A Troubled Peace
Authors: L. M. Elliott
L. M. Elliott
To the memory of my father, who started me on this journey
;
And to my guidesâmy husband, John
,
and our children, Megan and Peterâwho have walked it with me.
“Pull her up, Henry! Pull her up!”
Outside the air felt like ice water in his chest.
Old Man Newcomb's place.
Henry floated in darkness. His head throbbed with a percussiveâ¦
Henry walked off the ship's gangplank in clownish high steps,â¦
The owner invited Henry back to the small kitchen andâ¦
Henry flattened himself against a windowpane, trying to create spaceâ¦
“Marchez!”
Seven white crosses.
“You must forgive le patron. Since July, his grief hauntsâ¦
Henry sat dazed, horrified, incapable of absorbing it all, becauseâ¦
Henry sat on smooth gray leather in the backseat ofâ¦
In the heart of Annecy, Henry stood by a canalâ¦
“Elle n'a aucune nouvelle de ta soeur?”
That evening, the son found Henry in the garden. Henryâ¦
On the train to Paris, Henry ached. The hurt spreadâ¦
Chink-chink. Chink-chink.
The military police headquarters was busyâlots of people in andâ¦
“Ever been to Paris?”
Around two A.M., Henry stumbled through the revolving door ofâ¦
Outside, Henry headed for Gare de l'Est, the train stationâ¦
Henry followed them, remembering that Madame Gaulloise said children lookedâ¦
The next morning, Madame Zlatin put Henry to work disinfectingâ¦
Henry had forgotten how insistent, how fiery, Claudette was. Butâ¦
“No, monsieur, I did not take down the note.” Madameâ¦
Henry bolted out of the Lutetia, into the park, lookingâ¦
Two pairs of feet in shoes cut open so thatâ¦
A sea of people followed them on the boulevard Saintâ¦
“Henri, wake up. Please, open your eyes.”
“Good thing I spotted you, sir. You'd have had troubleâ¦
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High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split cloudsâand done a hundred things
You have not dreamed ofâwheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of airâ¦.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew
â
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
âJohn Gillespie Magee, Jr.
M
ARCH
1945
“
P
ull her up, Henry! Pull her up!”
Henry gripped the plane's steering wheel as it crashed through sun-split clouds toward earth.
He gritted his teeth and waited. Henry had cheated death a dozen times like this during bombing missions over France and Germany. Hurling a plane into a dive to put out an engine fire was the first survival trick pilots learned. They'd earned their manhood during flight training by yanking a plane up just before it smashed into trees or barracks, bragging on how long they'd waited, how close they'd come, how boys who flinched and pulled up early were chicken. Whoever stayed cool longest won bets for three-day passes away from base through such dares. Stupid stuff.
Henry couldn't believe he was using the bullyboy tactic, and on Patsy, the person he loved most. But forcing a situation was the only battle strategy Henry knew since going to war. Never second-guess; force a shot-up plane to fly even though ditching was a better idea; charge in with guns blaring; do or die.
“Henry, please. Pull the plane up.”
“Not until you say yes. Come on, Pats.
Yes
.”
Henry glanced over at Patsy's heart-shaped face. It had that stubborn, I'll-never-admit-to-being-scared look he'd seen countless times on their school playground. He'd always loved what a spitfire she was. But it sure wasn't helping him now.
He calculated the distance to the horizon rushing toward him. He still had a good sixty seconds. He held to his bluff. “I'll pull up when you agree to marry me.”
The plane started to buck.
Patsy braced herself. “No, Henry. I love you. But I can't.”
“Why not, Pats?”
“I don't think you're ready, Henry.”
“Not ready? I spent all my Air Force back pay for the ring. I had a heck of a fight with my dad about buying it. I'd say I'm ready.” His voice rattled like the plane. “Please, Pats. Thinking about you, about coming home, is what kept me walking across France, what kept me alive when
the Gestapo near drowned me during interrogation. You're my copilot, my navigator. I can't fly straight without you.”
For a moment, Patsy wavered. Then she screamed: “Henryâlook out!”
Out of the lowering sun swarmed Nazi fightersâJunkers, Messerschmitts.
Twelve-o'clock highâbogeys coming in, fast!
Henry heard the voices of his crew shouting, calling out the flight path of the Luftwaffe killers streaking toward them.
Someone radioed American fighters for help:
Little friends, little friends, we've got a hornet's nest here. They're everywhere!
Do something, Hank. I don't want to die!
BANG-BANG-BANG.
A gray-green Messerschmitt roared past the cockpit, its bullets ripping into Henry's plane, the German pilot's mocking face close enough to see.
Did you really think I would allow you to escape?
KA-BOOM!
Engines exploded. The plane erupted in a ripple of orange flames. Billowing smoke choked the cockpit. Henry couldn't see anything, couldn't find Patsy anywhere. All he could hear was:
We're cooked, Hank. We're cooked
.
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Henry lurched up, crab-backing into the bed's headboard and banging his skull against his high school diploma hanging above it. He counted the windowsâone, two, three. He saw the whitewashed bureau by the door, looked up to see the airplane model he'd made when he was twelve hanging from the ceiling.
