“Hello, Robert,” he said in a subdued voice.
“Good afternoon, Preacher,” I returned, reflexively addressing him by title. His hair had thinned, and his eyes were hollow.
“I was wond—” I began, but he cut me off.
“Sit down,” he said, nodding toward a couple of sturdy pine chairs that sat on the porch. He closed the door quietly behind him and we sat down. I waited for him to speak.
“You were saying?” he asked finally.
“I stopped by the house and Ellen wasn’t there,” I said. “Thought maybe she might be here.”
I looked at him. He turned his head away, as though he was looking at something off in the distance. But there was nothing to look at. He said nothing for a minute, and I heard him swallow as his Adam’s apple bobbed. When he looked back at me, those hollow eyes of his were deep, glistening wells of pain.
“Robert . . . she’s gone,” he said, his voice low and shaky. His words jolted me like a live wire.
“What? Where?” I asked, desperate to know what he meant by “gone.” I waited for a century as several seconds elapsed.
“She’s gone,” he repeated. He sat hunched over, wringing his hands, staring down at the ground.
“You mean she’s . . .” I began, but couldn’t finish my own sentence. I didn’t need to finish. He nodded slowly, as though dazed. I closed my eyes and buried my face in my hands. It was too much.
I sat for several minutes in shock, overloaded to the point of numbness with a stream of strong and conflicting emotions. When the feeling returned, I felt sorrow, regret, and guilt.
“When . . . what happened?” I broke the silence.
The preacher leaned back in his chair and rested his arms on the arms of the chair. The tortured look on his face made it seem as though the words he was about to say were being forcibly extracted from his vital organs.
“She . . . took her own life,” he said, almost gutturally, as he tightly gripped the arms of his chair with his hands. “Hung herself . . . six weeks ago, tomorrow,” he finished. His breaths were fast and shallow.
There was no numbness now as a fresh wave of emotion pummeled me. “Six weeks . . .” I murmured, “it—it was her birthday.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, Robert. I’m so very sorry,” he said, as though he felt in some way responsible.
“On her birthday!” I whispered in disbelief. “Why?” I addressed my question to the universe in general. “Did—did she leave a note . . . anything?” I asked, wanting my questions answered, but yet afraid that hearing why she’d killed herself would heap even more guilt upon me.
“Yes,” the preacher replied heavily, and I waited for him to elucidate, but he didn’t.
“Can I see it?” I finally asked. I needed to know what she’d written. My father-in-law looked at me, and I realized he had been thinking carefully about what to tell me, so I shut up.
“No . . . I don’t think you’d be any better for it.” He sighed. “There are times when an answer is worse for the mind than a continual question,” he told me honestly.
“You see, Robert, the Apostle Paul talked about a sorrow that leads to repentance—a good sorrow.” He sighed and wiped his eyes before continuing. “Ellen . . . Ellen had a repentance that led to a sorrow so deep she just couldn’t overcome it.”
I felt so culpable, so responsible, so angry at myself for the sorrow that had driven Ellen to take her own life. “I should have come sooner,” I said with an impassioned woefulness.
“Don’t blame yourself, Robert,” he told me through quivering lips, “I was here, but—” he broke down and spoke between sobs, “—but—I—wasn’t—here . . . for her.”
He covered his face with a trembling hand as the sobs shook his body. He looked like a frail, broken old man whose days on earth would be too long no matter how long he lived. I knew the pain and regret he was feeling, for I felt it, too. I wanted to comfort him somehow, but knew there was nothing I could say or do to allay what he felt, so I let him do his grieving, and I did mine.
Then, through the sadness and guilt, I felt something else—relief. It seemed there was a finality about death that was much easier to cope with than what I’d anticipated I’d have to deal with in attempting to rebuild my marriage. No longer would I have to expend energy trying not to think about how Ellen had wronged me, and trying to accept her child. I could begin thinking about starting a new life. A life that wouldn’t be without its trials, but certainly wouldn’t have the daily struggles I would have had in trying to resuscitate a moribund marriage. My spirits rose. I began to feel free, like a soldier who thought he was being sent back into battle who has been told he’s going home instead. Then I remembered that Ellen was dead, and I felt ashamed for my feelings of relief.
