In the middle of March Ed was shipped back to the United States to convalesce and she travelled to Liverpool to catch a glimpse before he sailed, but the train was held up for troop movements and so she missed him and had to stand, watching the stern of the ship and its wake, feeling the cold, remembering Heine who had left from here too. She was alone again.
CHAPTER 18
The trip back on the troop ship would take ten long days, Ed had been told as he hauled himself up the gangway, a corpsman following close behind, but he would not go on a stretcher. He was going to walk out of England as he had walked into it.
He looked over his shoulder all the time but she didn’t come. Helen didn’t come. He eased himself down into the bowels of the ship, feeling the heat, the stench of illness and lay on a bunk in a converted hospital ward filled with bunks. Men lay groaning, swearing or were silent and Ed looked up at the base of the bunk above him. She hadn’t come.
He felt the heave of the ship as they met open water and the pain in his back from his cracked vertebrae grew worse and his leg throbbed though it was out of plaster. A corpsman came round to each bunk checking pulse and blood pressure and it was good to feel fingers on his wrist and a voice saying, ‘You’re doing just fine, Major. Be home real soon.’
But he didn’t want to go Stateside. He wanted to be with her.
Doctors were on call all day and all night and as the pain grew worse and the throbbing of his leg drowned out the vibration of the engines and the roll of the dice as three men shot crap, they gave him morphine.
‘But not much, Major. Just enough. Don’t want you getting too fixed on this.’ The doctor smiled, holding the syringe to the lights, easing up the plunger, expelling the air.
‘I seemed to be getting better, Doc,’ Ed said, his voice tight from pain. ‘So what the hell is happening?’
The doctor swabbed his arm, inserting the needle. ‘Everything’s going just swell, Major. It’s those roads you had to use to get to the docks in Liverpool.’ He grinned, pressing in the plunger. ‘Got themselves a few pot-holes I guess, knocked everything about a bit. It’ll settle, don’t you worry.’
‘Hey, Doc, there’s a man here bleeding from his goddamn nose.’ The voice was urgent, frightened, and the doctor moved quickly, dropping the empty syringe into the enamel kidney bowl the corpsman held. Ed heard voices, murmurs and always the groans, and then there was nothing.
When he woke the pain was better even though the ship was lurching and bucking and as the days passed he was able to ease himself from the bunk and, with a Captain who had lost a hand flying a bitch of a Fortress, he inched along the deck, feeling the lash of the wind, watching the other ships steaming with them, noting the zig-zag course.
The Captain handed him a Lucky Strike and put one in his own mouth but Ed lit the match because Captain John Bryan still held the pack and he only had one goddamn hand, hadn’t he? It was good to be with a flyer, to ease into chairs and look out on to big seas which broke and sprayed the deck; to look out and see no planes, no wind socks, no bombed houses, to hear no dawn roar of departing planes.
He sucked on his cigarette, drawing the nicotine deep into his lungs, feeling its heat. He expelled his breath, seeing it whipped away. There was no reason for them to talk much because they had both felt the same fear and pain as their Fortresses were hit. They both remembered the judder and the stagger and understood the darkness in one another’s eyes.
They ate a plateful of food in the canteen which would fill six stomachs in the villages they had flown over and John told him of the girl he had met but would not marry because his high school sweetheart was waiting in Arizona.
Ed told him of Helen, whom he had married. He cut up John’s steak, grinning when his buddy said they would make a good team.
‘I’ll be your legs, cling on to that mare back in Montana, you can hold the reins,’ John said, eating relish on its own. ‘Gee, it’s going to be good to get back.’
Ed shook salt on his meat, seeing the blood ooze from the rare steak. ‘But do you reckon they’ll understand?’
It was hours later that John replied. They were sitting in on a poker game, the two of them playing one hand; John holding the cards, Ed slapping them down.
‘I guess Ruby won’t know what the last two years have been like. I’ve changed. I don’t know if we’ll make it. Maybe I should have brought my village girl back, she knows what it’s all about I guess,’ John said.
He said nothing more and the smoke was heavy in the room off the end of the ward. It stung Ed’s eyes and he narrowed them, checking the cards, raising the stakes until they lost and then they walked around the deck, slowly because he was still limited in his movement.
They knew there were clouds above them because they could see no stars and there was only darkness around them because the blackout was still in force on this sea crossing.
John lifted his head, pushing back his hair with his stump. ‘You see, I get these dreams. Ruby won’t know why.’
Ed flicked his cigarette over the side, leaning on the rail, feeling it digging into his flesh. The Captain had told them they would be passing the Statue of Liberty at 07.00 hours but he didn’t want to arrive and be in a country where no one would know how he felt, how John felt, how the thousands of draftees were going to feel.
But he did arrive and was flown by transport plane which rattled and bucked, bouncing into the nearest airfield in a way that Ed would never have allowed from any of his young flyers. And his pop was there, grey and strong, his stetson pulled down, his eyes the same clear blue. But his mom had been crying, her face was puffed and her lips swollen. They hadn’t changed, but he had. Jesus Christ, he had. He wanted Helen, he thought, as he felt his mother’s arms around his neck.
