Love and Lament (50 page)

As I wrote earlier, we stayed until early January as part of the Army of Occupation. Then we were loaded into unheated boxcars, 60 men to a car, for a long and trying journey back into France. It took five days and nights, half the time on sidetracks waiting for French trains to pass. I tell you, it was hard not to be angry, many of us waved our fists at those trains and shouted “Is this the thanks we get?”

Now we’re at Camp Mud as we call it, waiting for our transport home. The food supply is nothing to complain about, at least I haven’t heard any. The problem is the waiting and the sickness. So many have been stricken with intestinal problems, we’re worried some won’t befit to travel. But it’s the flu that is taking a toll. Already, 5 in our regiment have died just while we’ve sat here and waited, and another 60 or so are ill
.

Well it’s late now and I’m thinking of you and wishing you pleasant dreams. The other night I dreamed I was walking through the courthouse, looking for you. I opened every door and I couldn’t find you, and something told me, “She’s not in here, she’s outside waiting for you.” And I went out onto the grass behind the building and you were across the street, waving at me, with the afternoon sun behind you so it was hard to see you. There was a long line of cars, so I couldn’t get to you right away, but you were smiling and your hair was loose, like it was coming undone. We were both happy. And that’s when I woke up. Tell me what you think it means when I see you
.

Love always
,

LST

On the second day of March, four days after she’d received Leon’s letter, Mary Bet had a premonition. Just as she was waking up, crossing the borderland from her dreams, she saw again the circuit rider in a sable suit. But this time he was riding away from her in the other direction, toward a scarred and rutted field with mist rising all about, and coming toward him on a big chestnut horse was Leon. He smiled in a contented way, but he galloped past,
toward the other rider. She tried to shout and warn him away, but she could make no sound. Nor could she move. She awoke, aware that she’d been trying to yell. From downstairs rose the
throp-throp-throp
of Flora’s treadle, and she wondered what on earth Flora could be doing at her machine of a Sunday morning.

Flora said she was only fixing a hem on a dress she wanted to wear that very morning and she saw no harm, since it was for church. By now they were nearly out the door, and Mary Bet said, “Flora, whether or not he comes home, I have no need to marry.”

Flora stopped and adjusted her bonnet, which she preferred to a hat, not looking in the mirror, because she and Mary Bet thought it vain to primp overmuch before church. “Why, Mary, what has come over you?”

“I’m happy living here with you. What do I want with a smelly old man and his needs?” She smiled in a coy way to try to stop herself from crying.

“I’ve never said you did, but honestly I think something’s upset you. Have you heard anything since his letter?”

“No, it’s just a feeling.”

“Why don’t you go out and see his brothers this afternoon. It would do you good, give you some peace. They’ll have the latest news.”

“You and I think alike,” Mary Bet told her friend. “I had the same notion as soon as I woke up.” She gave Flora a kiss on the cheek, which made her friend smile and blush both. Flora then offered to come with her on the ride, but Mary Bet said there was no need.

She went out after church, the hour and a half in the buggy giving her a chance to collect her thoughts. Was he already gone and the news hadn’t spread around yet? They could’ve gotten word this very morning. When she pulled into the dirt-and-gravel driveway and parked up close to the old house that Leon’s father had built
after the war, she wondered if the quietness of the place meant that there was a death in the family and they wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Who was she to break in on their Sunday peace, anyway? Leon had probably not even mentioned to them that he was going with a girl, a woman, who’d become the sheriff while he was away in training. They weren’t engaged. He may even have some other, closer woman friend for all she knew. She thought it best if she just kept going on around the drive and out the way she’d come.

Then Leon’s middle brother, Sid, came up from the yard and rested his hands against his fat sides. “Hello, Miss Mary Bet,” he said. His beard was so thick she couldn’t see his mouth move. She was glad Leon didn’t have a beard that like; anyway it wouldn’t be fitting for a school superintendent to look like a hillbilly. She sometimes wondered how he had come out of this family, but they were so kind and gentle that she couldn’t hold it against him. The younger one, Bob, was practically mute in his shyness and she didn’t expect to see him, though he was probably off watching from somewhere. Sid was an incorrigible tease and jokester and he used foul language, but he wasn’t mean.

