(From One Half Dozen of Luna City – a short story for the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack of December, 1941)
Adeliza Gonzalez-Gonzales – who was never called anything but ‘Adi’ back then – was just thirteen when her older brother Manuel – Manolo to the family, Manny to his Anglo friends – came to Papi and Mama and said to them, “Papi, I want to see more of the world than Karnes County, an’ at the Navy recruiting office, they say that I’ll get a paycheck nice and regular, and I can work on ship engines that are bigger than this house. Besides, everyone says if America gets into a war, then they’ll be drafting men my age, an’ I don’t wanna be a soldier, marching around in the mud and all that. The Navy lives good, and they say that the food is great. Can I have your permission, Papi?”
Mama got all pinch-faced and weepy,
because Manolo was her favorite and oldest child. Papi sighed and looked solemn
and grave, saying, “Manolo – mi hijo
– if this is what you truly want, I will sign the papers.” To Mama, he added,
“Do not cry, Estella, can you see your boy as a soldier, following orders?”
“But he still must follow orders –
the Navy is as military as the army,” Adeliza piped up, and Manolo jeered and
replied, “Nothing like the same at all, Adi!”
Manolo packed a few things in a
cheap cardboard suitcase, and climbed aboard the bus to the city, and in time
over the next three years the postman delivered hastily-scrawled letters and
postcards; letters with odd postmarks and postcards of splendidly colored
landscapes and exotic places. Manolo came home on leave once, in the summer,
splendid in his white uniform and round white cap, carrying a heavy duffel-bag
over his shoulder with apparent ease, seeming to have expanded from a boy into
a man. Manolo was greatly excited. His ship was being transferred from the West
Coast to the Hawaiian Islands. He brought presents for the family, a breath of
fresh air and tales of travels in exotic far lands. Later, he sent his little
sister a scarf of silk gauze, printed with a map of the Hawaiian Islands and
pineapples and exotic flowers. Adi put it in the chip-carved box where she kept
her handkerchiefs and her most precious small possessions. From that time on, a
tinted picture-portrait of Manolo in his uniform sat in pride of place on the
cabinet radio and Mama kept a candle burning before it always, a candle
dedicated to Saint Peter, who had the particular care of sailors.
A winter Sunday morning, when the
breeze from the north promised chilly nights, and the frost in the shade had
not yet melted in the sunshine; Papa came to fetch Mama and Adi and the other
children after morning Mass. Adi sensed that there was something wrong, even
before Papi spoke. There was a peculiarly grim expression on Papi’s face, a
hush among the congregation scattering to their houses after Mass, silence
broken only by the tinny sound of the radio in Papi’s car.
“The Japanese have dropped bombs on
the harbor, and our bases in Hawaii,” Papi said. “The war has begun, whether we
wish it or no.”
“What of Manolo?” Mama demanded,
her hands to her mouth in shock and horror. “Where is he? Is he safe?”
“I have no idea,” Papi replied, his
eyes shadowed with fear. Adi said nothing. She was sixteen now, almost grown.
She met Papi’s gaze with a silent nod of understanding.
Two
days later a card came in the mail, from Manolo, a card on which Mama fell on
with tears of joy. “You see!” she exclaimed. “He is safe! This letter is from
him! All will be well, you will see!”
“Mama,
the letter is postmarked the week before last,” Adi said, to Mama’s unheeding
ears. A week later, a parcel bound in brown paper arrived, addressed in Manolo’s
handwriting.
“Christmas presents!” Mama
exclaimed, “From Manolo, of course. You see, he is safe! It is only rumors that
he is missing, that telegram was mistaken.”
“Yes, Mama,” Adi agreed with a heavy heart and
a show of cheer, for the telegraph office messenger boy had brought that small
envelope at mid-December. The telegram from the war office was followed in
short order by Father Bertram, then the priest at St. Margaret and St. Anthony,
who had seen the messenger boy’s bicycle pass the priest’s residence while
Father Bertram was pruning the pyracantha hedge around the tiny garden.
Everyone knew that telegrams meant bad news, now that the war had well and
truly come to them, but Father Bertram’s intended consolation and comfort were misplaced,
for Mama was not distressed in the least.
“In the government telegram, it
says only that he is missing,” Mama insisted, over and over again. “Missing –
not dead. In my heart, I know that Manolo is safe.”
In the end, Father Bertram was the
most sorely grieved of them all. He departed shaking his head and saying to
Adi, “Your poor dear mother – I can only think that the enormity of your loss
has affected the balance of her mind.”
Father Bertram’s Spanish was very
bad, afflicted as he was with a very strong accent, reflecting many years as a
missionary in the Argentine, so Adi was not entirely certain of what Father
Bertram meant. She only smiled uncertainly. No, Mama had merely decided that
Manolo was safe, and doing what he needed to be doing for the war effort and
would not hear any word to the contrary. Never mind that Manolo’s ship – the
great battleship Arizona, whose
engines Manolo had tended lovingly – had blown up with a roar that could have
been heard halfway across the Pacific. There were pictures of the battleship,
half-capsized in billowing clouds of black smoke in the weekly English
newsmagazine. Poof! Like that, a candle
blown out in a single breath and a thousand and a half lives snuffed out with
it. It made Adi’s heart ache to think of this, and she wept, but not where
Mama could see.
That
Christmas and many Christmases afterwards were not happy occasions for Adi’s
family. They were not happy again until Adi married and had children of her
own, to bury the memory of that first wartime Christmas.
