Take Me Home (9781455552078)

by Garlock, Dorothy

  Sitting on his rump, Huck shook his head, clearly discouraged, his pride more wounded than his rear end. “Sorry about that, boss,” he grumbled, accepting John’s hand and struggling back to his feet. “I feel like a fool letting that rat get the better of me.”

  The sheriff waved it off. “Dale’s a handful,” he said. “I know that all too well. He’s been fighting me ever since I caught up with him. You should’ve seen me trying to wrestle him into handcuffs.”

  Still plenty intoxicated, Sylvester had started cackling at the sight of Dale’s comeuppance; even the threatening way the thief was glaring at him wasn’t enough to stop his laughter.

  “You best knock that off,” Huck cautioned. “Otherwise, I’ll put you both in the same cell. I don’t reckon it’ll be so funny then.”

  The deputy must have sounded serious; the old drunk’s guffaws dwindled into a series of coughs before he fell silent.

  Olivia stared at her father. John Marsten was just shy of fifty, his sandy blond hair touched with silver at the temples, the skin around his piercing blue eyes starting to become marred by wrinkles. Though he was lean, he was strong in build as well as stature, the sort of man who commanded a room’s attention just by entering it. Even in situations like the one that had just happened, he never appeared ruffled, but calm and collected. He’d been the law in Miller’s Creek since just after Olivia had been born, a fixture in town as familiar as the red and white pole outside the barbershop or the clock high above the bank. Much like the rest of the townsfolk, he had always made Olivia feel safe.

  Hanging up the cell keys, John finally noticed his daughter. “Olivia,” he said, his face softening. “I didn’t know you were here.” Looking back at Dale, he added, “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “I’m fine,” she reassured him.

  Glancing down at his watch, her father said, “What brings you by? I would’ve thought you’d be home by now.”

  “Actually,” Olivia replied, “I was wondering if we could talk.”

  “Of course.”

  Realizing that her father meant that they should have their conversation right there, she said, “I was hoping we might have some privacy.”

  John nodded. Looking over his shoulder at his deputy, he said, “Olivia and I are going to head outside for a bit, Huck. You think you can hold down the fort?”

  Glancing over the top of his newspaper, Huck grinned. “Long as those troublemakers keep quiet, I reckon I can handle it.”

  The spring sun was beginning to set in the west when Olivia and her father stepped out behind the police station. The early evening still held a bit of the day’s meager heat, but a light breeze carried with it the promise of a chilly night. John didn’t seem at all uncomfortable, but Olivia shivered as she placed her hands in her armpits, both for the warmth and to keep her ring hidden.

  “You want to go somewhere warmer?” her father asked, noticing her discomfort.

  “This is fine,” she answered.

  John nodded as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his shirt. Once he’d wrangled one free, he struck a match and lit it, taking a drag and blowing a plume of smoke toward the sky. He looked over at his daughter a bit sheepishly and asked, “Can we keep this a secret?”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  For years, Olivia’s mother had scolded her husband about his smoking habit. Whenever he came home from work, his clothes smelling like tobacco, Elizabeth had turned up her nose and walked from the room. For his part, John had tried everything to cut back, but he still craved one from time to time.

  “So what’s on your mind?” he asked.

  Olivia noticed how her father had phrased his question. Instead of asking what was wrong, about what had bothered her enough to come by the station to talk to him, he remained neutral; she knew that it was the lawman in him, not wanting to make any assumptions before he had the whole story.

  All day, Olivia had tried to come up with a way to talk about the proposal that had changed her life. She’d considered just blurting it out, but her heart was pounding so hard that she settled on easing her way into it. “What do you think about Billy?” she finally asked, unable to meet her father’s eyes.

  “He’s a good young man,” John answered evenly. “Polite. Well-mannered. Comes from a good family.”

  “But do you like him?” Olivia pressed.

  Her father’s gaze narrowed inquisitively. “I do,” he said. “I’ve always thought he’s been a good friend to you.”

  “Well…now he wants to be much more than that…”

  John had been bringing his cigarette up to take another drag, but listening to his daughter’s words, he paused, the butt a few inches short of his mouth. “Did Billy ask you out on a date?” he asked.

  “Yes…no…” Olivia stammered; she wondered if this was how Billy felt trying to find the words to ask for her hand.

  “Which is it?”

  Unable to hold the truth back any longer, she took a deep breath and answered, “He asked me to marry him…”

  Even though Olivia knew that her father’s success as a sheriff came from remaining unfazed by the most unexpected of occurrences, she saw that her revelation had stunned him, even if he didn’t let it show for long. He nodded as he puffed on his cigarette, the drag undoubtedly deeper than he’d originally intended.

  Now that Olivia had begun, the story tumbled quickly out of her. “He was so wound up, pacing out in front of the hardware store, that I started to worry,” she explained. “I thought something bad must have happened, but the next thing I knew, Billy was down on one knee with a ring in his hand,” she continued. “He proposed, and then…and then…”

  “And then?” her father echoed.

