by Mark Dunn
Mama gave Mrs. Hicks a look I have never seen before. It was a face like you make when you smell something very bad. I thought that it was the smell of the throw up that was making mama look that way. But then I figured it out. It was the way that Mama felt about Mrs. Hicks. It was because she was scaring us so bad. It was the things she was saying about Fumiyo.
I looked at Fumiyo. There was water going down her leg. I liked Fumiyo. She made puppets for Jeffie and me when she wasn’t working and let me wear her kimono to see what it felt like. It is very pretty and has very big arms. Now Fumiyo was wearing her sleeping kimono but it was all wet from pee pee. Mrs. Hicks left. She took her gun. We all sat down on floor and listened to the sound of the planes and the guns. The radio went dead. It got quiet for a while outside but then the planes came back and started to drop their bombs again. Mama had her arms around Jeffie and me. Fumiyo was sitting next to me but she wasn’t sitting very close. Finally the planes went away and Mama told Fumiyo to go and get herself cleaned up.
Later a truck came down the street it had a loudspeaker telling people to go the YMCA or the college. Fumiyo looked at Mama. She said I go too? You go too said Mama. Mrs. Hicks is a nincompoop. These are men who bombed us. You are a girl. You are not the cause of this. Mama held Fumiyo’s hand. Fumiyo was shaking.
We went to the YMCA. There were other families there. There were other Japanese cooks and maids and gardeners there. They were part of the families too. The bad things that were happening were not their doing Mama said looking around. But some people gave the Japanese people bad looks. Mama says this will be the way it will be until the war is over. She said for me to be extra nice to Fumiyo. I made her a necklace made of pretty ribbons that a nice lady gave me to play with. Fumiyo cried when she put on the necklace.
This was written all by me Lisa Chapman but my mother made the words spell right.
1942
CERULEAN IN WISCONSIN
That first morning, the two men went deep into the forest. Wheaton’s father-in-law, Vester, took him into a new-growth stand planted a few years earlier by the Civilian Conservation Corps. “Most of our forest primeval was logged right out of existence,” Vester explained. “There’s good and bad to that, I suppose. We’ve got some beautiful young maples and paper birches down this path.”
Where Vester discerned a path, Wheaton saw nothing so distinguishable in the cluttered carpet of leaf and branch beneath his feet. “The muskeg where Dack got himself trapped when he was about twelve—I’m sure you’ve heard the story—it’s a mile or so in that direction. I’ll take you there on our loop back. It’s an unearthly, diabolical place. The ground is like sponge cake, except where there’s water underneath. Then the earth seems to ripple like something vital and alive. The Chequamegon Forest is a smorgasbord of anomalies of nature. Fascinating. Makes me sometimes regret going into the paper business instead of natural sciences.”
Vester Ostrum was in his late fifties; his son-in-law, Wheaton, in his early forties. Wheaton was too old for the draft but wouldn’t have been able to serve anyway. As a teenager, his arm had been crushed in an automobile accident. Wheaton was a quiet man. He preferred to listen to his father-in-law and comment only with a smile or a comprehending nod, or the occasional “you don’t say.”
Vester settled himself down on a mossy nurse log to catch his breath. “I get winded romping through these old woods,” he wheezed. “Not a kid anymore. And the two packs of Lucky Strikes a day don’t help much.”
Vester lit up.
Wheaton nodded as he pulled out his own box of Camels for a smoke.
As Vester was giving his son-in-law a light he said, “I can’t thank you and Monica enough for coming up here. I noticed you got a B sticker on your car. You can get yourself all the way up here and back on just an eight-gallon allotment?”
Wheaton shook his head. “But I figured we’d be here at least a week, so that’s another eight gallons to send us back to Appleton.”
“Whichever of those dry-as-dust grammar schoolteachers of mine said I’d need all that arithmetic in my later years, I’d like to give her the gold star. With every goddamned fill-up at Drummond’s pump down the road, I’ve got to calculate everything I’ve got to do and how many gallons it’s gonna take to do it. And it’s hardly a fair arrangement. The OPA ought to give a little special consideration to those of us who have to drive twenty-five miles just to buy our weekly groceries.”
