All the Little Hopes

by Leah Weiss

  Everybody within the sound of our bell collects in the front yard. Mama yells from the porch, “The whole war is over. Japan surrendered. We won. We won, and it’s over.” Her voice catches on emotion that threatens to sink her to her knees. Bert comes from the house and grabs her arm to help her down the steps. Daddy throws his hat in the air and runs to pick Mama up in his arms. Helen has Betty Gail, and they dance in the yard beside Lydia and Cora, everybody a little drunk on happiness of this magnitude. I feared peace would remain a chimera, a castle in the air, but it’s here, and we won, and it doesn’t feel real.

  Lydia tugs at Mama’s dress. “Is Everett coming home tomorrow?”

  Mama says, “Give your brother time. He’ll be home soon. But now we celebrate.”

  Grady hitches the tractor to the flatbed wagon and all us Browns and Mayhews climb on so we can ride together. With the sun setting on a pink horizon, we head the two miles to town to experience the full rapture. We see Cornell, Rosalee, and baby Amee walking to the celebration and they get onboard with us, and we cross the Roanoke River with every church bell ringing like Christmas morning. The cacophony is exhilarating. Grady pulls off the side of the road so we can mingle with our friends. Everybody wears a fresh layer of joy, and the streets are full of people clapping each other on the backs. Some bring out fiddles and banjos. Some pull harmonicas from their back pockets, and they play for people doing jigs in the streets, and we almost get drunk from happiness. Peace has come too late for some like our Wade Sully. The Turner girls lost their brother Skip, and Ricky Miller’s cousin from Robersonville lost his leg, but everybody’s glad the war is over.

  But the POWs? What are they thinking?

  I say, “Mama, can Bert and I run to see our Germans?” And because she can’t deny anything on this day of bliss, she says yes, and we run to lower Main Street and down River Road to the locked gate at the prison camp, leaving the celebration behind.

  The scene is different here, and the Germans are quiet. Some are lined up somber against the tall fence looking toward town, hearing remnants of the party they’re not part of. We call Wolf’s and Joe’s names, and they come up to the fence, and Joe says, “Move down more,” and we go to the far end where we can talk and link our fingers through the wire fence and stand a foot apart.

  “You heard, didn’t you?” and they nod, and there’s nothing else to say. Their homeland surrendered months back, but with the fall of Japan, the dismantling of war begins in earnest. America has five million soldiers to bring home. War-torn countries need rebuilding from the ground up. It’s a daunting prospect I cannot fathom.

  Our Germans are downcast. Their future is uncertain. Wolf and Joe won’t have a tender homecoming waiting for them like Everett will. I’m not sure they have a home to go to at all.

  The next Sunday, after church and the jubilant sermon on victory and the Lord’s answer to our prayers, we walk in the door with the phone ringing. Daddy answers it and listens and looks at Bert, “It’s for you.”

  “Who is it?” Mama whispers.

  “Her sister, Ruth.”

  Bert hardly ever talks about Ruth or her pa. She’s only gotten two letters since she’s been here. She wondered who wrote them since Ruth can’t read or write. One said her granny passed, and the other, five months back, said her sister Ruth got married to a widow man with two little girls, and to neither of those events did Bert go home. We stay in the parlor to give her some privacy, but we listen.

  “What happened?” she pauses. “When?” and waits. “Okay,” she says and hangs up.

  She comes to the parlor door. “Pa died last night. Ruth says it was pneumonia that took him, and I need to go home for the burying.”

  Bert’s death-news sucks some of the jubilant air out of our day, and her usual wild glory is compressed. The only other time I saw such sadness come over her was after Frankie Tender left scars on her heart. Those scars haven’t healed fully since Frankie was never found. Larry Crumbie and Terrell Stucky haven’t been found either, but nobody cares about them.

  “We’ll get you on tomorrow’s earliest bus so you can attend the funeral. Lucy, you should go, too, as support.”

  I barely register the surprise bus trip before Irene’s car pulls in the yard and brakes hard. She hurries across the yard shouting and we step out on the porch. “Got another missing man.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Mama declares in disbelief. “Who in the world is it this time?”

