Willow Run

by Patricia Reilly Giff

  “Ha. You think I'll get double desserts, double allowance, and Grandpa won't be telling me how wonderful you are every two minutes?”

  I went over to the table, happy to see that Mr. Colgan was telling Lily's grandmother about the price of bread and cake and canned beans. I helped myself to supper: a little Spam doctored up with Grandpa's pickles, a mountain of Mom's potato salad with a couple of elephant-foot onion slices, and a lump of oleo for the heel of the rye bread. I went outside to sit with Lily on the back step.

  “The oleo is disgusting, isn't it?” I looked down at the white lump with yellow dye running through it in spots, wartime butter.

  “Horrible,” Lily agreed.

  “I wouldn't smear it on my bread in a million years except that I'm entering an oleo contest, twenty-five words or less.”

  “Great,” Lily mumbled, her mouth full.

  “Mmm, mmm, mmm, the tastiest taste in the world, oleo even … ,” I began, and broke off. “That's as far as I've gotten.”

  Lily sat there nodding and I thought about Grandpa. He was going to skip the oleo contest. “I can't think of one good thing about it,” he had told me.

  I looked back through the doorway. He was talking about our soldiers landing in Normandy now, shaking his head over the casualties. His voice was loud… and you could hear the German in it, the roll of the rrrr s, the mixed-up f s and v s. “We have to hope,” he said. Haf to hope.

  I wondered what Lily thought about his accent. But she was speaking at the same time. “I'm going to miss you.”

  I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. I was going to have this tremendous adventure, and she was stuck in Rockaway.

  Lily turned to me. “About the candy,” she began.

  I swallowed. Lily and I had found a bag of candy that Mom had planned on sending to Eddie. We had eaten a ton of it.

  “I'm sorry about that,” she said.

  My mouth watered when I thought of it. “Just as well we ate some of it,” I said, feeling a little guilty anyway. “Eddie always gets cavities.”

  “But your mom,” Lily said.

  I didn't answer. Mom had been furious about sending only half the candy. We went back inside then, and I edged around to Grandpa, who was still wearing that miserable hat, and tapped his arm. “I'll take that for you.”

  His hand went up absently, his thin hair rising as he slid the hat off his head.

  With my plate in one hand I went to the kitchen door and tossed the hat onto a chair. Dad was cutting into a huge watermelon at the counter. He grinned when he saw the hat. And Virginia Tooey had come into the kitchen. Mom, an apron tied around her middle, was leaning against the sink talking to her, smiling. Mom was round as a dumpling, but when she smiled there was no one as pretty.

  She handed me a plate of celery and olives. “Meggie, just put this …” She turned back to Virginia without finishing.

  I found a place for it on the dining room table and stood next to Lily. Jiggs meowed underneath and I bent over to give him a taste of Spam. He took one sniff, then walked away. “I don't blame him,” I told Lily.

  And there was Mr. Colgan, everyone veering away from him as if he were the blind man in blindman's buff. “Bet you'll miss your grandpa.” He leaned forward to spear a slice of cheese and fly it over my shoulder into his mouth.

  I knew Grandpa could hear him. “Dad has a job for the war effort,” I said. “We'll be home as soon as it's over.”

  Mr. Colgan reached for another slice of cheese, his eyes glued to me so I couldn't escape. “Hey, Meggie. Why isn't your grandfather going with you? Plenty of room in the car.” He nudged me. “Isn't that a great idea?”

  I wished I could back away from him and slide out the door. Grandpa's eyes were on me now. I didn't want to look at him, but my eyes went up to his face. Was he sad that we were going without him?

  I could feel it in my chest: no one knew me in Michigan. No one knew that Grandpa had taught me to count in German: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf; no one like Mikey or the Muscle Man would wonder if Grandpa and I were secretly hoping that Germany would win the war. No one would lock him up in a prison there…or worse.

  “How can I leave?” Grandpa said. “I have a garden to grow, and I have to wait for Eddie.…”

  I took another forkful of potato salad. “Right,” I said to Mr. Colgan. “He has to stay here.”

