The Magic of Ordinary Days (33 page)

But my lips were too cold to form words.

Ray gestured toward the radio, then stared at me. “I heard the news.” Now he shook his head. “I couldn't find you anywhere. Why were you out in this storm? You could have froze to death.”

As we stood in silence, finally warmth began to work its way back into my bloodstream. I looked out the window at heavier snow than I'd seen in years. I caught my reflection in the glass and saw a polar cap encrusting my hair. Now the snow was beginning to melt and drop big clumps of slush onto the floor.

I turned back to Ray and said, “I promise I'm not this crazy.”

He took my arms. “Do you have something to tell me?”

With the storm screeching and swirling outside, Ray and I swam together in a calm sea. It's a difficult thing to do, once you've been deceived. But my time was now.

“His name was Edward,” I said aloud. “He was a lieutenant from the Mountain Division. I let him sweep me away. He said he loved me, and after one night together, he disappeared.”

Ray was looking over every inch of my face. In his eyes, I didn't see pity. Instead, in the colored strands of his eyes, I saw the soft seeds of something like hope. Finally, he asked, “Do you still love him?”

I stood still. “Is that what it was? Love?”

He blinked. “You got to answer that question.”

Now I could feel blood making its way back into the skin of my face. “It wasn't love, even though at the time I thought so. And maybe it no longer matters.”

I looked over his windburned face, those cracks in his lips that now I realized I wanted to smooth away with my own. Melting globs of snow continued to fall out of my hair, but I no longer cared how ridiculous or pitiful I looked.

“What does matter to you?” he asked.

In the past, I would've listed things such as common interests, mutual attraction, worldliness, and higher education. My freedom above all else. If I had found love, it would have had to be the kind that overwhelmed and overpowered all else.

I passed a hand between Ray and me. “Once you told me that this,” I said, “is a beginning.” I searched his face. “But how do you know, Ray? How do you know it's the beginning of something good?”

“I know.” His breath was warm on my face as he moved in closer. “Because someday, you're bound to forgive yourself.”

Thirty-four

In the safety of our house and the warmth of our bed, I got to know the fullness of Ray's lips on my face and the taste of his skin, the soft bend of his ear and the touch of his breath on my shoulder. I discovered the silky strands of hair at the base of his head and the feel of his shoulder blades beneath my outstretched hands. I discovered just how far around my arms could encircle his back. He touched me as if I were the curved and delicate handle of a china cup, but he held me tightly just as I was, flesh and blood and full of human flaws and fears. In his arms, I wasn't a girl dreaming of sailing the high seas, and I wasn't a farm kid jumping the train, either, but a fully grown woman riding the soft side of a crescent moon.

As we lay together under the covers, I told him, “I drove them into New Mexico, but I didn't know those men were German prisoners.”

He smoothed away wisps of hair on my forehead. “I know you didn't.”

And then, in his arms, I cried for Rose and Lorelei.

Under clearing skies the next morning, I listened to the news report. In Washington, the Cabinet had just announced an end to the exclusion and detention of Japanese citizens. The concentration camps had been deemed by legal resources to be against the law. Public Proclamation 21 outlawed the holding of loyal U.S. citizens of any ancestry; therefore the Japanese American evacuees would be allowed to leave the camps with their personal belongings, twenty-five dollars, and train fare.

After I listened to the report, I took that old hound dog Franklin galloping out into the fields covered in deep, flat snow. Before me, V-shaped animal tracks nicked across acres of topcrust, but I took the first human steps, each one sinking me lower into the soles of remembrance. Snow now covered all the dust lost from all the other butterfly wings, all the shining human details from the previous green seasons, those from the past season and those from many other seasons before mine, too.

As the sun faithfully opened its bright bald eye, visions of the place where Rose and Lorelei might be at that moment, somewhere behind bars, sent me pain I couldn't bear. I had to refuse thoughts of them in that level of confinement. The camp they had been forced to endure had been bad enough. Instead, I would remember them as I chose to, walking the green fields, searching the canyon for butterflies, and laughing in unison.

When Franklin and I returned to the house, I saw that the Otero County sheriff had made his way down the roads behind a snowplow to our farm. Ray and I sat with him at the table while he questioned me about the part I had played in aiding the POWs' escape. I told every ounce the truth, although I didn't altogether admire the way it rang in my ears. After the sheriff satisfied himself that I had known nothing of the men's identities, he sat longer than I would have liked, slurping on coffee and chatting on with Ray about the aftereffects of the storm.

I couldn't listen to them casually converse about the weather, or anything else, for that matter, when the future of two valuable lives had so recently been forfeited. I knew what would happen next. Rose and Lorelei would be painted in the newspapers and on the radio as traitors by people who'd never met them, by people who could never understand what torments and desires had driven them to their sad, ill-fated decision.

Instead, I found my eyes drawn to the window outside, to that square of blue sky, where I could see white shafts of sunlight reaching down to earth, the fingers of God telling me that we could survive it. In only a few hours after the sheriff drove off, the news came out. I was portrayed as the innocent victim, the new-comer who'd befriended the wrong people, and who'd been duped into providing transportation after the escape.

By dinnertime, solace arrived in the form of Reverend Case and Martha on our doorstep. I hadn't spoken privately with the reverend since my arrival here, and the sight of that kind face gave me a sense of hope that someday these wrongs would be analyzed and prevented in the future. In church, he spoke so eloquently of forgiveness, so perhaps someday this country would give apologies for wrongs committed under extraordinary circumstances. And would the world ever count Rose and Lorelei among the casualties of the war? Perhaps someday they could be forgiven for their mistake, too.

