by Dean Hughes
He turned then and continued down the hill until he reached the edge of the woods. Beyond the trees was an extensive pasture. Alex and Otto stood and looked out across the open acreage. “I guess we just hold up our hands as high as we can and walk toward the road,” Alex said. “I don’t see anyone yet, but when they do see us, we need to be sure they know that we’re surrendering.”
“Once we get to the road, they’ll see us from the outpost,” Otto told him. “They should have field glasses on us. They’ll know what we’re doing.”
“All right, then. Let’s go.” But both hesitated. This was an act of trust, and it ran against natural instincts to walk into the open. Finally, Alex stepped out and Otto followed. They walked the full distance of the pasture toward the road. They kept their arms stretched high in the air, and they heard nothing, saw no one.
As they neared the road, there was a barbed-wire fence to cross. The two stood with their hands up and looked around them in all directions, and then Otto put his foot on one strand of the fence and pulled up on another one. Alex stepped through, and then he held the wires for Otto. But just as Otto was stepping away from the fence, Alex heard a burst of machine-gun fire. He dropped, instinctively. “Don’t shoot,” he screamed. “We’re Americans.”
Another burst of fire followed, and Alex yelled again. “We’re Americans. We have no weapons.”
There was no reply, but Alex could hear movement, and then he saw a man running up the road. “Don’t move. Stay down,” the soldier yelled, and Alex felt a sense of relief. The man kept running. He was carrying a carbine, and when he finally stopped, he trained it on Alex. “I’m an American,” Alex said. “I was dropped behind enemy lines to choose drop zones for Operation Varsity. Our password is ‘Varsity Coach.’”
“That’s a German uniform you’ve got on, buddy. That’s all I see.”
“We had to use these for cover.”
Alex couldn’t see the boy’s face, could only hear how young he sounded. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a Kraut. And you’re surrendering to me. So get up slow, and don’t try anything.”
“That’s fine,” Alex said, and he slowly got to his feet. But Otto wasn’t moving. Alex turned toward him and saw that the back of his uniform was covered with blood. “Otto,” he said. “Otto.” He dropped back onto his knees.
“That’s a German name,” he heard the boy say, and then he felt a slam in the back of his head.
Alex knew some time had passed when he came back to consciousness. He was lying on his back, looking up toward the sun. There were four faces over him now, and one of the men said, “Get up. You’re a prisoner of war.”
“I’m an American.”
“You can tell that story to someone else. We’re going to turn you over.”
“What about Otto? He’s a German, but he’s working for us.”
“He’s not working for nobody now. He’s dead. Now get up.”
Alex was still dazed. He didn’t try to get up, but the men jerked him to his feet. He felt his head spin and his knees go weak. He almost dropped again, but the men were holding him. “Don’t you know the password?” he said. “It’s ‘Varsity Coach.’ We were supposed to use it to get back behind the lines. We put our lives on the line for you guys.”
“Look, buddy, I don’t know no password,” one of the soldiers said. “No one told us to check with all the Krauts for passwords before we shoot at ’em.”
“But we had our hands in the air. We have no weapons.”
“Shut up, okay? I still might shoot you.” Then he spoke to the others. “Go back to our outpost. I’ll take this guy in.”
The other three disappeared, and Alex kept walking. He wasn’t sure whether this sergeant who still had hold of his arm might not take this chance to shoot him and get rid of him.
“All right,” the sergeant yelled ahead, “I’ve got me a Kraut who speaks English like he was born in America.” He walked to two MPs who were standing by a jeep, which was parked sideways across the road. “He’s talking about passwords and saying he was doing reconnaissance, but he’s got a Kraut uniform on and he had German papers on him. He called his friend by a German name, too. So I don’t know what’s going on.”
An MP cursed Alex and then grabbed him and shoved him up against the jeep. “Turn around!” he demanded.
“We searched him already,” the sergeant said.
