With Every Letter (14 page)

Tom leaned down and scratched Sesame behind the ears. “What should I offer this week? First choice on sleeping positions in the ravine? First in line for chow? The driest slit trench in the next air raid?”

Sesame cocked his head to one side and chortled.

“Thanks, but I don’t think the men want the next rat you catch.” Tom straightened the dog’s harness, a cut-down cartridge belt. He was training Sesame to deliver messages. Maybe it was his imagination, but Sesame stood taller when he wore his working-dog belt.

Tom checked his watch—1449. At 1500 he had his Friday meeting with Newman and the platoon leaders to review the past week’s work and prepare for the following week. For once, Tom could hold up his head. His platoon had completed most of their work. Quincy and Reed would have little to complain about.

“Come on, Sesame.” Tom led the dog away from the work site and toward the headquarters dugout. He pulled Annie’s latest letter from inside his Parsons field jacket to read again while he walked.

My new friendships have made me think more about my mother, and I feel compelled to tell her story for the first time, even though it’s shameful. The Lord has shown me I need to forgive her, and writing it down should help. Thanks to anonymity—and your kind heart—I feel comfortable telling you.

My mother was only seventeen when she married my father, and I came a year later. The pressures of motherhood convinced her she’d never lived. She bobbed her hair and neglected my father and me in favor of speakeasies, wild living, and—I’m ashamed to say—other men. When I was two, she was killed in a drunken car accident.

I believe I’ve forgiven her for that, but the Lord is showing me a new dimension to forgiveness. My mother’s abandonment and death deprived me of an important relationship. So many things can only be passed from mother to daughter. My father tried, bless him, but how could he teach me to dress and style my hair and interact with little girls?

You probably have a similar situation. For both of us, death severed a crucial relationship, and the remaining parent tried to fill that hole. Your father’s death deprived you of having a man to work alongside and learn manly things from.

In addition, our parents’ deaths gave us more difficult lives. I’ll never understand or excuse what my mother did, but I must fully forgive her.

Tom folded the letter and stuck it back inside his jacket. The sun streamed down on the barren plateau, but a sun
without heat and chill winds made the Westerners and Southerners grumble.

Tom was a Pennsylvania boy, not a California boy. Thanks to his father.

He grimaced. He’d never thought about forgiveness as Annie did. Keeping up a sunny front required shoving away anger and sadness, but resentment ran in a buried river in his soul.

Dad had abandoned him. He loved booze more than his wife and son. On the day his drinking cost him his job, he came home and smashed the kitchen chairs. In the middle of the night, Mom wakened Tom and hurried him to her sister’s house.

Dad begged her to come back. Tom heard him at the door, pleading, his voice throaty, and Tom wanted to run to him, to his daddy, but Mom held him back. She loved her son and wanted to protect him.

Tom passed an A-20 and its flight crew in their sheepskin-lined leather jackets. He greeted them and continued on his way.

Another memory intruded, and he wrestled with it. Daddy coming home in the evening, dusted with the sharp smell of the explosives used in his demolitions work. “Where’s my Tommy?” he’d call.

“Here I am!” Tom would run up, hop on one foot, and stretch his hands tall to the ceiling.

“Oh no! It’s a burglar!” Daddy’s face would fill with mock terror, then he’d tackle Tom and tickle him.

“It’s me, Daddy. It’s me,” Tom would say between giggles.

“It’s my Tommy? Why, I didn’t recognize you, you grew so much today.”

When Tom caught his breath, Daddy would swing him up onto his back, gallop into the kitchen, kiss Mom—which
made Tom break into more giggles—then gallop around the house.

That’s what he stole from Tom when he chose liquor.

He stopped and closed his eyes. “Lord, I haven’t fully forgiven him, have I? He took so much from me. Help me. Help me forgive him.”

Sesame leaned against Tom’s leg, his brown eyes warm and penetrating.

“God sent you into my life, didn’t he?” Tom’s voice came out husky, and he rubbed Sesame’s ears. The dog saw what he hid and loved him anyway.

A man let out a shrill whistle behind him, by the A-20.

An air raid.

More whistles broke out. Pilots scrambled to their planes, fastening parachute harnesses and yanking on leather flight helmets.

