Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  Chapter Sixty

  John

  1945

  IN 1945, I STEPPED OFF THE USS SNOOK, AFTER WHAT WOULD become one of the most famous submarine tours in World War II history. We landed in Pearl Harbor, and my time was up. I carried my seabag on my back, walked toward the busses that were taking many of us from Pearl Harbor to the airport to fly home. Noakes told me I was always welcome in Chicago. He gave me a slug on the arm and walked away and took the bus to Waikiki with all the soldiers on leave, just like I had done with Noakes on those brief weekends we had away from the Snook over the previous three years.

  The bus was full of giddy young men. The war was over, and even though they would no longer have to fight in the Pacific, they would have to return to the boats and head back out on patrol beneath the water or on the large decks of giant war ships. I could smell their excitement to get drunk and get laid. Their freedom wafted through the air in mists of cologne and deodorant starch that all could have been rung out from their clothes and their skin and their slicked-back hair.

  The bus stopped in Waikiki, and I got off first. I saluted them all as they ran past me on their way to the bars, and I said goodbye to the USS Snook, the war, and my youth, forgiving everyone in that long moment that no one was a part of but me.

  I touched the large, scorched scar on my belly and knew that I had no reason to be angry anymore, and I thanked my God, the God of my mother’s prayers for saving me out in the middle of the ocean so that I could stand there and wave goodbye to my life on the boat and, even more than that, to my childhood, to the loss of my family, and to my broken heart.

  Running my hand up and down the leathery swaths of skin, my forever trophy for what Noakes and I did that day to save our submarine, I forgave my father for buying the car that drove them to their deaths. I never knew I was so angry with him for this until that day next to the bus. I forgave Maria for leaving me and Manuel for dying. I forgave my grandfather for the pain he gave me, filling my life of up with loneliness and fear, for the broken bones and for stealing me away from Della in Trinidad when I ran to her. I didn’t need the anger anymore. The burn from the engine had given me a second life.

  And then I forgave Della for saying no, for being cold and forgave her for how it broke my heart into something that I no longer recognized, and I realized that what she gave me—hope—throughout all those years at my grandfather’s home along the Truckee River had saved me from even more pain, and while I walked the rows of my chile garden, it was her face that made me smile. Her face when we were children. Her face when we grew to into our early teens. Her face that I saw in the window when I ran to her. And it was her face, placed so close to mine in my memory from our one night together, that gave me the hope and courage to pull my searing skin across the engine and live to walk out again into the fresh air. I loved her still, but I forgave her. I moved my hand from my deep, wavy scar to my heart, and I thanked her for my life.

  With the war behind me and my honorable discharge papers in my seabag, I no longer wanted—or more honestly—needed what these sailors needed. I was not going back under the water in the tunnel of a large piece of metal. I didn’t really know what I needed that day, so when I got off the bus in Waikiki, I got a room, threw my bags on the bed, went shopping for some new clothes, and found a bar on the beach that served fresh seafood for cheap. The whole Pacific lay out there in front of me. I’d spent nearly four years living in it, and I never wanted to go back down under again. I was done. Done with cramped rooms. Done with the smell of the latrine. Done with being bossed around every second of my day. Done.

  I sat in the sun and ate seafood and watched the ocean. The waves lapped up against the land. In the boat, we really never felt the water around us. We could only feel the slight sensation of being pulled through when our engines turned on. There on my stool next to the water, I watched every wave, the swell of each one and then the crest and then the break and crash. I had given up on ever seeing Della again, her long, black hair and smile that had always been made up of half laughter and half deviousness. I ached for her in a way that felt full and empty at the same time.

  I turned to wave at the bartender for another drink, the taste of beer and salt on my lips. Beyond the bar, a dark, beautiful woman walked up the beach, asked for a table, and sat down only ten or so feet from me and ordered a martini.

  “All we have is beer and rum,” the bartender said.

  “I’ll have a beer, thank you,” she said.

  She turned toward me, walked over to my table, placed her hands on mine, shook her head at me. “Goddammit, John,” she said. She raised her glass. “To Manuel and Ernie.”

  She was beautiful. She had come.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Della and John

  1946

  AT ONE POINT IN THE NIGHT HER FEET TOUCHED HIS. SHE pulled her body close to his chest and whispered in his ear. He lay still except for the up and down of his chest. Then she rubbed her hand slowly across the scar that ran from his chest to his waist, a swath of chewed flesh.

  They had spent a year in Waikiki. They didn’t leave each other’s arms—not by the beach, not in their tiny apartment that looked out over the water from the hillside Della ran up after their first and only argument. Who knows what they fought about, but when she ran back down the hill, her silhouette framed in the green flash of the Hawaiian sunset, the fight had died, and they laughed about her running up there with all of the lizards. They didn’t leave each other’s arms, and, at night, when they lay in bed, exhausted from a day at the edges of the ocean, they told each other everything, except for the one thing Della had promised the US military that she would never tell a soul, and this secret ate at her every single, goddamned day.

  That one night when her feet touched his, when she ran her hand up and down the scar that John had so proudly earned and displayed on the beach, young children pointing at it and embarrassing their parents, she leaned into him in, the moonlight shining on his young, dark face. She whispered, “I wasn’t a secretary, John. I was a code breaker. I saved the USS Snook. I was the one who broke the codes, who guided the ship through the ocean.”

