Sleeping With Soldiers
Jenean
McBrearty
Not many mothers name a son Ralph
these days. It's not biblical like Jacob or romantic like Zachary. It's a
down-home, farm boy from Nebraska kind of name. Maybe it was Mary Connor's way
of inoculating her boy against the neighborhood street gangs. It worked. He
followed in his father's footsteps.
"Mary Connor was the finest
woman I knew," Father Tuttle said as he and Ralph walked away from the
graveside, both of them in uniform. Tuttle in a black suit, starched white
collar, and purple stole. Ralph in his dress blues. Tuttle hoped Mary was able
to attend his graduation from boot camp so she could see him spit and
polished—probably the most squared away Marine on the field. "Where are
you headed to now, Ralph?" Tuttle said. They were standing beside the
priest's BMW—another black box.
"Wherever Uncle Sam needs me."
"She sure was proud of
you." Tuttle offered Ralph his hand. "She had a right to be."
They exchanged a firm handshake.
"Thanks for everything. The arrangements, the flowers, the service. I
never thought about her dying. Weird
that she beat cancer but died of the flu. She had the sacraments?"
Tuttle was looking down at the
clipped cloned grass that surrounded the headstones. "Oh, yes. You need a lift somewhere?"
The Cooper hearse was gone, and Tuttle didn't see another vehicle.
"No. No. I'm fine. Think I'll
stay awhile."
"Well, alright. It's a long
hike back to town."
"I'm used to walking, Father."
Tuttle drove away, slowly of course.
He didn't want Ralph to think he was in a hurry even though he was in a hurry.
He didn't like funerals any more than he liked crying babies at baptisms or
nervous wedding parties, but at least the guest of honor never complained about
the weather or the sermon. Something in the rearview mirror caught his eye. He
blinked just to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He put
the car in reverse and backed up....
It looked like Ralph walking towards
a white headstone where three other soldiers stood, all of them, even Ralph, in
desert camouflage utility uniforms, black boots, and cammy caps. Tuttle
stopped, but by the time he was out of the car, they were halfway up the hill. Or
had they disappeared within it? "Ralph?" he called, "Wait....."
------------------
Greely Cottage nestled in an old
orchard of apple trees. In Spring, the white blossoms hovered around its
thatched roof and made its red door shout "notice me" to the hunters
that galloped by on the week-ends; Blackberry Riding Academy was a quarter mile
away.
Mary thought the place looked like
an English post-card rather than a rural Virginia farm, and wondered who lived
behind the white curtained windows as she passed by every evening on her way
home from Chocolat-Cheer Candy Store. She never saw a soul, but the front yard
was always mowed, the hedges clipped, and the flowers tended to, as if cared
for by ghosts who watered, clipped and weeded at night. She never saw smoke rising
from the chimney either, Mr.
Bunch at the General Store told her the place was a hundred years old, and had
never been modernized. "You won't
find an electrical appliance anywhere in the house," he told her one
freezing November afternoon.
Mary has stuffed a box of Cheerios
and a quart of milk into her basket and was considering the bananas. "How
do they keep warm?" she said, noticing Bunch had raised the price to 52
cents a pound from 48 cents.
"They? Nobody lives there 'cept
Fred Connor when he's home on leave—Greely Cottage's is one of them historical
sites. Everyone else is dead. I hear his mother was a lively young
bride....sad, the way she went so soon after he was born.
"How did she go?" Mary said, forgetting the bananas. Of course it'd
been a woman who'd hung the lace curtains. She'd wanted to hear about the
mysterious little house, even if was ancient gossip.
"Katherine took sick of the
influenza epidemic in '19. She come over right before the war and brought it back from New York, she did, when
she met Sean Connor's troop boat. It was the soldiers that brought it here,
they said. Could be true.....it's said if it wasn't for his Aunt Nicole, Little
Freddy wouldn't have turned out the way he did and Sean wouldn't have had any
happiness in his life.. and I wouldn't be sellin' apple butter." Bunch
went to the jams n' jelly aisle and brought back a jar of Connor's Best Apple
Butter Mary'd ignored.
