Sentinels of Fire (35 page)

“Yes, sir. I'd been in—”

“Carriers, right? Bet you weren't too concerned about destroyers back then, were you, other than to make sure you had 'em all around you.”

He had me there. I'd never given them a second thought. Halsey was grinning.

“Dutch Van Arnhem commended you in a message before he died,” Halsey said. “Makee-learn XO suddenly thrust into command and doing stuff no one else had done up there and staying alive. Funny what dire straits can evoke in the way of improvisation.”

He stood up. “Congratulations on that medal. You earned it. Get well and then come with us to Japan.
Malloy
's going to limp home. You're going to command the next tin can that needs a skipper. And don't ever criticize me again, or I'll bite you.”

Another grin to show me all those teeth, and then he was gone.

 

SEVENTEEN

As things turned out, my newly sculpted body let me down. Connective tissue problems, recurrent infections, hearing problems, a skull differently shaped from what I was born with, and extensive damage to the biggest organ in my body, my skin, got the best of me. One of the corpsmen tending to me said I looked like a walking (sometimes), talking Peking duck. I tried to glare at him, but my eyelids wouldn't work. I got my first look at myself a day after Halsey's visit, and I suddenly admired the admiral's self-control. For a long while, my skin looked like vellum. Halsey, being a victim of shingles, must have sympathized.

Malloy
was escorted back to Guam and then to Pearl by two destroyer escorts, and the crew, captained now by newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Enright, fought an insidious flooding problem all the way back. At Pearl they dry-docked her and discovered she had a cracked keel assembly along a hundred and fifty feet of her hull, probably caused by that big bomb on kami number four. The net result was that the BuShips rep at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard recommended a strike. She was cannibalized for every spare part that was still usable, defueled, and then scuttled fifteen miles off Diamond Head in fifty-eight hundred feet of water. Jimmy Enright, Mario, and Chief Dougherty personally opened the sea chest clean-out valves, and she was gone in twenty minutes.

I was sent to the big naval hospital on Guam for treatment and rehabilitation, after which they sent me back to the even bigger naval hospital complex in San Diego known as Balboa. There a tropical medicine specialist found the fix for my skin problems, and I was officially discharged from the hospital and then medically retired in the rank of commander, USN. I walked out of the hospital into the eternal San Diego sunshine with no place to go, no car, and no nearby friends or relatives that I knew about. I got maybe a hundred yards before I had to sit down. Being semicrushed under the weight of the
Malloy
's pilothouse structure had done far more damage than anyone had been aware of, and I knew I was lucky to be alive. Being eased out of the Navy, albeit kindly, with good medical care and a pension, was equally crushing. I hadn't realized how much my entire adult life had been defined by the Navy.

I had been moved to an ambulatory ward in late July. “Ambulatory” covered a whole spectrum of cases; mostly it meant that you no longer needed constant treatment, but rather, time to heal. It was staffed by an office full of smiling sadists who insisted that each day you walked just a little longer, and when you were done with that, you got to go play in the rehab room with the same kinds of things Torquemada used to refresh the Faith and set the answer to an occasional question. After a couple of weeks I realized that if I did these things voluntarily, the sadists would leave me alone. That's when I discovered a room in the ward next door that contained what was left of Pudge Tallmadge.

I'd taken to reading the name tags outside the patient rooms as I hobbled through the wards in my pj's and bathrobe, clumping along with the assist of two canes at first, and then one. I'd read the name, kept going, stopped, and turned around. The door was cracked open, and there was a woman whose face I recognized sitting in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. I knocked on the door.

“Yes?” she asked. The likeness was remarkable. I'd seen her picture on the skipper's desk every time I'd gone into his inport cabin. She was probably forty, a little on the plump side, with a sweet face and hair beginning to go gray.

I stepped in. She put a hand to her mouth and then apologized for her reaction. “You look terrible,” she said. “What happened to you?”

