The Root Cellar (24 page)

They went inside and, in a moment, a round, motherly-looking woman appeared. When she saw Rose and Susan with Will, her face lit up.

“So,” she said, “you’ve come to take my boy home.”

“He won’t come,” said Susan.

Matron looked at Will, who stared stubbornly back at her.

“I see,” she said, and nothing more except, “I expect you’re ready for your suppers.”

Tiredly they ate cold beef and potatoes and corn in the kitchen. Will slept, as was his habit, on a cot just inside the door of the room where the sick and needy patients were. Matron found cots for Rose and Susan and put them in an upstairs room. The room had long windows in the front that looked out on the street and a high ceiling with plaster molding around it carved in the shapes of grapes and strawberries and melons and leaves.

“I bet it was a wonderful room when it had all its furniture and drapes,” said Rose.

“I guess so,” Susan said and, apart from whispering prayers to herself, she said nothing else. She curled herself into a tight ball like a
kitten, and after a time Rose heard her breathing deeply.

Rose lay watching the shadow of the house making arrows and angles in the moonlight across the foot of her cot. The images Will had put in her head were still fresh and sharp, and stronger even was the look she had seen in his eyes as they had walked together on the road from Arlington. She thought about Will, so weary and grieved, and the way he had been that day in the boat, so eager and full of delight. She remembered that she had thought about marrying Will. She thought about Susan, who wanted only one thing, to have Will home, and about her own self not really knowing what she wanted or even who she was.

“Being a person’s too hard,” she thought. “It’s just too hard.”

She got up. She put her clothes on and went downstairs, through the hall, through the long hospital ward where the men snored and groaned, and into the smaller ward behind it where Will slept just inside the door.

She leaned over and shook his arm.

He sat up, looking around him with quick, jerking movements, and reached for something beside his bed that wasn’t there.

“Will, it’s me, Rose. I want to talk to you.”

He swerved around and focused on her. He sighed in obvious relief.

“Okay.” His voice was tired, full of resignation.

“I’ll wait for you outside in the back, by the kitchen door.”

“Okay.”

The door out of the kitchen led to a small yard very like the one at Mrs. Fiske’s. Rose sat down on the doorstep. The moon was high above the branches of the catalpa tree that stood at the back of the yard, and by its light Rose watched a thin, mangy gray cat walk along the top of the board fence that separated the yard from the one next door.

Will came out and sat down beside her. He had two cups of tea in his hands.

“Thanks,” said Rose. “Will, you have to give me some money.”

“Some money?”

“Have you got some?”

“Yes, some.”

“I want to go home. Susan won’t come without you. She’ll stay here.”

“No, she won’t.”

“Will Morrissay,” said Rose, “you’re a lot older than I am now, and you’re a soldier, and terrible things have happened to you, so I shouldn’t say it, but you’re being dumb. Or you just don’t know Susan at all. She won’t go home without you. She’ll stay here forever if that’s what you mean to do. But I don’t want to. I want to go
home. I don’t want to be stuck back in time. I’m sick of being a twelve-year-old boy. I want to be myself, ordinary Rose with an ordinary Aunt Nan and an ordinary Uncle Bob and ordinary cousins. I don’t belong here. I thought I did but I don’t—any more than you belong in the United States. I want to go home to Hawthorn Bay. You know, I’ve just remembered something. A funny man on the road from Albany asked me where I came from. I said Canada, and I do now. Same as you. And I don’t see any way of getting there except to take the train and the boat, and I don’t have any money. I want you to give me some.”

Will said nothing for a few minutes. He sipped his tea and watched the cat sharpen its claws against the fence.

“Would you give me some money?”

Will reached into his pocket and took out some bills. Rose took them and stuffed them into her pocket. “Thanks. Oh, and this belongs to you.” She pulled out the tiny cloth packet she had been carrying in her pocket since Susan had given it to her in exchange for her silver rose in the garden at Hawthorn Bay. “It’s your song.”

