Ink had never looked so stark. Tommy Mayhew was dead.
Staff Sergeant Moody, showing his old-time Yankee stoicism, waited until everyone else had left the officers’ quarters before reading the rest of it.
Shot down. Some town in Germany.
He let the paper fall from his fingers; the other KIA were, for the moment, of little interest to him. War hardens humans, many against their will. It becomes a necessity to be shielded against grief. When the bulletin drifted to the floor, the ghost of those ravaged in mud and who lay in their final twilit whispers, bleeding and cold, outside city gates – Versailles, Warsaw, Dusseldorf – there was Tommy Mayhew, and the number 417.
This is not a war story of guns and bombs. It is not a story of Dresden, or Iwo Jima; it is not of legions of gray-suited blond men, not of the last sights of divine wind.
It will not happen on distant shores, through crimson tides.
It will, instead, happen in one nondescript room, in Madison, Wisconsin.
“It’s a particular feeling,” Dwight Moody will say almost six decades later. His voice is cultured in a gentile way; it speaks of his Cornell education, but it lolls and lilts and – between words – will tell of backwoods Maine, and a time polar to today.
“An emotion,” he says, raising his eyebrows reflectively over spectacles, “that just lets you need someone when they’ve gone. Just an emptiness that you let yourself feel.”
The walls were gray; same for the ceiling, and row after row of bare bulbs hung from it, looking like teeth, casting an over bright glow to the drab room.
Concentrating on the way the smooth, cold steel of the bed frame felt against his arm, the hum of the generator across the hall, and the air redolent of the cheap cigars that all of the other officers smoked, he was reluctant to let himself feel anything but this sterility. His eyes found a spot on the granite-colored ceiling furtively and, with a little sigh of grief – and, at the same time, fear – of what might be dredged up after twenty years, he slipped them closed. He is afraid, but he does.
An emptiness that you let yourself feel, he’ll say.
Gray swirls away and, in its ebb, the America that Mellencamp and Springsteen will sing about decades later. This was not Wisconsin; this was Maine, and in this tiny town, where the sounds of cicadas and crickets drove you mad for half the year, and some of the roads were nothing but oiled dirt, and stout trucks and threadbare blue jeans vastly outnumbered bullet-nosed Studebakers and smart tweed, time to slow down, and the Roaring Twenties lost their momentum, quieting to a whisper, the further they went from New York, from Chicago, from Boston.
Two six year-olds slouched, fishing from a moss-encrusted rock, in cutoffs. Not posing for a postcard, as the early Saturday sun streamed down golden and dry on their shoulders, but, rather, with impatient glares at the fish, which had refused to bite at the bare hooks dangling in the water all morning. Honeysuckle grew all around the pond, but their paths to the water’s edge were apparent – there is a crashing, trampling clumsiness unique to young children. To them, despite the lack of luck, this day was pretty good; in the limbo between first and second grade, they weren’t articulate enough to classify it in any other terms. Sunlight danced across the water, in constant ballet with the small crests and troughs produced by their boredom, in the guise of rock throwing.
Through the ripples, there was a tent, glowing from a Coleman lantern. If you held your ear close you would hear voices – twisted and turning through the octaves of puberty – whispers and similar sibilance, voicing speculations and drawing conclusions as to what, precisely, made a girl a girl. This was the floodgate before real life, and like some great and terrible train, hurdling down a tunnel at full shriek, they could hear it.
One of them had a knife. With it, he confided in the other, he had carved the initials of one specific girl in an adjacent oak. His voice shook as he said who it was.
“Wendy Jay?”
“Wendy Jay.”
There was a dumbstruck silence and, at any second, the would-be Casanova expected it to come apart like gossamer, before giggles; being a child – in all of its naïve, questioning, Santa Claus glory was something everyone only had so much time for and once the first bit was chipped – they both knew – from that toy-loving, girl-hating bit of Cowboy ‘n’ Injuns plate mail, it was a downhill ride. In that silence, they knew life.
The boy clapped his nervous friend on the back. The black flies and the mosquitoes – not to be deterred by the fire – buzzed, a wildcat screamed into the pitch of the moonless night, but the sleeping bags were warm, and the frankfurters appropriately greasy. It was all right.
And that buzzing grew to a clatter, and so many voices could be heard in it; the freedom bell tolling for those going to spill their own red, white, and blue blood. It was the train station, and in this New England exodus, two men, both tall and strong, shook hands; old-time Yankees never hugged. As they shook, they saw fear in each other’s eyes. No Deus Ex Machina, no clap on the back, no stone throwing to pacify. The scores of mothers around, clinging and not finding purchase, with red eyes and matted hair, to a crop of reluctant sons would not scream if it was going to be all right.
The hands let go, and cursory, transparent smiles were exchanged. The trains were boarded and that shriek, amid the clatter of stomping, dragging feet, was manhood.
Dwight Campbell Moody, all of twenty-four years old, of Lincoln, Maine, kept his eyes closed as the caboose of the train disappeared into the tunnel forever, raised his hands from the bunk to his chest, and whispered a prayer. He heard the words, as they hung in the gray silence. The boards had rattled, he remembered. In Bangor, as he had waved, the boards under his feet rattled as the first train left. He let himself feel it.