Here and Again Read online

  Ginger opened her truck door. “Yes, I believe he is.” She smiled up at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes smiled back.

  “Excellent!” her father replied brightly. “Any other spiritual matters we can help with?”

  Ginger laughed a little, which was instantly returned with a louder laugh from both her parents on the other end of the line. It continued for a while and then faded softly into silence. Waiting.

  “No, no. I just called to say—” She broke off unexpectedly. Why had she called? Her chest seized, tightening with longing and sadness. She let out a small cry as she comprehended her own purpose.

  “To say you are staying there,” her mother finished.

  Ginger didn’t answer. She closed her eyes in the rushing realization that she was not going home.

  “You don’t have to come back here, Ginny, if your life is there,” her father said.

  “I miss you,” Ginger whispered. “I miss your world.”

  “Our world is everywhere. It’s your world. It’s right there to find. You just need to open your eyes and reach out your hand and invite it in.”

  Her father was speaking again in his spiritual way but today his words made perfect sense. “I don’t know how.”

  “Oh, I suspect you’ve already done it, Ginger. It’s why you are staying.”

  “I’m staying for Osbee.”

  “And Henry and Bea and Oliver. Yes?”

  Ginger opened her eyes and looked down the road to its end.

  “Sometimes, Ginger,” her mother said, “we look at the horizon and see the end. But you have to remember that’s only the end as far as we can see. If you move a little farther, closer to the horizon, it moves and there is more to see between you and the end. Good and bad things between you and the end. But you gotta keep moving.”

  “Gotta take the good with the bad,” Ginger said quietly.

  “Yes, Ginger,” her mother replied.

  “Why?”

  “See, Monica, this call is spiritual.”

  They all laughed. Ginger started the truck and put it in gear as she wiped her eyes.

  “Remember, Ginger, bad happens. It’s the way of things. But always something good is made from the bad. It’s hard to see in the bad. But good will be made of all things. And you only know it’s good because there was bad.”

  “Yin and yang, man,” her dad said. “That’s the whole point of that spiraling circle of black and white.”

  Ginger drove slowly, watching Mr. Schaaf circle his field of winter wheat. He was not cutting it. He was not weeding it. What was he doing? Looking forward, she saw the road’s end. It did not back up. It ended.

  “The road ends,” Ginger said.

  “The road is made by humans, Ginny, my dear,” her dad replied. “The horizon is not.”

  She sighed and came to a stop at the crossroad. Gazing up in the mirror, Ginger half expected to see Samuel there. He was notably missing. What was there was the thin line of asphalt she had come down with the Smoots’ farm at its terminus. Moments before, it had been where she began. Now it was at the end.

  “I suppose,” she said, “it’s all about perspective.”

  “Whose daughter is this?” her father exclaimed. “Monica? This strange young woman talking about perspective is calling us, imitating our sensible, practical daughter.”

  Ginger didn’t need to see. She could hear her mother roll her eyes. In the stillness on the line, Ginger thought that the phone was like the road. It began where she was and ended with her parents. To them, the phone line began where they were and ended with her.

  “It’s me, Dad. I’m just starting to think about what you have been thinking about for a long while.”

  “We ponder,” her dad said. “We don’t think.”

  She rolled her eyes just like her mother.

  “I wish I could see you guys,” Ginger whispered.

  “Well, we could come out. You want us to come out?” her mother asked.

  It was a lot of money to cross the country. Money they really didn’t have.

  “She’s not answering,” her father said. “Does that mean no, Monica?”

  “No, Tim. She’s thinking about money.”

  She was about to ask how her mother knew such a thing, but felt as though she was floating on the line with her parents, on the road with the farm. She was a feather drifting and the wind that held her aloft enveloped her. It was a moment to do nothing. She held silent and still.

  “She didn’t say no,” Tim said.

  “No, she didn’t,” her mother affirmed.

  “That must mean yes!”

  “Sounds good to me,” her mother agreed. “We’ll call you with our flight info.”

  “And remember, Ginny,” her father began.

  “Hang up, Tim, before she says no.”

  “Oh, good-bye, Ginny Moon.” There was a click.

  “You’ll always be our Ginger Moon,” added her mother and without another word the line went dead.

  The feather she was hit the ground as the line died and, startled, Ginger gazed at the phone. As she flicked on her blinker, there was a loud honk. She jumped in her seat and looked up. To her right, old Mr. Schaaf sat upon his tractor just opposite her. His face was still, frozen in a small frown of concern. She smiled and rolled down the window.

  “You all right there, Ginger?” he asked, yelling over his engine.

  “I’m fine. What are you doing?” she inquired, circling with her finger, motioning to his field.

  “Planting alfalfa over the winter wheat. Time to plant.”

  Ginger nodded. She thought a moment and added, “Do I have winter wheat?”

  “Yes, we planted it. We’ll get to your fields—”

  Ginger shook her head. “We’ll take care of it this year, Mr. Schaaf. Thanks!”

  His face darkened again.

  “We’ve fixed Henry’s Child and have a new plan,” she said, smiling as brightly as possible to allay Mr. Schaaf’s look of deep concern.

