Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  As Wally walked back, he hated to think what he would find, but from a distance he spotted George still sitting against the tree. Wally allowed himself to hope, for a moment, that maybe he had gotten through the day all right. But as he came nearer, the truth was obvious. George’s eyes were open, but nothing was there.

  Wally took a breath, but he didn’t react a great deal. He had lost George that morning. This was only the inevitable being carried out. And so Wally found Alan and said, “George is gone. He asked me if I would bury him deep—so he won’t get dug up by the dogs. Could you help me?”

  “Sure. But we need to eat first.”

  “I know.” And there was no question about that. Wally hardly had the strength to walk right now, let alone dig. And so he helped build the fire, and helped cook the polluted rice, which was full of insects and rocks. Then he ate a good deal of the stuff. The irony was that as men died the ration of rice didn’t change, and those who could eat got plenty. The problem was, and everyone knew it, they were getting nothing else—no vegetables or meat, nothing to provide them the vitamins they needed. They could eat every day and still die of malnutrition if they didn’t get some other kinds of food from time to time.

  Still, Wally ate his fill, and then he took a shovel and a pick and the little saw he used during the day, and he found a clearing among the tall trees of the jungle. The ground was covered with grass and vines and ferns, but the growth pulled away easily from the moist earth. The digging also went easily until Wally began to hit roots, which he worked to saw away.

  After a short time Alan arrived to help. He was an infantry sergeant, a man who had spent ten years in the army before the war broke out. He was originally from Oklahoma, but his wife and two kids lived in California. Wally had seen pictures of them: two little boys with dark, neatly combed hair and big eyes. Alan had told Wally once that he was going to get home no matter what it took. He would not let his wife down, and not those two boys.

  Alan didn’t say anything now. He simply knelt down and began to saw at one of the roots that Wally had uncovered. And they worked that way for some time. The men had all acquired the habit of staying within themselves when they worked, saying very little, and perhaps finding, as Wally did, that other images—memories—were more sustaining than shared feelings about the present. But eventually Alan said, “Where was George from?”

  “Montana. Up by Butte.”

  “I’ve never been up there,” Alan said. “It’s supposed to be nice.”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty. I went on a trip to Alberta, Canada, one time. We drove through that country.”

  “That’d be something,” Alan said. “You know. Take a trip. Drive a car. Things like that.”

  “I was thinking today I’d like to go to a football game. Remember how that used to be, sitting at a game on a fall afternoon?”

  “Yeah.” Alan said nothing more for a time, but the thought must have stayed in his mind. “What about George?” he finally asked. “What did he do back home?”

  “He grew up on a little farm. He worked hard, I guess, from what he said. He didn’t finish high school. What he talked about lately was having a farm of his own.”

  “What about you, Wally? What are you going to do after this is all over?”

  “I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure about is that I want to go back to college—and make a better go of it this time.”

  “And go to those football games—with a date. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want out of the service,” Alan said. “I want to stay home with my wife and my boys—see them every day.”

  There was a long pause, and then Wally said, “I wish George had gotten a chance to see his home one more time. He used to talk a lot about Montana. He missed the mountains.”

  But that was more sentiment than either one wanted to deal with. They continued to dig, and eventually they got the grave down four feet or so. That was as deep as they were going to get it, but it was deep enough. And so the two walked back to the camp and picked up George’s body. It weighed very little, less than a bag of rice. They placed him in the grave, and then Wally went back for a jacket George had brought with him to the jungle. At least it was something to cover up his face before they threw dirt back over him.

  The backfill didn’t take long, and they tamped the dirt down as best they could. Then they stepped back together. The sun was going down, and in the half-light Wally was touched by the beauty of the place. “Well, at least it’s green here—even if it doesn’t look much like Montana,” Alan said.

  “Maybe we ought to say something—or have a prayer,” Wally said.

  “You go ahead. I’m something of a churchgoer, but I’m not much at praying out loud.”

