Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  That could have been the end of the story, and in fact I did expect the responsibility to my mother's legacy to end with the closing of the play. I had done what Walter had instructed me to do—I had told my mother's story; I had told people the truth. I had made sure she did not die nameless.

  This is a story that should have ended right there. However, the production of the play, and the subsequent media attention it garnered, triggered a series of events I could never have foreseen. With the storm of attention that followed the play, we would all soon discover why our mother had spent her entire adult life refusing to talk about herself or her past. Unbeknownst to me or my siblings, Mary Sherman Morgan had lived her life hiding a number of secrets. The media attention that followed the play became the earthquake that rocked the foundation of those secrets and forced them out into the open.

  This is a story that should have ended in November 2008. Instead, it was just the beginning.

  Unsympathetic bankers, a hardscrabble land, and a growing season shorter than a John Deere brake shoe had for years combined themselves into a conspiracy of execution. It was here in a far corner of North Dakota the dreams of European immigrants came to die.

  Undulating plains of grass extended in all directions to the horizon. To the south, a retreating gray mass of falling mist from some distant storm roared onward. Cutting the grassy plain in two, like a finger run through fresh paint, was a road. In summer the road was hard dirt. But this was late November, and after two days of rain it had become greased with the slimy mud of Dakota farm country. Pitted with water-filled ruts, and combed with gouges from old tractors, car tires were known to disappear into this muck at random. Fortunately, the driver of the 1930 Chrysler had been here before and knew where the soft spots were.

  The Sherman farm soon came into view, its half-finished little spit of a house hardly bigger than a two-horse barn. It sat there atop its meager ten-acre plot, a fading brown memory waiting for time to finish its work. The bone-white paint that once adorned the structure had long since been blasted away by the Canadian winters, their winds indifferent to man's imaginary borders, blowing ever southward through the flatlands like giant walls of sandpaper.

  As the Chrysler approached, its passenger could detect a new sound wafting up along the air currents. It was the rhythmic creak of metal hinges, endlessly complaining about the farmer's refusal to oil them. Betty Manning, a supervisor with Williams County Social Services, turned to look out the rear window, making certain the horse trailer was still attached.

  The Sherman farm had once been encircled by a wooden fence, but it had collapsed long ago. Only the gate remained—a lone sentry protecting nothing from nothing. The Chrysler arrived and the driver, Sheriff Knowles, pushed the gate open with a gentle nudge from the car's chrome bumper. Ten feet from the front porch, Sheriff Knowles cut the engine. He looked out his window to examine the front tire, now sunk a full hand-width into the wet sludge.

  “Thirty miles from town is no place to get stuck.”

  The “town” was Ray, a rail stop along State Highway 2 populated by three hundred hardy souls. (Seventy years later the population would grow to four hundred.) Small by any standard, its central location amongst thousands of square miles of farmland would one day inspire its residents to refer to their town as the “Grain Palace City.”

  Betty opened her door and stepped out. “Rain or no we have a job to do.” She headed toward the farm house porch. It took only two steps for the mud to swallow one of her shoes.

  “I'll get it.” Sheriff Knowles retrieved the shoe, then helped her to the porch.

  Betty was about to knock when she was distracted by a movement through the window. A young girl had been watching them, stepping out of view once she realized she might be spotted.

  “Mary? Is that you in there?”

  But there was no answer.

  “Do you have the papers?” the sheriff asked.

  Betty nodded, pulling them from a deep pocket in her dress. “Do you have handcuffs?”

  He indicated where they were clipped to his belt.

  “If he's been drinking it might get nasty.” She raised her fist to the split-pine door and knocked loudly.

  “Mister Sherman,” she called out. “It's Betty Manning from Social Services.”

  The sheriff leaned to one side to peek through the window. “He's sitting in a chair. Asleep—or passed out.”

  Betty knocked again. “Mister Sherman—please open the door.”

  They waited, but when the door remained shut the sheriff reached out, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

  “Mike?”

  Michael Sherman was hunched forward in a wooden chair, drunk and still. Around the chair, like a protective circle of wagons, lay a ring of empty wine bottles. At the far side of the room, eight-year-old Mary stood alone, pale and quiet.

  “My dad's asleep.”

  Sheriff Knowles shook the man's shoulder. “Mike—wake up. Come on, Mike.”

  A single eye opened—then the other. He mechanically turned and tilted his head to address his rouster.

  “Jeff? Whatta you doin' here?”

  “I'm afraid I'm going to arrest you if you don't start obeying the law.”

  Mike noticed there was a second person in the room. He turned slightly to see who it was.

  “Oh. You.”

  Betty stepped forward. “Mister Sherman, your daughter still is not attending school. She is eight years old—more than two years behind her peers. If you do not enroll her today you will be arrested.”

  “I need her to clean the creamer.”

  “Mary needs to be in school, sir.”

  “This is a farm; we have chores.”

  “This is country; we have laws.”

  Michael turned his head and spat at an insect that had crept in through the floorboards. “How's she gonna get across the river?”

