A Troubled Peace (2 page)

O
utside the air felt like ice water in his chest. Henry sucked it in, little needles of pain jabbing him awake and clearing his storm-swept mind. He exhaled a thick mist of breath, haloing himself in the moonlight. Behind him his shadow stretched along the frost-slicked grass. Henry smiled. Over in France, on the run with the Resistance, he had hated such clear, starry nights. Back then, his shadow had been a traitorous enemy in bright moonlight, betraying his presence to German sentries. He'd darted from tree to tree to mask his telltale companion, each dash a heart-pounding risk.

But this night on his Tidewater farm, Henry beckoned his shadow as a friend to accompany him and Speed. Once past the chicken houses and into the back fields, he even dared to whistle. Speed trotted along beside him, making
all sorts of happy dog noises, snorting and sneezing as he sniffed along the shimmering, crackly ground.

Henry laughed.
See, fool. No Nazis here. Stop being such a birdbrain.

His whistling turned to humming and then to singing, almost shouting:
“You've got to aaaac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, eeeeee-liminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In-between…”

Henry tried a few swing shuffles as he sang, imagining the jazzed-up big band sounds of Johnny Mercer's anthem of positive thinking. Speed barked and hopped up and down, nipping at Henry's pants. The two skipped and played, until they tripped over each other and fell into a heap of puppy and boy. Speed slobbered kisses on Henry's face. Henry halfheartedly pushed him away. “Aw, come on, pal, I'm not a kid anymore.”

But it was the cold—not decorum—that made Henry jump to his feet. He popped up the fleecy collar of his new flight jacket, to cover his ears. “Darn, Speed. I didn't realize it was this cold again.” It'd been wildly warm the week before, hitting ninety degrees one day. While Lilly and Henry happily stood in the sunshine in short sleeves, Clayton had flown into a streak of curses about the fruit trees blooming when it was sure to frost again, killing off their apples.

Clayton was even more cantankerous these days.
Despite the economic boom that had come to Richmond because of war ammunition production and new army facilities, times remained tough for farmers. With gas rationed to just three gallons a week, Clayton couldn't run his tractor and had hitched mules to his plow and wagons. A pair of the obstinate creatures cost him $800—a fortune—and one of them had kicked him good in the leg. Henry figured the only reason Clayton hadn't shot the mule on the spot was the fact that shotgun shells were nearly impossible to buy, rationed along with shoes, tires, butter, and meat.

Using mules had slowed Clayton's work. So had Henry's absence. But Clayton had refused to use German POWs that Camp Peary hired out to local farms and pulp mills. Several Richmond farmers had had most of their peaches ruined when the prisoners picked them well enough but then scratched swastikas into the skin as they packed them for shipping.

Henry had laughed when Clayton had told him that story. He couldn't help it—the gesture of carving swastikas into peaches was so ridiculous. Was that what the war would come to—blind, numb loyalty? In Europe such unquestioning obedience to Hitler would mean a lot more than ruined peaches. It would cost thousands of lives—like the huge casualties in the Battle of the Bulge when the Nazis had stubbornly regrouped in the Ardennes Forest,
after being chased across France by Eisenhower's D-day army.

Now Allied leaders were responding to Hitler's unyielding stance with their own brutality, desperate to hasten the war's end. To cripple Hitler's railways and ability to transport supplies and troops, British and American planes bombed cities like Dresden, not just military targets near it. The newspapers weren't real forthcoming about it, but reading in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
that they'd dropped incendiary bombs filled with phosphorous, Henry knew what “Operation Thunderclap” meant for the civilians down below, the children playing under a war-torn sky.

The firestorm sparked by the phosphorous raged for days across miles of city blocks and created temperatures hot enough to suck people into the flames. The thought of it made Henry want to vomit. God help the crews who had dropped those bombs. Yes, their mission had saved countless American foot soldiers battling their way toward Berlin. But following orders only went so far against the morality of an airman's nightmares once he returned to base and had time to reflect on what he had done.

Henry pushed himself to walk on, marching on a reconnaissance for forgetfulness. Speed silently padded behind him, sensing Henry's tumult, cautious as when Clayton took him on a bird hunt.

But Henry's brooding thoughts kept pace with him.
What about that kind old German sergeant who was supposed to have shot him dead and instead let him go? Would he have shown such pity and generosity to an American boy only to be roasted in an Allied bombing? After her capture, would anyone have been merciful to Madame Gaulloise, the aristocratic woman who got him safely out of Switzerland? And what about Claudette, the beautiful angry Resistant from the Morvan, whose thirst for vengeance would have landed her right in front of retreating Nazi tanks, shaking her fist and harassing them in her rapid-fire French. Would they have just run over her?

