Victory Over Japan
Victory Over Japan
Ellen Gilchrist
Copyright © 1984 by Ellen Gilchrist. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from Don Congdon Associates, Inc; the agency can be reached at
[email protected]
.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck.
Excerpts from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. from
Collected Poems 19091962
, Copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; Copyright 1963, 1964 by T.S. Eliot.
“Pictures in the Smoke” and an excerpt from “Inventory” by Dorothy Parker reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. and Gerald Duckworth & Company Limited from The Portable Dorothy Parker, Copyright 1926 by Dorothy Parker; Copyright renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker.
“Jade Buddhas Red Bridges, Fruits of Love” has previously appeared in
The Atlantic
, “Music” (under another title) and “The Gauzy Edge of Paradise” have previously appeared in
Mademoiselle
.
Contents
3. The Lower Garden District Free Gravity Mule Blight or Rhoda, a Fable
CRAZY, CRAZY, NOW SHOWING EVERYWHERE
6. Defender of the Little Falaya
7. Crazy, Crazy, Now Showing Everywhere
8. Jade Buddhas, Red Bridges, Fruits of Love
10. Miss Crystal's Maid Name Traceleen, She's Talking, She's Telling Everything She Knows
11. Traceleen's Telling a Story Called “A Bad Year”
13. DeDe's Talking, It's Her Turn
14. Traceleen, She's Still Talking
Victory Over Japan
WHEN I was in the third grade I knew a boy who had to have fourteen shots in the stomach as the result of a squirrel bite. Every day at two o'clock they would come to get him. A hush would fall on the room. We would all look down at our desks while he left the room between Mr. Harmon and his mother. Mr. Harmon was the principal. That's how important Billy Monday's tragedy was.
Mr. Harmon came along in case Billy threw a fit. Every day we waited to see if he would throw a fit but he never did. He just put his books away and left the room with his head hanging down on his chest and Mr. Harmon and his mother guiding him along between them like a boat.
“Would you go with them like that?” I asked Letitia at recess. Letitia was my best friend. Usually we played girls chase the boys at recess or pushed each other on the swings or hung upside down on the monkey bars so Joe Franke and Bobby Saxacorn could see our underpants but Billy's shots had even taken the fun out of recess. Now we sat around on the fire escape and talked about rabies instead.
“Why don't they put him to sleep first?” Letitia said. “I'd make them put me to sleep.”
“They can't,” I said. “They can't put you to sleep unless they operate.”
“My father could,” she said. “He owns the hospital. He could put me to sleep.”She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway.
“They couldn't give them to me,” I said. “I'd run away to Florida and be a beachcomber.”
“Then you'd get rabies,” Letitia said. “You'd be foaming at the mouth.”
“I'd take a chance. You don't always get it.” We moved closer together, caught up in the horror of it. I was thinking about the Livingstons'bulldog. I'd had some close calls with it lately.
“It was a pet,” Letitia said. “His brother was keeping it for a pet.”
It was noon recess. Billy Monday was sitting on a bench by the swings. Just sitting there. Not talking to anybody. Waiting for two o'clock, a small washed-out-looking boy that nobody paid any attention to until he got bit. He never talked to anybody. He could hardly even read. When Mrs. Jansma asked him to read his head would fall all the way over to the side of his neck. Then he would read a few sentences with her having to tell him half the words. No one would ever have picked him out to be the center of a rabies tragedy. He was more the type to fall in a well or get sucked down the drain at the swimming pool.
Fourteen days. Fourteen shots. It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night. There we were, eating graham crackers and listening to stories while Billy was strapped to the table in Doctor Finley's office waiting for his shot.
“I can't stand to think about it,” Letitia said. “It makes me so sick I could puke.”
“I'm going over there and talk to him right now,” I said. “I'm going to interview him for the paper.” I had been the only one in the third grade to get anything in the Horace Mann paper. I got in with a story about how Mr. Harmon was shell-shocked in the First World War. I was on the lookout for another story that good.
I got up, smoothed down my skirt, walked over to the bench where Billy was sitting and held out a vial of cinnamon toothpicks. “You want one,” I said. “Go ahead. She won't care.” It was against the rules to bring cinnamon toothpicks to Horace Mann. They were afraid someone would swallow one.
“I don't think so,” he said. “I don't need any.”
“Go on,” I said. “They're really good. They've been soaking all week.”
“I don't want any,” he said.
“You want me to push you on the swings?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I don't think so.”
“If it was my brother's squirrel, I'd kill it,” I said. “I'd cut its head off.”
“It got away,” he said. “It's gone.”
“What's it like when they give them to you?”I said. “Does it hurt very much?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I don't look.” His head was starting to slip down onto his chest. He was rolling up like a ball.
“I know how to hypnotize people,” I said. “You want me to hypnotize you so you can't feel it?”
“I don't know,” he said. He had pulled his legs up on the bench. Now his chin was so far down into his chest I could barely hear him talk. Part of me wanted to give him a shove and see if he would roll. I touched him on the shoulder instead. I could feel his little bones beneath his shirt. I could smell his washed-out rusty smell. His head went all the way down under his knees. Over his shoulder I saw Mrs. Jansma headed our way.
