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Title: Lady Ann
Missing Souls
March 2018 Brooke Folk, Author
Divine Love - Spirit Inspired Short Stories
BrookeNetwork.com production
Authors Note: This was also featured as a two-part story in The New Republic weekly newspaper in southwestern, PA. Brooke is a weekly contributor in his “Tales from the Trail’ column.
Lady Ann
Somewhere in a timeframe of 1942, the railway took him away from her, to never return and to never have word from him since his last kiss and "I love you." Not a learned lady, her efforts to have her husband located in the war arena, was never successful. Somewhere, in the next forty five years, she spent her life in near solitude in the mountains of Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Lady Ann was an assumed war widow with no closure. Cross country by rail to San Diego was his orders and that is all that she knew. Twenty five hundred miles before he was to have special naval training and that was all she could tell local authorities who passed it on to county and state. The trail always went cold in their efforts to locate her newly wed and then off to war husband. The connecting rail lines couldn't confirm that he arrived at his destination. The mystery story of their not being accountable by passenger name could be explained away by special government change of identities aboard their trains.
Every lonesome whistle that blew on the Western Maryland and B&O line that lay in the valley of her mountain became a hoped for returning sojourn of her soldier without a name of record. Each hoped for whistle promise of a reunion, became mournful echo's for Lady Ann. Station managers of both lines in the small community of Meyersdale, had yellowed folded papers of a map to her mountain cabin, to give to the missing returning soldier who asked the whereabouts of his 'Lady Ann'. Each station manager passed on the information to their successor for decades.
It was a non spoken code of ethics that the station managers adhered to. Each would keep a vigil on her sparse mountain cabin, if Lady Ann didn't walk the tracks into town every now and then, to check on the safety of the yellowed note being in still good repair and visible to the station manager. In time, the Western Maryland stopped passenger service and decades later, the tracks were silent. The last station manager of the Western Maryland took the fragile note upon the stations closure and for his remaining days, would check on Lady Ann.
Her walks into town on an abandoned rail line, the very one that took her love from her so many years ago, somehow still gave her hope. The B&O, later the Chessie System, still had Amtrak service into Cumberland, Md. Even though Meyersdale no longer had a working depot, her note remained visible. At random times, Lady Ann would find someone around the station when peering into the windows. To that person, she would lament her story. Her walks into town were eventually non existent.
One of the last station managers, who retired from the Cumberland station, knew of Lady Ann. She was a secret icon of sorts. The code of ethics of managers was all but silent now. The last surviving manager, now well into his 80s, made pilgrimages to Lady Ann's cabin in spring and fall until he too fell silent. The yellow note was found in his will. A great granddaughter from Lavale, MD was the beneficiary of the original yellowed note along with a loving note from her great grandfather. A small sum of money was left to the mountain cabin assumed widow named Lady Ann.
Now in her late sixties, Lady Ann related her story one last time. She didn't need the money. You see, those few station managers agreed to put a small amount of money from their paychecks into a successful investment fund. A local bank saw to her personal banking and tax needs. She wasn't rich, but lovingly cared for. The station managers of the rails, the rails that took her love from her in 1942, felt a strange compelling to start the funding. Lady Ann understood who was behind the compelling. Until now, she never told a soul. That revealing will be continued in the next week’s column.
...continued from last week.
Lady Ann answered the gentle hesitant knocking at her cabin door. The hinges were long overdue for lubricant. She explained to the young lady that nobody could enter her place without her knowing it and she liked it that way. Besides she didn't need to waste any lard on those old hinges anyway. Her pretty young visitor didn't need to explain the purpose of her visit. Lady Ann saw the yellowed note in her hand.
"Weren't no reason to wear a dress into my woods," she chided her visitor. The girl couldn't help but gaze around the cabin, noticing a 1940's time warp motif. She did offer her explanation and handed the envelope to Lady Ann. Thumbing the cash, she handed it back to the girl and asked her visitor to sit down. "What's your name girl," Lady Ann asked? Her visitor said, "Ann," just like your name." "Well if that don't beat all. Never been two Ann's in my home," Lady Ann said. "Hard to believe, but I once was cute just like you. Cute enough to get married for a couple days before I lost him." Her story was then told one last time to a complete stranger.
“For the first two years I suspected he was lost to this world because of the war efforts but I suspected wrong. Yes, the war called him but it weren’t the enemy on some foreign battle field that did him wrong. It was around the time I bought this old hunting cabin, that I got my answer. I wanted to be alone with my God and His nature and little else. I was but a young bride of twenty years old and two days only at that, before those now rusted rails (she pointed down into the valley) took him from his home and from me. It wasn’t normal not to get mail when he arrived in San Diego, I was told.”