  He nodded, his face barely shifting from his frown.

  “Gotta get to the store,” she added and waved as she turned the corner.

  She drove out of the fields and farms, beyond the hairpin curve of the Shenandoah. Pulling up to the hardware store, she parked and walked in. The benefit of not working on a weekday is that there are very few people out and about and help is readily at hand. She realized she had no idea what fuel to get and so she called Osbee and handed the phone to Dave, the hardware guy. She was then directed to purchase several bottles of Coleman lamp fuel and the new wicks, with which she left the store and headed back to the truck.

  She approached her car door and as she was about to open it she peered at her ethereal reflection floating in the window. Her hair had grown out about an inch and a half since she’d last colored it, and the ginger color at the roots looked confused and a little frightened by the brassy, washed-out, dark brown tint of her curled ends. The longer she stared at herself, the clearer a view she had of how she had been walking around the world. She looked overworked. She looked overwhelmed. She looked tired. She looked as if she didn’t care how she looked. Inasmuch as Mr. Schaaf’s horn had caused her to jump, so did her next thought: her parents were coming.

  “Mood hair?” she said to her curls. “Time for a cut.”

  Quickly, she hopped in the truck and drove into downtown Woodstock. The main street in town was small, with period buildings from the 1910s through the 1950s lining the sidewalks. Woodstock had a long history, like many small Virginia towns, part of which was the sprawling growth of suburbs and houses covering farm fields and flowing streams on its outskirts. That sprawl was imposing its shoulder on the loop of the Shenandoah wherein Smoot’s farm still stood and threatened to push the five farmers there into the river with its weight. But they w
ere stubborn people, the Smoots and their neighbors, and no one had sold. Not yet anyway.

  After pulling into the back parking lot of the beauty salon, Ginger made her way through the cold, shady alley back onto Main Street. As expected, there was no one in the waiting area, so Ginger was immediately asked to sit in a chair and was thus forced to look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror in front of her.

  “So, what do we want?” the young woman with a beautiful blond French bun asked as she touched Ginger’s brown curls, pulling them this way and that.

  Ginger wondered if the girl was as confused and frightened of what she was touching as her roots seemed to be. “Cut it off, please.”

  “Beg pardon?” The girl held two handfuls of Ginger’s dark brown curls and stared at her in the reflection.

  “I think I’d like to start fresh. So please just cut it all off.”

  “You mean, cut off all the brown? Uh . . . it will be short.”

  “That’s okay,” Ginger replied. Her eyes widened at her reflection. There she saw herself with a smile upon her face that she had not seen in so long. She took in a deep breath, the upturn of her lips retreating just a little. Smiling at Jesse had always been returned with such brightness. She had loved his face but truly had been enamored of it when she watched him look at her smiling. “Starting fresh, but keeping the root,” she said, winking at her own reflection as if it were Jesse who had done so.

  A small crease between the young woman’s immaculately trimmed eyebrows belied a small concern with her customer’s decision. But the customer was always right, so shortly thereafter Ginger watched the brown curls fall to the floor and drift across the white tile on the gentle breeze that blew in under the beauty shop’s door. Slowly, methodically, the strawberry blond curls of Ginger’s birth sprung to life, relieved as they were from their dark burden. The hairstylist’s face brightened as she came to realize the nature of Ginger’s hair, and when she had finished, the young woman smiled greatly at her own masterpiece.

  “Would you mind?” the stylist asked, holding out a thin red cloth headband.

  Ginger laughed a little and nodded. Carefully, the headband was wrapped around Ginger’s short curls, pulling them gently back from her face.

  Together, customer and stylist grinned at who they found in the mirror. Ginger saw her natural self, her pale skin and soft freckles. Her long neck held her heart-shaped face. There was one longer curl remaining on the left side in the back, which the stylist wrapped around her finger and pulled forward.

  “I love that curl,” the young woman said. “I think you luckily missed it in your last hair color.”

  “You are leaving it?” Ginger asked.

  “Yes! You look like a painting on the front of a Jane Austen book.”

  They laughed.

  The hairstylist pulled off the smock with a soft shake and took Ginger’s offered credit card.

  “Maybe next time you feel like coloring your hair,” the young woman said, “you can come in.”

  “So you can talk me out of it?”

  The hairstylist blinked innocently, saying, “Not at all. Customer’s always right. Maybe we can just talk it over.”

  Ginger signed the receipt, leaving more of a tip than she knew she could really afford.

  “Will do,” Ginger said. “Thank you.”

  The young woman opened the door. “You’re welcome.”

  As Ginger stepped back into the world, it seemed to have become a warm spring day. She twirled her long curl as she turned left and then left again into the shadowed alley. She thought about Jesse’s eyes as they looked at her, wishing she could feel his gaze upon her again. Walking from the alley, she stopped. Behind her truck, across the parking lot and on the other side of the street, was a small field of grass that had obviously been some building at some time. Off center in the field, she saw a man in a butternut uniform seated on a chair. Leaning forward and squinting, she began to walk toward him.

  “Samuel?” she whispered.

  The closer she came, the more she could see. He was seated with his right shoulder toward her. He was smiling and laughed a little as he stared ahead. In his profile, she could see a knick on his right ear.

