Finding can bloom in the strangest of places.
After Pop’s funeral, we went back to Ma’s house. She had spent the past few days sorting through his life and memories, taking down the photos, trophies, and memories that Dad had collected over the years, pausing to cry and reflect with each. Pictures of him in the service, stationed on this ship or that, visiting different countries, and his various awards; they all came down. His various movie posters were also packed away; the celebrations of The Best Years of our Lives, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter were each put in storage. My sisters had joined Ma in the “cleaning,” as they all called it, each item requiring a long conversation about Pop, his life, and how much they missed him. I spent my time with Grandpa in the garage, safely away from the overflow of emotion.
Ma’s garage was filled with half-packed boxes of Pop’s things, scattered alongside a pair of unused bikes, yoga mats, and a host of unfinished craft projects, all mute evidence of Ma’s repeated efforts to force some mutual activity. Grandpa was idly picking through a box of items put aside for him when I walked in, things from Pop’s youth that Ma and my sisters had thought Grandpa might want. “Anything good?” I asked as I passed under the half-raised garage door.
He shook his head. “You father always did have shitty taste in music,” he noted, picking up a record, The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding. “Not a single jazz record in here.”
“To each his own, I guess. Are you going to take any of the old pictures?”
Grandpa held up a photo of Pop and his brother, still children. “Best to leave these with your sisters, I think.”
“You never did keep a lot of pictures,” I noted. “Not even of Grandma.”
“Oh, I’ve got one of your grandmother,” he said, tapping against his heart. “I just keep it where I need it.”
Ma came in behind me and wordlessly handed a steaming cup of coffee. She gave the other to Grandpa. He eyed it suspiciously, but she smiled and assured him that she hadn’t put anything in there to soften the bitter taste. Grandpa took his coffee plain. Ma then pulled a chair out from behind a stack of old Christmas decorations and, unfolding it, placed a soft cushion on the seat and set it beside where Grandpa stood. He grumbled about not needing a nurse but Ma ignored his protests, just as Grandma had, giving him a light kiss before returning to the house.
“Are they still reminiscing?” he asked.
I nodded. “Talking about all the good times. Ma said it’s part of grieving, but…”
“But what?”
I leaned against Pop’s old workbench, long unused. “I dunno. I’m just not… Everybody is talking about how sad they are and how much they miss him. I just…” I shrugged.
“Not sure what you’re supposed to be feeling?”
I grimaced. “I’ve been around death plenty. I’ve buried plenty. I just don’t get all the…” Despite my protest, I could feel an unwanted knot forming in my chest. With practiced skill, I forced the unhelpful emotions down, to where they could be safely ignored.
Grandpa looked steadily at me, breathing in the life-restoring steam before taking a thoughtful sip. Despite Ma’s insistence to the contrary, the delicate fragrance of hazelnut drifted up from both my cup and Grandpa’s, mute evidence that she had, in fact, flavored the brew. Grandpa still drank, either not noticing, or just not making comment on, the smooth taste. “Henry, did I ever tell you how I met your grandmother?” he asked suddenly, not looking up from his unpainted cup.
“You met after the war, right?” I noted, grateful for the change in subject.
“Yes and no. We met face-to-face when I got back from the Pacific, but we exchanged quite a few letters while I was still in Fukuoka.”
My heart skipped a beat. We all knew that Grandpa had been a POW in a Japanese camp the last few years of the war. He never talked about it, not ever; and yet, everyone knew. I was eight when Ma had told me, when we had to take Grandpa to the VA hospital after his suicide attempt. She explained as best she could to a child; soul-sick was the term she used.
“I didn’t know they’d let you write letters,” I admitted carefully, not wanting to trigger any worse memories, especially after having just put Pop to rest.
“Not at first,” Grandpa admitted, sitting on the padded chair. He glanced up, lost in thought, while tracing a light touch along the rim of his porcelain cup. “When they first took us, we weren’t allowed anything.” He glanced at me. “You know how that is.”
