Chapter 18
As the months went by and the war went on, there was letters to be wrote ever day, and chickens to dress and ironing to do. Mrs. Whiteside, she give me work, and other people did, too. We needed it. In the war Sam was only making half of what he done when he was home. We got by, is all.
Me and Alta Bea, living outside of Wiley and not being churchgoers, we didn’t get to town much. Alta Bea wasn’t one to neighbor with the folks in Oil Hill, neither. When me or her did leave the house, it was to go to each other’s house. She got the paper, and we kept up with the war news that way. We’d read about battles at the Marne, the Meuse-Argonne Forest, the Belleau Wood—places I had no idea where they was or how to say them—and then months later we’d get a letter and find out if Sam and Harold had been in them. Hardly nobody in Wiley went to the war, being farmers or oil workers. It seemed far away.
I did take pleasure in Opal, couldn’t help it. She had a bright and happy spirit, and though she was quiet, there wasn’t no dimming her light. No matter how much gloom hung over the house, she went around acting happy, always curious. When she wasn’t sewing or in school, why, she’d run all over creation. She’d leave the house in the morning and not come home till dark set in. She loved playing in the oil field. Liked the racket, I reckon. Liked to watch the men, liked to listen to them holler. Probably heard some coarse language, and that probably sent a thrill up her spine, something a child like Opal craves ever little bit.
But Dacia, seemed like she couldn’t hardly stand to be in the same room with me. She’d bring up Will. She’d ask me questions she knowed the answers to, like she was a young child, just to be mean. Was he still in the ground, and wasn’t he cold? Had coyotes dug him up? Didn’t they dig up dead people? Did somebody shoot him, she asked me one time, and I told her of course not, now go do your chores and leave me be. She knowed where my sore places was, seemed like, and she delighted in poking them. Or not so much delighted as wondered what would happen and had to find out.
Just to torment me, she taught Opal a chant they done at school during recess—Kaiser Bill went up the hill to get a peek at France, Kaiser Bill come down the hill with bullets in his pants. Dacia thought it was dirty because it said “pants,” and she thought she was getting away with something, getting Opal to sing a dirty song. Of course the joke was on her, because it wasn’t about underpants. But Dacia relished it anyhow.
Ever time she poked me like this, I felt like the cords in my neck would bust, but I muffled my wrath and left the room ruther than give her the satisfaction.
I had bad dreams ever little bit. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I talked to Sam—pretending like he could hear me—and told him my troubles. I tried to picture him in a muddy hole in the Argonne Forest, listening to the big guns booming a few miles off, like he talked about in his letters, but I couldn’t. I woke up tired and mean. I jerked the skillet around and broke the eggs, slammed the plate on the table.
Alta Bea had the baby in October, another girl. Named her Ruby. I helped with this one, too, though I never took as much pleasure in it as I done with Alice. Even with a new baby it felt like life was mean and small, there was a filthy, bloody war on, and things might go on this way forever.
To our great relief the war ended in November. But a lot of the soldiers didn’t come home right away, Sam and Harold included. Sam wrote me from France that they never knowed, from day to day, was they coming home. Christmas come and went, and no Sam. I felt a cold fury inside. How come he couldn’t come home? He wrote me, be patient, which was just like him. Wasn’t nothing to do but wait.
That was the winter of the big flu. A couple dozen people we had connections to in Wiley and Oil Hill come down with it. Mrs. Whiteside, she laid in bed for six weeks with a fever and couldn’t hardly get her wind, but she got over it. I was worried Alta Bea might catch it, and her with two babies at home, but she never did.
I got the girls to school most days. In January, Dacia broke her arm playing Crack the Whip on the ice. She cried and asked for Sam, wanting him to play her a song on his teeth like he done. I told her to quit acting like a baby, didn’t she know we all missed him.
* * *
The day come, March 15, 1919, when I got a telegram from Sam saying him and Harold had arrived in New York City. Soon’s they could get a seat on a train, they’d be home. I bawled that night till my throat was raw.
Wasn’t but two weeks later, why, Sam and Harold did get home. Me, Opal, Dacia, and Alta Bea and her two girls went and met them at the train. Harold, he stood there for a minute blinking and looking around like he didn’t recognize nothing. But then Sam clapped him on the back, and Alta Bea and me and the girls, why, we pretty near run them over. At first Alta Bea’s babies screamed like they’d been shot, but we wasn’t surprised. Takes a while for little children to get used to growed men.