  So Wally bowed his head and folded his arms. “Father in Heaven,” he said, “we have laid to rest here our friend George Robbins. He was a good man. We bless this spot of land, far from his home, that it might be a resting place for George’s earthly body until he is called forth in the resurrection. We pray that thou wilt accept his spirit home with thee. Grant him his wish that he might hear the gospel preached, and that he might take it to his heart. And bless his parents that they might be comforted until the time when they will be joined with him once again. We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

  By the time Wally finished, he had begun to shake—maybe as much from the exhaustion as the emotion. Alan put his hand on Wally’s shoulder, and the two stood quietly for a time. And then Wally said, “Alan, I’ve got that shelter-half. It keeps a guy a little bit drier at night. Would you like to sleep in there with me?”

  “Yeah. I sure would.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you a preacher or something?” Alan asked. “I never heard any regular fellow say a prayer like that.”

  “I grew up with prayer. My dad was a leader in our church. I just tried to say what he would have said.”

  “Do you pray a lot, on your own?”

  “Every day. Almost every minute.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But I’m not very good at it. Could you maybe say a prayer for us?”

  “Sure. I’d like to do that.” And so this time the two men knelt by the grave, and Wally prayed for the two of them, for all the men in the detail, and for all the prisoners on Luzon.

  Wally felt good about Alan. He was a strong man, likely to stay alive. The two of them could help each other. But when they lay down that night and tried to get some sleep, Wally thought of Warren and Jack. He still missed them all the time. Even those days in O’Donnell seemed pretty nice now, back when they had managed to get a bottle of ketchup or a can of meat once in a while. If he couldn’t go home for a long time, he hoped he would at least get back to his friends. And maybe Alan could join their little group.

  Chapter 9

  Bobbi had been at the hospital almost two months now, and she was fairly comfortable with the procedures. What she had trouble handling were the demands. Nurses worked twelve-hour shifts, and they were supposed to be on duty only four days a week, but she had never seen a week that easy. Men were being brought in from the Pacific Islands or off ships, and the hospital was crammed full at all times. Sometimes, after twelve hours, she had to stay on to help as a new load of wounded sailors or Marines was admitted, and she usually worked six days a week.

  Most of the men were decent, many of them just kids, but they had been at war and had taken on the bravado of soldiers. She heard such a barrage of foul language that it soon became part of the noise of the place, something she hardly thought about, but the constant overtures and off-colored suggestions were still difficult for her to tolerate.

  One morning in August she walked into a burn ward, where ten men were crowded into a room for six. These were patients who were well on their way to recovery. Some of them could now get up and shower on their own, but others were still confined to their beds and needed to be bathed. “Who wants to be first?” she asked, and she laughed
.

  Some of the men were shy about bed baths and dreaded them, but most of them didn’t mind. “Do you use the same water for all of us?” one of the boys asked. He was a seaman named Zobell, a guy who never seemed to stop talking—or shouting.

  “Yes. Of course I do,” she said. “If one of you has a skin disease, we want you to share it with everyone.”

  “I believe that,” Zobell said, and he swore. “You’re trying to kill us off.” But he was laughing, and then he added, “You can scrub me right now—while the water is still hot.”

  So Bobbi stepped to his bed and set the basin on a little stand nearby.

  “You sure look nice in white, Bobbi. You ought to wear it every day.” He grinned at her. He was older than most of the boys, and he often joked about his dissipated life—lots of drinking, lots of women. He looked hard, too, with a filminess in his eyes, and premature wrinkles in the skin of his neck.

  “That’s Ensign Thomas to you, sailor.”

  One of the men yelled from across the room, “You’d better salute that girl, Zobell.”

  Zobell sat up a little straighter and tossed his bandaged right hand toward his eye, purposefully clunking himself in the forehead. He had been caught in an explosion aboard his ship, and he had burns over most of his body. He was healing pretty well now, but he still had a lot of skin grafts—and pain—ahead of him.

