The Magic of Ordinary Days

by Ann Howard Creel

  Back in my room, I threw on clothes and thrust my arms into my overcoat. I found Ray outside the barn, moving haystacks from the truck bed inside.

  “Morning,” he said as he lifted a bale of hay and tossed it inside the barn.

  I gave a half smile. “I saw the box.” I put my hands in my pockets. “I looked inside, but I won’t touch anything without your permission.”

  He kept working. “I got it down for you.”

  “From the attic?”

  He nodded and slowed for a moment. “I told you once Martha had pretty much everything. But I didn’t tell you that Daniel had put a bunch of stuff in our attic after our folks died.” He stopped to catch his breath. “It did make it easier.” He gestured around, outside the barn. “They’re everywhere around here, anyway.” Then he looked at me. “But those photos and other things, why, they were like flags waving sadness in our faces. After Daniel died, I did the same thing with his stuff, too.”

  Just outside his ear, I saw a thin line of shaving cream he had apparently missed that morning. I wanted to brush it away, to touch his cheek, to see how soft it would feel after a shave. “After I look through the box, what shall I do with it?”

  He leaned on the pitchfork. “I couldn’t face it before, but now ...” His voice trailed off, then he said, “You can do anything you want.”

  The sun was beginning to burn off the chill of the morning. Icicles that hung from the barn eaves began dropping tears on the ground. But Ray looked relieved, as if he’d finally shed his sadness. Three years since Daniel’s death, and even longer since his parents‘. Three years it had taken him to get to this spot.

  “I’d like to put them out. The house is so bare anyway. And I think it’s those personal things, those remembrances, that make a house into a home.”

  He nodded. “Go on ahead, then.”

  But as I walked back up the steps into the kitchen, and then found myself standing before the box again, I hesitated to do it. It wouldn’t be fair to pry into these lives, especially those ones dead and gone that meant so much to Ray, if I wasn’t at least willing to try it. I looked back outside and watched the easy, comfortable shape of him stepping outside the barn as he hooked another bale of hay.

  The house did seem warmer when he came home. The awful news of the war had been easier to take when he was here to share and validate the horror of it with me. He continually surprised me by doing things, such as magic tricks, I’d never have imagined him likely to do, such as checking out that book from the library, marking on his calendar with my name, thanking me for the strangest things. We didn’t share a single interest, but he had found things in me to love. And over the past months, the pain of losing Mother had become less dreadful in his company.

  I opened the box and touched the top photo frame. What would happen if I just gave in and allowed him to love me? Could I continue to be the seeker I’d always been, only planted here on this growing ground instead of far away? Outside, Ray had paused from his work to throw a stick to Franklin. When that dog came loping back up to him with the stick in his mouth, panting and so proud of himself, Ray crouched down and scratched both sides of Franklin’s neck at once.

  I lifted the first photo out of the box, brushed it off, and started back in time. I didn’t know it then, but as I went down into that box of Ray’s gentle love, I was traveling back in time, too, peeling off layers of past pain and grief, and beginning to heal my own damaged heart.

  On Wednesday, I went shopping with Martha and Ruth. We bought diapers and diaper pins, some yellow receiving blankets, and a few long white baby gowns. We looked at cradles and bas sinets, but I didn’t find one I liked enough to buy.

  The next day, December 7, Ray emerged from his room as if the day were like any other. He sat down, prayed as usual, and then began eating the eggs over easy and sausage I’d made for breakfast.

  I waited until he had finished up, had downed each bite and emptied his coffee mug, too. Then I whispered, “Ray, I want to help you.” I put my napkin on the table and moved in closer. “To get through this day. Maybe we could go somewhere, do something special.”

  He looked up at me, and to my surprise, his eyes were dry.

  I asked, “Where would you like to go?”

  He rubbed his chin. “The truth is”—he sat back in the chair—“I’d like to stay around the farm. I could show you more parts you never seen before.”

  I smiled. “That sounds fine. Whatever you want.”

