After a few moments of rest, she went back upstairs to finish sweeping the empty room before going home. Her eyes darted, watching for a long brown tail and quick movements.
Thick dust covered the area where the rug had been. Broom and dustpan in hand, she started at one end of the room and worked her way across. In the middle of the room, the edge of the dustpan bumped against an uneven board. Annie squatted and noticed two matching vertical cuts against the natural horizontal lines of the wood floor, about a foot apart. The cuts in the wood were aged and had been made a long time ago. With her fingers, she tried to pry the boards but nothing happened. She left it alone and kept working until the entire room was swept clean.
Tired and hungry, she was ready for a soaking bath and some of her grandmother’s vegetable soup. Leaning against the broom, she surveyed the room again, pleased to have completed one job, but disappointed in the mishap on the stairs. In an effort to save money she had now cost them more in repairs on the handrail.
Her eyes went to the cuts in the wood. Curious, she examined it again and found the wood moved just a bit when she pushed on the corner. With a table knife scavenged from a kitchen drawer, she lifted the wood a little bit. Another spot and it moved again, then again, until the wide board clattered onto the floor.
She jumped back and waited for a rat to jump out. When nothing happened, she peered into a small dark hole between the downstairs ceiling and the floor and saw the glint of metal just below the surface. She reached in and grabbed a metal handle and pulled a small, dust-covered box into the light. With the tail of her shirt, she wiped the dust off and saw it was dark brown painted on metal.
When she tried to open it, it appeared to be locked. She fished a paper clip from the trash bag and inserted the end into the lock and jiggled it until she heard a click.
Inside were brown envelopes with old-fashioned handwriting. She picked up a letter and held it gently in her hand. It was addressed to Lilah and William May, her great-grandparents and Beulah’s parents. The return address said: War and Navy Departments, V-Mail Service, Official Business.
Annie excitedly flipped through the envelopes and saw that each envelope was addressed to her great-grandparents with postmarks beginning in April 1942 and ending in January 1944.
These must be from Great-Uncle Ephraim, she thought.
Opening one of the envelopes, her suspicion was confirmed. It was signed by her great-uncle, the family’s hero, the one who gave his life for his country, and was now buried just up the hill from the old stone house in the May Family Cemetery.
All these years, precious letters were hidden away in a metal box under the floor of a house that nearly burned down and then faced near destruction a second time.
She read, first one letter and then another, as she went back to the 1940s and heard the voice of a great-uncle she never knew. Her grandmother spoke of her brother Ephraim as a saint and a brave man who willingly gave it all for his country. The voice she now heard from the letters was a country boy, barely out of his teenage years, who longed to be back among the green pastures and rolling hills of home. A boy used to hard work and handling guns in order to provide food for his family—not to take another’s life. A boy who was committed to serving his country at all costs, but like any normal human, preferred peace over war.
“Annie?” There was a note of alarm in Jake’s voice and she could hear him taking the stairs two at a time.
“Here,” she called.
“Are you okay?” he said, his eyes scanning her even as he spoke. “What happened?”
“Nothing, why?” she asked, taking Jake’s outstretched hand as he helped her up from the floor.
“Beulah called when you didn’t come home for supper. I got worried you fell or something.”
“I did fall back in time, reading these letters. But I had no idea it was so late. Look at this, Jake. These letters were in a metal box, hidden under the floor,” she handed one of the letters to Jake. “They’re all from my great-uncle Ephraim during World War II.”
“Where were they?” Jake asked.
“There,” Annie pointed to the hiding place in the floor. Jake got down on his knees. He reached in and felt around.
“Nothing else here,” he said. “What happened on the stairs?”
Annie sighed and rolled her eyes then told him about the rat.
He laughed then pulled her to him.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “But call me next time and let me help.”
Annie gathered up the letters and put them back in the metal box.
“Are you finished with the hay?”
“Almost. Joe and I are putting the last load in the barn. I took a water break and saw a missed call from Beulah,” Jake said, as they walked down the stairs together. “You did a number on this.”
“Hard to fix?” she said.
“Not compared to the rest of the house. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”
Outside, he lifted the mattress into the bed of the pick-up.
“You make it look so easy,” she said.
“Just trying to impress you,” he grinned.
***
“Thank heavens you’re okay,” Beulah said when Annie walked in the back door. “I thought you’d fallen through the floor.”
“You’re not going to believe what I found.”
Beulah sat down at the kitchen table and she placed the metal box in front of her.
“Have you ever seen this box?”
Her grandmother put her hands on it as if feeling it would bring back the remembrance.
“I can’t say I have.”
“Open it.”
Beulah opened the box and stared at the letters in front of her. “What in tarnation? These look like the letters Ephraim sent me when he was in service. But mine are upstairs in the drawer by my bed.”
“These letters went to your parents.”
“Mama and Daddy?” she watched Beulah pick them up, one by one. “I never knew what happened to those letters,” Beulah said. “Where’d you find them?”