Both brothers liked sweets and she had brought along half of a pound cake she had baked two days ago. “I brought you this,” she said. “I just decided to drive out today, or I’d’ve made something special.”

Sid lifted the waxed paper she’d wrapped tightly around the plate. He brought the cake to his nose and inhaled deeply. “I could eat this right now. And dinner’s still in here.” He patted his belly, which hung over his trousers so that his suspenders seemed always stretched to the breaking point.

Mary Bet asked after his brother and mother, and when Sid invited her in to see them, she said, “No, no. I only wanted to know if you’d had any word from Leon. He wrote me a nice long letter, but it’s dated more than two weeks ago.”

Sid studied her as though he was just now putting something together. He shook his head. “No, we sure haven’t. We got a letter about the same time. It wasn’t but about a page. He said they was just waiting on a ship to take them home. Is there something he forgot to tell us, his own family?” He raised his eyebrows in a merry way.

“What?” said Mary Bet. “Oh, no, no. ’Twasn’t anything. We’re just good friends, and I was concerned about him.”

“Well don’t you worry. Old Leon can get himself out of a predicament better than anybody I know. If he has to talk the Frenchies out of a boat, he’ll do it. He one time got himself sent home for a week for speaking up to a teacher. He didn’t stay no week, though. He marched right back the next day and talked her into letting him back in. Here I’m telling a tale on him.” He laughed.

Can he talk his way out of the flu? she wanted to say. Can he talk his way out of the accidents that happen whenever large groups of men get together for any length of time? Instead, she just smiled and nodded and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Sid.” He assured her it was no bother at all, and seemed disappointed when she said she ought to be getting home. As she pulled the buggy around, she noticed a little patch of daffodils she hadn’t seen before, the first of the season. Surely that was a good sign. But a cool March wind whipped up just as she jounced onto the White Chapel Road, and she felt a shiver through her entire body. Why had she not brought the wool blanket instead of this thin old cotton thing?

By the time she got home, the sun was low in a mackerel sky and the world felt too big. Her hands were stiff in their black riding gloves.

FOR TWO WEEKS
and two days she waited, going to work at the courthouse, coming home in the evenings to Flora, mending clothes, cooking supper, helping Flora clean. They employed only a
houseboy and felt themselves very modern and very industrious, and in these postwar weeks of waiting Mary Bet felt the need to keep herself continuously occupied. She removed everything from the icebox shelves and cleaned out all the compartments; she scrubbed the top of the cast-iron cookstove; she even took a scrub brush to the laundry mangle, which Flora said was the same as washing soap with soap. Why she had to keep herself thus occupied was not something she cared to dwell on, though when on some evenings they went to listen to a neighbor’s Edison gramophone, her mind would drift with the scratchy music to a project left unfinished—the weekly sheets to be boiled for two hours and then ironed the way Essie used to, the walls that really could use washing—and she thought, “I must, I must be prepared.”

She thought: I have been the governor’s constable in Haw County. I have made a boy see the error of his ways and helped bring men to justice for operating illegal stills, and at least for a short time I have seen peace reign over my jurisdiction. I conserved food, grew a victory garden with Flora, gave up meat on Tuesdays and pork on Thursdays, and served my country the best I knew how. Why can I not now feel settled in my own home?

After the fall election, Mary Bet had asked the new sheriff if he intended to keep her on as a clerk. He told her he had given the matter some thought and wondered if she would consider a new position—office manager. “All right,” she said, pleased and proud. The board voted on it and kept her salary the same as it had been as sheriff. “Of course,” Flora reminded her, “that’s not near what your cousin was making, nor the new sheriff either. But I guess it’s better than most women around here.”

One day when Mary Bet came home at dinnertime, Flora told her that a boy had stopped by saying there was a telegram waiting for her down at the depot.

“Why didn’t he bring it himself?” she asked.

“He said Mr. Dalton had to give it to you in person.”

Mary Bet shook her head. “I won’t go pick it up. I don’t want to see any telegram. I have work that needs attending to for the sheriff. I can’t go traipsing down to the station.” She stood in the little vestibule, undecided whether to go back into the eating room or run immediately down to pick up the telegram. She stepped into the parlor and sat on the sofa, her coat and hat still on, her handbag clutched in her lap, and stared at Flora’s sewing machine.

