Read Under the Same Blue Sky Online
Authors: Pamela Schoenewaldt
“We could come back. Or go somewhere else.”
“I’d be in your school? You’d be my teacher?”
“Yes.”
“Can we have a dog?”
“When we’re settled.”
“But not Lilli?”
“No, Lilli lives here.”
“Can we come back for Christmas?”
“Yes.”
“I have to talk English?”
“Yes, but you’ll learn quickly.”
“Can I play now?”
“Yes.” He slipped off the bench and ran to find Lilli.
At night, when I put him to bed, David solemnly announced that he and Bucephalus would try Galway.
“I’m glad.” In the next weeks, I fixed the terms of my employment with the Galway school board. I’d start work in mid-April. Harriet Willis, the current teacher, couldn’t wait to go home to her family in Ohio and, many suspected, to a sweetheart just back from the war. Some small repairs would be done on the house and it would be repainted. I asked for white. In the meadow, I drew my father’s grave. “See?” I whispered. “You’re coming with me.” I’d also bring the little coffin that Tom had made, one of his wooden puzzles, and four of my father’s tins.
At a going-away dinner in the big dining room, David sang songs the soldiers had taught him. Georg and Anthony gave me art books for the school and a small Constable landscape for my house. “We’ll come out soon to make sure it’s hung properly,” they promised.
My mother grew quiet as the evening ended. The last time I’d left her, she had my father. Now she was alone, despite the bakery and so many new friends. So much had happened here. We held each other tightly at the train station. “Write to me, Hazel. Write me all the time.”
“I will. And if Tom comes back, if you hear anything—”
“We’ll tell you right away.”
“I’ll miss you all.”
“We’ll visit.”
“Here’s your lunches,” said Anna, handing me a heavy sack. “Don’t forget to feed the child.”
David hugged Lilli again. Georg, Anthony, Anna, and my mother waved as we pulled away.
“Will we be happy in Galway?” David asked.
“I hope so.”
W
E WERE SO
busy in the first weeks that I had no time to measure happiness, or even question the wisdom of my choice. Once again, I visited the farm families; this time David eased my way. He was learning English quickly, and children welcomed a new, exotic playmate. Sometimes returned soldiers recounted their great adventures. Others struggled to manage their old lives and work with damaged bodies. In many houses I saw young men sitting glassy-eyed in corners or heard that they’d slipped away when they saw strangers coming, even a woman and a small child.
As Jim Burnett predicted, more families wanted their children in school. Sometimes adults followed me out to the road for a confession: “I can’t read or write, Miss Renner. I don’t want my kids to know. Will you teach me?”
“Don’t make them go to school,” Ellen said. “They’d be ashamed.” So I gave lessons at my home two evenings a week. Under the guise of “calling on the schoolmarm,” men and women gathered at my kitchen table, learning to sound out food labels, newspaper headlines, and familiar Bible verses. Some paid with quarters. Others brought crafts or produce: bacon, eggs, jam, fruit pies, or baskets. One man made a rush-bottom chair for David; Molly Hyde sewed gingham curtains for my kitchen.
Taking over the classroom so late in the year, I didn’t push the children hard. We spoke about the war as much as they wanted to, drew pictures of those they’d lost, and had spelling, geography, arithmetic, and history bees to break up the day. In September, we agreed, school would be “more regular.” I planted a vegetable garden with meticulous advice from older students who marveled at my ignorance. “You’re from the city,” they said kindly. “Don’t expect too much your first summer.”
T
he evening of June 6, 1919, was balmy. In the kitchen, chopping onions for the next day’s soup, I struggled to excite David with the wonder of what had just happened in Washington: The Senate had ratified a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. I’d explained “voting,” then “Senate,” and had begun “Constitution” when a knock at the door had David bolting away. We’d never get to “ratify,” I was thinking, when he came running back.
“Numa, there’s a man on the porch.”
New students for my evening classes sometimes came at this hour, stiff and embarrassed, slowly circling to their purpose. My hands were deep in onions. “What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Ask him to come in.”
David darted back to the door, delivered his message, and returned. “He won’t. He’s wooden, like this.” David demonstrated, so like John Foster, my bringer of paint, that I froze. “And there’s a dog in the yard that looks just like Lilli. The man has curly black hair.”
