Across a War-Tossed Sea

by L. M. Elliott

  Abruptly, the five o’clock siren sounded, signaling the end of the work day for some, the beginning of it for others. Most didn’t react to the blaring sound. But Wesley flinched and stiffened. Being around big ships all day had brought back a lot of very bad memories. Now the siren’s wail sounded like the alarm he’d heard over and over again back home when the Luftwaffe was coming loaded with hellfire.

  The truck backfired again. It might as well have been a firecracker going off at his feet. The popping backfire, the siren’s wail, threw Wesley back to London.

  He looked nervously to the sky, waiting for the first whistling scream of a bomb falling through the air. He backed away from Freddy, not seeing him, only the rush of hurrying people, and waded into the stream of passersby. He needed to find the nearest shelter, quick!

  Somewhere, far away, Wesley heard a voice calling him. Then strong hands reached past the crush of bodies and turned him around. “Where you going, son?” Ed guided Wesley back to the bus stop, just as a mud-splattered bus pulled up.

  Shaking, trying to reel himself back into Virginia, Wesley let Ed hold him back while everyone else boarded. He, Ed, Alma, and Freddy were the last to step aboard. Rattled as he was, Wesley didn’t pay attention to the fact that they walked all the way down the aisle, past plenty of empty seats, to cram themselves into already crowded benches in the back.

  “I think you look a mite discombobulated, honey lamb. Better sit with us,” said Alma.

  Of course he was going to sit with Freddy, thought Wesley; why wouldn’t he?

  The bus driver pulled the long lever to close the door and started to pull away from the curb. But a few more passengers rushed it, banging on the glass. He let them in. Wesley recognized the faces of two teenage boys who bounded up the steps. They’d been to the Ratcliffs’ Halloween party. Behind them came the rude man who smelled of tobacco and whiskey.

  As the bus left Newport News and headed toward Richmond along the country highway paralleling the James, Wesley shed his distressing flashback by watching the passing landscape. When dusk fell and he could no longer see much out the window, he and Freddy discussed the pros and cons of the planes the Ticonderoga would carry into battle. They speculated where the carrier might sail first.

  Then, knowing Freddy loved jokes, Wesley repeated one the twins had told him. “Knock-knock!”

  Freddy grinned. “Who’s there?”

  “Dwayne.”

  “Dwayne who?”

  “Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!”

  The boys burst out laughing.

  “Wait, I got one,” Freddy said. “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Boo.”

  “Boo who?”

  “Don’t cry. It’s only a joke.”

  The adults sitting around them chuckled. Even the bad-tempered man up front turned around and grinned at them. But only for a moment. He nudged one of the teenagers, who also looked back. They whispered together.

  “Say, kid,” the teenager called. “Aren’t you one of the Brits staying with the Ratcliffs?”

  Wesley smiled. “Yes, I am.”

  “I thought so.” The teen smiled too. He gestured for Wesley to come up front. “Come on up here and join us. You don’t need to sit in the back of the bus.”

  “Oh, thanks very much. That’s very kind of you,” said Wesley. “But I’m fine right here.”

  The teen’s face clouded. “Really, kid, you should come up here.” His tone of voice was no longer so friendly. “You don’t belong back there.”

  Wesley was aware of a sudden tense silence in the bus. Ed and Alma seemed to have frozen. Freddy straightened his glasses. He was looking at Wesley with the strangest expression, like he was waiting for Wesley to prove something.

  Freddy pointed to a large sign nailed into the seat in front of them that said WHITES on its front. For the first time Wesley realized that only white people were sitting in front of it. All the Negroes on the bus crowded in behind it. He was sitting in the “colored” section.

  Wesley looked back to the teen. “Is there a law that says I can’t sit here?”

  Instantly, the man took his sincere question as back talk. He stood up, whacking the arms of the boys, who then rose out of their seats as well.

  “Ed,” Alma breathed, nervously putting her hand on her husband’s arm.

  Suddenly, the bus swerved and pulled over to the side of the road. The driver turned around and opened the door. “No trouble on my bus, gentlemen. Sit down or get off.” He was a big man and his blue uniform strained against the muscles in his arms.

