Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  Helen went to work in Boston. She didn’t mind it all. She got tips just for showing up. She knew. She didn’t care. She once told me that if old white men wanted to give her extra money for just standing there, she would take their money.

  “They have money for a reason. We, as women, just barely got the right to vote. I figure they owe us for all the years of bullshit they’ve given us. The years, the decades, the centuries, the millennium of them dragging us around by the hair and fucking us when they want to. If I just have to give them coffee, I’ll take their extra money. It’s not my fault that they feel like giving me extra goddamned money because they think in the back of their mind, if they admit it or not to themselves, that I might just pull up my dress and say, ‘open,’ then I will rob them for their stupidity.”

  So she stuck around and robbed old men by just bringing them coffee and cakes.

  It was 1942, and the war raged in the Pacific and across Europe, but the exodus of young men to the battlefront had yet to come, so jobs and places to stay were somewhat scarce outside the school in the rural part of the state. I did the only thing I could do that summer: I went home to see my family. I loved them. I liked being around them. Ernie wasn’t there, and that weighed on me, but I knew my mom and dad would want to see me. The little boys, hell, they were in high school. They didn’t give two shits if I came home or not.

  Plus, I was dark, darker than the girls who worked the high-class clubs in Boston and Springfield. I always knew I was pretty, with long dark hair and the slightest upturn of my thin nose with a shrinking jawline and bright blue eyes that clashed against my brown skin, but I also knew that at that time, in the places where women weren’t treated like complete objects, I couldn’t get work. I wouldn’t be treated like the men in my family treated me, like an intelligent, gifted peer, no matter the genitalia between my legs, so I jumped on the train home toward the high wheat and alfalfa plains of Colorado where the Dust Bowl had finally left.

  When I walked through the door in early June of that summer, my mom held out her hands to me. In them, ten ears of early yield corn were wrapped in thick, thick husks. She wasted no time. The hug would come later that night when I stirred corn in the frying pan. She would walk up behind me, three or four times at least, and wrap her strong and wiry arms around my waist and kiss the back of my head, getting up on her tiptoes to do so.

  I wasted no time with the corn. I walked out to the front porch, sat on the edge of our home, and tore the husks from the ears. The sun sat in the east in front of me. It hung there, far away, where I imagined summer on the lawns of Mount Holyoke. I could see and feel the dew of early morning on the blades of grass in the center of campus. I missed it. Mostly, though, I missed the library, the stacks of books that melded together like the clasped fingers of lovers within their wooden shelves, row after row after row like the corn and alfalfa fields of home.

  My family laughed behind me, the stress of money and food all but gone away over the last few years. I felt like they had moved on without me during my year at school. I imagined that this was how my house sounded every night when I was gone, and I felt really goddamned good about it. Part of me came home that summer because I felt guilty for leaving in the first place. In one evening, I knew I shouldn’t host that guilt, and it freed me.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  John

  1942

  ON MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, I WALKED INTO THE RECRUITMENT office in Reno, and signed my selective service papers—all young men had to at age twenty-one.

  My grandpa couldn’t say a word two weeks later when I told him I had been drafted. I hadn’t. I didn’t wait for it, I volunteered. Fuck him. I had found my way out.

  The man at the office looked at me and asked if I had a problem being under water for long periods at a time, and I told him the only thing I wanted to avoid was staying in my grandfather’s house for any more “long periods of time.” He nodded his head. I signed my papers, and three days later I was on a bus bound for New London, Connecticut, all the way across a country I had never seen. I wanted to kill the people who killed my brother. I wanted to use a big gun to do it. I wanted to make it through the war so that I could find and marry Della in Trinidad.

  It had been six years since I saw her in the schoolhouse. The letters had been cut off. My grandfather threatened to pull Paulo from boarding school and make him miserable if I ever tried to go back to Colorado again.

  But I had it all mapped out. I would go to boot camp. I would go to war. I would return to Colorado as a war hero, lean over and kiss Della in my uniform, and find a way to make a living in the rural high plains of Colorado with her. Even though it would take four years to get there, to see her, I didn’t care.

