Читать книгу Hideaway Home - Hannah Alexander - Страница 10

The train slowed at a long uphill curve, and Red saw Lake Taneycomo gleaming in the sunshine out his window. Not much farther now. He started watching for familiar landmarks: the big cedar that’d been hit twice by lightning and lost most of its branches, but kept on thriving; the rocky cliff that looked like half a huge teacup—one of the area’s bald knobs, where it was rumored that the old vigilante gang, the Bald Knobbers, sometimes met when preparing to raid a farmer’s land.

He remembered riding the train to Springfield with his mother and listening to stories from old-timers about the places along the tracks that had been raided by that gang, the owners forced from their land with threats of beatings or burned homes—or death.

That had happened just before the railroad came in. It had become evident later that the vigilante gang had had inside knowledge about its course. Many men became rich when they later sold their ill-gotten land to the railroad.

Red closed his eyes, wondering when his mind would stop wandering to brutality and the ugliness of humankind. When he looked again, the first buildings of the tiny burg of Branson came into view.

The train continued toward the Hollister station, a short jaunt south. He wasn’t sure what kind of a ride his mother would’ve arranged, what with the gasoline rationing and so few cars in town, anyway. Could be she’d come for him with the horse and buggy, unless she was in a hurry to get back to the house, and was able to convince one of the neighbors to take a car out of hibernation long enough to drive her.

Lilly Meyer always said one of the big draws of the Meyer Guesthouse was her horse and buggy. In this new world of modern cars with all their speed and fancy buttons and gadgets, Ma believed her guests returned to Hideaway year after year because they wanted to be taken back to a time when life wasn’t so hectic.

Red knew how it felt to be lulled into a sense of peace by the clopping of horse hooves instead of a smoking tailpipe.

Many who did have automobiles in Hideaway had followed Lilly Meyer’s lead and parked their cars for the rest of the war. They rode their horses or bicycles to town when they needed to shop or have a haircut or deliver goods. The gasoline was left to the farmers in the rest of the country, who needed to supply food to the troops.

Most farmers around Hideaway still used mules as their power source for plowing and wagon pulling, cutting hay and reaping corn. This way they didn’t have to fret about the shortages as much. They could save for other things.

Red had discovered just how well-off he and his neighbors had been in Hideaway by talking to other soldiers who’d come from farms across the Midwest. His hometown had five hundred and fifteen of the best people he’d ever known. That was why the population had doubled in the past ten years, smack dab in the middle of the depression, and that was why it would keep growing long after the war ended. Why, he could even see it doubling again in time, maybe to a thousand or more.

The train stopped at the Hollister station. He looked out the window for signs of his ma. Other men in uniform left the train, including Ivan, who glanced back in Red’s direction and waved. They’d see each other soon enough. Ivan could never resist Ma’s cooking.

Red waited, watching happy reunions taking place on the train ramp. Two soldiers and an airman stepped off, uniforms proudly decorated, as Ivan’s was. Many were probably home for good after the victory in Europe.

Home. It was the one thing everyone in the field dreamed about and talked about most.

Until now, Red hadn’t been any different. He slid his left hand down the side of his thigh to his knee, where shrapnel had ripped into the muscle and bone. He’d been held in the stateside hospital for three weeks, with daily injections of some new drug called penicillin that was supposed to kill the infection.

He didn’t know how well it had worked. The surgeon had told him the bone looked good, the infection gone, but for some reason his brain didn’t seem to be getting the message he was healed. He couldn’t put all his weight on his left leg yet. Smart as the surgeon was, he wasn’t God.

Red still didn’t see his mother or anyone he recognized who might be here to pick him up. And so he stayed put, the darkness of the past few weeks haunting his thoughts.

Dark and heavy. Dark and hopeless.

Here he’d been thinkin’ that Bertie would be better off without him, but wouldn’t that be the same for everybody else, as well? Nobody needed a lame soldier taking up space, Ma least of all, with all the work she needed done.

The last of the passengers disembarked, and the crowd on the platform began to thin. Red looked on glumly as Ivan greeted his parents in the parking lot.

Ivan’s father, Gerald, broad-shouldered and smiling—teeth gleaming so brightly Red could see them from where he sat—gave his son a bear hug. Both men towered over the fair Arielle Potts, whose Swedish coloring Ivan had inherited.

Ivan gestured toward the train, and they all glanced toward where Red sat watching them from the shadows. He didn’t think they could see him, looking from the bright sunshine into the darkness of the railcar, but he waved back.

The three of them climbed into a shiny black Chevrolet.

After most others had left the train, Red hefted his duffle over one shoulder and reluctantly grabbed the cane, forcing away his brooding thoughts. He dreaded seeing the look on his mother’s face when she saw him with his cane for the first time.

Sure, Ma knew about the injury, but to see her youngest hobbling on a cane like an old man? No mother should have to witness that.

Finally, out of the window, he saw Lilly Meyer come riding up in a buggy pulled by the big bay gelding Seymour, and Red felt a rush of relief.