  Bobbi did feel sorry for him when she considered what he had gone through. “That’s enough,” she said. She pulled his sheet down to his waist.

  Zobell was laughing. “Bobbi, don’t you know I’m in love with you? When are you going to let me take you out?”

  Bobbi didn’t answer. She was helping him pull his pajamas over his bandaged hand.

  “Maybe we could spend a quiet night at home—here in my bed.”

  Sometimes Bobbi let all this slide off her, but she was tired of it. She preferred to work with patients more recently wounded—men who needed her more. “Zobell, you say one more thing like that to me,” she said, “and I’ll report you.”

  “What? That I love you? I can’t help it. I can’t resist those cute little freckles on your nose.”

  An older Marine at the far end of the ward began to sing, in a roaring voice, “She’s got freckles on her but . . . I love her.”

  All the men were laughing. “Don’t confuse love with lust, Zobell,” someone yelled. “Bobbi’s got a shape like Mae West.”

  This got another huge laugh, and it stung Bobbi more than she wanted to show. She knew he was making fun of her, that she wasn’t “curvy,” and that was fine with her, but she was humiliated to have men commenting on her body. They had no right to do that.

  “I’m serious,” Bobbi said, still looking at Zobell. “I’m not going to put up with any more of this.”

  “Hey, I’m serious, too. My heart bleeds for you. I can’t think of anything else all day. What can I do?”

  “You can wash yourself,” Bobbi said. She left the basin and began to walk away.

  But as she walked past the bed toward the door, Zobell called out, “But Bobbi, that’s what drives me crazy—that cute little walk of yours.”

  Bobbi kept going, and she walked directly to Lieutenant Kallas’s office. She knocked on the door and after a moment heard, “Yes. Come in.”

  Bobbi was shaking, but she didn’t want her boss to see that. By the time she had stepped into the lieutenant’s office, however, she was having trouble keeping control. “I want to put a sailor on report,” she said.

  Lieutenant Kallas was looking down at some papers on her desk. She had a pencil in her hand. “What’s the trouble?” she said, without looking up.

  “He made lewd remarks to me.”

  “How bad?” Something in her voice seemed to say, “So what else is new?”

  “He asked me to get in bed with him. He talked about my body, said . . . a lot of things.” Bobbi’s voice was shaking.

  Kallas finally looked up. “Did he grab at you, pull at your clothes—anything like that?”

  “No. But he never lets up. Every time I’m in that ward, he starts in on me.”

  “That’s only because he gets a reaction from you.” Kallas looked down again, as though she were finished. She was not really a big woman, but to Bobbi she seemed huge, with her snarling voice and her strong shoulders.

  “What gives him the right to—”

  “Thomas, if I try to discipline every boy in this place who makes a pass at a nurse, I’d have them all in the brig. If you act like a shrinking violet and get all flustered, these guys love it. Or they think you like it.” She cursed, and then she added, “Just ignore all that bunk and go about your business.”

  “I can’t go back to that ward now. I told him I was putting him on report.”

  “Do you even know what that means, Thomas?

  “Not exactly. I just—”

  “I’m sick of this. They send you kids to me right out of nursing school, and I have to throw you into a situation you can’t handle.”

  “Well, I’m sick of being treated that way by those men.” Bobbi’s voice had finally taken on some sharpness.

  Kallas pushed her chair back and stood up. “Maybe you’re the one going on report. Don’t take that tone with me again. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You go back and show those men you’re a professional. If you want respect, earn it. If a man starts pawing at you, we can deal with that. But some sailor making a few jokes, that’s nothing I want to hear about.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You Mormons grow up too sheltered. You don’t know the first thing about life. If you’d hang out in a bar for a few hours, you’d see how men act when they’re really on the prowl. After that, a little kidding in a hospital wouldn’t bother you.”

  Bobbi didn’t reply to that, but she was beginning to lose control. Tears were running down her cheeks.