  He'd be safer in Rockaway, even those boys had said so. And then it was time for Lily and her grandmother to leave. I went to the door with them, still thinking about Grandpa, and gave Lily a hug.

  “See you soon,” she said.

  “After the war.” I wondered how long that would be.

  “Just for the duration.” We both smiled. That was what everyone said all the time.

  Chapter Four

  Last day. I said goodbye to Lily one last time and sneaked her a key to our house so she could go up to the attic and write a book. I'd even left a piece of candy for her up there.

  I skated down the street trying to miss the cracks as I counted blue stars in the windows: six of them, six families who had soldiers fighting in the war, and one gold star in the Winstons’ window for Eddie's friend Bobby, a great basketball player, who had been killed in action.

  We had a blue star in our own window for Eddie. For a quick moment I closed my eyes thinking about him, his forehead always sunburned, his cap pushed back over his hair.

  A letter had finally arrived this morning. It crinkled in my pocket. I reached in to touch it, Eddie's writing all over it, then turned up Grandpa's path. The banner with his star for Eddie was looped over the knocker on the door instead of hanging in the window like everyone else's. That was Grandpa. Always different.

  “Hey, Grandpa?” I unstrapped my skates and left them on the stoop, then took a few giant steps through the living room and into the kitchen. A row of jars marched along the counter, pickle jars, but not holding pickles. Each one had a half-dead sprig of a plant that Grandpa was bringing back to life. Here and there ghostly roots were beginning to sprout.

  “Grandpa?” I called again.

  Not in the house. Of course not. Outside in his victory garden with the bugs and spiny cucumbers. Ah, not cucumbers yet, just yellow buds. It was only the beginning of July, after all.

  I banged out of the kitchen into the yard, catching my heel. I had a hundred blisters from that screen door. But no more. After today I wouldn't see that door again, nor Grandpa's counter filled with jars of green things, nor the cucumber vat on the linoleum floor with pickles swimming around inside. Not until the end of the war. I swallowed thinking of it.

  “He's probably out there in the yard dreaming about pickle relish,” I said to myself, but under my breath. Lots of things were wrong with Grandpa, but being deaf wasn't one. He always heard more than I wanted him to.

  Right. There he was, but he wasn't bent over like a pretzel pulling weeds out of his victory garden. He was under the only tree in the whole yard, a pile of papers on his lap, his red plaid cap pulled down over his eyes.

  Why was he just sitting there?

  I felt a clutch somewhere in my chest. Grandpa was old. He had even been in the U.S. Army in the Great War. He still talked about it even though it must have been a million years ago, when he had first come to this country from Germany.

  Suppose he was dead?

  He reached up to wave away a Japanese beetle. They were all over the place, chomping away at the vegetables as fast as he planted them.

  I walked toward him. He was alive, certainly he was alive. What was I thinking of? He had told me once he wanted to live to be a hundred. And he still had a way to go.

  He looked up from under his bushy eyebrows and pushed back his hat with one large hand. A rim of dirt lined his nails: he was always running a clump of soil between his fingers or sifting it across his wrist, then rubbing it in.

  “When your grandmother Margaret died,” he had told me once, “I felt better kneeling in the dirt, watching my plants grow. T
hat and …” His voice trailed off. Grandpa could drive you crazy, beginning a sentence and stopping halfway through.

  “What?” I had asked.

  “Edward,” he had said. Edvard. “And you.” He pointed at me. “You make me feel better. Who knows why?”

  “Bah,” I had answered, his favorite word, pleased in spite of myself. We had grinned at each other.

  “Well, Margaret,” he said now. Vell, Mar-gar-et.

  “Meggie.”

  Grandpa hauled himself to his feet, papers scattering. One landed at my toes: our entry for the Sweetheart Soap contest. I scooped it up. “There's mud all over this. We spent two hours working on it and now…”

  He peered down at the splotched paper in my hand. “It's not how it looks, Margaret. It's the words we have here.” Verds. He tapped the paper with his thumb. “We might even win this time.”

