September 6, 1945
Ben hammered down a loose piece of the tin roof. The tin almost burned his hands, but the paint to seal the roof went on better when it was hot. They needed to get it done before another rain. The day he came home after that storm, his mother had three buckets under drips in the house. The roof had been prone to leaking ever since Ben could remember.
He sat back on his knees, ignoring the heat to look out across the hill. From the roof, he could see all the way down to where the Robinsons’ house poked up out of the trees. That was where the girl Woody was sweet on lived. The shadow of a buzzard floating past up in the sky skimmed over him, and a cardinal trilled out its song from the edge of the woods.
Home sights and sounds. But in spite of how good it felt to be home, he couldn’t deny being a little restless. He needed more, but he hadn’t figured out more of what.
Woody let out a yell to bring Ben’s attention back to the roof. Woody was brushing on the paint, and from the looks of it, he had almost as much silver paint on him as on the tin.
“It’s hot as Hades up here.” Woody swiped his forehead with his sleeve and left a smear of paint in his hair.
The boy was willing, but he had a hard time staying focused on a task from beginning to end. That had to be why so many things around the place needed work. Things that would have been kept up if Pa hadn’t died.
“We don’t lack much. After I hammer down a few more nails, I’ll help paint.”
“We should wait till sundown or a cloud to shade the roof or something. A body could die of heat prostration up here.”
“I’ve been in worse places. You’ll make it.” Ben bent back to the task of nailing down the tin.
Sadie’s head popped up above the edge of the roof. Ben frowned at her. “What are you doing up here?”
“Becca’s holding the ladder. She said I could climb up and see what you’re doing.” Sadie looked at Woody and giggled. “You’ve got paint on your face.”
“He’s got paint everywhere but on the roof, I’m thinking.” Ben sat back on his haunches. “You climb on back down from here before you get hurt and tell Becca to keep you on the ground.”
“I think I need to be on the ground too,” Woody said.
“When we finish.”
Woody sighed and dipped the brush in the paint can again.
Becca called up from the ground. “I won’t let Sadie fall, Ben.”
As if she could catch the child should Sadie make a misstep on the ladder. They’d just both end up in a heap. Ben clamped his mouth shut. It wouldn’t do any good to fuss at Becca. She wouldn’t listen. Not to him. Not to their mother. She never had.
Becca had shown up with a pillowcase stuffed with her clothes and a happy smile on her face the day after Ben got home. She looked as glad to be back under her mother’s roof as Ben was. Her husband, Carl, trailed after her, his smile less certain. He acted as uneasy as a toad on a hot rock and spent most of the time out on the porch. Becca said the cave-in at the mine had jangled his nerves until he couldn’t hardly stand being inside anywhere. Ben could understand that. He’d witnessed plenty of jangled nerves in the army.
The morning after they came, Carl gave Becca a hug and headed to Harlan to catch a train to Ohio to look for work. Becca stood on the porch and watched him head down the trace. The man didn’t look back. Becca didn’t appear bothered by that. Instead, once he disappeared from her sight, she let out a long breath that sounded as much like relief as sorrow and settled in the grapevine rocker on the porch. She rocked back and forth, her hands lightly on the baby bump that barely showed under her loose skirt. She started humming a tune Ben didn’t recognize and then broke out in words that were no more familiar.
Becca was the one among them who took after their pa’s granny and was always ready to tap her toes to any song she heard, and if she wasn’t hearing any, to make up her own.
She looked over at Ben when she’d sung through her song. “Did you know that down in those mining towns with the houses setting practically on top of one another, some folks bellyache about a body sitting out on her stoop and singing a song?”
“Is that right?” Ben leaned against the porch post and looked at this sister who had grown up while he was away. She was tall and slim like their mother and looked some like her, with her dark hair in a thick twist pinned up on her head. She’d gotten her dark blue eyes from Pa, the same as Ben. The two of them were alone on the porch.
