When my grandmother, Audrey Faye Gossett, was little, she was in a parade. It was 1936, and the CCC men were digging an 80-acre lake on part of her family’s property they deeded over to the state for a park. The days were lean, but the Gossetts were still at it. That’s the way it was in those days. My great grandmother fed the neighbors’ sons after they worked in the family lumberyard alongside her own. My great grandfather hired anyone he could and paid them with what he had. He did better than most in those days, mainly on account of his father’s cooperation with the Forest Service. When they told him how reforestation could help sustain not just the forest itself, but also his lumberyard, he listened. So, little Audrey Faye still had a few small privileges in her young life because her daddy put pine trees in the ground like his father before him.
Audrey Faye was seven years old in 1936 when the Labor Day parade first happened in Wayward Falls. The mayor, a sociable man who believed nothing could help the town get on to 1937 more than a parade, informed his citizens in early August when the dog days began, that they would put on said parade to restore the hopes and aspirations of the people whose hearts were sore after so many long years of hardship. He issued a special declaration naming the incoming first grade class the grand marshals and gave the eight children the title “Our Future and Our Hope.”
When my great granddaddy heard that title, he had to hold in his laughter on account of little Audrey Faye sitting there at the dinner table with her big brown eyes alight. Her older sisters did not hold in their laughter, and their mother scolded them as she passed the cream peas. Audrey Faye did not think there was anything funny about being Our Future and Our Hope. She scowled at Frances and Alice Ann from across the table until a bowl appeared before her face and she smiled at the sight of ham in the turnip greens.
“Miss Jones says the children are to carry something with them,” their mother said. “Something that represents the family’s economic contribution to our community.”
“What’s Audrey Faye gonna carry?” her brother Kenny asked with mischief in his eyes. “A saw? A pine board?”
“She could carry a pine cone,” her oldest brother, George, suggested. “That’d be easier than a board and safer than a saw.”
Audrey Faye frowned. She didn’t want to carry a pine cone or a board, and there wasn’t any way their father would let her carry a saw. She’d be liable to trip and cut her leg off. Marjorie and Ginny would get to carry much more interesting things anyhow since their fathers were the grocer and the town doctor. Why, Ginny might even get to wear her father’s stethoscope! It would be mortifying to have to walk beside her two best friends with a dumb old pine cone when they had a stethoscope and something pretty from the store.
Across the table, Frances was giggling, giggling so hard that her freckled cheeks were flushed. Behind her napkin, she whispered in Alice Ann’s ear, and then she took to giggling, too.
“It isn’t funny!” Audrey Faye bellowed.
“Mind your manners,” their mother said without heat.
The older two calmed their giggles, but Audrey Faye scowled at them again.
“That face ’d stop old Bully in his tracks,” their daddy said to her. “How ‘bout you put your sugar face back on?” He winked.
“Yes, sir.” Audrey Faye let her face relax, but inside she still scowled. She put a bite of turnip greens in her mouth and chewed them down.
This started Frances and Alice Ann to giggling again.
“Girls!”
Their mother’s reprimand incited more giggles.
“I can’t help it,” Alice Ann laughed. “She’s chewing her cud over there. Maybe she ought to walk one of Uncle Sam’s calves.”
George, the oldest, shook his head at his sisters, while Kenny started to laugh along with them. Audrey Faye’s cheeks flamed. She felt hot tears in her eyes.
Their daddy cleared his throat, which hushed everyone. “Audrey Faye may decide for herself what she wants to carry in the parade,” he said with measured seriousness. “As the emblematic member of our family’s Future and Hope, she enjoys the privilege of choosing for herself what she thinks best represents our family’s contribution to this town.”
Before anyone could say a word, she sat up straight and announced in the most grown up voice she could find, “Then I’m bringing Glory with me in the parade.”
“The duck!” Frances groaned. “No!” She turned to their mother. “You can’t let her take that silly duck of hers in the parade!”
George took up for his youngest sister, listing all the reasons why taking Glory in the parade was a good idea. Kenny rebutted every one of them with the same argument: “It’s a duck, George.”
