Born April 6, 1921.
Died from wounds March 15, 1945.
“Greater love has no man than this.”
“Lucian? Lucian,” Mary Jane called softly, sweetly. “You’ve been here an hour now. Shouldn’t we be going?” She had remained in the car until now giving him the time he needed to be alone.
“Can we come back tomorrow?” he asked as a small child would, seeking permission from the adult directing his life.
“Of course, dear. But the heat and all. I’m afraid …”
“You don’t understand,” he whispered as he stood up and took in a deep breath of the humid, sultry Philippine air. “You can’t understand,” he said, emotionally struck by the thoughts coursing through his tired mind as he wiped the last drop of moisture from his eyes.
“Yes, I can. I can understand, Lucian,” she responded sweetly.
“No. I’m afraid you cannot! No one can. No one,” he insisted, taking one final grieving glance for the day at the tombstone. Putting his arm around her and walking slowly toward their chauffeur-driven car he repeated the dictum: “No one can understand.”
CHAPTER 29
Lucian Parker sat on the edge of the bed at the historic Manila Hotel near the port and just outside the Inturmuros section of Manila. He had been in this hotel once before, when war broke out. It was here he was promoted in rank, along with his brother in December 1941.
He had reserved this room for this occasion. One thousand and eight hundred dollars per night. The MacArthur Suite was a special suite of rooms very few had seen before the war. It had been the famous general’s home—his family’s residence when he served as commander of the American armed forces in Southeast Asia. Now it was available for anyone, at the right price.
He couldn’t sleep. Not now. This was the moment he should have lived—should have been done with—years before. He sat there pondering what he would say to Mary Jane when she awoke. Why he had been willing to live since the war without making the issue plain—the truth known to Mary Jane, he didn’t understand himself. He guessed he would have to relive it once more this night, make sure he identified his reasons for doing things the way he had.
Although the neon lights of Manila’s downtown district ignited the streets with their fiery red hues, the night sky had turned an ominous black with the monsoon clouds sweeping over the large island.
The monsoons, he whispered to himself. Monsoons that spent their tropically charged moisture on so many paved roads and busy intersections that didn’t exist fifty-five years earlier. The monsoon didn’t stop the city—it never had.
The damp, hot, humid wetness that he once had counted on for survival during the war—to quench his thirst, to bathe in—it reminded him that some things can never be changed.
But he had changed. He was Lucian Parker, heart and soul, wasn’t he? He had confided to another person once after the war and had promised to take care of the nagging burden. But insecurities are hard to conquer, he reckoned.
He frequently would make a commitment to make things right to the minister up the road from Warm Springs. Pastor J. D. Briggs was his name. Dead now, his son Jeffrey B. was at the pulpit. J. D. had been a good listener, Lucian remembered; a good friend, too.
He wasn’t sure if the son knew his secret. Maybe he should have told him as well. But he remembered those Sunday conversations on the steps of the church porch in Redemption, a town about the size of Warm Springs.
“I’ve lived the best I can. Do you think it’s enough?”
“You know I do, Brother Lucian. When you gonna stop this guilt trip and tell Mary Jane and get on with it?”
“Soon,” he would answer. “Soon.”
Redemption, he said silently to himself as he bowed his head and gazed intently as if in so doing he would discover the thing on the floor—the thing he had lost so long ago.
And the promise he would make to Pastor Briggs made him feel he had halfway accomplished just that—an expiation of sorts, a deliverance from his guilt. The word “soon” was used a lot over a fifty-five year period of time.
“You can’t fool the man in the mirror,” his pa, Jason W Parker, used to tell the two of them when they were just boys growing up first along the rails near Tulsa, then in the whistle-stop railroad station in Warm Springs. Of course, for Lucian Parker, the words truly had a double meaning.
