Home by Morning

by Alexis Harrington

  He looked at her full on, and she felt as if a lightning bolt had shuddered through her body. She forced herself to turn her eyes from his, but the sensation of being watched persisted. Eyes on her, considering her.

  He was Amy’s intended, she reminded herself. He had betrayed Jessica. He had proven to be fickle and faithless—

  “—so glad to run into you, Jessica. I was hoping to see you.”

  Jessica jumped at the sound of her name being spoken, and turning around, she saw Adam Jacobsen. “What? Oh, Adam! Yes, it’s been a long time.”

  He’d grown into a taller man than she’d expected. His wide brow and full face were offset by large, dark-lashed eyes. Still, she could see traces of the child he’d been, especially around the jaw and chin, and his nose had acquired an arrow shape that seemed to point to his mouth. Dressed in his Sunday best, he carried a clipboard under one arm. He leaned a bit closer to be heard over the crowd around them. “I’m glad you decided to accept Mayor Cookson’s offer to stay with us for a while.”

  “I understand you had a say in it,” she replied, not completely comfortable with that fact, or with him. Why would he, of all people, have lobbied for her to linger in Powell Springs? Late in their teen years, he’d once caught Jess and Cole in the tall grass by the creek and had run to blab the news to his own father, who in turn had reported her to Ben Layton. The elder Jacobsen had built an entire Sunday sermon around the sin of lust and the dangers of leaving young people unsupervised.

  Shortly thereafter, Jessica’s father had shipped her off to college with the intention of giving her something besides Cole Braddock to occupy her mind.

  “You were just the right candidate to take care of our folks till Dr. Pearson gets here.”

  She lifted a brow and smiled slightly. “I think I was the only candidate.”

  He flushed and shifted his clipboard. “Well, yes, that’s true. But you know a lot of the people around here. I felt it was a good idea.”

  She noticed that the paper on his board held a list of local townspeople. Some of those whom she’d seen along the street to watch the earlier parade had check marks beside their names, as if he was taking roll. Nodding at the page, she asked, “Making notes?”

  “Oh—this.” He turned the list toward his jacket. “I’m just keeping track—that is, I want to be sure everything we planned is going well. The committee, including your sister, worked so hard on this.”

  Right, she thought. Still the little sneak, but worse now. A self-important sneak for the American Protective League. She wondered if her name was written with the others.

  Jessica caught sight of Granny Mae, who glared at her and then walked back inside the café on the other side of Main.

  “Ah, well, I’d better get down to the park,” Adam said. “That will keep us busy for the rest of the day.” He turned and gave her a sincere smile. “I’d really like to see you again, Jessica. Maybe even in church. It’s good to have you back.”

  He headed off, full of purpose. When she glanced back at the door to the smithy, Cole was gone.

  Later, Jess sat at her kitchen table with her coffee when she heard the office door open below. Another patient? she wondered. So much for Horace Cookson’s prediction of a slow month here.

  “Telegram for Dr. Layton!”

  Hearing this, she abandoned her cup and hurried down the stairs. In the waiting room she found a boy she didn’t recognize. He wore a wool cap and knickers, and his shirttail hung out on one side. “I’m Dr. Layton.”

  “Sign here, ma’am. Mr. Fenton said this is a ’mergency.” He shoved a pencil and a receipt book into her hand. When she’d scratched her initials on a blank line and handed back the book, he ran outside, jumped on an old bicycle, and peddled down the street.

  Jessica closed the door and stared at the Western Union envelope as if it contained a snake. In her experience, telegrams usually brought bad news.

  She knew she had to read it, and with no little trepidation she tore open the flap. Pulling out the hastily folded note, she saw that it was from her soon-to-be employer.

  Dr. Jessica Layton

  Powell Springs, Oregon

  --URGENT--

  Your help needed at Seattle General Hospital immediately. Influenza ravaging city. All medical resources stretched to breaking. Mortality rate high. Please come with greatest haste.

