by Leisha Kelly
It wasn’t long before Sam and Thelma came too, because we’d all agreed to meet here and go to the train together. Their entrance was always something of a big event, much different than Lizbeth’s, because their kids let everybody know right away that they were getting close. We heard them outside before they even parked the car. It sounded like Georgie and Rosemary were singing at the top of their lungs again. And little Dorothy was crying like babies do.
Didn’t seem possible that Georgie could be almost six already. And precocious as anything. Smart as a whip and loud as firecrackers. Rosemary was a real pretty three-year-old and nearly as loud as her brother. Lizbeth’s Mary Jane kept her distance from them sometimes, when they got to be a little much.
Little Albert was the quiet one of Sam and Thelma’s bunch, and you wouldn’t expect it because he was barely two. But he’d sit quiet on his father’s knee for a long time, just watching everything going on around him. He liked to sit quiet with Frank too. Once in the fall I saw him with Frank, just looking up at the clouds in the backyard. After a while, he gave a nod like he was satisfied with something. Frank nodded right back, and the little tike hugged at him like they’d just shared something special. I didn’t know what, but Thelma said Franky probably did.
Dorothy was still a tiny thing. Only three months old, and Sam and Thelma were already talking about the names they’d use when they had another baby. It wasn’t strange for Sam to think about more children, coming from a family with ten. Or Thelma either—she had eleven brothers and sisters. But it worried Mom and Lizbeth a little, I think, about them having to stretch what little they had so far.
Mom came back to the kitchen and helped Lizbeth pack sandwiches to send with the boys on the train. Mrs. Jones put a cake in the oven for dinner later. She wanted us to come back here for that, so we wouldn’t have to drive all the way home and think about dinner right away. I knew she was trying to make things easier for Mom, but I wondered if anybody would care about dinner after the train left.
The kitchen started smelling really good, with the cake in the oven and the spices Mrs. Jones got out to mix with the meatloaf she was making ahead. Mom opened the bag of gingersnaps we’d baked at home and repacked them along with the sandwiches. They were Robert’s favorite. I was glad we’d made them.
Dad and Mr. Hammond sat in the sitting room with the pastor. Willy and Frank and Sam went walking outside, which I was glad to see because Willy didn’t pay much attention to Frank a lot of times. I figured they had things to talk over about their pa, and how things should be at home while Willy was gone.
Mr. Hammond acted a whole lot better this morning than he had last night, but I guess everybody still knew there’d be a lot on Frank’s shoulders, and on Rorey and Harry too. Mr. Hammond had trouble keeping up with things on their farm. And if something was bothering him badly enough, he didn’t even try.
Georgie and Rosemary tried to insist on playing with their grandpa, but he wasn’t in the mood to be climbed on or hear their racket. So Dad sent them upstairs with Emma Grace and Bert to play until it was time to go. Lizbeth’s husband, Ben, was pretty serious-faced, and he sat with Pastor and Dad and Mr. Hammond for a while, but everybody else left them alone.
Way too soon, it was time to get everybody’s coats and go meet the train. Sam and Ben carried Robert and William’s bags, though they wouldn’t have had to. William seemed even more excited than he had earlier. But Robert had gotten really quiet. We all went out of the house together to walk up the street past Charlie Hunter’s station to the train depot. Only Mrs. Jones and Thelma, with little Albert and the baby, stayed home. Mr. Hammond didn’t want to come. But I heard Sam remind him that he’d promised, so he dragged along with us, trying to act like he was at least doing better than last night.
Rorey was extra anxious again. She had her scarf over her head this time like a sensible person, but she was walking fast, hoping for the chance to linger with Lester for a while, still hoping he’d use his last minutes before the train left to propose to her.
There were more people than I expected waiting at the depot. Of course I knew the families of the boys that were leaving would all be there, but there were other folks too, friends and relations from church and from town. Rorey got all silly, running into Lester’s arms. Robert and Rachel were different, like they both wanted to savor the other one’s looks before they even got close. And when they did, they kissed. I hadn’t expected that.
