Fallen Flyboy by Cathy Eaton
Fallen Flyboy by Cathy Eaton
Published in The Write Place At the Write Time
http://www.thewriteplaceatthewritetime.org/fiction.html
The mailbox wasn’t empty. Her heart rate drummed faster than her feet as she raced up the front steps of her parents’ home. A letter from Colchester, the town nearest to the English airbase where her husband had been stationed for three months.
But the flimsy envelope postmarked July 26, 1942, wasn’t from her husband.
Mary smiled anyway. Yet another of her Cy’s squadron mates was writing. How they loved the socks, scarves, and sweaters that she’d been knitting and posting overseas. It made her feel good, sending handmade things from home. With all the requests she was getting from Cy’s flying buddies, she planned to recruit her friends to start knitting.
Mary, home from work, deposited the rest of the mail on a table on the kitchen table, slipped out of her heels and shrugged off her suit jacket before she banged shut the mudroom door and padded barefoot across the lawn behind her childhood home. She slumped down against the fence inside her dad’s Victory Garden and wriggled her toes in the soft blades of grass.
“We all loved Cy,” the letter began. “It tortures me that I must be the bearer of such unthinkable news, but I will do my best to describe the details of the mission.” Her stomach lurched, and the sky tilted as the twenty year old blinked furiously, needing to decipher what this man she’d never met was trying to explain about her husband. Phrases lurched out.
Awakened …June 30th…Six crews … our squadron’s contribution to the raid…Leveled off … ten thousand feet…coast of Belgium… flak…evasive tactics…Jerries throwing stuff up…Cy’s ship …a wide spiral…Three Jerry fighters….riddled the plane…Damn cold-blooded…spiral tightened into a spin… hoping the ship broke up sufficiently to enable some of the crew to escape.
The toxic words tingled her fingertips as she clutched the letter to her breast. Numbness seeped into her chest and spread to her knees that were hunched into her body. She wanted to roll up into a tight ball like the caterpillar she had plucked off a tomato plant. The sounds of neighbor kids jumping rope and cars streaming home from work evaporated until she was enveloped in a cocoon of silence. Later, much later, she crawled past a row of leafy lettuce. She saw dandelions poking their jagged leaves through the earth. Her fingers ripped them out, but their roots defied her. She dug with her hands. They were the enemy. If she could rid the garden of these diabolic weeds, then she could make the words of the letter disappear, make today turn back to last week when Cy had been writing about the lousy food at mess time.
Official word arrived later: a uniformed colonel, a folded flag, and a crisp salute. Family gathered and a stream of visitors invaded their home to shower Mary with their sympathy, but she refused to sanction a funeral, refused to grieve. No one witnessed her shed tears.
A reporter seeking to write an article about the fallen flyboy came to interview the young widow, married less than a year. Mary wore red, not black. A fashionable belt singed her slender waist. Blond wavy hair framed her freckled face. She looked like a high school student, not a war widow. She interrupted each attempt to express condolence with a tale of Cy’s crazy antics as if at any moment he’d walk in the door and take them for a spin in his convertible. The newspaper columnist, Margaret Nye wrote:
We fluttered our handkerchiefs and began to murmur, but she said, “That crazy guy! Always getting into scrapes—Do you remember when he rode the wild colt and he stayed on for five minutes before the colt threw him and tried to stamp on him, but he hung to her foreleg and wasn’t hurt a bit.”
We leaned back in our chairs and remembered and kept looking at her.
“Why, that crazy guy,” she said. “Remember when he took the sailboat out and the storm came and everybody said no boat could live through it, and then he came in and there was a cut on his face and the mast had broken, and he asked what we were fussing about.”