“My song?”

“The song you wrote about the bird the day you and Susan and I were in the orchard.”

He frowned, took it from her, and opened it slowly. He stared at it as though it were the ghost of someone long dead and forgotten.

“My song,” he said wonderingly, “my song.”

Rose began to hum it as she had so many times to herself and to Susan. “I wish you had your flute,” she said when she had finished.

“Flute,” said Will, in that same bewildered voice. He was looking at the worn, creased piece of paper. “Flute,” he said again. His hands were shaking. “I lost my flute. I lost it at Cold Harbor. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to play it anyway. I didn’t think there’d ever be any music in the world again except tramp-tramp-tramp and the dead march. After that I forgot. I forgot.

“But I remember now. I remember that day I made the song. I wanted so bad to write it so I wouldn’t forget. I went to see old Mr. Lestrie down in Soames, who used to teach music there. I asked him if he could show me how to write it and he did. And he said he’d teach me a lot more if I wanted, but I never went again. I guess I was scared. I was a little feller. I thought you were wonderful.” He looked at her shyly. “And all them things you talked about. I thought a lot about all that after you disappeared and I couldn’t figure it out. Then one day I seen you, must have been a year or more after you’d gone. I seen you out by the road. I was going to go and talk to you, but before I could you was gone. You was gone the way a drop of water on a hot pan goes—just dries up
and ain’t no more. It gave me the shivers, but then I done some more thinking and I figured that what you said was true, every word.”

“But I didn’t stay gone,” said Rose and she felt happy. “I came back. And Will, remember what you said about belonging, that day in the orchard? Do you remember? You said, ‘It doesn’t matter where you come from.’ You said, ‘I guess what matters is where you belong.’ Well, I know now. I belong in that other time and I have to go back there.

“I have to tell you something.” Rose looked at Will out of the corner of her eye and quickly looked away. “I thought you were wonderful, too. I decided I was going to marry you.”

“What!”

“I was. I was going to marry you. But I know now that it was silly because I’m not the one who is going to marry you, and anyway I belong in another time, and I have to go back even if I go by myself. I’m going to go down to the train station and go home.”

“Go back to bed, Rose,” said Will, “and we’ll all go together by and by.”

Rose did not let him see her smile of satisfaction.

The Storm

I
t seemed as though she had barely fallen asleep although it was an hour later when Rose woke to find Susan standing by her cot. When she saw that Rose was awake, Susan dropped to her knees and put her arms tightly around her.

“You done it,” she whispered. “You done it. Like Will told you all that long time ago, you was good luck, the best luck a body ever had. Will told me what you talked about in the night. I love you, Rose.”

Embarrassed by her own show of emotion, Susan stood up. “Matron’s give Will some money she figures he’s got coming to him for working here,” she said, “so with what I got, and what Will give you, we got enough for all our fares and one good dinner.”

“What about lemonade?”

They both laughed.

“Will and I, we been out to the graveyard to say our prayers over Steve,” Susan went on, “and Matron says the morning train goes out of Washington at eight o’clock. So Rose, what we got to do is go get on the train.”

“That’s so, Susan.” They grinned at each other. Rose leaped out of bed and got dressed hastily. They ate a quick breakfast, said goodbye to Matron, who said “God bless you” to them all but took Will in her arms as though she were his mother, adding “You have a good angel, you’ll be all right now,” and off they went. Rose wondered if Matron meant Susan or the other kind of angel.

When the train stopped at Philadelphia, Rose bought Will a harmonica for ten cents. He played it hardly at all at first, but after an hour or two he played it softly all the time, trying out notes, remembering notes, completely losing himself in the music.

Rose knew now that she wanted to go home to Aunt Nan and Uncle Bob and the boys, but when she thought about leaving Will and Susan, especially Susan, she felt sad. “You won’t forget me, Susan?” she pleaded.

“I ain’t likely to.”

