Under the Same Blue Sky (33 page)

“You don’t understand. We have a sick child.”

“No, ma’am,
you
don’t understand. If you had the king of England, we couldn’t help him. This ’flu takes who it wants, when it wants.” He wiped his brow. “I’ve been filling caskets all day. Some of those men were at Verdun and lived; they survived four years of trenches, bombs, poison gas, mortar shells, forced marches, hunger, typhoid, dysentery, and trench mouth. They slept in freezing rain. They fought rats for food. They beat the Hun. Now they’re heading home, and some damn bug gets them. You tell me, is there a God up there?” He turned away. I grabbed his arm, yanking him back.

“What should I
do
? The child’s only three years old.”

Wavering like a drunk, the orderly took a breath. “Try to keep him alive. Every hour he lives, you have a better chance. Warm liquids. Keep him sitting up. Don’t bother with medicines—belladonna, camphor oil—none of them is worth a damn. Is there gurgling in the chest? Does he cough blood?”

“No. That’s good, right?”

“It’s not bad. When did the symptoms start?”

“Yesterday.”

“If he lives to morning, you’ve got a chance.”

“But—”

“Orderly!” someone called. He pulled his arm free and was gone.
I trudged to the canteen. With so many sick, the cook said, there was food to spare. I got baked beans, canned meat, a green mush of peas, squares of cheese, broth, and tea. Georg helped me make a table of sorts while David watched, panting. I pressed my ear to his chest. No gurgling. Yet.

“Georg,” I whispered in English, “I’m so frightened.”

“We survived, didn’t we? So it’s possible.” I nodded. Yes, we survived. But were we limp as rags? Were our bodies like fire? Did we pant like this? Did our eyes blaze red?

“Hazel, you do understand that a ship captain won’t take us if the child looks sick. So he’s got to seem healthy when we get to port. With luck, that’s tomorrow.” We must make a deathly sick child look well. Who could command that miracle? I pushed spoons of broth between David’s cracked lips and held him when he coughed. Georg and I divided the night into shifts; the next day would be long and we’d need our strength.

Near midnight, David’s fever spiked. He shrieked that his mother had come for him and tried to scramble from the car, biting me to get free. I wrestled him down and tied a blanket around the thrashing body. At dawn, we left camp. Limp, feverish, coughing, wheezing, aching, the whites of his eyes a terrible red, at least he’d survived the night.

Finally we reached Antwerp. In sight of the USS
Ulysses Grant,
Georg turned to David like an officer sending troops over the top. “Listen to me. You must look healthy when we board. You’ll wear a hat and keep your head down. You’ll walk on your own and you will not cough until we reach our cabin. Do you understand?” The red eyes widened. Georg held up his marksmanship medal. Sunlight flashed on the bronze. “This will be yours
if
you don’t cough.” David gulped and nodded.

Georg went to have a birth certificate made that listed David as our son. The cost was our Peugeot. “Everyone wants documents these
days, and there’s only one good forger left in Antwerp,” he reported. “But this will get him in the country.”

“Thank you, Georg.”

When he smiled, years flew off his face. “I never thought I’d have a son, even a counterfeit one.”

“Did Tom—could you—?”

“I telegraphed the Western Union office in Dogwood. They haven’t heard anything.”

“I see.”

We dressed David in the best of his ragged clothes. He coughed constantly. “Everything hurts,” he whimpered. At a ransacked pharmacy near port, I paid an exorbitant price for a vial of laudanum. “At least it’ll make him sleepy,” the druggist said.

Georg’s guise as shell-shocked soldier couldn’t last for days on shipboard. We’d say he’d been a civilian translator for Allied intelligence whose papers had been stolen. Discreet inquiries revealed that the captain was a weapons collector. Georg bought our passage with dollars, his pistol, and the Viking sword helm.

“Why’d you bring your family over?” the captain asked, fingering the pistol’s pearl-inlaid handle.

“I can’t reveal that,” Georg said stiffly. “Except that it concerned the war effort.”

“I see. Well, we board at 1600 hours.”

We dosed David with laudanum and angled a hat over his eyes. He walked silently up the gangplank, squeezing my hand. “The kid looks tired,” a sailor noted.

“Yes, very,” I said. “Could you point us to our cabin?” Tucked into a real bed at last and clutching the medal he’d won, David gave himself up to a spasm of coughs. I panicked. “The captain will hear him, and there’s no more laudanum.”

