by Bill Mesce
Which Harry took to mean, there was also no longer a shoe factory, a Mum, or a Da. All gone, he guessed, under the same rain of bombs that had taken Elisabeth McAnn’s eye and maimed her leg.
“How well did you know Lieutenant O’Connell?”
“I loved him.”
It was a bit more forthright than Harry had been prepared for. He nodded, clumsily trying to maintain a sense of savoir faire. “You, um, couldn’t have known him very long. I believe he’d only just come over — ”
“They arrived in May. I met him in late June.”
“Well, that’s, um, that isn’t very long, is it?” he asked tentatively.
That amused smile, again, and that sadness, again: “How long did it take you to know you were in love with your wife?”
Harry reflexively moved his ring hand under the table.
“I didn’t need to see the ring. There’s a look about you.”
“What kind of look?”
“A married look.”
He laughed.
Their tea came. Harry stirred in some milk and saccharine. She took one bite of her toast, then set the bread down on the little serving plate.
“Major, where is he?” she asked. “Now?”
“Um, well, Scotland Yard. They have a...facility.” He didn’t want to use the word “morgue.”
“Would it be possible for me to see him?”
Harry assumed he could arrange such a visit, but he had no wish for her to see the clinical butchery of a police post-mortem. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Miss McAnn. Just next of kin. I’m sorry.”
“I see. Perhaps that’s best. ‘Remember him as he was,’ isn’t that what they always say? I saw him just before, you know. Yes, it would’ve been the day before. Sunday. Because of the rain. They had postponed the mission and given him an overnight pass. We spent it together.” She stared off through the tea shop window, off somewhere, nowhere, as musing people do, missing Harry’s red-faced reaction to her revelation. Her eye regained its focus and turned back to Harry. “What will happen to him?”
“I imagine they’ll ship him home. To his family so they can — ”
“They won’t want him.”
“Oh. In that case, the Army will arrange something.”
“I wouldn’t think he’d like that. Then again, I suppose he would be the first to appreciate the irony of it; the people he liked least taking care of his afterlife and such.”
The conversation drifted after that, and Harry was reluctant to steer it back to business. She queried him about home, his wife and children. Harry produced the cracked photos tucked in his billfold. He almost asked about her family, but then remembered the look on her face, the tone in her voice when she had mentioned Coventry.
There was a pause in the chitchat and Harry thought perhaps this was the time to get back to the matter at hand, but then she asked how he had traveled to Chillingham.
“I have a jeep.”
“Would you mind a short ride? I’m inside all day”
“How much longer do you have for lunch?”
“Bernice — she’s the girl I work with — she went to great pains to make it clear I owe myself an indulgence or two.”
“Then let’s go,” Harry said and paid the bill.
They did not drive far. Still, she seemed to enjoy the ride. She slouched in the seat, her head back, heedless of the wind whipping her dark hair into a tangle, turning her face toward the sun, where it met the warm rays with a closed eye and feline smile. She asked Harry to pull to the side of the road just outside of town. She kicked off her shoes and held out her arm. “Can I borrow you, again? I hate that thing,” and she nodded at the cane she’d tossed in the back of the jeep.
Harry held out his arm, she took a firm and practiced grip and, leaning against him, they started through the thick grass, kicking up flurries of small, pale butterflies as they went. She directed them up a low knoll overlooking the road that wound south. They paused at the top and she sagged against him to catch her breath. Feeling the curve of her breast against him, Harry held his supporting arm away from his body, inserting some prudent space between them.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded and stepped away, on her own, favoring the scarred leg. She lowered herself onto the grass facing away from the road, not bothering to tuck her hems properly about her. She scratched at where the grass had licked at her shins and Harry, for the first time, noticed that her legs were bare, starkly white except for the purplish parenthetical scars about the one knee. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
Harry took in the expanse of open country, the hillocks sheathed in waving heather, the casual splay of an orchard, the flat mirror of a pond, the shadows of clouds slipping across the grasslands.
