Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  So you see it’s a very good hospital with very good care and Johnny Clay’s getting the best of it. I’m going to write you every day to let you know the news and also when we’ll be home again. He won’t be able to travel for a long time, but the doctors seem to think he’ll come out of this, just like we all will.

  I surely do miss you.

  Love,

  Velva Jean

  P.S. The little plane we stole limped in here with 188 shrapnel holes in the waist and tail, a 20-mm dud in the gas tank, severed rudder cables, shattered elevator cables, shrapnel in both main tires, and the number two prop blade blown in half. The head mechanic at Manston said it was a miracle we were able to fly as far as we did.

  TELEGRAM

  TO: Velva Jean Hart

  FROM: Hoyt Justice

  October 3, 1944

  Aunt Junie working for Johnny Clay from here. She says remember how you said the verse over Harley when she healed him. She says to say this verse now—Ezekiel 16:6. Take care of that boy and you.

  Love,

  Daddy Hoyt

  FORTY

  On October 4, they let me see Johnny Clay. The first thing I saw when I looked at him lying in his hospital bed was Mama’s face. He lay on his back, eyes closed, his face fading into the pillow, just like hers had after she took sick, right before she died. I stood in the doorway of the room and couldn’t move.

  The doctor was a white-haired, sad-faced Scottish man named McTeer. He said, “Go on. It’s all right.” And I wanted to say: It’s not all right. It’s all wrong. That’s my brother, and he looks too much like Mama, and I can’t see him like this. Johnny Clay belonged to the gold mines and the rivers and the trees and the mountains and the sun. He didn’t belong to a white bed and white walls and tubes and bags hooked up to him. I wanted to yell at him and shake him and tell him to get up right now and wake up already, to stop acting, stop pretending. I wanted to holler, “Dammit, Johnny Clay,” till I couldn’t holler anymore.

  Instead I took the chair the doctor held out for me and I sat down with my hands folded in my lap and I stared at my brother as if he were someone to be suspicious about.

  The doctor said something about the operation, about cutting something out of Johnny Clay and patching the ends of something else together. He talked about a coma, and about more blood transfusions, and would I be willing to give more blood.

  I said, “Of course, of course,” but I was looking at the black of my brother’s lashes against his skin. I was looking at the Cherokee cheekbones, so much like Mama’s, and the broad mouth, and the gold hair that was coming back in. A beard was growing in too, a darker gold than the hair on his head, and I thought how much he would love looking scruffy like that, like an outlaw. He was thin, just a shadow of himself.

  The doctor said, “We weren’t able to save his finger.”

  I blinked at the doctor because I didn’t know what that meant and then I remembered: Oh yes. His hand. I looked at my brother again, at his left hand, which lay at his side on the bed. The middle finger was bandaged.

  The doctor said, “He might be able to hear you. Talk to him. Tell him you’re here.”

  I wanted the doctor to go away and leave me alone. I said, “Thank you,” but my voice was someone else’s. I said, “I’m here, Johnny Clay. It’s me. Velva Jean. I’m sitting right here and you’re safe and so am I.” The doctor nodded at me as if I’d done something good and smart, and then a nurse walked in and she stopped when she saw me and kind of tiptoed the rest of the way in. She began to adjust all those tubes and bags.

  I said, “We got all the way here from Germany, and we’re almost home and I need you to hang on because I will be mad as Sweet Fern if you leave me. Do you know what I went through to find you and get you here?” I started telling him about crash-landing in France and the prisons and Hugo Bleicher.

  The doctor and the nurse both stared at me, but I didn’t care. I said, “I want to tell you something else. I will never speak to you again if you don’t wake up. Do you hear me? Not even if you’re in heaven and you decide to haunt me. I’ll pretend I never knew you. I’ll act like I don’t even know your name.”