“Olivia, dear,” he said as he took my hand. “I came to see if you and Ray are in need of prayer.”

Martha brought in fried chicken and roasted potatoes, and of course dessert. We sat together and shared a plate of consolation at the table. In this farmland I have come to call home, food is seen as a sure cure for just about anything that ails you. People shovel in piled-high plates of heavy meats and casseroles, salads and desserts, even during the most trying of times.

After we finished eating, I stacked the plates in the sink, and Reverend Case readied himself to begin our prayers. We sat around the table, Ray, Martha, Reverend Case, and I, with hands clasped together. Speaking softly, Reverend Case began praying to God, asking Him to help me to weather this storm.

I stopped him in midsentence. “Please.”

I don't think anyone had ever interrupted Reverend Case in prayer before. The dear man's eyes couldn't hide his surprise and concern.

I told him, “I don't desire prayer for me, personally.” Because I hadn't paid such a high price after all. When I'd headed out here on my wedding day, I hadn't realized I'd bought a ticket to my own history, a different one from studying Akh-en-aten and Horizon-of-the-Aten, maybe, but a living, ongoing one. I pictured Daniel, all the other dead soldiers and civilians, and prisoners all over the world. “Couldn't we pray for those who have paid with their lives?”

Reverend Case prayed as I had requested, then he and Martha stayed for coffee before heading out. “We have congregation members and others out there without adequate heat,” he explained. I hadn't realized that others around me were going cold. Before he and Martha left us, I gathered up our extra quilts and carried them out to the car.

“Careful,” he said to me as I peered over the load and made my way down the porch steps.

“You sound just like Ray,” I told him.

Reverend Case looked pleased with himself. “You two seem to be getting along mighty well.”

I placed the quilts in his trunk, then turned back into the sunlight. I was open, exposed, without intending to be. “I love him,” I said to Reverend Case. Then I turned to Martha. “I love your brother.”

On the plains, people rarely speak openly of their feelings, especially of one so personal as love between husband and wife. Reverend Case raised his eyebrows for a second, then he smiled and said, “I'm so happy for the both of you.”

But Martha didn't respond with words. Instead she walked up, kissed me on the cheek, and turned toward the car door in a waltzlike move. In all the years I've come to know Martha, I've never heard her talk of such personal feelings as I'd just done. It seems that certain lines of privacy aren't often crossed in a land where physical distance keeps people independent by necessity and by choice.

This land of distances, this land of buffalo grass, locoweed, crops, and churches, became my home. Change comes to these farmlands slowly. Harvest time is still the best season, everyone still talks endlessly about the weather, and contrary to what Ray once told me, he has always been kind.

One afternoon the following August, I took the baby, whom we named Daniel, outside on the porch and left him to nap in his bassinet while I worked in the flower garden. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had just exploded onto the pages of history, V-J Day had passed, and negotiations over the terms of Japan's surrender were under way. Earlier in the year, before the war's end, Camp Amache had been closed. Finally, the shadows had begun to fall on the most deadly war in human history, and on the Singleton farm, the tall Shasta daisies and black-eyed Susans in my garden nodded their heads and scraped against each other's arms as a warm prairie wind blew in ever so gently. The whirligigs that once belonged to Ray's mother, which I had repainted in red, white, and blue, stood above the flowers, and her collection of stones scattered out among waxy geranium stems.

Earlier that morning, I'd pulled weeds that had taken root and wrapped themselves around the flower stems. As Daniel slept nearby on the porch, I stood out in the sunlight, looking for any remaining weeds and examining this flower garden that would most certainly have pleased my mother.

One small yellow butterfly floated in and landed on a daisy petal. I didn't know the name of that species, but as I watched it open and close its wings, I thought how it reminded me of a single petal of a yellow rose.

Rose.

Then I watched as more came, until perhaps a dozen of the same kind of butterfly did a sunny swing over the flower heads and landed on their centers.

Lorelei.

I thanked the butterflies, as if they were responsible. Memories are fragile things to hold, but many times, it's what we have. The flowers grew for my mother, the whirligigs twirled for Ray‘s, and the butterflies came for the sisters—Rose and Lorelei, Abby and Bea, Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl—perhaps for all sisters everywhere.

I had never seen them again after the day we took that drive. Once I'd tried to visit them while they were being held in Denver awaiting trial, but they had refused me, probably out of shame. After their arrest, reporters and others had tried to ascribe all kinds of political and ideological reasons for what Rose and Lorelei had done. It was conjectured about and editorialized and discussed by the so-called experts, and many times during those days, I felt that I alone understood their reasons. Maybe the girls had at times questioned how much they owed to this country that had imprisoned them, yet it hadn't been nearly as complex as most people believed. They were simply two lonely, isolated women who fell in love and gave their trust away.

In their well-publicized trial, the German corporals testified against them, and the jury returned a guilty verdict to the reduced charge of obstructing justice. Rose and Lorelei each received a three-year prison sentence and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. After their release, I could only assume they returned to their home state of California.

The baby let out a cry. By the time I reached the bassinet, he was yelling, as if he'd awakened from a bad dream and found me missing.

“I'm here,” I said, then lifted him and held his face to my cheek. My love for him had come as a surprise to me. Once he had arrived in howling perfection, it had come swiftly, intensely.