  “Tiny Junior. Flossie hasn’t seen him since yesterday morning, and she’s beside herself.” Irene is now at the steps and pats her chest to catch her breath. “He’s always home by dark, but last night, he wasn’t. She didn’t worry much until he wasn’t there this morning. She’s spent the day looking in all the usual places, but it’s time to put together a search party. I thought Daddy and Grady would want to help.”

  “Course we do. Let’s get out of Sunday clothes.”

  “We’ll help, too.” Bert adds us to the lot and saves thinking about her pa for later.

  I whisper “Trula Freed” in her ear, and she nods. With alacrity, we jump on our bikes and ride with our gingham dresses billowing out. We ride down the dirt road toward the painted cottage with the red door. We pedal hard with the rush of wind sweeping back our hair and muffling our ears. My heart thuds with worry for Tiny Junior, already fearing we may never see him again. But I’m angry, too, at a fate that might take a pure soul before his time. The other missing men were spiteful. Tiny Junior doesn’t have a cunning or conning bone in his body.

  Bert rides beside me and I see her lips moving. “What?” I shout.

  “—be looking for his bicycle. Let’s check Aunt Violet’s place.”

  I shout back, “What in the world would he be doing there?”

  “We need to look somewhere the others won’t.”

  I want to hear what Trula Freed has to say first, but I don’t argue. We pass the cutoff and ride to the abandoned house that was Bert’s pitiful welcome to Mercer County. We haven’t been this way in a long time. Windows are broken, and the screen door is ripped from its hinges. It was likely boys who made a mess of a place that’s not a home anymore. We pass the garden plot grown wild and the chicken coop caved in on itself. We circle the back lot, looking for Tiny or his bicycle.

  We see it. In the tall weeds. Lying on its side. The spokes of the front wheel point to the sky. Beside an abandoned well with the rotten boards broken through.

  We lean over and look down the well, and there he is. Sitting in the bottom of that muddy hole. Waiting. Grinning.

  “Told you so,” Bert whispers, feeling rightly proud of herself. She shouts, “You okay down there?”

  “Hey, Miz Bert. Hey, Miz Lucy. I’m hungry, and my leg got hurt.”

  “Hold on,” I say. “We’ll get help and get you out of there. Your mama’s going to be so happy. Everybody’s going to be so happy.”

  Bert stays with Tiny so he’s not scared, and I ride home so Mama can call the sheriff’s office with the news. Then everybody starts converging at Violet’s place, a ladder is lowered down the well, and we are heroes. We stand off to the side and Bert says, “That’s the way The Mystery of the Missing Man should go. You look for him, you find him, and it’s done.”

  I was looking for a shortcut. Bert thought like Nancy Drew.

  The next morning at first light, Bert and I are at the bus station with round-trip tickets, one suitcase between us, Mama’s food to fortify us, and ten one-dollar bills from egg money. Soldiers crowd the aisle, manly and kind. They wear the air of relief, their hats under their arms. Their glances linger on Bert. They try to connect with her faraway gaze, but her grief isolates her.

  We’ll be gone three days to mountains I’ve only heard about. We will retrace Bert’s journey across the expanse of North Carolina. I hide my excitement under a layer of serious because Bert has lost her ma a
nd her pa. How is she going to take seeing him dead when she last saw him in hard times? How can she mend a bridge that doesn’t lead anywhere anymore?

  Hours away from Asheville, the mountains appear. They hover on the horizon like a mirage in pale hues different from the blue of the sky. Bert sleeps against my shoulder, and I don’t want to rouse her, but Lord am I excited. The bus window is open and, like Bert said there would be, cooler air comes from those far-off mountains. It thrills me to feel her stories come true.

  The bus climbs on Route 70, and the mountains grow taller. I see lush green on the lower elevations and hints of reds and golds above, and a chill in the air has me close the window and waken Bert with my movement. “Do you know that your Appalachian Mountains are the oldest in the world? Some scientists say the crystalline rocks found in the mountains are a billion years old. Guess how many zeroes there are in a billion.” Bert doesn’t guess, so I tell her, but she isn’t impressed.

