by Jon Stafford
“Yes,” the girl said eagerly, nodding her little head.
“Well, you must put this money in your shoe just like I did. Don’t you want ta help the princess?”
The girl’s face turned solemn. “Oh, yes, I do!”
He handed her the money. “Well then. This is very important. You mustn’t tell anyone about this except your mama.”
The girl was almost breathless, her little mouth wide open.
“Now, put it in your shoe and lace your shoe back up.” He paused while she did it. Then she looked up and nodded, awaiting the next instruction.
“I know you’re a good girl, and you will help your mama save the little princess.”
The girl nodded again.
“Now, look around. Do you see any bad people?”
The girl looked very hard but only in one direction. “No!”
“Okay, it looks clear. Now I will watch you. Is it that drugstore over there with the blue sign, Rexall?”
She nodded again.
“You go there and tell your mama all about this and give her the money for the princess. You go now, and watch for cars when you cross the street. Go ahead.”
The child walked off toward the store, proceeding so haltingly that Wiley had to laugh. He watched as she crossed the street and went in the store.
“Time for me ta go,” he said to himself. He looked down at what was left of his roll. “Thirty bucks. Damn, I hope it’s enough to get to Columbia.”
As he stood, he felt a sharp pain in his side. It took an entire minute to pass, but it did, and he headed toward the train station a mile away.
Wiley perked up as he walked. Could I have a girl like her someday? he thought. If a man has a child, then he leaves something that can’t be taken away by anybody. He shrugged, finding it hard to believe that any woman would be interested in him. Cute little kid. I would like a boy! I would like a boy ta maybe throw a ball with. Maybe I could own a house. Maybe I could have a wife who . . . loved me.
He thought again of the dark-haired Gregory girl he had known. It seemed so long ago.
Jill. She’ll be grown up now. They say they want me ta come. I’d like to go there. But Scott’s still overseas, so I hope it won’t be awkward.
Wiley had met Scott Gregory in basic training in Columbia and had spent many evenings at the Gregory home. He thought back to the first time he entered the big two-story house with its giant chandelier and staircase. He had never been in such a house before, and it had dazzled him, shocked him.
And yet they were always nice to him, including him in everything they did, which he thought a wonder. He was still in wonder of it, and it made him worry that it would not work. At the same time, the Gregory place was the only real home he’d ever known besides his grandparents’ tiny house. The pain in his side came back and remained, not always as sharp as before but enough that his breathing quickened.
He took a train into Chicago. There was a telegram office near the Chicago train station, so he stopped to send the Gregorys a wire letting them know he was coming.
He caught another train for Knoxville, where he arrived twenty hours later.
He paid $12.52 for the last leg of the journey: Knoxville to Columbia, with a layover of ten hours in Asheville, North Carolina. With almost all of the money from the paymaster gone, he had to dip into his personal “stash” of twenty dollars. After buying the ticket, he had five dollars and some change left. He shook his head as he walked away from the ticket counter. I’m gonna show up with no money, he thought. What’ll they think of me?
The last part of the trip from Knoxville through the Appalachian Mountains to Asheville was rough. The rails were well worn from endless carloads of heavy war matériel traveling over them. The ride was a jolting one as the train curved around the various mountain peaks.
With so many servicemen in the car smoking, Wiley found it harder and harder to breathe. All the way from Asheville to Columbia, he felt winded and faint.
The erect and soldierly bearing he’d displayed in his travels of the last few days was absent as he stepped onto the platform in Columbia. Even sitting in the car, he had breathed hard. Now, as he entered the station, he bent slightly as the wound seemed to get worse.
Doris Day’s new recording of “Sentimental Journey” wafted across the building, echoing perfectly against the ceiling.
Sharp pain, worse than ever before, flared in Wiley’s side. The pain blotted out the song. He suspected what had happened, that the wound had ruptured. He could feel it.
He had no idea that it had never been attended to correctly in New York. The nurses and doctors, so busy tending more seriously wounded men, had passed him along without examining the wound carefully enough. No one had realized that the bullet had nicked his spleen and that he needed two more months in the hospital. He was used to pain and privations, this veteran who had never voted in a presidential election. Like his doctors, he still thought he would be all right.
His mouth widened, though his lips remained close together in what almost appeared to be a smile. He stopped, leaning against a wall next to a glass display case. A spot of blood appeared on his shirt. He blinked once or twice, staring into the case. There in the middle was a red rose made of paper! It was the only thing he noticed in the display. One of the only things he’d ever seen that belonged to his mother was a similar red paper rose.
Wiley’s mind went back to his childhood in West Virginia, when he spent his time at his grandparents’ house. The rose, red fading to pink, sat in a vase on the end table.
