Mrs. Hull, shivering like a woman very cold, whispered, “Sh-h, Kate’ull hear.”
But a moment or so later, when the car turned down the lane, Sue Annie was whispering again: “It’s the same car, an I do believe it’s th same woman. She wore a kind a curledy coat made out a th hides a black lambs.”
It seemed long enough for the sun to go down before the car came on and stopped in front of the porch steps. A fattish woman with a high bosom, a Red Cross marker on one arm, and dressed in a coat of black lamb hides as Sue Annie had said, opened the car door and got out, slowly, like a woman not much used to moving herself around. A youngish woman, bare-headed and bare-handed, continued to sit in the driver’s seat, turning her head a little to look at the children gathered in a tight huddle by the empty gasoline pump, but never lifting her glance to Old John directly in front of her or to any of the company. Gertie, watching as the others watched, trying to read the faces, the hands, the way the fattish woman walked around the car, thought the news they brought was bad, very bad, else the young one would open the car door and speak, or at least look up and smile.
All eyes were fixed on the large black pocketbook the fattish woman held in her two hands, looking down at it, opening it as she walked. The message was in it, Gertie realized, and Gertie’s eyes were like all the other eyes, fixed on the purse, twisting into it, searching out its secrets.
The gold thing on the purse was unclasped at last, and the woman drew back the flap and looked in, but without taking anything out. She paused, her fingers fishing in the purse while she looked up at the people. John said, “Evenen, ma’m. You’ve brung us word?”
He stopped, forgetful of his manners and of what he would say, as he, like all the others, tried to find the word in the broad face where a young girl’s big red-lipped mouth was painted on under an old woman’s watery blue eyes. The face looked sober, concerned, but more than anything taken up with the awareness of the importance of its business. John, failing to find anything there, pried at the purse with his eyes, and like the others pried and tore harder still with his glance when, after some rummaging, she brought out a yellow envelope. A little gasp went up from the crowd. A yellow envelope like that had come for Jesse back in dogwood-blooming time, and another for Henley a little after molasses-making time.
No one moved forward. It was as if by not stretching forth a hand for it, the death or the pain of wounds or the lostness waiting there would pass by, and go into some other hand outstretched for it.
The silence was so heavy while the woman looked at the name that Gertie heard cowbells in the Cow’s Horn across the river and far away, and behind her in the door Aunt Kate’s gasping, uneven breath. Then it was as if Aunt Kate, by making sound, had asked for the letter and taken it for herself, when the woman said, looking at John: “We have a message for Lorenzo Nevels. Is he here?”
All the trembling and the weakness left Aunt Kate, and her eyes shone blindly wide and sick in her face, unseeing like eyes going through the dark. She stepped forward with outstretched hand, saying: “My man, he cain’t come. Give it to me.”
She walked alone across the porch steps while Gertie hated herself; for whatever had happened to Kate’s own, something inside her snapped up and free like a young hickory held down by a swinging boy, leaping free and rising straight. It wasn’t Clovis. The message would have come to her. In all the others, too, she thought there was this instant’s sinful secret leaping up of hearts, “Not mine. Not mine.”
The bluish-white ring that had an instant before framed Lucy Anderson’s mouth was dissolved, and the redness spread like a fire over Mrs. Hull’s neck had faded. The stranger woman’s painted mouth was widening, spreading, as she held out the yellow envelope. Her voice was grudgingly kind as she said: “Last time I brought you bad news—and now I’m so glad to bring you good news, very good. Your missing son has been found. He is a prisoner of war.”
She handed Kate the yellow letter. Her bright voice went on and on—something about the Red Cross in Town and food packages and where to send them.
Gertie caught the word, “Italy,” then forgot to listen with her worry over Kate. The old woman stood with the envelope in her hand, staring straight into the face of the other, but a body could tell that none of the strange woman’s words were sinking in, for Kate was like a woman made of starch caught in the rain, knees bending, shoulders humping. At last she settled slowly down onto the porch step, still holding the envelope, carefully, as if it had been some precious and fragile thing, while she kept her head lifted, listening still, like a child hearing words it cannot understand.
