The House Near the River

by Barbara Bartholomew

  When he did think about Ange, he remembered that she had said she was twenty eight when they met. Months had passed now, no doubt she was already twenty nine and the opportunity for that first meeting would never come. It was too late. That day in Oklahoma City had never happened.

  Things closed down here on Sundays, even as they had at home. Sunday was the day to go to church and to spend with family. Only the most essential work was done and even though he took over such chores as feeding the horses and cows, his afternoons stretched long and gloomy. One Sunday he set out driving through the narrow back roads, the dirt black and rich, so different from the red soil of home.

  With a farmer’s eyes he studied the passing landscape. Not only cotton, but corn, onions and other vegetable crops grew well here. During the war, a prison camp in the area had provided German farm boys to hire out to the farms. Local farm people found they had much in common with those enemy kids from half a world away and now, with so many returned vets moving to the cities for schooling and new opportunities, were short on a labor supply.

  Something in Matthew’s independent background didn’t like working for somebody else. He wanted to be his own boss. He wondered if he had enough money put by to maybe pay down on a little place of his own. He’d left his share of the family farm to Clemmie and her children, but no reason he couldn’t have something here.

  That way he wouldn’t have to be around other people, either be boss or boss others. He could work alone again without the struggle of daily painful dealings with other men.

  He liked the area north of where he now lived. It was more like home with trees lining the creeks and wide stretches of prairie land. It was a long way from the big old city to the south and the farm people might only go into Dallas once a year to the state fair, though plenty of the older folk had never set foot in the city.

  He’d heard there were loan programs for veterans. Tomorrow he would start looking for information and start asking about farms that might be for sale. He’d have to buy land and some used equipment, a tractor, a plow.

  He didn’t forget to survey the land for likely looking spots as he drove, even as he planned, but wasn’t aware of any particular difference in the land as he moved down a well-kept graveled road to where a brick school house, probably a product of the government work in the ‘30s, set in Sunday abandonment, and felt suddenly jarred as though he’d run into a huge bump in the road.

  There was no bump. Everything that had happened was inside him. It was abruptly as though Ange was very near to him, so close that he could almost touch her. He looked around wildly, then stopped the car to get out and look more closely. She’d talked about cracks in time, places that seemed to draw her toward them. Perhaps he was near one of those cracks and was feeling her presence close by.

  He saw no more than he ever had. Around him was an ordinary fall afternoon, the chill wind blowing across him and stirring his hair. Nothing out of the ordinary, but the feeling he had, right here in this place, that she was near.

  He cursed with the futility of it, then prayed that somehow they would find each other again.

  He stayed there until darkness fell and, knowing the location was firmly fixed in his mind, drove back south, the lights of his car brightening his way, and almost sorry that once again he was feeling the stirring of hope.

  That feeling was the most dangerous thing he could allow to happen to him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The weeks of a normally steaming summer passed quickly enough what with showing urban youngsters how to milk a goat or a Jersey cow, how to collect the brown eggs from the hen house, or scatter grain for baby chicks.

  Their two helpers baked, cooked and cleaned, but there was still plenty of work inside the Prairie House for Angie and Clarence and visitors didn’t seem to be kept away by the one hundred degree plus heat, though in the middle of the day they retreated into the air conditioned bed and breakfast to while away the day with the modern inventions of satellite television or the internet.

  At night a barbeque under the brightly starred night sky was a popular feature, held down by the pond they’d had dug about a decade ago.

  Clarence insisted on raising his son himself even though most of the local women looked to see him give up and hire a nanny after a few months. Angie, watching his patience with the child, bet that he would hang on, though she did recommend a couple of mornings of nursery school in the fall.

  She and Jason didn’t bring up the subject of moving in together again and over the summer drifted slowly apart so that she wasn’t surprised when she heard he had moved in with someone, a woman younger than herself with whom she was not acquainted. Surprisingly she felt more relieved than rejected and when concerned friends tried to match her up, turned them down without regret.

  By fall when the daisies mother had planted out front were blooming and guests had harvested the small wheat field with an old fashioned scythe and seen the crop through into bread making it was time to entertain them with popcorn and candy making and long evenings in front of an apple wood fire, she was as homesick as anybody could be when they were in their own home.

  She missed Clemmie’s companionship and the chatter of Danny and the little girls, but most of all she wished for just a few minutes with Matthew and the assurance at least that he was surviving.

  She took to spending long Sundays at the assisted living center with Grandma where a country preacher came in for a morning service and various local singers entertained them with some of the same gospel songs she’d heard at the little church in Oklahoma. After lunch, she sat with Grandma in her tiny apartment and tried to get her to talk of old times.

  Dad was right and Grandma’s memory was no longer what it had once been, though she still recalled the early years of her life more clearly than what had happened yesterday. And she was strangely reluctant to spend much time in reminiscence, saying with slight sadness that it wasn’t good to think about the past for more than a little.

