Tears in the Darkness (64 page)

“This is awful,” Ben Steele thought. “What am I going to do?” After class he went back to his small office to think.

He told himself, okay, the war is over. He wasn't a prisoner anymore and this wasn't Japan. It was America, and “this kid's an American, too.” That being the case, “I have to treat him like everybody else, no different.”

For a while it worked. He seemed okay with Harry, and Harry seemed okay with him. Then the student discovered that his professor had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and Ben Steele could feel the boy pulling away, withdrawing.

That troubled the teacher in him, and he sat the student down for a talk. By the end of the semester, Harry Koyama was among the best students in the class. And Ben Steele was beginning to wonder what had happened to all that hate he'd brought home.

 

IN 1999, THE MORNING
after his eighty-second birthday, Ben Steele, long retired from the classroom, awoke early, after six. Shirley would not stir for another hour but he was up before the sun, an old man long off the range holding to the habits of a young Montana cowboy.

He sat on the side of the bed for a moment, shaking off the numbness of the night, then he pushed himself to his feet, performed his morning ablutions, and made his way down the darkened hall and around a corner into the kitchen. The morning light was just beginning to fill the room, and he stood at the glass doors to the back patio, watching the first rays of sun play on the towers of rimrock that rose up behind the well-ordered neighborhood of ranch houses and split-level homes in suburban Billings where they lived.

Since he was a man of habit, it is easy to guess what was going through his mind that cool November morning as he watched the rim-rocks change color from gray to light brown, the color, he once remarked, of the young antelope that come down from the mountains in the spring to romp among the sage by the highway and feed on the first green shoots of prairie grass. He was happy to be free. Every morning for fifty-four years he'd had the same first thought:

“I can go where I want to go, I can do what I want to do, it's wonderful.”

And this notion, this simple sense of emancipation that came to him as he cleaned his teeth and combed his hair and pulled on his blue jeans and plaid shirt, made him a most agreeable man, a man with a warm handshake and an irresistible smile.

He had errands to run that morning, and after cereal and toast he settled himself behind the wheel of his pickup, a new gray Dodge Dakota with a camper top. He was not an acquisitive man—the salary of an art professor had never allowed for luxury, and what's more he was cheap, so “tightfisted,” his grown daughters liked to joke, he could make the face on an Indian-head nickel cry out in pain—but he had to have that new truck.

His first stop was the ophthamologist to prepare for cataract surgery a week hence. Old men, he liked to joke, were like old cars—some damn part or other was always wearing out. Overall he was healthy enough, a bit overweight perhaps (Shirley fed him sensibly but he had a sweet tooth and kept candy hidden in the cab of the truck) and a little slow of foot (poor circulation often left him leg weary), but he could still climb into a canoe to fish the Big Horn or wade out into the icy currents of the Stillwater to chase the trout in the eddies. He even planned to get on a horse again. A friend from the East was due that night, a tenderfoot eager to understand the open range and ride side by side with an old cowboy, a man who believed in the boundless.

After the eye doctor, he headed east on Broadwater Avenue to a branch post office to mail something to his adopted son, Sean, then he turned the truck back up toward the rimrocks, looking for KEMC, Billings's public radio station, where he was scheduled to give an interview on his life and work.

Artist and educator Ben Steele was born November 17, 1917, in Roundup Montana to Benjamin Cardwell Steele and . . .

It was just before 10:50 a.m. and Elizabeth McNamer was taping her show
Speakers Corner
in studio B at KEMC radio. McNamer was something of a personality in Billings. An Irishwoman educated in England, she had lived long in the American West but had held hard to her Anglican intonations. An odd voice for cowboy country, but then Billings was a town where the word “character” seemed to apply to a lot of folks.

Ben grew up on the family homestead south of Musselshell on Hawk Creek. He attended school . . .

McNamer had known Ben Steele for years, which is to say that like most who claimed his acquaintance, she really knew his work.