  John turned his head to her and kissed her black hair and moved it across her forehead and kissed her skin. She moved closer to him, wrapping her body around his, and he squeezed her in his arms. The moon moved across the sky. They lay there awake together until the sun rose in the window frame.

  Epilogue

  JOHN STOOD ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD WHERE HIS PARENTS had been killed by the angry rain. A small boy held his hand. The mountains stretched out in front of them, the shallow basin rising slowly into the face of the Sangre de Christo whose rocky cliffs climbed into Colorado’s blue sky. The boy squeezed John’s hand when his father began to walk the both of them down into the gully that ran along the edge of the road. The wetted grasses of late spring smelled so rich that the boy plugged his nose with his other hand.

  “It always smells like asshole around here this time of year,” Della yelled. She followed the two of them down into the gully. Her black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, just like her mother’s had always been, and blended into her black dress. Della’s lips were painted a pale red, and her eyes matched them, the remnants of a day of crying.

  “I hate the smell of wet grass in the spring,” she said to her son who held his father’s hand and to her daughter who ran off into the field around them. She carried a shovel and three clay pots in her hand. John was quiet, as usual, not saying much, and his little boy mimicked his father, half smiling in the sunlight.

  The boy let go of his father’s hand and waved his mother and sister down toward them.

  John knelt down and dug his hands deep into the wet dirt in the bottom of the gully.

  “This is where they died, Ernie and Manuela,” he said. “They were so kind. You would have loved them, and they would have loved you. If I have one great sadness, it’s that they never got to meet you both. You would have
made your grandpa laugh and your grandma smile and place her hand on your head and pray for your well-being every other minute because I know she would have loved you so very much. That is my one great sadness.”

  Della walked down into the gully and knelt next to John and the children.

  “Shovel,” she said. “Let’s get this done. I hate the smell of wet grass in the spring. Assholes. It smells like assholes.”

  He took it from her hands and dug up three pots full of dirt, soil melded together by the roots of the grasses that began at the road’s edge and stretched across the valley of the Sangre de Cristo.

  “It’s big,” Ernie said. “The mountain is so big.” He pointed to the glowing face of the mountainside. Trees ran up it until the bald summit above the tree line touched the sky.

  “Sangre de Cristo,” John said.

  “Sangre,” Manuela repeated.

  On the other side of the valley, alone in a cemetery made for two outside Della’s childhood home, the little family stood next to a freshly made mound of dirt. Della placed the pots of dirt and grasses on the ground next to her mother’s freshly dug and filled grave.

  “Shovel,” she said. “Let’s get this done. We don’t have all day to sit out her and cry and feel bad for ourselves and all that crap.”

  John shoveled a hole in the dirt mound. He leaned down and kissed his children’s heads one at a time while Della placed the wild grasses from the foot of Sangre de Cristo into the hole. Her black dress had become covered in the wet detritus of the earth where John’s parents had died when she knelt down in dirt earlier that day to say goodbye to them. There, at her own parent’s gravesite, she fell to her knees and said a quiet goodbye to her mother and father.

  “Shovel, goddamnit,” she said.

  John used the shovel to smooth the dirt around the mounds of soil and grass they added to the gravesite. He patted the earth down to make sure the roots would survive the wind and rain of early spring along the high plains. When he was done, Della grabbed Manuela’s hand. John grabbed Ernie’s, and they turned them away from Benita and Francisco’s grave to let the wild grasses grow.

  Acknowledgments

  I am profoundly grateful for the people who helped bring Let the Wild Grasses Grow to the page. This book would not exist without the belief, labor, and editorial vision of my agent, and friend, Elizabeth Copps: thank you for the long discussions about plot, character, and theme, but, mostly, thank you for believing in it from the very first—and very different—draft and helping me mine out the real heart of the story. I’m grateful to all the people at Torrey House Press who brought such love and engagement to the birth of this book: Kirsten Johanna Allen, Anne Terashima, Kathleen Metcalf, Michelle Wentling, and Rachel Buck-Cockayne.

  Thank you to Liza Mundy, whose book Code Girls served as such a wonderful reference to the lives and careers of such brave and intelligent women during WWII.

  To my dad: thank you for the endless stories about life in the US Navy and aboard submarines. They inspired me to bring them to life on the page as a mix of your anecdotes and research. All my love to you.

  And thank you to my wife and son for always putting up with me. Love you.

  Author’s Note

  To my grandma and grandpa Cordova, the inspiration for Della and John. I wish you were here to see this book come to be. I think you would have “goddamned” loved it. Thank you for everything you gave to me: wit, laughter, and love (and the freshest tortillas known to humanity). In the epilogue, John says this to his son about his parents, and they are the exact words I say to my son when he asks about you: “They were so kind. You would have loved them, and they would have loved you (they would think you are so funny and smart). If I have one great sadness, it’s that they never got to meet you.”

  About the Author

  Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. Author of Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis and coeditor of Utah Reflections: Stories from the Wasatch Front, his essay collections have been named finalist for the Autumn House Press Awards (2013, 2020) and the C&R Press Awards (2020). His essays can be found in literary journals, trade magazines, and online zines, nationally and internationally. He is the host of The LITerally Podcast, a podcast devoted to sharing the successes of other writers. Johnstun is a graduate of Weber State University, Kansas State University, and Pacific University, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. A Utah native, Johnstun can be found running the trails along of the Wasatch Front.

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