An Inheritance

Chapter 8

After giving Abigail her snacks, Lauren avoided the desk which she had left only partially examined.  She looked at the neat bookshelves and complimented herself on having at least finished one task, even though she had forgotten to buy the magazine storage units after visiting with the pastor.  There were still the boxes of papers and magazines in front of the bookshelves, but Lauren just wasn’t in the mood to go through them either.

But the smaller bedroom had all of those storage boxes lining the floor, Lauren felt maybe those could be easily gone through.  She needed to find something to make her feel as though she was making a dent in what she had come down here to do.

When standing in the bedroom, the boxes looked more formidable than Lauren had previously thought.  Aside from that one time while looking for Abigail, she had not really looked around this room, or stopped to pay attention to how many boxes were really there.  Although there were a few large wooden crates, the majority were either long plastic boxes or heavy corrugated dressers consisting of at least three drawers each. 

Lauren almost turned around to go back to the desk, but then stopped herself.  I have to start in on these; they won’t go away by themselves.      

The wooden crates were over in the corner, so Lauren picked her way carefully through and around the other boxes.  The first two crates held toys that looked as though they were a mixture from her mother’s time all the way back through to the late 1700s.  Lauren pulled out a variety of dolls, from simple rag dolls with painted faces, to a few delicate porcelain-headed dolls with elaborate dresses.  There were carved wooden hand guns, tin trains and spinning tops.  Stuffed and wooden animals, blocks and games like the ball-and-cup were layered through the crates.  Many of the toys were hand-made and all, except for the few porcelain dolls, must have been dearly loved as they showed the signs of being heavily used.  These were probably used from one child to the next, and possibly even one generation to the next Lauren thought as she placed them back into the crates.

The last crate was made of cedar like the others, but was larger and very heavy.  So heavy that Lauren couldn’t pull it over to the cot where she had been sitting like she had for the others.  So, she just unlatched the top where the box sat and pulled away the blanket used as a covering.  Lying inside on top were schoolhouse and student supplies which included: charcoal and chalk, a small slate and rag, a teacher’s guide, lesson sheets with the ABCs and Lord’s Prayer printed on them, along with homemade wooden rulers.

Underneath the supplies were student primers and children’s reading books; the reason why the box was so heavy.  There must have been a hundred of those small books.  Opening up a few, Lauren saw that the first unprinted page contained the shaky childish signatures of each child who had called them their own.  In many cases, the entire page had been autographed presumably by each child in the family in succession.  There were first readers, second readers, adventure books and fairy tales. 

As she browsed through several, Lauren was struck by two things.  First was that the children in the stories contained in the books were so terribly unlike what these children must have been.  The pictures showed boys in short pants and starched white sailor shirts and the girls in pretty little dresses with bows in their hair.  Life for these fictional characters was no where near the reality of the early Labeaux children.  She wondered what they must have thought while reading these books.  Were they envious?  Or were these the beginning of showing some of her kin there was a life outside of the bayou? 

The second thing that struck Lauren was the number of books these children had available to them.  Granted, by the copyright dates, these books spanned almost two centuries, but education and reading must have always been high on the scale of important things in the Labeaux family.  It must have hurt her grandmother to have her daughters leave even before they had finished high school, although both her mother and aunt continued on and eventually received college diplomas.