Here and Again (2 page)

T
he Covered Bridge

T
he afternoon was cold and as the school bus drove away the dark cloud of its exhaust drifted heavily behind Ginger Martin, following her up the lane. The snow on the top of her shoes had gradually changed from loose and powdery as she walked to the bus stop to dense and icy now on the return home. It had started to drizzle. Her feet were heavier, as was her mind, for this was a day unlike any other in the last year.

A long whine brought her attention from her feet to the road ahead, where her youngest, Oliver, was sinking into the ditch on the Creeds’ side of the lane. He had slipped off the asphalt as he ran home and was being pulled from the hip-deep snow by his older brother, Henry. Hip deep to Oliver anyway, for he was the smallest in his kindergarten class. Now he was wet and the whine climbed an octave as he gazed down the road and found his mother’s eyes on him. Quickly Henry silenced him and, with a backward glance at Ginger, dragged Oliver whimpering toward the house.

Usually on her days off she’d drive them to and from school. Now, with finances the way they were, the family had had to choose between spending money on gas driving on these special days or keeping the satellite dish for the television. After very little debate, Ginger’s three children agreed that they would keep the television—not a surprise. So this morning, just as they were now doing this evening, they had walked to the bus stop. Earlier, they had woken up, eaten breakfast, and headed out the door as if it was any other day of the week that she wasn’t there. Like Grandma Osbee, whom they lived with, she could have stayed in the house and watched them make their way down the long road to where the school bus picked them up. But somehow that seemed unfair. It was cold; they were cold as they walked to the bus. In commiseration, she slipped into her husband Jesse’s work coat and her rubber boots and made the trek with them.

At first, there had been a bit of whining in the morning from Oliver because the winter snow was at his knees in places on the road. But no whining had also been part of the agreement. Thus Henry, ten years old and her eldest, picked Oliver up along the way, just as he was doing now on the way home, where the drifts became a little too deep.

The true grace for Oliver this winter had been John Mitchell. The aging farmer came down the road with his tractor every few days, especially after the heaviest snowfall, to clear the asphalt. Ginger was incredibly thankful. Because Mr. Mitchell plowed, she could maneuver her truck down the drive every day without shoveling. Her children could walk to and from the bus without sinking into the fallen snow. There had not been one cold or flu in her house all winter, knock on wood. She shuffled to the right and actually did—she stopped and knocked on the Schaafs’ white wooden fence to her right. Then she returned to the slushy road and continued
home, trying to count how many dozens of ginger cookies she, Osbee, and the kids had made for Mr. Mitchell this winter.

He always came when the family was home, and every time she found his tractor slowly making its way up the road she’d turn the TV off and have her two sons comb their hair in the tidy, respectful fashion taught to them by their father. Her daughter, Bea, would, without a word, head upstairs and return with a blue ribbon. She’d hand it to Grandma Osbee, who quickly braided the little girl’s dark brown hair and secured the bottom with the ribbon. Then the entire family would don their coats and meet the old man at the top of their drive with a plate of cookies and a cup of hot coffee.

As always, Mr. Mitchell ate almost every one. The rest he tucked away in his various pockets, remarking how fluffy and chewy they were—just as he liked them to be. Most of the time, he sipped his coffee, pondering why Jesse had pulled up the asphalt on their drive and paved it with gravel. No one really had an answer and the fact that there was likely to be no answer just made the kids fidget. Ginger usually smiled, shrugging away the comment the way she’d shrug off an unwanted arm wrapping around her shoulders in condolence.

After finishing his snack, Mr. Mitchell returned to his tractor and backed down the gravel drive. Only when he reached the asphalt road would Ginger release her children and they’d bolt back inside, strip off their coats, and land in a pile in front of the TV. At that point, right on cue, Oliver would whine that there were no more cookies, as John Mitchell had taken every last one. They truly were the old farmer’s favorites. But Oliver didn’t care nor did he realize that his bottom was dry when he boarded the bus because of the grace of Mr. Mitchell. His only concern was the lack of cookies.

