Jacob gratefully returned to the United States, glad to be finally going someplace among the living, eager to meet his daughter Victory and rest in Dixie's arms. Upon receiving his letter that he was discharged, Dixie wasted no time returning to Ohio to set up the grocery and have it prepared for his return. He came home to a beautiful daughter, a loving wife, and a ready-made business and all was right with the world.
Dixie and Victory waited on the doorstep when they heard his car arriving, a premature American Gothic of women, Dixie strong and tanned and radiantly beautiful, still holding the broom she had been giving the porch one last sweep with, and Victory a perfect tiny replica of her mother, holding her doll in the same way. The sun backlit the house in golden twilight, bringing out the hidden russet tints to the ladies' hair. Dixie dropped the broom with a clatter as Jacob ran up the porch and swept her into his arms for a lingering, soul-restoring kiss. He then turned to his daughter, still standing beside her. "Ah there's my beautiful girl," Jacob said gently, kneeling to see his daughter eye-to-eye. "We haven't met yet, allow me to introduce myself. I'm your daddy, home from the war."
Victory regarded him suspiciously and retreated behind Dixie, clinging to her mother's skirts.
"Oh now. Your mama tells me you aren't shy. Come on out where I can see you." Jacob let his daughter take the lead, with the infinite patience of a man who had dealt with adult issues to the point where it was a luxury and a pleasure to retreat to the simpler, honest level of a child.
Victory inched partly away from her mother, looking him dead in the eye, still gripping her mother's skirt tightly in a tiny balled up fist. Jacob reached out his hand as he would to a stray dog, and waited for her to respond, a bemused smile on his face, thinking, at least she didn't scream or cry. She gingerly touched his hand, looking at the signet ring. "That was your grandfathers, honey," he gently said, pushing down the twist of grief as she turned the ring on his finger. "Do you know how it feels to fly, Victory?"
She suddenly smiled broadly and opened her hands to him, and a wave of joy rushed through Jacob, making him giddy. He scooped her up and swung her high in the air while she giggled and begged for more. Dixie laughed, saying, "I told you I was telling her about you." Jacob swept her in his arms too, and held his ladies close to his breast for a timeless moment, until Victory had had enough of this emotional stuff and wriggled back to the painted planks of the porch to resume play with her doll.
That evening Jacob spent quietly with his ladies, playing with Victory and catching up with Dixie. The next day she proudly took him to show him his store. He was impressed, and very pleased with his enterprising wife. She had selected a building right on the main street, a hardware store whose owner had retired and closed, leaving the fixtures in place. It was clear she spent hours cleaning and polishing the wood, for everything gleamed as if new, but inwardly glowed gold with the soft depth of old wood and fine carpentry. She'd had an ice unit installed for meats, not yet stocked, for that could not be stocked ahead of his return, but sparkling and ready for use, as were also the fresh vegetable bins, smartly arranged as islands in the aisles, making it possible for all of the produce to be easily examined. Staples that could be bought ahead were neatly arrayed on the shelves, in the impeccable logical order of a woman, which Jacob quickly learned was exactly right for a grocery, and different from any grocery he'd ever seen before. The heavier sacks and bolts of cloth were slightly below waist level, which Dixie explained made them easier to lift, and light large non breakable things were on the top shelves, where a woman could knock them down with her umbrella without hurting herself if they fell on her. Canned goods were at eye level, making the labeling easier to read, and glass jars slightly above that, out of reach of baby's hands. The bottom shelves were reserved for singular, less needed items, in order that a shopper was not compelled to stoop as often.
And the inventory! Dixie painstakingly thought of everything a household needs on a daily basis and missed nothing in her orders. A smattering of these items Jacob had never heard of, he mused as he picked up a small jar of snow white cream of tartar, to be expertly informed by Dixie it was made from beets and used to make egg whites stiffer. She confessed to having gently coerced people to give her their ration stamps in exchange for sewing lessons to help get the store stocked, a marvel of diplomatic maneuvering impressing Jacob to no end. Not to limit her inventory to women's needs, she appealed to William for assistance with men's goods, and a tidy selection of tools, basic grooming items, smoking implements and tobacco were perched in the back of the shop near the wood stove, with convenient benches nearby. Smart woman, Jacob thought, as he realized the men would be sitting there waiting on their wives, and likely to make a purchase of their own if it was right in front of their eyes. Medicinals were behind the counter, ensuring children could not get into them, and candy on the counter top, easily within tiny hands' reach, encouraging children to beg for it when their parents wrapped their purchases. The timber sale covered it all nicely, with four hundred dollars in the bank as starting capital to cover the meat purchase and give them a cushion besides. Her mother would be shipping vegetables from the farm. Jacob was to sell these and send her half of the proceeds, which he felt was quite fair. Dixie had even obtained the newest cash register she could get, and a neatly bound ledger book for accounts, with a shining black fountain pen.
