Read Long Upon the Land for Free Online Page A

harvested. Field peas, tomatoes, and okra would bear until frost, but the rest could be cut in and rows run for the fall planting.
    Robert came back to the porch with us and allowed as how a glass of tea would taste real good and did I still have some of those sugar cookies I’d baked last week?
    I did.
    I brought out the cookie jar and he took a handful. Dwight and Cal helped themselves, too.
    “I always think of Mama Sue when I eat one of these,” Robert said. “She’d wait till it was almost time for us to get home to start making them. Us boys would get off the school bus of a cold winter day and we could smell them all the way out to the road. Ain’t nothing like a warm sugar cookie and a cold glass of milk.” He munched reflectively. “Unless it’s warm chocolate cake. She said when she was a girl, their cook would make one on a Saturday morning and it’d smelled so good she couldn’t stand it, but her mama wouldn’t let it be cut till Sunday dinner. After her and Daddy got married and she came to live with us, she always sliced us off a piece of chocolate cake while it was still warm. These days I heat mine up before I put on my ice cream, but that was before microwaves.”
    Cal’s only been in our family two years so he hasn’t heard all the familiar stories, but because he’d been fascinated when Aunt Zell described how my parents met, I asked Robert to tell him about his own first meeting with Mother. It’s one of our more dramatic family legends and I never get tired of hearing it. Too bad Frank wasn’t here or I’d make him tell his Mama Sue story, too.
    “How old were you then, Robert? Nine? Ten?”
    “Something like that,” he agreed. “She saved our lives,” he told Cal. “Me and Frank’s. Won’t for her we’d’ve been long dead by now.”
    He took a swallow of his iced tea and leaned back in the chair with Cal sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. “I forget why she come out to the farm.”
    “To cut a Christmas tree,” I reminded him.
    “That’s right. It was getting on toward Christmas, ’cause her and Aunt Zell come out next day and brought us some Christmas candy. We’d had a real cold snap and Possum Creek had near ’bout froze solid, something we hadn’t never seen before…”

December 18, 1945
    O h, for heaven’s sake, Zell,” Sue says impatiently. Despite boots, wool slacks, and heavy jacket, she’s starting to shiver and her words leave little puffs of steam on the frigid air. “What’s the big deal? Go. I’ll be fine.”
    Zell looks from her sister to her fiancé. The icy wind has reddened her cheeks and ruffled the wisps of fair hair that escaped from beneath her blue scarf hat. Her pretty face is torn with indecision. “You sure?”
    With manful chivalry, Ash Smith says, “If you’ll wait till after lunch, we can all go and I’ll cut the tree for you.”
    Sue shakes her head. “I’m perfectly able to cut a Christmas tree by myself.” She glances up at the dark sky. “Besides, they’re predicting sleet this afternoon.”
    “I could maybe change our appointment,” says Ash.
    Zell gives him an anxious look. “But didn’t Mr. Clark say we have to decide this morning?”
    With one gloved hand on the door handle, Sue gives an exasperated shake of her head. “Make up your mind, Zell. It’s too cold to stand here in the middle of town arguing about it. I’m going.”
    “Well…if you’re sure you’ll be okay?”
    “Ash, will you please put my sister in your car and go buy her dream house before I turn into an icicle?”
    The big white brick house has come on the market only that morning. As soon as he finished dealing with the owners, the real estate agent immediately called Ash. Jim Clark is an old friend of the Stephenson family and over the years, he has heard Zell speak wistfully of the Hancock house. When Ash visits Clark’s office to check out possibilities for their first home, Clark says, “Too bad the Hancock heirs