“Every bit right. You’d think a person would want to hear something to take the gray out of those places, but some folks gather gray around them.” She looked back to where her husband had disappeared into the trees.
“Didn’t Carl like your songs?”
“Back when, he did.”
“Back when?”
“When he was courting me. He used to play a juice harp some and was ready to do a jig at the first note of a tune. That was ’fore he went down in the mines. He said man weren’t meant to spend all the daylight hours down in a dark hole with a lantern on his hat. Even before the cave-in he felt buried alive, I’m thinking. A man can’t be happy that way nor nobody around him.”
“I suppose not.”
She stared up at him from her rocking chair. “You happy, Ben?”
He looked away from her out over the mountain. He was glad he’d gotten home while everything was still green. “I’m glad to be home.”
“I reckon so am I. But happy ain’t always so easy to catch and hold on to as the storybooks tell us, is it?”
“We don’t live in storybooks.”
“I can’t argue with that. Especially here in these hills. But that don’t mean we don’t have stories to tell. I’m thinking you could tell plenty if’n you wanted. About the war and all.” She stopped rocking and eyed him.
“Some stories are better left untold.”
She watched him a long moment before she nodded a little. “I reckon we do pick and choose what we want to tell and what we don’t. Me, I like turning stories into songs, and right this minute I’m catching hold of happy sitting here on this porch to sing, with nobody but that blue jay up there in the oak yonder to complain about it.”
“What about me?” Ben couldn’t keep from smiling. “What if I complain?”
She grinned back at him. “I’ll tell you to poke your fingers in your ears and leave me be.”
Ben laughed then. “Sing on, little sister.”
As the week had passed, he’d heard Becca singing every day. Some of the time, she got Ma and Sadie to sing along with her. At first, Woody tried to join in until Becca put her hands over her ears and let him know he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. That hadn’t bothered Woody much. He just said if he couldn’t carry the tune in it, he’d just make a drum out of that bucket. That was worse than the singing, and Ma saved their ears by producing a harmonica. With Becca’s help, he was learning to make some music.
Becca had tried to talk Ben into joining the family band too, but he told her somebody needed to listen.
“No, no,” she told him. “Better to jump right in the middle of the tune and be part of it.”
“But I might be like Woody and then you’d kick me right out again.”
“I didn’t kick Woody out. Just shoved him over in a different spot. And weren’t you glad? If Woody had kept singing, old Rufus would have been joining in with a howl or two.”
“A fellow has to sing the song he’s got.”
“I’ll be listening for yours,” she’d told him with a laugh.
Becca was forever ready to laugh about something and she even had a way of getting Ma to smile along with her. She could make him smile too.
So could Woody with his jabber jay talk. But right now, up here on the roof, Woody wasn’t trying to get anybody to smile or doing any smiling himself. He was probably ready for Ben to go back to the army, since every day Ben found new things that needed fixing up around the place. That cut in sharply on the boy’s wandering-the-hills time.
Ben picked up the extra brush and leaned over to stroke the paint on with a broad sweep. “Bet I get my tin piece done before you,” he challenged Woody.
That was all it took to get Woody down to work.
They just lacked one more tin sheet when a voice called up to him. “I do hope you’re taking care of that arm, Mr. Locke.”
Ben stood up and looked down at Francine. He changed the name in his thoughts to Nurse Howard. Best to think of her as a nurse. Not a woman. At least not solely as a woman.
“Don’t worry yourself, Nurse Howard. If I were to be unfortunate enough to fall off this roof, I’d tuck my arm up against my chest and break my face.”
“Good that you remember directions.” She laughed. “Is that you up there, Woody? You’re looking as shiny as a new nickel.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her since they huddled in the shallow cave to wait out the storm. A couple of days after that, she and the other nurse from the Beech Fork Center came to check on Sadie and see Becca. But the other nurse had obviously been in charge that day. Nurse Howard had shown none of her Sergeant Francine side or this friendly side he was seeing now.