Wheaton nodded.
“You haven’t asked about Ann,” said Vester.
“Monica told me some things.”
“Did Monica, when she had your two—did she get that way?”
Wheaton shook her head. “She lost a little sleep there in those first few months. We both did. It made us both a little, you know, cranky, but it wasn’t anything like what Ann’s been going through.”
“I still think it’s because Dack hasn’t been here. Christ, think of it: my boy’s got a two-month-old boy of his own he’s never even seen. It’s a hard thing for a woman to have a baby when her husband’s off at war. And I’m no good—an ornery old coot like me. More like a Dutch uncle to the poor girl than a proper father-in-law.”
“It’s good that Monica and Ann are getting to spend some time together.”
“It’s a Godsend, really. Especially after what happened last week.”
Ann and her sister-in-law Monica sat at the kitchen table drinking lemonade. The weather had turned warm (about as warm as it generally got in woodsy northern Wisconsin), and the screen door was letting in a nice breeze. It fluttered the pages of the Flambeau Paper Company’s 1942 calendar pinned to the wall next to the icebox. Ann’s father-in-law Vester worked at Flambeau as a bleaching engineer. Ann hoped that her husband Dack’s job as pipe fitter at the mill would still be waiting for him when he got back from Europe at the end of the war.
Ann and Monica had known each other since childhood. It was Monica who had set up her brother Dack and Ann on their first date five years earlier. Park Falls had always been a fairly small town. Everybody knew everybody else, but after Ann’s emotional depression settled in, she stopped seeing her friends. She even kept her father-in-law at arm’s length. Vester didn’t know what to do. He wrote to his daughter and asked if she’d come and spend some time with Ann. Maybe Ann would open up to Monica, even though she wasn’t opening up to anybody else.
“With each day,” said Monica after patting her lemonade-sticky lips with a napkin, “does it get a little bit better at least?”
Ann looked over at her other son—her two-year-old. He was playing with a toy dump truck on the kitchen floor. Ann shook her head. “Most days it’s just the same as it was the day before.”
“And you don’t think at least part of this has to do with Dack not being here?”
Ann shrugged. “I felt like this after Dack Junior was born. But it wasn’t nearly as bad. I don’t know. You could be right. I feel so alone sometimes, but it’s—Monica, it’s more than that. It’s hard to put into words.”
“Is it a kind of a sadness, Ann? Or are you afraid? Does it make you afraid?”
“I do get scared. I get very scared. But other times I just want to walk out that door and keep going. I think maybe I’ll get to someplace where I won’t feel so empty anymore.”
“And how do you feel right now, Ann?”
“It’s good that you’re here. I should be happy. But there’s nothing there. I look at Little Dack or at the baby and I know I’m supposed to be filled with a special kind of mother’s love, but it isn’t anywhere inside of me. That’s what worries me the most.”
“Can we talk about what happened last week? Would that be all right?”
“I should talk about it, I know. I’m sorry for what I did to Little Dack. I’m sorry for what I put Vester through. I can’t defend it.”
The two men were walking again. “The cranberry bog’s over there,” said Vester. “And that glade over there: blueberries and raspberries. I’m sure Monica�
��s told you stories about what it was like to grow up in these woods. I hated it when she went off to college. I knew that as much as she loved this place she wouldn’t be coming back here to live again.”
“It’ll be easier when the war’s over and we can drive up to visit more often.”
“I was suspicious of you. From the very beginning.”
“How do you mean?”
“So much older than Monica. Taking her away from me the way you did.”
“My work has always been in Appleton.”