  The teenagers plopped down immediately. The man squared himself. “You standing up for coloreds, Mac?” the man snarled.

  “I’m standing up for my bus. There will be no trouble on it. Get out or sit down. We’ve got ten more minutes to the terminal. Your choice.”

  “You gonna make me?” the man challenged.

  The bus driver reached below his seat and pulled out a baseball bat. “I see now that you’re drunk, mister. I wouldn’t have let you on the bus in the first place if I’d realized that. Now sit down or get off before I blow my top.”

  Grumbling, the man sat.

  The rest of the drive the bus was eerily silent. When he pulled into the station, the driver told the man and the boys to get off first. As he stomped down the stairs, the teen who’d invited Wesley to join him turned around and pointed at Wesley. “I’ll be lookin’ for you, boy.”

  “Better hang back a few minutes,” the driver cautioned Alma, Ed, Freddy, and Wesley. He waited with them as the teenagers and man disappeared down the street, and only then did the five of them step out onto the roadway. “My son is fighting in Sicily. He just wrote that a squadron of Negro pilots from Tuskegee has been mighty helpful there. Mighty helpful. I hope after the war things are different for you folks.”

  He turned to Wesley and asked, “You ever seen a snapping turtle, son?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, a snapping turtle is an ornery thing. Once it snaps and bites onto something it thinks is threatening it, it won’t let go. A boy like that, who swallows his daddy’s nasty attitudes, that kind of boy latches on hard to trouble. Watch yourself.”

  The driver tipped his hat at Alma and left.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A month later Wesley learned exactly what the bus driver had meant by his story of the snapping turtle. He and Ron were walking home from school. Usually Ron ignored him, joking and parading with his buddies. Wesley would lag behind, waiting for Freddy to come up the road from his one-room schoolhouse. But this March afternoon, the sky was an unsullied robin’s-egg blue, trees were just starting to green up, and Ron was in a strangely friendly mood.

  Of course, there also was a history test the next morning, which probably accounted for Ron’s suddenly being all buddy-buddy. He was pumping Wesley for all he was worth on facts about the Industrial Revolution. “What’s the difference between Rockefeller and Vanderbilt?” he asked.

  “Vanderbilt was railroads and Rockefeller oil,” Wesley answered dutifully, as Ron scribbled on the study guide Miss Darling had given the class.

  “Wait.” Ron stopped. “I thought Carnegie was railroads.” He looked at Wesley suspiciously. “You trying to trip me up?”

  “Carnegie started in railroads, but he switched to steel,” explained Wesley, refraining from saying something sarcastic, having learned now not to “worry a wasps’ nest” as Mrs. Ratcliff termed asking for trouble. Besides, now that Wesley had Freddy as a friend, Ron’s taunts didn’t bother him quite as much. And helping Ron with his homework helped keep the peace around the Ratcliff house.

  “Steel?” Ron asked.

  Wesley sighed. “Yes. He actually is a Scotsman, you know. He…”

  “Shut up.” Ron abruptly stopped him. Coming toward them were two boys on bicycles. Ron quickly folded up the paper and rammed it into his jacket pocket, as the pair swerved to a halt in a show-off shower of grave
l.

  “Hey, Ronnie.”

  It was the boy from the bus! Wesley rammed his cap lower on his head to hide his blond curls. He looked down and started scratching the sandy dirt with his toe.

  “Hey, yourself,” Ron answered.

  “Miss you in class, guy.” The boy reached out and smacked Ron’s arm in a friendly gesture. “It just ain’t the same without you.”

  “Yeah.” Ron sounded irritated, reminded that these boys had moved ahead in school while he had flunked a grade. “Whatcha up to?”

  “We’re heading to Fort Harrison, to ride the earthworks. If you really move going uphill, you get a good whoop and holler at the top.”

  The boy was describing the ruined battlements of a Confederate fort. Wesley had ridden the earthworks himself, rattling his teeth as the bike climbed and fell on the moatlike ridges.

  “Yeah, I know that. Think I’m a fathead or something?” Ron’s aggressive tone somehow came across as friendly posturing with these boys, who grinned at him. “In fact, I bet I can get my bike to fly across the gap between earthworks.”