A dog like Lilli. Black hair. Here. Colors in the kitchen blared; every
edge turned sharper. This moment, on this plain June day, everything was changing. “He must want reading lessons. Can you go play in your room?”
“But—”
“Go on, David. You know how shy they are at first.”
I took off my apron, smoothed my hair, and walked slowly to the door. After all this time, after all my giving up, after months of mornings thinking that
today
I would have news, had he come so soon? I opened the door. And there was Tom, like a simple, solid fact. There were the same broad shoulders and dark curls with threads of gray. Arms and legs whole, face unscarred. Except that he was wooden, exactly as David said. I turned wooden, too, staring at him with my hand on the door.
In all the times I’d pictured our reunion, even at this very door, I’d always seen a two-reeler romance:
My darling, you’re home at last
. I leap into his arms. Organ music swells. Fingers tangle in my hair. We kiss and kiss. Not this. Nothing in this wooden man said, “
Touch me.
” Everything said, “
Be careful. I might break.
”
I stepped back. “Come in, Tom. I’m so glad to see you.” As if he were an evening student:
Come in, Tom. I’m so glad to see you.
Did I once lie with this man skin to skin, our bodies tangled? It hardly seemed possible.
“Can Lilli come in?” I’d never have recognized this toneless voice.
“Yes, of course.”
He whistled and she came at a stately pace. Even Lilli was different, fixed on Tom, staying close, barely acknowledging me. We filed into the kitchen, a stiff procession. He took a chair facing the door. When he set his knapsack down, it clattered on the floor. Lilli sat, pressed against his leg.
Say it because it’s true, wooden as he is.
“Tom, I was so afraid you’d never come.”
Where did that slow smile begin? Far inside, finally cracking the
wood of his face. “So was I.” He put a hand on Lilli’s head. “Your mother said you’d be here.”
“When did you get to Dogwood?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Nobody told me.”
“I asked them not to. I wanted you to see for yourself how I am.”
“Oh.” And how was he? Like a man under a spell. Ask something normal. “Are you hungry?” He nodded. I began making coffee and cut a piece of strawberry pie.
A floorboard creaked. Tom scrambled to his feet so quickly that the chair toppled. His knapsack clattered over. “Who’s that?” he demanded, his voice sharp as a rifle crack. Lilli was on her feet as well, hackles up, growling at a pale and shaking David, who was clutching his wooden truck. Tom shook his head as if to clear it. “Down, Lilli.” She sat. “It’s the kid from Prussia?”
“Yes, this is David.” Breathing hard as if from a terrible race, Tom righted the chair. Lilli pawed his leg. He gripped the scruff of her neck.
I went to David and spoke to him softly in German: “This is my friend Tom, who lived at the castle. He was in the war. Lilli was his dog. They’ve come to visit.”
“He’s scary. Will he hurt me?”
“No. And you’re not afraid of your friend Lilli, are you?”
“I don’t know. She’s not the same.” I sat down with David on my lap.
Tom’s breathing eased. Lilli lay down at his feet. “I’m so sorry, kid. Strange noises make me jumpy. Do you understand?” A careful nod. “They told me all about you. Anna said you were very brave to come to America.”
A tiny voice: “You brought Lilli.”
“Yes. They thought she’d help me get better. She remembers you, I’m sure. Would you like to pet her?”
“Yes.”
“Go, Lilli.” David slid off my lap and Lilli bounded to him, wagging, bowing, circling, rubbing and pawing him as they tangled like puppies. We watched them play, warmed by their pure and easy joy. “Hazel, I want to tell you where I’ve been and what happened that made me like this.”
I gave him the coffee and pie. “It doesn’t have to be now.”
“Yes, it does.” He braced himself like a student before a spelling bee’s last round, when the hardest words are coming.
“Tell me.”
Tom took a long breath. “I was gone a very long time. I wasn’t myself here.” He touched his head. “I have some good days now, but many that aren’t good.”
“I’m glad that you came. I missed you.” I reached for his arm. At least this was the same: hard under a soft flannel shirt. He raised his other hand and laid it gently on mine. A shiver ran through me. I’d waited so long.
That same warm, wide smile—almost the same. “Wonderful pie.”
“There’s more. As much as you want.”
