Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion

by Karen White

  As I lay on my berth, listening to the silent breathing of the two other women in my compartment, I stared out the window as the moon flashed through the trees and thought of all that I’d left behind me, and all that I had gained from loss.

  The muggy air of an early Mississippi morning swaddled us as we stepped off the train at the Indianola depot. Will had wired ahead to let his family know what train we’d be coming in on so we could be met at the station. I was exhausted and travel stained, the swaying motion of the trains staying with me even as I stood on the platform waiting as Will retrieved our luggage.

  I removed my jacket and gloves, desperate to feel a breeze. The humidity always made the heat worse, but it made the chill of winter even more biting.

  “Mr. Will!”

  I turned to see Lucille’s husband, Amos, walking toward us down the platform. He wore his uniform of worn denim coveralls and a plaid cotton shirt, neatly starched and pressed by Lucille, sweat making his bald head gleam. Will set our bags down and met Amos halfway, throwing his arms around the older man.

  Amos held Will at arm’s length. “You’s too skinny. You needs some of Lucille’s fried chicken. My George say he gained five pounds since he come home on account of his mama’s cookin’.” He grinned widely, but I could see the worry in his eyes, too. I’d seen it when George came home, the look of joy at reunion stirred with the worry of how much of their souls they’d lost in the killing fields of Europe.

  Will gave an uncomfortable shrug, then picked up our bags before Amos could grab them. “I’m so used to carrying my gear that I need to hoist something.”

  “That’s good to hear, ’cause you be hoisting a big cotton sack right soon. Been a good summer. Fields are just bustin’ out with cotton.”

  We began walking toward the old pickup truck that Amos had been driving since Herbert Hoover was president. Its red had long since faded in the Mississippi sun to the color of an autumn cypress, but Amos kept the engine in perfect condition.

  “How’s George?” Will asked as he tossed his bag over the side of the truck bed, then placed mine carefully next to it.

  A broad smile split his face. “He doin’ real good. He grown some, too—might be taller’n you now.” His smile faded. “Says he movin’ to Chicago. Will just about break his mama’s heart, but he say there’re better jobs there for him.” He opened the passenger side door for me to slide into the middle. “All them boys comin’ back from the war don’t want to work the cotton fields no more. Things are changin’. Yes, sir, things are changin’.”

  The cloth seat burned from sitting in the sun, my blouse sticking to my skin as I leaned forward away from the seat back. Amos settled himself behind the steering wheel as Will climbed in beside me, doing his best to avoid touching me.

  Amos pulled the truck out onto Highway 82, heading west. A warm breeze blew through the open windows, bringing with it the smell of rain. “We could use some rain,” I said, eager to change the subject. “It’s been dry the last couple of weeks.”

  I turned my head toward the window, desperate for the wind to hit my face. Will and I remained silent as Amos kept up a constant chatter about the crop and the farm, about people Will had known all of his life. Will nodded occasionally, but his gaze never left the broad sweep of level lands that made you feel as if you could see all the way to the edge of the earth. When we were small, Will, Johnny and I had started walking just to see if we could reach that horizon that seemed so close. It had been near sunset before our parents found us less than a mile from Greenville. We’d all been punished severely, me most of all. I’d been sent away to school in New Orleans where the scent of the river was different and the accents of the people foreign to me. But I always liked to think that a part of that adventure stayed with us, reminding us of the day we’d believed that it was possible to touch the sky.

  “Stop here.”

  There was something in Will’s voice that forced Amos onto the gravelly roadside. Without a word, Will left the truck and moved to the edge of the road in front of a field of what Delta farmers called white gold. Rows of cotton plants pregnant with white bolls seemed to stretch out like fingers all the way to where the land ended and the sky began.

  We watched as Will scrambled down the side of the road into a turnrow, then bent to snap a cotton boll from one of the plants. He stared at it for a long time until his broad shoulders began to shake. I slid toward the door, wanting to go to him, but Amos placed a staying hand on my arm.

