Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  That made sense, and Wally was glad they were in a spot where there was plenty of cover for the trucks. But the day would be long, sitting and waiting, and Wally couldn’t get it out of his head that it was Christmas, not a day to be stuck in a flea-invested bamboo thicket. After “breakfast” Wally and his friends caught a little more sleep, and then they passed the time doing nothing, talking at times, thinking more. Just after noon a supply truck came down the road, and to everyone’s surprise the cooks received the makings of a pretty good Christmas dinner. The canned turkey wasn’t quite like Mom’s, and the mashed potatoes looked more like potato soup, but all in all, it wasn’t bad. The food seemed to lift everyone’s spirits a little—just not enough.

  Wally sat on the ground and leaned against the wheel of his truck. He and his buddies speculated about where they might be going and how the Japanese would respond to their retreat into Bataan. But that kind of talk was depressing, not to mention frightening, and talk about home was even worse. Before long they had all three become quiet. They tried to sleep again, and Wally managed to drift off a couple of times, but he was uncomfortable and nervous, and he didn’t sleep much.

  Late in the afternoon, a mechanic from the squadron, a fellow named Arnold Karn, walked over to them. “Hey, fellas,” he said, “some girls have opened up for business in a little shack down the road. There’s already a long line, so if you want your chance, you’d better get down there.”

  Wally, of course, wasn’t interested, and neither was Warren. Wally glanced at Jack to see what he would say, but he shook his head. After Arnold walked away, Wally felt much more depressed. Something about men acting that way only reminded him of how far he was away from home and of the things he associated with Christmas in the Salt Lake Valley. He thought of the time he had taken LaRue and Beverly shopping downtown—the decorations, the girls in their new coats and hats, the funny tie they had bought for Dad. And then he thought of Lorraine and the pretty red dress she had worn one Christmas day. He knew he would never marry her, but he wished he could see her one more time. It would be nice to sit on her porch and talk for a while, tell her what he was thinking. Maybe she would even see some changes in him.

  He thought of the last time he had talked to her. He could see her standing there on the porch, the golden light making her hair and skin so beautiful. He heard her whisper, “I love you too, but it never would have worked.” There were things in this world too lovely not to hold onto, and he had let Lorraine get away. But then, she had been right. It wouldn’t have worked—not then.

  And then a tune came into his mind: “I get along without you very well. Of course I do.” But he couldn’t let that get into his head. He sat up. “So what do you think?” he said, laughing. “Who’s going to win the Rose Bowl?”

  Jack had been asleep. He rolled over on his blanket and looked at Wally. “What?”

  “Who’s going to win the Rose Bowl?”

  Jack dropped his head back onto his blanket. “Who cares?”

  “Who’s playing?” Warren asked. He had been lying on his back with his arm over his eyes, but clearly he had not been asleep. Wally sensed that he wanted to talk—that, like Wally, he was ready to stop thinking.

  “I don’t even know,” Wally said. “I thought maybe you guys knew.”

  “It’s Duke and . . . somebody. Oregon State College, I think,” Jack said, but he still sounded disgusted about being awakened.

  “What are you talking about?” Wally said. “Last year you were laying down bets with all takers.”

  Jack nodded. “I know,” he said. He sat up slowly and then leaned against a spindly little palm tree that was struggling to survive under the canopy of bigger trees. “I got cured on betting. Last summer, when Ted Williams was batting over .400 halfway through the year, I gave some big odds that he’d never keep his average that high all year.”

  Wally knew about that. He laughed. But Warren, who was sitting cross-legged close to Wally, said, “We missed a great baseball season at home.” His voice had taken on a surprising sadness. “DiMaggio had that huge streak—hits in over fifty straight games.”

  “Fifty-six,” Wally said, and he felt Warren’s mood grabbing him, so he tried to think of something else. “Jack, what was your greatest moment on the football field?” he asked.