  In the meantime, I had a brother to avenge and a grandfather to escape. That too put me on the bus to boot camp with no hesitation lingering around me. Was I worried about Paulo? About the threats my grandfather had made? Nope. Not anymore. Mandatory service was my shield from his hatred and cruelty.

  Many times in those moments between being awake and asleep on the bus, I imagined Della sitting on her porch waiting for me to come home. In my mind, that’s all she could do. I knew she loved me. That’s what her last letter—six years earlier—said, so I knew that she would wait for me, passing the days by helping her mom cook, by tending to her smaller brothers, and by looking out at the sunset for me to come back. In my heart, I knew that’s what she would be doing, and this gave me peace.

  The bus dropped me and six other recruits at the entrance to the base. We stood, together, lost for a moment until a man yelled at us to grab our stuff and follow him through the open gate that led into the compound.

  I could smell the ocean but not quite see it. Multiple two-story, wooden barracks stood between me and the waves of the Atlantic. I’d never been so close to open water before, but I felt like I was born to live in it, just like my swirling pool in the Truckee River. I knew, right then, that I had made the right choice, that the Navy—and a submarine—would be my home for the next four years of my life, even though I had yet to be assigned a ship or a mission. The sea called to me.

  Chief Kelly told us to follow him, so we did. He led us past three rows of buildings until we hit the edges of the thick and wide Thames River. Compared to the Truckee, it looked like the ocean to me.

  And then I saw them.

  In the river, attached to docks that extended outward from the concrete covered shore, the submarines.

  They lay on top of the river like long shotgun barrels. Their long, flat, grey tops kicked off no glare from the sun. Five or six men moved back and forth along the edges of a giant gun on the surface of one of the submarines, and one soldier sat in the metal seat at the back of the giant ten-foot-long barrel. He placed his eyes into scopes while two other soldiers practiced shoving three-foot-long shells into a chamber the size of three men. The gunman swiveled the gun around 180 degrees, slowly, resting it with the double barrels pointed across the harbor.

  I wanted more than anything to learn how to shoot that gigantic gun, to spin it around and aim at an enemy ship, to be in control of so much power. I shook my head, dreaming of the day I would call a submarine my home, being afloat in an ocean so big that no one even knew I was there.

  “This way, runts,” Chief Kelly said to the four of us. “Stay with me.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He turned to me. He nodded.

  He led us past a very tall spherical tower that had a spiraling staircase wrapped around it from its base to its summit. At the tower’s base, soldiers walked in and out of a building that housed the entrance to the training facility. At its summit, an octagonal room with very few windows stuck out around the giant tube. Next to the tube, a square staircase, encased in wood and metal, mirrored the tube in height. From it, at three points in its ascent, enclosed bridges were connected to the tube. It shot up from the ground next to the submarines on the shores of the Thames River in Connecticut, a lo
ng way from my chile patches next to the Truckee outside of Reno, more than two thousand miles away.

  Chief Kelly walked us into a large, sterile building at the end of the dock.

  He told us to strip, right there at the entrance of the place. And I stood in line, in my underwear, shivering, for an hour until I got escorted behind a white curtain where a man, just as sterile and white as the walls of the room, gave me shot after shot after shot in the arm. He waved his hand for me to leave his curtained-off section. I followed, moved up one boy at a time until I got to the barber, and all of my black hair had been shorn and lay on the floor. I stood in another line, even colder it seemed without the hair on my head, until Chief Kelly walked across the line, assisted by a young soldier who dropped a uniform in my outstretched hands and into the hands of my fellow greenies.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  We did.

  Then we waited, the shivers still shaking us from our bones outward. A boy next to me had to keep himself from crying. His eyes swelled. Sparkles of budding droplets hung on his lids. The sniffles that come with tears rose and fell quickly in his breath. And he wrapped his arms around his torso, embracing himself like his mother must have. He was tall and strong, but his knees seemed to barely hold him up.