  I looked back at Will, imagining thousands of soldiers around the world standing in different fields, and in vineyards, and port cities, on old familiar roads and front yards, touching home again.

  I glanced down at my ruined hands, thinking of Johnny and all the boys in the county who would never be coming home. I wanted desperately to hold on to this moment for Will, to allow him to believe that while he’d been away we’d held on to the life he remembered so he could slip back into it like a familiar bed. But time could not be fenced no matter how hard we tried.

  Clouds scuttled overhead as we drove the rest of the way home, turning onto a dirt road right past the stone pillars that announced the entrance to the home where I’d grown up, Oak Alley. I no longer accidentally turned too short into the wrong drive, finally realizing where my home truly was.

  Will leaned forward slightly as the wind picked up, rushing through the open windows of the truck, the wheels kicking up dust as we drove under the canopy of oaks, maples and gum trees until we reached a clearing and the house the Claibornes had called home for almost a century.

  It was a simple whitewashed two-story farmhouse with a chimney on each end and a wraparound porch. My great-grandfather had lost this part of his property at auction to pay his taxes after the Civil War. A fence had always separated the two, fostering generations of mutual hatred, at least until I was born and the lure of the fence had proved too tempting.

  Two figures sat on the steps of the porch, and my breathing became short and shallow until I forced myself to fill my lungs with the heavy air. Amos took our bags from the back and carried them to the covered porch as Will climbed from the truck and held the door open for me. Before I’d even set both feet on the ground, I heard my name called.

  “Mama! Mama!” John-John’s bare feet raced over the yard toward me.

  I bent down in time to catch him in my arms. “Hello, sweetheart. Mama missed you so much.”

  I lifted him when I stood, reveling in the weight of him. Closing my eyes, I breathed in the earthy scent of little boy and a trace of soap Lucille must have forced on him.

  I turned as Will approached, then watched him and my son regard each other with open curiosity through identical hazel eyes set beneath dark brows and hair.

  “Will, this is John-John. Sweetie, this is your uncle Will.”

  “Soljur,” John-John said. “Like Daddy.”

  I kissed his temple. “Yes, darling. Like Daddy.”

  They continued to take each other’s measure, and I shifted my feet uneasily in the grass. “Today’s my birfday,” John-John said, his face serious. He held out a hand with three fingers just like I’d been teaching him. “I’m free.”

  The corner of Will’s mouth lifted. He reached over and ruffled the little boy’s hair. “It’s good to finally meet you, John-John. And Happy Birthday.” He studied him for a long moment. “You look just like your grandpa, Tug, don’t you?”

  John-John lifted his right hand. “Erich make dis. It’s a top an’ it spins.”

  The man who’d been on the porch with my son when we’d first driven up approached. I felt Will stiffen beside me as he took in Erich’s pants with the large letters PW stamped in blue across each thigh.

  In one of our few conversations on the train, I’d told Will about the German POW camps that had been established in Indianola and around the country to provide local farmers with much-needed la
bor. But I’d stopped from telling him more when I’d seen the look of disdain that had curled his lips and darkened his eyes.

  “Will, this is Erich Schumacher. He was a big help to Amos during the planting, and he’ll be here for the harvest. He’s a good carpenter, too. He’s done a lot of the repairs . . .”

  Will cut me off. “Where’s home, Mr. Schumacher?”

  He gave Will a measuring look before answering in good English, his accent apparent from the heavy consonants not usually found south of the Mason-Dixon line. “Near a small Bavarian town called Freising, about thirty kilometers from Munchen.”

  “You’re German?” Without allowing Erich to answer, Will turned on Amos. “You let this German near my nephew? Near my mother and father? On my land?”

  All of the endless travel, the heat and my sore hands finally overtook my already frayed nerves. I put John-John down, his arms clinging to my leg like kudzu. “It wasn’t Amos, Will. It was me. We needed help with the cotton, and the Germans were the only labor available. So I hired them. We had Erich and a bunch more during the planting season, and I’ve already asked for the same men for the harvest.”

