“Jap skull,” said Fred, and grinned. “Buddy who was on Bataan got it out of a big pile of them.”
I started to hand it back but he said, “Keep it to remember me by.”
Some of the other nurses had Japanese skulls their boyfriends had given them. On Halloween, Ellen Standish lit hers with candles like a pumpkin and set it in the barracks window. Then her boyfriend’s ship went down in Subic Bay after it was hit by a kamikaze and she threw the skull in the trash. Life magazine said the Japs were not like other people, that savagery was bred into them and you could tell it by the narrowness of their foreheads. I held the skull against my belly and felt the forehead. The bone was smooth beneath my fingers. Fred took off his cap and set it on the skull. Then he took a picture of me holding the skull in my lap. When he reached California he wrote me in Manila and enclosed the photo. On the back he wrote, “I lost my head over you.”
Tommie was dating a cargo pilot from Pierre, South Dakota. He planned to take his plane for a joy ride and invited Tommie and me to go.
“Won’t Billy get in trouble?” I asked.
“The war’s over,” Tommie said. “Nobody gets in trouble any more.”
When we reached the airfield outside Manila we found two planes parked side by side. They were dark green and had swollen bellies like they were pregnant. Billy and a friend loitered beside the planes.
“We’re both going up,” Billy said. “Rachel can ride with Ed.”
I smiled at Ed, who was cute, blue-eyed, and from Wyoming, but I didn’t flirt because I was practically engaged. Billy had his arm around Tommie’s waist. “You girls are in for a treat. We’re going to show you how we run buffalo out West, right Ed?”
Tommie giggled.
It was my first time to fly. When we took off I gripped the sides of my seat and held my breath, because the plane was shaking like it would fall apart and it is not often you do something that makes you think you could die that very moment. Then the heaviness drained away and we lifted as though we were made of feathers. Ed reached over and pried my fingers loose. “You can let go,” he said, and winked. We floated above Manila. The piles of rubble looked like mounds of brown sugar spilled beside the bluegreen ripples of Manila Bay. A jagged shadow moved over the surface of the city and then I saw Billy and Tommie were flying ahead of us.
“Over there.” Ed pointed. General MacArthur’s mansion stood unscathed, its swimming pool like a gemstone set in a ring. “Those Nips wouldn’t touch old Mac’s house,” Ed yelled above the roar of the engines. “They think he’s a god or something.” And so were we like gods, American gods, as we passed beyond the suffering city and over an ocean of trees and green grassland.
“Water buffalo!” Ed yelled. His radio crackled, and Billy’s excited voice answered, “Round-up time, cowpoke!” Ed whooped and grabbed the throttle, and we dropped out of the sky. There were only a dozen of them, a make-believe herd. They were running, they seemed to be beside us, then we leveled out and passed over the terrified carabao, so close I could see the muddy splotches on their backs. We soared again. I clutched the seat and hoped I wouldn’t throw up.
“Your mouth’s wide open!” Ed pointed and laughed.
I clapped my mouth shut and looked out the window. Tommie and Billy were far below us. They swooped down, wing at a tilt, then straightened to make a run. The frenzied carabao bore the cross-like shadow of the airplane on their backs.
“He’s damn low!” Ed yelled.
In my mind Tommie sat forward in the cockpit, screaming for joy. I tried to call a warning, pressed my hand against the window as though I could reach through and pull her to me, hold her close for safety. The airplane skimmed the grasses, tipped its wing, and disappeared in a plume of gray smoke that gathered itself, then opened and spread like the petals of a bright orange rose.
RACHEL, 1946
I came back from the war with a new suit of clothes, a suntan, an album full of photographs, and a Japanese skull. I came back without Tommie.
