Under the Apple Tree Page 10

  People were beginning to settle in for the trials and deprivations of Wartime. In May, you had to line up to get Food Stamps for the rationing of most of the stuff that was good, like meat, butter, sugar, and eggs. Artie knew that Wartime sacrifice had really come home when Mom served up the first supper of liver, which wasn’t rationed at all, and no wonder, the way the stuff tasted. When Artie complained, Dad just told him to put more catsup on it, and that way at least you could get it down.

  All the guys in Roy’s class joined up right after graduation. Bo Bannerman got in the Air Corps, and Wings Watson joined the Army. There was a big parade down Main Street for the boys who were leaving to defend America and save the world for democracy, and as the drums rolled and the bugles blared, Artie wished he were old enough to go himself.

  Since that wasn’t possible he did the next best thing and planted a victory garden in the backyard. He dug the rows himself and spent his own money to buy the packages of Burpee’s seeds for radishes, carrots, and his favorite vegetable, lima beans. There were never enough limas to make more than a couple of helpings for supper, and the carrots were kind of short and stubby, but the radishes came out great. Artie pulled them up proudly, washed the dirt off them, and put them on a plate at the supper table. Mom and Dad said they were the best radishes they’d ever had. Eating them made Artie feel good even though they didn’t have much of a taste when you got right down to it; the thing was, radishes tasted so blah that it made you realize you were living in Wartime, and if worse came to worst and America’s farms were destroyed by German incendiary bombs you could always survive on radishes from your own backyard till Victory came.

  A couple of weeks after school started in the fall, Shirley came over to read to the Garbers Roy’s first letter from the fighting front! The family got one letter all to themselves in the summer, scrawled in big handwriting that Mom said showed how tired Roy was, but Dad said it just meant Roy was trying to fill up the page and so was the same old Roy and they shouldn’t worry about him. The only exciting part of it had been where the censors had inked out a word. Roy had said, “I got me a view of the ocean, but the nearest hotel is at XXXXXXXXXX.”

  But the letter to Shirley from the front was full of amazing, firsthand stuff about actually fighting the Japs! Of course, Roy wasn’t allowed to say where he was, and when you wrote him it was just to the A.P.O. number in San Francisco where all the mail to the South Pacific went, but from reading the papers everyone knew Roy’s First Marine Division was fighting in New Guinea, and Guadalcanal, and it was probably one of those places or maybe one of the smaller islands that wasn’t even famous yet. The important thing was that he was really in the thick of it.

  Shirley’s voice cracked and the thin, V-mail stationery rattled in her trembling hands when she read from Roy’s letter how the Marines were doing great but the fighting would probably take a long time because “it takes time to dig the little rats out of their holes.… If you look into the jungle you can’t tell if there are three monkeys out there or three hundred … it’s better to shoot a few coconuts than miss a Jap.” Artie made Shirley read those “good parts” over so he could write them down and report them to his class at school, which made him sort of a hero himself, just because he was Roy’s brother.

  But that was nothing compared to the day Artie went to pick up the papers for his route just before Thanksgiving. The bikes of three or four other carriers were parked outside the shed where the truck dropped off the papers from Moline and Old Man Mosely counted them out and made sure all the routes were delivered and the money collected on time. The kids were huddled around Mosely reading something in the new paper, and when Artie came up everyone started cheering. There was a story in the paper that read:

  FORMER BIRNEY STAR GETS 17 JAPS ON GUADALCANAL

  A sharp-shooting fool who is as cool while picking off Japs as he was while sniping baskets for Birney (Ill.) High School was listed in official records today as one of the outstanding snipers in this jungle battlefield. He is Private Roy Garber, credited with seventeen Japs—all of them plucked out of trees with a Garand rifle. Close behind Garber is Private Charles Bailey of Swayzee (Ind.), with eleven. He got them all at one time.

