He shook his head. “Can’t. We only get paid a few dollars per month.”
Was he exaggerating? That was practically slavery. “Why do you spend some of it on birdseed, then?”
“We’ve got a feeder near the bunkhouse. I like to have something cheerful to look at in the winter.”
“Oh.” I’d been expecting something a bit more high-minded.
“Also, as the Scriptures say, ‘Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.’”
There it was. “Your heavenly Father picks up the hardware store tab, eh?” I dropped the seed I’d collected into his cupped palms, then thrust my hands back into my pockets to get some warmth.
“No. But I’m the son of my Father, and I do my best to keep up the family resemblance.” He nodded his thanks, but I could see disdain under the polite veneer. “Thank you for your help. If that’s all, I’d like to get back.”
I couldn’t let him leave before I’d asked him anything. “Actually, would you mind escorting me to . . .” Where was it Jimmy had said? “Casey’s. Jimmy Morrissey is meeting me there.”
The conflict between what Thomas wanted to do and what he knew he ought to do was clear on his face. “All right,” he finally said, duty winning the round.
I got the feeling that with Thomas Martin, duty won every round.
He beelined down the street, clearly in no mood for light conversation, but I dogged his steps, grateful for those physical training drills at boot camp. “I’ve been talking to some of the other men for my report. Jack Armitage and his terrible accident keep coming up.”
“I’m sure.”
Once again, the conversation took a verbal bullet to the heart and died without another sound.
Maybe with Thomas, the key was to be direct. He seemed to share Gordon’s aversion to deception in all forms. “Some of the fellows said you quarreled with Jack before he left for the lookout. Is that true?”
For a moment, there was no sound except our footsteps scuffing the sidewalk and the occasional car rumbling by on the street. “You could say that.”
“That’s a shame. If he doesn’t make it, those will be the last words he heard from you. It’s a weighty thing to have regrets.”
That, at least, was true. Uncomfortably true.
Thomas stopped so suddenly that I nearly tripped over him. “I don’t regret anything I said to Jack.” His eyes were burning, and I felt we were on the edge of a discovery. “You see . . . I warned him.”
Another long pause. Although I had a suspicion Thomas had hated every Hollywood movie since talkies were introduced, he sure seemed to borrow his sense of drama from them. “Warned him about what?”
“That I’d found this underneath his mattress.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out a tri-fold brochure. I took it between two fingers, half expecting to see a pinup girl, but no smoky-eyed dame smoldered out from the top page of the glossy paper. No, it was a sharp-eyed eagle under a banner for the United States Army.
Your Country Needs You, the headline read. A recruitment brochure.
There had to be some mistake. Probably someone had left it in Jack’s things as a prank. “Are you sure it was Jack’s?”
“I thought of that. But when I confronted him, he admitted to it. Said as he learned more about what the Axis powers were really up to, he wasn’t sure what was right anymore.” Thomas’s voice was equal parts scorn and bewilderment, as if he still couldn’t believe Jack had said something like that.
I tried to process it. After all those late-night arguments from his moral high ground, Jack had been at least considering joining the military.
Gordon didn’t know, did he? No, surely he would have said something to me.
“I-I suppose that must have been a shock to you.”
“I told Jack he was betraying his conscience, if that’s what you mean.” Thomas shook his head in disgust, too absorbed in his story to notice my surprise. “My father refused to fight in the Great War. He was court-martialed and thrown in prison for nearly three years, where the guards beat him for sport.”
It sounded like the plot of a movie—one set in a country other than America. “Couldn’t he have been a medic or an ambulance driver?” I had researched that option, tried to persuade Jack a 1-A-O classification was the perfect compromise. “Some kind of support staff, I mean.”
“If he had, what would he have been supporting?”
The answer hung between us. War. Violence. Endless trench warfare. I’d heard from enough graying veterans to know they’d hoped brutality like that would never again call the world back to war. But it had, only twenty years later.
