There Is a River Page 8

“There was nobody home, ma’am. The neighbors said I could find her here.”

  Her—for a moment the word did not mean anything.

  . . . nobody home . . . neighbors said I could find her here.

  . . . her . . . find her . . .

  Then she felt Dorrie stiffening, and a sound from Sissy in the room behind her, both now waiting for the blow to fall on one of them instead. Comprehension came—not Janson. Not my Janson. It’s not—

  The spinning slowed. She could breathe. She could think.

  “Who are you looking for?” she asked, realizing she was trembling.

  “Mrs. Timothy M. Cauthen—”

  “Tim—” Sissy’s voice was small and frightened. Elise turned and saw the look of fear on Sissy’s face, saw her rise slowly to her feet, the photograph she had been holding fluttering from her lap and to the floor. Sissy walked to the door and accepted the telegram in shaking hands. She stared up at the man for a moment, and then looked down, at last holding the telegram out for Elise to read it to her.

  Elise’s eyes fixed on the page, but she could not make herself say the words. She looked at Sissy.

  “Tim—he’s—” Sissy said quietly, one hand rising to cover her mouth.

  Then she sank to the floor.

  For a time there was only concern for Sissy.

  It was not until later that Elise read her the words: “. . . regret that your husband . . . was killed in action . . .”

  She was ashamed of herself, but she could not help thinking, thank God it wasn’t Janson. Thank God it wasn’t Janson.

  9

  Janson’s handwriting—

  Elise stood on the porch a few days later, staring at the letters Mr. Ware had just put into her hands, four letters with Janson’s handwriting. Four letters—

  Her hands were shaking so badly that she could hardly hold the first one steady enough to read it, her vision clouding suddenly:

  “Dear Elise, first off I love you tell the kids pa sais high. . . .”

  She leaned against the nearby wall for support, feeling suddenly drained, realizing that she had been existing on worry and force of will alone—but no more. Janson was alive! He had been thinking of her when he had written the letters now in her hands. He was alive!

  She clutched the letters to her and went through the door and into the front room. Judith sat before the radio there, tuning it to a program.

  “From your father—letters from your father,” she said, holding the letters out to the girl, but refusing to allow her to take them when she reached for them excitedly. “No, let me read them first,” Elise said, trying to move away and sit on the bed where she could read them in peace—they were hers, and she had been waiting for so long.

  “But, mama—” Judith said.

  “No,” Elise said, refusing to be distracted.

  There were words blacked out of the first letter, an entire line out of another, the censors at work between her and Janson, but that did not matter. He had said that he missed her, that he missed even her cooking, though she was fully aware she had never quite learned to cook. The third letter talked about foods he dreamed of at night.

  “They must not be feeding him very well,” she muttered to herself, surprised not to be annoyed that he talked about what he wanted to eat for the entire duration of a letter. His spelling had not improved, and neither had his handwriting, and punctuation was something he used sparingly, if at all—but those letters were gold, each word the most beautiful thing she had ever read in her life.

  “He got the cake we sent him,” she told Judith as she continued to read, hearing the girl drag a chair closer to her across the wooden floor. “He said the icing stuck mostly to the paper, but they scraped it off. Mackey and the other men said it was the best cake they had ever eaten—”

  “Pa ought not let the other soldiers eat his cake. We made it for him,” Judith protested and Elise looked up at her briefly, then the girl’s tone changed. “Maybe Mackey could have a piece; he did let Pa have some of the fudge his mama had sent him. I remember that Pa said it was good—”

  Mackey was often mentioned in Janson’s letters, as were other soldiers he knew over there. Elise thought Mackey had become a real friend to him, perhaps one of the few real friends Janson had ever made in his life—it was funny that war could make friends of men who otherwise would never have met, for Janson had never been outside of Alabama and Georgia before the war, and Mackey, from what she had learned in Janson’s letters, had rarely seen the outside of New York City.

  Elise started reading the final letter of the four, not wanting to finish it too quickly, for that would only mean the start of waiting again for the next to come. She reached the last line and had to blink back tears, reading words she had read many times before.

  Beneath the words “your husband,” spelled his own particular way, Janson had signed his full name.

  At times Janson thought he spent half his days now digging holes, and the other half lying in them. There were also days he spent moving through towns that had been shelled apart, tensed against being shot at by some sniper in a standing building. There was waiting and rare mail calls and mud—more mud than he had ever thought to see in his life, mud to lay in, to taste, to wear in the creases of his body and caked in his clothes and on him until it seemed a part of his skin. There were cold meals and K rations and the goddamn chocolate bars that could break your teeth. There was dysentery and wet feet and mud—always more mud—and being shelled, lying in a hole with metal fragments and wood splinters raining down.

  There were nights that never seemed to end, listening, keeping watch, then laying in a hole and trying to sleep, thinking of home—and mud, slogging through it, sleeping in it, trying to dig a place that might be safe for the night. There was killing and being afraid to die and seeing men who were no more than boys being blown apart—and mud, mixed with blood and bodies in the fields they had passed through. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever go home to Elise. Sometimes he wondered if he should. Sometimes he knew he had to no matter how many he might have killed or what he had seen or the sounds that seemed to stay inside of him—and the silence in the long nights, and the waiting, and the coarse edge that had come on him now as it had on all the others.

