Letter #5
Birth of a Nation NEW
YEAR’S EVE, 1940
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Dear Heavenly Father,
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I never really thought about it, not until tonight when I felt Mother shiver in spite of herself as we heard the sharp,
clear retort of gunfire a few seconds after the church bells tolled in the death of one decade and the birth of another.
I don’t know why Father, but for the first time in my life I wanted to seize hold of them used-up days and clutch
them to my chest!
At the very least I know the best and the worst they have to offer. Now ain’t that just like a silly ole man
what sees his children growing up too fast to hold unto? And I, who couldn’t wait to grow up when I was a young’n.
Never guessing the glory that was waiting for me in their proper time.
Thank You for being so patient with me! And for all the good that is yet to come.
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Yours forever,
The Webbs
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Letter #6
A Song of Peace
February 10, 1940
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Dear Heavenly Father,
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There ain’t been much on the radio about war news since last May, and that ‘SITZKRIEG’ on that Western
Front continues a kind’a war where no one gets hurt, but I am troubled.
It ain’t
often I say that.
Usually it’s enough to come out here and stand under this here tree what Mother’s grandpa planted on his
first trip West. The tree stands tall over our heads, but unseen and largely unsuspected is the tap root deep in the earth,
in silent support of the branches and the changing leaves it won’t never see.
When
I feel Your breeze moving soft through the green corn stalks like the touch of an angel’s wing, or I catch the tune
of the nameless little hum what Mother gives as she tends to some easy task, or I look at our four sons and fine daughter,
the fear departs. A song of peace wings into my heart like one of Your little sparrows.
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THANK YOU!
Amos
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Letter #7
Children’s Toys
February 21, 1940
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Dear Heavenly Father,
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I wanted to take a moment and share with You how much we all needed and made use of that there rain You sent our way.
Not just the crops, which needed it badly for a fact, but for the moments it gave us to break the habit or irritability that
arose out of fear when you wake and see the sky in the morning ain’t fixing to do you no good.
Why it rained so hard for a fact that we had to roll up newspapers and shove them under the porch door just to keep
the cold out!
James and Tom, they spent the day downtown. Mother kept Penny Acres busy in the kitchen making “Gingerbread Men”
from hand rolled dough, but Richard and Sandy, them youngest boys, they was more than I knew what to do with till Maude Amy
she suggested we go up to the attic to “check for leaks”.
Well, we walked around for a while, till the boys got used to hearing the sound of their own footsteps hollow like,
then we got them Stereoscopic slides where the pictures of the same thing are put a short distance apart on a card and when
you hold it up close to your eyes, you can see the pictures in them real good!
The
boys is so different, for a fact! Where James and Tom used to play up here on their own, Richard and sandy
would rather sit on that stiff, horsehair couch we was finally able to remove from the front room with Aunt Clara’s
demise, then to listen to them stories I heard Father Washburn tell so often they had become real.
The past is very real to them. Like six year old Sandy asking me if Father Washburn knew Father Abraham? Only he meant
it face-to-face.
There is no greater satisfaction in all my life than to see the seed we planted grow straight and tall in Your sight,
or for me to see our Babies grow, straight and tall,In Your sight.
By the time we looked
up the rain had been over for hours. Sadie was mooing her distress and the hens they was all busy cackling their displeasure.
The calf in the stall was bawling loudly too. Our precious time together was over for today.
But the memory of it will live for as long as I do!
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Sincerely,
Your Son too,
Amos Webb
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Letter #8
The Death of Innocence
March 11, 1940
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Dear Heavenly Father,
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How I worried. I wished them two gone, from selfishness. Now Abe Fielder, he come to no good end. He
died last week from wounds inflicted in a drunken brawl disputing
the ‘price’ he was to receive from ‘selling’ Jesse’s hard work to the highest bidder.
An unclean end to an unjust life.
Willis Sannyonson, though not a born member of this here valley, he took in the boy Jessie when no one else would,
saying that the boy he wasn’t bad just mistaught and misused all of his short life. We was fixing up a place for him
in the shed what Father Washburn had fixed up snug and pretty while he was still young enough to wrap whole fingers around
common tools to make things that were uncommonly pretty. But then out of the dust comes Willis and Pauline with their little
niece Diane, what’s their Ward for life.
“ We have no son at our house” they say with a smile, “ but
Amos and Maude Amy already got four. It don’t seem right neighborly not to share the wealth in men folk” they
say in their fancy words. And the boy he up and goes like he’s glad to be there!But as soon as the moon was full Jesse, he run away and our Tom, to his shame, he got drunk and went with
him! Taking two, pure bred collie puppies and the twenty dollars what Mother saved up to buy that cloth coat with. And Tom,
he knows how much that egg money means to his Ma and how hard and long she had to work to save it, but that demon Rum, it
clouded his mind and filled his heart with hate.
We was going to trim it with the pelt of one of our own red foxes from the north side of the mountain. And I cain’t
find it in my heart to forgive him! Jesse, he stole them two prime pups to sell, not for a companion. Willis could ’a
forgiven him for that, and I’d say I could have too, had that been the facts.
Jesse drowned.
Trying to force them two young dogs to cross a raging stream. Tom, he was drunk too, but scared sober enough to jump
into the water to try and save the boy and the dogs’ lives. The one pup made it, and he got the second
one wedged onto the mud-bank, with Jesse right behind him, holding
unto his shirt tail and being pulled to safety, but the current were strong and the cloth ripped plumb away in his hand.
Tom, he was in a jail
cell when Willis Sannyonson, he took Mother and me all the way to the County Seat in Bender’s Junction. Them dogs was
pitiful glad to see the Master what loved them. They barked and jumped up and down and tried to lick the features right off
’n his face when it drew near to them. Hugged them, he did. To try and hide his tears of joy.
But Tom. Oh Father! It near to broke my heart when Tom hung his head all the lower at the sound
of the voice of the one who loves him. Mother, she just gathered them into her arms and forgave him his every wrong.
Willis, he could hardly speak, for a fact. So he took Tom’s hand and looked him in the eye. He said in words
of his own as how them two dogs was like children to his wife and him and as how he could never repay Tom for his risking
his divine life for such as these that were so dear to him as he was to his mother and me. I never realized the good of forgiving,
father. I did it because it was the expected thing to do, no matter the small steps of anger I hid in my
heart and called “hurt”. Then I saw the face of the man my second son had become and I saw that I had lost him.
Father! Can I ask
YOUR forgiveness when I can find none of my own?
Your
deeply troubled son,
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A.J. Webb
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