  “Samuel?” Ginger called, trotting past her truck and across the parking lot.

  He didn’t look in her direction. Instead, he picked a rifle up from the field and put it across his lap. Then he shook his head and said something. He put the rifle back into the grass.

  “Samuel?” Ginger called louder as she crossed the street.

  As he straightened in his seat, the smile on his face faltered. He sat still even as Ginger entered the field.

  “Samuel,” Ginger said as she approached his chair. “Samuel, it’s me.” Stepping up to him, she reached out to touch. Her hand stopped before reaching his shoulder. “It’s me.”

  He continued staring ahead with a fixed gaze. Stepping behind his chair, Ginger followed his eyes, trying to find what was keeping his attention.

  Standing still just behind him, she reached out with her left hand and placed it upon his right shoulder. There was a blinding flash and Ginger froze where she was, blinking to gain her sight. When her vision returned, she found herself standing alone in the field. She turned around and then around again.

  “Where did you go?” she asked.

  There was no reply—just the sound of the breeze rustling the overgrown grass at her knees.

  Chapter 18

  Some Christian

  Confused and unsettled, Ginger stumbled back to the truck and was now driving through Woodstock toward home. She blinked over and over again, her eyes continuing to recover full vision. If she hadn’t been thrown off-balance by the weird goings-on in her world recently, the episode in the field had knocked her to the ground. She was sick, nausea rushing like the waves of a spring run on the Shenandoah. The flash was an omen. It had to be. She never was one to believe in anything like omens, but the last six days had completely changed her outlook on everything.

  “Samuel!” she yelled up at the blue sky above. “Samuel, what the hell is going on?”

  She reached the hardware store at the edge of town and pushed on the accelerator. Something bad was happening at home, she was certain. There was a brewing somewhere, somehow. What it was was not clear, but it was whirling like a great black summer thunderhead and it was bearing straight down her little lane and was going to land on her gravel drive.

  Her tires screeched as she rounded the corner of her road. Mr. Schaaf’s tractor sat exactly where she had last seen it but its seat was empty of its former occupant.

  “Oh, God!” she breathed and then, gazing ahead, she slammed on her brakes.

  A traffic jam on her lane? It was. Trucks and trailers and cars that were parked or trying to park lined the narrow shoulders of both sides of the road. There were people walking in the direction of her house. Young people. They were jostling one another, and if she peered up the part of the road that was clear, she could just make out about five or so standing in her front yard.

  “What the hell?” Ginger pulled to the right and parked in the ditch directly in front of Mr. Schaaf’s tractor. She climbed out, grabbed her purse and the fuel, and slammed the truck door. With a quicker gait than anyone in front of her, Ginger walked up the lane, overtaking a young woman and two young men. They had to be no more than twenty, if that.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  They stopped and turned around.

  “Um. What is going on?”

  “Colonel Rogers asked for some volunteers to come help him.”

  “Rogers,” Ginger repeated. “Ed Rogers?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Can I carry something for you?”

  Ginger gazed at the young man and, very slowly, her gait lessened until she had come to a complete stop. He was six foot at least and dark with dark hair
and matching eyes. It was his hair and its tidy cut that gave him away.

  “You from VMI?” she asked, unloading her Coleman fuel into his offered arms.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m Dijan Little.”

  “Dijan Little,” she repeated.

  “He ain’t so little.” The other young man snickered. The young woman laughed.

  “I—I’m Virginia Martin,” Ginger said. Together, they continued their walk toward the house.

  “Martin? Like Captain Jesse Martin?” Dijan asked.

  “Yes! He was my husband. You knew him?”

  “Nah. My dad’s a professor at Washington and Lee and a friend of the colonel’s. They talk about him.”

  “Your dad knew Jesse?”

  “Mmm. My dad teaches philosophy. Captain Martin and the colonel and my dad had great conversations in Latin.”

  “Ah.” Ginger nodded.

  As her right foot hit gravel, she found that the five people standing in front of her house were actually a group of students pulling up the posts of her snake-rail fence. The rest of it had already gone missing. Following the drive, she came to an abrupt halt and her eyes widened.

  “What are those?” she yelled up the hill. From nowhere, Ed Rogers appeared and was now marching toward her.

  “There you are!” he said, his face stern as he trotted down the drive. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “What are those?” she repeated, pointing to the large back ends of two cream-colored horses.

  “Mules,” Ed Rogers said. “You’ll need them because Christian hates to work and Penny can’t keep him straight.”

  “I—I don’t think I—”

  Ed Rogers took her purse and indicated that she should follow him up the hill.

  “This is Augustus and this is Agrippa,” he said in introduction. “You’ll like the mules better than the horses. Get your boots on.”

  With no more said, Ed led Ginger by the hand into the house. There in the kitchen she found Lorena, Eloise Schaaf, Merry Whitaker, Genore Mitchell, Marilou Creed, and Osbee. Each was in some stage of cooking something and the house was thick with moisture and scent from their efforts. Mr. Rogers dropped her purse on the stair step without so much as a pause and headed straight into the kitchen.