Small Town Girl

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy!” Where some children got stage fright and mumbled when they saw people in the pews, Lorena loved performing. Her voice rang out strong. She had good news to tell.

  Bombs falling all over the world didn’t change the truth of that joyful news of a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. After the play, they all sang carols and then ended the service by praying fervently for the young men going off to war.

  On Christmas Day, their table was still loaded down with good food in spite of some grocery items being in short supply. Kate didn’t hear anybody complain about the shortages at the store. Doing without became a badge of patriotism. If they had to give up some things they’d once thought necessary, then they’d find other ways. Hadn’t they just come through the Depression? They knew how to do without. Besides, those kinds of things were a lot easier to give up than their sons and husbands and brothers. And preachers.

  Mike cut his sermon short on the third Sunday in January to break the news to his church that he was enlisting. “It’s my duty to step up and do my part for my country.” He looked grim as he gripped the sides of the pulpit. A grimness that was reflected back to him from the pews.

  With tears making trails through the powder on her cheeks, Evie gripped Kate’s hand on one side and their mother’s hand on the other. All over the church, others were crying with her, but not Kate. Kate was drained of tears. She’d spilled them all in the deep of the night for Jay. Now listening to Mike say he too was joining the Army, her sorrow went beyond tears. How could they expect a preacher to become a soldier?

  As if he heard her unspoken question, he went on. “The Army needs chaplains. I’ll go through the same training as any soldier, but then I’ll be assigned to a unit to help with the spiritual needs of the fighting men. I’ll be marching with them, fighting with them if I have to, as we push back the enemy.” His jaw tightened and his voice rose a bit as though he were pounding home the point of a sermon. “Our cause is just. The Lord will be with us.”

  He stared down at the pulpit a long moment. At last he looked up and went on in a softer voice. “Your job, your sacred duty here at Rosey Corner Baptist Church, is to lift me up in your prayers so that I will be empowered to comfort and encourage the men on the front lines. I’ll be writing back to you every week to let you know how much your prayers are needed. I might not be able to tell you details of where I am or who I’m with, but I know you will gather to faithfully pray for the men I’ll be shepherding through this man-made hell on earth. The Lord will know the needs and he will hear and bless your prayers.”

  He paused and looked around the church. “Some of you have already been touched personally by the hardship of war.” His eyes touched on Carl Noland’s parents in the second row from the front. “I want you to continue to lift up one another to the mercies of the Lord and to remember to pray fervently for the healing of one of our own. The last letter from Carl’s wife says she expects him to be brought back to a hospital in California very soon where he will continue to get treatment for the severe wounds he suffered at Pearl Harbor. He needs your prayers. So do all the wounded and their families and the families of those men who gave their lives in that battle and the battles since. Never stop believing in the power of prayer.”

  Mrs. Noland began to sob and Mr. Noland put his arm around her. Evie squeezed Kate’s hand even tighter, but at least she wasn’t dissolving into a puddle of tears. She was being braver than Kate would have ever thought possible. Crying silent tears. She even managed to curl up the corners of her mouth in a sorrowful smile when Mike settled his eyes on her.

  He didn’t try to veil his obvious love as he went on. “And I do covet your prayers for my wife as she faces our separation with courage, as so many others are doing all across our great nation. We will conquer the tyrants tearing our world apart. We will win, but as President Roosevelt continues to remind us, it could be a long fight.”

  He turned his eyes back to his congregation as his voice strengthened. “Long or short, at whatever cost, we must stay steadfast in our resolve to defeat the evil threatening us. With your prayers and the prayers of all Americans, we will be victorious and bring peace back to our country and the world.”

  He stared out at them, demanding their commitment to the Lord and to their country. “Let us pray together for victory.”

  He bent his head and the church was silent except for a few muffled sobs. Somehow the sound of tears only made the silence that much more profound.

  Evie didn’t bend her head, but kept her eyes locked on Mike as though gathering in the sight of him as much as possible while she still could. Kate understood what she was feeling. But at least she was sending Mike off to war with love. At least she hadn’t slammed the door on that love the way Kate had.