  The sun was coming up warm, but still we loaded up coats and a thermos full of hot coffee. Ray drove away in the direction opposite where he’d taken me before. We passed by clumpy dirt in empty fields spiked with every shade of brown dry plants, then, unexpectedly, a broad green rectangle of winter wheat lit up the landscape, looking to me exactly like a park of summer grass.

  As we drove out, I asked Ray, “How does it feel to have all the photos and things around?” The night before, after I’d sifted through the box, I’d dusted and found a spot for each item around the house. The photos of Ray’s parents; childhood pictures of Martha, Ray, and Daniel; scrapbooks; yearbooks; Ray’s and Daniel’s bronzed baby shoes—silver baby cups engraved with their names; and the greatest find of them all—the Singleton family Bible filled with information and words of inspiration on every birth and death over generations. These treasures now adorned every room.

  “It’s not bad,” Ray said and looked over. “There’s more, you know. In the attic. Her china, her knickknacks, and whatnot. She collected buttons.”

  “Your mother? Buttons? I knew she collected stones for the garden, but I didn’t know she could sew.”

  “She did sew.” Ray nodded. “But most of those buttons never got put on clothes. There’s all kinds. Old ones, brass ones, ones with tiny birds and other things painted on the fronts. They’re in the attic, a whole box of them in jars.”

  I tried to imagine what else might be up there. Even in my exalted, blown-up physical state, I could climb up there and find it, examine it all.

  Ray seemed to know what I was thinking. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not going up there after it.” He put his hand on the seat between us. “It’s yours,” he said. “If you want it. But please let me get it down for you. Promise?”

  I nodded.

  He pulled to a stop where the fence met the railroad tracks. “End of the line,” he said.

  Outside, the sun was rising high in clear skies marked only with an occasional pearl of cloud. Crisscrossed with the tracks of coyotes, the snow beneath our feet hadn’t yet been touched with human shoes.

  “I didn’t know the property went all the way to the tracks,” I said over my shoulder to Ray as I crunched through the snow in that direction.

  He was right behind me. At the escarpment, we stopped.

  “Daniel and I used to come out here as kids,” he said as he squinted into the sunshine. “Back then, we had a mule both of us could ride.” Ray gazed at the railroad tracks rising up in front of us. “Daniel liked it out here.” He looked my way and smiled. “You and he would’ve got along swell. He wanted to see the world, too. He’d come down to these tracks and tell me that one day, he was going to go riding off somewhere.”

  I hadn’t thought often of Daniel before. But since I’d seen his face in the photos, a younger and leaner version of Ray with a bigger smile, I could also picture the farm boy out here along the railroad tracks, dreaming.

  “He joined the Navy since he’d never seen the sea. He wanted to come back here, of course,” Ray said. “Just wanted to sew some wild oats, as they say.” Ray lifted his hat, then put it back on. “Less than six months before Pearl Harbor. Our part of the war hadn’t even started yet.” He kicked at clumps of hard snow underneath his boot. “We figured one of us could run the farm, and one should join up. Daniel said this was his chance to see the world. And me, I was happy to stay back here and feed people instead of fighting them.” He looked relieved when he turned to me. “He got to see Hawaii,
that’s something.”

  I waited for a plane to pass overhead, long enough, too, to fight off tears for the young man who had died on that beautiful island. “It is.”

  We started walking the line where the snow-covered prairie ended and the rock bank leading up to the tracks began.

  “Dangerous place for kids to play.” My own words jolted me for a second. Now I was leaving off the first word or two of my sentences, just as Ray so often did.

  “Not really,” he said. “We kept off the track, except for setting pennies.” He explained, “We’d save up a penny or two, bring them down here, and set them on the tracks. When a train comes, it flattens out that penny, leaving it thin as paper and shaped long, like an egg. But it happens so fast, you can’t see where the train sends that penny flying. Daniel and I used to spend hours searching out our mashed pennies. We’d look all around, in the sage-brush and the prickly pear cactus, until we found them. And you know what?”

