Homefront Hero

by Allie Pleiter

  “Not yet strong, but delightfully steady. You’ve turned the corner indeed, Miss Sample, and I couldn’t be happier.”

  “I was wondering,” John said with a stiff groan, “if we couldn’t all be happier off the floor. I fear at the moment it’ll be a week before I walk steady.” He stole a look at Leanne, giving her a tentative squeeze, “but I’ll be the happiest limping man east of Chicago.”

  Madison laughed. “You will at that.”

  It took considerable effort—and pain—to untangle Leanne from the circle of John’s arms and get her laid out onto the fresh sheets Ida had managed to find and set on the bed. No one cared at the bother—it was far more celebration than anyone at the hospital had seen in too long. Every inch of Leanne felt cracked and dry, and yet still she smiled. John made glorious protests as Dr. Madison eased his stiffened body from the floor. “You’ll pay for that night under her weight.” He laughed, giving John’s shoulder a friendly shake.

  “Gladly,” John said, fixing his gaze on Leanne again with dazzling warmth. She marveled again at his vigil over her. She loved him dearly, every boisterous, defiant bit of this man God had sent to her side. Surely God was laughing this morning at all doubts she’d expressed at the Almighty ever getting through to a soul the likes of John Gallows’s.

  Ida had managed to somehow find a second pillow, and she propped Leanne up, fussing about her like a queen’s handmaiden. She brought a chair from the other side of the cot and handed John a tin mug of water. “You can tend to your damsel in distress for ten more minutes,” she clucked like a proud mother hen, “then it’s time for the both of you to get cleaned and rested.”

  There were still people in the room as John leaned over her to help her sip the water, but she forgot all of them in the depths of his eyes. “Drink, my love.” His voice held a new, tender quality that spoke to the deepest parts of her heart. The water was bliss to her throat, cool and wet and wondrous. John looked at her as though he couldn’t help but do so, as though she were a treasure instead of the rumpled sight she suspected she was. Still, he was doubly handsome to her in his unkempt, unshaven state, so perhaps the same was true of him as he looked at her. She felt herself blushing under the directness of his eyes, that dashing regard that had won far lovelier hearts than hers. He fingered a lock of her hair as he yawned. “Now rest.”

  “You, too,” she replied, yawning, as well. She was so very tired, so grateful to be enduring a dull ache instead of the stabs of pain she’d known before. “Sleep well…” and with a boost of courage she added, “my love.” She drifted into sleep recalling the sparkle in John’s eyes that followed her words. She loved him. He loved her. They lived. Tomorrow could bring anything, and she would have enough.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dr. Madison looked at John from over the top of his glasses as they sat the next day in the tiny room that had become the doctor’s quarters. “You’ve pushed yourself too far, but I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that.”

  John leaned back against the room’s single chair. It hurt to stand. It hurt to do anything anymore. “You know what I’m looking for.”

  Madison took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve hardly the right equipment to make an assessment, especially under these circumstances.”

  John had given enough speeches to know propaganda when he saw it. “I’m long past pretending, Charles. Out with it.”

  There was a long pause before Madison answered. “No, I don’t think you’ll heal. Not properly. Not enough.”

  John felt the world tilt a bit and grabbed the arm of the chair for support. He’d prepared himself for this, had known on some level that this was coming, but it still felt like a punch to the stomach to hear it aloud. “I’m done, then.”

  “In service, yes. Honorable discharge, decorated I’m sure, but—” he gave John a steady, direct look “—flying is out of the question.” Madison took a deep breath before adding, “If you’d have gone…”

  “Who can say what would have happened if I’d gone to Chicago and France?” John stood up and turned toward the room’s only window. He hated how the sound of casket-builders’ hammers still punctuated the air. “Not that I haven’t turned it over in my mind a dozen times. I could have gotten what I thought I wanted.” He turned and looked back at the doctor, wincing at the pang that accompanied the move. “Then again, I could have gotten what I deserved.”

