And it looked like she bent her head and . . . whispered to it.
What in the world?
I must have leaned too far forward, because the pew creaked underneath me, and Sarah Ruth jerked her hand away and spun around like she’d been caught dipping into a collection plate, the hem of her dull brown skirt swirling around her knees.
I stood up so she’d know it was just me. “Hello, Sarah Ruth.”
“Gordon,” she said coolly.
“You look lovely today.”
Which was true, but I should’ve known better than to actually say it. Sarah Ruth treated every compliment like an insult in disguise. Nobody in Clayton had fancy city clothes, but Sarah Ruth’s Sunday best always looked especially dressy—probably because I mostly saw her in the square-shouldered lines of the Forest Service uniform.
“You weren’t singing the last song.” Sarah Ruth made the statement calmly, like it was a perfectly natural response to what I’d said instead of a complete evasion. “Why not?”
Well, she had asked. No reason why I shouldn’t answer. “Because I don’t see God in the watch fires of a hundred circling war camps. There, I only see violence.”
She tilted her head, the auburn strands catching the early afternoon light pouring in through the sanctuary windows. “Where do you see him, then?”
A good question. Ever since the fire, it had been hard to see or hear from him at all, so I tried to remember what it had been like when God felt near. “Well . . . in the beauty of sunset over the mountains. Or the trilling of a waxwing. Or even something as simple as the warmth of a blanket and good conversation on a cold evening.”
I stopped. There I went, rambling again. “Never bore a lady with philosophy, Gordon.” Dorie had told me that once, long ago, laughing prettily and touching my arm.
But Sarah Ruth only shrugged, stepping away from the cross and moving toward the first row of pews. “Sure, God is there. That’s why I love the woods and the mountains. But he might be in the fires too.”
Before I could respond, she tilted her head at me and lowered her voice. “Want to know a secret?” I nodded, because what else could I say? “Dad wonders if all forest fires are bad.”
“Excuse me?” The first subject change—away from a compliment—had been expected. This one came out of nowhere.
She nodded sagely. “Think about it, Gordon. Before 1905 and the founding of the Forest Service, fires burned through these mountains every year with no one to stop them. And what harm did that do?”
I felt myself shifting back into my university debate club days. “We also didn’t have people cutting down thousands of acres to build highways and department stores back then.”
Her smile, slight as it was, felt like a triumph. “Granted. But live in a forest long enough, and you’ll realize everything is connected. Without the occasional wildfire, streams can get crowded out by too much vegetation. Ground cover like juniper can take over grazing land. New meadows won’t form, and the predators that depend on them will go hungry. Not now, sure, but after decades of flying in with our planes and shovels, what’s going to happen to that balance?”
There was a strength to her words that took me aback, a hornet hum of certainty, the kind I felt when I read Thoreau’s passionate essays about nature in Walden. “I never thought about it.”
“Dad has,” she said simply. “Oh, there’s nothing he can do about it—if he said something like, ‘Maybe we should allow some fires,’ he’d get laughed straight out of a job. But he wonders, and just because some higher-up decided on a strategy of total suppression doesn’t mean he blindly accepts it. You wouldn’t guess just looking at him, but Dad’s a rebel.”
“So that’s where you get it.”
She leaned against the nearby pew and grinned. “You could say that.”
I felt a surge of victory. It wasn’t quite a compliment, and she hadn’t quite accepted it, but it was close, wasn’t it?
“So, Gordon: What if war is like a wildfire?”
It appeared she hadn’t been changing the subject after all. “I don’t understand.”
“Maybe sometimes you have to use fire to burn away the old, twisted ground cover to make room for new life.”
Ah. A metaphor. That I could work with. “War can’t burn away human sin.”
“No. But we all have to do our part to resist it. Men like my brother William are called to raise barricade lines to keep the fire of evil from spreading and destroying.”
