Under a War-Torn Sky (27 page)

Dear Dad,

You and I have never had a real good talk. But I learned a lot about you over here. This war has taught me that people sometimes do the wrong things for the right reasons. I think you treated me harsh to prepare me for this. Well, I've got to admit it helped. Love's got responsibilities, like you always said, things you've got to do even when you don't really want to. I understand that now. I put up a good fight but, you know, Dad, they play for keeps in a war.

It was an old regimental sergeant who came to get him. Henry had seen him before. He had brought Henry meals many times. The man clearly had no affection for his Nazi commanders. He never did that to-the-sky salute and he always seemed to fume after they left him. But he followed orders, loyal to his homeland. Given the man's age, Henry figured he had served in the First World War, too.

When the old German came to get Henry, he carried a shovel. He wouldn't look Henry in the eye. Henry's stomach lurched. The sergeant's orders must be to take the American out and shoot him, after making Henry dig his own grave.

In the field, Henry scratched out a trench very, very slowly, trying to buy himself some time, time to think, time to live. Maybe he could whack the old man with the shovel and run. He could hear the distant rumble and grind of tanks, the shouting of men. Somewhere, towards the west, mortar shells were exploding. If he ran straight into a battle would they really bother chasing him?

Henry looked up to the sky. Locked in the truck, he hadn't really seen the daylight sky for weeks. It was a clear, crystalline blue, stretching up forever, with a bright day-moon shining. The autumn air was crisp, invigorating. What a day for flying, thought Henry. Up in the sky he'd be away from all this killing and pain. There'd be no dead-end alleys, no bullets to stop him. Would the air lift him up into silent, soaring glory if he wished it hard enough?

Henry closed his eyes and tried to smell a breeze. If he made himself light, shed the war and his fear, maybe he could just slide up into the heavens like a kite, the way he had pretended to do a million times over as a kid. He opened his eyes and focused on the translucent day-moon, the boundless blue that reached towards it. Without really realizing what he was doing, the words of his favourite poem came out of his mouth like a prayer: “‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed…'”

As he recited, the words vaulted Henry's soul into the clouds, to freedom. For a few moments, he hovered, strong, unafraid, on the winds. But when his words stopped, his flight did, too. Henry remembered his own grave lay at his feet. His eyes fell from the sky to the dirt. Slowly, sadly, Henry turned to face his executioner.

The sergeant's resolute expression had turned to a troubled, conflicted one. He sighed heavily and shook his head. Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out a thin sheet of paper folded many times. He handed it to Henry.

It was orange and carried American and British seals. The top half was written in German. The bottom half translated:
The German soldier who carries this safe conduct is using it as a sign of his genuine wish to give himself up. He is to be disarmed, to be well looked after, to receive food and medical attention as required, and to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible. Signed, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force.

Henry looked up in surprise. The German's weather-beaten face seemed softened by a mix of compassion and remorse and plain old weariness. Allied planes must have dropped the leaflet. Hope flared in Henry. Were the Americans really that close? Was the Nazi defeat really that inevitable? Clearly the old German thought so. Maybe he even hoped so.

The sergeant kicked dirt into the empty grave to fill it. He undid Henry's shackles and pointed his thumb west. “
Auf, geh heim.
”

Henry wasn't sure he understood. Was it a trick? Could someone in this hellish war still have that much mercy? Henry backed away tentatively. He looked to the sergeant for approval. “Home?”

The old German nodded and repeated, “
Auf. Geh heim.
” He lifted his rifle and fired it once into the air to make the officers back at camp think he'd shot Henry. The sound reverberated in the chill air. Then he turned and walked away, very slowly, to his own unit.

Henry was alone, free, just a few miles from American troops. All he had to do was skinny through enemy lines, avoiding detection and the bombs of his own countrymen, then walk up to tanks rolling into battle and give himself up without getting shot.

Somehow, on that clear, cold morning – when his enemy had chosen to spare Henry's life rather than kill him – the journey seemed completely possible.

Thanksgiving Day, 1944.

