Angels For All

Angels for All is the second book in a series about the life of OLLIE MCNEW (POV).  Ollie has a gift for premonitions; she believes guardian angels send them.

Ollie marries Roy Glenn and they start life together in a two-room sharecropper house.  They have faith that hard work will reward them with their own productive farm.  The first two years, crops do well and their first child is born.  After all their savings go for the down payment on a place of their own, Roy gets mosquito fever.

In the third year, the baby gets diphtheria, Ollie almost dies after the birth of their second child, the stock market crashes leaving the country in a depression, banks fail, and crops die for lack of rain.  Roy goes to North Dakota to earn money for the mortgage.

Left alone with two babies in a remote rural area, Ollie competes with wild hogs for the corn and sweet potato crops.  She has trouble with prowlers, snakes, wild animals, and thieves.  Scalding applesauce burns her arm; part of the roof blows away during a storm, and one cold windy night the chimney catches on fire.

She carries water to keep her garden alive, and guards it with a shotgun to keep out rabbits, pigs, and neighbors.  While working, Ollie wears a pistol on her hip.  She sleeps with the handgun under her pillow and a loaded shotgun at the head of her bed.

One winter, while Roy works in Tennessee, Ollie has no meat in the house and no green vegetables after a hard freeze.  She gives the fresh milk to the girls to keep them healthy, but an improper diet, low in niacin, causes Ollie to get sick with pellagra.

After ten years of struggling, hope of making the farm, they love, productive has vanished.  They sell the farm and equipment, buy a truck, and leave for California with three little girls to pursue new dreams.