Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  “Hello?” she said brightly.

  “Hello,” he answered back.

  “Who’s this?” the girl said.

  “This is Bud.”

  A long silence, then the sound of a telephone handset hitting the floor. Goddamn, he thought, she must have fainted.

  “Hey! . . . hey!” he yelled.

  Then in the background he heard shouting. “It’s Bud! Everybody, it’s Bud!” Chairs rattled on a wooden floor and from the footfalls and all the shouting, it sounded like people were running around in circles. “It’s Bud,” he heard someone yell again. “Good Lord, it’s Bud.”

  The girl came back on the phone. She was very excited.

  “Bud, this is Polly,” Uncle Jimmy’s daughter, she said. They hadn’t heard anything about him for so long, they thought he might be dead. “Where you at, Bud?”

  “I’m in San Francisco—”

  “He’s in San Francisco,” she yelled to the others.

  “Where’s the folks?” he asked.

  “They’re livin’ up to Broadview, Bud,” she said. The Old Man was managing the Spiedel Ranch up there.

  “Well, give me their address and I’ll write ’em.”

  “No, Bud. Dad said we’re gonna get in the car and get on up there and tell ’em you’re home.”

  When he finally connected with his family, his mother was beside herself. Between sobs she told him how much she’d missed him, how worried she’d been, how little word they’d had. He told her about the good care he was getting, all he was eating, how he couldn’t wait to get back to Montana.

  “We got lots of food here, Bud,” she said. “We’ll have a real celebration. It’ll make a great Thanksgiving.”

  LETTERMAN GENERAL HOSPITAL was a way station for the returnees, the first of several hospitals and convalescent centers where they were to recover. The army was keeping a close medical eye on the former prisoners of war, testing them, talking to them, cataloging their ills. At Letterman, the army was also collecting evidence. The American government was preparing the “stern justice” it had promised the Japanese at Potsdam, and in every hospital, reception depot, and repatriation center where former POWs were being processed, lawyers and legal assistants were taking thousands of statements and affidavits about war atrocities and the criminals who had committed them.

  A week later, on October 6, Ben Steele was transferred to Baxter General Hospital in Spokane, Washington, the closest army hospital to Billings, some six hundred miles east across the mountains. He was assigned to Ward B-5 with nine other returnees and examined again.

  During forty-one months of captivity, he had dropped more than fifty pounds, but eating his way across the day and through the night, he had gained weight steadily since his release. (He figured he weighed 110 pounds on August 15, the day the Japanese surrendered. Now he was up to his prewar weight, roughly 165.) He seemed to have recovered from the jaundice, malaria, and pneumonia that had dogged him at Omine-machi, but he still suffered the lingering effects of severe malnutrition, beriberi in particular. His ankles and feet were slightly swollen, his skin was dry with red patches, and he had a slight heart anomaly. He also had bouts of dysentery; blood tests revealed the presence of amebiasis, a parasitic infection. He was missing several teeth as well, lost to malnutrition or the rocks that came in his prison camp rice.

  Doctors treated the malnutrition with high doses of vitamins, the dysentery with carbasone, an antiprotozoan medicine, and dentists built him a prosthetic appliance for the missing teeth. Every night nurses also gave him a dose of phenobarbital, a barbiturate used as a hypnotic and sedative. His chart said they were treating him for “extreme nervousness,” which was to say, he couldn’t sleep.

  He got through the days all right, but the nights were bad. At night he was slapped and punched and kicked all over again. He had lived so long in the world of the unknowable, the unforeseen, his psyche was still on tenterhooks. Extreme nervousness—a good description for the fear that followed him to bed. But what could they do, the doctors? There was no therapy for war, no drugs or talking cure to blunt what war leaves behind in the minds of the men coming home from the battlefields and prison camps. If a man was going to bed nervous, best anyone could do was give him a pill and urge him to get over it.