No word from Cy came, and Mary’s parents welcomed their daughter to wait out the war with them. The priest at their parish told them to try to keep life as normal as possible. Everybody went off to their jobs during the day and came home at night to eat dinner as a family. In the evenings they played bridge or hearts. Mary’s concentration was sloppy. While the others counted points and took tricks, her thoughts drifted to the roasted chicken she’d prepared for Cy in the cottage they would buy in the country when he returned. Her parents fretted as she spent more and more time drawing sketches of cottages. She even cut out tiny photographs from magazines of appliances and furniture that she glued into rooms labeled kitchen, dining room, and bedroom.
She needed to believe that Cy was coming home to her. In his last letter before his bomber spiraled out of control, he’d closed with a promise.
“Just so you’ll understand and won’t worry—a great many boys get shot down, and aren’t heard of for a long while—but they are all usually safe. If anything like that should happen to me, you’ll know I’m O.K.”
A month after his plane was shot down, her trust was vindicated. Another letter came from a stranger, this one postmarked Holland.
Dear Mary,
Your husband dropped from his aeroplane, while he was flying from England to Germany in the South of Holland, in the River Schelde. I was there in the vicinity with my ship, and it made me very happy to be able to save him from death, when he came down by parachute. He was wounded on his breast, back, and legs, his bearing was very courageous. His situation was not hopeless. I was very sorry to be compelled to hand him over to the German authorities and probably they have brought him to the hospital at Benyen op-Zoom, as their prisoner.
Mary’s counterfeit smiles became real. She felt lighter and began picking names for their children. The hinges on the door of the mailbox practically wore out with her constant yanking it open to search for mail.
On August 13, 1942, Mary received a postcard from Cy:
Darling: Am a German prisoner of War! This is my first chance to write. Let Squadron know… I was the only one who got out alive. Have sorta been through hell. Taken 27 shell fragments out of me but feel pretty good now. Spend most of the time thinking of all the fun we will have when it’s all over. All my love to you. Cy
Energy flooded Mary. She began volunteering in the maternity ward at the hospital. Each baby she rocked was one step closer to holding her own babies. She resumed knitting socks, hats, and scarves for Cy’s war buddies back in England. She wanted to keep them all warm, to keep them safe. She scoured magazines for decorating ideas for their cottage home. Every day was a gift.
For nineteen months, Cy and Mary exchanged letters that the Germans and Americans censored. Thick black lines drawn through sentences robbed the couple of pieces of this fragile lifeline. As permitted by the Red Cross, Mary sent monthly packages: books, more wool socks, chocolates. Cy received only two parcels.
In February 1944, Cy wrote a letter detailing how he was teaching a philosophy class to the other officers. He described chess tournaments, track competitions to keep fit, and gardening to keep sane. No letters arrived from Cy during the month of March. Nothing in April.
Mary wrote daily. Just because his letters weren’t getting through didn’t mean hers wouldn’t reach him.
At first Mary made excuses. Battle chaos and the retreating Germans were to blame. Each morning, her mother practically shoved her out the door. It was all Mary could do to drag herself to the advertising agency where she took dictation. She pretended not to notice how the clacking of the typewriters sounded like gunfire. She rouged her cheeks to hide their paleness. She splurged on red lipstick as if to paint a smile on her face. Friends tiptoed around her, and their compassion felt like betrayal. She hushed their pity with stories about that crazy daredevil she’d married. The guy who during training had flown beneath bridges and dive-bombed barn roofs, making farmers leap into haystacks.
Death kept ambushing her. In less than a month she attended seven funerals: her neighbor, two high school friends, three guys from basic training, and Cy’s fraternity brother, all young warriors who wouldn’t be coming home. Ministers spewed sermons about sacrifice and courage.
At home Mary knitted late into the night, postponing sleep as long as possible. Her dreams sucked her into a war newsreel. First scene: jaunty pilots wave from their bombers. Second scene: squadrons of planes blow up munitions factories, bridges, and troop trains. Third scene: dirt clumps on flag-draped coffins. Fourth scene: jaunty pilot waves from his cockpit. Some nights she woke up and couldn’t remember the color of Cy’s eyes. She pressed her face into her pillow on those nights so she wouldn’t scream.
