Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  But Wally saw something else in the mirror—in his own face. He had been lazy, certainly; irresolute about what he wanted out of life; and he had taken some experimental steps off the path. But his dad had been a little too impatient, a little too quick to compare him to Alex and Bobbi. Wally hoped he could learn from that. He loved his father, but he didn’t want to be exactly like him.

  Elder Kimball wished everyone well one last time, and then he left the room. The Cluffs followed, each holding a daughter’s hand, and Lorraine walked after them. Wally, however, continued to look at himself in the mirror, and in those few seconds before he turned to catch up, he wondered what kind of a man he was becoming, whether he was measuring up, yet, to his father’s expectations. He had been called, recently, to serve in his ward as president of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, and he liked being around the young people in the ward. But he felt, as he looked at himself, a need to give those kids a little more of himself—to guide them away from some of the mistakes he had made.

  Bea prepared lunch for the Cluffs after the temple ceremony, and then later in the afternoon she held a little reception so that everyone in the family could meet Don and his wife and celebrate with them. It was a Friday, so the men were all working, but Al took some time off, and Alex and Richard knocked off early for the day, and they brought Heinrich and Peter Stoltz along. Chuck Adair showed up too. The women in the family had all come a little earlier and had helped Bea get ready. LaRue was the only one who couldn’t make it. She was working at Snelgrove’s ice cream parlor and had to work an afternoon and evening shift.

  It was a hot August day, but Dad had set up electric fans in both the living room and dining room, and the old house held the morning coolness pretty well. Everyone had a chance to get acquainted with the Cluffs and congratulate them, and there was lots of good food. But when Richard and Bobbi spoke of leaving, President Thomas spoke above the other voices. “Before people start heading home, let me just say a couple of things,” he said. “I want to express our congratulations to Don and Marj and tell them how happy we are for them. I’m very impressed with their little family, and with the commitment they have to the gospel, even though they’re still new in the Church.” He hesitated, then put his hand on Don’s shoulder. “But especially I wanted to thank you, Don, on behalf of our family, for all you did for Wally. He’s told me what a strength you and Chuck were to him. He said he never would have made it if it hadn’t been for his group of close friends. So God bless you. We have our son back, and—to no small degree—we have you to thank for it.”

  Wally stepped a little closer to Don and said softly, “That’s right.”

  “Thanks, President Thomas,” Don said, “but you’ve got it pretty much backward. The strength of our group was always in Wally and Chuck. Everyone in our camp respected those two. They were the ones who pulled me through.”

  “Chuck was actually the one who led the way,” Wally said.

  Don laughed. “Wally never will take credit for all he did, but he started changing my life right from the beginning, in the first few days of the war. He prayed for me—and that showed me how to pray for myself. Long before I met Chuck, Wally was the one who taught me how to survive. And he did the same for a lot of other guys. He deserves a medal—but I guess he’ll never get one.” Don’s voice had gotten shaky. He turned toward Wally and gave him a little pat on the back, but then he ducked his head, obviously embarrassed by his own emotion.

  Marjorie turned to Wally and hugged him. “Thank you so much,” she said.

  Wally didn’t know what to say. He looked over Marjorie’s shoulder at his father, and Dad gave Wally a little nod. It was the simplest of confirmations, but it touched Wally, made a difference, as though a medal had been pinned on his chest. But he heard someone climbing the steps, heading upstairs, and he realized that it had to be Alex, who had been standing on that side of the living room. Wally wondered what it meant

  that Alex would leave at that moment, and he feared that he knew the answer.

  Wally waited for the conversation to drift away from such serious matters, and then he walked to the stairs, but Anna saw him and reached out for his arm. “Don’t go after him. Just give him a little time,” she said.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He will be.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Talk to him. But not today.”

  Wally didn’t want to wait, but he accepted Anna’s judgment. He saw that Richard and Bobbi were leaving, so he went to them and said good-bye. The Stoltzes were getting ready to go too. They were talking to the Cluffs. As Wally returned

  to the living room, he noticed that Peter was standing back, waiting. So Wally stepped over to him. “Peter, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you today. How are you doing?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Peter said.

  “Hey, that was good. You’re getting that ‘th’ sound better all the time.”

  Peter seemed pleased with that. “Now if I could learn to say my ‘w’ sounds, I wouldn’t sound so much like those Germans in the movies.”

  Wally was glad to hear Peter laugh. In the past little while he seemed to be turning into the Peter that Anna had promised he would become. At work he had been a little more outgoing, a little more trusting of his language. Wally talked with him often enough to know that he was a bright young man, and witty when he relaxed around people.

  “We didn’t get a chance to meet your son,” Wally heard Don say to the Stoltzes.

  Brother Stoltz turned and said, “Peter, come. Shake hands with Brother and Sister Cluff.”

  Peter stepped forward and shook hands. Wally noticed that he was less formal about it than he had been when he had first arrived in Salt Lake City. He didn’t bow his head, and in an almost American style, he said, “Nice to meet you.”