  I reached out to pat his back but got reprimanded.

  “Cordova. Stand still. You’re not this boy’s wet nurse, understand? You move again, and this will be a horrible day for you,” Chief Kelly said.

  I pulled my arm back to my side and waited. That’s when the boy’s first tear hit the floor and when Chief Kelly laid into him so fiercely that I began to hurt inside. He yelled at the kid so hard that I felt bad for him and worried he might not make it through the screaming, but the kid pulled it together somehow, reining in his tears.

  “Let’s go, Boots,” Chief Petty Officer Kelly said.

  We followed Chief Kelly through a well-designed maze of barracks until he led us into our barracks that had no beds, only green Navy seabags that lay in rows on the barrack’s floor. We turned toward the sailors in the room. Chief Kelly nodded his head, and the men, walking down the line of hundreds of Boots that must have come from other medical buildings, dropped our sleeping gear into our outstretched arms. A hammock. A mattress. Two fart sacks, mattress covers. One pillow. Two pillow covers. And two blankets.

  “Boots, follow the leader,” Chief Kelly said. A sailor walked up to us, pointed at the first ten Boots in the line and walked down the first row of seabags. The ten followed him down the row and intuitively stopped in front of each bag, except for one kid who kept walking after he passed his seabag and who got reamed in front of the entire group. Dumbass.

  We all stood next to a seabag. There wasn’t one extra seabag. They’d been counted and laid out for each of us, not one that didn’t belong there even made it into the barracks that day.

  I didn’t move until I was told to move. My grandfather taught me that. But there are always a few in the group that hadn’t learned to listen for orders.

  Out of the hundred or so of us, twelve kids reached down to grab their seabags before Chief Kelly had told them to do so, and within ten seconds, twelve sailors had pulled them out of line and had them doing a thousand pushups while the rest of us stood there and watched. The dumb kids did push-ups. The rest of us waited in the cold barracks for thirty minutes until the dumbest of them finished. We all held the gear we were handed in our outstretched arms, angry. My shoulders burned. The liquid between muscle and bone had seemed to dry up, and pain replaced it. I feared to even crack my neck, worried I might look like I was moving out of turn. I learned really quick.

  When the twelve Boots got back into line, Chief Kelly told us to place our gear onto the floor next to our seabags and stand back at attention.

  He stood in the front of the room and talked as loud as a shout, but he did not shout, “I’m only going to show you this once. If you do not listen, if you do it wrong from now until you make it out of here, you will be sorry. Take your seabag…”

  Chief Kelly listed, one-by-one, all of the gear that we had just put down on the ground. With each piece, including all of our bedding and the cot, he told us how the piece should be stored—rolled up or folded or laid flat—and in which order it should be shoved into the bag. Again, some dumb kid with his finger in his nose grabbed a piece out of order, even though Chief Kelly had told us all exactly which piece to grab next. The kid was pulled out and told to lap the group, hammering out forty laps around us while we all waited.

  To me, the order of filling the bag made a lot of sense, so it worked its way into my memory before we finished the exercise. When we got done stuffing our bags, we stenciled our names on them. Like Chief Kelly instructed, we flung them over our shoulders while he spoke.

  “Your seabag is your home. You have everything you need to be a sailor. Wherever your seabag falls, that is your home. Take care of your home because it’s the only one you got,” he said.

  “Now, undo your seabags, set up your cot, and lights out,” Chief Kelly said. “I want silence.”

  We would not eat that night.

  The dormitory window framed the moon in the dark sky outside and snores echoed across and through the bunks. A bell rang loudly in the middle of the night. The light had disappeared from the window in the doorway. Two or three boys fell out of their hammocks at the sound of it, their bodies thudding hard on the concrete floor. A kid cried out in pain. Others shouted from being startled awake.

  The roaming glow of flashlights bounced around the room like someone had released giant fireflies in the barracks. No lights had been turned on.

  Chief Kelly’s voice cut the darkness and the fear and the silence.