“I was five years old, my oldest sister seven, when Father was taken to prison,” Thomas went on. The story seemed to come out of him now on its own, with no more dramatic pauses. “We did all we could to help with chores, but my father’s pitchfork was twice my height. Our brethren at the church tried to make up the difference, but after one year stretched into two and it was clear no pardon was coming, we had to sell the farm. The land that had been in my family for five generations, that was supposed to be my inheritance . . . gone.”
I pictured all the strong, suntanned farmer boys I’d known growing up, the proud way they bragged about the latest harvest. “That must have been very hard for you.”
Thomas stopped, frowned. “I didn’t say . . . that wasn’t the point. But yes. It was hard.” And his gaze seemed to be somewhere else for a moment. Where, I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe in the schoolyard, standing up to bullies taunting him for his jailbird father. Maybe back on his favorite spot on the farm, breathing in the smell of freshly plowed dirt. Maybe on the front porch when his father came back a different man.
He’s a CO, Dorie. He doesn’t deserve your sympathy.
But that was silly. COs were people too, whether I disagreed with them or not. And they had their own wounds, just like Howie and the others at the base hospital.
Thomas blinked, and wherever he had been, now he was back on the slush-covered Oregon street next to me and clearly unhappy about it. “After all my family suffered, I couldn’t believe Jack would just . . . abandon his beliefs like they were nothing. I was furious.”
It still barely made sense. Jack, a soldier? The last time I’d spoken to him, he’d been so infuriatingly sure of himself, full of arguments and justifications.
But if Thomas was telling the truth, if he really had been furious at Jack for going against his beliefs and possibly leading others astray . . .
It was time to press. “Mad enough to hurt him?” I eyed the bruise on his face, a blotch of variegated navy and plum. “I see he put up a fight.”
“That?” His laugh was sudden and sharp. “No, Jack didn’t give me that bruise. You find Gordon Hooper and ask him whether I would hurt anyone. Then you’ll get your answer.”
Gordon? No, he couldn’t have.
But then again, what did I really know about him, other than what he claimed to believe?
I tucked the brochure away in my pocket as evidence without asking if I could keep it. “You’re sure you didn’t feel like the Lord needed some help revealing the truth about Jack?”
He stepped to the side to look at me, and I felt the cold of the wind for the first time, as cutting as his stare. “You really don’t understand what we believe, do you? What it means to leave justice and vengeance to God?”
“Maybe I don’t,” I said slowly, watching him for any tell-tale sign of lying. Broken gaze. Nervous twitch. Carefully rehearsed justifications.
But Thomas just looked directly at me, as if he was suddenly the one interrogating. “As an outsider, you’ll never be able to understand. But I know what I said was right.”
The self-righteous air of his words grated on me, and even though I knew I should let it alone to focus on my questions, I couldn’t resist. “It doesn’t sound like you were especially kind.”
&n
bsp; “Kind?” His brow furrowed as if he couldn’t remember the meaning of the word.
“There’s more to loving your neighbors—or your enemies, for that matter—than just not killing them, you know.”
He jerked his head toward me, surprise on his face for a moment. But only a moment. “Yes. Sometimes it means warning them. Like a watchman has a responsibility to raise the alarm if he sees a distant danger coming. ‘Whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the sword come, and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head.’ I did my part.”
Then he pointed across the street, past a filling station, to a soda fountain with Casey’s written in punched-out metal letters over a striped awning, and turned to leave, satisfied that he’d had the final word.
Well, I couldn’t let that happen. “It’s not that black-and-white. About violence and all.”
Thomas shook his head. “Not black-and-white. Just good and evil and the war in between.”
CHAPTER 14
Gordon Hooper
January 20, 1945
Anyone who watched me slam the ranger station door knew what answer Morrissey had given me to my daily question: No, there hadn’t been any change in Jack’s status.
