Here and Again

by Nicole R Dickson

  “I never wanted to live here, but Ed inherited and so here I was. With a cave for a kitchen.”

  “So, if ever I was to eat, I had to build her this kitchen. And then we rebuilt it. And rebuilt it. And—”

  “Stop,” Lorena said, handing him a cup. Ed mouthed to Ginger, And rebuilt it.

  Then he smiled and Ginger grinned happily back, for his was a small smile without showing any teeth, but warm and kind. She hadn’t thought he ever smiled, but there, on his face, was clearly an event that must happen often as told by the lines about his eyes and cheeks. His demeanor, though, would not lead one to believe it was true.

  “Cold and imposing, but welcoming and warm on the inside. Like Edward here,” Lorena said.

  “That’s how I thought of Jesse at first, too. Cold and imposing,” Ginger said.

  “He saw your name badge and the freckles like stars on your face and knew he was going to ask you out,” Ed said.

  Ginger nodded, chuckling. Stars on her face. Stars all over her body. Why hadn’t she heard of Ed Rogers if he had heard that of her?

  “That’s why I asked Lorena to dance, too.”

  Ginger furrowed her brow and sipped her coffee.

  “Have you never heard that song?” Ed asked.

  Ginger shook her head, having no idea what he was talking about.

  He cleared his throat a little and began to sing: “The years creep slowly by, Lorena. The snow is on the grass again.”

  His voice was tenor, every note hit true, and he finished a single verse, then stopped. Ginger wished he would finish, but thought his song, like his smile, seemed not to be given easily.

  “That is a beautiful song,” Ginger said.

  “It has several verses. A very beautiful love song. I heard a friend of mine introducing Lorena to another man at a USO dance. There she was—the woman in the song—soft brown hair, soft brown eyes. My heart beat so heavily I couldn’t swallow. It took me two hours to slide in beside her. She was dancing with everybody, but I finally saw my chance, took her hand that night, and haven’t left her side since.”

  He touched his wife’s right index finger.

  “And rebuilt my kitchen?” Lorena asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Again and again,” he replied, smiling once more. He gazed in Ginger’s direction. There was a silence then. A quiet that seemed forever. Then, as if from a great distance, he said, “I have three daughters, Virginia, but if ever I had a son, I feel so surely he would have been like Jesse. He loved as I love. I feel your wound deeply just as I feel my own.”

  Ginger didn’t reply. She stood holding her breath in the light of his smile. There were no tears to shed. There was not a cry peeling from her empty place. There were simply two souls sharing a loss. He looked down at his coffee. Ginger did also.

  “I should be going,” she said, breaking the solemnity of the kitchen. “I should try to get home before Osbee puts the kids to bed.”

  She placed her cup on the counter. “Thank you for the coffee.”

  “We are so happy to have finally met you,” Lorena replied, slipping her arm inside the crook of Ginger’s elbow. “When Ed comes to fix the tractor, may I join him? I’d like to meet Osbee.”

  “Please,” Ginger said. “I’ll be home tomorrow, but have to work the following two days. My next day off is Sunday.”

  “Would afternoon be all right?” Ed asked, opening the side door for them.

  “Sure. Anytime,” Ginger replied, stepping out into the snowy darkness.

  “Very good,” he said. Following his wife, who still held Ginger by the elbow, he came to the truck and opened the door. The smell drifted out. Ginger could smell it from where she was walking, but if Ed smelled it, he made no sign.

  “I had a run-in with an Amish boy last night,” she stated, though no one seemed to be asking. “On my way to work I found him curled up in a ditch, drunk and freezing. He threw up in my cab as I drove him to the hospital.”

  “Oh, is he all right?” Lorena asked.

  “Well, he left, so I suppose so.”

  “How is an Amish boy in West Virginia?” inquired Ed.

  “According to another nurse, he’s on that teenage thingy the Amish do.”

  “Rumspringa,” Lorena offered.

  “That’s it!” Ginger declared, climbing into the truck. “I’ve been trying to find that word all day.”

