The House Near the River (9 page)

The children chased off in a game of tag with their friends and she didn’t object when Matthew circled her with one arm as they ambled toward the car. She noticed that the sheriff had emerged from the crowd, though she hadn’t
seen
him earlier, and had drawn Clemmie aside to speak earnestly to her.

Clemmie listened for a moment, then tilted her nose in the air, and stalked daintily away, giving him the cold shoulder.

They drove through a darkness that was the more complete to a woman who lived near the brightness of a city that turned night into a kind of twilight and she thought she saw feral eyes watching from along the sides of the road. Tonight for the first time venturing into the larger world beyond the family, she had felt how alien was the world around her. She had no place among these people. On the most basic level they were so
opposite
from her. They had grown up with different memories hardwired into their beings.

Their church going seemed embarrassingly simple to her, even naive. The most shocking memory of their lives was the attack on Pearl Harbor, which had disabused them of the idea that Americans were safe behind their oceans, isolated from the conflicts of a larger world.

Her moment of revelation was the attack on the twin towers when
she’d
realized for the first time that the home land itself was vulnerable and no safety existed anywhere.

They lived in a geographical area where everybody pretty much sounded and looked alike, had a common frame of reference. Where she was from, people from many nations mixed and rarely could come together on a common point of view.

No way did she belong here, but somewhere inside she wanted to weep at that idea. After this, would she ever feel she belonged anywhere
?

Grandma’s farm, today or tomorrow, was the fixed point of her existence. Somehow it was home. She was glad when they began to drive over the rough, rutted trail that led to the house.

Shirley Kay had fallen asleep so Matthew lifted her onto his shoulder. David was barely awake, but before Angie could reach for him, Danny had lifted him in skinny arms and
staggered toward the house with him.

Clemmie followed the others in, seeming lost in her own thoughts, while Angie stood alone watching the others vanish inside. Terrifyingly she began to see or imagine lighted cracks in the atmosphere around her, glimpses it seemed into other worlds, and once again she wondered if she was losing her mind.

She saw Grandma
in her middle years
, looking past her as though studying the horizon for a storm. On the other side, she witnessed her cousin once again, and though she couldn’t hear the words, thought she saw on Amanda’s lips her own name. And further on in the distance she saw more vaguely the form of a woman, hardly more than a girl, a dusky-skinned maiden of surpassing beauty who had to be a descendant of one of the native American tribes. Tears trickled down a face that was the mask of tragedy.

Each opening beckoned to her, drew her toward it with such force she could hardly resist. But even though she had only minutes before decided that she did not belong in this place, she fled past those portals, real or unreal, to run into the house, slamming the door behind her and running into Matthew, who had returned after apparently stowing his little niece in her bed.

“Whoa, Ange,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

She pressed against him and felt his arms wrap around her. “They’re trying to take me away,” she whispered.

“Who?” he asked. “Who would take you away?”

“The universe. The world. The balance of time.” She was close to hysterical and, pressing her face against his chest, she barely managed to keep from tears.
Then she tore away from him and, ignoring the voice that called after her, went back to the bedroom she shared with David.

Finally she slept, but it was one of those nights where reality met with illusion and throughout the hours she saw cracks of light and scenes of familiar people and places appear around her. She didn’t know what part of it she dreamed,
wether
she actually witnessed any of those scenes, but when she awakened it was with a heavy feeling of dread. When she reached across the bed and couldn’t find David, then opened her eyes to see she was alone, she came close to panic.

Still in her nightgown she ran from the room, calling his name. In the dining room she was stopped by Matthew, who grabbed her hands and said, “He’s all right, Ange.  Clemmie is feeding him breakfast in the kitchen.”

She pulled her hands free and raced into the kitchen where, just as he’d said, David and Shirley Kay as well were peacefully eating cereal. Clemmie looked up to see a wild-eyed Angie still in her nightgown, followed by her brother and frowned.

Getting the message Angie fled to her bedroom and tried to catch her breath.

Nightmares,
she told herself.
Only nightmares
.

Usually Clemmie did her washing on Mondays, but with everything going on she was running behind. The kids were out of school now for the summer, vacation began in early May, so while Danny was sent to the field to help his uncle, the girls went with them to town to do the laundry.

Angie was glad they didn’t have to heat wash water in an iron pot over a fire in the yard, the way Grandma had
described
earlier family women washing clothes, but after a couple of hours at the Washateria
in town
, hot and noisy and full of women doing laundry at wringer washing machines, she wondered how much progress had been made.

Though Clemmie was acquainted with several of the other women, the roar of the machines was such that little conversation was attempted. Anna was assigned the chore of looking after Shirley Kay and David, who thought playing ta
g
among the machines was a fun game and were so difficult  to contain, that Clemmie released her eldest daughter from laundry duties, sending her to help mind the two younger children.

Angie and Clemmie worked together over the tubs of hot soapy water, blue water and clear rinse water, sending sopping items of clothing through the wringer  to
alternate tubs.
. By the time the end was in sight, Angie felt as though she’d gone through the wringer herself. She w
as wet from sweat and splashing
  and exhausted from the back-breaking work. Her head ached from the continual noise.

Between them they carried the baskets of wet wash to the car,
then
treated the kids to a nickel bottle of pop each. Angie chose a squat bottle of Coke for herself, though it was
a
considerably shorter bottle than the fruit drinks the kids had. Clemmie had cre
am
  soda.