Their daddy smiled at Audrey Faye and nodded, while their mother cast him a doubtful eye. Audrey Faye jumped up from her seat and scampered around the table to kiss her daddy’s face. He hugged her and kissed her forehead before sending her back to her seat.
“Edgar,” their mother said, “I don’t see how a duck has anything to do with lumber.”
“It doesn’t,” he answered.
“Please explain, then, how that little duck of hers represents our family’s economic contribution to the community.” There was a glint of amusement in her eye.
Their daddy set down his fork and knife on his plate and leaned back in his chair. He folded his arms across his chest and thought for a moment. “Audrey Faye, why did we give you a duck to raise?”
This question was easy enough to answer. They had only told her a dozen or more times. “To learn ’sponsibility.”
“Responsibility,” their mother corrected her.
“Responsibility,” Audrey Faye repeated.
“That is right,” their daddy affirmed. “Therefore, what do you do with the duck’s eggs?”
“I sell them, Daddy, to Mrs. Odom on account of Mr. Odom liking duck eggs best.”
“How much money do you earn selling Mrs. Odom duck eggs?”
“Ten cents a dozen.”
“And what do you do with that ten cents?”
“I give a penny in Sunday school and I put a penny in my bank. Mother puts the rest in for the groceries.”
“So, every dozen eggs the duck lays contributes eight cents to our grocery bill and a penny to the church. I’d say that duck of yours is mighty helpful to this family and the Lord, which makes her a help to this town.”
Their mother shook her head at their daddy.
“That’s not even three dollars a year if Glory laid every week and she don’t,” Kenny remarked. “I don’t see as how that helps much at all.”
George patted his youngest sister’s hand. “Don’t listen to Kenny, Audrey Faye,” he advised, looking at their brother from across the table. “He’s just being impertinent. Dad’s right.”
Audrey Faye smiled up at George and then down the long table at their daddy who winked at her again. “I am bringing Glory with me,” she said once more, and the matter was settled.
—
Glory was an Easter duckling, hatched on Resurrection morning and given to Audrey Faye as the first animal for her to raise on her own. From the first moment she laid eyes on that soft, downy little brown and yellow duckling, she was smitten. Before they left for Sunday worship, she had named the duckling Glory in the Morning, or Glory for short. Audrey Faye told their mother she wanted to remember for all her days that her Glory was born on Easter morning. Their mother closed her eyes at the proclamation and prayed to Jesus the duckling would live.
Audrey Faye cared for that duck of hers with all her heart. Her love for Glory ran so deep, in fact, that their mother had to outlaw waterfowl in the house, which Audrey Faye grieved for nigh on a week when a late freeze had her so nervous about Glory that she tried to sleep in the barn with the whole brood except that their daddy stopped her when he saw her toting her pillow and quilt across the side yard. Audrey Faye cried into his shoulder as he carried her back across the yard and up the stairs to her bed. He sat beside her until long after she fell asleep.
By early summer, Glory had become nearly as besotted with Audrey Faye as Audrey Faye was besotted with Glory. The two were inseparable. That duck followed that child all over the homeplace, waddling up and down the garden rows while Audrey Faye watered what the drought couldn’t. The child fed weeds to the duck, and the duck champed them down with what the girl just knew was a grateful heart to Jesus for having given her a girl who handfed her dandelions.
“Now you thank the Lord Jesus for these greens,” Audrey Faye would whisper as she held out a tuft. “You tell Him you’re grateful to have them, ‘cause it ain’t come time to rain, and they’re here only ‘cause He’s made them grow anyhow.”
And Glory would quack a string of prayers that grew the child’s faith more than Brother Jessup’s preaching.
Down at the pond, Audrey Faye watched Glory swim and dive and preen and bury her beak in her feathers that were sprouting more and more as each day passed. Had there ever been a prettier sight to see than that duck gliding across the shallow pond under the June sun? She hollered at her brothers to keep their fishing hooks away from Glory and one morning went to screeching through the side yard to find their daddy. There was a snapping turtle on the far bank, and it surely would want her Glory. For three days, George and Kenny hunted that turtle for an hour or so between their chores, but they were as serious about it as sin and kept their shotguns ready for the moment that old Beelzebub showed his unsightly head. Audrey Faye brought them well water and biscuits with her share of the jam, and when it got so bright out the second morning that it hurt to look across the water, she found their mother’s umbrella and held it up over them. All for her Glory.
