Small Town Girl (37 page)

Kate thought maybe they’d tiptoed past all the bad talk and she was thinking about going inside when he began talking again in a wondering tone of voice. “Funny thing that we never noticed him drinking any other time. You said yourself that Graham was surprised when you told him Jay was drunk. He lived with Graham for several months. You’d have thought he’d have noticed if the boy drank like I used to. Everybody in Rosey Corner back then knew I had a drinking problem. Wasn’t a secret from anybody.”

“Only because of the war,” Kate said. “Aunt Hattie said you learned to drink in France.”

“Aunt Hattie might have been right about that, but I could have left it in France. I didn’t have to carry it home with me.”

“Jay hasn’t been to France.”

“But he was thinking about maybe having to go.” He stroked her hair. “That doesn’t really matter now. What matters now is this. Do you love him?”

Kate hesitated, but she saw no need in avoiding an answer with so much truth already in the air between them. “I do.” She touched her hand to her chest. “I feel like there’s a hole inside me that might never go away if I don’t see him again.”

“So why don’t you write him and tell him that?”

“I could write him.” She smoothed out the wrinkles in her housecoat. “But I need more than words on a paper. I have his car.”

Her father didn’t sound surprised. “Your mother was afraid you might be thinking about doing something crazy.”

“Georgia’s not so awfully far away. People drive that far all the time.”

“Not young women. Alone. Young women who’ve never driven anywhere farther than Edgeville.” He sounded very sure. “Not young women who bear my last name.”

Kate had been expecting her mother and father to be against her making the trip across three states. It didn’t matter. She was twenty years old. She could do what she wanted. Even if the thought of it did make her heart keep doing its nervous flutter. “I’m going.” She pushed all the firmness she could into her voice.

He surprised her by laughing. “Of course you are. Nobody has ever talked Katherine Reece Merritt out of doing anything she makes up her mind to do, now have they?”

“Then you’re all right with me driving to Georgia?” She could hardly believe her ears as she twisted around to look at him again.

He was smiling. “I’ve always wanted to go south. For a visit.”

“But—” she started, but he held up a hand to stop her.

“Don’t worry. I’ll go sightseeing or something if the two of you decide two’s company and three’s a crowd.”

“Oh, Daddy.” A blush warmed her cheeks as she gave his arm a shove, but she felt like laughing too. It wouldn’t be nearly as scary with her father riding with her. Even if he didn’t know a thing about cars, he obviously knew a few things about love.

“So pack up what you’ll need in the morning and gas up the car. We’ll leave right after Victoria and Sammy tie the knot.” Suddenly he sounded a little sad again. “I’m losing all my girls.”

“You can never lose us, Daddy.” Kate gave him a hug. “We’ll always be your girls. Especially Tori. She was your baby for too many years before Lorena came to live with us.”

“She’s not much more than a baby now. Way too young for marrying, but these are not normal times.” He blew out a breath. “And when I think about it, she’s not much younger than your mother was when we got married. That too because of war. A few weeks of heaven that kept me going when I stepped into the hell of war. Sammy and Victoria deserve the same chance for happiness. We couldn’t deny them that.”

He kissed her forehead. “I want you to have that chance too, baby. Love is worth chasing.” When he stood up, the swing bounced and Scout scrambled to his feet.

Kate caught her father’s hand. “What if he’s found another girl? Or he could be gone already.”

“Lots of what-ifs and maybes. I mean, the crazy guy is jumping out of airplanes. Anything could happen.” He squeezed her hand again. “But if any of those worrisome maybes have happened, we’ll stare them down together. Then we’ll get back in the car and come on home to do whatever we can here to win this war. Just be ready tomorrow.”

Kate and Sammy’s little brother, Eugene, stood up with Tori and Sammy in front of the preacher at one o’clock on Saturday. Mike couldn’t get leave and so there was a gap in their family circle as they celebrated with Tori. Kate could imagine Evie sitting lonesome in the rooms Mike had rented for her, staring out her east window, if she had one, and wishing with all her might she could be in Rosey Corner with them. She’d talked to Kate and Tori on the phone at the store that morning and told Kate to give Tori double hugs for both of them.

