Helga efficiently maintained the sheep farm, pampering her favorite ewe, Whitey, with treats of apples when she tended to the flock as a whole, purchasing a woolly sheepdog from the neighboring farm to help her in her work. The neighbors who rode by would laugh as she raged after chipmunks with a pitchfork, tearing across the pungent fields followed by the happily barking sheepdog, her cursing the rodents in every language she knew for eating her oats. Time passed quietly and gently for her in weeks of hard but fulfilling work, frequently visited by Jacob and Dixie, interruptions Helga both looked forward to and dreaded, having grown weary of Dixie's continual attempts to convert the land girl into a lady, chiding her for her farm hand pants and casually tossed together hair. Helga enjoyed seeing Jacob, however, spending lively hours with him discussing world affairs and social ideas, he finding her mind more that of a man than a woman, continually amazed at her self education and understanding of gentlemanly pursuits, confused at the dichotomy between her radiantly sensual woman's body and coolly rational manly mind.
The next year brought a crisp letter of news of Victory's second child, Sunny Day, born in the brilliant fall, although an easier delivery than her hard-headed sister, that last few months of pregnancy in the sweltering heat had sapped her energy and the labor had lasted over two days. Victory collapsed in her bed, declaring no more children, watched a spider make her way to her egg sack across the wall and shuddered at the thought of all those babies. Sunny was a gentler, compliant chubby child Victory initially found equally frustrating in that there was no fight in her to challenge her mother. But, Victory was determined to rise to any occasion, and quickly developed an efficient household around her two year old wild child and the totally docile infant.
Tickled with his invention to help Victory boil the baby bottles, a contraption of clamps and brushes and soap dispensers and timers all tied into a large pan for sterilizing them, Jedd decided to start an Inventors Club, to assist inventors in their careers. He proudly displayed his first patent for the Automatic Bottle Washer, framing it in the living room, where he held meetings with an elite group of men wearing pocket protectors and peering at each other from behind thick glasses, among them men who eventually viewed the earth from the stillness of space, with the cooing Sunny deeply in love with her father and his friends, who always brought interesting toys for her to play with, completely unaware what she was teething on were O-rings from rocket assemblies and her building blocks were missile parts.
This order was soon disrupted one sultry evening when their firstborn daughter, Dinah, was taken by violent seizures, her frightened parents rushing her to the hospital to learn their little girl was epileptic. Horrified, and ignorantly fearful of contagion, Victory isolated the girl, keeping her infant sister away from her, forcing bitter medicines faithfully, hoping the disease would go away. While the powerful drugs kept most of the seizures at bay, they insidiously worked on the mind of the toddler, making her mind and body slog through its growth, mired in cold molasses as if the syrup itself was the problem and not the drugs within. Victory watched helpless as her beautiful chestnut-haired, black eyed baby reverted to crawling as her speech slid back into babble, moving in slow motion through life, interrupted by violent nights of Victory sitting on the floor, holding the wildly thrashing Dinah, waiting for the spell to pass, tears quietly seeping from the mother's sleepless and glassy eyes. Dinah's illness consumed Victory's energy and hopes, spiraling her into a period of sleepless nights, jumping at any sound remotely resembling the start of a seizure, waking irrationally in the middle of the warm, stormy southern nights to pad barefoot across the worn wood floor through the scent of rain washed pine and baby powder to check the crib and reassure herself Dinah was breathing.
Before long, Victory was seeing auras around living things, halos around lights, and hallucinating fleeting images of spirits out of the corners of her eyes, unaware she was severely sleep and dream deprived. She took this as a sign God meant for her to carry a message to the world, and started attending church on a daily basis, bundling the infant Sunny with her, leaving Dinah with her grandmother, afraid the toddler would accidentally breathe on other children and pass the disease to them. Jedd puzzled over his wife's sudden religion, but took it as a positive sign Victory was finally comfortable with his faith, pleased to see the women of the church welcome her and include her in their activities. Day after sweltering day, Victory dressed simply, always in pastels, pinned a lace-edged kerchief on her head to reflect off the sun and as soon as Mrs. Stuart arrived to watch Dinah, walk to church from there, where she slipped off her shoes and sat with her swaddled infant in her arms, listening to sermons, singing in the choir, physically present but mentally absent at chattering women's circle meetings, patiently working on quilts in a square circle of sewing ladies, mesmerized by the patterns in the cloth, always examining the harmony of color and texture, or listening for the overtones ringing from the music, or gazing, all else around her unheard and unseen, in the rafters of the old clapboard church, watching for the angels she knew she would see flying there, staring at the crucifix for when the Christ would appear in a blaze of pure light, waiting for the message she was certain she was to deliver.
She started to have waking dreams, and after one of seeing Jedd in uniform, she pressed him to reenlist for this war, over his strenuous protests, reminding her of his older age and concern for his job and daughters. Resigned to her persistence, he went to enlist and was rejected largely due to age, but the physical also revealed early cardiac problems and the fact his vision was failing miserably all together. This discovery plunged Victory into deciding Jedd had to go on a diet, to lose weight and eat greens and carrots to improve his sight, convinced the purpose of the dream was to bring his defects to light, and from that moment til the day he died, Jedd was consigned to giving up his beloved sweets and to crunch through a daily ration of what he called rabbit food.