And best of all, a glorious painted sign proclaiming, "Saer Grocery" proudly swung over the door. Jacob was speechless and turned to Dixie, his eyes gleaming with tears he was fighting and took her face in both his hands, kissing her soundly. Victory piped up "Me! Me!" from her stand by her mother's knees and he picked her up too and planted a noisy, happy kiss on her pink cheek while she giggled. Dixie ceremoniously hung a bright brass bell on the door, and the sign announcing their opening the following Monday.
That evening, William and Sarah stopped by with their brood, now three children, and the two families had a joyous reunion, singing and laughing until late in the night. By the end of the evening, Jacob hired William as his co-manager, completely unaware Sarah and Dixie had plotted this from the start. For the first time in over three years, Jacob slept soundly, dreaming of the fairies and elves he so loved as a child, but this time they were filing in his store with wee pots of gold, making purchases one after another, with songs of Welsh heroes and unshakable faith rolling through his head.
By the year end Dixie announced to Jacob she was pregnant again. The store was prospering and Jacob was elated to hear the news. Victory wasn't as enthusiastic. First she'd had to share her mother with her father, but that wasn't so bad because he played with her. But now a baby? She wasn't sure what exactly a baby was but if it resembled those squalling things Sarah carried around she wanted nothing to do with it. Over time, fascinated with her mother's growing belly, Victory capitulated and decided a baby might be fun; Dixie patiently used Victory's doll to show her how to feed and change a baby, teaching the little girl to be a grown up helper to her mama. Victory took this responsibility very seriously, and avidly learned child care, bathing her dolls at least twice a day, much to Dixie's amusement.
Times were changing, and ragged groups of men returning from the war were flooding into the towns. Many of them returned to find their jobs replaced by women, at a loss as to what to do. Unemployment plagued the cities and transients became common as men traveled west to find work. Many of these fell to alcoholism, to escape their fate and the sweeping changes in their world, and the streets were not as idyllic and safe for women or children to walk. A pall settled on the Midwest as families hard hit by unemployment lost homes and hit the streets for shelter, and frustrated men, no longer heads of their households, took their anger out on their wives, their daughters, and any woman whose shadow crossed their paths. Dixie cast a long shadow.
On a gloomy day in the winter of 1918, Jacob and William had to go into the city to place critical stock orders, a lean order, for sales in the store were now flagging, but nonetheless needed items to keep the business rolling. Dixie left Victory in Sarah's care and manned the store when they were away. She was carefully straightening and dusting the stock around her unwieldy 8-month belly when an unwashed man in a ripped and muddy army uniform stomped into the store, shaking off the light dusting of an early snow. Dixie sighed, wishing men would learn to leave their wet coats at the door and wipe their feet, and slipped behind the counter to see what the man needed, silently watching the water drip off his coat and leave a trail of little puddles across her freshly mopped floor.
"May I be of assistance?" she inquired.
"Yah. Ya mos' thert'nly kin," he replied in a gravelly, slurred voice. "Gimme your money." He demanded, bringing out a hunting knife, brandishing it in her face.
Now, Dixie was afraid of many things, but nothing got her dander up more than someone trying to take her hard-earned money. Fear flew right out the window as she reached behind her to grab the nearest, heaviest thing she could lay hand on to throw in the man's face. The man read her plans and grabbed her arm before she snared anything; he leaned over the counter and bent her arm backward, causing a sickening crack in her collarbone and shoulder, splashing Dixie's vision with bright yellow pain as he pressed the knife against her cheek. "I shaid, gimme your money," he repeated, his eyes unfocused black pits, his breath reeking of whisky.
