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  Harmony

  Return to Harmony

  Copyright © 1996

  Janette Oke and Davis Bunn

  Cover design by Jennifer Parker

  Cover photography by Buck Holzemer, Minneapolis

  Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, MN 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oke, Janette, 1935–

  Return to Harmony / Janette Oke [and] Davis Bunn.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-55661-878-9 (pbk.)

  1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Bunn, T. Davis, 1952– . II. Title.

  PR9199.3.O38R45 2010

  813'. 54—dc22

  2010016354

  * * *

  FOR JEAN

  With thankfulness to God

  for the many shared dreams

  laughter, tears, and treasures.

  All that a sister was meant to be—

  mentor, supporter, encourager,

  and special friend.

  JANETTE OKE has more than thirty million copies of her books in print. She has also won both the Gold Medallion Award and the Christy Award for fiction. Janette and her husband, Edward, live in Alberta, Canada.

  DAVIS BUNN, the author of twenty bestsellers, has received numerous accolades, including three Christy Awards. He and his wife, Isabella, make their home near Oxford, England. Davis serves as Writer In Residence at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University.

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  Books by Janette Oke and Davis Bunn

  Books by Janette Oke

  ONE

  JODIE RACED DOWN the dusty street, her calico skirt gathered in one hand, the other trailing a piece of colored bunting. The broad ribbon streaming out behind her was a remnant of the parade marking President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection campaign. Her leather lace-up shoes still felt clumsy and awkward after almost a month of discomfort. She had received them for her thirteenth birthday, and it was a present which still rankled. Her mother had declared it was time for a proper young lady to have proper shoes, to quit all this running around barefoot, that she had given in to Jodie’s pleadings quite long enough. Good anklehigh lace-ups tied nice and firm were the answer, and it had not mattered how much Jodie complained. And she had complained quite a bit.

  Jodie slowed her skipping at the sight of a vaguely familiar form. The smaller girl crouched on the bottom step of a porch, head bowed down on her knees, her shoulders bent and shaking.

  The streamer settled unheeded into the dust of the sidewalk as Jodie approached the small figure. “What’s the matter?”

  The young girl was sobbing so hard it took her a few minutes to get the words out. “I… found me a… a puppy,” she finally managed between hiccoughs.

  Jodie hesitated a moment. Bethan Keane was as much a stranger as anyone near her own age could be in the town of Harmony. She was a quiet, shy little thing with a riot of copper curls around a small, pale face. She scarcely had the nerve to say she was there when the teacher called out her name. She was an easy target for teasing from the other kids, because she was so small and so quiet, and because of her eye. Bethan had a lazy eye, was what Jodie’s father had explained. Her father, who ran the town apothecary, knew all about things like that. How could an eye be lazy? Jodie wanted to know. But her father did not answer. He seldom had time for most of Jodie’s questions. Jodie had heard him tell a customer that if he answered even half of Jodie’s questions he would not have time for anything else. Now, as Jodie stood and looked down at Bethan’s sniffling little form, she saw how the left eye swam out to one side, just as though it really was lazy.

  Jodie squatted down on the stoop beside Bethan. “Why does finding a puppy make you cry? Most kids would be—” she searched for the appropriate word, groping for one she had just heard her mother use, “eg-static.”

  That opened the faucets up wide. “My momma won’t let me keep it. Not even for one night.”

  So it was settled indeed, then. Bethan’s momma, Moira Keane, was known as a woman of her word. Jodie’s mother said that Moira’s severe exterior hid a heart of solid gold. Maybe so, her father had replied, but that exterior was about as yielding as the pit of a Georgia peach.

  Jodie inspected the puppy, reaching out to touch the sides that shivered with excitement, or nervousness, and declared, “Sure is a scrawny little runt.”

  “He’s hungry. I fed him some milk and meat scraps and a piece of bread, and he’s still hungry.”

  One small hand stroked the puppy’s back. The bones of its spine jutted up through the soft fur, and every rib was clearly visible. “I think maybe he was ’bandoned.”

  “Abandoned,” Jodie corrected, and examined the puppy with the experienced eye of a country girl with the added benefit of a father knowledgeable about medicine. The trembling little beast was a mongrel, probably part hound and certainly the runt of the litter. But the eyes were clear, and the dog looked intelligent and eager despite being so weak from hunger. “Can’t be more than a few months old,” she observed.

  Bethan nodded and sniffed and wiped her eyes. Jodie noted that a pink ribbon from one of the girl’s braids was tied around the puppy’s neck. Every once in a while the puppy would sit down and work at it with one paw, but then would lose interest and return to staring at Bethan with adoring eyes. “Momma says I’ve got to let it go. But if I do, who will feed it?” she mourned.

  Jodie gazed at Bethan, whose hand kept brushing at the puppy with such love and whose chin still trembled with her sorrow. Jodie felt herself touched in a way she couldn’t explain at the girl’s reluctance to put the small pup back out on his own with no one to tend to his needs—abandoned once more.

