A Promise to Love Read Free Page B

to mature. If he could hang on for one more year, and if the weather cooperated, he would have a good first crop next year.
    His goal was to have enough to ship down to the markets in Detroit. If he packed the cherries well, they would survive the one-day steamboat trip just fine, and people were always hungry for fresh fruit after a Michigan winter.
    Much of the land that had been opened by the timber cutters was not rich land. It had a thinner layer of topsoil than anyone had expected. The good first crop the farmers had gotten from the virgin soil had given everyone hope, but it was misleading. He was barely eking out a living with his oats, wheat, and corn. It was only a matter of time before the land played out. It had occurred to him that if there was one thing that Michigan soil appeared to be good at, it was growing trees. He figured if Michigan could grow giant pine trees and heavy forests of hardwood, it would also grow excellent fruit trees. A mixed orchard was his goal, to be built over a period of years.
    There were already fine cherry tree orchards springing up all over the northwestern part of Michigan—progeny of the trees a Presbyterian missionary had planted back in ’52 on Old Mission Peninsula. He saw no reason why he couldn’t establish an equally lucrative cherry orchard. All it took was time and patience.
    Sometimes he wondered if Diantha’s strange behavior had been because her life was simply too hard—that it caused her to “go away” in her mind from time to time.
    â€œI wish you were still here, sweetheart,” he whispered to a wife who was no longer beside him. “Just one more year and your life would have been so much easier.”
    â€œMama can’t hear you,” Agnes pointed out.
    â€œI know. It just helps ease the pain to talk to her sometimes.”
    â€œBut it don’t make good sense—talking to someone who ain’t here,” she insisted.
    Agnes had been born with more common sense than some people achieved in a lifetime. He seldom bothered to argue with her, because it never did any good. Agnes knew what she knew.
    â€œYou’re right.”
    â€œPolly just filled her britches,” Ellie called. “Pee-eew!” From the nasal sound of Ellie’s voice, he knew she was holding her nose.
    Joshua glanced back. Polly was sitting in the corner of the wagon upon a little mound of straw, hugging her rag dolly with a guilty look on her face.
    â€œI reckon I got to go tend to her now,” Agnes said. “I wish she’d learn to go to the toilet like a normal person. I’m sick of washing diapers.”
    Agnes climbed over the seat into the back of their small farm wagon, turned her little sister onto her back, and removed the gray flannel diaper.
    â€œWe’re in luck,” Agnes announced. “It ain’t juicy.”
    After Agnes had changed the little girl’s diaper, she propped Polly up, handed her the doll, and then leaned back against the side of the wagon with her arm around her baby sister.
    â€œDid you get Mr. Bowers paid off?” Agnes called from the back of the wagon.
    â€œI did.”
    â€œTook about everything we got, didn’t it?”
    â€œMr. Bowers deserves to be paid.”
    â€œStill, it’s gonna be a lean summer unless you get another carpenter job.”
    He couldn’t argue with that. “Probably.”
    â€œYou ain’t planning on farming us out to other people like you did little Bertie, are you?”
    Farming them out? Was that what his children thought he was doing? He couldn’t care for an infant while doing his spring planting. Virgie might be angry at him, but she was wonderful with her little grandson.
    â€œNo. Of course not.”
    Not unless he was on trial tomorrow and did not know it. Millicent’s comment worried him.
    Another small altercation broke out between Ellie and Trudy. Joshua glanced back to see what the problem was