  Every morning when Kate got up, she thought maybe she would begin to forget. That the ache in her heart would be less. Time was supposed to heal all wounds. Everybody said that. Not to her. She didn’t talk about the pain in her heart. She pretended to be fine. She smiled as much as anybody else. The human spirit demanded smiles even in the darkest of times.

  But her mother knew. Lorena knew. Even Evie knew. And of course, Graham knew. They looked at her with sympathetic eyes, but they didn’t talk about it. What good would that do? Even if she did want to write Jay to see if they could find a new beginning, she couldn’t. She had no idea where he was. He didn’t write. Not even to Lorena.

  Every day Lorena raced for the mailbox as soon as she got home. Even after weeks went by without a word from Jay, she didn’t give up hope of one day finding a letter from him there. If Kate was with her when she looked in the box, she’d stare up at her with a defiant set to her chin and say, “He will write. When he can. I know he will.”

  And so the coldest days of winter passed. Mike left and Evie found another Army wife to share her apartment. Reverend Winston, an older preacher Mike had met in Frankfort, came to fill the pulpit at the church until Mike returned. He lacked Mike’s fire and humor, but they had church. They sent up concentrated prayers. For Mike. For Carl, who, the news came in, had lost his left leg at Pearl Harbor. He was rehabilitating in California with the help of the woman he married out there.

  “I saw a picture of her,” Alice Wilcher said one day in late March when she came in the store. “The woman, I can’t remember her name. It’s Juanita or Solina or something like that. Anyway, whatever her name is, she said Carl asked her to send her picture to his mother. Mrs. Noland showed it to me because she knew I used to write to Carl when he first joined up.”

  Kate mumbled something to let Alice know she was listening as she filled a rack with packets of garden seed that had just come in. Radishes, cucumbers, melons. She and Alice were alone in the store. Mama had left early to see about Tori, who was in bed with a bad cough. Lorena had been by the store after school, but she’d gone home to gather the eggs and feed the chickens before dark. It was a chilly, gray day with clouds blowing past that didn’t seem to know whether to rain or spit snow. Kate had been hoping Graham would stop by, but he and Poe must be staying in by the stove. Nobody was coming out.

  Nobody but Alice, who needed no encouragement to keep talking. Alice laughed a little. “She’s always saying how she wished Carl had fallen for me. Poor woman. I never had the first bit of romantic interest in Carl, but no use letting her know that. She likes to tell me how much better I would have been for him. A Rosey Corner girl and not some foreign-looking girl out in California.”

  “Is she foreign looking?” Kate asked, not because she cared, but because it was something to say. Alice was different now when she came in the store. She still liked to gossip, but the war had changed her. The war had changed everybody. Helped them focus on what was important instead of what wasn’t.

  “Hard to tell much about what she looked like, except she did have real dark-looking hair down around her shoulders.”

  “Sounds pretty.” Kate didn’t wan
t to talk about Carl. She didn’t really want to talk about anybody. She just wanted to know what to do next. To have a purpose. To do something to make a difference.

  “Well, she must not be Japanese or they’d be rounding her up to ship off to those internment camps with all the others out there on the coast. You read about that in the papers, didn’t you?” Alice leaned on the counter. “How many did they say?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “I can’t even imagine that many people. How many of us are there here in Rosey Corner? A hundred maybe.”

  “I don’t know.” Kate rearranged some of the packets of seeds. Carrots, squash, marigolds. The onion sets, corn, and bean seeds were in buckets in front of the rack with a measuring cup and paper sacks for people to buy however much they needed. She put her hand down in the pole beans and felt their silky smoothness. She let the beans slide off her hand and reached to straighten some cans of peaches on the shelf behind the rack.

