Ollie's Angels

DARK SECRETS, book one of Ollie's Angels, describes the early life of OLLIE MCNEW. Ollie, born of Irish and Cherokee ancestry, is a middle child struggling to compete with an older sister and brother, yet showing unusual compassion for younger siblings. Ollie accepts premonitions as guidance given by guardian angels. She displays wit and insight, yet sometimes incurs trouble when a stubborn nature overrules intuition. She wants to become a nurse, and tries to learn all she can about medical procedures. Fifteen-year-old Ollie receives a head injury, when attacked by two boys. While comatose, she recalls occasions that reflect the life of a gutsy girl in the pre-Twenties era. They include the death of a young friend, strangers that steal a gun, drunks chasing a man of black Indian descent, a strange lizard, a starving family, infection in a girl's foot, robbers at the wagon yard, stray dogs that save Ollie from panthers, Gypsies, a fight, remembering the war, an ungrateful tramp, a dying aunt, a rabbit hunt in the snow, a pie supper, a trip to a carnival, a promissory note, the rape and murder of a young girl, and dark secrets shared with her best friend. Ollie meets a young man and wavers between love and following her dream of nursing. She chooses Roy and they begin repairing a two room sharecropper house, where they will live and farm surrounding acres. Ollie has her first encounter with neighboring thieves when they attempt to steal her engagement ring, cook stove, and horse. Capable with the pistol she is wearing, Ollie reclaims her property and orders them to leave.

In ANGELS FOR ALL Ollie believes in premonitions sent by guardian angels, but has no warning of hardships to come with drought and The Great Depression. Roy and Ollie start married life striving for a better future and a place of their own. Each chapter is an episode that illustrates different difficulties imposed by farm life. Almost every year, Roy goes away to other states working to earn money to pay the mortgage on a home they buy. Ollie stays on the farm to harvest crops and care for the children. She struggles against wild animals, foraging pigs, sickness, storms, hunger, and neighbors that prowl night and day stealing everything they can including diapers, garden vegetables, harness, and cottonseed. Ollie offers thanks for blessings she receives, giving credit to guardian angels for helping, but berates herself, when she discounts premonitions of impending danger.

In 1937, Ollie and Roy, after striving to keep their farm during the Great Depression, leave to pursue a better life in California. Finding it is not the Promised Land they anticipated, they return to Arkansas. On a small Arkansas farm, they labor with mortgage payments, drought, and sickness. Roy goes away almost every year to work and supplement farm income, while Ollie and the children work the land. Roy wants to hire a man to help, but Ollie's intuition causes her to plead against it. Later, they learn that the man requesting work is a serial killer and has murdered twenty-two people. They buy the farm of their dreams in 1946. It has a big barn, a house large enough for their six children-and a mortgage. In 1950, Ollie, expecting their seventh child, gets strep throat and loses her hearing. Uterine tumors dictate induced labor in her eighth month. At delivery, Ollie learns she has twins. It is four years before she can afford a hearing aid, allowing her to hear her babies laugh or cry. The family raises melons and vegetables to peddle in town, and attempt to raise pigs, cotton, and corn-drought and bad luck follow. They try borrowing money to start a dairy, but cannot get a loan, fire destroys the pasture, corn and cotton crops, and a tornado hits the farm. After four children are grown, Roy and Ollie begin operation of a Grade 'A' dairy farm.