CHAPTER SIX

Two Questions, One Answer

Another day. Nothing new. Saw a very good U.S.O. show last night.—February 15, 1945

Ric had already left for work when the kids piled into my car for the ride to school. I tossed my purse and book bag into the backseat and buckled in. I had a trick to be sure the kids buckled in quickly too: I wouldn’t start the car until I heard three clicks. Click, click, click.

I turned the key. Nothing happened. I turned it again. Nothing. There was no sound, no turning over, just silence. I looked at my watch. My carefully timed morning had just taken a huge hit.

“Everybody out,” I said.

“But, Mom,” Danielle said, “I’m supposed to meet Casey before school.”

“I can’t be late,” Micah joined in.

Caleb was already out and jumping up and down beside the car.

I groaned loudly as I bolted up the steps and back inside. Not only did I need a ride, I also needed somebody to give all my kids a ride. That was a lot to ask of anybody. And the only people I’d feel comfortable asking were my mom and dad.

I picked up the phone and dialed my parents, quickly explaining the situation to Dad. Mom had left for a prayer group, but Dad quickly agreed. While he was on his way, I phoned the school where I worked to let them know I’d be a few minutes late.

We all got into Grandpa’s car and I wrote excuses for each of them on the way to their schools. After the kids were delivered, he drove me to my school.

As he pulled up in front, I said good-bye and made him promise to pick me up right after my part-time teaching job ended at noon. I felt like a little kid again, getting dropped off by my daddy.

“Are you hungry?” Dad asked when he picked me up.

“Yeah. I guess,” I said.

“Me too. How about lunch?” he asked.

He drove us to Stone Soup, a little soup and sandwich shop. Inside, it was crowded with downtown business people, the line stretching from the counter to the door. Behind the counter, employees in white aprons made sandwiches and ladled soup from large pots. The menu was written on a large chalkboard. Enchilada soup was the Wednesday special. I ordered a cup and Dad ordered a bowl. I pulled out my checkbook but he insisted on paying. I poured ice water into Styrofoam cups while he found us a seat at one of the little round tables.

My father had read tons of books on every aspect of the war over the years, and I’d been reading about Iwo Jima, so now I had a little background information. Unlike the more personal questions, the general ones would often launch him into lengthy and detailed answers—though, he never offered information on his own. So, I asked a few questions about Iwo Jima. But his answers were uncharacteristically short. Then, to my surprise, he asked a question of his own.

“Why do you suppose my mother kept the letters?” he asked.

I shrugged. I hadn’t thought about it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I guess I’ll never know,” he said as he finished his soup.

“Dad?” I asked. “Would it be OK with you if I put your letters in archive-safe sleeves? They’re plastic and have holes punched so I could put them in binders.”

I looked down and dipped the spoon past the crunchy strips of tortillas on top.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t want you to go to any trouble or anything.”

“It’s no trouble,” I explained. “Actually, it would be easier. The paper is so thin and I’ve been researching on the Internet. I found out that it’s not good to handle the actual letters over and over. I also talked with our school librarian. She said the same thing. In fact, I took the notebooks to school and showed her. You should have seen the look on her face. She was so excited that I was transcribing them.”

“Transcribing?” he asked. “You’re transcribing them?”

I’d forgotten to tell him. It had just come about so naturally, that it didn’t feel like I really made the decision at all. It was just another tentative step on this journey we’d started together. I looked at him, hoping to read his reaction. We were right across from each other, no more than twelve inches away. He glanced up from his soup a few times, but his expression never changed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m transcribing them.”

“You mean you’re typing every letter?” he asked, putting down his spoon.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Why?” he asked in the same tone I’d heard months earlier.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Feb 14, 1945

Dear Folks,

Yesterday, I decided early to get my traffic course application signed. Then got permission to go to Honolulu to the main offices to get the actual course and get started. Got all that done by 1 pm and then went out to Waikiki to a show, “None But the Lonely Heart.” Not bad. Ate all the ice cream in every form I could get my hands on and caught a bus back to landing and by boat to camp again.

