Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  I hadn’t noticed feeding tubes or IV lines. “He can eat?”

  “I put a spoon to his mouth, he takes it. I can get him up, take him to the bathroom, and his body seems to know what to do. Better than a coma, they tell me.”

  “Well, then there’s hope, Mrs. Tallmadge,” I said. “If he can do all that with your help, then one day he’s going to look around, see that he’s safe, and come back out.”

  “That’s the plan, Commander Miles. That’s the plan.”

  I realized then that he was in capable and strong hands. I knew a doctor had probably sat her down and laid out the possibilities, and she hadn’t flinched. One of the advantages of a good marriage, I thought. I made my manners and told her to contact me if she needed anything. She asked where. I realized that I had no idea, so I took down her address and telephone number and promised to contact her from wherever I eventually landed, probably in Washington, D.C.

  A week before that, the hospital administrator had informed me that the Navy was going to medically retire me. There’d be a pension, but after only ten years of service not much of one compared to the stipends given to officers who served the traditional twenty or even thirty years. My personal effects from Malloy had arrived in a cruise box from Pearl, along with a big black-and-white, framed picture of the entire crew, assembled on the 10-10 dock at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, and signed by every one of them on the back. There was a second picture, taken by Marty, of Malloy’s stern standing straight up in the air before making her final plunge. I ended up throwing most of the uniforms away since they hung on my somewhat emaciated frame like old laundry. I kept the crew picture and gave the other one away to the local Naval District Public Information Office.

  Mrs. Tallmadge had asked where she could contact me. My mother was still alive and retired in the D.C. area. Having no job, no car, and no skills applicable to anything out there in the civilian world, I’d probably have to go home, regroup, and start over. The only good news was that I had almost four years of paychecks saved up in the Riggs Bank of Washington, so money wasn’t going to be a problem, for a while, anyway. I knew that eventually, when the Japs finally gave up, there’d be a huge wave of people just like me coming home. The newspapers were already commenting on the influx of veterans coming back after VE-day, and there’d been editorials speculating on what the country was going to do with them, and for them.

  I did have one more thing to do before I walked away from all things naval, and that involved going to a small town in Georgia. I still had trepidations about making that trip. It had sounded like the right thing to do when I went down to sick bay that morning, but now I wondered. How would a widow and a family react to a perfect stranger appearing on the front steps bearing something so terribly personal as two rings and a lock of hair?

  * * *

  Amazingly well, it turned out, and with grace and dignity besides. I’d taken a train from California to Atlanta. The train took four days to make the trip, during which I spent a lot of time just looking out the window with my mind in neutral. I rode in a normal Pullman car and not in one of the two cars allotted to recovering soldiers and sailors, each with its own small medical team. I hadn’t been back to the continental United States since early 1942. Any leaves I had taken had been at R&R sites in the Pacific. It was pleasant to just look out the window and reacquaint myself with America. It looked pretty good.

  Before leaving San Diego I’d sent off a letter addressed to Mrs. William Van Arnhem, care of the post office in Monticello, Georgia, telling her I was coming to bring her some of the commodore’s personal effects. I spent a day in Atlanta resting up after the train trip, having arrived on August 6, 1945, the day we dropped the big one on Hiroshima. Based on the radio news, the war might be ending sooner rather than later. The next day I put on a coat and tie, packed my two bags, and hired a car and driver to take me to the booming metropolis of Monticello. Hiring a driver was a bit of an extravagance, but I hadn’t driven a car in years and doubted my ability to find my way around the southern countryside. Not to mention that I was still pretty weak from my time at Balboa.

  When I got to the tiny town of Monticello, and it was indeed tiny, I found the post office, introduced myself, and asked if a letter to Mrs. Van Arnhem had come through. The postmistress, a peppery lady of uncertain age, wanted to know who was asking. I told her that I’d sent the letter and now needed to take something to Mrs. Van Arnhem. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, she knows you.” That apparently was the key: She knew me. How, I didn’t know, but the postmistress gave my driver, a middle-aged black man by the name of Homer, directions to the plantation, known locally as Blue Pines.

  I expected to see Tara looming majestically up on a hillside when we turned, as directed, into a long, tree-lined lane across from a large red barn. Instead, the one-lane sandy track wandered for at least a mile through fields of drying feed corn. The trees along the road were not stately oaks but some unidentifiable and distinctly scrubby specimens of little character. The house, when it finally appeared, was a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch and a green metal roof. No columns, huge brick chimneys, or second-floor verandahs, and definitely no clusters of happy black people humming gospel songs as they loaded bales of cotton onto horse-drawn wagons. Clark Gable was not much in evidence, either.

  Oh, well, I thought. This was probably what real plantation houses looked like. I hadn’t seen any blue pines, either, but there were two vintage 1939 cars parked to the side of the house under the only oak tree I’d seen since arriving. It was just before noon, and the place seemed to be entirely deserted. For a moment I thought about simply turning around, but meeting Mrs. Tallmadge had strengthened my resolve.

  “What do you think, Homer? Anybody home?”

  “They be out directly, suh,” he said. “Country folk gonna take ’em a look before they come steppin’ out when strangers come.”

