by Susan Wilson
But I was not waiting out the war in some safe harbor; I was part of it. We were all part of it. Even just being in that break room, my hands toughened up from the work I was doing, made me feel proud that I was a part of the war effort. Who would have thought that I could enjoy the satisfaction of running a machine, of producing a product that would directly affect the war? I didn’t have enough backyard for a victory garden, but I had sewn blackout curtains for every room in the apartment. Because I walked to work, I was saving those gas-ration coupons for the day when Rick would be discharged and I’d drive to the ends of the earth to get him. When the neighborhood kids came to the door, I turned over the day’s washed-out tin cans so that they could be turned into tomorrow’s tanks. I helped with the St. Alban’s Ladies Guild jumble sale, the proceeds going to a fund for displaced children. It was always the thought of those European orphans that pierced my heart, little children whose parents were dead, whole families gone, with no way to explain it to tiny victims. In my dark moments, I wondered if the parents of those orphans would have preferred that they’d never been born than to have them suffer the horrors of invasion, bombardment, and abandonment.
Yes, we were all doing our part. So the day that I opened the Ladies’ Home Journal and saw the full-page ad for Dogs for Defense, I didn’t quickly turn the page.
WANTED: WAR DOGS FOR DOGS FOR DEFENSE/ENLIST YOUR DOG NOW, the headline read.
The ad made a persuasive appeal: … there’s a real job today for dogs that can meet the requirements for service with the United States Armed Forces! There are duties that the K-9 Corps can perform even better than men … sentry duty, pack work, messenger and communication service and sledge work are but a few of the jobs many dogs are already doing for their country.
I read every word, my glance returning after each paragraph to the illustration of a dog that looked a lot like Pax. Pax fit the bill: Dogs may be purebred or crossbred, must not be less than twenty inches at the shoulder, not storm shy or noise shy, not less than 1 year or more than 5 years old. Pax was a big dog, he was a little under four years old, and he’d never made a sound during thunderstorms. I’d walked him all over Boston and he took in stride the cacophony of the city streets. He defended me against drunks urinating on hydrangea bushes. He was aloof but affable, never vicious. He had heart.
The promise: Your dog will be well-trained, well-fed, and well-cared for while he’s serving Uncle Sam.
Purina Dog Chow, the very same I fed to Pax, was the sponsor for this ad run by the American Kennel Club’s Dogs for Defense volunteer board.
My break was over, so I returned the magazine to the shelf of reading material we girls had brought for the communal room. Leaning into the small mirror hanging just next to the exit—something the female staff had requested for the once exclusively male break room—I dabbed on a fresh coat of lipstick. I may have been wearing denim overalls and had my hair pulled up out of my hard-won pageboy hairdo into a bobby-pinned pile of curls hidden by a kerchief to keep the dust and dirt out, but we all clung to our emblem of femininity—bright red lipstick. As I blotted my lips with a square of tissue, I saw behind me, reflected in the rectangle of mirror, a new poster: GIVE DOGS AND DOLLARS TO DOGS FOR DEFENSE … TRAINING SENTRY DOGS TO HELP OUR SOLDIERS.
I went back to the shelf and picked up the magazine, flipped the pages back to the Dogs for Defense advertisement, and ripped it out. I folded it and put it in my locker.
Everyone should do his bit.
* * *
I put the kettle on and opened up the box of cookies I’d baked for Rick. I’d used the last of our sugar ration to make them. I had pressed my thumbprint into some of the cookies so that he’d see some physical manifestation of me. In a few, I had pressed three knuckles in an attempt to represent Pax’s paw print.
Lately, I’d noticed that a number of the neighborhood dogs had vanished. The big setter and the beagle no longer came up to their fences to bark as Pax and I walked by. On our way around the block that evening, we bumped into Mrs. Tingley, as we often did on Pax’s after-work constitutional. She was alone, her collie, one of Pax’s favorite playmates, absent from her side.
“Where’s Lady?” I stopped, hauling Pax closer to me so that I could chat.
