Almost Home

by Valerie Fraser Luesse

  “I feel better, so much better, since I laid my burdens down . . .”

  Daisy looked up at Reed. “I think I’ve been homesick for God.”

  He smiled at her, lifted her hand, and kissed it. “I follow that.”

  Daisy became completely mesmerized by the music, but the war had made Reed perpetually vigilant. Part of him was always keeping watch. This time he sensed it before he saw it—a peculiar movement in the aisle.

  “Daisy, look.” He pointed to an unaccompanied white child, probably nine or ten years old, walking slowly down the aisle toward the stage. She had fair skin and curly blonde hair that flowed all the way down to her waist. Her cotton dress, which reached to her ankles, was plain but brilliant white. No adult came after her.

  With every few steps she walked, another row of heads turned on either side of her, but she kept looking straight ahead, like a bride making her way to the altar to meet her intended. The choir kept on singing, the worshipers clapping and shouting, as the child reached the foot of the stage and stood there, looking up at the singers. Slowly she raised one hand above her head, just as Reed had seen adults do in a Pentecostal church he’d once visited with a high school buddy in north Alabama.

  “If you don’t believe I’ve been redeemed . . . God’s gonna trouble the water . . . Just follow me down to Jordan’s stream . . . God’s gonna trouble the water . . .”

  “Forgimme, sir, but is that yo’ baby girl down front?”

  Reed and Daisy turned to see an elderly colored man with white hair and a bright yellow tie standing behind them with his hat in his hands.

  “No, sir, we don’t know her,” Reed answered. “She came from somewhere outside. We watched her walk all the way down the aisle.”

  “Well, would you and Mrs. mind goin’ down there and fetchin’ her?”

  “But we don’t know who she is,” Daisy said.

  “Yes’m, I understand. But whoever she be, if her folks was to catch her in here with us or see one o’ us carryin’ her out, well . . .”

  “We’ll see if we can find her parents,” Reed said.

  The old man smiled. “You kind, sir, ma’am.” With that, he left them and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Want me to do it?” Reed asked Daisy.

  She shook her head. “I’ll go with you.”

  Reed held Daisy’s hand as the two of them walked down the aisle together, passing row after row of curious faces turning to see what the only white people in the tent were about to do. They knelt down on either side of the child, who still had her hand outstretched. Her face was upturned, her eyes closed. She calmly opened them—eyes the color of aquamarines—when Daisy put an arm around her.

  “Honey, are you lost?”

  The little girl turned her back to the stage and looked from Reed to Daisy. Then she raised her arms and laid a hand on each of their foreheads. Reed felt a wave of warmth all through his body and thought he might faint. He saw Daisy sway slightly on her knees and sit back on the grass as a shout went up from the crowd. Then the child retraced her steps in an unhurried walk back up the aisle and out of the tent as the singers carried on.

  “Every time I feel the Spirit movin’ in my heart, I will pray. Every time I feel the Spirit . . .”

  Reed helped Daisy stand and get her balance. The two of them held on to each other as they walked up the aisle and out into the sunlight, then stopped to breathe in the fresh air just beyond the tent.

  Daisy was feverishly flapping the Liberty National fan she had held on to. “There she is.”

  She pointed to the child, now holding the hand of a woman who looked to be about forty. The woman was wearing a faded purple gingham dress with a white collar. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck.

  “Ma’am, is that your little girl?” Reed asked as he and Daisy approached them.

  The woman put a protective arm around the child. “Yessir. She done something wrong?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. It’s just that we saw her come into the tent by herself and wanted to make sure she got back with her family.”

  The woman smiled. “Yessir, she did. My Susanna loves her a camp meetin’. Never could keep her away from them tents.”

  Susanna and her mother turned to walk away, but after a few steps they both stopped, looking first at each other, then back at Reed and Daisy. Susanna tugged at her mother’s hand. “Go on and tell ’em, Mama. That’s how come I brung ’em to you.”

  The woman let go of Susanna’s hand and returned to Reed and Daisy. Staring at them, she frowned and said, “Well, ain’t that peculiar.”

