He had come straight here. Right past the quiet and still depot. So unlike his pa to not be here if Mary Jane had passed the word along. Maybe he should go home to the depot, surprise the old man, his father. Maybe he was busy on a ride somewheres and on his way back to Warm Springs this very minute.
Maybe he’d be gone. It wasn’t like him though. Times were tough without him and his brother to help out. He hadn’t seen the old Baldwin steamer in the yard as he drove past. Maybe …
“Well!” she said, releasing a long and happy sigh. “How do I look?” she asked, spinning herself in the brightly patterned Easter gown.
“Like a dream,” he whispered admiringly. “Just like an angel,” he said softly, setting the photo down and coming to her.
“Mary Jane, I …”
“Shhh,” she whispered as she brought her lips to his. “We’ve got a lot to talk about but right now I need you to hold me.”
“Me too,” he assured her as he held her head, the fullness of blond strands against his own. He wanted to feel love again. Something driven from him so many years ago. “I need you, Mary Jane,” he whispered into her ear as his tears descended to mingle with those already streaming down her tender cheeks. “I need you like water, air … I can’t go on anymore like I have been. I’ve been so lost. I’ve lived in hell,” he stuttered, seeking composure. “I …”
“Come with me,” she offered, wiping moisture from her own eyes and taking his hand and leading him to her room.
“I’m not sure I am too good at this. I just need you in my arms. Will you understand if …”
She nodded to interrupt his questioning. “Let me be with you now. Quietly.”
CHAPTER 63
“I had no way of knowing if you got my letters,” she remarked quietly as Lucian finished his supper. She raised her eyes and watched him poking at the food, slowly, stirring it around, mentally far away from the kitchen table where the two sat for their first meal together in almost four years.
“I thought you knew about your pa,” she offered again. “He was real proud of you, and Norman too,” she spoke up. She hoped he would raise his eyes to her and find a way to unburden his feelings.
“I’m sorry. I don’t feel much like talking now. I’ll come to terms. Did he suffer?” he asked, finally breaking the influence of the silent spell he had been under.
“The Kelly boys found him slumped over. The engine was going. They were going to ride with him into Redemption and then on over to Albuquerque. He was real excited after hearing the army had landed in the Philippines. He died there aboard the train. He’s buried next to your mother. Maybe we should go there. Go for a walk. The weather is fine for a Sunday walk.”
“Did he talk about us much?”
“All the time. It’s all he talked about. I remember …” She stopped and smiled with a glint of tears in her eyes. “I remember it was the week after Easter Sunday, 1942. We had just heard of your surrender on the radio and he asked for a sign. He was pretty broken up. And he prayed asking God to offer something that showed you and Norman were alive and coming home.”
She paused, emotionally overcome at the thought of the dear sweet father of her two twin loves. How Jason Parker had sorrowed so very much to feel there was a reason for all the suffering and tragedy going on.
Lucian looked up at her and reached across the table for her hand. “Go on, Mary Jane. Finish, please.”
“He said he heard a train whistle. He got all excited and ran to the window like a little boy would at the coming of an unexpected visitor. He said, ‘They’re comin’ home. My boys are comin’ home.’”
“He heard a whistle?” Lucian asked with a childlike perplexity. “We blew a whistle real loud once, right before the siege in Bataan by the Japs. So loud we joked Pa would probably hear it.” He smiled at the thought of the two of them recounting the Easter joke their pa would always tell about the bunny and the hen. “I guess he heard it then.” He smiled.
It was his first smile since showing up on the doorstep earlier that day and the first he could recall having for years.
They had cleared the dishes from the table, and hand in hand walked the country road to the cemetery where her Grandpa Harry and Lucian’s parents were buried. No talking transpired as Mary Jane allowed her husband to take in the newness of all that was after nearly four years of separation from Warm Springs.
“Where’s the train?” he finally asked.
“The man from Santa Fe was apologetic but said he had no other option but to take it back for lack of final payment. He had it shipped up to Oklahoma City.”
“It’s comin’ back. That is, if you don’t mind. I’d like to go . pay it off and bring it back. It was the last thing we all—my brother and pa—had together. I got enough pay and more to clear it off, this land too, if needed.” He nodded over at the old spread where Mary Jane had grown up. “Three years of back pay at officer rates is a pretty good chunk.”
“I think that would be wonderful. Maybe we could build that house you and I talked about. Right near the springs with a big front room to gaze out upon the place. A large yard for the children where we could watch them easily as we sit there on the covered porch. Remember the night we got married? Remember how we talked about it right after … well you know.” She giggled.
His face flushed red as he turned away from her. “Yeah,” he said, simply unable to cope with any memories of that day.
They came to the-white picket fence which surrounded the small well-cared-for town cemetery on the bluff overlooking Main Street. His feet froze in place. He was all alone. He was the last Parker alive. It was up to him to carry the legacy. This made it all real.
“Come,” Mary Jane urged, pulling him forward to the headstones. He read them carefully, still seeking comprehension of how his world had changed so very much in the space of four years.
