Small Town Girl

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “No sir. Trying to stay away from the trees, sir.” Jay was feeling sick to his stomach and dizzy from the pain. He pulled his arm away from Artie’s shoulders and stood on one foot in front of the sergeant. He managed to bite back the yelp that wanted to come out as pain stabbed from his ankle all the way to his shoulder.

  “He must be hurt bad, Sarge. He was talking religion,” Artie said.

  “Religion?” Sarge peered at Jay. “You drunk, Tanner?”

  “No sir,” Jay said. “I don’t drink, Sergeant, sir. Not anymore. Drinking breaks hearts, sir.”

  “What’d you say?” But it wasn’t a question he wanted answered as he leaned closer to Jay. “If you aren’t drunk, you must be crazy.”

  “Yes sir. Now that I can admit to, sir.”

  That’s the last thing he remembered before waking up with a medic beside him as they bounced along toward a hospital.

  “Easy, soldier.” The medic put his hand on Jay’s shoulder. “Banged up your leg a little, but don’t you worry. You’ll be good as new in a few weeks. Then you’ll be right back out there.”

  Jay looked up at him in the dim light from a lantern hanging over their heads. “Do you believe in God?” That must be his favorite new question. Maybe Sarge was right. Maybe he was crazy.

  The man didn’t answer his question. Instead he said, “You aren’t about to die or anything, soldier.”

  “Thank you.” Jay shut his eyes to absorb the bounces of the truck. But he wasn’t sure who he was thanking. The medic or the Lord. Maybe both in his crazy way.

  36

  She’d known what she was going to do from the moment she saw the address on Jay’s letter. Georgia. That wasn’t across the ocean. She had a car. His car. If Evie could go to Arizona, Kate could go to Georgia.

  Now and again the uncomfortable thought nudged her that Jay hadn’t written to her. He’d written to Lorena. But he had asked about her. That meant he still loved her, didn’t it? She desperately wanted to believe it did. She thought about writing him and asking straight out if she’d ruined their chances the night he’d hit Lorena with his car. Lorena didn’t hold that against him. She knew without a worried thought that Jay would never hurt her if he could avoid it. She didn’t know he’d been drinking.

  Kate was beginning to not know that too. She’d been absolutely certain that night. She’d smelled the drunken vomit on him, but everybody else was acting as if her nose had betrayed her. Maybe it had. Fern said it had. And Fern didn’t lie. Kate’s mother told her to not give up on love. Evie and Tori said the same. Lorena looked at her with sad brown eyes, trying to understand. Kate thought even Scout looked at her with accusing eyes sometimes.

  Everybody loved Jay. And heaven help her, so did she. So much that it was like a constant burn inside her. She had to see him again. She couldn’t let him go off to war without telling him she was sorry. Without telling him she loved him. She wanted to offer him her love without conditions. That was surely trust, wasn’t it? She wanted to beg him to hear the music with her again.

  Every time she got behind the wheel of his car, she thought about driving it away from Rosey Corner. She studied the maps she found in his glove box. She traced off the roads with her finger and tried to imagine being that far from Rosey Corner. Alone on the road. It gave her shivers, but she was the middle sister. Nobody had ever babied her. She could do whatever had to be done. And she had to see Jay before they sent him overseas. She had to.

  But she couldn’t leave before Tori and Sammy got married. A matter of days. Surely a few more days wouldn’t matter, but nearly every night she had the same dream where Jay was standing at the rail of a ship. Down on the dock she kept jumping up and down, screaming his name. He never gave any sign of hearing her, and then the ship would begin moving away.

  When the ship disappeared, she always jerked awake. With her heart pounding in her ears, she would stare at the dark air pressing down on her and listen to Tori and Lorena breathing softly in their sleep. A familiar sound of family. She’d think about Evie out with Mike in Arizona. But mostly she thought about Jay. She pulled his smile that always looked a hair away from a laugh out of the darkness. She wrapped her arms around herself and remembered the feel of his arms as they danced to the music of their hearts. Oh, to dance in the moonlight with him again. She imagined him jumping out of airplanes and wasn’t surprised. That was Jay. Embracing the moment. Why hadn’t she done the same?