He was not able to put it off any longer. Not now. No matter what a man, or a woman for that matter, does to slow the aging process, the mirror pretty soon gets through. Oh sure, the man staring into the mirror feels like a twenty-year-old inside. “That’s the magic of this thing we call life, I suppose,” Jason Parker had added once when Norman and Lucian last saw their father with shaving mug and brush in hand before they left for the war.
“But living a lie doesn’t make it truer just because you lived it longer,” Jason reminded them both. “Be true to the man in the mirror. I’m mighty proud of you boys.”
He had been true to the name—he was sure of it. At least he had been true to the Parker part, by giving that name the best he had inside of him.
But he had failed Norman. And that was what Lucian really stared at each day when he looked into his mirror—a lie lived just a little longer.
He considered the woman he loved so dearly. Mary Jane was sound asleep. She would chastise him for not getting any rest. But no matter how tired his body was, his mind was alert to this day. It was a day that could destroy everything he had come to regard as important if Mary Jane didn’t handle it well.
She was such a fragile flower. He loved that quality, the fragility, the utter feminine tenderness, he thought to himself as he turned to gaze once more on her serene repose.
The air-conditioning reminded him that in hours to come he would greet a morning filled with steamy vapors in a lush green land made up of hundreds of tropical islands and millions of struggling people who didn’t share, and never would, the comforts of life he was able to give to his beloved “Missy,” as he often tenderly called her.
He was anxious to go back, for the second and final visit, to the American cemetery and there spend some final moments at the fifty-five-year-old resting place of his twin brother wounded in action on that day in 1945. He had to go there and talk it out. Make sure he’d done all he could. And as much as Mary Jane meant to him, he needed to actually talk, be alone, just hear himself voice the words aloud, relive the story—just this once since the war—and then it would all be done. Once he had, he then could offer no more. It would have to be enough.
He questioned himself as he walked from the softness of the mattress to a rigid but elegantly padded lounge chair situated near the balcony and the sliding glass windows that gave view to the teeming port city below.
The man from Warm Springs had come back to face the war that had been buried so long. Who was the man? What was he made of? He queried himself in soliloquies only the sleepless ever know.
CHAPTER 30
The night’s veil had turned the steady rain to a mere drizzle as the lightning disappeared on the eastern horizon, and with it the monsoon downpour. Breaking through the fragmenting cumulus, a full moon illuminated the cleansed city. He had reminisced long enough. It was time for action now.
Humidity lingered in the air, and the very definable scent of Philippine life and tropical foliage mixed with moisture drew him into a reverie he couldn’t dispel. It reminded him of their last, final, desperate day together—the brothers’ battle for survival during the war and freedom from the Japanese prison camp and the final train run when he finally rejoined his brother.
He got up slowly from the easy chair that faced the balcony overlooking the sleepless city and approached his beloved Missy. She was sound asleep from the travel, the worry, and age catching up with her. He caressed her cheek softly with the tenderness of a father to a child and then kissed it. If she stirred—awoke—he wouldn’t leave her. If she did not, then he would leave a note and go to the place that might heal his broken spirit.
He scribbled a note:
Darling,
I will be with Norman. I couldn’t rest. See you when the shadows flee. Don’t worry. It isn’t the first time I stayed out all night in the Philippines.
Love you darling,
Lucian
He taped it to the bathroom mirror and, grabbing his overcoat, slipped quietly from the hotel room.
CHAPTER 31
Lucian, normally wearing his fedora, wore instead for this occasion a blue baseball cap with the name of his outfit emblazoned upon it: 200TH COASTAL ARTILLERY, NEW MEXICO NATIONAL GUARD.
An Oklahoman, he was proud of his unit, his cousins, and his friends from the state of New Mexico that he had adopted as his second home. Although he never talked about the war, and didn’t go to reunions for fear of what memories might do, he was proud of his men, brethren all, and the fighting spirit they had shown during the war and imprisonment of more than fifty years before.