  He sat in the bottom of a foxhole he and Mackey had dug late the day before, his spare pair of socks knotted together and hanging around his neck to dry. This was the same place he had passed the night, at least the little part of it when he had been sleeping. There had been a mail call the day before. He had received a bundle of letters, and that was the reason he was furious now—he could not believe Elise was working in the cotton mill. She knew how he felt. She knew—

  He sat trying to write a letter, holding the paper on a book he had borrowed from Mackey, trying to keep the book balanced on his knee as his pen scratched furiously at the paper. Writing was hard enough to do when he was not angry, and he was angrier with Elise than he had been in all the years since he married her. He had written two letters yesterday since he had gotten his mail, one to Elise and one to Stan—she was going to quit that job, no matter what she had to say about it. He would not have her working in the mill. He would not, and if she would not quit on her own, then he would make certain that Stan would make her quit.

  “I mean you quit,” he wrote. “I tolt Stan to make you quit if you would not on your own so I mean you quit before he hasto I mean I wont have you work in the mill I wont. You quit write now and dont go back so help me you better quit.”

  He stopped and stared at the paper for a moment, then wrote:

  “I mean it you better quit,” then underlined the last word two words for good measure. “You quit,” he wrote again. He did not know how she could have gotten such a fool idea in the first place. She knew how he felt about her working, and for her to go to work in the cotton mill, for the Easons—he didn’t car
e if Dorrie Keith and all the other women in the mill village went to work in the mill. He didn’t care if Eleanor Roosevelt herself were to come to Eason County and go to work for Walter Eason. Elise was not going to. Of all things—

  But she probably wouldn’t listen to him. She never had. There was not once in her life she had ever listened to anybody.

  If she had she would never have married him in the first place.

  He sat thinking of the days when he had first known her, long ago in the place she had grown up in Georgia, at a time when he had thought the only thing they had to do to be together was to get out of Endicott County and away from her father. He had never thought anything could tear them apart after that. War had never entered his mind.

  All he wanted to do now was to see Elise. All he wanted to do was to be a husband and a father and to work for his land. All he wanted was to go home.

  And sometimes he was afraid he never would.

  “I miss you,” he wrote, his eyes never leaving the paper, though his anger had left him for the moment. “Dont worry about me I am fine you take care of yoursef and the kids and Ill be home when its over. I love you,” he wrote at last, though he knew he did not have to. “I love you,” he wrote again, then stopped himself before he wrote what it was he had really been thinking.

  That he hoped he lived long enough to see her again.

  December 1944 meant a Christmas without Janson home.

  Elise walked toward the mill on a chilly morning late in December, hoping that at the end of her shift she would be too tired to do anything but sleep. She had lain awake for hours the night before staring into the darkness, worrying about Janson over there only God knew where, about Henry who was growing older every day with his father gone, Catherine who fancied herself in love with a boy who would be leaving for overseas, and Dorrie whose youngest son was now missing in the war. Elise just wanted it to end. She just wanted Janson and all the other men to come home. She wanted the world to be normal and life to go on and things to be like they were.

  She was doing all she could, everything she could, to help in the war effort. She was pulling her shift in the mill. She was buying war bonds. She was conserving cooking fats and cooperating with rationing and not complaining too much. She had planted a victory garden in the spring, and canned vegetables in the fall, had given to scrap drives and bought even more war bonds and written to Janson every chance she could. They were doing their part, they were all doing their part, all the women who had gone to work in the mills or in war plants throughout the country, all the old people pulling shifts again when they should be enjoying their rest, and the kids growing up while their mothers worked and their fathers were at war.

  They were all doing their part—or at least almost all of them were, Elise thought as she neared the front of the mill to find Buddy Eason standing at the edge of the sidewalk arguing with a man who was carrying a clipboard.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Eason, but that’s the best I can give you,” the man said calmly, then visibly flinched as Buddy began to yell at him again.

  “Well, goddamn it, I’ve already told you it’s not good enough!” Buddy shoved the smaller, badly balding man with the last words, then stood with his fists clenched, as if he thought the little man would fight.

  “There’s a war going on, Mr. Eason.”

  “Fuck the war!” Buddy shouted, and Elise saw several women who were nearing the gated entrance to the mill hurry their steps to get on past the two men. “I don’t give a damn about the war; it’s not good enough!”

  Elise had no idea what the confrontation was about, and it really did not matter. Little excuse was needed for Buddy to go into a rage.

  No—not everyone was doing his part. There were people such as Buddy Eason who used the circumstances of war to make themselves rich. Buddy controlled the black market in Eason County, which Elise and most other people in the mill village knew, but which no one did anything about. It was said that Buddy could supply anything, to anyone, for the right price—he could even supply women, or so Elise had been hearing, for people said he was openly involved with a “lady” who ran a “house” out in the country.

