Morgan has your talent for the mechanical. A friend of ours lent him a book on engines. Morgan read it and was able to figure out how to fix our broken tractor all by himself. Of course, we don’t really need a tractor at the moment. There is still no rain so I haven’t bothered trying to put in a crop. Maybe next year. But it is nice to have all those engine parts up off the barn floor. Morgan’s grades continue to be among the best in his class, though he and two other boys got into trouble for smoking a cigarette last week. The teacher was pretty hard on him and so was I, though I don’t think he really smokes. He was trying to impress the other boys.
Hope you are well. I won’t ask if you are coming back to the states since I know you wouldn’t tell me anyway. You have been over there so long now, I don’t suppose you’re ever planning on coming back. Europe must agree with you.
Best wishes,
Evangeline
Over the years I wrote dozens of similar letters. I made copies, thinking they would serve as a kind of chronicle of Morgan’s growing up and our lives together. After a while I wrote them more for my benefit than Slim’s, though I mailed them just the same. Very newsy and cheerful they were, but I didn’t record everything.
When Morgan came home with a split lip and refused to tell me what the fight was about, I didn’t write that down. He was so dark and silent for the rest of the week that there was no doubt in my mind as to what had happened and that I was the cause of it, but I never wrote about that. Bastard is such an ugly word on paper. My pen was too heavy to form such painful words. No mention was made about the chicks dying of pullorum disease and how Morgan and I both cried as we raised and lowered our axes over the necks of the infected birds until there was not one left and the chicken yard was eerily silent and awash in wasted blood. The words doubt, longing, hunger, fear, abandonment, tears, aging, sickness, foreclosure, or war never stained the picture I painted in those letters. They were all part of the landscape, but it was a part I would not allow myself to dwell upon. I wanted no unhappy memories weighing us down, and now, as I write that word “us,” I can be honest about who that included: me, Morgan, Slim.
By refusing to put the uncomfortable questions out where they can be read and reflected on, you can fool yourself into thinking none of it matters. Pain can be concealed for a long time—but not forever. Eventually the tanks come rolling over the border, the bodies are exhumed, the masks are removed, and words cannot be misconstrued or minced any finer. We are what we are.
Chapter 15
September 1939
“Ruby, listen to this.” I squinted to force the newsprint into focus and mentally scolded the editors for making the type so tiny.
“You need to get some glasses,” Ruby mumbled through a mouthful of toast. “Your face is all squashed up like a prune.” She said the same thing every morning when I read the paper over breakfast; I was starting to think she might be right.
“Oh, hush up and listen,” I growled as I held the paper farther away and read it to her.
With the permission of its readers, the Daily Times today moves the war.
It can’t be moved out of Europe and off the face of the earth, of course, pleasant a thing as that would be. But the editors feel news of the war can and should be moved off page one.
For some time, they have felt that what has been reaching us, and through the Daily Times has been reaching you, has been a spoon feeding of propaganda in its most vicious form: propaganda designed to sway our sympathies, even to move us to action. Given a free rein, sooner or later such propaganda would drag the United States into the European mess, just as it did in 1918. We don’t care to be a party to high treason.
On the other hand, people are interested in war news therefrom, it seems, regardless of how inaccurate and highly colored available reports may be. We can’t toss out bodily the thousands of words of purchased war “news” that comes over the wires to us daily. So we are giving over the back page of the Daily Times to the war. You’ll find the war news there—but not here. If editorially possible, the word “war” will be eliminated from this and subsequent issues of the Daily Times, with the exception, of course, of this editorial today.
Each day, the war reports have been so directly contradictory that it was actually surprising yesterday when a bulletin from Paris said the leading story from Berlin could not be contradicted. Each day’s quota of “news” has carried stories from Allied capitals that denied every gain reported from Berlin, and laid claims to Allied gains which Berlin, in turn, denied.