The thoughts buzzed around him. He started to run, to flee their attack, but the faces followed, dive-bombing him like Messerschmitts. The image he feared most seeing, couldn't stand thinking about, not knowing, was of Pierre, the solemn little boy who had sheltered him, fed him, taught him, and lost everything—his mother, his grandfather, his farm—because of Henry's presence.

Henry sprinted, stumbling over stones and knee-high meadow grasses, flailing at images only he could see. Henry had left Pierre with a priest when his mother had been dragged away by the French Gestapo, the Milice. Left him with nothing but Henry's good-luck marble. What kind of protection would that be against an enraged, blood-soaked world?

“It's my favorite marble.
Mon favori.
I want you to have it.
That way I'll always be with you.
Henri avec Pierre.”

“Pour toujours?”
the small boy had whispered.

“Yes, always. Wherever I go, I remain with you.”

 

Henry fell to his knees, heaving from his run and his guilt about what his escape had cost Pierre, and about leaving him behind. He couldn't have taken Pierre with him, not on the almost suicidal run he'd had to make. He knew that. But was Pierre all right? Had the priest really taken him to a monastery for safety? Had he avoided the Nazi attack on Vassieux that came after Henry fled? Could his mother have survived the Ravensbruck prison the Milice sent her to?

France was in complete upheaval, trying to piece itself back together as Allied forces and retreating Nazis cut a path of destruction across it. Complete victory in Europe was still battles and months away. There was no way to know the answers to any of the questions that hounded him.

Stop thinking!
Henry felt as though he was going mad. Patsy was right. He
was
frightening. He frightened himself. He had no idea what memories might grab him by the throat next, or what he might do in response.

God help me.
Henry looked up to the stars. Slowly, his panic eased. There, he thought, look how far a soul can stretch. Look at all that black, quiet serenity. Where up
there, behind which star did God sit? Could God see the hell on his earth, the barbarity his creations were capable of? Did he weep to see it? How could he not do something to stop it?

No answers came. But out of the darkness of Henry's mind crept the words of “High Flight,” a poem that had kept him both grounded and inspired during his combat months, a long-ago faith of his own:

Henry leaped to his feet. That's right. He could fly. In the sky, he could touch God. Salvation was there.

Henry knew exactly where to find a plane that could take him.

O
ld Man Newcomb's place.

Henry lit out across the fields. Newcomb had a Curtiss Jenny, a gorgeous, open-cockpit, WWI biplane—a real gem, since most had been junked long ago. He used it for barnstorming and wing walking. As a boy, Henry had watched Newcomb do daredevil loop-de-loops, whooping and hollering, for the local air circus. The wild-eyed pilot had even taken him up a few times, trying to convince Henry to do wing stunts. It was on those windswept jaunts, in that kite-like machine, that Henry first felt the rush of flight.

In Newcomb's Jenny, he'd leave his nightmares in the dust. It would be real flying, nothing between Henry and the clouds, just a big-ass engine and some fabric-covered wings. No bombs, no flak, no fighters, no worries.

When he saw its brass radiator gleam in the moonlight,
Henry didn't even consider knocking on Newcomb's door. War and living on the run had erased the habit of asking permission. He was going up. Now.

Henry stood on tiptoes to peer at the old-fashioned dial gauges on the control panel. Everything looked fine. He fished around for goggles, finding the long white scarf Newcomb always wore like a flying ace. Like a knight of the skies, thought Henry, as he wrapped it around his throat, his heart filling with the romance, the mystique flying had once had for him.

Then he noticed a tank and a spray boom crammed into the backseat. Newcomb was using the Jenny for crop dusting. Despite his reputation for brewing stump liquor, the old man was getting almost respectable. Last summer, during a polio outbreak, authorities had even trusted Newcomb to fly over the city of Richmond, dumping DDT, an insecticide that killed flies carrying the crippling disease.

But on this night, Henry wasn't interested in respectable. He couldn't stand the idea of anything being dropped out of a plane he was flying. This night was about freedom. This night was about baptism—washing himself clean of death and regrets and disappointment and fear, then beginning life reborn, redefined. This was about the “long, delirious, burning blue…the high, untrespassed sanctity of space.” Henry heaved the tank out of the plane,
laughing wildly when it hit the ground and cracked, releasing a stream of stench.

A jug of moonshine whiskey sat next to the Jenny's wheels. Newcomb was obviously using it to prime the engine. Henry poured the liquid into the engine's little brass cups on the intake manifolds and shut their levers. He rotated the Jenny's thick, wooden propeller five times to suck in the alcohol. Next he'd have to swing the heavy prop hard enough to spark a jump start and pop the engine into running.

Henry threw himself on it. One swing. A cough and sputter.

Another shove. A rattle and die-off.

A third. Nothing at all.

Henry still weighed next to nothing, starved as he'd been on the run in France. He chugged some of the jug's bitter, rancid booze. Feeling it knife through him, Henry hurled his whole being against the prop.