He knelt down at the grave of his father, reading his name carefully as if to be sure this could be true. “I’m sorry, Pa,” he whispered. “I tried to bring him home with me. We almost made it. I love you. I …” He stumbled with a sudden rush of emotions that swept through him and unlocked the dam holding back any hint of the sorrows that had built inside him. He hadn’t allowed emotion during the war. Just anger. Just the anger necessary for killing. Now he wept like a boy not understanding how everyone could leave him like this.
Mary Jane knelt next to him and held his head against her breasts, gently caressing his short crop of hair. She allowed him all the time he needed.
“Lucian?” she asked quietly after some time. He was frozen in a distant far off gaze she was totally unprepared for. “Lucian?” she prompted again.
“Huh?” he finally allowed, awakening as if he had been in a trance.
“We should go now. It is getting late. You should rest.”
“Can I come back tomorrow?” he queried like a boy would to a parent seeking permission.
“Yes, darling. But it’s hot and you should get some rest.”
He followed her out the gate and took one look back. “Tomorrow,” he assured and then walked hand in hand back to the small cottage on Main Street.
He lay asleep on the sofa as if he hadn’t slept in weeks but with an unfamiliar inquietude. He couldn’t seem to just lie and sleep deeply. He talked now and then calling out “Lucian, Johnny, Manuelito.” But strangely he didn’t call his brother’s name. She hadn’t heard “Norman.”
There was no doubt he had seen horror too abundant to describe. He had asked her just before falling asleep to never ask him about the war. That he wanted to forget it. That it was a nightmare. She thought she could understand, but also knew unless he described what hell he had gone through she really never would be able to comprehend.
And she wondered about the secret love she had for Norman. Did he suffer? Did he think of her?
She looked at him and didn’t see the man she married. This man was the flesh and blood resemblance but the war had so scarred him, so marked him
that she wondered if Lucian would ever really return home. She really needed to know, to have some answers.
At length she got up and went to her nightstand where she kept the stationery and began to write a letter to him. She had a sudden awareness that crept into her heart that this was perhaps not Lucian at all. She observed him in his fitful sleep and dismissed the thought.
“No. It’s Lucian,” she mumbled to herself as she began to write a letter to him. She stopped and looked at him carefully, praying in her heart to know who he was now, and how to be the wife she should be. The nagging realization of the former thought from minutes before suddenly surged through her like a jolt of electricity.
“It’s you! Isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 64
Present day, American Military Cemetery, Manila
“Lucian?” she called gently. “Lucian, it’s me, Mary Jane,” she tenderly announced. “Lucian? Do you hear me? Can you hear me?” she softly voiced with a throaty plea.
“He’s been like that for an hour or so Mrs. Parker,” the Filipino interjected. “He ended telling his story to me. About my father Manuelito and …”
“I’ve heard that name before!” she interrupted, surprised at the sudden thought shooting back in time.
“I need your help. You brought my husband here in the night?”
“Yes,” Vincente answered.
“And you are a son of someone my husband knew from the war?”
“Yes, Mrs. Parker. Amazing as it may be to hear it. I was a simple taxi driver stopping at the Manila Hotel last night on my final round. Today, this morning, I am a different man. I know things because of Senor Parker I never knew. He told me who I am. It is as if God has answered my prayers of a lifetime.”
“Perhaps his, too,” she mumbled under her breath, touched by the scene. She was confused, surprised at this man’s story, but knew she could query him more and get the complete picture of all that had transpired last night with patience, some more questioning later. Now she needed to help Lucian and help herself resolve the issue that had silently grown like a cancer for fifty-five years.
She pushed a dozen small objects aside in her carrying bag looking for the time-yellowed envelope. She thought a thousand times she would show it to him.
Smudged now with the one hundred fingerprints from touches seeking courage to hand it over to her beloved, she retrieved it from the bag and held it outstretched with trembling hand as Vincente looked on.
“Lucian,” Mary Jane tried again. The sun was now evaporating any moisture left from the gentle rain of the previous evening. She watched with concern as her husband gazed transfixed at the stone object before him.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he finally voiced, inaudible above the squawking of the song birds, sounds of life, and morning traffic passing outside the gates of the hallowed ground. “I couldn’t have lied except for love,” he pleaded as if the white stone cross over the grave would say something to ease his pain.
“Lucian.”
“Don’t call me that,” he answered.
“Darling?” she mouthed with a gentle hand upon his shoulder. He was bent over, kneeling. Eyes closed, fist clenched, head bowed, he epitomized every painting ever brought to life on canvas of a man in mighty petition to his maker.
“Oh God, hear me …” he moaned softly, clutching at his abdomen as if suddenly struck by some horrible blow.
“Lucian!” she gasped, frantic to comfort him. She came to him, lowered herself to the moist ground with him and held out her arms, still clutching the time-aged envelope in one hand.
He didn’t look up but responded with heaving chest and the stuttering sobs of a little child unable to break the cycle of terror, fear, and remorse that filled him.
He sought her, placing his head and frustrations in the softness of her waiting arms and breasts. She responded with motherly affection for a boy desperate to tell his secret but not knowing how needed. This was a very different kind of love only a deeply caring woman can ever understand.