That was what it was to live in this little hairpin curve of the Shenandoah River. Together, five farm families watched out for one another and the littlest ones were kept oblivious to cold and worry when possible. As Jesse and Ginger Martin’s children were the only kids left on the road—all others having grown and moved away—it was mostly the other farmers who looked out for their brood. Henry, Bea, and Oliver were known in the area as the “Little Smoots,” Henry and Osbee’s great-grandchildren. When the Martin family moved to the Smoots’ farm, every farmer became their other grandfather and their wives other grandmothers. These were Jesse’s children and Jesse had pretty much grown up on his grandparents’ farm himself.

Jesse’s nature was not that of his father’s people, the Martins from Richmond. His blood ran with the Shenandoah and with his mother’s family, the Smoots. His mother and father raised their children in Richmond. During the summer, his brother and sister were sent away from the city to camps. Jesse asked to spend his vacation with his grandparents, and so he did. He farmed and fished, milked cows and planted flower beds. He crossed the river in a boat and climbed the hill beyond into the state park that was his playground. The winding water, which was a bubbling rapid to the south, looped around in a U-bend, becoming a smooth, glassy flow to the north. It was his playmate. It was his friend on lonely days. It was family.

So when Grandpa Henry passed on five years earlier, Jesse had to step in. There was great pressure put upon Grandma Osbee by her daughter, Ester, to sell the Smoots’ forty-two acres of Shenandoah land. Osbee was too old to continue to farm it alone and the best option, according to Ester, was to sell the farm, put the money into a trust, and move Osbee closer to Richmond.

But Osbee didn’t want to sell and leave her land. That would
dishonor everyone who had held it since 1799. Though she was lonely and hurting, her weathered root was yet strong, deeply grounded in the land of her family. She knew who would always keep her on the land. She knew who would fight Ester, his own mother, taking his grandmother’s side in all things. Thus the call came to Jesse and he answered it as he answered all calls to duty. Though stationed with the 16th Military Police Brigade in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when not deployed, he sent Ginger and the children to live on the farm, coming home himself between deployments and on all possible leaves. Jesse Day Martin was bound to the farm just like his grandmother. So when it came time to pass on the land, Osbee would bypass her own children, knowing they would sell it, and leave the farm to her grandson Jesse, who would work it.

Ginger pulled Jesse’s work coat tighter around her body, stopping as she reached the end of her drive. The Smoots’ farm began where the road ended, the gravel drive climbing five hundred yards up a gentle-incline hill to a small white farmhouse rebuilt in 1866 after a fire had destroyed the original. To the left and north of the house sat a large, raw, unpainted barn built at the same time. It was home to Half-a-Penny (or just Penny) and Christian, two workhorses Jesse had brought home for his children to ride. Beau, their brown, tattered mutt, lived there also, along with Regard, the gray tabby cat.

Regard didn’t belong to the family. He was a stray that stayed. As Ginger gazed around, she found him crouched on top of one of many fence rails that were strewn on both sides of the drive. It was rough-hewn locust wood and would have been part of the snake-rail fence Jesse had planned on completing last time he was home. His duty, however, had taken him away just as he finished sinking the posts into the soil, so all lay exactly as he had left it a
year and, what? Nine months. It was forever since he had been gone.

As she kissed at the cat, Ginger surveyed what winter had brought to the farm. The property was the half-moon end of a loop in the north fork of the Shenandoah River. To Ginger’s north and left was a wide, flat field that rolled down and away from the small rise of the house to a large stand of trees from which the snake-rail fence had been cut. A version of that same fence separated the horses’ corral from the rest of the cropland. Jesse had finished that before he left. Now the field was covered with snow, its furrows hidden beneath the smooth blanket of white and winter wheat, undisturbed all winter by horse or human.

On Ginger’s right and south was a pond that used to feed the springhouse by way of a stream. In times past, when there was no such thing as a refrigerator, such a springhouse was used to keep food from spoiling. It was a mystery to the Smoots why the pond no longer fed the stream, but it hadn’t since the Civil War. So a small, dry streambed ran down to a copse of ash, hickory, and walnut trees. It was on this side Jesse had planted Ginger’s apple and pear orchard eleven years before when they came to spend their honeymoon on the farm. They hadn’t gone to Hawaii or Tahiti. Military people rarely find true rest anywhere but home, where they rarely are—or so Jesse had explained. The perfect honeymoon, therefore, was to be home together and home was the farm. Grandpa Henry had helped Jesse dig and plant for four days, getting the trees solidly set into the ground to help Ginger and her Northwest sensibilities find a root there, too. Ginger smiled as she watched Jesse in her mind’s eye carry a tin bucket of McIntosh over to her.