  (Although there were psychiatrists serving in World War II, most of their work focused on keeping men in combat, restoring their psychological balance so they could resume their place on the fighting line or in the cockpit. The only serious research on so-called war neurosis, as Freud labeled it in World War I, was done by Colonel Roy R. Grinker and Major John P. Spiegel, two Army Air Force doctors who studied the effects of war on American and British air and ground forces in the campaign in North Africa in 1943. In May 1945, while Ben Steele was still a prisoner of war, the two men published Men Under Stress, a rare detailed look at the impact of war on the psyche, particularly the American psyche. Grinker and Spiegel did not talk with prisoners of war, but their findings can easily be transfigured to explain the experience of the men in the camps. Their work suggests that when an American soldier exchanges his “birthright of independence” for captivity, he cannot help but feel inferior. “The shattered confidence” and “helplessness which have been the product of [a prisoner’s war] experiences” linger, and when a man is repatriated, he returns home “physically and psychologically depleted.” The greater the “injury” to his psyche, the more difficult the “repair.” The key was “to seek a solution” that would restore his sense of independence. He would never again experience the surety he had when he marched off to war—the enemy had taken care of that—but if his personality was strong enough and if he could find work or activity that restored his sense of self-sufficiency, he might “recover” and begin to build a new life.)17

  BEN STEELE had started drawing again.

  Not long after he arrived at Baxter, he took a call from Father John Duffy the Catholic priest at Bilibid who had secreted the young artist’s charcoal and pencil drawings in his Mass kit. The priest, recovering at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., said he had some bad news. He’d shipped out on the Oryoku Maru, and when the ship was bombed and went down in Olongapo Bay, he left his Mass kit, and all Ben Steele’s drawings, behind. Perhaps, Duffy suggested, he could start to re-create them.

  His days were busy but quiet. Medical appointments, dental appointments, passes into town. He listened to the radio and read the newspapers, trying to catch up on the country he’d left four years before. He also wrote home regularly.

  BAXTER GENERAL HOSPITAL

  Spokane, Washington

  Oct. 16, 1945

  Dearest Mother & Family:

  Thought would write a few more lines to let you know I am still O.K. and expecting to [be transferred to a nearby convalescent center] any moment now . . .

  I know it must have been awful hard for you Mother. Thought about you so much and how you were worrying. Am so happy to be back can’t express my feelings . . . Will close with

  Love & kisses

  Bud

  Since the folks had no phone out at Broadview (none of the rural ranchers did), they had to plan his homecoming by mail.

  Dearest Bud,

  We are waiting every day to hear you are coming home. I guess they want to be sure you are able to return home. Have you had any steak yet? I remember how you used to love steak. There have been so many times here when we had everything to eat. I could never enjoy it thinking you were hungry . . .

  Yes, Joe &Jean are pretty big & I am sure you would never know them. Joe said to me, “You will have to cook a lot of grub when Bud comes home as the way he talked, he could eat the whole tablefull.”

  Lots of love

  Mother Dad

  & kids.

  A few days later, the beginning of the third week in October, a reporter from the Spokane Daily Chronicle came wandering through Ward B-5 in search of a story about returning prisoners of war.

  BATAAN SURVIVOR AT
BAXTER

  RECALLS JAPS’ BEASTLINESS

  There was nothing unusual about a man receiving the last sacrament in Bilibid, the prison where the Japanese sent men to die when they were too feeble and sick to work.

  This man was very sick. Over his frame, which normally carried a weight of 175 pounds, his skin was stretched drum-tight. He weighed maybe 100 pounds. This night in Bilibid, they thought, the man was going to die. They gave him the last sacrament.

  But the man didn’t want to die and he lived. His name is Sgt Benjamin C. Steele Jr. and he now is a patient at . . .

  The article went on to list some of the grisly details of his imprisonment (“I have been beaten so many times I couldn’t count them,” he told the reporter), the death march, Tayabas Road, the hellships. Next day he clipped the article out of the paper and enclosed it in a letter home. When the letter arrived in Broadview, the article was read, reread, read again. Between readings, Bess Steele made up her mind to do something she’d been thinking about for nearly a month, since the day her son first called home.