In fact, when she’d come last week, Nurse Howard hadn’t even glanced his way, as if she feared looking at him might get her in trouble. Nurse Dawson did keep a sharp eye on her, as though expecting Nurse Howard to make a misstep. Ben had stayed out of the way, not mentioning his arm, nor had she that day. Not even to ask if he was using his sling. Just in case the stern Nurse Dawson knew about the removal of the cast earlier than prescribed, Ben had found the sling and rested his arm in it.
“Very funny, Nurse Howard.” Woody stood up. “I guess this gets me back for laughing at you milking Bella.”
“I’m not laughing at you, but with you. There’s a world of difference.” She dismounted and tied her mare to a tree. “Jasmine missed you riding her in.”
“Somebody won’t let me off the roof.” Woody shot Ben a look.
“Not until we’re through, but that should be soon.” Ben was ready to climb down himself where he could watch the nurse. See her smile close up. It cheered up the place when somebody new came to call, but then he hadn’t felt much cheer when the two nurses had come together last week.
“Well, if you get down before I have to move on, Woody, you can ride Jasmine to the creek for a drink as long as you don’t run her. We’ve got some distance to cover today back over to the Nolans’ to check on baby Lenny.”
Ben moved closer to the edge of the roof and looked down. “You think you know the way now?”
“I’m hoping so. I’ll be ready for rattlers, and the sky is blue all the way across. I think we’ll be fine. Somebody showed me the landmarks on that map.” She shot another smile up toward him.
“It’s hard to be ready for rattlers. You should get a dog.”
“Nurse Dawson isn’t fond of dogs.”
The screen door slammed open and Sadie ran out to meet her. “Nurse Howard, I’ve been drinking all my milk. Priscilla said I should tell you that next time you came.”
The nurse gave Sadie a hug and then pointed toward Sadie’s doll. “And what about Priscilla? How’s she feeling? You know, about everything.”
“Yes’m, she’s feeling fine. Becca is teaching us a song about a frog going courting.” Sadie laughed. “Ain’t that the silliest thing? But Becca says silly songs make us feel better.”
“I think she must be right.” Nurse Howard put her arm around Sadie and they moved up on the porch out of Ben’s sight. “Come on. I need to check your ears and see how Becca’s doing.”
Ben dipped his brush back in the paint and swiped it on the tin. He could hear the sound of the women’s voices drifting up from the house below him but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Still the sound was good.
“Nurse Howard’s nice, and not just because she lets me ride her horse.” Woody looked over at Ben. “I like her, don’t you?”
“I just met her last week, Woody.”
“That don’t mean you can’t like her. I liked her the first day she was here when I took her up to the hospital.” Woody made the final swipe of paint on his tin sheet and stepped over on the last spot not painted as he backed toward the ladder. “Some folks are just easier to like than others, don’t you think? Take that Nurse Dawson. She don’t like me for nothing, but Nurse Howard, she’s different. She’s one of them what’s easy to like. I mean, for somebody brought-in.”
“You could be right.” Ben dipped his brush in the almost-empty paint can and then scooted the can behind him toward the ladder. “Climb onto the ladder and I’ll pass you the paint. But be careful. We don’t need to give Nurse Howard any extra work.”
Ben held the top of the ladder steady while Woody stepped over the edge of the roof onto one of the rungs. Ben handed him the paint can and watched him climb down. Then he stepped over on the ladder and finished painting the last of the roof.
He barely had his feet on the ground when Woody jumped on the nurse’s horse and headed toward the creek. The boy was apt to get paint all over her saddle. Ben would have to make him clean it and the reins when he got back if they showed traces of silver.
The sound of singing came out through the screen door. Sadie singing the song about frogs courting and then another voice joined in. Not Becca or his mother. The nurse. Francine. Ben hesitated at the steps. Maybe he shouldn’t go in and disturb their fun. But it was his house, he was thirsty, and Woody was right. Nurse Howard was an easy person to like.