The House Near the River (20 page)

“How long?” she asked again.

“We were pulling cotton so it was fall. Matthew had moved to Texas and bought a little farm down there and then, without a  word of warning, here the two of you were, coming down the road in his Nash, s
aying you were getting married.

“We had the wed
d
ing in the living room at Christmas. You visited with us for a day or two, then went back to Matthew’s little house in Texas. We were so happy for you.

“Then
not long after,
Matthew called to tell us about the baby. He sounded so happy. We decided  to go down to see you, all of us, the kids and Tobe and me, but when we got there, you were both gone
. The house was bare and neighbors said Matthew had been by himself when he gave them the livestock, saying he was going away. He told them his wife had left  him.

“We looked for him, talked to everybody who knew him. He’d vanished and nobody seemed to know what had gone wrong. I had a terrible feeling I’d never see either of you again.”

Angie swallowed hard. “Well, you were wrong. Here I am. We’ll manage to find Matthew  no matter where he has gone.”

“But, Ange, what about the baby? Did it never happen?”

To her surprise, Angie found that mythical infant had a strange reality to her. She could not bear the idea that it would never exist.

She was glad when Danny awakened, demanding attention so that she didn’t have to come up with an answer to satisfy Clemmie.

Angie took to spending most of her days at the farm, looking after the girls and the house so that Clemmie could stay with Danny at the hospital.

She watched the flickering cracks in time that appeared around her, but none of them seemed to present familiar scenes. She saw what seemed to be long ago before the settlers came. Dusky-skinned Native American women went about their work, tending children, cleaning buffalo hides, cooking in pots over fire
s
.

She stared at them in awe, but felt no compulsion to join them. Even more frequently she witnessed pioneer women in long skirts and  bonnets and  wondered if they were Clemmie’s ancestors.

It was as though the history of the prairie was being played out in quick sketches before her eyes. She heard no voices or sounds, but only saw the panorama before her.

Too busy doing the hard work that normally was done by Clemmie, she found few spare moments to dwell on what now seemed almost ordinary in her life, though she did question Clemmie about specifics of
her appearance
at the Harper home.

“It was just before Christmas,” Clemmie told her.

“And what year is this?”

Clemmie blinked, then answered. “1947.
April
1947.

She’d met Matthew on December 8
th
, 1941.
She’d come back with him to be married in December 1946, five years later.”

And now she was here in
April
1947, supposedly pregnant. Only she wasn’t. She had stepped out of time either before or after her marriage.

None of it made any sense to her.

She dreamed that night. A dark-haired woman who looked like she might be part Indian
stared
seriously into her face. “You must awaken, little one, or it will be too late.”

In her dream she took the admonishment
as significant.
“I keep trying. It’s like being in a nightmare where you think you wake up, only to find you’re still dreaming, still caught in the nightmare.”

“No nightmare. More real than the
ordinary day
.”

She spoke slowly, hesitantly, as though she were not accustomed to the language, but still with proper usage as though well educated.

“Are you Indian?” Then she corrected herself. It was more correct to use other terms. “Native American?”

“I am Cheyenne. A wise woman of the Cheyenne.”

“And you come to me in a dream?”

She smiled, showing her teeth. “I walk in time, as do you. We meet out on the great plain of the spirits be
c
ause I must advise you.”

And then Shirley Kay cried out in the night and the dream lay broken, shattered around her.

From that night, Angie felt a new urgency. She had to do something, she didn’t know what, or something really bad would happen. She had no idea what she must do.

Finally Danny was brought home from the hospital in an ambulance, crying out with pain over every jolting bump in the road from town. He was still too sick to sit up and Tobe carried him into the house to place him carefully in the bed in the spare bedroom.

Angie slept on the sofa in the dining room, close enough to hear him if he cried out in the night.

His recovery was still by no means certain and, if it came, would take a long time.

His sisters, newly tender with their wraith of a
brother
, took turns playing games with him while Sharon read stories
aloud.

Clemmie and Angie cooked special food for him, trying to tempt a fretful appetite. Late spring came before he began to show definite signs of improvement and with a tired sigh, Angie knew she no longer had an excuse not to move on.

The Cheyenne wise woman had appeared in her dreams two more times, encouraging her with increasing urgency that she must do  something, but she always woke before the mission could be spelled out.

No longer did Angie question her own sanity. This life she lived was as real as anyone else’s.

She wanted to go home and make sure Dad and David were all right. Even as she did chores around the farm, she watched the flickering openings,
searching
for the right one, but saw only strangers.

Trying to analyze past crossings, she began to realize that she’d followed people. That first step in time that had led her here had been because she’d seen her brother and when she’d left, she still had been following David.

But in what she still thought of as the present family, the homestead was abandoned and then men on their big tractors who farmed the land were not familiar to her.

Who was to guide her through? How would she know when  to go?

This time she told Clemmie she was about to make the attempt.

“Oh, No, Ange. No telling what will happen.”

“Somewhere, somehow it has already happened. I must follow my own footsteps to find my way. Right now my life is only puzzles. So, if I disappear again, Clemmie, don’t be alarmed
.”

