Rebecca and John (F)

Al-Anbar was enough. Helmand was more than enough. And so, Col. John Freeman, retired. Twenty-one years and 146 days. Two lifetimes, maybe three, lived. Survived. But standing in front of his uncle’s farmhouse five miles out of Port Harris on Route 6, what he saw across miles of open pastures and a few scattered homes suggested a possibility, life maybe to be lived again. Or in some fashion, even savored for the first time.

In his third week, after cleaning the house and the barn and prepping the tractor and mower and plows for field work, he was intent on organizing his uncle’s fishing gear. He was breaking down an old Penn reel and carefully laying out the pieces when his father called from town and asked him to mow the meadow down the road about half a mile. The old Tate place, now the Dorn residence.

The meadow was on the sea side of the road. As a boy he ran with the Tate brothers—they were four—across that unfenced space, and there they played bruising games of football and spooked rabbits. Stretched out on their backs at night, they sometimes could fall asleep trying to count stars in the great wash of faraway lights.

And so he hooked up the mower to his uncle’s red Massey Ferguson and cut the seven acres of the north pasture and then drove down the road to the Tate place and took the meadow down to nearly the ground. A week later his father called again.

“John! You cut the meadow?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I forgot to tell you—no, Miss Emily, not until next week! Charlene will call you! I forgot to tell you to cut their yard.”

“The—who are they?”

“The Dorns. I started taking care of their place, the yard, the meadow, last May.”

John waited only a few seconds. His father might put the phone down and walk off to help a customer.

“In May, you were saying.”

“Yep, after the accident killed those boys. That man.”

“Who?”

“Coach Dorn. He was killed in that crash coming back with the baseball team. And two of the boys.”

John picked up a screwdriver. “I remember you told me about that. So, who lives there now?”

“Mrs. Dorn. And the twins. Little girls, two or three—yes, three now I would think. Since you are living out there now. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

That his father asked, well that was something. That was most likely Miss Charlene’s hand at work. Dutifully, on the last day in April, he loaded the lawnmower in the bed of his truck and drove down to the Tate—down to the Dorn place.

The front yard was small and wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to cut, but the back was a good bit larger as it held the septic field. Still the task would be completed in under an hour. The surrounding hayfields marked open spaces with barbed wire and old wooden posts stretched out across the gentle roll of the land for hundreds of acres. From the backyard, he could see the bay and the sea beyond. That was the only shortcoming at his uncle’s place, sited on the wrong side of a rise so the view just revealed the run of pastures and hayfields and the mix of trees that followed creeks winding through the terrain.

There was a well-built swing set in the middle of the yard, and on the back deck was a picnic table and two folding chairs. At the back door was a mat with several children’s shoes, and leaning against the outside of the door frame was a broom.

The second time John went out to Dorn’s it was a bright Saturday morning. He hesitated when he saw the Subaru parked up close to the garage, but he had it in his mind to cut the grass, and so he got out and headed toward the front door. Half-way to the front porch, the door opened and two girls dashed out, both with their hair in ponytails with red ribbons and both wearing pink sneakers, but one with purple laces and the other with orange. They hardly noticed him as they raced to the car.

However, Mrs. Dorn noticed him and with her keys in hand, and leaving the door open, stepped toward him. She tilted her head and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly.

He stopped, and before she could speak, he offered, “I’m John Freeman. I’ll be taking care of the lawn and the meadow. If that’s okay with you, Ma’am.”

“You’re the Marine.”

He hesitated. “I’m Ed Freeman’s son. I’m living in my uncle’s house up the road now.”

She turned back to lock the door. “I’m Rebecca, Rebecca Dorn.” Then she came down to him. Her hand was cool in his. “The girls are Amy and Abby—just to make things harder.” She smiled. “Amy’s in the purple laces this morning.”

“Well, I’ll be done in less than an hour.”

“No problem. We will be shopping and getting some lunch. Thank you, John, for helping us this way.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. Dorn. I’m sorry for your loss.”

She unlocked her car doors. “Rebecca. It’s okay to call me Rebecca. Okay girls, let’s go.”

In May, he made a point of cutting the yard during the workweek. Sometimes he would see the Dorns driving into town on the weekends, and sometimes during the week, he would see them coming back home at the end of the day. When he was in his father’s store, Miss Charlene would ask about the Dorn girls as she called the three of them, and she would add some little piece of information—how Rebecca Dorn was a paralegal for Dickie Cass and how the girls were being taken care of by Cindy Wasserman and how she would see them at Al’s getting ice cream on Saturdays. How Rebecca was 29 and the girls would be four in August, but she couldn’t remember the day.