  “You know,” Don said, “right after the war ended, us prisoners finally had a chance to meet some of the Japanese civilians. They turned out to be wonderful people. After all those years of thinking of the Japanese as my enemy, it was really good for me to have that experience. People still feel a lot of hatred—on all sides—and I hear the kinds of things they say, but to me, people are people. They’re the same everywhere.”

  “Yes. I think that’s true,” Heinrich said. “We’ve been treated very well here.”

  “Wally told me that you resisted Hitler—that you fought against him.”

  “Only a little. When we could.”

  Wally saw the next sentence coming, but it was too late to interrupt. “Well,” Don said, “I respect you for that. It would have been easy to go along with Hitler and just protect yourselves. But you put your lives on the line. That took a lot of courage. That’s the trouble in this world: too many good people stand back and let the bad people run the show.”

  “Most people in Germany couldn’t resist. It was far too dangerous.”

  “But that’s what impresses me about you and your family, Heinrich. You didn’t worry about your own lives. You took the chance.”

  Wally felt Peter straighten ever so little, saw him take a small step back, and then another. Heinrich was clearly trying to think of the right thing to say. “It’s difficult,” he mumbled. “It’s different in every case.” But he too was moving back, and by now Peter was retreating from the living room toward the front door. Wally didn’t know the boy well enough to go after him, to say something—nor did he know what he could say—but he knew how Peter would take the words, how he would apply them to himself.

  The Stoltzes left, and Alex came downstairs without saying anything about his own disappearance, and then he and Anna left too. Marjorie insisted at that point that she help Bea with the dishes, and Beverly took the little girls up to her room to entertain them. Maybe Dad sensed that this was the first opportunity for the old friends to talk by themselves; he excused himself to his office. That left Wally with Chuck and Don in the living room. Wally was still worried about Alex

  an
d Peter, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t want Don to feel bad about the things he had said so innocently.

  Chuck and Don had not had much time to catch up, so they chatted with each other about their lives now. Chuck spoke with more confidence than Wally had heard from him since they had come home. He told Don about his early struggles, but he said, “I’m working now—even if it isn’t a great job. Wally keeps telling me I ought to go to college. I’ve never figured I had the brains for that, but I guess I’m going to give

  it a try this fall. I figure, if Uncle Sam is willing to pay for it, it can’t hurt to see what I can do.”

  “That’s right, Chuck,” Don said, “and don’t worry about being smart enough. You’ll do fine.”

  Chuck was sitting in Dad’s new chair, with all the flowers on it. Wally never had grown accustomed to the idea of his father sitting there, and Chuck looked even more out of place. Wally had spent too many days with him in that crowded little barracks in Japan, sitting on the floor. “Well, we’ll see what happens,” Chuck said. “What I’ve got to do is get married. I envy you two guys when I see you with your wives.”

  “What about Louise?” Wally asked. “She seems awful nice to me.”

  “She is. I just don’t move very fast, I guess. It scares me to get married right away, until I’ve got a little more to offer.” But Wally and Lorraine had been out with Chuck and Louise a few times, and Wally was quite sure that Chuck would be getting engaged before long. Maybe that’s why he changed the subject. “Have you been feeling all right, Don?” Chuck asked. And Wally understood the question. Don looked strange, all filled out again, the way Wally had first known him, but he seemed much older—even old for his age.

  “Well . . . yes. Mostly. I’m eating fine, but I feel just a little sick to my stomach—almost all the time.”

  “Have you told a doctor about that?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been to the veteran’s hospital a couple of times. They can’t find anything wrong with me. They say it’s in my head, and it probably is.” He hesitated, looked at Chuck and then Wally. “Do you guys ever have any trouble in your head? You know, just doing all the things you used to do?”

  “I couldn’t think straight for a while,” Chuck said. “I felt like I was nuts or something. I didn’t dare try anything. I didn’t even want to leave the house.”

  “I was kind of like that too,” Don said. “But now, my brain seems to get stuck on certain things—certain memories—and then I can’t stop running everything back through my mind. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Then other times I’m so tired I can hardly stay awake.”

  “I’ve been lucky,” Wally said. “I haven’t had those kinds of troubles. But I ache. My whole body aches—especially my knees. I don’t say anything about it because I don’t want Lorraine to worry, but sometimes I wake up in the night, and I feel like I’m coming down with one of those fevers again—like I got out in the jungle. My doctor says some of those diseases never really go away. They just stay in your system, and they could come back, full-blown, all over again. I probably worry too much about that.”

  “I talked to Eddie the other day,” Don said. “He called long distance. He’s doing pretty well, but he said that Bill Doherty killed himself.”

  “Killed himself? Why?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. They said he got real depressed, wouldn’t talk or anything, and started telling his family to leave him alone. Then one night they heard a gun fire and ran to his room and found him there, shot through the temple.”