  “We've already been over this, Mister Sherman. The State of North Dakota will provide a horse she can use to get across the river to the schoolhouse.”

  The Sheriff crouched down to talk to Michael face-to-face.

  “Mike—Mary needs to be in school.”

  “They took everybody. All my kids; Amy, the boys; everyone's gone. To school.” He pronounced the word school with a deep drawl of disdain. “I need somebody to help me, Jeff. Elaine's too young to do much. All I got is Mary.”

  A young girl entered from a back bedroom and stood next to Mary. The sheriff addressed them.

  “Girls—where's your mom?”

  Mike answered for them. “She's visiting her sister.”

  The sheriff reached out to Betty, who handed him a sheaf of papers. “It's not just the law, Mike. It's what's right. It's what's right for your daughter.”

  Michael took the papers. The sheriff removed a pen from his crisp uniform pocket and offered it up. As his eyes became adjusted to the dark room, Sheriff Knowles could better see the worn-out man sitting before him; the whiskery face and reddened skin, the unkempt hair, the half-open eyes peering through clouds of glaucoma and alcohol.

  Michael managed to find the pen, took it, and affixed his signature.

  “Now who's gonna clean the creamer?”

  Betty took the signed forms. “Why don't you give it a try, Mister Sherman.”

  She stepped farther into the room so Mary—hiding behind a small table—could see her.

  “Mary. My name is Mrs. Manning. Do you remember me?”

  The young girl nodded quietly, and Betty stepped closer.

  “Would you like to go to school? Right now? There's lots of other kids waiting to meet you.”

  Mary glanced at her father to see his reaction, then turned back and nodded her head.

  “Come on,” said Betty, offering her hand. “I have a surprise for you.”

  Mary stepped forward and entered a ray of sunlight that poured in through a cracked window. She wore a threadbare print dress, but no shoes. Her face was sullied, her hands filthy. H
er hair was scraggily and oily and seemed to have attracted two flies in orbit. Sinfully nearsighted, her eyelids were affixed in a near-permanent squint.

  Mary took the woman's outstretched hand and followed her to the door. She stopped next to her father.

  “Daddy? May I go outside?”

  Michael said nothing for several moments. He finally broke the suspense with a single word.

  “Go.”

  “Come on,” whispered Betty.

  As the sheriff signaled he would stay with Michael, Betty led the young girl outdoors, but not before giving her sister Elaine a sideways glance. Betty knew it was just a matter of time before she would be back for the little one.

  Most of the storm clouds had moved on, leaving a brilliant midday sun to brighten the Dakota prairie. A slight breeze blew, creating waves along the tops of the grasses and pulling with it the dreams of young girls.

  “Do you like horses?”

  Mary nodded.

  “Would you like one for your very own?” Betty walked to the back of the trailer with the girl in tow. Mary could hear the animal's huge lungs breathing in and out as the woman opened the rear trailer door.

  “Come on, boy.” She pulled out a short wooden ramp and led the horse down to the muddy ground.

  “What's his name?”

  “I don't know. Why don't you give him a name?”

  Mary thought a while, looking around the farm as if for some sign of inspiration.

  “I'm going to name him Star.”

  “Star?”

  “Every night I like to come out here and look up at the planets and the stars. I like to watch them move across the sky. I'm going to name him Star.”

  “Then that's his name.”

  “Am I going to ride him to school?”

  “Not for a while, honey. We need to get you some riding lessons first. For the next few days Sheriff Knowles will be driving you to school. A horse is a big responsibility. Once you know how to ride him—and take care of him—Star will be all yours.”

  Betty tied the horse up to the lonely gate. The sheriff came out of the house, removed two bags of feed from the trailer, and set them on the porch. Then he opened the rear door of the Chrysler.

  “Ready to meet your new classmates?”

  They got into the car and the sheriff started the engine. He pulled the car around and headed back toward the highway.

  The two lane road—Highway 2 on the map—followed every rise, descent, ridge, and rill of the landscape, its engineers having made no attempt to straighten out Mother Nature's work. Betty glanced back to see how her charge was handling the ride.

  “When we get to the school we'll clean you up a bit. Before we introduce you. Okay?”

  Again Mary quietly nodded.

  Betty turned and watched the road spool beneath the car, like some oversize conveyor belt. She had no way of knowing the historic effect the young girl behind her would have. Mary was just another neglected kid who needed to get out of the farmhouse and into the schoolhouse. Betty handled at least two dozen such cases every year—nothing special about this one.

  The “War to End All Wars”1 had been over for more than a decade. Yes, the Great Depression was in full force, but Ray, North Dakota, was hardly Detroit or New York; the woes of Wall Street were barely felt in the northern frontier. Here on the Dakota prairie, economic depressions neither arrived nor left. At least the world was at peace. Yet even now there were rumblings in Europe—the humiliation of Germany having been a gag in the throat of its people. Soon the land of Prussia would be home to great factories building secret and mysterious weapons—weapons that would spread fear to every country. One of those weapons would evolve into the seed of a future space race between the world's two most powerful countries.

