Here and Again (4 page)

“No, thanks, Mama,” she replied without as much as a glance in her direction.

“You, Henry?”

“No, thanks. I’ll wait for dinner.”

“Such nice manners,” Osbee said, stirring the pot on the stove. “Sometimes, Henry, you have to think of others, not just what you want. What if you left? Bea would have to deal with Oliver all by herself.”

Henry smiled over at his mother. Bea made no response at all.

“What’s for dinner?” Oliver asked, returning from the other room and settling back into his chair. He had found one of his
pencils. It was so ravaged, the lead was sticking out on one side where he had chewed all the wood away.

“Spaghetti.”

“Again?” Oliver whined. “We always have spaghetti.”

“Shut up, Oliver,” Henry said.

“Don’t say, ‘Shut up.’ Say, ‘Be quiet,’” Ginger corrected as she put the milk away.

“You shut up,” Oliver said. “I want some milk.”

“You can wait for dinner.”

“Why’d you ask
them
?” Everything was a whine.

“I can’t hear you, Oliver,” Ginger replied, stirring her coffee.

“Why’d you ask them?” he said, his whiny voice growing louder.

“She can’t hear you ’cause you’re whining,” Henry shouted.

“Mom!” Oliver yelled.

“I can’t hear you!” she yelled back. He looked up at her. She smiled.

“Why did you ask them?” he whispered, grinning back.

“’Cause they eat their dinner when they drink milk. You fill up on milk and don’t eat your dinner.”

“Done,” Bea said. She shut her workbook, returned her pencil into its spot in her plastic pencil case, and tucked it all into her backpack.

“You want me to check your work?” Ginger asked as she leaned against the counter.

“Nope,” Bea replied, tossing the backpack by the sunroom door. “I need to check the horses.”

“No, you don’t,” Henry said, sharpening his pencil.

“Leave her be,” Osbee interjected. “Thanks for taking care of them, Bea.”

The door opened and shut without another word. Peering
over her cup, Ginger found Osbee looking at her. The old woman turned back and opened the oven.

“What’s in there?” Oliver asked.

“Meatballs,” Osbee replied, pulling them out of the oven and sliding them off the baking sheet into her bubbling pot of spaghetti sauce.

“Spaghetti
and
meatballs,” Oliver said, smiling at his mother. “Not just spaghetti. I love meatballs.”

“Yes, you do,” she replied, placing her cup on the counter. “Finish your homework.”

Ginger grabbed Jesse’s coat again and headed for the door. Beau rose to follow but she shook her head. Lying back down beneath Oliver’s chair, he let out a great breath of relief. Duty would have him follow her to the barn, but it was cold. Luckily, he’d get to stay inside.

Glancing back at Osbee, she winked and quietly left the kitchen. She gazed out the sunroom door, finding the yard washed in the lapis watercolor of early evening. The bare walnut tree that grew between the house and barn painted dark brown streaks of shadow across the snow. As she pulled her boots back on, she searched for Bea, but the little girl was nowhere to be seen. She had entered the barn already. Slowly, so as not to let the sunroom door squeak, Ginger stepped back out into the cold and tiptoed across the yard to the barn.

When she arrived, she could hear the murmured voice of Bea talking in the darkness beyond the closed barn door. Ginger bent and peeked through a knothole in the wood. In the back of the barn where shadows seemed forever, Henry’s Child, as it was called, blinked at her in the fading light. The 1957 International Harvester 600 gas tractor had been purchased in 1966 and then doted upon ever since, first by Henry and later by Jesse. It was the
first vehicle Jesse learned to drive and it was a favorite event for all three children to ride upon it into the hay and cornfields with their father. It was, though, Bea who rose at dawn every day with Jesse. Bea favored working with her father from the time she could sit up to any playing she could do elsewhere with any other. Bea was Jesse’s child. Now Henry’s Child, like the snake-rail fence on the driveway, sat exactly where Jesse had left it, for the tractor had blown a piston just two days before his deployment. He had to have parts machined for it and as there was no time to do so before he left, Jesse pushed the tractor into its spot in the barn, intending to fix it upon his return. There it remained, silent and still and visited now only secretly by Bea, for whom it was a tangible memory of her father.

So here she was, sitting on its seat, bouncing gently as if she rode upon it now. Bea had caused Ginger the most worry since Jesse’s death. She had gone completely silent, neither weeping nor talking. What she had done instead was begin to leave the table after meals and come out to check on the horses. It had become her chore, so she said. Each night Ginger would follow her little girl, squatting down as she did now, her head resting against the wood of the barn with her eyes closed, listening to Bea speak with her father on the tractor as they rode together in the forever shadows.

