The House Near the River Read online

  Angie grabbed the other woman’s hands. “No, no, Clemmie. There never was a baby. At least not yet. I have no memory of coming back a second time, of marrying Matthew, of expecting a baby. It’s like before when you all remembered meeting me and my being engaged to Matthew and I had no memory of anything like that.”

  “You must have a really terrible memory if you can forget things like that. It was such a lovely wedding, too, simple and beautiful. I’ve never seen Matthew so happy.”

  Her life was mixed up in some strange way. Where the events of other people’s lives seemed to unwind seamlessly in proper order, hers jumped back and forth.

  At least there was one comforting fact. Clemmie didn’t remember her brother’s death, but that he’d gone missing again.

  “When did it happen, Clemmie? When did I show up back here?” Clemmie didn’t look much different from the last time she’d seen her, the kids hadn’t grown perceptibly. Danny seemed smaller, but that was natural as terribly sick as he’d been and still was. Sharon’s legs were a little longer and now that she was well again, Angie noticed that Shirley Kay’s vocabulary had grown.

  “How long?” she asked again.

  “We were pulling cotton so it was fall. Matthew had moved to Texas and bought a little farm down there and then, without a word of warning, here the two of you were, coming down the road in his Nash, saying you were getting married.

  “We had the wedding in the living room at Christmas. You visited with us for a day or two, then went back to Matthew’s little house in Texas. We were so happy for you.

  “Then not long after, Matthew called to tell us about the baby. He sounded so happy. We decided to go down to see you, all of us, the kids and Tobe and me, but when we got there, you were both gone. The house was bare and neighbors said Matthew had been by himself when he gave them the livestock, saying he was going away. He told them his wife had left him.

  “We looked for him, talked to everybody who knew him. He’d vanished and nobody seemed to know what had gone wrong. I had a terrible feeling I’d never see either of you again.”

  Angie swallowed hard. “Well, you were wrong. Here I am. We’ll manage to find Matthew no matter where he has gone.”

  “But, Ange, what about the baby? Did it never happen?”

  To her surprise, Angie found that mythical infant had a strange reality to her. She could not bear the idea that it would never exist.

  She was glad when Danny awakened, demanding attention so that she didn’t have to come up with an answer to satisfy Clemmie.

  Angie took to spending most of her days at the farm, looking after the girls and the house so that Clemmie could stay with Danny at the hospital.

  She watched the flickering cracks in time that appeared around her, but none of them seemed to present familiar scenes. She saw what seemed to be long ago before the settlers came. Dusky-skinned Native American women went about their work, tending children, cleaning buffalo hides, cooking in pots over fires.

  She stared at them in awe, but felt no compulsion to join them. Even more frequently she witnessed pioneer women in long skirts and bonnets and wondered if they were Clemmie’s ancestors.

  It was as though the history of the prairie was being played out in quick sketches before her eyes. She heard no voices or sounds, but only saw the panorama before her.

  Too busy doing the hard work that normally was done by Clemmie, she found few spare moments to dwell on what now seemed almost ordinary in her life, though she did question Clemmie about specifics of her appearance at the Harper home.

  “It was just before Christmas,” Clemmie told her.

  “And what year is this?”

  Clemmie blinked, then answered. “1947. April 1947.

  She’d met Matthew on December 8th, 1941. She’d come back with him to be married in December 1946, five years later.”

  And now she was here in April 1947, supposedly pregnant. Only she wasn’t. She had stepped out of time either before or after her marriage.

  None of it made any sense to her.

  She dreamed that night. A dark-haired woman who looked like she might be part Indian stared seriously into her face. “You must awaken, little one, or it will be too late.”

  In her dream she took the admonishment as significant. “I keep trying. It’s like being in a nightmare where you think you wake up, only to find you’re still dreaming, still caught in the nightmare.”

  “No nightmare. More real than the ordinary day.”

  She spoke slowly, hesitantly, as though she were not accustomed to the language, but still with proper usage as though well educated.

  “Are you Indian?” Then she corrected herself. It was more correct to use other terms. “Native American?”

  “I am Cheyenne. A wise woman of the Cheyenne.”

  “And you come to me in a dream?”

  She smiled, showing her teeth. “I walk in time, as do you. We meet out on the great plain of the spirits because I must advise you.”

  And then Shirley Kay cried out in the night and the dream lay broken, shattered around her.

  From that night, Angie felt a new urgency. She had to do something, she didn’t know what, or something really bad would happen. She had no idea what she must do.

  Finally Danny was brought home from the hospital in an ambulance, crying out with pain over every jolting bump in the road from town. He was still too sick to sit up and Tobe carried him into the house to place him carefully in the bed in the spare bedroom.

  Angie slept on the sofa in the dining room, close enough to hear him if he cried out in the night.

  His recovery was still by no means certain and, if it came, would take a long time.

  His sisters, newly tender with their wraith of a brother, took turns playing games with him while Sharon read stories aloud.

  Clemmie and Angie cooked special food for him, trying to tempt a fretful appetite. Late spring came before he began to show definite signs of improvement and with a tired sigh, Angie knew she no longer had an excuse not to move on.