  Ed smiled as Ginger settled into her seat. She looked at him, waiting for the door to shut. He smiled ever so slightly more.

  “Thank you for letting me get the doors,” he said. Gazing into his eyes, which were as bright blue in the floodlights as they had been in the kitchen, she realized this had also been a discussion he must have had with Jesse.

  “It seems important to y’all.” She snickered.

  “It is,” he replied.

  “You know, I once stood beside a door in Alexandria for five minutes straight, waiting for Jesse to go in before me.”

  “We know,” Lorena said, chuckling.

  “Then I gave up and went in. It was so uncomfortable.”

  “But he never held it for you in Seattle,” Ed said.

  “Almost never,” Ginger corrected. “He just couldn’t get past it.”

  “If a man does not hold a door for a woman down here, it reflects on his mother,” Ed explained. “Or grandmother.”

  “Yeah. Mrs. Schaaf, the farmer’s wife who lives just up the road from Smoot’s? She said the same after I waited for two men to come out of a coffee shop. They were on the inside and when we came to the door, the first one opened it. It felt so weird ’cause I would have to walk by his outstretched arm to go in, so I waited for him to come out. Mrs. Schaaf whispered in my ear, ‘Go in. The other one is watching.’”

  Lorena laughed. “The one holding the door for you couldn’t do anything else but wait for you to enter or the man he was with would think poorly of him.”

  “And poorly of his grandmother,” Ginger added.

  “And his grandmother,” Ed agreed.

  “Thank you,” she said. That was the proper thing to do and only then did Ed shut the door. She rolled down her window as she engaged her engine. “Please come down Sunday. Osbee would like to meet you, I’m sure.”

  “We’ll be there,” Lorena said.

  Ginger shifted into reverse, backed up, and headed down the drive, the branches making now what seemed a bivouac upon the road.

  She hummed the tune to Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and the lightness she had felt since leaving the hospital lifted slightly more. Henry’s Child would be running again and would have a proper home when she left.

  “One down,” Ginger whispered. “Beau, Regard, Penny, and Christian to go.”

  She flipped on her blinker and climbed back onto the asphalt.

  “And Osbee,” she added to herself in the mirror.

  As she said it, the weight that had been sitting in the passenger seat crawled back upon her lap as if for comfort. She rolled down her window further to smell Virginia’s winter night. It was heavy and dry and cold comfort.

  July 22, 1861

  Manassas

  Dear Juliette,

  The ringing of cannon is yet in my ears and the glaring flash of musket has burned my eyes. I have not slept nor can I sleep and though the dawn rises I cannot feel its warmth. I feel my brothers fall. And then—they fall again. I cannot rise.

  We thought the fight would be small and on the far right flank, away from us. It came instead from our direct right and left. We stood upon a hill at the northeast corner of a house, watching the chaos of battle below rage across a stone bridge. It built and grew, a writhing, horrendous violence, and it was on all of our minds to leave as it crawled inexorably in our direction. We were losing, backing up toward our position. Yet we did not leave. We did not flinch. For there, upon
his horse, was Jackson, that queersome professor of ours—so odd, so cold. The butt of so many jokes. He gazed over to us, his eyes shining blue, and though we knew he looked on us, we could feel he looked elsewhere, some far ethereal place. In that moment, the battle crashed upon us like a great wave coming upon a seawall. But it could not breach us.

  I fired. All was smoke and screaming horses and men yelling and where I saw blue I fired. I could not see their faces, so as I fixed aim I said a prayer for in that sea of blue somewhere would be Zach and Jeb—the loving sons of the late Reverend, whose buttons now secured my coat. They chose Union and never did I want to see them at the end of my bayonet. A cannon boomed and I, along with my entire division, hit the ground. The great blast tore a hole in the house next to us and, unbeknownst to us at the time, the invalid lady lying on her mattress within was blown to pieces. I stood, praying as I fixed my next target—praying that it wasn’t Zach or Jeb.