“You know your mama made that,” his grandmother had often told him. “She loved flowers so!”
He had looked at it a thousand times, wondering about his mother, what she was like, and why she had gone away and left him. He knew every petal of the faded flower, every detail of the two leaves as they sat in the plain amber-colored glass vase. When he first noticed it, the vase was fully two of his little hands high. By the time he’d run away, his fingers had nearly reached the top.
He spoke to the flower, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. “Mama, I made it. I never thought I’d live through it, but I made it. I’m alive. I’m a lieutenant now and people respect me and look up ta me for the first time in my life. I’m somebody! I just wanted you ta know . . . I’m pretty tired now.”
The sight of the faded rose took the strength out of him. He breathed even harder. A Marine walked by, and Wiley reached out for him.
“Ser-ge-ant?”
The soldier turned and looked at Wiley. “Yes, sir?”
“I think . . . I’m gonna faint.”
The husky man grabbed him.
“Get me outta here. . . . Is the sun shining?”
“Yeah, it’s real bright!”
“Okay . . . okay . . . get me outta here . . . I can’t breathe.”
The Marine put Wiley’s arm over his shoulder and took a good deal of the scout’s weight. In a minute they had left the bustle of the station and went into a brick-paved courtyard. He sat Wiley down on a bench and leaned over, looking him in the face.
“Sir, you don’t look so good.
They got corpsmen in there. Let me get one for you.”
Though still winded, Wiley felt better. “Is it . . . hot, sergeant?”
“No, sir, it’s real nice, maybe seventy? Hell of a lot better than Eniwetok.”
Having heard of that Pacific island battle, Wiley smiled weakly. He looked up at the man. “I didn’t mean ta . . . hold you up from your family.”
“That’s all right, sir. It’s only me and my mom. I gotta take the bus to Bamberg. That’s west of here,” he said, correctly gauging that the young lieutenant was not from the area. “You know you’re bleeding?”
“Yeah . . . I got it in February . . . and can’t seem ta shake it. I was . . . doin’ pretty good till yesterday. I guess the train jarred me.”
“Let me get you a corpsman.”
“Naw, I feel better. If I can just sit here awhile.”
“You got anybody comin’ for you?”
Wiley looked up and managed a smile. “I do,” he said hopefully. “I do. I got people here. . . . They’re comin’ for me. Go ahead, get your bus. I’ll be fine.”
“Not a chance, sir. I never left a man down yet, and I’m sure as hell not gonna start now.”
“Thanks,” Wiley said gratefully.
“I’m gonna get you a Coke, hold on.” The Marine walked off.
Wiley thought again of the faded rose. Mama would be proud a me now, he thought, his head leaning down staring at the brick. Still winded and blinking a little, he looked up as he heard a sound.
“Chip!”
As he looked up toward the sun, he saw the outline of a woman’s face.
“Chip!” He could not focus on the face with the brightness of the sun, but the voice sounded familiar. He blinked a few times.
“Chip, it’s me, Jill, Jill Gregory.”
She sat beside him on the bench, an eighteen-year-old dark-haired girl. His heart leapt. He had thought about her so many times.
“Jill! I’m sorry. I didn’t hardly recognize you. I–”
Jill stared at him, her smile turning worried. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, let me catch . . . my breath. I was lookin’ for your mom. No . . . I didn’t mean that.” As the words were coming out of his mouth, he looked at Jill and smiled, thinking, Her hair isn’t black. It’s dark brown!
“That’s all right. Mama couldn’t come. She’s baking you three peach pies.”
Jill looked at him, not even noticing that he was hurt. She had last seen him when she was fourteen and a freshman in high school. She and her mother had written him letters and rejoiced at the occasional reply. The family had carefully followed the European campaign news in the paper, wondering which action Wiley was part of. She had thought of him a million times, and here he was! She didn’t notice his labored breath or the beads of sweat on his forehead. All she saw was that he was very good-looking, a tall and handsome man.
Wiley saw the way Jill was looking at him and smiled. He thought: I do have people! I do! They came for me like they said. I know this’ll work, I just feel it.
In a minute, the Marine came back. He smiled. “This your girl?”
Both Wiley and Jill smiled back weakly.
“Here, lieutenant, drink some of this,” the Marine said, handing him a six-ounce Coke.
It rattled around some in his teeth as he drank. He took a deep breath. “Thanks.”
The Marine saw some men waving at him from across the way. He waved back. “Some of my buddies got a cab to the bus station,” he said. “I need to go pretty quick if I can. Think you can get up?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Haltingly, Wiley stood. Jill stared at the blood on his shirt and the look of pain on his face.
