Dear Deke,
I hope you are doing all right fighting the Japs. It sure seems sometimes like the war in Europe is what most folks care about. On the police force, they are always telling us to be on the lookout for German spies, but never a word about the Nips. I guess maybe Washington seems pretty far away from Japan.
My friend Peggy that you met during your visit here was asking about you. I gave her your address, so maybe she will write to you.
It is getting to be fall and I remember all the good times we had picking up apples for cider from the windfalls on Old Man McGlothlin’s orchard, or even making sausage. You can’t get sausage like that here in the city, not no way, no how. But I do like having hot running water. No more heating pots on the stove for a bath!
You be good and lick the Japs — I know you could do it with one hand tied behind your back if you had to.
He folded the letter carefully and tucked it away to read again later. He supposed that he ought to write back to Sadie, but he never had been much for writing letters. He jotted a short note to let her know he was all right and that he appreciated hearing from her. On the page his handwriting was neat but blocky and almost childish from lack of practice.
As for Peggy, he remembered her as a quiet and serious young woman who had also grown up on a farm, somewhere in Maryland, so they’d had that much in common. The city was filled with young men and women fresh off the farm, stuffed into city clothes and trying to look like they knew what they were doing, when a few short months before they had been milking cows or hauling slop to feed the hogs — or even sharing a decent pair of shoes with a brother or sister. The Depression had been slow to let go in a lot of small towns and farms. For these young people, the war meant opportunity.
He hadn’t gotten any letters from Peggy. No wonder — he was sure that his scars had scared her off. Like any young man, Deke was interested in women, but he had mostly put them out of his mind because of his looks. He had gotten to the point where he reckoned that no woman would have anything to do with him. He was damaged goods.
So far, women remained a mystery to Deke. Not that he didn’t yearn for their company sometimes. If he wanted any loving, he supposed that he’d have to pay his two dollars for a few minutes of vigorous humping like all the other desperate GIs had back on Hawaii — and then feel ashamed about it later. It wasn’t how Deke wanted to treat a woman — or himself, for that matter.
Sadie’s letter didn’t say much, but it prompted a flood of memories. Deke also had to smile, thinking of all those times they’d had growing up on the mountain farm. The chores had seemed endless, and it was true that life wasn’t always easy — far from it. But it hadn’t been all bad either. Then again, he supposed that it had less to do with happy childhood memories than it did with taking pride in surviving adversity. He and Sadie had come through a lot together.
If he managed to survive this war, he’d have to see what he could do about getting back the Cole family’s land. The farm didn’t seem to matter all that much to Sadie — she seemed to have moved on and embraced her new city life, with all its possibilities.
When he had visited Sadie in the city, she had caught him studying her with admiration when she had been about to head out the door in her uniform. The uniform had made her appear mature and official. She even wore a touch of makeup and lipstick, something their own mother had never worn a day in her life. Between the makeup and the uniform, she had not only looked older but appeared right at home.
“What are you lookin’ at?” Sadie had snapped, suddenly sounding every bit like the Hancock County girl that she was. “Did I grow two heads overnight?”
Deke had shaken his head sheepishly. “No, you look different is all. Like you belong here in the city.”
“I can’t look like a rube, not if I want to be taken seriously,” she’d retorted. Then her voice softened, and she touched the back of his hand to reassure him. “Don’t you worry, Deke. You know me. I’m the same old Sadie under this lipstick. I’ll always be a country girl at heart.”
Knowing Sadie, he reckoned that was true. Still, he was proud of her for having the courage to move to the city and make a new life for herself.
Maybe the city life was fine with Sadie, but Deke had other plans. He wanted nothing more than to return to the mountains, to see the lush valley farms and the peaks covered in forests. To wake up on a crisp winter’s night to the sound of a fox barking and see the full moon glowing on the snowy fields.
He felt a pang, though, thinking about those farms and fields. Deke swore that if there was one thing he was going to do in this life, it was get the family farm back and kill the son of a bitch who had robbed his family of it in the first place. Given time, they would have paid back the money that his father had borrowed, but that no-good banker hadn’t given them more time.
It all came down to greed. Taking the land was bad enough. Worse yet, he blamed that banker for bringing about his mother’s death. She’d already been frail, and the loss of the farm was a final blow from which she had never recovered.
As for him and Sadie, that banker had stolen their happiness when they’d been forced to move into a boarding house in town. He’d had to find what work he could. His time in a dusty, noisy sawmill had been sheer misery for a young man used to working the land, but it had been a matter of survival because they had needed his wages.
But revenge would have to wait. That snake of a banker was safe enough for the time being.
Right now there were a whole lot of Japanese and a vast ocean between Deke and that goal. If he ever wanted to get home again, the first thing he had to do was survive the war, and there were no guarantees about that.
CHAPTER FOUR
In his bunk nearby, Philly let out an indignant snort. He’d been reading a copy of the shipboard newspaper, a slim rag called the Anchor Chain, that he now threw down in disgust.
“What got into your craw?” Deke wondered.
The thin sheets of newsprint offered a roundup of news from home and tidbits about the men and officers in the unit, such as births of children back home. Aside from a few stale military announcements, there wasn’t much actual news; it was all kind of innocuous, but it was a welcome slice of normalcy. The Anchor Chain was meant to boost morale. It was hard to see how something in it would have upset Philly.
Philly tossed the newspaper at Deke. “Look at what’s on the front page.”
There at the top of the fold was a photograph of Woodall’s Scouts, wearing their fancy matching uniforms and brandishing their sniper rifles. Colonel Woodall stood beside them, looking like their prim-and-proper scoutmaster. The last sentence of the photo caption read, “The Japanese snipers are really going to fear these boys!”
“I’ll be damned,” Deke said.
“They haven’t even fought the Japs yet,” Philly fumed. “After all that we’ve done, you’d think that we’d be the ones to get their picture in the paper.”
“Philly, it ain’t the New York Times,” Deke said, picking the name of the biggest newspaper he could think of. “It’s just that little rag that goes around the ship.”
“Yeah, but still. Credit where credit is due, you know.”
Deke was more curious about their rifles. He looked more closely at the photograph, but the fuzzy newspaper photo did not offer much detail.
“I like my Springfield just fine, but I wouldn’t mind trying one of those M1 sniper rifles,” Deke said. He wondered if the semiautomatic sniper rifles really offered an advantage. “Then again, all you really need is one good shot.”