I tried to smile, but my facial muscles weren't quite following orders yet. The resulting grimace probably frightened her. I introduced myself, trying not to mumble, and said I'd been exec in
Malloy
under Captain Tallmadge, who was lying there in the hospital bed, eyes closed, looking positively serene.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Connie Miles. Right. My God, what happened to you? Where's the ship?”

“The ship is asleep in the deep,” I said. “It's a long story.” I looked over at the captain, which is how I would always remember him. The captain. His eyes opened briefly, staring vacantly into the middle distance. His hands were resting comfortably on his chest, and his mind was long gone, from what I could see. She saw me looking.

“Oh, don't mind him,” she said. “He's resting. Now tell me, what became of
Malloy
? He loved that ship.”

Resting, I thought. Well, I guess that was one word for it.

“May I sit down?” I asked, suddenly conscious of the fact that my legs were trembling. I'd learned not to let that go on for very long.

She jumped out of her chair and led me to it. Then she left the room. She came back a moment later with a second chair, pulled it close to mine, and sat down. She asked me to tell her the story. Everything.

So I did. I kept glancing over at him, but he simply lay there, eyes closed again, breathing in, breathing out.

“They wouldn't tell me anything,” she said. “I got a telegram that he'd been injured and was being sent to Guam, and from Guam, here. I got here from Maryland just about when he did. I expected … injuries, but this is how he was. They said they didn't know when, or even if, he'd come out of it.”

She seemed resigned to his mental state, as if this was just a matter of time before he woke up one day and called for coffee. “What happens next?” I asked her.

“They've told me that they will train me to take care of him—bedsore management, one of the nurses called it, and, of course, hygiene. Then I'll take him home to the Eastern Shore. Soon, I hope.”

I hadn't noticed feeding tubes or IV lines. “He can eat?”

“I put a spoon to his mouth, he takes it. I can get him up, take him to the bathroom, and his body seems to know what to do. Better than a coma, they tell me.”

“Well, then there's hope, Mrs. Tallmadge,” I said. “If he can do all that with your help, then one day he's going to look around, see that he's safe, and come back out.”

“That's the plan, Commander Miles. That's the plan.”

I realized then that he was in capable and strong hands. I knew a doctor had probably sat her down and laid out the possibilities, and she hadn't flinched. One of the advantages of a good marriage, I thought. I made my manners and told her to contact me if she needed anything. She asked where. I realized that I had no idea, so I took down her address and telephone number and promised to contact her from wherever I eventually landed, probably in Washington, D.C.

A week before that, the hospital administrator had informed me that the Navy was going to medically retire me. There'd be a pension, but after only ten years of service not much of one compared to the stipends given to officers who served the traditional twenty or even thirty years. My personal effects from
Malloy
had arrived in a cruise box from Pearl, along with a big black-and-white, framed picture of the entire crew, assembled on the 10-10 dock at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, and signed by every one of them on the back. There was a second picture, taken by Marty, of
Malloy
's stern standing straight up in the air before making her final plunge. I ended up throwing most of the uniforms away since they hung on my somewhat emaciated frame like old laundry. I kept the crew picture and gave the other one away to the local Naval District Public Information Office.

Mrs. Tallmadge had asked where she could contact me. My mother was still alive and retired in the D.C. area. Having no job, no car, and no skills applicable to anything out there in the civilian world, I'd probably have to go home, regroup, and start over. The only good news was that I had almost four years of paychecks saved up in the Riggs Bank of Washington, so money wasn't going to be a problem, for a while, anyway. I knew that eventually, when the Japs finally gave up, there'd be a huge wave of people just like me coming home. The newspapers were already commenting on the influx of veterans coming back after VE-day, and there'd been editorials speculating on what the country was going to do with them, and for them.

I did have one more thing to do before I walked away from all things naval, and that involved going to a small town in Georgia. I still had trepidations about making that trip. It had sounded like the right thing to do when I went down to sick bay that morning, but now I wondered. How would a widow and a family react to a perfect stranger appearing on the front steps bearing something so terribly personal as two rings and a lock of hair?

