by Karen White
He stared into his coffee mug like it had answers. “Poor Mama. She’s loved that man her whole life. And now she’s like a ghost. Not dead, but not alive, either.”
I remained silent, not wanting to show any disrespect by agreeing. Or by telling him that I’d learned in the past three years that some people break in a strong wind, while others learn to bend into it.
He looked down at my hands, and I fisted them, as if I could hide what he’d already seen. In a quiet voice, he asked, “Why didn’t you go home, Ginny?”
I stood as if to emphasize my words, as if to convince him that I was sincere. “Because this is my home now.”
We stared at each other across his father’s desk for a long moment, listening to the clanging of pans in the kitchen as Lucille prepared breakfast. The sound had come to mean home to me, along with the braying of the mules, and the spring song from the family of warblers that lived in the magnolia tree outside my window. And the sweet notes of my son’s voice as he pretended to read one of his father and uncle’s childhood books that remained on the bookshelves in their boyhood bedroom, which John-John and I now shared.
Living at Oak Alley with my parents and brother, I’d never heard any of those things. I’d been insulated and isolated from the rest of the world. And from the person I never knew I could be.
“For now,” he said, his voice hard as if shutting a door. He moved away from me, toward the window that showed a slowly brightening sky. “I’m walking the farm today with Amos to get a handle on things, figure out when to start the harvest—looks like the fields are almost ready. You won’t have to deal with any of this anymore. And no more German labor, Ginny. I can’t abide it.”
I was unprepared for the surge of anger, for his easy dismissal. “Save yourself the trouble of trying to find labor to work the harvest. So many of the tenant farmers moved up north to work in the factories for the war effort and they’re not coming back. And those who stayed are working for higher wages than we can pay. My own father is paying them twice per pound what we can. If we don’t use the Germans, our crop will rot in the field. Just ask your daddy. It was his idea to begin with, and it took me two minutes to realize that he was right.”
His stranger’s eyes flickered in the light from the window. “A German bullet killed my brother. Or has everyone already forgotten that?”
I looked away, unable to meet his eyes. “There are lots of empty spots at kitchen tables all over the country. We’re not likely to ever forget that—and we shouldn’t. But we can’t change it, either. It’s hard to walk forward if you’re too busy looking behind you.”
I thought of his mother, and her empty eyes, and was suddenly exhausted. I sat down, leaning against the back of the chair. “If we have a good harvest this year, we might be able to afford one of the new harvesting machines everybody’s talking about. The Germans will be gone after spring planting. If we can get one of those machines by next fall, we’ll be fine. We just need to make it through the spring.”
My gaze moved past him out the window where the sun was just beginning to stretch its legs over the horizon. In my old life, I’d never witnessed a sunrise, and the thought shamed me. After four long years of war when it seemed the whole world was on fire and the news was full of so much death and destruction, to take for granted the glory of a sunrise seemed a lot like working in the fields without a hat. Sooner or later, you’d end up with scars from wounds you didn’t remember having.
I flattened my palms against the ledger, then swallowed to clear my throat so I could say the words I’d been rehearsing all night while I’d lain in bed listening to my son’s breathing in the bed next to mine. “I can leave now, if you want. Or I can stay through the harvest and help Amos handle the POWs so you don’t have to. Just promise me that you’ll do what needs to be done with the farm for your parents’ sake. They already lost so much. They can’t lose the farm, too.”
I focused on breathing slowly as I waited.
“Do you want to leave?”
“No,” I said quickly, surprising myself with my honesty. I’d never been one to give a straight answer, not when a half-dozen vague responses would do. “But I won’t stay if my being here makes you . . . uncomfortable.”
The sun crept higher in the sky, making the walls of the office blush pink. He turned toward the window again. “I wanted everything to be the same as it was,” he said softly.
I closed my eyes, seeing again the flat horizon on that long-ago day when Will, Johnny and I walked toward the sky. “Don’t look back, Will. Don’t. It’s like swimming with a stone around your neck. It’ll drag you down so deep that you can’t find your way back to the surface.” I shut the ledger book and rested my hands on top. “Moving forward is the only way I figure I can honor all those boys who aren’t coming home.”
He finished his coffee, then faced me, his face hard. “Stay through the harvest, then. I don’t want to have anything to do with the Germans.”
Joy and desolation battled inside my head as a thump sounded from my bedroom upstairs, followed by the quick patter of little feet running toward the stairs.
Will moved to the doorway. “Can he make it down the stairs on his own?”
“Yes,” I forced out. “He crawls down backward on his tummy. Johnny told me that’s how your mama taught the two of you.”
His old smile lit his face as he watched John-John’s progress down the stairs. “And it worked until we discovered that sliding down the banister was faster.” He laughed, and I found myself smiling at the sound, worried it had died alongside so many of his friends.
John-John rushed into the room wearing his red drop-seat pajamas and holding something in his hand. I drew in a sharp breath as I realized he must have been clutching the glass object as he climbed down the stairs. “Mama!” he shouted, running forward. “What’s this?”