The crowd listened less, but maybe understood more than Kate; at the words “good news,” breaths had gone out in a long relieved gasp; some, like Mrs. Hull and Lucy Anderson, were half crying. “Thank God, oh, thank God,” while Sue Annie quarreled in a shrill whisper, “Jesus God, what ails th fools a wasten good gasoline to skeer th liven daylights out uv us all?” and reached in her apron pocket for a chew to moisten her dry mouth.
The woman’s talk came at last to an end. There followed a silence that seemed to last a long while, then the woman was saying, somewhat sharply, as if she had already said it once, “Are there any questions, Mrs. Nevels?”
There was more silence, until Sue Annie whispered shrilly: “Kate, th woman’s asken you is they anything you want to know. Thank her fer her trouble.”
Kate looked confusedly around, as if she’d never known she had a sister Sue Annie, then quickly back at the woman, as if wondering who she was and why she came. “No’m,” she said at last, and again, “No’m,” then added in polite, toneless words, “I thank ye kindly fer yer trouble.”
SEVEN
AUNT KATE HAD REVIVED somewhat, but her glance was still bewildered as it wandered about the room, crowded now with the wearily waiting women, many with babies sleeping across their knees. Gradually the old woman’s eyes fixed themselves on a large map of the world that Mrs. Hull had got by sending fifty cents to somebody on the radio, and then hung from the nail that had used to hold a fat roll of bologna. One could, by leaning across the empty meat counter, make out even the fine print on the map, and find where each man had gone.
Aunt Kate after several glances at it, got up, and with a timid and uncertain air went to look into the map’s face. Her glance was confused and searching, as if she measured the face of some silent, suspicious-seeming stranger.
Mrs. Hull took the lamp from the mail shelf and set it on the meat counter a little sidewise of the map so that Kate might see better. Gertie, like many of the other women, crowded round to look over Kate’s shoulder. She, unlike Kate and several of the older ones, could, without too much spelling and effort, make out a map, that is, if it stood in a place known to her, like Samuel’s store here.
As it hung on the wall now, north was somewhere in heaven and south down in hell, and east was opposite the morning star. She could, however, take the map in her mind and lay it on the floor, and then, remembering the north star, know in what direction each man had gone. She found many of the strange places the women mentioned now. Some spoke fearfully in hoarse whispers, awed by their own inability to imagine clearly the mountains, the oceans, the vast stretches of flat land, the time, and the weather that now lay between them and the man who only a little while ago had been no further away than across the table. Others spoke casually, as they had used to speak of the next creek or hill, of the Aleutians, New York, Paris, Calcutta, Hampton Roads, Okinawa, Louisville, London, Cincinnati, Kelly Field, Oak Ridge.
Though the map was quite new and a war map, the name Oak Ridge was not there. A strange place it was, Samuel had said, where people worked without knowing what they did, and never asked. The power lines there were so many and so big they seemed made to carry all the thunderbolts of heaven. Lutie, Mrs. Hull’s oldest girl, had made a little dot about where she thought Oak Ridge should be. This was the place closest home, though in these strange, troubled times the men in the factories
and the training camps in the United States did not seem so far away. Even places straight across the ocean, like England and France, seemed close—after looking at India.
Aunt Kate’s Luke and John’s Cles were there in the hot country where missionaries went. No one knew if they had ever seen each other. Still, it was good to know they were in the same country. They never seemed so all alone as Lucy Anderson’s baby son who’d volunteered before the war like Kate’s Jesse to see the world. Lucy’s boy had been at Pearl Harbor, and then moved on with the fighting from island to island. It was now more than three months since Aunt Lucy had heard, so that now she could only stare at tiny specks of islands far out in the Pacific and wonder.
Gertie stared a long time at Italy, where Henley had been. She wanted to touch the place, but instead only whispered, “Italy.” Soft as the troubled word had been, Aunt Kate heard. She studied Gertie’s face as she had studied the map. “Italy, that’s it. I been a tryen an a tryen to call it to mind.”
