She hurried over to the bank of telephones down the hall from the committee meeting room. Instead of calling Lieutenant Colonel Pfeil, whose signature probably went out on dozens of wires a day, she rang up Franklin Roosevelt. In one way, a wounded private was no concern of his. But when the wounded private was the son of a Congresswoman who was also a former First Lady and who was friends with the Assistant Secretary of War…Maybe Roosevelt would know more than he might if she were calling about Private Joe Doakes.
She got through in a hurry. "Hello, Flora." Roosevelt didn't sound as ebullient as usual, so he probably knew something. "Yes, I had heard. I'm sorry," he said when she asked.
"What happened?" she demanded.
"Well, this is all unofficial, because I'm not supposed to keep track of such things, but I understand he's lost the middle finger on his left hand," Roosevelt said. "Bullet or a shell fragment-I don't know which, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either. Not a crippling wound…Um, he isn't left-handed, is he?"
"No," Flora said. She didn't know whether to be relieved it wasn't worse or horrified that it had happened at all. She ended up being both at once, a stew that made her heart pound and her stomach churn.
"That's good. If he isn't, I'd say it's what the men call a hometowner."
"A hometowner." She'd heard the phrase, too. "Alevai," she said. "By the time he gets well, the war will be over, won't it?"
"We sure hope so," Roosevelt answered. "Nothing is ever as sure as we wish it would be, but we hope so."
"Do you know where he is? The wire didn't say."
"I don't know, but I'm sure I can find out for you. Are you in your office?"
"No, I'm at a telephone outside the committee meeting room. But I can get there in five minutes."
"All right. Let me see what I can find out, and I'll call you back." The Assistant Secretary of War hung up.
Flora ducked back into the meeting room to explain what had happened. The Senators and Representatives made sympathetic noises; a lot of them had fought in the last war, and several had sons at the front this time around. Captain Rickover gave her his best wishes from the witness stand.
The telephone was ringing when she hurried into her office. Bertha stared in surprise. "Hello, Congresswoman! How funny you should walk in. Mr. Roosevelt is on the line for you."
"I'll take it right here," Flora said, and grabbed the handset away from her secretary. "Hello, Franklin! Here I am."
"Hello, Flora. Joshua is in the military hospital in Thayer, Missouri, which is right on the border with Arkansas."
"Thayer, Missouri," Flora repeated. "Thank you." She hung up, then turned to Bertha. "Get me to Thayer, Missouri, as fast as humanly possible."
That turned out to be a flight to St. Louis and a railroad journey down from the big city. Bertha squawked till she found out why Flora needed to make the trip. Then she shut up and arranged the tickets with her usual competence.
Landing in St. Louis, Flora saw to her surprise that it had been hit almost as hard as Philadelphia. The war in the West never got the press things farther east did. But Confederate bombers still came up to strike St. Louis, and long-range C.S. rockets fired from Arkansas had hit the town hard.
The train ride southwest from St. Louis to Thayer was…a train ride. Every few miles, a machine-gun nest-sometimes sandbagged, more often a concrete blockhouse-guarded the track. Here west of the Mississippi, spaces were wide and soldiers thin on the ground. Confederate raiders slipped north every now and again. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have had something sharp to say about that…if it hadn't had so many other bigger things closer to home to worry about.
Thayer had gone up as a railroad town. It had flourished, in a modest way, as a cross-border trading center-and then suffered when the war strangled the trade that kept it going. The military hospital on the edge of town put a little life back into the economy-but at what a cost!
Joshua wasn't in his bed when Flora got there to see him. She feared something had gone wrong and he was back in the doctors' clutches, but the wounded man in the bed next to his said, "He's playing cards in the common room down at the end of the corridor, ma'am."
"Oh," Flora said. "Thank you."
When Flora walked in, Joshua held five cards in his right hand. Bandages swathed the left. He put down the cards to toss money into the pot. "See your five and raise you another five." Then he looked up from the poker game. "Oh, hi, Mom," he said, as if they were bumping into each other back home. "Be with you in a minute. I have to finish cleaning Spamhead's clock."
"In your dreams, kid. I'll raise you five more." Another greenback fluttered down in the center of the table. The sergeant called Spamhead did have a square, very pink face. He seemed to take the nickname for granted. Flora wouldn't have wanted to be called anything like that.
He won the pot, too-his straight beat Joshua's three tens. Joshua said, "Oh, darn!" All the other poker players laughed at him. What would he have said if his mother weren't there to hear it? Something spicier, no doubt. He stood up from the table and walked over to Flora. "I didn't think you'd get here so fast."
"How are you?" Flora asked.
Joshua raised his wounded hand. "It hurts," he said, as he might have said, It's sunny outside. "But not too bad. Plenty of guys here are worse off. Poor Spamhead lost a foot-he stepped on a mine. He's lucky it wasn't one of those bouncing ones-it would've blown his balls off… Sorry."
"It's all right," Flora told him. "How else can you say that?" Spamhead got mutilated, and Joshua think's he's lucky. I can see why, but… "What does your doctor say?"
"That it was a clean wound. That it's nothing much to flabble about. That-"
"Easy for him to say," Flora broke in indignantly. "He didn't get hurt."
"Yeah, I know. I thought of that, too," Joshua said. "But he's seen plenty worse, so it's not like he's wrong, either. I'll heal from this, and I'll heal pretty fast. The only thing I won't be able to do that I could before is give somebody the finger with my left hand."
"Joshua!" Flora wasn't exactly shocked, but she was surprised.
Her son grinned sheepishly, but not sheepishly enough-he'd done that on purpose. "I didn't even think of it," he said. "The medic who took me back to the aid station was the one who said it first."
"Terrific. Now I know who to blame." Flora sounded as if she were about to haul that medic up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She was tempted to do it, too. She recognized abuse of power when she saw it, which didn't mean it failed to tempt her.
Maybe Joshua saw the temptation gleaming in her eyes, for he said, "Somebody else would've come up with it if he hadn't. I would have myself, I bet-it's the way soldiers think."
"Terrific. I don't want you thinking like that," Flora said. Joshua didn't answer. He just looked at her-looked down at her, to remind her he was taller, to remind her he was grown if not grown up, to remind her that he didn't care how she wanted him to think. He would think the way he chose, not the way she did. She squeezed him, careful of the gauze-shrouded hand. "I'm glad you're going to be all right. I'm gladder than I know how to tell you."
"Sure, Mom." Joshua took it for granted. Flora didn't, couldn't, and knew she never would. She started to cry. "I'm fine, Mom," Joshua said, not understanding at all. He probably was. Flora knew too well that she wasn't.
E ver feel like a piece on a chessboard, sir?" Lon Menefee asked.
Sam Carsten nodded. "Now that you mention it, yes." The comparison wasn't one he would have made himself. Poker, pinochle, and checkers were more his speed. He knew how the different chessmen moved, but that was about it.