Sam, he like to busted his face smiling, and after while Harold put his arm around Alta Bea’s neck and wouldn’t hardly let go. I thought she might lose her balance.
We had Alta Bea’s car, and it’s hard to picture how we all got into it. I think Dacia, and maybe Opal, too, stood on the running boards.
Alta Bea drove. “Hard to believe it’s been three years since we moved to Kansas,” she said.
“Hard to believe it’s been a year since you left,” I said to Sam.
“Ain’t hard for me,” he said. “I believe ever damn minute of it.”
“War’s over!” Harold hollered. “Time to get rich, fat, and happy!” He stuck his head out the window and let the wind blow his hair. “No more oil field work for me! War’s over! You’re looking at a lease-grafter!” He brought his head back in and grabbed aholt of Alta Bea. “Time to get cracking! Gonna be a boy next time!”
I couldn’t see Alta Bea’s face from where I set in the backseat, but I seen her stiffen and the back of her neck get red.
That night after supper Sam got out his fiddle case and headed out to the porch, and me and the girls looked at each other and grinned and followed him. Sam set in one chair and me in the other’n, and the girls on the floorboards with their legs dangling off the edge.
He played for a long time just making chords, tuning the bow, trying it out, back and forth, his eyes closed. For a long time he picked and plucked scales and pulled the bow with his ear up close to it. After while Dacia said, “ ‘Careless Love’!” and Opal called out “ ‘Frog Went a-Courtin’!” and Dacia said, “That train song about the oranges!” And so none of us noticed at first when Sam dropped his arms. He give me a bewildered look and shrugged.
“Sam’s wore out,” I said to the girls. “Had a big day. He’ll—”
Dacia stood up and turned to me. “No, he ain’t,” she said. “He’s never too bushed to play music.”
Sam hung his head. I seen his hands was shaking.
My instinct was to hustle the girls off to bed, but they had gotten too independent in the last year for that. I didn’t want to holler at nobody on Sam’s first day home.
Opal, she got to her feet and set her hand on Sam’s knee. “He’s tired in his spirit, ain’t you?” she said, solemn as a forty-year-old.
We all froze, even Dacia. I felt spit gather in my mouth, I was so like to cry.
But Sam just smiled his big smile and leaned over and kissed Opal on the forehead, and then he packed the fiddle away in the case and nobody said nothing else. The girls went to their room without being told, and me and Sam went to bed shortly after.
* * *
Sam woke me in the middle of the night, must’ve been three, four o’clock. “My time’s mixed up,” he whispered. “Can’t sleep.”
I scooted over and laid on my side with my stomach against him. “I’m so glad you’re back.” There was a rumble. “That me or you?”
“Thunder, off a ways,” he said. “Fixing to rain.”
“We could use it.” I rubbed my face against his chest.
He sucked in air and sighed real deep. “Can we go to Will’s grave tomorrow?”
“Sure enough.”
There was a long silence, and I thought he’d went back to sleep. But he said, “Seen a lot of graveyards.”
I petted his arm.
“Little white crosses, by the acre.”
I groaned.
“Didn’t want to get buried over there,” he said.
“Thank God you never.”
“You should’ve saw them farms. Hedges, they had hedges for fence? So thick a sheep can’t get through. You never seen the like.”
I started to say, “You told me all this in your letters,” but I never did.
Sheet lightning crackled in the window.
“And the houses was made of rock mostly, a lot of them thatch roofs,” he went on. “We’d come across a burned-out house, dead horses, dogs.” He was talking fast now, like he hardly ever done. “This one time, there was these two old people and a little girl. You could see what happened. Machine gun. They was running through the grass to the house. Got the old man first, fell on his face, old lady, landed on her side with her arms flung out, little girl, throwed her up in the air like a rag doll, landed all twisted.” He sniffled. I thought maybe he was crying, but I put my hand on his chest and he wasn’t.
“I figured, grandparents, granddaughter. Maybe an orphan. Seen a lot of children wandering around, beg for food.”
