by Ninie Hammon
Chapter 10
The drone of the big transport’s engines was pleasantly hypnotic. The black soldier’s voice was still too loud, only now he was pontificating about how the international date line was finally giving them back the day it had taken from them when they’d flown to Vietnam. Grayson smiled sadly, remembering how Haystack had been genuinely upset at the thought of losing a day of his life. And his days had run out before he got a chance to get it back. Now the farm boy was on his final trip home to Kentucky, where Grayson would surrender his remains to the Monroe Funeral Home in Spindle Rock.
After that, then what? Surely, Grayson’s orders would grant him a three-day pass. Getting in touch with Piper to tell her about it, however, was going to be a challenge.
The phone in the Sadlerton Post Office was something of a community phone. You could call there in an emergency, and Mildred Magee, the post mistress, would see your message got delivered. In fact, Mildred and his mother’d been childhood friends, and the only other time he’d called home—to tell her and Piper he was safe after the deadly firefight that decimated his unit—Mildred hadn’t just delivered a message. She’d hauled Piper down to the post office so he could call back and talk to her.
Only he hadn’t actually talked to her at all. He’d talked to some soldier on a switchboard somewhere and that guy had talked to Piper.
Grayson: Piper, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.
Intermediary: Piper, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.
Piper: I love you, Gray.
Intermediary: I love you, Gray.
After that experience, Piper had written to him and told him never to call again. And he hadn’t.
It ran a little thrill up his spine to think of actually hearing Piper’s voice, of the stunned surprise in it and how thrilled she’d be when he told her that he and all the members of C Company had gotten early outs—their tours in-country had been cut thirty days. Nobody said why, but the reason was obvious. When the only National Guard infantry unit in the whole country—the Kentucky 151st ARNG (Army Reserve National Guard)—had been activated, it had become the only National Guard ground maneuver unit in Vietnam, a unit of civilians that never should have—okay, let it go. Piper wasn’t expecting him until October. She’d cry when she heard his voice; he knew she would. And he’d have to make her promise she wouldn’t drive like a wild woman from Sadler Hollow to Spindle Rock to pick him up.
But he couldn’t call her from Honolulu. He’d get there at 7:00 p.m. Friday evening. If he’d calculated the time difference and date change correctly, that was 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning in West Virginia. Not only would the post office be closed then, it would also be closed for the rest of the weekend. The only way he could get in touch with his family was to call Carter in Charleston. Failing that, he’d just have to call Uncle Jim.
When the military transport touched down in Hawaii, all the other soldiers aboard let out whoops and cheers. Grayson had an entirely different, totally irrational, emotional response. It hit him out of nowhere. When he stepped into the Honolulu airport, he was instantly terrified, afraid all the scrubbed-up people inside the building would…smell his stink. His fatigues were clean, of course. He was clean—well, he had been thirteen hours ago when he dived through the closing doors of the transport as it was about to taxi down the runway at the Ton Son Nhut Air Base.
But there was a stink in his nostrils so strong he couldn’t smell the tropical flowers in the colorful leis a native girl placed around his neck. It was a stink of blood and urine and jungle rot pus. He knew it had to be his imagination. Still, he ducked into the first bathroom he saw and scrubbed his hands until the sores on them were bleeding. The stink remained, of course, because it wasn’t on his skin but in his mind. He barely made the commercial flight that was his connection. He stumbled down the aisle, collapsed in his window seat and sat there shaking, profoundly grateful no one was seated beside him. Then he turned and stared out into the endless blackness of ocean and night sky. When the airplane touched down at San Francisco International Airport, he could not recall a single thought that had crossed his mind during the whole five-hour flight.
