The men were all gone, he knew, without her answering. They had to be gone. There was nothing left of the hangar; they had all been taken up in a roaring conflagration of pain and smoke and great thundering orange-gold flames. Leon Hamilton and Charlie Hobbs, and LeRoy Davis and Grover Jones, and Milton Chalmers, and Clyde Sanders, all of them, all of them.
Okay, he thought, he would put his question another way. “How many are left?”
Mildred winced. “Eight.”
Eight. Eight out of nineteen. Like some crazy kind of math puzzle. What is eight out of nineteen? What is nineteen divided like that so it makes eight living, eleven men dead?
“And Sergeant Fleischer?” he asked.
She inclined her head toward the hall. Oh. Of course. Fleischer wouldn’t be in the colored ward. “He’s still sedated,” she said, the ringing nearly masking her words. He put his hands to his ears to shake the ringing away. There was something sticky on the side of his face, and he looked at his fingers, puzzled. Something yellow.
“What is this?” he asked, holding his fingers up to show her.
“From your eardrums,” she said. “Serum. Your eardrums were blown out.” He could hear her, but her voice sounded far away. “I can put some cotton in, so that it doesn’t get on your face.” He said okay.
He tried to talk to her, but always, there was the ringing. “When will it stop?” he asked. “The ringing, I mean,” and she looked down at his blanket, and her lips quivered.
“Maybe it’ll go away when your ears heal,” she replied, but there was a question in her voice.
“And maybe it won’t?” he asked, and she didn’t answer. He wanted to cry, but he wasn’t going to cry in front of a pretty nurse. The army had taken everything from him; his time, and his spirit and his dignity, and now, of all things, it had taken the one thing that might have restored everything else, the ability to hear his music.
* * *
Fleischer was still sedated when Willie, with Mildred’s help, rolled his wheelchair down the hall, and into the ward. The sergeant was bandaged like a mummy, the bandages yellow with boric petroleum. An IV of plasma was flowing directly into one arm, and he lay as still as a dead man. His ears, too, were stuffed with cotton.
“He doesn’t say anything, even when we debride him,” Fleischer’s nurse confided to Mildred. Mildred gave her a knowing look. Debridement was the most painful procedure in the world. The men screamed and cried like babies and begged the nurses not to do it. Even the morphine didn’t help.
“It’s like he’s not in there,” his nurse continued.
Willie pointed to Fleischer’s ears and looked up at Mildred. She nodded.
“Eardrums. Blown out,” she mouthed. “We think he’s totally deaf.”
Willie sat by Fleischer’s bed for a long time while Mildred waited, standing quietly next to his wheelchair. Neither of them spoke.
“Is he gonna live?” Willie asked.
“We don’t know,” said his nurse.
Willie sat by Fleischer’s bed for a while, not knowing what he felt. Triumph that a man he hated was going to die? Guilty for hating a man who had saved him? Did he really hate him? It was all mixed up in his head, and he didn’t know what he felt at all. People were ciphers, pieces of good, pieces of bad, and you had to put it all together and figure out what you saw. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe all that mattered was that Fleischer had done this for him, pulled him out of hell. Maybe all that mattered was intention, and Fleischer’s intentions had been good. Even on the bus, he had meant to do good. He sat by Fleischer’s bed and stared at him, the bandages, the IV line, and wondered whether Fleischer even knew he was there. He turned his face toward his nurse and gestured for her to take him back to his room.
“Well, his ears better heal,” he finally said, as she rolled his wheelchair toward the door. “Because I got things to say to him.”
* * *
He visited Fleischer every day after that, sitting by his bed, trying to puzzle it all out. Things were so complicated. Willie was full of remorse, then anger, then guilt. Fleischer was either a hero or a fool or something else, something indefinable, that left Willie confused and anguished. He was sorry he had screamed at Fleischer, called him a murderer, yet when he thought of August lying dead in the bus, he wasn’t sorry at all. He was grateful, yes, grateful was the right word, for being alive. Fleischer had saved him, risked himself to save him, and Willie felt indebted.