Ma’s broad, sun-reddened face showed him she’d spent a lot of time outside in the vegetable garden—one of Red’s jobs when he was home. She guided Seymour carefully through the crowd in the parking area, waving to several acquaintances along the way.

Even before the gasoline rationing of the war, Lilly Meyer had held with her horse. She wasn’t afraid of cars. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She just always loved her horses. Pa had tried to teach her how to drive when he was alive, but she would have nothing to do with it. She didn’t mind people thinking of her as a little backward.

In fact, Ma was the envy of the town with a business that had thrived through the depression and kept going during the war.

Hay and oats weren’t rationed here because the farmers raised their own. Neither were garden vegetables or milk from their own cows, or meat and eggs from their own stock. In his travels, Red saw what the rest of the country had had to do without. He couldn’t believe how blessed he’d been all those years.

Red grabbed the metal soffit over the door and tried his hardest not to grimace. As he stepped down, he saw his mother look at his cane, then his leg. The pain in his leg was nothing compared to what he felt when he saw the look in her eyes.

“Now, Ma, don’t you go worrying about me,” he greeted as he rushed to hug her. Ordinarily, he’d pick her up and twirl her around—well, maybe that would be called lumbering her around. Lilly Meyer was, after all, nigh on three-hundred pounds. He couldn’t lift her now, but he wrapped his arms around her bulky form and was grateful for her strength.

She clung to him for a long few seconds, and this surprised Red. Their family’d not been much for shows of emotion.

She drew back at last, and he saw tears on her cheeks. She patted the moistness on his uniform collar with alarm.

“Now, look what I did,” she said.

“It’ll dry, Ma.” His mother didn’t cry. Even at Pa’s funeral, she’d been as strong as a man, setting the example for Red and his older sister and brother, Agnes and Howard, not to show a trembling lip or damp eye. The Meyers wore brave faces for the rest of the world, no matter what.

Her double chins wobbled as she looked up into his eyes and brushed her fingers across his cheek, like he was a little boy again. “It’s going to be okay now. My hero’s home.” She glanced around them. “And none too soon, either, from the looks of things,” she muttered.

“What’re you talking about?” he asked. “The war’s half over.”

“Germans aren’t exactly the best-liked people in Hideaway right now, especially since we’re hearing about all those death camps.”

“But we’re not German, we’re American, Ma.”

“We’re German enough for somebody to hate us.”

“Who’s been snubbing you?”

She sniffed once more, then composed herself. “That ol’ Drusilla Short says I’m a Nazi sympathizer. Thinks I oughta surrender and be locked up and my guesthouse shut down.”

“Since when did anyone ever listen to that woman’s opinion?” Red patted Seymour on the nose and received a welcoming nudge that knocked him off his stride.

“Since two nights ago when someone threw a brick through our window that nearly conked poor John Martin on the head when he was reading the paper,” Ma said.

“John!” Red paused before he climbed in beside his mother. “He okay?”

“Fightin’ mad, but other than that he’s just got a mark on his noggin from some flying glass. Tough young buck.”

Red clenched his hands into fists as anger streaked through him. “Who do you think did it?” If he found out, he’d hobble out and bang some heads. They’d never try to hurt his mother again.

“You know bullies are cowards,” she said. “They don’t show themselves. And our house ain’t the only target for mischief. It’s been going on a couple of months. Mildred went missing last month.”

Red stared at his mother. The loss of one of Ma’s two milk cows would’ve been a huge blow to her. “You never told me that. You never found her?”

“Nope, but Joseph Moennig loaned me one of his. Said he’s got his hands full with all the farm work now that Bertie’s in California.” She nodded. “That Joseph is a good man. But he paid for his goodness two weeks ago. Some of his own stock went missing.”

“His cattle?”

“A couple of cows and some pigs, and you can bet they were taken off to market and sold. He’ll never see them again, and they were the best of his stock.” She shook her head. “I’m tellin’ you, Red, this place is in for troubled times. Want to know why I was late gettin’ here?”

“I figured you had a good reason.”

“Somebody decided Seymour needed to be let out of his corral sometime last night. If he wasn’t such a homebody, no tellin’ where he’d be by now. As it was, I found him washing his feet down by the river. I saw a chalk mark on the side of the shed. It was that broken cross the Nazis use.”

“A swastika?”

“That’s the sign.”

“Anything else?”

“Nope. Don’t you think it’s too much of a coincidence that ol’ Dru Short’s been hurling lies about us, and now we’ve got bricks through our window and Nazi signs on our stable?”

“Is the sheriff doing anything about the thefts?”

“Not that I’ve seen. Mayor Gerald says he’ll not let ’em get away with this, but he can’t stop it if he don’t catch nobody.” She patted Red’s arm. “Not to worry now. You’ll take care of it. You’ll find out who’s doing this, if anybody can.”

Red climbed into the buggy, glad for the sturdy handles he grasped to pull himself up. He felt more helpless than ever. What was happening in Hideaway?