The Magic Of Ordinary Days Part 1

The Magic of Ordinary Days.

Ann Howard Creel.

For my parents, who lived the war.

Acknowledgments.

My thanks go to Lee and Eleanor Hanc.o.c.k of Rocky Ford, who shared accounts of everyday life and farming during the war years, and Don Lowman of the Otero County Museum a.s.sociation, who aided me with information and resources.

A number of books were helpful, too many to mention, but in particular Frances Bollacker Keck's Conquistadors to the 21st Century: A History of Otero and Crowley Counties, Colorado and James L. Colwell's La Junta Army Air Field in WWII. I gleaned much information from Mark Jonathan Harris, Franklin Mitch.e.l.l, and Steven Schechter's book The Homefront: America During World War II, from Arnold Krammer's n.a.z.i Prisoners of War in America, Larry Dane Brimner's Voices from the Camps: Internment of j.a.panese Americans During World War II, and from Roger Daniels's Prisoners Without Trial: j.a.panses Americans in World War II. Pictorial inspiration came from V Is for Victory: America's Homefront During World War II by Stan Cohen.

Thanks to my circle of Colorado friends, especially Nancy, kind reader of the first draft, and Lynn, faithful supporter of every small step. My grat.i.tude will always go to Lisa Erbach Vance of the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, editor Frances Jalet-Miller, also of the Aaron Priest Agency, and my editor at Viking, Car olyn Carlson, for her excellent input.

Finally, thanks to every member of my family, most of all, to my husband, David.

Prologue.

I don't often think back to that year, the last year of the war-its days, its decisions-not unless I'm out walking the dawn of a quiet winter morning, when new snowfall has stunned into silence the lands around me, when even the ice crystals in the air hold still. On those mornings of frozen perfection, when most living creatures keep to a warm bed or a deep ground hole, I pull on my heaviest old boots and set out to make first tracks through the topcrust and let the early dawn know I'm still alive and appreciating every last minute of her fine lavender light.

Then I remember.

I'll begin this tale on the day of my sister's wedding, almost twenty-four years to the day after I came crying out onto earth's slippery soil.

It was April 1944. The Allied forces were preparing to invade France and put an end to the worst war in history, while back on the home front, some of us managed to go on with what might have been considered normal lives. On a Sat.u.r.day, a b.u.t.tery spring day along the Front Range of the Rockies, my baby sister Beatrice was marrying her high school sweetheart, then a newly commissioned Army officer, and leaving me the only Dunne daughter not yet married. The oldest of three sisters and still unmarried, it was an oddity that would not go unnoticed, especially by my aunts. As we waited in the receiving line, Aunt Eloise commented about the quality of the catches made by my sisters. During the war, officers commanded the highest regard, and Abigail, nearest to me in age, still held top rank in that department, as she had caught herself a high-ranking officer, and a medical doctor to boot.

"If only you hadn't always been compared to those sisters of yours," Aunt Eloise said.

Aunt Pearl added, "You might have been considered quite attractive by yourself."

My aunts were not cruel, you understand. They loved to talk, and at every available opportunity they gave away the neatly wrapped presents of their thoughts, confident that no one would refuse them. And although I sometimes ached to talk back to them, I had been taught well by my parents to respect my elders.

Instead of pursuing marriage, at summer's end and after completion of only two more cla.s.ses and the approval of my thesis, I would receive my master's in history from the University of Denver. My fascination with history started with the first lesson ever taught to me in grammar school. As my teacher described the sea pa.s.sages of Christopher Columbus, I could so easily imagine myself a stowaway girl on one of his s.h.i.+ps. I could see the promise of full sails billowing out above me and feel the sharp tips of salt.w.a.ter winds. If I had been there, I would've climbed the s.h.i.+p's mast and looked out to the horizon for new lands myself. Formal study at the university had always seemed more destiny than choice.

Unfortunately the war had forced postponement of my fall plans to travel overseas as part of an academic expedition. Because of a world gone astray, my path was strewn with the debris of war, and my journey with archaeologists, anthropologists, and other historians to study the excavation sites of the land of sealed tombs, Egypt, and the ancient city of Horizon-of-the-Aten, would have to wait.

During Bea's wedding reception, my aunts pointed out to me that now, more than ever, single girls had good odds of husband catching. From MPs training in Golden, to airmen at Lowry Air Base and Buckley Field, to medical personnel at Fitzsimons, available soldiers filled Denver's streets, USOs, and bars. But not just any private would do. Those in our social circle wanted to duplicate Bea's catch by latching on to at least an officer, perhaps even a doctor like Abby's, or a pilot, the loftiest catch in the hierarchy of the uniform.