She tried to follow me around. When the train rocked and swayed up the Levisa and the mountains, ragged and unkempt, closed in on me, she whispered, Aint four years a long time to go without mountains? How can you leave them again for New Orleans? When I saw my parents and Aunt Carrie at the train station in Justice, Father nearly bald now, Mother hunched over and gray in her wheelchair, Tommie was looking in vain over my shoulder for her own mother. I missed her, but I wanted her to leave me alone. I thought she died from too much wildness, and I was anxious to avoid her fate. So after we’d hugged and cried together and were settled in the car, the first thing I asked for was the letter that would carry me safe into the arms of a well-off man. Tommie disappeared.
“Letter from New Orleans?” Father said. “We aint had any such letter that I know of. Don’t believe we have any mail for you at all.”
I sat in the back seat beside Mother and tried not to show that anything was wrong. She gripped my arm with her one good hand and leaned close against me. “He’ll write,” I said to her. She smiled on one side of her face.
I never asked about Dillon because I was hurt he hadn’t met my train. But while she fried the pork chops, Aunt Carrie said, “Dillon lives at Winco and he’s working at the Number Thirteen mine. They’re shorthanded so it’s hard to get away, but he’ll be by soon as he gets off work.”
When I was upstairs in my room taking clothes out of my suitcase, I heard a tap and he stood there so tall his head nearly touched the doorframe. I dropped the blouses, and next I knew he swept me up in a hug and I was hugging back as hard as I could. It was a while before we stood back from each other.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re a woman now.”
I blushed. I was getting a nervous rise in my stomach and to quell it I said, “A woman, and engaged to be married.”
A change came over his face. I talked on, fast. “I wrote you about him once. He’s from New Orleans. His family has money but he’s not stuck up. I’m just waiting to hear from him to set the date.”
He shut the door and stood by the bed. His long fingers strayed over the pile of clothes. “I still love you. Always will. Stay here and love me.”
“We’ve been through this before. It’s wrong and people would talk.”
“Who cares what anybody thinks?”
“It’s not just what people think. It’s what I feel. It’s how I feel.” I was shaking all over.
He pulled me to him. “What do you feel?”
I tried to pull away but he held me tighter.
“I love Fred.”
“No you don’t.” He kissed my neck. He unbuttoned my bra and slipped his hand over my breast, pressed me against the wall. I felt him hard against my belly. He kissed my mouth and I opened it.
“I’ll tell you how you feel,” he said “You want to take your clothes off and make love to me. You never made love with any Fred, because you didn’t want to.” He raised my skirt and pulled down my panties. He touched me.
“You’re wet,” he said.
It was too much. I pushed him and was surprised at how easily he stepped back.
“How dare you in my mother’s house!” I pulled up my panties and tried to cover my breasts.
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of you, because of what you just did and because of what you just said. You run right over top of me and there’s no place to hide from you.”
“No, it’s your mother that scares you. Does she rule your life, that old woman in the wheelchair yonder?”
“Don’t you speak of my mother like that!”
“She’s a cripple and she’ll make you one.”
He stepped closer again. I slapped at him and caught him on the cheek with the heel of my hand. He stumbled backward, his fingers pressed against his cheek, and knocked a box off the dresser. The Japanese skull tumbled onto the floor. Dillon looked at it like someone waking from sleep.
“What the hell—”
“F
red gave me that,” I said. “It’s a Jap skull.”
He stooped and picked it up, touched the top of the skull. “It was a person. You can’t carry a person’s head around like this.”
“I told you, Fred gave it to me.”
“Fred can go to hell! You don’t give part of a dead person’s body as a present!”
“In case you don’t recall, we just fought a war against the Japs and they acted like animals!”
“They’re people, goddamn it!”
“You’re so self-righteous. You always have thought you were better than anybody else.”
“I am better than the sonofabitch who gave you this skull. And if you can’t see it, you can go to hell.”
He yanked the door open.
“Where are you going? Give me back that skull.”
“No.”
“My fiancé gave that to me. You can’t take what’s mine.”
“It aint yours. I’m giving it a proper burial. If you got any decency you’ll come with me.”
Even as he spoke the skull took on flesh and veins and hair and a body and stood beside him a whole human being, a mother’s child, and accused me. But I could not bear the two of them ranged against me, to have Dillon’s part taken by a ghost.