She pondered, looking again at the map. “I hope it’s warm there,” she said at last. She bent close to the map as if it were sky and she would read the weather. “Mebbe they won’t let him freeze to death like they done my Uncle Abner in th Civil War. They kept him two year at Chillicothe. He went in a well man an come out a skeleton with one foot gone, Granma used to tell me; an she said, he said—”
“Things is different now,” Mrs. Hull interrupted quickly. “In this war th Italians an th Germans treat our boys good, real good, like we treat their prisoners here in this country.”
Sue Annie nodded, “We’ve got the Red Cross now, Kate. Them Italians, they’ll keep Jesse warm an full a feed as a baby.”
Even Gertie, who wondered what the Red Cross was, nodded knowingly when Aunt Kate’s eyes swept her face. “They’ll be good to him, real good.”
But the old woman was studying the map again. “Clovis was a tellen me once he heared say er read they was mountains in Italy an rough wild country, mighty cold in th wintertime. An that th ground, what they was, was real steep an rocky an pore, not enough fer the people, an that they was allus hungry an—”
Sue Annie sniffed loudly. “Lord, Kate, Clovis don’t know a thing. You’re fergitten everthing we learned in school together. Why everybody knows it’s allus warm in Italy, an that mighty nigh all the land is flat an rich an black as river bottom. They never run out a hawg meat er corn bread, an butter, too, if’n a body wants it, an—”
Several voices were interrupting: “That’s right, Kate, you’ve fergot yer book learnen,” while Gertie, with the air of a disgusted woman, said: “Now, Aunt Kate, you know they ain’t a thing in Clovis’s head but tinkeren. Who does he think he is, a tellen you all about Italy like he’d visited there?”
Kate, who was staring at the map again, seemed not to have heard. She looked a time longer, her eyes questioning, wondering. She turned away at last with a weary headshake. “It makes me dizzy, th map,” she said, and sat down. Most of the others continued to look at the map, wondering, hunting, murmuring the strange, heathenish-sounding names.
Gertie, taller than the rest, looked over their heads. Her troubled wonderings on Clovis were sharper now. Her ears, like the other ears, were constantly straining away from the consciousness of things around her to the road, though her reason told her that the mail mule’s shoes would, in their coming, make too little sound for her to hear above the murmur of talk in the store. Suddenly, however, she turned quickly away and slipped through the door and hurried to the top step at the end of the porch.
She held her breath, leaned forward, listening. Disappointed, she was just turning away when she caught the faint sound she had thought she’d heard indoors—the clink of a mule’s shoe in the road. She clung to a porch post. Maybe soon, real soon, she could look at the map and find a spot for Clovis. But what if she didn’t hear? She looked up at the stars, washed in a keen light wind from the north. They hung above her, hard and cold and bright. She wished she could know that Clovis was somewhere looking up at the stars. But Clovis had never been a body to fool with the stars or the moon. Henley had never seemed so far away, for she could pick out a star and think he was maybe looking at it too.
She heard the mule shoes again. Soon they sounded more loudly and more often on the gravel; then suddenly they were softer, as Uncle Ansel turned into the sandy lane. Others of the women and several restless half grown children had gradually followed Gertie onto the porch to listen. The listening silence was heavy as the uncertainty lasted a moment longer. The creak of saddle leather sounded clearly through the darkness. There came a little chorus of cries, less joyous than in the old days, for at once the relief that the long wait was ended was dimmed by forebodings of disappointment or bad news.
Women, hound dogs, and children—even the younger ones like Cassie who had gone to sleep and were awakening now in startled wonder—all rushed onto the porch.
Mrs. Hull pushed the door open wide and set the lamp on the mail window so that a broad band of lamplight fell across the porch. Old Ansel dismounted from the tired head-hanging mule, and with many hands to help him took the worn leather bags from behind the saddle and handed them to Mrs. Hull. There were also two bulging canvas bags of packages and papers, but few glanced at these, and no one save Gertie waited while Uncle Ansel undid the fastenings. The rest followed Mrs. Hull with the thin bags of letters.
Gertie, when she had carried the package sacks to the mail counter, came back to stand on the porch where she could hear the calling of the names through the open door, and at the same time see the stars and breathe good clean air. Already Mrs. Hull’s clean store had begun to smell of overly warm hound-dog hide, wet-bottomed babies, and trouble—the smell of worried women sweating out the wait for the mail.