  “Up and at ‘em, drop and grab ‘em, get it all in your seabag. Now, Boots!”

  My eyes began to follow the flashlights and adapt to the darkness. Like me, most of us sat stunned at the end edge of our hammocks, hands rubbing through our hair and over eyes and bare-skinned chests—mostly bright white chests that moved up and down to catch some semblance of a calm breath.

  “I ain’t your mommy asking you. It’s me. I’m telling you,” Chief Kelly said.

  The quicker of us jumped off our hammocks, folded them up, rolled our sleeping gear and mattress inside, stuffed our clothes and gear like they showed us how to do during our break down, tied the hammock to the seabag, and stood at attention. The less quick, following behind us, did their best to catch up, but their delinquency had already been noted by those sailors who walked up and down the rows with round lights from their flashlights leading them, as if they were sniffing dogs, to the stench of inadequacy.

  Chief Kelly talked the whole time. His voice sunk into our skulls.

  I stood, along with just a few others, at attention until the last Boot finished, sloppily, wrapping all his stuff up.

  “Long, Davis, McCarthy, Cummings, Robbins, Cordova, Noakes, join me up front.” Humping my seabag on my back, I followed the sound of Chief Kelly’s voice to the front of the room and stood at attention in front of him, along with the other boys who had been called up.

  “Do you boys think you’re special?” Chief Kelly asked. “Do you think because you got your shit together that you’re special, that you are better than the other Boots?”

  No one said a word. Being the brightest of the group, I think we all knew that whatever we said would be turned against us, so no one answered, which, in turn, was turned against us.

  “Again,” Chief Kelly said.

  Not dismissed, we stood there, a black kid named Noakes, his name stenciled on his seabag, stood next to me. I’d never seen a man stand so sturdy in my life, like his skin had been filled with bricks and concreted together. A rock of a man.

  “You must think you’re special,” Chief Kelly said, “because you ain’t moving.”

  With that, we ran to our spots in the rows, undid our seabags, undid our hammocks, laid everything out in order on the floor and packed it all up ag
ain, long before many of the other Boots had undone theirs.

  I stood at attention. And, hell yes, I wanted to be special. I wanted to be the gunman who sat on top of the submarine and pointed that massive gun toward the people that brought us into that war, and if I had to be special to do so, if I had to be the best goddamned recruit there to get that job, I would be. I would earn it.

  I MADE MY FIRST MISTAKE three days into my time at New London.

  That day, we put on our boots. We began to run in the very cold morning. The thick, humid air touched by the speckles of salt from the ocean, filled my lungs, and I could feel it; I could feel the rush of thick oxygen run through my legs, the legs that until then, had only been fueled by thin, dry air at four thousand feet above sea level. Like a balloon being unknotted and released, I flew out ahead of all the rest of the Boots, running around the hard track, finishing two minutes before any other Boot and grabbing my knees next to Chief Kelly, who, for the first time I had heard since getting off the bus a few days earlier, couldn’t help himself by giving me a compliment, “God damn, private Cordova, that was the fastest first run I’ve seen in goddamn twenty years here. Don’t disappoint me tomorrow.”

  For everything that we did in our ten-hour days—including our middle-of-the-night fire drills—at camp, he expected me to excel: the marching, the calisthenics, the rifle drills, the pulling of oars, the loading of heavy shells into the mammoth-sized guns, and even the clothes scrubbing. If I slipped away from the top, he hammered down my throat that I could do better, that I had disappointed him, that I needed to find my way back up before he shoved me straight back down to the bottom, and I did it all with hope that when our assignments came out, I would get the one I wanted—to be the man who held the gun to shoot at the Japanese, the people that killed Manuel.

  He rode me hard. I rode me hard. He had his intentions. I had mine. And when we pulled the Mommsen lung over our heads and walked to the base of the tower and waited our turn in the loading shell before being thrown into the bottom of the one-hundred-feet deep tank, I wanted to go first, to prove that I was the best sailor who ever left New London.