  Somebody had come in the store last week talking about how they’d heard canned food might be rationed soon. Because of the metal. Already manufacture of new cars had been banned with those factories now being readied to turn out tanks and airplanes and guns. Women were lining up for jobs at some of those northern factories. Maybe that was what she should do. Get a job building planes or making parachutes. There was a parachute factory right up the road in Lexington.

  “We ought to know that,” Alice said. “At least somebody should.”

  Kate shrugged a little. “Aunt Hattie might know, or maybe Graham.”

  Alice looked down and fiddled with her pocketbook catch. “Graham ever hear from Jay Tanner?”

  Kate held in a sigh. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about Jay to Alice Wilcher. “Not that he’s told me.”

  “He’d tell you.” Alice pulled a handkerchief out of her pocketbook to dab at her nose. Not a lady’s handkerchief, but a man’s. She glanced around as though to make sure they were alone in the store. “What happened with you and Jay? I thought you were a couple. Then he just up and left.”

  “He joined the Army.”

  “Lots of men are joining the Army, but they get married or engaged first. Just think about Carl. When you threw him over, he went straight out to California and found a wife. And then there’s Victoria. She claims she and Sammy are getting married the minute school’s out.”

  “Sammy is bound and determined to enlist.” Kate’s throat tightened at the thought of him going to the war. That was even worse than Mike leaving. Sammy was just a kid. Barely eighteen. She could hardly bear to think about it.

  She did think about pretending she needed to go to the toilet in hopes Alice would go on home, but her mother had left Kate in charge of the store. Alice was a customer, even if she hadn’t laid the first thing on the counter to buy.

  “That’s what Victoria told me. Funny how her and Sammy have known forever they want to get married. Doesn’t happen like that for everybody, does it?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Carl wanted you to marry him.”

  “He thought he did.” Kate pulled an old towel out from under the counter and began dusting empty spots on the shelves.

  “What about Jay Tanner? Did he ever ask you to marry him?” Alice kept her eyes on the handkerchief as she folded it back into a square, matching the sides and corners precisely.

  When Kate’s lips turned up, she was so surprised to be smiling that she answered without proper thought. “He used to ask me to elope almost every time we were together. I guess that might count.”

  “But you didn’t.” Alice peeked up at her and then went back to work on her handkerchief.

  “Obviously, since here I am.” Kate put down her cleaning rag and stared out the window instead of looking at Alice. “Maybe I should have.” What in the world was wrong with her? Saying something like that to Alice Wilcher. Everybody in Rosey Corner would know Kate was pining after Jay Tanner now. Alice wasn’t a secret keeper.

  “I would have,” Alice said. “If he’d asked me, I’d have been in his car in nothing flat.”

  Kate looked back at Alice. She couldn’t quite read the look on the girl’s face. Worried maybe, or sad. “You were too young for him, Alice.”

  “That’s what he kept telling me.” Alice sighed, then after a few seconds, she started talking again in a hesitant voice. “You know how people in Rosey Corner love to gossip?”

  “You can’t believe everything you hear,” Kate said. “Or repeat everything you hear.”

  “Well, just between us . . .” Alice studied the handkerchief in her hands as she pushed out her next words in a rush. “I heard you got mad at Jay because you thought he was drinking the night he hit Lorena.”

  Kate went stiff. “Whatever differences Jay and I had are nobody’s business but our own.”

  “I suppose so.” Alice flashed her eyes up to Kate’s face and then back to the handkerchief. “But what if you were wrong? And he wasn’t drinking. What then?”

  “You weren’t there, Alice. I don’t know why we’re even talking about this.” Kate wanted to shove the girl toward the door, get her out of the store and away from her sight.

  Alice blinked her eyes a couple of times and pulled in a deep breath. “You’re right. I wasn’t there.” She very carefully placed the folded handkerchief back in her pocketbook.

  Kate mashed down her irritation with the girl. Having a curvy figure didn’t necessarily mean a girl was mature in other ways. She wasn’t much older than Tori. Maybe she didn’t know any better than to poke and prod and meddle. “Did you need any groceries, Alice?”