Dad was holding Mom’s hand. I knew this had to be hard for them. It was hard for me, and just as hard for Katie. I saw tears in her eyes, so I took her hand.
“We’ve gotta pray for them every day,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I told her. “We will.”
There was so much hugging then. Mrs. Porter just about wouldn’t let Thomas go. Mom hugged William first. And then she held Robert a really long time. Lizbeth and Emmie and all the rest took their turns hugging William. Their father hung back. I don’t know why. He was just like that. And Rorey was busy with Lester.
Katie and I hugged William too. That was strange, because he was still our neighbor, and Rorey’s brother, even though they were all so close they were the same as family.
Emma Grace got teary. “I’m sure glad Franky’s not going too,” she told me. “I’m sure glad Harry and Bert is too young.”
I put my arm around her, and so did Lizbeth. Then Robert was hugging the rest of us. When he got to me, I just held on.
“It’ll be all right,” he told me. “You’ll see.” He gave me a big squeeze and told me not to let Mom listen to too much news.
Then he was hugging Dad and Mom again and it was time for all of them to get on the train. I saw him reach for Rachel’s hand one more time and leave a folded-up piece of paper in it. I wished I knew what that said.
Lester’s sister Rose seemed to be crying worse than anybody, and I didn’t quite understand that, because I’d seen Lester being awfully mean to her more than once. I didn’t figure there was much about him to miss. But I went over and gave Rose a hug. She was a nice girl. She couldn’t help what some of her family was like.
Katie went with me and hugged Lester’s mother, which was a gracious thing to do since a lot of people considered her an embarrassment to the community. Edna Turrey’d been arrested four times for stealing. The only reason she wasn’t in the women’s prison was because she had so many kids the judge figured the stealing was for their sakes. He’d ordered her to go to church and have her husband bring her to see an officer every week. But her husband wouldn’t bring her. Not to the church either. So the officer went to them. And the pastor did too, sometimes.
“We heard Earl Wilkins got killed,” Rose suddenly whispered to me.
It was hard to understand the words because of her crying. But they shook me. We knew Earl Wilkins’s family a little bit. He was a cousin of some people from church, and he’d gone in the army at the same time as William’s brother Kirk.
This was a bad time to hear news like that. I hated to let the train carry Robert away. But he was already up on the platform waving to us. William was right behind him. Thomas and Lester were just a little farther in, waving out a window. Rorey ran up and reached to touch Lester’s hand one last time. I shook my head at her, hoping William didn’t feel bad over not getting any of her attention. He didn’t seem to. He had the biggest smile on his face I’d ever seen.
The whistle blew. And it was a hard thing, watching the train pull away. I went over and reached for Mom’s hand, thinking maybe she’d be quiet the whole rest of the day. Maybe all of us would be. Everybody just stood there for a while, waving.
“Well,” Mom finally said when the train was out of sight. She might’ve meant to say something more than that. About going back to the pastor’s house. Or something. But not another word came out. She just stood there looking at the track. And then the sky started to sprinkle snow on us, teeny flakes floating down real slow.
“We’d better go, Juli,” Dad t
old my mom. But instead of going anywhere he gathered her in his arms and held her for a long, long time.
I didn’t care. I didn’t want to move anyway, even if I was getting cold. Watching the people around us, some of them leaving, some standing like they didn’t know what they were supposed to do, I felt like the whole world had changed. The things we heard on the radio had been thousands of miles away not so long ago. We’d cared a lot all along. We’d prayed about the war over and over again. But now it would fill our minds and squeeze on our hearts. Now it might as well be in our own backyard.
I looked down at my overshoes, feeling the tears well up in my eyes and not wanting anyone to see. Lizbeth came and put her arm around me, and Emmie took hold of Katie’s hand on the other side of me, and they stood together just as quiet as could be.
“They’ll be okay,” Lizbeth whispered to me. “God will go with them.”
I didn’t say anything. God had been with Earl Wilkins. Earl had wanted to be a preacher some day. But now he was dead. The first casualty we personally knew from a war that had just snatched Robert into its grasp.
