CHAPTER 28

A thousand questions raced through her mind between the end of the road and the Jameses’ slick, black telephone, which rested on a bench-style table in the hallway near the kitchen at the back of the house.

No. Not a thousand. A thousand and one.

As soon as they reached the phone —the echoes of their heels on the hardwood floors fading around them —Miss Josephine snatched up the handpiece, rammed her finger into the 0, and wound it all the way to the right.

Alice-Ann bounced on the balls of her feet, waiting.

“Carriebeth?” Miss Josephine all but shouted to the operator. “Get me the American Red Cross. . . . Yes . . . yes . . . Oh, for crying out loud, Carriebeth, the same ones that called here earlier.” She opened her mouth to say something more, clamped it shut, then reopened it. “And don’t you dare forget your oath, Carriebeth. Not a word. Not a single word . . . Well, all right then.”

“What’d she say?” Alice-Ann asked, taking a step closer to hook her sweater and purse on the arm of the telephone bench.

Miss Josephine slapped her hand over the mouthpiece. “She reminded me that she’s never been one to gossip and if I knew half the secrets in this town she knew, I’d —Yes. This is Josephine James. . . . Yes, I do. She’s right here.”

The older woman pushed the handset toward her, but Alice-Ann reached for her sweater instead. The temperature had suddenly dropped. “Let me just . . .” She shoved her arms in, pulled it tight around her, and sat before taking the phone, placing it to her ear, and sinking to the bench’s chair. “Hello?”

“Alice-Ann Branch?” the voice asked over crackling and static.

“Yes. Yes, ma’am. I’m Alice-Ann Branch.”

“Hold please.”

Alice-Ann looked up at Miss Josephine’s anxious face and wondered if it mirrored her own. “They asked me to hold.”

Miss Josephine had come out of her sweater now and she wrung it in her hands like it was an old dishrag. “Thank the good Lord my George is down to the gristmill. This would only bring back the pain of losing our Pete.”

Alice-Ann’s heart sank, knowing it wouldn’t matter if Mister George heard about Mack’s sudden return from the dead now or later. The grief of every family in Bynum that had lost a loved one would return with this news. They’d wish and wonder. They’d pray and curse.

If God had spared Boyd MacKay, why hadn’t he spared —?

“Alice-Ann?”

Alice-Ann sucked in her breath. From half a world away and in spite of the line noise, Mack’s voice was exactly that —Mack’s. “Mack?” she said, her voice no more than a whispered prayer. “Mack, is that really you?”

He laughed easily, then coughed a few times as though the laughter had taken everything out of him. “Sorry. Hey, I just found out . . .”

She pressed the phone closer to her ear, reaching up to pull off the clip-on pearl earrings like those that had once belonged to her mother. The ones her father had given Alice-Ann on her eighteenth birthday. “Found out?”

He chuckled, coughed again, and said, “I didn’t know I was dead until I ran into George Junior.”

“George James?”

“My boy?” Miss Josephine pressed her fists and sweater between ample bosoms.

Alice-Ann held up a hand but nodded.

“I saw him last night in the mess hall. My first trip down there since I got here.”

Alice-Ann grabbed the bottom of the handpiece with her left hand. The one-thousand-and-first question leapt from her heart and into her mouth. “Mack, where have you been?”

Miss Josephine shifted in front of her. “And why did he call you and not his mama? That’s what I want to know.”

Oh, dear Gussie . . .

“Recuperating on a torpedo tube the first couple of months and then here in the hospital after that.” He coughed again, the sound of it almost lost within the line static. “Listen, Alice-Ann, they aren’t going to let me talk long. I still get tired pretty easily and —”

“Mack, what about your parents? Why didn’t you call your parents?”

“The government men . . . decided to send someone from Camp Stewart to see them. You know, to help prepare . . . before I call home. Should be there sometime . . . today. Before church services begin tonight, I imagine. May already . . . there.”

“They heard by telegram that you’d died, Mack.”