Tori looked so young but so beautiful in the simple cream-colored dress Mama had made for her. Her straight black hair fell like silk down her back and her green eyes shone with expectant love. She hadn’t wanted a big affair like Evie’s. She’d even turned down the idea of cake at Aunt Hattie’s house. She just wanted to say the marrying words in front of their friends and families at the church and be off with Sammy to a weekend at Cumberland Falls without wasting a minute of her time as Mrs. Sammy Harper before the war parted them.

After the ceremony, everybody hugged and shed a few tears and hugged again. Then they waved the newlyweds off from the church. A half hour later, Kate stowed a box of food and a jug of water in the backseat of Jay’s car, and everybody went through another round of hugs.

Lorena clung to her for a long minute. “You will come back, won’t you, Kate?”

“I’ll always come back, sweetheart.” Kate leaned down to look directly into Lorena’s face. “You know that. I’m your forever sister.”

Lorena sniffed a little. “You’re my angel sister. And don’t say you aren’t.” Her face turned fierce.

“Oh, sweetheart.” After grabbing her close in a hug, Kate
pushed Lorena back to kiss her nose. Then she touched Lorena’s dress over her heart. “You remember, no matter what, I’m right there with you whether you can see me or not.”

“I know.”

“You take care of Mama and Scout until I get back.”

“I will,” Lorena promised.

They left the two of them standing on the porch, looking as lonesome as she had imagined Evie earlier. Kate’s father leaned out the passenger-side window and waved until they couldn’t see the house any longer. Kate kept her eyes on the road. A smile soaked through her when she saw Aunt Hattie on the side of the road walking toward their house. The little black woman always knew when she was needed.

Graham was out in front of the blacksmith shop waiting to wave at them as they passed by. Beside him, Poe raised his head and barked once at the car. Then on the south side of Rosey Corner, Fern was standing by the road. She didn’t wave at them, but Kate thought she saw a smile slip across the woman’s face.

I
t was a bad break. In more ways than one. The doctors had to operate on Jay’s ankle and lower leg to put it all back together.

“What about jumping again?” That was Jay’s first question for the doctor after the anesthesia wore off.

“According to how high you want to jump.” The doctor smiled at his own joke without looking up from the chart he was holding.

If Jay hadn’t been so doped up, he’d have popped the man right in the nose. But then again, it was never a good idea to antagonize the person holding the scalpel or the hypodermic needle. He took a breath and tried to marshal his thoughts. “Out of airplanes. I jump out of airplanes.”

“You paratroopers are all nuts.” The doctor put down the chart and stuck his stethoscope in his ears to listen to Jay’s chest. After a minute he sat back, pulled the ear pieces loose, and tucked the end of the stethoscope in the chest pocket of his scrubs. “Healthy nuts, by and large, at least until you land on a rock or in a tree.”

“The luck of the drop,” Jay said.

“I’m afraid you drew the short straw this time, soldier. I’m not saying you’ll never jump out of airplanes again, but
I am saying you aren’t going to be doing any jumping at all for several weeks. Bones take awhile to heal.” The doctor laughed at the look on Jay’s face. “Don’t worry. You won’t miss the war. Uncle Sam will still want you as long as you can march and carry a gun. I am sure you’ll be able to do that soon enough.”

That had been almost a week ago. A week in the hospital learning to use crutches while his buddies were jumping out of airplanes. At night. Then practice was over. Orders came through for their unit. The whole bunch of them loaded on a train and headed north to climb aboard a troopship. Leaving Jay behind. It seemed he couldn’t even do Army right.

The doctor said Jay could have leave to go home while his ankle and leg were healing, but Jay didn’t have anywhere to go. No home but Rosey Corner and that was only in his dreams. Dreams he thought about trying to make real by imagining over and over picking up the phone and calling Merritt’s Dry Goods Store. He could almost hear Kate’s voice in his ear saying hello, but that wouldn’t let him see her. The dream got better when he considered hobbling down to the train station to buy a ticket for Rosey Corner. He couldn’t actually do that. The train didn’t stop in Rosey Corner, but it did stop in Edgeville. He could walk to Rosey Corner from Edgeville—even with crutches. Heck, he could run from there.

