“In there where Charlotte Ann is now?” I asked.
Mom didn’t answer for a minute. She only nodded and sighed again. Then she said, “I never actually heard her voice, of course.
“And that,” Mom finished, “is what is wrong with the dear little mother who is camping down there in the woods. You boys be very careful to be very kind and—”
“Is she an honest-to-goodness crazy woman?” I asked and shouldn’t have, not knowing I wasn’t supposed to say it, and Mom replied, “Thoughtful people never say that any more about a person who is ill in the way Mrs. Everhard is. They always say that they are not well emotionally. We try to understand them and to find out what made them that way, and sometimes when they themselves come to understand what caused their illness they begin to get well right away—in fact, some of them get well almost at once. Doctors try to give them something to hope for. It was only the grace of God and my believing in Him that spared me from going to pieces, myself,” Mom said. “He gave your father and me strength to stand the loss of your baby sister, Nancy.”
Say, when Mom said, “your sister,” I did get a lump in my throat because I was thinking what if it had been Charlotte Ann who had died.
“You boys must not act surprised when you find those little, freshly-dug holes here and there in the woods or along the creek because when she gets one of her sad spells she imagines her baby is still alive, even though it was buried, and she starts digging a hole in the woods or along the creek, looking for it. She thinks it was buried alive when she feels like that. She will dig a while and then stop to listen to see if she can hear it crying.”
When Mom said that I was remembering that we had seen her do that very thing in the old cemetery last night.
“Couldn’t the doctors make her well?” I asked Mom, and she said, “Not with just medicine alone. One thing the doctor has prescribed for her is that she attend some church regularly—a church where the minister believes and preaches the Bible and what it teaches about Heaven and the wonderful place it is, and how people can meet their loved ones there, alive and well—all through trusting in the Saviour. The doctor thinks that if Mrs. Everhard can learn to trust in God and to believe that she will see her baby again, she will be cured.”