The old man and I sat together in silence, as two men sit when there is nothing more to say, but much to think about.
I began to wonder what to do when I left that front porch. Where would I go? Should I stay and try to begin farming again? Should I sell the farm and move back to Pa’s place, or strike off in another direction? These thoughts followed each other around in my head, and I began to wonder if I was going to sit in that seat until I had things figured out.
The front door creaked open, and I heard someone step onto the porch. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see it was Mrs. Moore.
“Robert, I’d like you to meet someone,” I heard her say.
I looked up slowly, into a little round face. Mrs. Moore was holding a blue-eyed, tow-headed tot that peered at me shyly from behind a worn flannel blanket. The baby! For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that Ellen’s baby hadn’t died with her. I looked away, fearful that I would see some resemblance of his father in him.
“Robert, this is Joshua,” she said quietly. I mustered enough courage to look back up. I searched his face, but all I saw in him was Ellen.
Mrs. Moore set him down in front of me, and he stood there, staring at me. I felt myself begin to cry. All I had left of Ellen was standing in front of me, sucking his thumb.
“Joshua, this is—this is—” she looked at me for help.
“Daddy,” I said, looking at him through a blur of tears, “you can call me Daddy.”
Table of Contents
EPILOGUE
THE ROAD TO ANYWHERE
And so on that terrible day, Joshua and I began our life together. I took him back to the farmhouse that very afternoon. It was an instinctive action that needed no internal debate. I saw him as my son to raise, and I suppose I felt I owed a debt to Ellen, so it was the least I could do in her memory.
My care of Joshua quickly ceased to be a duty and instead became a privilege. I fell in love with the little boy, and he loved me, too. He gave me purpose in life, a reason to be alive, a motivation to abstain from alcohol when the demons got me down. Just looking at him could make me so happy and so sad at the same time.
Living on the property where my mother had died, and where I presumed my wife had committed suicide, was not my preference, but it seemed to be my only immediate option. I couldn’t walk into the barn without thinking about how I’d found Ma lying on the floor, I couldn’t look up at the rafters without wondering if Ellen had hung herself on one of them. Everywhere I looked there were memories I couldn’t escape, and it didn’t matter whether it was a beautiful memory or a horrific recollection, both of them evoked the same sadness. To me, it felt like the place was cursed.
I thought about selling it and moving in with Pa, and though I knew he’d welcome us both, I just didn’t feel right about it, so Joshua and I remained hunkered down, waiting for some sort of direction.
For the first month or so, I puttered around the place, spending time with Joshua and doing some much-needed maintenance. However, I soon realized it would take more than tidying up the place to put food on the table. Farming really wasn’t an option, since all the livestock had been sold, and the arable land had been rented to neighbors for years. Besides, mid-su
mmer is not the time of year to begin farming, and farming had never appealed much to me in the first place, so instead, I took a part-time job at a small sawmill to make ends meet, and left Joshua in the care of his grandmother when I was working. I didn’t much like the arrangement, but I told myself it would have to do until I received the divine guidance that I prayed for every day. As it turned out, no one was more astounded than I was when my direction came in a most unusual way.
~~~
Joshua burrowed sleepily into my side as we chugged along on a crisp December morning. We’d only driven 10 minutes and he’d already fallen asleep beside me. He slumped forward, his chin on his chest. I put my arm around him and pulled him toward me. He looked angelic with his droopy bottom lip and long eyelashes. I pulled him against me as tightly as I could without crushing him, as a powerful charge of love surged through me. My eyes watered, and I wondered if he’d ever know all the paradoxical things he symbolized to me.
We were on a mission that had begun the previous night. While giving my bedroom a thorough cleaning, I’d come across my satchel, which I had shoved under the bed and forgotten. I’d assumed it to be empty, but took a peek inside it before stuffing it in the closet.
