The House Near the River Page 16

  She started to him and then, as though it were an envelope being sealed, the opening closed and he was gone.

  Angie screamed out her anger and frustration to the empty air around her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Matthew felt like a statue. His muscles wouldn’t work, his joints wouldn’t bend or turn. He was a figure leaning against the wooden corral, staring at a woman who was no longer there.

  In those seconds when she had appeared, he had memorized everything about her. Dark hair worn loose so that it blew in the breeze, long-lashed dark eyes fixed on him. She’d been wearing short pants that showed most of her long, lovely legs and a top that didn’t reach her middle.

  Clothes for some other day than this cold November weather in 1946.

  He gulped down his disappointment that she had vanished before he could even reach for her and stood there, fixed in place, hoping desperately for a second appearance.

  After a couple of hours, he could stand no longer. His legs were ready to collapse under him so he found a seat on the dry winter grass and continue to watch. He knew she would try to find the way back and he meant to be here waiting for her when that time came.

  But at dark the cow and calves were calling and he had to lock in the hens or predators would get them. His body was stiff and cold as he started to the barnyard to care for his animals. By the time he’d finished his chores, the temperature had dropped below freezing and he knew he couldn’t keep up his vigil outside all night long.

  He went inside, heated soup and ate it without tasting, then went outside again to look for her. He kept going out into the cold night at intervals until about midnight when he fell asleep in his chair next to the dwindling fire in the little stove.

  Hope was almost harder to bear than despair. He had seen her. She was real and nearby. But how could he reach her?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Angie had never been more determined in her life. Instead of standing around waiting for Matthew to reappear, she went back to the inn and, finding her father alone, told him in a few choice words what had happened and what she was about to do.

  She was going to find Matthew and they were going to get married at Grandma’s house in Oklahoma.

  His mouth opened, then closed again. He stared at her.

  “In the past,” she added that relevant piece of information.

  By now there wasn’t much she could say that would surprise her dad for long.

  “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  He nodded, then reached for her, hugging her close. “You won’t be gone forever?”

  She had to be honest. “I seem to have a gift for this and I think I can learn to make it work. If not, look in the old albums. I might be there.”

  “You love this World War II soldier that much?”

  She nodded, tears coming to her eyes.

  “Then go with my blessing.” He hesitated for a moment. “But try to come back now and then.”

  He didn’t attempt to follow her as she walked out of the bed and breakfast for what could be the last time. She didn’t know why, but she was feeling a new assurance. There had to be more to this than simple chance. She had to find a way to exert some control. This was, after all, her life.

  The heat outside had declined but only slightly. It wouldn’t get dark until late in this summer day. She started to go back down the road to the spot where she’d seen Matthew, then paused. She’d been able to go to him in a faraway country. No reason she couldn’t stand on the porch and reach him.

  The assurance began to ebb quickly as she stood there and thought about what to do. David suddenly came running from round back of the building, darting up the steps to her. “Have a good trip,” he called.

  Her little brother was one weird kid. “I hope to,” she called back, but the door had already slammed behind him.

  She thought about the lighting-colored portals that regularly flashed through the air around her at the house near the river. Maybe something about that environment made it all so frighteningly easy that a little boy could just trip through the opening. Couldn’t be like that in many places or people would be falling through all the time.

  It wasn’t just the place. It was the person. Something about her and the people she felt strongly about .

  She closed her eyes and thought about Matthew and how she must get to him. She stood that way for perhaps five minutes, afraid to open her eyes to an unchanged afternoon on the porch.

  When she did open them, the porch was still there, the hot afternoon still blazing around her. But the lightning flashed against darkness as though in the deepest part of a cave and she bent forward to see a man asleep on a narrow bed. Even though she couldn’t see his face, she recognized the form. Matthew!

  She felt the breath of winter air even as she rushed toward the opening.

  Angie found herself standing in a cold, dark room, able to see the figure on the bed by the light of a dim quarter moon shining through a small window. The first thing she thought was that she really should have changed her clothes. Shorts and crop top really didn’t do the job here.

  Now that she was actually here, she felt unexpectedly shy. She’d been chasing after him across the years and now that she had found him, she didn’t know what was going on. Obviously Matthew had set out to start his life over by leaving the farm of his grandparents and coming here.

  Time passed strangely. She might have spent a few weeks while he was living years or standing still as little David had for all the time they’d been missing him.

  He looked to be deep in sleep, but suddenly, as though he knew even when unconscious that she was there, he sat up in one swift movement.

  “Ange?”

  She had only an instant to look at him in the dim moonlight. His chiseled face showed suffering, but he was still the most gorgeous thing she’d ever seen. She felt a rush of love and then she was in his arms and they were weeping together.