Clemmie tried to laugh. By now she’d been forced to accept that Angie was not carrying a baby. It had been a huge disappointment to her and she worried about that baby who might never exist.

She prayed for that baby and for her brother. No matter how strange the happenings, Clemmie was persuaded that God reigned over all.

Day after day grew warmer, moving toward summer, as Angie watched for a familiar face on that other side where she hoped to find her father and brother. In spite of the message she’d left, Dad must be so worried by now.

Increasingly her mind was with them and then one evening as she as coming back to the house, carrying a pail of milk to the separator, she saw Dad’s face. He was laughing at something.

No time to wait. No time to hesitate. She
dropped the pail and
rushed forward
but even
as she moved through the
shrinking
opening, she knew she’d made a mistake.

It was too late. She was already through, but not into the time where her father stood with laughter on his face. The scene had changed just as she’d entered and she stood now in an unfamiliar time.

The day lay cold and deep in snow and she
realized
instantly that she was far from the farmhouse in Oklahoma. For the first time her journeying had taken not only
years into a different when,
but
also
a far distance in where.

She stood looking down on a valley
from which emerged
the sounds and smells of battle. She heard men cry out and saw the lumbering of tanks, leaving snow and mud in their tracks as they battled each other. Further on one of the tanks was on fire and she saw a man run toward it, yelling for his friends.

Angie knew where she must be. Something in the scenes she walked into drew her. So far it had been a combination of individuals and the old house that stood so significantly as a part of her family history.

Her brother had drawn her. Clemmie had drawn her. The house had
sent
her
here
.

But only one person could have brought her to this setting. Her heart pounded and her breathing came hard in the cold and wind. She was only wearing the feed
sack dress Clemmie had made, her legs left bare between the hem of the dress and the socks she wore with her shoes. She had no coat to protect
her body
against the wind that blew so hard as to nearly knock her down.

The tank fire whipped in the wind and still she stood frozen from shock as much as cold
. Sh
e had read it was the coldest winter they’d seen in fifty years in these parts
and new she watching that last powerful gasp of German desperation as they saw the chance at victory slipping from
them
. She was at that great tank battle called the battle of the bulge.

And somewhere down there was Matthew, the man she loved with her whole heart, and she had been drawn here by his presence
. She knew now that she and Matthew had met once before that day in Oklahoma City and that she must act quickly or all the rest that had followed would never happen.;

It was hard floundering through deeper snow than she’d ever seen in Oklahoma or Texas, great drifts of it heaped in her path, but she rushed with every ounce of speed and strength toward that tank fire. Matthew said what little he did of his war experiences as though everything crystalized in this moment when
, having been rescued himself,
he went back to try to save his buddies in a burning tank.

She must look very strange, a woman running across the field of battle in a war where women went only as nurses and ambulance drivers and she wore none of the apparel of war, no uniform, no weapon, and she was cold, so very cold.

But there was a reason she was here and she knew Matthew’s life hung in the balance.

The tank burned hopelessly when she got there, a sight of horror such as she’d never imagined. For those trapped inside  it was too late. The cries of horror had stopped, they were dead, left for fodder in that terrible fire.

But only steps from the fire, in its path as
fiery
fingers reached toward them lay Matthew and  the boy he’d pulled from the fire. Matthew lay unconscious, his face
splotched red
by his burns, a red that stood out starkly against unnaturally white skin. He was near death.

In his arms, the boy he’d rescued was hardly better, barely awake. She knew instantly that no matter what lay in his future, neither he or Matthew would live if they were not moved from the fire’s path.

She could not hesitate for fear of causing them pain or further injury. There on the ground with the fire rushing at them, death was their only destiny. With more strength than she had a right to possess, she grabbed Matthew’s
feet
, even as he still clasped that boy who looked about seventeen in his rescuing hold, and dragge
d them,
sliding them across
the snow.

When she had them safely out of the fire’s path, she became aware once against of the din of battle sounds. The boy looked up at her and said, “ma’am, you sure must be an angel.”

She laughed and turned to look for a source of help for them and instead walked right through an opening in the
dreary winter day.

Angie landed, shivering and crying, in the midst of a one hundred degree Texas afternoon. Her little brother stared at her, then pulled his thumb from his mouth and yelled, “Dad, Ange is back home.”

She looked around. She was lying on the rug in the big public living room of the Prairie
House
. Fortunately David was the only other person in the room .

“Dad!” he yelled. “I think she’s hurt or sick.”

Her father ran into the room, got half way across the rug and then stopped to stare at her. “You all right, Angie?”

Angie stopped crying long enough to laugh. “It’s not fair. Dammit, it’s not fair. I don’t know if he . . . they were all right, though I guess they must be or we’d never have met at the coffee shop . . .no that was before . . .”

“David, run and get a blanket.” Dad hovered over her, feeling her face, touching her hair. “She’s freezing cold, though I don’t know how.”

Her teeth chattered so hard now she wasn’t sure he could even understand what she was saying. “It was so cold, a blizzard I guess, and I didn’t even have a coat.”