  “Get out of town!”

  “Seriously.” Ron puffed himself up. “Bet ya a nickel!”

  “You’re on! You can use my bike,” the boy from the bus said.

  “Swell!” Ron turned to the rider’s companion. “What about you, Roy?”

  “A nickel? You do know, Ron, that’s five whole cents, right?” He held up his fingers as he counted, “One, two, three, four, five.”

  Ron’s face turned red. “Yeah, I know.” Ron raised his hand, his fingers extended. “One, two, three, four, five.” With each number he rolled down a finger until he made a fist that he shook threateningly. “Ready to put your money where your mouth is?”

  The boy from the bus laughed. “Good old Ronnie.” He slapped Ron on the back and elbowed his friend to follow. “Let’s go.”

  The trio started off, without Ron saying a word to Wesley.

  “What about your pal?”

  Ron looked surprised that Wesley was still standing there. So the rider called to him in friendly fashion, just as he had on the bus: “Hey, kid. Come on. Join us.”

  Wesley ducked his head and shook it, fearing that as soon as he opened his mouth the boy would recognize him.

  “Speak up, runt,” Ron snarled. Wesley knew that Ron was furious that he’d been caught walking with Wesley—as if they were friends.

  “Thanks, but I need to nip home.” Wesley replied in his best American accent. But in his nervousness, he blundered into using an English saying.

  “Nip?” Ron’s friends laughed. “You got some bootleg whiskey on you, kid?”

  Wesley didn’t dare look up.

  Even so, within seconds, the bus rider was onto him. “Wait a minute,” he turned to Ron. “Is that the Brit?”

  “Yeah,” Ron answered with a sigh. “He’s the limey. Let’s go.”

  Wesley heard the rider swing his leg over his bike and lower it to the ground.

  “Hold up, Ron. This kid humiliated my dad on the bus from Newport News.”

  “What?” Ron asked.

  “Yeah, he was sitting back in the colored section. When I heard him tell a joke with that accent, I recognized him from your Halloween party. Minding my manners, sweet as molasses, I invited him to join us up front. But he sassed us. He said there weren’t no law against him sitting back there.”

  Wesley gasped. “That’s not what I said!” he cried, finally looking up, realizing for the first time that his innocent question about segregation laws sounded like a defiant American wisecrack. He’d gotten into hot water like this so many times since coming to the States, not speaking “American English” or knowing American sayings. “All I meant was…”

  “You sassing me again, kid?” In three quick strides the teenager was toe-to-toe with Wesley, looming over him. “There was total hell to pay with my old man that night after we got off the bus.” The boy’s voice was bitter. “As if what happened was my fault or somethin’. That’s the thanks I got for being nice to you.”

  Instinctively, Wesley looked to Ron for help. But Ron’s face was all gnarled up. Just like it’d been on the day the mules had dragged Charles, and Bobby had helped Charles instead of helping Ron.

  Still staring down Wesley, the boy from the bus threw a barb at Ron. “You should teach this kid the way things are done here, Ronnie. In the country that’s saving his skinny ass and his little island. For Negroes in America it’s separate but equal.”

  “Equal?” It just came out of Wesley’s mouth. “Are you kidding?”

  It was Ron who shoved Wesley first.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Later that day, Patsy and Charles were walking home, their shift on the aircraft watchtower over. “Oh, Chuck, that’s so funny!” Patsy’s laughter lifted to the darkening sky. “Why in the world do they wear wigs of horsehair?”

  Charles had been describing British courts and the fact that lawyers were still required to wear white, eighteenth-century-style wigs with tightly upturned curls as they argued cases. “What can I say, Pats. Tradition is very important to us. You should see those poor blokes bolting for air raid shelters clutching those wigs on their heads. I saw one old bald barrister lose his once. A good wind blew it off and a dog grabbed it and ran away, growling and shaking the thing like he’d caught a Thames rat.”

  “Oh, Chuck, how terrible for the gentleman!” But she was laughing all the same.