  The night before Tori’s wedding, the dream shook Kate awake yet again. But this time Sammy and Tori were on the ship, disappearing with Jay. Tori wouldn’t be on the ship. Kate knew that. She’d be here at home fighting off her own nightmares after Sammy was sent to the war zones.

  Kate sat up in the bed and watched her sister in the silvery moonlight that was slipping in through the window. She was so very young. Only sixteen. She’d always been skinny and had a way of catching every cold that came around. But Tori was tougher than she looked. She was teaching Kate a few things about going after what she wanted. She hadn’t spent months worrying about what she should do. At least not after Pearl Harbor changed all their lives.

  But it was different for Tori. She and Sammy had long been on the path of love. The war had merely hurried things along for them. He planned to enlist the day after his nineteenth birthday on July 5th. A little over a month after their wedding day. A month Tori was ready to treasure.

  How many months had it been since Jay left? Since she’d pushed him away. Five months they might have spent together. Five months she’d never get back. But how could she promise her life to a man who drank? She loved her father. She hadn’t stopped loving him while he was drinking. Her mother hadn’t either, but there were times when Kate thought she wanted to. Times when the drinking was more than her mother could handle.

  The thoughts spun around in Kate’s head until she couldn’t stand it. She eased out of bed and tiptoed out of the bedroom. Scout scooted out from under Lorena’s bed and followed her across the sitting room, his toenails clicking on the wooden floor at the edges of the rug. The screen door squeaked when she opened it, but she was careful not to let it slam shut after she and Scout went out on the porch.

  With June only a couple of weeks away, the night air carried the fresh scent of summer. Kate pulled in a breath and held it, letting it seep through her. The trees were still dripping from a late afternoon shower, and off in the distance, a rumble gave notice more rain might be coming. A little thunder didn’t bother Kate. There’d been plenty of times in years past when they’d prayed for the sound of thunder and rain on the roof.

  Kate pulled the housecoat she’d grabbed off the bed tight around her and sat down on the swing. The chains rattled against the hooks in the porch ceiling and then were quiet. Scout went out to sniff around the yard. When he came back to settle at her feet, water drops were clinging to his back. She never even thought of his old name anymore. No trouble now. She reached down and stroked his head, glad for his company.

  How many problems had she mulled over on this very swing? She was sitting right here when she told her mother she didn’t believe there was a God. Kate cringed when she thought of how mixed up she’d been then. She’d been so sure that a just God, a loving God wouldn’t have let Grandfather Merritt take Lorena away from them, but Grandfather Merritt had taken Lorena and given her to the Baxters. At least for a while. A too long while. Even now, nearly six years later, the pain of knowing Lorena needed her then and being helpless to change things made Kate’s heart hurt.

  She’d been so young. Only fourteen. She’d thought she could figure out all the answers then. She was Lorena’s angel sister. The sister with the answers. But she’d found out some things didn’t have easy answers. She still knew that, but she no longer doubted God.

  A dark stain of evil was spreading over the world, but God hadn’t deserted them. He was hearing their prayers in the trenches, in the foxholes, in the airplanes. He was ready to hear Kate’s prayer as she pushed against the wo
oden porch floor with her bare toes to rock the swing gently back and forth. But what to pray? She stumbled through her mind searching for the right prayers. The ones that mattered.

  For peace, of course. For Mike and Jay and every soldier lining up to do battle against the enemies out to destroy their world. For Tori and Sammy as on the morrow they would speak their wedding vows and cling to one another a brief while before the war yanked them apart. For Lorena, so full of trust. For herself. Why was she always so ready to pray for everybody else and so reluctant to pray for herself?

  When the screen door opened, Kate expected her mother to be the one stepping out on the porch, but instead it was her father. He’d pulled on his pants and shirt but hadn’t bothered with shoes. Scout’s tail thumped against the porch as he raised his head up to welcome him.