  Signed,

  Thomas Martin, MD

  She sat down in the nearest chair and reread the message. Leroy Fenton had said something about an outbreak of sickness at Camp Lewis. It had spread from a few people who’d reviewed the troops there to consuming all of Seattle? This was serious, and she knew it. Although she’d promised to stay in Powell Springs for a month, this new development changed everything. She would have to catch the next train north on Saturday and put the town’s healthcare back into the hands of Granny Mae.

  There was nothing else to be done.

  Adam Jacobsen sat at his desk, the very desk his father had used before him. Pencil in hand, he stared at a blank sheet of paper. The daylight was fading, and he’d been sitting here for a good hour now, trying to create a meaningful sermon for Sunday’s church service. Wads of crumpled paper surrounded him, the result of false starts and boring discourses.

  Though he had followed his father’s vocation, Adam sometimes caught himself questioning the older man’s view of God and religion. He wasn’t altogether convinced that angry exhortations, threats of fire and brimstone, and thundering sermons were the only ways to keep people on the path of righteousness. He had been raised to believe that they were; the Reverend Ephraim Jacobsen had ruled Powell Springs’s souls—and his son and wife—with an unflinching determination to root out evil wherever it might try to hide.

  “The enemy is clever and takes many forms,” he would say, “but God will not be outwitted—or disobeyed.” Adam’s mother had dealt with the rigid view by becoming increasingly distant, both emotionally and at last, literally. Five years earlier, she’d gone to Colorado to care for her aging mother and had never returned, not even to attend her husband’s funeral last winter. Only in letters had they maintained contact with her.

  Adam had embraced his father’s precepts of a terror-inspiring deity and the certainty that heaven had appointed Ephraim Jacobsen as one of its soldiers, complete with official induction papers—the Bible—dictated by the Almighty and taken down by one of His angel-scribes. He had also inherited his father’s unwavering patriotism and the ironclad belief that President Wilson’s decisions came directly from God.

  Now that his father was gone and his responsibilities had fallen to Adam, he was torn between pastoring styles, if only a bit. But whenever he stopped to think about his slight deviation from his father’s teachings, a shiver of panicky guilt ran through him.

  This week, the topic he’d selected for his sermon was marriage. It was no random choice. Adam was on the downside of his twenties, and still he had no wife. Nettie Stark, the sturdy and outspoken woman who had come to keep house for him and his father three years earlier, reminded him about it on a regular basis. Oddly, though, nothing had brought his marital status home to him more forcefully than seeing Jessica Layton in the window at the hotel.

  Their paths had not often crossed when they were younger—she was exactly the type of female his father had warned him against. And she’d been mixed up with Cole Braddock, who came from a family of rugged, bronco-busting ranchers. They managed horses, the elements, and women with equal ease. But he’d always kept an eye out for her over the years. He’d catch sight of her on her rare trips home, and the image of her was imprinted on his mind. Now her courtship had ended, Cole was probably going to marry Amy Layton, and Adam was reminded of a particular truism in the Book of Genesis.

  It is not good for man to be alone.

  Truth be told, Amy, and not her sister, was much more the kind of woman he might have envisioned as his helpmate. Yet part of him had always secretly yearned for Jessica even while he
’d reported her wantonness to his father. (He had never forgotten stumbling upon her and Braddock down by the creek. The image had been seared upon his memory…their urgent hands all over one another, her skirts hiked up above her knees, his shirt unbuttoned, Adam’s own arousal and fear as he’d turned to run away.)

  He’d found it in his heart to look beyond that adolescent indiscretion and forgive it. Her choice of professions had redeemed her in his eyes, and he admired that choice, though Ephraim had not. But just as Adam was called to save souls, she had been called to save lives. They had both followed in their fathers’ footsteps. He saw a sort of compatibility in that, especially since she’d defied convention to administer to the sick. Female physicians were such a rarity, he’d never even heard of another besides Jessica.

