1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "Does that lead to what Gran was implying?" Missy asked.

  "In a way, I suppose. Every now and then, Vera would perk up. The summer Aura Lee was fourteen going on fifteen, before her freshman year of high school, she came home one evening from Nat Fritz's house. Vera went into a tirade because during the afternoon, several people called to say that she was sitting on the creek bank with Joe Stull instead of being at the library, where she was supposed to be," Willie Ray said. "And reminding your Nani that Joe was two and a half years older. Plus not exactly from the cream of the crop, socially."

  "Sounds like Grantville."

  "Aura Lee pointed out rather firmly that since all Nani's informants agreed that that the two of them had been sitting on the creek bank talking, in plain sight of everyone, not touching, each one of them throwing a pebble into the water every now and then, her mother didn't have much to complain about. Which was true, as far as it went."

  "Didn't it go far enough?" Missy asked.

  "Well, I bothered to do what Vera didn't. I asked Aura Lee what they'd been talking about, and she answered, 'kissing frogs.' Specifically, that most boys were frogs and that very few frogs turned into princes when they were kissed by princesses. So that, overall, there wasn't much point to kissing them. All of which seemed to derive from some kid who was going to be at the Fritzes' that evening wanting to kiss my daughter. She never did explain exactly how or why she called Joe in as a consultant on the point. But basically they concluded that she was going to put off kissing anybody at all until she got a year older, at which point they'd meet there on the creek bank again and discuss matters in more detail."

  Missy giggled. "That is so funny."

  "Except that a year later, we had one of the worst gully-washers ever. It was raining solid sheets of water, the creeks and branches were up. Joe came along in his mother's rattletrap of a car and, just like he expected, found Aura Lee in a yellow slicker huddled up next to the guard rail, with the creek rising fast and water lapping the toes of her flip-flops. Holding onto the post. As stubborn as a little mule. So he piled her into the car and headed out here to bring her home. They barely made it across the ford at the run. Dashed into the house. Headed into the kitchen. Of course, Aura Lee was hungry. The girl was always hungry. For someone so tiny, she ate incredible amounts. So I found them sitting at the table. She offered me her specialty, a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I made a face. Joe said that he'd opt for straight peanut butter on toast. That sounded pretty good, so I took it. Just then the phone rang. Vera, with Debbie and Anne, saying that she couldn't cross the run and was going back to spend the night in town. I told Joe to call his Ma with the news. So he ended up staying the night."

  "With or without hanky-panky?"

  "Without. Aside from a reasonable amount of flirting on the porch while they stood there after supper and watched the rain come down. Presumably talking out whatever they were scheduled to talk out on the creek bank that afternoon. But it was clear that they were eyeing each other meaningfully, so to speak."

  "You were willing to live with that, Pop?"

  "There's not a lot of point in trying to make the rivers run upstream."

  "You didn't do a thing?" Missy sounded scandalized.

  "The next morning, with the water going down, I walked him out to his car and asked him what his plans were. He said he was leaving high school right then, after junior year, and going into the army. I said I trusted that Aura Lee would not have any serious reason to regret his departure. Joe was eighteen. A kid too, when you came right down to it. He had the guts to look me in the eye and tell me that Aura Lee featured in every possible future he drew up for himself, if she was willing to be there. And the sense of humor to tell me that he didn't have any intention of making a serious move until she had outgrown putting bananas in her peanut butter. 'First things first,' he said.

  "So he went off to basic training a few weeks later, then to Leonard Wood, and Aura Lee spent her sophomore year of high school getting excellent grades and still not kissing frogs. Though I suspect that she kissed Joe more than a few times before he left, whether he thought she was too young or not. All things considered. Just to make sure that he'd remember her. She grew up a lot that next year."

  "This leads to what Gran was saying?" Missy asked.

  "That next summer was the one after Debbie finished high school. I was determined she was going to WVU and living on campus-that she should have a chance to grow up. Vera was equally determined that she wasn't. Let's put it this way. Both of us were distracted and not paying a lot of close attention to Aura Lee. Who by that time had the firm reputation of being a good girl who kept herself to herself and was in no way a troublemaker. I never even told Vera that Joe had been here that rainy night. The only other person who knew it was Juliann Stull, who kept her mouth shut."