  Broadview Mont

  Oct 23-1945

  Dear Bud,

  Received your letter & clipping Bud. Dad & I both cried when we read that clipping. Can’t imagine anything like that happening to you. I hope MacArthur orders every Jap killed over there. I am so bitter toward them & I know you have a bitter feeling also. And more than we could ever have . . .

  Well Bud I made up my mind to go to Spokane . . . I will leave this weekend & will go by bus.

  Lots of Love

  Kisses from all

  Mother

  The bus from Billings followed old Route 10 west through Livingston and up into Butte, then through the mountains to Missoula and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, crossing the Washington state line east of Opportunity and, around three in the afternoon, finally stopping at the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Spokane.

  Bud had gotten there early, two hours early, and wandered around the terminal. When he got bored with circling, he sat down to wait, but he couldn’t sit still, so he got up, circled some more, took a seat again. Then a voice from a loudspeaker announced that the bus from Coeur d’Alene would arrive in a few minutes. His chest grew tight; he could feel his pulse throbbing in his throat.

  He walked out of the terminal and into the large open garage where the buses pulled up to unload. He found a spot against a wall where he could lean and watch.

  The passengers got off slowly, stepping down onto the gray concrete platform.

  “Five years,” he thought. “I haven’t seen her in so long.”

  And suddenly, there she was.

  In an instant, they embraced.

  “God, Bud,” she said, “how I missed you.”

  She held him tight and for a long time.

  “All right,” she said at last, collecting herself, never taking her eyes off him. “Now I want you to walk”—she pointed to a spot a few feet away—“walk around over there.”

  “I’m fine, Mother,” he said, “really.”

  Then she hugged him again.

  SHE WAS OLDER than he remembered. In October 1940 when he left home, his mother was fifty, still dark-haired and lovely. Five years later, sitting across from him in the parlor of a family friend in Spokane, she looked seventy.

  Her once dark hair was light gray going to white, her face creased, eyes exhausted.

  She wanted to know everything, she said, everything that had happened to him, and he knew right away that talking to that reporter had been a mistake.

  He tried to stick to what he thought she already knew, what she’d read in the newspapers, but his mother kept pressing him for details. She wanted the worst of it.

  Finally he told her, “Look, Mother, you just won’t believe where I’ve been. And I can’t even explain that.”

  ON WEDNESDAY, November 14, thousands of people filled the streets of Spokane to honor General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright, a native son from nearby Walla Walla who had spent the war with Ned King in prison camps in Karenko, Formosa, and Mukden, Manchuria. A thin man before the war, Wainwright looked drawn now as he sat atop the boot of the open touring car that carried him down Sprague and Riverside avenues past some fifty thousand people (the largest crowd ever to gather in the city) who had lined up five and six deep at the curb to welcome him home with confetti and hurrahs that echoed through the downtown streets.

  Following the general’s party was a line of automobiles carrying former prisoners of war from the Army Air Force Regional and Convalescent Hospital at nearby Fort George Wright, among them Ben Steele.

  People were leaning out of windows and waving from rooftops, more people than any of the former prisoners had ever seen. In the crowds along the curb, men removed their hats in salute, and women clutching handkerchiefs daubed the tears from their eyes.

  Ben Steele was overwhelmed—all those cheers, all that attention—but he could not stop himself from wondering, “How do people really feel about us?” Hadn’t he and his comrades let them down by giving up, surrendering? And how could a man think himself a hero just for staying alive?

  HIS DISCOMFIT had really started several days before, on a trip to the suburbs to visit the wife and parents of his friend Walter Mace, who had died at Camp O’Donnell.

  He’d been with Walter at the end in Zero Ward and had promised the dying man he’d visit his wife, Peggy, who was living with her in-laws.

