The House Near the River (2 page)

She couldn’t
help
laughing out loud. He was so naughty and so cute.

After a while, she got thirsty and went in the house to get a glass of tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. “Where’s David?” Mom frowned at her, sweaty and tired-looking from working in the hot kitchen, though Gran looked cool as a cucumber. But then Gran had worked on the farm all her life, while Mom was accustomed to an air conditioned business office.

“I’m just getting him some juice.” As an afterthought, Angie added a little box of orange juice and picked up a couple of Gran’s homemade oatmeal cookies as a snack for both of them.

“You can’t afford to take your eyes off a child that age for a minute,” Mom scolded.

“Only
two seconds
,” Angie tried to reassure her mother. Mom was such a worrier. Poor David, she’d probably go along on dates when he was a teenager.

It was only to make her mother happy that she picked up her step as she crossed the wide hall that led from the back to the front of the
house
and stepped out on the porch, expecting to see the little boy right where she’d left him.

Angie woke with a sudden start,
feeling sick inside
in spite of the fact that it had now been fifteen years since that nightmare had been reality. David hadn’t been there and she was sure he’d just
run to the side yard or out back where the chickens pecked in their yard. He was fascinated with the baby chicks.

Nausea building in her stomach and heart racing, she’d dropped the drinks and snacks to the ground, hardly noticing that the cold tea splashed against her ankles and ran, searching at first with confidence that she’d see that small face at any second and then with rapidly building panic.

It was when she finally accepted that David just wasn’t there, not anywhere, that she’d screamed and Mom and Gran came running. They’d search
ed
the farm, called the
sheriff’s office for help, and made Angie wait by the phone while they got into the farm pickup to drive the nearby roads looking for the little boy.

They never saw him again and though it was never said aloud, Angie knew her mother never forgave her, not to her dying day
. Now
years away from that tragedy,
that terrible moment when she’d found her brother gone
still popped up in painful dreams at unexpected intervals. As it had tonight.

Normally when one of these dreams disturbed her night, she got up and turned on the television, made hot cocoa or tea, and took on some active task, like vacuuming her living room or scrubb
ing
the kitchen floor until she was so tired she could fall asleep again.

Here, trapped in her car, she had no such options and the nagging sense of
sadness
and regret overwhelmed her. The loss of David and her part in it ached as though it had happened yesterday.

She knew well enough that the thirteen-year-old girl she’d been when the disappearance happened didn’t deserve lifelong punishment for a brief interval of inattention that could have happened to anyone. No one had ever understood what had happened to her brother, how he so quickly vanished. They’d assumed a kidnapping and hoped for a ransom demand that never happened, even though it didn’t seem possible that anyone could have
driven up
and grabbed the child and
left
without being noticed by
at least
one of the neighbors.

For Angie, the worst fear seemed the most likely. She spent whole days still trying not to picture the little boy stumbling down a  crevice in the badlands down by the river, or wandering until he was swept into the river itself, his small body
taken
away in its waters or lost forever in quicksand.

In va
i
n did she try to comfort  herself that whatever terror and pain the little boy had felt was
long
past. A print of a girl trying to see her small brother safely across a great chasm that had been on the wall at Grandma’s little church haunted her. In the picture, a guardian angel hovered over the two children, but on that February day in
her
thirteenth year, there had been no angel
. She frequently wakened to the sound of her brother calling her name, “Ange, Ange!” as he did when he got in trouble.

Perhaps in his distress he’d called for her and been puzzled when she didn’t come to his rescue.

Abruptly Angie couldn’t stand it any longer. Better to face her fear of wild animals, most of whom were probably even more scared of her than she was of them, then this residual terror. She sat up, opened the  door and climbed from the car into a breezy winter night.

Beginning to chill immediately in the night with its cold wind, she hurried to open the trunk of her car, taking out the hooded winter coat she had draped across her single piece of luggage and gratefully slipped it on, enjoying the thick warmth it offered as protection against the cold night.

The night was silent now. Perhaps the coyotes were off hunting across another pasture with more opportunities of game. She pictured them creeping up on her in the darkness and decided she was being foolish. No doubt the wild animals out there were more afraid of her than she was of them, and a whole lot less dangerous than the human predators to be found in the streets of any big city.

She decided what she needed was to stretch her legs a bit before trying to sleep again. Going to look in the trunk, she brought out thick socks and running shoes and, with the door open, sat on the car seat as she put them on her feet.

Starting off at a brisk walk that turned into a slow run as she began to loosen up, she ran, a pale silver path shown for her on the rutted
road
by the dim moonlight, as she
hurried
down to the road and back. Warmed by the accustomed exercise, she felt her confidence go up. She hated the thought of climbing back into the car, which made very nice transportation, but wasn’t much of a bedroom.

Looking thoughtfully at the house which stood in forbidding shadows, she contemplated using her coat as a pallet on the floor inside, but then decided that would be foolish. The poor old house was close to falling down, the porch torn away, the windows glassless eyes, the doors missing. The elements had taken a hard toll on it since the days when her grandparents had made it their home.

