There Is a River

by Charlotte Miller

  He was bleeding, blood on his hands when he put them to his side—where was his rifle? Had he dropped it? Thrown it aside? His mind was not working. The world was dark. And he could not feel the snow. He had wanted to see Elise again. He had—

  10

  Elise sat alone in the front room of the mill house, trying to write a letter to Janson. Usually the words came easily to her. Usually there was so much to say, but this afternoon all she could do was sit and stare at his photograph on the dresser top, and then beyond it to her own image reflected in the mirror. She could think of nothing more to write other than: We’re fine. We miss you. I love you.

  The house was quiet. Henry and the girls were not home from school yet, and Elise had done nothing since finishing her shift in the mill but sit at the dresser and try to write her letter. The house was too quiet.

  We’re fine. We miss you. . . .

  There was a knock at the door and she got up, thinking it might be Dorrie running late on her way home after her own shift, or possibly Sissy stopping by with the baby. But when she opened the door, she found a man her mind did not want to recognize.

  Then she saw the telegram in his hand.

  “Mrs. Janson T. Sanders?” he asked. She was clinging to the knob of the door as she held it open, her free hand clenched into a fist against her chest. She knew that she did not answer him, but suddenly the telegram was in her hands and he was leaving the front porch, the screen door now shut behind him. She was shaking as she shut the door, shaking as she crossed the short distance to the dresser to sit again, holding to the back of the chair as she made her way past it, shaking as she placed the telegram on the surface there before her and tried to take up her pen and make herself continue her letter to Janson—he won’t be dead if I don’t read it, she told herself. He won’t be dead—I’ll write a letter and I’ll go fix supper and I’ll read the telegram later and it won’t be for me. It’s for someone else. Janson’s not dead. Janson’s not—

  She was taking the telegram up in shaking hands, the trembling moving through her arms and into her body until she was quaking and chilled all over. A knot was rising into her throat to choke her, the paper rattling in her hands so badly that she could hardly read the words.

  Henry’s voice came from behind her as the door opened, and then Catherine’s, and Judith’s. “Mama, Mrs. Shelby said—”

  But Elise was dropping the telegram, her hands covering her face, the knot in her throat turning into a choked sob as the shaking enveloped her completely.

  “Mama—”

  “Pa’s not—”

  “Mama—”

  Elise took her head from her hands and looked at the three faces around her. Her voice was shaking so badly that she could hardly speak. “He’s been wounded—he’s alive,” was all she could say. “He’s alive.”

  Janson awoke with a start, the sound of the train whistle loud in his ears. He had been dreaming, had been back there again. The cold. The darkness. Realizing he had been hit. Thinking he would die there frozen into a grotesque shape in the snow.

  He had thought he would never see Elise again, and it had been with surprise that he had come to consciousness briefly to find himself staring into the blood-streaked face of a medic. He had awakened again some unknown time later in a field hospital, doped up on morphine for the pain, but alive, hearing someone tell him that it was over for him, that he was going home.

  Going home—

  The sound of the train was constant and welcome in his ears, the feel and sway of it beneath him taking him only closer to home, to Elise, and to his children. Elise had wanted to come to where he was the minute he reached the United States, but he had refused to allow it. She could not leave the children, and he would not have her traveling alone in war time, no matter what else she had to say—he would be home soon enough, he told her.

  Soon enough.

  He stared out the window, the countryside beginning to take on the familiarity of a long-known face. They would soon be entering Eason County—had it been only a year, no, less than a year, since he left here? So much had changed since then. So much. Tim was gone now, and another of Clarence and Dorrie’s sons, Pete. The village grocer, old Mr. McCallum, had lost all three of his grandsons in just the past few months, and the Baptist minister, Reverend Satterwhite, had a son missing and presumed dead. The land he was moving through might not have been forcibly scarred by war, as had been much of the land of Europe that he had seen, land that was torn apart and blood-spattered, hole-pitted and shell-blackened and filled with death—but war had touched here as well. War had taken so many men and boys who had once sweated in fields beneath the Alabama sun, who had worked in cotton mills and walked Main Streets and courted sweethearts, and who were lying now buried in foreign soil so far away from the Alabama clay, dead in a war that had still seen no end. Janson did not know how the world could ever be the same after this.

  Most of all, though, he wondered about Elise.

  She sounded so different on the telephone when he talked to her. She had been excited and worried and—older, more sure of herself, as if she did not need him now.

  And why would she?

  She had been alone all these months. She had worked and looked after three children. She had taken a job in the mill and handled money and done things on her own.

  And she had not needed him.

  She would not need him now, especially not now, a cripple home from the war, one more burden to bear.