Censors of all belligerent nations have clamped down with iron fists on all reports being sent from their countries. The best reporters in the world are forced to file the news the high commands want them to file—or nothing at all. Careful study will give convincing evidence that many purported “war” pictures are posed, “set up” publicity stills and nothing more.
So, the Times is moving the hokum—some of it may amount to more than that, but you can’t be sure—to the back page. If you are interested, you may find it there.
“Can you believe it?” I marveled. “They’re moving the entire war to the back page.”
“’Bout time.” Ruby blew on her coffee to cool it. “I’m sick to death of hearing about it.”
“Ruby, really! This is ridiculous. Only in Dillon could they put hog prices and church picnics on the front page while all of Europe is at war. I know the reports might not be one hundred percent reliable, but it is news. Pretending it isn’t happening won’t make it go away.”
“But what if they’re right?” Ruby mused. “What if this is just a lot of hokum shoveled out by a bunch of foreigners who want to drag us into their war? You don’t want us to go to war, do you?”
“Of course I don’t want war. Nobody does. Morgan’s already sixteen. I wouldn’t want him going off to fight, but it doesn’t seem right to just shove it all on the back page like none of it matters.”
Ruby held a platter out to me, offering me the last piece of bacon, but I was too distracted to eat. “Suit yourself,” she said, grabbing the bacon with her fingers and finishing it off while she listened, halfheartedly, as I talked.
“These newspaper editors complain about Allied censorship and at the same time they’re acting like censors themselves. We can’t just ignore what is happening, can we?” Ruby’s mouth was too full to answer, so she shrugged as though she was at least willing to give it a try. I continued on even more stridently, determined to make her understand my point.
“Paul got another letter from his brother Nils last week. You can’t imagine the terrible things that are happening over there! Whole neighborhoods of Jews rounded up and sent away to labor camps, but they never come back. No one ever hears from them again. All kinds of awful rumors. Nils is afraid of what will happen to his little students if the Nazis were to invade Holland. Hitler has made it clear there is no room for the feebleminded in his master race.”
Ruby shifted in her chair uncomfortably, “Well, of course, it’s terrible what’s going on in Germany, but I don’t know what it has to do with us. I’m not the only one who feels that way. Your Mr. Lindbergh seems to think we ought to stay out of it no matter what. Listen to this,” she said, leafing through the back section of the paper until she found the article she wanted. “It says right here, ‘Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who resigned from his voluntary army service only the day before, addressed the nation in a radio broadcast from Washington D.C. last night, urging America to ‘keep carefully out of Europe’s war,’ asserting that ‘if we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end by losing it here at home. We must not be misguided by this foreign propaganda to the effect that our frontiers lie in Europe.’”
“There!” She thumped the paper for emphasis. “Your hero is on my side. It’s not our war.”
“But how can we just ignore what’s happening over there? From everything that Paul hears and says—”
Ruby cut me off. “Eva, even if those rumors are true, what good
would it do us to fight if it’s a war we can’t win? Slim seems to think it’s impossible.”
“Well,” I said quietly, “maybe that’s the difference between them. Slim worries about what’s possible, and Paul worries about what’s right.” Though I remembered a time when Slim didn’t believe in the existence of the impossible. How do people change so much?
Still, I thought, perhaps Ruby had a point. Could Paul be giving Nils’s stories more credence than they deserved? And if the Germans were really so strong, what good would it do to fight them? Slim had seen their planes and pilots and factories firsthand. Ever since he’d come home from Europe five months before, he’d been subtly making his point. Now that he’d left the army, he clearly didn’t intend to be subtle anymore. Well, Slim had seen a lot more of the world than I had. Maybe he was right. Maybe we couldn’t beat the Germans, but if someone didn’t put a stop to Hitler soon, where would it all end?
“All I know is,” said Ruby as she rose to clear the table, “we didn’t survive the Depression just so we could turn around and get mixed up in another war.”
“Hmm.” I nodded, acknowledging her point. “Things are looking better, but I don’t know that we’ve survived yet. It wasn’t much of a crop.”
