Angel Sister (12 page)

Later with the beans in the jars boiling in the kettles and the kitchen so hot Kate could barely breathe, she shoved more wood into the cookstove the way Aunt Hattie told her. She wiped the sweat off her face with her skirt tail and said, “No wonder people put cookstoves outside to can on.” She and Aunt Hattie were alone in the kitchen.

“It ain’t no bad idea in the kind of summer we’s having now,” Aunt Hattie agreed. “We’ll make us some tea and sit out on the back porch when we’re sure we’ve got the jars boilin’ proper. You got any ice?”

“The iceman came yesterday, but we’ve got it so hot in here, it’s probably all melted in the icebox.”

“Don’t be worryin’ over ever’thing, child.” Aunt Hattie put her hands on Kate’s shoulders and looked straight into her face.

“But I have to, Aunt Hattie.” Kate was almost glad for the sweat on her face. If a few tears sneaked out, Aunt Hattie wouldn’t notice.

“No, you don’t. You can’t do one thing about the ice meltin’.” Aunt Hattie’s brown eyes bored into Kate, and they both knew she was talking about more than ice. When Kate didn’t say anything for a moment, Aunt Hattie tightened her hands on her shoulders and said, “I knows about your mama. She’s done workin’ herself to a frazzle over there with your granddaddy whilst that ol’ Carla sits on her hands. I’d a done gone over there and helped her, but I don’t figure I’d better show my face around that place right now. But what I don’t know is about your daddy. He been comin’ home like he oughta?”

Kate dropped her eyes away from Aunt Hattie’s to stare down at the floor. She didn’t want to answer her. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“You look back up here at me, child.” Aunt Hattie waited till Kate raised her eyes back up to her face before she went on. “Ain’t no need in you tiptoeing around the truth with me. There ain’t nobody on this green earth I ever loved more than I love your daddy except my own boy, Bo. But lovin’ somebody don’t mean you think they don’t never do nothing wrong. Ain’t a one of us that ain’t done some wrongs.”

Kate’s throat felt tight, but she made herself say, “He didn’t come home last night till almost daybreak.”

Aunt Hattie mashed her mouth together and shook her head. She pushed a breath out her nose before she said, “That ain’t no way for him to be acting right now.”

“No, ma’am, but he can’t help it, Aunt Hattie. He just can’t help it.”

“Ain’t no truth in that, child. Ever’body can help it. With the good Lord’s help.”

Kate stared down at the floor again. She didn’t know what to say to that.

After a moment, Aunt Hattie went on. “Your mama, she needs to come on home. You tell her I said for her to let the church people help. Some of them are wantin’ to. They think a heap and all of your grandpappy at that church. There ain’t no shame in askin’ for help. And she’s needin’ to be home.”

“All right,” Kate said. “I’ll tell her.”

Aunt Hattie gave Kate’s shoulders one last squeeze before she said, “I’m praying for you, Katherine Reece Merritt. Whatever happens you’s gonna be able to handle it just like you is handlin’ the heat in this kitchen to fix these here beans. It ain’t easy, but you is doin’ it.”

______

When Victor saw Aunt Hattie coming toward his blacksmith shop, he wanted to run out the back door and hide. She wouldn’t be coming for any good reason. Not with the way he could see the frown creasing her face from all the way across the yard. He almost went over and lifted up the saddle blanket on his shelf to take a nip from his bottle. But he knew better. If she saw him, she’d break it for sure.

He wished she’d been there to break the first bottle he’d tipped up to his mouth way back when he was in France. He hadn’t messed with the women over there the way some of the other men had. But drinking hadn’t seemed so wrong. He hadn’t thought about it burrowing down inside him and coming home with him. At the time he hadn’t been all that sure he’d live long enough to come home.

War was worse than anything he had ever imagined. Even before they got to the fighting, the whole thing was one misery after another. He’d thought he couldn’t get any more miserable when he boarded the train and left Nadine behind. But then they loaded them on those old ships, stuck them down below, and wouldn’t let them up on the deck more than an hour or two here and there on their way to France. Victor was sick the whole way along with most of the other men. In rough water there weren’t enough buckets to go around, and sometimes the floor was slimy with vomit. A man couldn’t get away from the smell of it.

Things didn’t get a lot better in France. Not with the way they stuffed them in trains to go to their training grounds. Then the cooties were waiting at the training camps. It was almost a relief to get to the trenches. At least until it rained and they were walking in mud all day long. And kept raining so that the mud got deeper in the trenches and swallowed up the planks they laid down to walk on and sometimes pulled a man’s boots right off his feet. There were stories of men sucked down into the muck never to be seen again.

Victor didn’t know if the stories were true, but he did think it possible. The mud was everywhere. In their hair under their helmets, flavoring their food, between their toes in their boots, layering their canteens, permeating their very souls. They couldn’t get away from the mud. They slept in it, fought in it, lived in it. Died in it.