"Katherine may have been the
vivacious one, but Nicole got the brains. Saved the farm with this stuff. Told
the bank she'd let it have a percentage of the net if they gave Sean a year's
extension on his mortgage. Not the local bank either—that one went belly up in
'28. I'm talkin' a New York bank. No market for butter. No market for apples to
speak of. Nicole concocted a substitute. Sort'a like Sean was her substitute
husband, you might say."
------------------
The Kaiser announced imminent mobilization
when Gerhardt was in Potsdam. From the rear of the crowd, he snapped the
Kaiser's picture and gave it to Nicole who begged him to take her to Brazil
until the war was over.
"Even if there is a war, it
won't last long," Gerhardt told her as they drove to Berlin. She was
taking the train to visit her newly married sister in Lubeck. For Gerhardt, a
job as a photojournalist and their own impending marriage lay ahead, and
nothing dared to ruin their plans, not even a skirmish with the English.
"I'll be back in two
weeks," Nicole said, and kissed him lightly on the lips. They had said
good-bye in earnest in their hotel room at the Astor on Strausstrasse. There
was nothing to be said now except the standard warnings to each other to be
careful. As if men who go to war aren't careful after they see their first
battle.
"I'll have a flat rented by
then," he promised. He watched her board the train and waved farewell.
Though he said he'd see her soon, two weeks turned into four years.
A thousand days and a thousand
pictured later, Gerhardt mustered out of the army, and returned to his family's
farm in the Tyrol, half blind from gas and afflicted with an uncontrollable
tremor of his left hand—and the dream. "I see it every night–the pit
beneath the floor, filled with bodies wrapped like mummies."
"Shell-shock, Gerhardt,"
Dr. Henrik told him. "We're not sure how to treat it." Henrik had
been a field surgeon and was probably experiencing shock himself, though he
blamed his insomnia on indigestion.
"How do you deal with the
memory of slaughter ? How do you will yourself to stop seeing?" Gerhardt
wondered aloud. The two were drinking beer on Dr. Henrik's veranda, looking out on golden
meadows and rolling hills that paid homage to towering mountains that
surrounded them.
"Doctors are trained to think
of patients as large biological organisms, not real people with families and
friends. It's called professional distance. It helps." Dr. Henrik was thirty-two but the stress of
war had turned his hair gray; bad food and worse weather had made him
permanently frail. Gerhardt had chronicled the changes with his omnipresent
camera, assigned as he was to aerial reconnaissance.
"At least I'm not in the trenches,"
Gerhardt had written to Nicole, but his profession had allowed for little
distance. A surprise visit by British artillery had sent the pilots scrambling
to the planes to get them airborne, but few could outrun the shells. Gerhardt
had, smartly, taken cover near the armory where the gas was stored. He fired a
few canisters in the direction of the barrage, but, being untrained, he
poisoned himself. Still, he was awarded a medal.
He carried the round piece of tin
around in his pocket, and would, unconsciously, hold it in his hand and massage
it with his thumb like rubbing a talisman. "I guess I felt the same way
about the people I photographed. They may have be moving about, but as soon as
I snapped the shutter, they became mannequins without souls."
"Yes, yes. It seems cruel, but
if you can think of them that way you'll sleep better, believe me, Gerhardt.
Nothing's to be gained by ruminating over the dead. Now, tell me more about the
dream—as though you were filming it."
"It begins with two men looking
for a place to bury a mummy. They outline a oblong patch on a dirt floor and
dig a grave. Instead of burying the thing, they keep enlarging and deepening
the grave until it's a huge pit, and as they dig, they keep finding more
wrapped corpses—hundreds, then thousands—but they keep digging until finally
the mummy they wanted to bury wakes up. He's alive, one of the men says,
because he sees the eyes blink. All the mummies come alive then, so the men get
out of the pit, pour gasoline over them, and toss their torches in it, burning
the mummies."
Dr. Henrik nodded. "You keep
burying the dead, and they won't stay sleep. But you aren't responsible for the
war, my friend. As soldiers, we obeyed orders. But everyone obeys—their
parents, the law, traffic lights."
Gerhardt finished his stein, and
opened his hand. "I got this medal for lobbing those gas canisters at the
British. I'm proud of this medal."