Lilly Forester's kitchen smelled of a harvest feast. Inside her stove a wild turkey sizzled, stuffed with apples, onions, and corn-bread crumbs. Succotash – corn and lima beans in a thick creamy sauce – bubbled on top. The biscuit batter she had mixed early that morning was slowly rising. In a few hours it would be light and fluffy enough to roll and cut and cook.

Right now she was making pumpkin bread. Covering her whitewashed table were blue bowls full of ingredients: thick molasses, cinnamon, ground cloves, nutmeg, raisins, creamy butter, cracked walnuts, and brown speckled eggs.

Lilly measured out two cups of sugar ever so carefully. Rationing being what it was she couldn't afford to lose one precious granule. Because of the war, people were allowed to buy only a pound of sugar – two cups' worth – every two weeks. She'd needed to plan way ahead to have the two cups for the bread, three cups for the apple pie, plus a little left over for the relatives to have a dash of sugar in their coffee after dinner.

Clayton had called her a silly, sentimental fool for making Thanksgiving dinner to begin with. He was in no mood to entertain what he called his deadbeat cousins. “What do we have to be thankful for this year?” he'd snapped. The farm's output was way down because Clayton was having to work it alone without Henry. Then he added, “You know the boy is dead, Lilly.”

Lilly had reached for wood to knock the instant Clayton said it. “Don't you be burying him before he's gone, Clayton Forester,” she'd said, fighting her irritation with him. Clayton had gotten even harder since the telegram had come informing them Henry was missing in action. Lilly tried to tolerate her husband's surliness because she knew it was his way of grieving.

But she had to believe Henry was alive somewhere. She couldn't go on otherwise. She'd heard tell that some of the French people were helping pilots get out. And weren't Patton's tanks crossing France quickly now? She fought off the idea of her son caught between two great armies, dodging bullets from both sides.

Lilly sat down at the table, remembering other, happier Thanksgivings – when Clayton had actually stopped picking on Henry to talk about how lucky they'd been that season. When Henry had danced around her begging for a taste of dessert before the dinner even started. And her favourite memory – when Henry had been all of three years old. After lisping through the blessing he had added, “Please, God, when I grow up I want to be a bird.”

She glanced at the photo of Henry, so tall and proud in his uniform, hanging on the wall. What kind of thanks could she offer this Thanksgiving? “If I am to have no more time with my son, Lord, thank you for the blessing of having him at all.” It was a halfhearted prayer at best.

“Henry, honey, where are you?”

Tap, tap, tap.

“Mrs. Forester, you home?” called a voice.

Lilly wiped her eyes with her apron before opening the back porch door to a blast of frosty air and Patsy's smiling, cold-red face.

“Hey, honey, you look about frozen,” said Lilly. “Come on in.”

Patsy stood shivering and stamping her feet. “Mmmammma sssent me to bbbuy a half dozen eggs,” she said through chattering teeth. “Sssshe doesn't have enough for the ccccake.”

“Hush now, we have time for that. Come warm yourself a minute,” said Lilly. “Mr. Forester's out collecting this afternoon's eggs. He'll be back in a few minutes and then you can have really fresh ones.”

Patsy crept close to the stove to warm herself.

“How are those little ones at your place? Are they getting excited about Thanksgiving?” asked Lilly. Their church had placed a hundred London children with parish families to protect them from Hitler's bombings. Patsy's family had taken two little boys into their already enormous brood. Lilly had wanted to shelter a child – he or she could have used Henry's room – but Clayton had refused.

“They're fine,” said Patsy. “They don't really understand the holiday. But I've told them it's a time of celebrating everything, all the bounty, this country has given us. A time that the pilgrims and Indians were friends even though they were so different. A time for family to be together. I think the ten-year-old, Wesley, feels kinda bad about being here, like it's charity. Talking about Thanksgiving seems to make it worse for him. He wants so bad to be fighting the Nazis himself. So I've got him doing salvage. He's peeled off enough tinfoil from old cigarette packages and gum wrappers he's found at the dump to make a lump the size of a baseball. One of my teachers told me he could get fifty cents for that ball over at the Richmond Engineering Company. They use the tin in bombs.”