With a firm shrug, pushing pain to a top shelf she'd deal with later, Dixie whipped her arm out of the man's grasp and took a step back, pressed against the shelves behind the counter. "Excuse me sir but no. I will not. Now leave," she declared and looked him in the eye, scrambling with her hands below his sight behind her back for anything to harm him with. All she found was the fountain pen. She deftly unscrewed it with one hand while she stared him down and grasped the ink bladder. Quickly she brought it up and squirted the whole lot of black ink in his eyes.
"Fuck you bisch! You cunt! You mother fhucking whore!" He exclaimed reeling back and rubbing his stinging eyes, trying to clear his vision. Dixie slipped out from behind the counter, saw she couldn't get past him to the door in the narrow aisle, and ran to the back of the store, picked up a shovel and came back to him.
"You get on out of here now. Or Ah'll hit you with this." She raised the shovel, standing firm, the baby kicking wildly in her belly.
"Oh no ya won' bisch," he growled and rushed her, grabbing the shovel neatly out of her hand as if she was a child. He swung wildly and clipped her in the ribs, causing her to collapse on the floor. Unaware the baby stopped kicking, she instinctively backed up, trying to kick the man's feet out from under him while her side and shoulder burned in waves forcing her to fight blacking out. "I don' thin' sho," he said, very low and mean, clipping her again, this time on her other side. She rolled over and curled up in a ball, protecting her head and the baby; the man repeatedly beat her in the back and shoulders until she passed out from the pain.
Jacob and William returned four hours later to a closed store. Frantic, knowing Dixie never closed early, and knowing she was still a month away from delivery, Jacob pegged the shopkeeper beside his store and learned a customer came to the store about an hour after the man cleaned out the register and ran. The customer discovered Dixie and rushed her to the hospital, locking the store. No one remembered the attacker, who seemed to have simply vanished into the air. Jacob refused to let William drive and barreled to the hospital, watching the main street stores and outlying fields fly by through a haze of red, left the car in the middle of the drive, his door wide open, and ran in to see his wife. William lingered to move the car to the gravel lot reserved for automobiles, then went in to find Jacob. The countryside lay under a black blanket of incoming storms, air thick with ozone and threatening tornadoes, which William noticed uneasily as they tore down the road, but Jacob was oblivious to anything but the blood in his eyes.
The Doctor tried to detain Jacob in the hall before he went in to see Dixie, to prepare him for what he would see. Jacob stayed barely long enough to hear the doctor say, "she's alive, and we think the baby will survive, but in what condition we aren't sure. We took it early. It's a boy." Jacob flung the door open and ran into the warm room, stopping cold in his tracks as he saw her laying face down, the sheet leaving her back exposed to the waist, for the bruising was so deep even a sheet was painful to her, her bodice arranged between firm pillows on the sides to hold her ribs in place, since taping them was too painful for her too and there was no danger she would want to roll over, white tape wrapping her broken shoulder and collarbone, and intravenous fluids slowly dripping down amber rubber tubes into her one unharmed arm. Unable to turn her head due to the collarbone, she responded to his weak cry of "Dixie!" with a muffled, drug slurred "Shacob, oh Shacob."
He came closer and noticed from the damp on her pillow she had been crying, and rang for the nurse to replace it, taking her good hand and gently petting it. He didn't know what to say.
"The doctor says he thinks our son will be ok," he said, trying to comfort her.
"Nah ok. Lif. Jus' lif. Not nuf," Dixie mumbled and began crying again.
Feeling the walls pressing in on him, overwhelmed by the smell of disinfectant and bodily odors, trying to ignore the background sounds of women crying out in labor, Jacob gently kissed her hand, telling her he would be right back, then slipped out of the room suppressing the gagging rising in his throat from when he first saw her. He chased down the doctor and insisted on seeing his son. This time, Jacob was listening as the Doctor walked him to the special care nursery.
"Your son was born too early, and one of the blows to the side Dixie got also hit him pretty hard on the head; he has a concussion. We don't know how that will affect how he grows up yet, but right now we are working on keeping him alive, because his brain has been swelling and we're trying to get that down first, and keep his lungs working because he was born with them partially collapsed. He's a big boy for his age, which helps, and he has a good cry even as faint as it is, always a good sign," the doctor concluded, smiling gently and placing his hand on Jacob's shoulders. "Your wife will recover. She looks bad, but the broken bones will heal and the bruises will go down. She didn't get any blows to the head and fortunately none of the injuries broke any spinal bones. We don't know how she managed to avoid puncturing any organs with nine broken ribs, but God was with her."