“And men like me?” I knew the names the others called us, both to our faces and behind our backs. But I’d never heard Sarah Ruth voice an opinion, either for or against us.
Her measuring eyes took me in, and this time, she didn’t look away. “There’s a season to everything. Maybe you’re meant to come back to the scorched earth and help something grow again.”
Beautiful words. But were they true?
I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can accept that. The reason Jack and I came here in the first place, when everyone we knew mocked or hated us for it, was because we believe it’s always wrong to fight and kill.”
She took a step closer, and I could see her inhale deeply. “Gordon, about Jack . . .”
The fear and loss came back in a rush. Jack. In a hospital somewhere, alone. “What about him?”
“Just . . . don’t be too sure you’re right. That’s all.” She shrugged and couldn’t keep meeting my eyes. “Especially about something as complicated as war and peace.” With that, she turned on her heel, striding down the aisle like a mountain-bound ranger with a mission.
I had to ask, before she left for good. “Why were you whispering to the cross?”
She stopped. Turned. And I’d never seen her eyes like that before, so serious and sad. “Dad used to pray that way sometimes. Before Willie died.”
That didn’t answer my question—not really. “Were you praying too?”
As she angled toward me, one hand on the door, the light from the lone stained-glass window at the back of the church gave her a halo of gold and red and green. “Just burning out some old, twisted ground cover.” Her voice was almost a whisper again.
“Sarah Ruth!” The holler cut through the quiet so abruptly that we both flinched. Jimmy’s head poked into the sanctuary. “C’mon, before Mom gets hung up again with—”
That’s when he noticed me, and his general teenage impatience to get to lunch was replaced with unmistakable suspicion. “What’re you doing with him?”
“It’s called conversation, little brother. You should try it sometime.” Sarah Ruth’s voice had lost all of its wistfulness, snapping back to her usual smirk. “Most people enjoy it, I’m told.”
“Aw, come off it.” Was it intentional, the way he placed himself in the gap between the two of us?
Sarah Ruth angled herself around him as she walked toward the door. “It was good to talk to you, Gordon.” As if we’d been discussing the weather or the latest radio show instead of grief and prayer and the burden of peace.
“You too,” I blurted, pretending not to notice the warning glare Jimmy gave me before the doors closed, the silence no longer comforting.
So Sarah Ruth didn’t think we were cowards. That was good. But what had she been about to say about Jack? And she couldn’t be right about some men being called to fight and others to make peace . . . could she?
I should have hurried to catch up with Sarah Ruth and Jimmy, back to the truck and the national forest. But there was one more thing I wanted to know.
Sure enough, I leaned over the altar and saw that the place where Sarah Ruth’s hand had rested on the wooden cross had been rubbed smooth.
A few hours later, I found myself kneeling beside Jack’s empty bed with a cardboard box and too much on my mind.
Morrissey’s instructions had been clear. While the other men had their usual free Sunday afternoon to use at their leisure, I was assigned to sort through Jack’s things. Anything government issued stayed. The rest woul
d be sent to his family.
Still no word on Jack’s condition. Something about entering the bunkhouse, empty and cold, and seeing his perfectly made bed caught me in the gut.
I clutched the box tighter. He’s not dead.
But either way, it was clear that even if Jack woke up, he wasn’t coming back to Flintlock Mountain.
A pile of belongings rested at the foot of the bed—someone had clearly retrieved them from the lookout. A shaving kit, a toothbrush, two changes of clothes, a blue towel frayed at the edges, the necessities of daily life. I sorted through them, trying to remember what we’d been given two years ago when we joined up and what Jack had brought from home.
That task done, there was only one left. I knelt beside the trunk at the foot of Jack’s bed and tested the lid.
Locked, as always.
Thankfully, one of the privileges of being Jack’s best friend was knowing he kept the key inside the Bible on the small bedside table. I turned the key, opened the lid, and started sorting.
When it came to what the government allotted us, the pile was small. Boots. The canvas coveralls we used on jumps. The blanket folded neatly at the foot of the cot.