  But I am captivated by the other side of North Carolina. I didn’t expect to fall in love with a place so different from my birthplace, but I know this is home before I ever set foot on terra firma. Trula Freed spoke about other lives lived, and I wondered if she was spinning tales.

  Bert stands to pull the suitcase from the top rack, and three men jump to their feet to help, bumping into each other, laughing and apologizing, hoping to catch the pretty girl’s eye and earn a smile. She pays them no mind but pulls out two sweaters she knew we would need. I pull mine around, relishing August goose bumps.

  With eyes riveted out the window, I say, “How could you stay away so long?”

  “From here?”

  I glance over to her. “Of course, from here.”

  “It’s pretty. Real pretty. But I thought I was being banished for being a thoughtless girl. I buckled under the weight of Ma’s words back then.”

  “You were thirteen,” I say, an age that sounds terribly young compared to fifteen. I shake my head. “But what am I saying? If you’d come back here, you’d never have become part of my life. So for every loss, there’s a gain, and I’m grateful you belong to us.”

  The bus pulls into the Asheville station, air brakes hiss, and the door snaps open. We shuffle down the narrow aisle toward the steps with Bert leaning down, looking through the windows. She catches sight of her sister, Ruth, and squeals, then jumps down from the bus and takes her sister in her arms in a homecoming hug that brings tears to my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for them to look alike—the same beauties with auburn hair and golden skin and womanly shapes I still can’t lay claim to.

  Bert turns to include me in the welcome, and I get a hug, too, smelling a different earthiness on her sister’s skin. Ruth’s husband stands behind her, a short man with burly arms and kind eyes, unruffled in this sea of flushed joy. My first thought is You can count on this man. His name is Homer Sykes, and he holds out his big hand to shake mine. I love the firmness of it for Ruth’s sake.

  Married…with children. It’s hard to wrap my head around it, a girl two years older than Bert and me, married with her pa’s blessing. How could she stay a girl and bury her granny, nurse her pa to death’s door, and embrace Homer’s two little girls needing a mama? She’s already pulled hard time and seems suited for it.

  Homer puts our belongings in the bed of a rusty truck. Bert and I climb in back while he tells me where we’re headed. “We gotta ways to go,” he says quietly and points to the steep side of a mountain that sucks the breath out of me. I had no idea that rugged beauty like this existed in my birth state or what it felt like to breathe high air.

  It’s midafternoon in sunshine when we leave Asheville. The winding paved road turns to gravel, then to a narrow dirt trail wide as the truck. We go up and up with Bert and me leaning against the tailgate. I pull my sweater tight, and Bert unfolds an old quilt to wrap around us. August in the mountains is not August in Riverton.

  Daylight fades and the blackening forest presses snug against the trail. I think of the hair-raising tales Oma told us that were set in the Black Forest, the world of the Brothers Grimm. I think about her wolpertinger, once stored in her trunk in our attic that now lives in Lydia’s room, and how I believed it was a composite of three animals skillfully sewn together to create a fantasy creature that never breathed on its own. Now I’m not sure. This loamy richness and crisp air I inhale is as foreign to my side of North Carolina as walking on the moon. It’s different enough to breed real magic. Is this the secret place my heart has been yearning for without knowing? Will I see wolves and minks or even a wolpertinger? I don’t ask. I want this fairy tale to unwind in its own good time.

  The road forks left, right, left, then I’m lost. We end up in a field on a knoll that holds a cabin on its peak, a neat garden, chickens, goats, a small stand of gnarled fruit trees, and a scattering of horses and buggies. We’re surrounded by the outline of mountains like jagged teeth. Tears sting my eyes. This is where Bert was born.

  I reach for her hand to give her comfort and wonder for the hundredth time what’s going through her mind and hope it isn’t only pain. It’s over two years back when Bert the girl was banished and carried her obstinance bound in muslin to the humid land she has made her home. In the distance, headstones dot the landscape. A picket fence falling over in places encircles a cemetery. Bert’s roots were always here.

  Chapter 50

  Bert: The Wake

  Going up the mountain, my insides turn hollow like they was gutted with a rusty fork. My pain is ragged, and I’m light-headed. Some of that comes from being in high country. Some of it comes from not belonging here no more.