“No,” she said with a grin, piling the dirty silverware onto the bacon platter with a cheery clatter, “but it’s a start.” I couldn’t help but grin back, remembering how we’d sweated to bring in the crop, working like madmen to cut and stack the wheat before any hail or wind or insects could destroy our little harvest. It didn’t matter that the yield was only ten bushels an acre, we were so happy it might as well have been fifty.
“Well, I don’t want to jinx things, but I think you’re right. We may have lived through the worst of it.” I raised my coffee cup in a self-congratulatory toast. “Good-bye, desperation, drought, and dust! We have survived you and lived to tell about it; scarred and bruised, but all in one piece!”
Ruby raised her own cup and clinked it against mine, “Happy days!” she crowed and we laughed together, content to forget Europe, and the war, and the world away from Dillon. It was so wonderful, for a change, to consider our troubles behind us.
The rains had returned, and so had Slim. Surely, I thought, it was an omen of better times.
The Aquitania docked in New York harbor on April 14, 1939, and Charles Lindbergh walked down the gangplank, come home to America. I read the newspaper story over and over, trying to picture what he must have looked like and what he must have felt, returning to the country he had left, or rather fled, for the safety of his surviving son more than three years before. I could see it in my mind—the white steel of the ship’s hull dotted by portholes, the gray New York sky, the noise of reporters, and the jarring pop of flashbulbs, startling, like rifle shots—but no matter how hard I concentrated, I could not imagine his eyes, his smile, his thoughts. The man who stepped off that ship was a stranger to me.
I put the paper down next to me and went looking for my scissors, remembering I’d left them in the mending basket. They were at the very bottom, lying on top of an old white shirt of Morgan’s, long outgrown and missing some buttons. I picked up the scissors and shirt and brought them back to my chair. Without really thinking, I cut a long, thin strip off the fabric and then snipped pieces off the strip into perfect little squares. I still remembered how to make the tiny blocks come out even, exactly one inch square. I cut until there was nothing left over and stack after stack of white squares sat bravely on the table like miniature flags of truce.
Then I picked up the newspaper and, just as carefully as I had with the fabric, making sure all the corners were sharp, cut out the article about Slim’s homecoming. I folded it reverently and put it in the largest envelope I could find, so there would be room for more. It turned out to be the first of many envelopes full of clippings on Slim. He had opinions on what America should do about the war in Europe, and he wasted no time or opportunity in voicing them.
Ruby’s attitude was pretty typical of people in Dillon and probably in the rest of the country. We were just putting the Depression behind us. The last thing anybody wanted to do was go off and fight a war, especially one so far from American shores. I, too, felt torn between the desire for safety and peace, and the pleading faces and frightened eyes that seemed so vivid when Paul read Nils’s letters aloud. It was a confusing time.
Slim’s voice was one of the loudest and most fervent of the many beseeching Americans to stay out of the war in Europe. He seemed to be everywhere at once, appearing at rallies, making speeches, and writing articles. I read every word, clipped the articles out, and filed them away. Sometimes I’d take out all the clippings and read them over again one by one, trying to stitch this newsprint character together with the man I’d known, the man who’d left his eyes in my son’s face, but none of it held together.
The article I most remember was one he wrote for Reader’s Digest magazine called “Aviation, Geography and Race.” It had Slim’s name on it, but it might as well have been a stranger writing, it sounded so unlike the man I knew. He talked about “alien hordes” and said we needed to “build our White ramparts again” and that we should protect ourselves by relying on “an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation.” This while Hitler stormtroopers were already marching through Europe, crushing everything in their paths like some maniacal steamroller! I just couldn’t reconcile my knowledge of Slim with whoever was writing those words. My bewilderment was so complete that more than once I promised myself to give up trying to figure things out. None of it concerned us, I reasoned; time to quit reading so much and just let Slim be Slim. Then Morgan would bound into the room, all youth and energy and good intentions, smiling his father’s smile, and my resolve would melt. It did concern us, so I would pore over the articles again, compelled to search for and find the thread that linked us all.
