The Magic of Ordinary Days

by Ann Howard Creel

  But must all persons bear the consequences of their actions, at all costs, as my father believed? The POWs had been recaptured without incident, without any harm having been done. I kept telling myself this. And wasn’t guilt of the deed itself sometimes punishment enough?

  I remembered the man at the gas station who’d refused to talk to me, just because I was in their company. I remembered the pain on their faces even when they were working so hard to conceal it. I remembered new love on their faces, too. And I saw Lorelei’s wings flapping, her colors falling to the ground.

  Later, I found myself standing at the kitchen window again and staring down the dawn of a new day. And still I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  Thirty-three

  I knew the day ahead would be one of the toughest of my life, yet Ray was the happiest I’d ever seen him. I had come to him in the night, and he couldn’t stop smiling. In the bathroom, I heard him humming over the sound of the shower. He came out dressed in his newest flannel shirt tucked in with a belt and his hair combed carefully over the thinning area on top. As usual, he had missed the bald spot in back, but I wouldn’t tell him.

  He pointed out the kitchen window. “Not too much snow last night, but more’s coming.”

  “Could we drive to the telephone?”

  He looked out the window again and up at the sky. “Not a good idea. We could get stuck on the road.”

  I couldn’t make my bottom lip stop dipping and jerking. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Rose and Lorelei, the only ones who could tell me the truth. Although the POWs were back in captivity, I had to know if I’d played a part in their escape. My plan was to call Camp Amache, tell the guards it was a matter of grave importance that they bring one of the girls to the telephone, then simply ask Rose or Lorelei if they had done it. I wouldn’t chastise; I wouldn’t complain. I simply had to know the truth.

  “Ray, I need to make a phone call.”

  “Come here,” Ray whispered before I found myself back in his arms.

  After we ate a hot breakfast, Ray got the truck running while I bundled into my coat and muffler and closed up the house. Once we were heading down Red Church Road into town, the truck’s heater finally started to send warmth up from the floorboards, but little blasts of freezing wind squeaked in from poor seals around the windows.

  Ray kept glancing over at me, but he didn’t ask me why I needed so badly to place this call. And even if he had, I wouldn’t have known what to tell him. If I told him the truth about Rose and Lorelei, then he would have information he, too, was withholding. Or would he report it? It didn’t take me long to decide to stay silent. Perhaps I’d never find it necessary to tell anyone. The POWs were back in custody, the weather had made any trip to the sheriff’s office impossible anyway, and hadn’t Rose and Lorelei suffered enough already?

  Big snow started pouring out of a sky capped by low-lying storm clouds. The flakes blew in sideways, building up on the windshield and nearly blocking our view of the road. Stiff gusts made Ray grip the steering wheel with both hands just to keep control of the truck. He kept creeping onward for a mile or so longer, then he gradually put on the brake and turned to me. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. It’s just too dangerous. I got to turn back.”

  Slowly he inched the truck around in a circle and started urging it back in the direction of the house. He had the wipers going, but they couldn’t keep up with the ragged chips of snow now clattering down on the windshield. The weather worsened by the minute, but Ray worked the truck back toward the house, taking extra precaution when we passed over a bridge. I heard him let out a big sigh as we finally saw the triangular shadow of the barn’s roof rising out of a world suddenly gone devoid of color and depth.

  Snow was already building up, covering everything slippery white. After he helped me up the porch steps, Ray said, “I need to go close up the milk cows and the horses in the barn. I’ll be back soon.”

  I entered the house by myself and clicked on the radio.

  After a song ended, the announcer began to relay more details of the POW escape incident. The most bizarre twist in the story had only recently been revealed, he said. The recaptured Germans named two Japanese interns as accomplices in their escape. The interns, Rose and Lorelei Umahara, living in Camp Amache, had immediately been arrested and charged with treason.

  Now I knew the source of the doomed sensation that had plagued me for nearly two days. As full realization clamped down on me, the room became a dark and cold dungeon. I became small and shaking and full of anguish more profound than the pain I’d felt even when I first realized Edward had left me and that I was pregnant. It couldn’t be true. Their betrayal was worse, worse even than mine had been. A more cruel breach of faith I could never have imagined. The POWs would receive some token punishment within camp, such as a few days of solitary confinement or loss of rations, but nothing more. After all, the Geneva Convention maintained that it was a POW’s duty to try to escape. But the Umahara sisters, the announcer said, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, ironically, because they were citizens.

  I wasn’t prepared for the gravity of this tragedy. The pain of it turned my lungs into sponge, made it impossible for me to go on breathing. I flew out the front door without turning off the radio. I stumbled down the porch steps and ran out into the storm as fast as my burdened legs could carry me.

  A monstrous ghost of snow and storm bore down on me from above, but I didn’t care. I ran full-face right into it. Now I was pounding the ground, trying to send it all away with every heavy thump of my feet and each new boot track laid out in the snow. I didn’t wish for summer, didn’t think of the city. As I ran, I longed only for a return to the recent past, for one last opportunity to change that grievous mistake of faith committed by girls who couldn’t have realized the dreadful consequences of their actions.