Henrik stared at the silver circle.
"Rightly so."
"So why does the dream give me
the sweats?"
"Heroism can be tough on the
nerves," Dr. Henrik said.
"It wasn't heroism. I did my
duty. Nothing more. Those goddamned Brits. You know they gave Von Richthofen
full military honors after they shot him down? It's tough to hate an enemy who
remains well-mannered even when he's being squashed."
Henrik smiled for the first time in
years when Gerhardt said that. "We
may yet learn who our real enemies are," he said.
"You mean the Communists?' Gerhardt
said.
"I mean all our enemies..."
Before Gerhardt said good-night to Dr.
Henrik, they were his enemies too.
"No more fighting, Gerhardt,
please" Nicole said when he told her of his determination to rid Germany
of Dr. Henrik's purported anti-national assailants.
"All life is a fight, and
Germany is fighting the noblest war of all—the fight to save what's left of our
culture." She didn't understand. She was a romantic child. She'd asked him
to abandon his duty, renounce his honor, and let others bear the burden of her
protection. They'd married, but love was beyond him.
"I'm tired of war. Am I a bad
person for wanting us to salvage our life together? Der Kaiser ist tot, Gerhardt."
Gerhardt held her close. "No, you're
not bad, just weak and foolish. The Kaiser is alive in the Netherlands. It's
rumored Prince Frederick has returned, and this
man Hitler— people say he can restore the throne of the Hohenzollern. They say
he's taken over the German Worker's Party. You'll see, Nicole. Germany will be
set right again."
They talked little more that night.
Nicole left at seven the next morning, and hesitantly posted a letter to her
brother-in-law, begging for assistance....Germany was hungry. A month later,
after Gerhardt finally fell asleep as morning brought another day, Nicole
loaded her suitcase into the taxi and trained north to Lubeck and it's ocean
liners. Across the Atlantic, were eight million German-Americans—enough to
swallow her into anonymity—and a young boy who needed her...
------------------
"Do something valuable. I'm not
saying you'll get rich before you die, but you would have lived well. If
there's a beyond, you'll know other folks remember you though you're nothing
but dust."
Fred watched as his father put up
his whittlin' knife and wondered if his ol' man had anything to give him
besides advice for his high school graduation. If not, if advice was all he
could afford, it would have to do. He was lucky to have graduated at all.
People were jobless and homeless in '36; most of his friends had quit school to
work or set off on the road to make their way. It made it easier on their
families.
But his father was firm.
"Before you take to the road, learn something. You won't get paid for
misery, but for a skill."
Fred listened—one of the few boys who
did–and told Rootie, the fifteen year old daughter of their nearest neighbor
two miles down the road, "I'm tempted to do a lot of things, but being
stupid isn't one of them."
"You want to know what I'm
going to do? I'm going to Hollywood," Rootie said.
I'm going to be a movie star. My mama says I'm pretty enough."
I'm going to be a movie star. My mama says I'm pretty enough."
"Every pretty girl wants to be
a movie star," Fred said, turning away with a scowl painted on his face.
Men might not pay other men for their misery, but they'd pay a girl to look
pretty. It didn't seem fair, but it was the truth. With that, he kissed her
full on the mouth and tore home before he made a liar out of himself and did
something stupid.
"What would you say was the
most valuable thing a man can learn?" Fred said to his father. The ol' man
walked to a locked cabinet and returned with a C.96 and a box of bullets.
"This is the only valuable
thing I have to give you. The farm can feed us, barely, but the bank will be
taking it shortly."
"I can't take your Mauser, Pa...."
"Yes, you can. The German
officer I took it from doesn't care who has it now. You learned how to read,
write, and count. You learned how to keep books, shoe a horse, and sail a boat.
You're ready to enlist. You might as well get a head start on everybody because
there's going to be another war."