“The captain’s on deck. Once we’re at sea, the worst he can do is quarantine us. Don’t worry. I’ll find some dinner.” Georg left us in the cabin as I washed clothes and propped up David with pillows. I listened to his chest. Still no gurgling. We had a chance.

S
LOWLY THROUGH THE
night, David’s coughing eased. By morning he could take a bit of egg in broth. When sun broke out in the afternoon, we carried him on deck. I pointed to the glinting western rim of the ocean. “America’s over there.”

“Is Mama in America?”

“No, David. She’s not.”

“I’m tired. Can Bucephalus and I go back to bed?”

The fever passed by the second morning. He coughed less and less and ate more. Slowly a child emerged whom we hadn’t seen in our first, fraught days together. He roamed the ship, petted and spoiled by soldiers. A burly infantryman was brought near tears by the sight of David eating crackers. “Look how he holds them with two hands like a squirrel. Maybe you think I’m crazy, ma’am, but down in the trenches, so scared, tired and hopeless, death all around you, a man forgets what little kids are like. You forget there even
are
little kids somewhere eating crackers in peace.”

The soldiers fed him English words and phrases like candy, policing each other’s diction. David parroted them with grave care, he so eager to please, and they so eager to be pleased that the games lasted for hours. They taught him the rhyme of the bird named Enza and whooped when he belted out: “And in-flu-ENZA!”

I offered to translate but he wanted to learn another song from “my new uncles.” At night, slotted between us, he recited: “Knee bone kineckted tu di shinbone. Shinbone kineckted tu di—di—”

“Ankle bone,” I prompted.

“Ankle bone. Gud?”

“Yes, David, very good.”

Next came his version of the wildly popular soldiers’ ditty: “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning,” or rather the first line, before his English melted into “da, da, da,” which pleased him just as much. Moonlight from the portal window splashed Georg’s face, softened by delight. This must have been how Friedrich knew him.

Winter weather kept us below in the grandly termed “salon” with its battered card tables, board games, and rows of chairs. Each day, it held fewer men, for influenza had boarded with the soldiers. The infirmary filled quickly. As some died, others filled the empty beds. The captain had sworn not to bury America’s fighting men at sea; he’d bring the bodies home. Card games faltered when banging from the carpenter’s shop below signaled another coffin being made. “Where are my uncles?” David demanded.

“They’re working,” we said. “The captain keeps them busy.”

“It’s the Kaiser’s revenge for losing the war,” announced one soldier. “He sent sick men to the field camps disguised as Yanks.”

“Hell no,” scoffed another. “He used a germ bomb.”

Had influenza taken Dogwood? The ship’s wireless was not available for civilian use. We’d have to wait until we docked in New York.

And Tom? I found an exhausted Red Cross officer on a break in the salon and asked about the prison camps. Perhaps Tom was there. “They’re being emptied very quickly now,” the officer said. “All the Americans have been released. That’s one of the terms of the armistice. So if your friend’s alive, he should turn up. However, we did receive lists of prisoners during the war. Do you understand, Miss Renner, that many of the missing will never be found?”

I didn’t ask, as I’d asked on our last crossing, if the lists could be mistaken. A soldier named Butch came to my table. “He’s right, ma’am.
You have to understand how it was. Men got buried in bomb blasts. If one of ours died in enemy territory, he wouldn’t get reported, maybe never even found. Some just walked away.”

“And then?” Here was hope, just a shimmer.

“A man alone, probably shell-shocked, no provisions, pretty soon no bullets. It would take a miracle to last a day. And miracles are rare in wartime.” Butch nodded at David, who was struggling to follow our English. “You’ve got a cute kid here. That’s something.” Yes, the sweet curve of cheek, the melting eyes, the now-even breath, the small, square hand on my arm all were something. More than something. And yet, could Tom be alive, trying to come home?

CHAPTER 21

Christmas in Dogwood

S
teaming into New York Harbor on a windy morning in mid-December, we joined a throng of healthy men on deck waving down at a sea of jubilant, jumping and cheering men, women, and children. “This is America?” David asked in wonder. “So many people! Where do they live?” We pointed to skyscrapers in the distance, but they must have seemed like child’s blocks to him, stacked impossibly high.

Then came somber silence, for the captain had ordered that the wounded be brought off first. Those waiting on the dock drew back silently as a stream of orderlies carried out men on stretchers and helped others who were bandaged, limping, blind, or horribly twitching from shell shock. Finally the healthy could leave. Georg carried David down the gangplank. One by one his surviving shipboard “uncles” were enfolded into waiting arms. We found a public telephone and waited in an agonizingly long line to call home.