“If you walk out with that skull, don’t you ever come bother me again.”
“I won’t. Don’t think that I will.”
He went out with the skull and left me alone.
DILLON
The Rachel I knew would not treat a person so. War changes people, even those who don’t pick up a gun. Maybe my Rachel died in the Philippines and another has come back in her skin. My Rachel would not cart a person’s head halfway around the world in a box like a pair of old shoes.
I’m driving so fast I barely make the curves. The road is black. I am tempted to straighten up and take a tree, but I keep leaning on the wheel. I don’t know how she could push me away in favor of some rich sonofabitch with no respect for the dead.
No, she always was shallow. She wanted to be a stewardess, Jesus Christ. I don’t love her, never did. It’s my childhood I love, living on the Homeplace and being a boy with my mother. It’s my daddy I love. I only thought I loved Rachel because she remembers him.
The car clips the shoulder of the road, kicks up gravel. I fight the wheel and keep control, the back end skips when it hits the pavement but I keep going.
A streak of orange flashes past my headlights and disappears with a thump. I pull off the road onto a wide shoulder and sit breathing hard, listening to the motor. Then I turn the truck around and drive back, hoping to find the road empty. But a red fox is there, stretched full length across the black pavement. I drive past twice more, hoping it will be gone, a bad dream, but I catch it each time in my headlights. I marvel at how its coat burns fire, even in death. I haven’t seen a red fox since I left the Homeplace, they do not much come around the coal mines. There is just this one.
I pull onto the shoulder again, turn off the motor and get out. I pick up the fox by the legs. It is heavy, things take on heaviness when they are dead. I lay it carefully in the back of the truck and drive to my house at Winco. In my mind I see what might have been, the red fox slaking its thirst at the edge of Blackberry Creek, comforted by the murmuring of the water and the sound of its own drinking, calmed by the rustling of leaves in the night breeze. It slips up the bank, across the road and safely up Trace Mountain to its den, alive because I was driving slow and careful and sane, because I didn’t let a woman hurt me.
At Winco I dig a hole beside the fence in my yard. I wrap the fox around the skull and bury them together. I don’t know what religion the skull is so I say O Buddha O Christ O ancestors O God. The red fox died for our sins.
TRACE MOUNTAIN 1946 – 1951
RACHEL, 1946
I never heard from Fred. After a while I swallowed my pride and wrote to him, but he didn’t answer. Mother and Father didn’t say a word to me and treated me as solicitously as if I had a disfiguring disease.
I went to Aunt Carrie to cry out my hurt. But the first thing she said, after she comforted me, was “Does Dillon know?”
I straightened my back and dabbed at my eyes. “What difference does that make?”
She didn’t say anything.
“He’ll be happy,” I said. “I don’t like someone being happy about something that makes me so sad.”
“Did you really love that boy?”
“Of course I did.”
“I just wondered. When you talked about him, your eyes didn’t light up.”
“I don’t show my feelings so easy,” I said.
She just smiled. I turned away, angry, sat down at my dresser, and started to brush my hair.
“Dillon hasn’t been by the house lately,” she noted.
“That’s because he’s off sulking.” I tugged hard with my brush, ignoring the tangles. “It’s what he does whenever he doesn’t get his own way.”
“I figured you all had a fight,” she said. “Anything you want to talk about?”
I had invited her to my room, but now I wished she’d leave. “It’s nothing to do with Dillon,” I said just for spite, “and nothing you can do anything about.” I was putting bobby pins in my hair. “I ran into Tony Angelelli today.” I watched her face in the mirror to see how she’d take that. She wasn’t pleased, so neither would Dillon be. Good. When she left I smiled into the mirror.
I was glad to see Tony again, in his little office in the Jenkinjones company store, with the huge black safe and the bars on the window. He looked small, a man who was once free to roam the world but has been cast back in his prison cell. He had been with the army in Italy, an interpreter. It must have been pleasant for him, repeating the words of others, not having to think of his own. I had expected he would bring back a docile, grateful Italian war bride, but he was still single.