  Angie was reminded that her grandmother had always been a person who lived for the current day, not spending a lot of time regretting the past or worrying about the future. It was a trait she’d always admired and wished to emulate, but now found frustrating.

  One Sunday afternoon when the leaves were being swept from the trees by a strong northwind, she asked Grandma about her mother. “Her name was Clemmie, wasn’t it?”

  “Clementine,” Grandma corrected, “though most everyone called her Clemmie.“ She smiled, remembering. “Clemmie and Charlie, the best mom and dad anybody ever had.”

  “I thought you were young when your father died.”

  She nodded. “I was only five, but I have some memories of him. I remember the day when they came to tell us he’d died in some far off place. I thought Mom would die too. But she was a strong woman, she went on for our sakes. “ She hesitated a moment as though assembling her thoughts. “Tobe. That was Papa’s name.”

  Angie knew very well who Tobe was. Had Clemmie married the sheriff after all? “Your dad was Charlie,” she tried to correct Grandma’s confusion. “Not Tobe.”

  Rose Ward ignored her granddaughter. “Most of what I remember about Dad is just from things other people told me, but everybody said he and my mom were just the best kind, that if more people were like them we wouldn’t have half the problems we have today.”

  She looked up at Angie and smiled. “Tobe was my stepfather. Mom married him later. He was good to her, good to us, but he wasn’t my dad.”

  Angie sat silently considering. She wondered how Matthew and Tobe had gotten along after their falling out. She suspected Clemmie would never have married against her brother’s disapproval. Maybe Tobe’s acceptance into their life meant something bad had happened to Matthew.

  She couldn’t help fearing that he’d decided against going on. But no, he would never let Clemmie and the children down that way.
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br />   Grandma’s eyes were closed. She looked to be drifting toward sleep, as she did so often these days. “Sharon,” Angie said softly. “What about Matthew?”

  A smile flickered across the soft mouth. “He was such a dear.”

  She hadn’t thought to argue that she was no longer Sharon, that like her sisters she had chosen to be known by another of her names. Funny that! She wondered how it had happened.

  “What became of Matthew?”

  She didn’t open her eyes and was barely awake. “You would know the answer to that better than me, Ange.”

  Ange? Grandma had never called her by that name. In this place and time only little David called her Ange. But Sharon, back in1946, knew her by that name.

  “Grandma?” She tried again to reach her, but got no response. She would have to try again later.

  She got up to leave. “Danny always remembered better than me,” the whispered words came to her. “He was older.”

  Uncle Dan had been gone for years.

  Grandma’s eyelids flickered. “I was so glad to see you again. “

  “Again?” Angie knelt at her side.

  “They wanted a baby so badly. I didn’t understand, but it seemed right. The girls and I . . .but I didn’t know until you began to grow up that the baby was you, Ange.” A smile flickered across her lips. She looked so tired. She frowned. “Or your daughter,” she added in a puzzled tone.

  None of it made sense to Angie. She had a hundred questions to ask, but Grandma needed to rest. She kissed her cheek. “We’ll talk later, Grandma. We’ll work it all out later.”

  Later never came. The living center called the inn that night to tell them that Grandma had suffered a massive stroke and was being flown to a Dallas hospital. They called Ivy to stay with David and drove down Interstate 75 toward Dallas. By morning Grandma was gone.

  Clarence was devastated, Angie hardly less so. They clung to each other for comfort and to get through the final services. Dad said his mother had always wanted to be buried back at home so the three of them headed again to western Oklahoma to the bare little cemetery on the hill. Dad told Angie that members of the family had been laid to rest there since early settler days.

  Angie tried to avoid reading any of the names on the gravestones for fear of what she would see. Clemmie, Matthew and the children were all as real to her as a few months back, she couldn’t bear to read that they had died long ago.

  Amanda was there with her husband and daughters as well as a dozen other relatives that Angie barely remembered. It was a cold day with droplets of freezing rain hovering in the wind and the cousins clinging together, mourning the woman who had been so much a part of their younger days.

  For Angie, it was losing her mother all over again. Grandma had wanted to tell her things; it wasn’t fair that they hadn’t gotten the chance for one more talk.

  After they left the cemetery, Clarence wanted to stop by his old home. He seemed sad to once more see the rundown condition of the house and Angie insisted on staying in her car with David. She wasn’t about to risk losing her young brother once again, not after what she’d given up to see him safe.

  She closed her eyes, aching inside. Never before had she admitted even to herself that the choice had been a hard one, that if it had just been about her she might have stayed with Matthew.

  Her life was not complete without him. She caught the thought and stomped it down. What a thing for a modern woman to think! She was complete in herself.

  She tried to focus on David, refusing to more than glance through the car windows. She wished Dad would hurry and they could leave, but he’d gone around to the back porch.

  Then her glance was caught, locked in place and she saw dimly through the increasing rainfall the dim figure of Clemmie, her hand across her forehead as though shading her eyes from the too bright sun. Her sunbonnet dangled from its strings down her back. She looked worried and Angie wondered what was wrong.