She told her about the secret hiding place.
“Mama and Daddy’s bedroom,” Beulah said, fingering each letter. “You mean they cut out part of the floor and hid it there, under the rug?”
“I’ll show it to you whenever you want. Do you know why they hid the letters?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” Beulah said.
Chapter Eight
BEULAH SAT AT the kitchen table and stared at the letters scribed when she was just a girl. Memories of a time that seemed ancient surfaced like bubbles floating to the top of water, as if they had been waiting for some signal.
When her brother had signed up after the horrible attack on Pearl Harbor, he was off to training and then was eventually shipped overseas. They didn’t know where until the day when she was the first to get a letter from him. The mail took a long time back then; and they didn’t always arrive in the order of when they were written. And so she had received the first communication from the faraway land.
***
It was a warm afternoon in late April, the trees sprouting leaves, the grass growing enough so the livestock didn’t need hay any longer, and she was barefoot in the garden helping her mother plant corn.
Her father puttered in from town in the dark green Chevy truck and pulled up next to the old stone house. She sensed the excitement in his voice when he called, “Beuly, come get your letter from Eph.” Her mother dropped the sack of corn and they all ran to meet her father. With grave care, her father handed the letter to her and she held it in her little hands as if it were a bar of gold from Fort Knox.
They had waited to find out where he was sent since Ephraim couldn’t say anything before he left. If he did, the censor would mark it out or maybe even not let the letter go. So the boys had learned to be careful about what they told. She thought of a slogan from those times on posters everywhere: “Loose lips sink ships.”
While her parents
waited, Beulah opened the letter carefully. At the top, next to the date, it had said North Africa.
“He’s in North Africa,” she said.
Her parents looked at each other with a strange expression she was too young to understand and too scared to ask the meaning. She read the letter to them, which told her how much he missed her and asking what she had been doing. He told her very little about his own life in the service, but was eager to know what was going on at home.
Ephraim wrote many more letters to her. All those letters were safely stored in her room. But she had never laid eyes on the letters now placed in front of her by her granddaughter. Oh, she reckoned her parents had read them, or parts of them to her when they were received. To now hold them and read them as an adult, well, it was like finding a buried treasure.
The first few letters were from training camp. Beulah skipped those and went straight to the first one from overseas.
North Africa
April 21, 1943
Dearest Mother and Dad,
How is everyone by this time? Dad, I was wondering if you got the field broke? I sure wish I could be there to help you. It’s a lot for you all by yourself. How many new calves do you have by now? I would like to see them. That new bull was fine stock and I am anxious to know what kind of cows he puts on the ground.
It’s not too bad here. I have made some buddies. One is from Boston and he never handled a gun until he joined up. He would tickle you to death the way he talks but he laughs at me, too. His name is Charlie Fitzgerald and he is Catholic. There is another fella called Rooster and you can imagine why.
And then my best friend is Arnie Mason from Texas. We were raised up the same way and he likes to talk about farming as much as I do. Except they call them ranches out there. He talks of cows with horns as long as a bale of hay. Can you imagine it? I have seen them in movies but I would like to see for myself. He has invited me to visit him after the war, and I think I would like to see Texas someday.
We have been awful busy, and I am glad. It is good to pass the time so we aren’t left to think of home too often. The food is okay, but I sure do miss Mother’s cooking. And Mother, I’m fine and dandy, so please don’t worry about me. I will write more when I have time. Give Beulah my love.
Love,
Ephraim
Beulah heard his voice through the words, always upbeat, always cheerful. Even to a little sister ten years his junior, he had treated her with such love and care. He had taken her on dates to the movies with his sweetheart, Bessie Sprinkle. Looking back now, Beulah knew her parents had probably sent her as a chaperone. Still, he seemed glad to have her along and she never knew the fighting or resentments siblings closer in age experienced.
Placing the letter back in the box, she made a decision. She would not devour these all at once. Instead, she would parcel them out, starting at the beginning, and enjoy them one by one. They had waited in silence for nearly sixty years. It seemed disrespectful to read them too fast. She took the box upstairs and placed it by her bedside table. Tonight she would read another one—or maybe two.
On her way back down the steps, she thought about Bessie Sprinkle, Ephraim’s old girlfriend. She had died twenty years ago of breast cancer, after raising three kids with the man she married before the war was even over. If she remembered right, Bessie’s husband was from another county, discharged for medical reasons. For a while, Bessie was like a big sister to Beulah when she and Ephraim were courting. She even came over for visits after Ephraim enlisted, but those had tapered off and Bessie had gone on to other things, even before Ephraim was killed. Truth be told, she had resented Bessie all these years, her dropping her brother while he was serving his country. Even as a little girl, she had wondered if it had broken Ephraim’s heart to lose his girl while being so far away from home. It had troubled her to think he might have died with a broken heart.
Bessie had lived a whole life beyond Ephraim, just as Beulah had. It seemed strange how one person’s life was cut so short and others lived to ripe old ages. It was a mystery and one she would ask the good Lord about when she got to heaven. His ways were higher.