  Before long, my feet and fingers began to sting and burn, as if thrust into a fire rather than freezing. Cutting winds made my clothes and coat into transparent gauze. But I kept stumbling and trudging myself through the snow, drawn to the spot on the road between the fields where first I’d met them, back on a day of sunshine and Indian summer. I stopped running and stood in the place where once, so long ago, we had introduced ourselves and talked of butterflies. Their wonderful lives had come down to this, this one mistake, caused by belief in men who professed to love them.

  If only they had told me the truth, I could have cautioned them not to do it. I could have warned them. But in that instant, my own truth came over me. At the same time the snowflakes were encasing my body into a frozen shroud, the realization of my own part oozed its way out of me and into the gray daylight.

  Rose had tried to tell me. That night of the barn dance, when she walked me out to the truck, she had tried. But I had been so consumed with my own problems that I hadn’t given her the time and attention she needed in order to be able to get it out. I had underestimated what they were going through by daring to compare their pain and suffering to mine. I had underestimated their endurance because I assumed them too strong to be easily manipulated by others. I had underestimated everything about them. I had failed them by taking them for granted, too, along with everyone else.

  I thought of the water nymph Clytie, who, too, had given it all away. As friends, Rose, Lorelei, and I had started swimming together on the surface of the water. We had at times dipped below the surface as we went along. But we hadn’t taken a deep dive, hadn’t delved into those dark waters, the ones where we kept hidden the unseen frailties that lie in wait. In the end, the friendship had failed because we failed to dive deep.

  I stood adrift in the snowstorm until my shivering stopped, until my body settled into an artificial calm. Now my feet and hands no longer existed, and sky tears froze into silence on my face.

  I don’t know how long I languished in the middle of the storm. I remember making my way back through a soup of snow, seeing the lights coming from the house windows,
and feeling the heat envelop my body as I walked through the door.

  Ray stood before me. His voice was full of frustration, but gentle on me nonetheless. “What are you doing? Trying to kill yourself out there?”

  But my lips were too cold to form words.

  Ray gestured toward the radio, then stared at me. “I heard the news.” Now he shook his head. “I couldn’t find you anywhere. Why were you out in this storm? You could have froze to death.”

  As we stood in silence, finally warmth began to work its way back into my bloodstream. I looked out the window at heavier snow than I’d seen in years. I caught my reflection in the glass and saw a polar cap encrusting my hair. Now the snow was beginning to melt and drop big clumps of slush onto the floor.

  I turned back to Ray and said, “I promise I’m not this crazy.”

  He took my arms. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  With the storm screeching and swirling outside, Ray and I swam together in a calm sea. It’s a difficult thing to do, once you’ve been deceived. But my time was now.

  “His name was Edward,” I said aloud. “He was a lieutenant from the Mountain Division. I let him sweep me away. He said he loved me, and after one night together, he disappeared.”

  Ray was looking over every inch of my face. In his eyes, I didn’t see pity. Instead, in the colored strands of his eyes, I saw the soft seeds of something like hope. Finally, he asked, “Do you still love him?”

  I stood still. “Is that what it was? Love?”

  He blinked. “You got to answer that question.”

  Now I could feel blood making its way back into the skin of my face. “It wasn’t love, even though at the time I thought so. And maybe it no longer matters.”

  I looked over his windburned face, those cracks in his lips that now I realized I wanted to smooth away with my own. Melting globs of snow continued to fall out of my hair, but I no longer cared how ridiculous or pitiful I looked.

  “What does matter to you?” he asked.

  In the past, I would’ve listed things such as common interests, mutual attraction, worldliness, and higher education. My freedom above all else. If I had found love, it would have had to be the kind that overwhelmed and overpowered all else.

  I passed a hand between Ray and me. “Once you told me that this,” I said, “is a beginning.” I searched his face. “But how do you know, Ray? How do you know it’s the beginning of something good?”

  “I know.” His breath was warm on my face as he moved in closer. “Because someday, you’re bound to forgive yourself.”

  Thirty-four

  In the safety of our house and the warmth of our bed, I got to know the fullness of Ray’s lips on my face and the taste of his skin, the soft bend of his ear and the touch of his breath on my shoulder. I discovered the silky strands of hair at the base of his head and the feel of his shoulder blades beneath my outstretched hands. I discovered just how far around my arms could encircle his back. He touched me as if I were the curved and delicate handle of a china cup, but he held me tightly just as I was, flesh and blood and full of human flaws and fears. In his arms, I wasn’t a girl dreaming of sailing the high seas, and I wasn’t a farm kid jumping the train, either, but a fully grown woman riding the soft side of a crescent moon.

  As we lay together under the covers, I told him, “I drove them into New Mexico, but I didn’t know those men were German prisoners.”

  He smoothed away wisps of hair on my forehead. “I know you didn’t.”

  And then, in his arms, I cried for Rose and Lorelei.

  Under clearing skies the next morning, I listened to the news report. In Washington, the Cabinet had just announced an end to the exclusion and detention of Japanese citizens. The concentration camps had been deemed by legal resources to be against the law. Public Proclamation 21 outlawed the holding of loyal U.S. citizens of any ancestry; therefore the Japanese American evacuees would be allowed to leave the camps with their personal belongings, twenty-five dollars, and train fare.