The MP ignored this. He kept patting Alex’s pockets, and he checked his legs, his boots, for anything concealed. “I’m in intelligence,” Alex said. “I’m a CIC officer. I was trained in Dijon and then dropped in here last week. I was a sergeant in the 101st until they pulled me out for this mission. I’m Airborne, the same as you guys. I was trained at Taccoa. I jumped at Normandy and up in Holland. I fought in the Bulge. I’m from Salt Lake. My name is Alex Thomas. I don’t know what else to tell you. Can you get an S-2 down here? Maybe he’ll know the password. They told us all you guys would know it.”
“Just sit down right there,” the MP said, “and stop running your mouth. We’ll decide whose side you’re on. No one would ever talk me into putting on one of those stinking uniforms, no matter what the reason.”
“What about to save your life?”
“Shut up.”
But the MP got on the radio, and he called for someone to pick up a prisoner. Then he added, “Someone from Intelligence needs to talk to him. The guy claims he was dropped in here to do reconnaissance, and he speaks good English.”
When he got off the radio, he looked back at Alex skeptically. “Just sit right there. Don’t move,” he said.
“There was no reason for those guys to shoot at us,” Alex said.
“I told you. Shut up.”
Chapter 15
LaRue and Beverly usually worked at the family factory on Saturdays. When there was nothing else to do, they helped in the packaging department, where they boxed airplane parts and readied them for shipping. But more often, lately, Bea Thomas had been teaching them to track orders, check to make sure shipments were correct, and then type shipping labels. Beverly did most of the labels even though she hadn’t yet taken a typewriting class at school. She pecked away with two fingers and seemed to lose herself in a task that LaRue found far too tedious.
At noon Beverly got out the picnic basket that she and her mother had packed that morning. The girls sat at a big oak desk with Grace Pearson, her mother’s secretary. “Come on, Mom,” LaRue called several times, but every time LaRue looked into her mother’s back office, Bea had a telephone to her ear or she was studying the sheets of paper on her desk. Finally, however, she did walk to the outer office. The girls had already brought a chair to the desk for her, and they had set out a sandwich and an apple on a sheet of scrap typing paper.
“I’m sorry,” Bea said. “I swear, I’m going to cut the line on that phone someday. Everyone needs everything right now. What ever happened to courtesy? Is that another casualty of war?”
“We’re like those people in a Charlie Chaplin show—all running around, herky-jerky,” Grace said. “But I’ll have to admit, I kind of like it. I think the commotion finally got to Millie, but I don’t let it bother me.”
That was a bit of an awkward subject, and LaRue was surprised that Grace didn’t know it. Millie Ellertson had worked for the family for the past year or so, but she had recently left to take another job. Millie had been Gene’s girlfriend, and Gene, the third Thomas son, had been killed in the war. Now Millie was dating someone else. The Thomases all felt that she had wanted to separate herself a little from the family now, and that was understandable—but still sort of awkward, and to LaRue, a little sad. At one time, Millie had seemed almost like another sister, and LaRue had found herself hoping that she would never marry, that she would “wait” for Gene. It seemed that maybe Gene deserved that—although he wouldn’t have thought so himself.
“Millie talked to me about this boy she’s dating,” LaRue said.
“Really?” Mom said.
“What did she tell you?”
“She said she likes him, but she doesn’t love him the way she did Gene. So she doesn’t know what to do. He wants to get married, but she hasn’t told him she will—not yet, anyway. I think she probably will, sooner or later.”
“Well . . . I think it’s for the best. I hope she does marry him. She deserves the chance to have her own family.”
“Is this boy a Mormon?” Grace asked.
“Well . . . yes,” LaRue said. “But I guess he started smoking while he was in the service—and he hasn’t been back to church since he got home. Millie’s trying to get him going, but she doesn’t know for sure whether he’ll be able to take her to the temple.”
“Oh, dear. She can’t be thinking that,” Mom said. “I need to talk to her.”
