Summer was dying. It was lulling itself to sleep with the whispers of leaves already drying on the branches of oak trees set in the most brilliant greens and all shades of the sun. Summer would have to wait for its reincarnation next year however and it wouldn't be a rebirth that I would be seeing again in Trost, Michigan anytime soon.
Pulling air into my lungs, I stood as a boy, shoulder to shoulder with my shorter mother at the bus stop. Only one would be boarding it. Beside me sat my suit case filled with the meager things I was allowed to bring: underclothes, a flannel, jeans, my small sketch book with two pencils and hanging with a great weight around my neck, my mother's silver Joan of Arc pendant.
Yes, I could stand beside my mother as a boy for a few more minutes, indulging her, as her only, as her baby. Seeing me as a man would only remind her that I was leaving any minute now. I squeezed her hand tiny in mine.
She looked up at me. Her hair was all soft toffee curls sitting on her brow and around her shoulders but her eyes didn't hold the light of the morning the way her tendrils did. They looked like they had aged a year each day until this one had arrived. She looked so tired. Tired from all the crying and endless prayers said in the quietness of her grief or spoken out loud in defiance to my father whom might hear it in his eternal place of rest.
I gave her the only thing that I could in the moment. The only thing that she needed more than air perhaps. I gave her my smile. That goofy lopsided grin that often won me hers.
I mentally begged her not to cry when she looked away once but bravely looked back again. She was steadfast as an individual. Alone in the beginning, working two jobs as a teacher and a waitress, she raised me to the son standing two heads taller than her. In the end, I would have to leave her. I could only hope to be half as strong, staring into the abyss of my future.
I was weary of making promises but seeing her look at me like I was about to vanish into the thin morning air, I had to give her something more. "I'll come back you know." How many other sons and husbands had made this promise I wonder? Yet, just because I had said it in reflection to anyone else in my shoes didn't diminish it's solid presences between us. We could both hold onto it until whatever maddening conclusion led me to its end.
"I know." She replied simply swinging my hand with hers between us as I had as a child walking through the park with her. Such distant vanilla memories.
I smirked. "I'm one tough son of a bitch." I gloated outwardly showing my arrogance despite the hollow pit in my stomach I was threatened to fall into.
Mother smiled knowing my brand of mischief. "Jean, did you just call your mother a bitch?" She asked sternly looking up at me with the look in her eyes that was usually followed with a wooden spoon to my ass a minute later. She was always such a feisty little thing and so pretty. I had always thought, like all boys, that my mom was the most prettiest lady.
Even the dark in the hollows of her eye sockets and the redness around the rims of her eyelids from crying hadn't convinced me otherwise. "No mam." I said holding my unoccupied hand up in defense between us. The look on her face didn't have me convinced that there was peace between us.
"I should hope not. I raised you better than that." She had raised me perfectly in all her flaws.
"Of course." I smiled widely feeling the tips of my grin press into the meat of my cheeks.
"And such a filthy mouth. You sure you don't want to join the Navy instead?" She joked coping with the ticking time passing us by.
I had once considered it. Some of my friends had gone to the Navy to fight the war on the high seas but in the end, I couldn't cope with the concept. There was just something unsettling about being trapped in a listing battleship in the middle of shark infested waters that agreed with my stomach about as much as riding in a car did. Which was not at all if anyone was wondering. So, I chose the oblivion that would keep my feet on dry land.
She looked up at me in profile, screwing up her left eyebrow. "It's not too late you know. I can still hide you in the cellar." She mused trying so hard not to let the last of our moments slip by unnoticed. If she could, I'm sure that she'd capture them and string them on a necklace.
Just as selfish, I replied in turn. "No thank you. I don't think that the rats and I would get along too well." We didn't have rats in our cellar to be honest.
"Bummer. Well at least mail me a new husband." I tilted my head at her with raised eyebrows. "I'd like one at least 5'11'' with dark eyes and a good income. To go please." I snorted out my nose looking to the sky. How did the cosmos work in such wonderful ways to bless me with such a splendid mother? A question for the philosophers I'm sure.
The sound of a worn engine caught our attention down the road. I was sure that the sight of the red bus descending upon us was breaking my mother's heart. She looked up at me biting her lip fighting to finally see me as the man I had become at this point, even though I didn't feel like one. I had thought wrong that her tears were entirely dried up.
One slid down her round blushed cheek pulling my courage down with it. I enveloped her in a tight hug to my chest. Her thinly muscled arms skirted around my back pulling me to her with a strength I never knew she had. She sobbed once but only once.
Her whispers seemed so mundane and scolding but it was the last thing she could offer me besides the kiss on my brow. "You train hard and don't be a brat to your fellow recruits. Listen well to your teachers."