“Do you see that? Down there?” She pointed to a pile of brown stones below, almost invisible beneath tall weeds and shrubs. “It goes back to the time of William the Conqueror. At least, that’s what they say. Someone’s home, they say. I imagine all this must’ve looked much the same back then, don’t you? Do you see the pond down there? On the other side of the orchard? Sometimes this is where we’d come. We liked it out here so much that even when I wasn’t working he’d hire a bicycle, a tandem, and we’d come out here with a basket of food. And after, we’d go down and nick a few apples from the orchard, and we’d swim in the pond. From the road, no one can see you.”
The sun slipped into its next orbital degree and the little pond suddenly lit up like a flare, the sun dancing in a thousand glistening fragments on the minute wavelets stirred up by the wind. Harry considered her reference to its privacy and wondered if that implied that the trysts in the water were more intimate than simple swimming. He looked to see if she’d noticed his discomfort, but she seemed lost in memory.
They sat quietly for a few moments. Harry heard the distant buzz of an aeroplane engine. He thought the noise drew a moan from the girl, but then he saw the lowing cows, their legs folded under them as they nestled under the apple trees, their tails flipping idly at flies as their jaws ground at their cuds. He turned to her to make some droll comment about the hard life of cows, but stopped himself when he saw her face. Perhaps it had been her he’d heard after all.
She asked for a cigarette and Harry offered her one of his Players.
“I was hoping they’d be American,” she said.
He apologized, but she took it anyway and he lit it for her. He didn’t like the way the cigarette sat naturally between her little-girl fingers, adding a sullen maturity to her.
“You said you wanted to ask me about him?”
“Whatever you can tell me. Was there any...friction between him and any of the other men in his outfit?”
“Well, if you mean did anybody hate him, yes.”
“Who?”
“All of them.” She smiled at the uncomprehending look on his face. “He wasn’t like them, Major. He was no soldier. He didn’t belong here.”
“I thought all pilots were volunteers.”
She shrugged, offering no explanation.
“You said something about his family, about them not wanting him back. Was there a problem in the family?”
“He never said directly, but I gathered...” The same shrug.
“He doesn’t seem to have volunteered much about himself.”
“I didn’t ask.” She turned that one eye on Harry, and it grew dark and hard. “Look at me, Major. And tell me what you see.”
Taken aback, Harry cleared his throat, smiled in a puzzled sort of way, but she didn’t allow him to fumble his way to an answer.
“Eventually,” she said, “you’ll say something along the lines of, ‘I see a very pretty, very brave young girl.’ Someone like you would probably be overly polite and say ‘young lady.’ But you wouldn’t say ‘scarred.’ You wouldn’t say ‘crippled.’ But that’s the truth of it, eh? And if you’re crippled and scarred...The polite young men ignore me. The soft-hearted ones pity
me. And the not-so-polite, well, some have a sick idea of sport.”
“Dennis O’Connell was different.”
“He was different. He took me as I was. And I took him as he was.”
“Meaning no questions.”
“Meaning no questions.” She closed her eye. A hand came up to massage the broad, white forehead as if she were in pain.
“Are you all right?” Harry asked her.
Her head came up and she smiled, a bit forced. “Fine, thank you.” She turned, looking back down at the lazing cows below. “The first time I saw him...I let a bedsit above a pub here in town. I was just home from the shop and some of your lads from the field were in the bar. He was alone in a crowded room, if that makes any sense to you. You could see he wasn’t one of them. They were all on about this and that, flying, playing darts, so on, playing at the war being quite the game, working very hard at not letting on how afraid they really all are...There’s an old piano in the pub. I don’t know why; no one ever plays it. I don’t remember that anyone ever had. He was sitting at it. The poor old thing is so out of tune, but he could play it well enough that you didn’t hear it. Nice music. Not the popular things his mates wanted to hear. Classical, eh? And to them, that was just a reason to mock him. ‘Hey, Mozart, how about something that doesn’t put people to sleep!’ You understand? Then, later...”