“I think we gotta take down that tree on the far side of the field. It looks like it’ll fall down with the next snow anyway and we gotta fix the fence,” Bea said quietly. “Christian got out last month and went wandering over into Mama’s orchard. He remembered there were apples and pears over there from the last time he kicked the fence down in summer. He ate half a tree before we got him. Man, did he have a stomachache.”

Bea laughed. Ginger smiled at the memory herself as a warm breeze gently shifted her hair around her ear.

“I think he thought there were apples there. Horses aren’t very smart, huh? There are no apples in winter and he walked all the way over there in the wind and snow for nothing. Mama says it served him right. But we gotta mend the fence.”

“Good evening, Virginia Moon.”

Ginger bolted to a stand. Samuel stood before her with his cap on and a bedroll on his back, secured diagonally across his chest with a rope. She shook her head.

“Is something the matter?”

“Shh,” Ginger said, motioning him away from the door. Bea laughed again. Samuel glanced over at the barn door and then back to Ginger.

“Is someone in there who should not be?” he asked in a low voice.

“No, it’s my daughter,” she whispered.

“You do not want to know why she is laughing?” Samuel tilted his head.

“She’s riding with her father.”

Samuel frowned, gazing around the barnyard. “He is not . . . gone . . . yet?”

Ginger stepped sideways toward the gravel drive. Samuel followed.

“She goes in there and rides with her dad—or the memory of her dad.”

“Ah.” Samuel nodded. “And you are spying on her. In her private moment with her father.” Samuel’s lip curled slightly.

“No, no,” Ginger said adamantly. “Not spying.”

“What do you call it?” He was staring at her now, his brown eyes shaded dark in the growing twilight.

“She doesn’t really talk anymore. She completely shut down since her dad died. The school psychologist thinks she needs
help—like, maybe medication. That she’s not grieving her father’s death.”

“What is a school psychologist?”

“A busybody.”

“Oh.”

“She goes in the barn and this is where I can hear where she’s at, you know? How it is with her. I know she’ll be okay because this is—it’s how she mourns.”

“Ah. So you tell the school psychologist this?”

“No. It’s private,” she replied, stepping back from Samuel. Why did she need to tell him any of this anyway?

“Well?” he pressed, his eyes growing darker.

Ginger shifted her feet. Night was coming on fast. “It’s how I know the psychologist is wrong. Bea just . . . mourns privately. That’s all.”

“Bea. That is her name?”

Ginger nodded, thinking she should call her daughter because it was getting very dark.

“Grief is felt with the same depth as love, I think. To love someone wholly is to be entirely filled with them, and when they are lost—a gaping emptiness.”

Ginger took a deep, cold breath through her nose. It had grown so black, so cold. She exhaled and, with it, emptiness passed her lips. She had no words. There was no light. There was only pain.

“So you stand out here to help carry the entirety of your daughter’s loss while bearing your own.”

Ginger nodded. She had no breath for there was no air.
I’m her mother,
she mouthed.

“You are a good mother.”

Ginger shrugged, shaking her head.

“Yes, you are,” he replied.

“Mama?” Bea’s soft voice hit Ginger on the back, forcing a gasping inhale. Samuel didn’t move, but kept staring at her.

“Yeah, Bea,” she replied hoarsely.

“Who’s that?”

“Um, Mr. Annanais. Mr. Annanais, this is Beatrix, my daughter.”

Samuel smiled at Ginger and turned toward Bea. “Well met, Beatrix.”

“You in a Civil War play or something?”

“Or something,” Samuel replied. Ginger watched him lean down and squint as he looked carefully at Bea. “You look very familiar.”

Bea shrugged and stepped forward.

“Why are all your buttons different?” she asked, pointing to Samuel’s coat.

“It is a long story and I need to make my way home.”

“Oh,” Bea said. She looked over at her mother and raised her eyebrows.

Ginger shrugged, breathing purposefully, counting the beats of her heart. “Would you like to come in first?” Ginger offered in nearly a whisper. “We’re having dinner and then I can drive you home.”

The sky had turned the shade of a fine, dark lapis. In all of Ginger’s travels, only Virginia had a twilight sky so deep. She glanced around confused, for just a minute ago it had been as dark as dark can be. She blinked, gazing up at the North Star.

“No, but I thank you. I can walk home now.”

“You sure? It’s five miles on this road and it’s going to be cold tonight,” Ginger said, still staring at the lapis blue sky.

“I would like to walk. It was very nice meeting you, Beatrix.”

“You, too, Mr. Annanais.”

“Your daughter has nice manners.”

“From her father,” Ginger replied, returning her gaze to Samuel.