* * *
Piper looked over the edge of her coffee cup and told Carter she felt like the rich aristocracy. He gave her a puzzled look, and it struck her fresh that spending the night in his mother’s house in the mountains was probably disconcerting for him. She’d never been to his apartment in Charleston, but he had talked about it—the fancy kitchen with appliances he had no clue how to use, the shower/bath combination and the balcony overlooking the Kanawha River. His mother’s house clung to the slope of the steep mountainside like a bird’s nest in a tree. The only flat land near it was a meadow about the size of a baseball field that belonged to the Tucker family, who’d moved out of the shack at the far side of it years ago.
Marian’s house had few amenities. It was clean—oh, my yes, the old woman had always kept the hardwood floors scrubbed and polished, the frayed curtains starched and ironed, and handmade quilts covered the worn-through spaces on the parlor couch and chair. The kitchen was on the back of the house and opened onto a porch in the little backyard. Snuggled up to the house beside the porch was a woodpile and the storage shed where Piper kept the lawnmower. The table where they sat was at the far end of the parlor in front of the kitchen door, with windows on both sides, providing a view into the woods beside the house or down the valley out front.
The two bedrooms that had been the boys’ rooms when they were growing up were much smaller now because the new bathroom with its big claw-foot tub had been hunked out of one side of them. Carter had added the bath when he piped running water to the house after his mother got sick. For years, he’d been begging her to let him fix up the house, but she’d allowed as how it’d been good enough for her and Everett and it was fine now—why there was a good well not ten feet from the back porch and a serviceable outhouse at the edge of the yard!
Marian occupied the small bedroom closest to the bath; the other small bedroom was Sadie’s, though she actually slept in a playpen alongside Piper’s bed in the larger bedroom.
Maggie had insisted on making a pallet on the back porch, and Piper suspected even that might have been more comfortable than the bed she probably shared with who knows how many siblings in some mountain shack. Carter slept out on the couch in the parlor—which was not nearly as comfortable as it looked, courtesy of two broken springs—one that poked up through the cushion on the right side and another that allowed the cushion to sink into a hole on the left. Carter’d always joked that the couch was like the mountains themselves—pretty from a distance but steep and craggy up close.
“Rich aristocracy? How you figure that?” he said. He hadn’t shaved yet, and she liked how the rough, stubble on his cheeks and in the indention of his chin gave him a rugged look. The blond hair on his arms shone golden in the sunlight.
When she first moved with Sadie back to the mountains, Carter had dropped by once in a while to check on them. But as his mother’s condition worsened, he came more and more often. The proximity, the forced intimacy of cramped spaces, had been awkward at first. But not anymore. Now it seemed perfectly normal to look across the breakfast table at an unshaven Carter, his hair askew in an endearing sofa-induced tangle. He sometimes arrived in a suit and tie straight from work. This time, he had shown up in more standard fare—an old Duke T-shirt and jeans.
“Don’t know anybody’s not rich who has their own personal nanny,” Piper said, and nodded to Maggie. “She gets to Sadie before Sadie even has a chance to figure out she wants something.”
The two little girls were playing with Rasmus in the small patch of yard beyond the front porch. Maggie had made a bed of red maple tree leaves for the stuffed bear, and Sadie was chattering away to the noseless creature.
“I heard her singing to Sunshine last night after Zeke left.”
Piper could hear the dislike in his voice when Carter said her brother’s name, but she let it go.
“I did, too, and the song sounded like something Ma used to sing, but maybe I’m only imagining it.”
“You ain’t,” Marian said from the hallway. Carter and Piper turned to face her, and Piper thought she looked better this morning than she had in weeks. “My old granny called it “The Ash Grove,” but I’ve heared it called by other names, too. Come from the old country.”
There was color in her cheeks, and the lines around her mouth didn’t seem quite so deep. It might have been wishful thinking, but it even seemed the old woman’s voice was stronger, and there was no palsy stutter.
“Maggie singing that last night—it put me to sleep same as it did Sadie, slept the night through,” Marian said. “Granny McCullough used to sing it when I’s little.”
Marian’s voice was scratchy, but the melody was true.
“The ash grove how graceful, how plainly 'tis speaking.
The harp through its playing has language for me.