  Forgetting for a moment the blank paper under his hand, he looked around the room and thought that the house seemed more empty every day. It was silly, he supposed. Nothing had changed all that much; before his father died, they’d lived here for years, entrenched in their routines. The parsonage stood across from the church, with a green, park-like expanse between them. It was a modest home, comfortable, but definitely intended for a small family rather than one man alone.

  Then there was that other, even more shamefully urgent matter.

  It is better to marry than to burn.

  And burn Adam did. He’d never envisioned or wished for the life of a monk. For that reason, among others, he had urged Horace Cookson to ask Jessica to stay in Powell Springs. He wanted her. If luck and God were with him, she might make him a fine wife.

  Lieutenant Steven Collier emerged from platoon headquarters, which had been set up in the front yard of a bombed-out farmhouse. “Back to the front lines again tonight, boys.” He flopped down next to Riley in the trench and looked at the rest of their platoon.

  “What?” Riley demanded. “We just got here and it took us hours. We were only relieved last night.” They were in the reserve trenches at the back of the action. From somewhere in the rear, he heard a harmonica wheezing “My Old Kentucky Home.”

  Whippy, unperturbed as always, had the makings for a cigarette balanced on his lap.

  “But, Sir, I was hoping to get a bath,” Stoney said.

  “Here?” Whip asked, without looking up from his cigarette papers. “You’re dreaming, son. The only way to get a bath in this place is to stand in a rainstorm.” He looked up at the heavy gray sky. “Your chance appears to be coming momentarily.”

  General grumbling and muttered swearing ensued.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Collier said. “That’s the word from platoon headquarters, though. We’re moving out late this afternoon.”

  As the war had ground on and casualties were counted in the millions, men spent more and more time at the front lines.

  “I guess I’d better write that letter to my folks pronto.” Stig Ostergard had a blond head the size of a pumpkin, and finding a helmet to fit him had been a challenge. He was a nice young guy from Wisconsin, engaged to a pretty Swedish girl who spoke no English.

  “Right. No lollygagging back here in the rear forever. We have a duty perform, and Fritz is waiting for us.”

  “Hey, my family has a dog named Fritz. I see him sometimes when I’m on patrol,” Stoney said. Everyone looked at him. He was a very green farm boy from Ohio. Until this trip overseas, he’d never traveled farther than fifteen miles from home. Riley worried about him these days—he seemed to be coming loose at the seams. They’d lost a few others in the last months to shell shock. The victims ended up either gibbering idiots or stone-silent zombies. Or they’d just sit and rock themselves and cry. None could follow orders or do anything but huddle in the trenches, or shoot everything that moved, including allies. A couple had even managed to get their rifle muzzles into their own mouths.

  “Freedom has an enemy named Fritz, kid,” Collier replied with all grave sincerity, choosing to ignore the odd remark. “You fight this war, and you’ll never fight another, and neither will your kids or your grandkids. This one is going to end ’em all. This one is going to make the world safe for democracy. And it depends on us. The world is depending on us.”

  The grumbling died away.

  “Sergeant?” Collier prodded Riley.

  He nodded. “All right, you heard the lieutenant. Draw your water and chow rations. We need to be ready to go in a couple of hours.”

  Whippy hauled himself to his feet, his deed accomplished. “First the British, then the Yankees, and now this. It looks like the Fourniers are fated to carry a gun and defend the honor of their country in every generation.”

  “What country did the Fourniers defend against Yankees?” Kansas Pete asked.

  “Why, the Confederate States of America, of course. You do remember the War of Northern Aggression, don’t you, Pete? I believe they still teach it in schools.”

  “The what?”

  “The War Between the States.”

  “Oh, hell, Pete never went past third grade,” Stig said.

  “I did so! I finished seventh grade, for your information, smart aleck.”

  “In any event, gentlemen, here we are.” The cigarette dangled from the corner of Whippy’s mouth. “C’est la vie. I hope.”