  The doctor cleared his throat, but I just talked louder. I said, “I want you to know that I’m going to be here every day. I’m going to sit in this chair and I’m going to tell you every last thing you ever did to make me mad, starting with when I was ten and you were twelve and you would leave me after school so you could go off with Hink Lowe and the Gordon boys. Then, after I’m done, I’m going to dare you to get out of that bed and tell me off. If you don’t, I’m going to tell everyone between here and America that you’re a yellow chicken.”

  I glared at the doctor and glared at the nurse, and they were both staring at Johnny Clay with eyes like saucers and mouths that hung open, as if they were waiting for him to sit up in his bed right then.

  I thought: I am just getting started. I was so mad, I was shaking. I said, “You listen here. We are going to get home again. Do you hear me? You mark my words.”

  Then I took his hand, the one that was bandaged, and before I could say anything else, the coldness of it went through me. I could tell from the touch of it that he was barely there, that he was still here but that he was probably someplace else too.

  I said, “Dammit, Johnny Clay.”

  My voice broke in the middle. And then, while I could still talk, I started repeating the verse of Aunt Junie’s. She was the witch healer that had once lived in our mountains and had cured Harley when he almost died after burning up in the Terrible Creek wreck. She had talked the fire right out of him.

  I said, “‘And when I passed by you, and saw you weltering in your blood, I said to you in your blood, Live and grow like a plant in the field.’” I said this three times, holding his hand, my eyes closed, and then I sat with him until it was night and the doctor told me visiting hours were over for the day.

  Johnny Clay had a second operation on October 6. Dr. McTeer said, “It was successful. We think the bleeding has stopped. Now we need him to wake up.”

  I said, “I’ll discuss it with him, sir.”

  I went in and sat with Johnny Clay and held his hand and told him how much we all needed him to wake up. I said to him, “There’s no reason not to because you had your surgery and the pain won’t be nearly as bad now. So open your eyes. Please.”

  When his eyes stayed closed, I repeated Aunt Junie’s verse. And then I fussed at him about the time he’d stolen my best marbles, and the time he told Daddy I took his pyramid-head steel rivets, the ones he used in his blacksmithing, when in actuality Johnny Clay had used them as bullets for a pop gun he made so he could shoot blue jays.

  In the afternoons, after visiting hours were over at the hospital, I took long walks on the Cliffs of Dover, looking out at the sea and thinking about all that had happened over there, in France. I wondered if Eleanor was home by now with her daughter and how old her daughter was and if Eleanor was a good mama in addition to being a spy. I wondered what secrets she knew that might help us win the war, and if she would go back to spying or if maybe she was going to stay home now and be a mother.

  I had decided not to think about Émile. Not yet. Instead I tried to remember who I’d been before the war and who I was now.

  At night, I ate my meals alone, still eating with my left hand because it was just as natural as brushing my hair or putting on my lipstick, and then I went back to my barracks to a room all my own, and I wrote letters home. I wrote every day, even when there wasn’t anything new to tell. I wrote pages and pages about nothing—the Cliffs of Dover or the breakfast I’d eaten or whether it was rainy or sunny and if the moon was full. I wrote as much as I could so I wouldn’t have to think, because as soon as I finished at the hospital and finished with dinner and finished with my letters, I had to get into my bed and face a long night of lying awake, staring at the ceiling, and worrying about Johnny Clay.

  The thing that kept running through my mi
nd was, What will happen to me if he dies? I wasn’t anyone’s daughter and I wasn’t anyone’s wife. I wasn’t anyone’s mother. I was just a weapon of war, but now my war was over and the only person I belonged to in this world was my brother, and he belonged to me. He was my best friend, and if he died, I would be alone and I might as well be dead too.

  On October 13, Special Force Headquarters ordered all the American and British agents who were still in France back to England. The British agents were reassigned to India and Ceylon. The French went to French Indochina. The Americans—all but my brother—were sent to China.

  Sometimes I sat beside Johnny Clay’s bed and sang him songs. I tried to remember the song I’d made up on the train about living out there, but I could only hear it in bits and pieces. I decided to write it over again, so I asked the nurse for a piece of paper and a pencil, and she brought me a stack of paper and two pencils. I looked at them and thought about the days when I could have filled up that paper and used every bit of that lead, but now I wasn’t sure I could fill even half of one sheet.

