It didn’t help, because this was now, with air attacks and what the Germans called Blitzkrieg, which had taken over entire countries in a matter of a few weeks. Modern weapons and communications were more sophisticated, with more effective ways of killing . . . and also hearing about it.
But medical care was better too, wasn’t it?
Not good enough.
Velma learned how it worked: A car came, often with the minister or priest or even a rabbi. An officer was driving—the uniform depended on which branch of the military the son or husband or brother had joined up.
There had been rumors that only telegraphs would come or phone calls that would just blurt it out or letters that began with something like: ‘Regret to inform you . . .’
They came from the War Department, and everyone knew stories about mothers reading about their sons and starting to scream in grief and swear at men who started wars, or wives reading about their husbands and fainting on the spot.
She held her breath whenever she saw a vehicle like that, but so far they had not come to the typing school or the apartment where she lived all alone. It was a big enough space to feel it too—the loneliness. There was too much room for just one person, and when it was empty, it echoed.
Her folks helped Velma fill it with secondhand furniture, though nothing grand; nothing meant to be permanent. And now there were also small old-fashioned rugs on the floors, and the walls had pictures of Joe—a few in uniform, including their wedding, but most of them in his civilian clothes—so for her, it was home.
It was an added expense, spending Joe’s hard earned military pay like that on rent, but Velma didn’t want to live at home with her folks. Besides, the rest of his paycheck she saved religiously, and it was put in a growing savings account. In fact, her father-in-law offered to help her invest the money in stocks and bonds that would help it grow faster.
He said, “We’ll call it your nest egg fund.”
The drugstore down below also let her work when she could, usually at the counter or cleaning up after hours. Every little bit helped—not just the money, but keeping busy. Besides, it’s the only time she got a chance to talk to people without feeling sad.
Velma went to church with their parents every Sunday still, and came to dinner at least one night a week to both hers and his. Her dad asked her now and again why she didn’t move back in, but her mother already knew.
Her father had been to the Big War, the War to End All Wars. That war clearly hadn’t ended wars at all, but he had been sent to France, and several men from his unit were sent home after they’d been gassed. Others were buried in battlefields that turned into foreign cemeteries—she had read that some soldiers were blown into so many pieces by the artillery and the machine guns that it was a wonder anyone found them at all.
Maybe they hadn’t, and the shell craters were just filled up and a marker was put up for remembrance to save the feelings of the folks back home. It was a terrible time, and he seldom talked about it before this war—but now he did, and she almost wished he wouldn’t.
For him it was a relief, it seems, having had it bottled up for over twenty years. Her mother never stayed around to hear it, and it made Velma . . . nervous.
When she was a kid, she had gone through his ‘war trunk’ up in the attic along with her older brothers—that’s what their mother called it. Actually, Velma served as a lookout so they wouldn’t get caught and had to go up later on her own to see what the boys had seen before.
She didn’t mind, as it gave her more time. All this was done in secret, and she wasn’t sure if her father knew about that, but Velma figured that her mother knew—moms just know.
The trunk included his old identification papers and the uniform of a captain—pants and jacket, suspenders and hat, this and that, some of it seemed a bit . . . muddy. There were also all sorts of paraphernalia—an old pistol (unloaded, firing pin missing) and holster (leather cracked and a bit burned in one spot), a knife without a scabbard (the blade was bent a bit, and the tip was broken off), some spare buttons that looked brass and a canteen with a unit emblem that looked more like a souvenir than serviceable.
The boys particularly liked the weapons and a sort of tin cup with a bullet hole blasted clean through it.
At the very bottom, there were also three small boxes with medals inside. One was a Purple Heart (their father must have been wounded) and one had a round sort of coin on the bottom with a silver star on the ribbon. She heard her brothers call it a Victory Medal.
The last was a ribbon with a funny sort of cross dangling down that looked like a big ornate ‘x’. There were also crossed swords behind a small round shield in the center—somebody’s head, like with money, and around the edge of that was engraved: ‘Republique Francaise.’
These were for gallantry, her mother told them once, but not when Velma’s father was home. Each of the medals also had a newspaper article folded inside the box lid, but the paper looked rather delicate, and none of the kids had been brave enough to unfold them and read about what their father had done back then.
There were also old photographs and bundles of letters tied up in ribbons that were faded with age. The envelopes were all addressed to their mother’s maiden name. Velma knew now they were letters from their father to his sweetheart then—the woman who became his wife, and their mother.
Velma held them close to her then, thinking it romantic, and when she thought about them now, she thought of her mother in a different way—as a woman.
In a scrapbook, there were other newspaper articles and scraps of things like train tickets and bits of once-colorful paper with French words and some sort of flyer from an old steam freighter, announcing its arrival in New York.
It all seemed so mysterious, like a make-believe game or props in an old movie or play. Velma loved the old pictures of ladies in long dresses and big hats. The men looked dashing too, and her father’s picture in formal uniform with a saber looked rather grand.