  “How could a guy make it through everything we put up with and then do something like that?” Wally asked.

  No one answered for a time, but then Chuck said, “I think I know how it happens.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. A guy hangs on any way he can through all those years, and he figures, ‘If I can just make it home, everything will be all right,’ and then he gets home and maybe everything isn’t so great.”

  “Some guys had their wives divorce them. I know that,” Don said. “And sometimes wives got involved with other guys. That’d be pretty rough to come back to.”

  “In prison camp everything was clear cut,” Chuck said. “We ate what they gave us, we worked, and we stayed alive if we could. That’s all there was. And then a guy gets home and everything starts to look complicated—way too complicated. For a while, that’s how it looked to me.”

  “You did what you had to do, though,” Wally said. “You forced yourself out of the house.”

  “But I don’t know if I could’ve done it without you—and then you and Lorraine. You two have really helped me. Louise probably would have given up on me a long time ago if we hadn’t had you two to run around with.”

  “Hey, we’re friends.”

  “I’m glad you guys are sticking together,” Don said. “When I first came home, I had my wife and kids, but I felt alone all the time. In Japan, I got used to us guys all looking out for each other—making sure a guy got help if he was sick and all that kind of stuff. That’s the only time in my life when I felt like I had friends I could depend on, absolutely, without feeling like I was asking too much.”

  “But your wife looks after you now, doesn’t she?” Chuck asked.

  “Sure. But I can’t tell her what we went through over there—not so she would ever understand. When I’m around you two, I know I don’t have to explain anything. We don’t even have to bring it up. We just know.” He ducked his head and added, “I think I’ll miss you guys the rest of my life.”

  “Sometimes,” Chuck said, “I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I think is that I’m glad I’m home, not back in that camp, but then I’ll think, ‘But I’m alone here,’ and I almost want to turn around and go back. That’s how much you guys meant to me.”

  Everyone was looking down. Wally didn’t want to look in their eyes; he was too embarrassed. But he knew what they meant, felt the same way. He was certainly happier to be home, to be married to Lorraine, but he also knew he would never experience anything quite like he had in the Philippines and Japan, where life hung in the balance every day, and the only lifeline was his group of friends.

  “I’ve been telling Marj we might want to move up here,” Don said. “If I could find a good job, I think we would. Marj likes the idea of being where there are more Church members, and I’d like to be where you guys are. I feel like we’re brothers—and always will be.”

  “That’s right,” Chuck said. “What we should have told President Thomas was that we took turns saving each other’s lives. Don’t you forget that—ever.”

  Wally looked at Don, and then Chuck, and the three of them nodded.

  “I wouldn’t ever say it was worth it,” Wally said. “That would be too much like thanking those guards for all the stuff they put us through. But if it had to happen, I’m glad for some of the things we learned. My brother told me a while back that war brings out the worst in people, and I’m sure it does, just about all the time. But I feel like what happened to us showed us the other side: what a guy can be, at his best.”

  Again, they all nodded.

  Chapter 22

  Bea Thomas was about to leave her office and take the bus home when her husband showed up. “Hey, lady, need a ride?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Thank you, Al,” she said. “I was just thinking how much I hate waiting for that silly bus.”

  “Do you mind if we take a little detour on the way home? I want to show you something—and get your opinion.”

  Bea smiled. Al was careful these days to include her in virtually every decision. She knew that doing that actually ran against his instincts, but it pleased her that he was trying so hard to reform. “That’s fine,” Bea said. “But I hope it’s not too far out of the way. I need to get dinner started.”

  “The girls could look after themselves for once, Bea. You spoil them.”

  “Oh, I do? And who has been telling me for twenty-nine years now that he likes to have his whole family s
it down together for dinner?”

  He grinned and shook his head. “I do like that. But the girls could at least get things started. They never think to do that unless you give them specific instructions.”

  “I know. But you also tell them to get busy on their homework right after school, and both of them are really good about doing that.”

  Bea hadn’t worn a hat that morning. The day was just too warm. She looked around on her desk to find a file folder she had promised herself to take home. She didn’t carry work home as often as she used to, but sometimes it was still difficult to keep up with everything, especially since she had cut back on her hours. She never came in on Saturdays now, and most afternoons she tried to leave by three or four.

  “The only reason LaRue studies,” Al said, “is that she wants that scholarship—so she can run off to some eastern girls’ college where they’ll stuff her head with all kinds of apostate attitudes.”

  Bea found the folder under some papers she had stacked on her desk. She tucked it into the little valise she carried with her to work, and then she looked back up at Al. “Let’s not talk about that again,” she said.

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “Because we usually get into an argument about it.” She walked to the door, waited until Al stepped out, and then turned out the light.

  As she stepped into the hallway, Al said, “I don’t know why you say that. You don’t want her going back east to college any more than I do.”

  “I don’t, Al. You know that. But it also doesn’t do any good to harp on her about it all the time. It only makes her more stubborn.”