He leaned back. “Peace is so good: strawberry pie, a kitchen, a little boy, a front porch, a field without shell holes, songbirds. On the front, you start thinking that all these things are dreams. You’re crazy even to remember them.” His gaze drifted out the window. His body, too, seemed lighter, as if it might float out as well. I had to pull him back.
“A telegram last spring said you were missing in action. What happened?”
David climbed back in my lap. Lilli returned to Tom. He stroked her velvet head. “Late April, 1918. You knew the baron’s cousin, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was shot down?”
“Yes.”
“I figured I had to be next. Nobody lasts long up there, and he was the best. I was in Belgium, flying every day. You watch the other guy’s plane go spiraling down and you think:
I’m next.
The last time I flew, I was supposed to bomb a railroad terminal. A fog rolled in, and I wasn’t sure if I was over a village or the terminal.”
“You couldn’t see.”
“No, and I couldn’t come back with the bombs. You had to drop them. When I flew low to see better, my plane was hit. I managed to land, but I didn’t know where I was. In the fog, shapes kept coming at me. I shot them. They could have been villagers.”
“But if they were shooting at you, they were soldiers.”
“I don’t remember if they were shooting or not. Some of them fell. Then I was running.”
“Where?”
“Into a forest. I ran until it was quiet and green all around me. I was bloody and my head hurt. I must have slept because I dreamed that my friend Colin came out of the fog. He said, ‘Tom, why didn’t you get me another cup of tea? Then I’d be alive now.’ I woke up sweating and shaking. I didn’t have my dog tags, and I was wearing civilian clothes.”
“How did you get them?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. There was a house outside a village with an old woman named Louise. She was hunting mushrooms in the woods and found me. She took me home and bandaged my head. She was a cabinetmaker’s widow. These are his tools in my knapsack. She didn’t ask questions. Or she did and I couldn’t answer them. In any case, I wasn’t Thomas Jamison anymore. She called me Jean-Paul. I worked for her, and she fed me. I kept seeing Colin in the fog.”
“You didn’t try to go back?”
“No. I just worked for Louise and people in the village. I slept. If
there was wine, I drank it. I’d watch airplanes and remember how quiet it was in the clouds. When my head cleared, the idea of even trying to go back seemed crazy. The front was always moving. How could I find my unit? If I did, they’d shoot me for desertion. More likely, I’d walk into a German camp. Then
they’d
shoot me. Eventually, I stopped thinking about going back or going home or even about you. I just—was there. Do you understand?”
“Like in a dream?”
“Like a nightmare. Soldiers kept passing through the village: French, English, American, German. They were all the same to me. I’d hide in the woods, absolutely still, playing dead. Any little sound could have killed me.”
Like a floorboard creaking under a small boy
. “Every time they came, I expected to die. Even if I didn’t move, a soldier might see my shape and shoot. Why not? I’d shot at shapes. Sometimes I thought I
was
already dead. This is what dead people do, right? They live in the woods in Belgium. Crazy, wasn’t it?”
I squeezed Tom’s arm. “You aren’t dead, though. You’re here.”
“Yes. It’s amazing.”
“But you didn’t come home after the armistice.”
He stroked Lilli a long time. “No. I’d been feeling better in the fall of ’18, except on foggy days. There weren’t as many bombs, and I thought about Colin a little less. Louise talked about peace: ‘
La paix, finalement la paix.
’ On November 11, when the war ended, they celebrated in town, but peace didn’t change much for me. I was still lost.” David whispered that he was hungry. I gave him bread and butter.
“Louise didn’t want to keep me anymore. Maybe she paid my ticket and put me on a train because somehow I was in Paris. I’d had this thought that you’d be there. I’d find you, and you could put my pieces back together. Like magic.”
“Tom.” I held his hands tightly in mine, as if that warmth could melt
the line between our bodies. Even then, nothing happened. No tremor, only my ache for his pain.
“I know. That was crazy. Nobody knows how to put men like me back together. There’s no magic. They say it takes time. And maybe it never happens, or it’s never finished.” He stared at the table.
“So you were in Paris,” I prompted.
He blinked and revived. “Yes. It was big and noisy. I jumped at every sound. I had these tools, though, so I went around to bars and cafés and fixed things for food and a place to sleep. I helped a priest whose church had been damaged. People were kind, mostly. But I couldn’t find you and I had trouble on foggy days.”