“Make me a pie, woman,” she whispered to the barren branches of her winter orchard.

Beyond the orchard and hidden behind the copse of ash, hickory, and walnut, the little streambed ran past the springhouse to the river and there Jesse had taught his children to swim and fish and find the magical, secret world of his own boyhood. He dreamed for nothing greater in life than for Henry, Bea, and Oliver to grow on this land and flow like this river. Though he was a soldier, the tender of his heart beat freely here, in his Shenandoah dream, with Ginger, his children, and his grandmother. He took it with him when he was deployed; he’d lock away his green, gentle heaven, keeping him connected to the subdued beauty and serenity of his valley home when in the omnipresent heat and violence of war’s fury.

Ginger stood, listening to him tell her as much as he rested his head upon her breast the night before he last left. She sighed, her breath as white as the flat white sky above. If there was a sun up there, Ginger didn’t see it nor did she feel its heat. She could go into the house now to be warmed by the cup of coffee she knew Osbee had waiting for her. Instead, she turned toward the pond. Between the orchard and the copse of trees, a covered bridge stood over the streambed. A covered bridge over a dried-up stream in the middle of a forty-two-acre farm in a hairpin turn of the Shenandoah—what use was that? It was the first question Ginger had asked of Jesse when he had brought her to the farm to meet his grandparents. In answer, he’d explained to her that it was there so someone could put a historic marker on Interstate 81 calling attention to it and people would exit, drive five miles of windy roads to the Smoots’ farm, and give the people living there new faces to look at. She had laughed then. Now, eleven years later, the bridge seemed just as strange and out of place as she felt.

Heading in that direction, Ginger felt a longing for her home in Seattle. She wanted her parents and the city. She wanted lots of
people and noise and traffic and large bodies of water everywhere. Ginger was born in 1972, the only child of Tim and Monica Barnes. It might have been 1972 for the rest of the planet, but for Tim and Monica it was still the sixties. They raised their daughter in a small flat above their retail store, the Ginger Moon, which they named after their daughter. The shop was a community fixture in the Fremont District. They sold brass Buddhas and silver dancing Shivas; tarot cards, hemp handbags, and cotton tie-dyed dresses were bestsellers. Patchouli was the first scent Ginger remembered smelling, and the sound of the sitar, the first music she heard. Her childhood was free and magical, full of raw milk and tofu and people from everywhere speaking many languages, most of which she did not understand. Yet all of their voices became the rich background music of her life. She wanted to travel one day and submerge herself in the deep water of the world of which Fremont was just a tiny raindrop.

That was what she said she wanted to be when she grew up, a traveler, and always she wanted to be a nurse. But art was everything to her parents. When she began to show an interest in science, her father and mother, in absolute terror, fought back. They sent her to after-school art classes, drama classes, dance classes, and singing classes. Ginger enjoyed it all, but mostly her attention was drawn back to small things—bugs or moss or the soft brown feathers on the top of ferns. She liked microscopes because even tinier things could be seen—like bone tissue or liver cells. To Ginger, histology was art. So, loving their daughter as they did, Tim and Monica relented, falling back into the community of their store and letting Ginger pursue her nursing degree and then sail away from them into the waters of the world.

It was as a traveling nurse in an emergency room at a hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that Ginger had met Jesse. He’d
seemed cold that night, coming to collect two soldiers who were in her charge due to a bar brawl in town. Distant and aloof were not words enough to describe being in his icy gray gaze. When she’d enter the room to check on her two patients, the quiet murmurs of Jesse and his men would stop. In silence, she’d check an IV or administer a painkiller without looking at any of them and it wasn’t soon enough for Ginger that the soldiers were released and headed back to Fort Bragg.