TWELVE

THE LETTER FROM Ben, arriving in Jericho two days after his leaving, was a giddy surprise for Sally. She read it again and again, as though the words were able to leap up from the page and fashion Ben’s face and mimic Ben’s voice. So many promises in the letter. So many.

Her own letters to Ben, written daily since his leaving, also had promises, though she knew she would not mail the letters because she did not have an address for him in Boston. It did not matter. She doubted she would ever show them to him, for she believed they were childish, the words dangerously revealing, words of romantic and erotic yearnings from a girl pretending to be a woman.

Her mother had noticed her behavior since Ben’s leaving and had said, “What you’re going through is the worst time of your life, and maybe the best. It’s your in-between time, and you’ll never forget it.”

Her mother was right. “In-between” was the perfect word. Awkward, fragile, exhilarating. Her mother had said it was because her dreams had overflowed into her body like a summer flash flood and her body was struggling not to drown. And it did seem that way. Occasionally, thinking of Ben, something—some force—flew up in her body, pressing against her lungs, and she would gasp for breath.

She wondered how her mother knew such things. She loved her mother, yet also pitied her. Her mother was a bitter person who suffered from anemia and from resentment that no one understood. She seldom appeared at the store, seldom left their home, and, sadly, seldom smiled. It did not seem possible that such a woman had ever felt the joy of passion, or could recognize it in another person.

“Hold on to every second of it,” her mother had advised. “It won’t last long, and when it’s gone you’ll never get any of it back.”

“What does that mean?” Sally had asked.

Her mother had turned away from her without answering.

On the night that she received Ben’s letter, Sally closed the door to her room and pulled the drapes over the window. She removed her clothes and stood nude before the full-length mirror on the back of the door, gazing proudly at her body. She had heard girls talk of lovemaking, of how men behaved, and what a resourceful woman could do to keep men tamed to their touch only. Some of the talk was covered in giggles, some whispered in wonderment. Some believed lovemaking was a horror, some said it made a woman jittery with happiness.

Sally smiled at her reflection. She believed she would be jittery.

She lightly touched her breast, felt a shiver. Her breasts were small and sensitive.

She closed her eyes and imagined that she was in her wedding room on her wedding night, and that Ben was in the bed watching her.

“Mrs. Ben Phelps,” she said in a soft voice.

She wrapped her arms in a hug around her body and thought of the promises in Ben’s letter, and she remembered the first time she knew she was in love with him. It was a Saturday, one week before her fourteenth birthday. She had carried lunch to her father, and as he ate alone in the storeroom, she had helped Ben arrange a display of dresses.

“You don’t have to do this,” Ben had said to her.

“Daddy says I have to learn about the store,” she had replied politely but stubbornly. “When I’m sixteen, I’m going to start working here so I’ll know what to do when it’s my store.”

“It’d be better if he showed you,” Ben had said.

“Why?”

“It’s his store, you’re his daughter.”

“Does that matter?”

“I think so,” Ben had answered. “If it’s going to be your store one day, he should be the one telling you about everything. I may say it wrong.”

“Well, what if I grow up and marry you?” she had said playfully. “Then it’d be your store.”

Ben had looked at her in disbelief, and then he had busied himself again with the dresses, dropping one to the floor.

It was in that moment, as he stooped to retrieve the dress, that she knew she was in love with Ben Phelps, and that one day she would marry him.

She brushed her face with her fingers, pretending they were Ben’s fingers. The reflection in the mirror smiled back at her, and she knew that she was beautiful and that her lovemaking would be beautiful.

“Mrs. Ben Phelps,” she said again in her soft voice.

Before she went to bed, she wrote another letter to Ben.

My dearest Ben,

Tonight, I believe you are here with me, so close that I can touch the air and feel your face. I love you with every tender thought I have ever had and wish for sleep only to dream of you, as I have every night that you’ve been away. Someday, I will tell you of those dreams, or, better still, I will live them with you.

If you do not come home soon, I think I will die of loneliness.

But now, I will dream. And in my dream, you will be here.

I kiss the air that is your face, and hold the night breeze that brings me your arms.

With my love,

Sally

THE TRAIN DID not arrive in Beimer until twenty minutes after three, which did not surprise Henry Quick.

“Sometimes it don’t get here to almost dark,” he had said to Ben. “Must’ve been some trouble on the track between here and Bowling Green.”

Ben and Lottie and Little Ben had waited on the porch of Henry Quick’s store, taking a lunch of baked sweet potatoes and biscuits and water from Henry’s well. After the lunch, Little Ben had curled in his mother’s lap and slept as Lottie fanned him with an ivory-handled folding fan she had taken from her purse. Ben knew it was the fan he had seen before, in the tent on the night that Lottie had offered her body to him. The thought of the night made him blush.

“Guess the boy’s wore out,” Henry had suggested quietly.

Ben had agreed with a shake of his head.

“Looks like his daddy did when he was little,” Henry had added. “Got the same eyes. Maybe he’ll be a baseball player, too.”

“Maybe,” Ben had replied.

“Foster was something else, he was,” Henry had declared. “God-o-mighty, he was something else.” He had rooted his shoulders into the chair back and had begun to tell stories of Foster.

The man that Henry Quick described was not the man Ben had known in Augusta. The man in Augusta was old and tired and drink-addled, his skills eroded, his passion spent. The only thing that had seemed alive in Foster was his bitterness and his confusion over failure.