  “And Thomas, don’t ever let me see you cry again. We aren’t a group of little girls here. We’re pros. You get yourself together—take five minutes—and then go back to work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Bobbi thought she was probably supposed to salute, but she was never clear about that. She saluted anyway, and Kallas shot back a casual little flip of her hand that looked more like a dismissal. Bobbi was as embarrassed as she was angry. More than anything, right now, she wanted to go home—where no one had ever spoken to her the way Zobell had, or the way Lieutenant Kallas had either.

  But she walked to the nurse’s rest room, and she washed her face. And then she strode down the hallway and into the burn ward. As she walked toward Zobell’s bed, she saw him begin to smile. She said in the firmest voice she could find within herself, “I’m warning you, don’t start.”

  The men all laughed, and Zobell slapped his hand over his mouth. Bobbi picked up a washcloth and dipped it in the water. “Hey, that water is cold now,” Zobell protested.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. She wrung the cloth a little but left it wetter than usual, and then she slapped it on his chest.

  Zobell howled with exaggerated horror and then said, “That’s what I needed, honey. A cold shower. When I’m around you, I—”

  Bobbi slapped the cloth onto his face. “Now I’m going to wash your mouth,” she said.

  The men all liked that, but Bobbi was afraid she had only made things worse. She needed to be forty years old and hard as nails—like Kallas. Right now, all she really wanted was to get out of the navy.

  Bobbi and Afton rarely had trouble getting their Sundays off. Sunday was usually the lightest day at the hospital, with less surgery going on and most doctors only on call. It was the easiest day to work, so most of the nurses were happy to accept Sunday shifts. They could get a weekday off and go into Honolulu when stores were open—and stay to enjoy the night spots.

  There was a small branch of the Church in Kalihi, but since it wasn’t much farther for Bobbi and Afton to take the bus into Honolulu and attend the Beretani
a Ward in the Oahu Stake, they decided they would do that. The ward met in a chapel next to a beautiful new tabernacle with an impressive mosaic of Christ over the front entrance.

  On the first Sunday Bobbi had not been exactly surprised by the mix of people—Hawaiians, Asians, Polynesians, Caucasians—but still, it had seemed strange to her, even a little uncomfortable. She had never felt so welcomed in her life, but the Hawaiian and Polynesian women, complete strangers, were so quick to throw their arms around her, and the meetings seemed almost too casual. She told herself she liked the relaxed atmosphere, but it was so different from what she had known at home that it hardly seemed a Mormon church. Worst of all were the discussions in the adult Sunday School class. It seemed more of a storytelling time, almost a social event—and here the division of the races was more obvious. The Caucasian teacher tried to conduct the kind of lesson that might have been typical in Salt Lake, but most of the islanders hardly seemed to pay attention. When they did answer a question, or make a comment, their thoughts seemed simplistic, almost childlike. Bobbi didn’t want to be a snob—she liked the people in some ways—but she longed for something more familiar, more a piece of home. Since arriving at Pearl Harbor, she had studied the scriptures more than ever in her life, and she wanted to exchange some of her thoughts, her insights, but when she tried to do that now, only the teacher and the other mainlanders seemed interested.

  After she’d attended for only three weeks, the bishop had asked Bobbi to teach a Junior Sunday School class—kids five and six years old—and the time with the children turned out to be the best hour of her week. She was rather relieved to leave the adult Sunday School and be with the children, who were so lovely. She didn’t think much about culture and race when she was with them, and trying to explain the gospel in simple terms was not only appropriate, it was also good for her.

  On the Sunday after Bobbi had had her run-in with Lieutenant Kallas, she was especially happy to escape the navy base and take the bus into Honolulu. It was a beautiful morning—as most mornings were—and the freedom to be away from the hospital was wonderful. Bobbi and Afton packed a lunch. They planned to have a picnic in the park near the palace and then wait for the late afternoon sacrament meeting.