“I know, Alice-Ann. That’s the way it’s done. I —I don’t have . . . control —I didn’t know. But I wanted to . . . you. I wanted you to hear it from me.” He paused. “Alice-Ann, the thought of . . . waiting for me at home . . . I —I lost your letters. I’m sorry. But in my mind, since I got shot down, I reread them a hundred . . . or more. And I realized . . .”

The static grew in intensity, so much so that it ate the rest of his words.

“Mack?” Crackling met her cry. “Mack?” she called out again. But the line had gone quiet. Alice-Ann replaced the handpiece, shuddered, then looked up at Miss Josephine, whose mouth hung open like an old man’s while sleeping on a hot afternoon. “We lost —we lost connection.”

Miss Josephine grasped her hand and pulled her up. “Come on, Alice-Ann. Let’s have some hot tea and you can tell me everything he said.” She all but dragged Alice-Ann into the kitchen. “And don’t leave out a single word.”

“I —”

“And tell me, what did he say about my boy?” She grabbed the teakettle and filled it with water. Alice-Ann gripped the back of one of the kitchen chairs and squeezed.

How would she —could she —possibly answer Miss Josephine’s questions? No matter what she said, surely by this time tomorrow everyone in Bynum would know that Mack had called the Jameses’ farmhouse and had asked specifically for Alice-Ann Branch.

Everyone. Including . . . “Carlton,” she sighed the name.

Miss Josephine turned from the stove. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.” She pulled the chair out and eased herself down. “He said he saw George Junior in the mess hall. George told him, apparently, that he had been declared dead.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know, Miss Josephine.”

The older woman joined her at the table while they waited for the water to heat up. “But why did he call you, hon?” she asked. “Why not his mama and daddy? They’ve been so upset —and I know from experience what that’s like —at losing him. And him their only —” She dabbed at her eyes, where tears pooled along the lashes.

“Miss Josephine.” Alice-Ann reached across the table for her hands, folding them into her own. “They’re sending someone from Camp Stewart today to tell the MacKays. They may already be there, he said.”

Miss Josephine sighed a shaky breath. “That’s the right thing to do. They should do that for every —every mother. And father. But I guess that would be too much to ask.” Her eyes darted back and forth along the pattern of the tablecloth —a collection of red-and-yellow flowers strung together by green vines and leaves. “Too many of our boys have died. They’d be too busy sending out men to deliver the bad —the news.”

“I wrote to Mack,” Alice-Ann interjected thoughtlessly, because she didn’t know what to say about words spoken from her older neighbor’s anguished heart. “I wrote him a lot. Before. He was Nelson’s best friend, you know, and I —I thought it would be nice.” She shrugged again, hoping she appeared as casual about writing to him as she would have been about writing to Nelson, had he gone off to war. “You know, to keep him informed about Bynum and all that was going on here and —and —I guess that’s why he called . . . me.”

Miss Josephine nodded as the teakettle whistled. “Well, I reckon that makes sense,” she said, standing. Then, as though it really did, she asked, “Milk or lemon?”

No one mentioned her new hairdo or the cosmetics she wore at church that evening. Rather, the entire congregation buzzed about the news —which had managed to reach all of Bynum by the time Wednesday night prayer meeting started.

Boyd MacKay had been shot down in Japanese-infested waters. He’d held on to a piece of wreckage for hours in clear view of an enemy ship. Miraculously, no one had spotted him. He’d kept his face down, he said, and prayed without ceasing. Then, a miracle. An American submarine located him. They’d had to wait until dark to surface. To bring him on board. And there —while Bynum had buried another “son” —he’d spent time recuperating.

The only two, by Alice-Ann’s estimation, who didn’t mention Mack’s return from the dead, were herself and Carlton, who managed not to say much at all. Period.

Aunt Bess said three words to her before they walked through the front doors of the church. “Admit to nothing.”

“Meaning?”

She shook her head. Papa mumbled, “What’s done is done, Alice-Ann. You’ve made the right choice.”

And of course she knew she had. She loved Carlton. With her whole heart.

But she had loved Mack, too. Or at least she thought she had.

Then again . . . maybe what she’d felt for him had been nothing more than childhood infatuation. But how would she know? How could she know? She had so little to compare it to.