“Let me get my coat,” Flora said. “I’ll come with you.”

She didn’t remember the ride down around the courthouse and south to the station, only the sound of Flora’s voice, saying, “It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”

When they got there, they saw a knot of people standing outside the office talking quietly, and one or two of them waved a greeting. Mary Bet caught bits of conversation. “It’s a shame, with the fighting over, and them just waiting to come home.” “Battery C.” “His family’ll take it hard.” “I believe it was pneumonia.” “I heard ’twas a bad heart, but maybe the pneumonia caused the bad heart.”

Mary Bet looked down the platform as though searching for herself as a young girl at the Hartsoe City station, waiting for her father to come out of the office with the piece of paper saying her sister was dead. She tasted something like iron in her mouth and realized she’d been biting so on her lip that she had drawn blood. She felt Flora take her hand and guide her toward the little office, where she did not want to go. And then they were inside, and Mr. Dalton was standing with a woman Mary Bet knew vaguely—she lived out in the country and Mary Bet could not think of her name. The woman was crying without making a sound, her shoulders rising and falling, her breath coming in quick gulps, and Mr. Dalton in his stationmaster cap and pea-green jacket had his arm around her, patting her shoulder.

He sat the woman in a chair and went over to his desk and found the Western Union telegram bearing the name Mary Bet Hartsoe.
He smiled gravely at her. But that was the way he always smiled, Mary Bet thought. He had a serious demeanor, had maybe never told a joke in his life. He moved quickly, like a little soldier, but he had not gone to war. Hooper had gone, Leon had gone—when neither of them had to. And here was a man, his pants too short for his shoes, who had stayed at home, just to keep a few trains running and deliver bad news.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Flora said.

Mary Bet glanced at it, though she knew what it said. Her eyes were so full she could not make out the words and so she handed it over to Flora, who took it. “If all goes well,” Flora read, “regiment arriving in Raleigh Saturday, March 22. Then home. Love and fond regards, Leon Thomas”

“What?” Mary Bet said. “What does it mean?”

“It means they’re coming home,” Flora said.

Mr. Dalton glanced at the woman sitting in the chair, her gray head bowed, her shoulders stiff, as though she were an animal trying to avoid detection. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

Mary Bet went over to the woman and bent down. “I’m so sorry,” she said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry.” The woman nodded and sniffed, and then Mary Bet went outside onto the platform where Mr. Dalton told them that there was to be a reception and parade in Raleigh. The telegrams had been coming in all morning; Sid Thomas had been in earlier to receive one nearly identical to Mary Bet’s.

The noon sun was bright on the concrete beyond the hard shadow of the metal roof. The air was crisp and new and full of the stirrings of life out in the fields behind the station and the brambles and woods across the track. Mary Bet could feel herself breathing, her lungs filling and the breath going out and her lungs filling again. She glanced back through the window of the station office, but Mr. Dalton was in there now and she could not see the grieving woman.

She folded the telegram, then folded it again. But instead of putting it away, she kept a tight hold on it. “We’ll go home now,” she said to Flora.

THE PARADE IN
Raleigh was the grandest she had ever seen, with four brass bands supported by booming bass drums. She stood with Flora and the Thomas brothers and some others from Williamsboro who had driven over in a caravan, and they waved as the top officers drove slowly past in fine open-top cars. Then came the color guard, flags rippling in the brisk air. And now the soldiers came, marching in their peaked caps and olive-drab jackets past the shops and department stores of Hillsborough Street.

It was Flora who spotted him first. They called out and waved, and he smiled and saluted and marched on with his unit. Mary Bet didn’t know him. He was nearly in the middle of a row, a face that was somewhat familiar, a little less rounded, the deep-set eyes older, more distant. It seemed the strangest thing to wait all this time for his return, and then see him march past until he was indistinguishable from a hundred other uniformed soldiers, as though they were only replicas of men performing a ceremony instead of real men with lives waiting for them at home. She didn’t want to see him there, she just wanted to go home and think about whether she wanted to see him at all. The smells of engine exhaust and horses, the excitement of the crowd on this cool and wonderful day of homecoming was almost more than she could stand. She could feel her heart banging high in her chest with the echoing drums.