Whenever the light through its branches is breaking,
a host of kind faces is gazing on me.”
She moved slowly but without apparent pain from the hall to the table.
“Granny was a McFarland from the Isle of Skye, had a voice clear as spring water and a brogue thick as molasses. Me and William’d snuggle down warm in our cornhusk mattress and listen to her sing and the wind howl down through the holler.”
Piper sat very still. She’d lived with Marian since Grayson shipped out last October, had been married to her son for almost eight years, and in all that time she’d never once heard Marian mention her brother, William—the brother Piper’s father had shot and killed. Piper’s older brother, Riley, said William had ambushed their father and he’d only been defending himself. Piper figured the McCulloughs probably said the same thing about Rooster Campbell. Since both men had been dead when William’s son, Jesse, found them, there would forever be speculation about who had started it. Not that it mattered now.
* * *
The big tires squealed in protest when the plane touched down. Grayson blinked, then opened his eyes slowly, unbelieving. Bright airport lights twinkled in all the buildings like Christmas decorations. California! He breathed deep. The imaginary stink was gone. He was home!
The giddy joy Grayson felt made him wonder if his feet were actually touching the floor of the terminal as he walked toward the baggage claim area. He felt like he might just float up to the ceiling, light as a little kid’s helium balloon.
He was surprised to see that even now, at four o’clock in the morning, the airport was far from deserted. A smattering of people dotted the wide concourse and clustered in groups at the gates.
He was approaching a group of young people, students maybe, hippies. The girls had long straight hair, parted in the middle, and wore beads and peace crosses. The boys’ hair was long and straight, too.
A toddler was holding the hand of one of the girls, who didn’t look a day older than fifteen herself, and as he approached, the little girl let go of her mother’s hand and began to toddle—stagger forward. She was barely able to remain upright, and when she went down with a plop right in front of him, Grayson bent to help her to her feet.
“Don’t you touch her!” the hippie girl shrieked, leaped forward and yanked the child up into her arms.
Grayson was so surprised, he just straightened and gaped at her. Then she took a step toward him and spit in his face!
“Baby killer!” she growled.
The girl behind her moved forward and tried to spit in his face, too, but it fell short and landed on his shirt.
Grayson couldn’t move.
“Baby killer!” the second one yelled, then the five of them took it up as a chant. “Baby killer! Baby killer!”
Grayson turned away and started resolutely down the corridor—he wouldn’t run!—and they followed along beside him for thirty yards or so, shouting and spitting. The people in the concourse and at the gates fell silent, watching, and he glanced at their faces as he passed. In some of them he saw sympathy. In most, mere indifference, which somehow felt worse than being spit on.
He washed the spittle off his face in a bathroom, straightened his uniform, then marched with dignity out of the airport with his head held high, and caught a bus to Fairfield, where Haystack would be waiting for him at Travis Air Force Base.
But when he got there, Grayson discovered that Haystack had left without him.
* * *
Maggie had taken Sadie back out into the yard to play while Piper washed the lunch dishes when the toddler pointed her chubby little finger at the meadow below the house.
“Wanna see Sabie’s b’flies?” she asked. “C’mon. I show you.”
She grabbed Maggie’s hand and pulled her toward the gate in the fence like a dog straining on a leash. “Go see b’flies, Mabie!”
The two walked down the dusty road together, then Maggie hefted Sadie up onto her hip to carry her through the brambles that ran between the road and the meadow at the base of the hillside. A hedge of pawpaw bushes marked the end of the brambles, and Maggie set the wiggling child down on the ground beyond the hedge, then watched her plunge off through the waist-high weeds and wildflowers, squealing, “B’fies! B’fies.”
The meadow was alive with them, so many it looked like a patchwork quilt with moving patches. White ones, yellow ones, and blue ones. Maggie had never seen so many butterflies in one meadow. before.
Or had she?
The familiar lump formed in her belly, the ache without real pain that made her midsection throb with every beat of her heart, every intake of breath.
