by Dean Hughes
President Thomas nodded. “I do want to do that,” he said. And then he added, “Thanks, Bea.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Just . . . you know. The bridge.”
“Okay. But don’t talk about it. We’ll all just get up in the morning, and we’ll start building.”
“That’s good. That’s right.”
But Millie said, softly, “I need a bridge of some kind myself. I don’t know what to do with myself right now.”
“Don’t worry,” Sister Thomas said. “We can help with that. In this family, we always find plenty of bridges. And you’re part of the family. Do you understand that?”
Millie was losing control again, and Bobbi took her in her arms. But Sister Thomas walked to the cupboard and said, “Girls, now come on. I need help figuring out what I’m going to . . .”
But she couldn’t do it. She broke down.
President Thomas walked to her and took her in his arms. “It’s okay,” he said. “Grandpa took one day. Let’s have a family prayer now. We need to pray for the other boys.”
Bobbi was happy to do that, and the prayer helped. She felt some of the comfort President McKay had spoken of, and, as he had advised, she tried not to think too much. She knew she had to let the Spirit touch her heart and heal it, a little at a time.
***
Alex’s leg was healing very well. The first two weeks, when he couldn’t get out of bed, had been bad. He had had way too much time to think. But he was walking every day now, and he was working hard to control what he told himself about the war. He wasn’t sure what it might be like to go into battle the way the Book of Mormon prophets had—to feel spiritual and warlike at the same time. Maybe he could never manage something like that. But Margaret had told him she was glad he hadn’t liked the killing, and he tried to find some comfort in that. Over and over he asked himself, did he believe in this war or not? The answer was that he did. He had done what he had to do, and he couldn’t go through life blaming himself.
But that didn’t stop the dreams. Almost every night he awoke, sweating and in a panic, his mind full of bloody pictures. And in the daytime, little flashes of memory would suddenly take his breath away. What he felt ran much deeper than what he was telling himself, and he knew it, but he also knew that he would be going back, and so he had to be under control.
He finally got a letter from his parents, and they seemed to be holding up all right—also doing their best to keep their emotions from defeating them—but he wished he could go home, at least for a while. It was where he should be, and yet, one more thing he had no control over. He wrote a long letter to his family, assured them that he was all right, and he said a lot of brave things about accepting Gene’s loss. But even as he wrote the words, he wasn’t sure what was from his heart and what was only to satisfy expectations.
And so he walked as much as he could, sat up and read to keep his mind busy, and he dreaded the nights. He agreed to take pain medication, mainly so he could sleep, but that only lasted so long each night, and then he usually waited, wide awake, for morning. He thought a lot about Gene. A great hole had been cut into his heart, gouged out like the slice in his leg, and both scars would always be there. He felt cheated, as much as anything, because he and Gene had never gotten to know each other as adults. The two had been separated just as Gene was coming into his own as a young man.
Alex was lying in bed one afternoon in early July. More men were arriving from the front all the time, and the hospital was filling up. Two extra beds had been crowded into his ward, but he still felt distant from the others. The new man next to Alex now was in bad shape. He had been hit by mortar shrapnel, and his body had been torn to shreds. He was medicated heavily and slept most of the time. Margaret had told Alex that the man was likely to survive, but she didn’t think he would ever walk.
Around the room, with ten beds crowded together, there was usually quite a bit of talk, but Alex was at the far west end of the room, and he said very little. At the moment, he was enjoying the afternoon sun. The weather was overcast so much of the time, and so he was happy for the brightness today. He was looking toward the window, seeing the tops of a row of trees—huge, spreading oaks, like the live oaks he had seen in Georgia—and beyond, a little green hill. He thought of going outside, but he had already walked enough that day, and his leg was hurting.
When Margaret came into the ward, Alex paid little attention until she walked to his bed. “Alex, my boy, I have a surprise for you. I know it’s a bit too good to be true, so I thought I might warn you just a little. It’s that wonderful.”
Alex tried to think what she was talking about. “I can deal with it,” he said, smiling.
“Look toward the door,” Margaret said.
Alex saw a young woman walking toward him, and then his body jerked as he realized whom he was seeing. “Anna,” he whispered, but he still didn’t believe it. Any second he was sure his vision would clear, and it would only be some pretty English girl Margaret had brought to visit him.
But it was Anna, and now she was hurrying to him.
She stopped at the foot of his bed, and the two simply stared at each other. Alex hardly knew what to do, but his first thought was that she was twice as lovely as he had remembered. She was older now, a woman. She was crying, and her huge blue eyes were magnified by the tears.
“How . . . ?” Alex could only think to say.
But she answered in German. “We escaped into Switzerland,” she said. “And then to France.”
He hardly heard her, could still not comprehend that this could be true. He reached his hand out to her, and she came around the bed and took hold of it. They continued to look at each other, but it was like trying to look into the sun, almost too much for Alex.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Alex said, and then he remembered to speak in German. “I’m almost healed.”