  He was right. A minute later the front door opened, and the woman whose picture I’d seen framed in the commodore’s cabin stepped out onto the front porch. She was maybe five foot two and dressed in what surely did look like period clothes, as she had been in that portrait. She looked older now; a death in the family will do that to you, I told myself.

  I got out of the car. Homer said he’d just wait outside if I didn’t mind, so I walked up to the front steps. I was escorted by two friendly, tail-wagging dogs who’d appeared out of nowhere. I had to take one step at a time, but without a cane, finally.

  “Mrs. Van Arnhem?” I said. “I’m Commander Connie Miles. I had the pleasure of serving with your husband, the commodore. I hope you received my letter?”

  “I did, Commander, I did,” she said in a lovely and cultivated Southern accent. I thought I saw someone else move behind one of the heavily curtained front windows. “Dutch told me about you in a letter just before he died. He said you showed great promise. Won’t you come in, please.”

  I walked up the steps and took her hand briefly, and then we went inside.

  “Have you come far, Commander?” she asked over her shoulder. The front hall was much cooler than the front yard. There was a living room to one side, a dining room on the other, and an ornate stairway dead ahead. Judging by the floors, moldings, and the thickly plastered walls, the house had to be nearly a hundred years old.

  “From the other side of the world,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Yes, that must be so,” she said. “Dutch could never tell me where he was at any given time; the censors, you know.” She showed me into the living room, where we took seats. A Negro maid appeared with a tray service of what looked like iced tea and sugar cookies. Had she been expecting me? Of course, I realized. The postmistress.

  “We were together at an island called Okinawa,” I said. “Which is only a couple hundred miles south and east of the Japanese home islands.”

  “Did you know about this new bomb, an atomic bomb I think they called it?”

  “No, ma’am, but from what
they’re reporting, I suspect the war against Japan will end pretty soon, hopefully without the need to invade. The Okinawa invasion was bad enough.”

  She nodded. “We listen to the evening news, of course, but the radio correspondents seem to always have a very optimistic slant on how things are going.”

  I smiled. “That’s called propaganda, I think,” I said. “But in fact, Okinawa has been taken, and now the Army Air Forces are systematically pulverizing the home islands. I am, however, well out of it.”

  I explained my medical retirement after only ten years in the Navy, and she displayed some sympathy. “Does it bother you?” she asked. “That you must leave the Navy? It was everything to Dutch.”

  “Yes and no, Mrs. Van Arnhem,” I replied. “The Okinawa campaign was very hard on the Navy, and I myself will be a long time healing, I think.” I told her in relatively sanitized terms about what had happened to me and the ship. My ship. One of his ships. That thought stopped me for a moment, and she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

  “I am very, very tired,” I said. “Rising to the rank of commander in ten years would have been impossible before the war, and in my case, it happened less because of any personal merit and more because of circumstances.”

  She nodded. “Dutch talked about that, before he left for the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, he said, there would be big changes coming to the fusty old Navy. I would love to hear more, Commander, especially since my Dutch is not coming home.”

  I hadn’t come there to talk about myself, but this charming lady had managed to put me at my ease. I almost felt embarrassed.

  “He was buried at sea?” she prompted.

  “Yes, ma’am, he was,” I said. “As the captain, I officiated. It was a formal burial ceremony, or as formal as we could make it. He’d only been aboard for a brief time before the attack. He was on the bridge in his unit commander’s chair when the attack came.”

  She nodded, almost absently, and looked off into the middle distance. A cloud passed over the sun outside, and the room dimmed for a moment. Too much, I told myself. She doesn’t want to hear this. Her husband’s well and truly gone, consigned to the depths of the Pacific, that great eater of seagoing men and their presumptuous little ships.

  “You said you were going to bring me something,” she said finally. “The Navy returned some of his personal effects—uniforms, his sword, some hats.” She looked at me inquiringly with sad eyes.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. From inside my coat I removed a silver cigar case. It wasn’t entirely appropriate, but I hadn’t had much time in Atlanta to find anything else. I handed her the case, which she opened. Inside were his Naval Academy ring, his wedding ring, and an antique flat silver locket with an oval of glass in the front. And inside that …

  I think she first focused on the rings. She smiled a smile of sweet sadness, and yet it was as if she were welcoming the rings back home, back to their rightful place. Then she saw the locket.

  She gasped and almost dropped it, but then she picked it up with trembling hands and stared at it, her eyes welling up. Oh, God, I thought. I shouldn’t have done this. What had I been thinking?

  Then she pressed the locket between her tiny hands, closed her eyes, and began to weep. I felt like I should say something, anything, to comfort her, but I recognized that this was a very private moment, a homecoming vastly different from that of the two rings. This was between them. I wasn’t even there.

  After a few minutes she composed herself. “You did this?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  “Yes, ma’am, and I’m very sorry to have upset you. I thought—”

  “Oh, no,” she said, cutting me off. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. How did you know?”

  I took a deep breath. “The captain”—I was relieved—“told me that the commodore was married to a very traditional Southern lady. As I recall my history, a locket, with a lock of hair, was an old custom in the South. Since no part of him was ever coming back, I just thought you might appreciate it.”