  I’d only seen the look on Will’s face once before, nearly four years ago when he’d found Johnny and me beneath the three-hundred-year-old cypress tree that had their parents’ initials carved into it. Right in the same spot where Will had asked me to marry him, and I’d said yes. I’d hoped to never see that look again. It was more than anger and hurt. It was the look of a starving man right after you’d snatched the last bread crumb from his hand.

  Will turned in a circle as if looking for someone. But that person had been in a wheelchair for the best part of a year and couldn’t help him now. “Why?” Will asked. I knew he wasn’t asking me to repeat what I’d already told him. He was simply asking the same question I’d been asking for three long years that no one on this side of heaven had an answer to.

  “Because someone had to make sure that you’d have a home to come home to.” Taking John-John’s hand, I turned to Amos. “Please take Erich back to the camp now. You can bring him back tomorrow to get started on repairing the roof on the mule barn.”

  Erich nodded, then followed Amos, his eyes carefully avoiding Will’s. The front door of the house opened and we all turned as Lucille came out, wiping her hands on an apron, Will’s mother, Marjory, following closely behind her. Marjory’s knees buckled at the sight of Will, and Lucille placed an arm around Marjory’s too-slim hips to hold her steady.

  Will walked quickly toward his mother, her dark eyes never leaving his face. Lucille let go only after Will had reached them and his arms were safely around Marjory, his face reflecting a grief I was already too familiar with.

  Marjory Claiborne had once been a force of nature in Indianola, small of stature and soft of voice, but wielding so much authority and conviction that people seemed to forget that she was half their size. She ran her house and her two boys with stern discipline, never one to adhere to a spare-the-rod philosophy—not that it helped corral the Claiborne boys. But even with them she commanded respect and devotion.

  But the war had killed a part of her, almost as if she’d stepped on a mine and it had blown up half her heart. I’d begun to believe that only the hope of seeing Will again was what got her out of bed each morning. It was one of the reasons I’d agreed to go to New York, to be a surrogate protector for the one thing the war had not taken from her.

  Will cradled his mother’s head against his chest, patting her back much as I imagined she had once done when he was a child. Her tears bled dark spots onto his jacket, and I wondered if they would stain. Not that it mattered. I doubted he’d ever want to wear his uniform again.

  Lucille clasped his arm in her large, black hand, her lips clamped together and trembling as she worked hard not to cry. Will smiled at her, but it didn’t lift the bleakness from his expression. “Amos is gonna bring George up to the house for birthday cake after supper tonight. He gots lots to tell you.”

  Will nodded, but anything he was going to say got stuck in his mouth as his attention turned toward the doorway. For the first time in his life, Tug Claiborne appeared smaller than his wife. Even his large personality had shriveled to fit inside the shrunken body folded into the wheelchair like a rag doll.

  A guttural sound emitted from the older man’s throat, his eyes wet with tears he wouldn’t let go. His strength had deserted him, but his stubbornness would not. For a moment, Will hesitated as if he didn’t recognize this man, or these people, or the life they represented. Before he could realize that he was right, he bent toward his father and grasped his hands.

  “I’m home, Daddy. It’s going to be okay.”

  Lucille’s eyes slid to mine for a moment before she turned back to Marjory. “Let’s go start makin’ dinner. We gots two things to celebrate today. Praise the Lord, yes we do. We gots your favorites, Mr. Will. Collard greens and fried chicken, and my beans done in fatback just like you likes them when you was a boy. Don’t figure that much has changed. Your mama done made her peach cobbler, the one that took first prize at the church fair three summers ago. We’ve got to fatten that boy up, don’t we, Miss Marjory?”

  Marjory stared blankly as Will pulled his father’s chair back into the house, followed by Lucille holding tight to Marjory. I stood where I was, needing to be quiet for a few moments. My son sensed this and held on to my hand without complaint as the wind picked up and the late-morning sky darkened.