This time it caught and whipped around, nearly whacking Henry as it sped into a whir. The engine spit smoke and the little plane shimmied all over. The delicate cables connecting its two wings hummed, beckoning.

Henry kissed the yellow-painted fuselage, pulled out the wheel chocks, and scrambled into the bucket seat as the Jenny rolled along the grass. He was vaguely aware of Speed barking along behind him, then the sound of
another dog howling. He paid no attention.

Henry opened the throttle. He braced his feet against the wooden bar that controlled the tail rudder, wrapped his hands around the long, thin wooden control stick, and pulled.

Bounce, bounce, bounce
. The Jenny hopped happily along the ground like a child skipping, so light, so carefree, so different from his B-24, heavy with menace and five-hundred-pound bombs. Each hop lifted the Jenny a little higher for a little longer, until it finally vaulted up over the walnut grove at the field's edge, its wheels brushing the barren treetops with a musical
swish
. Air rushed through the plane's spiderweb of struts and wires, vibrating them like wind chimes.

Henry's soul rang with a long-forgotten joy. He shouted lyrics to a new hit: “I haven't felt like this, my dear, since I can't remember when. It's been a long, long time.”

Between that and the steady seep of Newcomb's whiskey into his thinking, it didn't occur to Henry that he was stealing a plane. And he didn't hear the shotgun blasts below.

 

C'mon, girl. Give me some speed.
Henry closed his eyes and held his face up to the winds.
C'mon, a little faster. That's it.

The Jenny putt-puttered up to its maximum 75 mph, nothing like his B-24's 180 mph, but good enough to smack
Henry's face with a bracing current. He dipped his right wing and skimmed around in a full circle, then tilted left to arc the opposite way in a figure eight, as gracefully as an ice-skater, sliding his way across a vast lake of air.

Henry looked toward the stars that pinpricked the black sky. The Milky Way was so clear, so thick with shimmering lights, it looked like a runway laid out for him.
There, girl. He pointed. That'll take us. It's got to be a pathway to heaven. Let's go chase some angels.

He pushed the throttle's control knob to open it more and pulled back gently on the control stick to tip the plane's nose up into a climb angle. The little Jenny began to tremble. But she dutifully inched higher, about 200 feet per minute.

“I've chased the shouting wind along…,” Henry recited. He chortled to himself, his laugh catching in a hiccup of overwrought, tangled emotions—relief, regret, hope.

Come on, sweetheart. Old Man Newcomb said you could reach 6,500 feet
. He pulled the stick back a little harder.

The Jenny shook.

Darn it, girl. I'm on a mission, here.
Henry's words were slurring.
Don't quit on me now. If I can just get a little higher.

The Jenny quaked.

C'mon!

The engine belched, gagged, then suddenly silenced.
The Jenny's nose dropped and she began to drift earthward, gliding on air. Newcomb did this kind of stunt all the time for the air show. It was like she knew exactly what to do.

For a few long, glorious moments, Henry just grinned and listened to the quiet, waiting to hear a voice—God's voice, any voice of salvation. But when the hum of the struts turned to a shrieking whistle and the wind rushed so fast along his face that it felt like scraping along gravel, Henry realized that he was plummeting. The Jenny could go into a spin. Henry could die.

He didn't care.

It might be better to go this way—quick, in flight, not pulled down and picked apart by his own mind. He sat still a little longer.

Look at that, girl. Dawn's coming.
There was the slightest glow of pink along the horizon. He watched it slip along the flat terrain below, tickling the edges of a farm. With the dispassion of a traveler passing through, Henry recognized the layout of his own home.

The Jenny kept falling.

Then a voice did come:
Pull out of this stall, lieutenant. Now, Hank!

Captain Dan?
Henry sat up straight, battle-ready.
Captain, where are you?

The vision of Dan, wounded, drifting to safety in his
parachute only to be strafed by a Messerschmitt, slapped Henry to attention.
NOOOOOO!
His scream sliced through the silent sky.

Henry grabbed hold of the control stick and pushed forward to regain speed and control of the plane.

The little Jenny bucked, caught some wind, lifted, floated, dipped again, surfaced again. Henry struggled against the flood-water-strong pressure on the foot bar controlling the rudder. The Jenny fishtailed back and forth grotesquely, careening downward toward Clayton's chicken houses. Henry shoved the control stick to bank away, almost flipping the Jenny into a roll. But he righted her and lowered her, and for a few seconds, he had her on the ground, rolling along, soft and smooth.

“Yes, ma'am!” Henry cheered.

But the Jenny had no brakes, and the tailskid wasn't slowing her enough. Henry was fast coming face-to-face with the tree line separating his farm from Patsy's. There was no way to stop. Before he could react, he slammed into it. A wing caught a low-hanging branch; the struts twanged and snapped, and the Jenny tumbled about wildly.

Henry cracked his head against the instruments. The world went black.