------------------
For shy Mary, the trip up the Greely
Cottage steps was an emotional gauntlet. Unplanned, she told herself. The two
extra boxes of chocolate covered apricot cottlettes were on the
"freebie" table near the door, and when she saw the smoke curling
from the cottage's chimney, it was a sign today was the day. Ignoring her knotted
stomach and palpitating heart, she composed a friendly,
I-was-just-passing-by-and- thought-I'd-be-neighborly-to-a-soldier script as she
came up the walkway, and struck a confident pose. The worst Fred Connor would
say is no thank-you, I'm allergic to chocolate, because he wouldn't be rude to
a nineteen year old Catholic girl from Boston.
Her eyes were cast upwards when
the door opened; she wanted look Connor in the eye. "You're Mary," he
said. She lowered her line of vision to straight ahead. He was short—with the
fiercest green-fire eyes of a Welshman she'd ever seen. They locked on her and
tracked her fidgeting like radar.
"Yes," she said,
"from the Chocolate-Cheer...I brought you...these." She held the
candy over her face with both hands as though warding off a Cupid's arrow. Too
late. The damage was done. That voice, that smile, that angled chin, consumed
her, fear and all.
He took the candy boxes and
pretended to read the labeling. "Bunch told me about you. Said I should be
wary of an unwitting female predator in the neighborhood. Are you
dangerous?"
"I don't think so," she
said. Fred opened the door wider and she could see a half-decorated Christmas
tree. Was it that obvious she was looking past him into the living room?
"You haven't put the tinsel on yet," she said. "It's not
finished, but it's beautiful anyway."
"You're not finished
either," Fred said. "I see you're not wearing a ring. Does this mean
you're not engaged?"
"Yes. I've only been here a
year."
"A single, pretty girl, bearing
sweet gifts to a lonely guy...sounds downright life-threatening."
Mary
felt her face grow warm. "My first job out of high school.
Chocolate-Cheer, I mean. My friend, Amy, lives here. I'm going to college next
September." Fred had tucked the candy boxes under his arm, and was nodding
as though he was interested. "I thought I'd study something wildly
fascinating, like archeology or something, but now, I'm leaning towards
business. You know, something useful."
"Do you know anything about hanging
tinsel? That's an incredibly useful something. I know quite a lot about machine
guns, but tinsel-ing isn't in the training manual. You think maybe I could
bribe you with a cup of cocoa to finish the tree?" With both arms, he hugged
the candy boxes to his chest like a teddy-bear. "I love chocolate."
Okay, he was adorable. He probably
knew it, probably had tons of women falling into his arms, probably looked even
handsomer in his uniform, and was incredibly as kind to old ladies and small
animals as he was to her at this moment. God had ordained that some people were
to fall in love this way: A man bustling about the kitchen humming Deck the Halls, heating milk in a
saucepan on a wood burning stove, and a woman delicately hanging silver
aluminum, strand by strand, on the branches of fir tree; a couple admiring each
other's accomplishments bundled up before a roaring fire on a December evening,
and discussing the pros and cons of simple names for children—like Fred and
Mary. The up-side? Easy to spell, easy to remember. The down side? Nobody
thinks you're important. Nobody wants to date you. Worse, yet, nobody notices
you.
"If I was in the movies, I'd be
the best buddy who gets killed," Fred said.
"And I'd be the maid who
watches the kids while the star has an exciting life," Mary said.
Fred glanced up at the portraits
that presided over the cottage: Sean Connor, flanked by sisters Katherine and
Nicole. "You think the buddy and
the maid might live happily ever after if they'd ever meet?"
"Maybe. It's Hollywood, after
all."
"For soldiers, that happy ever
after may not be a long time. We're in war, Mary. It's easy to forget that
until it comes time to say good-bye."
She followed his gaze to the
portraits, a thousand questions popping into head like a fire-works burst. They
could wait. Just as, in the present moments of life, Death waits. He will
intrude, sooner or later. But in this moment in time, he could wait. She could
push him out of the way, temporarily. Back. Back. Push him back until there is
no more breath or laughter or hope. Until denial was impossible. Nineteen or
ninety, only then would she admit defeat.
------------------
Mary held him close to her heart one
last time. She caressed his mouth with her fingertips, and let them glide through
his freshly-brushed hair. His gold belt and each button was polished, the white
gloves immaculate. Had he been able, he would have marched with her down the
aisle, held her arm again as she approached the altar rail for communion. He
looked as he did when he left her, but his scent had evaporated. When she bent
over him, there was no breath upon her neck, no kiss upon her cheek.