Only now did she realize what some of those stains on some of those old things may not have been mud, but blood.
Maybe that’s why her mother understood why Velma wanted to live on her own. She was a married woman now, and her mother also knew how it was to wait for your man, to worry and wonder if he’d ever come home again.
She would know how it was at night too, Velma was sure—crying yourself to sleep, writing long letters that you never sent because they were filled with longing and worry, listening to music that made you even sadder—sometimes you danced all alone, all the time crying . . . but still you danced.
Not to dance would have admitted no hope, and worse, defeat. She would not give up here at home. That’s what women were supposed to do: Keep the home fires burning.
Velma kept up appearances, and sometimes down at the drugstore counter, old men would have chicory coffee together and listen to the news on the radio. The drugstore had a speaker outside, pumping jukebox music or the radio programs into the street for the passers-by. There were benches set outside below the drugstore front windows and under an awning for people to sit and listen.
When the weather was nice, she’d open the window of her apartment above and listen too . . . for a while.
Sometimes, she’d go down below and they’d ask her how was Joe? Velma didn’t really know, he never wrote of things like that. Sometimes she thought perhaps maybe they wouldn’t really have much to talk about, and worried about that when he came home again.
But she told them, “Fighting on. I can’t wait for him to come home.”
It was true.
They’d exchange glances then, and some would shake their heads, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She knew what it meant—that maybe he wouldn’t come home. Usually someone would quickly change the subject to something benign: Baseball wasn’t what it used to be, as many players went into military service too. There was talk of women having a league of their own, but to these men, that seemed . . . unseemly.
�
��Women don’t like to compete.”
“They like to compete for men,” another said.
The old men laughed, and another one noted, “And there’s the Miss America pageant.”
“That’s not a real competition, that’s not a sport.”
They all nodded at that, and one would nudge the other and nod toward Velma, and then they’d change the subject again. They had no doubt the war would be won, but what would come next—that was the question. In another twenty years, would they have another one worse than this one?
Would another generation of young men have their numbers thinned like a farmer culling a herd?
The weapons now were worse than before: bigger bombs, artillery that went farther, talk of rockets that spanned the English Channel and hit the English homeland. There were submarines too—the dreaded U-boats. Aircraft carriers were gigantic ships, bigger than anything know to man before, built because they had amazing aircraft now: fighters, bombers and freighters.
One said, “Some change is good, and if it means no more wars like these . . .”
They all nodded again, and then in unison, took a sip of their coffee. Nothing more was to be said.
~~~
As the months went by, Velma ignored the changes in the town—the rationing, the lights out, the curfew and the signs all around:
‘Loose lips can sink ships.’
Or ‘Report suspicious behavior.’
Or ‘Mend and make do.’
No one mentioned the other dreadful changes—the cemeteries all had several new graves, with adjacent land cleared, meant for even more too.
The town was really a small city, but it always had that hometown atmosphere. But there weren’t as many people around now as there had been before. Some had gone into military service and were deployed; women joined up as nurses and clerical help, and they were gone too. Other folks went to the bigger cities to work in the factories or further out into the country to work in the fields.
Everyone knew there had been Japanese folks around for decades. Many had worked on the farms up and down the Western coast.
They were easy to spot—they had different features and funny habits toward one another and religion that seemed very strange. They hadn’t bothered other folks, and other folks hadn’t bothered them.
Many had actually been born in this country, it was said. They had a word for that, but none of the old men at the counter could remember what it was.
Didn’t matter, those people were different—they were Japanese, and now Japan was the enemy.
Nobody trusted them now, but they had always kept to themselves. This time, it was different. The police and county sheriff put more deputies on, and that made people wonder and gossip as to why.
Then word came about the internment camps, and men who were not signed up for military service were hired to help round them up, haul them off, and some stayed away to guard.
Rumor had it that some of those new employees also were meant to guard P.O.W. camps, but nobody knew for sure about that. It didn’t seem reasonable to have anything like that so close to the coast. The old men figured it would be better to put them in the middle of the desert or out on the Great Plains where you could see a man for miles because it was so flat.
One of the old men said, “Or up in the mountains so the prisoners-of-war couldn’t escape and go fight again. If the weather or terrain didn’t get them, maybe a bear would—if they got away, I meant.”
They laughed.
Another said, “They wouldn’t need to go back to fight, they could make havoc here—cut power lines, blow up dams, that sort of thing.”
“They probably guard all that,” said another.
“It’s a big country, and they probably don’t have enough guards to go around.”
“Maybe we should make some sort of unit to help with that then? Around here, I mean. We could phone or write letters to our friends in other places, and they could organize too.”
“The Old Eagles Battalion, how about?”
They liked that.
“I don’t fit into my old uniform anymore, I don’t even have to try, I already know.”
