by Julia Watts
“I’ll try,” I said, but as I left her in the shadowy woods and walked into the sunlight, I knew I’d never fall in love again, and I couldn’t imagine ever being happy.
August 6, 1945
Mama had come in to turn up the radio so she and my sisters could hear it while they were outside washing clothes. I was sitting at the kitchen table where I’d been sitting since breakfast even though I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything. I’d been claiming to be sick ever since Friday, but since I didn’t have a fever or any symptoms except profound misery, Mama seemed to be getting suspicious.
“Them dishes has been sitting in the sink for over an hour,” Mama said. “When you was planning on washing them?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said. “I don’t mean to be lazy. I just don’t feel good, and I don’t feel like doing anything.”
“Well, if there’s one thing I can teach you about being a woman, it’s that the work don’t go away just cause you don’t feel like doing it.”
Mama turned up the radio, but the music that was playing was cut off by the announcer’s deep voice: “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special announcement issued by President Truman.” Opal and Garnet and Baby Pearl tripped over each other getting through the door to hear what the announcement was. As we listened, the world changed.
The message was from President Truman, but it wasn’t his voice on the radio that said, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.” He went on, “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
“Did Japan just get blowed up?” Baby Pearl asked, but Mama hissed, “Shh.”
The announcer went on to talk about all the scientific knowledge that was needed to work on the project and how everything had to be top secret. I had guessed where the bomb was made before I heard him say “Oak Ridge,” but apparently my mother and sisters hadn’t figured it out yet because they said, “Did you hear what he said? He said Oak Ridge!”
Opal started jumping up and down. “Daddy helped make the bomb that ended the war!”
“The war’s not over yet, honey,” Mama said, but her face was lit up, too.
“It will be soon, though, won’t it, Mama?” Garnet said. She was holding Opal’s hand and jumping up and down with her. “The Japs can’t fight back if we just keep bombing ’em and bombing ’em.”
At first I wanted to tell Opal that Daddy hadn’t helped make the bomb. He had just built houses for workers here. But then I thought better of it. Everybody who worked here was helping make the bomb because without the bomb none of us would be here in the first place. It put me in mind of that nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built”—This is the man who built the houses to lodge the workers that made the bomb that crossed the ocean to end the war by killing the people who started the war…Oak Ridge. This is the town the bomb built.
Everybody was laughing and talking at the same time except me. Mama asked, “What’s the matter, Ruby? Ain’t you glad?”
“I don’t know. I’m glad the war might be over soon. I’d like to know more about this Hiroshima place. Do you reckon it was just military men there, or do you think there might have been some regular people, too, like families?”
Mama looked at me like I was the most peculiar person she had ever seen. “Well, shoot, honey, I don’t know. Whatever was there, it ain’t there no more. And I’m glad. Serves them right for what they did at Pearl Harbor.”
I held back from saying what I was thinking, that if there had been any little babies in Hiroshima, then surely they hadn’t been responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There was no point in saying anything. Mama and my sisters were happy and proud, and it feels better to be happy and proud than it does to think.
At first neighbors just talked to neighbors, but by the middle of the afternoon everybody had poured into the Townsite—housewives, soldiers, plant workers, scientists—to celebrate and to finally break the silence by talking about the project. Loudly.
“So that’s what we were doing,” I heard one young woman plant worker say, laughing. “I had no idea.”
A middle-aged bespectacled man in a suit shouted, “Atoms! I’ve been dying to yell that word for two years now! Atoms! Atoms!” His face was joyous, and I couldn’t tell if he was drunk on liquor or just drunk on his accomplishments.
Newsboys wound through the crowds with issues of area newspapers calling, “Extra! Extra! Power of Oak Ridge Atomic Bomb Hits Japs: Truman Reveals Use of World’s Greatest Bomb!”
Daddy found us in the crowd and hugged Mama and then all of us girls together. His eyes were shining as he said, “Girls, I want you to remember this day as the proudest day of your daddy’s life. I always wanted to be a part of something big, and there ain’t nothing bigger than this.”
“Congratulations, Daddy,” I said, like he had thought up the bomb and built it all by himself.
* * *
Scanning through the crowd, I saw Iris’s face. She was on the wooden sidewalk on the other side of the street in a cluster of cheering housewives. Sharon was in her mother’s arms, wearing a pink and white checked sun suit, and I was shocked to see how much she’d grown in the few weeks since I’d seen her. I watched Warren, wearing more of a smile than I would have thought him capable of, as he pushed through the crowd toward his wife and child. He kissed Baby Sharon on the forehead, then kissed Iris on the cheek. Iris said something to him and smiled, but it was a small smile, one that flickered and faded.
I know Iris’s heart enough to know that she, like me, couldn’t take pure joy in what her husband and others like him had created, not when the purpose of their creation was destruction. Like me, Iris is a thinker, somebody who will turn things around in her mind and examine them from every possible angle and worry and brood while everybody else is having a party in the street.
I was staring at her, and I knew I should stop because if I didn’t, after a while she would see me, too. And I knew we couldn’t look at each other again without falling to pieces. We had already seen too much.
August 5, 2006
Dear Reverend Stevens,
I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I’ve danced with you and held you and kissed you. Before you get too nervous, let me also say that I’ve changed your diapers. Back in Oak Ridge, during what we used to call “the war” (like there wasn’t ever going to be another one), when you were a baby and I was just a girl, I was your babysitter.