I nodded. Grandpa and I shared a similar wartime experience, though in different wars; Pop and Uncle Henry had served in Vietnam, but they saw combat. More importantly, though, I was the only one other than Grandpa with prisoner of war experience.
“Once the war turned against them,” Grandpa continued, “orders came down for the guards to be ready to execute all the prisoners; we even had a few drills that we learned later were them getting ready to kill us; they’d march us out to the pissing-trench, line us up, and read the roll to make sure everyone was there. But they never went through with it. Instead, they started letting in mail, doctors, better food.”
“And that’s when you and Grandma started writing to each other?”
Grandpa nodded.
“I’d been on the Grenadier for two patrols before it happened,” Grandpa began, carefully setting his coffee on a long wood bench bearing Pop’s old ship models. “She was Gar-class, built early in 1941.” He sat down on the cushioned chair. “In fact, she was commissioned right around the same time I enlisted. March 19th, 1941. Me and two buddies, Johnson and Dustin, all out of Richmond.”
“Were you at Pearl Harbor when…?”
“Nah. The Grenadier was on patrol, like most subs. We’d been tracking a destroyer before the attack; they think she was screening the Jap carriers. Anyway,” he leaned back and took a deep breath. “we got word about Pearl and everything changed. Instead of tracking, we started hunting, keeping the Jap fleet jumping around trying to protect their oil and troops. Our goal was to delay while they rebuilt the surface fleet.” He laughed then, somewhat ruefully. “It’s funny, but the Germans catch a lot of shit for what their U-boats were doing in the Atlantic, but we were doing the same damn thing in the Pacific. Only real difference was we didn’t go out of our way to target civilians.”
“That’s war,” I confirmed. “You were in the engine room, right?”
“That’s right,” Grandpa confirmed. “Me, Johnson, and Dustin all worked in the same garage before we enlisted, and we all volunteered for the submarine service together.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why be a submariner?” I asked.
Grandpa shrugged. “Better pay. You got a bigger signing bonus and extra pay.” His eyes grew distant for a moment before returning. “Plus,” he said, “submarine crews a smaller and… well there’s something about being part of a small, close-knit team.” Grandpa retrieved his cup and took a drink. “Me, Johnson, and Dustin had all grown up together and we stayed close after leaving school. I liked having a close group I could count on. We got along great, the three of us, except for music. We could all agree on band music, and Johnson got us to liking the Jazz he was always listening to, especially Cab Calloway. But God help us if Judy Garland came on; everything had to stop, no noise at all, so Dustin could listen in peace.”
“He liked her singing?”
Grandpa snorted. “Singing, hell. That fool saw The Wizard of Oz and fell in love. She could read a grocery list and he’d have listened. Anyway, all through ’40, the news was about Japanese aggression and the need for fighting men. We were all dreaming of seeing the Far East and wanted to get out of that garage anyway, so…” he shrugged. “After training, we were all assigned to the Grenadier. Johnson was a Cook, Dustin was an Electrician’s Mate, and I was a Machinist Mate, Third Class.” He grinned. “Fancy title for the asshole that kept the pistons turning.”
“I thought you all worked in a garage? Why the different ratings?”
Grandpa sipped his coffee. “Dustin had a knack for those new circuits, and he was small enough to fit his hands behind the panels. And Johnson…” he shrugged. “The Navy only allowed Blacks certain jobs back then.
“Loud as hell in that engine room,” he mused. “You could always tell the new guys by their yelling.”
“Yelling?”
“At night, when Jap planes couldn’t spot us, we ran on the surface to swap out air, with the diesel running to recharge the batteries. You couldn’t hear each other over the racket. Hell, you couldn’t hear yourself think. Two diesel engines, screaming at each other like an old married couple.” Grandpa chuckled. “New guys tried to yell over the engines, usually lost their voices by day three. After a week or two, you learnt to just signal.”
“What about when you submerged?”