Had she ever seen so many butterflies before?
She honestly did not know. Everything before she stood on the porch of Sadie’s house on Wednesday was just…gone. Vanished in a gauzy mist she couldn’t see through. She couldn’t remember butterflies. Or sunsets, afternoon rain or parents, brothers or sisters. Rivers, creeks, meadows, mountains—nothing. Everything she’d seen in the days she’d spent in Sadler Hollow looked achingly familiar, like she’d just walked away from this house or just climbed down out of that tree only moments before. At the same time, it all felt distant and unfamiliar, like she had never seen a sky quite that shade of blue or a flower that smelled so sweet.
She was old enough to know that she ought to be terribly upset by it all. It should have terrified her to be somewhere but not know how she got there. How could she possibly connect so completely to people she barely knew but have no memories at all of the people before them in her life, and certainly there must have been people before? She hadn’t brought herself into the world, after all, or raised herself for…how many years? She didn’t know. But she did know that somewhere there was a mother and a father who belonged to her, though, who might right now be watching and waiting for her.
She reached up involuntarily and touched her healing split lip. Miss Piper and Nan Marian talked about the people who’d beat her, split her lip, blacked her eye and caused the painful bruises all over her body. She had no memory of them.
And right now, she didn’t care.
That seemed more odd to her than any of it…that she didn’t care. Maggie was perfectly content in the right now, the present. The past and the future were…mist.
What did matter to her right now was Sadie. An overwhelming love for the precious child had blossomed in Maggie’s chest the instant she saw her, as if Maggie had gathered up all the love for the people in the “before” of her life and given every bit of it to the astonishingly beautiful little girl with wide purple eyes. Her love for the child seeped out into all the voids in her heart, filled all the empty spaces. The focus of her every thought, the intent of her every action, was Sadie.
Sadie raced around the meadow gleefully chasing butterflies, grabbing at them, giggling, her honey-gold curls, tumbled by the gentle breeze.
Maggie wanted to capture the moment, stitch it into the fabric of her soul or seal it up tight in a mason jar, imprison it there
, a memory that would give off a golden glow even when the world turned dark and gray. She sat down in the shade of a small basswood tree and watched contentedly.
The afternoon wore on. Sadie tired of chasing butterflies and turned to picking handfuls of wildflowers that she deposited out of chubby, green-stained hands in Maggie’s lap. Then she pulled the stems off the heart-shaped basswood leaves on the ground beneath the tree, and they decorated the hearts with colorful flowers. Maggie showed Sadie an anthill in the dirt and grasshoppers in the weeds. The toddler held her breath as she watched a ladybug creep across her finger and then take flight.
But she always returned to chasing butterflies.
Finally, Maggie followed Sadie into the center of the field and sat down Indian-style facing the sun that now tracked down the western sky.
“Sadie,” Maggie called to the toddler, “you’ll catch nary a thing running after them like that.”
Sadie returned to Maggie’s side.
“B’fies go bye-bye,” she said despondently.
Maggie took the toddler into her lap. “We must be still as little beasties hiding from a cat,” she said. “Shhhh.”
Maggie stroked Sadie’s butter-colored hair and rocked gently back and forth. She began to sing a song, not a lullaby this time, though the haunting melody was soft and relaxing.
The sun moved toward the far ridge, backlighting a small armada of puffy clouds that had dropped anchor above the valley. Maggie’s unbraided hair cascaded down her back, and the sunlight set it ablaze, highlighting a half dozen different shades of red and auburn, gold and orange. When the breeze lifted and tumbled the curls, the effect was of flames dancing away from a burning log.
“Shhh,” Maggie crooned, rocking back and forth. The sun was warm and squinty-eyed bright. There was a hum of bee-song in the air and the raucous cry and response of cicadas in the trees—the volume rhythmically rising and falling. Sadie grew very still, and Maggie thought perhaps she’d drifted off to sleep. “See, pretty one. If you’re still, you don’t have to chase them. They come to you.”