“That must’ve—”
“Me and Harold, we was on our way back to camp one night, we eat supper at a family’s house in town. This was before the battle of the Argonne. I told you about that, the people in Beauchamp? They’d have some of the fellas over to eat, bottle of wine, flowers on the table? A mother, little boy, daughter, grandmother—nice folks. So Harold, he gets drunk, and I haul him out of there, and we was walking back, and we come up on this little family graveyard. It was dark out. We seen this lady, I thought she was a growed woman, but closer I reckoned she was fifteen, sixteen, she was laying facedown on this grave, new grave, bawling, and Harold, he goes over to her and gets on his knees and touches her, you know, and she screams, and I tell you what, Bertie, I had to punch him a time or two to get him off of her. I thought I might have to shoot him, the son of a bitch.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Next day, he says, ‘I done what? Me? I don’t remember.’”
“Hard to trust him after that,” I said.
“Things in a war, they ain’t . . .” I felt him shrug.
We was both quiet for a long time.
“It light enough out yet?” he said.
“For what?”
“Go see Will.”
That would have been the time to tell him about the other baby if I was going to, but I never did. I just said, “Let me get my shoes on.”
It was cold out, and the air was wet, but the rain hadn’t came. There was a thick fog along the ground. We tromped up there, him and me. The little duck Opal had made, we found it stuck in the lilac hedge and put it back on Will’s grave. We didn’t stay but ten minutes. Sam didn’t say much. I had the feeling he’d said all he was going to.
* * *
A couple months later Sam come home with a truck that somebody’d made by putting a truck bed onto a Model T Ford. It was already three or four years old, seems like, but Sam had learned a lot about motors during the war, and he knowed how to make it go no matter how old it was.
Opal and Dacia heard him coming and went running out to the road. I watched them from the front porch. He drove that truck right up until the tires almost touched the house. They all three was laughing fit to die.
Sam pumped the foot-feed. “Come take a ride!”
“I got supper to get!”
“That can wait! Come take a ride!”
Well, of course I pulled the pan off the fire, got me a sweater, and went out there and climbed into the truck. It made an awful racket. I had to put my hands over my ears. Off we went, heading toward Wiley.
The road was mostly ruts, and we rocked back and forth and up and down, and after while my breakfast wasn’t setting on my stomach too good. I had Sam to stop, and I got out of the truck and throwed up by the side of the road. I felt awful, shaking. Opal climbed down after me and petted me on the shoulder, but then she got a whiff of it and throwed up, too. She was always sympathetic like that.
Inside the truck Dacia got to laughing, and she couldn’t hardly stop.
Now Sam got out and come around to where me and Opal was. “You sick, little bird?”
“I bet she’s expecting!” Dacia hollered through the window.
“Are you?” His voice had hope in it.
I heaved twice and throwed up again.
Opal groaned and walked to the back of the truck. I heard her choking back her bile.
“They’re both expecting! Opal too!” Dacia yelled.
Now Opal was ten or eleven years old and of course hadn’t never done nothing, so what Dacia said was preposterous. But still it made me mad. “You take that back,” I said to her.
“Bertie and Opal’s in the family waaa-ay,” Dacia said in a singsong voice.
“That ain’t funny,” Sam said.
I was so riled, I swallered hard and climbed into the truck and snatched her by the hair and pulled her down onto the ground, her screaming the whole time. “Say you’re sorry!” I hollered. “Say you’re sorry!” I had her by the arm, and I was shaking her, making her head snap once.
Then I heard Sam say, “That’s enough, that’s enough, let her go now, that’s enough.”
I let loose of her hair, and she took off running back toward the house. I was panting like a dog, and my throat gurgled. I heaved again but nothing come.
Sam petted me on the back. “You got to be careful. You got to take care of yourself.”
Opal walked toward me. “Are you?”
I hadn’t told nobody yet, and I was loath to, afraid I would miscarry again and shame myself. But Opal had caught me by surprise, and I nodded, and, to my shock, her and Sam throwed their arms around me and rocked me.
I lost that one a while later, couple weeks maybe. It wasn’t as hard as the other one. One night I felt that ache like before, and I went out to the backhouse and that was it. To comfort me, I told myself a story. I told myself this baby come too soon after the war, while the bad feelings from Sam’s war stories was still hovering in the bedroom where he told them. So the baby’s spirit refused to come into this awful world. It was the kind of a story they used to tell back home in Kentucky, like the Rumpelstiltskin story I made up for Dacia—a story to explain how come something happened—and I thought it through sundry times. It meant that when things settled back down, when the leftover ugly war feelings went away, me and Sam would have our baby and live happily ever after.
Next morning I told Sam and the girls it was just a false alarm, like I’d said to Alta Bea the first time. Dacia, she give me her stink-eye look she had, but she never said nothing.