“We couldn’t do enough to deserve a uniform. We could make armbands though, and wear some sort of emblem. It doesn’t have to be fancy, I bet.”
“I don’t have my gun anymore. Bernice made be sell it when the grandkids started coming. She didn’t want it around the house.”
“I have hunting rifles, but nothing more.”
“That’s all well and good, but we’re old. What if the escaped prisoners take the weapons from us? We’d be aiding and abetting.”
“Not on purpose. Say, we could work in squads, so they can’t overpower us. Besides, we don’t need to wrestle them down, we just need to corner them or trap them until the real authorities come.”
That might take some time, Velma figured, especially since the notion of their special troop never got off the stools at the drugstore counter.
By that time, not many men were around at all in the town. The women took up many of the usual jobs—janitors, factory workers, farm laborers and store clerks, even mechanics. Velma kept to her schooling, but she wondered what was the point. It was a constant reminder that she was planning for a future that meant the worst had come: Joe would be gone.
She talked to her minister, and that helped some. When she finished her course, he introduced her to the lawyers—his old friends—in a prestigious law firm. Seems the minister was a shrewd poker player, they claimed. These days the stakes were not matches or toothpicks, but things like ration coupons and cigarettes and hard-to-find canned goods.
Gambling is a sin, isn’t it?
The minister only laughed at that and told his old friends that she’d be just what they needed—and maybe someday she’d be a lawyer herself, given that women were doing everything else these days—keep the home fires burning indeed.
They had all laughed about that too. Velma didn’t. If Joe—when Joe came home, she’d make sure he went into a profession that was safe. Doctor, lawyer, accountant—something like that.
He had talked about being a sheriff’s deputy, maybe someday a sheriff, but after seeing the newsreels in the movies, she figured he might have changed his mind about that. Maybe she’d have to change it for him.
~~~
As the months passed, her work at the law firm was not difficult, but there was plenty of it. She tried not to read what she typed, but often she couldn’t help but see wills, and probate, and declarations of bankruptcy, and hard times and hardships to do with the war.
The money was good enough to make a few improvements in her small apartment. She didn’t have to for the extra money now, but Velma still kept up with the occasional work in the drugstore—it kept her busy and gave her people to talk to.
Joe’s letters came more frequently, but they weren’t long and felt more like obligation than devotion. She sometimes lay in bed in the dark, wondering if all the men just took turns writing something and then just copied the same letter over and over again. They’d all send it off to the women they couldn’t quite remember, starting the letter with ‘Dear Sweetheart’ and ending it with ‘Yours, always’ and their name.
Not that she blamed them—they must have much more to think about than their girls and wives and mothers back home. Somehow, it didn’t seem important—a birthday, a Christmas gift, an anniversary. When you were fighting for your life, and for the lives of your friends, your perspective must change as to what’s really important—she told herself time and again.
One day when she felt particularly down, having just typed the home foreclosure of the parents of a girl she’d known in grade school, Velma heard a strange noise she hadn’t heard before. It started out slow and low, and seemed to grow like a wave of insects coming at her and bouncing off the window pane—first one or two, then a few, then a huge noise like a wind storm had blown them all toward her.
Something snapped inside, and she dov
e to the floor, thinking it was an invasion, and those must be planes flying over.
They were, but happy ones. One of the lawyers found her down there and explained. He laughed as he helped her up again. Then he was on his way to be with friends and family, and so the office would be closing early today.
The war in Europe was over—Germany had surrendered.
The town was roaring.
But the war in the Pacific raged on.
Still, like everyone else, Velma took the time to celebrate. There was talk of men coming home from Europe, and others only stopping to visit on their way to deployment against the Imperial Japanese Empire. True, the tide had been turning America’s way, island by island, but word came time and again of how the fighting had been vicious—especially for the Marines . . . especially for Joe.
All through the war, there had been unfamiliar and strange names of places in the news like Corregidor, Bataan, the Solomon Islands, Guam, Guadalcanal, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Many she could not even find on the wall map that the lawyers had put up in the law library.
The minister had come to the office to put pins up of where men from the town had been sent, where they were fighting, and sometimes where they had fallen. Whenever someone died, he’d replace the tiny little flag he’d planted with a tiny little cross. The older men would have a drink in toast and pause for a moment of silence.
The president had died the month before the German surrender, FDR had been elected four times, and the nation fell into mourning—but they still had to fight on. She sometimes wondered if all those men out there in the battle lines had even heard.
Just another one of the casualties, this time on the home front—the home fire burning now was just a candle in the window. By then, it had been a few months since she’d had anything more than a quickly written note, but even that from Joe was a blessing—she’d gotten her own war trunk, and kept all the letters inside. She kept other things too—magazines and newspapers with articles that she thought he might like to read.
A Little Romance: Stories for Hopeful Hearts Page 27