Patsy was finally warm enough to take off her worn overcoat.

When she did, Lilly laughed. “What in the world do you have on, child?”

Patsy blushed. She looked down at the jeans she wore, rolled up to her knees, her father's shirt with its tails hanging out. “It's what the girls working the munitions factories wear. And see,” she pointed to a black ring on her left hand. “Any girl who knows someone fighting in the war is wearing one.”

Patsy held her hands up like that for a moment before dropping them awkwardly to her side.

Lilly knew what Patsy wanted to ask. “I haven't heard anything, honey. As soon as I do, I'll come tell you. Or better yet, Henry will tell you himself.”

Patsy nodded. Embarrassed, she looked away. Her eyes fell on Lilly's china cabinet, on a tiny wooden airplane tucked beside a delft blue teapot. “Did Henry make that?”

“Yes. That boy was always crazy for flying.” Lilly put her arm around Patsy's thin shoulders. “In grade school, he knew everything there was to know about clouds – cumulus, nimbus – oh, I can't recall all the types he told me about. But he knew all about them, just like he was part of them. You know, we must try to not grieve too much if we've lost him. Henry got his chance to fly, to climb up into the clouds.” Lilly's voiced cracked and she added softly, “But you have to promise to keep coming to visit me so I don't get too lonely. Okay, honey?”

The sound of Henry's dog, Speed, barking outside interrupted Patsy's answer. Car wheels grated along the driveway's gravel.

“Goodness, who could be coming here now?” mused Lilly. “It's too early for the relatives. No one else would waste the gasoline to drive over here. They'd telephone.” Then she froze, fear stopping her heart. Sometimes the Army delivered death notices in person. “Oh no.” She reached for Patsy with a shaking hand. “You don't suppose?”

Patsy couldn't answer.

Slowly, Lilly removed her apron and smoothed her skirt. “Don't cry,” she muttered, half to herself. “It would embarrass Henry.” She forced herself to put her hand on the old iron doorknob and twist it open.

When the taxicab had turned up his farm's half-mile-long driveway, Henry had wanted to leap out the door and run all the way himself. How could the driver be so slow? Didn't he know how badly Henry wanted to see his folks? He'd been waiting, about to explode with impatience, for a month since American troops found him, running towards them on an open road.

That moment had been perhaps one of the most dangerous of his time in France. He had waved and shouted to the foot soldiers clustered around the fast-moving tanks. “Hey! Am I glad to see y'all.”

Ten men had surrounded him with pointed guns. Shrivelled down to a hundred pounds, covered in grime, wearing German boots and filthy civilian clothes he certainly hadn't looked like the American pilot he claimed to be. Pulling out the safe conduct paper the old German sergeant had given him hadn't helped matters at all.

The infantry had passed him back down the lines under guard. Eventually someone believed Henry. But then it had taken two weeks to make it back to the coast and across the channel to England. Another week to get on a transport plane filled with wounded men heading first to Iceland and then to New York.

In New York City, the Army had insisted on interviewing him again about the
maquis
and the German troops he'd seen. Then he'd been run through more medical tests. Finally, the Army issued him back pay and a uniform. Only then could Henry get permission to catch a train to Virginia.

“Want me to wire your parents, son?” a colonel had asked.

“No, sir, I want to surprise them.”

Now Henry leaned forward from the taxi's back seat to peer out the front window. Poison ivy vines, turned crimson by the frost, climbed up the dark green cedar trees lining the drive. The fields lay golden and shorn, asleep for the cold season. And there, finally, he could see the white Victorian farmhouse between two enormous oak trees that had been the goal that kept him alive. Home. It was the most beautiful sight he'd ever seen.

Cccccccrrruuuunnnch.

The taxi skidded to a halt, the driver having to veer to avoid Speed, who was charging the car and barking like mad.

“How much do I owe you, sir?” Henry asked, reaching into his pocket.