Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ausubel Ramona

Author:Ausubel, Ramona [Ausubel, Ramona]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

1968

FERN HAD PUT gathers of daisies by the bed in preparation for her husband’s return from the cold north. She wrapped up the baby and set off for the bus station to wait. Outside it was early morning, dewy and anxious.

Fern did not know what she would say to her husband. What she would report from days of walking without purpose, of her slow evenings sitting at the window with a bowl of cooling soup, watching the insects take over the skies. She had cooked a certain number of eggs, thrown away the rotting vegetables, dug a hole for an oak seedling that she never planted. That her daughter did not seem like enough of an accomplishment would strike her as sad only later.

The strangest thing was when that mythic person, that impossible, imagined soul was supposed to step off of an oil-sweated, slack-muscled bus. Fern stood there, shoes on and dress pressed, the baby in white linen, and the bus pulled in and sighed, and the engine settled into a worried rumble. Boys in uniforms held their hats to their chests, stooped in the doorway and then unfurled. There they were: just bodies. The same size as when they left.

As Fern waited for her particular counterpart to emerge, she studied the other boys for scars on their necks. She imagined their wives and girlfriends undressing them for the first time, touring the hash marks of war, running their fingers over those oversmooth patches where feeling-skin had been erased. Those were just the physical reminders—what of the heart’s tissue?

And just like that, the last off the bus, Edgar stooped, stepped and stood up straight. His smile was a white heat. He put his bag down and scooped Fern up. That warm chest, that warm breath and she felt very small. “It’s you,” he said.

They knelt together at Ruth’s side, each of them taking one of her small fists. Edgar did not move or breathe. The moment was a sheet of ice, thin and perfect and Fern wanted badly not to crack it. “You are already so big,” he said to the baby he did not know.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

A cricket landed on the baby’s chest, green and an inch long.

“Hello, Cricket,” he said. Edgar would never call his daughter anything else. Soon, neither would anyone.

The other couples began to retreat, arm in arm, hand in hand, to their cars. They rumbled home to lunches already prepared, to houses scrubbed for the occasion. These boys had survived the war; some of them would also survive coming home from it.

—

There had been a third phone call to the General, this one made while Edgar’s father drank a bottle and a half of champagne himself and watched the news—dozens of soldiers had died that day in a raid a few miles from the blue glare of the South China Sea. Behind the newscaster in the mud there was a hand and wrist, the familiar green cuff, but no arm was attached. Hugh had not been calling for another favor but to offer thanks for what his son had avoided.

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