  Then she was gone and other flashes moved before her eyes. She saw Danny and Tobe, looking like they were arguing with each other, and then in another scene, Sharon, her sweet face seeming concerned.

  Sharon! Grandma! She found herself weeping for the loss that suddenly was so final and for the words left unsaid.

  “What’s wrong, Ange?” David’s little voice asked and, anxious not to alarm him, she brushed the tears away and looked up with an attempt at a smile. “Just missing Grandma,” she said.

  “Gone to be with Mommy in Heaven,” he tried to reassure her.

  She hugged him and then was grateful when Dad came back to the car, not commenting as they started down the road again.

  In the months since she’d come back, Angie had worked hard on focusing on the real world around her, knowing it wasn’t healthy to linger in thoughts of the 40s. But the drive back home from the Oklahoma farm was a time of being lost in those memories. David slept most of the way and Dad seemed absorbed in his driving and his own thoughts. He and his mother had been close. She knew he felt her loss keenly.

  She watched the modern highway unwind in front of her and thought of the old roadways, rutted with mud and studded with bumps, and the Nash that would be a collectible if by chance it still survived.

  Sometimes it seemed to her that those days in the past were more real to her than the day around her. Ice pellets turned to rain as they traveled further south and she peered past flashing windshield wipers and pouring rain, factors that added to her sense of unreality.

  The fact was that she was homesick. She longed to hear Matthew’s voice, to feel his arm around her shoulders. She wanted to make him feel better and she felt very sure he was missing her at least as much as she missed him.

  They’d just crossed the river bridge, the speed limit going up by five miles an hour and she knew they were back in Texas. She was going further from Matthew with each mile they drove.

  “Dad,” she choked out the word, then when he glanced at her didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m so sorry about Grandma,” she finally thought of something she wanted to say.

  “Right back at you.” His look was serious. “You know you meant the world to her. In fact, it was only because of her that you came to us.”

  She stared in him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

  “I figured your mom had told you the story about how you were adopted.”

  She shook her head. “I always knew I was adopted, you make certain of that, but even as a little girl I knew Mom wanted to pretend that I’d been born to her and that if I talked about being adopted, she would be sad.”

  He frowned, then shook his head. “Sorry, honey, guess we both liked to pretend a little that you were always ours.”

  “I was,” she assured him. “That’s why I never felt the need to go looking for my biological parents the way some adoptees do.”

  He shook his head. “Or maybe we managed to give you the impression that you would be betraying us if you went looking.”

  She couldn’t bear to see him blaming himself. She nodded to where David was slumped in sleep in his car seat in the back. “Looks like the little guy gave it up.”

  He nodded.

  “It was a hard choice whether to leave him with Ivy or take him along. I’m glad you let him go. At least the three of us were together.”

  He reached over to touch her hand. “You were very much wanted, Angie. You’ve never seen a couple as happy as your mom and I were when Rose told us about you.”

  “Grandma told you.”

  He nodded. “It seemed a young woman she knew was having a baby and couldn’t provide a good home so she wanted to find the right parents. She knew Rose and believed her son and his wife would be that.”

  It was something like she’d always supposed the story to be. So common and yet uncommonly painful. “You agreed and there was an adoption
. Did you meet my . . .the woman?”

  “No, it was a private adoption, arranged by our lawyer. Your grandmother was the go-between, the woman didn’t want anyone else to know her identity. You’ve got to understand, we were so eager. We weren’t about to botch the deal by insisting on anything, but it was all perfectly legal.”

  “And that’s all there was to it. It was just that simple?”

  He nodded.

  “I think Grandma started to tell me about it, just before she went to sleep and then had the stroke,” her sentence ended on a quaver.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Who my mother was. Doesn’t it occur to you, Dad, that she was probably someone you knew if she was a friend of Grandma’s.”

  He frowned. “No, I don’t believe that. Mom was the kind of woman who befriended total strangers and those same strangers sat down and confided their life stories to her. I’m sure she was no one in our circle of acquaintances.”

  Feeling exhausted, Angie leaned her head back. “Considering everything, Dad, if you don’t mind, I would like to find out what I can about my biological family.”

  “Why should I mind?” He grinned. “You can’t go looking for your ‘real’ father, Angie, because that’s who I am.”

  She smiled. “My biological father,” she said. “I believe that’s the correct term.”

  The rain slackened and a stream of light broke through the thick clouds. “It’s going to be tough because we have so little information, but I will do what I can to help you.”

  As she took her turn at the wheel and Clarence slipped into a snooze in the passenger’s seat, Angie tried to concentrate on how she would go looking for her own history. As an adult and with her adopted father’s agreement, surely she would have a right to see her own birth certificate, the original one where her birth parents would be named.

  But even as she planned, her thoughts and feelings seemed to steal out like tendrils of a plant seeking the spring sun. It was the strangest feeling, but it was almost as though in leaving the farm and driving back home, she was not moving away from Matthew but toward him.