  He stopped walking and turned to gaze at me now. “We always found them closer than we thought.”

  He looked at me openly then, let me see it then, that sweet vulnerability in his eyes that he’d worked so long to hide from me. The curtain that shielded them gone, his eyes were now an empty stage ready for whatever act I was willing to play out with him. “After we’d looked all over Creation, we’d find them somewhere near to the tracks, after all.”

  Looking into those eyes, the pain and worry that had been clinging to me for too long began to fall away, replaced by a feeling of fullness that swelled to the point of near pain, then landed as a deep, sweet ache.

  He said, “Sometimes you do find what you’re looking for, closer than you think.”

  Thirty-one

  The next day, I was to meet Rose and Lorelei early in the morning, but I got a late start. When I finally awakened, Ray had gone out somewhere on the farm, but left me with the truck, as was planned. I dressed quickly and drove to the meeting place in Wilson, all the while stealing nervous glances at my watch. I had never been late before.

  When I ground the truck to a halt at the pay telephone, I saw that Rose and Lorelei weren’t alone. With them stood two good-looking soldiers I immediately knew had to be the boyfriends they’d been telling me about. As I stepped down from the truck to meet them, I noticed they wore their stripes on brand-new MP uniforms. Their shirts looked as if they’d just been laundered and starched, and a pressed crease ran down the front of their trouser legs. How well they were groomed. Even their shoes looked new.

  Lorelei introduced them by first name, Walter and Steven. After the introductions, both men surprised me by barely saying a word. Instead, they merely nodded as we shook hands. They weren’t boys; they were at least in their mid-twenties. And I hadn’t met men this shy since the day I met Ray.

  At their sides, they held duffel bags. I turned to Rose with a question on my face.

  “We’ll explain in the car.”

  The soldiers tossed their duffel bags into the truck bed, then jumped over the side to ride back there themselves. Rose and Lorelei slid in on the seat beside me, and I started the engine again.

  “Can you go south?” asked Lorelei as she ran her fingers through her hair. “We want to go to that canyon where we found the Hairstreak. Do you remember it?”

  “Of course I do.” But that canyon was all the way down in New Mexico. “It’s a long drive.”

  Rose looked around Lorelei. “They’re on leave. They want to spend a day or two camping out. But don’t worry, we’re coming back with you.”

  Now they had me smiling. “By necessity or by choice?”

  Lorelei laughed. “Choice, for the most part.”

  I glanced in my rearview mirror. Both soldiers sat backed up against the truck cab, braced against December winds. “They must be freezing back there. If they took turns, we could fit one of them inside.” And that way I’d have a chance to talk with these boyfriends, to form an impression. I could already read Rose’s and Lorelei’s feelings all over their shining faces. If it was possible, I’d swear they’d fallen even more in love. But what of these men?

  “They’re fine. They want to ride in the back,” said Lorelei.

  “Okay, then.” I pushed down on the accelerator. We had a long way to go, and I didn’t want to return so late I’d worry Ray. I glanced at Lorelei. “Now, which one is yours?”

  She laughed again. “Walter is mine. Rose has Stephan—I mean Steven.”

  I nearly laughed. Lorelei and Rose hardly ever mispronounced anything. Their English was as good as mine was, so if cool Lorelei was stumbling over a word, she had to be pretty wound up about spending a day in the company of these men. “You wouldn’t be nervous, would you?”

  Lorelei laughed again, then answered, “We haven’t seen them in so long. In fact, we barely get to meet at all.”

  Rose said, “This day is what we’ve been waiting for.”

  But with the men riding in the back and such a long drive ahead of us, it made no sense. “You won’t be spending much time with them at all.”

  Lorelei only shrugged.

  “I’m so happy for you,” I said. “The cameo pendant?” I asked Lorelei.

  As an answer, she pulled it out from her blouse and let it lay outside of her open collar.

  “Tell me more about them,” I urged.

  “They’ll both be shipping out soon.” This was familiar territory. “They want to do a little sightseeing before they go.”