“After the Germans hit Donophan?”
She looked off, to someplace west of the small town behind them, to where, Harry guessed, the aerodrome sat. Almost lost among the distant trees and tall grass he could see a broad, open expanse, a scattering of low buildings marked by a military dullness, a crisscross of wide tarmac paths.
“We all knew,” she said. “Everyone in Chillingham. We could all see it that night. The explosions. The flames. Sometimes, when the wind is right, you can still smell it...All the next day, until he could get me word, I wondered...I tried to prepare myself...” She seemed to drift for a moment, then remembered Harry and the cigarette in her fingers. She took a last puff then stubbed it out on the ground. “Even before that. They thought he was a coward. They said it to his face.”
“Was he?”
The amused smile flashed. “How eagerly do you want to die, Major?”
He shrugged, conceding the point.
“I tried to talk him into deserting, you know. I still have family in Ireland. They’d’ve taken us in. But he’d have none of it.”
“Why?”
“Obligation?” She considered that a moment, then shook her head, the question still unanswered. “He kept putting in for a transfer, but they wouldn’t let him go. I had the feeling they were going to keep him there until they turned him into what they wanted, or until the war ate them all up.” The sadness was back in her face. “I suppose I’d been waiting for this. I knew one day he wouldn’t come back. That was just...the way for him.” Her eye closed, squeezed hard, as if whatever pain had been prodding at her now gave her a sharp, deep stab. “How much can they take from you...” It was whispered, not intended to be spoken aloud. She looked up, then held out her arm for his assistance. “I should get back.”
He drove her back to the shop and walked her to the door. “Thank you for taking the time.”
“It didn’t seem like so much.”
“It was a help, though. Believe me.”
“A coward would’ve run, wouldn’t he, Major? Every day he looked the other men in the eye and said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ That’s a courage of a sort, isn’t it?”
Harry made a helpless gesture; it was a question too far outside his provenance.
“You’ll let me know how things are going? When there’s something you can tell me?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Then,” and she surprised him by rising on the toes of her good leg and giving him a little peck on the cheek, “good luck and good hunting.”
He could feel his cheeks grow warm. “Tallyho.”
She gave him a last farewell grin and limped into the shop, the little bell over the door tinkling behind her. It was only then he realized she’d never spoken Dennis O’Connell’s name.
*
The 351st had arrived on station in the sylvan fields outside of Chillingham, about thirty kilometers south of London, in late spring of 1943, and was operational by June. They christened their aerodrome after the first of their number to lose his life in service of the cause: a flame-haired twenty-two-year-old from Decatur, Illinois, named Wayne L. Donophan.
Ironically, Donophan had not died in combat, but in a training flight gone wrong a few weeks before the 351st had shipped out from America. Naming the field after him was the close-knit unit’s way of keeping alive a man who had trained and flown by their side since the 351st was formed. Few in the group had the experience to know that within a month of becoming operational, there would be more appropriate candidates for canonization. In fact, depleted by combat losses, and rotations home of the grievously wounded and the blessed few who survived a full duty tour, by August first, few on the 351st’s roster remembered, or had even known, young Donophan.
The fields around Donophan no longer smelled sweetly of heather and wildflowers. Now the acrid smell of defeat was there, oily on Harry’s skin even before his jeep reached the Chillingham crossing sometime that mid-afternoon: that nose-wrinkling stench of burnt petrol and scorched wood. As he drew closer to the aerodrome, the smell of a past burning grew stingingly strong.
Harry girded himself for a scene of carnage, but as he drew up to the aerodrome gate he was surprised to see little beyond the perimeter fence. To one side was the flat expanse of the field, empty of aircraft and people, the strips of tarmac hidden by tall grass. To the other side, haphazard earthworks just inside the fence blocked his view. He jerked the jeep to a halt at the gate. Over the idle of its engine he heard the sounds of construction — hammers and saws — and above the earthworks could see the flexing arm of some sort of earth-moving machine.