In the bottom, far in the corner, I saw something I’d forgotten about. It was Johnny Snarr’s lucky shell. I picked it out, sat down on the bed, and studied the piece of brass I held in my hand. There were so many stories connected to that dull golden casing, so many memories of Johnny and other men that had died so terribly. I allowed myself to think about them that night, the good and the bad alike. Some of them made me chuckle, others made me shiver, all of them made me want to cry.
I thought about Johnny’s last days and felt guilty once again that I’d allowed him to continue to fight when it had been so obvious he was mentally unfit to. I almost felt sick when I thought about how he’d searched through the mud and slush for his lost shell as the gunfire had splattered all around him.
Then, I remembered something, not something I had forgotten, just something I hadn’t remembered in a long time. I remembered what Johnny had told me when he’d hurtled back over the wall.
“When I die, promise me you’ll give this to Maggie,” he’d said. It was eerie that he’d spoken those words mere hours before he had died. He had seen the end coming.
As much as I would have liked to keep that shell as the only memento I had of my friend, I knew that that had not been his wish. It did not belong to me, so that’s why Joshua and I were driving toward Jacksboro on a Saturday morning. I didn’t know where Johnny’s widow lived, or if she still lived in the Jacksboro area, but I was determined to make good on the promise I’d made to my friend.
Fortunately, Jacksboro was even smaller than Coon Hollow, so locating the residence of Maggie Snarr took less time than I had feared. I could feel my heart jump as we pulled up in front of a humble-looking house that narrowly escaped the title of ramshackle by virtue of its neatness. Though I wasn’t bringing fresh news of her husband’s death, I still felt like I was a bearer of bad news, so I felt some trepidation as I prepared to deliver something that would remind a widow of her loss.
“Come on, sleepyhead,” I smiled at Joshua as I lifted him out of the car. He blinked and smiled lazily back at me as we walked across the brown lawn to the front door.
As I lifted my hand to knock on the door, the door opened. A petite, brown-haired woman stood in the open doorway.
“There you are! Come in!” she said, as though she’d been waiting for us and was relieved we’d made it safely. I was taken aback. I had expected to drop the shell off at the door with a short explanation and be on our way.
“Were—were you expecting us?” I asked as I shut the door behind me. I was completely perplexed. She smiled wanly. She looked harried and jaded, and her hair was pulled back in sort of a spinsterish fashion.
“As a matter of fact, I was,” she affirmed. “I prayed this morning that God would send an angel to help me.” I laughed nervously, not sure if she was tetched or what.
“Um, well, we’d better move along before that angel of yours shows up,” I quipped uneasily. Being identified as an angel was a pressure that I really hadn’t prepared myself for. She laughed quietly, and her face relaxed.
“How about I make you a coffee and we can talk while I wait?” she proposed. I chuckled, beginning to feel a little more at ease.
“Sounds like a deal,” I told her. We both stood, staring at each other for a moment.
“Are you Mrs. Maggie Snarr?” I finally asked. It seemed that would be a good fact to confirm to start with.
“Maggie to you,” she replied. “And you are?” she asked.
“Robert Mattox,” I replied, and extended my hand. She shook my hand with an honest strength, and while her bones were delicate, I could feel her hands were no strangers to work. They reminded me of my ma’s hands.
“Sergeant Robert Mattox?” she asked, her voice tinged with something that sounded like the excitement one might expect to hear from someone meeting a celebrity.
“Yes,” I responded, surprised she had heard of me.
“Johnny spoke so highly of you!” she said to me with warmth and admiration. “Come!” she beckoned, and Joshua and I followed her into the kitchen.
Maggie put on some water to boil and excused herself. As I waited for her to return, I looked around the room. The place was old, and it looked drafty. The table was rickety, and had I been a heavier man, I wouldn’t have trusted the chair I sat on.
