Camping and exploring became his passion, and he spent hours in the forest, sittingbeneath blackjack oak trees, whistling quietly, and playing his guitar for beavers andgeese and wild blue herons. Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people andthings man‐made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.
Although he was quiet, years of heavy lifting at the lumberyard helped him excel insports, and his athletic success led to popularity. He enjoyed the football games andtrack meets, and though most of his teammates spent their free time together aswell, he rarely joined them. An occasional person found him arrogant; most simplyfigured he had grown up a bit faster than everyone else. He had a few girlfriends inschool, but none had ever made an impression on him.
Except for one. And she came after graduation. Allie. His Allie.
He remembered talking to Fin about Allie after they'd left the festival that first night,and Fin had laughed. Then he'd made two predictions: first, that they would fall inlove, and second, that it wouldn't work out.
There was a slight tug at his line and Noah hoped for a largemouth bass, but thetugging eventually stopped, and after reeling his line in and checking the bait,he cast again.
Fin ended up being right on both counts. Most of the summer, she had to makeexcuses to her parents whenever they wanted to see each other. It wasn't that theydidn't like him‐‐it was that he was from a different class, too poor, and they wouldnever approve if their daughter became serious with someone like him. "! don't carewhat my parents think, I love you and always will," she would say. "We'll find a wayto be together."
But in the end they couldn't. By early September the tobacco had been harvested andshe had no choice but to return with her family to Winston‐Salem. "Only the summer
is over, Allie, not us," he'd said the morning she left. "We'll never be over." But theywere. For a reason he didn't fully understand, the letters he wrote went unanswered.
Eventually he decided to leave New Bern to help get her off his mind, but also becausethe Depression made earning a living in New Bern almost impossible. He went first toNorfolk and worked at a shipyard for six months before he was laid off, then movedto New Jersey because he'd heard the economy wasn't so bad there.
He eventually found a job in a scrap yard, separating scrap metal from everythingelse. The owner, a Jewish man named Morris Goldman, was intent on collecting asmuch scrap metal as he could, convinced that a war was going to start in Europe andthat America would be dragged in again. Noah, though, didn't care about the reason.
He was just happy to have a job.
His years in the lumberyard had toughened him to this type of labor, and he workedhard. Not only did it help him keep his mind off Allie during the day, but it wassomething he felt he had to do. His daddy had always said: "Give a day's work for aday's pay. Anything less is stealing.'' That attitude pleased his boss.
"It's a shame you aren't Jewish," Goldman would say, "you're such a fine boy in somany other ways." It was the best compliment Goldman could give.
He continued to think about Allie, especially at night. He wrote her once a month butnever received a reply. Eventually he wrote a final letter and forced himself to acceptthe fact that the summer they'd spent with one another was the only thing they'dever share. Still, though, she stayed with him. Three years after the last letter, hewent to Winston‐Salem in the hope of finding her. He went to her house, discoveredthat she had moved, and after talking to some neighbors, finally called RJR. The girlwho answered the phone was new and didn't recognize the name, but she pokedaround the personnel files for him. She found out that Allie's father had left thecompany and that no forwarding address was listed. That trip was the first and lasttime he ever looked for her.
For the next eight years, he worked for Goldman. At first he was one of twelveemployees, but as the years dragged on, the company grew, and he was promoted.
By 1940 he had mastered the business and was running the entire operation,brokering the deals and managing a staff of thirty. The yard had become the largestscrap metal dealer on the East Coast.
During that time, he dated a few different women. He became serious with one, awaitress from the local diner with deep blue eyes and silky black hair. Although they
dated for two years and had many good times together, he never came to feel thesame way about her as he did about Allie.
But neither did he forget her. She was a few years older than he was, and it was shewho taught him the ways to please a woman, the places to touch and kiss, where tolinger, the things to whisper. They would sometimes spend an entire day in bed,holding each other and making the kind of love that fully satisfied both of them.
She had known they wouldn't be together forever. Toward the end of theirrelationship she'd told him once, "I wish I could give you what you're looking for, butI don't know what it is. There's a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone,including me. It's as if I'm not the one you're really with. Your mind is on someoneelse." He tried to deny it, but she didn't believe him. "I'm a woman‐‐I know thesethings.
When you look at me sometimes, I know you're seeing someone else. It's like you keepwaiting for her to pop out of thin air to take you away from all this .... "A month latershe visited him at work and told him she'd met someone else. He understood.
They parted as friends, and the following year he received a postcard from her sayingshe was married. He hadn't heard from her since.
While he was in New Jersey, he would visit his father once a year around Christmas.
They'd spend some time fishing and talking, and once in a while they'd take a trip tothe coast to go camping on the Outer Banks near Ocracoke.