“Yes, I know. And I know you do good work with that Lutheran aid group.” Vester pointed and lowered his voice. “See. I told you we’d see a cardinal before too long. I’m not much of a birder myself. I’m generally only on familiar terms with the ones that get roasted and put on a plate—the wild turkeys and pheasants and ruffed grouse. But we do get our share of binocular folk here in the warm seasons. There.” Vester pointed again. “That’s where I found Dack Junior. Right over there in that clearing.”
“What do you mean, ‘found him’?”
“Where she left him. Last week. I was out in the barn working on that old Essex coupe Dack bought a couple of years ago. That’s when she wandered away with my grandson. She must have left the baby napping, but he started wailing not long after she’d gone. That’s what brought me inside. I see the baby in the crib, but there’s no Ann and there’s no Little Dack. It doesn’t add up, her going for a walk with Dack and not telling me to keep an eye on Steven. I get Goldie to come over to stay with him and then I go off looking for them.”
Ann took a loaf of bread from the breadbox and set it on the table. Monica was cutting slices of ham for sandwiches. “So you sat him down and just walked away?” asked Monica. The question wasn’t casually delivered. There was serious concern written on Monica’s face. The whole topic was making her quite uncomfortable, but it was important to get to the truth of what had happened. Monica now realized that there was an even more important reason for her being here: to talk Ann out of ever doing such a thing again.
“He had a little cattail. He was sweeping the cattail across the ground like a broom. I stepped back and took a good look at him. He seemed so happy, so perfectly content. I wondered if I would ever be that happy again. I backed away a little more. He looked up at me. He didn’t call my name. He didn’t reach out for me as he often does at home. He didn’t need me at that moment. It was odd. Both of them, Little Dack and Baby Steven—always needing me, holding me fast, cutting off my oxygen. But now it was as if Dack was giving me permission to go.
“The air smelled fresh and clean. The breeze felt so cool. There were loons conversing on the lake. The sky was blue and filled with ravens. I walked toward the alder thicket. Little Dack became smaller and smaller in the clearing each time I glanced back at him over my shoulder. With each step I felt more free. A peace settled over me. I stopped looking back. I just walked. I don’t know that you’ll believe me, Monica, but it was as if I wasn’t myself anymore. I wasn’t a mother of two needful boys, I wasn’t the abandoned wife of a soldier husband. I was no longer that hollow, useless person that I had grown to hate. I was something else—a creature of the forest, existing for no one but herself. It sounds daffy. I didn’t want to tell you.”
Monica set her knife down on the table. She looked at Dack Junior, who seemed to bear no emotional scars from having been left by his mother to fend for himself in the middle of Chequamegon National Forest. She got up from her chair and placed her hand upon his silky-haired little-boy head. He smiled up at his Aunt Monica. “How long did you leave him, Ann? How long did you walk?”
“Until I got to the muskeg. My feet started sinking. I felt as if the ground wanted to swallow me up. That was all right. Being swallowed up was something that I was prepared to accept.”
“You need to see a doctor, Ann.”
“What can a doctor do? My own mother suffered from depression after the birth of each of her four children. With each child it got worse. She endured it. They say when it comes you’re supposed to endure it. They say that it eventually passes and that things get better. That’s what happened with my mother.” Ann sat down. She spread her hands out on the table, palms down, leaving space between each of her fingers. She looked at her hands as if seeing her mother’s hands in their place. “My mother was strong. I’m not as strong as she was.”
“I’m sure that circumstances were different for her.”
Ann nodded. “But I can’t think of any circumstances in which Momma would have walked away from one of her children.” Ann picked up the knife. She got up from the table and carried it to the sink. She placed it carefully into the basin of the sink.
“When I finally found my way home, the baby was crying. Goldie Larson gave me a look. She didn’t want to give Stevie up to me. Ten, fifteen minutes later Vester walked in with Dack Junior. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him—the shame of what I had done.”
*
The two men, both hungry, were coming home now. There would be ham sandwiches and coffee waiting for them. There would be talk of Monica staying on for a few weeks. Monica’s husband Wheaton would be okay with that. These things were temporal, he had heard. These things eventually worked themselves out. But it was good to have a woman there.