  The men were exhausted. Nobody slept much as it was, and it was no secret to anyone that casualties were running sky-high. Both sides were losing men in vast numbers. Riley was beginning to wonder about all the star-spangled rhetoric they’d been given. Would the world really be a better place for losing millions of lives in this horrible bloodbath? And that didn’t count the men who’d had arms, legs, or arms and legs blown off. Was it true that no price was too large, no sacrifice too great? Would there be any kids or grandkids left after this was over?

  Riley was a sergeant now, and the complexities of the world order were too vast for him to settle. But the questions, the doubt about his presence in this conflict and the exact nature of what they would actually gain for their “sacrifice,” hummed in the back of his head like a murmured conversation, pitched too low for him to grasp. Sighing, he hoisted his rifle and went in search of a place to sit for a while.

  In the two or so hours they’d been given, the men took the opportunity to shave, wash up a little, and write letters home. Riley sat in a dugout that was as gloomy as a cave, and except for the light provided by a couple of dim, bare bulbs, was almost as dark. He didn’t have time to send a note to everybody in the family, so he addressed his to Susannah to tell her as much as he could about his well-being and to ask for things from home.

  “Aren’t you going to write to your mother, Whippy?”

  Fournier stood in front of a small mirror that hung on a wire from a peg driven into the dirt wall. A basin of water stood on a camp stool next to his knee, and he’d stripped down to his under-shirt. “Yes, but it offends my dignity to look this disreputable. I’ll scratch a note to her after I finish here.” Riley heard the scrape of his razor and then a sharp intake of breath. “Jesus,” he muttered, “I swear I don’t know how they expect a man to shave in light like this.”

  He wiped the rest of the lather off his chin with a somewhat clean towel and faced Riley. A spot of blood revealed the nick on his chin.

  “Hey, soldier, where’s your identification tag? You know we’re never supposed to take it off.”

  “You aren’t going to pull rank on me at this late date, are you, Braddock? I met a lovely Gallic mademoiselle who wanted a keepsake from our enchanting evening rendezvous.”

  “You gave her your tag?”

  Whip turned on that lazy, cantaloupe grin again. “Along with the best part of me.”

  Riley started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. This Southern eccentric was the only fun part about the whole miserable war. “You’re amazing. You give away cheap jewelry and ‘the best part’ of yourself, and here we are close to getting our asses shot off.”

  “Exactly so. That’s the perfect reason for doing it.” He dragged a comb through his
roebuck-colored hair.

  Riley shook his head, still laughing. “I hope you also gave her a French letter so that she didn’t get a longer-lasting souvenir from you.”

  “Why, I rather believe that the seed of my loins would go far toward improving some of the stock I’ve seen here. However, a gentleman is always prepared.” He pulled a small, wrapped packet from his gear to wave at Riley. “I didn’t want a lasting souvenir either. What is it the chaplains are preaching? One night with Venus and three years with mercury. I don’t fancy acquiring a social disease, and the treatment sounds even worse.”

  Riley shifted the writing tablet on his knee. “Well, you’d better get another tag and hold onto it. The ambulance drivers will want to be able to put a name to you in case they pick you up.”

  Whippy made a graceful bow. “I’ll see what I can do, Sir.”

  Riley finished his letter to Susannah and gave it to the post, then tried to catch a nap. After what seemed like five minutes, he felt a hand shaking his shoulder as he sat with his back against the dugout wall.

  “It’s time, Braddock.” Riley looked up to see Lieutenant Collier standing over him.

  Rations were drawn, and as the October daylight dwindled, the doughboys climbed the dugout stairs and started their way back toward the front. They passed mud-caked men turning their shovels to a trench bottom, others working to repair a broken telephone cable, and a foul-smelling corpse in a German uniform lying face-down in a stagnant puddle. Overhead, a Hun airplane buzzed through the sky. Enemy air strikes had been especially brutal in this latest offensive; the Germans sought to gain and hold control.