In December 1941, when he was twenty‐six, the war began, just as Goldman hadpredicted. Noah walked into his office the following month and informed Goldmanof his intent to enlist, then returned to New Bern to say good‐bye to his father. Fiveweeks later he found himself in boot camp. While there, he received a letter fromGoldman thanking him for his work, together with a copy of a certificate entitlinghim to a small percentage of the scrap yard if it ever sold. "I couldn't have done itwithout you," the letter said. "You're the finest young man who ever worked for me,even if you aren't Jewish.”
He spent his next three years with Patton's Third Army, tramping through desertsin North Africa and forests in Europe with thirty pounds on his back, his infantryunit never far from action. He watched his friends die around him; watched assome of them were buried thousands of miles from home. Once, while hiding in afoxhole near the Rhine, he imagined he saw Allie watching over him.
He remembered the war ending in Europe, then a few months later in Japan. Justbefore he was discharged, he received a letter from a lawyer in New Jerseyrepresenting Morris Goldman. Upon meeting the lawyer, he found out that Goldmanhad died a year earlier and his estate liquidated. The business had been sold, andNoah was given a check for almost seventy thousand dollars. For some reason he wasoddly unexcited about it.
The following week he returned 'to New Bern and bought the house. He rememberedbringing his father around later, showing him what he was going to do, pointing outthe changes he intended to make. His father seemed weak as he walked around,coughing and wheezing. Noah was concerned, but his father told him not to worry,assuring him that he had the flu. Less than one month later his father died ofpneumonia and was buried next to his wife in the local cemetery. Noah tried to stopby regularly to leave some flowers; occasionally he left a note. And every nightwithout fail he took a moment to remember him, then said a prayer for the manwho'd taught him everything that mattered.
After reeling in the line, he put the gear away and went back to the house. Hisneighbor, Martha Shaw, was there to thank him, bringing three loaves of homemadebread and some biscuits in appreciation for what he'd done. Her husband had beenkilled in the war, leaving her with three children and a tired shack of a house to raisethem in. Winter was coming, and he'd spent a few days at her place last weekrepairing her roof, replacing broken windows and sealing the others, and fixing herwood stove.
Hopefully, it would be enough to get them through.
Once she'd left, he got in his battered Dodge truck and went to see Gus. He alwaysstopped there when he was going to the store because Gus's family didn't have a car.
One of the daughters hopped up and rode with him, and they did their shopping atCapers General Store. When he got home he didn't unpack the groceries right away.
Instead he showered, found a Budweiser and a book by Dylan Thomas, and went tosit on the porch. She still had trouble believing it, even as she held the proof in herhands. It had been in the newspaper at her parents' house three Sundays ago. Shehad gone to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, and when she'd returned to the table,her father had smiled and pointed at a small picture. "Remember this?" He handedher the paper, and after an uninterested first glance, something in the picture caughther eye and she took a closer look. "It can't be," she whispered, and when her fatherlooked at her curiously, she ignored him, sat down, and read the article without
speaking. She vaguely remembered her mother coming to the table and sittingopposite her, and when she finally put aside the paper, her mother was staring at herwith the same expression her father had just moments before. "Are you okay?" hermother asked over her coffee cup. "You look a little pale." She didn't answer rightaway, she couldn't, and it was then that she'd noticed her hands were shaking. Thathad been when it started.
"And here it will end, one way or the other," she whispered again. She refolded thescrap of paper and put it back, remembering that she had left her parents' home laterthat day with the paper so she could cut out the article. She read it again before shewent to bed that night, trying to fathom the coincidence, and read it again the nextmorning as if to make sure the whole thing wasn't a dream. And now, after threeweeks of long walks alone, after three weeks of distraction, it was the reason she'dcome.
When asked, she said her erratic behavior was due to stress. It was the perfectexcuse; everyone understood, including Lon, and that's why he hadn't argued whenshe'd wanted to get away for a couple of days. The wedding plans were stressful toeveryone involved.
Almost five hundred people were invited, including the governor, one senator, andthe ambassador to Peru. It was too much, in her opinion, but their engagement wasnews and had dominated the social pages since they had announced their plans sixmonths ago. Occasionally she felt like running away with Lon to get married withoutthe fuss. But she knew he wouldn't agree; like the aspiring politician he was, he lovedbeing the center of attention.
She took a deep breath and stood again. "It's now or never," she whispered, thenpicked up her things and went to the door. She paused only slightly before openingit and going downstairs. The manager smiled as she walked by, and she could feelhis eyes on her as she left and went to her car. She slipped behind the wheel, lookedat herself one last time, then started the engine and turned right onto Front Street.
She wasn't surprised that she still knew her way around town so well. Even thoughshe hadn't been here in years, it wasn't large and she navigated the streets easily.
After crossing the Trent River on an old‐fashioned drawbridge, she turned onto agravel road and began the final leg of her journey.
