growled. Resolutions harvested when the moment was ripe, never until. So it was with mysteries.

  But suspense in our own household was more than I could endure and I wanted to know everything now. Whining, however, would get me nowhere. My father was not to be questioned, and that was final.

  “Stop sniveling, Sarah,” Francesca warned. “He’ll tell us when he’s good and ready. I’m perfectly content with that.”

  “What if he doesn’t?” I continued to persist.

  “Then you can ask him,” was all Francesca offered as a response.

  Impasses like these were a frequent pitfall in my conversations with my grandmother. She had many of the qualities of a fairy-tale princess, not the least of which was imperiousness. I got my pig-headedness from her, make no mistake. We might easily have gone on this way for an hour without either one of us giving in. We’d done it often enough in the past.

  But, like the Indians say, “Those who fight and run away, live to fight another day.”

  So I threw my hands in the air and turned the conversation around a corner.

  “What chore shall we do first?” I asked.

  Francesca lifted her pug nose toward heaven.

  “Why, whatever you like, Sarah,” she purred, magnanimous on the field of battle, victorious.

  Chapter 2

  Summertime Chores

  H

  e was the premier mechanic in a twenty-mile radius. My father enjoyed a thriving business and he also often burned the midnight oil. Sometimes, Daddyboys would stay at the shop for fourteen hours at a stretch, keeping the town’s outlandish cross-section of cars, trucks and tractors in good running order. In the summer, when the touring season was at its height, he had more work than he could handle.

  My mother was a cook of considerable repute. I swear her pie crusts melted on contact with your tongue. In fact, Daddyboys insisted that she’d made a pact with the devil when it came to flour — “No lump would ever dare show its ugly face in her gravy,” he’d tease. Her biscuits were light as air; her canned fruits and vegetables were spiced with unusual seasonings of her own devising. She spent her days with her beloved stove, creating delicacies that sold briskly at Porter’s Emporium, Lost Nation’s sole general store.

  It was up to Francesca and me to keep the farm running while my parents worked, so most of the daily chores on our property fell to us. We fed and curried the horses, RedBird and
Miss Blossom. We also cared for the chickens and tended to the flower and vegetable gardens.

  Our apple trees were harvested by next-door neighbor Joshua Teems and his sons, Isaac and Jacob.

  Mr. Purdy, the butcher, dressed out the occasional sheep or pig I raised as a member in good standing of the 4-H Club. Butchering days were painful. I raised those animals practically from the day of their birth, and by the time they had grown to eating size, they’d become the dearest of friends.

  Whenever Daddyboys loaded the truck for a mournful trip into town, I hid out down by the pond, so as not to hear the awful squealing and bleating that echoed in my head long after the truck was out of sight.

  These woebegone episodes of mine prompted my grandmother to cluck her tongue and pronounce that I would never be a farmer’s wife. “Too much poetic soul,” she would observe, not unkindly. Prophetically, as an adult, I don’t eat anything with four legs.

  Thankfully, there would be no butchering today. Instead, Francesca and I would take a delicious detour from our chores.

  “Let’s ride RedBird and Blossom to the swimming hole,” I suggested, already skipping down the back stairs. I knew exactly what Francesca would say, which she did.

  “But of course.”

  In the kitchen, Francesca and my mother exchanged polite greetings.

  “Good morning, Rachael.”

  “Good morning.”

  Their relationship was not distant, exactly. It did, however, exist on rather strictly defined terms. They were generous to and thoughtful of one another, but I never saw them in one another’s pockets.

  My mother was practical and outspoken; my grandmother was grand and outspoken. My mother was rooted to the earth; her mother’s feet always rested on a mountain top, the better to look down upon your little world and keenly observe every single thing that happened in it. My mother was business-like to the point of briskness and rather cheerful. Francesca was … well … more like an empress in a folktale. She was cooler, deeper. By some accident of birth, they had been thrown together like clashing colors in a crazy quilt.

  “Wherever did that come from?” Francesca said, pointing to a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower that sat rather haughtily on top of the ice box.