  “What?” Daisy asked.

  “It’s the same,” Susanna’s mother said.

  Reed and Daisy looked at each other. “What’s the same, ma’am?” he asked.

  “The message. You’re both s’posed to get the same one: ‘Turn a-loose.’ I ain’t never seen that happen before.”

  With that, she returned to her daughter, and the two of them crossed the park to a sidewalk, where they stepped onto a streetcar and disappeared into the city.

  “Let’s find some shade,” Reed said, showing Daisy to a park bench under a sprawling oak. She flapped the Liberty National fan near his face to help him cool off.

  They sat together, taking more deep breaths and fanning, before he said, “Did you feel a warm—I don’t know—wave, maybe, come over you when Susanna touched you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And it was kinda peaceful?”

  “That was strange, Reed. That was real strange. But it was movin’ too.”

  He nodded.

  “And it was comfortin’.”

  “What do you make of it, Daisy—what her mama said: ‘Turn loose’?”

  Daisy thought it over. “I think the Lord’s done sent my dead husband to talk to us, and now we’ve seen a country prophet in downtown Birmingham. I hope there ain’t no cast iron in heaven, ’cause if there is, I reckon the Almighty’s ’bout ready to whack us upside the head with a skillet. He’s tellin’ us we gotta turn loose of our old hurts, Reed. I see it now. They ain’t holdin’ on to us. We’re holdin’ on to them.”

  “But we’ve been tryin’.”

  “I know, but we owe it to Charlie and Deacon to try harder. I see that now too. No matter what troubles you and me have got, we’re alive. We’re here on this earth, and we’re meant to make the most of it. Charlie and Deacon are fine. They’re happy where they are. And no matter how bad we feel about their time here gettin’ cut short, their dyin’ wasn’t our doin’. We’ve been throwin’ time away, Reed. And time’s a gift. We oughta be usin’ every minute we’ve got.” Daisy reached down and picked a dandelion from the grass. “Count o’ three?”

  Reed nodded and smiled. “Count o’ three.”

  “One. Two. Three.”

  They blew on the dandelion, sending its feathery shower into the breeze and leaving only the bare stem, which Daisy threw over her shoulder. Reed leaned over and kissed her.

  “Do you consider this our first date?” she asked.

  “I reckon. Why?”

  “Well, from what I understand, most fellas take a girl to the movies or out to dinner on their first date. You, on the other hand, went with a fancy lunch, a new dress, and a Pentecostal religious experience.”

  They both broke into laughter.

  “I’ll try to tone it down next time,” Reed said.

  “I don’t know what just happened,” Daisy said. “But the weird thing is . . . I feel better. I feel like everything’s gonna be okay—maybe not right away, but somewhere down the road.”

  “Me too.”

  “Now, take me home before the angel Gabriel steps offa the next streetcar.”

  CHAPTER

  thirty-eight

  Once again Reed was staring at the ceiling, a million thoughts racing through his head. He had stretched out on the twin bed on his porch, hoping the night air would put him to sleep. But his mind was a whirligig.

&nb
sp; He was in love with Daisy. No. He was crazy in love with Daisy. If things kept going the way he hoped, he owed it to her to decide, once and for all, how he would provide for her. The truth was that Reed had come to believe life was far too short and precious to waste it working a job just for money. What he wanted was a purpose, a life’s work that meant something.

  That wasn’t the only puzzle he was struggling to sort out. He kept hearing noises in the dark hours and could never be sure if they were real or the shadows of a nightmare, but he had finally swallowed his pride and confided in Si, just in case whoever dropped that gas can was still up to no good.

  He lay perfectly still and listened. There it was again. Something off. Something outside that didn’t belong there, like a copperhead in the green beans. And this time there was the smell—far too familiar—of something burning.

  Reed got up, stepped into the backyard, and stared in disbelief at the skating rink, oddly glowing from the inside. Was it real? Of course it was real.