  He looked down at himself, at how he was sitting, his weight all on one side, the cane resting against his thigh. Dull pain ached in his hip and down into one leg, as it had for much of the time since he had awakened in the field hospital—a bullet had passed through his side and exited through his left hip; two others had torn through that leg. The doctors had tried to tell him what those pieces of metal had done to his body, but all he understood was that he would have a pronounced limp, and that he might need a walking stick for the rest of his life. To him, his body seemed twisted now, his left leg not in alignment with the right. That leg and hip were not as strong as the other side, and he leaned heavily on the cane when he walked. It hurt, a dull ache in the bone that reminded him of a toothache, but seated in that area, and worsening when he walked a lot or stood or sat for long periods of time.

  It ached now, and he tried to shift to a more comfortable position, but he knew there was not one. There never was.

  The Army nurses had been nice. They had been the first American women he had seen in a very long time, and had brought him paper and a pen so that he could write to Elise. Some had even flirted with him. They were pretty and he had talked to them, had showed them pictures of his wife and kids, told them about home, even about the land he would buy one day—if he could work it now.

  He dragged his mind back to the present. There was no need for the land, no need for anything, if Elise did not want him. He could be a husband to her, a man in her bed, a father to his children—but he did not want Elise to feel pity for him. He did not want her to look at him and turn away. He wanted things to be like they had always been, his wife back again, his home as he had left it, Elise to be Elise, not independent where she didn’t need him any more. He just wanted his life back.

  He stared out the window at the passing countryside. A train had first taken him to her those long years ago. A train had taken them to their life as man and wife in Eason County. A train had taken him away when he had left for the war. A train was bringing him back now to a life he had not known in a very long time.

  The train began to slow as it passed through the outskirts of Pine and then neared the depot. Janson leaned forward, staring out the window, his eyes searching for a familiar face, worrying whether he would recognize his children after these months. They were almost grown now. They might not even need him back. Elise might not—

  So many nights he had dreamed abo
ut coming home. So many nights as he had lain in a hole dug into foreign soil, so many nights in the cold and the rain, lying in the mud, or in snow as he dug through frozen earth—he was home.

  As the train came to a stop he saw her standing on the platform, her eyes moving over the train as she searched the many windows of the passenger cars for sight of him, and he hurt inside at the very sight of her—had he really forgotten how she looked, how the simple sight of her could take his breath away?

  Home—he thought, as he pushed himself painfully to his feet, leaning heavily on the walking stick. He was home.

  Those had been the longest days, the longest weeks, in Elise’s life, knowing that Janson had been wounded, receiving word that he would be coming home, waiting for him—but it was over now. She stood on the depot platform, looking for the first sight of him. He had been gone almost a year, and she wondered how much he would have changed in that time with all he had been through.

  He had called her as soon as he arrived in the United States, reaching her on the telephone at Sissy’s house. Elise knew she would not forget to her dying day the sound of his voice that first time after so many months, sounding so different, so distant, but unmistakably Janson.

  “I’ll be comin’ home,” he told her, refusing to let her come to where he was in a hospital up north. “I’ll be comin’ home—”

  When she had talked to him over the past weeks, he had seemed to understand what she was feeling. He had seemed her Janson, but later, over the days of waiting, she had begun to worry, and now she was afraid—would he be different now? How could any man not be different? She knew he had probably killed German soldiers, for that was what he had been sent to do. He had almost been killed himself, had been wounded three times, this last time so horribly that he almost died. He had been cold and hungry and afraid—he had said little about it on the telephone, but she knew, or at least thought she knew, from the little that he had said. How could any man not be different now? The Janson who left here had never taken another man’s life, had not even liked firing a gun, though he had done so many times in hunting to feed the family. He had been kind and gentle and—and somehow she knew that the Janson who would come home to her today would no longer be that man. How could he be?

  Almost a year. She herself had changed so much in that year. She was thirty-four years old now—God, how old thirty-four had seemed to her when she was sixteen. She had found gray in her hair in the months since he had been gone, had yanked it out again and again, only to find it returned once more. In the time he had been gone, she had never once wanted another man, though she had lain awake so many nights in a bed that had seemed emptier than she had ever thought any bed could feel. In all that time she had never doubted him—but now, as she waited, she wondered. She knew how Janson was. Almost an entire year—could he have waited?

  The woman who had said good-bye to him a year before would never have even dared the thought—but she was no longer that woman, and she knew it. For almost a year now, she had depended only on herself. Stan had been there, but her family was her family and she had taken care of them. War had changed her—how badly had it changed Janson? Men over there were fighting, dying, probably living life to the fullest extent possible because they knew how easily it could end. Elise just wanted her husband back. Janson not being Janson was something she did not think she could bear.