  Then their wet faces were pressed together and they were exchanging tender kisses, reassuring themselves with touches that the other was truly there and that at last they were in each other’s arms.

  After an unknown interval of time passed, they pulled about two inches away to study the features before them. “You’re so beautiful, my darling,” he said.

  “Ditto,” she answered drunk with love.

  “What?”

  She laughed out of sheer delirious joy. “The same to you, my love.”

  “Where were you?”

  She explained how her family in the present—future—day had turned the old school house into an inn and into their home as well.

  “I stumbled across this place and bought the farm because I felt close to you here.” He drew in a deep breath, suddenly looking as though he’d been relieved of many hard years. “Don’t tell me I’m crazy.”

  She laughed again. “If you are, we’ve both lost our minds. Is this your house?”

  “Such as it is. It’s just a shack, but now that you’re here, I’ll do what I can to make things better. It didn’t matter when it was only me.”

  They kissed again, a long and passionate kiss this time, and she snuggled in his arms.

  “You’re shaking,” he said. “You must be freezing in those skimpy clothes.”

  Before she could protest, he wrapped her in a quilt from his bed. She drew its comfort around her, thinking nothing felt so good as a homemade quilt, not even an electric blanket.

  He hurried to take wood from a basket on the floor, placing it in a wood stove so that soon she was hovering, her quilt still tucked around her, next to those warming flames.

  He lighted a candle, filling the little room with soft light.

  Angie still shivered, but not because she was cold. So many questions to be asked between them. So many things to talk over.

  He came to sta
nd at her side, holding his hands out over the warming fire. They were lost in the intimacy of the night and the countryside. No telling how far away the next person was at this time of night.

  She remembered reading somewhere that only about half the number of people populated the planet compared to the time in which she’d spent most of her life. It was a very different world. A high percentage of Americans still lived on farms. Now that the war was over, they were full of hope, but many of them still struggled to meet basic needs.

  She looked around curiously. This house seemed to be made up of just this one room. She supposed there was no indoor plumbing and that was not an unusual fact for a rural home.

  She sighed, however, deeply content. She reached for one of his hands and grasped it in both her own.

  “Matthew,” she remembered to ask, “Did that boy you pulled out of the burning tank survive?”

  Surprise flickered across his face. He couldn’t know that she’d seen that boy who’d thought she was an angel. His face had looked so young.

  He nodded. “Glenn’s alive. Got some bad scars from the burns, but he writes me now and then. Says he’s got a job and a girl.” His smile was slow and thoughtful. “What more could anybody want?”

  It wasn’t time to hurry, not anymore. They were locked in a slow dance of emotion, trying to realize that before them now lay as much time as anyone possessed.

  “Danny’s all right,” she said, “or he will be.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “Something wrong with Danny? Clemmie didn’t say anything when I phoned her yesterday. She said everybody was fine.”

  She shook her head, trying to sort it all out. “I forget. It hasn’t happened yet. But I was there and he gets through everything all right.”

  “And Clemmie will call me when it happens?” He sounded like a man who was trying hard to act as though this was normal.

  “She’ll want to do that first thing,” she evaded. She didn’t like remembering that at that point nobody knew how to connect with Matthew. They feared he had vanished forever.

  Not wanting to be caught in that fear, she reached up to put her arms around his neck and pull him to her. This time she initiated the kiss, long and sweet and increasingly passionate.

  She knew what should happen next. He should pull her over to that little bed that was scarcely big enough for the two of them and they would be lost in each other.

  At first he seemed to totally surrender to her overtures, but then he stepped back if only by inches, gently loosening her hold.

  “Ange,” he said, “Will you marry me?”

  He was a man of honor, a man of his own time. Not that they didn’t have as many wild boys back in the 40s as in the next century. And in the war years, many of the conventions of the past had been left behind to the Victorians who had inhabited the century before them.

  But Matthew saw her as an ideal, the woman with whom he wanted to spend a lifetime. Remembering that Clemmie said they might never see him again, she was as desperate to seize this moment as had been any soldier being sent away from his girl across an ocean to possible death.

  She pushed closer, kissed him again, more gently this time. The last thing she wanted to do was to give him a lesson in post-modern morality. She liked this Galahad of a western farmer, brought up in a community already behind the changes sweeping the nations. “I would love to marry you, Matthew Harper,” she said.

  They would grab what they could from this chaotic world they seemed destined to inhabit.

  The next morning Matthew went into town and bought a print house dress, a Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, stockings, underwear and shoes, and a coat, coming home with such attractive selections that she complimented him.

  His smile was wry. “I ran into a friend. She was shopping for her wedding, but she took time to help me pick out things for you.”