Mrs. Tingley, a middle-aged woman who had sent three sons to war, didn’t answer right away, and suddenly I worried that some horrible news had come to her. Her face began to crumple, but then she pulled herself together. “We donated her, you see. To the Dogs for Defense program. She’s going to be a messenger dog or a scout.”
“Dogs for Defense. I’ve seen the ads.”
“She’s doing her bit. Just like my boys.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
Mrs. Tingley looked down at Pax, then up at me, and smiled. “I do. But not as much as I miss my boys. Dogs like Lady will help get them all home sooner. I believe that. You should think about donating Pax. He’d be perfect. Besides, they’ll send him home to you as soon as the war’s over.”
“I couldn’t. How could I?”
“How can you not?”
* * *
The funny thing about becoming aware of something you’ve never noticed before is how suddenly you see it everywhere. Now that I was aware of the Dogs for Defense program, everywhere I turned, there it was. The vanishing dogs. The posters, the ads, the newspaper stories featuring little kids handing a leash over to handsome military types. “We’ll see that he gets home. He’s doing his bit. You can be proud.” Public-service announcements featured Rin Tin Tin as a recruiter for the K-9 Corp, and the newsreels showed the grainy images of dogs running, jumping, taking down well-padded targets, tails wagging, praised by smiling, pride-filled handlers. Saving soldiers’ lives. Everywhere. And everywhere I went with Pax, the more I imagined that everyone we passed was thinking, There’s a big strong dog. He should be doing his bit. As if this were a different war, I half-expected him to be handed a white feather.
No. I had made my mind up: Pax wasn’t going anywhere. I needed him too much. He was my connection to Rick, my only companion, my entertainer, and my silent partner in the darkness of my worst thoughts. If I could have kept Rick out of it, I would have. I couldn’t, but I sure could keep our dog home.
And yet, in that box of gingersnaps and lemon wafers I included not only a silly love note but the Dogs for Defense advertisement I’d torn out of the Ladies’ Home Journal. I think that I wanted Rick to know that I hadn’t succumbed to pressure. I think that I wanted him to agree with me. Or make the decision for me.
Chapter Eleven
Rick Stanton shakes off the catcher’s sign. This batter is better than he looks and a fastball thrown to him has the potential to tie up this game. As it is, they’re losing the light and it won’t be long before the game is called because of darkness. Rick winds up, kicks, and launches a curveball.
“Strike three!” Pvt. Al Hooper joyfully signals his sergeant out. With good grace, Sergeant Phillips hands the bat to the next batter and doesn’t argue that, from his perspective, it had looked like a ball on the outside left corner. Only on the playing field does the strata of rank become moot. And only rarely do they get to carve a playing field out of the battlefield. Once the game is won or darkness beats them to it, rank will be restored and Phillips will be back to making the calls.
Rick tosses the baseball gently up and down. The Boston Braves had sent him a box of balls and a carton of bats almost nine months ago. Through near-constant movement of their battalion, barrages, and battles, his platoon had lost most of the donated equipment. They are down to two balls and one bat. He’d joked that maybe they should start using grenades for batting practice, hitting toward the outfield of enemy territory. They all joke. They all play this bizarre form of pickup baseball for one reason only: It keeps their minds off the next day. It isn’t enough to have survived until today. There is always tomorrow and it is tomorrow that they worry about. You know you’ve made it today. But, will your number be up durin
g the next advance, the next ambush, the next time the enemy fires its big guns in your direction? Baseball, sometimes played in a tiny market square or in some farmer’s abandoned field a few yards behind the artillery, is something they can do and forget for nine amateur innings why they are playing on foreign soil in a danger zone. And that tomorrow may not be your day.