  “My. Dear. God,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  Actually, looking at her face, I did. For once I’d done something completely right. I felt good enough about it that I forgot about my aching bones for a few minutes while she sat there clutching that silver locket and rocking gently in her chair.

  “Tell me everything, young man,” she said at last. “What he was like, how he looked, what happened at the end. Everything. I haven’t seen him for three years, you know. Tell me everything, please.”

  We spent the next few hours in that living room, sipping on sugary tea, with me telling her probably more than I should have about our time on the Okinawa picket line. Toward the end I began to run out of steam, which was when she took a really good look at me. Then things happened quickly. Homer was dispatched back to Atlanta with, I found out later, a ten-dollar tip. My two bags and I were hustled up to a guest bedroom, complete with a four-poster bed, an armoire, and a huge wooden fan stirring the air above. I was firmly instructed to take a long nap. As I was stowing some of my clothes, the maid who’d brought the tea knocked discreetly on the door and delivered another tray, this one with some fancy crustless sandwiches and a cold beer. Navy family, I remembered. Libations would be available in the parlor at six, dinner at seven, and I was, of course, spending the night. I didn’t argue.

  I came down at six much refreshed. I would have probably slept until the next morning except that I’d heard female voices out in the upstairs hall. When I got downstairs, wearing the same coat and tie but with a fresh shirt, I got a surprise. A much younger woman was there on the sofa beside Mrs. Van Arnhem, and I recognized her face from that portrait on the commodore’s desk. Turned out her name was Julia, and she was, as I’d thought, their daughter. She’d arrived from Atlanta while I was sleeping off my cross-country trip.

  Julia looked more like her father than her mother, with dark brown hair, sly brown eyes, and a very pretty face that would not have been out of place in Gone With the Wind. While her mother affected the mannerisms and dress of the nineteenth century, Julia was very much a denizen of the twentieth, if her stylish dress and sophisticated way of carrying herself were any indication. Her lipstick was vividly red, and there was a cigarette case on the coffee table in front of her that I was pretty sure did not belong to the lady of the house. She had elegant, slim legs and looked as if she knew her way around an after-hours nightclub. She gave me a frankly appraising look when we were introduced, which immediately had me wondering how well I’d scored. Given that I was twenty-five pounds underweight, with the remains of dark circles under my eyes and a way of moving that probably resembled a large but injured insect, I suspected not very well. This young lady looked like she regularly feasted on handsome, rich playboys up in Atlanta, assuming there still were any rich playboys, that is. I realized then there was a lot I didn’t know about the United States of America in late 1945. I wondered if I was going to like it.

  After supper we migrated to the living room for coffee. Julia offered me a cigarette when she lit up and seemed faintly disappointed that I didn’t join her. Her mother excused herself after a little while. Julia promptly got up, went to a small sidebar I hadn’t noticed, and poured a couple of cognacs for us. I asked her what she did for a living.

  “I’m in the finance department of a large bank up in Atlanta,” she said. “Investments, putting commercial deals together. That sort of thing.”

  “The only thing I know about finance is that it went off the rails in 1929,” I said. I remembered the pay cut the Army and the Navy took in the mid-1930s as a result of the Depression that followed.

  She nodded. “It’s making its way back,” she said. “Especially in Atlanta. That city is going to boom one day, and I wanted to be in place when it does.”

  “Are there that many women in finance?” I asked.

  “There are now,” she said. “Well, not very many, but more than none. The war did wonders for women’s opportuniti
es in business. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when all those men come back home.”

  “You think women will be pushed out?”

  “I think that the competition is going to be really fierce,” she said. “That’s why I plan to start my own company this year. It’ll depend on how many clients I can poach from the bank when I leave, but I want to have it in place when everybody starts looking for work. How about you? What are you going to do once this horrible war ends?”

  “Damned if I know,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been medically retired, so I’m really out of the Navy now. They say I’m physically unfit for active duty after Okinawa.”

  She nodded. “What will you do for money, then?” she asked.

  The financier, I thought, getting right to the point. “I’ve got almost four years of paychecks saved up,” I said. “I’m not married, so I just banked it. I’ll be okay for a while, I think.”

  “That’s good, because unemployment is going to go through the roof after the war. The economy’s going to contract hard until the politicians get another war going somewhere. Europe is devastated. That’s going to take a decade to fix, and somehow we’re going to have to find a way to get the Germans back to work. They’re the only ones who really do work over there, you know.”

  “Sounds like interesting times ahead,” I said. “I may just sit them out.”

  She gave me a strange look, seemed to make some kind of decision, finished her cigarette and her cognac, and then looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and get back to the city,” she said. “But right now I’d like you to meet someone. I’ll be right back.”

  I sat back in my comfortable chair and looked around the parlor, with its twelve-foot-high molded ceilings, real if slightly shabby wallpaper, and furnishings from what looked like the 1880s if not earlier. What do they do way out here in the sticks, I wondered. There’d been crops in the fields, but who was tending to the farm if all the men were gone?