Neither of them said any more about it, but thoughts of parting hovered over them throughout the journey. They traveled all day, all night, and arrived in Oswego just after noon the next
day. Will stepped off the train behind Susan and looked around him slowly in all directions. He sniffed the air.

“Looks like a storm’s brewing to the west,” he said. Otherwise, none of them said anything all the way to Mrs. Jerue’s house.

Will knocked at the door. They stood three in a row and watched through the screen as Mrs. Jerue came toward them along the hall, her wide, flowered skirt bumping the walls. They saw her questioning look become a look of surprise, her surprise become a smile, and the smile fade as she realized that the tall soldier with Susan and Rose was Will and that Steve was not with them. She opened the door. “Come on along in, Will. Thanks be to God for your safe home-coming.” Then, though the tears began to flow down her face, she put her arms around Will and they hugged each other tightly.

The children had come running at the sound of voices, and at first there was a hushed and horrified silence. But Mrs. Jerue took them into her grief as generously as she had taken them into her house. She listened, with the children, to Will tell stories about Steve in the army, some funny, some sad, and then they all told stories about him, remembering all the things he had done in his life. They laughed and cried together, and Mrs. Jerue made a huge meal for
them, after which she insisted on hearing the tale of Rose’s and Susan’s journey south. She scolded both for running off.

“If you could have seen me.” She sighed. “You know I’m not as slim as I once was and I had some terrible time. When Charlie here come running to tell me you’d run off, I figured pretty fast (my brain’s not run to fat, you see) where you’d gone and we hightailed it down to the station just in time to see the train pull out.”

“We saw you,” confessed Rose.

“Why, you young scallywags!” Mrs. Jerue chuckled. “You sure gave me a runaround, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way now. It might have been we’d none of us ever have seen our Will again neither, if it hadn’t been for you.”

They spent a night and a morning at the Jerues’. The first night they bathed and Mrs. Jerue took away all their clothes. Early the next morning she came into the little room where Rose and Susan slept. She gave Susan a pretty pink-and-white flowered dress of Jenny’s, and when Susan had put it on, Mrs. Jerue said, “Now run on along, girl, and get your breakfast.” Then she sat down on Rose’s bed and fixed her with a steady gaze.

“You come here with Susan and you spun us quite a yarn. Then you sneaked off. Where’d you come from, youngster?”

Rose squirmed inside Charlie’s nightshirt that Mrs. Jerue had given her to sleep in.

“I don’t much like being lied to,” said Mrs. Jerue.

“I’m sorry.” Rose’s voice was very small.

Mrs. Jerue frowned. She leaned over and inspected Rose closely, the way she might have inspected cabbages for holes or bugs. “What’s more, you ain’t a boy,” she declared.

Rose felt very uncomfortable for a moment; then, suddenly, she felt as though a burden had been lifted from her. “I’m Rose Larkin,” she said. But how to tell Mrs. Jerue where she had really come from? She didn’t want to lie. So she said, “I’m a friend of Susan’s. I didn’t want her to have to go find Will by herself. So we thought it would be useful if I dressed as a boy. And I guess it was, too. But I’m sorry we made you run after us to the railroad station.”

“That’s all right, Rose, it’s all in a lifetime, as I always say. Now, you stay put for a minute.” Mrs. Jerue left the room.

In a minute or two, she was back with a dress over her arm and a pair of boots in her hand. “There, this ought to do just fine for you. Louisa’s grown out of it. It’ll be dandy with your red hair.”

The dress was white with grass-green stripes. It had mutton-chop sleeves, a high collar, and an ankle-length full skirt, not as full as the
skirts Mrs. Jerue herself wore—there was no hoop—but fuller than any Rose had ever worn. To go with it, there was a green velvet ribbon. “To tie up your hair, as it’s some grown out since you was here before.” Mrs. Jerue smiled, her tired eyes red from weeping. Holding the clothes tightly to her, Rose smiled back.