Silence followed as everyone seemed to realize at the same time that Mom had said the wrong thing in front of Grace, who was not LDS. But LaRue laughed and said, “That’s right, Mom, you take charge. You can tell her what to do.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Mom thinks she has to solve all our problems,” LaRue told Grace.
“She does a good job of it around here.”
“Oh, come on, girls,” Bea said. “You make me sound like a busybody.”
“How did you end up in charge down here, Bea?” Grace asked. “It doesn’t even sound like you wanted the job.”
LaRue and Beverly both began to laugh. Bea shook her head at them, and then she said, “Grace, you know very well I’m not in charge.”
Now it was Grace who laughed. “Who do you think you’re kidding?” she said. “Even Mr. Thomas told me the other day, ‘You’ll have to ask Bea about that. I just don’t know.’”
“Hey, it’s the same at home,” LaRue said. “Dad struts around like the only rooster in the henhouse, but Mom is the one who keeps things going. Dad’s hardly ever home.”
LaRue saw Mom—and Beverly—duck their heads. Mom always worried about giving Grace a bad impression of the Church.
Grace was a young woman from Denver whose father had been transferred by the Union Pacific railroad to Salt Lake City. He was a manager of some sort, and pretty well off. Grace had moved to town in time to finish school at East High, and she had married a local boy, a Mormon, but she had gotten a divorce after only a couple of years. At times she expressed her disgust with “local attitudes,” and from what LaRue knew, some of her conflicting points of view had been at the heart of her marital problems. For one thing, her husband’s family had never been very accepting of her.
LaRue also knew that Bea, from the day she had hired Grace, had been hoping to soften her opinion of the Church. LaRue had heard her tell Dad, “If she would join the Church, I really think that marriage could be patched up. It’s just a shame for Grace to be on her own with that cute little boy of hers.” And then she had mentioned some things she had told Grace—things she hoped would help her understand the true principles of the Church and not the ones she had extrapolated from some rather narrow and unkind behavior she had witnessed.
“LaRue,” Sister Thomas said, and she sounded careful, “your dad has important responsibilities, and so he’s gone in the evenings quite often. Maybe I do make a lot of decisions about little things around the house, but no one knows better than you that it’s your father who sets the spiritual tone in our home.”
LaRue saw all kinds of ironies in that statement. Mom made the daily choices, all right, but then Dad would come home and make pronouncements. Once he did, the appeal process always set in. It was a matter of working around him—begging or bargaining. In the end, he was never so tough as he liked to let on, but he also never dropped the procedure. He started from a strong position and then let the negotiations begin. Every now and then, when he was upset or cranky, he would suddenly clamp down. Bea wouldn’t get the money she needed for some purchase, LaRue would have to listen to a long lecture, or poor Beverly would find out that she read too much and ought to get out and exercise, that she ate too little and ought to be thankful for the good vegetables set before her, or that she needed to speak up for herself and not always let LaRue run over her. This last one always amazed LaRue: “Do as I say; think for yourself,” he seemed to be telling poor Bev.
“Say what you want, Bea,” Grace said. “You’re not only in charge, but people like it that way. Everyone says you’re fair. And you know this business better than anyone.” Grace gave the desk a little rap with her knuckles for emphasis.
LaRue liked Grace. She was a stylish young woman who liked to experiment with hairdos. She wasn’t overly pretty, but she was dramatic—someone people looked at as she walked by in her bright dresses and high heels with fancy straps, her stunning red lipstick.
“Grace, you exaggerate. I feel like I’m in over my head around here every single day.” Sister Thomas was eating her sandwich quickly, obviously feeling some haste at the moment, maybe as much as anything to end this conversation.
“I’ll tell you what,” Grace said. “When this war is over, it’s going to be women like you who have turned over the old apple cart—without even meaning to do it.”
“What apple cart?”
“You’re showing men what women can do—and you’re showing us girls at the same time.”
“That’s right!” LaRue said. She reached over and gave her mom a pat on the shoulder.