The young girl interrupted Lady Ann. “But I thought the officials never received word about your husband’s whereabouts?” “Heavens sake girl, them folks never did get to the bottom of any of their investigations. Shameful, but I forgave em after awhile. It wasn’t about two months after moving into my home that I got’s a feeling come over me. It got so that I thought this move to solitude was a mistake. Maybe I was going looney bins. Not in my right frame of mind. “Why was that,” young Ann asked? “Shush up girl and I’ll tell you. You always interrupt your peers when theys trying to explain sumpin to you?”
Young Ann had an instant fondness and was happy to oblige her peer. As she remained silent, Lady Ann explained her story that no human ears heard before. The story that explained the compelling of those dear dedicated station managers to do what they did for Lady Ann. What she suspected for many years was confirmed just recently. “For years I let my imagination play with me. Every misplaced and reappearance of my sewing things, was my husbands way of telling me he was ok. Cupboard doors opening and closing, pictures always need straightening, that sort of thing.”
Lady Ann continued. “I never once gave up hope. Then just last year I gets a book I never asks for and it says there is a spirit world we know as the heavens and everybody goes there and our souls can ask our Creator for His Divine Love and we can feels it. I feels it a lot and I never stop asking for it. And inside me, I hear this small voice that I think is me thinking but I never knows how to think such things. Somehow I knows it’s my Danny and somehow I knows you was coming here too. Somehow I knows the station managers and the bank were lookin after this mountain woman and now I knows it was my Danny’s doin.”
Lady Ann points to the book across the room on her quilted bed. “That’s a powerful book, you needs to get yourself one of them.” That was the end of her story. Ann noted the title before leaving. ‘True Gospel Revealed anew by Jesus’. Ann visited Lady Ann the following spring. The cabin was empty, no trace of being a habitat for almost five decades.
Ann scoured obituaries of the local Republican newspaper. There was no trace, just like the disappearance of her husband. Walking the half mile or so back to her car, Ann distinctly heard a passenger train going through the valley. Though it couldn’t have been, the rails were recently lifted to make way for a rails to trail hiking and biking trail. The lonesome whistle didn’t sound lonesome. Ann smiled as she caught the vision of Lady Ann and her Danny waving good by as they spirited away from their beloved Somerset County home to their promised heaven mansion.
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A comment from Carol, editor of The New Republic
Ok, Brooke, you have to tell me the truth. No sly fox allusions this time lol. Where did the story of Lady Ann originate? Is this a creation of your beautiful and cunning imagination, or is this story based in reality. Not sure if it’s more the way you wrote it, or the memories of my own time with a new husband at war, but you have absolutely given me chills this morning.
Author’s reply: Lady Ann, an inspired story. Given to me by my sources and permission to bring it close to home, years later as a writer. As I compiled line upon line, my visual acuity saw the details! A bit fuzzy at first, then as a tear fell and another, I felt Lady Ann's weight of the unknown frustrations guide me to the location, of which I caught a glimpse of the very landscape in late May of 1966 when I became lost. It was that day when taking my street bike off a well-known mountain dirt road for a quick adventure.
That date is known, down to the precise day and hour because that evening was my high school graduation in May of 1966. My small Benelli 125cc street bike couldn't climb out of the heavily sloped mountainside. I tried walking the bike up the steep slope, with the engine running, to assist me in its lowest first gear. I made some progress until the clutch overheated. The bike on its side and me slumped next to a tree, the silence except for the whispers of nature, gave me a solitude moment to survey the hopelessness. I could walk out but never walk the miles back into town in time for graduation. I could smell my mother's supper on the stove and feel her concern of why I wasn't home and dressed for my special ceremonies in less than two hours and the party after.
It was that delicious smell and the fear of missing out on my own graduation and the fears that would overcome the family that gave me the strength for another try. The cooling of the clutch enabled a successful climb until I broke out onto the familiar dirt road, yards from where I made my foolish entry. Without using the once again heated clutch and stretched cable, I was able to non-clutch into a mid-range gear that gave me enough speed and power to descend the mountain road back into town with a half hour before graduation. Explaining my error in judgment, no time for supper and just enough time to shower and dress and join my graduating classmates, I finally had a brief moment sitting in the auditorium seats to reflect on my stupidity. Years later, many years later, I relived that late afternoon and remember vividly, the delicious aroma that triggered my final attempt to scale that mountainside. I now know it was from Lady Ann's cabin.