“Hazel, you’re back!” my mother shrieked. She and Anna were healthy. Yes, influenza had passed through Dogwood. It was terrible, but over now. No, they’d heard nothing of Tom.

“The baroness died in Prussia,” I said. “We have a three-year-old boy.”

“What? A little boy?” my mother demanded just as the line fell.

“Let’s go,” said Georg. There was just time to catch the next train for Dogwood. With some difficulty, we got David into the railroad car, assuring him that it wouldn’t swallow us. Seeing our bags, a dapper passenger asked if we’d been away long. I said we’d been visiting family. “Where?”

“In Canada.”

“Canada. Good territory for shoes. I sell them, you see. Good thing you were gone. You missed the worst of the ’flu.” He cracked his knuckles. “Sorry. Nervous habit. Can’t stop myself. The ’flu was a doozy. The Kaiser’s parting shot. Came through like a freight train. Undertakers couldn’t keep up. They were shoving bodies in pits. In Philadelphia, they had babies buried in macaroni boxes. Am I scaring the kid? But it’s the God’s truth.” He cracked his knuckles. “Sorry again. They said crowds spread it, so the governor closed taverns, theaters, churches, schools, all kinds of public meeting places. Funerals couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes. They set up infirmaries in warehouses, schools, armories, any place they could. Terrible times, terrible. Then it was all over. Bang! Like it never happened. Except it did. Them that didn’t lose a boy in war lost somebody to influenza.”

“In-flu-ENZA,” David repeated.

“The kid’s right. Flew in like a bird. My brother lost his wife and son. He says ’Enza should have taken him. She got everything else he cares about. Well, here’s my stop. Good talking to you folks.” He cracked his knuckles once last time, gathered his bags, and was gone.

“What did he say?” David asked.

“That many people were sick here.”

“Just like at home.” He peered out the window. “But it’s not like
home.” No, New Jersey had no bloated corpses along the road, burned shells of homes, blasted fields, or rolling coils of barbed wire. Yet under the slate sky, a somber change had come. In the stations, signs forbidding spitting and public assemblies had replaced war posters. Advertisements hawked miracle cures. Black armbands and ribbons on front doors showed where influenza had passed.

A light, cold drizzle fell as we arrived in Dogwood to be scooped up by Anna and my mother. Georg briefly acknowledged condolences for the baroness. Anna plucked David from my arms, peppering him with questions. I saw car keys in my mother’s hand. To my astonishment, she’d learned to drive. She too wore a black armband. “Marjorie McClellan,” she explained. “Last week.” On Main Street, we passed the drugstore and the bakery, both with black ribbons on the door.

“Geoffrey Henderson died of influenza,” Anna explained. “He was waiting for the troopship to come home.”

Almost safe. His poor parents. “Who else?”

“Many. We’ll talk about it when you’re settled. But first, you tell us, how do you have a little boy?” I explained briefly. They listened, nodding, as if bringing home the orphaned son of a Russian soldier and a Prussian kitchen maid was the normal outcome of any trip abroad. Anna’s only comment was “We didn’t have much time to get ready for him.”

At the castle, Kurt welcomed us in his solemn way. “We didn’t know, sir, if you wanted a black ribbon for the baroness.”

“No,” Georg said quietly. “The child has seen enough black.”

“Come inside, David,” Anna urged. “And see what we have for you.” It was astonishing. With so little warning, she and my mother and Tilda had assembled some boy’s clothes, a teddy bear, Tom’s wooden blocks retrieved from storage, and a cardboard tube of sticks and spools called Tinkertoys.

“Just invented,” Anna boasted. It was so good to be in the warm, familiar kitchen, fragrant with baking and filled with the abundance of peace: baskets of onions, potatoes, and apples, a full pantry. We had a comforting meal of soup, breads, cheese, and cold meat. David let himself be sniffed and licked by Lilli and settled by the stove with his Tinkertoys. Lilli curled around him, her great tail swishing the floor.

“Now then,” Anna said, passing a tray of my mother’s
butterplätzchen
. “Tell us the whole story.” We related our sickness on the crossing, the wasteland of Prussia, Georg’s grave, the castle’s debts and decay, the death of the baroness, and the terrible days of David’s influenza.