  He expected the visit would be wrenching, and he was right.

  He told them how much he had liked Walter, what a fine man he was, and how he had gotten sick, so sick there was nothing anyone could do for him.

  At the end, he said, the very end, Walter was thinking of home. (“‘Go see Peggy,’” he quoted Walter as saying. “‘Talk to her. Tell her. You promise?’”)

  Peggy was inconsolable. All he could do was sit there in her grief.

  When he went back for dinner a few days later—he didn’t want to go, but he felt he had no choice—he reminded himself to censor what he said.

  The truth was, Walter had lost heart. Lying in his own filth and a swarm of flies, he gave up. Ben Steele had seen it in his rheumy eyes, the final look of sadness and submission that filled the face of almost every man who had entered Zero Ward.

  HIS FURLOUGH started the day after the parade. He was eager to get home for Thanksgiving to see his mother again and the Old Man and Jean and Joe and Gert and her family. He wondered how much Billings had changed in the five years he’d been away. And he longed to set eyes on the prairie again, the image that filled his mind whenever he thought of home.

  He boarded the North Coast Limited in Spokane and settled down in a seat for the six-hundred-mile trip to Billings. Not long after the train crossed the border into western Montana, another passenger, a man in a suit and tie, approached him. Ben Steele had seen the man eyeing the decorations on his uniform, the three rows of red, green, white, and gold campaign ribbons below his silver Air Corps wings.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I’m Bud Steele,” he said. “How ya doin’?”

  “Bud Steele? Really?”

  He nodded.

  “My God,” the man said. “The whole town’s been wondering about you.”

  And he offered Ben Steele a drink from a bottle of whiskey. By the time the train rolled into Billings, one drink had become five and Ben Steele walked right past his youngest sister without recognizing her.

  “Hey, Bud!” she yelled. “It’s me, Bud, Jean!”

  The whole family was there, fifty of them, everyone hugging and kissing him and patting him on the back all watery eyed and blowing their noses. He looked around, taking it all in—the city seemed untouched by the war. Same small-town feel, anyway.

  On Thanksgiving they went to Aunt Jo’s in Musselshell for dinner. A real crowd, even the neighbors from the old days at Hawk Creek. It was the kind of meal he’d been imaging for years—turkey, dressing, mashed and sweet potatoes, green beans, gravy,
cake, and pie. He stuffed himself, and everyone got a kick out of watching him.

  AT HOME a few days later, his mother pulled him aside.

  She had something to give him, she said, and she slipped her engagement ring off her right hand and held it out to him.

  “This is the only thing I have of any value,” she said. “And I want you to have it.”

  He tried to refuse, but she kept pushing it at him.

  “You’re going to take it, Bud. I want you to have it.”

  He could see there was no point arguing.

  “Thanks, Mother,” he said and slipped the diamond carefully into his pocket.

  A COOL NOVEMBER MORNING and he is up early with the folks at the ranch in Broadview the Old Man is managing. His furlough has been a good one, about a week left, and this morning he’s looking forward to helping the Old Man with some chores. Stock needs tending, and after breakfast he strolls out to the barn to get a horse. He takes the bay in the second stall, slips on a bridle, then a blanket and saddle. He works slowly, enjoying the creak and smell of leather, the barn dust, the protests of the bay against unfamiliar hands.

  When he’s done he leads the animal into the yard, puts his foot into the left stirrup, and finds his seat. His first time ahorse in years, and he sits there for a minute, taking in the ranch, the corrals, the chickens in the yard.

  He’d been staring at the same scene for days, wandering out of the house every so often and lifting his nose to the wind to catch the scent of sage, studying the magpies and sparrows wintering in the hills, listening to the sound of the wind. He couldn’t get enough of it, the rolling brown prairie, the cottonwoods, the winter grass, the feeling of being free.

  * * *

  THIRTEEN

  NOW CAME THE DEFEATED, Called to accounts.