Can you feel grateful and angry and sad all at the same time? For the same person? Why was it so hard to find the answer, the balance, the solution to the puzzle?
He sat for days by Fleischer’s bed, wanting to talk to him, but there was never any indication that he even knew Willie was there.
Sometimes Ruth was there, sitting quietly and reading, or stroking her husband’s arm. She greeted Willie with reserve, and always asked politely how he was doing, then looked away, her lips set in a straight line. He guessed that Fleischer had told her about the bus thing and how Willie had called him a murderer, which added to his agony even more. One day he came in when she was in the middle of arguing with two doctors and a nurse.
“No more,” she was saying. “He’s too sick from it. I want the treatment stopped.”
“It’s the best we can do,” one doctor was saying. “Tannic acid treatment is experimental, but it’s all we have.”
“He’s getting sick from it,” Ruth repeated firmly. “He told me so.”
They all looked over at Fleischer, who remained immobile. “He told you?” the other doctor said, his voice filled with doubt. “He hasn’t talked to anyone since he came in here.”
“He talks to me,” Ruth said. “When no one is around, he whispers to me. And he said to leave him alone. He doesn’t want you to experiment on him like an animal.”
* * *
Weeks wore on. Sometimes Pastor Booker was there, up for a visit and a prayer. He left a Bible and a plate of homemade lemon cookies from Mrs. Booker. Sometimes he brought a few members of his prayer circle and they swayed and praised the Lord over Fleischer’s bed, but he never acknowledged them. He never acknowledged anyone.
Time passed; the swelling and redness was gone from Fleischer’s face, and his hair, which had been totally singed off, was growing back. So were his eyebrows, and every once in a while, Ruth would gently shave his face. His eyes were open and staring up at the ceiling. He made no attempt to communicate, even though his bandages were slowly being removed. One day both his arms were finally bare, pink and tight and shiny new–looking; a few days later, his legs. The asbestos in their hazardous-material suits apparently had saved his life, both their lives, but Willie wondered whether anything could have saved his mind.
* * *
“You’ll be going home in a few weeks,” Mildred informed Willie. “The doctors think you’re going to be okay.” Except for his hearing, of course. His ears still oozed a little, and the ringing had grown fainter, like he was hearing something from outside the window or down the hall, but it was always there.
He took her hand—Mildred’s hands were as soft as angel wings, as cool as a stream of water—and his eyes met hers. He had fallen in love with her. She was tender and sweet, and gentle. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He couldn’t picture life without her.
“I’ll go home only if you go with me,” he said. She flushed and said yes.
He pointed to his ear. “I can’t hear you,” he said, and she laughed, and said, “Yes, yes, yes,” so loud that a passing nurse poked her head into the room to see what the shouting was about.
* * *
Willie had expected some kind of an inquiry long before this, but there was none. Careless, the brass said. Someone in the hangar had been careless with a cigarette and it had ignited the gasoline. But Willie knew that it wasn’t true. No one smoked inside Fleischer’s hangar. He was a stickler about safety. A pain-in-the-ass stickler. He wanted to talk to Fleischer about it, but Fleischer just l
ay there, his eyes dead, never saying anything. The nurses turned him from side to side so he wouldn’t get bedsores; the plasma IVs were eventually removed. Ruth fed him every night, since she now had a job working in a gift shop in Montgomery to help earn some money and couldn’t come up in the day. She came every night, and fed him Jell-O from his tray, or some soup, and he opened his mouth like a baby bird and ate from the spoon, and swallowed, but never said anything, not even good night to her, not even when she bent over to kiss him long after it was time for her to go home.
* * *
Willie was bored. Occupational therapy consisted of making pot holders out of brown and maroon and yellow strips of corduroy cut from old bathrobes. Willie made twelve pot holders and sent them to his mother and his sister. He made five more for Mildred and three for Mabel, Mildred’s sister. Then he refused to make any more. Parts of the hospital were off-limits; the swimming pool on base was off-limits, even though the doctors had told him that swimming would be good therapy for his skin and to build up his arms and legs. The trouble was, the color of his skin was the trouble, even in the hospital. He sent a letter to New York and asked his mother to send him his trombone. He would sit in the colored lounge and play his trombone. He didn’t hear all that well, but he knew he could pull some kind of music from inside his head.