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” he’d said, sounding haggard as a hotshot after a three-day fire. “That’s what happens in war, son. Not everyone makes it home.”
I’d done my best to push down my frustration. “With all due respect, it’s not the same thing. This isn’t a battlefield.”
“Might as well be.” Then he practically shoved me out the door, muttering about mealtime and getting to Saturday chores.
Despite my reassurances to Dorie the night before, I couldn’t help wondering whether Morrissey actually checked in with the hospital every day. Was he just trying to get rid of me?
It’s just his way, being gruff like that, I told myself as Mrs. Edith heaped fried potatoes onto my plate. I couldn’t let Dorie’s dime-novel conspiracies get to my head.
Once I’d settled at a table in the corner, Charlie sat next to me, his coffee sloshing slightly onto his tray. “Hi, Gordon.”
I forced out an unconvincing greeting in response, which he must have noticed, because he hesitated. Then he tugged an envelope out from under his tray. “Hey, I got in my last set of pictures, including those dead birds of yours, if you want to see them.”
Normally, I would have studied the stack eagerly, admiring the angles Charlie had captured and envisioning the way I’d arrange the composition of my sketches from them. Today, though, I only riffled through them, managing a few hums of approval.
Then I got to the last picture in the stack.
“I thought you might want that one too,” Charlie said tentatively.
It was Jack and me, dressed in our work jeans and T-shirts, our coats flung to the side, a jagged bandsaw between us, cutting down the Christmas tree we’d put up in the cookhouse the month before. An ache cinched around my middle, seeing him with that carefree Armitage grin, waving at Charlie and the camera. While I, fresh from the hard work of sawing a massive pine, just looked tired, my halfhearted smile weary around the edges.
Still, I knew I’d keep it somewhere safe, maybe bring it out again in December, just to remember better times. “Thanks, Charlie.”
“Don’t mention it.” He took a sip of coffee, then wrapped his hands around the mug, letting steam bloom up before he looked back at me, his dark eyes full of compassion. “We all want him back.”
I glanced over at Thomas, cutting into his potatoes with perfect precision a few tables away. “You sure about that?”
He followed where I was looking. “You know ol’ Thomas likes to be the one in charge. I figured he’d try to get in some kind of an insult about Jack. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
I straightened the photos, keeping Jack’s on top. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“You gonna apologize to him? You know, after you . . .” He shrugged and cleared his throat. Rumors spread quickly at Flintlock Mountain. I was sure Shorty had given an account of our fight like he was the radio announcer for a champion wrestling tournament.
“We’ll see.” It was a safer answer than “no” and basically amounted to “none of your business,” which I couldn’t outright say to Charlie, of all people, so kindhearted that he didn’t like swatting spiders. “Say, what chore did you draw today?”
Not much for a change of subject, but Charlie lit into it, probably glad as I was for an escape from the awkwardness. “Cabin cleaning with Mr. Richardson. You?”
“Laundry duty.” An easy job, but also one with plenty of time to stew over my worries.
I glanced down at the picture again, at Jack’s straight posture, the strong arms that had torn sawdust from the massive tree behind us. So alive, especially compared to the last time I’d seen him, his body limp and scarred, carried between Morrissey and Richardson.
Now, there’s an idea.
What could it hurt, really? Just so I could rest easier at night.
“Charlie,” I said, trying to smile like Jack and Dorie did when they wanted to persuade someone, “I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”
An hour later, instead of a plum job ironing shirts in the warm indoors, I found myself hacking my lungs out as I tried to sweep a chimney clean with a straw broom, bringing a swarm of coal dust into the cabin.
This is all Dorie’s fault.
“Ought’ve brought a kerchief,” Les Richardson observed, his own bearded face covered with one. Combined with the high-crowned ranger hat, he looked ready to lasso a cow or conduct a stagecoach robbery. He yanked a desiccated mouse skeleton out of a trap beside one of the bunks and flung it out the propped-open door.