  “Why so far away?” I asked. “Bent’s Fort would have been closer.”

  “They’ve already been there,” answered Rose.

  Up ahead, I watched a whirlwind spin along the side of the road. The Navajo believed whirlwinds to be the worst of bad luck. They would do just about anything, even turning around and deliberately going miles out of their way, just to avoid one. There was nothing to it, of course. Just superstition. Whirlwinds, also called dust devils, were just a natural phenomenon.

  Dust devils. Devils. There it was again, something evil in the name. That whirlwind did seem sinister to me at that moment, so full of its own power. I let up on the accelerator to avoid it, but I was too late. It spun over the road and whipped right over the truck, jerking the wheel away from me for a fraction of a second despite my firm grip. Then I remembered Rose’s comment to me that night after the dance. They’re pressuring us, she had said.

  I glanced over at Rose and Lorelei. “Just be careful,” I told them.

  When we arrived at the canyon, Walter and Steven were red-faced and bone-stiff from the cold. They creaked out of the truck bed and sank down onto the ground. Lorelei hooked an arm through Walter‘s, and Rose walked along close beside Steven. I took up the rear as we made our way down the path and into the depths of the canyon.

  All the branches of the cottonwoods were as bare as steel bars, and any fall-colored leaves had long since been blown away. The ground was hard but dry, and not frozen. A light breeze kept the branches of bushes rattling against each other like keys jangling on a chain.

  On the canyon floor, Lorelei turned around and said to me, “We’re going to keep on walking. You can wait for us here, if you like.”

  Funny how most people treated pregnant women like invalids. I was six months along, but had barely slowed down. Just as before, I worked in the house and took walks whenever the weather allowed. “I don’t mind walking,” I told her.

  Rose spun around. “You should wait here for us.” Then she looked at me as if pleading. Obviously, they wanted to be alone.

  “Okay,” I replied.

  I found myself a flat rock and sat for close to an hour. I didn’t mind the solitude, and the scenery inside the canyon was a nice change from the flat map of the farm. But I couldn’t imagine what Rose and Lorelei were doing with the men. Rose and Lorelei were not the kind of girls to go off and have affairs in broad daylight, even in this remote canyon. I could barely imagine them kissing.

  Up and down my back, a prickle began to run. I stoo
d up, walked for a few minutes, and then sat back on the rock again. I knew what Rose and Lorelei were going through, falling in love with handsome soldiers. I knew what they were dreaming of—love letters, kisses in the shadows—and I knew what they were planning—futures together. I knew how much they trusted, just as I had.

  I checked my watch repeatedly and told myself to stop fretting. They were probably just off kissing those boyfriends, doing nothing more. And they were bright girls. At the camp, they were handling the worst of circumstances. Certainly they could handle male company. And just as many male soldiers had suffered broken hearts at the hands of their girlfriends as vice versa. “Dear John” letters sent to men overseas and “Allotment Annie” stories of women marrying for a soldier’s paycheck had become just as common as stories of the girl who got left behind. It was so like me to analyze everything into bits and shreds. For once, I would just stop it.

  Instead, I thought about the last few days with Ray and found myself smiling at the memories. I’d been trying to impress him with cooking, while he had complimented my every movement and feature, even my feet. In the evenings, we had left the table for the divan and had worked closer and closer to each other until we sat shoulder to shoulder. Only the night before I’d discovered that I could turn around and face him on the divan, tuck my legs to one side, and curl against his chest. So close I could hear the slow thumping of his heart and his breathing coming in and out, equally, without a pause. And when he whispered to me, I could feel the words start in his chest, rumble through his throat, then leave his body to fill the room with wishes.

  I heard a rustling in the thicket along the trail, and then Rose and Lorelei appeared by themselves. “We’re ready,” announced Rose.

  I stood up from the rock and brushed off the back of my slack-clad legs. “The temperature will dip down below freezing tonight. Are you sure they should camp out this time of year?”