I couldn’t reconcile that kind of thing in my mind. And if there was anybody who could, I figured it’d be Frank. It was so like him to quote Scripture at challenging moments that I could almost expect him to start any minute now. But he didn’t. I looked up and realized that he wasn’t there to tell us anything. Where could he have gone?
I turned from Lizbeth to look around a little more. Finally I spotted him up against the depot, looking terrible thin and pale in his overcoat and far more upset than I expected. His pa was right next to him, saying something I was too far away to hear. It didn’t look like Frank answered him. It didn’t look like he wanted to hear whatever it was.
“Pa?” Lizbeth called. “Are you ready to go?”
“Guess we better,” Mr. Hammond answered. “Ain’t nothin’ else to do here.”
But he didn’t move right away, and Lizbeth turned to my parents for a second. “I know Pa says he’s fine. But I’m not blind. I know he did some drinkin’ at the party last night. Has there been more of that?”
“I don’t know,” Dad told her. “Let’s hope that’s the end of it.”
“Tell me if he gets any worse. I’ll come out. I’ll stay with them a while if I have to.”
Daddy nodded. “Thank you, Lizbeth. We’ll keep an eye on things.”
She nodded and took Mary Jane in her arms. They were the first of us to start off, and Mr. Hammond went with them.
Frank just stood against the depot. He closed his eyes for a second, and I almost went over to him to ask what in the world could be troubling him so much, even with Willy leaving. Was it something his pa had said? I knew Frank’d been quiet last night and this morning, but he’d endured an awful lot in his life, and he usually took things pretty much in stride. It’d been a long time since I’d seen him looking this upset.
Rorey grabbed my arm. “Look, Sarah! Lester gave me a locket. Ain’t it pretty?”
I looked, but I scarcely even saw the thing. “Where’d he get it?”
“How would I know? What difference does it make? He gave it to me. And he told me to write.”
“You were planning on that, anyway,” I said, starting to move away from her.
“Well, I know! But it’s different now that he’s practically begged me to! Don’t you see? That’s like being promised! Ain’t it?”
I sighed. “At least you know he’s wanting to get mail.” “Oh, Sarah! Why do you have to be such a killjoy all the time?”
I didn’t answer. Mom and Dad were starting to walk away, so I went too. By then Frank had pushed himself away from the side of the depot and was up ahead with Sam and his kids, lifting little Rosemary onto his shoulders. He must have been okay because he started quoting the Bible then, just like I’d expected him to do before.
“The salvation of the righteous is of the Lord. He is their strength in the time of trouble.”
Everybody was quiet for a minute. And then my mother added her quiet amen.
Another dinner at the pastor’s house was even stranger than before. I wished we would just go home and get back to normal, but we wouldn’t have felt normal today anyway. It was a big job for the Joneses to feed us all again, especially since they’d invited Sam’s family and Lizbeth’s family to join us. The house was pretty full, but we had plenty of food. Mrs. Jones’s meatloaf was almost as good as Mom’s, and Lizbeth’s rolls were wonderful. Having so many people at the pastor’s house felt kind of like a holiday. But it wasn’t the same without Robert there.
Looking down at my green beans and onions, I wondered why God had chosen to make time pass. I could still remember when Katie first came to us and all the fun we’d had then. She hadn’t been used to the country. Most everything was new to her, even picking green beans. So many happy things happened when we were kids. Maybe nobody else in the world wondered the kind of things I did, but I wished I could know why we’re born little and then grow and everything has to change. Why couldn’t God have just picked a special moment, like when we were wading in the creek, and let us stay there as long as we wanted to? And be whatever age we wanted our whole lives? But maybe that’s heaven. And maybe I was just being silly.
Pastor and Mrs. Jones were being very nice to us. They got out some sheet music, and we sang along with Mrs. Jones playing piano for a little while. But then it was time to go home, and despite what I’d thought earlier, I didn’t really want to. But Mr. Hammond did. I could tell that. I think he was extra bothered about another of his boys going away. He let little Georgie climb on him some and Rosemary muss up his hair. He acted all right to them. He even talked all right, but he didn’t look too happy in his eyes. And I knew that Frank and Lizbeth saw it too.