He was pulling her closer now, unsure of himself but needing so much to hold her. He kept looking into her eyes, and now her face was directly over his. She bent a little more, and their lips were almost touching. He had never kissed her, never been this close to her, but he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, and he felt the wonderful softness of her lips. Then he held her next to him, and he tried to believe that anything this exquisite could actually be real.
He finally realized that the men in the room were cheering and clapping, and he was suddenly embarrassed.
“Hey, Thomas,” someone yelled. “How about sharing the goodies?”
Alex didn’t answer, but Margaret said, “You boys be careful what you say. This is his betrothed.”
Alex let Anna go, and she stood up straight, but she took hold of his hand again. “I know about your brother,” she said. “I wrote to your parents to find out where you were. They wrote to me and told me what happened.”
“Where are your parents?”
“In London.”
“Are they all right?”
“Yes. But something terrible happened. We got split up, and Peter didn’t make it across. We don’t know what happened to him. People in the French Resistance have gone into Switzerland, but they can’t find him. Papa thought it was safest to get us all to London. But Papa wants to go back to Switzerland as soon as he can, so he can search.”
“How can your father get there?”
“It’s not so difficult to travel across southern France now. The German military has its hands full trying to fight the Allies.”
“Are your parents holding up all right?”
“Not really. They’re very worried. But we thought people here in England might hate us, and they have been very kind. Once they find out we had to flee the Gestapo, they consider us their friends.”
Alex needed to talk to her about so many things. He hardly knew where to start, but that kiss was still lingering on his lips, and he wanted more than anything to hold her again. She seemed to know that, and she bent over
him. He took her in his arms.
“I didn’t know whether I could ever be happy again,” he said.
He felt her body shake as she began to sob, and he felt the warmth of her tears on his neck. “I know,” she said. “It’s what I thought so many times.”
Chapter 32
Wally had been through a lot lately. All during his imprisonment, he had watched men die of dysentery, but he had worked hard to keep himself and his utensils clean, and he was pleased that except for his time in the jungles of Tayabas, he had remained relatively free of illness. But in the spring of 1944 he had fallen ill, and the Japanese had sent him to the sick barracks, a place very few men ever returned from.
Wally had come close to dying, but Chuck and Art, along with Don Cluff, had stuck with him, sneaked extra rice in, encouraged him to hang on. His friends never admitted it, but Wally knew they were giving up some of their own food rations, no matter how little they received themselves. “I’m getting a few vegetables in me—out in the garden,” Chuck told Wally. “I’m healthy as a horse. You need to eat this.”
Wally’s friends fed him at times when he was too sick to lift his head, and Wally gradually got enough strength back to return to his own barracks. He was disheartened to find that someone had taken advantage of his illness and stolen his boots, but when he discovered one of the healthy American cooks wearing them, he was too weak to do anything about it. “Prove they’re yours, skinny,” the man had told him, and Wally had had to turn and walk away.
But Wally gradually began to work again, and he got a turnip or a leek to eat once in a while. The vitamins seemed to help. He was starting to feel fairly strong again when rumors began to circulate that some of the men were going to be shipped to Japan. Most prisoners believed that conditions would be better there. Speculation also had it that the Japanese were losing the war and that the prison camp would soon be liberated, but that was actually a frightening prospect. It could possibly mean freedom, but on the other hand, the guards had often threatened to kill all the prisoners if the camp were attacked, and everyone believed they might actually do it.
Wally wondered whether he should volunteer to join the group going to Japan, and he and Chuck spent hours talking about it, but in the end, it hadn’t mattered. The Japanese were taking five hundred men, and anyone who was moderately healthy was chosen. No one knew exactly what life would be like there, but it was a change, both frightening and promising, and Wally liked the idea that the next year wouldn’t be another one exactly like the last two.
The trip to board the ship was like others that Wally had taken. He was marched with the rest of the men into the town of Cabanatuaan, where they were jammed into boxcars, and then, in the miserable heat, with no water or sanitation, they were hauled to Manila. There, they were marched through the streets to Bilibid prison, a place Wally remembered all too well. He saw living-dead prisoners, who were supposedly being cared for but most of whom would surely die. What he learned was that the medical personnel had been shipped out, and prisoners in Bilibid were being starved to death.
That night, in the prison, Wally asked around to see whether anyone knew anything about his friend Alan. No one there knew the name, but some told him that not many men had survived the work detail Alan had been with. Wally felt that if anyone had, it would have been Alan. He hoped maybe he would see him again in Japan, or at least after the war. But in truth he feared the worst, and anger boiled up in him as he thought how Alan must have been treated.
The next day a group of another five hundred men arrived from a prison camp on the island of Mindanao. Wally recognized some of the men who were from his old squadron, and he took some pleasure swapping stories about the days before the war. But he also learned, to his sadness, that many of his old friends were now dead. Lieutenant Dark, for one, had gone out on a work detail and never come back. And Harvey Opdyke—big old Harvey—had dwindled down to a skeleton before he had died of malnutrition and disease.