If they are hunkered down in a small town or village, sometimes children will show up to watch. Eyes peek over windowsills, followed by a slow emerging from gaping doorways; the gradual building of an audience who watches the game in an unnerving silence. Nonetheless, these kids often surprise Rick with their knowledge of this quintessentially American game. Or, maybe it’s just that kids have an innate understanding of how games are played. They watch as intently as genuine fans while the Americans, stripped down to undershirts, helmet liners instead of baseball caps, swing and miss, catch flyballs, run the bases—generally mess kits loaned for the duration of the game—sliding headfirst into home plate, which, by invented tradition, is always the helmet of the highest-ranking officer playing the game. They watch, and sometimes Rick will call a kid over and put him in the game. Ragged children, skinny in a way a child should never be, a wariness and timidity in their eyes that looks permanent. A tiny miracle may take place when he calls a kid over, stands him beside a mess kit, and gestures in crazy sign language that he should catch the ball and tag the runner out. Sometimes, not always, that one kid will lose the wariness in his eyes, and a little sparkle will show. One little moment of pleasure, of play in a life spent scrambling for survival. That was how they’ve lost most of the balls—Rick gives them to the kids in exchange for a smile. He thinks of his own unborn children. He’ll teach them how to play the game and about these kids and how much the game of baseball meant to them.
This time, there are no children watching. They end the game before dark with a quick one-two-three last inning, chalking up a two-to-one victory for Rick’s team. It isn’t all that different from winning on the legitimate ball field, handshakes and backslaps, easy laughter, good-natured ribbing of the losing team. All that’s missing is a tavern and a cold beer. All that’s missing is the life he left behind. Most days, it is possible to keep his perspective. This carnival of noise and destruction and blindly following orders is his here and now. Francesca and Pax and playing baseball live in a very special compartment in his brain, a place that he lingers over only during those rare moments when he isn’t fully engaged in the hard work that war forces on him. To dwell on what is a very different plane from the one he currently inhabits is like thinking of sex while pitching a no-hitter. To think of home and his life and how much he misses it is hazardous. It’s a losing proposition.
Yesterday, the battalion had gotten mail for the first time in a couple of weeks. Rick had each one of Francesca’s letters bundled together in the bottom of his pack, and during the stretches when they didn’t receive mail, he’d extricate the bundle and read two or three randomly pulled out of the pile. He used to keep the letters in his field jacket pocket, but the bundle had become too thick to carry there, where it weighed against his breast, pulling him to one side.
So, like all his comrades, Rick stood in the crowd and waited to hear his name called by the quartermaster, the anticipation of a letter or two like a taste in his mouth.
“Stanton!”
“Here, sir.”
The quartermaster deftly snapped a bundle of letters into the air, where it sailed precisely to where Rick stood.
“You ever want to pitch, you let me know.” Rick tucked the bundle into his jacket.
“I got a hell of a fastball, Stanton; you don’t want to hit against me.” He rooted around a little more in the mailbag. “Wait, you’ve got a package.” The quartermaster lofted a small brown paper-wrapped box to Rick.
Rick read each of the stockpiled letters from Francesca in date order, each one decorated at the bottom with her XX’s and OO’s and a messy paw print from Pax. Her letters, like his, had taken on a certain rhythm. The weather, a greeting from her parents via their monthly phone call, a snippet of gossip about neighbors or one of the players who had remained behind; a report on her day at the factory. A funny story about Pax. Pax sending his love.
The box held cookies, bashed mostly into crumbs by the time it reached him. Among the remnants was an envelope. Rick licked the tip of his finger and picked the crumbs off the envelope, savoring the bite of ginger as he tasted what his wife had tried to do for him.
Dearest Rick,
Sweets for my sweet. Pax did his own paw prints. Honestly.
With all my love, your own, Francesca
His sticky fingers found the slick magazine paper and he pulled out the enclosed advertisement. Rick had seen one, a war dog. Just the sight of a well-made American dog, so unlike the scrawny, fearful mutts that scurried away from them as they approached, too long feral to trust human beings, had made him more homesick than he’d ever been in all this time. The dog had been a casualty dog, put to use in the aftermath of a battle, locating the still-living wounded. All Rick wanted to do was pat the dog, but the soldier handler was clear: No one was allowed to do more than admire this working canine from a respectful distance. Rick’s fingers had itched to feel fur beneath his hand, and the rebuff had sent him into a funk of missing Pax.