“You’re not okay, are you?” She took his hand, uncertainly. “Mama said you’d been wounded . . .”
Wiley nodded. “I . . . think I better have somebody look at it again.”
“I’ll take you home. We’ll just call Dr. Hart, and you’ll be fine!”
With Jill supporting him on one side and the Marine on the other, Wiley made his way out to the Gregorys’ car in the parking lot, his feet wobbling occasionally. The Marine put Wiley in the worn-out red 1938 Chevy Cabriolet convertible. They shook hands and parted ways, off to their new lives.
The Circle
I see him sometimes as he plays,
In endless summer days.
This little fellow from my past,
Who plays until the very last.
He smiles so much more than then,
Glad I’m not the man I might have been.
—The Things He Never Had
Columbia, South Carolina, June 2007
Jill
Jillian Gregory Wiley sat at the huge desk, a relic left over from her father’s law office, wondering how to begin. Her children and several of her grandchildren had approached her in the last few months after her husband Chip’s death, asking her to write a narrative on their lives together. She was eighty years old now. Her once very dark brown hair, which had been her best feature, had become lustrous silver that she wore in a pageboy. Like her mother before her, she was five foot seven inches, fit in a size eight dress, and had never weighed more than 135 pounds.
The task before her was not an unhappy one: to write the remembrance of a happy life. But her expression held a hint of sadness because of the recent death of her husband. Though computers had become a way of life, she bent over a yellow legal pad. Occasionally, she paused to look out the windows in the den so familiar to her, once her parents’, then her own, and now her son Andy’s. Her grandchildren were at school, and her son and daughter-in-law, Kay, were at work. The large old house, in the family since 1930, was quiet.
She began.
I first met my husband, Joseph “Chip” Wiley, in the spring of 1940. He was a sixteen-year-old private in the US Army, and I was a young girl of fourteen, a freshman in high school. We were married in 1947, after I had two years of college. We had our first child, Andy, in 1948. I had a hard time in the pregnancy, so we decided not to try again until Chip got out of the service in 1960. We had two more boys, Jamie in 1961, and Joseph, always affectionately called “L.C.” for Little Chip, in 1963. After sixty years of a happy marriage, Chip died this March. I write this now, while I still recall the details well enough, so that my children and grandchildren might understand the times in which we lived and the complex man Chip was.
My mother and I, perhaps, didn’t understand him all that much ourselves. Though she, and I to a lesser extent, engineered the change that gradually made him into a family man and a successful businessman, we never knew much of his earlier life. My brother, Scott, first brought Chip here when both had weekend passes from Basic Training here at Fort Jackson. Scott told us Chip’s childhood had been very rough. We failed to get very interested in his military career either. That he had extensive experience with guns, tanks, and the madness of war never concerned us all that much. Mother saw through the whole thing, as she usually did, by accepting Chip as he was. He was absorbed into our family and loved as a son or husband, which, of course, was what he needed.
The
re was much that his new family could not have understood about Chip. It wasn’t easy for Chip to adjust to a new life, his third. He had already experienced two very different lives before 1945. His youth was almost a scientific case study of “Survival of the Fittest,” one that would have made Darwin himself take note. He survived his father’s beatings only by cunning: lying, knowing where to hide, learning to sense danger, finally running away when cunning no longer worked.
His life in the Army had been more complicated but completely unscientific. In combat, while experience could save you one day, each day brought a new set of chances where the weakest and most foolish sometimes outlived the most careful. The conclusion, to him, was that men were expendable, mere pawns in a game without rules, a game beyond all understanding.
Many times he pulled the little Colt .25 pistol out of his pocket or a drawer, depending on where he was, and held it against his temple. He never intended to pull the trigger. He never even pulled back the slide to cock the weapon. It was not any kind of religious belief that kept him from killing himself. He had no relationship with God. Through his grandparents, he did believe in Goodness. He felt strongly that the Creator would certainly put his new family under his loving wing and thought that others also deserved His gaze. But he was sure that no beneficence awaited him. He saw soldiers like himself as solitary players in the great scheme of things, ones who had no right to request help. He held the gun to his head as testament to the fact that he thought himself worthless and that his status could not be changed.
Chip remained in the Army for fifteen years after World War II ended. He saw still more combat in the Korean War. He had no trouble commanding men and knowing that they would instantly obey his orders. But he never considered himself superior to any man, only a better soldier because he had more experience. He never spared himself from sharing their privations, never kept for himself the better sleeping conditions or food that were his due as an officer. If anything, he suffered more than the others because he felt he deserved worse. Men loved him for this sacrifice and would do anything for him. While he was glad to have the admiration of soldiers and the love of his family, it took years to change his opinion of his worth.