* * *
The package arrived a week later, wrapped in brown paper and cardboard. Willie recognized it as soon as Mildred brought it in to him, along with his mail and a box of sugar cookies cut into stars from his grandmother. He and Mildred shared the cookies and she admired the smooth, golden curves of the trombone. She wheeled him down to the lounge, and he sat by a window in the golden sun and put the trombone to his lips. It was like kissing a woman; it was that sweet. He played it softly, a few notes, then a few bars. It sounded far away, dampened; the ringing in his ears was still there, but he could hear the notes through his head. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the same at all; it was muted and trembly and he knew it would never be the same again, but at least he had some of the music left.
* * *
Fleischer was sitting up now, and they wheeled him to the window every morning so he could see what the world was like outside, but he never looked out. He stared straight ahead, barely blinking. They wheeled him into OT, but he never even looked down at the table where the long strips of corduroy were waiting to be made into pot holders. He ate with some help from either his nurse or Ruth, and didn’t do much else. He never spoke; he never even indicated that he recognized Willie, who had cut his visits down to twice a week. Willie had run out of things to talk about, and he didn’t want to tell Fleischer how the brass thought the explosion was caused by the carelessness of the men in the hangar. Willie knew why it happened. He knew it was somehow caused by Hogarth. It was revenge. One day maybe he and Fleischer could talk it over. One day, maybe the brass would straighten it all out, but he knew Fleischer wasn’t ready. He just kept staring off somewhere. Maybe he was home in New York. Maybe he was lost somewhere in the hangar pulling out his men, though Willie hoped not. Wherever he was, Willie hoped that Fleischer could pull himself back out.
* * *
Night fell; it was lights-out. Mildred came in and gave Willie a lingering kiss on the lips.
“My mama is planning for us to have a big church wedding,” she told Willie, who could think of nothing he wanted more. “Soon’s you get discharged.” She kissed him again and left to make rounds.
He sat in his bed and looked across the ward. The men from his platoon were getting better. Two had been sent home; the other five were healing. Their faces were puckered and drawn, melted, with their mouths or their eyes pulling to one side as the burns turned into contractures and made their faces look like drama masks Willie had seen once in a theater. But they could shuffle along the ward during the day, to OT, to make pot holders, and they could eat by themselves, so the army pronounced them cured and was sending them home.
* * *
Willie slipped out of bed and pulled on his robe. He took his trombone from under his bed and slipped it from its case. He would be going home in three weeks, and he wanted to leave something for Fleischer to remember him. If Fleischer ever came back to his senses, Willie wanted him to know that he had been there, and that his anger and fury had been debrided from his heart, that he was renewed, that he could see that sometimes color gets in the way, both ways, and that all it boiled down, in the end, to the fact he was just grateful that Fleischer had saved his life.
* * *
He slipped into Fleischer’s room. The other men in the ward were sleeping, but Fleischer lay in his bed, his eyes open and unseeing. Willie sat next to his bed and rubbed the trombone on his sleeve. It gleamed golden in the soft light from the hall. “This is all I got to say,” he whispered softly and pressed the trombone to his lips. His ears were still stuffed with cotton, to keep the fluid that dripped from his ruptured eardrums from irritating the skin on his face. He wouldn’t be able to hear it all that well, except through the bones in his head, but he hoped it would be enough to say thank you. Fleischer just lay there, his own ears stuffed with cotton, saying nothing. Willie took a deep breath and gently blew a note. He could feel the music in his head; it echoed back into his skull. The two of them were wrecked, and he wanted to put that in his music along with his apology and his gratitude.
