Sophie and the Rising Sun (14 page)
Read Sophie and the Rising Sun Online
Authors: Augusta Trobaugh
Tags: #Romance, #Literary, #General, #Historical, #Fiction
Then the fear began to descend upon her. What if something had happened to him? But wouldn’t she have known? Such a small town can’t keep many secrets. If something had happened to him, Miss Anne would have told her. She was sure of it.
Finally, she gathered her unopened paints and packed away the still pristine paper and wondered what had happened. He promised to come... and then she remembered the condition upon which he made the promise: “if I am able.”
Perhaps he was ill?
On her way back home, she walked slowly, thinking about how to find out what was wrong, and she remembered to remove the sprig of bougainvillea from her hair before she passed through town. She put it carefully into her pocket and wondered yet again where he could be. Because his not coming was more than just that.
Somehow, it was much more.
By Monday, she could think of nothing else.
Get hold of yourself, Sophie!
she admonished in a silent voice that sounded strangely like her mother’s voice.
You’re acting like a child! You must remember to act like a lady!
No ma’am, Mama,
another part of her responded.
Not like a child. And not like a lady, either. Like a woman.
So that the whole day, the voices argued within her. And all the while, the sprig of pink bougainvillea wilted quietly on her dresser.
Finally, she decided that perhaps she would just make a call on Miss Anne. That would certainly be nothing new, though she hadn’t been to see her old friend in several weeks. But in that way, she could ask about Mr. Oto right in the course of casual conversation. Still, she finally rejected that idea, because she felt certain that Miss Anne would notice that her inquiries about Mr. Oto, no matter how lightly phrased, were more than just polite conversation. Especially if Sophie were right there in Miss Anne’s own parlor, seated in a chair and maybe with her hands making the cup clatter against the saucer. Miss Anne knew her far too well. Miss Anne would know right away, and then what would Sophie do? Confess? Confess
what?
That she cared very much about him? And what would her old friend say to that? Her own gardener!
On Tuesday morning, as she walked toward the library, Sophie saw Miss Anne herself digging among the marigolds Mr. Oto had planted and tended so carefully. And she hesitated only for a moment before she stopped by the fence and called out, “Miss Anne? Is Mr. Oto ill?”
She did everything she could do to keep her voice light and sound casual, but still, it held a faint tremor that would not have been lost on Miss Anne one bit, if Miss Anne hadn’t been rather startled by the fact that once again, she was facing the telling of the big
lie.
And who would have thought it would be so hard? And especially, having to lie to Sophie!
Miss Anne came to the fence, all the while looking at the handful of weeds she had pulled from the flower beds, as if they were the only thing in the world worthy of her interest.
“Mr. Oto has gone to Canada,” she said matter-of-factly. “To be with his family,” she added, still studying the handful of weeds.
“Oh.” It was a small utterance from Sophie, but the way she said it surprised Miss Anne somehow—she couldn’t have said exactly
how.
But she wondered briefly why the word seemed to be wreathed in a sigh of the smallest magnitude.
Sophie, on second thought, noticed that Miss Anne didn’t look at her when she spoke of Mr. Oto. Why was her old friend acting so distant and cool about it? For after all, Miss Anne had never made a secret about her genuine fondness for him. But somehow, everything about Miss Anne felt different now to Sophie. Of course, Sophie would never pry, but she couldn’t help but wonder about it. What on earth was wrong? And how could she possibly ask Miss Anne more about him?
She couldn’t, that’s all. So they stood there, the two old friends, separated by a white, picket fence and by a silence that neither of them could fill.
“Well,” Sophie said at last. “I’m sure you’ll miss him. He always took such good care of your garden. You need for me to bring you anything from the store?’’
Mama was right,
Sophie was thinking.
Nothing lasts.
Miss Anne’s strange aloofness seemed to relax a little. “I’ll certainly miss him,” she agreed, still studying the weeds, “And no, thank you—I’ll be going to the store a little later myself. But I appreciate it.”
Sophie moved on a little down the sidewalk, wishing that there were some way of asking the questions she wanted to ask—but there wasn’t. It was just that simple. Finally, she just waved her hand and walked on. But she could feel Miss Anne’s eyes upon her as she walked away, and her gait felt awkward and unnatural, so she raised her arm and studied her watch, as if she were late for an appointment.
And indeed, Sophie’s feelings were accurate, for Miss Anne still stood at the fence, watching her walk away down the sidewalk.
My
, Miss Anne thought
,
she certainly looks pretty this morning, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it
is. She lingered for yet another moment, wincing at the feeling of isolation wrought by the telling of the lie.
Sophie! I want so very much to tell you. But I can’t involve you in this. It’s far too serious.
At the cabin, Mr. Oto
had settled in as well as he was able, doing everything exactly as Miss Anne directed him. He had torn a blanket apart and tacked the pieces over the windows and over the doorway, so the light from the kerosene lamp couldn’t be seen at night. He never went out during the daylight, and he carefully buried his empty cans in among the palmetto bushes, away from the faint path.
He propped up his painting of the Crane-Wife on a small, wooden box against the wall and even gathered a few mature stalks of golden dune-grass, which he placed on the floor in front of the painting -almost like a shrine before which he spent long hours in meditation.
It was a time of surprising and profound grief for him. And shame. Shame that the deepest grief in him was not for his father and his brothers, their wives and sons and grandsons, not even for the war— terrible war. But for the loss of those precious hours with Sophie, a loss that was a thousand times more painful than he had ever anticipated. His mind returned over and over to every moment they had spent together on the riverbank, so that in his memory, he walked along a strand of silken thought that occasionally held a perfectly round, luminous pearl. Her face in one, her laughter on another, her pale arms in the morning light, her deep green eyes. And finally, her soul’s hunger for that dome of sky over where the river and the ocean came together.