  There had been a lot of time for thinking, for remembering, in the time since he had been wounded. The years they had spent together, the first day she met him, the struggle just to be together, all Janson had gone through to marry her, seeing him beaten and bloody at her father’s hands, their having run away together, the life they had finally begun—those things were never far from her mind. She thought of their first coming to Eason County, of her horror of the life he had brought her to, her fear of his grandmother, her tears over burned pans of cornbread and nearly setting the kitchen on fire—it all seemed so silly, so childish, now. The years in the mill village, even the years sharecropping, had been good years because they had been together—but, of all the memories of their life together, there was one that had stayed with her the most in the past days. That memory was of standing before his grandparents’ house not long after he had brought her to Eason County, on a day when she had watched him walk down a long, red road toward Pine to ask for a job he had once refused, from a man he hated—and he had done it for her, and for Henry, the baby she had been carrying at that time. His grandmother had known then that he would never be the same, had said as much to Elise, though Elise had not understood it at that time—and he had been different when he came home that day. He had been a husband, and a father-to-be, and no longer just the boy she had loved and married despite her parents and her own common sense—but he had still been Janson, more mature, accepting of what had been placed on him, but still Janson.

  Elise had thought she knew him so well then. She had been only a child herself, barely seventeen. Only over the years since had she really gotten to know the man he was, gotten to know him so well that she could finish his sentences and often know his thoughts and he could do the same for her. She had never thought he could change; he was always so much the same—but now? Elise herself was a stranger to the woman she had been then, and she wondered if he would seem a stranger to her as well. She wanted to see him so badly, to touch him, to hear his voice, to know for herself that he was healthy and alive; she could even deal with it if he had been unfaithful in that time—but he had to return to her still Janson. He had to be still the man he had been.

  She moved closer to the train, her hands clenched into fists at her sides with the tension inside of her. Her stomach was nervous, as it had been all morning. Her eyes first scanned the windows of the train, and then searched the faces of the men in uniform who stepped down to the platform. A cold nudge of fear creeped into her. She could not make herself move; she could only stand rooted to the spot, wondering if it had all been a mistake and that he was not coming home at all.

  Then she saw him, stepping down onto the platform, leaning heavily on a walking cane, a young sailor coming down just behind him and reaching out to offer help, a look of pity on the younger man’s face. Janson seemed shorter, bent slightly as he leaned on the cane, his green eyes showing a moment’s obvious pain as he shook his head and then turned to look at Elise.

  Janson—for a moment Elise stopped where she was, her eyes meeting his for the first time in almost a year. He did not smile. He just stared at her, what seemed an awful patience there on his face. He did not move toward her, but only seemed to be waiting.

  Janson—Elise thought her heart would burst as she stared at him, unable to break the spell that held her there and make herself move in his direction. Then she rushed forward and into his arms, knocking the cane away accidentally in her need to reach him. He almost collapsed against her, then he was holding her and she herself was keeping him on his feet—he was home. At last, he was home.

  The house had grown quiet, Henry and the girls in their beds already, and Elise checking the kitchen one last time. Janson sat on the edge of the bed he had shared with Elise before he left for the war, waiting for her, and wondering what it would be like to be with her now after all the months they had been apart—now, with the way his body was. He looked at the cane leaned against the iron headboard of the bed, then looked away again, feeling a touch of disgust with himself. It would hurt him if Elise herself turned away—but what would it be like now?

  Coming home had been so different than he had imagined it might be. So many nights overseas he had lain in a hole and tried to imagine what it would be like the day the war was over and he could come home—but the war was still going on, and he had come home anyway to an Eason County that had changed, and a wife who had changed. He and Elise had come from the depot in the first taxicab ride he had ever taken in his life, had driven down a Main Street now bustling with people and activity in the midst o
f war. They had gone into the village, and it had seemed to Janson that almost every house had a flag hanging in a front window, so many of those now having gold stars on them. The mill itself seemed to be running all-out behind its high fence and gate. There had been men in uniform there, and Elise said they were helping now in the mill to get materials out for the war effort, but, other than those, there were few men of military age about.

  Janson had seen quite a number of women on the street near the mill, and he had been surprised to note that some of them had been wearing slacks. Elise herself was wearing a dress, and Janson had stared openly at her legs on the taxicab ride home, for her calves were bare beneath the hem of her skirt, with white socks turned down at her ankles.

  “It’s impossible to even get stockings now,” she told him, tugging self-consciously at the bottom edge of her dress as she noticed his stare. “I lost one out of the only good pair I had left down the drain while I was rinsing them out—”

  So much seemed to have changed. There had been plenty of vegetables at supper that night, but no meat—meat was hard to come by as well, Elise told him, or butter, or coffee, or so many other things. So much had been rationed, from sugar to shoes, to automobile tires, to gasoline, and what was not rationed there was usually a shortage of—so much he had forgotten while he was away. There had been rationing and shortages before he left, but that seemed ages ago now.

  There had even been a truck on their street when they had gotten home. “Whip the Japs with your scrap,” the sign on the side had read. Elise said they now saved everything, from bacon grease, to paper, to the tin-foil that came wrapped around chewing gum, anything that could be recycled and used in the war effort. Home was not the way he had remembered it at all.