He had had this hat made up for this trip. He also carried with him something more powerful in its symbolism and meaning than anyone could possibly know. Around his neck was the dangling set of dog tags he had worn from the beginning of his military training at Fort Bliss until right before leaving Manila when his war ended. They seemed to possess a magical potion for his spirit. They were his true identity clanking like train wheels do against a track—connecting him and moving him closer to his beloved brother.
When he reached the covered hotel portico, a Filipino concierge asked him if he needed a cab. He nodded. The youthful man smiled and waved to a waiting yellow sedan. Lucian fixed his eyes upon the young man who promptly opened the door for him.
“I know you, don’t I?” he asked before stepping into the backseat. The boy looked so familiar to him.
“No, sir.”
“Well then. Here you go,” Lucian said, fumbling for a five dollar bill and handing it to him.
“Thank you, sir. Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, you were a fighter for the Filipinos in the big war? I see your hat.” He smiled, pointing to Lucian’s cap.
“Yes,” he replied, door ajar, but seated now.
“I want to thank you for your service to my people and country. My grandfather spoke much of you Americans. He was a fighter too.” The young man stood back and saluted happily to the old veteran.
Lucian returned the salute. He had never been thanked since that same day he finally reached his brother after the firefight to rescue the fellow prisoners of Cabanatuan. He had supposed the Filipinos were grateful, but he had not been certain, had never been saluted or thanked directly.
“Thank you, young man,” he muttered. Lucian sat in the backseat of the cab, lost in memory. In his mind’s eye he saw another young Filipino who had sacrificed his life for him and his brother the same day they were wounded during the escape.
A good man, he whispered as the driver patiently waited for instructions. Manuelito, if I could only tell you … , he muttered under his breath.
His mind busily drifted through time as it had every waking hour for days now. Every young Filipino now reminded him of his World War II guerilla friend, Manuelito Salazar.
“Where to?” the cab driver asked.
“American Military Cemetery.”
“This time of night? Maybe it’s not open.”
“Then I will pay you to drive me there and back,” he answered.
“Okay, Joe. I do it. You have friends buried there from the war?”
“Yes. Many friends. Too many.”
“Where you from, Joe?” the driver asked, looking into the mirror at the old veteran.
“Fort Stotsenberg, then Bataan, then Camp O’Donnell, and finally Cabanatuan. In the mountains with the guerillas too.”
“No! You a prisoner of war of the Japs?”
“Sorry to say.”
“What state you from, Joe?”
Lucian Parker hadn’t been called “Joe” in five decades. The kids, the men especially, had referred to all American military men as “Joe.”
“Oklahoma. But I fought with the New Mexico National Guard.”
The cab driver offered a suddenly sullen, serious gaze into the eyes of the man in the backseat through his rearview mirror. There was silence for some time as they drove through the city to the cemetery.
“So you know Cabanatuan. Santa Rosa, too?” the driver finally quizzed, anxious to know more about the American.
“My brother and I drove the train before the Japs invaded. Then my twin, he drove the Jap train past Santa Rosa and back here to Manila, with supplies and such. Did as much damage as I could. Got our boys all the food he could sneak in, too.” He smiled with a memory-filled sense of satisfaction.
The cab driver’s eyes raised as he inspected his rider carefully in the rearview mirror. “I got family in Santa Rosa. A house there. My sister lives in it. I was born in Santa Rosa. They help many American fighters. I was born just after the war. My father died helping Americans after escape from Cabanatuan.”
The driver’s heart raced strangely. The cabby searched the man’s face for a response to the bait in the words he had offered. This man had been, at the very least, in the same places, at some of the same times as his deceased father.
“Lots of Filipinos died at Cabanatuan, Camp O’Donnell … it was a cryin’ shame, a real cryin’ shame. I’m sorry.”
“My family still keeps photo of Americans there. Not all Filipinos seem grateful, but many still are. Especially around here in Luzon. Too many Americans and Filipinos fight and die together to forget.”