  Impossible. No one would want to touch this. “Think, Grandpa. It's a soap contest.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. His laugh was the best thing about him. Eddie and I always said so. His teeth were strong and even below his gray mustache, and his eyes crinkled, almost like the pictures of Santa Claus in Macy's window every Christmas. When Grandpa laughed, we couldn't help laughing, too.

  “I sent an entry to the oatmeal contest,” I told him. “I'm probably going to win that, anyway.”

  I wouldn't win in a hundred years.

  “Nasty stuff, that oatmeal,” he said.

  I nodded. Suppose I did win? I'd have to eat oatmeal for breakfast the rest of my life. That was the prize. A lifetime supply of oatmeal.

  I wondered what the prize for the oleo contest was. But winning was winning. Grandpa and I had a plan. When we won our first contest we were going to take ourselves on the bus to New York City and see the sights. It was a secret, of course. Only Eddie knew.

  Grandpa looked at his watch. “Enough time to weed a little?”

  I let the paper drop back into the pile. “I just came to say goodbye. Mom and Dad said they'd be over later.”

  “I counted,” he said. “Fourteen blossoms on the first cucumber vine.”

  I didn't like the way his eyes looked, almost the way they did when he dusted the picture of my grandmother Margaret in his living room… the only thing he dusted in the whole house.

  If I said “Come with us,” would he leave his house and his garden? I thought he might. But what about the swastika on his window, and the factory, and the OSS? I thought of prison. I couldn't ask him.

  “You'll have fourteen cucumbers.” I tried not to look at him.

  He walked past me down the path, patting the flat leaves as if they were his babies.

  I remembered suddenly. “I have a letter in my pocket. Mom said to bring it over for you to read.”

  He still didn't answer.

  Was Grandpa crying?

  Of course not.

  I handed him the letter, the thin envelope with red, white, and blue edges. He stood there, patting it the way he had patted the plants, then leaned against the tree to read it.

  It wasn't much to read, I knew that, and it had been written two months ago: still April, when the plants hadn't even begun to sprout in Grandpa's garden. Much too soon to know if Eddie had been in Normandy. I knew the letter by heart.

  … the war has to end one of these days. In the meantime I think of you and miss you, Mom and Dad, Meggie, Grandpa, and even the cats. I'll be home when this is over, and I can't wait.

  Grandpa crumpled the envelope, and now I was sure he was crying. “I'm glad Mrs. Easterly is next door,” I said to fill up the no-talking space.

  Grandpa turned, his eyes rimmed with red. “Don't you worry about me, Margaret.”

  “I'm not worried, not one bit.”

  “Good thing.”

  I didn't even want to mention the garden. “Maybe you could go fishing with …” I couldn't think of anyone.

  “I'll go by myself. Probably catch my dinner every day without anyone knocking over the bait box and splashing her feet in the water.”

  I bit the inside of my lip. Fishing with Grandpa was just the opposite of what he was saying. He was the one who couldn't move two inches without dropping the hooks into the water, never to be seen again.

  Last week the ham sandwiches had gone off the bridge. A bunch of killies had attacked the bread like piranhas, and the brown paper bag with the napkins had sunk to the bottom, one soggy mess. All we had between us was six cents. We didn't have anything to eat all day but a pair of Chiclets he found in his pocket.

  “Pay attention,” he said now.

  “I am.”

  “What did I say?”

  I tried to think. What was he always saying? “You're going to fertilize…”

  “No.”

  “You're going to…ah…go to the movies without me.” I took a wild guess. “Stage Door Canteen.”

  “That hasn't been there for months.” He handed me Eddie's crumpled letter. “Don't lose this, now.”

  “I'm not the one…,” I began, and gave up.

  “Come on,” he said, “I'll show you something inside.”

  I followed him into the small room in back of the kitchen, his office. The desk took up most of the room and was filled with contest entries, and bills, and newspaper clippings. A small table was covered with pictures: Mom when she was a girl, Eddie and me, one of Grandma Margaret standing in front of the Neckar River in Heidelberg, where she had grown up. But the best thing, Grandpa always said, was his Victory medal from the Great War. I picked it up. The rainbow ribbon was faded and the medal was tarnished, but Grandpa kept it in the place of honor next to Margaret's picture.

