A Father for Philip Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You
don’t even have a phone down there,” he’d said. It was true. David hadn’t
wanted one, saying they’d have a lot more privacy without one. If her dad
wanted to talk to them, he’d have to walk down the hill from the farmhouse.
Since she spent most of the day up there with him when David was at work,
anyway, it didn’t bother her, and she liked his insistence on maintaining their
life apart from her father as much as possible. The nights, after milking,
other farm chores and dinner, belonged just to the two of them.
    It was there in the farmhouse kitchen
that she stood as her father, with a grave face, read her the telegram that
tore Eleanor’s world apart. David’s university professor in Ecuador was “sad to
inform” her, David was missing with three others somewhere in the jungle. A
search had been under way for more than a week, but little hope could be held
for the safe return of the party. He wished her, most inexplicably, Feliz Navidad .
    At first she was inconsolable and her
father grew more and more desperate as he realized at last the depth of the
love his daughter had for the man who had wanted to take her from him. He tried
to console her by saying “the boy” would return, that it could take weeks to
travel only a short distance in the jungle, that all she had to do was have
hope.
    Weeks passed with no word, then months,
and as the time for the birth of her baby approached, George recognized the
futility, not only to her, but to himself, of his preaching hope to the
heartsick woman. He gave up trying to bolster her. She must begin to forget
now, he told her, to live again for herself, for him, and for her unborn child.
Her man was dead, and the sooner she quit moping and weeping for someone she
could not bring back, the better would be for all of them.
    Eleanor pulled her grief inside herself,
hid it away and got on with the business of becoming a mother. “You’re
recovering, I can see,” her father had said one day when he came across her
singing as she sewed clothes for her baby. “It’s for the best.”
    “I know, Dad. I don’t want to endanger
David’s child.”
    “ Your child,” he’d replied, his tone firm. “I reared you alone. You can raise yours
the same way. You’ll be a better mother now you’ve accepted David’s death.”
    What George did not know, however, was
that she had not accepted any such thing. His insistence that David was dead had
lit within her a small spark of defiance of the fates. The tiny seed of hope in
Eleanor’s heart had taken root, and grew daily into a strong healthy plant
which, in spite of all odds, refused to die.
    Over the years, it stayed with her, day
and night from every summer into each succeeding winter and grew higher every
spring when the roses on the arbor spread their tendrils longer and farther. As
her roses grew, determined hope filled her soul. The sweet-scented climbing
roses eventually covered the entire structure as the wood grew gray with age
and weather.
    Philip had been born on a gentle May
morning just as the sun rose. Dr. Grimes and a midwife, for the sake of the old
man more than the mother, who seem not to care, had agreed to deliver the child
at home, rather than in the hospital. The nurse looked down the face of the new
mother as she held her son for the first time. Tears ran down the pale cheeks
and the nurse had to mop them up, asking kindly if there were something Mrs.
Jefferson wanted. “I want to go home,” Eleanor had whispered.
    The other woman had patted her
comfortingly. “What is this, if not your home?”
    Eleanor had no choice but to agree. The
farmhouse was her home.
    It took three years and a further
trauma, but not an unexpected one this time, for Eleanor to go home to her
small house with her son. The day she laid her father to rest she packed up her
belongings and Philip’s and carried them alone to the two-bedroom house David
had built for them. She rented the farm and the house to Bill