WE GATHER TOGETHER by Edward L. Woodyard

We Gather Together Chapter Fifteen

Julia McCulloch propped Annie and Jack's place cards against the picture frame to dry. She then did the place cards for her four grandchildren, in birth order: Jason Drexler, Courtney McCulloch, Kelly Drexler, and Lindsay McCulloch. Lindsay's card would be placed in front of her high chair at the table, next to Cara. She had four more cards to do.

She heard Sam outside raking leaves, the long tines of the metal rake scrapping the flagstones in the front walkway. She hoped he was being cautious. He wasn't forty anymore.

While Sam was raking leaves into a pile for his grandchildren, he looked up at his house. He and Julia had had some wonderful years in that home. He would readily admit to anyone that bringing up his kids had been the greatest time in his life. He never thought he'd ever consider himself a family man, but that's exactly who he was. He couldn't help but think of his own grandfather and parents, and of his and Julia's first Thanksgiving in their new home. Jacob McCulloch Junior, or J.J. as everyone called him, was the only grandparent he remembered; the three others had died when Sam and his brother Tom were very young, within months of each other. William and Marjorie Hartman, his mother's parents, had been killed in an automobile accident in the piedmont area of South Carolina when the brakes failed on their '47 Cadillac and the car went down a steep ravine. William Hartman managed to drag his wife up onto the road, but both died in each other's arms while waiting for help. His father's mother, Harriett Armstrong McCulloch, had died of a brain tumor when his father was in college; she had been "to the manner born" and instilled those qualities into her only son, Peter, who in turn instilled them in his two sons. A Victorian Southern belle from Kentonia, Kentucky, she had been enrolled in Miss Spencer's School for Girls in New York City when she met the son of a Scottish immigrant named J.J. McCulloch who had just started a printing operation with a Mergenthaler linotype machine he had shipped on a flatboat to Castlebury, New York from Baltimore, Maryland.

Sam's father, Peter McCulloch, had been a tough taskmaster at times. As Sam confessed one time to Julia, "I spent the first half of my life living with my father. I've spent the second half thinking about him."

Peter had a remarkable influence on Sam and Tom, just as J.J. had had on him. Despite Anne Hartman McCulloch's best attempts to intercede between her husband and their two sons, Peter McCulloch would put aside his erudite education from both his mother and his venerable alma mater, Hadley, in order to discipline his sons directly and publicly, including sometimes harshly and without subtlety. When bringing up his own four kids, Sam learned things from his father that he chose to emulate, as well as other things he chose to reject. Even so, for Sam McCulloch, his father would be the greatest man he would ever know. He doubted if his kids would say the same thing about him. He still some years ahead of him to atone for any perceived slights, so they still might. In the end, it wouldn't matter what they said or thought. He knew that he had done the best that he could, especially with Scott.

A chilly gust of wind helped along Sam's efforts with piling the leaves. He leaned against the wooden rake handle to feel the sun on his face. He thought about his wife at her desk, writing the place cards. She was an extraordinary woman. She was his. And he was hers.

Sam knew that a woman could make or break a man. Julia had made him. There was no doubt about that. The best moments in his life had been because of her. He was blessed. If he died now, he would know that he had had a good life.