  “I’m sorry I woke you, Daddy.” Kate scooted over to make room for him.

  “Your mother thought it would be Victoria who would be sleepless tonight.” He reached over and laid his calloused hand over hers. “But instead here’s midnight Kate.”

  “Is it midnight?”

  “No, midnight’s long gone. It’s the underbelly of the morning. Two a.m.” With a laugh, he squeezed her hand and stared out toward the night sky. “It’s pleasant out here this time of night. Quiet. At least other than the tree frogs and katydids. But they add to the quiet. I missed this when I went to war. The good sounds of night. Nothing was ever quiet for long over there. The earth was crawling with noise and people.”

  “Do you still have the nightmares?” Kate asked.

  “Sometimes. Some things a man can’t forget. The boys going over will come back with their own nightmares. Those who come back.”

  When a tremble went through Kate at the grimness of his words, he wrapped his arm around her and pulled her over next to him. “Sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, but you’ve never been one to duck away from the truth. War’s worse than anything you can imagine. It demands and takes all a man has to give. And then it gouges out a little more.” His arm felt suddenly a little stiff around her.

  “Why do there have to be wars, Daddy?” Kate felt like a little child asking for answers to questions that had no answers.

  “That’s a question somebody wiser than me will have to answer. Throughout history there have always been wars and rumors of wars.” He blew out a long breath of air. “When I went over there, they told us we were fighting the war to end all wars, and here not thirty years later it’s all happening again. Only worse.”

  “Do you think we’ll win?”

  “President Roosevelt says we will.” Silence wrapped around them for a moment before he went on. “I think we have to. You read the newspapers. Men like Hitler have to be stopped. Whatever it takes.”

  “It scares me to think about it,” Kate said. “The war. At the same time it all seems so far from here. From Rosey Corner.”

  “Thank the Lord for that.” Her father tightened his arm around her. “I’m glad I don’t have to worry about my girls being safe here at home.”

  “Some women will be joining up in the new Women’s Army Corps.”

  “Are you thinking about doing that?” Her father’s voice sounded a little tight. “Is that what’s got you out here on the worry swing in the wee hours of the morning?”

  “I don’t know.” Kate sighed, but she did know. “No, I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  Her father waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, he said, “So it must be matters of the heart. What happened between you and Jay?”

  She hesitated, not sure what to say. She couldn’t talk about Jay drinking. Not to her father. The thunder was staying in the distance, but from the woods a whippoorwill called. A lonesome sound. At last she said, “I didn’t trust him enough.”

  “Trust is important between a man and a woman.”

  “That’s what he said. He said without trust we didn’t have anything.” Her voice trembled a little as she said the words, but she swallowed down her tears. She wasn’t the kind of person who cried over everything. Not like Evie.

  “Your mother says you thought he was drinking the night Lorena got hurt.”

  “I didn’t think it. I knew it.”

  “But . . . ,” her father said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “He said he wasn’t.”

  “But you didn’t believe him.”

  Kate shook her head a little. She didn’t trust her voice.

  “And now you wish you had.”

  “I don’t know what I wish.”

  The sounds of the night wrapped around them again. At last her father broke the silence between them. “I’ve never really told you how sorry I am for what I put you through when I was drinking. I shouldn’t have ever let alcohol get hold of me. You were just a kid. You shouldn’t have had to take care of a drunken father.”

  For a few seconds everything froze inside Kate. This was a door to the past they never opened. She moistened her lips and wasn’t sure what to say. “Mama couldn’t.”

  “I’m not blaming her. I’m blaming me.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It wasn’t okay and it will always matter. But what has happened in the past can’t be changed. We can only step out on tomorrow and try to do better.”

  Kate twisted around to look up at him in the near darkness. “And you did.”

  “But not before I hurt people.”

  “You didn’t hurt me,” Kate said quickly. Shadows hid the expression on his face as he stared out into the night, but he sounded so sad.

  “I think my drinking may still be hurting you.” He turned his eyes back to her.