"We must close the lid," a
voice said and hands from nowhere pulled her back from the box. Back. Back.
Back to this life because it wasn't her time yet.
For
the second time, she'd come to Arlington's cathedral of corpses, listening to
words that only tradition kept comforting, and hearing the twenty-one volleys
fired off in salute.
The Lord is my Commander, I shall
not shirk; He maketh me bear want and
loneliness. He leadeth me into danger.
He restoreth my courage. He leadeth me to triumph
for His name sake. Yea, though I walk in a battlefield, I fear no enemy because He is with me. His Howitzers
and Shermans protect me. He gives me valor
in the presence of mine enemies. He anoints my wounds with oil. My blood runneth over. Surely, liberty and freedom will
follow me, and I will praise His name—Justice
forever.
For the second time, she placed a
folded flag into wooden case, and set it on her mantel with the other, flanking
the two photographs, one her husband, one her son. Denial was impossible. Happily
ever after lasted twenty-three years. Memories lasted her lifetime at Greely
Cottage where her life had begun. It would, at a date simply specified as
"upon the death of Mrs. Connor" revert to the Virginia Historical
preservation Society who, it was particularly specified, would preserve the
family portraits and pictures including the wedding picture of Mary and Fred,
and the Marine Corps graduation of their son, Ralph—hero of Kandahar.
------------------
Father Tuttle stared at his watch. It'd only
been five minutes since he shook hands with Ralph Conner. Where could the men
have gone? How far could they have walked? His hallucination, or apparition, if
he chose to believe in ghosts, couldn't have lasted through a half hour
service. And yet, thinking back, he hadn't seen a car. There'd just been his
BMW and the Cooper hearse—the small, golf-cart sized car that delivered urns
instead of caskets. Ralph had just been there, as though dropped from the sky,
waiting for them.
Tuttle walked from the curb to Fred Conner's
grave, one of the thousands at Arlington, where he'd scattered Mary's remains
over it as her will directed. She was the ashes, Fred the dust. He knelt by the headstone and read again: Lieutenant
Frederick Conner, USMC, b. June 6, 1918—d. June 6, 1944.
His hand dove into his pocket and
yanked out a folded piece of paper. He hadn't known Mary Conner, really. He
said he did because that's what he was supposed to say to grieving people he'd
never met. He was the finest man I knew. She was the finest woman I knew.
Relatives like to hear those sops. Usually, he took the check from the shaking
hand of the deceased's loved one, who probably hadn't seen the crone for a
decade before the body actually died, bought a box of candles for the altar,
and made his car payment. But today.... Today he should have been paying
attention... Today, it was dereliction of duty though he didn't know exactly
why.
Lieutenant Frederick Conner Jr., USMC,
b. April 7, 1942— d. February 2, 1968, he read, and checked the small map at
the bottom of the page. The Vietnam Veterans were in another section.
"Damn it!" Tuttle said, afraid to look up and see Ralph standing above
him. Ralph must have known he'd made a mistake. Ralph could have stopped him,
told him, you damn fool, you're in the wrong place. Too polite to correct a man
of God.
He ran to his car and brought back the empty
urn, wanting to scoop up as much of Mary's remnants as hadn't completely blown
away. He certainly wasn't the finest priest she'd ever known—Gerhardt Tuttle,
who'd screwed up the funeral of the last of the Connors—but finally the
futility of his task weighed him down, and he sank to his knees on the nation's
holy ground and watched as the wind spread Mary's ashes over the fields of
white stones.
END
___________________________________________________________
| ||||
I
am a graduate of San Diego State University, and former community
college instructor who taught Political Science and Sociology at
military installations and Des Moines Area Community College.
Credits: Reviewer —social science/history for Choice Magazine (2006-2008); paid columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader (2006); EKU English Department's Award for Graduate Non-fiction (2011), published in Teaching
for Success, Static Movement, Main Street Rag 2011 Anthology—Altered
States, Wherever It Pleases, including the Anthology: Rustlings, and, bioStories among others.