  She? She scented a story, but was pleased to hear that other girl was getting married too.

  Matthew saw a neighbor about looking after the livestock while he was off getting married, packed a few belongings, and then with Angie sedately dressed in her simple blue cotton print, her new coat draped over her shoulders, they started off for Oklahoma.

  Clemmie had said they’d been married at the farm so when Matthew suggested they go home for the wedding, she hadn’t supposed there as any reason to object. Nothing felt real anyway, she was floating in the ether, and she wanted family to witness her wedding even if that family couldn’t possibly be her father and brother.

  They drove through the night on lonely graveled and dirt roads, country roads that bore little relation to the super highways of the future. It was slower this way and their headlights picked up the glittering eyes of numerous small animals as they drove through the countryside and through small town after small town.

  They crossed the river bridge in the morning hours and only had to stop twice for Matthew to patch flats before they pulled in the long driveway at the house near the river. At this time of year, the country was brown and sere, a withered version of what she’d so recently seen as she lingered to help care for Danny.

  But that hadn’t happened yet, she reminded herself as she got out of the car to greet Clemmie and the children.

  Right now she wasn’t even trying to figure it out. She was spending every minute living her life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Everything was arranged within three days. In the meantime Matthew slept in his old room upstairs and Angie was in the spare room downstairs.

  Not that she did a whole lot of sleeping. Nor, she suspected, did her about to be groom. She’d never seen Matthew in such a happy daze. When they were all together, each time she looked at him, it was to find him staring at her.

  For once there was no subtlety about him. His emotions were all out in the open, plain for everyone to see. Clemmie teased him about being head over heels in love and he solemnly agreed.

  He seemed to have none of his sister’s anxiety about things going wrong and Angie vanishing again. As for the bride herself, she wasn’t worried, not yet. When Clemmie had been recalling the days around the marriage, she’d spoken of no incidence where Angie disappeared.

  That didn’t happen until later and she was determined that she would get it all straightened out and come to an understanding that would give the two of them a life together. She had puzzles to work out still, particularly about her mom, but that would wait until later.

  She was about to marry the man she loved. She supposed Clemmie would say Matthew wasn’t the only one who was head over heels.

  Clemmie had some ideas of her own about their new relationship. “Of course, you’ll move back here,” she said as she served one of her fried chicken dinners as a means of celebration.

  Each meal was a holiday this week as she enjoyed having her brother back and happy with Angie. Even the kids were about an octave louder than usual in their excitement.

  Matthew didn’t argue. He just shook his head. “Farm won’t support two families,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “But the farm and this house as well belong to both of us.”

  “I’ll sign whatever papers are needed to deed everything to you.”

  “But that’s not fair!” his sister protested.

  “I’ve got a good start down in Texas and we’ll do fine.”

  Angie nodded. “He even has a house,” she agreed, trying not to think of that little one-room shack. Even for Matthew she wasn’t sure she could be a good sport about taking baths in something that looked like it belonged in an old western or in a Little House On the Prairie sequence. But she would do her best.

  Much as she loved Clemmie and the kids, she didn’t want to start her married life in this crowded household. And she was sure Tobe and Matthew, two strong-minded men, would have trouble trying to exist on the same piece of earth.

  Matthew
grinned at the mention of his modest home. “I’m not intending for you to live out there, Ange. That’s no circumstance for a woman.” He turned then to address himself to his sister, as though to persuade her that he was capable of taking care of Ange.

  Angie didn’t even bristle at the thought. During the war, women had been forced to look after themselves and keep life humming at home while their men fought. Look at Clemmie, she’d had no choice but to keep the farm going without either her brother or her husband.

  But now they were back and ready to take up where they’d left off. They couldn’t face the fact that the world they’d battled to save had changed while their backs were turned, changed because of their own experiences and those of the women left behind.

  She would be helping Matthew build their new life and she felt sure that in the long run, he would be glad. Providing for them wouldn’t be a burden he would have to bear alone, but he was used to that. His sister, his mother, his grandmother, all the women in his life had shared the work of the farm with their husbands. He would expect his wife to be a full partner.

  Then she realized what he’d said. “Where are we going to live?”

  He grinned. “With your approval, I’ve made arrangements to rent the cottage I lived in when I was foreman for the Hendersons. It’s a nice little two bedroom house with a bathroom, gas heat and electric lights. All the necessities.”

  He’d told her about his time of working as a foreman for the Henderson farms and of his friendship with father and daughter. She started to protest their financial situation. Basically they had less than a hundred dollars and a mortgage on the farm, but she looked at his face and knew he wouldn’t appreciate her bringing that up in front of his sister’s family.

  She didn’t have to say it. “John Henderson will let me have the cottage as payment for helping manage his workers.”