Lola

Watching from a distance she sees a drama unfolding. She recognizes the players; her brother Fred and Fancy his wife. Fancy the sister-in-law she loves. There is something unusual about the crowd that is gathering around Fred and Fancy as they they group together on the platform of the train station. Is it the expressions she sees on the faces of the crowd? Is it the absence of laughter or loud common talk? Is there a change in the air around McCorkle as unspeakable news is borne to this family on a telegraphed page? She ponders this as she watches these actors on this wooden stage performing their parts.
She sees Fancy now at the center stage. Fancy, kind, demure possessing not a trace of malice or ill will. She can see that in her hand is a small scrap of paper. Can sense that the paper is trembling as she unfolds it. Within a moment the deathly news has been delivered. And the lives of a mother and father are changed forever by reading the telegraphed words on a slip of paper. Lola, from her secluded place sees that the news is bad. She blinks away the quick tears that fall from her eyes as she sees Fancy fall to her knees on the wooden platform. She swallows the lump that arises in her throat as a sound reaches her ears. A sound of sorrow, of sadness so encompassing there can be no comfort.
  For all the years to come when Lola's mind would return to this day and its tragedy she would always wonder why she had been unable to move. Why she had been frozen in place. Unable to run to her friend throwing her arms around her comforting her. Why she had stayed hidden in safety behind the great tree. While Fancy, her friend, had wept and grieved for her young son lost in war, a son she would never see again.
Now Fred is lifting his wife to her feet. He is holding her in his arms. Her shoulders are bent. She sobs. The crowd now begins to move, as one single unit, away from the station. The awful drama is complete the stage is empty. They each make their way to share the news.
She does not know the words contained in the Telegraph ; the words that have broken her family so. She imagines the telegraph, the unusual way that words are arranged upon these forms. How that both good news and bad, uplifting and devastating tidings can be delivered on these harmless papers. She thinks for a moment about words, about their power. The Telegraph should have been sent from a happy young son "be home soon" but the cruel arrangement of words had instead been sent to this family from the war department and had spelled out death. "Your son is missing in action"
Lola does not know the details but she knows enough from watching the scene that the news is of her nephew and the news is bad. He is 19 and boyishly handsome with dark brown skin and hair so black it shines. She pictures him now as she remembers his carefree laughter.
How inhumane is war! How cruel is the thing called war to irrespectively and randomly choose to reach out and snatch the boys from the safety of the hills. Boys carefree, happy, young. Waiting before them lives to be lived. Yet without mercy this war stops their lives and they are gone and in their place emptiness.
  The crowd has gone. They've all walked away. Now a car and a truck cross the track and drive slowly down the McCorkle road. Walkers now pass by Lola, unseen, as she stays silent; obscured by the massive trunk of the old white Sycamore.
Then finally Fred's truck moves past her. She sees them there in the cab. Their profiles a study in grief; images of shattered hope. They pass. They carry their sorrow. The news they will share with the others. Their grief will be be no less though they were to share it with thousands. This Lola knows.
  She remembers still, her own sorrow. Her own loss. Those days and weeks after Van's death when grief had covered her with a weight so heavy she couldn't lift it to free her self. She couldn't move, couldn't even crawl out from beneath it. It was a cold dark blanket of sorrow. So real. So great. She remembers the friends who tried to help but she would not be comforted.
Fred has other sons, she thinks now. Me I lost the only husband I had; and not to a great cause like freedom but instead to a stone, a mill stone. (Here she remembers the day Van brought the giant round, flat stone home on the flatbed, his pride, his excitment)
Here Lola shivers at the selfishness and coldness that rises up inside her even after all these years. Then the guilt over her own selfishness and lack of sympathy. "Lord forgive me for my uncaring and selfish ways. Comfort Dear Fancy and brother. Hep me love them."
She thinks now of the war and why it had to be that even with all the other hard times - the hunger, the poverty, the loss, there also had to be war added to their difficult lives.
Would her own son too be drafted to fight in a foreign land? Is Evelyns young husband now fighting , now dying in faraway France? While she and a new baby girl awaits news?
It is too much to bear. She again sees the handsome face of her nephew and at once pictures him lying lifeless and white in a muddy, cold field in a land far from the hills of home. Now dead from a bullet fired from the weapon of a someone else's son they call the enemy. She trembles as she thinks of him now. Had he thought of home as he lay dying? Were his thoughts of warm sunlight upon his hills? Did he think of his mother and her hymns? Did he remember squirrel hunting, Beech trees and Autumn days?
She pictures his body still and lifeless and she again sees Vans dead body. Most of the time we do not see our longest night approaching nor the storm until it breaks upon us. She has learned that this is the way of life. Hard times and changes will always be there to face. And the storms must be weathered and the dark nights must be faced alone. Always hoping for the sunlight and praying for the dawn. The sun has dropped behind the hills as she steps out from behind the tree and onto the road leading home.