  Artie stuck a pin for Roy on the Battle Map of the South Pacific he had thumbtacked to the kitchen wall, right on the island of Guadalcanal. He prayed he would grow up faster so he could join the fight for freedom, and dreamed of being in uniform alongside Roy, the two heroic brothers risking their lives so the world could live happily ever after.

  III

  1

  Artie was in uniform.

  He stood at Attention along with more than two hundred other troops awaiting their orders.

  “Right hace!” barked the Commander, and Artie pivoted on his right heel, snapping his left alongside it in the same rhythm as the rest of the disciplined ranks, all with chins up, shoulders thrown back.

  “For-ard harch!” the command came, and Artie stepped ahead, his legs moving in unison with the hundreds of others, his chest thrust out and swelling with the pride of being part of this well-trained outfit.

  “By the left flank—harch!”

  As one man, the lines swung smoothly into lengthwise columns on command as they approached the reviewing stand, where among the uniformed officers stood the venerable United States Senator Orville P. Hapgood, wizened and wise, silver of hair and tongue, come to deliver an inspirational Wartime message to the troops.

  “Eyyyyyyyyes—right!” the command cracked forth, and Artie almost threw his neck out of joint he snapped it so hard to his right, where his eyes caught a glimmer of the Senator himself, his silver hair tousled by the breeze, his black suit and gray tie seeming like a kind of uniform of his own.

  When the troops had passed in review and assembled again in formation the Commander put them at Parade Rest and introduced the distinguished visitor.

  “We of Camp Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko, Boy Scouts of America, are proud to welcome the Honorable Senator Orville P. Hapgood, who is here today to pay tribute to our work, and spur us on to greater effort in the fight for freedom and democracy.”

  In the hot sticky Sunday air, with only the sound of a few buzzing horseflies marring the military stillness, Artie concentrated with all his might. He wanted to remember everything down to the last detail so he could write all about it to Roy in his next V-mail letter. Everything was happening so fast now it was hard to keep up with all the exciting stuff going on in his own life and around the world.

  Just before school was out for summer vacation the Americans and British had routed the powerful panzer divisions of the Nazis in the desert of Africa, and Artie had clipped out the headline about it that said “Axis Trembles with Fear!” Out in the South Pacific, Roy and the U.S. Marines had finally captured the key island of Guadalcanal, and were pushing back the Japs in those tiny dots of islands on the Battle Map that Artie had thumbtacked up on the kitchen wall. He stuck a red pin in whatever place he thought Roy was fighting, and memorized the weird-sounding names of places no one had ever heard of a year ago and now were famous: Rendova, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella, Bougainville.

  Some people thought the War might even be won by Christmas, which would make 1943 a red-letter year for Freedom as well as for Artie, who had joined the Boy Scouts on his twelfth birthday and put away the innocently bright blue kidlike uniform of the Cubs for the manly khaki outfit he wore today. The orange crayon marks on his bedroom door showed he had grown past the magic five-foot mark and now was tall enough to be in the Service! He only wished he and his uniformed comrades could march to San Francisco right now and board a ship bound for the Solomon Islands to reinforce Roy and his leatherneck buddies.

  He tensed his muscles to resist the awful temptation to swat away the horsefly that had settled on the tip of his right ear, and watched in statuelike respect as Senator Hapgood stepped forward, stern and gray-faced, to address the troops of Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko. Artie wondered if the decrepit old guy would be able to t
alk loud enough, but he shouldn’t have worried. Hapgood’s crackling voice resounded clearly across the cow-pasture-turned-parade-ground, with words that would remain forever engraved in the hearts and minds of every boy who heard them, right to their dying day.