  “Aw, that ain’t nothing.” Charles was on a roll now. “You should see the Buckingham Palace guards. They wear black bearskin hats that are a foot and a half tall. My favorite uncle is a Royal Guardsman. He says it’s heavy as hell. Oh, sorry, as heck. But all that fur shields his eyes and helps him keep from reacting to the crowd when he’s standing guard. That’s a big game in England—trying to make palace guards notice you. Better yet, laugh, by doing junk like this.” He stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers while sticking out his tongue.

  Patsy giggled. “They’d laugh at that for sure.”

  “Nope. They’re trained to stand stock-still. When Wes and I were young, Uncle Trevor used to pretend to stand post and let us try.” Charles snapped to attention. “Go ahead, Pats, see if you can get me to smile.” Charles fixed his gaze above her head.

  “Oh no, that’s silly,” said Patsy.

  But Charles knew how to get her to play along. He’d seen Bobby goad Patsy into joining her siblings’ games over and over again with three simple words: “I dare you,” he said.

  “Okay, mister, you asked for it.” Patsy put down the large notebook and books she was carrying. Standing with her hands on her hips, she considered him a moment. Then she stuck her pointer fingers into her dimpled face and twisted, crossing her eyes.

  Charles kept staring ahead.

  “Oh my gosh, look at that.” She pointed behind him with a gasp. “Really, Chuck, look what’s coming!”

  Charles ignored her.

  She faked a little soft-shoe dance.

  Nothing.

  Frowning, she stood with her arms crossed, tapping her foot, considering her next move. Charles’s jacket was open. With a mischievous smile, she reached out and poked his ribs.

  Charles caught his breath.

  “Aha!” Patsy started tickling him in earnest, the way she did the twins. “Now I’ve got you!”

  Charles burst out laughing, “No fair! You can’t touch the guard!” He grabbed her hands and swung her around playfully. “You cheated!” he cried.

  Swinging around like a child’s game of ring-around-the-rosy, they tripped and fell into a laughing jumble. Patsy’s head landed on Charles’s chest and she lay there a moment, trying to catch her breath. She rolled over, face to the sky, gulping air to quiet her laughter.

  The Ratcliff brothers tumbled all over one another constantly like this, somehow ending up in laughing heaps. Patsy, too. But this was new to Charles. Startled by the scent of her rose-water perfume, the wisps of her silken
hair lying across his face, Charles’s heart started pounding. He dared to reach up to stroke her head.

  But before his hand touched her, Patsy sat up abruptly and pointed to the sky. “Oh look, Chuck, did you see? A shooting star, I’m sure of it. Make a wish, quick.” She clasped her hands and closed her eyes.

  Charles sat up slowly as he made his own devout wish. Would he ever have the guts to tell her what it was? he wondered.

  As they scrambled to their feet, Charles scooped up her notebook and handed it to her. Without thinking, he said, “You know, after the war, Patsy, you should come to London to see the works in the National Gallery. There are paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, Rembrandt, van Gogh. You’re such a good drawer. All artists should see the masters as inspiration for their own work.”

  “You know about my drawings?” she asked in surprise. For a moment, they both held an end of her notebook.

  Uh-oh. He was caught in his snooping. Charles would have come up with some lame fib, like he’d just happened to see them when her notebook had fallen open or some such rot, but he caught the wistfulness and hope in Patsy’s question. It demanded honesty. He gave up trying to play it cool. “Yes, I know about your drawings,” he admitted. “Why do you hide them? They’re beautiful.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  Charles nodded.

  “I dunno.” She dragged out the words. “I suppose I feel stupid thinking a farm girl can dream about being an artist. Maybe if we lived in London or somewhere like that it might be different. I read that in New York City some girls who can draw well become commercial artists or work for ad agencies.” She looked at Charles’s face intently as if to gauge his sincerity. “You really think my sketches are beautiful?”

  “Oh yes!” he exclaimed.

  Patsy looked up at him with such gratitude for his compliments that Charles was totally entranced. “Absolutely, you should dream about becoming an artist, Patsy. I’ve seen famous art in London, so I know what I’m talking about. Your drawings are beautiful.”