Reluctant Warriors

by Jon Stafford

  “You want this child, don’t you?”

  “More than my life!” she told me she said to him and often smiled at me and repeated the phrase again.

  “Then she is yours. I think you’d better call her Wilhelmina.” He walked out the door and toward his infamous old dark green ’35 Hudson, the motor still running in the driveway.

  No doubt Mama related the story so many times so that I would understand that I had a place in this life, on the farm, and that there was no way for me to ever find out who my folks were. There were rumors over the years, but the old doctor kept his word and died without ever revealing anything. So, my life started on the farm. Sixty-five years later I am still here with Joe, my husband of forty-five years, and the photos of our children and grandkids to keep us company.

  I have only a few faint memories of my life before the farm. It was a time of shadows and being inside. I see a man bending over me who is in very dark clothes, a suit, I suppose. He speaks to me, but I can’t understand his words. In another, I hear muffled sounds like sobs. People are very unhappy, and I am unhappy too. And I think there was a dog, maybe named Sparky, who was my friend. I cried when he went away.

  When I came to the farm I came with no possessions of any type other than the clothes on my little body. Of course, I never cease to ask myself questions about this: why I had no other clothes or toys, why I was taken from my parents, and what happened to them. I wonder how much the old doctor knew. Perhaps he knew nothing and was merely handing me on from another person. Perhaps the person my birth parents wished to look after me was unwilling to do so, and passed me on to the dear doctor who knew I would find a home at the Five Brothers. I pray to God every day that my real folks rest in peace, and give thanks that I was brought here. If I have any regrets, it is that I have never liked the name someone in my background obviously intended that I should have.

  With work enough to do, Mama was about to take on even more responsibility. I was six almost to the day (we decided that my birthday would be May 1) on May 10, 1942. That was the day my two beautiful brothers, the little Granville boys, came to live with us, stretching the money Papa was sending to us even further. It was just impossible for Mama to farm and look after all of us, and the last crop was ’41’s.

  I came home from school one day, and there they were! While they always looked to everyone, even to us, like twins, there at the table were Toby, four, and Danny, three.

  “We know who you are!” said Toby.

  “You are Willa, Willa-Willa!” said Danny, and they nodded and smiled.

  “Wilhelmina,” I said, trying to figure out what was going on.

  “Oh,” they both said.Then they continued eating some ham, even though it was only about 4 p.m.

  “Danny and I are going to live here now,” said Toby. “He is my brother. And I am his brother. We are brothers!”

  They both nodded.

  “Oh,” I said, though nothing could have been more obvious.

  They were always such handsome boys! With their towheads, blond hair, and blue eyes, they were just fun to look at.

  They ate and jabbered away. Grandmother, who announced about this time that we were to call her “Mimmi,” slowly shook her head.

  Soon enough, Mama talked to me about them. She asked me so sweetly, pleading with me, really: “Is it all right that they come to live with us? They don’t have hardly a soul in this whole world, baby.”

  The full meaning of what she said eluded me. All I could see was someone to play with and care for. “Sure, Mama. Are we going to cook for them too?”

  “Yes, baby, they are your brothers now. You’ll have to help your grandmother and me take care of them. We will have to plant a larger victory garden next year, and you will have to be the farmer.”

  “Oh, yes,” I thought, “how fun!”

  And it was fun.

  The next morning I went downstairs to help with breakfast. Was Mama surprised! I got the job of making the biscuits. Grandmother had helped with meals before, but had given it up with Grandfather’s death. Mama had been doing it for months. Looking back on it, it must have been a great relief to her to have my help, because kneading and then rolling the dough with one hand must have been very difficult. But she never complained.

  Then Toby and Danny came down for breakfast. I had the great satisfaction of watching them eat my biscuits.

  “I think I’ll have a biscuit,” Tony said.

  “I think I’ll have one too,” Danny seconded.

  “I said it first!”

  “Okay,” Danny said, sounding so depressed. “Then I won’t have one.”

  “No, you’re my brother. So you can have one. You can have mine. I’m your big brother, so I’ll fix one for you!”

  They were always like that, helping each other, just as nice as they could be. In high school they were both linebackers on the football team, and they’re in business together now.

  It was years before I heard how the boys came to us. Their father, William Granville, was a worker in the Curtiss aircraft plant in Des Moines. Their mother, Sophie, was from Dorance. They married and lived in Des Moines quite happily until Sophie took sick, and in a matter of a few months, died, of what we never heard. Evidently, it was her dying wish that the boys be raised in Dorance, and William wanted to honor her wish. The boys were brought to Dorance and raised by Sophie’s mother. But in a year and a half the grandmother herself died.