  Long rows of cotton plants in the fields behind the house bobbed their puffy heads like old ladies in church praying for rain. The water-saturated air tasted bitter and sweet, an odd concoction of celebration and grief. But I couldn’t stop myself from believing that there was hope there, too; that hope existed in the endless cycle of sowing seeds and reaping cotton from the dark, alluvial soil. I had to believe that. I had to for John-John’s sake. And for Will’s.

  A small flock of white-throated swallows flitted up above the trees, nervously chattering as they circled the house before settling on the roof and chimneys like children returning home to roost. Fat slaps of rain hit the ground around us, splattering my shoes and stockings and speckling John-John’s bare feet with dirt. Holding tightly to his hand, I led him toward the house and up the steps as the sky relinquished its rain. My shoulders ached as if I’d been hauling a cotton-filled sack through muddy furrows, and I straightened them, lifting my head. I entered the house with purposeful steps as the rain fell on the thirsty fields and the white house, turning the dust to mud.

  3

  It was still dark the following morning when I padded quietly into the back office that had been carved out of the parlor. I’d have preferred to use the dining room table for farm business, still feeling as if I were intruding into Tug’s life by sitting at his desk and writing checks from his checkbook, but the dining room had been converted to a bedroom for him and Marjory.

  Amos and one of the tenant farmers had carried their bed from upstairs as I watched with Marjory and she silently cried. That’s what had finally broken her. It was as if moving that one piece of furniture was the beginning of a funeral cortege for the life she’d always expected to have. She was different after that, easily letting go of the yoke that had tethered her to the farm and allowing me to slip it around my own neck.

  I’d watched with the same dry eyes I’d had when I’d packed up all of Johnny’s things and stored them in a suitcase in the back of our bedroom closet. I didn’t have time for tears, or looking back, or wishing for something that wasn’t to be.

  I flipped on the desk lamp and sat down, then heard Lucille come in through the kitchen door. I waited for the smell of coffee to drift into the office, more grateful than I should have been that coffee was once again in regular supply.

  I started with the mail that had accumulated while I’d been gone. The first was another letter from the Southern Tenant Farmers’ U
nion protesting our use of POW labor. I rubbed my temples, wondering how long it would take the coffee to brew, and if I should bother with a reply explaining yet again the shortage of workers and my inability to pay the higher wages the remaining ones demanded.

  I looked again at the teetering stack of mail, then slid the letter from the STFU into the wastebasket. I pulled out the ledger and began logging the bills as I paid each one, then wrote out the checks. I didn’t sign them. I brought every check to Tug, who seemed grateful to make a semblance of a mark in the signature line. It was accepted at Planters Bank in Indianola, who’d done business with the Claibornes since it had opened in 1920.

  A steaming mug of coffee was placed on the desk in front of me. I looked up, surprised to see Will. He was dressed in a plaid cotton shirt and dungarees, and if I hadn’t seen his eyes I might have thought it was the old Will, the Will with the easy laugh and big dreams. The Will I’d fallen in love with when I was six years old and never stopped loving.

  “Good morning,” I said, putting down the pen and picking up the mug. “Thank you.”

  His response was a short nod. “Lucille told me I could find you in here, and that you’d be wanting coffee. I thought she was joking. You’ve never been the kind of girl to get out of bed before noon.” He took a sip from his own mug.

  “There’s work to be done. And John-John will be up soon, which makes it hard to concentrate.” I indicated the ledger and the piles in front of me.

  His jaw tightened as he glanced at the papers on the desk. “So Daddy . . .” His voice faded away, leaving a trail of incomprehension and confusion.

  “Tug’s still there, Will. Beneath the man you see, the father you used to know is still there. It’s just harder for him to communicate and get around. But he still signs all of his checks—as best he can—and I always go to him with my questions. I can usually figure out what he’s saying.”