  Jack obviously knew what Wally was doing, but he finally responded. “One time in high school I broke loose on a long run,” he said. “Seventy yards or something like that. It was pretty late in the game, and that touchdown put us ahead. We won, and after”—he finally smiled—”everyone treated me like a big hero.”

  “What about you, Wally?” Warren said. “You played football too, didn’t you?”

  “I sat on the bench. My big plays were all with the cheerleaders, after the game.” Wally grinned, and then he pretended to hold a girl and give her a big kiss.

  “Didn’t you really get in the games?” Jack asked seriously.

  “Not much,” Wally said. “My best sport was track. But I quit that in the middle of my senior season.”

  “Why?”

  But now the conversation had taken the wrong turn. Wally pulled a long stem of grass from the ground and rolled it in his fingers. “I just . . . didn’t like it. The coach made me run the four-forty, and it about killed me. Maybe my dad’s explanation was right—he said I was a quitter.”

  “If you were good, why did you quit?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. I had it in my head that I had to beat my brother’s record. When I found out I didn’t have it in me to do it, I just decided . . . to heck with it.”

  “Sometimes you still talk like you’re in competition with your brother,” Warren said.

  “I know. But now, it seems stupid.” Wally stuck the grass in his mouth for a moment, but then he took it back out and said, “I wish I could have a chance to do certain things over in my life.”

  “Hey, we’re young,” Jack said. “We’ll have plenty of chances.”

  “Sure. If . . . you know . . . we get back.”

  “We’re not going to die, Wally,” Jack said. “So don’t start talking that way.”

  Wally nodded, but he glanced at Warren. And he saw the same solemn awareness in Warren’s eyes that he felt in himself. “Right now,” Warren said, “I wish I’d never come over here.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Wally said. “Next Christmas I’d like to be home.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jack said, “me too. As far as that goes.”

  ***

  The Stoltzes spent their lives in the Hochs’ cellar. Bombs fell quite often, always during the night, and officials devoted their days to keeping the city operating. That meant it was possible to hide out in a basement with little thought that authorities would bother to come around checking—and the Stoltzes were thankful for that measure of safety. For the first few days, the cellar had been a second chance at life, after death had seemed so close. Gradually, however, life in cramped, dark quarters had become a tedious imprisonment. A better answer always seemed necessary, but one day followed another, and the Stoltzes remained in the little room, hardly big enough for all of them to sit in comfortably.

  The cellar was for storage—for fruit and canned goods, for produce in summer—not for people to live in. The rock floors and walls were cold and hard. Only a tiny window, high on one wall, emitted a little light. An electric light made reading possible, but reading material was limited. During the day, the Stoltzes sat on two small mattresses; at night, they slept on those same mattresses, with feather ticks for covering. Peter slept next to his father and tried not to take up much room. Brother Stoltz struggled all night, every night, to find any rest. The pain in his shoulder and knee made every position unbearable after a time.

  When Christmas came, tedium was beginning to turn into despair, but the Hochs tried to do what they could to make things pleasant. President Hoch was too old to be called into the military himself, but he had a son in France, and another, a married son, was pa
rt of the Czech occupation. Both sons were safe for the moment, but the Hochs feared the future and were not really in merry spirits. All the same, Brother Hoch came home with a Christmas tree. It was actually only a branch from a fir tree. He had found it in a park, where a bomb had ripped the tree apart and burned most of the branches. But this branch was healthy, if not exactly shaped right, and Brother Hoch built a stand for it. On Christmas Eve, the Stoltzes came upstairs, and the two families decorated the tree with ornaments—but no candles—and then sang Christmas carols.

  The next morning, on Christmas, the Hochs had a little gift for each of the Stoltzes. Both President and Sister Hoch worked now, Sister Hoch because it was required of her. Brother Hoch had worked for the city before the war, keeping up parks and gardens, but all that was gone now, and he spent his days doing salvage work—primarily removing rubble and digging out those left alive after bombing raids. It was a discouraging, never-ending task. Every week he faced new heaps of debris, often a new one created overnight, with fires still burning and the smell of burnt or rotting flesh.