They drove through the dry cold air of late March. He sat near the window of the pick-up looking out across the space which England did not possess. Seeing the mountains which were his home but not really his home because Helen wasn’t here. He looked up at the peaks and missed the flatness which was East Anglia. He didn’t speak because he didn’t know what to say to these people who were his parents but whom he hadn’t seen for three years, three long strange years. They drove into Little Fork, driving past the wood-fronted stores which looked like something from the cowboy westerns which Chris sat and watched at the cinema. He missed the boy, he missed his wife.
Ma Benson was on the corner of the drug store, Ma Benson who had bounced him on her knee and who was now waving the Stars and Stripes as the pick-up approached. His pop slowed, then stopped and Ed wound down the window.
‘Gee, it’s great to have you home, boy,’ Ma Benson said, kissing his cheek. She still smelt of lavender water. Some things never change and now Ed smiled.
‘It’s kind of good to be back, Ma,’ he said.
The ranch was the same, just the same, and Ed lay in bed, looking at his curtains which still had the ink mark he had splashed across when he was sixteen and trying out his new pen.
The stars were bright and the moon too, throwing its light down on to the snow which Helen would not be able to believe was so deep, so hard, so cold. His leg and his back were hurting and it kept him awake all night and he was glad because he did not want to sleep.
That week he received her letter.
Greater Mannenham
My darling Ed,
I missed you. I travelled all the way but I missed you. The journey back was so bleak without a last look at your face, a last feel of your hand in mine.
It won’t be long before I come. Let’s just see this war out first. You will be home and in your own bed by now with your own people around you. I hope that you are feeling better and that you can relax but I fear there will be a gulf between you all, at least for a while. Be patient. You’ve come from a strange war world and you go back to something which has not been touched like Europe. Remember, though, that they will have had their changes. Boys will have gone, hearts will have been broken, even if buildings
are not crushed and rations reduced as ours have been.
Get well, my love. That is all that is important. And try to forget all that has passed.
I love you, I love you.
Helen.
For the first two weeks Ed sat in a chair in his bedroom, wanting the small room around him because it made him feel safe but now at last he was sleeping at night though his dreams woke his mom. He knew that they did because she came in and sat with him, but he wanted Helen because she knew where he had been.
In the third week he walked downstairs and sat by the lounge stove, listening to the crackle of the wood and the sound of the wind. The generator was cranking up, his father said on Friday evening, and Ed nodded but what did it matter? It always cranked up.
By the middle of April the pain was easing enough to push to one side and he walked around the ranch, but he was still so goddamn stiff, he murmured to his mother.
‘I know, Ed. It’s a plain nuisance and you must be plumb tired out. Shall I get you something from Doc Mathers for the dreams?’
He looked at her as she walked along the path to the creamery. There was mud everywhere, it had come with the spring thaw as it did every year. Did nothing change over here?
‘There’s nothing he can give me that would help. It was different over there, Mother, you see. We killed people, not cattle. People.’ His voice was hard. ‘And they tried to kill us.’
Her eyes were shocked and she moved ahead and he was sorry and caught at her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Mom. I guess I can’t quite get used to being back. It’ll take a bit of time.’
‘I know. I try to understand,’ she said, taking some butter from the wooden ledge inside the damp building which his father had built when Ed was only ten.
‘Business could be a whole lot bigger, you know, boy,’ His father said as they ate turkey in the well heated kitchen that night. ‘It’s shipment that’s the problem. That train takes so damn long, winding through the country, changing at Chicago. Anyone would think we hadn’t got a living to make.’
There was half a turkey left on the platter and bacon too. It was too much, too damned much. Ed looked at the stove and there was too much damned heat. He looked out of the window at the buildings which were the same as the ones he had left before the war. There were no smouldering ruins, no wrecked Fortresses or Spitfires in the fields.
Ed couldn’t eat any more. ‘Some people over in England aren’t concerned with making a living, they just have a lot of dying to do. Don’t you folks ever think of that?’
He got up, knocking his chair to one side. His back was painful tonight. He pushed from the room, climbing the stairs. He stood by his bedroom window, looking up to the mountains. It would be peaceful up there. Helen would like it. He gripped the curtains, the ink mark was dark against his hand and he wished he was sixteen again and not the old man he now was. He gripped the material so tightly that it ripped and he didn’t care, he tore again and again, shredding it, wanting to wipe out the months and the years which had made him old and frightened.
His father knocked on the door but he didn’t answer, just leaned his head against the window, feeling the cold, seeing the strips of curtain in his hands.
His father knocked again and came in and stood next to his son and now Ed turned to him and saw the face which had always been good and kind, the body which had always been bigger than his and still was and he moved and pressed his head against his pop’s shoulder and cried as he had not done since he was twelve years old.
His father held him, rocking him backwards and forwards as he had done years ago, stroking the back of his son’s neck which was still the same as that young child’s and he didn’t let him see the tears in his own eyes for the boy who would never be the same again.