When Beelzebub was finally shot dead, they paraded the fat turtle’s corpse up and down the yard in a wheelbarrow, whooping and hollering and rejoicing while Audrey Faye sang “There is power (power) power (power) wonder-working power in the blood (in the blood) of the Lamb” at the top of her lungs. She asked their mother to bake the boys a pie, and she did. They celebrated in the backyard so Glory could come. The duckling – now half grown and fully feathered – waddled around in the yard, quacking and eating dandelion greens and cracked corn like she knew it had been her life they had saved.
At the close of the celebration, Audrey Faye presented each of her brothers with medals of honor she had made them out of paper and tin foil. She pinned them to her brothers’ shirt fronts and proclaimed them her Everlasting Heroes and the Bravest Brothers to Ever Live. Then she stood up on the old tree stump in the middle of the yard with Glory in her arms and said a loud, grateful prayer to Jesus that half the county could hear.
So, when Audrey Faye Gossett announced at the dinner table that she would carry Glory in the Labor Day Parade as the family’s symbol of their economic contribution to the community, not one Gossett should have been surprised.
Glory was well over a year old when the parade came to Wayward Falls. She was a hearty duck with mottled light and dark brown feathers and a patch of lovely blue ones on either wing that Audrey Faye cherished. When Glory molted in her second summer, the child gathered up the blue feathers and kept them in her treasure box underneath her side of the bed. Glory’s feathers were just filling back out when the parade came that September.
The parade route wound up and down most every street in town. The mayor liked to have it all stretched out so there was plenty of room for every one to line up alongside each other so folks could see. When Audrey Faye’s mother learned the parade would be so long, she worried that her daughter would have trouble keeping up with Glory for such a distance. So, she contrived to make a little float for Glory to ride on. She took an old egg basket with a broken handle and made it into something to look at with some cast off ribbon and a violet sprig carefully borrowed from one of her late mother’s hats. She went into the attic and opened her trunk where she kept the artifacts of her youth and removed the box containing the roller skates she had worn nearly every weekend of her high school years. Edgar first noticed her one of those Saturday afternoons when she and Betty Carver were dancing together around the rink to Joseph C. Smith’s orchestra. The skate needed a little oil, but it would work well enough to wheel the duck through downtown.
When Audrey Faye saw the float on the worktable in the barn, she just about cried. She hopped up and down, clapping and praising her mother and then scampered off to the pond with the float for Glory to see.
The duck stared dumbly for a moment before quacking twice and waddling down to the water.
“Oh, Glory, you’ll see. You’ll fit in it right good, and then I can pull you along behind me all the way through the parade. You won’t have to walk one step of it. You’ll just ride along like the grand marshal. Everybody’ll see you and know you’re my Glory. Won’t that beat all?”
Glory preened her feathers.
The child sat down on the bank underneath the cottonwood and watched her Glory swim with the other ducks. She held Glory’s basket in her lap and felt the softness of the violets between her fingers. “Our Future and Our Hope,” she whispered across the water. “That’s what we are, Glory. Our Future and Our Hope.”
—
The morning of the parade, my grandmother shined her shoes and brushed her blonde hair until it gleamed. She put on her freshly ironed Sunday dress, and Alice Ann tied a ribbon in her hair that matched the ribbon on the duck’s float. Frances helped make sure her socks were straight and even. Once her appearance satisfied her two older sisters, they permitted her to go downstairs to Glory. George handed her the float, and Kenny complimented her dress. Their mother said a quiet prayer in her heart.
Their daddy waited for the whole lot of them on the back porch. He was there with Glory in a crate. In his hand, he held a freshly picked sunflower to pin in his youngest daughter’s hair.