But I had never run my life in order to meet men or find romance, although I wasn't immune to those things, either. I'd always dreamed that someday love would come into my life in some spectacular fas.h.i.+on. Probably it would happen in another country, on board a s.h.i.+p; most likely it would unfold during one of my future treks to uncover a secret of history. One side of me knew that these were the dreams of an inexperienced girl, and yes, I was inexperienced with love. But it didn't bother me. Every day, it didn't bother me.

Secretly I hoped to always disagree with my aunts. That way I'd know I hadn't succ.u.mbed to the limited view of so many of their generation. But my dear mother-I could see how my aunts' comments wounded her. Recently, however, I'd convinced her to stop stepping in on my behalf. Early on, I had learned my place on the family wall and found it not such an uncomfortable place to hang. My sisters and I weren't speechless, motionless tulips or ferns in a pattern of wallpaper. In the years of our girlhood, we could mingle and socialize during family outings. Abby, Bea, and I often stood at the front of my father's church, in the theater lobby, at the country club or museum, and we had become well practiced in the art of pastoral family presentations. And after years spent before others, at the easy perusal of relatives and friends, I knew exactly what I was.

I was the practice rug.

Among the Navajo, traditional weavers learn their art by first weaving a rough rug. It is a chance to hone their skills; the rug may contain loose weft, uneven corners, and other flaws. After this essential practice, however, the weaver may go on to produce masterpieces. And so it was with my family. I thought of myself as the first, rather average attempt at a daughter; then, after my birth, my parents brought into the world two rare beauties. I had the most common color of brown hair, a forehead a bit too broad, and a small, lima-bean-shaped birthmark just above my upper lip. My sisters were masterpieces woven of warm wool, natural blondes with unmarked skin and real smiles, not painted on hard canvas, and they were approachable, so that admirers did not hold themselves back. So unusually blessed, Abigail and Beatrice neither competed with me, nor did they gloat.

Despite the inevitable comparisons, Mother always pointed out the good qualities I did have. She'd say that my fingers were long and tapered, that I always sat tall in a chair, and that my teeth had come in straight and white like a row of dominoes.

"And you're as sharp as a tack, you are," she'd say with a hug. "Someday you're going to go places."

As we grew up, my sisters played with dollhouses and dreamed of futures beside successful husbands, whereas I became gripped by the past. The stories and struggles of olden days worked their way from the crepe paper pages of old books and under the seal of my skin. I was the Shoshone guide Sacajawea leading Lewis and Clark on their expeditions, or I was a pioneer woman leading her clan out west on one of the first wagon trains. As I grew into a young woman, a need to understand and experience began to drive me. My whole body became part of the chase; the desire for a fresh find seeped out of my every pore. It was Mother who understood. She helped me fill in my application for the university and collect references. She plotted out on the map with me all the places I might want to go.

But although many a learned woman wanted to deny its importance, even Mother admitted that in our society, beauty was still prized above knowledge and wisdom in a woman. Despite female accomplishments that for the first time held us up in a place where our feet could walk the earth at the same level as our male counterparts, many men most wanted a pretty image hooked on their arms. And yes, although a woman no longer needed a husband, Mother hoped that maybe someday I'd want one, one who could appreciate me, mind and all.

Mother's honesty was something I had always thought I would have; I relied on it.

Whenever I remember Bea's wedding day, I always remember the flowers. Before Bea left for her honeymoon, she gave me a white rose she had singled out and plucked from the bouquet before the bridal toss, and this I waxed and kept on the polished top of my dresser in the months that followed. And on that day, not only had the church and the country club been filled with lilies, gardenias, and roses, but outside on the city streets and in the parks, the crabapple trees had been blooming, every branch decked with blooms of pink, white, and fuchsia so deep in color it almost came to purple. That spring, the crabapple blossoms fell to the ground over a period of several weeks, coating the sidewalks and streets with cupped petals so thick the concrete beneath them disappeared.

My mother had always loved the crabapple blossoms, and I liked to believe their abundance that spring was gifted to her. During the wedding and reception, she held herself up well, with plenty of smiles and gracious small talk in the face of compliments for the wedding. Once I had heard that every person must complete something of importance before he or she dies, and perhaps witnessing her youngest daughter's marriage had been just that for Mother. She smiled and chatted with friends and members of Father's congregation throughout the long reception, as if it would have been impolite to show any sign of her illness. Father directed the event and would have tolerated little less than perfection.