Back in the car, the drive was all too short. Clemmie sent Sharon and Anna  inside to feed themselves and the younger children while she and Angie lugged clothes baskets to an outside line. She quickly began to hang clothes by hooking them to the line and to other garments with wooden clothes pin
s
.

Enough wind blew across the farm land, so that the lines were soon
ful
l
of flapping clothes and Angie could hope that she could rest for the rest of the day.

Apparently it didn’t work that way.

After quick lunch of cold cornbread crumbled into milk and eaten with a spoon, along with freshly sliced tomatoes and iced tea, it was back to work again. “We have a big noon dinner except on wash day,” Clemmie apologized, as she washed dishes while Angie dried.

Then there was sweeping and dusting to do as well as cleaning the bathroom. The younger children were ordered, protesting heavily, to nap back in the bedrooms and Angie would have loved to join them, but hardly felt she could do so when Sharon and Clemmie picked up hoes and headed for the garden. Clemmie made her put on gloves to protect her hands from blistering before she allowed her to take a hoe of her own.

The garden seemed huge to Angie as they weeded row after row, Sharon
sometimes had to
help her identify which were garden plants and which were undesired weeds.

She began to think longingly of the big farmer’s
market
in her town back at home where vegetables and fruits could be purchased without all this hard labor. “Don’t Matthew and Danny come in for lunch?” she asked Sharon while they worked side by side.

Sharon looked blank. “We call it dinner,” Clemmie said helpfully. “And in the evening we have supper. Matthew likes to take his dinner with him
on wash day
. He and Danny will eat right out in the field.”

Even though it was early May, the day was warm enough to bring up a sweat and to make the bonnets that the women wore necessary to protect them from sunburn. Angie had tried to reject hers, but
Clemmie insisted she wear it. “You wouldn’t want your skin to get all brown,” she said.

Angie  wondered why not. Surely she at least deserved a tan to show for all this hard work and she was sure these people had never heard of the high risk for skin cancer.

Sharon explained that a peaches and cream complexion was highly desired and no girl with any claim to beauty would risk having her skin turn dark and leathery looking.

After gardening, the evening chores came next. While Matthew and Danny milked the cows, Clemmie went into the house to make supper while Angie and the younger children, led by Sharon, fed chickens, pigs and calves, a rather time consuming process, and then gathered eggs before closing the chickens in their house
,
safe from predators for the night.

Matthew looked up from where he was sending the fresh milk through the separator that removed cream from the milk,
separating into two streams
. The leftover milk would be fed to the animals as the family only drank whole milk while the cream was put in a can to be sold in town on Saturday.

Angie felt like her middle was about to cave in because she was so hungry and hurried to wash her hands and join the others at the dining room table. For supper, they had what seemed more like breakfast: pancakes served with homemade butter and sticky sweet sorghum, thick slices of fried ham, and either sweet milk or buttermilk. To her relief, Angie found that the sweet milk did not  boast  of added sugar, it simply was the term used for regular milk as opposed to buttermilk, which she would not even think of tasting, but was a popular drink for the rest of them, excepting, of course, David.

Feeling too full from the heavy, calorie laden meal Angie only wanted to collapse in a chair, but such was not the design for living at the Harper household. Matthew took a couple of buckets of the skimmed milk out to the barnyard animals while Danny was sent to draw a bucket of rain water from the cistern. While they did dishes together, Clemmie explained that
though
they had well water piped in the house, it contained to much
gypsum
to be drinkable so they still collected water in the old cistern for that purpose.

Sharon had seen to the baths for the younger children while they cleaned the kitchen, and then she and Sharon had taken their own turns, so that by the time she emerged fro
m
the kitchen, the children in their nightclothes had assemb
l
ed
in the dining room to listen to the Fibber McGee Show on the radio.

They seemed to enjoy it as much as children she knew liked television and even Clemmie seemed amused. Matthew came in from the back of the house, his hair wet from a fresh combing and
he was
clad in clean clothing.

Danny, who wanted to listen to the radio, was sent for his bath
.
Angie
sank into a chair and promptly fell asleep.

When Clemmie awakened her later to send her to bed, she smiled gently at her. “Just another day on the farm,” she said with considerable irony.

Matthew felt ready to chew nails. He came in to noon dinner dirty and tired from work he usually loved. Working on the tractor, planting cotton was to build the future. Usually he could think of the various stages of the growing cotton from the first plants breaking through the soil to
producing
squares, blossoms, then the heavy green bolls hanging from the plants. Best of all was the fall harvest when workers gathered in the fields with their long dirty-white sacks to pluck the fluffy balls of cotton, stick them in their sacks, weigh the sacks and then dump cotton into the old red wagon until it was piled high and he pulled the wagon to the gin with a bale of cotton.

A good crop mean
t
good times. Saturday, the usual market day when they bought groceries and feed for the week turned into a full-fledged festival as everyone had money in their pockets and new clothes, household goods and small indulgences could be purchased.

After a decade of poverty, then the war years, the fall of 1946 promised to be a superlative one.

Trouble was his mind wouldn’t stay on his planting today, nor on the promise of the planting. These days it went back like a homing pigeon to thoughts of Ange.