On that, the Doctor walked Jacob into a dimly lit nursery where his son lay naked save for a tiny diaper in an incubator all alone in the carefully heated room. A white clad nurse sat beside him and chatted with him softly. Tubes ran down his nose connected to bellows softly pumping in air, and out of the top of his skull in a spot shaved of the curly black hair he was born with, where his soft spot was, other tubes emerged, through which a viscous bloody yellow fluid seeped. Jacob irrationally had the impression the baby's brains were leaking out, each drop of fluid an idea, each pulse an inspiration. Intravenous needles pierced his frail arms, sliding nutrients and fluids into his body. He was no bigger than a half grown hen and Jacob watched the blood coursing through his son's translucent skin. A dark bruise circled his forehead, and the doctor explained the umbilical wrapped around there during the attack and had remained there long enough to bruise him, since it was over an hour before they removed him. Red lines streaked down from the bruise, another effect the doctor explained was not as malignant as it looked, just part of the bruising. Jacob was suddenly overwhelmed with an extreme feeling of d Jacob took a deep breath and stood, walking over to his son, taking his tiny hand in one finger. The baby woke and weakly turned his head to look directly at his father. A flood of relief washed through Jacob when he saw intelligence behind the bruised eyes, and he slowly let out his breath and smoothed the wrinkled red fingers feebly grasping his index finger. The doctor gently ushered Jacob out, telling him they had to watch the baby carefully and it was best not to risk upsetting him. Numbly Jacob followed, to collapse in a chair in the hallway beside William, who said nothing, the younger man simply putting his arm around his friend.
After a few silent moments, Jacob rose again and returned to Dixie's room.
"I saw our son, honey. He took my finger and looked me in the eye. I think he'll be all right," Jacob told her, gently smoothing her hair away from where it fell on her back, gritting his teeth to avoid cringing from touching her bruised and broken skin.
"Lif? Babef can chee oo?" she mumbled.
"Yes sweetheart. He's alive, and he can see me," he reassured her, feeling as if the enormous weight of the mountains descended upon him, pulling him down into the earth. "I'm going to go now, let you sleep. I'll be back in the morning." Jacob didn't want to admit he couldn't take seeing her this way and had to leave lest he would scream.
"F'kay. Shtird. Luf oo."
"I know you're tired, honey. I love you too." Jacob bent and softly kissed her hand then slipped out of the room. William again put his arm around him and the two men walked quietly out of the hospital into the now roiling storm winds. Jacob stood and watched the storm clouds with the tunnel vision of shock, noticing curiously that the main bank of the storm seemed to be rolling away from them, but one laggard cloud was standing still, directly overhead. He named the cloud Greed, and soundly cussed it out in Welsh, running around in circles in the field near the hospital, leaping into the air, reaching his hands over his head in fists, taking swings at God. Jacob knew in his heart had he continued in the mine rather than opening the store this would never have happened, and took all the guilt of the war and the social change and the economy and his family's pain on his singular shoulders. William simply watched, allowing his friend to vent, hoping this cloud too, will pass. He personally was relieved and grateful the baby and Dixie survived, and was confused Jacob was all anger and no thankfulness for that gift of God.
Dixie and the baby were in the hospital three months, where miracles of healing were celebrated daily, champagne purchased in New York and smuggled into Ohio popped for the day Dixie rolled over, and a full blown party thrown when the baby, now named Jacob Luc Saer, Jr., or "Cobb," had his tubes removed and was taken off the respirator. Cobb being the second baby in the world to survive this experimental procedure, even the doctors celebrated when he was declared in "satisfactory" condition. Dixie had a hard time coming off the morphine, for they left her on it longer than usual not only to numb the physical pain, but to dull the psychic pain, freeing her soul to rest and heal. She grew to like feeling nothing, having to think of nothing, and wholeheartedly resented being thrust back into the real world. But visits from Victory, when her mother and brother were finally "presentable" without shocking the child, brought Dixie back around, giggling with her, hiding her winces when the laughter shook her shoulders and ribs, watching her little one sit on the windowsill, bobbing one leg, and telling her mother all about the critical social life of her dolls. Homecoming was celebrated with a grande pot luck dinner, where Jacob called everyone he knew and invited them over to see Dixie back on her feet again and to formally meet his son, and the solitary house sang and danced and was filled with light.
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