“And her good mother,” Samuel added, staring back at her with deeper eyes. He bowed a little and walked by her, heading down the drive.

“It gets really dark on the road and slippery. You be careful.”

“I shall,” he replied over his shoulder, and as he walked he adjusted his bedroll on his back.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Bea?” she asked, looking down at her daughter. Her eyes were bright, reflecting the darkening blue sky above. Why was the light in her daughter’s eyes so bright when Samuel’s had been so shadowed?

“Where’d he come from?”

“I’m not sure. He was in some reenactment over the river earlier and then I guess he just came back across. Daddy’s ash tree fell down and there’s like a tree bridge over the Shenandoah.”

Bea’s forehead creased. Ginger winced. She should not have said that. Why had she said that? Ginger brushed her daughter’s forehead, trying to smooth away her pain. The sunroom door squeaked and they could see Osbee peek out, the light from the house spilling out behind her.

“Dinner,” she called.

“Coming!” Ginger answered.

“Hey, Mama?”

“Yeah?”

“Where did Mr. Annanais go?”

Ginger spun her head and gazed down the drive. He was not there nor was there any movement on the road. That was odd. It
took longer than that to walk to the road. “I don’t know,” she replied with a frown.

“Maybe he’s crossing the Schaafs’ field. It’d be faster to the big road.”

“Maybe,” Ginger said, scanning the Schaafs’ land for a shadow moving in the darkness. The trees were quite a distance from the road and she had no idea how he would have made it so far so fast.

“I’m hungry,” Bea said, sliding her hand into her mother’s palm. For a moment, Ginger froze. Bea never held her hand. Always, she was with her father—by the hand, in his arms, on his lap. It felt so awkward and yet the incredible emptiness in Ginger lightened a bit. Her throat tightened as she gave her daughter’s hand a little squeeze.

“Me, too. Let’s go in.”

Gazing up at the sky, Ginger found the North Star twinkling in the clear Virginia heaven. It was a new moon and there would be no light in the dark places tonight.

“I hope he doesn’t get lost,” she murmured.

May 26, 1861

My dear Juliette,

Upon arrival at Harper’s Ferry, I was quite surprised to find my professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, the now Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, as the commanding officer. He had come to Harper’s Ferry two weeks prior, bringing with him cadets from VMI with orders to secure the town and organize the incoming militias. I remained quiet, but now and then I was greeted by a few of my old classmates with raised eyebrows. It was on all of our minds, those who attended VMI, how it was possible that a man who was so poor a teacher could lead our gathering militia to war. We will, however, keep our thoughts to ourselves. We shall perform our duty in obedience and if that includes following Colonel Jackson into the Valley of Death, then so be it. We are VMI and Virginia. No duty is greater.

With that, to my present location. I have been promoted and now am Second Lieutenant Samuel E. Annanais, tasked with relocating a locomotive engine to Staunton. When we arrived, Colonel Jackson had stopped all trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on the tracks that pass through Harper’s Ferry. He directed us to take several locomotives to Staunton and so we did, running them down a spur line to Winchester. But the tracks ended there. It is twenty miles farther to Staunton. Just for a minute, we wondered if the Colonel was aware that the railroad line ended in Winchester. Then, in obedience, we followed orders and because it is our duty to follow Colonel Jackson, we are now hauling the locomotives down a
turnpike. Not a few people have dropped a jaw as we pass by. We brightly smile, tipping our hats to the ladies on the road. What stories shall the little ones tell their grandchildren in some far distant future? The army of the great nation of Virginia rode by the town with locomotives and boxcars and not a track for miles. What tenacity and determination! Track or no track, we shall get these trains to Staunton as ordered. No mean feat, this.

But moving locomotives is heavy work and so we are at rest. I have here in my hand your last letter and have read it so many times now. I follow the curving lines of your words with my finger, touching the paper where I know your hand has touched. Your voice whispers to me as I read and my spirit ebbs and flows in the memory of its music. Nothing in the world would keep me from you but this duty I must fulfill. But once the war ends and I am granted the honor of your hand by your father, Juliette, I shall never leave your side again. I cannot replace Charles. No man can replace another. No husband can replace another. I will, however, be the man who loves you and the husband and father who serves you and our children. I wish nothing more, for there can be nothing greater.

So I sit here with your letter while the horses are watered in a small brook. They bluster now and then, speaking to each other in whispers only they can understand. I wonder if they speak of the weeping willow leaves that rustle as gently they brush the brook. I close my eyes and feel your hair loose, tumbling across my face. To take in its sweetness as the willow draws in the cool water—that is what I long for. I shall keep this thought in mind and heart until next I write. You are ever here, Juliette, with me.

Your devoted,

Samuel E. Annanais