Ticket Home
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY JAMES MICHAEL PRATT
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
AUTHOR’S STATEMENT
Copyright Page
In memory of my uncles,
NORMAN AND LUCIAN PRATT
who personified love, kindness, and the gentle nature
of true manhood. They have long been deceased
but they left a legacy of love and service to
God, family, and country. The world is
a better place for these two men
having walked among us.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each.
—COVENTRY PATMORE, THE REVELATION
PROLOGUE
“Once upon a time,” Lucian Parker read from the fairy tale at the prompting of his preschool-aged granddaughter as she climbed up on his lap.
The padded rocker was positioned in front of the voluminous picture window to take in the Oklahoma ranch he loved so well. Whoever coined the phrase “there’s no place like home” was truly the first wise man, he mused.
Now his mind suffered the inquietude of a condemned man. Time, precious as it was, was short. Life, as good as it was, was draining from him daily. He felt it. Now for the first time in his mortal existence he couldn’t control events around him.
And eating at him always was the one thing still left undone in his life, a secret he had so successfully buried that he had reasoned no one need ever know. Not that he hadn’t lived an honorable life, it was just that a secret lay buried in the Philippines, left behind by war, and that secret was something even he had believed, until now. Now there was one more item of honor he must fix, God willing, and then he could rest in peace.
“Grandpa!” the tiny blonde with ponytails and a lively bounce announced, alerting him that his precious little girl was still in need of storytelling.
“Oh yes.” He smiled, returning to the present. “Once upon a time …”
His voice trailed off after a few sentences and he fell silent. His focus was far away from this, the sweetest place on earth. He couldn’t seem to help it. He wondered about time, where it had gone, why it had suddenly passed like an unsuspecting breeze does—so silently, quickly, wafting across the brow, at once hot, sometimes cold.
His health had been good for so long, he wondered and felt puzzled by the news the doctor had given him days before. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Lucian …” he had said.
“Lucian, it’s time to slow down,” Mary Jane had said as they left the doctor’s office in Oklahoma City, a three-hour drive from Warm Springs. “You’ve lived your life like you’re trying to make up for something,” she added as he opened the car door for her. He couldn’t let her know the bad news.
“I am,” the seventy-nine-year-old responded in a deep, reflective tone of voice. He gazed into the azure eyes of the silver-haired, slender, and stately seventy-seven-year-old love of his life and stared as if he were looking through her and into the past—far beyond where he now stood.
“I am,” he whispered as he closed the door for her.
That was two days before. A routine physical last month revealed why he was suffering so much fatigue and loss of weight. He had promised a concerned Mary Jane that it was the malaria that visited him every now and then. The test results were not characteristic of his normal vigor, however, and malaria it wasn’t. The tests showed startling revelations of a virulent disease that had silently, and without noticeable pain, crept into his life, sentencing him to a fate no one returns from.
Now days later he still hadn’t told her the truth, though he suspected she had checked up on him, had called the doctor’s office herself since their visit.
“I want you back in this office the minute you get home from that trip to the Philippines,” the doctor ordered. Mary Jane seemed to know about that, reminding him just this morning of the fact. She had remained in the outer waiting room while the doctor gave him the troubling report.
“I don’t know any other way of telling you this, Lucian. You are an older man. You have had a longer life than most. Men in this advanced stage simply don’t get much more time. I’m sorry,” he had said and then gave an indication of what “much more time” meant, what to expect.
What was I supposed to do? he questioned himself, mind wandering. Walk out of the doctor’s office and say to Mary Jane, “I don’t have much time left …”
Lucian Parker had been aging, yes, but “older”? No, not an “old” man. Old men retired. Old men sat on their porch rockers and whittled, they didn’t work. He still worked every day—running the depot. Taking people from miles around for rides on the steam locomotive down the line to Redemption town.
The water tower was thirty years his senior. The steam engine had two decades on him and it still ran. They held up with regular maintenance. So could he, he concluded. If he died, so be it, but he would die on his schedule, his way, working and living life, not on some doctor’s timetable.
But he would see the doctor when he returned, especially if it made Mary Jane feel better. He would rope the moon for that girl. He had always felt that way. Guessed he always would.
Lucian was the switchman on the shortline railroad he had owned for more than fifty years. He could still pull the levers changing the direction of the train to switch from one rail to the other. He had just done so today, although it took considerable effort. Even today the rails in shortline country weren’t automated like the mainlines.