*   *   *

Amazingly well, it turned out, and with grace and dignity besides. I'd taken a train from California to Atlanta. The train took four days to make the trip, during which I spent a lot of time just looking out the window with my mind in neutral. I rode in a normal Pullman car and not in one of the two cars allotted to recovering soldiers and sailors, each with its own small medical team. I hadn't been back to the continental United States since early 1942. Any leaves I had taken had been at R&R sites in the Pacific. It was pleasant to just look out the window and reacquaint myself with America. It looked pretty good.

Before leaving San Diego I'd sent off a letter addressed to Mrs. William Van Arnhem, care of the post office in Monticello, Georgia, telling her I was coming to bring her some of the commodore's personal effects. I spent a day in Atlanta resting up after the train trip, having arrived on August 6, 1945, the day we dropped the big one on Hiroshima. Based on the radio news, the war might be ending sooner rather than later. The next day I put on a coat and tie, packed my two bags, and hired a car and driver to take me to the booming metropolis of Monticello. Hiring a driver was a bit of an extravagance, but I hadn't driven a car in years and doubted my ability to find my way around the southern countryside. Not to mention that I was still pretty weak from my time at Balboa.

When I got to the tiny town of Monticello, and it was indeed tiny, I found the post office, introduced myself, and asked if a letter to Mrs. Van Arnhem had come through. The postmistress, a peppery lady of uncertain age, wanted to know who was asking. I told her that I'd sent the letter and now needed to take something to Mrs. Van Arnhem. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, she knows you.” That apparently was the key: She knew me. How, I didn't know, but the postmistress gave my driver, a middle-aged black man by the name of Homer, directions to the plantation, known locally as Blue Pines.

I expected to see Tara looming majestically up on a hillside when we turned, as directed, into a long, tree-lined lane across from a large red barn. Instead, the one-lane sandy track wandered for at least a mile through fields of drying feed corn. The trees along the road were not stately oaks but some unidentifiable and distinctly scrubby specimens of little character. The house, when it finally appeared, was a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch and a green metal roof. No columns, huge brick chimneys, or second-floor verandahs, and definitely no clusters of happy black people humming gospel songs as they loaded bales of cotton onto horse-drawn wagons. Clark Gable was not much in evidence, either.

Oh, well, I thought. This was probably what real plantation houses looked like. I hadn't seen any blue pines, either, but there were two vintage 1939 cars parked to the side of the house under the only oak tree I'd seen since arriving. It was just before noon, and the place seemed to be entirely deserted. For a moment I thought about simply turning around, but meeting Mrs. Tallmadge had strengthened my resolve.

“What do you think, Homer? Anybody home?”

“They be out directly, suh,” he said. “Country folk gonna take 'em a look before they come steppin' out when strangers come.”

He was right. A minute later the front door opened, and the woman whose picture I'd seen framed in the commodore's cabin stepped out onto the front porch. She was maybe five foot two and dressed in what surely did look like period clothes, as she had been in that portrait. She looked older now; a death in the family will do that to you, I told myself.

I got out of the car. Homer said he'd just wait outside if I didn't mind, so I walked up to the front steps. I was escorted by two friendly, tail-wagging dogs who'd appeared out of nowhere. I had to take one step at a time, but without a cane, finally.

“Mrs. Van Arnhem?” I said. “I'm Commander Connie Miles. I had the pleasure of serving with your husband, the commodore. I hope you received my letter?”

“I did, Commander, I did,” she said in a lovely and cultivated Southern accent. I thought I saw someone else move behind one of the heavily curtained front windows. “Dutch told me about you in a letter just before he died. He said you showed great promise. Won't you come in, please.”

I walked up the steps and took her hand briefly, and then we went inside.

“Have you come far, Commander?” she asked over her shoulder. The front hall was much cooler than the front yard. There was a living room to one side, a dining room on the other, and an ornate stairway dead ahead. Judging by the floors, moldings, and the thickly plastered walls, the house had to be nearly a hundred years old.