“That was daytime, when the Jap planes were out, or when the skipper was lining up a shot. When we switched to batteries…” Grandpa’s eyes clouded. “The whole world was quiet during a dive. Nobody moved or even breathed; we just looked at each other and waited. No noise, that was the rule while the Skipper and the rest were lining up a shot. We’d just stand there, crammed together in that tiny compartment that stank of oil and grease and sweat and ass.” He grinned. “Gotta say, there’re times I miss that.”
“Seriously?” I asked, thinking back to my own time confined in such a tight space.
Grandpa smiled again. “60 guys in a 300-foot-long metal tube, along with provisions for a 75-day patrol, the 24 torpedoes, and ammo for the deck gun and small arms. Showers only every 10 days, if that, and during a dive, the air got so fouled you couldn’t even light a cigarette. Triple-stacked bunks with less than a foot of free space between you. At first, we put Dustin’s skinny butt up top and I got the basement, but on the third night after lights out, we caught him playing with himself, staring at this old copy of Photoplay with Judy Garland on the cover. After that, we put him in the middle, where we could keep an eye on the little freak.
“Of course, an attack run was a whole different thing. You’d hear the torpedoes swimming away, maybe a few thuds, and then we went deep and quiet.” Grandpa snorted, “Except the fuckin’ torpedoes didn’t blow, half the time.”
“Why?”
“Cheap-ass contractors. Greed, boy, pure and simple. Oh, nowadays you hear talk of rushing production after Pearl Harbor, but that’s crap. Even before Pearl, our equipment was garbage. Half the time, our fish either malfunctioned, going too deep or swinging wide, or they just bounced off the target. Hell, sometimes the damn things would just move out in this wide circle and come back at us. So,” his face grew stern, “most of the time we surfaced and used the guns.
“That’s how the Japs caught us. We were finishing off a troop convoy, hitting their hulls with the big gun and using small arms to chew up anybody that came on deck. All the sudden Dustin, on lookout, started screaming his head off and pointing.” Grandpa shook his head. “When I saw them, my gut just dove under the waves and never came up again.
“A pair of Jap destroyers were coming at us. Skipper ordered an emergency dive, but…” He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Four hours of them hunting us. Depth charges going off every few minutes; the whole damned world grabbing you and trying to break your back, like the Grenadier was trying to throw us off her. Concussions breaking shit all over the boat, fires starting, smoke building up, guys yelling.
“The worst was the time in between, though, when it got quiet again. When you’re hiding and the power is giving out, the only sound is your heart.” Grandpa loosened his tie, pulling the noose free and releasing the top two buttons on his shirt. “We lost electrical, so the whole sub went dark; there was only some flashlights being used for damage control, everything else was just a closed-in nothing. The air felt like someone was wringing your neck; between the fuel leak, the smoke, and the CO2 buildup, there wasn’t a breath to be had. After hours of maneuvering, the batteries were all but dead, so everything was turned off except sonar and the one screw that still worked.
“We knew she was taking on water, but we couldn’t find the cracks, let alone plug them. So,” Grandpa breathed deep, “Skipper finally ordered us to surface. We’d get out on the rafts and scuttle the Grenadier. Then we’d try to paddle to an island. But the periscope was barely broke surface before they started shooting at us. The raft over portside just exploded in shreds of rubber and chunks of red meat. There was wasn’t even time for them to scream. The rest of us just froze. Finally, some Jap officer started hollering, and they took us aboard one of the destroyers.” He took a deep breath. “Next stop, Fukouka.”
***
“They loaded us in with a bunch of other prisoners on the Oryoku Maru,” Grandpa said once I’d returned with fresh cups. I hadn’t even realized that I’d drained my coffee, so I briefly left for refills, and the break was necessary, for one or both of us. “Army mostly,” he continued, accepting the plain black coffee, “taken early in Guadalcanal, and some sailors from the Chicago. They took us to Penang first, then up through Malay before shipping us to Japan.