  A shadow fell over them. “Hey, what’cha got?” Jodie looked up to find Kirsten Sloane staring at the puppy. Kirsten’s father ran the local butcher’s shop, and her mother was the sternest teacher in their school. She was the tallest girl in the class, bigger even than many of the boys, and somewhat of a snob and a tyrant. She took one look that swept in Jodie, Bethan, and the small puppy all in a glance, sneered at them, then turned to call back down the street, “Come look! The runt’s found herself a runt!”

  Bethan’s chin quivered, but she kept her voice steady as she said, “Leave my puppy alone.”

  Kirsten seemed to enjoy tormenting those smaller and weaker, and Bethan was often her favorite victim. Her eyes glinted as she reached for the little dog. “I can touch him if I want.”

  Without thinking, Jodie coiled her
self up and sprang at Kirsten. The larger girl was caught completely off guard and went sprawling in the dust. For one moment Jodie felt triumph, then surprise. She had not expected her effort to bring such immediate results. But the satisfaction soon turned to concern when she glimpsed an adult shape coming their way. She put on a contrite expression and reached down to Kirsten. “I’m sorry. Here—let me help you. I… I stumbled.”

  Kirsten slapped the hand away and scrambled to her feet, fists clenched at her sides. “You did it on purpose! I’m gonna—”

  “Here, here, what’s this?” Miss Charles, the new teacher at their school, was upon them in an instant. “Now just a minute, Kirsten.

  Didn’t you hear Jodie tell you it was an accident?”

  Jodie stepped back and breathed a sigh of relief. For reasons she could not quite understand, Miss Charles had taken an instant liking to her. The knowledge made her feel safe enough to say, in a slightly smug tone, “I don’t know what happened—I must have slipped.”

  “Did not,” Kirsten hissed between her teeth. The look she turned on Jodie said clearly that she knew what had happened and was in no mind to let it pass without retribution, even though she felt unable to do anything about it at the moment.

  “If I catch the slightest wind of anything more between you two,” the teacher said, reading the situation correctly, “I will take it up personally with your mothers. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  Kirsten subsided to an angry scowl and Jodie lowered her eyes in submission and nodded slowly.

  “I asked you a question,” Miss Charles said, turning to Kirsten and using her warning voice.

  Kirsten gave a single nod, then turned and fled, shouting over her shoulder as she ran, “All right for you, Jodie Harland!”

  Jodie turned back to Miss Charles and gave her a proper curtsey, something she ordinarily would have done only after pleadings from her mother. Or maybe a nickel from her dad. “Thank you, Miss Charles. I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”

  “Not at all, Jodie. I do hope this is the end of it.” She smiled at them both, turned her gaze on the swiftly vanishing Kirsten, then back to the two before her. “You girls have a nice afternoon, now.”

  When the teacher had strolled on, Bethan turned to Jodie with eyes wide in surprise. “You did that for me?”

  Jodie was a little surprised herself. “I couldn’t let Kirsten pick on you like that.”

  “Thank you,” Bethan said, her voice little more than a whisper. Before Jodie could respond, she turned solemn and said, “But you fibbed to the teacher.”

  “Not really.” Jodie thought it over, then decided, “Not a lot, anyway.”

  “But you did. I heard you with my own ears.” There was no real condemnation in her voice. Only quiet certainty. “If we’re gonna be friends, you have to promise never to do that again. It’s not right—it’s one of the Comman’ments.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Jodie said, using one of her father’s favorite expressions. She sank down beside the smaller girl, too astonished to stand any longer. “You really mean it, don’t you?”

  “ ’Course I do,” Bethan said. “That is, if you want to be my friend. Seems like we’ve already made a good start. Friends help each other. That’s what you just did for me.”

  “I don’t have many friends,” Jodie confessed, taking up Bethan’s train of thought.

  “You’re lucky,” Bethan replied in her quiet and solemn way. “I don’t have any at all. Except for Dylan. And he’s my brother, so I guess he doesn’t count.”

  Suddenly Jodie leapt to her feet. “What’s the matter?” Bethan asked quickly, looking around as if expecting Kirsten to descend on them again.

  Jodie was already starting down the road. “Come on—it’s almost noon,” she beckoned Bethan. “I’ve got an idea. We need to hurry, though. Momma says I have to be home in time for dinner.”

  Bethan rose to follow. “But where are we going?”

  Jodie started to run. “The puppy needs a home, doesn’t he?”

  Harmony of 1915 was a growing community, but full of traditional farming spirit. Homes were places of calm, comfort, and security. Trees were old and broad and as stately as the big central buildings around the town square. Harmony was the county seat, so the main intersection was firmly anchored by a courthouse and state building, both fashioned of gray granite. They offered a sense of grandeur and permanence to the town, dressing up the surrounding low red-brick shops in the downtown.