"I will. I promise Mom." I said inhaling her comforting scent trying to scribe it into the stone of my memory.
I could feel her hand slide across my sternum looking for her saint. She padded the pendant thrice. Look after him, Joan.
"Be safe, Jean-boy."
I pulled back to look into her glistening eyes. "I'll write to you as soon as I can." Her hands grabbed mine and pulled them to her forehead. I didn't know the level of strength it took her to let go as the shadow of the bus washed over us.
I kissed her forehead as she did mine, her hands going lax in mine. "Good-bye Mother." I pulled away finally able to face the open doors of the bus as a man yet I felt small like a child: frail and insignificant.
The first step on that bus was the one that unraveled me the most. Despite myself, I couldn't look back, a coward of my own resolve. How I wanted to turn around and run but an oath was burned in pen on paper beneath my finger tips and my time was up.
I took up a seat on the other side of the bus making sure that, if by some chance I was still able to, I wouldn't be able to look back. My suit case was put above my head in the bin save my sketch book and one pencil. It was a long drive from the rural area of Michigan to the train stop in town 3 hours away.
The ride into town did prove to be not only boring but also exhausting. I didn't feel tired physically but my mind buzzed with all the things I should have said better to Mother when I left her standing at the stop. I thought about how I should have hugged her tighter or how I should have spent more time with her in my final days at home. All of the ways that she meant to me or how she could be confident that I could handle this.
Hindsight was a hungry beast today. I wasn't handling this well at all. I feared that the little jar I kept sealed away in my heart with her memories inside would only prove to be too heavy to carry. I secretly begged my feet and legs not to fail me.
The bus stopped mid town where the people buzzed in the excited yet sombre air. Those who lived closer to town could afford the luxury of saying good-bye at the station unlike us rural folk. Yet, it was all the same sorrow written in their faces as it was in mine. Most could summon their best smile for who ever was being left behind but there were a few whose honesty couldn't be smothered, the distress of separation and the unknown too much to bear.
We could all relate in that way, although most of these boys were strangers to me. There were some familiar faces stagnantly still in the moving mass of people however. It gave me a small stone of hope to hold in my hand to know that something familiar to me was going with.
"Connie!" I called over the gasps of the locomotive's steam engine on my left, a great metal beast of steel wheels and the smell of burning coal.
The boy, shorter than I by obvious standards, turned around upon hearing his name. "Hey, there he is." He said shaking my hand like we hadn't just seen each other two weeks ago talking about what we were doing today.
I took the sight of him in before he decided to ruin our reunion as his usual protocol dictated. He had shaved his head, reasoning weeks before that it would be easier to deal with. I agreed with him but didn't follow his example, too attached to my own locks. I just wasn't my father's son without the agouti hair flipping out on my crown six ways to Sunday.
He shuffled a bit in his suit, his pants buckled high on his hips. The little imp looked sharp unlike myself who had shown up in suit pants, a white buttoned shirt with a sweater vest pulled over the whole outfit. I didn't look homeless per-say but I didn't look like a million bucks either. Looking around me, in the sea of well dressed individuals, I stuck out pretty badly.
Not that it was a problem on my part. I simply didn't care..
Taking my silence as a signal to talk, Connie proceeded to create dialog between us. I was simply convinced that he couldn't stand any length of silence. I, in contrast, couldn't get enough of it.
"You ready to get this started?" His face froze for my answer with baited anticipation.
There were small things that I didn't particularly care for in people and in Connie, it was his too forward eagerness that rubbed me raw like sand paper. I knew that it was just in his personality and he made up for it by being a reliable friend but I still couldn't help my mental cringe.
He lacked the steady personality that I preferred in my company. I liked to take my time with things and see the world in finer detail. To fully feel the steady beat of the universe unfolding around me like standing in the center of a blossoming flower opening its petals lethargically to a bright warm morning.
I knew that my lively hood wasn't always going to reflect how I wanted it to be, not even by 30 percent but I knew that most people defined themselves by the quieter moments in their lives. Goodness knows, that in all the hours I spent drawing or painting, that I found my own defining moments spent between lazy hours of portraying things in detail.
Don't get me wrong, I love the thrill you get when your heart pumps the heat of your boiling blood through your veins and all but as a man who can appreciate the slow build of progress, I was in no hurry to "get things started" as Connie had asked so enthusiastically.
In no real hurry to race to my death either, as I could put it in another way.
Which, by statistical standards was more than likely the case. I wasn't too much of a coward not to read the headlines that reached us state side from across the seas. I scared myself sometimes on how much I sought to know about the truth of things and the truth was that Death was wearing his best to greet whoever Fate didn't favor. I could shiver at the thought that my name was on his list.
For now, this notion was nothing more than a faint whisper in my skull. However, I knew as time grew on, that it would take on a more concrete form.