  I picked up the pencil and I wrote two lines:

  You are lost and gone forever.

  I am afraid.

  I pulled my knees up close to me so that I was hunched over in the chair. I tapped the pencil against my chin and said to Johnny Clay, “I haven’t written a song in a very long time. But I’m writing one now. I’m writing one for you and for Mama. And for me too. It’s for all of us.” My eyes started stinging and I blinked, even though there was no one to see me cry. It was the thought of the three of us together in one place, even if that place was just a song written on a piece of paper.

  A star that lights the way.

  No prisoners.

  I wrote line after line, in no real order. Just wrote them down as they came to me.

  I was lost for a while.

  The Freedom Line.

  The war is over for you.

  Life is beautiful.

  Every morning at mess, one of the officers would announce the weather forecast for the day. Almost every day, it was the same: “Dull and showery.” “Misty and cold.” “Cold and windy.” “Cold, dull, bleak.”

  The weather made my mood worse. I wasn’t sleeping. I could barely eat. Even when it rained, though, I went walking because I needed to do something when I wasn’t at the hospital. An OSS officer had flown to Manston from Harrington to debrief me, and each morning I had to go over everything that had happened, again and again.

  The thing that made it worse was the newspapers. Even all the way over in England, they were talking about the WASP. A London paper reprinted an American story with the headline “Not Created by Congress,” which quoted people who claimed the program would be ending soon and all the WASP would be sent home. One of the men they interviewed said, “We’ll wake up one of these mornings to discover there are no more WASP to sting the taxpayers and keep thoroughly experienced men out of flying jobs.”

  I asked the officer in charge if I could have the paper and he said yes. I marched outside into the damp and the cold and walked down to the sea ledge. There, I tore the newspaper into a thousand little pieces and watched them sail away across the water.

  The weather forecast for Thursday, November 2, was “Clear and sunny. Visibility—very good.” I spent the morning walking in the wind along the Cliffs of Dover. The sun was so bright I had to squint. But it was also cold. It wasn’t time for visiting hours yet, but I knew I could sit inside the hospital and drink hot tea and get warm.

  Instead I kept walking. I wanted to feel the bite of the cold on my face. I wanted to push myself to walk a little farther today. On the way to Dover there was a fishing and mining town called Deal, and this made me think of Mr. Deal and the Deal boys—Jessup, the baby, and his older brother, Coyle, who was married to Sweet Fern, and Danny, who’d been married to her first, before he died.

  There was a castle in Deal that had belonged to King Henry VIII, and one day I asked someone to tell me the history of it. I closed my eyes while he told me and I pretended it was Émile telling me instead. Then I walked along the Goodwin Sands, which was a sand bank that ran for ten miles beside the cliffs. More than two thousand ships had wrecked on the beaches there, and I thought, When Johnny Clay gets better, we can come down here and go searching for buried treasure.

  If he gets better.

  My birthday was in three days. I was going to be twenty-two years old, but I felt three times that. As I walked, I looked out at the blue of the Channel and I could see the crooked coastline of France curving along in the distance, just twenty-five miles away. The cliffs of France were also white, and I wondered if they were the cliffs that circled Omaha Beach and Utah Beach and Juno Beach. I heard the words to the song I was writing, the lines that I had so far. And all at once I couldn’t help it—I thought about Émile.

  I pictured his dark gypsy eyes and the proud set of his mouth. I heard his voice and the funny songs he would sing. I saw his hands, large and strong, and in my mind they weren’t covered in dirt or blood, and one of them was wrapped around one of mine.

  I sat down on the sand and I watched the waves lap in and out, in and out. It was a sleepy rhythm that was like a kind of lullaby. I could almost hear my mama singing me a song. I lay back on the sand and rested my hand on my breast, where Émile’s had once been, and made myself think of him.

