Come What May - Helen Weeks - Bog

On the harsh and unforgiving West Texas prairie a family named Calloway has carved out a farm on the one hundred and sixty acres of land bought with the coal miner savings of a quiet man named Jacob. Young and eager to make his mark on the land, he worked years to sow the seeds of a future in the land he turned into gardens through dogged determination. Never having had much affection in his life Jacob is astonished by the deep love he has for the daughter produced from his first marriage. The happy, sweet tempered Lacy has a way of bringing out everything that is good in Jacob. When fate makes him a widower he marries a woman to mother the little girl and she captures his heart and the love of her step-daughter, Lacy. When the children arrive Lacy willingly helps care for her siblings, learning from her parents the skills to live in the way of the early settlers, making what is needed from resources on the farm, yet eager to embrace modern conveniences. It was an idyllic life that was fated to end in tragedy, and when her parents are killed in a car crash leaving her with seven young brothers and sisters Lacy decides to raise them on the farm her parents left her. In spite of Amos Booth, the Tatum banker who tries to force her to put them into an orphanage and attempts to steal the land, Lacy persists and is backed up by the legal system. The siblings put in long hours of work to wring a living from the land. Lacy Calloway and her brothers and sisters stubbornly refuse to abandon their parent's dream of a self-sustaining farm. Despite the irrational behavior of the Tatum banker, who is also the children's grandfather and some of the people in the town, the land that fights them with drought, heat, and fierce storms, they face every obstacle with sheer determination and an unfaltering faith in their family and a God they believe smiles on them every day.