“Take the ‘A’ Train,” he played, soft as a whisper. The other men in the room gave appreciative grunts and turned to listen, and he sat by Fleischer’s bed every night for the next two weeks and played music. After a while, the men made requests for him to play some of their favorites, and he played “Sophisticated Lady,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” “Mood Indigo,” and then he played his own personal favorite, “Solitude,” playing into the night. Playing until his arms got tired, playing through the dim ringing, all from memory, hoping, in some way, to reach the man lying in front of him, who never seemed to hear him at all.
Chapter 43
Willie sent his trombone back to New York the week he was going to be discharged from the hospital; his medical discharge from the army came soon after. He took Mildred with him and married her one month later, telling everyone at the wedding that the army thought so highly of him, they sent him home with his own private nurse. It was a church wedding, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and her family came up from Philadelphia. They didn’t have any money, and Mildred wore a simple white silk blouse with an orchid pinned to her shoulder, a borrowed pale blue taffeta skirt, and a short veil. Willie wore his uniform. They invited Sergeant Fleischer and Ruth, in care of Maxwell Field Army Hospital. But Fleischer had been discharged, and the invitation was returned without a forwarding address.
Willie had to find a job, though he knew it wasn’t going to be with music. The army had taken his music; he had to find something else. The trouble was, there weren’t any jobs for blacks beside the usual maintenance man, especially since he was listed as having done that kind of work in the army, and possible employers always wanted to know what he had done in the army.
The next year Mildred got pregnant; his mother got diabetes. The year after that, Mildred’s father had a stroke. It was all on Willie’s shoulders now, and he got the only job he could, mopping floors for the phone company. He wanted more; he’d had some college years before and decided to try again. He went to school every night for his teaching degree. It took him ten years, and in 1954, he was finally able to put his mop down and get a job teaching shop. Mildred brought nine-year-old Rowena to his graduation ceremony and they sat right in the middle row, fiercely proud of him.
Before Willie knew, the years passed, like water running through his fingers, and Fleischer was pushed somewhere in the back of his mind. Someday he would find him, he promised himself. Someday he would straighten it all out. Every few years, he became ambitious and wrote a few letters to the Veterans Administration, but nothing came of it, and before he knew it, he
was an old man, closing up his apartment, giving it a final cleaning, because he couldn’t take care of it all by himself with Mildred passed on, and him being eighty-seven, with one leg. He had been packing up his desk when he found Fleischer’s ring, wrapped in toilet paper, stuck in a corner of a drawer. Gold, with a blue stone, as clean and shiny as the day he had packed it away. He held it in his hand, feeling its heft, running his thumb over the monogrammed M, and remembered. The years had painted them all with the same brush. They were both old men now; it was time to let the ring make peace between them.
* * *
Dusk is falling, softly graying the rooms. The rain has come, and the house is sitting in a pocket of thunder. A flash of light startles me; a loud clap catches a beat of my heart unaware, and makes me jump. I am still caught up in the explosion in the hangar.
Willie and I are sitting in the living room; it had grown dark around us without us much noticing or caring. We can barely see each other now; Willie’s voice has dropped to a lull, then to nothing. His story has spun itself out and is retreating back into the past, and there is nothing left but the sound of rain, and thunder. I am trying to think of my father as a hero, bravely forging through flame to rescue his men. I can only see his angry face, hear his angry voice. All I can think of, and I am sorry about it, was that he was no hero to me.
We sit quietly for a while, listening to the bustle in the kitchen. Rowena has found a home health aide to care for Willie, since the VA informed her it has no beds left because of the new war, and won’t let him return. He has officially become an outpatient, even though Rowena is working and can’t stay home to care for him. Salary for the health aide comes from his meager veteran benefits and Rowena’s paycheck. The aide flicks on a light to dispel the dusk and comes in to take Willie’s sugar level by pricking his finger with a lancet. She apologizes for hurting him, but he just smiles up at her.
“Didn’t hurt me one bit,” he says gallantly.
“I’ll start dinner,” she says. Willie wheels himself to the back door and opens it. The air is moist, like tears. I stand next to him and we watch the rain.
In the Shadow of Alabama Page 29