  “Fire!” He grabbed the quickest thing he could find to put on—the old Army fatigues he had worn earlier to help Dolly in her garden—then ran shirtless and barefoot through the house, waking everybody up. Dolly, in her housecoat and slippers, began ringing the dinner bell on her front lawn to try to rouse the neighbors. Reed threw on his sneakers and sprinted to Si’s toolshed.

  Soon a crowd—most of them still wearing their nightgowns and pajamas—had formed two human chains, buckets in hand, from the lake to each end of the skating rink. If they could’ve rigged up some hoses, Si’s pump in the creek would’ve been far more effective in extinguishing the fire, but there was no time for that. So everybody passed bucket after bucket of water as fast as they could from the lake to the rink. Again Reed smelled gasoline and could only hope that whoever did this only used it to start the fire. If they had covered the rink with fuel, no amount of water would put it out.

  He had grabbed a couple of shovels and now handed one to Jesse. “We need to dig a fire line to protect the house!” he shouted over the crowd. “The creek’ll stop it if it heads west.”

  The two of them began deepening the shallow trench that ran parallel to the road between Dolly’s house and the blazing skating rink. Spotting a couple of teenagers who also had brought shovels, Reed got them started digging on the south side of the rink. Between the lake, the creek, and the trenches, they should be able to keep the fire contained so that none of the families on the loop lost their homes.

  Jesse and Reed were both coughing from the smoke, their faces darkening with soot as the fire burned on. With every shovel of dirt he lifted, Reed saw flashes of foxholes and explosions and charred arms and legs, yet he kept digging, as if each time he pierced the ground with that metal blade, he might slay another war demon.

  Daisy came running up the road and joined Anna on the boardwalk. The two of them took up spots at the far end of the lake and helped pass buckets of water to the flaming rink. On and on the community battled the flames, until they heard a loud pop and then a crash as the roof of the skating rink started caving in, and the few men inside came running out. A collective cry went up from the crowd as the building folded into a heap.

  “Si!” Dolly was calling. “Si, where are you?” Reed could hear the panic in her voice.

  “Dolly!” Si came staggering out of the smoke and found his wife standing on the boardwalk. Reed looked up to see them collapse into each other, holding on for dear life as their hope for future prosperity turned to cinders.

  CHAPTER

  thirty-nine

  It was almost four in the morning before Dolly and Si, with their boarders and neighbors, reduced the raging fire to smoldering embers. They had managed to get enough water on the boardwalk and the flooring of the rink’s side porch to save them so the lake could reopen, but the rink and everything in it were gone.

  As the crowd slowly dispersed, Reed and Jesse tossed their shovels to the ground and lay down on Dolly’s lawn to catch their breath. They were covered with soot, both of them coughing from all the smoke.

  “Man,” Jesse said as he rubbed his eyes. “How do you ever get over something like this?”

  “Don’t know,” Reed said. “Never owned anything.”

  “Me and Anna lost a lot, but we’ve still got a home and a farm. I don’t know how the two of us could get back up if we had to watch our house and barn go up in flames.”

  “You’d work together just like Si and Dolly. You two would make it somehow.”

  “Hope I never have to find out. Want to grab some clean clothes and head for the slough?”

  “I’ll be along in a little bit. Thanks for your help.”

  Reed sat up and looked around as Anna followed Jesse to the house. Daisy came and sat down next to him, and the two of them watched in silence as neighbors stumbled out of the smoke and solemnly made their way home. The loop girls, all with curlers in their hair, were wearing raincoats over their nightgowns. An elderly man, no doubt frightened beyond thinking when he heard the alarm bell, had put on his Sunday hat with his pajamas and slippers.

  After everyone was gone, Reed said, “I don’t feel like bein’ around everybody just now. Wanna walk with me over to the lake?”

  He helped Daisy up and held her hand as they crossed the road to the lake. Daisy sat down on the steps that led into the water as Reed took off his shoes and went in. Standing chest high in the lake, he washed away all the soot and smoke that covered him from the waist up.