It was the blue bottle I’d unpacked and left on the dresser. Will crouched down in front of him. “It’s a bottle from Lucille’s bottle tree. Why don’t you and me go put it back now so it can be with all its friends?”
John-John scrunched up his eyebrows. “Why?”
“Because we need it to catch all the evil spirits before they can get into the house.”
He thought for a moment. “Why?”
Taking the bottle from John-John, Will said, “Maybe Lucille can tell you better than I can.”
He held out his other hand and John-John reached up to grab it. After a brief backward glance from Will, they left the room with the bottle to return it to the bottle tree. For a long time I stared at the empty space where they’d been, hoping that they weren’t too late.
Hours later, as I settled John-John back into bed for his nap, I glanced over to the dresser where the bottle had been and then to the spot next to it where I’d placed the letter, relieved to find it still there. I slipped the letter into the top drawer, then slid it closed with a soft snap.
4
The harvest began the following week. As promised, Amos drove the German POWs to the fields each morning, then returned them to the camp behind high barbed wire fences after the iron bell announced it was quitting time.
The fields were bisected by the highway, and Amos and I arranged it so that the Germans worked the north fields, while everybody else—the seasonal field hands, Amos, Will, George—worked the south fields. I rotated between the two to supervise. I couldn’t pick the two hundred pounds of cotton per day that the other workers did, but at least my labor was free.
By the time the dinner bell rang at noon on the first day and all the field-workers collapsed in the shade of the back porch and under the trees, my shoulders ached, my fingers were bloody and raw and my eyes stung from the brightness of the sun despite my wide-brimmed hat.
Will and I sat on the back porch with John-John on my lap, eating Lucille’s fried chicken and dumplings. Since our conversation in h
is father’s office, he’d been avoiding me, only speaking to me when we needed to discuss the farm, or when he asked me to show him the ledgers. We were dancers at a country dance, coming together only briefly, but always aware of the proximity of the other. He sat eating his lunch at the other end of the porch, his back to me.
Erich removed himself from the POWs clustered in the group beneath a shady elm and approached the porch. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, his straw hat in his hands. Will put down his knife and fork and fixed a hostile stare on the German.
Addressing me, Erich said, “I would like to have the wood left from the barn repair if that is all right. I have a project . . .”
“We don’t need any of your projects,” Will interrupted.
To my surprise, Erich climbed the steps and approached Will, stopping a few feet behind him.
“I apologize. I only wish to help.” Will continued to glare, his fingers tapping hard on the table. Erich took another step forward. “We are not so different, you and I,” he said softly, his fingers worrying the brim of his hat.
Will jerked to a stand. “I beg your pardon?”
Erich didn’t step back. “The war is over, and we are not soldiers anymore. I am a farmer, like you. I want to return to my fields and to my wife and son. It was dreaming of my home each night that kept me alive. I imagine you and I shared the same dream under the same stars.” His fingers tightened on his hat. “And we both lost our brothers.”
Will took a step toward the German, his hands in fists. I turned John-John’s head away, pressing his face into my shoulder.
“Do not speak of my brother,” Will spoke through clenched teeth.
Erich’s face showed no alarm. “Our brothers are dead, Herr Claiborne. But we are not, yes?” He offered his hand to shake, and it hovered in the space between them like a white flag.
Without a word, Will stepped past Erich and stormed down the porch steps before disappearing around the corner of the house.
—
For the remainder of the harvest, Will remained aloof, our conversations only about soil, and weather, and the price of cotton, avoiding the subjects that floated between us like a poisonous cloud, waiting to be inhaled.
But I’d sometimes catch him watching me with wary eyes, like an owl in a tree waiting for darkness. We seemed to both be waiting for the inevitable confrontation, yet reluctant to let go of the peace of our false innocence. John-John took turns following Erich and Will down the rows, carrying his own small sack as he wrestled the puffy bolls from their stems. He kept up a steady stream of conversation with each man, and more than once I caught Will stopping to laugh and rub John-John on the head. When Lucille came to gather him for his nap, Will seemed disappointed to see him go.
I found I couldn’t dwell on Will and his demons. Watching the men weigh their stuffed cotton sacks at the end of each day and seeing the mule carts tote the cotton to the shed filled me with as much joy and pride as I’d once reserved for a new dress and matching shoes. I relished the new calluses and blisters on my hands, wearing them as proudly as medals.
Slowly, the fields lost their bloom of white, the furrows returning again to dark brown. The air turned crisper in the evenings and the bald cypress trees that fringed the swamps around Indianola transformed themselves into clouds of russet leaves. The harvest had been a good one, but its end was bittersweet knowing that as soon as the cotton was ginned, I would be leaving.
On the last evening after the quitting bell had rung and our sacks had been emptied, we trudged silently from the fields to the house. Tug sat in his wheelchair on the porch with Lucille and Marjory, with Amos’s truck parked in the drive, the tailgate open as Erich and the other POWs lifted something from the back and placed it on the porch steps.
Erich held John-John, but jumped down and ran to Will as we approached. “Look, Uncle Will! Grandpa has a hill!”