“Howdy!” a cheery voice startled me from behind. I turned and saw a little girl standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a doll. I realized she must be the curly-headed toddler that Johnny had shown me a picture of long ago, but she was a young girl of six or seven now.
“Why, hello!” I smiled back at her. While her face bore many of her father’s physical features, she certainly hadn’t inherited his reserved nature.
“I’m Elizabeth,” she announced loudly as she walked boldly toward me. “Who are you?” she inquired, looking up at me as though she had a right to the information.
“I’m Mr. Mattox,” I replied amusedly.
“What’s his name?” she pointed to Joshua.
“Joshua,” I responded. She appraised him for a moment.
“He’s cute,” she decreed, and somehow I got the feeling that the matter had been in doubt until she gave the say-so.
“Lizzie, don’t be making a pest of yourself,” Maggie scolded as she entered the room. She had let her hair down and put on a black skirt and a white blouse that contrasted nicely with her dark hair. She looked younger and less tired than when she’d left.
“She’s just being a good hostess, that’s all,” I defended Lizzie, and winked at her.
Maggie brewed me a cup of coffee, steeped some tea for herself, and sat down at the table.
“Would Joshua like something? Cookies and milk?” she asked, looking at Joshua. Though he was too young to speak intelligibly, his excited burbling seemed to indicate he understood the question.
“I think that would be a yes,” I laughed, and she went and retrieved some cookies from the cupboard and a glass of milk from the fridge. I noted how bare her refrigerator looked when she opened it up, and it seemed to confirm my suspicion that Maggie Snarr was having a little trouble getting by.
I broke the cookie into bits and fed them to Joshua.
“Cream, sugar?” Maggie offered.
“No, thank you,” I declined, and took a careful sip of the piping-hot coffee. Joshua took a few more bites of cookie, but then became more interested in Lizzie’s doll, so he slid off my lap, toddled over to her, and grabbed the doll by the hair.
“No, Joshua, you have to hold her nicely, like this,” Lizzie told him like a bossy big sister, and helped him cradle the doll in his arms.
“Lizzie, why don’t you take Joshua and show him some of your toys?” Maggie suggested. “If that’s alright with you,” she added, looking at me.
&n
bsp; “By all means,” I agreed.
Lizzie dutifully took him by the hand and led him into the next room. I watched them leave the room, and when I turned back to speak to Maggie, I saw we both had the same little smile on our faces.
“So, what brings you to visit me today?” Maggie asked me.
“Well, this morning during breakfast, God came to me . . .” I teased, and we both laughed. I quickly grew sober as I began to speak of why I had come.
“No, the reason I’m here is that I made a promise to your husband before he died,” I told her. I could tell what I’d said touched a tender spot, but she nodded for me to continue. I pulled out the brass casing from my pocket and set it upright on the table.
“This is a casing from a bullet for an M1 Garand rifle,” I told her. She looked at it interestedly as I continued. “But this isn’t just any bullet shell, this is the casing from the bullet that Johnny killed his first German with.” She reached for it slowly and picked it off the table, holding it this way and that in her hand. She looked back up at me, and I saw her eyes were cloudy.
“Many of us were a little superstitious. Well, some of us were more than a little superstitious,” I corrected with a little laugh. “Most of us had some sort of good luck charm we carried around. Well, for Johnny, that shell was it. It was his lucky shell. That casing never left his person for the better part of a year.” Maggie looked at the shell as though she was holding a precious, holy artifact.
“He made me promise that when he—if he died,” I corrected hastily, “I would give it to you.”
Her eyes remained fixed on the piece of brass in her hand. A tear rolled haltingly down her cheek.
“And so . . . there it is,” I ended quietly. There was nothing more to say. I had delivered on my promise.
“Thank you,” she whispered through her tears. She cried, not with girlish sobs, but rather with a certain dignity and composure that spoke of a character acquainted with enduring hardship. I found her pluckiness endearing, and had to blink back tears of my own when I thought about how bravely she comported herself. She wiped her eyes with a hanky and gently blew her nose.
Love is a Wounded Soldier Page 31