All that remained was a box of tacks, a set of pencils in various stages of nub, and a Sunday dress outfit, complete with a tin of shoeshine and a polishing rag that I borrowed for church days.
Then, a surprise: not one journal but four, arranged in a small stack.
I allowed myself a smile. He really did write down everything, didn’t he? The journals were all exactly alike—plain black-and-white composition books—so I’d never noticed when he’d filled one and started another.
Lifting the stack revealed one more item at the bottom: a snapshot of the Armitage family at what looked like a picnic, his parents framing their two children. A younger Jack aimed his usual Hollywood-charm smile at the camera, but Dorie tilted her head, smirking more than smiling, about thirteen years old but displaying not a hint of awkwardness.
I shook my head. He hadn’t kept it tacked to the wall or out in a frame. But his family was still with him, whether they wanted to be or not.
Taped to the back was a paper in Jack’s hand, reading, Dorie’s new address.
I glanced at it.
What was she doing at a hotel in Seattle? That was a long way from small-town Pennsylvania.
Even as I asked the question, I wondered if I knew. She’d married a military man, hadn’t she? Gone across the country to follow him, maybe an officer who got a cushy stateside job at one of the ports in Washington.
It’s her choice if she did, Gordon. Whatever she did, it wasn’t just to spite you. I knew that, just as I knew, deep in my heart, that, war or no, the sharp differences between us would have made us the kind of cat-and-dog couple my parents had been. Still, it stung, picturing her sauntering through the streets of Seattle on the arm of an officer in a spiffy dress uniform.
Had Jack ever written her? I didn’t think I’d ever seen him at it, although it was hard to tell, given all the scribbling he did in his notebook.
I decided to put the journals on top of the box, for Jack’s parents to see first. Let them remember who Jack was, not the conscientious objector, but the man.
My hands moved to fold the flaps of the box inward, and then I paused.
That one second was all my curiosity needed.
Jack had never let us touch his journal, had shielded it even from me when I tried to lean over and read a line.
To know what he was thinking just before he died . . . well, it might help me find closure. There were so many questions I couldn’t ask him now. Surely he wouldn’t mind if his best friend took a short glance.
I opened the first one, with October 1942 emblazoned on the front, and started reading.
It wasn’t a journal.
That was clear by the bold heading: Danger on Planet Xylon. By Jack T. Armitage.
I couldn’t help smiling, then laughing when I read the first few pages. It was a radio play, of all things. Not a factual account of CPS service for future generations like we’d all thought. A science-fiction drama about a space explorer named Captain Jackson Andromeda, clearly autobiographical.
Some of my laughter was at the comedic bits. Some . . . well, let’s just say it was clear Jack was a beginner. Not that I could have done better, but I imagined some of the lines would be absurd spoken out loud, especially once the aliens joined the program.
Behind the notebook, held together with a paper clip, was clearly the rough draft, pages of smudgy lined paper with pencil scratch-outs as well as arrows that made the whole thing look like the most complicated football playbook known to man.
“We’re going to have fun talking about this when you wake up, Jack,” I said. No one answered, and the silence felt heavy.
I paged through a few of the other notebooks—late 1943 was Jack’s hackneyed Western period until he shifted to exaggerated film noir in early 1944—before placing them back in the trunk, when I noticed a loose sheet had fluttered to the ground. It was a notebook page with a torn edge, folded in half. Another rough draft.
And as I read all the way through it, I thought again of Dorie Armitage. Whoever she’d become, whatever she was doing, Jack had written this scene for her.
CHAPTER 9
Dorie Armitage
January 17, 1945
The freshly painted boards of the enclosed porch of the base hospital creaked as I wheeled Staff Sergeant Howard Mitchell out of the convalescent wing. Even in January, he insisted on getting an hour of fresh air from the cracked-open windows. “Good for the constitution,” he always said. “And Lord knows mine needs amending.” He chuckled, then inhaled deeply, as if the bracing wind off Puget Sound might regrow his left leg, amputated at the knee.