  Before the unforgettable part, Hapgood praised the Scouts of Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko for taking a whole week off from their regular schedule of canoeing, knot-tying, making fires from their own wooden and leather-thong tools, and baking potatoes in the mud, to spread out across the surrounding countryside and collect scrap metal from every farm, in a drive that brought in 17,483 pounds of potential planes, guns, and ammunition for the War Effort. The boys knew from the ad clipped out of Life magazine and posted on the Pow-Wow Board just how directly this material could be transformed into fighting equipment: “7700 aluminum pans make a pursuit plane … 1 iron makes 2 helmets … 1 old tire makes 8 gas masks … 1 refrigerator makes 3 machine guns … 1 old radiator makes an aerial bomb …” and so on. Artie had hoped they could actually collect the 7700 pans to make a whole pursuit plane, but a lot of the farmers’ wives were pretty chintzy about giving away the pans they cooked in even for a pursuit plane. The guys hoped anyway that the whole amount they collected would make a pursuit plane, even if a lot of it was rusty old car fenders, broken bicycle chains, beat-up shovels and teeth-bent rakes and battered cans instead of actual aluminum pans. The Senator didn’t say anything about the pursuit plane, he just said the Scouts of Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko had made a “significant contribution” that would help Our Boys on the far-flung battlefronts of the world in the fight to save it from the dark night of everlasting infamy.

  They had heard that stuff before, but none of them had ever heard anything like what the old Senator told them next.

  “You boys are learning the lessons here that will make you the kind of brave soldiers who are fighting and dying for us right now,” he said, “I happen to have personal knowledge that some of those soldiers who used to be Boy Scouts, just like you, and who learned the lessons of loyalty and courage from Scouting, were captured behind enemy lines and brutally tortured by the Nazis, who wanted them to tell the secrets about the strength and positions of the American troops. But these brave boys, these former Scouts, refused to betray a single secret to the enemy, even though the sadistic Nazis beat their privates to jelly!”

  At that moment, as if it were part of a rehearsed maneuver, the right hands of more than two hundred assembled Scouts reached automatically to cover themselves protectively between the legs but then in iron discipline forced their hands back to their sides. Only one guy, George Pendennis, actually grabbed his gonads with both hands and doubled over with an awful “Arggggh” sound coming out of him that everyone pretended not to hear because they were still at Attention.

  The Senator went on for another couple of minutes about the stars and stripes, and the truths we hold self-evident, and this nation indivisible, under God, but no one heard or anyway remembered anything after the incredible words “beat their privates to jelly.”

  When the Commander dismissed the formation most all the guys went charging off to their cabins so they could hold on to their balls and screech and moan as they writhed around on their bunks imagining Nazis beating their privates to jelly. It was a million times worse than anything they ever had heard before, much worse than the supposedly true life story of the blacksmith in Decatur who was ready to slam down his huge metal hammer on a piece of iron on the anvil but he didn’t notice that one of his balls had got loose from his pants and was lying on the anvil and he smashed the damn hammer down and crushed his own ball! But even if that was true, which lots of guys swore it was who claimed to know eyewitnesses of friends of the doomed blacksmith, just one accidental smash, no matter how awful and crushing, was nothing compared to a bunch of Nazi torturers methodically going at it until they had beat your privates to jelly.

  Artie wanted nothing more than to run to his cabin and join the other guys in holding his balls and writhing around whooping and groaning, but the awful thing was—awful now, anyway, after what the old Senator had said in front of everyone—Shirley Colby had driven herself and Caroline Spingarn out to Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko to watch the Sunday Retreat parade along with other relatives and visitors and Artie had to go over and squire them around the place. They were already smiling and waving at him, so he couldn’t even put his hands on his gonads just to check and see if they were all right, that they hadn’t turned to jelly just from hearing the torture story. He was afraid if he even tried to do it on the sly, Shirley and Caroline would think he was playing pocket pool.

  Artie forced a smile as he bravely went up to Shirley and Caroline, pretending nothing was wrong or different, hoping they would all agree without saying anything not to mention the horrible torture story. Artie escorted the girls to the Canteen, which used to be the Trading Post before the War, where he treated them to Mounds Bars and root beers but didn’t feel like having anything himself but a stick of Spearmint from a pack already in his pocket. Artie chewed ferociously.