  No one would ever think to lock their doors in Harmony. Sitting on the front porch meant folks were home to visitors. Much was made of little things—a teething baby, a new foal from a prize horse, a birthday, an anniversary. It was a way for folks to say that they cared and belonged.

  It was warm for an early April day, and visitors from the countryside were already slipping into customary summer ways. Farm wagons pulled up under the great shade trees were filled with market produce covered by layers of fresh hay. Horses waited with the patience of hard workers, munching idly from feed bags and swiping at the year’s first crop of flies. Farming mothers spread out bright linens and began unpacking hampers, while their kids danced with the excitement of having pennies to buy Cheerwine and root beer and maybe even a licorice whip.

  Harmony stood at the center of eastern North Carolina’s farm belt. It grew faster than other regional towns, both because it lay on the main road connecting Richmond to Fayetteville and on down to Columbia, and because the train from Raleigh to the Wilmington port stopped there. Harmony was also the farthest inland a barge could travel on the nearby Yancey River. Farming families from as far away as Greenville and Selma traveled in to sell their produce, have their chests thumped and wills made, and to search for the special dry-goods not carried by general stores in villages closer to home.

  Jodie turned left behind the courthouse, scampered along a narrow dusty track, and came out in front of a long row of wooden shanties. “I sure hope he’s home.”

  Bethan walked more slowly, looking around in astonishment. “I didn’t even know these were back here,” she said in a breathless voice that spoke both of the hurried trip and the shivery awe that she felt at being in an unknown part of town.

  “I love to explore,” Jodie explained, stepping onto the third shanty’s narrow front porch and knocking on the door. “Momma’s always going on to me about it. She says I was born with a restless spirit.”

  A querulous voice called, “Who’s there?”

  “Me, Mr. Russel. And I brought a friend—two of them.” Jodie turned to where Bethan waited a safe distance away nestling the puppy and said in a low voice, “It’s okay. He used to work around the place for my daddy. But his eyesight’s gone. Momma comes back every once in a while and makes sure he’s all right.”

  “That she does, that she does. Your momma’s a pure-bred saint, little lady.” Apparently the man’s hearing was just fine, for he spoke his words from somewhere within the strange little home. The screen door squeaked open to reveal a wizened old man in stained pants, suspenders, and collarless shirt. His leathery face was crowned by a mass of white hair. He squinted down at Jodie, then grinned to reveal more gaps than teeth. “Ain’t many folks who’d take the time to see how an old soldier was doing.”

  “Mr. Russel fought in the Civil War,” Jodie announced.

  “Ain’t nobody interested in such goings-on anymore.” The man peered vaguely in Bethan’s direction. “Come on up here close so I can get a look at you, little girl. I ain’t gonna hurt nobody.”

  Bethan stirred reluctantly, but Jodie motioned her closer and spoke again. “I heard Momma tell Daddy your dog passed on.”

  He turned his attention back to Jodie. “Nigh on three weeks now,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “Sure did leave a big hole in my life. That little guy was wonderful company for an old feller.”

  He looked back toward Bethan as she took a pair of tentative steps his way. “What’s your name, gal?”

  “B
ethan, sir.” She pronouced it to rhyme with “Megan.”

  “Now ain’t that an interesting name,” he commented. “Where’d your folks come upon it?”

  The old man’s friendliness seemed to overcome Bethan’s shyness, and she spoke quickly. “It’s Welsh. Momma came from there— Wales, I mean—when she was a little girl. It’s part of Britain. My real name is Elizabeth Ann, but Momma shortened it to Bethan. That was her grandmother’s name. Daddy says she probably had the naming all planned from the beginning, and he wishes she’d have just gone and done it up front.”

  “Bethan’s momma is used to getting her own way,” Jodie explained, reciting something she had heard her daddy say.

  Bethan stared at how the old man squinted in his effort to concentrate on distinguishing the new face. “I’ve got a bad eye too,”

  Bethan said frankly. “But only when I get tired. Momma says it’s lazy, and it came from Daddy’s side of the family.”

  “Well, is that a fact? Let’s hope it don’t ever get no lazier,” he said with good humor but a tone of concern in his voice as well. He bent over. “What’s that you got there in your hands?”

  “It’s a little puppy,” Jodie said before Bethan could answer. “Bethan found him. Her momma won’t let her keep him. And he needs someone to care for him or he’ll get hungry again. And he’s lonely.”

  “That makes two of us, then, don’t it?” Work-stained hands reached over. “Mind if I hold him for a minute?”

  Bethan hesitated, then with a nod from Jodie handed the puppy over, her eyes watching carefully as the elderly man scooped him in his big brown hands and held him tenderly against his stained shirt. The little puppy instantly tried to reach up and lick the wizened face. The gap-tooth grin reappeared. “Well, ain’t he a friendly little feller. Feels like all skin and bones, though.”

  “He needs a good feeding,” Jodie agreed.

  “And lots of love,” Bethan added, her voice carrying a hint of bittersweet.