  Homer’s truck pulls outta the dark onto Pa’s land when the sun sets on Mount Mitchell, the tallest mountain in all of North Carolina. The truck stops, and me and Lu climb down from the back and get our footing on the mountaintop. Pa’s wake has been going on two days with relations and church family watching over him, but the burial waits on me. Tomorrow, Pa’s soul will be released to heaven, and the pine box holding his body will be set in hallowed ground. Jacob Bartholomew Tucker was one of the chosen, so I don’t worry bout where his soul is headed.

  Ruth whispers, “Pa’s waitin in the parlor. Ready?”

  I lie and say, “Ready.” A sharp wind whips my hair and cuts through the sweater and cotton dress. Is it Ma’s restless spirit-ghost wanting to pierce my soul? This is a haunted place. I am haunted here.

  I point to a empty chair in the yard. My eyes stay on the front door. I say to Lu, “Wait here. I’ll get you when I’m done.”

  I follow Ruth’s straight back. Her thick braid falls neat. Uncle Bud sits in the porch rocker. “Evening,” he says when I pass. Aunt Beulah’s likely in the kitchen tending to food. The folks inside the front door part to let us in. The shuffling feet are muffled on worn floors. I nod to Mr. and Miz Davis, the Harker family, pass the McDonalds and the Beirnes. Reverend Aloysius stands by the casket holding his worn bible. The people are the same color and same thinness and wear the same dusty clothes. Candles light Pa’s open casket. I bout faint till somebody touches my elbow and holds out a glass of branch water. It’s Sam Logan—the boy everybody thought I’d settle with once upon a time—and I look up to meet his kind eyes.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He whispers back, “You different.” His breath smells of sassafras he chews.

  I go to the casket, and Sam stays back.

  Pa was tall but not big, but the man in the casket got all the living seeped outta him. His face got a cloth soaked in soda water to slow darkening. There’s likely quarters on his eyes to keep em closed. I pray Pa can’t see in the dark of my heart and judge me harsh.

  Ruth says, “He died peaceful. He won’t never alone. Me and Homer or his mama Marcella was always with him.”

  I’m shamed to say, “Did he ask bout me?” but I want to know.

  “That he did.”

  “What kind
a words did he say?”

  “At the start, he say, ‘Bert, lend me a hand,’ but you won’t here to tote wood or water. Then one time he say, ‘You look like Bert standing there.’” Ruth throws scraps to me. Last time I hear Pa’s voice was two years back when Lu’s daddy found a way to reach him. Pa was on the other end of the line, sounding deep in a hole.

  Ruth knows my mind. “He don’t put blame. The Good Lord called Ma and the baby, that’s all.” She offers comfort words, but they weigh heavy. “Sam Logan asks if you was moving back and staying. I don’t answer for you cause I ain’t got the right, but the homeplace is yours if you want it. Homer’s got his place we live at. This one’s too far to tend to.” Ruth smooths down the front of Pa’s yellowed shirt. “Take your time thinking on it. It ain’t goin nowhere.”

  Chapter 51

  Lucy: Closure

  I stand in the growing dusk, looking for the privy. I see it off to the side near a lean-to shed. A girl about my age waits at the door, and I walk over. “Evening,” I say and nod in respect, and she nods back, then faces the wooden door with the crescent moon cutout. Without turning around she says, “You reckon Allaburt’s gunna stay fer a spill? Be wither kin?”

  It takes a moment to understand that she’s asking about Bert, Allie Bert, Allaburt. The girl asked me if Bert is going to stay, and I’m speechless. Unlike last time when she rode across the state with a one-way ticket, Bert has a return ticket leaving in two days, and it never crossed my mind she wouldn’t need it.

  The privy door opens, and a child steps out adjusting her flour-sack dress that almost touches the ground, then she takes the older girl’s hand and they walk toward the house where they belong, like everybody else, except me. I’ve never been an outsider before, knowing no one, understanding little, standing on unfamiliar land. I’ve lived such a harbored life, sticking pins in a map on a wall, collecting ten-dollar words, pretending a story in a book was an introduction to life.