Across a War-Tossed Sea (6 page)

Once, Charles even speculated that he could float a raft down to Hampton Roads if he caught the tides right. “Just like that Huck Finn did the Mississippi,” Charles had said, more to himself than to Wesley. “Bet I could do it in a night and climb onto a ship without anyone seeing me in the dark.” Charles had stood for a long time, as if in a trance.

Remembering that episode, Wesley stopped himself. Charles wasn't going to listen to him if he were in that kind of mood. And he was sure to be. Wouldn't it be better for Wesley to actually have good news to tell Charles for once, like that he'd prevented Mr. Ratcliff from bringing in POWs by talking to Ed?

Suddenly, Wesley felt rather important. He turned and jogged toward the old sharecroppers' cottage where Ed and his wife, Alma, lived.

Twilight was dropping as Wesley came to Ed's four-room cottage. Half log cabin, half whitewashed board, its happiest feature was a long ramshackle porch across its front that doubled its size. A long neat line of white river rocks marked the path to the front door, which Alma ringed with marigolds in the summer. She worked hard, long hours as a maid at one of the old river mansions down the road, but when Alma was home, the scent of something good cooking always greeted Wesley as he passed on the way to school. Sometimes she even handed the Ratcliff boys biscuits to eat on their way.

“It's okay,” Bobby reassured them when Wesley and Charles worried over taking food from someone who clearly had so little. “She misses her own children. It makes her feel better.” Alma's four sons were all grown and long gone about their own lives.

Wesley saw a sudden glow inside the cottage as Alma or Ed lit a kerosene lamp for the evening. Good, they're home, he thought, and picked up his pace. As he reached the porch, he heard a cranking sound, then the scratchy
Crrrrrrrr-crrrrrrr-
crrrr
of a record player starting up

A low, mournful voice began to sing:
“Sometimes I feel like a
motherless child.”
Rising and falling, the voice repeated the lament and then was joined by other deep, sad voices singing, “
A long
ways from home
…”

Wesley stopped mid-step. The song tore at his heart. He'd never heard music like it before. Sudden hot tears stung his face as Wesley backed away from the sound of someone putting words to his sorrow.

In the gloom, he stumbled and fell back onto the sharp, hard edges of the walkway rocks. “Oooooowwww!” he cried, rolling and clutching his butt, his hip, his elbow, his shoulder. “Oooooowwww!”

In mid roll, Wesley heard another sound—the harsh
cliiiiiick
as the hammer of a gun was cocked and readied.

He sat up.

There on the porch was a boy, holding a shotgun aimed straight at Wesley.

“D
on't shoot!” Wesley threw up his hands. “Please don't shoot.”

The gun didn't lower.

“I—I,” he stammered. “I'm terribly sorry if I disturbed you.”

Still the boy didn't respond.

“My name is Wesley Bishop.” His words rushed out, panicked. “I am staying with the Ratcliffs. Miss Alma knows me. Her biscuits are brilliant!”

At that, the boy peeked out from behind the gun. “You talk funny,” he said as he lowered the shotgun, resting its butt against the porch floor.

The two stared at each other. Because the boy was backlit by the lamp, Wesley couldn't see his expression.

Finally, the boy with the gun asked, “So? What do you want?”

Wesley's heartbeat began to slow down enough that he could talk some sense. “Mr. Ratcliff would like to know if Ed's sons might be able to come up from Newport News and help him this weekend. Is he home?”

“Does it look like he's home?” the boy countered. “He's at a church meeting.”

“When will he be back?”

“Soon enough.” The boy didn't stir.

This was not getting him anywhere. Cautiously, Wesley stood and brushed himself off. His elbow was throbbing and bleeding where a stone had gouged it. He hated to make more work for Mrs. Ratcliff with bloodstains on his clothes. “Might I trouble you for a bandage and some Mercurochrome?” he asked.

“‘Might I trouble you?'”
The boy snorted. “Where you from?”

“Great Britain.”

“You came
here
from England?”

“Yes, that's right,” Wesley answered hopefully.

“Well, there's a fool born a minute,” the boy muttered, taking a step back. “All right, then. Come on in.” He dragged the gun behind him and opened the screened door. Wesley followed.

“Don't have Mercurochrome. But you can wash up there.” The boy pointed toward the kitchen, where there was a long wooden table with a pitcher and water basin.

Now Wesley could see the boy. He was slight and wiry and wore round horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes seem enormous. Probably just a year or so older, Wesley judged. The boy watched as Wesley rinsed his arm. Then he wandered into the next room to an old wind-up Victrola—the kind of record player with a big trumpet bell coming up from the turntable box.

So that's what Wesley had heard. “What were you listening to?” he asked. “I've never heard music like that before.”

“It's a spiritual.”

“What's a spiritual?”

“Why, a spiritual is gospel music. A song Negroes sung when we worked fields in our days of bondage. Music helped us get by. This one is ‘Motherless Child.' That was the Golden Gate Quartet singing it. They're the famous jubilee group from Norfolk, you know.”