  “I said ‘yes,’” Olivia answered, finally allowing her hand, and the ring on her finger, to show. At that moment, she finally felt the enormity of her decision, the weight of it; maybe by admitting it to someone else, it had become real.

  Olivia had expected her father to frown, to say that she wasn’t ready, that she was too young to get married, the same sort of sentiments expressed by his deputy, but instead, he surprised her. John dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushed it beneath his boot, and smiled as he walked over and pulled his daughter close; Olivia was so shocked by his reaction that it took her a moment to return his embrace. After a moment, her father stepped back and said, “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

  Too dumbstruck to respond, Olivia could only stare.

  Noticing, John said, “Usually when someone decides to get married, they’re a bit more excited than this.”

  “I’m just…I’m just still in shock I guess…”

  “That’s understandable,” her father replied. “After I asked for your mother’s hand, I stumbled around in a daze for a week or so before things got back to normal. It’ll eventually pass.”

  “Isn’t it normal for a man to ask his prospective bride’s father for permission?” Olivia prodded, asking another of the questions that had gnawed at her all afternoon. “Didn’t Billy say anything to you about it?”

  “Not a word,” John answered. “But what with him getting ready to leave for training, he might not have felt he had time.” Pausing, he added, “If it makes any difference, if he had asked, I can’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t have given him my blessing.”

  How about the fact that I don’t think I’m in love with him? Olivia thought.

  “Have you told your mother?” John asked.

  “Not yet,” she answered with a shake of her blond hair.

  “I’m sure she’ll be excited.”

  Olivia had no reason to doubt her father. Elizabeth Marsten had always encouraged her daughter to better herself through marriage. To her, Billy couldn’t have been more ideal; his family was one of the wealthiest in town. She could already hear the shriek of joy that would meet her announcement; just thinking about it made Olivia queasy.

  “How much longer does Billy ha
ve left before training?” her father asked.

  “Just about five weeks.”

  Tenderly, John took his daughter’s hand in his own, his fingers rough against her skin. “It’s not easy being married to a man who’ll be heading off to war,” he said. “Your mother might never admit to it, but she suffered plenty while I was gone.”

  In 1918, back during the first war in Europe in which the United States took part, Olivia’s father had been an infantry­man. For months, he’d slogged across mud-strewn battlefields, marched through trenches, fighting against the kaiser’s army. Decades later, he still didn’t talk about those days, although one of the things he had acquired during that long year of war was an undying hatred of Germans. He enthusiastically supported the war against Hitler and his nation.

  Olivia understood what her father was saying, but how could she admit that this was one of the reasons she’d accepted Billy’s proposal? That she was afraid that if she had not agreed to marry him, he would go off to fight with a broken heart. That if he were killed in action, she would never be able to forgive herself. Holding her tongue seemed easier.

  “I’ll manage,” she said simply.

  Her father nodded solemnly; Olivia knew that she’d given him no reason to doubt her desire to marry, and it made her ashamed.

  “Now run on home,” John said. “Once I finish up with Dale I’ll be along so we can celebrate as a family.”

  This time, when he took his daughter in his arms, it was Olivia who held him close, her eyes shut tight to hold back tears. Maybe it was because she’d begun to understand what accepting Billy’s proposal meant. Or maybe it was because even though she didn’t love him, at least not in a romantic way, Olivia couldn’t imagine taking back what she’d done; it would kill him inside.

  She was going to become Billy Tate’s wife, and there was nothing that could change that fact now.

  So when a lone tear finally did fall, Olivia wiped it away quickly.

  Chapter Three

  PETER BECKER ROCKED back and forth on his hardback seat as the train jostled its way down the tracks, the sound of its passing steady and rhythmic. Three dozen men shared the train car with him, yet it was oddly quiet; no one spoke, the silence occasionally broken by a cough or sneeze. Most heads were turned to stare out of the windows at the passing landscape. Brilliant sunlight shone down from a cloudless sky, bright on the endless fields as they rushed past, sparkling across the water of trickling rivers and streams, only to disappear when the train passed through a thick copse of trees. Once, a trio of deer had looked up from the tall grass they were eating. Peter would have liked to get up and move around, to take in all of these new yet strangely familiar sights, but that was impossible.

  He could be shot just for getting out of his seat.

  Heavy iron handcuffs shackled both of Peter’s wrists. A chain ran down through a bolt in the floor, connecting him to the man sitting to his right. An American soldier stood two seats in front, his back to the door that led between the train’s cars, his gun held at the ready, and his eyes vigilant for the first sign of trouble.

  Peter was a German soldier.

  He was the enemy.

  Nearly three months had passed since Peter’s infantry unit had accidentally stumbled onto an American patrol in the forests of western Germany. He still remembered the bitter cold of that day, the way the wind burned the bare skin of his face, but nothing could compare to the icy fear that filled him when the Americans revealed themselves, the morning filled with their shouts demanding surrender. Two of his fellow soldiers had refused and raised their guns, only to be shot full of bullets, dead before their bodies even hit the frozen, snow-covered ground. Wisely, Peter and the rest had done as they were ordered.