“Fukuoka was actually three camps, spread around the prefecture. Originally, we were in Mushiroda, where they made us work on building a new airfield. After that, they moved us to Hakozaki. It was near some river; I forget the name. There was a rail line nearby, with trains every few hours, even at night. The camp itself was in a pine forest, at the bottom of a deep valley. Groves of trees everywhere; hardly any sun could get through, the branches were so thick. You could just breathe in the woods, at first. It was… peaceful.
“They put us to work cutting lumber, clearing the woods as fast as possible, faster. All we had were old, manual saws, and accidents happened all the time. Injuries usually just meant you’d either die of infection, or the Japs would take you away.” A burning memory froze in my gut then, as I flashed back through my childhood to all the woodworking projects I’d helped Grandpa with. I realized, then, how an auto mechanic learned to work with wood.
“The first thing they had us build was a crematory,” Grandpa continued, “back behind the camp. That ran pretty steady for the next two years. Me and Johnson did ok with the timber, but Dustin struggled to keep up. Anybody that didn’t work hard enough was punished. Dustin was just too small, so me and Johnson had to help him out, making it look like Dustin had gotten some of our work done. The three of us looked like we did less than the others, but usually not so much that we’d get punished.
“There were no real latrines, just a few trenches that ran towards the creek we drank from. Within a week or two, the whole damned camp was covered with flies and mosquitoes. Everybody got sick. They had an open cesspool right next to the kitchen, and the only heat we were allowed was exercise. As time went on, the smaller, weaker guys would just keep getting sick and, if you couldn’t work…” he shrugged. “They found uses for the sick and weak. Me and Johnson tried to cover for Dustin for as long as we could, but…”
Grandpa chuckled suddenly; the deep shadow that had been growing across his face retreated a bit. “Funny thing was, they thought they were being cruel by packing us so tight in those old shacks. Tiny rooms with straw mats to sleep on and more than a dozen men per room. Thing is, we were submariners; we were used to having no personal space. We were used to smelling each other and sleeping right up against each other. And as cold as it got in the winter…” Grandpa openly laughed. “Fucking guards froze their balls off at night, but me and the guys, we got real cozy warm with each other. Most nights, we all snuggled up and got a good night’s sleep while the guards suffered.”
His laugh faded away, then, and his gaze went distant, back through the years. “Of course,” he noted, “cutting wood was just the day job. They had different sorts of fun for us at night.
“The airmen went first,” he said then. “This wasn’t long after the Army started firebombing Japan. They took all the pilots to a local girl’s school of all places… they brought back the heads and mounted them on sticks outside our barracks. That was just some fun they had, not an interrogation. Those they took for questioning…” He looked at me. “I heard they started training programs for people that might get captured; that true?”
I nodded. “It’s not much.”
“Didn’t help?”
I shrugged. “What could?”
Grandpa nodded his understanding. “’Whiskers,’ is what we called him. Never learned his real name. He didn’t wear any rank, so I suppose he was a civilian. The others made a point of shaving, but old Whiskers had this long mustache.” He sighed. “Well, everyone got a turn with Whiskers. They’d make you kneel in front of him and bow, putting your forehead to the floor. They’d handcuff you behind your back, and old Whiskers would ask you questions and beat you with his wooden sword. He’d hit you when and where the moment took him. Every now and then, he’d take out a real sword and threaten to cut off your head. You’d believe it, too; there were lots of heads out front. When they broke something or you started pissing blood, they’d return you and start on someone else for a while. Sometimes they’d grab you again after a few days. Sometimes they didn’t bother.
“We could never figure out why some people were killed and others weren’t.” Grandpa’s voice was empty of anything except facts. “The guards would just grabbed whoever they spotted first. Sometimes they’d bring in kids or fresh recruits from local villages; they’d line up the visitors and pick a few of us at random. The guards would tie our guys up to these big poles in the assembly yard. Then these instructors that came with the visitors would demonstrate judo, archery, and sword-fighting, sometimes with practice weapons, sometimes with real ones.” Grandpa creased his brow. “They said they wanted their students to see what war looked like.