As for the course, they gave me the whole works all at once. In case I move around I’ll have it all with me that way. It consists of 27 books about like my radio course and three big folding maps with Freight Classification Territory and various railroads in U.S. and Canada marked. The course seems to be quite thorough. It covers freight tariffs, rail and water rates, and routes tracing and expediting—air express and parcel post regulation to mention a few. Looks very interesting especially since I already have a kind of haphazard knowledge of a lot of it. In this course it’s all catalogued right so it’s kind of a bridge toward getting my present knowledge and learning more later, together.

As I finish a few lessons I’m going to send the books home so you can look them over. I’m going to figure out a plan now to study when it’s cool in the morning so I can get the most done. Jonesy is going to take a course in accounting while he is here so we’ve decided to run a regular classroom schedule. Just in the morning tho. Afternoons get too hot to work.

I’ve gone about a week with no mail again. Something’s sure wrong with my mail—Jonesy hardly misses a day. I’m going to start tracking it down if don’t get any tomorrow. Let me know how mine is getting to you—if it skips a few days and arrives in bunches or they come about the same length of time all along.

Nothing new in any line, still loafing.

Write soon. Love, Murray

Feb 15, 1945

Dear Folks,

Another day. Nothing new. Saw a very good U.S.O. show last night…All soldier cast. Also, they opened our new outdoor theatre. It’s called, Phillips Theatre. It’s just a few steps from our tent. The other one was several blocks.

This camp isn’t really the nicest in the world. Not a blade of grass and not a tree. Just lots of dirt and very hot sun. Believe ’tis kind of an existence would get monotonous after the first few months.

Got a flock of magazines yesterday. Most of them almost up to date too. A lot of them we’ve been getting are quite old. Usually December issues.

Studied a third of the way thru my first lesson. Have 27 lessons. So far it is very simple and easy to understand.

Well Jonesy is still with me. I told you he was having trouble with his back. He had it checked by the local doctor who then sent him up to the hospital on the island for a complete check up and x-ray. The x-ray showed it perfectly normal as far as bone structure is concerned. However it seems there can be plenty wrong with a back that’s not discernable by the naked eye nor by x-ray. For example your trouble Dad, the sacroiliac joint can cause trouble without anything at all being visible. That seems to be Jonesy’s trouble. He was in an auto accident about same as mine and wrenched his back. Everyone says keep after them if your back really bothers you as they can’t really do much with it. Jonesy is taking some pills and two treatments a day but doc admits it isn’t going to ever do any real good except to relieve it for a while. You know he’s here just like me on “borrowed time.” Last time doc gave him 3 days more of heat treatments. And then going to check him again. Tomorrow is the check-up day—then will know. It’s a cinch they won’t send him out like he is. The hospital recommended limited services—which means a desk job in the states. Anyway he’ll know tomorrow then I’m going to work. About mail time—I’ll get this in and see if I’ve got some for a change.

Write. Love, Murray

I sat at my dining table and opened the notebook. Taking the first letter out, I carefully slid it into the sleeve and then put it in the new notebook I’d just bought. When the first of the worn notebooks was empty, I closed it and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. The initials R.J.F. were printed in slanted letters in one corner of the notebook. Raymond James Fisher was my dad’s little brother. Slightly above the initials was ’41. I traced it with my finger. Then the answer came to me, an answer to the question my father had asked over tortilla soup.

“Because she didn’t know,” I said aloud. “She didn’t know if her boy would return from the war.”

I gently turned the pages. I was taken back in time to a grandmother I’d never met, a mother who feared for her son. That’s why she had saved the letters. They were a part of him. She’d used an old two-ring notebook that my uncle had used in high school. And every time she got a letter in the mail, she’d put it in the notebook. It was proof that her beloved son, more than two thousand miles away, was still alive. She saved them because the next correspondence she received could be a telegram that started with the words “We regret to inform you…” Every letter could be the last. And when the last letter she received from him was followed by her son stepping off the train, she didn’t need them anymore. She had her son. She put the letters away—until one day she gave them back to him.

When I finished transferring the letters to the archive-safe sleeves, I had filled four black notebooks and gone through four one hundred-packs of sleeves. My father had written more than four hundred pages of letters to his folks during the war. What a treasure they must have been to them, but especially to his mother.

He had asked me, “Why are you doing this?” and I couldn’t answer. But slowly an answer was forming. I was finishing what my grandmother had started. Something was driving me to transcribe the letters. I thought it was for my children. And it was, but there was something more.