A chaplain came to pray over Jay’s ankle. Jay didn’t mind. It was good to hear an expert pray. While he’d heard dozens, more like hundreds, of prayers in his years of going to church with his aunt and uncle and then at Rosey Corner too, that was before they meant anything to him. Jay hadn’t exactly figured out what had happened to him when he made that last jump, but he did know whatever it was, it stuck. In spite of the broken ankle.

Before, whenever he’d been ready to step up closer to believing in the Lord and something bad happened, he’d thought it
proved all that religion stuff didn’t mean anything. A person prayed, that person expected something good to happen. He didn’t expect to get punched in the gut and go down in a heap. He’d always thought what a joke that was and simply turned his back on the feeling he might need something the church had to offer.

Maybe that had been his mistake. Thinking the church had the answers when he should have been going straight to the source the whole time. Straight to the Bible.
Thou art there
. High or low. And he had been there. Jay had felt a presence as he drifted through the night. The Lord had landed on the ground with him, shaking his head and smiling along with Jay at the irony of life. Here Jay was actually believing for the first time ever and there hadn’t been anything but a rock to land on. Or maybe the Lord was smiling because it took jumping out of airplanes to blow open the doors of Jay’s heart.

Chaplain Wilson said there wasn’t anything wrong with questions. “That doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer you understand. God’s ways are not man’s ways. Sometimes things can’t be understood with the head, but only known in the heart. That’s what faith is.”

The man put his hand flat over his heart. He looked even older than Sarge, with a balding head and deep wrinkles around light blue eyes that watched Jay with easy kindness. He told Jay he’d fought in the World War. Said he heard the call to preach in the trenches over there and had been at it one way or another ever since. After Pearl Harbor, he got back in uniform as a chaplain. Nothing Jay said seemed to upset him, so Jay didn’t see any reason not to be honest.

“I’ve never had much faith in anything,” Jay said. “At least not till this year.”

“What happened this year?” The chaplain leaned a little closer to Jay’s bed as though he didn’t want to miss a word of whatever he was going to say.

“You mean besides feeling somebody floating down through the air with me?” Jay raised his eyebrows at the man. That was certainly a happening.

“I’m thinking something must have softened your heart so that the Lord could finally get your attention.” One corner of the man’s mouth turned up. “Something even more than jumping out of an airplane.”

“Could be.” Jay shifted his position in the bed to try to ease the pain in his leg. He remembered how easy it was to run down the road with Birdie and Kate after the wedding. Funny how Kate had grabbed his eyes that day and not let go. He’d known even then that he’d never met any other girl quite like her.

“You want to tell me about it?” Chaplain Wilson asked.

Jay blew out a long breath. “I guess it was really last year. My buddy, who happens to be a preacher too, by the way.” He looked over at the chaplain. “Anyway, he got married last September.”

“And?” Chaplain Wilson frowned a little, trying to make sense of what Jay was telling him.

“And his bride had a sister.”

“I see.” The chaplain leaned back in his chair with a smile. “A very pretty sister, I take it.”

“An angel of a sister.” Jay let his eyes drift to the window as Kate’s face floated up in his memory. Another thing he hadn’t been able to do right. Love.

“So what happened?”

“So what happened is that I didn’t head on to Chicago the way I intended after my buddy got hitched. Instead I stayed in Rosey Corner. I could have stayed there forever, I think.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Wars mess things up. People mess things up.” Jay stared down at the cast on his leg. “I mess things up. I always mess things up.”

The chaplain looked down at Jay’s cast too. “Rocks can pop up in the worst places.”

“They can for a fact.” Jay tapped the hard plaster of his cast.

“But sometimes rocks can be shoved out of our paths to clear the way.” Chaplain Wilson leaned forward again to look straight at Jay with kind eyes.

“Some of the rocks in my path are more like boulders.” Jay didn’t shy away from his eyes. “Way too big to budge.”

The chaplain smiled slightly. “No rock’s too big for the Rock of Ages.” He touched Jay’s arm. “Together, we’ll pray that he’ll make gravel out of the rocks in your path to happiness.”