  While they were on the porch of the Canteen, leaning on the rail overlooking the little creek called Old Tuscarora, which was supposed to be an Indian name meaning “Babbling waters,” the Camp Commander, Harrison “Ribs” O’Mahoney, came up and started being real buddy-buddy with Artie, which he never had been before in his life until Shirley Colby showed up.

  Ribs was a tall guy with a sunken chest and long arms and legs that sort of hung real loose on him, which was good for giving guys the knee or the elbow playing football and basketball. Ribs had just graduated from Oakley Central but the Army, Navy, the Marines, and even the Coast Guard turned him down because of a trick knee he had got in the Thanksgiving game with Geneseo, which gave him a slight limp that got even worse after all the Services rejected him, maybe because he felt ashamed or wanted people to know there was something really wrong with his leg instead of just a yellow streak down his spine.

  “Pretty neat Retreat today, huh, Artie?” Ribs said, pretending he gave a tinker’s damn what Artie thought.

  “Sure,” Artie said.

  “These pretty girls here your sisters?” Ribs asked.

  “Nope,” Artie said. “This is Shirley Colby, and this is Caroline Spingarn.”

  The girls smiled politely at Ribs, and he flashed a real Pepsodent gleamer at Shirley.

  “Friend of the family?” he asked her.

  “I go with Roy Garber,” she said, holding up her wrist with the silver ID bracelet on it. She had had some of the links taken out so it fit her now.

  “Lucky guy, Roy Garber,” said Ribs.

  “If you call being out in the Solomons ‘lucky,’” Shirley said.

  “There’s worse things,” Ribs said, and with little spots of red coming out on his cheekbones he turned and limped away, worse than usual. Artie felt sorry for the guy, having to go around in nothing but a Boy Scout uniform when he was old enough for the real thing.

  “I didn’t mean to make him feel bad,” Shirley said.

  “That’s okay,” Artie said. “Ribs has a trick knee and all. That’s what makes him feel bad.”

  “You’d think he could do something,” said the practical Caroline Spingarn. “Couldn’t he drive a tank at least? Sitting down?”

  “You got to be a hundred percent, I guess,” Artie said.

  “At least he’s working with boys,” Shirley said. “That’s a contribution.”

  “Well, it’s nothing much when you think what happened to those boys who were tortured like they were and never gave away any secrets,” said Caroline. “Ughhhh. Jelly.”

  “Excuse me,” said Artie.

  He knew he was going to heave his cookies and he ran off as fast as he could, hoping to make it in time.

  “Where are you going?” Caroline called after him.

  Damn her!

  “To Old Wasacoma!” Artie shouted back.

  A bunch of other Scouts walking to the Canteen broke up laughing, pointing at Artie and slapping their
knees and yelping like a bunch of hyenas.

  “Old Wasacoma” was the Indian name for the latrine.

  Artie refocused his binoculars but he still couldn’t see anything but green leaves.

  “There it goes!” shouted Ribs O’Mahoney. “Look at the markings on the wings!”

  That made Artie think of Swastikas and Rising Suns, or the Star of America or the Bull’s-eye marking of the RAF fighter planes, and he lost all the concentration he was trying to muster to spot the bird.

  “Okay, you guys,” O’Mahoney said, “we saw one. That was a yellow-breasted nuthatch.”

  Ribs was leading a Bird Study Hike, and as usual, he kept spotting more and more kinds of birds you had to identify for Bird Study Merit Badge, even though Artie wondered sometimes if he really saw them. The thirty or so birdwatchers were either still squinting up in the air, or looking questioningly at Ribs.

  “Okay, you guys,” he said impatiently, “go on and write it down. ‘Yellow-breasted nuthatch.’”

  Everyone obediently wrote the name in their Bird Book, making it official that they had “seen” this species, since Ribs O’Mahoney told them they had. Artie wondered if the whole thing was really legal, or whether some National Bird Study Review Board might call him up before them to question whether he had really seen all those birds or only been told he had seen them, which might be cheating, but might be okay since a superior officer had given him the orders to do it.