As often as possible, Uncle Robert was invited to the Benton home on Lord's day afternoons. Sometimes the Marshalls joined them. They all loved to hear him tell stories of his life on the farm, of his family, and the way in which the Lord cared for them all. They grew to love him more and more, and were already dreading the day in March when he would be leaving for his farm in South Carolina. "I'll be back," he would affirm with a smile. "I'm just going away for the summer."
It was Jennie who would sit talking with him by the hour, while her mother was busy in the kitchen and her father slept in his chair, the younger girls off somewhere else. This particular day she sat in a chair opposite him, as he told her how his son Thomas had lost his wife, leaving behind three small girls to raise. He and his wife Molly helped raise those children for Thomas through the years. The girls really became their second family and they loved them as their own. Now he had remarried.
"Our house was always filled with people," he reminisced.
"Did you like that?" Jennie asked.
"I preferred it that way. We loved it. People would come and stay for days at a time, and then of course there were some permanent guests living with us from time to time, like my sister-in-law." He burst into hearty laughter, remembering the varied experiences.
Jennie always liked to hear him laugh. She had never heard anyone laugh quite the way he did, so forcefully, yet so gently. She could sense he was about to tell her a story.
"One Lord's day we had a large crowd in our home. When we finished dinner, the young girls carried the plates to the kitchen, a few at a time, stacking them on the counter in a rather careless fashion, as young girls are apt to do. Now there was a swinging door into the kitchen...." Pausing, he looked over at Jennie with a merry twinkle in his eye. "Well, the stack of plates grew higher and higher. As the girls ran back and forth through the swinging door, chasing one another, 'Crash!'-the dishes lost their balance and fell to the floor, the entire set in pieces!"
"What did you do?" Jennie asked in astonishment.
Resolutely he said, "I just got a broom and carefully swept it all up. Molly was out in the living room with the guests and never knew, until everyone was gone, what had happened."
It was so like him. That patient, practical, courteous way he had of just accepting what happened, cleaning up, not making a fuss—though, no doubt, the girls received a sound scolding before the day was over.
Many times Jennie heard him say: "We must never question the Lord. The Lord always knows best." His voice would be deep with feeling, perhaps remembering all the hard things he had come to accept during his lifetime.
"What are your happiest memories, Uncle Robert?" she asked him another afternoon.
He paused and looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, thinking back. "Oh," he said, "I suppose my happiest memories are of the days when our children were young. We would finish supper, make a fire in the living-room fireplace, and sit around it together. We didn't have a car, so we couldn't go rushing about in those days. We would read a chapter from the Bible together and discuss it. Each night we read to the children from some book they particularly liked, after which they would be tucked into bed, ready to settle down for the night. But later on, it was hard to make ends meet. The farm wasn't doing well at all. Sometimes we would trade what crops we had for sugar or fabric or the other things we needed.
"When the big depression came," he offered with a bit of humor, "I had a little money I saved in the bank—not very much, mind you, but a little. This one morning we heard the banks were going to close. So another friend and I hurried over to the bank, hoping to get there in time to withdraw what belonged to us.As we stood in the line waiting, we were relieved to see the people ahead of us coming away with money in their pockets. At last there were just two people ahead of us. All of a sudden, the bank teller shut the window! The bank closed down and we lost all we had saved."