We stopped at the bottom of the steps where a wedge-shaped ramp had been made to fit over each rise, the flat top wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair. Tug’s face was lit from a lopsided grin as Erich moved behind his wheelchair and slowly pushed him to the bottom. Tug reached up with his good hand and patted the German’s arm in thanks.
“You made this?”
We all turned to Will, unsure how to read the roughness in his voice.
“Yes. To thank you all for many kindnesses shown to us here. I wish to have made it sooner so your father could greet his son when he came home, but I had no more wood.”
Will’s gaze took in the man standing before him, then moved toward his parents, John-John, me. And then toward the tidy white house with the wraparound porch and the harvested fields behind it with rows that reached out toward the horizon as if he were seeing a dream come to life. And maybe he was. Maybe this is what he’d dreamed of under the same stars that twinkled light over sleeping soldiers and his Mississippi home. He looked like the boy who’d awakened as a man to find that there was no longer a bigger bed to crawl into.
His gaze returned to Erich. After a long pause, he held out his hand. “Thank you.”
Erich placed his hand in Will’s and the two men shook.
Will cleared his throat. “John-John tells me that your son’s name is Hans.”
A slow smile lifted Erich’s lips. “Yes. And when he grows up he wants to be a horse. Or a farmer like his father.”
Will reached down and placed a hand on John-John’s head. “I guess boys are pretty much the same everywhere. John-John told me yesterday that he wants to be a mule.”
The men’s voices carried softly across the yard as they spoke of the next generation of young men, hope in their voices that they might grow up to be farmers instead of soldiers.
I slipped past the cluster of people and went inside to grab a sweater, then headed out the back door toward the bayou that edged the southeast boundary of the property. The family cemetery lay beside it, cocooned in the shelter of the cypress trees. It was the best spot to watch a Delta sunset and to finally say good-bye.
I hadn’t been there since Will’s return, but now, with the harvest over, I didn’t know when or if I’d be back. I walked through the wrought iron enclosure and found Johnny’s marker. There was nothing of him buried beneath it except the miniature Civil War cannon and soldiers that had been his favorite toys as a child.
I watched as the sun gently eased itself through the autumn sky, peering through the sinuous arms of the cypress trees. Insects pricked the dark water of the swamp, the soft gloaming light settling onto the surface for a good-night kiss.
“You’re going to miss supper.”
I turned at the sound of Will’s voice. “I didn’t want to miss the sunset. I don’t know when I’ll get another chance.”
He came to stand next to me, neither of us speaking for a long moment. He squatted down next to Johnny’s marker, his finger tracing the letters of his brother’s name. “You’d think growing up with a person would make you really know them. I always thought Johnny put himself first. But that’s not true, is it?”
A vine of dread slipped up the back of my throat. “Why do you say that?”
He stood and faced me, his serious eyes reflecting the fading sun. “He loved John-John like his own, didn’t he?”
Slowly, I nodded, unable to force any words from my lips.
“It wasn’t until I came back and John-John told me his birthday that I figured it out. I was angry with you at first, because you didn’t tell me. And then I realized that I never gave you the chance. I just signed up and shipped out, thinking I could leave you behind.”
I swallowed. “Johnny was a good father. It made him grow up a lot.”
Will was silent for a moment. “Johnny will always be his father. I don’t want anybody to think otherwise.”
I nodded, understanding the complicated yet unconditional love between brothers.
/> “You don’t have to leave, Ginny. I’d like you to stay. Johnny would want you to.”
I looked up at him, unable to speak.
“He wrote to me the day before he died. It was almost as if he knew . . .” Will shook his head. “He asked me to tell Mama and Daddy good-bye.” His eyes held mine. “And to take care of you and John-John.”
He paused as a flock of white-throated sparrows exploded from the treetops, swirling above us for a moment before flying into the dusk. They would head north in the spring but would return again to the Delta the following winter. It was as if a giant magnet pulled us all back toward home, back to the place where we began.
I closed my eyes, seeing Johnny’s impatient scrawl in the letter he’d written to me on the same night he’d written to his brother.
I’m walking into enemy lines tonight because I’m too much of a coward to face another day of fighting or to put a bullet in my own brain. You made me happy, Ginny, and I hope now you can find your own happiness. I wish I could see one more Delta sunset. Maybe when you see one, you’ll remember to think of me and how much I loved you.
I knew then that I wouldn’t show Will the letter, that I would destroy it so Johnny’s last words would be the ones he’d written to Will about his love for his family. He would always be a hero to those who had known and loved him.
“Can we start over, Ginny?”
I thought for a moment. “We can never go back to the people we were, and I don’t want to.” I touched his arm. “But maybe we can start again. As the people we’ve become.”
The sun dripped yellow over the horizon like butter melting in a frying pan, and my vision blurred. “Johnny wanted me to remember him when I saw the sunsets.”
Will put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder as if I’d always belonged there. “It’s a good memory to have.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“Will you stay, then? With us?” I felt his breath on the top of my head. “With me?”
