There Is a River Page 6

  “Won’t you have a slice of my cake?” she said again, talking now to no one in particular. She took the knife up to cut a piece from her lovely creation. Already several slices set on plates there on the coffeetable, and not one of them had been touched. “It really is a lovely cake. I worked all morning to—”

  “Thank you, but no,” Frances Garrett said, sitting so stiffly in her chair that she never once came to rest against the seat back. Mrs. Garrett was one of the most influential women in the church, a cousin to Walter Eason—by rights she and Helene were related now, at least by marriage—and still she could not support Helene even in this one little thing. All she had wanted was to have a lovely party. All she had wanted was to give them a nice place to discuss the paper drive, and they could not even—

  She sat down on the sofa, took up her coffee cup to take a sip, then immediately set it down so hard onto its saucer that it clattered loudly, sloshing its contents out over a lace doily on the table.

  “Is there something wrong with the refreshments?” she demanded. “None of you have taken even one bite of the cake I baked for you, and you’ve let your coffee sit until it’s stone cold. You won’t even have my cigarettes. I went out of my way to invite you over here, fixed refreshments for you, had a lovely cake and real coffee—something I’m sure you couldn’t get anywhere else—and you won’t touch one bit of it. Do you all think you’re too good to accept my hospitality after I worked so hard to have a nice party for you?”

  Frances Garrett had looked ready to explode with indignation at Helene’s words, but it was Alice Talbot, seventeen years old and with a fiancé in the Navy, who had spoken. She sat on the edge of her chair, her hands clenched tightly in her lap.

  “I wouldn’t eat a cake made with black market sugar if Eleanor Roosevelt herself served it to me in the White House! Don’t you think we know you didn’t make the cake with sugar you got with ration stamps, and the coffee and the cigarettes, you didn’t come by those honestly, either. Did you really think we’d eat your cake and drink your coffee and smoke your cigarettes when we know that what you got on the black market might have been something needed to help in the war effort? It’s people like you and your selfishness that make things only harder on our boys.”

  Mrs. Garrett reached over to pat the girl’s clenched hands, whether out of an approval of her words, or in an effort to calm her down, Helene could not tell, and at the moment she did not care.

  “Well, if you feel that way, young lady, then you can just leave! There is absolutely no excuse in this world for being rude! I tried to be a good hostess, tried to give you something you couldn’t have anywhere else, and look at the thanks I get. You can just leave my house this minute if you feel that way, and that goes for any of the rest of you that feels the same.” She expected an apology, expected a look of embarrassment on more than one face because of the girl’s outrageous behavior, but before her astonished eyes every woman in the room rose almost as one.

  They gathered their knitting, their handbags, the bothersome two-year-old and the nose-picker, and left the room one after the other, until she was left alone with her ready-made cigarettes, her fine, real coffee, and her lovely, uneaten, cake.

  7

  “Goddamn it—you better keep me out of it!” Buddy Eason shouted as he paced back and forth in his grandfather’s office the afternoon he learned that fathers would no longer be excluded from the military draft. The flab on his cheeks vibrated with every step.

  “I’m not going over there to let some damn Kraut put a bullet into me!”

  Walter Eason sat behind his desk, his fingers steepled before him as he listened to Buddy’s latest tirade. The first was when the draft was instituted and he had to register. The second came when the upper age range for induction was raised to include men his age. Since then, Walter knew his grandson should be thanking his good fortunes daily that he had impregnated Cassandra Price and produced the twins, for Wally and Rachel had been enough in themselves to keep their father out of the military.

  It was hard for Walter to admit his grandson was a coward, but, after all, Buddy had been a disappointment in every other way. He had proven himself a failure as a son, as a grandson, and as a husband and father. He was a failure as a man as well.

  It had taken all Walter’s control to keep Buddy from refusing to register or registering as a conscientious objector in the first place. Buddy had said he would rather go to camp, or even to prison, than go into the military. He had already done more than his grandfather had ever thought possible to destroy the Eason name, but displaying his cowardice so openly was one thing that Walter would not allow. There were Walter’s great-grandchildren and their future to think about.

  “You haven’t been drafted yet,” Walter said, staring at Buddy. He knew it would not be difficult to keep Buddy out of the military. The mill was, after all, producing materials essential to the war effort. Buddy could easily be classified as II-A, doing critical civilian work, although Walter knew the only work his grandson did was to show up at the mill office in the mornings. Buddy was blinded to his own luck, blinded by cowardice and total self-concern, and Walter was in no mood to salve his fears.

  “Goddamn it—I mean it, old man, you better keep me out of it!”

  Sweat beaded over his upper lip and across his forehead, one of the few times Buddy ever broke a sweat, for Walter was certain he had never broken one doing any work. He leaned across Walter’s desk, staring at the old man with what Walter knew was meant to be a threat, and Walter had the momentary and almost irresistible temptation to see to it that Buddy did not receive the II-A classification. The military could do Buddy a world of good, Walter thought. Away from here, away from the influence of the Eason name, where he would have to at last stand or fall on his own, where he would have to face discipline and men with more power than he had, Buddy Eason might at last become a man.