  Then all went quiet, like the morning mist days before, and I heard my name—Samuel? When I turned, I saw a shape in the cannon smoke. I shifted to see past the cloud, and in that second a minié ball nicked my left ear and killed Avery, who stood behind me. I watched the ball enter his eye and he fell. Jackson ordered us forward then, he told us to yell like furies, and I tried to scream, turning as ordered, advancing as I was taught to do, but all that came from my open mouth was a silent wail—the keening as my brothers fell around me—one and then another.

  I could not tell when it ended. The dead lay about the field, the screaming wounded. There, in the distance, all those fine women and men who apparently had ridden out from Washington to see the battle flew away, tangling themselves in their retreating troops and random musket fire. What did they think to see? A play? A Shakespearean narrator with mighty voice, marking the hour and minute as a bloodless sword fight ensued? Fools.

  My regiment is three quarters gone. One battle and we are decimated. Our president rode past us at dusk, thinking we were stragglers and speaking words to us as if to rally us. Finally someone told him it was us who held the line—the seawall that was not breached. He left us, riding toward Jackson, and as I looked, there was the moon, rising full—pale orange floating away on a glowing cloud. I stood, fixed upon its cool, soothing face, and wept, for I wish now to return home. To return and find you and live as all my friends, dead around me, will never live. I wept until the rain started, and though there was great elation at our victory all around, I could not notice anything but the moon covered by cloud, my friends’ absence, and the ache I have for you.

  So here I have sat the night, what is left of our brigade to be enveloped in another. Some believe it is over, but I cannot see that. The blue sea has simply receded. Though they have lost this day, I know two officers yonder. They are in earnest.

  I close with great pain. I have written here to empty myself to you but I am not empty. My mind reels with that voice—Samuel? My life spared by a voice from a silent cloud of cannon smoke and because of it Avery is dead. It is a burden I do not know how yet to carry. Can you help, my love? Can I ask of you to hold this thing so I can be empty? I no longer know if such a thing can be asked of another. Nor do I think I would have you carry it—my love for you is such that I would have you free of burden. Such is duty and this duty is mine to carry. If I may instead ask of you, Juliette, your arms’ embrace beneath a pale orange summer moon one night, so lightness shall have hold of me within this weighty burden. Would you? I await that night.

  Your devoted,

  Samuel

  Chapter 7

  Elysium

  When she arrived home, the Martins’ Mercedes was gone.

  It was nine thirty and the snow covering the fields was pale but not bright in the moonless night. Ginger turned the car off, resting her head on the steering wheel for a moment. She was exhausted after twenty-two hours awake. Spent.

  The warming weather in the valley during the day had melted the snow and now, with the temperature dropping, all was freezing to ice. She thought of nothing but the slippery asphalt and Osbee leaving the farm. In her mind, she saw images of Bea and Henry and Oliver seated in the back of the truck, weeping as they waved good-bye to their grandmother. They loved her parents and were very excited when they’d come to visit. But what was true, more true than Ginger wanted to admit, was what little Oliver had observed six months earlier as he and his siblings watched her parents’ airplane take off from Dulles: Only Grandma Osbee gives love. Everybody else gives gifts.

  Ginger had cringed at the comment. But to her children, Jesse’s parents and her own must have seemed no more than old people bearing gifts—Santa Clauses or wise men making great journeys to deliver this doll or that game. Neither set visited more than twice a year and Jesse’s hadn’t been by in two. So she wasn’t unsurprised when she climbed out of her truck and found three brand-new bicycles leaning together on the porch for warmth.

  “Merry Christmas,” she whispered, shutting her truck door. The reverberation of it caused several balls of snow to fall from the eave just to her right. She quickly dodged them and skipped up to the porch. She slipped her house key into the lock. All was dark and quiet within, except a couple of giggles from the second floor.

  “Ginger?” Osbee’s voice floated down the stairs.

  “It’s me.”

  “If you want, dinner is in the fridge. Just put it in there. It’s probably still warm.”

  She shut the door. Even though she hadn’t eaten in twenty-two hours, she was too tired to eat.