She did not even cry when Cousin
Nando, and Cousin Jesus Gonzales and a half-dozen of the other teenage boy cousins
came to Adi after Mass on Christmas Day, 1941, announcing that they had all
sworn a blood-oath to avenge Manolo. Cousin Jesus had already had his orders to
report to the Army, but the other boys were intent on volunteering for the
Army, the Navy, the Marines even.
“So … we meant to ask you as Manny’s
sister – if you would give us all a token,” Jesus Gonzales affirmed solemnly.
“We pledge to avenge him by killing a dozen Japs each. Our solemnest promise,
Adi!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Adi snorted.
Yes, of course she was angry at the Japanese for killing her gentle brother
Manolo, who only lived to get grease all over his hands and work on his engines
until they were tuned and vibrated like the beating of a human heart. And they
had attacked without warning, without a declaration of war, which to Adi’s
understanding, was sneaky and unfair. But Jesus Gonzales, who was dark-eyed,
lean, and handsome like a movie star, looked at her soulfully and begged again,
until she relented. “Give me a moment.”
She went into her parent’s house –
the house in the oldest part of town, into her room, and took out the chip-carved
box with her most precious small things in it, considering a sacrifice of the
scarf printed with that map of the Hawaiian Islands, the pictures of a tower
and exotic flowers, and blue waves crashing on a white-sand shore; the scarf
which had been a gift from Manolo. No,
not that. She took instead another of her handkerchiefs, a pretty white
cotton gauze handkerchief, printed with little blue flowers and green leaves,
and the sewing shears from Mama’s sewing basket.
Out on the front porch, she met the
cousins – dark-eyed romantic Jesus, hot-tempered Nando, and the others. “My
token, that which you have asked for,” Adi said, as she crunched the scissor
blades through the crisp-starched handkerchief; producing a dozen smaller
squares, and struggled for something to say as she put them into the hands of
that boy or this, thinking that this was absurdly like something from the old
legends, or the movies on a flickering silver screen. She struggled for the
right words. “Not in hate … Manolo didn’t hate, for he didn’t want to be
remembered that way. But for the right, for justice and freedom, and for our
people. For Manolo …” she lost the thread of her thoughts entirely, for Jesus
and Nando reverently kissed the scraps of handkerchief as they were handed to them,
and so did the other boys.
“Write to me?” Asked Jesus, at the
last. “Promise, Adi!”
They all went off, in the following
weeks, all with their small cheap suitcases packed, taking the weekly bus that
was the only public transport then from Luna City to the wider world, and to
the duty and colors which called them. Cousin Nando became a pilot, Jesus a
cook with the Army, the others to service mundane or heroic as chance and
temperament led them. Adi Gonzales was certain that every one of them took that
little square of cotton handkerchief, printed with blue flowers.
Jesus Gonzales certainly did, for
it was one of those small things which she found at the end in sorting out his
things, after half a century of faithful marriage; a cotton scrap, discolored
with age, so fragile that it practically fell apart in her hand as she took it
out from his wallet.
But Mama … No, Mama never accepted
that Manolo was gone from the world of the living. Against all evidence to the
contrary; the telegram from the government, that Manolo never came home again,
she insisted that he was alive and well, doing his patriotic duty for the war,
still working in the engine-room of the battleship Arizona. Mama was first to the telephone – the telephone that was
almost the first in Luna City in the household of a Gonzales or Gonzalez,
certain every time that it was Manolo calling, long-distance. The war dragged
on.
Even when it ended and the next began, Mama
smilingly assured Adi and the family, their friends that Manolo was fine and
happy in his work. For she had seen him frequently – or his likeness, in
pictures of sailors on one ship or another, on shore leave, or in the newsreels
in the movie theater in Karnesville. Mama did not allow the star on the flag
which hung in the front window of their house to change from white to gold, and
there was a wrapped gift on Three King’s Day for Manolo for many years to come.
Now and again, Mama claimed that that she had talked to someone who had seen
Manolo. In her later years, Mama even insisted that she had spoken with Manolo,
on the telephone. In her final illness, she had opened her eyes one afternoon,
and said to Adi – perfectly clear, “There is nothing to worry about, mi hija. Manolo has left insurance, to
take care of us all.”
Some years after both Mama and Papi
passed away, Adi’s nephew Roman and his wife celebrated their twentieth wedding
anniversary with a trip to Hawaii. Roman and Conchita went to the Arizona Memorial, and surreptitiously
left a bouquet of fragrant white plumeria flowers floating on the water; water
still streaked with oil leaking from Manolo’s ship, iridescent streaks which
the locals said were the tears of the ship, crying for her lost crew.
Roman and Conchita also went to the
Punchbowl Cemetery. They brought back pictures. Adi is certain that Manolo is
buried there, among the unknowns from the Arizona.
After all this time, it hardly matters, really. But she likes to think of him,
the strong young sailor in his white uniform, with his hands and fingernails
from which the oil and grime that came from working engines would never quite
be cleaned. She likes to think of him walking among the palm trees, plumeria
and frangipani scenting the tropic air, the blue water and white foam, crashing
on a sugar-white strand.
Now and again, Adeliza
Gonzales-Gonzalez, who has not been called ‘Adi’ in years thinks she has seen
Manolo, in a magazine picture accompanying some story to do with the Navy, or a
sailor half-glimpsed in a television newscast. She is very careful not to say
anything about this, of course.
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