  “Who can say what any man deserves? I’ve conferred with doctors from seven other bases, and I still can’t explain why Leanne and the others live while hundreds more do not.” Madison dropped his gaze. “We’re not done here, John. Not by a long shot.”

  The randomness of influenza, the jarring lack of logic in who fell ill and who escaped, gave heavy weight to such questions. It was why Leanne had spent so much time talking about God’s grace to her patients. To him. John returned his eyes to the window and the clear blue sky framed within. “I’m not fit to rejoin the service.”

  Madison came up behind him. “Do you regret it? Staying?”

  “No.” John didn’t even have to think about it.

  “You’d be all-too-human if you did.” Madison tucked his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “To admit your regret doesn’t belittle the act. It may even make it more heroic, if you ask me.”

  “I think I loved her even then,” John explained, amazed at how easily the words came. “In the way I made the choice to stay so easily, with such certainty. I knew, somehow, that my place was here. No, I don’t regret it, Charles. I’m alive, and so is Leanne.”

  “And two more besides,” Madison added. “But not enough live. We’ll not be able to lift the quarantine for days, perhaps even weeks.”

  John managed a smile. “What matter is that? My battle and my prize are already here.”

  * * *

  A week later Leanne sat in a chair for the first time since she’d fallen ill. Ida and Dr. Madison had contrived a room for her in a corner of an upper floor, away from the still-infected patients. Eventually the other survivors would join her when they became well enough to move, but for now Leanne enjoyed the ultimate luxury of privacy.

  This afternoon as she dressed for the first time, privacy felt too lonely. She felt lost in the large room and large clothes—her blouse and skirt looked as if they belonged to someone else, hanging loose and awkward on her bony figure. She was gazing in a hand mirror Ida had brought with a hairbrush and a small length of ribbon. It was as if a stranger’s reflection returned her gaze. While only shadows now, Leanne felt as if she could still see influenza’s horrid dark spots on her own face. It unnerved her to know she had borne the purple blotches she’d found so ghoulish on her patients. She was a survivor, yes, but she was also a victim. Would she always see the spots, imagined in the mirror even when her face was full and flush with health? She still looked and felt so sickly. So weak and scarred.

  It almost made it worse that Dr. Madison and the rest of the hospital staff reveled in her survival. She did not know how to be this wondrous “first survivor,” or what that meant. John was the one at home in the spotlight, not her, and she had not done anything worthy to earn her newfound significance. John had once said his only heroism was “not dying.” How funny that she now felt the same sentiment.

  “I am glad to be alive, Lord,” she preached to the sallow face in the mirror, “but I’ve not the grace to ignore how much of my hair is gone.” Leanne could do nothing with the thinned and lifeless locks influenza had bequeathed her. She’d learned about hair thinning out during a high fever, but it was another, humbling thing to live with the symptom. “How vain I am despite all my reasons for gratitude.” Where was the lovely, pretty-feeling Leanne who’d gazed at John from her place beside him on the magazine cover? She looked at her sunken cheeks and moaned at how far she was from that woman now. “I look old. A crone.”

  “You are the most beautiful woman in the world to me.” John’s voice came from behind her
. Leanne turned, expecting to see his “charm and flattery” face, the one she’d seen him use during his speeches. Instead, she saw a precious genuine affection fill his features. He meant his words.

  John’s appearance was sometimes hard to bear. While pain darkened his expression more often than not, he still possessed the handsome features of his war- hero past. He hadn’t really changed, whereas she felt like a walking war-wound. She leaned back against him as she considered herself again in the mirror. “I see far too much of Private Carson when I look in this mirror,” she admitted, trying once again to force her limp hair to twist up artfully over her pale forehead.

  “Shh.” John placed a kiss on the spot where Leanne had affixed the thin curl. “Carson had lost his appetite for life. That’s not something you catch like a disease. It’s something that festers inside a man until disease or wound sets it loose.” He plucked the mirror from her grasp, taking both of her hands and turning her to face him. “You are a true beauty. I look at you and I see a warrior. Someone who has waged a mighty battle and earned her victory.”