  Kate’s heart was doing a nervous dance inside her chest. She didn’t want to talk about her father drinking. It hadn’t made any difference in how she loved him. Not then and not now, but some things were better left buried. Forgotten the way the Bible said sins were after the Lord forgave them. As far as the east is from the west. Cast into the deepest ocean. That’s the way she wanted her father’s drinking problem to be.

  “What happened between me and Jay didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Her father’s voice was gentle, but his eyes were probing her.

  She looked down at her hands. “You didn’t make Jay go out and get drunk.”

  “No, you’re right about that. Each man is responsible for his own actions.” He pushed his foot against the floor and rocked the swing back and forth, being careful not to disturb Scout. “Each girl too.”

  “I know. You and Mama have been telling me that for years.”

  “So we have.” He kept the swing moving slightly, a comfortable rhythm as he rubbed his hand up and down her upper arm.

  Kate thought maybe they’d tiptoed past all the bad talk and she was thinking about going inside when he began talking again in a wondering tone of voice. “Funny thing that we never noticed him drinking any other time. You said yourself that Graham was surprised when you told him Jay was drunk. He lived with Graham for several months. You’d have thought he’d have noticed if the boy drank like I used to. Everybody in Rosey Corner back then knew I had a drinking problem. Wasn’t a secret from anybody.”

  “Only because of the war,” Kate said. “Aunt Hattie said you learned to drink in France.”

  “Aunt Hattie might have been right about that, but I could have left it in France. I didn’t have to carry it home with me.”

  “Jay hasn’t been to France.”

  “But he was thinking about maybe having to go.” He stroked her hair. “That doesn’t really matter now. What matters now is this. Do you love him?”

  Kate hesitated, but she saw no need in avoiding an answer with so much truth already in the air between them. “I do.” She touched her hand to her chest. “I feel like there’s a hole inside me that might never go away if I don’t see him again.”

  “So why don’t you write him and tell him that
?”

  “I could write him.” She smoothed out the wrinkles in her housecoat. “But I need more than words on a paper. I have his car.”

  Her father didn’t sound surprised. “Your mother was afraid you might be thinking about doing something crazy.”

  “Georgia’s not so awfully far away. People drive that far all the time.”

  “Not young women. Alone. Young women who’ve never driven anywhere farther than Edgeville.” He sounded very sure. “Not young women who bear my last name.”

  Kate had been expecting her mother and father to be against her making the trip across three states. It didn’t matter. She was twenty years old. She could do what she wanted. Even if the thought of it did make her heart keep doing its nervous flutter. “I’m going.” She pushed all the firmness she could into her voice.

  He surprised her by laughing. “Of course you are. Nobody has ever talked Katherine Reece Merritt out of doing anything she makes up her mind to do, now have they?”

  “Then you’re all right with me driving to Georgia?” She could hardly believe her ears as she twisted around to look at him again.

  He was smiling. “I’ve always wanted to go south. For a visit.”

  “But—” she started, but he held up a hand to stop her.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go sightseeing or something if the two of you decide two’s company and three’s a crowd.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” A blush warmed her cheeks as she gave his arm a shove, but she felt like laughing too. It wouldn’t be nearly as scary with her father riding with her. Even if he didn’t know a thing about cars, he obviously knew a few things about love.

  “So pack up what you’ll need in the morning and gas up the car. We’ll leave right after Victoria and Sammy tie the knot.” Suddenly he sounded a little sad again. “I’m losing all my girls.”

  “You can never lose us, Daddy.” Kate gave him a hug. “We’ll always be your girls. Especially Tori. She was your baby for too many years before Lorena came to live with us.”

  “She’s not much more than a baby now. Way too young for marrying, but these are not normal times.” He blew out a breath. “And when I think about it, she’s not much younger than your mother was when we got married. That too because of war. A few weeks of heaven that kept me going when I stepped into the hell of war. Sammy and Victoria deserve the same chance for happiness. We couldn’t deny them that.”