“Good. That makes me glad. They shouldn’t forget. No one should,” Lucian replied as he peered out the rain-streaked window at the buildings now flying past. They were on the outskirts of the city where the seventeen thousand graves lay quietly in testimony to sacrifices made by young men.
“Hey, maybe you knew my father,” the curious cabby finally offered.
“Maybe so,” Lucian replied, dryly. His mind was on other things, other events as he rolled the window down to get some moist night air. “It all comes back to me now,” he whispered.
“I don’t hear you. You say what?”
“Nothing.”
More silence absorbed the sound of tires on wet asphalt. The rain had cleared from the sky completely. The driver rolled his window down for fresh air.
“So why you go to cemetery so late? Not scared of ghosts?” The driver smiled.
“Just of my own making,” Lucian mumbled back.
“But you can’t stay all night. Maybe you want me to bring you right back?”
“Maybe.”
“Here it comes. Looks like you can go in. Maybe you want me to stay? I can give you good rate. War veteran rate.”
“I’ll pay you a U.S.A. rate for overtime. Let’s say fifteen an hour times two? Thirty total per hour, ghosts or no ghosts.”
“You got it, Joe!” The cabby smiled as he brought the car to a slow five miles per hour. “Which way we go?”
Lucian pointed to a tall palm tree he had noticed marking the row. The driver pulled alongside the shoulder where the pavement ended and grass began.
Lucian grabbed his raincoat as he opened the car door. Looking to the driver to tell him to wait, he drew back suddenly from the man, uneasy, stunned. Clearing his eyes with the backs of his hands, looking intently at the Filipino again with only the illumination of a full moon to help him, he appeared surprised, startled.
The driver opened the door and got out. “What’s wrong, Joe?”
“You!”
“Me?” the Filipino said, approaching him.
A full two heads shorter than Lucian, his dark but friendly Filipino eyes gave way to a sense of familiarity. A part to his full head of hair and a certain boyishness for someone at least fifty years old reminded Lucian of another time here in Luzon.
“You! You’re Salazar! Manuelito Salazar!” Lucian pronounced, incredulous himself of the fact. He drew himself closer to the man now standing in the ha
lo of a luminous moon. “It was a night like this, Manuelito. Right after the raid on Cabanatuan. Remember?”
The Filipino returned the piercing gaze of the American caught up in his own history with a smile. His eyes moistened and uncommon emotions seized him. “Señor Parker … You are Señor Parker?”
“Sí,” replied Lucian with a juvenile innocence and eagerness to hug, shake hands, do something.
“My father was Manuelito. I am his son Vincente. Vincente Salazar. You are the man in the photo … Si?”
“Photo? The one the little girl took behind the house in Santa Rosa?”
“My older sister.”
“I am the man.” The two men embraced unashamedly.
“Manuelito,” Lucian offered with a cracking voice. He fixed his gaze upon the diminutive Filipino as if searching through him to some other place and time.
“My father, Senor Parker—he is …” he tried to finish.
“Manuelito … I never told you … I didn’t get the chance to say …” He brushed at the water flooding his eyes. “To say thank you!”
CHAPTER 32
Mary Jane possessed secrets of her own. She was married to Lucian. Lucian and Norman went to war. Lucian came back. He had changed some. War can do that to people. But he said he was Lucian. Was she supposed to question that? There were times she could have sworn … but no, she always believed that this was her Lucian.
They had been married but a few short days before he shipped out. With the exception of one year as a child in the schoolhouse at Redemption, she had known the brothers little more than two years upon marrying Lucian. Just one of the twins came home from the war. It had to be Lucian. He had said so. Why shouldn’t she believe him? She had him back. Nothing else mattered.
Hearing the hotel room door close behind him as he left had filled her eyes with moisture, brought on more frequently now. There was unusual emotion between them lately. Lucian was ill but wouldn’t divulge what the doctor had told him, only that he needed another checkup when they returned home. But she sensed it was serious, probably even life threatening, to bring Lucian to the point of revisiting all his war memories.
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