  But Walter could not risk the life of his only grandson.

  He had already buried two sons.

  He would not now bury his grandson as well.

  Walter sat behind his desk and stared at Buddy, listening as Buddy cursed the Japanese, as he cursed the Germans, as he cursed the government. And God as well.

  He remained silent and he waited, wishing somehow that fear alone had the power to make an overgrown boy into a man.

  Tim Cauthen did not want to be inducted into the Army, but, when the telegram came extending his government’s “Greetings,” Elise and the family knew that he was willing to go. It made it harder knowing he was leaving a wife he loved dearly, a small daughter, and another child yet to be born.

  “If something happens while I’m over there,” Elise heard him tell Janson and Stan the day he received the telegram, “you look after Sissy and Nora for me, and the new baby as well.”

  Janson nodded, as did Stan. Elise watched them, thinking that sometimes men did not use words for the things women would outright say: I may be injured; I may not come home whole and in one piece. If I don’t come back . . .

  She stood in her open back door, watching the three men where they sat on the steps that descended to the back yard. Tim was silent now, staring at the cottonwood tree that grew between this house and the next, then beyond it, toward where his own family lived just down the way.

  “My folks never did like the idea of my marrying Sissy, and they don’t think any kinder on it even now,” he said quietly, the sun shining in his brown hair. “If something happens while I’m gone, they might—”

  “Won’t nobody take Nora an’ th’ baby away from her,” Janson interrupted, “not so long as me an’ Elise either one have breath.”

  “Or me,” Stan added, seeming willing himself to take on Tim’s family in a fist fight, though he had only one arm.

  Tim nodded, and then rose from the step. “I better get home,” but he lingered, continuing to stare toward his home, as if he wer
e missing it already. “Sissy’s a good woman,” he said quietly. “We’ve had some good times together.”

  He brought his eyes to Janson for a long moment, and then he turned and walked away.

  The entire family accompanied Tim to the depot the day he was scheduled to report. Elise watched as Sissy clung to him, knowing she was afraid to let him go.

  Tim smiled at Sissy and chucked her under the chin when she released him at last. “Don’t you worry. The war’ll be over soon and I’ll be coming home.”

  But Elise saw his face as he drew Sissy to him again, his eyes meeting Janson’s in a look that said clearly . . .

  If I don’t come back . . .

  Elise and Janson walked Sissy to her door. Her mother-in-law had taken Nora home with her, saying she wanted to play with the baby for just a while.

  “Why don’t you and Nora come to our house later for supper?” Elise invited. Sissy seemed so young, and she had never been on her own, not once in her life. Elise kept remembering how people had always said Sissy was slow, though Elise had never been able to think of her in that manner. “You can even stay the night, if you’d like,” she offered.

  “No, we’re gonna stay here,” she said, staring in the open doorway to the empty three rooms in her half-a-house.

  She seemed so lonely already without Tim that Elise wondered how Sissy would ever survive, especially if Tim were—

  “Tim’s comin’ home,” Sissy said, almost as if she had read Elise’s mind. “Tim’s comin’ home.”

  Elise found herself talking of the past after she and Janson reached their house that afternoon. She gathered up their clothes that had been worn the day before, that had been left lying across a chair at the foot of their bed, then started into the middle room of their three to put them with the pile of laundry she had begun to gather earlier in the day.

  She could hear the floorboards creak in the front room, then Janson’s favorite rocker as he sat down, a comfortable sound she knew from the years they had been living in this house. She had learned many sounds in the places where they had lived through the years, sounds that were now a part of her, such as the wind whistling between the wallboards in the old sharecropper house on Stubblefield’s land, or the sound of the squeaking porch step leading up to the first house they had lived in in the mill village, and especially the sounds that bedsprings could make before the children had been born and they had had to learn to be quiet.

  She had been with Janson for over sixteen years now, half of her life, and she could not imagine a day spent without him—how could Sissy ever live without Tim? How could any woman live with her husband so far away, and with the knowledge that he might never come home? Elise thanked God that she had been spared that, and she wished Sissy had been spared it as well.

  There was a knock at the front door and she heard Janson get up to answer it. Elise could hear the vacant sound of his rocker moving against the floorboards, so different than when he was sitting in it, and a moment later the sound of the door opening. There came a man’s voice and the sound of the spring stretching on the screen door.

  “Who is it?” Elise called from the middle room when Janson did not say anything in response to the man. She picked up an armload of clothes to take to the wringer washer out on the rear porch. “Janson?”

  She moved to the open doorway between the front and middle rooms, thinking that he must have gone outside—but he was standing alone in the front room. There was a paper in his hands, and Elise did not have to see the back of the man now descending the front steps or the first words of the telegram he had delivered, to know the meaning of the look on Janson’s face.

  His eyes rose to meet hers, and there was a mixture of satisfaction for himself, as well as concern for her, in the expression that passed over his features.