  “Thanks, but I’m exhausted,” she said and climbed the stairs. Peering into her sons’ room, she found them seated together under Henry’s covers reading Harry the Dirty Dog. It was Henry’s favorite story when he was smaller and was one Oliver always picked because Henry always agreed to read it.

  “Lights out,” she said, entering their room and kissing them both on the head.

  “Awww,” Oliver whined.

  “Two more pages and we’re done,” Henry said, scooting deeper into his covers. Oliver scrunched down next to him.

  “Two more pages and lights out.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Oliver whispered and smiled up at her.

  She rubbed his strawberry blond head and stepped back into the hall. Opening Bea’s door, she found the room dark and still. Tripping over a globe and an open atlas, Ginger caught her balance on the bed.

  “Mama?” Bea whispered.

  “Sorry, Bea. I can’t see the stuff on your floor.” The light on Bea’s nightstand popped on. She sat straight up in bed and gazed wide-eyed at her mother. Ginger winced in the sudden light.

  “What is it, Bea?”

  “A ranger from the state park came by today.”

  “Oh?” Ginger responded, sitting down on the little girl’s bed.

  “Yeah. They need to come through our field to get the trees up from the river.”

  Ginger looked at her daughter. Clearly she was bothered by something. “What’s worrying you, Little Bea?” She asked it just as Jesse had done and, in that instant, tried to swallow the words back. She knew the rule. Only Jesse was allowed to call her Little Bea. It was Bea’s rule.

  “I asked him about Mr. Annanais.”

  Ginger frowned and cocked her head. Bea hadn’t noticed Ginger’s infraction. That was odd. “What about him?”

  “I asked the ranger what battle happened on the other side of the river and he said there was no battle.” Bea stared into her mother’s eyes intensely. Then she gazed at the window.

  Ginger followed her eyes, her frown deepening. “Okay,” Ginger prompted.

  “I said that a man in a Southern uniform came over to us yesterday and then the ranger asked if his coat had mismatching buttons.”

  The world stopped turning. All Ginger could hear was her breath and Bea’s breath and the rising speed of her own heart.

  “I didn’t answer the ra
nger, Mama,” Bea whispered.

  “Mr. Annanais left, Bea,” Ginger said, quietly, keeping her own rising anxiety from her voice. Was Samuel a thief? A criminal? Ginger wished she had double-checked the doors downstairs to make sure they were locked. She cursed at herself as she touched Bea’s hair. “I think he’s a long ways off. Does the ranger think he’ll be back or something?”

  “Mama?” Bea whispered again, reaching over and touching Ginger’s cheek.

  “It’s okay, Bea.”

  “He’s a ghost, Mama.” Bea said it so quietly that Ginger was sure she hadn’t heard it correctly over the terror pounding through her ears.

  “A what?”

  “A ghost. The ranger winked at me when he said it.” Bea looked down for a minute. “I don’t like that guy.”

  “What do you mean, a ghost?” Images of Samuel flipped through her mind—standing on the fallen tree, his dark eyes by the barn, his odd behavior on the road at Oak Flat. Manassas? But—that wasn’t him at Manassas.

  “I hid behind Grandma ’cause I didn’t like that ranger. He told Grandma the ghost helps people sometimes in the park. Sometimes people get lost and he helps them find their way out.”

  Manassas . . . the musket . . . a turning profile. It wasn’t him; she was sure. She smiled.

  “He’s just pulling your leg, Bea,” Ginger said. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t like him. Maybe you could tell he was just joking with you in that way adults do that you don’t like.”

  Bea was a serious person. She meant business. Anytime any adult spoke to her in a childish way, especially in a joking fashion, she didn’t like them.

  “He wasn’t joking.”

  “You and I saw Mr. Annanais, Bea. And I saw him up near my work on the road.”

  “You saw him again?” Bea’s eyebrows knit together.

  Ginger giggled, trying to lighten her daughter’s mood. “Yes. He was going home to Laurel Creek, hitchhiking home. He’s not here and he’s no ghost.”

  “You sure?” She was serious.

  “Positive.”

  “Where’s Laurel Creek?” Bea asked, pointing to her atlas.