  At every bombed-out building there were relatives waiting for news, or there were those who had just heard what they dreaded to hear. Sometimes, President Hoch got someone out—someone trapped but still alive. But more often he found people who might have lived had the rescue effort moved more quickly. These were people who had slowly died of hunger or exposure. Sometimes they had clawed until their fingers were bloody. Others were found sitting in air pockets, trapped, serene, as though they had accepted their deaths and merely waited.

  President Hoch told Brother Stoltz more about this than he wanted to hear. It seemed, however, that President Hoch needed to tell someone, as though to carry it in his head night and day were too much for him.

  The Hochs had to deal daily with one major problem: They had four extra mouths to feed, and rationing cards limited the amount of meat, butter, produce, and other commodities they could buy. Brother Stoltz had turned over all his cash to the Hochs, and that helped to buy potatoes and flour, but they had to be careful about how much food they were seen carrying into the house. They used some of their stored food, and they kept a small garden out back, but they also relied on others. They said little of this, but the Stoltzes knew that members of the branch were bringing food. President Hoch assured Brother Stoltz that he hadn’t told other branch members that he had refugees in his home. Letting that word out would be too dangerous for the Stoltzes and the Hochs. But he must have appealed for help in some way, because the food kept coming.

  Today, however, was Christmas. President Hoch told the Stoltzes, “I know your existence in our cellar is very difficult, but let’s find some joy in the idea that you were able to find us—and that we are all alive.”

  “We’ll never be able to thank you enough,” Sister Stoltz said. “We can only pray that somehow better days lie ahead.”

  Anna had a hard time seeing how that could happen. She sat near the tree—the branch—on the floor, and she tried to find pleasure in the decorations, the little gifts, but she could see no way out. Even if the war ended, the Stoltzes’ problem with the Gestapo would not go away unless Germany lost the war, and that was not going to happen quickly.

  As the bombs dropped on Berlin, other possibilities seemed just as likely. Sooner or later, the Hochs’ house could take a direct hit, and all of them would die. Or the Gestapo could somehow find out that the Stoltzes were there, and the family would be dragged off to prison—or worse. Or perhaps, most unthinkable, the war could drag on, and Anna would spend her young adulthood in this prison. The Hochs were kind to put their own lives in danger this way, but the fact was, life was going on somewhere, and Anna was seeing nothing. She spent her days waiting, with almost no hope of any change, any fun, any satisfaction. Her father had taken it upon himself to continue her education, and Peter’s, but he had few books to work with. Brother Hoch tried to bring home something from time to time, books he salvaged from destroyed homes, but it was hit and miss as to what he could find.

  “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you keep learning,” Brother Stoltz told his children. “We have to keep our minds going if we want to survive.”

  Anna did believe that, and sometimes she was able to lose herself in her books for hours at a time. But the terrible reality was still there. She never saw the sky. When she went upstairs to use the toilet, she saw sunlight filtering through curtained windows, but she couldn’t part those curtains and look out. She lived in a world where exercise was nothing more than running in place, and where the only joy was the occasional laughter the family could make for itself.

  But Anna did dream. She imagined a life someday, after all this. She pictured herself strolling through the woods, hearing songbirds. She liked to remember what it felt like to be outside, to go where she wanted, to walk to a grocery store, or to ride a bicycle. Sometimes, still, she imagined herself seeing Alex. She had his picture, although she sneaked a look at it only now and then, and she sometimes allowed herself a little fantasy, always the same. He would fight his way through the danger, hunt until he found her, and then lift her and her family out of this place. When the bombs fell at night, and the rumble came closer and closer, she would shut her eyes and picture it. But after, when the bombs stopped, she would find it all very childish. She never mentioned Elder Thomas to her parents, but she kept him as “Alex” for herself, and when her family mentioned him, she acted as though she took little interest in the subject.