“Dear, dear, don’t blame something like that on me,” Bea said, and she laughed. But LaRue could see that her mom actually rather liked the idea. “I will say this: In some ways, when the war is over, I sort of dread the idea of just being home all the time.”
“Oh, oh,” LaRue said. “Look out, President Thomas.”
Everyone laughed at this, even Mom, but she was quick to say, “Now, LaRue, don’t misunderstand. I still say the most important thing a girl can do is raise a family. You know that’s how I feel.”
“What about Grace?” LaRue asked. “She has a little boy to raise. She has to work and raise a family.”
But Grace took LaRue by surprise. “Not really,” she said. “My former husband is good about taking care of us. We have enough to get by. I just like working better than being home with a baby all day. My mom takes care of my little boy, and that gets me out of the house.”
This was stunning, even to LaRue. She had never heard a woman say something like that. And Bea, who had obviously been taking some joy in the things Grace had said about her, looked downright worried. She seemed to wait long enough for her words not to seem a direct response, and then she said, “Well, the war has, as you say, upset the apple cart in some ways. And maybe part of that is good. Maybe we’ve all had to change the way we think a little—especially men. But not everything that’s coming out of this is good. When I was a girl, families seemed a lot more stable. The men farmed, or they went to work, and the women were close to their children. Everyone sat down together for dinner, and after, they had some time in the evenings to sit on the porch and talk, or play some games. Nowadays the kids run around so much more than they used to. Families don’t spend enough time together. When they do, half the time they just sit and listen to the silly radio.”
“Maybe families were better, Bea,” Grace said. “I don’t know about that. But men got away with way too much. The man I married thought women ought to be like children—seen but not heard.”
“Well . . . I know,” Bea said. “Some men do have attitudes like that.”
“Especially Mormon men.”
LaRue was intrigued. “Are Mormon men different?” she asked. “Aren’t all men sort of like that?”
Grace took a deep breath. “Oh, I don’t know. I hear all kinds of things. My friend tells me that Catholic men are the worst of all. But she’s married to a Catholic, so that’s where she puts the blame. All I know is, a lot of women are getting fed up with the way things are, and women here in Utah are behind the times.”
“Grace, we believe in inspiration,” Bea said. “And we believe t
hat men have the stewardship to lead their families. Things work so much better that way.”
“That sounds good, Bea, but my husband was stubborn as a mule. He’d make some stupid decision, and then—when I questioned it—get all upset because I was trying to wear the pants in the family. So I said, ‘Good. You wear the pants. And you can keep them on in bed at night, too, if that’s what you want, because you won’t have any need to take them off when you’re sleeping with me.’”
Grace had clearly gone too far. Bea’s round face was suddenly bright pink. Grace was smiling, but she was ducking her own head. And Beverly was clearly mortified.
A lot of chewing took place for a time, but finally Bea said, “Grace, I know that some men think they have a right to boss their families around. And the girls could tell you that Al and I have had some . . . discussions about that.” She glanced at LaRue and smiled. “Al can get a little that way himself.”
“A little?”
“LaRue, that’s enough. You happen to think I’m too bossy, too.”
LaRue laughed. “Well, that’s true.”
“Men were raised that way, the same as I was. That’s just how things have been. But Al and I have had some very good talks, and he’s treating me more like a partner than he used to. I can’t ask for anything more than that. He’s admitted that he’s been wrong at times—and I have too—and now we’re trying to work to make things better. To me, that’s what marriage is all about.”
“But, Bea,” Grace said, “my husband wouldn’t give an inch. He told me I had no right to question his decisions. And I wouldn’t live that way.”
LaRue thought she understood that. She knew that her dad had made some changes. He did seem to be trying. But every time he took a couple of steps forward, he would take at least one back. His instincts just hadn’t changed very much. LaRue could never be married to someone like her father.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Grace said, “I don’t spend my time moping around. Most women around here think you have to be married and have a dozen kids to be happy. Well, I’ve changed just enough diapers to know there are better things in life than that.”