  Called from Des Moines, the father faced a dilemma. He could not come to live in Dorance and keep his high paying factory job working sixty hours a week. He had gone to Dr. Karnes, who suggested Mama. William Granville said he would come back for the boys after the war, and Mama had agreed that she would not have legal custody. But he never came back. We have always wondered if he lost his life in some accident. I know he sent money to us for a long time, but this ended when he left the Curtiss plant in 1944 to travel to California to work for Lockheed, or so we heard.

  What Mama had to contend with during the war is apparent from something that happened to me. A year or so after the two little Granville boys came to live on the farm, my teacher unintentionally said very unfortunate things in my second grade class.

  “Class,” young Miss Judith Henshel began, “our first vocabulary word is ‘orphan.’ Now class, think of what an orphan is.”

  She fumbled trying to think of a way to explain it. The little Hollum boy, Jed, raised his hand.

  “Is that when you don’t have a mother?” he asked.

  “Yes, that is so,” she said. “But what else?”

  A little girl raised her hand. It was Betsy Wald, who still lives in Dorance.

  “Yes, Betsy.”

  “That’s when you don’t have a father?”

  “Yes, that’s right. So what is it?” she said, her voice trailing up.

  The class had spoken nearly as one. “That’s when you don’t have a mother or father!”

  I had been looking around, participating and hanging on my teacher’s every word. Smiling, and not having any idea of the damage about to be inflicted on me, she added: “Yes, and we have an example right here amo
ng us. Wilhelmina is an orphan.”

  A boy blurted out: “So, Wilhelmina doesn’t have a mother or a father?”

  Amazed and shocked, I almost could not respond. “No, no, I do have a mama and daddy! Daddy is off fighting in the war. My mama . . .”

  As I looked around the room, it seemed as though each of my classmates had accepted that the teacher was right and that I had no one. I had never thought much about not knowing my real mother and father, because I had had such a happy existence on the farm. But suddenly, even I realized that the teacher was right. I didn’t like the way it felt to be different from the other children. Now, everyone knew I was different.

  I was so hurt that I cried for hours after I came home. It was not like other times when I cried from some temporary setback, but it was a deep hurt that made Mama cry just watching me.

  “Miss Henshel said you are not my mama,” I cried out. I could feel my little lip quiver. “Mama, can you be my mama?”

  Grandmother had put the boys to bed. Mama rocked me in the old rocker that survived so many children, stroking my hair until I went to sleep.

  “Sweeeeeeet baby,” she said over and over again in her loving voice. “You are my baby! You will always be my baby. I am your mama. I will always be your mama. Always, always, always.”

  Mama and I were at school when it opened the next morning, 8 a.m. sharp. By this time, word of what had happened had spread all over town. The principal, Mr. Jacob Farthing, who had retired before the war but had been pressed back into service, had heard all about it. He had already been to the house where the teacher rented a room and knew that she knew she had made a very hurtful mistake. He was prepared for an irate parent, a hysterical woman. But he got something else.

  Ushered into the office, we sat on a wooden bench. Mama let me wear my church dress and patent leather Mary Jane shoes to make me feel better. I snuggled as close to her as possible. My legs were too short to touch the floor. I recall swinging them up and down so I could see my Mary Janes with my white socks folded over ever so carefully. Those shoes just shone!

  The principal began explaining that it was all some sort of misunderstanding. He went on, seeming nervous even to a young child and talking a little faster than he usually did. I don’t think he ever looked at Mama, but he smiled at me. Still, she said nothing, but just looked at the man. I saw her gripping the bench tightly with her hand.

  I suppose her face said all that there was to say. It was the sad expression of a person who was doing all she could.

  She said: “My husband is off in the war halfway around the world. I have not heard from him in weeks. I must run the farm as best I can and take care of my three little children. Is it too much to ask that you not make my child feel worthless and unloved?”

  The principal tried to answer for a moment, but in the end stopped, put his face in his hands, and bowed his head. There was simply nothing to say. There were no words of comfort for anyone: Mama, the young teacher, the principal, or me. My hurt took a long time to go away.

  In 1943, Papa came home for the only time during the war for thirty days’ convalescence leave. Mama received a telegram on July 10 that he would come. For more than a week we were on edge with excitement, Mama smiling and much happier than usual. I had seen him only once before, for three days shortly after I had come to the farm. I was only five then, so I had few recollections of him and associated him more with pictures in my parents’ bedroom than with actual memories.

  The boys had never seen him. They really had no idea what it was to have a father. But they went about it all in their usual positive manner and jabbered away. We had only one topic of conversation.

  “Toby, we have a father. He’s coming to see us.”

