Jenny Creighton Character Analysis

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

“I’m so scared, Jeth. Seems I hadn’t known what war was till Danny Lawrence come bringin’ us this awful word of Tom.” She closed the Bible and crossed her forearms on its faded cover. “I used to dream about the nice home Shad and me would have and how I’d keep it bright and pretty, how I’d wait of an evenin’ to see him comin’ down the road toward home. Nowadays I don’t make any plans; I just don’t dare to have any dreams for fear someday a soldier will come home and tell us that he was standin’ beside Shad, the way Danny was standin’ beside Tom—”

She got up abruptly and put the Bible back on the shelf among the books Shadrach had left. Together she and Jethro walked silently out into the barnlot and got their teams ready to go back to the fields.

Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

[…] Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember […] Nancy running toward him […] He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or [John…]

Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

“I’m so scared, Jeth. Seems I hadn’t known what war was till Danny Lawrence come bringin’ us this awful word of Tom.” She closed the Bible and crossed her forearms on its faded cover. “I used to dream about the nice home Shad and me would have and how I’d keep it bright and pretty, how I’d wait of an evenin’ to see him comin’ down the road toward home. Nowadays I don’t make any plans; I just don’t dare to have any dreams for fear someday a soldier will come home and tell us that he was standin’ beside Shad, the way Danny was standin’ beside Tom—”

She got up abruptly and put the Bible back on the shelf among the books Shadrach had left. Together she and Jethro walked silently out into the barnlot and got their teams ready to go back to the fields.

Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

[…] Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember […] Nancy running toward him […] He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or [John…]

Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”