Tom shielded his eyes and gazed west. Sure enough, black dots appeared beneath the afternoon sun.

“Here we go again.” He gathered Sesame into his arms and raced away from the airfield, the Luftwaffe’s target. He dropped into a slit trench and sheltered the quivering dog between his body and the earthen wall.

Sesame didn’t mind construction noise, but he hated the explosions during an air raid.

More men jumped into the trench, a whole line of them, helmets like stones in a stream, rifles like reeds along the banks.

After Tom attached the leash to his pistol belt, he readied his carbine. He had to look ready to shoot even if he didn’t intend to do so.

One P-40 sped along the runway and lifted into the sky, and another followed. The propwash raised a cloud of dust on the ground.

“Go, boys. Get ’em,” the officer next to Tom said.

A mechanic to Tom’s right adjusted his steel helmet. “We’re the 33rd Fighter Group. We ain’t gonna let Jerry get away with this.”

Tom glanced at the faces around him, eyes lit up and focused, as if watching a college football game and not a struggle for life and death.

“Here they come, boys.”

Tom hunched lower in the trench but peered over the edge. German Junkers Ju 88s, skinny twin-engine bombers with strange bubble-like cockpits, about ten of them.

Two more American P-40s took to the air, then a P-40 bearing the French Tricolor on its tail.

“Hey, the Lafayette Escadrille’s joining in today,” Tom said.

“’Bout time,” someone grumbled.

“Be fair,” another fellow said. “The French had never seen the P-40 before. Takes time to learn a new plane.”

“What’s the escort? Me 109s?” Tom asked. The German Messerschmitts were some of the best fighter planes in the world.

“Me 109s. Yeah.”

“Wait.” An officer flipped through a deck of aircraft identification cards, printed with silhouettes of different types of aircraft. “Might be Macchi 202s.”

“Italians?” the mechanic said.

“Sure. We’re fighting them too.”

“I know that.”

“Look at the engines when they come by. The 202s got a big old engine, not sleek like the 109.”

“What do you think the quarterback will do?” Tom said. “Punt or go for the long pass?”

Men turned and stared at Tom.

He chuckled. “We sound like we’re in the bleachers at a football game—not a battle.”

“Same thing,” the ground crewman said with a laugh. “Who wants a beer?”

A chorus of “I do, I do, I do” ran down the line.

But this was no game. The American antiaircraft guns opened up with booms that shook the ground and made Sesame tremble.

Tom pressed the dog’s pointed ears shut.

The first Ju 88 passed over the field and dropped a string of bombs, kicking up dirt and steel from the runway. “I know what we’ll be doing tomorrow,” Tom muttered.

Some of the men in the trenches popped off shots at the bomber, and a P-40 buzzed around the larger plane. Bullets zipped through the air, and yellow tracer fire lit the path.

The Ju 88 climbed and turned to the east, but the P-40 stayed with it, bullets hitting the mark. One of the bomber’s engines gave off clouds of black smoke. The wing snapped in half. The plane spiraled to the ground.

An explosion rocked the earth and took the lives of the bomber’s crewmen.

A whoop rang out from the trench. Tom joined in because he had to, but cheering death made his stomach churn.

The tail of the bomber stuck out of the wreckage, and flames licked at the painted swastika. This was why the Americans had to fight, to kill. Because the Nazis were bent on destruction, and destruction was the only way to stop them.

Bomber after bomber plummeted from the sky, nine total. But no P-40s fell, and no Americans or French died, so it was considered a victory and a cause for celebration.

Tom soothed his little dog. “Someday, Sesame. Someday this will all be over. Then we can build.”

15

USS
Lyon
New York Harbor
February 7, 1943

Mellie leaned on the railing of the USS
Lyon
and belted out “Manhattan Serenade” over the rumble of the ship’s engines. Hundreds of personnel from the 325th Fighter Group and the 802nd Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron crowded the deck. The Manhattan skyline passed by on Mellie’s left, and the scenery shifted perspective moment by moment.

In two weeks she’d be in Africa. Not only would she get to explore a new continent, but Ernest’s letters would arrive more quickly and the conversation would flow.

Her song swelled, filled with the joy of friendship and motion.