***
With much to ponder, she felt drawn to the kitchen to sort it all out. The letters had stirred up deep feelings and cooking helped her think clearly.
The iron skillet was just heating up for pork chops when the harvest-gold wall phone rang out. When she answered, Betty Gibson launched into talking as soon as Beulah said hello.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Woody Patterson sure didn’t go to Chicago to buy a horse. I saw him drive by the Snip and Curl this afternoon and he wasn’t even pulling his trailer.”
“How do you know he just got back? Maybe he unloaded it and came back into town,” Beulah said.
“Because he goes to the nursing home every Thursday morning to see his mother. You know Shirley Updike? She’s in the DAR with me and she works at the nursing home. I called her and asked if Woody had been in this morning and she said no. Woody never misses seeing his mama on Thursday morning, although heavens knows there’s not much left to see. She’s done wasted away with a brain injury, but he goes every Thursday morning come hail or high water.”
She looked at the iron skillet, longing to be off the phone and slopping batter on the pork chops.
“So what do you think, Beulah? Why is he going off to Chicago under the pretense of buying a horse with no horse trailer in sight?”
“Well, Betty, sometimes a man uses sayings to politely hide what he really means.”
“So what are you sayin’?” Betty asked, frustrated she wasn’t jumping on her bandwagon.
“Your own Joe says all the time he needs to ‘see a man about a horse,’ and we all know it’s a warning that he’s going off behind the barn to relieve himself.”
There was silence on the other end of the line and Beulah grinned to herself. It was so easy to get Betty’s goat. No wonder Joe did it all the time.
“So, are you saying Woody Patterson went all the way to Chicago to urinate?”
***
Saturday night was Evelyn’s dinner party and Jake insisted on picking them up, even though she and Annie were fully capable of driving the mile from her farm to Evelyn’s. It was a nice gesture just the same. He helped her to the SUV and into the back seat. Thank goodness for those running boards. Who in the world could mount one of those high vehicles without them? It was nearly like climbing up on a horse, an activity she had given up years ago.
Annie, looking so pretty in that perfect shade of red, slid into the front seat and off they went. Evelyn had been consumed with the party planning all week and Beulah hoped she wasn’t worn to a frazzle now it was time for the dinner. They were celebrating Jake’s official return from Cincinnati and the guest list included the usuals at their after-church Sunday dinner for the single folks with the addition of Betty and Joe Gibson, who normally made a practice of eating at Long John Silver’s after church.
The only addition to the dinner party out of their normal circle was Tom Childress, Lindy’s father. Jake had been drawn to him as a mentor of sorts after he decided to move back and he was certainly a fine man. He had a stellar reputation and was looked up to in the community as a leader. Jake had picked a good mentor, and Evelyn’s invitation for dinner was a nice gesture.
They arrived and Jake helped her out and up the front steps, Annie on his other side. They were back door friends with the Wilders, but she knew Evelyn wanted everyone to come to the front door on a night such as this. They were the first to arrive, which was just as well, since she could offer her help.
“Oh good,” Evelyn said, her apron still on when she opened the door. “Annie, can you put ice in the glasses? Beulah, I need you to see to this meringue. It does not want to stand up for me. Jake, can you turn on some music?”
Meringue was her specialty and Beulah was glad to be assigned a job she could do.
“Do you have some cream of tartar?” she asked. Evelyn produced
it and she added just the right amount. The meringue was stiff as a board in just a few minutes. And without even asking Evelyn, who seemed quite preoccupied, she put it on the pies, giving the tops some nice curls to brown just so in the oven.
Actually, Evelyn seemed nervous, which was odd for a woman who was no stranger to entertaining. It wasn’t like her to be this behind in preparations, but she must have spent her time on getting dressed, because Evelyn was quite a vision in a baby blue knit suit that accented her slim hips and her blue eyes. One of those St. Somebody brands. Evelyn’s mind was not on pies this evening, so Beulah decided to take over the desserts and slid them in the oven for browning.
Woody Patterson came in through the back door, his reddish brown hair slicked back off his freckled face, making him look younger than his forty-odd years. He wasn’t a bad-looking fellow when he cleaned up, except for the unruly upper plate that flapped about when he talked too fast.
“Beulah!” he said, his voice bouncing off the kitchen walls. And then he eyed the pan lying in the sink and swished his finger around it, gathering up leftover pie custard.
She started to fuss at him for coming in the back door and for slopping around in Evelyn’s dirty dishes, but poor Woody was raised up rough and probably didn’t know any better. Instead, she decided to help him.
“Go back out and come in the front door,” she whispered. “Evelyn wants everyone to come in the front door tonight so she can greet you.”
“Huh?” he said, leaning over so he could hear. Again, she said, “Go out and come in the front door,” louder this time, and taking care to enunciate each word.
“Go out the front door?” he asked, a look of total confusion on his face.
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