Julia's Hope by Leisha Kelly Page A

from upstairs. And there was a lot more to carry down. I bowed my head. “This whole place, Juli. I’m not sure I can do this.”
    “I know. But we’ll be fine.”
    I shook my head, feeling all jumbled up inside. “How do you fix a barn, Juli? The thing could fall on me, just like you said.”
    “We’ll figure something out. Maybe it’s not that essential.”
    I sat on a chair and put my elbow on the table. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I told her. “Except chopping wood. And I don’t do that well.”
    She smiled again. “Honey, I think you’re wonderful. You’ve been doing all you can. You haven’t said a sour word about what I’ve gotten us into. I know you wanted to see Dewey. And you’re being a jewel to me, really.”
    There wasn’t anything I could say to her. I didn’t deserve her praise. She was the one feeding us. She was the one who knew what she was doing.
    “Sammy, one of the wires is down on the clothesline pole outside. If you can find a way to put it up for me, I can hang things out to dry. I’ll be washing our clothes with the curtains right after breakfast.”
    Without a word, I went outside, thinking it might be like this from now on. Me at a loss until Juli gave me bearings, telling me what I should do.
    The clothesline wire hung down from one pole and stretched across the damp grass like a snake. I picked it up and pulled as hard as I could, but it wasn’t long enough to reach the far pole. Never mind that. If Juli wanted it up, it would go up. I walked back to the barn for a piece of the baling wire that littered one corner and then went to the shed to check the toolbox for some pliers. It didn’t take long to twist one piece of wire onto the other, stretch it the distance, and then tighten the thing as much as I could. We’d have wash hanging there soon enough. Just like regular folks.
    Julia came outside, saying she’d seen spearmint along the front of the house yesterday. She went back in with a handful of leaves, and we had her strange tea with the muffins that morning. Then I kept fetching water, and she heated all she could, filled the tub, and washed out the kids’ clothes first. I wondered how clean they’d turn out with no soap and no washboard, but Juli used an old potato masher, a scrub brush, and her bare hands. She did my clothes too, and hers, and then Emma’s old curtains. I was outside, hammering a board back in place on the henhouse, when she came out to drape the laundry to dry.
    “Chicken coop in pretty good shape?” she hollered.
    “This I can fix, at least.”
    “That’s good. We’ll need chickens.”
    Yes, Julia, I thought. You’re believing for them too, aren’t you? Any day now, someone’s liable to come and hand us a chicken just as easy as we’ve been handed this place. That’s what you think. That it will all just happen. Why can’t I be like you?
    She hung up the clothes while I replaced the chicken wire that had pulled loose along one wall. When Juli went back in, I turned to the garden with a hoe, thinking that the better I whacked the dirt loose, the sooner Juli could plant Rita McPiery’s seeds and have something decent to report.
    By the time I went in with my arms full of broken sticks for kindling, Juli had scrubbed every cupboard in the kitchen, top to bottom. I piled my sticks in the corner behind the stove and then got Robert’s help carrying down the rest of the kitchen boxes we’d separated last night.
    Julia and Sarah spent quite awhile putting things away in cupboards and drawers, and the room started to look like a real kitchen. But it was messy the way my kindling just lay on the floor. I went back out to the barn with a handsaw, looking for decent boards and some nails I could pull loose from somewhere. With Robert at my side, I hammered together a passable wood box.
    “You sure are good at stuff, Dad,” Robert said.
    “This isn’t much.”
    “Mom’s gonna like it.”
    I shook my head. “There’s nothing