Inside it was so still while Mrs. Hull opened the mail sacks that Gertie heard a hound dog snuffling in its sleep. It dreamed of hunting. If she didn’t hear would she dream of Clovis? She had dreamed of Henley; but the dream-seeing was all the sight she’d ever have of Henley. It wouldn’t be that way with Clovis. She could hear the crinking of the coal stove and the shuffling of the letters as Mrs. Hull laid them by handfuls on the counter.
Then, different from the old days when letters, papers, and packages were properly sorted and put all together for each family, Mrs. Hull began at once the calling out of the letters. Ann Liz Cramer, Sue Annie Tiller, John Ballew, Mamie Childers, John Ballew, Ansel Anderson, Kate Nevels, then her voice, rising, trembling: “Lutie, Lutie, read it quick. It’s frum Andy.” She went on through other names, her voice fluttering only a little, and paused but an instant when Lutie cried: “Mom, he’s all right. Feelen good.”
Gertie stood in the doorway, watching hungrily, as did some of the others who had no mail as yet to read. Their hopeful eyes fondled each letter as Mrs. Hull picked it up, then lowered it into the circle of lamplight long enough to read the address. Gertie watched through many names. She heard Mrs. Hull read “Iva Dean Gholson,” then saw young Iva Dean, a bride of only a month or so when they took her husband, rush forward almost crying with joy for she had heard nothing for many weeks. Mrs. Hull said softly, as she held out the letter, “I wish it was different, honey—but it’s a due bill er somethen from Ward’s.”
The letter fluttered to the floor unopened. Iva Dean turned away, hump-shouldered, old-faced, and tired; less alive she looked than Old John reading one of the many letters he had stacked under the lamp. The girl bumped into Ann Liz Cramer, who now and then glanced wistfully down at two letters held in one brown, brawny hand. “You want me to read em, Ann Liz?” Iva asked.
Ann Liz nodded, flushing a little. Iva Dean turned her back firmly and rigidly toward Mrs. Hull and began reading in a low voice the letter Claude Cramer and his children had had Blare Tiller write: “‘Dearly beloved ones, I take my pen in hand to write you. The rest are in good health. My stomach is some better, but it will not be cured till I can quit this city water and have some good corn bread. This India
na meal ain’t so good. Well, the CIO got Arthur like it got me. We both have to pay. He don’t have it so hard. His work is from eleven to seven at night. We—’”
Gertie turned away, not wanting to listen to words that rightly belonged to Ann Liz Cramer alone. “Mom—do them men that ride them airplanes like Lena Gholson’s man—do them men ever hit the stars?” It was Cassie slipping a hand, warm and moist from sleep, into Gertie’s.
“Nobody can hurt th stars, honey—they’ll allus be there.”
Cassie blinked at the sky. “What makes you like to look at th stars, Mom?”
“The heavens declare th glory of God; an th firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night—’”
“But what do they say, Mom?”
Gertie stared up, considering the Little Dipper. “Different things to different people; fer one thing they say, ‘We’ll never change, an we’ll never go away—all the nations on this earth with all their wars, they cain’t cut us down like we was trees.’ And they say to Cassie Marie, ‘Little girl, if’n you lost all yer friends an kin you’d still have us an th sun and th moon.’”
When would it come, her name? The pile of letters must be almost gone. She took comfort from Cassie’s touch and smoothed her hair, then frowned, feeling the sweaty dampness at the back of her neck. “You’ll be sick runnen out in this cold, hot an sweaty, you’ll …”
The “Gertrude” had sounded so strange, she never turned until she heard “Nevels.” Mrs. Hull held out a letter, long with a heavy look, and lots of stamps. Gertie fumbled over it, blinking, half blinded by the sudden change from starlight to lamplight. “It’s registered, an you can sign when I’m all through,” Mrs. Hull said, and added as Gertie continued to blink and fumble: It’s from Clovis, postmarked Detroit. Money must be—don’t tear it crosswise.” And Mrs. Hull went on, talking now to herself as she held up some circular, “‘Nunnely D. Ballew.’ Don’t they know th only Ballews left is John’s family?”