Wesley admitted he didn't.

“What? The Golden Gate sang at the last inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself! They're the first Negro music group to sing in Constitution Hall and the White House!”

The boy turned to a small stack of thick records and rifled through them indignantly. “Didn't you see the movie
Star
Spangled Rhythm
? They performed in that with Mary Martin and Dick Powell.” Finally, the boy found what he was looking for. Ever so carefully, he took the first record off the turntable, slipped it into a sleeve, and replaced it with the one he'd located. “This is their latest. For sure you know this one.” He cranked the box's handle and gently put the needle onto the rotating black disk.

Crrrrrrr-crrrrrrr-crrrrr…

Four men began to sing in tight, deep harmony about Stalin, the “Russian Bear,” and the Soviets standing up to Hitler's invasion and blockade. It sounded a little like the
a capella
barbershop quartets Wesley had heard at the county fair. But the rhythms were jauntier and syncopated:

They'd never rest contented

Till they'd driven him from the land
.…

“Oh, I do know this,” Wesley said over the music as the quartet sang that the devil had made Hitler and called Stalin a “noble” Russian. He'd heard it on the radio. Ron had called the singers “a bunch of Reds” for praising the Soviet Union's communist leader Joseph Stalin. Many Americans hated Stalin despite the fact the Soviet Union was one of the Allies and Stalin was labeled one of its “Big Three” leaders, along with FDR and Churchill. After all, once Stalin had aligned with Hitler to divide Poland between them, and his regime was about as repressive as Hitler's Third Reich.

Wesley didn't mention Ron's opinion. Instead he marveled at how the four voices blended, swelled, and fell as one.

Crrrrr-crrrrr-crrrrrr
…
The music ended.

“Oh that's bully, that is,” said Wesley.

The boy's face turned from a look of blissful appreciation of the song to a sudden defensiveness. “No one's trying to bully you, boy.”

“Oh no, I mean it's excellent!” Wesley said. He smiled. “I never heard music like this back home in England. We have singers like Vera Lynn. Her best song is ‘White Cliffs of Dover.' The cliffs are the last thing our RAF fighters see as they head for bombing runs over Jerryville, and the song is sad and sweet at the same time, about peace coming someday.” Wesley stopped abruptly, realizing the boy was frowning. “Do you know the tune?”

The boy shook his head.

“No? Well, anyway, your music…well…that first song…that first song…” Wesley hesitated to be honest about the song's effect on him.

The boy completed his thought for him: “Made your heart hurt?”

“Yes,” Wesley gasped. “Exactly.”

The boy nodded. They were silent a moment.

“Where's your mama?” the boy asked.

Wesley sighed. “Way across the Atlantic Ocean in London.”

The boy whistled. “Nerts! For real?”

Wesley nodded. “Where's yours?”

“Down to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company.” The boy used the long company name with noticeable pride. “She and my daddy both are building warships. Virginia is popping them out fast now. Daddy got hired as a welder. Mama paints the hulls.” He eyed Wesley. “What do your folks do?”

“Daddy is a teacher and coach, and a volunteer fireman. He pulls people out of buildings that the Nazis have bombed. Mummy drives an ambulance.”

The boy pursed his lips and nodded, showing Wesley that, at least as far as his parents' war-worthiness, he checked out. “Why aren't you with your parents?” Wesley asked.

“I was,” the boy explained. “But the company is hiring so fast there's a terrible housing shortage. Landlords get away with charging eight dollars a week for a one-bedroom apartment. Don't that beat all? My parents needed to take in another couple to help pay that. Besides, Mama was so tired when she came home—after standing for eight hours with only twenty minutes for a lunch break—she had nothing left for me, she said. So she sent me here to Grandpop and Gran. I wanted to go back to our own house, but…” He lowered his voice and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “The government took it.”

“What?” Wesley asked. “Why?”

“They're building something secret.”

“Where?”

“A ways yonder,” he gestured over this shoulder. “About ten mile toward Richmond Air Base and Elko.”

“What are they building?”

The boy shrugged. “Don't know for sure. But I'm pretty sure I saw the shape of a plane of some kind, covered up with netting.”

“You don't say?” Wesley wondered at that mystery for a moment. “Why would they do that?”

The boy shrugged again. “Beats me.” So much was hushed up because of the war.

“But they just took your land?”

“That's right. Came one day and told us and all our neighbors that we had to leave in thirty days. They tried to set us up in a trailer camp instead. ‘Shucks,' my daddy said. He'd rather work at the docks anyway, helping with the war. Just like my uncles. Daddy has three brothers. Every last one a true-blue patriot.” He held up a finger with each description: “The youngest is training in Norfolk. He'll ship out soon with the navy as a messman on a destroyer or an aircraft carrier. Uncle Chester is a wiper on merchant ships. He's back and forth, on the Atlantic, dodging U-boats, taking troops the supplies they need to keep fighting. Like I said, my daddy builds fighting ships. It's a cause with my daddy since his big brother died. Uncle Walter was out just past Norfolk, without any navy boys to protect them and…”

The screen door opened, interrupting the boy. Alma and Ed entered, dressed in their Sunday best.