Maybe I was being too morbid and blunt about things, perhaps it was what people found irritating about me as I had found Connie's quirks to be but it was just how I had built the world around me. I liked being realistic and I didn't need anyone's permission to sleep in this bed I had made.
Apparently I had ignored my friend long enough, in my own thoughts, for him to understand that I didn't want to reply to his silly question. So he tried a different approach to get a conversation out of me. No matter how much I might passively protest.
"I can't believe this."
He was just so good at breaking my inner revery. I could have been on an earth shattering break through and this little shit made damn sure to cut every tether in my head. Sometimes that was a good thing though. Like now for example.
I indulged him this time.
"What is so dastardly, may I ask?" I mocked outwardly. Connie gestured to himself as if I knew exactly what his conundrum was. Sometimes it was better to ask than assume.
He pouted looking up at me. "I'm going to be the shortest recruit ever drafted into the Army." It took everything in me to give him a smile. One that I may have been saving for my mother when I got back from deployment or whatever place I would end up.
These days, particularly this one, I found myself selfish with my smiles. I couldn't really help it but I knew that Connie was just as nervous over all of this as I was. If a little assurance was what I could give him by smiling at his ridiculous antics then I was all the more closer to the day when I could give them out freely again.
"That just means you'll be harder to hit." I reason. I know that it won't put his insecurity to rest but it's enough to get him to loosen up. Connie grinned punching me lightly in the shoulder. I grunted at the contact and retaliated by kicking over his suit case. We chuckle with our heads down never needing to say anything else.
I didn't want to waste any conscious effort trying to reason myself across the line of optimism. I couldn't delude myself into thinking that what I was doing was going to be noble or heroic. I might not even get the distinguished honor of being buried in my own country's soil should I bite the dust overseas.
Yet, here I was, unable to run away because the fear of repercussion was much more real than a war breathed in conversations on the street or fragmented in the words in the morning paper. I was such a fool to think that trading the possibility of a court martial was of more importance than her crying face burned into the darkness beyond my sight. Everything was a mess, I accepted, clenching my fist over my chest where her pendant lay.
Connie and I had gotten on the train and found a section to ourselves two rows back in the fourth car pulled by the behemoth coal fed engine at the front trucking along on the tracks belching black smoke from its stack as it went.
The seats were woven with an uncomfortable cloth that was scratchy beneath my palms. Leaning in, I rest my brow against the window looking out into the blurry countryside that seemed to run faster by the more I looked down. I anchor my eyes in the distance trying to hold back the acid in my throat. The mountains didn't try to pull my stomach out like the foreground did.
"You okay Jean?" Connie asked about an hour after the train had left the station. I was surprised that he had given me that long. He leaned forward looking at my face which was squashed against the mercifully cool window.
I looked back willing my breakfast to stay where I needed it to remain. That was the last meal my mother had cooked for me and I would be damned if I was going to share it with Connie and everyone else.
I shifted my shoulder against the window pane to alleviate my numb elbow then swallowed hard. "Yeah I'm okay. Just tired." He sighed not believing me as I had known but by the grace of some great name, he remained silent about it. He left me to myself and I'm sure that counted as a miniature apocalypse.
Eventually, after my stomach had finally given up on making a scene, I had accomplished in settling myself into a bastardized version of sleep. The more stations we had stopped at along the way to hell, the more young lads and sparse few dames filled the cars, all either quiet as corpses or nervous with casual chatter.
One girl joined us on the second stop, a town over from my home of Trost. Her name was Sasha Braus and was acquainted with Connie through their parents mutual friendship. She wore a plain powder blue dress lined with white lace and her brown hair was pulled away from her face by a barrette. Connie Springer, you little hound.
Her enthusiasm met his seamlessly and much to my objection, she was a pleasant break in my weary routine for the bits of it I was aware of. I wanted to give him comical grief for it but I felt too detached from everything, the pull of sleep chained me steady to the blissful darkness beyond my erratic reality. She didn't indicate offense that I was sleeping through most of their conversations, not that it was a deciding factor for anything that I was doing.
She and a few other females had accompanied us on the train, all enlisted, though not under the draft. They all had freely volunteered to enlist in WAAC or in the Army Nurse Corps. I picked out, through the holes in my consciousness, that she was going in as an engine repairman (woman). Through the haze, I heard Connie jest about never letting her around his car back home. She agreed in kind to never touch it, but only because it belonged to him. Which may have been an insult.
I decided that she was alright.
She was brave for signing up. Something that I couldn't share the feeling of. I felt progressively smaller in my corner toying with sleep; a child trying to block out the world of rushing states outside my window and the hushed voices of high strung youth. I was simply stuck between sleep and misery. Nothing more and everything less.