In forty years of days, Professor Steele had trained hundreds of painters and draftsmen, a handful of whom enjoyed some renown: Clyde Aspevig, Jim Reineking, Elliott Eaton, Kevin Red Star. Outside the classroom, their teacher had developed something of a reputation as well. In forty years of nights and weekends, Ben Steele had holed up in the studio behind his house in the lee of the rims producing his own work, art that reflected his life.

Ben volunteered for the United States Army Air Corps and served from 1940 to 1946. Present at the bombing of Clark Field in the Philippines . . .

He painted the West and he painted the war. And though his “war stuff,” as he liked to call it, was in every sense art, almost everyone tended to look at it as testimony, an affidavit of the suffering of those days.

Elizabeth McNamer described that work for her listeners, then asked her interviewee what it had been like to make the infamous death march. Ben Steele leaned forward.

We were so thirsty on the death march that we would . . .

Seven or eight minutes into the interview, Elizabeth McNamer noticed that her guest seemed suddenly unsettled. The bright brown eyes, usually so relaxed, looked distressed.

“What's the matter, Ben?”

He sat very still for a moment.

“I've got this pain in my back,” he said.

McNamer reckoned he was getting stiff from leaning forward at the microphone.

“Why don't you stand up for a minute,” she suggested. But he could not raise himself, and the pain was getting worse.

“Lois,” said Elizabeth, “can you get Ben a glass of water? He's not feeling very well. And maybe someone should call an ambulance.”

Lois Bent, the producer, was sitting on the other side of the glass
window that separated studio B and the control room. When she came around the corner into the studio, she found Ben Steele slumped forward in his chair.

“Mm-my back . . . ,” he mumbled.

“Ben! Ben!” Lois was bending over him, yelling.

“Oh my God!” said Elizabeth.

She was just about to make a second call for an ambulance when two paramedics, Michelle Motherway and Julia Johnson, rushed into the room.

To Motherway the man looked ashen, “like the color of the wall.” And his blood pressure was low, “eighty over sixty,” she told Johnson, dangerously low. His symptoms suggested a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He had “that look,” as paramedics say, that “impending sense of doom.”

They picked him up in his chair and hustled him into the ambulance.

“We're fighting time,” Motherwell told the emergency room doctor, Ron Winters, on the radio, then, turning to the driver, Alicia Kraft, she said, “Get going . . . and go as fast as you can.”

The ambulance raced down Twenty-seventh Street to Deaconess Hospital. Dr. Winters was waiting at the emergency room door. Motherway had been right, it was an aneurysm. This guy is in trouble, Winters thought, and he grabbed for a phone and summoned a surgeon.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of the rimrocks, in their gray clapboard house on Cascade Avenue, Shirley Steele had just returned from her own errands and was standing at the ironing board in the laundry room downstairs when the phone rang.

“Shirley, it's Elizabeth McNamer. We're taking Ben to the hospital. He's very ill.”

When Shirley Steele arrived at the emergency room, she found her husband in cubicle 13, lying on a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses. His face and head were swollen out of all proportion. He was screaming and moaning. She should leave, a nurse said, ushering her to a small waiting room.

A few minutes later a doctor appeared in the doorway.

“Excuse me, are you Mrs. Steele?”

“Yes?”

“I'm Scott Millikan.”

“Yes?”

“He's bleeding badly and we have to stop it,” the doctor said.

The rent in his aorta was pouring blood into his viscera, drowning his organs and driving his blood pressure down to forty and sending his body into a deep and dangerous state of shock.

“If I do nothing,” Millikan continued, “he will be dead in ten minutes, and if I do something he may still be dead in ten minutes.”

“Go ahead,” Shirley Steele said.

The surgeon sprinted for the operating room. He had an hour—“the golden hour of trauma,” clinicians call it—sixty minutes from the onset of bleeding to arrest the flow or lose the patient.