Grandpa was gone now and Grandma lived in an assisted living center, where she was much beloved by the other residents and worked hard at managing their lives for them. Even tonight Angie came close to a smile at the thought of Gran.

But what had she and Amanda been thinking when they planned to come out here exploring? The old house was no safe place to go tramping through
. T
hey could have
crashed
through
rotten
floor boards or
had
something fall through what had been the attic on to their brainless heads.

Somehow she hadn’t guessed it would be this far gone and perhaps neither had Amanda, who had admitted she hadn’t been out here in years. They would have taken one look at the old house by the light of day and decided to drive down by the river for their picnic.

“Ange.
Ange.”  The soft call of the name her little brother had called her drifted to her on the wind and she closed her eyes, telling herself she was really losing her mind this time. One counselor had told her that she’d failed to move on from that childhood tragedy and that until she had shed herself of it, she would continue to be haunted much as soldiers relive
d
the long ago terrors of
long ago
battle
s
. Of course she hadn’t heard a voice calling her name.

Anyway the voice hadn’t been that of a little boy, but that of a grown man, his tone particularly deep and sounding as though it was harsh from the dust and wind that swept the farm.

Matthew strolled the pastures alone in the dark of the night and once or twice he called the name of the woman
he had longed for
these past few years. “Ange.
Ange,” he whispered softly and without demand. After the years that had passed since his meeting with
this
woman with her soft, dark eyes and
hair
that glinted in the sun and the face that he could never forget, she
had haunted
his days and even more his nights.

He’d plowed the fields,
telling
the oxen Babe and Jude about her. He’d taken her to war and talked to his buddies about her and not told them that he’d only seen her once and fallen in love forever.  She’d been with him when he commanded a tank in the snows near
Bastogne, when he’d been
injured
pulling one of his men from a burning tank, and when he’d gone with Patton’s army to Berlin in the last days of the war.

He’d tried to shut her out when they’d seen unbelievably terrible things at the prison camps. Like most soldiers he’d wanted to protect the folks back home from a world unimaginably cruel.

He’d wished she were there when he came back home, but, of course, she wasn’t. Though sometimes he’d imagined her near at hand, hovering just beyond reach as he suffered the shameful breakdown they called shell shock. He’d sat in a corner, shaking, lost again in the burning tank, seeing his friends die one after another in battle, starving at Bastogne, unable to believe he was back home again and troubled about so man
y
who would never return.

Before the war, he’d thought of himself as invincible, able to take anything that fate dealt him, but now he knew he was weak and flawed and now that he was as well as he’d ever be, he avoided his neighbors and allowed only his family to see what was left of the man he’d been.

It was easier to think of her than of the war, a dream that might have been if he’d remained whole and sane. Then he would have gone searching for her until she was found and would have made her his wife.

Now he was resolved to let her go. She deserved better than the man he had come back
as
from war
-
torn Europe.

By day he worked so hard he didn’t have to think and the farm demanded everything he could give. He was sole support of his widowed sister and her family and it took hard work to bring a living from western Oklahoma prairie land. He told himself that he’d kept them going through the dusty years of the late 30s and now that Clemmie’s husband, his brother-in-law, was dead
on the beaches of the Normandy invasion, she and her four children had no one but him to depend on. That was the thought that kept him going through the torment the war had left him in. He was desperately needed.

If only Charlie had lived and he had died, then Clemmie would have a husband and her children a father and his pain would have quickly ended.

He couldn’t see much in the dark, but he didn’t need to see. He knew what lay around him. The Harper family had struggled to keep the farm going through the thirties and because of the strength of newly broken land and the drought-resistant soil, they’d managed, barely, to survive.

Those were the years when Matthew was growing from twenty to thirty, that miserable decade, when the hard times the farmers had known in the years before turned to battle just to keep the family fed and reasonably healthy.

His father having died in 1929, leaving him and his mother with a mortgage because of the new house
they’d so
proudly managed to build, less than a thousand dollars owed for the two story house with its wide front porch, but more than Matthew thought he’d be able to pay.

He’d lived with the nightmare of worry and fears that they’d lose house and farm and be forced to join the trail of migrants finding their way to the hope of jobs in distant California.

And then Clemmie and Charlie lost their farm and, of course, they’d taken them in. Things were both harder and better. Both he and Charlie to do the work, but eventually they’d had four kids—which left them with eight people to feed instead of just him and mama.

But agonizing year after year, they hung on, under-nourished and
increasingly gaunt, Mama looking ninety when she was only
sixty
so that she died while he was away in the army, leaving the farm to him and his sister.

And then Charlie had been killed and Clemmie, back at home, a woman alone trying to keep the farm going when all the men were away and no help to be had. He’d no choice but to come back, broken man that he was. If Clemmie could keep going doing a back-breaking job that no woman should have to do by herself, then he must keep going for her sake and for the children.

Only the spirit was gone out of him, the drive to live and succeed that ran so strongly in the family had been drained from him by the war. He should have died, he knew that. He was a man living beyond his intended time, a walking ghost.

He walked back toward the house.  The eggs were gathered, the chickens locked in for the night, the calves fed.