Les Richardson was of the classic logger-and-cowhand ilk that used to comprise the whole Oregon Department of Forestry, the kind who didn’t answer many questions and asked even fewer. He had also found Jack’s body at the fire, so I’d swapped Charlie for cabin duty in hopes of learning more.
Five years ago, the department had completed a string of cabins down Antlers Trail on level ground before the terrain became steeper, leading up to the lookout. They were Morrissey’s pride and joy. Only a few were occupied on weekends over the winter, but come the spring thaw, they’d be rented most every night. Until then, the only upkeep was a monthly visit to knock off any ice dams, clear out the chimneys, and check for critters.
Once I’d made another shove with the broom and held my breath to shield my lungs from the stirred-up debris, I made my opening move. “Mr. Richardson? I wondered if I could talk to you.”
“Eh?” He turned a grizzled face toward me. “Nothing’s stopping you. So long as you can do it while cleaning that mess.”
I applied the broom to scraping the coal dust toward the door, glad that I wouldn’t have to look directly at him. “Did you see anything in the fire? The one that injured Jack?”
He nodded. “Sure. Burnin’ trees. And brush too.” There was no sarcasm in Mr. Richardson’s voice, as if he actually thought he was being helpful.
“I meant . . . a person. I thought I saw someone.”
As always, it sounded crazy, like I believed in the ghost stories the rangers sometimes told us when they were feeling particularly social.
Mr. Richardson grunted and yanked his handkerchief away from his face. “I reckon you saw one of us, Hooper. Me or Morris. We was weaving in and out of the fire, looking.”
I gripped my broom tighter. “Looking for what?”
For a minute, it seemed like Mr. Richardson would go back to his guarded silence, but maybe something in my expression was just desperate enough. “He had a bad feeling, Morris told me. On account of the boy didn’t call in the fire.”
“You were looking for Jack?” It would make sense. If Morrissey suspected something had gone wrong, that would explain why he and Richardson had taken so long circling the burn area.
“More or less.” He shifted a bit. “Are you su
re it’s good for you to be thinking ’bout all this? Can’t change the past, you know.”
I wasn’t about to let him off the hook that easily. “Where did you find him?”
“Near the middle. Like he’d gone charging into the center of things.”
I winced and covered it by pretending to cough on the coal dust. That image of Jack as a hero, striding into the flames . . .
When I looked back up, Richardson was staring somberly at me. “Listen, Hooper. I know you were asking Morris about all this before. And he’s awful cagey, ’specially when he feels it’s his fault.”
What was that supposed to mean? “If you and Mr. Morrissey hadn’t found him as quickly as you did, he’d have died for sure.” I returned to the hearth, beating the dust onto the floor to be swept cleanly away.
“I know that, and you know that, but Morris . . . he ain’t sure.” Mr. Richardson stood, shrugging his wide lumberjack shoulders. “Reckon it sends him back to his war days, seeing a man down like that.”
I’d known that Morrissey had served in the Great War, and I’d heard stories from Shorty about shell-shocked veterans at the asylum he’d worked at before coming here. “Not all of them came back whole,” he’d said, his voice unusually serious. “The kind of things they shouted . . . well, if I hadn’t been against war before that, I would’ve been after, let me tell you.”
That triggered a memory. “Morrissey told me he’d lost two men to fires. Who was the other one?”
If possible, Richardson grew even more somber. “The Basin Fire. Summer of ’37. Had to call in some men from other districts, some of them not trained near well enough. One fellow got pinned in by the blaze when he should’ve pulled out hours before. Wasn’t Morris’s fault either, if you ask me, but he felt responsible, what with him assigning the lookouts and all.”
Was there anything that went on at Flintlock Mountain that Morrissey didn’t feel personally responsible for?
Mr. Richardson nodded and scratched at his beard. “He’s a good ’un, Morris. You ever wonder why no one here’s ever given you a hard time?”
The Lines Between Us Page 13