Being the small country depot owner, engineer, and mechanic on this railway from the farmland of Warm Springs to the Santa Fe mainline south meant he knew everyone and everything that moved in and out from these parts. Mostly a switchman though. He nodded ironically as he contemplated this day.
“Ha!” he laughed out loud as if in dialogue with himself, his granddaughter still on his lap contented in turning pages. “Switchman. Now if that don’t be
at all! Haaa!” he cackled long and loud for anyone to hear. I’ll be damned and guess I am, he thought. Now that takes on a whole new meaning—switchman …
If he had taken a short and direct line to truth fifty-five years ago he wouldn’t be so worried about the outcome of his trip to the Philippines. But this day had to come. Should’ve come sooner, he reasoned.
His beloved twin brother was there. Buried. Left behind by war. And he had to make a final visit to find his peace with him, to talk to him, figure out how it all ended like it did, and make amends somehow. Then he’d straighten out this whole fifty-five-year-old secret—his quiet affair—with his precious Mary Jane.
His granddaughter had waited, patiently flipping the pages, talking to herself as children do while his mind had wandered. “Grandpa?” She nudged him, looking up at him from a wide set of tender and penetrating blue eyes. “Grandpa!” she pleaded, jostling him awake.
“Oh, yes. Yes indeed. Eyes like Grandma’s,” he said smiling, giving her a tight squeeze and tickle around the middle. “Once upon a time,” he again began in a reverent whisper, but trailed off as suddenly as the word “time” issued from his lips.
It was a word playing tricks on him, teasing him, and his secret was like a balloon ready to burst. But then he and Mary Jane were leaving for the airport today. Then on to take care of this nagging matter.
His tiny granddaughter eagerly went ahead of him, turning the frayed pages of the colorful and well-worn fairy-tale picture book he had read to his offspring for five decades.
His mind drifted plaintively back making it hard to focus on the words of the children’s story. He knew his inner turmoil, a private hell, would soon end—one way or another.
The child impatiently took over in a sweet high-pitched tone as she made her own story up from its pages, contented and lost in them, as a child does when absorbed in so much fantasy.
His faculties had abandoned the rocking chair this day, and left his granddaughter there to fend for herself. He went back to another time and place during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Was that when it all began? he mumbled to himself. It was then, wasn’t it?
The rocker had slowed to stillness. The family patriarch had been lost in remembrance for minutes, no more, but long enough for his darling granddaughter to fantasize, turn each page, and happily contemplate the ending of the fable.
“And they lived happily ever after,” she squeaked in guileless innocence, reaching up to touch her grandfather’s whiskered cheek. Seeking his attention, she grabbed onto his right hand and patted the gnarled work-worn hands, playing with the wedding band, causing it to turn around his finger.
“Grandpa?” she called. “Grandpa!” she demanded, waking him from his reverie.
“Yes, sweetheart?” he answered, breaking his solid stare out the living room picture window. For minutes it had painted a panorama of his past life and final deeds with his dying brother at the end of their private war in 1945. He blinked at the moisture unexpectedly welling in the corners of his eyes.
“Grandpa, how come all the stories end the same?”
“How’s that darling?” he responded throatily.
“Happily ever after,” she answered. “Do all stories end ‘happily ever after?’” she quizzed innocently, still playing with his thick hand many times the size of hers.
He couldn’t quite muster an answer. He watched her playfully manipulate the ring on his finger. It had replaced another one long ago, one inscribed with a deeper meaning than he could ever have imagined, until now.
That ring had been passed down to Parker men for two generations. First to him from his father, then to his brother, and then …
He could barely remember now, just that Manuelito, their faithful wartime Filipino ally against the Japanese, had it last on that fateful day in the Philippines. The ring, a symbol of faith, was lost for fifty-five years now.
He was old, more confused than ever about how stories ended, but he didn’t lack for a memory. He had a good memory. And that meant he must not lie to her, nor tell her the truth … damage innocent hopes and dreams.
“If you do what is right and keep the faith then all stories end ‘happily ever after’,” he finally offered, hiding his true emotions behind a kiss on her soft cheek, a tickle to her tummy. “Run along and play now darling,” he encouraged.
“Thank you, Grandpa,” she yelled, as the screen door shut behind her petite and bouncy little body.
“You’re welcome darling. You’re welcome,” he spoke softly.
His mind lingered on the happy scene of playfulness then moved on. It was as a convicted man does. Knowing he was about to be set free from a prison sentence he had brought upon himself and returned to his former identity—a man freed from his prison but on probation. Even the probation would end if … No, impossible. His brother was dead.