I’m writing because of an article I saw about you on the Internet. Yes, I did “Google you,” as my great-nephews would say, but don’t worry. I’m old, but I’m not crazy, and I’m not a stalker. I figured I probably wouldn’t find you because your name might be different, but you popped right up on the first page. You can imagine my surprise when I saw the picture of you in the Champaign, Illinois newspaper. For some reason, I imagined you’d be younger, but then I did the math and realized that of course you wouldn’t. But the real kicker was seeing you in your black shirt and white collar. An Episcopal priest! When I was taking care of you, I never would’ve even imagined there could be such a thing as a woman priest, let alone that I was bouncing a future one on my knee!
In the interview I read, you had just come to the church in Champaign and were talking about your ministry. You said you felt a special calling to help the mentally ill because your mother spent most of your childhood and adolescence in a mental hospital while your father left you in care of your grandparents. The only time you saw your mother was for short, supervised visits, and she died of breast cancer when you were just twenty-two.
Reverend Stevens, I don’t know what your daddy or your grandparents told you, but your mama wasn’t crazy. Not when I knew her, anyway. And if she was crazy later, it was because she was driven to it.
Yo
ur mama was special. She was special and different in a time and place when people—especially women—were expected to be the same. The old, musty notebook enclosed with this letter is a journal I kept during my time in Oak Ridge. It’s as much about your mother as it is about me. I hope it lets you see her as she really was, as someone who thought and read and laughed and loved and was loved.
I stopped writing in my journal right after the bomb dropped. I was too sad and too scared to keep spilling my secrets onto its pages. I meant to burn it, but something always stopped me, and so I kept it hidden instead. I kept it hidden when my family moved back to Kentucky, and I kept it hidden in my dorm room at the teachers’ college. Your old babysitter didn’t do so badly for herself, you know. I loved college so much that I went on to The University of Tennessee, where I got a master’s degree. I worked for many years as a high school English teacher and later, a principal. I also met a wonderful woman with whom I’ve spent the past thirty-seven years. At one point in the journal, I wrote that I would never be happy again. I was wrong.
Throughout the decades, I always kept my girlhood journal secreted away. Whether out of habit or out of fear, I don’t know. But when I read the interview with you, I knew it was time to let it go. I knew the words I’d written all those years ago had finally found their audience. And so this yellowed journal, as old and wrinkly as I am, is for you. I hope you come to know and love the woman in its pages. The time for secrets and hiding is over.
Acknowledgments
While this book is a work of fiction, it owes a great deal of authenticity to the work of historians, librarians, and other experts who have made the story of America’s “secret city” available to the public. Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson’s City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946; Russell Olwell’s At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee; James Overholt’s These Are Our Voices; and the wonderful Thelma Present’s Dear Margaret: Letters from Oak Ridge to Margaret Mead were particularly indispensible titles in my research. Also very helpful was time spent in the Oak Ridge Children’s Museum, The American Museum of Science and Energy, and the City Room of the Oak Ridge Library. My thanks also go to Mariella Akers, who gave me a guided tour of Oak Ridge’s Manhattan Project-era dwellings.
After writing the first draft of this novel, I learned (with some trepidation, at first) about the existence of another novel for young people set in Oak Ridge during World War II, Connie Jordan Green’s The War at Home. I promptly read Ms. Jordan Green’s book and found it to be both excellent and (to my relief) very different from my own; I recommend it highly to readers looking for another fictional perspective on daily life in the Atomic City.
As always, my thanks go to Linda, Jessica, Becky, and the impressive team of women at Bella Books, and to editor extraordinaire and literary goddess Katherine V. Forrest.
Bella Books, Inc.
Women. Books. Even Better Together.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Phone: 800-729-4992
www.BellaBooks.com
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Dedication
October 5, 1944
October 9, 1944
October 13, 1944
October 15, 1944
October 19, 1944
October 24, 1944
October 29, 1944
November 1, 1944
November 3, 1944
November 7, 1944
November 10, 1944
November 14, 1944
November 19, 1944
November 24, 1944
November 27, 1944
December 4, 1944
December 16, 1944
December 27, 1944
January 1, 1945
January 4, 1945
January 10, 1945
January 14, 1945
January 20, 1945
January 25, 1945
January 30, 1945
February 5, 1945
February 14, 1945
February 20, 1945
February 22, 1945
February 26, 1945
March 2, 1945
March 6, 1945
March 9, 1945
March 13, 1945
March 17, 1945
March 20, 1945
March 23, 1945
March 27, 1945
March 30, 1945
April 1, 1945
April 5, 1945
April 7, 1945
April 12, 1945
April 15, 1945
April 21, 1945
April 25, 1945
April 27, 1945
May 1, 1945
May 4, 1945
May 8, 1945
May 12, 1945
May 18, 1945
May 30, 1945
June 4, 1945
June 12, 1945
June 19, 1945
June 28, 1945
July 2, 1945
July 4, 1945
July 6, 1945
July 9, 1945
July 15, 1945
July 19, 1945
July 24, 1945
August 3, 1945
August 6, 1945
August 5, 2006
Acknowledgments Bella Books