  After dinner, Peter told the Hochs about a wonderful Christmas when the elders had been with them in their home in Frankfurt. Sister Stoltz cried at the memory, and Father reminisced about the branch and then told the story of his conversion. Sister Hoch was a quiet, warm person with a round face and round, dark eyes. “Ernst brought me to the Church,” she said, and she laughed. “I wasn’t going to join a sect, no matter what he told me. But he was so kind, and I wondered what made him this way. That was the beginning of my interest.”

  Brother Hoch told more of the story, how he had joined the Church in Leipzig after the missionaries had taught his family for more than a year. But when he had met Sister Hoch, he had fallen in love instantly, he said, and he had made up his mind he would never give up until she believed as he did. Five years actually passed before she joined, but he refused to give up, and after she joined, they finally married.

  All this time Anna said nothing, but she loved this story, and, of course, she thought of Alex. She wondered what he was doing on Christmas day. She tried to imagine Salt Lake City—the white, two-story home he had told her about, the brothers and sisters. In her image of things, Alex was there, and he wasn’t married. He still had her picture. He kept it close, where he could look at it often.

  Anna had heard the news that America had been attacked by Japan and that Hitler had declared war on the United States. Anna wondered whether Alex would become a soldier. What if he died fighting the Japanese, or worse, fighting Germans? He was such a gentle man, not someone to kill, and certainly not someone who ought to be killed.

  The Stoltzes stayed upstairs much longer than ever before. The Hochs kept the curtains drawn, but for Anna, being out of the cellar seemed almost like being free, and so the day was good. But that evening she had to go back, and the temporary freedom only made the confinement seem worse. But Sister Stoltz suggested that the family sing Christmas songs, and that helped some, even if it brought back difficult memories.

  Chapter 35

  President Thomas was sitting in his office at the dealership one day late in March when he looked up to see Mat Nakashima standing in his open doorway. “Hello, Mat,” he said, but already he saw the concern in his friend’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m wondering whether you can help me.”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  Mat stepped into the room, his hat in his hand. He was wearing a suit, something he avoided most of the time. President Thomas motioned for him to sit down. “You kn
ow my brother—the one we call Ike?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “He’s been arrested.”

  “Arrested? What for?” President Thomas couldn’t have been more surprised. Ike was like Mat, a hard-working man, very highly thought of in the south end of the valley.

  “He went to California for the winter—to work. He was living with my uncle and aunt in Fresno. Now the government is rounding up the Japanese—all up and down the coast.”

  Suddenly President Thomas understood. He had heard that this was happening. “Yes, I know, Mat. But I didn’t think they were arresting people like Ike.”

  “They’re taking anyone of Japanese heritage. It doesn’t matter how many generations back a family has been in the country.”

  “They’re looking for spies, Mat—fifth columnists. You can understand how people feel.”

  Mat looked at the floor for a few seconds, and then he said softly, “President, they aren’t rounding up German Americans.”

  “Germany hasn’t attacked us. Japan has. Japanese submarines have been spotted right off the coast.”

  “German U-boats are sinking ships on the other coast.”

  President Thomas hardly knew what to say. “It’s nothing against any of you. It’s just a way of being careful.”

  Mat took a long look at President Thomas, but he didn’t try to argue.

  “Listen, Mat, they don’t know who to pick up and who not to. Maybe I can get in touch with some people. I know a local FBI agent. If I let the right people know that Ike grew up here, maybe they’ll let him come home.”

  “What about my uncle and aunt?”

  “That’s going to be harder, I suspect.”

  “President, they’ve lived in California for thirty years. They farm. They pay their taxes. They have citizenship. They’re just as American as you are. This isn’t right.”

  President Thomas believed that, but he also knew the panic that was spreading across the country. America had never been attacked before. “Mat, people do things differently during a war,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s a good thing. But when people are this scared, they need reassurance. Right now, I’m not sure it’s safe for your relatives. People feel so much resentment against all Japanese.”