  After I listened to the report, I took that old hound dog Franklin galloping out into the fields covered in deep, flat snow. Before me, V-shaped animal tracks nicked across acres of topcrust, but I took the first human steps, each one sinking me lower into the soles of remembrance. Snow now covered all the dust lost from all the other butterfly wings, all the shining human details from the previous green seasons, those from the past season and those from many other seasons before mine, too.

  As the sun faithfully opened its bright bald eye, visions of the place where Rose and Lorelei might be at that moment, somewhere behind bars, sent me pain I couldn’t bear. I had to refuse thoughts of them in that level of confinement. The camp they had been forced to endure had been bad enough. Instead, I would remember them as I chose to, walking the green fields, searching the canyon for butterflies, and laughing in unison.

  When Franklin and I returned to the house, I saw that the Otero County sheriff had made his way down the roads behind a snowplow to our farm. Ray and I sat with him at the table while he questioned me about the part I had played in aiding the POWs’ escape. I told every ounce the truth, although I didn’t altogether admire the way it rang in my ears. After the sheriff satisfied himself that I had known nothing of the men’s identities, he sat longer than I would have liked, slurping on coffee and chatting on with Ray about the aftereffects of the storm.

  I couldn’t listen to them casually converse about the weather, or anything else, for that matter, when the future of two valuable lives had so recently been forfeited. I knew what would happen next. Rose and Lorelei would be painted in the newspapers and on the radio as traitors by people who’d never met them, by people who could never understand what torments and desires had driven them to their sad, ill-fated decision.

  Instead, I found my eyes drawn to the window outside, to that square of blue sky, where I could see white shafts of sunlight reaching down to earth, the fingers of God telling me that we could survive it. In only a few hours after the sheriff drove off, the news came out. I was portrayed as the innocent victim, the new-comer who’d befriended the wrong people, and who’d been duped into providing transportation after the escape.

  By dinnertime, solace arrived in the form of Reverend Case and Martha on our doorstep. I hadn’t spoken privately with the reverend since my arrival here, and the sight of that kind face gave me a sense of hope that someday these wrongs would be analyzed and prevented in the future. In church, he spoke so eloquently of forgiveness, so perhaps someday this country would give apologies for wrongs committed under extraordinary circumstances. And would the world ever count Rose and Lorelei among the casualties of the war? Perhaps someday they could be forgiven for their mistake, too.

  “Olivia, dear,” he said as he took my hand. “I came to see if you and Ray are in need of prayer.”

  Martha brought in fried chicken and roasted potatoes, and of course dessert. We sat together and shared a plate of consolation at the table. In this farmland I have come to call home, food is seen as a sure cure for just about anything that ails you. People shovel in piled-high plates of heavy meats and casseroles, salads and desserts, even during the most trying of times.

  After we finished eating, I stacked the plates in the sink, and Reverend Case readied himself to begin our prayers. We sat around the table, Ray, Martha, Reverend Case, and I, with hands clasped together. Speaking softly, Reverend Case began praying to God, asking Him to help me to weather this storm.

  I stopped him in midsentence. “Please.”

  I don’t think anyone had ever interrupted Reverend Case in prayer before. The dear man’s eyes couldn’t hide his surprise and concern.

  I told him, “I don’t desire prayer for me, personally.” Because I hadn’t paid such a high price after all. When I’d headed out here on my wedding day, I hadn’t realized I’d bought a ticket to my own history, a different one from studying Akh-en-aten and Horizon-of-the-Aten, maybe, but a living, ongoing one. I pictured Da
niel, all the other dead soldiers and civilians, and prisoners all over the world. “Couldn’t we pray for those who have paid with their lives?”

  Reverend Case prayed as I had requested, then he and Martha stayed for coffee before heading out. “We have congregation members and others out there without adequate heat,” he explained. I hadn’t realized that others around me were going cold. Before he and Martha left us, I gathered up our extra quilts and carried them out to the car.

  “Careful,” he said to me as I peered over the load and made my way down the porch steps.

  “You sound just like Ray,” I told him.

  Reverend Case looked pleased with himself. “You two seem to be getting along mighty well.”

  I placed the quilts in his trunk, then turned back into the sunlight. I was open, exposed, without intending to be. “I love him,” I said to Reverend Case. Then I turned to Martha. “I love your brother.”

  On the plains, people rarely speak openly of their feelings, especially of one so personal as love between husband and wife. Reverend Case raised his eyebrows for a second, then he smiled and said, “I’m so happy for the both of you.”

  But Martha didn’t respond with words. Instead she walked up, kissed me on the cheek, and turned toward the car door in a waltzlike move. In all the years I’ve come to know Martha, I’ve never heard her talk of such personal feelings as I’d just done. It seems that certain lines of privacy aren’t often crossed in a land where physical distance keeps people independent by necessity and by choice.

  This land of distances, this land of buffalo grass, locoweed, crops, and churches, became my home. Change comes to these farmlands slowly. Harvest time is still the best season, everyone still talks endlessly about the weather, and contrary to what Ray once told me, he has always been kind.