“I didn’t know how to help her,” said Vester to his son-in-law as they tramped across a thick, overgrown field.
“Would Dack have known what to do?” asked Wheaton.
“Who knows? Maybe not.” The two men walked on in silence. After a while, Vester said, “A quarter mile in that direction is the lake where I caught that giant muskellunge I was telling you about. I noticed the rod in your car. We’ll go fishing tomorrow—give the girls some more time to themselves.”
Wheaton nodded. Then he said, “The female muskellunge remains near her eggs after she spawns. But only for a short while. Then she goes. She swims away. This is the way it is with the muskellunge.”
“Makes you wonder why,” said Vester, wisps of smoke curling about his head. “A real puzzlement.”
Back in the kitchen the knife lay in the sink. Ann tried not to look at it.
1943
TELEGRAPHIC IN IOWA
Someone called him the Angel of Death. Which wasn’t fair…or even true. Technically speaking, Angels of Death choose only the doors of those whose lives are coming to an end on which to rap with skeletal knuckles. They do not deliver telegrams to next of kin. This was Billie’s job.
Billie Smaha worked for the Western Union Company. The gangly sixteen-year-old reported each morning to the company’s office in Red Oak, Iowa, the small office right next to the Hotel Johnson. He’d wait on the delivery bench until there was a telegram to go out, and then he’d hop on his bike and deliver it to whomever it was addressed. After school, Billie put in a second shift.
Billie Smaha never had to wait long on the bench, because in 1943 there were a good many telegrams that needed delivering. 1943 was the year that the war came home to this farming community of 5,600 in southwestern Iowa. This was the year that forty-five of its young men, all members of Company M, 168th Infantry Regiment, 34th Infantry Division, along with hundreds of their fellow GIs, were vanquished by the German army in the catastrophic Battle of Kasserine Pass, the first major meeting of American and German forces in the war. There were heavy casualties.
March 6 and 7 of that year were especially grim for the residents of Red Oak. On those two days, Billie needn’t have even brought his bicycle along. The families were assembled for the sake of convenience at the hotel next door. Upon its long portico, a solemn vigil was held. One by one the telegrams arrived, each new telegram nearly identical to the last: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son has been declared missing in action.”
“Missing in action. What exactly does that mean?” asked one of the anxious mothers.
“It means what it says,” replied her equally worried husband. “That they don’t kn
ow yet just what’s happened to him.”
How could that be a good thing?
Yet it actually was a good thing. Two months later word came that most of members of Company M had, in fact, survived the battle. They had been captured by the Germans and were now being held as prisoners of war.
They were still alive.
The war raged on. Billie rode his bike all over Red Oak in service to the Western Union Company.
He stopped wearing his Western Union cap. He did this in an attempt to soften the looks of apprehension that registered with those who observed his approach. The looks were hard for Billie to bear. Fewer telegrams came to Red Oak in those days in the innocuous form of congratulations or birthday greetings or baby announcements. They were replaced by the little yellow envelopes which bore the three stars that every home-front wife and parent had reason to fear.
Billie was not the Angel of Death, but with him came news of a life cut short, a life mislaid, or a life crippled on some foreign battlefield by the vicious instruments of war.
I will not say that the citizens of Red Oak, who had already tasted too much the bitterness of military conflict during the Civil War and the First World War, hated Billie. How can one hate a boy who is only doing his job—a job that few of us would wish to do? Yet Billie’s sudden presence upon a porch or portico; his knock upon a door after all had sat down to supper; or his unbidden appearance early in the morning when the father had already left for work and the mother had begun to wash the breakfast dishes—it was never a welcome occurrence. It was never without pain, a pain that Billie could not help but feel.
Mrs. Harold Simpson’s face turned white when saw that it was Billie ringing her bell. She had the envelope half-open before Billie could say those few words with which he sought to prepare her: “It isn’t good news, Mrs. Simpson.”