  Once he had cleaned away all the grit from the fire, he started wading back to Daisy. He was in knee-deep water when he realized that she was looking at him the same way she had when they first met on the creek bank—studying him as if she were trying to figure something out.

  “What?” he said.

  She pointed to his fatigues. “You look like a soldier. Is that how you looked in the Army?”

  He wasn’t sure what to say. “I was . . . never this clean in the Army.”

  Daisy waded into the water with him. She slowly ran her hand over a scar just above his collarbone and another on his shoulder. “I saw these before . . . that first time we went swimmin’ at the slough. I was afraid to ask you then . . . Who did this to you, Reed?”

  She looked like she was about to cry, as if she could feel the painful wounds that had left their mark.

  “They’re just scars, Daisy. They can’t hurt me anymore.”

  He pulled her hand away from his shoulder and kissed her palm, then put his arms around her and held her close. They were standing there together in the moonlit lake when he said, “I wanna marry you.”

  And she answered softly, “Okay.”

  CHAPTER

  forty

  Anna and Jesse came into the kitchen, where everyone had gathered, just in time to hear Evelyn declare it “beyond imaginable” for Dolly to prepare a full breakfast and serve everyone in the dining room, especially since it was Saturday and none of the men had to go to work.

  “But I know ever’body’s hungry,” Dolly objected as she slid a pan of biscuits into the oven, “and I think I need somethin’ to do with my hands.”

  “Well then, we can serve ourselves off the stove and eat in here,” Evelyn said, “rather than have you bothered with all those serving pieces.”

  “Y’all sure that would be alright?”

  “Absolutely,” Joe said as the others agreed.

  “If you trust me with the bacon and eggs, I can do that while you work your magic on the sausage gravy,” Anna said.

  “Thank you, honey.”

  Dolly and her boarders tried to calm themselves with their usual morning chatter, but Si remained silent, staring into his coffee cup at the end of the table.

  Reed came into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “Where’s Daisy?” Anna asked him.

  “She went home to clean up.”

  “Joe, I don’t know where you came by this bandage to brace my arthritic wrist, but it has worked wonders,” Harry
said.

  “The infirmary nurse at the plant is sweet on him,” Jesse said.

  “Watch and learn, Jesse, watch and learn,” Joe said, which made everybody laugh, except for Si, who kept staring into his cup.

  Jesse winked at Joe. “Hey, Joe, did you notice anything peculiar at the lake when we came back from the slough?”

  “No, nothin’ in particular,” Joe said. “Just your typical lovebirds, standin’ in the middle o’ the lake and smoochin’ like there was no tomorrow.’

  Reed threw a napkin at Jesse.

  The boarders laughed as Jesse kept on. “Can I be the best man?”

  Reed smiled and shook his head. “I’m fixin’ to make you a dead man.”

  Dolly came over and kissed Reed on the cheek. “We couldn’t be happier for you, honey.”

  Evelyn helped Dolly and Anna carry loaded plates to the table. The room got quiet as everybody ate, and the quiet brought a sobering reminder of what had just happened and why they were all gathered in the kitchen instead of Dolly’s dining room.

  Finally, Si spoke. “I know who did this.”

  “What, Si?” Dolly asked.

  “It was them Clanahans that burned us out. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “But how do you know they’re anywhere around here?” Dolly asked.

  “I just know it was them. There was gas on that fire. We ain’t got no other enemies would wanna put us out o’ business. And there ain’t no kids around here mean enough to do something like that for a prank—they all enjoy the rink too much. I guarantee you them sorry Reno people did this. I’m gonna make ’em pay for it too.”

  Dolly sat down next to him. “Si, you know what can happen when you lose your temper. You’ve worked real hard on that, and I’m so proud o’ you. Please promise me you won’t do anything till you’ve cooled off and thought it through.”

  “I don’t know about that, Dolly.”

  She reached out and laid her hand over his. “Please, Si. Bad things come in clusters, remember? We got to be careful.”

  Dolly was obviously frightened. No doubt Si could see it. He sighed and kissed his wife’s hand. “You sit right there and let me get you some coffee for a change.”