Another vision sprung up when the Pastor was intoning the rite of Holy Communion one shimmering hot Sunday. A black-robed, white-haired minister appeared behind then descended from the altar, gliding to face her, his feet hanging motionless beneath the heavy hems of his robe. He then opened his arms palm outward, showing hands creased with coal, saying,
The final syllable uttered, the figure brought his arms up, across his chest, and his robes transformed from sound-muffling black to a singing white, after which the spirit turned scarlet, then liquid, in a slow progression starting at his feet and working up to his head, bleeding away through the floorboards of the church, leaving a taste of iron in Victory's mouth, who unwittingly had bit her lip when she automatically drank the communion wine when it passed by her while her soul was held in the aura of the vision. The words burned acid bright in Victory's mind, immediately engraved in her memory, but their meaning eluded her as they were in the banned Welsh - the language she'd only heard daily as a small child, now rarely as she visited her father, which her father forbade his children to speak or learn, wanting them to be Americans.
Gathering her baby and her tenuously clinging wits, she ran outside, mid communion, past shocked and curious southern church ladies, to the nearest phone and called her father to recite the passage to him, in hopes of a translation. She caught him at home, for Jacob always preferred the soothing peace of the earlier service in his church. Surprised, Jacob easily transformed the mystery to a message, a relief to Victory, for as soon as she spoke the words, she forgot them, unable to repeat them had Jacob not recognized them right away. Jacob dismissed it as Victory dreaming awake from lack of sleep, remembering bits and pieces of the Welsh services they used to attend when she was a tiny girl, with the passage perhaps being a subconscious wish to end the sleepless nights. It seemed plausible enough to Victory, who wrote down his reply and tucked it in her bible.
Victory felt at peace, believing this to be the message she was to receive - with patience her child's cursed disease would end - and she held her bible to her heart, returned to the church, spending the remainder of the day kneeling in prayers of thankfulness. Her new-sprung mission of feeding Jedd then began to distract Victory from her church errands, as she no longer felt the magnetic pull of the spirits there, and she fell back into a normal routine, attending the Sunday services and active still in the choir. Dinah grew back into toddling around, and on the year anniversary of her most recent seizure, her mother slept soundly for 16 hours straight. Gradually Victory returned to normal, sleeping through the night and losing the bright colors edging her world, void of memory of the dreamless years.
Sunny grew closer to her father in this period, having been set aside by Victory, an outgrown toy, in favor of the greater challenge. Jedd quietly assumed the role of raising Sunny, bringing her to his work to teach her his trade, less mindful of raising a lady as much as he was interested in raising an heir to his intelligence. It was immediately evident the green eyed, mahogany haired chubby baby was bright, and Jedd regaled in his child who more resembled him than her mother. He held her in his lap in the quiet evenings, reading science and mechanics magazines to her, using electrical diagrams to make mazes for her to solve, and using her blocks and toys to create mechanical physics projects for her education.
He helped her to grow physically as well; having read about the importance of eye-hand coordination, he laid out paths of typing paper for her to crawl on, having to put each knee and each hand on particular squares. Another exercise was dropping clothespins into an old bleach bottle; another to sort out buttons of the same color or size or type from a box of a thousand buttons he'd collected over the years. Each of these were to help her survive her future in some small way, and Sunny saw these as fun games, never questioning that they were an unusual way for her to be spending her time.
Jedd took her with him everywhere, and Sunny spent her childhood touring home shows displaying the new marvels of house building, electronics conventions where every booth had flashing lights and beeping diodes, engineering meetings fascinating her with perfect models of suspension bridges and hi-rise buildings, and strolling through museums - of science, of art, and of mankind. It didn't matter if they were just walking down a sidewalk, Jedd would pick up a leaf and tell his daughter what kind of tree it fell from, why it fell, and what made the colors change, as casually as most would discuss the weather. Teaching her was second nature to him, and it became his mission to fill her head with all that he knew - and more. But the adventure she liked best was going to work with him.
She loved the smell of the company's tool shop, rich in leather and fresh cut wood and the metallic bite of oil and steel, and once she was old enough in the future for kindergarten ran home from school to her father and his haven, stopped in the door, stretched full body and inhaled deeply, then ran to happily help out where she could, keeping imaginary drawings of new machines in a heavy, neat hand in her play books. Over time, as she learned to copy fading blueprints and was doing this with easy accuracy, Jedd turned over the basic maintenance of the real drafting records to her, reviewing them every so often and very pleased with his daughter's results. Her quick mind absorbed the job naturally, able to redraw parts schematics before she was five, then going into Elementary school with an uncommonly large vocabulary in tool names and hardware parts.
The world news weeped of the bombing of civilians in Dresden early the next year, more from its own guilt at celebrating the bombing as a turning point in the war than from the loss of life, and sang of the liberation of Paris later in the fall, hinting the great Nazi army was finally beginning to fail, starving and cut off from resupply. The Saer family read this news hopeful the war would end soon, having heard nothing from Cobb since Helga replied to his grieving letter. Their wish for their son was granted as the war drew to a close, and a thin and hungry Cobb arrived in September by taxi cab, his right leg and eye destroyed by a mine, leaning heavily on a cane. He stood, still tall and strong despite his gaunt height, in his distinguishedly decorated dress uniform, a solitary figure in the setting Autumn sun, standing on his footpath waiting for Helga to welcome him into his home, grim guilt from being the lone survivor of a skirmish floating barely visible under the surface of his eyes.
Her heart breaking at his infirmities, Helga swept out of the house, hair freely shining in the sun and smelling of the hay she'd been baleing all afternoon, to embrace him and touch him and kiss his pain away. He pulled her close, holding her tight, then hobbled with his wife back into his home, leaning on Helga's broad shoulders with his other arm, the cane dangling unneeded in his hand.