“Should a man even expect happiness with a war going on?” Jay asked.

The chaplain paused a moment, considering Jay’s question. “I think so. Doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily find it. But war’s bad enough by itself without us giving up all hope of happiness.” The chaplain stood up. “We serve a God of hope. For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? That’s in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians and every believer knows the answer. Not what, but who. The Lord, a friend closer than a brother and ever with us.”

“If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”

“Scripture.” Chaplain Wilson looked a little surprised. “Psalm. I know that one. ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.’ You hang on to that, son, and you’ll be fine.”

He started away, but then turned back to say, “I’ll pray for you and your girl.”

Jay watched him move on to another soldier in another bed. If only he could claim Kate as his girl. Was that something
it was all right to pray? For Kate to be his girl? He wanted to believe there was a chance for them to dance in the moonlight again.

Kate’s father didn’t like to drive, but Kate loved it. At the beginning when she’d driven out of Rosey Corner and then on straight through Edgeville and kept going, her hands were sweaty on the steering wheel. Everything from there on was new territory. Places she’d never been. The whole world spread out in front of her alongside the strip of road she was following south.

She was thankful for her father in the passenger’s seat. They didn’t talk much about where they were going or why. Daddy studied the map and fretted some about Mama and Lorena at home. They talked about Tori and Sammy and Evie and Mike. And Kate kept driving.

Before they got out of Kentucky, they had a flat tire, but Kate’s father had brought along a patching kit and air pump. On Sunday morning, they picked up a newspaper after spending the night just over the border in Tennessee. Her father took the wheel some then, and whoever wasn’t driving read the news aloud if the scenery alongside the road didn’t grab their eyes. That didn’t happen often as they passed through towns and by farms and trees. Some of it looked the same as Rosey Corner, but a lot of it didn’t. Even the rocks alongside the road looked different.

Kate made a wrong turn in Knoxville, but after winding around with an eye to the south, they found their road again. The car overheated in the Tennessee mountains and they had to stop a couple of times to let the engine cool. Her father said at least the mountain air was refreshing. Every time the gas gauge showed half empty, they started watching for a place to fill up. When all the food they brought with them
was gone, they stopped at a country store something like their own store back home to get sandwiches and drinks.

In Georgia, the dirt went from brown to almost red, as though the hotter sun had burnt it. Her father laughed at her amazement that dirt could look so different, but she thought he was sharing some of the same surprise.

As they got closer to Fort Benning, Kate became quiet. Through all the miles before, it had been a kind of adventure, like Phileas Fogg going around the world, but now the end was in sight. Before the sun went down, she might see Jay. Her chest began to feel tight and her heart did a few stutter beats. She’d thought she had it all planned out. What she would say. What she hoped he would say back to her. But now she moistened her lips as she drove and wondered if she’d be able to say anything.

Her father reached over and touched her shoulder. “You okay, baby?”

Kate glanced over at him. “What if he—”

Her father held his hand up to stop her words. “No what-ifs right now. Right now we just have to worry about finding him. We’ll worry about those what-ifs if they happen.”

“But what if they do? Maybe I should have never come.” She felt a little queasy.

“No second-guessing now. Not after we’ve driven all this way.” He patted her shoulder. “Besides, I don’t think you’ve got any worries. I saw the way the boy looked at you. A look straight from his heart. That kind of feeling doesn’t melt away. Trust me.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Kate managed to smile over at him, but her heart kept trying to jump up in her throat. Maybe she should have prayed this whole thing through a little better before she drove across three states chasing after Jay. Maybe she should have written Evie to see what she thought. Maybe a thousand things. But then the Bible verse she’d told Jay
slipped into her mind.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear
.

She couldn’t claim perfection, but she could claim love. And she could claim prayer. First, she could pray that she would find Jay, then that he would be glad to see her, and last that whatever first words came out of her mouth would make sense.

At the visitors’ entrance they were directed to the headquarters. Kate’s father leaned forward in the car seat and kept peering out the window as if he couldn’t see enough. Being on the base was bringing back memories of his training years ago. Some good memories, he said. More hard ones. When he got out of the car, he stood a little straighter, as if the soldier in him was waking up.