  Mrs. Manning had no way of knowing, of course, that the scrawny and scraggily eight year-old girl seated behind her would play a major role in that race. She had no way of knowing that a second world war was in the offing—that the unwashed little urchin she was now escorting to school would one day contribute to the war effort as a chemist in a weapons factory. Or that she would play a pivotal role in the coming space race. Or that she would one day rise to become America's first female rocket scientist.

  Or that she would become a champion bridge player.

  Betty Manning could know none of this, all of it being too far ahead to see. Little Mary Sherman was just a child, a face, a name. A name like Jennifer or Susan or Elizabeth or Star. A name on a very long list of names.

  The one-room schoolhouse came into view over a rise. Betty Manning—dedicated social service worker with Williams County, North Dakota—opened her briefcase and pulled out her next assignment.

  “For my confirmation I didn't get a watch and my first pair of pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope.”

  —WERNHER VON BRAUN1

  At the same moment that Betty Manning was marching the urchin farm girl toward Ray's one-room schoolhouse, Captain Heinrich Strugholdt, Berlin's chief of police, was doing a little marching of his own. Moments before, a homemade steel rocket had slammed into the Berlin North Police Station,2 puncturing a four-inch hole in the station's roof and filling every cubic centimeter of the building's interior with noxious fumes. The three-foot-long rocket had come to rest atop the desk of one Officer Ernst Ritter, who had been so terrified by the experience he had to go home and change his underwear.

  Captain Strugholdt clutched the rocket firmly in his right hand as he negotiated the twelve steps outside the main entrance. There was no doubt where the rocket had come from, or who owned it. The small cadre of young college students was well known around the city for their rocket experiments at an abandoned World War I ammunition dump just north of the city. Consisting mostly of bleak, open fields of grass and swamps, the surplus property was owned jointly by the city of Berlin and the German Defense Ministry. The land and its few scattered, dilapidated buildings had been lent to the young rocketeers thanks to the space-dreaming, fast-talking, entrepreneurial salesmanship of one Rudolf Nebel,3 a college student with dreams of building a rocket to fly to the moon. Captain Strugholdt had personally visited the area several times to watch the launchings and inspect the goings-on. None of the students' rockets ever seemed to go high enough or far enough to reach occupied buildings—the closest being more than a kilometer away. Clearly, however, the work of these enthusiastic rocket experimenters had progressed considerably since his last visit.

  As Captain Strugholdt approached the city boundary, the four-story office buildings gave way to two-story hotels and apartments, which then yielded to small shops and markets. Passing Lars Michel's shoe store and a few small residential cottages, the road narrowed and the vista opened, revealing the raw, undeveloped fields and brilliant green grass of the ammunition dump's periphery. It was this field that the youthful rocket experimenters had begun referring to as their Raketenflugplatz (Rocketport).

  At the point where the road narrowed, the pavement made a wide bend to the left, then continued straight as it ribboned its way northward toward Germany's border with Denmark, a three-hour drive away. It was at this moment, as Strugholdt was entering the grassy field, that he encountered the students, approaching on foot and searching the tall grass for their errant missile. At the sight of their rocket, the boys rejoiced.

  “Captain Strugholdt—you found our rocket!”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “I found it.”

  The captain had never bothered to investigate this group closely, a decision he now regretted. The local residents never complained and, in fact, were often seen joining the experimenters tourist-like during their monthly launches. Strugholdt knew none of the names of these boys, who they were, what universities they attended, or who their families were. Today, however, someone had to be held responsible.

  “Which of you is the leader?” the captain demanded.

  The boys exchanged puzzled looks. None of them had ever been technically “in charge”—they
were a headless ragtag, a rudderless ship, a group led by the nose of enthusiasm rather than some outstanding personality. Today, that would change.

  “I said, who is in charge!?”

  One by one, the youthful rocketeers turned to look at the muscular, attractive, blue-eyed blond boy walking out of a tall strand of grass. The boy brushed dew and thistles from his pants as he approached. He was dressed considerably better than the others, a sure indication of his family's wealth. The boys pointed to him.

  “He is.”

  “What is your name?” the captain demanded.

  “Wernher,” the boy said. “Wernher von Braun.”

  “You and your friends are not welcome here anymore,” said the captain. “Go home. Tell your parents they owe me two thousand marks for the damage you caused to the police station.”

  With that, the captain turned and marched back toward the city, the rocket still firmly in his grasp. As the boys quietly watched him go, smiles began to spread across their faces. If, in fact, their rocket had managed to reach the police station, then that could mean only one thing: their many hours of work and research and testing were paying off—their rockets were becoming more powerful and sophisticated, reaching greater heights and longer ranges. They congratulated each other on their success, went their separate ways, and never told their parents.

  Mary gently pushed open the door to their home. Tightly holding her first homework assignment with both hands, she passed the threshold and entered the dim house. There was a clunk, and she looked down to see her foot had knocked against an empty wine bottle. Mary looked around but saw no one. She stepped forward.