Sometimes after a hard downpour a new body part appeared out of the mud. Victor told himself it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, the man was dead, gone from his body to meet his Maker. What was left was just bone, sinew, and skin. And if Victor was ordered over the top and got hit by enemy fire to end up one of those bodies sunk down in the mud, what difference would it make if the soldiers lucky enough to still be breathing used his hand sticking out of the side of the trench to hold something up out of the mud. That’s how they were using Oscar’s. Nobody really knew the dead man’s name or even his nationality, but it only seemed right to name him, to make him part of their company when his hand emerged from the side of the trench.

That’s how war was. A man had to survive as best he could. He couldn’t worry about what he’d left back home. He couldn’t worry about how long he was going to live. A man just had to follow orders and give all he had to win the war and save democracy.

War wasn’t a thing like Victor had expected or maybe anything like anybody back in the States had expected. Back there, they’d taught them to march. Wasn’t much use for marching in the trenches. It was just hunkering down and hoping a sharpshooter didn’t spot your helmet if you forgot and lifted your head a few inches too high. Or that your gas mask would work when the Germans launched their mustard gas barrages. Or that you wouldn’t get the order to go over the top.

Up out of the trenches, the German artillery had made rubble of the buildings and splintered the trees. Barbed wire barriers laced the no-man’s-zone between them and the Boches. Not a good place to be. Of course sometimes a man imagined it might be better to get the order to charge out into battle. At least then he’d be moving and not just sitting in the mud waiting for the enemy’s artillery to find its mark.

Victor couldn’t see how they could ever expect to win the war by simply taking up existence in the trenches with the rats and body lice and mud. Squads sneaked out at night to spy out the enemy’s position and try to take German prisoners, and the engineer companies kept adding more barbed wire to the barriers meant to deter the enemy from making their way undetected through no-man’s-land to their frontline trenches. On both sides above the trenches, men peered out of baskets suspended below balloons tethered to the ground to catch a view of any unusual activity along the enemy lines, and occasionally a plane would buzz over. Some of the soldiers took potshots at the planes when they saw the German colors, but they never brought one down.

If it hadn’t been for Nadine’s letters making their slow way across the ocean to him, Victor wasn’t sure he could have survived the trenches even with no German fire. There were three rows of trenches—the forward front line where the soldiers had to be on guard at all times, the second row where the doughboys were ready to go forward to relieve the front line, and the back trench where a man could relax for a few days without worrying about getting his helmet too high out of the trench. The mud and the rats and the cooties didn’t go away, but here at least a man might get a letter from home.

Victor could even now shut his eyes and see some of the lines from those letters written in Nadine’s hand although the letters themselves were lost to the mud.
The lilacs are blooming. I took a deep breath of their sweet scent and blew it into this letter for you. I say your name every night as I look up at the brightest star in the sky and it sings like poetry in my heart. I carry you in my prayers all day long.
He especially treasured each and every
I love you
. Simple words, but words he needed to read over and over.

Anytime they had a mail call and Victor’s name wasn’t called, his spirits sank so low that he sometimes wasn’t sure anything he remembered about the summer was true. Maybe it had all been only a dream and Nadine had never given her love to him. Maybe he was going to wake up and there would be the truth like the mud sticking to him. But then the next mail call he’d have a letter. A letter that said she loved him. That she would always love him. No matter what happened. That she could hardly wait until he came home. That she would be there waiting for him.

Not all the letters were good. Some brought bad news. The one where she told him she’d lost the baby before she got far enough along to show under her full skirts. That had been a sad day in the mud. Gertie’s letter a couple of months later, telling him their mother had contracted influenza and died. It hadn’t seemed right for bad things to be happening back home when so much was bad all around him. He’d somehow expected home things to be protected in the circle of his memory, to stay the same until he got back to Rosey Corner.

They hadn’t written to him about Bo. Aunt Hattie had decided there’d be plenty of time for Victor to be sorrowful about that later on after he got home. The only reason they’d told him about his mother was that he’d know something was wrong when he didn’t get any more letters from her.

But Bo had died over there. Killed in action, fighting alongside the French. The American generals wouldn’t let the black soldiers go into combat with the white soldiers, but the French didn’t worry about color. They needed men to take the place of their fallen comrades. So they embraced the black troops who came ready to fight the German enemy and to die beside them in battle. Like Bo.

Aunt Hattie was afraid Victor might lose heart if he knew Bo had been killed. That he might think if Bo couldn’t make it through the war, then there wouldn’t be any way he could. Aunt Hattie might have been right. But in a war it wasn’t always the best man who came through alive. Sometimes it was the luckiest. The man who was ducking behind a tree when the enemy bullet came his way or the man in the back trenches when the artillery fire came. And hadn’t Bo always told Victor how lucky he was? Lucky to have a mother and father with means. Lucky to have him, Bo, watching after him and keeping him out of trouble. Lucky to be able to go to school. Lucky to be fast on his feet. Lucky in love.

That was the last thing Bo ever told him. Bo had come through Louisville before being shipped out after going home to see Aunt Hattie. He came by the boardinghouse, where Maudie McElroy let him sleep on the back porch before he caught his train east.