That is how justice works, he mused. It comes no matter if you want it or not. Maybe delayed, but certain to have its day. But he had kept the faith, hadn’t he?
He had done all he could to make up for the lie he had lived. He was a servant to the townspeople, benefactor to many causes, an elder of his church—the one in the small neighboring town of Redemption just a hike down the road.
But all that didn’t matter to him now, not if he couldn’t be forgiven. He wondered if he could be absolved—if his one glaring fault of character could be erased.
My twin brother would want that, wouldn’t he? And even at this late day in his life, would Mary Jane understand and release him from the weighty burden he had lived under?
He was determined to follow through with his final visit now. Mary Jane had consented to go with him. Outside Manila in the Philippines were the graves of seventeen thousand servicemen who died freeing the island country from the Japanese during World War II.
He had something to say to his twin, something that would set the record straight and resolve the deepest wound of the war. He could close that wound now, and at least offer this token of honor even though it was late, so very late in life.
He gazed intently through the large paned-glass window and thought he saw his brother’s face smiling that silly grin from their youth. He smiled back but felt ashamed. He knew in his heart he had let him down, and that it should have been his twin, not he, who was sitting here now hearing a granddaughter sweetly voice the words of childhood innocence, “Once upon a time …”
CHAPTER 1
Summer 1939, Warm Springs, Oklahoma
“Don’t you want to check out the springs? That’s what this place is all about,” Lucian said grinning, tugging his shirttails from his trousers as they stopped the ten-year-old Dodge stake-bed truck at the end of a dirt road outside of the small town named for the natural hot springs.
“Lucian, we promised Pa we’d check out this land—see if it was the one for grazing livestock. It looks like maybe the only one worth something in these parts. We got to go back to the county clerk and submit the bids while Pa works with the Santa Fe man on those contracts. Come on,” Norman urged.
“It won’t hurt nothin’ to take a peek. We’ve come halfway across Oklahoma to take this job, and I hear these hot springs make your body sort of tingle when you’re done. Besides, them years as boys down in Redemption? Pa always promised to bring us up here. Remember? We moved back in thirty-two and never got to. Now’s our chance,” he grinned, “to do some skinny dippin’.”
“Yeah, I recall all about Pa’s promise. But we made one to him too. Lucian, we got a deadline to meet.”
“It won’t hurt to take a dip. You want to, don’t you?”
“Sure, I’d like a dip in the springs, but we can come back tonight,” Norman protested.
“All work and no play makes for a dull boy, Norman.” Lucian grinned.
“Yeah, well, playing is just fine, but ‘there’s a time for every purpose under heaven,’ the good book says. You aren’t the only one that can quote,” he replied, surrendering to Lucian’s whim by untucking h
is shirt and stripping it off. “I’ll race ya,” he laughed.
“Hey, Norman, that’s not fair. You’re not supposed to be so spontaneous,” Lucian laughed, racing to catch up with him.
“Which way did that drug store clerk say to go once the road ended?” Lucian asked, huffing and coming to a stop.
“Straight ahead and then toward a path jogging off to the right by a clump of trees,” Norman answered, breathing huskily.
“Clump of trees? There’s nothing but trees. Off to the right? Come on.” Lucian waved as he took off through the open meadow to his right.
A short distance later a path developed and they found themselves under a thick canopy of green willows making their way to the pool of water for which the small whistle-stop town was named.
“There it is,” Norman pointed out.
“Well I’ll be,” Lucian said. “See that?” he said lowering his voice.
“What?”
“That. There.” He smiled as they drew nearer the vapor-producing pond. “In the steam … over on the other side. Is that a woman?”
“Sure looks like it,” Norman agreed with a sheepish grin.
“Let’s hunker down here behind the bush. Come on,” Lucian whispered, smirking and motioning with his hand for Norman to join him.
Norman hesitated. It wasn’t like him to take advantage of a young lady … but in the heated mist coming off the pond she was a vision of a goddess if there ever was one. He stood there transfixed, staring at her slender back. Her tender curves were unlike anything he had ever seen and his heart beat loudly enough for her to hear it, if she listened close.
He could tell she wasn’t wearing anything below the waterline either as she stood waist-deep, bending forward to rinse her long autumn-colored hair. At least her hair, as wet as it was, reminded him of autumn with its golden hues.
“Norman, sit down,” Lucian commanded. “She is the prettiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he whispered as he peeked through their bushy hiding place at the teenage girl enjoying her bath in the hot spring. “Norman!” he growled with another movement of his hand. “You’re going to give us away.”