After a few days, all one thousand of the men were marched from Bilibid and through the streets of Manila. A lot of Filipinos lined up to watch the “parade,” and some of them laughed and made fun of the grimy prisoners. But others signaled their support. At the pier, the prisoners waited for hours, without food, before being loaded on an old relic of a coal-burning ship. Word was that it was a Canadian vessel, captured and taken over by the Japanese.
Once on board, the men were divided into two equal groups and sent down into the two holds of the ship. There was simply not room for everyone, and the men were crowded close together without enough space for everyone to sit down. Then the guards threw a tarp over the hold, and that only held in the heat and cut off the air. The men were smashed together in the dark, and within a short time the hold was stifling, the smell disgusting, the air so stagnant it was hard to breathe. There were no sanitation facilities until the guards threw down a few five-gallon cans, but with so many men these were almost impossible to get to. All this time, the men received nothing to eat or drink.
The first night was hellish, but finally, toward morning, the vibration of the engines started, and the ship began to move. At least they were underway—or so the men thought. They soon learned they had only been moved out into the bay, where the ship had anchored. All day the prisoners suffered with the heat and the crowding. Wally found himself breaking out with a burning rash. But when the men screamed for air, the guards told them to be quiet or they would receive no food.
The prisoners did get a little rice to eat that day, but when night came the ship was still anchored in the bay. Wally had seen so much in his years of captivity that he thought nothing could test him any further, but conditions had seemed almost human at times at Cabanatuaan, and he had gotten used to that. He had been hopeful that a change might bring something better, but now he knew that this trip, however long it might take, would certainly be the end for many of these men. Another few days like this, and the weaker ones would begin to die.
That night the engines started again, and the ship actually seemed to be heading out of the bay, but in the morning the prisoners learned that the ship had turned around and come back. No one knew why. At least the guards pulled the canvas back and allowed some air into the hold. In fact, groups of prisoners were allowed to go out on the deck, a few at a time, and have a smoke or at least breathe the sea air.
But now a routine set in. Every night the ship would start out, sail out of the bay, then turn back and anchor near Corregidor. Occasionally the guards would throw the tarp back, but most of the time the men were covered over and had to live with the stench and unbearable heat. Fleas and body lice thrived in this atmosphere, and Wally and the others were bitten all over. Two weeks passed that way, and still the ship was in Manila Bay. Some of the men believed that American ships were patrolling the area and the Japanese kept turning back to avoid them, but no one knew that for certain.
Wally stayed with Chuck and Art and Don. They stood up much of the time, to rest their backs and relieve the crowding a little. They talked part of the time, when their energy was up, and tried to distract themselves from all the agony. They told and retold stories of high school days in Salt Lake, and Don related more of his own background. He had grown up in a small town in southern Illinois where his wife and two daughters still lived. He had farmed, as a boy, and the service, as much as anything, had been his escape from that life. Now, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad. “Every day I tell myself I’ve gotta get back to my wife and my little girls,” he told his friends. “That’s what keeps me going.”
“For me,” Wally said, “it’s the hope I can have a wife and kids.”
“So what do you think has happened to Lorraine Gardner by now?” Chuck asked.
“I’m sure she’s married,” Wally said. He looked away.
“What happened between you two?” Art asked him.
“She got tired of me, and I don’t blame her. I wasn’t doing anything with my life. I was flunking out at the U.” Wa
lly was leaning against a bulkhead. His legs were aching from all the standing. His only clothes were a threadbare pair of shorts and a tattered khaki shirt. He was barefoot and he was hungry, as always, but it was such a normal feeling that he didn’t think much about it.
“I always thought you were pretty smart,” Chuck said. “How come you didn’t do any better in school?”
It was all so far back—so little a part of who he was now. “I don’t know, Chuck. Things seemed important then that don’t matter to me now. I always felt like my father was pressuring me, so I thought I had to show my independence—or something like that. The truth is, I was lazy, more than anything.”
“What are you going to do when you get home?”
“I’ll go back to college, I’m sure. I’ll do better this time. If nothing else, the Japs have taught me some discipline.”
“It’s good to know we have something to thank them for,” Chuck said, and he laughed. “But don’t you hope Lorraine’s not married?”
“Sure. And I think she’d really go for a good-looking guy like me. I’m slender, have good bones—that you can see—and a heck of a nice beard.” Wally rubbed his hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved since leaving Cabanatuaan, almost three weeks before. “This haircut is nice too.” He ran his fingers through his stringy hair.
But Wally found himself pushed toward a favorite fantasy. When all this was over, he would get a chance to eat all the food he wanted. He would eat meals of roast beef, potatoes and gravy, big glasses of milk, and all the pie he wanted. And then he would be shipped home, and he would learn that Lorraine had been waiting for him all along. She would look exactly the same. In fact, on the day he would finally see her, he would walk toward her front door, and she would be standing on her porch wearing that light blue dress with the polka-dots, the one she had been wearing the day he had told her good-bye. She would stand there in the sunset, looking the same as she had then, but when she recognized Wally, she would race down the sidewalk and throw her arms around him.