Studying the ambulance log, Millikan calculated that the aneurysm had ruptured around 10:55 a.m.; Motherway was at the patient's side by 11:02; Winters received him at 11:18; Millikan was attending by 11:32; and at 11:45 Ben Steele was on an operating table, saline solution dripping into one arm, plasma in the other, and an oxygen tube down his throat. Scott Millikan was leaning over the patient, a scalpel in his hand and ten minutes left.

He cut the patient lengthwise from the sternum to the pubis. Five minutes to find the fissure. They saw the aneurysm almost immediately, a balloon in the aortic wall three and a half inches wide, the largest the surgeon had seen. And there was the rent with blood pouring out of it.

It was speed work, a kind of medical sprint, and after they had clamped the aorta and cut off the bleeding, the surgical team paused before beginning their distance run, the hours it would take to remove the aneurysm and try to repair the damage.

“All right,” said the anesthesiologist, taking a breather, “who is this guy? What's the story here?”

A nurse said, “This is Ben Steele.”

“Wait a minute,” Millikan said. “I know that name.”

“He was an art professor,” the nurse said, “and he was in that death march of Bataan.”

The surgeon turned to his assistant. “This is great, 'cause now I know this son of a bitch is tough. He's already proved he's a survivor.”

Five hours later Millikan wandered into the waiting room and flopped into a chair in front of the family—Shirley, Rosemarie, and Julie. The doctor had changed into clean green scrubs and was wearing hospital slippers but no socks.

“Sorry about the bare feet,” he said wearily. “It got a little deep in there.”

Then he gave them the news: the patient had lost a lot of blood; they had given him thirteen units during the operation. His main worry now was Ben's blood pressure: a sudden or sustained drop would likely cause a brain hemorrhage, and if that happened, it was unlikely the patient would survive.

And there was more: Ben's kidneys or heart might fail; his lungs might fill with fluid and he might drown; a blood clot might form and shoot to the brain; his internal organs, which had been swimming in blood, might have been damaged and could shut down.

Adding it all up, Millikan said, the patient's prognosis was no better than “minute to minute.”

Julie asked a few questions, Rosemarie was too frightened to speak, and Shirley shut her eyes and took several deep breaths.

“Hold it together,” she said to herself. “You have to hold it together.”

The next day, Friday, Millikan revised his prognosis. Now it was “hour to hour.” By Saturday Ben had improved to “day to day.” He could manage a few words at that point, and early Saturday morning Shirley was able to speak with him.

She stood by his bed in the intensive care unit, her left hand on the bed rail, her right hand wrapped around two of his fingers.

“How ya doin', kid?” she said and touched his cheek. “Hey! You need a shave.”

He looked at her and blinked.

“I thought—” He blinked again. “I thought they had killed me,” he said.

Then he turned his head and smiled.

 

 

 

 

 

All Japanese names are presented given name family name.

 

GHOSTS

1
.
Hohei
, literally translated, is “foot soldier.” The Japanese used the word to refer to infantry. All soldiers, including infantry, artillery, armor, communications, and so forth, were called
heiti
, “soldier” or, in modern translation, “serviceman.” We use
hohei
throughout to mean both infantryman and common soldier in all branches of the Japanese military.

 

CHAPTER ONE

1
. Schlesinger,
Almanac of American History
, 481–82. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act on September 16, 1940. The first draft took place on October 29.

2
. Gallup,
Gallup Poll
, vol. 1, “December 23—Threat to America's Future,” 312.

3
. “May 14, 1939—Most Important Problem,” ibid., 154; “May 10, 1940—Neutrality,” ibid., 222; “July 7, 1940—European War,” ibid., 231; “October 14, 1940—European War,” ibid., 245.

4
. Roosevelt, “For a Declaration of War Against Japan,” in Copeland,
World's Great Speeches
, 531. Morton,
Fall of the Philippines
, and Watson,
Chief of Staff
, go into great detail on the meetings of the various war plans boards and committees in the War Department. These boards gathered regularly throughout the 1920s and 1930s to draft military plans and policies based on the periodic shifts in American foreign policy. The planners tried to anticipate potential enemies and attacks and plan a defense, both on American soil and American possessions overseas.