As they sat out on the back steps, Bo shook his head at Victor and Nadine. “I’m a-lookin’ at the two of you and I still can’t hardly believe it. You got the preacher’s daughter to say yes.” He gave Victor’s shoulder a playful punch and laughed.

Nadine’s face colored up, but she didn’t quit smiling. A person couldn’t keep from liking Bo no matter what he said.

Victor squeezed Nadine’s hand. “I did.”

“Will wonders never cease?” Bo laughed again. “I don’t know whether you know it or not, Miss Nadine, but this boy here fell for you practically as soon as he was out of knickers. Lovesickest pup I ever saw. And now look at him. One lucky dawg. Luck like as how he’s got, it don’t never run out, so don’t you worry your pretty head about him, young Miz Merritt, if this war drags on and he has to follow me on over there. He’ll be comin’ back across that ocean. That’s for sure and certain.”

Victor had thought then that he had to join up. To prove his courage to his father. But nothing had ever proved that or was likely to. Not going to the war. Not coming home. His father wouldn’t even think it took courage for Victor to stand up and go to the door of his shop to meet Aunt Hattie. But it did. It took a great deal of courage, because Victor knew what she’d come to say.

“Aunt Hattie.” He kept his voice light and cheerful like she was just another customer come to get some piece of iron bent. “And what can I do for you today?”

“You knows what you can do for me, Victor Gale Merritt.” She stepped right up to him and poked her finger in his chest. She’d never been a big woman. Victor had been taller than her by the time he was ten. And now age had stolen a few inches and every ounce of extra fat until she was nothing but skin and bones and pure power. Every wrinkle on her face was frowning as she peered up at him through her steel gray eyebrows. “You can be goin’ on home at suppertime and not be letting the alcohol turn your feet off the right way.”

He didn’t have any defense. Sometimes it was better to just be quiet and take the beating he deserved. He looked down at the ground and felt beaten already. “You’re right, Aunt Hattie.”

“I knows I’m right. You has got to take care of your girls. What’s the matter with you that you’d go off to that wicked place when your girls are needin’ you?”

“I don’t know,” Victor mumbled.

“That ain’t no answer. You look back up here at me and come on out with the truth.” She waited until Victor raised his eyes back to her face. The skin was still furrowed between her eyes, but now it was a concerned frown. “What’s the matter with you, Victor?”

He didn’t know how to answer her. What truth could he tell her? He wasn’t sure he even knew the truth. The dreams. The ache in his shoulder. The noise of the cars passing on the road out front. Nadine running home to take care of her father. The child Lorena he wasn’t going to be able to protect. Kate’s eyes when that happened. The emptiness in his soul.

The look on Aunt Hattie’s face softened, and she put her rough hand on his cheek. “She ain’t left you, Victor. She’s standin’ right beside you same as she has through all your years together.”

“But I’m not good enough for her, Aunt Hattie. I haven’t ever been good enough.”

She pulled her hand back and gave his cheek a little smack. “Don’t you let my ears ever hear you say that again, Victor Gale Merritt. You as good as any man I ever knew.”

“You might be the only person who ever thought that.”

“How about your Nadine? Didn’t she marry you and wait through the war for you and carry your babies? You can’t be shuttin’ your heart to love like that.”

“I’m not doing that,” he said quickly. Then he stared at Aunt Hattie. “Am I?”

When she just kept looking at him without saying anything, he went on. “I’d die for Nadine.”

“I knows you would, child, but sometimes it’s harder to live for somebody, and that’s what you’s got to do right now.”

Her voice was full of caring, but that didn’t keep her words from pounding into him like hammers striking soft metal. Trembles pushed through him. “You told me that once before. A long time ago. When Press Jr. died.”

“It ain’t always easy to be the one still living.” There was understanding in her eyes.

“I’ve been having dreams, Aunt Hattie. They won’t let me be. Even in the daytime all the dead haunt me.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him down close to her face. “You ain’t got the first reason to feel guilty about still breathing air when others ain’t. It wasn’t none of your fault that my Bo died over there in France or that young Press Jr. didn’t get out of that river.”

“But maybe it should have been me instead of them.”

“That ain’t for us to decide. Things happen and people die. The good Lord helps the rest of us go on living.” Aunt Hattie studied Victor’s face. “He’ll help you too, with whatever’s tormenting you.”

“Did he help you when Bo died?”

“I couldn’t a made it if he hadn’t. That was a bad time.” Aunt Hattie dropped her hands from Victor’s shoulders and sat down in the chair by the forge.

Victor pulled his stool over to sit beside her and wait till she was ready to start talking again.

She stared off at the wall for a few minutes before she said, “It weren’t just Bo, though that was a blow that like to kilt me. But your sweet mama going at almost the same time was nigh on more than I could bear. So many folks dyin’ over there and over here. But the Lord, he tol’ me he’d let me know when my time was up. That until then, he’d help me keep livin’, keep catchin’ babies when they got born, keep watchin’ over Nadine till you come home. You know how Mr. Preston and Preacher Reece didn’t give that girl the first bit of help, and Gertie, well, Gertie, that child does good to keep herself helped.”