Finally, without even a flashlight to guide him—for he feared that the beam would be seen by someone—he walked one dark night all the way back to the big live oak tree, to that place where he and Sophie had been together on those glorious Sunday mornings, and there, he sat in Sophie’s chair, trying to draw her presence forth and to wear it on his body like another skin. He fancied that he could breathe her perfume and that somehow the chair still held the warmth of her. So he stayed in her presence until the dawn was coming fast, and he had to hurry to get back to the shack, where he slept deeply and peacefully until almost noon.
Later that day, a breeze lifted out the blanket over the window and allowed the bright light of day to fall upon his sleeping face. He sat up, groggy and a little confused, wondering what time it was and what day it was and what seemed to be calling to him.
Cautiously, he stuck his head out through the blanketed doorway, and the glare of a totally clear day made him rub his eyes and the earth was so hushed and still that he wondered for a moment if his hearing had suddenly gone bad. Like watching a silent movie, he saw the palmetto bushes and the gray-beard moss hanging motionlessly.
And the great crane standing at the base of the largest live oak tree, its white feathers like a mound of sunlit snow against the gnarled shades of moss and old velvet. It turned its head just the least little bit, to gaze at him full in the face.
“Sophie?” he whispered, as if it were the only word he could find to utter.
But the crane did not even blink its eyes at the sound of his voice, and so Mr. Oto and the crane stood, gazing at each other for long, silent minutes, until Mr. Oto blinked in the glare, and when he looked again, it was gone.
On the next Sunday night, he walked back to the road—during darkness, of course—to find a cardboard box with supplies in it, left by Miss Anne, as she had promised. Canned goods and more kerosene for the lamp, a big box of matches wrapped in waxed paper, and clean, dry clothes that still smelled of the musty closet and that must have belonged to Miss Anne’s long-deceased father. And the weekly newspaper that came out every Thursday afternoon, so that he read every word of it over and over again, especially about the war. And the shaking of his hands echoed the flickering flame in the kerosene lantern.
Miss Anne said:
Lordy, it was a hard time, sure enough. Maybe people today, who don’t really know anything about Pearl Harbor, don’t know what a terrible thing it was. Folks were all incensed about it. And scared, to boot. Makes for a bad combination, that does. And everybody looking at the newsreels at the theater in Brunswick, showing those goose-stepping Nazis—enough to curdle the blood, it was. And then showing all those Japs lined up in front of their planes and throwing up their arms in the air all at the same time and screaming in unison. And wanting nothing more than to kill us.
And you know, I thought that telling the lie about Mr. Oto would get easier, but it didn’t. Deep in my heart, I knew there wasn’t one thing wrong with what I was doing to help a fellow American. But the strain of it was much more than I’d expected, and one day, when I went to the post office and saw that big poster of Uncle Sam looking so stern and serious, pointing his finger and saying “I want YOU!” I just about jumped out of my skin. Because no matter how right I was, I still felt funny about it. Way deep inside. And so very much alone with it. Carrying the secret around all by myself. It was hard!
When I finally ran into Ruth in the grocery store, it was quite a difficult thing. She’d always been such a busybody, and I had dreaded seeing her. Not that she was ever evil—or even downright mean—or anything like that. Why, in over thirty years, she never missed so much as one single Sunday of church. Or so she said, at least. But I was enough like my papa to know that churchgoing doesn’t guarantee goodness in anyone. And Ruth certainly had a way of enjoying bad news. Or something like that. And wouldn’t you know, she lit right in on me about Mr. Oto.
“Anne!” she yelled at me that day, and before I could even turn around all the way, she jammed her buggy right up alongside me and looked at me so hard with those bright little eyes—always did look like she was getting ready to say Ah-hah! Gotcha!
“I’ve been wanting to ask you about that foreign man of yours,” she said. Well, she always did know how to get right at the heart of what she wanted to know. No polite chitchat for her, sure enough, just blunt and open questions without any warm-up whatsoever. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, so God rest her soul, I guess.
“I hear he’s gone away?” she framed it as a question, but it was a statement if ever I heard one. I tossed two boxes of Jell-O into my buggy and tried the best I could to look absolutely unconcerned. I also made a quick mental note not to buy some things I’d been planning on getting for Mr. Oto—more matches and several cans of beans. Such as that.
“Yes, he’s gone,” I said, looking back up at the shelves and reaching out to take down a box of cornstarch, though I still had half a box in my pantry.
“Where’d he go?” she asked.
“Went back to his family in Canada,” I answered, tossing the unneeded box of cornstarch on top of the Jell-O.
“Canada?” She said it as if she had never heard of such a thing.
“That’s right.” I picked up a box of unflavored gelatin, which was simply the next thing I saw along the shelf.
“Well, I expect you’re going to miss him,” she said. “He sure did leave sudden-like.’’
“Yes.” I tossed the unflavored gelatin into the buggy. “My garden will certainly never be as lovely as it was when I had him around to take care of it.”
There!
I thought.
How
w
onderful it feels to say something that’s absolutely true!
The rest of her comment, I decided to ignore.
“Well, to tell you the truth, your garden wasn’t the only thing he was interested in,” she said in a voice that dared me to ignore that deep pronouncement. I turned to look at her for the first time.
Might as well, I supposed—or I was going to wind up with a buggy full of things I didn’t need or want.
“Beg pardon?” I pretended that I hadn’t quite heard her.
She leaned close to me and whispered, “I said your garden wasn’t the only thing he was interested in.” Her brittle little eyes sparkled behind the thick glasses. “He was interested in Sophie, too, so I hear.”
Sophie? What on earth could she mean?
I knew I had to be careful, because getting taken by surprise like that was likely to make me mess up the story I had rehearsed so carefully.