The family piled into their daddy’s truck. Audrey Faye was allowed to sit in the cab between their parents while all the other children rode in the bed with the duck. They sang Gospel songs on the drive to town, and their daddy parked behind Clarke’s Grocery. Audrey Faye’s friends, Marjorie and Ginny, came out the back door. Just like Audrey Faye expected, Marjorie had her father’s stethoscope around her neck. Ginny was carrying a brand-new bottle of Coca Cola.
They said their good mornings, and Audrey Faye’s mother adjusted all three girls’ hair and collars. Her daddy reached into the bed of the truck and surprised his daughter’s friends with sunflowers to match hers. While her mother helped pin the flowers in the other girls’ hair, George told Audrey Faye he’d fetch Glory from her crate.
George gave Audrey Faye the basket and put Glory in it. The duck quacked loudly and rose up, wings flapping and beak snapping. Glory hissed, and Audrey Faye almost dropped her with a wild shriek. Her daddy swept the duck out of her hands.
Audrey Faye, cheeks burning red, followed after him, calling out, “It’ll be all right, Glory. I’m sorry I shrieked! It’ll be all right! It’s just a basket!”
Mortified, Frances and Alice Ann turned away together and retreated to the other side of the truck while their daddy set the duck down on a patch of dry grass.
“Let Glory calm down,” he advised Audrey Faye. “She’ll be fine.”
“You should’ve practiced with her,” Kenny said. “That duck won’t stay in that basket.”
George shoved Kenny. “No one asked your opinion.”
“We have to line up now,” Marjorie said when she heard their teacher call for them.
“We’ll save you a place right next to us,” Ginny promised as she and Marjorie scurried away together to the Feed and Seed.
Audrey Faye’s throat knotted up.
George tried to put Glory in the basket again. The duck nearly bit him. Their mother took the basket from him, and he put the duck back on the ground at their feet.
“It may be best for you to carry Glory.”
Audrey Faye looked up at her daddy and shook her head. “I can’t carry her so far, Daddy.”
George walked up with a pine cone from the bed of the truck. “Why don’t you carry this instead, Ree?” he gently suggested.
Her eyes burned with hot tears. “I just couldn’t, George. Not when I promised Glory.”
“A promise to a duck,” she heard Alice Ann groan, and the tears spilled over.
“I-if I don—” Audrey Faye’s voice caught, and she tried to suck in a breath between the sobs but the air kept sticking in her throat.
George picked up his littlest sister. “It’ll be all right, Ree,” he said.
“Bu-bu—we—we…” she hiccoughed. “Fu—tur—”
“And Our Hope. I know, Ree. Take a breath.”
Their mother kissed her cheek and gave her a hopeful nod.
“Maybe Glory could walk,” Kenny suggested from his seat on the tailgate. “She walks all over the homeplace. Can’t she walk twelve blocks?”
Their daddy silenced everyone. “Set her down, George. Audrey Faye is too big for holdin’.” He untied the ribbon from the basket handle and handed it to her. “Go get your Glory and go on ‘fore you miss the parade entirely.”
Audrey Faye took one deep breath and swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
Once their daddy had tied the ribbon around the duck’s chest, their mother straightened the sunflower in her hair, and off the little girl went with Glory beside her.
—
The Gossetts lined up at the corner of First Street and Avenue C where the Baptist Church stood across from First Methodist. At another time of day, it would have been a shady corner under the boughs of the pecan above them, but in the mid-morning September sun, it was sweltering. Nevertheless, that corner was the end of the parade route and a good place for the family to reunite. So, they felt the sweat drip down their spines for an hour while the parade came by.
“Why does Audrey Faye’s class have to be at the end of the parade?” Alice Ann bemoaned. “We have to stand here for this entire parade.”
“While Audrey Faye walks the entire route with a duck,” their mother replied in a tone that shut Alice Ann’s mouth.
“The mayor explained to me that placing the first graders toward the end gives us something to look forward to,” George said.
Kenny rolled his eyes. “‘Our Future and Our Hope.’”
“I sure hope our future has ice cream in it,” Frances muttered. “It’s as hot as the—”
“Frances.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said and closed her mouth.
