AT the supper table at our house that night I think I had never heard Mom and Pop laugh so hard as they did. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I don’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she can come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”

“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice sorta lit up like her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read in my life.”

“What was it?” Pop said.

“Yes, what was it?” I said.

Pop and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talk to each other about things that are not funny—things they have just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they have studied for next Sunday’s Sunday School lesson.

“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old school girl’s essay on a cow,” Mom said. Even before she started reading it I wasn’t sure I was going to like it because I am kinda close to being a ten-year-old boy myself and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write on a cow.

Pop cleared his throat like he was going to read himself or else so he would be ready to laugh when the time came, and Mom started reading while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted on her highchair, she not being interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she had to drink three times a day and didn’t always want to, so a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.

Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann I was remembering that there were plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who had dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself—stuff like that. Why had she had the picture of Charlotte Ann in her lost and found billfold? I knew that the very second Mom got through reading and she and Pop got through laughing that I would ask her about the picture of Charlotte Ann.

Well, this is what Mom read, she not getting to read more than a few lines before Pop interrupted her and the two of them started laughing. Pop stopped her maybe a half-dozen times before she finished and they laughed and laughed and kept on laughing and Mom wiped her tears and held her kinda half-fat sides and Pop held his ordinary ones and I grinned and scowled. This is it:

“The cow is a mammal. It has six sides—right, left, up and below, inside and outside. At the back is a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow, hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have never realized, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell, one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.”

Well, that simply doubled up my Mom and Pop in laughter and even Charlotte Ann pounded with her spoon on her ordinary wooden food tray, which I used to pound on years and years ago—the same spoon I had probably pounded with—and she acted like she was having the time of her life.

“What’s the matter, Bill? Isn’t it funny?”

“Not very,” I said. “Anybody who is ten years old ought to know more about cows than that.”

Right away Pop was ready to defend the girl, saying, “She was probably a city girl, who didn’t have any brothers,” which also wasn’t very funny.

“Say, Mom,” I said to Mom, “have you had any new pictures taken of Charlotte Ann lately?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“You sure you haven’t had one taken of her sitting in that fancy highchair in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just wondered,”—I having made up my mind not to tell her any more.

As soon as supper was over, I started to do the dishes without being asked to, for a change, almost enjoying it on account of I was learning to enjoy doing things for Mom when she was tired. In fact, it makes me feel fine inside—almost as good as I feel when I am eating a piece of ripe watermelon—to do the dishes while she rests, on account of she is a pretty swell mom.

Pop was in the other room with Mom, talking to her while she rested—Mom actually lying down while she was doing it, she being that tired.

“The most friendly couple is camping down in the woods,” I heard Mom say. “They were here this afternoon a little while. She’s the prettiest thing I think I ever saw—kinda fancy though, and was wearing high-heeled shoes—not at all the kind an experienced camper or hiker would wear. They wanted a pail of well-water and I sold them a pound of Old Brindle’s butter, which they are going to keep cool in the spring.” Hearing Mom say that, I sidled over to the kitchen door with her apron on and with the drying towel in my hands and listened to what else she was saying. I got there too late to get all of it, but part of it was, “She’s just out of the hospital, he told me. She doesn’t look like there’s a thing in the world wrong with her, but her husband—their name is Everhard—says she is under special treatment and she has been released to him. She’s not at all dangerous, but she gets depressed at times, and sometimes right in the middle of the night she gets one of her spells.”

I heard Pop sigh and say, “Being out here in the country with plenty of fresh air and good country food with an understanding husband like that will be good for her. I wonder how long she has been that way.”

And Mom said, “He told me confidentially when she was out in the car that it started about a year ago. She’s all right when she’s all right, but these spells come on and she cries—but she never does anything desperate—only wants to go around digging holes in the ground....”

That was as much as I got to hear right then ’cause the phone rang and when Pop answered, it was Little Jim’s mom, the pianist at the Sugar Creek Church, wanting to talk to Mom about something or other.

Mom was always tickled when it was Little Jim’s mom calling ’cause Little Jim’s mom was her almost best friend and sometimes they talked and talked until one of them had to quit ’cause she smelled something burning on the stove.

Well, I, the maid of the Collins family, went back to the kitchen to slosh my hands around a little longer in the hot sudsy water. Seeing our battery radio on the utility table and wondering what program was on, I wrung the water out of my right hand and turned on the radio, dialing to a station that sometimes had on a story for boys at that time of day. I tuned in just in time to hear the deep-voiced announcer in a terribly excited hurry say something about “those red, dish-pan hands” and then he galloped on to tell all the women listeners to be sure to use a certain kind of fancy-named soap or something that would make their hands soft and pretty almost right away. The soap was also good for washing dishes.

Pop had to come through the kitchen on his way to the barn, so he stopped and listened a jiffy with me. Then he said, “You using the right kind of soap, Son?” and I answered, “I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m afraid I am getting ‘dish-pan hands.’ Look at ’em!” I held my hands out for him to look at and he said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “Looks like you got dish-pan hair too.” Then he turned the radio down a little saying, “Your mother is resting so keep it low.”

“She’s talking on the phone,” I said.

“It’s the same thing. You will find out she will be all full of pep when she gets through,”—which I knew might be the truth because Mom nearly always felt fine when she finished listening and talking to Little Jim’s mom, who was always cheerful on the telephone.

