Morning Glory

I’m sorry they didn’t tell you more right after I got hit so you wouldnt have worried so much. I would have done so myself but I guess I wasn’t in much shape for writing. But don’t you worry now. I’m okay and I mean it.

By now you know I got hit by a Jap grenade while I was trying to flush eight of them out of a holeup near the airfield on the Canal which it’s okay now to tell you where I was, on Guadalcanal. The Canal was rough and we lost a lot there but we set them back and the airstrip is ours now. If we hadn’t the Pacific would still be theirs and I’m damn proud of what we did. I might as well tell you now my buddy Red didn’t make it and thats all I can say about it at the moment because its hard for me to think about it. So as I was saying it doesn’t seem much to put up with a few chunks of steel in your leg. But I have to confess I never was so glad to see anything as I was to see Old Glory waving over the Navy Hospital on good old American soil when I debarked here. Damn, Elly, I wish I could see you but this leg will have to mend first so I’ll be here a while but I’ll sure be looking for your letters. It seems like since I joined the Marines Ive lived for mail call. Now that I’m in one place your letters will get to me so write often, okay green eyes? Please don’t worry about me. Now that I’m back things’ll be just fine. Kiss the kids for me and tell Miss Beasley to write, too.

All my love,

Will

Dec. 9, 1942

Dear Will,

Oh Will your home at last. Your letter just came and I cryed when I read it I was so happy. They won’t send you back will they? Is your leg healing any better? I’m so worried about it and what you must be going through with the operations and the pain. If you weren’t so far away I’d come to you again like I did in Augusta, but I just don’t see how I can come clear to California. But would’t it be something if we could be together for Christmas?…

24 Dec. 1942

Dear Elly,

The nurses strung colored lights across the foot of our beds but looking at them gives me that choky feeling again. I’m layin here thinking of last Christmas eve when you and me filled the stockings for the boys. I want to be home so bad.

Jan 29, 1943

Dear Will,

Happy birthday…

5 Feb. 1943

Dear Elly,

They got me up on crutches today…

Chapter 19

Calvin Purdy dropped Will at the end of his driveway.

'Thanks a million, Mr. Purdy.'

'No thanks necessary, Will, not from a GI. You sure you don’t want me to take you the rest o’ the way on up’t the house?'

'No, sir, I was always partial to this little stretch of woods. Sounds good to walk through the quiet alone, if you know what I mean.'

'Sure do, son. Ain’t no place prettier’n Georgia in May. You need any help with them crutches?'

'No, sir. I can manage.' Leading with both feet, Will worked his way out of Calvin Purdy’s ’31 Chevrolet while Purdy retrieved Will’s duffel bag and brought it around, then laced it over Will’s shoulder.

'Be more’n happy to take your duffel up,' Purdy repeated accommodatingly.

'’Preciate it, Mr. Purdy, but I kinda wanted to surprise Elly.'

'You mean she doesn’t know you’re comin’?'

'Not yet.'

'We-e-e-ll, then I understand why you want to go up alone… Corporal Parker.' Grinning, Purdy extended his hand and gripped Will’s tightly. 'Anytime I can give you a lift or be of any he’p, just holler. And welcome home.'

After Purdy pulled away, Will stood for a moment, listening to the silence. No cannonade in the distance, no bullets thuppinginto the earth beside him, no mosquitos buzzing, no men screaming. All was silence, blessed May silence. The woods were in deep leaf, heavy green weighting down the branches. Beside the road a patch of wild chicory created a cloud of blue stars. Nearby a clump of wild clover startled, livid in the heat of its summer blush. Some creature had feasted on a smilax vine, spreading a scent like root beer in the air. A yellow warbler did a flight dance, landed on a branch and sang its seven clear, sweet notes, eyeing Will with head atilt.

Home again.

He moved up the driveway beneath the arch of branches that allowed the azure sky entry. He tipped his head and admired it, marveling that he need not cock an ear for the sound of distant engines, nor squint an eye in an effort to identify a wing shape or a rising red sun painted on a fuselage.

Forget it, Parker, you’re home now.

The driveway was soft, the air warm, his crutches poked holes in the red earth. They must’ve had rain recently. Rain. He’d never much cared for rain, not in his early life when he’d lived mostly in the open, certainly not on the Canal, where the damned rain was ceaseless, where it filled foxholes, turned tent camps to fetid quagmires, rotted the soles off sturdy leather boots and fostered mosquitos, malaria and a host of creeping fungi that grew between toes, inside ears and anyplace two skin surfaces touched.

I said, forget it, Parker!

The odd thing was, though he’d been Stateside for six months he still couldn’t acclimate to it. He still scanned the skies. Still listened for stealthy movement behind him. Still expected the telltale clack of two bamboo stalks rubbing. Still flinched at sudden noises. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. The air here had no mildewy smell, instead it held a tang of wild tansy which seemed familiar and welcoming and very native. During his drifting years whenever he’d caught a cold he’d brewed himself a cup of tansy tea, and once when he’d gashed his hand on a piece of rusty barbed wire he’d made a compress of it that cured the infection.

Walking up his own road amid the smells of tansy and smilax, he let the fact sink in: he was home for good.

At the sourwood tree he stopped, let his canvas duffel bag slip down and lowered his left foot to the ground. Real, solid ground, a little moist maybe, but American. Safe. Ground he’d shaped himself with a mule named Madam while a little boy sat and watched, and the boy’s mother brought red nectar and a baby brother down the lane in a faded red wagon.

He resisted the urge to drop his crutches and ease onto the bank where the grass was green-rich and wild columbine blossomed. Instead, he shouldered his bag and moved westward toward the opening in the trees where the clearing lay.

Reaching it, he paused in surprise. During his stretch in the South Pacific, when he’d pictured home, he often saw it as it had first been, a motley collection of scrap iron and chicken dung beside a teetering house patched with tin. What he saw today made him hold his breath and stand stone still in wonder.

Flowers! Everywhere, flowers… and all of them blue! Gay, uncivilized blossoms, clambering unchecked without a hint of order or precision. How like his Elly to sow wildly and let rain and sun-Will smiled-and all those years of chicken manure do the rest. He scanned the clearing. Blue-Lord a-mercy, he’d never seen so much blue! Flowers of every shade and tint of blue that nature had ever produced. He knew them all from his study of the bees.

Nearest the house tall Persian blue phlox bordered the porch, thick and high and tufted, giving way to Canterbury bells that bled from deepest royal purple to a pale violet-pink. At their feet began a rich spread of heliotrope in coiled blue-violet sprays. Against the east wall of the chicken house a clematis climbed a trellis of strings. There, too, began a carpet of long-stemmed cornflowers, as deep and true as the sky, continuing along the adjacent chicken-yard fence in a wall of royal color. At the shady border beneath the trees, pale violets began, giving way to deep-hued forget-me-nots which ranged in the open sun, meeting a spread of blue vervain. On the