  She turned away from him. “That’s just it, John, I’ve earned nothing. Don’t you see? You told me once you felt your medal was for nothing, that you were celebrated for merely staying alive. I feel like that. I don’t know why I lived and others died. I’ve nothing to teach or share or contribute. I’m just here. It will be weeks until I’m strong enough to serve on the nursing staff again. What am I?”

  “You, my love, are the most important thing we have right now—you are God’s gift of hope. You and every other soul who manages to pull through.” His winced as standing began to bother him, so he pulled a chair close to where she sat. It seemed like John couldn’t stand for more than a few minutes lately, and while he was doing his best to gloss it over, she could tell it bothered him immensely. “Can’t you feel how the atmosphere has changed since you’ve healed? Hopelessness doesn’t sour the wards any longer. People don’t come in here with a slaughterhouse fear in their eyes, because they know now that it’s possible to live. Every healthy breath you take, every day you improve, is God’s gift to everyone.”

  Leanne rested her chin in her hand. “Goodness, one would think you know how to give a speech.”

  “I know the power of inspiration. But yes, I do know what it’s like to feel like more of a symbol than a person.” John kneaded his thigh. “It wears on a soul to know others think you larger than you are. I do understand what you feel.” He smiled. “God was wise to put us together, don’t you think? Together. Us. The very idea still astounds me.” He leaned in and kissed her.

  It began as a soft and tender kiss, but deepened to a lingering, delighting, lover’s kiss. The kind of rapturous kiss a handsome man would give to a beautiful woman. He made her feel so loved. His regard, the clear affection in his touch, was a balm to the sting of her unhealthiness. There they sat, sitting because neither of them were able to truly stand, but feeling they were strong together. She knew, knew John loved her, even now. Not in spite of her scars, but perhaps even because of them. Didn’t she feel the same way about him, about his wounds? Could she have loved the unwounded John, the arrogant dashing hero too large for life? He wasn’t the same man without the thorn of his lame leg. The way he coped with his injury, with her illness, was so very much a part of how she loved him now. How perfectly suited they truly were for each other. “Very wise,” she whispered when she finally pulled away, breathless from his kiss.

  “Oh,” John said, reaching for a small bag he’d set down near his cane. “You had me so spellbound I nearly forgot. I’ve a gift for you. I know you’ve been far too idle for your liking, but I’m in no hurry to see you push yourself too soon.”

  “You,” she teased, “preaching to me about the wisdom of respecting one’s physical limitations? Perhaps the world really is coming to an end.”

  “You don’t want to force me to take back this yarn now, do you?”

  “Yarn! You brought me yarn?” She grabbed at the bag even as John held it playfully out of her reach. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do right now than to be knitting.”

  John leaned in, holding the bag behind him. “Anything?” His eyes sparkled with cinema-star charm.

  “You’re dreadful.” She leaned in and kissed him, deftly snatching the bag in his resulting distraction. “Anything productive, I mean. I’m hardly well enough to do much else, and my hands have been itching for yarn and needles.” The bag held the current set of socks she’d been working on. “How did you manage to get these sent over?”

  “You said yourself, I’m very persuasive. Look in the bottom of the bag.”

  Leanne dug deeper to find two of the softest, plushest hanks of yellow cashmere she’d seen in months. An absolute decadence in wartime, much less during a quarantine. “John!”

  “And as you also said yourself, I’m rather fond of breaking rules.”

  She fingered the luxurious fiber, soft as clouds and bright as sunshine. “Oh, John, I can’t.”

  “You can and you ought to. My secret source says it’s just enough to make a bed jacket or whatever it is you call such frilly things. And I shall have Dr. Madison write out a prescription if you refuse. You’re to be pampered, and that’s the end of it.”

  “A yellow cashmere bed jacket? It’s scandalous.”