  "So nobody was watching Aunt Aura Lee?"

  "Not closely. As long as she was home by curfew, she was pretty much on her own. Part-time job at the grocery store, six hours a day, for pocket money. Driving one of my old rattletraps that was barely good enough to get her to town and back. So when Joe got back on leave, she had time on her hands."

  "Where was there to go in Grantville those days?" Missy asked.

  "Hardly anywhere. That first evening they ended up in a booth in the pizza place, Joe catching a half dozen of his own friends up on army life. Until she reminded him that her curfew hadn't been extended indefinitely and he had to take her home. The rest of the time… I did ask her once during those two weeks if she had taken up kissing frogs. She gave me a look and said, 'Joe's not a frog. He just looks sort of like one to people who don't have enough sense to tell the difference.' "

  "I can almost hear her," Missy said.

  "We could have tried keeping her on a shorter leash those couple of weeks, I suppose. But nobody can be in two places at once. He sat with her in church. The first Sunday, Vera and I had a political reception in Fairmont in the afternoon. When we got home, Debbie was playing with Anne down by the run-she'd stayed home to babysit because Anne was always grumpy if a person waked her up from a nap-and informed us that Joe and Aura Lee were in the back yard, not particularly in a mood to have a two-year-old jumping up and down on them, so we should honk the horn, whistle loudly, sing off-key, rattle a few chains, or otherwise make noise before rounding the corner. Talk about simplicity in pursuit of privacy. I'm sure the last spot any of their friends would have thought to look for them was at our place.

  "He always got her home by curfew. Telling her not to see him would have gone nowhere. We'd already had your mother marry before she finished high school." Willie Ray smiled ironically. "I was clinging to a certain glimmer of hope that Aura Lee and Joe had more common sense than Debbie and Don had at the same age. Which, in the long run, they did."

  "You mean that she stayed home, finished high school, and went to the university?"

  "Basically. She'd been very partial to Joe since the first day she noticed that people came in two genders," Willie Ray said philosophically. "In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if she was looking at him when she noticed it. Even though no one would be likely to describe him as a good-looking boy or a handsome man. She never so much as went out on a date with anyone else. Not even to a church party or school dance. But I have to say that they managed to keep everyone guessing about exactly where things stood between them for the next two years, which was hard to do in a town this size. Which meant that Vera didn't have anything substantial to complain about. After Aura Lee started WVU, they didn't even try to pretend. They stayed reasonably discreet. Those are two different things."

  "How?"

  "That first year she and Debbie were sharing that apartment in Morgantown, your dad dropped your mom off here one Friday evening in the spring. Vera complained that she'd been trying to call the apartment all day and wasn't getting an answer. Debbie said that Aura Lee had caught a ride over to Baltimore at noon to meet Joe there. Spend the weekend. Go to a preseaso
n game; they were a lot cheaper than the regular Orioles games. Tour the harbor. Just relax a bit before she started cramming for finals. Vera got all upset. Debbie answered that it wasn't hurting her a bit. And it wasn't. If Vera hadn't pushed, she'd never even have known that's where Aura Lee was that weekend. Much less any of her friends at First Methodist knowing about it."

  Willie Ray leaned back. "One more thing for you to think about, girl."

  "What?" Missy asked.

  "It's a little hard to tell, since Joe was around. Maybe he was blocking Aura Lee's view, so to speak. On the other hand, he was a thousand miles away for months at a time those first few years they were more or less a couple. Years when she was very young. She had plenty of time to look around. No matter what Eleanor Jenkins was implying about the Hudson women, I think that if Joe didn't exist, Aura Lee would have ended up as uninterested in men as Chad's cousin Marietta Fielder at the library. Not hostile to them. Not a man-hater, or anything like that. Just… not personally concerned with the topic. For her, all the rest were frogs-the ones she grew up with here in Grantville, the other students in Morgantown while she was at the university, all the men she met while she was working in Charleston. There are some women who will look at a half-dozen or so men with reasonable interest while they're growing up, and depending on circumstances could be happy in a different way married to any of those possibilities. Not your aunt. Single minded."