  “Yes, and he will bring us all big presents. Danny, he’ll bring you a big present too, maybe a cow or a horse.”

  “I don’t want a horse. Horses are very smelly, and I would have to feed it. Toby, what do horses eat?”

  “Let’s ask our sister, Willa-Willa. She knows everything!”

  His stay was to be a disappointment. It was a convalescence leave, after all, and he was hurt badly enough that we didn’t get to see him much. He had suffered a bad ankle break on a war patrol, and then caught some bug coming across the country from California on the train. He arrived in an ambulance one day with Dr. Karnes, which concerned us a lot. He came into the house and soon was asleep in the bedroom. He remained there for several days, with only Mama and Grandmother going in to him.

  He regained his strength slowly. Soon he was able to sit on the porch and deal with three children, all wanting to establish ourselves as his favorite. His two little boys pestered him with questions while sitting on his lap.

  “Do submarines jump out of the water?” Danny asked.

  “Well, not usually,” he answered.

  “Are there women on your boat?” Toby wanted to know.

  “Nope, no women.”

  “Oh, that’s good, girls are a lot of trouble to us men,” he said. Papa smiled at Mama, and then nodded to Toby.

  He had time for me too. Finally, I got to see my father up close. He asked me about school, if I liked boys, thanked me for helping Mama with chores.

  This is my papa, I thought. He is a nice man, a handsome man. Now I know I have a mother and a father for always.

  He did have a gift for each of us. For Mama he had an African violet plant, the first we had ever seen, with its delicate flowers. I don’t recall what he had for Grandmother. For Danny and Toby he had little jackknives, and for me a tea set from Chinatown in San Francisco. We thought he had given us the moon!

  Soon, his time was gone and we all cried when he left. I picture us all lined up sobbing, Mama, Grandmother, myself, and the boys. Dr. Karnes came for him. Soon, the visit seemed like a dream. But I never had to rely on the pictures of him again. I knew what he looked like, and I waited every day for him to come home. But it was more than two and a half years before he came back to us for good.

  The war droned on, week after week, month after month. An occasional letter from Papa arrived. Grandmother remained in her depression. While my chores expanded as I grew, almost everything fell on Mama’s shoulders. It was the time in her life when she was the most needed, and so for her it was the most satisfying. She was a person who yearned so desperately to be needed, to serve others, and to be seen as a person of worth. With all of the stress, all of the endless struggles over food, war coupons, clothing, cattle, and, of course, tears and weather, she made her way and became self-sufficient, a person whom she could admire. After this, she never again had to look for the approval that Grandmother was never able to give. People saw a change in her that somehow showed in her face, a dignity that had not been there before.

  But events were to change Mimmi, our grandmother, too. On a Wednesday night in February of 1945, as the war was all but done in Europe but was just reaching its climax in the Pacific, the phone rang. I remember it so well.

  “Dell?” the voice asked. “This is Mrs. Whitlow.”

  It was our pastor’s wife, talking so loud Mama had to hold the receiver away from her ear. I could hear every word she said.

  “Dell, I really do not know who to turn to
. I have this little fellow here, a boy. I think he is about three years old. I know I have no right to ask . . .

  “Dell, I will tell you straight. This boy, Tommy, is illegitimate. His mother is that young girl, woman, who has been working in town, Jan Carhart; calls herself Mrs. Carhart. Used to come to church with him and sit in the back. I . . .”

  “Yes, the black haired boy. I remember him and how he would cling to her.”

  “Well, she said that her husband was in the Army. Ralph and I spoke to her many a time. But she was not telling the truth! I knew it! I just knew it! But, no! Ralph just went on in his way, not even listening to me. Well, the boy has been here at the parsonage for three days now and I just don’t know what to do with him.”

  “Where is his mother?”

  “Well, she left. And he won’t eat! He just sits off in the corner. He won’t eat. He just will not. I guess he just doesn’t like my cooking.”

  “What have you given him to eat?”

  “Oh, the same as what we have, a roast, greens of course, broccoli, Ralph’s favorite stuffed peppers, Brussels sprouts, and the like. The thing is that his mother has no husband. She just had a fling and came here out of shame. But she brought the boy to us three days ago, all flustered, and said she’d come back soon. But we haven’t seen her. And . . .”

  “Can I come for him?”

  “Well, we could bring him by. Ralph and I are headed in for tonight’s service. Are you going to come?”

  “Not this time, Mrs. Whitlow. We will be there Sunday as always. Will it be in a few minutes?”

  “Oh, thank you, Dell. If the Lord had given me children of my own, I would have been able to do more for him.”

  “I will be at the door waiting.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the old woman kept saying, the relief audible in her voice.