“She smiles with her voice,” Mom always says about Little Jim’s mom.

Pop went on out to the barn with the milk pail to see if the warble flies had tormented Old Brindle so much that day that she didn’t have time to manufacture as much milk as usual and I went on back to my kinda half-cold dishwater.

I was just finishing washing the last dish and was getting ready to start wiping them when Mom finished talking and listening to Little Jim’s mom. But say, when she came in she was still tired. She kinda sighed as she lifted the steaming tea-kettle and poured water over the dishes so she could dry them easier.

All of a sudden I got a half-sad, half-glad feeling in my heart, so I said to her, “You go on back in the other room and rest some more. I’m getting along swell.” I suppose I was glad because for a change I actually wanted to help her and maybe I was sad on account of Mom’s sighs nearly always make me feel that way for some reason.

She sighed again and started in helping me. I decided to let her because I didn’t want to discourage her from helping a tired-out son with his work.

She was so quiet for about three minutes, while all we could hear was the lazy ticking of the old clock on the mantle and the sound of the plates and cups and saucers and silverware. Pretty soon Mom said, still sadly, “I feel so sorry for her. Poor thing. If only she could believe and trust in God!”

I heard myself sigh the same kind of sigh Mom had sighed and felt sorry for the woman myself—knowing whom Mom meant. Then I guess Mom had decided that I ought to know more about Mrs. Everhard—I already knowing a lot. First, though, she told me some things I never knew about the Collins family itself, still using a kind of sad voice and saying, “I want you to know before you get any older. It will help you to understand your mother and father better, and all other people who have had to bury a little baby.”

“What?” I thought, without saying a word. Mom’s voice sounded different than I had ever heard it as she went on. “Just two years before you were born, Bill, your father and I had to give back to God a very beautiful, little three-week-old, baby girl. She was so very lovely and sweet and it broke our hearts, but we have tried to thank Him that He let us have her to love even for such a little while—” Mom stopped and again all we could hear was the lonely clock that was ticking so sadly it seemed like it must have felt sorry for Mom too.

Mom, still being very serious, went on, saying, “Then God gave us you to take her place and you have been a great joy to us—” and again she stopped.

I knew that if all her thoughts had come out in words, she could have added, “and also a lot of trouble,” but Mom didn’t and I liked her even better, taking a sidewise glance up at her out of the corner of my eye.

I guess maybe I had seen my mother’s face a million times—and while it’s nearly always the same, I have never gotten tired of looking at it. She always looks just like my Mom even when she’s all tired out or sad and hasn’t had time to powder her nose from the hard work she is doing in the kitchen or out in the garden or orchard or somewhere.

“She’s a pretty wonderful mom,” I thought and swallowed something in my throat which stopped a couple of tears from getting into my eyes. Then I began working a little harder and faster on the dishes, which I had decided to help dry.

A little later Mom told me something else about the strange woman and her husband, who were camping down in the Sugar Creek woods—something Little Jim’s mom had just told her over the phone and it was that something had happened to the woman’s mind, which the doctors called by some kind of fancy name, which meant she was mentally ill and maybe would be for a while until she had time to get well again.

“Thousands of people get well from being mentally ill,” Mom explained, “just like children do from such things as chicken pox and whooping cough. Sometimes though they have to have a very special treatment in a special hospital.”

“I can understand how she feels,” Mom went on, “because for a long time after we had buried Little Nancy it seemed like she couldn’t possibly be dead. She had to be alive, I kept thinking, and I kept imagining I could hear her crying in the other room—”

“In there where Charlotte Ann is now?” I asked.

Mom didn’t answer for a minute. She only nodded and sighed again. Then she said, “I never actually heard her voice, of course.

“And that,” Mom finished, “is what is wrong with the dear little mother who is camping down there in the woods. You boys be very careful to be very kind and—”

“Is she an honest-to-goodness crazy woman?” I asked and shouldn’t have, not knowing I wasn’t supposed to say it, and Mom replied, “Thoughtful people never say that any more about a person who is ill in the way Mrs. Everhard is. They always say that they are not well emotionally. We try to understand them and to find out what made them that way, and sometimes when they themselves come to understand what caused their illness they begin to get well right away—in fact, some of them get well almost at once. Doctors try to give them something to hope for. It was only the grace of God and my believing in Him that spared me from going to pieces, myself,” Mom said. “He gave your father and me strength to stand the loss of your baby sister, Nancy.” Say, when Mom said, “your sister,” I did get a lump in my throat because I was thinking what if it had been Charlotte Ann who had died.

“You boys must not act surprised when you find those little, freshly-dug holes here and there in the woods or along the creek because when she gets one of her sad spells she imagines her baby is still alive, even though it was buried, and she starts digging a hole in the woods or along the creek, looking for it. She thinks it was buried alive when she feels like that. She will dig a while and then stop to listen to see if she can hear it crying.”

When Mom said that I was remembering that we had seen her do that very thing in the old cemetery last night.

“Couldn’t the doctors make her well?” I asked Mom, and she said, “Not with just medicine alone. One thing the doctor has prescribed for her is that she attend some church regularly—a church where the minister believes and preaches the Bible and what it teaches about Heaven and the wonderful place it is, and how people can meet their loved ones there, alive and well—all through trusting in the Saviour. The doctor thinks that if Mrs. Everhard can learn to trust in God and to believe that she will see her baby again, she will be cured.”