Here and Again Read Free

shoulders in condolence.
    After finishing his snack, Mr. Mitchell returned to his tractor and backed down the gravel drive. Only when he reached the asphalt road would Ginger release her children and they’d bolt back inside, strip off their coats, and land in a pile in front of the TV. At that point, right on cue, Oliver would whine that there were no more cookies, as John Mitchell had taken every last one. They truly were the old farmer’s favorites. But Oliver didn’t care nor did he realize that his bottom was dry when he boarded the bus because of the grace of Mr. Mitchell. His only concern was the lack of cookies.
    That was what it was to live in this little hairpin curve of the Shenandoah River. Together, five farm families watched out for one another and the littlest ones were kept oblivious to cold and worry when possible. As Jesse and Ginger Martin’s children were the only kids left on the road—all others having grown and moved away—it was mostly the other farmers who looked out for their brood. Henry, Bea, and Oliver were known in the area as the “Little Smoots,” Henry and Osbee’s great-grandchildren. When the Martin family moved to the Smoots’ farm, every farmer became their other grandfather and their wives other grandmothers. These were Jesse’s children and Jesse had pretty much grown up on his grandparents’ farm himself.
    Jesse’s nature was not that of his father’s people, the Martins from Richmond. His blood ran with the Shenandoah and with his mother’s family, the Smoots. His mother and father raised their children in Richmond. During the summer, his brother and sister were sent away from the city to camps. Jesse asked to spend his vacation with his grandparents, and so he did. He farmed and fished, milked cows and planted flower beds. He crossed the river in a boat and climbed the hill beyond into the state park that was his playground. The winding water, which was a bubbling rapid to the south, looped around in a U-bend, becoming a smooth, glassy flow to the north. It was his playmate. It was his friend on lonely days. It was family.
    So when Grandpa Henry passed on five years earlier, Jesse had to step in. There was great pressure put upon Grandma Osbee by her daughter, Ester, to sell the Smoots’ forty-two acres of Shenandoah land. Osbee was too old to continue to farm it alone and the best option, according to Ester, was to sell the farm, put the money into a trust, and move Osbee closer to Richmond.
    But Osbee didn’t want to sell and leave her land. That woulddishonor everyone who had held it since 1799. Though she was lonely and hurting, her weathered root was yet strong, deeply grounded in the land of her family. She knew who would always keep her on the land. She knew who would fight Ester, his own mother, taking his grandmother’s side in all things. Thus the call came to Jesse and he answered it as he answered all calls to duty. Though stationed with the 16th Military Police Brigade in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when not deployed, he sent Ginger and the children to live on the farm, coming home himself between deployments and on all possible leaves. Jesse Day Martin was bound to the farm just like his grandmother. So when it came time to pass on the land, Osbee would bypass her own children, knowing they would sell it, and leave the farm to her grandson Jesse, who would work it.
    Ginger pulled Jesse’s work coat tighter around her body, stopping as she reached the end of her drive. The Smoots’ farm began where the road ended, the gravel drive climbing five hundred yards up a gentle-incline hill to a small white farmhouse rebuilt in 1866 after a fire had destroyed the original. To the left and north of the house sat a large, raw, unpainted barn built at the same time. It was home to Half-a-Penny (or just Penny) and Christian, two workhorses Jesse had brought home for his children to ride. Beau, their brown, tattered mutt, lived there also, along with Regard, the