Then afterward, Mother slipped away over several weeks, like water in slow-moving streams gradually sinks into the soil. My sisters busy with marriage and my father preoccupied with church duties, I was the one who left school to be with her. I was the one who eased her away.

Perhaps it was Mother's untimely death, perhaps because the cancer caused her to suffer so, or perhaps another absence between us caused the course of it all to change. But after her death, even my father lost his typical stern control. In the first weeks, he all but abandoned our two-story house in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood that Mother had always maintained with pride. In our house, fingerprints had rarely lasted long on the furniture, and any chipped dishes had been given away. Father let stacks of mail pile up on the foyer table, and he closed up other rooms to collect dust. He submerged himself in even more work of the church. And although we kept two radios, one in the kitchen and another in his study, Father would allow no music in the house. After all, a singer's voice might sound like hers. And we couldn't have flowers around again, although at the time of her death, the gladiolas were up, their tall stalks stabbing the sky and their blooms open, silently screaming.

I've often wondered, even to this day, why during painful times some people seem to step away from themselves and make decisions that fall far out of their usual line of character and behavior. Perhaps a natural reluctance to sit still is central, or perhaps, like the lesser animals, instinct forces us to go on even if grief has left us not up to the task. But no one could have guessed that the oldest, the strongest, the most independent daughter would be the one most altered by her death.

In the next few months, I put into motion the strange set of circ.u.mstances that would later find me losing my plans, the ones I'd mapped out with my mother. In one fleeting moment, I stripped away the petals of my future, let them catch wind, and fly away.

One.

On August 30, 1944, only four months after Bea's wedding, my sisters accompanied me to Union Station to send me off on a journey that would please only my aunts. I thought of Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl often on that day. A shame they had missed this farewell into matrimony. Without knowledge of the circ.u.mstances, they would have been joyous.

During the war, Denver's Union Station served as a crossroads for some four million American soldiers who pa.s.sed through its doors. Among the throng of uniformed servicemen and -women who daily boarded and debarked trains and made connections, Abby, Bea, and I walked to the ticket window and purchased a ticket for travel south, to launch the first step of a journey much different from the academic missions I'd once imagined. On that day, I would leave the city for the countryside, to carry out the plans for marriage arranged and urged on by my father.

Into my hand, Abby pressed gifts wrapped in new linen handkerchiefs and tied with ribbon. She held her face still. "I'm sorry Father couldn't make it."

"He tried," Bea said, but her youth betrayed her. Barely twenty years old and although a married woman, she hadn't yet learned to mask untruths on her face. It still flashed every emotion, just as it had when we three sisters shared a bed and huddled under a play tent of quilts in the sting of winter mornings. How little of the world she had experienced.

"Call us," was all else she could say.

On that morning, just after the liberation of Paris, the entire country sat perched on the sill of celebration. Laughter was louder, and in everyone's eyes gleamed a hopeful prospect, a wish we all held on to for easy victory, despite doubting its likelihood. Inside the pa.s.senger car I rode, the air grew dense with smoke from unfiltered cigarettes held loosely between fingers, pa.s.sed about, and shared. In 1944, cigarettes had become scarce, but not so on that day.

Near me, only one other woman traveled alone, a thirtyish woman with hair dyed platinum blond like Jean Harlow's. I thought of asking her to play a hand of rummy, anything to break the monotony of the ride and divert my attention. In the university library, once I'd introduced myself to a girl named Dot who later became one of my best friends. But the blond woman seemed engrossed in reading her newspaper, and perhaps I pondered on it too long. Perhaps people traveling alone wanted to be left alone.

I studied the scenes outside the window. In the last days of summer, wood ducks skimmed over low-water ponds, and ra zored pines swayed in the hills between Denver and Colorado Springs. Just outside of Pueblo, I saw a huge pile of salvaged rubber tires, precious commodities during the war, chained and watched over by a guard. In Pueblo, a town that held an Army air base and therefore another teeming depot, I debarked from the train, following the blond woman but preceding the throng of servicemen. An hour later, I changed trains and headed east. I tried to buy lunch in the dining car but changed my mind after I found it full of people pressed in against each other.

Across the plain, the land shook free of mountain, hill, and mesa, becoming instead long and close-fit to the earth's contours, as a sheet fits a bed. Wild sunflowers grew in patches just feet away from the tracks. They made me remember something Mother once said to me. I had everyone beat in the eyes. Mine, she had said, like her own mother's, were as big and as deeply brown as sunflower centers. And that memory nudged another one. Hadn't Mother once told us a story about sunflowers? During the years of our girlhood, she had whispered to us so many fairy tales, myths, and even some stories of her own making, that it was difficult to recall them all. In her own girlhood, she had once had aims of becoming a novelist, and in my opinion, she had an imagination fresh enough to have succeeded as a writer. Once I asked her if she'd ever regretted her decision to marry and have children, but she'd only laughed and rubbed my head. "Who better to tell my stories to than you girls?"