  Alice snapped her pocketbook closed and pushed away from the counter. “A box of crackers. Mama made soup. And some peanut butter. Mama says to put it on our tab.”

  “All right.” Kate got the crackers and peanut butter off the shelves and sacked them up. “Soup sounds good on a day like today.”

  She hoped Alice would pick up the sack and leave without saying anything else about her and Jay. Heaven only knew what the gossips would be saying tomorrow after Alice told them Kate wished she’d eloped with him. Sometimes it didn’t do to speak the truth out loud. If it was the truth. If only she knew the truth.

  Alice stopped with her hand on the door to go out. She looked back toward Kate. “It was nice Jay bringing you the car to use while he was gone.”

  “He didn’t bring it to me. He brought it to Lorena.” Kate wanted to tell her to just go on out the door. They could talk forever and nothing would be changed. She’d still be here at the store and Jay would still be in the Army. Somewhere. Maybe even in Africa by now or in the Pacific where the war was not going well.

  “Lorena can’t drive.” Alice started to pull open the door, but again she stopped. She turned full around and rushed out her next words as though she needed to say them fast before she lost her nerve. “I know you’re smart, Kate. Smarter than I ever hope to be, but you aren’t always right. You can be wrong. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

  Then she was out the door, slamming it behind her.

  Kate stared at the door and muttered, “Goodbye, Alice. Don’t hurry back.” She had no idea what Alice was trying to tell her. Or even if she was trying to tell her something or only doing her best to be irritating.

  The clock on the wall behind the counter ticked off the seconds. More than an hour before closing time. But at least a few people usually stopped by on the way home from work, and sure enough, the bell at the gas pump clanged as a car drove up. Kate grabbed her coat and hurried out into the cold air, glad to have something to get her mind away from Jay Tanner and what she’d told Alice Wilcher about eloping with him. Alice was right. Sometimes Kate was wrong. She didn’t really wish she’d eloped with him. Stand up in the church and marry him, maybe. But not elope. The only reason he had ever asked her that was because he knew she wouldn’t.

  At last Kate saw the last customer out the door and flipped over the OPEN sign to CLOSED. After she che
cked the washroom to make sure it was in good shape, she put her coat back on, turned off the lights, and stepped out into the chilly air. She never drove Jay’s car to the store. It was such a short walk from the house that it seemed a waste of gasoline to drive.

  The thick clouds were making night come early. Icy rain hit her in the face and Kate pulled the hood of her coat up over her head. It would feel good to get home and see what her mother had fixed for supper. Maybe soup, like Alice’s mother. She looked over toward her father’s blacksmith shop, dark and closed up, but a lamp glowed in the window of Graham’s room above it. She slowed as she passed. She hadn’t talked to Graham for a couple of days, and it always made her feel better to talk to Graham. Maybe he’d even heard from Jay.

  She shook her head and kept walking. She was getting as bad as Lorena, wishing for a letter. Wishing for what couldn’t be. But they might have gotten a letter from Mike. He was almost through with basic training, and then according to where he was assigned next, Evie might go join him until he shipped out. He was also hoping for a few days’ leave so he could come home and be the one to perform the marriage ceremony for Tori and Sammy.

  Kate counted back the weeks since Pearl Harbor. Jay would be through with his basic training. He could already be on a troopship on the way to war. He could already be in the middle of the fighting. He could be dead.

  She couldn’t keep thinking that. Else she was going to lose her mind. She was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t see Fern until she stepped up on the road beside her. “Fern, what are you doing out in weather like this?”

  Fern peered at her from under the man’s felt hat she had pushed down on her head. “Don’t mind rain. Snow. Just weather.”

  “You might catch something the way Tori has.”

  “Might.” Fern pulled a bottle out of her coat. “Hattie said give you this for the sick girl. A tonic. So I was waiting for you.”

  “You could have brought it to the store.” Kate took the bottle and slipped it down in her coat pocket.

  “Thought about it, but that other girl was there. Her talk hurts my ears.”