  The Cheyenne wise woman had appeared in her dreams two more times, encouraging her with increasing urgency that she must do something, but she always woke before the mission could be spelled out.

  No longer did Angie question her own sanity. This life she lived was as real as anyone else’s.

  She wanted to go home and make sure Dad and David were all right. Even as she did chores around the farm, she watched the flickering openings, searching for the right one, but saw only strangers.

  Trying to analyze past crossings, she began to realize that she’d followed people. That first step in time that had led her here had been because she’d seen her brother and when she’d left, she still had been following David.

  But in what she still thought of as the present family, the homestead was abandoned and then men on their big tractors who farmed the land were not familiar to her.

  Who was to guide her through? How would she know when to go?

  This time she told Clemmie she was about to make the attempt.

  “Oh, No, Ange. No telling what will happen.”

  “Somewhere, somehow it has already happened. I must follow my own footsteps to find my way. Right now my life is only puzzles. So, if I disappear again, Clemmie, don’t be alarmed.”

  Clemmie tried to laugh. By now she’d been forced to accept that Angie was not carrying a baby. It had been a huge disappointment to her and she worried about that baby who might never exist.

  She prayed for that baby and for her brother. No matter how strange the happenings, Clemmie was persuaded that God reigned over all.

  Day after day grew warmer, moving toward summer, as Angie watched for a familiar face on that other side where she hoped to find her father and brother. In spite of the message she’d left, Dad must be so worried by now.

&nb
sp; Increasingly her mind was with them and then one evening as she as coming back to the house, carrying a pail of milk to the separator, she saw Dad’s face. He was laughing at something.

  No time to wait. No time to hesitate. She dropped the pail and rushed forward but even as she moved through the shrinking opening, she knew she’d made a mistake.

  It was too late. She was already through, but not into the time where her father stood with laughter on his face. The scene had changed just as she’d entered and she stood now in an unfamiliar time.

  The day lay cold and deep in snow and she realized instantly that she was far from the farmhouse in Oklahoma. For the first time her journeying had taken not only years into a different when, but also a far distance in where.

  She stood looking down on a valley from which emerged the sounds and smells of battle. She heard men cry out and saw the lumbering of tanks, leaving snow and mud in their tracks as they battled each other. Further on one of the tanks was on fire and she saw a man run toward it, yelling for his friends.

  Angie knew where she must be. Something in the scenes she walked into drew her. So far it had been a combination of individuals and the old house that stood so significantly as a part of her family history.

  Her brother had drawn her. Clemmie had drawn her. The house had sent her here.

  But only one person could have brought her to this setting. Her heart pounded and her breathing came hard in the cold and wind. She was only wearing the feed sack dress Clemmie had made, her legs left bare between the hem of the dress and the socks she wore with her shoes. She had no coat to protect her body against the wind that blew so hard as to nearly knock her down.

  The tank fire whipped in the wind and still she stood frozen from shock as much as cold. She had read it was the coldest winter they’d seen in fifty years in these parts and new she watching that last powerful gasp of German desperation as they saw the chance at victory slipping from them. She was at that great tank battle called the battle of the bulge.

  And somewhere down there was Matthew, the man she loved with her whole heart, and she had been drawn here by his presence. She knew now that she and Matthew had met once before that day in Oklahoma City and that she must act quickly or all the rest that had followed would never happen.;

  It was hard floundering through deeper snow than she’d ever seen in Oklahoma or Texas, great drifts of it heaped in her path, but she rushed with every ounce of speed and strength toward that tank fire. Matthew said what little he did of his war experiences as though everything crystalized in this moment when, having been rescued himself, he went back to try to save his buddies in a burning tank.

  She must look very strange, a woman running across the field of battle in a war where women went only as nurses and ambulance drivers and she wore none of the apparel of war, no uniform, no weapon, and she was cold, so very cold.

  But there was a reason she was here and she knew Matthew’s life hung in the balance.

  The tank burned hopelessly when she got there, a sight of horror such as she’d never imagined. For those trapped inside it was too late. The cries of horror had stopped, they were dead, left for fodder in that terrible fire.

  But only steps from the fire, in its path as fiery fingers reached toward them lay Matthew and the boy he’d pulled from the fire. Matthew lay unconscious, his face splotched red by his burns, a red that stood out starkly against unnaturally white skin. He was near death.

  In his arms, the boy he’d rescued was hardly better, barely awake. She knew instantly that no matter what lay in his future, neither he or Matthew would live if they were not moved from the fire’s path.

  She could not hesitate for fear of causing them pain or further injury. There on the ground with the fire rushing at them, death was their only destiny. With more strength than she had a right to possess, she grabbed Matthew’s feet, even as he still clasped that boy who looked about seventeen in his rescuing hold, and dragged them, sliding them across the snow.

  When she had them safely out of the fire’s path, she became aware once against of the din of battle sounds. The boy looked up at her and said, “ma’am, you sure must be an angel.”

