Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Husband and Wife (08/08/14)
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TITLE: The Settler�s Prayer | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
08/13/14 -
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Then came Evangeline, blonde, petite and green-eyed with fiery red hair that Harvey noticed took on the hues of burnished wood in the rising moonlight. She had answered the mail-order bride ad in the Herald Express hundreds of miles away at a point when her twenty-five years were weighing heavily on her narrow shoulders. Restless and disenchanted with her normal routines of society’s darlings, the West called to her like a jilted lover.
“But, darling, if just isn’t DONE—traipsing off to who knows where to marry a STRANGER!” her mother daintily wiping her brow with a scented lacy handkerchief.
Variations of this initial conversation re-surfaced every time the couple corresponded throughout the summer months. Getting acquainted through the mail was as romantic as the heroine dime-store stories Evangeline read on the sly. As usual, her father ultimately gave in to her pleas and the engaged pair were soon to be married. It would be a long and arduous trip, so she convinced her parents to stay behind and come to visit her as Mrs. Harvey Miller in the near future.
Evangeline was shrewd enough to realize that Harvey would not be like her usual beaus, and she was right. Standing over six and a half feet tall, he had a strong muscled body that gave one an illusion of power barely contained when, in fact, his demeanor was that of an oversized teddy bear. Looking at him for the first time under sly, fluttering eyelashes, Evangeline sized him up as an easy conquest. They had only been married a month when that persona crumbled at her feet like a crooked sand castle.
“My dear, don’t imagine that my regard for you alters my firm religious convictions. You WILL accompany me to church whenever Brother Brown is in town, even if I have to hogtie and carry you over my shoulder,” an unfamiliar glint in his eyes challenging her to defy him, “you’re a pretty little minx and I love you, but I won’t be living with an infidel.”
She had sulked for two days after that first church service; but, failing to move him with a cold shoulder or tears, perhaps for the first time in her life, Evangeline had encountered someone with a stronger will than her own. The ad Harvey had placed in newspapers around the country had been meticulously worded to weed out non-believers, but apparently had left wiggle room for young women enterprising enough to only wear the garment of genteel Christianity.
It took over a year of her new husband’s gentle witness and the preacher’s expounding of the scriptures before Evangeline encountered Jesus as her personal Savior. The change in her was delightful and the spats and disagreements between the couple decreased considerably as she joined Harvey in daily study of God’s Word.
“If I had had my way, I would have run to Mother and Father a hundred times over during those first years wed to Harvey,” Evangeline admitted to Missy, a frustrated newlywed neighbor who had also come from the East, “but, of course, that being impossible, I learned to adapt to the hard manual labor and the loneliness of living so far away and the inescapable compromises between us.”
She smiled tenderly, remembering the times of hardship, the failed crops, the miscarriage, and, finally, the memory most poignant of all when she realized the full measure of the man to whom she had committed her life.
“It had taken me a long time to recover, physically and emotionally from a miscarriage and Harvey had been so solicitous and kind during that period that I hadn’t realized how much he had suffered until I found him out in the barn, his muffled sobs torn from him as he helped Ol’ Bessie deliver her stillborn calf. I watched this huge giant of a man, my husband, collapse beside that dead calf and bawl like a wounded bear as he shouted at God for taking our child before we could love and cherish him as our own. I put my arms around his neck, our tears mingling in the straw beneath us as we hugged and shared our loss, our commitment to each other stronger than our love.”
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