The last month and a half had been nothing but hurry and wait. Hurry to Florida. Wait for personnel and equipment. Hurry to Camp Kilmer. Wait for overseas processing. While in New Jersey, the 802nd worked at a civilian hospital during a measles epidemic. Alice Olson complained that they were flight nurses, not ward nurses, but Georgie reminded her they should help where needed.

Last night they were told to pack, destination unknown.

The news Mellie had longed for drained the color from Georgie’s face.

She sighed. Perhaps Captain Maxwell should be more concerned about Georgie’s fear than about Mellie fitting in. He still circled Mellie like a hawk and swooped down on infractions. She’d dared to question a medication order for one of the measles patients. Although Mellie was right, he still complained to Lambert. His hawkishness and Vera and Alice’s cattiness seemed designed to drive Mellie into a mouse hole.

She launched into the final verse of the song, determined to be a mouse no more.

“There you are. Just had to follow that voice.” Georgie wormed her way through the crowd to the railing, her face ruddy from the wind and cold.

“Where’s Rose? Still not well?”

“Yeah. She’s lying down. Once a month.” Georgie lifted an apologetic smile, as if she’d revealed a deep secret.

“I hope she doesn’t get seasick on top of it.”

“Rose? This is the only thing in the world that gets her down.” She pointed across the Upper Bay. “Look. There’s Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty just beyond.”

Mellie shielded her eyes to view the red and cream brick buildings of Ellis Island. She could imagine a steamship pulled up to the berth forty years before and a crowd of immigrants in peasant caps and shawls swarming from steerage into sunshine. “So much history here.”

“All those huddled masses desperate to come to America. We’re headed the wrong way.”

Mellie tugged her overcoat tighter and studied Georgie’s atypically downcast face. “Why don’t you want to go?”

Georgie snapped up her gaze. “What? I want to go. This is what we trained for.”

“So why do you look like your mother just died?”

“Do I?” She rubbed her gloved hands over her cheeks. “Oh dear. It shows? Do you think Rose noticed?”

“No. She’s too excited to notice anyone’s misery.”

“Misery. Is that what this is?”

Mellie smiled. “Has your life been so wonderful you’ve never felt miserable before?”

“Sure I have. My grandparents passed away. That was miserable. Though I was a tiny thing. And when I was ten, my favorite horse broke his leg and had to be put down.”

“Mm.” Mellie gave her a soft nod.

Georgie sighed. “All right, my life’s idyllic. My mama and daddy and big sisters love me to pieces. I grew up on the most beautiful horse farm you can imagine. I always had Rose and Ward.”

“But now you have to leave Ward.”

A deeper sigh. “I know he’ll miss me, but I can’t abandon Rose. We’ve always done everything together. We need each other.”

Papa’s face flashed into her mind. Up until the past year, they had always been a team. Now he was alone. If he lived. Her eyes watered, and she blinked hard.

Georgie gazed up at the overcast sky. “Rose and I complement each other. She makes me try new things, and I soften her rough edges.”

“You two are good for each other. And for me.” If only she had something to give to them.

Georgie held back her curls on one side and fixed a firm gaze on Mellie. “Rose can’t know how scared I am. If she knew, she’d slap me. With good reason. I’m scared of the U-boats. I’m scared of being caught in combat. I don’t know if I can handle it.”

Mellie hesitated, but she’d learned from four months of
friendship. She put her arm around Georgie’s shoulders. “You’ll do fine. The Lord will be with you. So will Rose, and so will I.”

“Please don’t tell Rose I came just for her. She thinks I’m as excited as she is, and it’s best that way. Besides, when I pretend to be happy, I end up feeling happy.”

Mellie smiled. She still had a lot to learn from these ladies.

“Promise me,” Georgie said, eyes wide. “Promise not to tell Rose.”

Her breath caught. She’d never been asked to keep a confidence before, a solemn responsibility. But she knew the sting of betrayal and could never inflict it on another. “I promise.”

Georgie’s expression overflowed with warmth. “I knew the minute we met we’d end up the best of friends.”

“You did?” Mellie’s nose stuffed up, and she sniffed. “If only I’d known when you did. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so shy.”