“Rhoda,” she called out. “I need you to clean off the blackboards before we go back in. Will you be a sweet girl and do that for me?”
“I wasn't doing anything but talking to to him,” I said. She was beside us now and had gathered him into her wide sleeves. He was starting to cry, making little strangled noises like a goat.
“Well, my goodness, that was nice of you to try to cheer Billy up. Now go see about those blackboards for me, will you?”
I went on in and cleaned off the blackboards and beat the erasers together out the window, watching the chalk dust settle into the bricks. Down below I could see Mrs. Jansma still holding on to Billy. He was hanging on to her like a spider but it looked like he had quit crying.
That afternoon a lady from the PTA came to talk to us about the paper drive. “One more time,” she was saying. “We've licked the Krauts. Now all we have left is the Japs. Who's going to help?” she shouted.
“I am,” I shouted back. I was the first one on my feet.
“Who do you want for a partner?” she said.
“Billy Monday,” I said, pointing at him. He looked up at me as though I had asked him to swim the English Channel, then his head slid down on the desk.
“All right,” Mrs. Jansma said. “Rhoda Manning and Billy Monday. Team number one. To cover Washington and Sycamore from Calvin Boulevard to Conner Street. Who else?”
“Bobby and me,” Joe Franke called out. He was wearing his coonskin cap, even though it was as hot as summer. How I loved him! “We want downtown,” he shouted. “We want Dirkson Street to the river.”
“Done,” Mrs. Jansma said. JoEllen Scaggs was writing it all down on the blackboard. By the time Billy's mother and Mr. Harmon came to get him the paper drive was all arranged.
“See you tomorrow,” I called out as Billy left the room. “Don't forget. Don't be late.”
When I got home that afternoon I told my mother I had volunteered to let Billy be my partner. She was so proud of me she made me some cookies even though I was supposed to be on a diet. I took the cookies and a pillow and climbed up into my treehouse to read a book. I was getting to be more like my mother every day. My mother was a saint. She fed hoboes and played the organ at early communion even if she was sick and gave away her ration stamps to anyone that needed them. She had only had one pair of new shoes the whole war.
I was getting more like her every day. I was the only one in the third grade that would have picked Billy Monday to help with a paper drive. He probably couldn't even pick up a stack of papers. He probably couldn't even help pull the wagon.
I bet this is the happiest day of her life, I was thinking. I was lying in my treehouse watching her. She was sitting on the back steps putting liquid hose on her legs. She was waiting for the Episcopal minister to come by for a drink. He'd been coming by a lot since my daddy was overseas. That was just like my mother. To be best friends with a minister.
“She picked out a boy that's been sick to help her on the paper drive,” I heard her tell him later. “I think it helped a lot to get her to lose weight. It was smart of you to see that was the problem.”
“There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, Ariane,” he said. “You say the word and I'll be here to do it.”
I got a few more cookies and went back up into the treehouse to finish my book. I could read all kinds of books. I could read Book-of-the-Month Club books. The one I was reading now was called
Cakes and Ale
. It wasn't coming along too well.
I settled down with my back against the tree, turning the pages, looking for the good parts. Inside the house my mother was bragging on me. Above my head a golden sun beat down out of a blue sky. All around the silver maple leaves moved in the breeze. I went back to my book. “She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.
“ âYou must take me as I am, you know,' she whispered.
“ âAll right,' I said.”
Saturday was not going to be a good day for a paper drive. The sky was gray and overcast. By the time we lined up on the Horace Mann playground with our wagons a light rain was falling.
“Our boys are fighting in rain and snow and whatever the heavens send,” Mr. Harmon was saying. He was standing on the bleachers wearing an old baseball shirt and a cap. I had never seen him in anything but his gray suit. He looked more shell-shocked than ever in his cap.
“They're working over there. We're working over here. The Germans are defeated. Only the Japs left to go. There're canvas tarps from Gentilly's Hardware, so take one to cover your papers. All right now. One grade at a time. And remember, Mrs. Winchester's third grade is still ahead by seventy-eight pounds. So you're going to have to go some to beat that. Get to your stations now. Get ready, get set, go. Everybody working together⦔
Billy and I started off. I was pulling the wagon, he was walking along beside me. I had meant to wait awhile before I started interviewing him but I started right in.
“Are you going to have to leave to go get it?” I said.
“Go get what?”
“You know. Your shot.”
“I got it this morning. I already had it.”
“Where do they put it in?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I don't look.”
“Well, you can feel it, can't you?” I said. “Like, do they stick it in your navel or what?”
“It's higher than that.”
“How long does it take? To get it.”
“I don't know,” he said. “Till they get through.”
“Well, at least you aren't going to get rabies. At least you won't be foaming at the mouth. I guess you're glad about that.” I had stopped in front of a house and was looking up the path to the door. We had come to the end of Sycamore, where our territory began.