  John’s smile was perhaps even wider than her own. “It’s therapeutic. Look at you. Your color’s improved already.” He picked up the mirror and moved behind her as she sat on the chair. He bent so that they could both see her reflection and held one of the hanks to her neck. Its fuzzy fibers tickled her chin. “Mmm. I’ve always liked you in yellow.”

  “I trust,” she nearly gasped as his murmur tingled down the back of her neck, “you were able to secure the sock you were working on, as well?”

  “Alas, no.” His eyes suggested he hadn’t even attempted to do so.

  “Oh, but Captain Gallows, you promised me a sock for the charity auction.” She pulled a strand of the cashmere from its twist in the hank, wrapping it around one finger with nothing short of glee. To knit something for herself, something so extravagant, something from John, filled her with a radiant energy.

  “My duties as makeshift quartermaster don’t allow for such luxuries.” He straightened with a groan and returned himself stiffly to the chair opposite her. “I may not be able to walk far, but I’m a champion of stretching supplies for miles.”

  Leanne put down the yarn to lay a hand on John’s knee. “How is your leg? It seems worse.”

  John’s sigh told more than his words. “It is. Madison said…” He stopped himself. “No bother about that. What shall you knit first? The olive or yellow?”

  “Yes, I will bother about that. What did Dr. Madison say? Has he been treating you?”

  John shifted his weight, as if the leg ached more at the subject. “Nothing to treat, nor anything to treat with. Fevers need ice more than sore legs, pain medicine is more luxury than your yarn there, and…some things just…don’t heal.” He busied himself with the olive army sock, inspecting it with false curiosity. “Impressive heel, my dear. Such neat stitches.”

  The John Gallows she’d known didn’t use tones of resignation. She pulled the sock from his hands. “John, stop avoiding the subject. What has Dr. Madison told you?”

  John pushed up off the chair, turning away from her and yet leaving his cane on the floor where they had sat. “There’s no point in discussing it.”

  “There is every point in discussing it. Don’t keep this from me. Not this.”

  John faced out the window, leaning against the sill for a long moment before he spoke. “Madison said I’ve abused it beyond repair. The leg is lame. Permanently. He couldn’t sign off on active service for me now even if he wanted to, even if Barnes demanded it. Which I doubt Barnes will do, as I suspect the general’s hunting for my head as it is.”

  Returning to service had been everything to John. He’d sacrificed everything, pushed himse
lf, broken rules and called in favors to make it happen. He’d been on the brink of achieving that goal. The influenza outbreak was supposed to be a detour, not the end. “I am so sorry,” she said, even though the words hardly did his pain justice. “I know how hard that is for you.” And here she was pitying herself because she looked sickly. She had every chance to recover, and now John did not. It seemed unjust.

  The second part of his statement struck her just then. “And why is General Barnes after your head?” John still had not moved. It dawned on her that John hadn’t told her everything. “What did you do?”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  John avoided her gaze. “I did nothing out of character for me.”

  “That leaves a fair amount of room to wonder. What did you do?”

  He propped his hands against the sides of the window and slowly stretched his leg, an attempt at casual movement she knew could not be true. “I suppose it’s more about what I didn’t do. The general doesn’t take to having his direct orders disobeyed.”

  Leanne had seen enough to know John disobeying orders couldn’t be news to the commander. This had to be larger than that. She put down the yarn and mirror on the table beside her and sat up straight. “And which disregarded orders are so important as to have General Barnes up in arms?” When John didn’t respond, she added, “John, please. Whatever it is you think I ought not to hear, tell me.”

  John turned slowly, leaning against the wall next to the window. He spoke slowly, reluctantly. “I was supposed to have left the base the day we came to campus. Barnes knew what was coming. The base in Boston had already been hit and ships coming into Philadelphia were falling fast. He gave me a train ticket and orders to ship off to Chicago that night so I’d escape the outbreak. He said it was for promotional purposes but I knew better. I suspect it was my father’s doing. Why else should I be swept out of harm’s way while everyone else sits like targets?”