He was traumatized beyond anything she had witnessed and knew she had to just hold him, reassure her aged husband who had slipped from his seventy-nine-year-old present to his youthful, terrorized past. She held him, stroking his soft gray hair, waiting for him to ask for the help he truly needed.
She kissed his forehead unashamedly, ready to confess her guilt, waiting for him to reveal to her his long-buried troubles.
She repeated her deep awareness of his emotions with trembling words as he lost himself to the past that he had carried with him like some sort of ball and chain; tied to this place, to his brother, to her, for fifty-five years.
“I understand. I know darling. I am so sorry. I understand darling,” she said softly, her tears mingling with his.
“No, Missy. You don’t understand. How could you?” he finally responded between the sobbings that had seized him. His weary swollen eyes looked up at her from where he lay his head, upon her breasts, eyes now peering deeply into hers.
“I lied,” he mouthed meekly, searching her for forgiveness.
She hung her head and a slight moan escaped from deep within her. “I lied too,” his wife offered quietly.
“What?” he answered searchingly. “No sweetheart. I forsook my brother, my loyalty, my honor. I took something that wasn’t mine. I …”
“So did I,” she interrupted.
He wiped at the moisture that had so thoroughly cleansed his bloodshot and weary eyes with the work-worn hands of a small-town train engineer. Hands that had for so many years tried to prove his loyalty and love, hands that had held his brother’s in the last tired moment of his life. “You know?”
“Oh Lucian … I mean …” she said, sadly shaking her head. “I have something for you. You read this,” she said, handing the envelope over to him.
He looked at the envelope as if it were sacred holy writing. “Norman” was scribbled in the unmistakable handwriting of his younger wife.
“What is this?” he questioned humbly, lips trembling.
“A letter. A letter from a woman to her husband’s brother returning from war. A letter I should have given you the first month you came home from the war but I was vulnerable, weakwilled. A letter about someone we both loved very, very much,” she said simply, arising to her feet and taking the arm of the diminutive Filipino taxi driver who had been the companion to her man for the entire long night. “Come with me. He needs a moment alone.”
Vincente Salazar understood. He had learned something this night he could not have in any other way. His history, what happened to cause his father’s death, and about the mysterious ring. He took her arm in his and escorted her away toward the waiting cab.
“Mrs. Parker. I beg of you something. I have something that is yours, your husband’s, I mean. I must go to my mother’s home in Santa Rosa, north of Manila. There I will get for you something I think is very important to this man,” he pointed, “and to you.”
“We will be fine. We can call for a cab from the caretaker’s office.” They both turned suddenly at the throaty moan coming from the grave site.
“Oh dear God! Lucian!” the twin cried to himself as he shakily struggled through the words of the letter.
“Come,” she tearily but mildly adjured the taxi driver. “He’ll need me, but first he needs his brother.”
He read the words meant for his eyes fifty-five years ago. If he had read these words then, before making the decision to continue to hide the facts from Mary Jane, the townsfolk of Warm Springs, all of this wouldn’t be necessary.
He had tried to comfort himself in the belief that God’s hand had made things right, the way they should have been in the first place with Mary Jane, but he couldn’t. God deals through faith, not lies, and he had not kept the faith.
Dearest Norman,
You are asleep. I am watching you as you stir every so often and cry out from nightmares you brought home from the war. Warm Springs isn’t the same as when you left. You are not
the same. We have both lost something. Not only have you lost your father and brother but an innocence. It is hard for me to describe to you what I am feeling, what I am seeing.
It is you, Norman, isn’t it? When I kissed you to welcome you home I felt the same way as I did that night in Los Angeles. Remember? Thinking you were Lucian, I kissed your lips to realize a difference. What it was I can’t explain, except it had happened once before, long ago outside a diner on Santa Monica Boulevard before the war.
Only now I want what you want. I have had both of you to love. But I am a widow, am I not? We should not fool ourselves, but I watch your terrible struggle and think, “If this will make him happy, make him feel closer to his brother, then all right. Let it be.”
Then I think, “No, it’s not right.”
I weigh out the meaning of this lie of ours and wonder if it is worth it. You are Norman and not Lucian. I can tell not by looks but by feeling. But I really don’t care. At least I have one of you back and I loved you both so dearly.
Upon reading this I expect you to take me to Redemption for a church service that we both deserve. I expect the people who have welcomed us home to know the truth.
I love you darling. I always have. How could a woman be so lucky to have had the two best men in the world to love?
—Mary fane
He bowed his head, tightly clutching the fifty-five-year-old letter to his chest. He began to wipe at the name upon the grave marker. Darkened by humidity and time he wiped furiously as if he could rub the name, CAPTAIN NORMAN B. PARKER, out somehow, right the wrong, make it correct.
“I love you, Lucian,” he cried in a child’s tone, asking for understanding. “God in heaven knows do! I didn’t mean to betray you! I … I wanted what you had so bad! Did I cause you to die?” he sobbed. “You didn’t give up because of me, did you?”
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