“Any pilots and aircrew that came in were given to the doctors. We learned later that they’d go to some university lab and demonstrate what live organs look like and how to remove them.”
He leaned back, once again running his hand along the hard wood of Dad’s workbench, as though to reassure himself of the separation between past and present. “We didn’t know why then, of course, but the second year was a lot worse. Things were going bad for the Japs, and they took it out on us. There wasn’t questioning anymore, just beatings and…”
Grandpa sniffed and blinked, though there were no tears. None left, I suppose. “You remember I said I enlisted with two other guys?” he asked and I nodded. “Dustin, they, uh… they grabbed him one day and took him into the yard, yelling something about revenge for the Philippines. They, uh… they stripped him, and tied him up to one of the practice poles, the ones used for those demonstrations. We didn’t see any students or recruits that morning, just a whole bunch of guards holding those practice swords. Whiskers, he had his real sword, but he was standing off to the side…”
Grandpa took a deep drink, finishing his coffee. “It didn’t take long for Dustin to stop screaming. He stopped even before we got out to the trees for the day’s work. We could still hear them beating him, though. They screamed at him and kept hitting him, a wet, thumping…” Grandpa looked deep into his coffee, his eyes lost in the darkness of time. “His head was mounted by the time we got back from the day’s work.” His eyes glistened and his breath held a slight catch, as though some weight was pressing down. “That day, I remember… I don’t know who or when, but while we cut down the tress, someone started whistling. You weren’t allowed to make noise, not talking or anything. They’d punish you for any noise. But… all the sudden, everyone was whistling, soft, but steady.” Grandpa closed his eyes. “We all whistled ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow.’”
***
This time, Grandpa went to refill our cups. He fixed his cup the way he liked, no sugar, no cream, nothing to dull the bitter reality. I took mine similar, though with some sugar. Once he had the drinks, Grandpa jerked his head for me to follow him onto the small porch where Ma’d set out a couple of chairs. One had a cushion, the other didn’t. Grandpa noticed the soft pillow and grumbled something about busybody women in his life, but he still sat with relief. I took the accompanying seat and accepted the offered cup.
The late afternoon was quickly losing what little warmth the day had provided. You could feel the mountain air pushing against the nearby sea, fighting for supremacy. I took out a cigar, clipped the end, and created a small point of warmth against the growing chill. I offered Grandpa a drag, but he declined, instead staring out into the distant and endless blue.
“Once the invasion of Okinawa started,” Grandpa continued, “I guess the Japs knew the game was up. All the sudden, the beatings and deaths just stopped. The camp commander told us that we could send letters home and get mail back.” He grinned. “Of course, our letters were not to mention certain things. They’d read them, and anything they didn’t like wouldn’t go.”
“Did anybody try anyway?”
Grandpa shook his head. “No heroes left by then. No, we wrote letters that only said we wanted to go home and what we’d do there. Me and Henry Johnson, we both sent letters home and we both got letters back from our sisters. Both the girls had sent photos for us.” Grandpa smiled and leaned back into his seat; his eyes lost in the fading horizon. “That was a good day,” he said softly.
“We’d finished work and had formed up for mail. Both me and Johnson got letters, so we took them back to our barracks and read. We’d been given new coats and the air was just cool enough for them. There was a breeze that blew the stink of the kitchen and the piss-trenches away, so you could almost get a clean breath. Johnson glanced over and saw the picture of May, my sister. He whistled and congratulated me that my sister and me didn’t look anything alike. He held out his own photo and offered a trade.”
Grandpa reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small rectangle, faded and bearing all the creases of a long life. It was blurry but there was no mistaking the image of a beautiful woman, radiant in the full bloom of youth. She wore an old-fashioned Navy Nurse Corps uniform, neat and crisp on her small frame. Her tiny hands were folded in her lap, a show of modesty somewhat marred by a mischievous grin and rebellious rise of her narrow chin. Her tie was missing and the top two buttons of her blouse were open. Her hair, though tied back, was thick and lustrous, a dark halo around an almost elfin face, whose superficial humility did nothing to quiet a spirit that still sparkled despite the old wrinkles of the photo.