I situated him in front of the window that offered the best view of the parade grounds.
“Good thing you came to visit today, Miss Doris. I’d just gathered up enough news for a letter.”
“Howie, you always have something to say,” I teased, tilting another of the porch’s chairs toward him and setting my portable writing case on my lap.
He threw his whiskered head back and laughed, drawing attention from a few of the other fellows staring blankly at the dismal sky. “Fellow’s got to keep the folks back home entertained.”
I knew the rough outline of Howie’s story: He’d been ambushed by guerilla warriors in Guam and was now settled in for recovery at the port of embarkation. But Dr. Pemberton had warned me from the first that I shouldn’t ask too many questions related to the men’s combat experiences when I visited the base hospital on Wednesday evenings. “Just be a friendly face,” he’d advised.
My eyes wandered down to the blanket around Howie’s thigh, dropped flat where it ought to have surrounded a healthy lower leg. It was the least I could do, with all they’d sacrificed.
He cleared his throat. “I know I’m a real fine specimen, Miss Doris, but you’d best keep your eyes on my face.”
I flushed the way I always did when caught staring. “Gosh, I didn’t mean—”
His hand batted my apology away. “Better settle in now, because I plan to run that fountain pen dry.”
I obliged, scratching out Howie’s words to his darling wife, Christine. There was no way to include his gestures or the affectionate look in his eye when he reached, “All my love, Howie,” but I did my best.
Then, on went the eagle stamps we could purchase at the PX, and soon the letter would be winging its way home to Olathe, Kansas. “Good,” Howie declared, after checking over the address. “Man ought to look after his family. I don’t stand by the boys who barely give their folks word.”
My hand stilled on the paper for a moment, and then I focused on folding the letter into perfect thirds. If he knew I’d never once written a personal letter to Jack after he left home . . .
And now it was too late.
For five days, I’d dealt with the news about Jack by filling my days as
full as possible—work and outings with the girls and even a second date with Archie. But as soon as bed check came every night, I found myself staring at the cracked plaster of the ceiling, remembering.
Not the Jack who folded his arms and set his jaw against my pleas not to join the CPS. The Jack who saved his paper-route money to give me a satin-lined doll buggy for my eighth birthday, who defended skinny Davy McIntire against the school bullies, who always had me gut the fish after an outing on the lake because he couldn’t stand to look at their sightless eyes.
And now he was injured—maybe fatally—somewhere far away.
After Freddie had given me the telegram in the garage, I’d hurried back to the hotel to call home. There had been a fire, a terrible accident, and the army was now keeping Jack for treatment but wouldn’t release his location. Nor could they say what his chances were of getting well, only that he was in “critical condition.”
He was a smokejumper, I found out. Somehow, even without a uniform, my brother had been the first to ride in a plane after all.
“You all right, sweetheart?” Daddy had asked after giving the details. He hadn’t called me that since before high school.
I asked where Jack was being treated, but they didn’t know. Even if they’d been able to pay for a train trip all the way out west—they certainly didn’t have the gas rations to drive—the army insisted he was in too critical a condition for visitors. They hadn’t pressed any further. Too distraught, I suppose, to squabble with regulations.
Now, without any updates, the omission bothered me. Like a few lines had been censored out of a report. And why had they taken Jack to an army hospital instead of a local one? How could he have been hurt so badly? Was it really the accident they claimed?
“You all right, Miss Doris?” When I looked up, Howie’s eyebrows were knitted together, the crinkles from beside his eyes gone.
I cleared my throat. “Just homesick, I suppose.”
“Reckon we all are.”
I tucked the letter into the envelope and sealed it. “Was there anyone you didn’t get to say good-bye to, Howie? Properly, I mean.” The words came almost on their own.
The Lines Between Us Page 8