EMMETSBURG: Two

Anna felt his worry. She turned to him as the first fat rain drops patted against the front of the house. He could feel her looking at him. For a moment they were both silent. He reached over and pulled the window shut. Instantly the heat rose in the room.

“John?”

“Go back to sleep?” he said quietly.

“What is it?” she asked, touching his bare shoulder.

He didn’t wish to worry her and frowned over thoughts refusing to form themselves into proper sentences.

“It’s nothing. Get some sleep.”

With a blinding flash of lightening, thunder, like a rumbling kettledrum, shook the world. John’s heart skipped a beat. Anna pulled closer, her warm breath at his neck. Her gasp was lost to the racket of a sudden spectacular downpour.

“Worried for the roof?” she asked. She ran a hand across his strong chest.

“Some,” he said.

He was worried for the roof, worried for the truck, for Anna and the prospect of not going back to work any time soon. He worried over the banks and all those who had lost hope along with their homes, and he worried for a world whose governments always saw the simple way out of their population’s discontent and disillusionment through war. He could feel it out there somewhere, rising as a certain tension in the world. And tensions had either to be relieved or they broke altogether. And John feared the world seemed to be coming to one hell of a break up.

John turned his head and found her hazel eyes in the dark. He said the only thing he could have said to her. The only thing his ego would permit. “Be fine.”

She pulled him closer and he suddenly felt trapped there. John’s heart thudded madly, as though about to burst from his chest. He was already sliding sideways out of bed, pulling gingerly away from her.


“Be back,” he said.

In just shorts John pushed his feet into a pair of old brown slippers. Anna didn’t protest. She watched as he left the room and crossed the small dining room to the kitchen door. He pushed open the back screen and a gust of wind tore it from his hands. The sound of it banging against the house was lost to the roaring waves of rain. Water already stood deep in the yard, with waves whipped and sheared by the wind.

Anna sat up, her feet still covered beneath her late mother’s heavy quilt. She swept back a lock of long Irish-red hair and studied him as if he was a strange animal, at once wild and beautiful in its power. It was like those pictures of great male lions from the National Geographic. The fight had long ago gone out of them though they still projected awesome strength.

John’s shoulders were broad and strong. His wavy brown hair brushed with the pewter evidence of hard years and great disappointment. He was no longer the bright-eyed boy she waved goodbye to as he went off to join Pershing in Europe. He was every bit the man who returned to her darker for that year at war.

He was silhouetted in the door against the silvery blue downpour like some dejected mythical hero. One arm was upraised, a hardened and calloused hand pressed to the frame. But the lightening, that immense and constant lightening threw his shadow in snapshot moments across the floor, making him appear all the more tragic and lonesome. There came the flat tap-tap-tapping of water falling upon kitchen tiles behind him. Anna watched with a measure of sympathy and understanding as her big man sighed heavily at the sound and looked skyward.

Anna loved him. She loved him more than he could ever realize. She loved that enduring energy, the stalwart refusal to quit, to quit her and to quit this life where lesser men might have given up. She loved that quality which compelled him to remain in the fight when all conscious faculties might have convinced him of its futility. It drew Anna from bed.

She paused in the dining room. There was hardly enough room for the old oak table and four heavy chairs. Let alone the Franklin sewing machine, where Anna hired out her services to help make ends meet. The lace-white curtains over the window were pulled tight. Beside the window a trickle of water ran along the wall past an oval framed photograph of her parents, taken just after landing in America. The couple looked ancient, and part of a very different world than they would leave for their only daughter.

Anna went to John, wrapping her arms around his body and pressing her cheek against the cool flesh of his bare back. She breathed him, suddenly and completely aroused by his scent. She moaned softly and listened to the steady thudding of his heart.

“Bad storm,” he said quietly. A flash of lightening brought a sharp and quick boom from somewhere across town. It was of a much different character than the thunder.

“Been worse,” she softly kissed his back.

He was a man of so very few words, but each was supported by deeply resonating thoughts. The words he chose so sparingly truly meant something.

“Gets so fighting even the little ones is too much anymore.”

She was quiet a long moment, and was suddenly fearful that he might slip away from her. “John Perkins, don’t you quit on me.”

He mulled over the words and held a hand out to the rain. It was cool and perfect. There was something about the rain. It had a power, as though the true character of the storm resided in the collaboration of each of those myriad drops. He thought about the waste of the European War and wondered why men of good conscience failed to rally as those myriad drops.

The rain let up just a little, and was already turning the long garden troughs into little canals. Already he was figuring a way to fix the roof, and would keep at that roof as long as he still had the breath and strength to do so. John managed a smile and touched her arm.

“Too dumb to quit.”