“Wesley!” Alma said in surprise. “Everything all right with the family?”

“Oh, yes.” Wesley stood up. “Mr. Ratcliff sent me to ask if you and your sons might be able to help him hay.” He explained Mr. Ratcliff's offer of bus fare and time-and-a-half wages. “Otherwise he'll need to hire POWs from Camp Pickett…and it's just…well, it'll be hard for Charles to be around Nazis.” Wesley stopped short of admitting that he didn't exactly want to be around men who might have dropped bombs on his homeland either.

Ed took off his fedora and suit coat and sat down heavily in a rocking chair. He was a strong man, but elderly and stiff, with deep long lines in his face from working in the sun. He undid his bow tie as he spoke. “I'll get them word. I'm not keen on Nazis being around here myself, not after losing our boy Walter with the
Atwater
.”

Wesley took in a sharp breath. Everyone knew the story of the
Atwater
. Its sinking was probably the most notorious torpedoing of any American cargo ship. Carrying tons of coal, the
Atwater
had steamed out of Norfolk all alone, its crew unaware of being shadowed by a Nazi submarine. Right after nightfall, just off Chincoteague, the U-boat opened fire, shelling the ship's bridge and engines. The
Atwate
r burst into flames and sunk in fifteen minutes. But the Nazis kept firing on the crew.

“Nazis don't have any hearts, I'd say,” muttered the boy. “How could they shoot at
Atwater
sailors when all those poor fools were trying to do was put on life preservers and jump into the water. They'd already sunk the boat and all its coal.”

“The Nazis even gunned down one of the lifeboats,” added Ed, sadness lacing his voice. “By the time the coast guard got there, most everyone had drowned or bled to death.” He shook his head. “Including our Walt.”

Wesley remembered that newspapers had called the Nazis' firing on unarmed men and the lifeboats nothing short of cold-blooded murder. Secretly, he and Charles had felt a twinge of bizarre satisfaction when reading that commentary. Now Americans knew how cruel, how unrelenting fanatical Nazis could be. Maybe now they would understand better what Londoners had withstood night after bloody night during the Blitz, when Hitler had targeted civilians for no strategic purpose other than terror. They were hardly charity cases the way Ron—and some others—painted them.

But now Wesley felt really bad. Before, the sinking of the
Atwater
had been just an event that vindicated him and Charles—like a plot twist that helped characters recognize an important truth. Now it was real. Now he knew people who had a hole ripped in their hearts and wept at night because of it. Just like at home.

For a long, uncomfortable moment, Ed, Alma, the boy, and Wesley remained silent. Finally, Wesley found his voice and, for once, the right thing to say. “It's jolly brave of your other son to keep sailing on the cargo ships.”

Ed blew his nose.

Alma smiled. “Yes. My boys are special. Every last one of them.”

“I keep telling him he doesn't need to volunteer to sail them sitting ducks,” said Ed.

“Read him Uncle Chester's letter, Gran, from his last sail,” the boy suggested.

“Oh no, Wesley doesn't have time for that.”

“I'd like to hear it,” Wesley answered. “Truly.”

“All right.” Alma walked to an old bureau and pulled out a letter from a drawer. Holding it in the lamp's glow, she carefully read:

“‘Dear Mama and Daddy, I can't sleep because nights are when the Nazi tin fish come out. So I figured I'd write. Today we had a lifeboat drill. Know what? If we got to jump ship we need to remember to hold down our lifebelt as we fall. If we don't the belt's like to jerk up and break our necks when we hit the water. So here we are, risking getting blown to bits and the thing that is supposed to save us can kill us! I swear any lame-brained fool shipping out these days has bubbles in his think tank.

“‘Sometimes we all wonder why we do it. No one treats us merchant sailors to USO shows! But here's the thing, Mama. I reckon you can use my war bonus of $2.33 a day. Save it up and send Freddy to Howard College. Tell him his Uncle Chess says so—I've seen how many books that boy reads. Besides, we've got to keep the tankers sailing to get our boys supplies while they're fighting. We don't want swastikas flying over the U.S. instead of Old Glory!

“‘Plus, we colored boys in the crew have been talking. Maybe at the end of this war, the Negro can get credit for what we do now. Maybe we can finally prove to the country that courage has no color.'”

Alma folded the letter and kissed it. Hearing it embarrassed and inspired Wesley all at the same time. He knew it was the time for him to leave.

The boy walked him to the door.

“Are you Freddy?” Wesley asked.

“Yes.”

“You like books?”

Freddy nodded.

“Ever read
Treasure Island
? That's my favorite.”

“Never heard of it.”

“What? Well, I shall lend you my copy.” Wesley extended his hand to shake in a gesture of friendliness Americans seemed so at ease with. “Pleased to meet you.”