Mary began canceling dates with friends. Volunteering in the maternity ward became impossible. She hibernated in her bedroom. Once slender, she grew gaunt. In June her older sister coaxed Mary to take a train to visit their father, who had been transferred to Washington D.C.
On the night of their arrival, while they rocked in wicker chairs on the porch of the boarding house where he rented a room, he paced in front of his daughter. Usually quick with a story, on this day his words stuttered to a stop.
Mary smiled at her father. “What is it, Dad? Cat got your tongue?”
He knelt at her feet and reached his hand to stop the steady creak-thump of the rocking chair. “For six months the Red Cross has not been able to find any record of Cy.”
Her smile evaporated. She started to say, “Well everything’s chaotic over there. His letter promi . . .” but her windpipe squeezed shut and she couldn’t remember what she had started to say. Her jaw hinged open as she gulped air, searching for oxygen, searching his eyes for a glimmer of hope.
“You have to accept that he’s not coming home,” her father continued. “It’s time to let him go.”
“You’re wrong,” Mary finally choked out. “He promised.”
Her father’s erect posture slumped as he stroked his daughter’s fists that were clenched into the hollow of her stomach. She couldn’t feel his touch; she couldn’t feel anything. Ice chips moved from her fingers, through her veins, to her heart.
Hours later, Mary agreed to go out for a walk. Anything to stop seeing their gouging pity. Her father and sister escorted the shell-shocked war widow down the grassy avenues of the Washington Mall. Abruptly, she broke away from them and rushed ahead to catch up to a tall aviator in a khaki tunic, screaming her husband’s name. When he turned to face her, she saw Cy’s blue eyes, his tooth that had been chipped in a hockey scrimmage. She grabbed the pilot’s arm as if she would tear it out of its socket. Her father and sister had to pull her away from the startled soldier. They bundled her into a taxi. Despite the gas shortage, her father paid the cabbie to drive along the Potomac River until her rampage of tears dried.
The rattling, swaying train trip back to Cleveland drugged her asleep. Back home, weightless like the feather from a down pillow, her body floated up the spiral staircase to the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. She didn’t undress but burrowed beneath the covers.
Despite the summer heat, she shivered.
She tried to imagine Cy’s final hours. Had shrapnel wormed into his heart and poisoned him? Had a Nazi guard drilled him with bullets? Had pneumonia suffocated him?
Mary squinched her eyes shut, willing herself to witness his departure from life. No visions came. Then she squeezed her skull between her hands and tried to envision a life without him. She couldn’t.
He had promised he’d return.
Finally sleep soothed her torment, as if the doctor had dosed her with morphine.
The phone rang. Its harsh jangle woke Mary. She listened to the footsteps thudding down the stairs to the hallway foyer. More footsteps. Her door creaked open. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?
“Mary, hurry. The phone, it’s for you.” Her feet carried her downstairs. Her hands raised the phone to press against her ear.
“I’m home, Darling. We escaped our German guards. Everything was chaotic. They were marching us to another camp as they raced to flee the Americans.”
Air gushed out of Mary’s lungs. The floor tilted as she pressed the phone so hard against her ear that it bruised her cheek.
“Where are you?” Her voice sounded shrill.
His voice sounded bruised and far away. Static made it difficult to understand his words. “In Washington D.C.,” she finally made out.
“I’m coming,” she said and told him she’d be on the first plane. She had so much to say to him, but for the moment her words shriveled up. Someone pried Mary’s whitened knuckles off the phone. Her younger sister wrote down the address of the Pentagon.
Seven hours later, in a staff sergeant’s office, Mary embraced her husband. Three of his teeth were missing. His skin was blotched with a rash. She barely recognized the cocky flyboy she’d married. An emaciated soldier wrapped his arms around her. In all the years she had awaited his return, it never occurred to her that he would return a stranger.
That night she cradled his emaciated torso in her arms as if he were a newborn in the maternity ward. She rocked him in her arms as he gazed into her eyes, trusting her to make him whole again.