  He crossed the room to give the telegram to her where she stood now in the drifts of laundry that had fallen from her arms.

  She stared up at him, refusing to take the paper into her own hands.

  He could read now. She did not have to tell him what it said.

  And she had already read the first word in his eyes.

  “Greetings . . .”

  Like so many others, Janson Sanders was going to war.

  8

  Elise had been by herself before, but she had never been alone. In the days that followed Janson leaving, she learned what being alone truly was, and what being lonely was all about. There were the children. There was Stan, Sissy, her friend Dorrie, the church, and more sewing than she could possibly get done—but she was still alone.

  She had never thought to live a day without Janson, but now she found such days her reality. And, as days became weeks, and weeks became months, that loneliness only grew, leaving an emptiness inside of her. She got up each morning—alone. She went to bed at night—alone. And every moment in between just seemed to remind her that Janson was not there.

  His letters helped, letters filled with his missing her, with memories of the past, his love for her and the children, stories about other soldiers he met, letters saying he was doing fine and not to worry. For all the misspellings and uneven script, those letters were gold to her, waited for, read over and over, cherished, gently folded away and tied in a blue-ribboned bundle she kept at her bedside, to be read again and again at night when sleep would not come. They were her only contact with him, and she clung to them, writing him almost every day, knowing he had to feel the same.

  And then his letters stopped.

  Day after day she waited for the mail. Day after day she was disappointed. Another week passed, and then another. Fear filled her, and she tried to keep herself from worrying.

  “Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for weeks sometime,” he had told her the day he left. He would write every chance he could get, but the letters might not get through, might be delayed, lost—don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. . .

  But, she was worried. As the days passed, she could think of little else.

  It was the next-to-last Tuesday of June, Henry’s sixteenth birthday, and Elise sat in the kitchen, looking at the remains of chocolate icing from his birthday cake. It had taken the last of her sugar to make the small cake, but it had been worth it to see the look of delight it had brought to Henry’s face. Chocolate—his favorite—really too small even for the three children and Olivia, who was never far from Henry’s side, but still Henry had halved his piece with his mother.

  “No, Henry, it’s your birthday. I want you to eat it; I made it for you,” she had protested, even as he put half of his prized slice on a plate for her.

  “It’s my birthday. I can do what I want.”

  “But, Henry—”

  “No, Ma, I want to.”

  So much like his father, less than four years younger than Janson had been when she met him, and almost as tall already as his father. Janson—her mind returned to him no matter what else she was doing. Where was he? Why had he not written? She still wrote him daily, dutifully mailing each letter, praying the next day would bring something from him, something to say that he was okay, that he was thinking of her—that he lived—and she thanked God each day that no telegram came: The Secretary of War desires to express his deep regret that your husband . . .

  Her letters were chatty, full of gossip, full of stories of the children, of what was happening in the village, and the things people were saying—and that she loved him in every line. She never told him of the unending waiting and the horrid loneliness that made her lie and listen to the darkness at night, of the shortages of food and meat items. There seemed to be a shortage nowadays of everything but loneliness. Sugar could be purchased only with ration stamps. Meat was virtually unavailable, except to those the butcher considered his “best customers.” Butter was scarce, replaced by cakes of margarine with color packets to tint it a shade of yellow—Elise knew of no one w
ho did not hate the margarine. Anything could be gotten on the black market with enough money, but Elise had sworn that she would starve before she would buy from the black market. Whatever she bought there might be the one thing needed overseas to save Janson’s life.

  There was more than rationing and shortages and the lack of word from Janson to trouble her mind during the days and throughout the long nights. There were money worries as well. She hadn’t realized how much it cost to feed and clothe and support herself, the three children, and Stan, but she learned quickly after Janson left for the war. Even with Stan’s wages from the mill, what she received from Janson, and what she made sewing, she found it hard to make ends meet.

  She had never had to pay bills, for there had been first her father, and then Janson, to do it for her—but she found herself handling money now, paying bills, budgeting how they would make it through each week. Stan would have done it for her, but it was not his job—it was her family, the family she had made with Janson. Until he came home, it was her place to handle things.

  Elise got up from the kitchen table to put the plates in the dishpan on the counter, then she moved about the house, straightening things that were already straightened, dusting places that held no dust. After a few minutes she found herself in the front room alongside the bed she had shared with Janson, the loneliness filling her until it was an ache.

  Laughter and talk came through the open window beside the bed and the screened door. Stan sat in the porch swing with a young lady at either side. He had become very popular with the girls in the village over the months of the war. He was good looking and unmarried, and the injury he had suffered in the mill gave ample reason why he was not in uniform.

  For a moment music from next door drowned out the voices on the porch. Ruth Shelby had her radio turned up too loud again. Elise could hear a male voice over the music, and laughter, and she knew Ruth was entertaining again. Bill Shelby was in the Navy, and he had been gone from home since the early days of the war. His wife was rarely lonely these days, however. When she was not at work in the mill, she dated as if she were an unmarried woman, had men over to her side of the house, men who often did not leave until early the next morning.