  “You must have been brave to get this,” I said.

  Grandpa leaned over my shoulder and touched the angel on the front. “It's the other way around. It reminds me to be brave when I need to be.” He stared out the window. “You have to dig deep before you judge a person,” he said absently. “What do people say? You can't tell a book by its cover.”

  What was that all about? I wondered. Had he somehow found out about the swastika on his window? Or maybe he was embarrassed about his accent. It was the first time I'd ever thought of that. Could he possibly know I didn't want him to come to Willow Run?

  I glanced over at his second-best thing: a paper tacked up between the windows that said he was a citizen: Josef von Frisch, a new American. The paper was so old it was crinkled on the corners, and it had a damp spot from the hurricane when I was five. It also had a dab of jelly, Eddie's fingerprint from long ago. If I had done that, Grandpa wouldn't have spoken to me for days. As it was, he had just rubbed at it, making it worse.

  Grandpa opened one of the drawers; it was stuffed to the gills, as he would say, with all kinds of junk. He pulled out an envelope and rubbed it against his vest before he handed it to me.

  I looked down at his loop-de-loop writing: lettuce, cukes, and tomatoes; then shook the envelope.

  I glanced up at him. “What's this for… seeds all mixed together?”

  “What do you think? Salad, that's what it is. Plant it all when you get to Michigan.”

  “All right.”

  “Bah. You'll probably lose it.”

  I tried to think of an answer, but he was on his way outside again, banging the screen door behind him.

  Willow Run, Michigan

  Thursday, I think

  Dear Grandpa,

  We couldn't find anyplace to stay last night, so we slept in the car. I counted nine mosquito bites on one leg and four on the other.

  The cats hate this trip. Judy keeps attacking the floor pads. Jiggs keeps attacking my feet.

  People in a Model A Ford just like ours were parked next to us. They were on their way to work in a war factory, too, but in the opposite direction.

  A girl was crying next to the window. But not me.

  Meggie

  Chapter Five

  The car was filthy, caked with mud from a thunderstorm in Rochester, grit fro
m a blast of wind in Ohio, and a smear of greasy yellow dirt on the fender from somewhere in Michigan.

  “We're here,” Dad said.

  Here was nowhere. A long building that went on forever, cars pulling up in front, people streaming in and out the doors like Macy's. What had I expected Willow Run to be like? I tried to think. Maybe the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. At least someplace shiny and beautiful.

  “It's the factory.” Dad waved his hand. “Henry Ford's assembly line for the war effort.”

  I didn't know who Henry Ford was, didn't know what an assembly line was, and I didn't care. I was sticking to the backseat of the car, boiling hot, while the two cats were fur coats covering my feet. “We're going to live in a factory?”

  “Come on, get out. I'll show you,” he said.

  We walked through the gates. Dad showed a tag to a woman at a table; then we poked our heads into the wide doorway. It was hot, it was noisy, people were all over the place, and pieces of metal were on tables and…

  “Enough for now,” Dad said. “Mom is hot in the car.” We slid back in and Dad waved his arm toward the factory. “Instead of cars, Ford is making bombers, B-24s. The same way though—everyone working on one piece at a time.” His round glasses glinted in the sunlight. “It's a mile long, this factory, the largest in the world. If only I could fly one of those B-24s …” He broke off. “But the next best thing is to build them.”

  Mom turned toward him, her plump hand on his arm, her face red from the heat. “I know how much you miss flying.”

  For a moment no one said anything. We watched people going in and out, hundreds of them, it seemed. If Dad had been able to fly, he'd have been in the war like Eddie. I was glad he wasn't, glad he wore those owl glasses. “I might die of thirst in this car,” I said to make him laugh.

  He did laugh. “Just the last few streets to go.” He started the car and drove along blocks of apartment houses with a few trailers here and there and a couple of shacks leaning against each other. Not a garden in sight.

  Grandpa would hate it.