They sat and talked into the night because Pop had heard the screams and had lain awake alongside his wife, holding her hand until the morning, grieving but impotent. Arthur McDonald told Ed how grey paint had been painted over the gold leaf dome of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in Boston three months after Pearl Harbor so that it was less conspicuous in the event of enemy bombardment. He told him how black paint was painted over the gold leaf roof of the Federal Building so it would not gleam beneath the moon and attract enemy submarines in American waters and they both laughed, gently.
He put his hand on his son’s shoulder as they sat side by side on the bed, filling the ashtray with half smoked stubs, drinking Scotch from the flask which Arthur had filled and brought up with him.
‘So forgive us for not understanding. We are trying,’ he said.
He went on to say how German U-boats had prowled up and down the East Coast from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean sinking tankers and freighters sailing for Britain with guns, tanks and planes. Many were sunk. Ma Benson’s neighbour’s son was drowned that way. There was no longer a star in her window.
Ed nodded, knowing that his mother had removed the one which had been in theirs when he returned home.
‘The war has touched us in that way and in others. We have interned the Japanese. Their houses have been vandalised or sold for a pittance but we have allowed their sons to be drafted to die and fight for America.’
Arthur stubbed out his cigarette, grinding it down until the remaining shreds of tobacco stood out stark against the black.
‘You see, Ed. War does strange things to people. On the one hand it gives them opportunities. Gee. Just think of the women who have been taking over the factory jobs, working alongside men, showing their worth. On the other hand war also brings despair. Think of the Little Fork families whose boys died on D-Day on Omaha. It does touch us but not as it has touched you. We feel for you. We love you but we cannot understand because your fear hasn’t been ours.’
He rose then, leaving the flask with his son, hoping that tonight he would sleep. But he didn’t, he lay away loving his father, his mother too, but it wasn’t just fear. It was guilt, and how could they understand that, because they had never had to kill.
He was in town when the latest draftees left Little Fork. He stood on the sidewalk watching the crowd gathering outside the hotel where the kids ate breakfast – their last small town breakfast. He leaned on his stick watching the High School band falling into position and then the colour guard from the American Legion. As the boys, for that is what they were, he thought bitterly, came out of the hotel they lined up and the head of the draft board called, ‘Forward march.’
Ed stood still as the kids marched down the street heading for the railroad station where the crowd gathered again. Ed walked along now, stiffly and silently, watching the parents forming tightly round their sons. Hugs were given, long strong hugs, and then the train came in and as they boarded the band played the Marine Hymn, as though it was a game, for God’s sake.
Ed walked back to the pick-up, forgetting the stores his mom had asked him to buy from the grocery store, thinking only of the kids leaving, so young and fresh. Some would die, some would survive and not be scarred. Some would survive and have to fight to try to come to terms with the things they had done and seen. Would they make it? Would he?
He wrote to Helen that night, knowing that it would be a long wait until she came because he had heard from John in Arizona that he was going to marry this English girl instead and there would be no official ships until months after the war had finished and who knew when that would be? It was now March 1945 and even if there was victory in Europe, what about Japan? Would he have to fight again in the Pacific?
He put his pen down and reached for the flask he had filled in Little Fork and longed for Helen and for peace.
CHAPTER 19
Helen was planting beet when Hitler shot himself in a bunker at the end of April as the Allies swept through Berlin. The Germans in Italy had surrendered the day before. She sat in the garden that evening, seeing the hedge in bud and the apple trees in the orchard, watching her son and Mary practising pitching and batting, hearing the thud of the ball
on the bat, their shrieks. They were slim – everyone was slim – because food had not been plentiful for the last six years but what there was had been equally shared and that was good.
She turned as Laura came out, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘I shall miss you so, when you go, my dear,’ Laura said.
‘I can’t imagine what it is going to be like to leave and so I just think of today,’ Helen replied, looking out over the fields at the back.
‘It’ll be great,’ Chris tossed back at them over his shoulder. ‘It’ll be just great.’
Mary pulled a face. ‘Huh, when I come out to see you you’ll be all American and sit there chewing gum.’
‘Over my dead body,’ Helen called and they laughed and so, for another day, Helen pushed the thought of leaving from her head though she could hardly bear to live without Ed for much longer.
The next week they heard of Belsen and Buchenwald and the millions of dead and the village was loud in its hatred of Germany again and Helen was quiet but wondered where Frau and Herr Weber were but Chris did not want to talk of them, or think of them now, he said, or ever again. Helen spoke to him, saying he was half German, saying that not all Germans had done this but he turned to her.
‘I’m going to be American. I’m Ed’s son.’
Helen knew that one day, she would have to bring Heine’s son back to him but for the moment she did not know how.
On 1 May she received a letter from Montana.
My darling,
You would be pleased if you could see me. I’m getting about great. My folks send the enclosed affidavit saying that they are prepared to take financial responsibility for you if necessary. I guess I can see your face getting red and sassy but don’t let it, this is just to support your application. I know you have my own affidavit and your money over here, and they do too, but I don’t want anything going wrong at the last minute.
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