The first week in June, it rained for three days, a steady, chilly run of indoor days unless there was livestock to take care of. Finally, after the ground had a chance to dry out, he went out to the Dorn home. He left the truck on the side of the road and went up and knocked on the front door. Rebecca opened the door and held it open with her foot while she pulled her hair back in a loose ponytail.

“I’m sorry to be out here on a Saturday, Mrs. Dorn—“

“Rebecca.”

“With the rain, you understand.”

“You don’t have to explain or apologize. I am the one who should apologize for taking up your Saturday morning.”

“No need.  And my schedule is the flexible one.” They both smiled.

“I won’t take long.” He turned away.

“Take all the time you need, John.”

He was a dozen steps away from the porch when she asked, “Do you know someone who can build a fence for us out back?”

“What kind of fence?”

This time she laughed. “Just not barbwire.”

“I could do that for you.”

“Not too tall. And I could pay you.”

“Well, you just pay for materials and I will get it done—four-footer?”

“No, you do too much, that wouldn’t be right.”

He shrugged. “Well then, okay, contact the high school—“ Her eyes widened a bit and her body seemed to stiffen. “No, never mind, I’ll do it. Just let me take care of it.”

“Okay.” She forced a small smile. “Okay, thank you.”

Hot, sunny days came and as June unfolded into a string of hours spent setting posts and noting the red and white clover growing in the meadow, John in some moments would stop working and look out at the bay and think about fishing with his uncle and setting crab traps and how his father would rather be riding a tractor or stocking shelves at the store.

One Thursday, Rebecca came home during her lunch break while John was working out back. She came out on the back porch and shielded her eyes. “Hey, if you want some water, I don’t lock the back door.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Help yourself. I have to get back. Looks great!”

“The posts?” He laughed. “Yes, Ma’am, they are good posts.”

Rebecca laughed. “Well, I think they are great.”

John went back to his work after she gave him a little smirk and closed the door. He thought to stay another hour or two because rain was in the forecast for the next two days, and so after he ate a snack bar that he had in the truck, he came back around to go inside for water.

When he opened the door and stepped in, he saw a jumble of shoes and sandals and flip flops that would be under his foot if he continued. Without much of a thought, he got down on his knees and sorted them out, a pair of sandals—hers—the flip flops that were so small in his hand, a pair of black heels that seemed too dressy for the office. He lined them up pair by pair against the wall.

And last, a pair of men’s work shoes, like he would wear around the barn when no heavy work was to be done. Kneeling, as he picked up the first one, he felt a tear. More tears followed. He set the shoes in the row against the wall, and there he stayed on his knees for three or four minutes, maybe longer.  

John stood up and went over to the sink. He tore off several sheets of paper towels and wiped his eyes and then found the glasses in the cabinet to the right of the sink. He drank two glasses of water as he looked out across the fields to the bay.

The following Saturday, he ran into Rebecca and Amy and Abby at Al’s. While the girls looked over the buckets of ice cream, Rebecca pulled him to one side.

“John. You organized our shoes.”

He glanced over her head, blushed, and then looked at her. “Yes. I’m sorry, Rebecca. I just—“

“No, it was okay. I was just surprised. But I knew it was you, so it was okay.”

“Just, habit, and I just, well, I just did.”

“It’s okay, John. Really. Would you stay, have lunch with us—if you can.”

He could. Then July came and the fence was finished and the grass was green and a spread of wildflowers came up in the meadow along the driveway to Rebecca’s. Saturday lunches, a red maple in the ground now out front, a pan of lasagna that would feed him for a week, a trellis over her mailbox where morning glories flourished, pushing the girls on their swings, and life cadenced so that time neither lingered nor hurried.

In the third week of August, just an hour before the sun would set, John walked down to Rebecca’s. He knew the girls were in Marshall with their father’s mother, and he wanted to ask Rebecca to go to dinner with him in the city. 

He knew she would say, “Like on a date?” and laugh. He would be serious with her and answer, “Yes, like on a date.” Just a few strides from the drive, he looked across the meadow, and about 100 feet out in the clover and grass, there was Rebecca, facing the sea.

She was wearing a simple blue dress and her legs were out behind her, not as if she had fallen but had shifted her weight onto one hip and braced herself with one arm. He thought to call to her, but something in the way she rested her head on her shoulder, made him think better of it.

John walked out and stood behind her, and without saying a word, she rose and sighed ever so quietly. He stepped forward and put his right arm around her so it covered the upper plane of her chest, and she let out a little sob and he could feel her weight shift back against him. And in that way, for several minutes, they stood, watching the bay deepen in color as the sun was sinking behind them.

“Will you spend the night with me?”

“Yes” he answered.

“I don’t mean—“

“I know what you mean. It’s okay.”

Then and there, Rebecca and John, silent and still, together as their shadows lengthened, the night to come as it may.  Ladson 2014