As the preacher spoke briefly of God’s great provision —Him the giver of life and death and life beyond the grave —Alice-Ann replayed her conversation with Mack in her mind. Most especially what he’d said as their call had been disconnected.

“I —I lost your letters. I’m sorry. But in my mind, since I got shot down, I reread them a hundred . . . or more. And I realized . . .”

“Realized what?” she whispered from the pew where she sat between Aunt Bess and Carlton, whose shoulder pressed into hers as a constant reminder of his presence. Of his devotion to her. Of his love.

He thought she was beautiful. He’d bought her the cottage. He’d placed —she fingered the center stone —his great-grandmother’s ring on her finger.

Feeling his eyes on her movement, she cast him a sideward glance. He smiled. Mouthed, “Realized what?”

Had she spoken out loud? “Nothing,” she mouthed back, then looked down. He’d placed his hand, palm side up, to rest between their legs. An invitation she willingly took. The warmth of flesh upon flesh gave her the security she needed. The ability to keep going.

If she could just get through this hour, she told herself. This prayer meeting with all the gossip sure to fill up the social time afterward. She could go home. Go to her room. Climb in her bed.

And there she would cry.

After prayer meeting, Carlton asked Papa for permission to drive her home and he gave it.

Part of her wished he had said no. The other part thanked him.

Carlton said nothing between the church and the car. Nothing as he opened the passenger’s door for her. Nothing as he started the car and pointed it toward home, the blackout hoods over the headlights casting scarce light onto the road ahead. Only after they’d pulled away from the church and the shadows of the night enveloped them did he clear his throat. “I guess we may as well talk about this. Get it all out in the open.”

She could have asked what he meant. She could have pretended Boyd MacKay’s resurrection meant nothing to her. But that would have been the game of a child, which she no longer was.

“I don’t know what to say,” she mumbled.

His fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “What did he say?”

“How —how did you know?”

“That he called you?”

Alice-Ann gripped the strap of her purse with vigor. “Yes.”

“Your father caught me outside the church before we went in.”

“Oh.” Papa always hung around outside with the other farmers. They’d talk about crops and weather and harvesting until someone finally stuck their head out and said, “Preacher’s in.”

“Well?” Carlton’s voice held a new edge, one she’d never heard before.

“Why are you mad at me, Carlton?”

“I’m not mad at you, Alice-Ann.”

“You sure sound it.” Like his, her own voice had gone up an octave.

“Well, you tell me then. How would you be feeling right now?”

“If?”

Carlton passed the driveway to the farm.

“Where are we going? You told Papa you were driving me home.”

“We need time to —we have to talk about this.”

“Papa will tan your hide, Carlton Reed Hillis, if you don’t take me right home. You know what he’ll think.” Not to mention the fit Aunt Bess would have.

His face jerked toward hers, and in a tiny flash of light, she saw anger. No, not anger. Something more. Something different. She saw fear. But not of her father or even of Aunt Bess. Carlton was afraid of something else.

“I think your father will understand,” he said with a swallow.

“You’re afraid,” she said as if she’d suddenly been granted all understanding.

Carlton slowed the car and eased it to one of the access roads along the back of their farm. When he shut the engine off, he turned to her, laying his arm against the back of the seat. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yes.”

His eyes sought hers, holding them, pleading with them as his fingertips caressed her cheek. “Do I have reason to be?” he asked, his voice once again the one she knew so well.

I don’t know . . . “No.” She shook her head. “Carlton, no . . .” She took his left hand in both of hers. “I love you,” she said, because it was true. She was sure of it.

He sighed deeply, filling the car with his breath, warm and minty as always. “Alice-Ann . . .” He shifted again to capture both of her hands with his, then brought her left up and kissed the ring. “I love you so much.” His gaze rested on their circle of promise. Their belief in a forever vow. “I couldn’t bear losing you.”

“You’re not going to lose me,” she said, tilting and ducking her head to press her lips against his. Quickly, so as not to start something she’d regret, what with them sitting in a car, alone, on a stretch of dirt hidden by crops and shadows. “I promise.”

And she meant it.

She was sure of it.