The sun was painfully bright on the white helmets of the gate MP’s. One detached himself from the cluster by the sentry box and approached Harry’s jeep. Passing clouds dulled the sun long enough for Harry to catch a quick glimpse of the figure beneath the helmet: a crisp, clean, razor-creased uniform, neat coils of gold braid hanging from a right-angled shoulder, buck sergeant’s stripes creased cleanly through the apex of the chevrons, a holster of burnished white leather, boots that glowed as brightly as the helmet, and the bold black-and-white MP brassard. The MP studied Harry’s AGO card for a long time before handing it back and snapping out a precise salute.
Harry flapped a salute back, then started arm-wrestling with the jeeps gear stick, trying to coax the vehicle through the gate. After a half-minute of gear grinding that set the teeth of the gate MP’s on edge, Harry mercifully jiggled the stick into gear. The jeep lurched forward a meter and stalled.
“Tell you what, sir,” the MP sergeant said. “Just leave it here. One of the boys’ll park it for you. It’s not a very long walk. You can find Major Korczukowski in the Headquarters building right over there.”
Harry mumbled a flustered thanks, grabbed his briefcase, and clambered out. A few steps through the gate and past the mounds of earth blocking his view, and Harry’s pace faltered. The MP’s posted at the gate were the polished machines of the Provost Marshal’s office, he now realized. Nothing that spit-and-polish could be native to Donophan Airfield.
And it was not the sounds of construction that Harry had heard, but deconstruction. Beyond the piles of earth, few solid structures still stood, and those only barely. The sounds of hammers and saws, the groaning of crowbars were the work of labor crews stripping their remains, vultures picking among broken bones for scraps.
A new smell arose from the mounds where the earth-mover was working, a sickening rot that went immediately to his stomach. Amidst the piles of dirt a Negro soldier sat atop a backhoe clawing at the ground. A squad of other workers clustered round, some carrying picks and sho
vels. All had rags wrapped round their faces, covering their noses and mouths. A corpse, its wrapping of white canvas streaming dirt, rose from a hole in the earth. The wrapping was still bright; interment had been recent. The workers standing round the rim carried the body to where two dozen other bundles lay neatly arranged side by side. The soldiers set the corpse down among its fellows and returned to where the backhoe was opening a fresh hole.
Harry held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and nodded one of the soldiers over. “What’s going on?”
“’Ey’s goin’ home,” the soldier replied.
Headquarters was an ugly, one-story clapboard building. From somewhere inside, above the sound of hammers and crowbars at work, Harry could hear the faint crackling of a wireless newscast. He stepped inside the screen door to stand before an empty reception desk. There was a bulletin board behind the desk with the usual layer of yellowed sheets tacked to it: memoranda, scores from the inter squadron softball league, notes of items for sale or purchase. A poster warned pilots to “Avoid performing aerobatics at low altitudes — Hitler laughs every time we crash.” The main hall of the building was cut short by a tarpaulin hung from the ceiling. There were doors on either side of the hall, some barred by planks nailed across them. The door marked “Adjutant” was unobstructed. The hammering seemed to be coming from just the other side. Harry stepped up to the door and knocked.
When there was no answer he swung the door open and found himself staring into blue sky and emerald fields. The rear half of the building had been blown away. Fresh dirt had been poured to fill the bomb crater. A labor crew was dismantling the building one plank at a time, saving the nails in coffee cans and putting the wood in neat piles.
“Where’s Major Korczukowski?” Harry asked.
The crew shrugged. “Maybe inside?” one ventured.
“Yeah?”
Harry turned at the voice behind him to find a broad figure propped in the door stenciled “Commanding Officer.”
“Major Korczukowski?”
“You must be Voss.” Leo Korczukowski nodded Harry into the office. “I’ve been using the CO’s office while mine’s being...redecorated. Grab a seat while I turn this off.” There was a small wireless set in a corner of the office. Harry couldn’t quite make out what the excited newscaster was going on about, drowned out as he was by the sounds of cheering and marching bands in the background.