Our marriage was all my fault; it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t pushed for it. Tony would have drifted on by me. But my fear was growing. A woman was nothing without marriage, fit only for a lonely, unhappy life, to be shunned and talked about behind her back. Girls younger than me already had children, and when I went to church I thought they looked at me like they felt sorry for me. I watched their children and longed for a baby of my own to fill my empty spaces. I had lost time during the war; while other girls were courting I was nursing soldiers. Lots of nurses caught husbands in the army, and I thought I had too. But I’d come home and learned I was unlucky. That was life, and I must do the best I could.
Tony still had a round face with a sweet, gentle expression, still had black curly hair that I knew other women admired. He agreed to go to a movie with me and didn’t seem to think me forward for asking him. He tried to feel my breasts and asked me to go to bed with him but didn’t mind when I refused.
“I been talking to my mother about you,” he said. “I told her you wouldn’t sleep with me and she said you’re a lady.”
“Lady or not, you cheated on me one time,” I reminded him.
“Aw.” He laughed. “It wasn’t nothing serious. She wasn’t the kind of girl you marry.”
Within a month we were engaged. To my surprise, Mother didn’t protest when I announced my plans. She watched Tony, who sat beaming at the kitchen table, eating a slab of Aunt Carrie’s apple pie and saying nothing. That night, Father came to my bedroom and said he’d talked to Mother. They both agreed the army might have been good for Tony, would have “straightened him out,” as Father put it. “We know it’s hard on a young girl these days, finding a husband. It’s the times, all the young men dying in the war.”
“I want your blessing.”
He hugged me. “You’ll always have our blessing.”
Then it was only Aunt Carrie and Dillon who stood opposed, and they were silent. Aunt Carrie knew better than to say anything out loud, and Dillon avoided me. The few times we did meet, he was distant and superior, as though it was beneath him to converse with such a backwar
d person. He didn’t come to the wedding, and I was glad.
I took my vows in a white wool suit with fake pearls around the collar and sleeves. Tony went against his mother for once and agreed to be married by the Methodist preacher. He was pleasant and didn’t seem the least bit nervous. We spent the night in Huntington at the Hotel Pritchard. I undressed in the bathroom, terrified of what was to come, and didn’t look at Tony when I got in bed. But it wasn’t much worse than going to the doctor. He pulled up my nightgown, stroked my body a few times, then laid on top of me and pushed. I felt numb, dug my fingers into his shoulders and held on. He kept pushing and I thought that nothing must be happening, that he would give up. But finally he relaxed, sighed loudly, and patted the top of my head. Then he fell asleep. I reached down cautiously and touched the insides of my thighs, felt something sticky. I turned on my side, wrapped my arms around myself, and lay awake for hours.
We moved into a five-room house at Jenkinjones, just down the road from my mother and father. I didn’t take a job because everyone said it was time for women to settle down and rebuild the home. I sewed curtains and cleaned and learned to cook Italian food, to measure out oregano and basil, pour olive oil in the boiling pasta, slit a squid and remove the thin clear backbone. Tony never said the house looked nice, never complimented my cooking, but complained if the spaghetti stuck together or the bread was too hard.
I told myself it didn’t matter; I didn’t need someone patting me on the back all the time. We spent quiet evenings together, Tony listening to the radio or reading newspapers, me with a book. Then Tony bought a car.
We’d been without one because cars were in short supply after the war; every dealer had a waiting list. Blackberry Creek had a bus line and passenger train, but it was hard to go anyplace at night. Then Tony brought home a black Ford. Soon he spent every evening at the Moose Club in Justice town. He stayed out later and later until one night I fell asleep over a book, sitting up in an easy chair. When I woke it was midnight and he still wasn’t home.
I paced the floor, felt sick to my stomach. At one o’clock I called the Moose Club. No one answered. I found a piece of paper and wrote in large letters, “Two can play this game,” and laid the note on the nightstand beside our bed. I turned out every light in the house and watched out the window.
The Unquiet Earth Page 7