  She laughed and turned to look for a source of help for them and instead walked right through an opening in the dreary winter day.

  Angie landed, shivering and crying, in the midst of a one hundred degree Texas afternoon. Her little brother stared at her, then pulled his thumb from his mouth and yelled, “Dad, Ange is back home.”

  She looked around. She was lying on the rug in the big public living room of the Prairie House. Fortunately David was the only other person in the room .

  “Dad!” he yelled. “I think she’s hurt or sick.”

  Her father ran into the room, got half way across the rug and then stopped to stare at her. “You all right, Angie?”

  Angie stopped crying long enough to laugh. “It’s not fair. Dammit, it’s not fair. I don’t know if he . . . they were all right, though I guess they must be or we’d never have met at the coffee shop . . .no that was before . . .”

  “David, run and get a blanket.” Dad hovered over her, feeling her face, touching her hair. “She’s freezing cold, though I don’t know how.”

  Her teeth chattered so hard now she wasn’t sure he could even understand what she was saying. “It was so cold, a blizzard I guess, and I didn’t even have a coat.”

  “Shhh.” He placed a hand lightly on her mouth. “You’re in shock. Let us take care of you.”

  He and the little boy wrapped her in blankets on the sofa and when guests started to come in, ordered them elsewhere. Dad went into the kitchen and came back with hot tea. He and David were both dressed in shorts and tank tops and the air conditioning was running—Dad quickly turned it off—but she was still shaking with cold.

  She told herself she had to stop crying because she was scaring little David. His eyes were huge and he was sucking his thumb and David was not normally a thumb sucker.

  She tried to pull herself back to rationality, to dismiss that scene on a cold day in Europe. She’d left Matthew and the boy he’d saved back nearly seventy years the past. Whatever had happened, had happened.

  “How long have I been gone?”

  “Months,” her father answered grimly. He looked at his son, then tried to lighten his tone. “We missed you.”

  “Missed you too.” Her shivering began to subside as Dad spooned Ivy’s hot chicken soup, no doubt brought in from the freezer to be warmed, into her mouth. “But it was important, Danny was sick and then there was the fire . . .” abruptly she stopped. No used trying to make explanations that couldn’t be comprehensible to him.

  “You two okay?”

  He nodded. “Fine.”

  She came down with a cold and was sick and feverish, dragging around the inn for most of a week. As always when she was back at ‘normal’ with her Dad and David and the home she’d lived in since she was thirteen, it became harder to accept the reality of those other experiences.

  She couldn’t have been with Clemmie at Danny’s bedside when he almost died. That old doctor had said he would have died if she hadn’t been there to see beyond the illness that all the children had to realize something different was wrong with Danny.

  And that other, harder reality of standing looking over a war torn valley and having to push through the snow to save Matthew and that unknown boy. Maybe she’d saved them. She couldn’t know for sure.

  The Cheyenne woman in her dreams had said she would make a difference. Well, she had, maybe. At least that particular visitor hadn’t made a guest appearance in her dreams the last few days.

  But how could she and Matthew be so drawn to each other and still be separated. That didn’t feel right. It wasn’t the way things should be.

  This time of year, July and August, were slow times at the farm. Even though it was vacat
ion time, not a whole lot of people wanted to bring their kids out and spend their days running around in blazing heat, so each year Dad brought in workers to freshen the painting and make repairs that had gone begging the rest of the year.

  So it was that as she recovered from her cold, indulging in a lot of sniffing, coughing and sneezing, she heard the constant talk of the painters and the pounding of hammers in the kitchen where new granite countertops were being installed.

  Even though it was a hundred and two outside, she just had to get out of the house. David was down by the sheds, playing with one of the young goats that followed him around like a dog.

  “This is Elle,” he told her solemnly. “She’s a girl.”

  She nodded. “Nothing as cute as a baby goat.”

  “Yeah.”

  As she strolled in heat that seemed to sizzle on the summer air, he followed her and the little goat followed him. She didn’t mind. It even helped a little to have company in her wandering that seemed as aimless as her life these days.

  She had two levels of homesickness. When she was at the farm in Oklahoma she missed home and Dad and David. At Prairie House in Texas she was missing Clemmie, Danny and the girls. She still didn’t feel much about Tobe, though he seemed to be good to Clemmie and her kids, he still felt like an intruder to her.

  And Matthew, she missed Matthew wherever she was as though a part of herself was missing. She pictured his lanky form, his thoughtful face until it was almost as though he stood near her.

  “Hi, Matthew,” David shouted cheerfully.

  She whirled around, stared at her brother. He patted the little goat. “Matthew isn’t here, David?”

  “Sure he is.” He pointed down the road to a farm where Hereford cattle grazed. “He lives over there.”

  She laughed uneasily. “You’ve seen him, David?”

  “Nope, but I can feel he’s there. It makes me feel good knowing Matthew is watching after us.”

  This made no sense at all. But she couldn’t just dismiss David’s words. This little boy was the only one she personally knew who had crossed into the time openings. He was an odd little boy, maybe as strange as his sister, even though they did not share blood heritage.