We waved good-bye to Sam and Lizbeth and their families, and Mom hugged Juanita Jones. The weather had gotten clear again with just another dusting of snow over top the roads. Dad said that was a good thing or we might have been stuck in town. Mom and Mr. Hammond climbed in the front of the truck with him. Katie climbed in the back of the truck with me, and we shared a quilt to wrap up in. Rorey and Emmie wrapped up in another one. Frank and Harry and Bert acted like they didn’t need one, but Mom had stuck in extra for them, and I knew if the wind got cold enough on the way home, they’d use them.
Bert was busy talking about the things he’d been reading about the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t hard to let those kind of words sail on past my ears without much notice. He liked to read, and he always seemed to remember everything. That was fine, except that I didn’t always want to hear about the kind of things he liked. Neither did Rorey, and she wasn’t so quiet about it.
“Why don’t you hush?” she asked him. “What makes you think we wanna hear ’bout Lexington?”
“Well, history’s important,” Bert told her with a frown. “You ain’t in school today.”
“Learnin’ ain’t only for school,” Bert defended himself. “Right, Franky?”
Frank had been staring off somewhere, thinking deep, as he usually did when we were driving down the road. But he must have been listening too. “Education’s the apprenticeship of life,” he said suddenly.
Rorey shook her head. “Did you make that up?”
“Nope. Mrs. Wortham read it to me once from a book Mrs. Post loaned us. Robert Willmott said it.”
“Mrs. Wortham ain’t read nothin’ for a while! Who’s Robert Willmott?”
“A English author. I know it’s been a while.”
I smiled a little. Frank’s memory was even more amazing than Bert’s, because it seemed to last forever even though he’d never been able to read much of anything for himself. None of us knew why he couldn’t. He was sure smart enough.
But his words seemed to bother Rorey. “I got two a’ the craziest brothers!” she lamented. “A couple a’ smarty pants! If you was to get a regular job, either of ya, nobody’d wanna hear it.”
“I’m not gonna get a regular j
ob,” Bert announced. “I’m plannin’ on bein’ a doctor or a newspaper reporter.”
“Says you,” Rorey answered with a frown. She didn’t say anything else the whole rest of the way. But Emma Grace reacted completely differently.
“I think that’s swell, Bert,” she said. “You could write all about the war or fix up the soldiers if they get hurt.”
“Goodness,” I told her. “Bert’s not even fourteen, Emmie. By the time he’s a doctor or a reporter the war’ll be long over.”
“Good. Then he can help deliver babies or write about that.”
“Not much writing to do about the birth a’ babies,” Bert protested. “I’d wanna do real news. Or investigation. You know, like about the mysteries of the past.”
“What mysteries?” Emmie asked innocently.
“Oh, maybe the Roanoke colony, or the underground railroad, or the hidden gold of the James gang.”
“You mean you wanna find the gold, if there is any,” Harry put in.
“That’d be all right. But the best thing’d be findin’ out everythin’ I could an’ writin’ it up in a series of installments— like the way they used to do a Horatio Alger story in the local paper.”
Harry shook his head. “I could never be a doctor or a reporter. Nothin’ that’d take a lot a’ extra education. I been thinkin’ ’bout come summer maybe prunin’ an’ cuttin’ trees for folks. Could have a firewood business on the side an’ keep Franky an’ Mr. Wortham in some wood too.”
Katie nodded her head at that idea. “I think we’ll all have to do our part. That’s what the president says. To help our families and our country.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment at that somber thought.
“I wanna have a café someday,” Emmie told us in a while. “Till then, I can help with the cookin’ at home and maybe even sell pies and such at the open market in Dearing when the weather turns nice. What do you think, Sarah?”
“Sounds nice,” I told her.
“What do you want to do?”
I didn’t know if she meant in the next few months or with my life. But it didn’t make much difference. “I don’t know.”