Rick held that creased piece of magazine paper in his hands, studying the photograph of the German shepherd and his proud young owner. He looked away and pressed a hand against his sternum. When the big guns thundered, it could feel like one’s chest was collapsing from the percussion. Rick felt exactly as if his chest was being crushed. He crumpled the page, pitching it away from him as if it were a grenade. Lacking enough weight, the paper dropped well within the danger zone. He knew what Francesca was doing, even if she might not realize it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see it; he really could. Pax, big, strong, smart, working as a scout or sentry, as a casualty dog or messenger. Rick retrieved the ad, smoothed it out, refolded it, and added it to the bundle at the bottom of his pack. A working dog. Smart and loyal, more than capable of doing the kind of work the War Department had developed. Rick could see Pax in the K-9 Corps. He just couldn’t see anyone but himself being the dog’s handler. They’d be an excellent team, he and Pax. They always had been, even before Francesca. From the time he’d scooped up the wet, thirsty, hungry puppy, Pax had belonged only to him. Anyone who had ever loved a dog wouldn’t easily give up that dog to war; but war was their life now. If Pax could talk, would he say he’d rather be home sleeping under the kitchen table than be doing his bit?
* * *
Rick and his platoon are called into formation, the balls and bat are stowed away, the momentary respite from action is over, and by this time tomorrow, well, who can say what may be true tomorrow. He doesn’t have time to write to his wife, to answer that unspoken, implied question. He’s squandered that time with a pickup baseball game. The game had gone well, but for once it hadn’t given him the usual release from his present. No matter how hard he had concentrated on his pitching or his hitting, the idea of his beloved Pax being sent into the same kind of daily danger he endured obstructed his focus.
As Rick climbs up into the already-moving troop carrier, a hand grabs his, hauling him over the tailgate and into the truck; the private who had been the umpire for their pickup baseball game grins at him. “That was a great game. We should challenge the Krauts to a baseball game; we’d be sure to beat their asses.”
* * *
Two days later, Pvt. Al Hooper was dead. He’d walked off to the side of the road to take a piss, smack in front of three camouflaged Germans, who opened fire on him, killing the boy instantly.
A scout dog would have alerted the platoon to danger. That umpiring private would never have died. That night, Rick bummed a sheet of V-mail from a buddy.
Dearest,
I know that you weren’t asking the question, but the answer is that Pax should do his bit, too. We should volunteer him for
the Dogs for Defense program. It’s the right thing to do. So, it’s going to be up to you now to keep one more creature in your prayers.
Love,
Rick
P.S. Please tell Pax that I’ll be looking for him.
Chapter Twelve
Dear Mrs. Stanton,
This is to advise that your German Shepherd Dog, Pax, has been called into the K-9 Corps of the U.S. armed forces …
When the war is over and you have had an opportunity to learn firsthand from the soldiers who have benefited by these trained war dogs, you will realize what a splendid contribution you have made toward your country’s welfare in time of war.
Sincerely,
Forest M. Hall
Regional Director
Dogs for Defense
Receiving that letter had been tantamount to getting Rick’s induction letter. Hall’s reassuring words of my future pride and Pax’s inevitable glory did nothing to assuage the lumpen feeling that surrounded my heart. I shook off Connie’s attagirl embrace; I didn’t feel noble; I just felt sad. Pax didn’t have any choice in the matter. Like a draftee, he was just being told what to do and would be sent away. Rick at least could write to me and let me know he was doing all right; Pax would disappear for the duration, and I believed that I might never know where he was. Europe or the Pacific, the Aleutians or stateside, protecting the coast with the Coast Guard. That last option was the one I prayed for. Like Rick had said, I now had to add Pax to my personal prayer list, along with my husband and brothers, cousin Sid, and all the players who had left the game, voluntarily or not, to be a part of the war.
The men came to collect Pax on an early-summer morning. I’d taken the last couple of days off from the factory, loath to lose any more time with my dog than I had to. We went for long walks, used up my precious gas ration to drive to the country, where he could run unrestrained. I’d talked to him, explaining over and over what was going on and where he was going and what he was going to be doing, and how proud we were of him, but I knew that he only heard the soft speech as soothing, not as explication. He had no sense of what was to come.