For a town as small as Wayward Falls, the parade was long, longer than anyone expected. It turned out that the mayor had recruited clubs and organizations from the entire county to participate in hopes of drumming up business downtown for the weekend. There were clubs Edgar Gossett had never even heard of and folks he didn’t know from Adam’s housecat waving as they passed by. When the Lumber Association drove their truck stacked high with logs past, he whooped and hollered at them with so much verve that Frances jumped and Alice Ann slipped off the curb into the street. George and Kenny both guffawed, and Frances swatted them. But Alice Ann saw what would save them all: pamphlets the Association was handing out to explain member benefits.
“Oh, I’ll take one!” she announced, thrusting out her hand. “One for each of us, please!” she insisted and then passed them out to the family for fans.
“Bless you,” their mother said when she felt the cool air on her neck.
“Our Future and Our Hope ought to be along directly,” their daddy announced. “Holt Graham said the lumber truck would be just ahead of them.”
“Thank goodness,” their mother said without thinking.
Everyone laughed when she clapped her hand over her mouth.
“There they are!” George hollered, pointing at the Wayward Falls First Grade Class walking in two neat columns behind a painted banner that proclaimed them Our Future and Our Hope.
Eight red-cheeked children with sweaty hair matted to their foreheads smiled miserably and waved to the last. Among them, the Methodist preacher’s son clutched a Bible to his chest. There were Ginny and Marjorie, both proudly bearing their emblems of medicine and shop. Two farmers’ sons carried farm tools, and one little girl had a basket full of cotton. The last boy held a baseball bat for a reason no one could perceive.
And there, in the back, was Audrey Faye, trailing along behind them all with her Glory. Every few feet, the duck sat down in the middle of the street, and every time Glory sat down, Audrey Faye, with the sunflower dangling half out of her mussy hair, knelt beside her and cheered her on, telling her it was just a few more steps. Whether out of obedience or desperation no one knew, Glory stood back up and waddled a few more feet before sitting down again.
Alice Ann heard the laughter rippling down the sidewalk, and she knew. She knew they were laughing at her sister and that dumb duck.
It was in that moment when Alice Ann Gossett had her finest hour.
She stepped out in front of her family and from her hands came the loudest, most insistent applause she could muster for the oddest, most embarrassing little sister a thirteen-year-old girl could ever have.
“Look at that Glory!” she shouted above everyone around her. “That sweet little duck! She’s made it all this way! Isn’t she the beatenest thing? Audrey Faye Gossett! That’s MY SISTER! Audrey Faye and her Glory! They’re Our Future and Our Hope!” Alice Ann fairly screamed as she clapped and clapped until her palms turned red.
Frances stared at Alice Ann for a full ten seconds while she ascertained what on earth had occurred. Then she heard the laughter, too, and out from her throat bellowed the kindest, most earnest encouragement she had ever given anyone, much less Audrey Faye.
The two Bravest Brothers to Ever Live joined in the cheering, and their mother just stood there and cried she was so proud. Their daddy, though, stood quiet, his eyes fixed on his little girl’s Glory.
Finally, Audrey Faye and her duck stood before the family there under the boughs of the old pecan on the corner of First Street and Avenue C. A small crowd assembled around them to tell Miss Audrey Faye how pretty she looked, and the child modestly thanked them each in turn. She kept smiling politely despite the sweat dripping down her face and the powerful thirst making her head swim. She felt her feet more than anything else. They were blistering hot in her patent shoes after walking down the blacktop streets for an hour.
“You did us proud, Audrey Faye,” their mother stated once the crowd dispersed. “Glory did us proud, too.”
It was then when the family looked down at the duck at Audrey Faye’s feet.
Glory had fallen down dead.
Their mother gasped.
“Mercy,” George whispered as their daddy knelt down to pick up Glory.
Alice Ann covered her face with the Lumber Association pamphlet. Frances turned her eyes away toward the church. Kenny gaped at his little sister who wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.
“We’ll have a right nice funeral,” George vowed.
Audrey Faye shook her head as she reached up to take the duck into her arms. “No, George. We’ll have a right nice supper.”
Amanda Johnston 