  After their capture, they had been treated well. For years, Peter and his fellow soldiers had been warned about what would happen to them if they were to fall into Allied hands; that the Americans would torture them mercilessly, shooting them like dogs when they’d had their fill. But that hadn’t happened. Far from it, they had been given warm clothes and food, far better than they’d been receiving from Germany’s beleaguered home front. Following weeks of endless questions aimed at determining what, if anything, they knew about German war plans, they had ridden trains to the Atlantic coast, boarded enormous transport ships, and then sailed west for the United States. After landing, it was more questions and more trains. Their final destination was to be a system of internment camps in Minnesota. For Peter, all sense of time had been lost; one day bled right into the next.

  For all of those on the train, the war was mercifully over.

  “When are we getting something to eat?!”

  Peter stiffened as the man beside him, the soldier on the other end of his handcuffs’ chain, shouted in German, his voice menacing; the suddenness of his voice in the silence of the train car made it sound much louder than it was.

  Otto Speer was the rare soldier who relished the violence of war. He was squat and thick-necked, and his hands were so large that his rifle had always looked tiny in them. With short-cropped black hair, dark eyes set a little too closely together, a nose bent awkwardly to one side, probably broken in a tavern brawl, and a jaw that looked as if it had been chiseled out of granite, Otto had been one of the most bloodthirsty members of Peter’s unit. A passionate believer in Hitler and the Nazi cause, he constantly railed against the Jews, berated any of his fellow soldiers he felt were shirking their duties, and had once killed a French farmer in cold blood when the man had refused to part with a pair of rabbits, laughing while the man’s wife screamed in sorrow. Otto claimed to be a distant relative of Albert Speer, the Nazi armaments minister, but no one believed him. Peter would have expected Otto to be one of the men the Americans had shot dead during their capture, but while Otto was undeniably dangerous, that didn’t mean he was stupid. While most of their unit had been dispersed to who-knew-where, sent on different boats and trains to different places, Peter had unfortunately found himself with Otto every step of the way.

  “I want something to eat!” he again demanded.

  The American soldier was doing his best to ignore Otto, but Peter could see that he was becoming annoyed.

  “It’s been hours since we last stopped!”

  “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying,” Peter hissed, trying to defuse the situation before it got worse.

  “He might not know the words but he damn well knows the meaning!” Otto snapped, turning his fury on his fellow prisoner. “How many of these pathetic Amerikaner shitholes do we have to go through before we stop?”

  Most of the towns they passed whizzed by so fast that there wasn’t time for more than a glance: homes with gardens ready for planting; shopkeepers unfurling their awnings, ready to open their businesses; old men behind the wheel of their trucks, idling beside the tracks as they waited for the train to pass; a congregation leaving church, the ringing of bells filling the air. Once, some boys had pelted their car with rocks; Peter had wondered if it was because they knew the train was filled with German prisoners, or if it was just childish fun. It always seemed like it was simply another day in their lives; remembering the destruction of Germany’s cities, Peter wondered if any of these Americans truly knew that their nation was at war.

  The only time the train stopped was to give the prisoners something to eat and allow them to use the restroom. The breaks were infrequent; it wasn’t unusual for Peter’s stomach to grumble or for his bladder to feel close to bursting. But instead of simply bearing it like everyone else, Otto had chosen to fight back. It was at moments like this that Peter wished he was sitting somewhere else, anywhere but beside the rabble-rouser who seemed hell-bent on causing a scene.

  “How much longer are we going to put up with this?!” Otto roared, rattling the chain on his handcuffs, looking around the cabin as if he was trying to encourage the others to join his tirade.

  “Shut up!” the American soldier snapped, his patience at an end.


  “The driver of this train must be a Jew!”

  “I said that’s enough, you damn Nazi!” The soldier took a step closer; Peter saw the barrel of the man’s gun lower, the knuckles on his hands white from gripping the rifle’s stock so tightly.

  “Let me out of these chains,” Otto growled, “and I’ll—”

  “You keep your mouth shut or it’ll be—”

  “He’s just tired and hungry,” Peter said without thinking, forcing himself to be heard over the growing argument. But unlike Otto’s shouted German, he immediately grabbed the soldier’s attention. The man’s head snapped to the side as he stared, his mouth slightly agape.

  Peter had spoken in perfect, unaccented English.

  “It’s been a long journey for all of us, you included,” he kept on. “We just want to get where we’re going without any problems.”

  “How in the hell’re you talkin’ like that?” the soldier demanded, but before Peter could answer, he snapped, “Just shut up! Don’t say a damn word!”

  Angrily, the soldier lowered his gun so that the muzzle swiveled back and forth between Peter and Otto; the prisoners sitting in the seat in front of them ducked their heads to stay out of the line of fire. Just like that, Peter was considered as dangerous as Otto, all because he’d spoken English. All he could do was look helplessly at the gun barrel pointing at him; with his hands shackled, he couldn’t even raise them to try to calm the situation.

  “You two just sit there and be quiet!” the soldier snapped. “If I hear another word out of either of you, there’s gonna be trouble!”