Check. Check. Check.
He was in his own bed, in Virginia. Just another nightmare. Another flight into the hell of his own mind.
Kicking back the tangle of covers, Henry fell out of bed and stumbled to his bureau. He picked up a small box and yanked open the starched cotton curtains. Moonlight fell onto his hands as he opened the case. There was the diamond ring Patsy hadn't wanted.
Henry rubbed his face against the ice-cold windowpane to wake himself up completely. He was so sick of his crazy, mixed-up thoughts; these nightmares; the flashbacks to air battles and his struggles on the escape lines of France; the bizarre overlap of his life in Virginia with the memories he was trying to dodge. He was ashamed of knee-jerk reactions like the time Henry's dad, Clayton, shot at a fox in one of the henhouses and the sound of the blast sent Henry bolting across half the county before he recognized he wasn't being hunted himself. It was so hard to know sometimes what was really happening and what was simply his mind playing with him, torturing him just
as the Gestapo had set up a fake escape to break his spirit.
He wanted the war in his soul to be over. He was home. Why couldn't he get back to normal? And why wouldn't Patsy marry him?
Henry had set up a perfect proposal, taking Patsy to a dance at Richmond's swank John Marshall Hotel. She'd piled her hair in soft curls and wore a dress she'd borrowed from a society friend she'd met through the Red Cross. It was deep blue velvet with swirls of small beads on its padded shoulders. Very fancy. Very Ginger Rogers. As she held his hand and guided Henry to the dance floor through the mob of returned servicemen and their dates, he knew marrying Patsy was the way back, back to the life he'd planned before the war, before the missions, before all the killing.
As the band played “Till Then,” the heart-wrenching song asking the hometown girl to stay true until her soldier returned, Henry held Patsy close and whispered: “Marry me, Patsy.” The moment felt like something out of the song, the line he'd hummed over and over to himself in France,
“Till then, let's dream of what there will be.”
But Patsy had said no. Not yet. “You seem so angry,” she said, “so haunted. I worry that you think getting married will stop all that somehow. But what if I'm not enough? I don't think I can fix all that. It scares me, Henry.” She'd paused, then murmured, “You scare me.”
Remembering, Henry butted his head against the glass.
Girl, you don't know scared.
He hadn't told Patsy half of what he'd seen. Boys shredded and blown out of bomb bays to splatter on the glass cockpits of planes following behind in formation. French children so hungry they fought over scraps dropped on the ground by picnicking Nazis. Women dragged out of their homes by neighbors to shave their heads as payback for teenage flirtations with the enemy.
Was he haunted? For sure. Every day in his mind, he walked the hills and streets of France, imagining the fate of those who'd saved him. He reflew his last bombing raid so that Captain Dan lived. He reclimbed the Pyrenees to save his friend, Billy. If only he had been stronger, smarter, done things differently, maybe they'd still be alive. Henry was not quite twenty and already he carried an old man's worth of regret and mourning.
He knew he was jumpy, that his temper had become quick-flint like that of his father, Clayton. He'd tried to explain to Patsy what it had been likeâliving as a hunted animal behind enemy lines. He had entrusted his life to strangers he couldn't understand, and lived off of adrenaline and suspicion, scrounging for food, scrounging for safety, rarely finding either, day after day, week after week, for months. He couldn't figure out how to shed that kind of battle-ready wariness, that kind of split-second instinct
to fight, to run. Half the time, he felt like a lunatic racehorse stuck in a start box. Nobody had said anything in debriefing about how to shrug that off.
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Henry covered his face and realized with disgust that his hands were trembling.
You're flak-happy, boy. After all you survived? Now, you start sniveling?
Henry kicked at the heap of blankets, bashed his foot against the bed, and swore loudly.
“Henry, honey? You all right?”
Ma.
Henry clapped his hand to his mouth. Poor Lilly had enough to deal with, married to Clayton. She didn't need a basket-case son. Did she know that he got up night after night and walked the lane of their farm to keep from waking her with nightmare screams?
Pulling on forced calm like a flight suit, Henry opened his bedroom door. There stood Lilly, small, sweet-tempered, worried, smelling of talcum powder and the biscuits she'd made for morning. “I'm okay, Ma. Stupid me. Got all tangled up in my covers and fell out of bed just like I used to when I was a kid.” He'd gotten so good at faking. Henry tugged the long braid of her graying hair. “Go back to bed, Ma.”
Lilly peeped past him to the mess of covers on the floor. “Want me to fix you some hot milk, honey?”
If only warm milk and Lilly's lullabies could settle
him the way they had when he was little. Henry took her gently by the shoulders and walked her back to her bedroom, where Clayton snored. “I'll see you in the morning, Ma.”
Henry lingered in the hallway after she closed the door. He didn't want to go back to bed and another nightmare. Instead he dressed and tiptoed downstairs.
Whistling to his dog, Speed, Henry stepped out into the frigid night. He'd walk himself into a dead fatigue. That was the only way he slept sane and quiet.