He remembered what Foster had said to him in Augusta, when Arnold Toeman had called him from the batter’s box, sending in Foster to hit for him. Foster had said, “It’s all right, Ben. It’s not what it’s made out to be, nohow.”

Henry could have been talking about a god from Greek mythology, Ben thought as he listened, and he had imagined Foster wrapped in clouds with a crown of lightning bolts resting on his head, and in his hand he held a baseball bat as a warrior would hold a sword.

“Sometimes, when he was home, he’d sit out here at night with a bunch of us fellows, and he’d tell us about games he’d played in,” Henry had said with a chuckle, “and he’d look up and say that playing a good ball game was a little like being a star on a black night. Said it was like being shot full of twinkle.”

And maybe that is how he would find Foster one night, Ben had decided. As a constellation, a string of star-dots against the dark velvet of heaven, star-dot lines connected by memory, outlining Foster, the god, his body muscled with moons of distant planets.

WHEN THE TRAIN arrived, Ben and Henry put the luggage on the passenger car and Ben took Little Ben from Lottie.

“I’m glad you going home, Miss Lottie,” Henry said. “But you always welcome up here.”

Lottie shook Henry’s hand. “Thank you for all the kindness,” she said. She stepped up into the train, then turned back. “Sometimes, if you could put some flowers on his grave, I’d be grateful.”

Henry nodded. He extended his hand to Ben. “Glad I got to know you, young fellow. Foster was a good judge of men, and I reckon he judged you right. You take care of them two.”

“Yes sir,” Ben said.

“You come through this way, you stop in,” Henry said.

“I’ll do that,” Ben told him. He followed Lottie onto the train and took a seat across from her, still holding Little Ben.

“I’ll take him,” Lottie said.

“It’s all right,” Ben replied.

“He sure is sleeping hard,” Lottie said. “Never saw him sleep this hard in the day.”

Ben swept his hand across Little Ben’s face. “He’s a little hot.”

Lottie frowned. “I thought he was, too,” she admitted. “But I was thinking maybe it was because we was sitting outside.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Ben said.

“Maybe,” Lottie repeated. She reached across the space separating them and touched Little Ben’s forehead. “Maybe it’s just a summer cold,” she added. “Mama said I used to get them all the time.”

THEY RODE MOSTLY in silence, the train rocking over its tracks, lulling them with the clicking of wheels on rail, the Kentucky and Tennessee landscape spinning away from them in a blur of green and haze. It was the second time that Ben had been on a train with Lottie, but six years had passed and their lives had changed. She was no longer with a traveling salesman promising the quid pro quo of good times for good times, and he was no longer a baseball player wounded by dreams. She had married Foster, had had a child with him, had buried him. And Ben was a dry goods clerk in love with a girl who was seven years younger than he was. He had made a place for himself in Jericho. People liked him. Treated him with respect. He was no longer the boy played for a fool by Coleman Maxey and Bill Simpson and Frank Mercer. The only link to his youth was Milo Wade, and it was chain-strong, a link Ben could not break. As long as Milo Wade waged his wars on the baseball fields of America, Ben could daydream, could hold to wishes that were private and tender.

Still, Lottie was with him. And Little Ben, curled on the seat beside his mother, sleeping his child’s sleep. And he had made a deathbed promise to Foster that he would take her home to Augusta. He could not turn away from such a promise.

It would not be easy. He had been away from Jericho for four days. By the timetable of his deception about being in Boston, he had three days before he needed to be home.

It was not the timing that concerned him. The timing would work. They would be in Augusta in less than a day, if there were no delays, and he could easily return to Jericho in another day.

He worried only that someone in Jericho would see him on the stop-through. It was a risk. He would have to stay on the train, hide himself from Akers Crews’s annoyed eyes, and he would have to hope that no one from Jericho boarded the train for a trip to Augusta.

He rolled his head against the seat rest, looked at Little Ben, still sleeping, his face rose-blushed with the heat, and then he turned back to the window. He saw a grainfield, a pasture with grazing cows, a farmhouse on a knoll, a waterfall that poured from the hip of a mountain and tumbled over a rock wall and splashed into a narrow stream that cut a silver scar across the pasture.

If anyone from Jericho got on the train, he would tell him the near truth. He would say that one of the baseball players he had met had asked him to accompany his wife and child back to Augusta, and because the player was a friend to Milo, he had agreed. Lottie would not dispute him. Lottie would understand.

He thought: I have to buy newspapers at the stop in Atlanta. Have to find out the baseball scores, and how Milo played.

He did not need any other information. It would be simple enough to tell stories about the games. He had imagined being in Boston at the Huntington Avenue Grounds ballpark for so many years, it seemed he had been there hundreds of times.

He would tell of other things, also. Of going to Boston Harbor to see the waters where American colonists, wearing the dress of Mohawk Indians, dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of tea in the year of 1773. Of visiting the Old North Church, where Paul Revere saw the lantern that would light the American Revolution. Of traveling one morning to Harvard University. Of walking the city until he was exhausted. He would say he stayed in a clean and airy boardinghouse and had fine meals and met good people. He would promise Sally that, one day, both of them would go to Boston. On their honeymoon, perhaps.

In Atlanta, he would buy a small gift for Sally and one for his mother. He would not say the gifts were from Boston; he would say they were from his trip.

Little Ben opened his eyes and looked quizzically at Ben. He moved against his mother’s lap, waking her.

“Mama,” he said weakly.

Lottie touched his face, felt fever. She looked at Ben. “He’s burning up,” she said fearfully.