In the beginning, of course, a lot of people agreed with Slim. They wanted to ignore Hitler. They discounted the stories of aggression and cruelty because they just didn’t want to believe them. If I hadn’t known Paul, I suppose I would have been as blissfully ignorant as anyone else, but month after month he read me letters from Nils filled with rumors of disappearing people, and broken glass, and yellow stars, and new edicts. There were so many accounts of such ugliness and hate, I knew at least some of it had to be true. Even then, I was torn. Germany was so far away from Dillon, the town where my son and the sons of everyone I knew studied and worked and played in safety. Hitler needed to be stopped, but surely it was the job of the European powers to stop evil in Europe. We had problems of our own.
Then, in May of 1940, neutrality about the war became impossible. In a single day the Nazis invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. No one could believe it. In less than two months’ time, every nation had surrendered. Holland capitulated only five days after the first German tanks rolled across the border.
When I heard the news, I jumped into the car and drove to town as fast as I could, looking for Paul. He sat at his desk while the radio reports droned on and on, sitting up straight and silent in his chair while tears rolled down his face and I looked on helplessly. Finally, I pulled a chair up next to his and listened with him, hoping my presence would help.
The surrender of France changed people’s minds. Farmers, thick in the middle of crop worries, started to talk about war and to realize that Hitler wouldn’t be satisfied until he controlled all of Europe. The Daily Times put the war back on the front page. Not long after the French defeat, Slim made a speech on the radio.
Paul came over for supper that night. After the pie was eaten and the dishes cleared, I took out another piece of Morgan’s old clothing, a pair of black pants worn out in the seat and started cutting them into one-inch blocks while we listened to the radio. At one point in the broadcast Slim said people shouldn’t pay attention to “this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion which has been running rife these last few days.”
Paul actually leaped to his feet, eyes blazing, put his face in front of the Philco as though Slim were sitting right in front of him, and shouted in frustration, “Good Lord, man! They’re marching around the Eiffel Tower and eating in the cafés! It’s not like people have made this up! What’s the matter with you, Lindbergh? Are you blind or a coward or both?”
Words of defense bubbled up in my mind as I searched for some excuse or explanation for Slim’s attitude, but there was none. I blushed red with shame, so red that Ruby asked if I was feeling all right. I just said the fire was too warm and went back to my cutting, concentrating on making each black square as perfect as possible.
After the broadcast Paul said he’d better be going, then cleared his throat and asked if I’d mind walking out to his car with him, “There’s a book I just finished reading that was very good. I thought you might want to borrow it.”
The night was chilly. I pulled my sweater closer around me. Paul, usually so ready to chat or joke after spending an evening with us, was silent. He had been pensive lately. No word had yet come from Nils since the invasion, and I knew his mind must be tied up in knots of worry for his brother’s safety. We walked toward the car in perfect time. Our feet crunching the gravel in unison sounded brave and out of place in the wide stillness of night. Paul reached in the backseat to fish out the book.
“Here,” he said holding it out to me. “It’s not new at all. It’s just an old copy of The Great Gatsby. I know you’ve already read it, but I needed an excuse to get you alone, and I remembered I had a copy in the car, so ... here. Take it anyway. You might like reading it again.”
I accepted the book and wrapped my arms around it, holding it protectively against my chest, schoolgirl fashion. “Have you heard anything from Nils?” I asked.
“No,” he murmured, “not yet. I suppose the mails are completely disrupted.” He held the back of his hand to his face, as though shielding his eyes from the sun, and for a moment I thought he might cry. “Oh, Eva! This horrible war ... being cut off from my brother and not knowing when I might see him again, it’s got me thinking about families and the people we love. We mustn’t take them for granted. It’s important to say the things you want to say, while you have the chance. Do you understand what I mean?”
Fields Of Gold Page 18