I never got married. John, he did, to a wonderful girl from over to Skinner’s Eddy, Caroline Jacobs, and they had kids, and time passed like it does for us all. The kids grew up and didn’t want to stay around Garlock’s Bend so they left and went down to Harrisburg for work. Carrie, his wife, she seemed to not quite care so much about things after that.
Now I always liked Carrie, don’t get me wrong about her. I really did. A whole lot more than liked. A whole lot more. In my own way, of course. I guess that in the end that’s important to remember, too.
Miller’s Store, where all this sort of comes to a head, you’ll have to understand about. It’s kind of the place in Garlock’s Bend where everybody goes. You can buy groceries there, and you can buy clothes there. And tools. And even light meals. You get so you don’t have to leave town very often. It’s an honest-to-goodness general store, in the middle of town right down along the river. I knowed it through four owners ever since the building was put up. And my daddy was one of the men who helped to do that. The current owner, Bill Miller, bought the store off his second cousin, Henry, who decided to retire pretty nearly thirty years ago now, and he’s run it ever since.
Generally it’s open by eight, only hardly nobody would ever be in there that early but Bill, fussing around with boxes and cans on the shelves, keeping things all straightened up. Not hardly ever anyone else, though. Not much happens early in Garlock’s Bend. It’s a town used to slow starts. But the people of the town and the hills around, too, consider Miller’s to be something of a meeting hall, so it is almost always open. Later in the morning there’s lots of them comes in. The talk is just plain satisfactory. And the coffee is special. So it’s not at all unusual at ten or eleven in the morning to see a fistful of men stuffed into orange hunting jackets all clustered around the homemade wooden tables, elbows on red-checkered tablecloths, sipping hot coffee rich with cream and sugar. Listening to young Dale Heberlein, the morning disk jockey from over at Towanda. Every one of them men laughing at Dale’s humor. With maybe a bought doughnut or some eggs and home fries, all peppered up. Add the smell of that coffee, maybe even some hand cut bacon, and it’s as good a way to start the day as there is.
Well, that’s Miller’s for you. That’s where things started to go haywire.
Funny thing is, even though I lived so close to John Lehmann, I got to talk to him mostly there at Miller’s. At home, right next to him, it was all farm business until the evenings. And then he had his family to attend to, with very little time at all to jawbone with me. I was alone, and like as not off doing things myself, chasing around, so mostly I saw and talked to him after growing season in the late mornings at Miller’s, and I sometimes think he wouldn’t of come there even then but for my sake, to befriend me and spend even just a little time with me. I always appreciated that.
I now and again think he knew, too, how very much I cared for Carrie down through the years. Maybe better than she did. But I never said a single word of it to either of them or to a person alive. I just never would have done that.
Over the seasons I sure liked the mornings I spent with him at Miller’s, but I especially liked those last few times. We used to sit and talk and drink that coffee. God, how I remember that!
It makes the loss of him all the more painful.
Some things, I guess, you’d end up going mad if you tried to keep inside of you. Just completely mad. And so I guess the best thing is to just tell the story, no matter how painful, to say what happened, get it out in the open finally and maybe get a handle on it. I have to admit, though, that John Lehmann’s story has me licked, and more than that — it’s got me scared, too.
Well, there isn’t a whole lot happening on a small farm in late October, except maybe finishing up your apples, and getting the ground ready for next year, that sort of thing, so for a couple of weeks this particular October I had been going just as regular as anything to Miller’s for breakfast and for talk. Mostly it was just to pass time.
For the first of those weeks John and Carrie occasionally came in too, and we had some good mornings together. All the usual stuff, bragging about farming and hunting, and me teasing Carrie and finagling an invitation for a supper from her soon.
Carrie Lehmann, I’ve got to tell you, was the gentlest, kindest, most friendly woman I ever knew. That’s a certain thing. And it’s not the most important thing in the world, but she had such beautiful light blue eyes. Those last times I saw her over there at Miller’s are dear times to me yet. They seem now to me to be a kind of adding up of all the earlier times I was ever around her. Sort of like they were the real times and all the ones before were dreams. I don’t know. I guess I can’t say it exactly like I mean it.
Then they began not to come to Miller’s so often. Winter wasn’t so very far off and we had a cold snap, and I guessed maybe it just was easier for them to stay home when that cold spell set in. There wasn’t anything too unusual in that.
But then there was that last time I saw Carrie. It had rained hard on and off for about a week. It was cold and damp and all the water had pushed up the Susquehanna until it was as high as it’s ever been. I mean, it was high. And there we were in Miller’s, just like always.
But this particular time there was something really different about Carrie. I could see that right away. She hardly touched her coffee at all, hardly touched it at all, and she wouldn’t talk about any of the usual things no matter how we tried to get her to. And she fussed and fretted.
“We’ve got to go back, John,” she said. “It’s time to go back home.”
Well, they had just come. I didn’t know quite what to think of that one, they had really just arrived not ten minutes before. And she seemed so nervous and so far away in her head when she talked. So I just stayed out of it.
“John, the water’s getting so high,” she pleaded. “I’m sure it’s nearly high enough. We had better go back. It’s not safe to be anywhere away from home when the water’s this high.” Her old blue eyes were glistening as she said, “It’ll be right up next to the house,” she said quietly. “It’ll be high enough for it to...” She caught herself and looked down.
God, but she did seem scared of something.
John, he just sort of looked at her, like he didn’t know quite what to say either. And then he looked away. He tried to keep a little conversation going with me, but you could see how helpless and embarrassed he was.
Carrie, she got real quiet, and she just sort of kept looking at John pleadingly. When she did finally talk again she just mumbled, and it was about the high water, how dangerous that was, and how easy it would be to break through. And how they better get home to keep everything safe. How she was scared bad for the both of them. And crazy things like that. All in sort of low and broken sentences.
But I sure was feeling badly for John, and I was scared for Carrie. There was something wrong with her, all right. She wasn’t acting normal, not for her nor for anyone else, talking like that. She seemed so scared because of the rain and the water rising in the river.
John, he ended up putting his arm around her and leading her quietly out of Miller’s. And he bent over and kissed her head lightly once as he did. I was really touched by that display of love, him being so matter-of-fact and all. He never even looked back.
Well, John did come alone a few times more to Miller’s, but he seemed distant somehow. He just sat there, quiet. He never brought up Carrie, and he wouldn’t answer any questions about her when someone else did. And then he always just left, like he had decided it was a bad idea to come in the first place. And he did that pretty nearly always right away.