“I lost something,” Grandpa said, “the first time I saw this.” He thought for a second. “Or maybe I gained something. Your Grandma, she reached out and took hold of me. Six thousand miles away, she reached out like she was right in front of me. She grabbed on and never once, not in more than fifty years, has she ever let go.
“Me and Henry Johnson, we made a pact that day. We’d live. We’d live and go home. We’d meet up with these beautiful women that became our whole worlds. We wrote to them, and they wrote back. It was months before we actually met, but I could hear your Grandma’s voice as though she were talking, whispering, to me. She told me about being a Nurse, about treating the guys that were sent home in pieces. I told her about life on a sub.” Grandpa smiled at me. “Did you know your Grandma was a dancer?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“That’s how she paid for nursing school; she danced. She asked me if I knew how and, when I wrote back saying I didn’t, she started talking about all the dance-spots she liked and the music she liked to dance to.” He closed his eyes. “I dreamed about dancing with her every night.
“Every day, cutting those damn trees and lugging dead trunks up and down those hills, every day of that me and Henry Johnson reminded each other that we were going to live and get home to those girls. When I got dysentery, when I thought I was going to shit myself to death, Henry reminded me. He reminded me that I promised to take his sister dancing. By God, I knew I was going to live to dance with that girl.”
Grandpa held the picture against his chest, breathing deep with closed eyes. I said nothing, just let the smoke from my cigar slowly form a ring around our heads, banishing the chill.
He returned the picture to its place against his heart. “1 in 5 men that served on submarines died in the war. 1 in 4 prisoners died in the camps. We survived. We went home.
“I remember stepping out of the transport. People were cheering everywhere and waving small American flags. A band was playing off to the side somewhere. Politicians, generals, and admirals were there to shake our hands and smile for pictures. Newspapermen asked questions we weren’t ready to answer. Bible-thumpers offered to pray for us. But all I saw was the most beautiful woman God ever blessed this shithole world with. She wore a bright blue dress. Her long hair had its own light, shaming the sun. She was smiling; she was always smiling. I just stood there, on that flight line; I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Dottie, your Grandma, she moved up, putting that little sway in her hips that just drove me nuts. She glided up and said, ‘Did you bring you dancing shoes?’”
***
Grandpa died about a year later. They laid him to rest next to Grandma. Ma and my sisters attended the funeral. I made my excuse, the same as my uncle. I would deal with whatever I had to in my own way, in my own time. That had always worked before… until it didn’t. The past started coming up, more and more often. I was having a harder and harder time pushing it back down, until I finally tried doing it permanently. A friend managed to get me to a hospital, where they got me some help; that’s where I met Angie.
Eventually, I was told that I had recovered enough to leave the hospital. I asked Angie to come with me to meet my grandparents. The funny thing is, standing at the grave, I didn’t really feel the sorrow that seemed to have worked its way through the rest of the family. I didn’t have any deep thoughts about mortality, or how the passage of time is slowly whittling down the people I know. I didn’t even have any grand affirmation of life, thinking about the families my sisters have started. I was worried, at first, that I might be slipping back into that darkness I’d only just climbed out of, but Angie just smiled and asked me to tell my story. Remembering the look of peace on Grandpa’s face after he told his, I talked. Standing there, surrounded by the dead and staring at the granite marker, I told her my story.
Only now, years later, do I understand the meaning of my grandparents’ headstone. Only after thinking back at my grandfather’s story and comparing it to my own, do I start to have an idea of what the words mean. Only after having married a woman that saved my soul, and shared with her all the pain war inflicted upon me, and then seeing her loving acceptance of the damaged creature I’d become, only then did the testimonial to my grandparents really make sense to me.
I think often of that granite block in its small Virginia graveyard. I think of the four words inscribed on it:
Jim and Dotty
Together