  I didn’t know how to feel about Émile. I didn’t even know his real name, so maybe I didn’t have the right to feel anything. But I thought I loved him. Maybe you couldn’t help but love someone, even for a little while, when you went through a war together. Maybe it was okay to love someone for a moment. No one else, not even Johnny Clay or Butch Dawkins, would ever understand what Émile and I had been through—crashing in the French countryside, running from the Germans, working with the Resistance, losing Coleman and Ray and Barzo, burying Perry, escaping from the Nazis in a stolen plane.

  And now he was back in France or somewhere in Europe or maybe Indochina with a real name I didn’t know and would never know—he wasn’t Émile at all, but maybe a Lucien or a Gerard or a François—and I was here on the Goodwin Sands in England but soon I’d be home again, and even if I had loved him, it would be like I’d never known him at all.

  That afternoon, when I got to the hospital, one of the nurses said, “Dr. McTeer’s been looking for you.” My heart nearly stopped, and before I could think or breathe the nurse said, “No, Miss Hart. Your brother’s fine. He’s awake, don’t you see? He woke up an hour ago.”

  When I walked through the door of Johnny Clay’s room, he was lying in the bed, propped up on two pillows. His eyes were shut and he looked just like he always looked except that he was sitting up a little higher. I thought the nurse must have been wrong. Maybe she was thinking of someone else’s brother. The hospital was filled with wounded and dying men.

  I stood watching, though, in case she wasn’t wrong, and the only sound was the tick of the clock that hung on the wall beside the window. A minute ticked by. Another minute ticked by. I felt the cold, dull, and bleak settling in around me.

  And then Johnny Clay’s eyes opened and he looked out toward the end of the bed and up at the ceiling and finally his eyes wandered over to me.

  He said, “Well hey there, little sister. I was wondering where you were,” just like I was the one who’d been gone awhile. His voice was weak, and now that he was looking right at me I could see how thin he was and how tired. Everything he’d been through was there on his face.

  I stood watching him, and suddenly I couldn’t move. I blinked my eyes over and over to make sure what I was seeing was real and not a dream. Before I could run to him and throw my arms around him, he said, “For your information, I didn’t steal those pyramid-head steel rivets from Daddy. I won ’em off Beachard, who stole ’em from Daddy. And it wasn’t me that stole your best marbles. Don’t you remember? Hunter Firth ate the three little ones and when he almost died Sweet Fern threw the rest away. Said someon
e was likely to kill himself on them.”

  I burst into tears. I stood there crying my eyes out. I cried so hard that I gave myself the hiccups. I put my hands over my face and cried and cried and hiccupped till I couldn’t breathe.

  Johnny Clay said, “Come on now, Velva Jean. Or are you still Clementine?”

  “No,” I hiccupped. “Not anymore.”

  “You knew I was going to be okay.” I dropped my hands and looked at him. He shifted and twitched around in the bed, his face thin, his eyes wet. “I’m too stubborn and mean to die. I told you that a long time ago. Why don’t you ever listen to me?” He was crying now too, the tears rolling down his cheeks. He rubbed the tears away with the back of his good hand and then he sat looking at me, letting the tears go. He said, “Come on now. We’ve got to be men about this.”

  I ran right to him and threw my arms around him and hugged him, all the while trying not to hurt him or hug him too hard. I felt his arms go around me and he didn’t feel so big and mighty anymore, but he was my brother and he was alive.

  I said, “Don’t you ever do that again, Johnny Clay Hart.”

  November 21, 1944

  Dear Clementine,

  I am writing for three reasons. First, to say I am happy to hear your brother will pull through. Second, to say I am sorry I wasn’t able to see you before I left England. Third, to send you the words to the song so that you can take them home with you.

  Un Petit Cochon (A Little Pig)

  A little pig

  Hanging from the ceiling

  (Pull its nose

  it’ll give some milk)

  Pull its tail

  It will lay some eggs

  (Pull it harder

  It will lay some gold)