  There were few areas where Buddy did not seem above the law, but there was one law that even Buddy Eason seemed unable to get around. Buddy had attempted to sell second-rate goods to the government, but somehow his grandfather had found him out. Walter Eason had made restitution, and now Buddy was on the outs even with his family—but Buddy did not seem to need the protection of grandfather or his family name any longer. The war had brought him money of his own, along with the power and influence that only money and fear can combine to give. He had gone to fat in the past years, and the added bulk had made him more imposing—but it was the knowledge of what he was capable of doing that gave him the power he wielded so freely.

  Everyone had no doubt that Buddy Eason could do just about anything, to anyone, if he so chose.

  Elise continued down the sidewalk, though she refused to look in his direction. His voice had stilled in the argument, and, even when the other man spoke again, Elise heard little response from Buddy. She glanced back at him as she stepped to the end of the short line of people waiting for entrance at the gate, only to find his eyes on her, a look of absolute hatred on his face—but it was a look she had expected to see there, and it was one she returned with equal feeling.

  She showed the badge pinned to her dress when her time came at the gate, although the man standing there knew her face. Security had been tight since the cotton mill had begun to manufacture for the war effort. They were making nothing more than heavy ducking for tents, and material to be used in parachutes, but still the security measures were constant. The grounds had been fenced off, and entrance was to be gained now only through the guarded gates by showing a badge. All the millhands had been fingerprinted, and there were rumors that the FBI had been called in to investigate them all. Elise had nothing to hide, and she could not help but to think—I wish someone would really check into Buddy Eason. Oh, I wish someone would.

  She stared up at the red brick of the mill, knowing the end of the eight-hour shift would at least bring her that much closer to the end of the war.

  Janson could no longer remember what it felt like to be warm. His hands were numb, his fingers aching and stiff from digging through snow and frozen earth to make a hole for the night. Then they had had to move out, leaving their overcoats and packs behind so they could struggle through knee-deep and even deeper drifts of snow, cold and so hungry that his stomach was gnawing away inside of him. The snow had started again, light at first, and then heavier as the wind picked up, driving into his face with a stinging, brutal force that made him want to close his eyes. He fell, then struggled to his feet again, so cold that his teeth were chattering—the world looked like a Christmas card, he thought, but it was a Christmas card from hell, because he knew that somewhere in that dark, snow-driven blindness were German soldiers who were just as cold and hungry as he was, and who would kill him and the men with him if they had a chance.

  They were moving through the open, nearing the edge of woods, but still he could hardly see the man ahead of him in the darkness. The snow stung his eyes, the wind and cold hitting him in the face so hard that he found it difficult to breathe—there was a sudden rattle of gunfire from the cover of trees at the side of the field, causing him to hit the ground, his face in snow, the mess up his nose and filling his mouth. He spit it away, then made himself crawl on his belly in the direction of the woods, fighting the urge to dig in where he was, for he knew he might very well die here in the open before he could manage to dig his way through the snow and several feet of frozen ground. He came on another soldier sprawled on his belly in the snow at the edge of the woods, unmoving, and it took him only a moment to realize the man was dead. He pushed himself on, reaching the woods and the cover of the trees.

  They were returning fi
re now, and hurried orders were being given, a group of men to flank the enemy, through the woods and along a ridge to their rear. Janson’s name was called, and he was moving out—but he had a bad feeling about this, a very bad feeling, the same as he had had the day Mackey died, caught by sniper fire in a town that was supposed to be cleaned out, or only minutes before the green kid of a replacement sharing his foxhole had taken a bullet between the eyes—he had watched the boy die, had seen the life leave him, and since then had known his own time would come. He had been too close, had seen too many men die, had been wounded twice, though not seriously either time.

  He kept thinking of Elise as they moved through the woods, of the letter in his pocket, a letter he had received several weeks before at the last mail call—he just wanted to go home. He just wanted to see Elise, to see his children, and he wanted the war to end before his own son could be here as well—he had seen boys die who were little older than Henry, German boys and Allied boys, boys who had not lived to be men, and who had never known the pleasures of a wife or a marriage bed.

  He just wanted it to be over.

  They were moving up behind the German positions now. The sound of the machine guns were loud from the nest ahead, and it seemed they would make it without being seen. The men spread out, a few taking positions behind trees, Janson and two other men leaving cover to move in closer. They could see the Germans now, uniforms in the darkness, helmets below the reach of return fire—suddenly one of them turned, his eyes meeting Janson’s over the distance. He was a kid, big and husky, with a look of fear on his face—then he raised a cry of warning, his gun coming up. There was gunfire from beside Janson, and again just to his rear. The soldier beside the German kid was hit, his helmet sliding down over his face. The kid was firing, the look of fear still on his face, and Janson tried to move to cover even as he returned fire—but he could not. He was going down, landing on his face in the snow. He tried to struggle to his feet, tried to get to the protection of a tree, but one leg would not move, and the other only pushed at the snow. There was gunfire all around him, and he was hit again, feeling the bullet pass through his upper arm even as the pain washed up from the pit of his belly and down one leg.