  "I see," Missy said.

  "Do you? You might want to give a thought to whether you're enough like her that Ron Stone is the only man you're ever going to be interested in that way. If he is, that maybe ought to affect your calculations. Whatever you're trying to figure out at the moment, if it's so, it had better affect your calculations. Weigh them."

  "I'm not like that. I dated a half dozen guys before I started dating Ron," Missy protested. "Kissed them, too, some of them. More than once."

  "With what result?"

  Missy looked at her Pop for a while. "They all stayed frogs," she finally admitted.

  Willie Ray leaned back. Point made. No reason now to bring up how relieved he and Vera had been every month things stayed on schedule for quite some time before he'd left for Korea. It embarrassed Vera to remember that, even after they'd been married for fifty years.

  The fact remained that Eleanor had pegged one thing right. Missy was more like the Hudson women. Which meant…

  He didn't believe that he was the only person still alive in Grantville who had been surprised when Eleanor Newton actually settled down and made John Jenkins a good wife. She had been as wild as they came when she was a girl. And if she continued to make a nuisance of herself, he wouldn't hesitate to remind her. He'd appeal to her better nature first. But if that didn't work, he wouldn't hesitate at all to remind her that she would probably prefer not to have Missy asking a lot of questions. He couldn't be the only person who remembered the stories and Missy would find one of them who was willing to talk, eventually. She was bound to, as tenacious as she was.

  "Was it true, Mom? What Gran said-well, implied-about Aunt Aura Lee? I've learned to take some of the things that she says with a grain of salt." Missy pulled her feet up onto the glider.

  "The summer of '74?" Debbie asked. She tapped her fingernails on the porch railing a minute while she thought about her mother-in-law and the way she tended to put things. "That's thirty years ago. Your Gran was telling the truth if she simply told you that Aura Lee and Joe were already an item the summer she was sixteen going on seventeen. As Elaine Bolender said then, he was cradle robbing, a bit. But there wasn't anything anyone could have done about it. Not short of locking one of them up. Or, more likely, locking both of them up, with guards posted twenty-four hours a day."

  "I took it from Pop that he and Nani didn't lock her up?"

  "Joe hitchhiked over from Fairmont when he got back on leave that Saturday, dropped off at Stevenson's Groceries, went in, said 'Hi, Boyd, where's Aura Lee?' Boyd said, 'in back stocking canned goods.' Which is where they went public, so to speak. A fast hug, her head on his shoulder, him saying he was on his way to his ma's and what time was she off so he could pick her up, she saying that she was driving Pop's old Studebaker and he'd have to follow her out home so she could drop it off and get her weekday curfew extended an hour or two. With enough interested spectators to get the report circulating." Debbie grinned. "And enough nicely chosen words in it to make plain that there was nothing going on behind her family's back. She hadn't spent several years as a politician's daughter for nothing."

  "I suppose," Missy said, "that it's at least some comfort to learn that the Hudson women weren't dumb. Which Gran managed to skip over. Whatever else they were."

  Debbie leaned back against the porch banister. "If she implied.. . or tried to imply… that Aura Lee ever had any interest in anyone except Joe, you can forget it. Things went on from there. The next day, Sunday, your Pop and Nani left for Fairmont right after lunch. Political reception. Ray was out in the barn, banging on something mechanical. I stayed behind with a napping Anne, curled up in an easy chair in her bedroom looking through WVU orientation stuff. I heard Joe pull in-it was pretty impossible to miss the noise of his ma's car-and didn't hear anything more. I'm sure they didn't know I was home. Aura Lee had gone outside before we decided not to wake Anne up."

  "How does that song go?" Missy asked. " 'The sound of silence?' "

  "Close." Debbie smiled. Well, sort of smiled. "About an hour later, I looked out the back window. They were in the back yard, lying on a sleeping bag. Not, at that point, even touching. She was on her back with her arms up over her head; he was propped up on one elbow, lying on his side, looking at her. I couldn't see his face, his back was toward me, but I could see hers. The first thing that I thought was practically blasphemous. You know that hymn? 'Have thine own way, Lord, Have thine own way. Thou art the potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me, After Thy will, While I am waiting, Yielded and still.' Okay, that's how she was looking at him. Even if they hadn't done anything irrevocable yet, it was clear that they would. It was a done deal. Sooner or later. She was just waiting for a cue from him.

  "It didn't last that long. In a couple of minutes she said something that made Joe start laughing, they both sat up, and he grabbed her around the shoulders for a regular 'kiss and cuddle' session. They were clearly enjoying themselves, so I went back and finished reading my orientation materials."

  Missy frowned.

  "Yes," Debbie continued. "I did just decide to ignore them. When Anne woke up, I took her out the front door and down to the run. I thought about letting her go out to the sandbox and bounce up and down on them. 'But that would be wrong,' to use a quote from that era. Funny as could be, but wrong."

  "Did Nani and Pop catch them at it?"

  "When Mother and Pop got back, the car made enough noise that by the time they drove around to the garage, they found the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the sleeping bag, their hands around their knees, looking thoughtful. Like those statues of monkeys contemplating a skull. Not that I expect our parents believed that they had spent the afternoon discussing Darwin."

  "I can't believe that Nani and Pop just lived with this!" Missy exploded. "You and Dad wouldn't have. Ah. You still won't, really, even though I'm nineteen."

  "I'm not my mother. Joe and Aura Lee got up, rolled up the sleeping bag, tossed it back in the closet on the back porch, and said that they were going to meet friends for pizza. Much to Mother's relief, I think. She sure didn't want to be put in a position where she almost had to invite Joe to stay for supper. She had been willing enough to see that Don and I were… very close. Not even really upset that I quit high school to marry him. She didn't want to see Joe. As long as she didn't acknowledge that she saw him, somehow he wasn't really there. So she didn't invite him to stay for supper. Any more than she would invite Ron to Easter dinner. Not even though, if she had, Aura Lee would have been right under her eyes all evening, instead of wherever they ended up.
It went that way for his whole leave."

  "Why?" Missy asked.

  "I can't read your Nani's mind, Missy. As for Pop… He said once that there were worse possibilities in Grantville than Joe Stull, lots worse, even as rough around the edges as he was then."

  Missy shook her head.

  "So things kept going," Debbie continued. "Once, when we were at WVU, Chad came to pick me up one Friday evening. He came into our little hallway and asked, 'What's with the lifelike VE Day double statues in the corner?' I said, 'I'll tell you later.' Once we got out into the car, I explained that when Joe came in and dropped his duffel bag, they did that. Just stood there for a while with their arms around each other's waists, not moving. You could sort of multiply 'how long has it been since we saw each other' times 'how much of a hassle have things been since we saw each other' to get an answer as to whether this would last ten minutes or a half hour.

  "Eventually, though, they would let loose and Aura Lee would say something on the lines of 'Pop sent ground venison and I'm making stroganoff' or 'I bought stuff for a cheese omelette with green peppers.' Food was always their next thought, once they were reassured that the other one was still really there. At least it was Aura Lee's next thought, and Joe's not one to refuse a meal.

  "And the last thing they did before he left was go to the laundromat. On Sundays, when Chad dropped me off again, I'd come back to a big pile of clean towels and sheets, all folded with military precision.

  "To be perfectly honest, I don't claim to understand Aura Lee and Joe. Like when she had that cancer diagnosed. Joe was like a rock for her and the kids, the whole time, but if she hadn't beaten it, I think he'd have gone under."

  "What cancer?" Missy asked.

  "She was diagnosed in the summer of '95. You were only ten, then. They operated at the university hospital in Morgantown. She was back and forth for radiation and chemo for a long time. She had to take leave from her job for nearly a year. Joe was still working out of Morgantown. He rented out the house in Fairmont and moved them all up there into an apartment so she wouldn't be faced with driving back and forth all the time, or finding someone to drive her if she was too nauseated. Got an older woman to live in so she didn't have to worry about constantly finding sitters for Juliann or where Billy Lee would be after school."