The story had been something about the sunflower heads, about how they follow the track of the sun. With my eyes closed, I reached far back onto the shelf of distant memory, but still I could not remember it.

The train made five stops between Pueblo and my destination, including one at Nepesta, where the Missouri Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads crossed. Outside my window, occasional ranch houses, signs of modest human habitation, dotted land that seemed most suitable for gophers and field mice. Then abruptly, outside of Fowler, the untrodden prairie ended, and miles of rowed crops in the fertile bottomlands of the lower Arkansas River began. For a few moments at a time, I saw stretches of the river-a silver-blue strand of waterway that curled back on itself and braided through stands of cottonwoods and willows. Near Rocky Ford, trucks piled high with ripe honeydew melons waited to cross the tracks, reminding me that summer was still at hand.

The train stopped at La Junta, home to another Army air base, where pilots received training in flying B-25 bombers. I debarked along with still more servicemen. La Junta, Spanish for "the junction," was probably named for its location at the convergence of the old Santa Fe and Navajo Trails, and still served as a transportation hub, only now for trains and planes instead of horses and wagons. The train station was huge compared to the buildings in the surrounding area and contained a roundhouse, docks, restaurants, and hotel rooms.

I expected to see my party as soon as I arrived; however, for a time that seemed much longer than it surely was, I stood on the platform with my large traveling case sitting upright at my side, waiting alone.

My father's old friend from seminary, the Reverend Willard Case, was to meet me and introduce me to the man who would become my husband. I had not seen the reverend in almost twelve years and wondered if I would recognize him. But as the depot finally began to clear of uniformed men and family members bustling about, I saw him striding toward me down the platform. He looked much as I had remembered him-wire-thin with a brisk walk. He removed a felt hat, the kind men found fas.h.i.+onable to wear with their suits during the war years, and I saw that since I'd last seen him, his once dark and unruly hair had turned into ribbons of silver strung away from his face.

As Reverend Case laid eyes upon me, recognition lit his face. "Ah, Olivia," he said as he approached me with an outstretched hand. "We were late in arriving." He took my hand in both of his. "And how was the journey?"

"Fine, fine," I answered, glancing up not at him but instead at the man who accompanied him. He had a face that wasn't unpleasant. No feature was too big or too small, but the resulting mixture was one that couldn't be called distinctive or handsome, either, and he had thinning red-brown hair that made him appear older than the thirty years I had been told was his age. He was tall and broad and appeared strong, as I would've guessed a farmer to be. Dressed in a brown suit with faded knees and elbows, he held himself a step back, completely still, his hat in one hand.

Revered Case followed my eyes. "Yes, let me make the introductions. Mr. Ray Singleton, this is Miss Olivia Dunne."

"Livvy," I said as we shook hands. "Most everyone calls me Livvy, for short."

I saw the lift of a smile in one cheek, but for only the slightest second, and then it was gone. Mr. Ray Singleton, who would become my husband as of this day, provided neither of us changed our minds, simply nodded in my direction. Then he stood back again, and holding his hat with both hands now, he shuffled it about in a circle.

He allowed Reverend Case to take the lead in conversation. "Any problems getting here?" the reverend asked me.

"Just a crowded train," I answered.

He pointed to my bag. "Is this it?"

Funny how I had fit what was left of me into that one case. "For now, yes," I answered.

Reverend Case directed our next moves. "We have the car parked nearby. Quite a little drive ahead of us," he said with the smile that now I remembered. Although they shared the same profession, Reverend Case's face and expressions lacked the hard edge that marked my father. While in Denver for the yearly conference, he had stayed in our guest room and had tolerated the spying games and antics of three young girls. Twelve years ago, even then I had wondered how this gentle man could have once been a close friend to my father. Or had my father perhaps been softer in his youth?

"Do we need to use the station services?" he asked me.

I nodded. "Please pardon me."

In the ladies' room, I removed my hat and pinned away feathers of hair that had escaped from the French twist hairstyle Bea had a.s.sisted me to put up for my special occasion. I checked my suit jacket from neck to waist, straightened my skirt, and smoothed out the lines that had creased my hem from hours of sitting in one place. And I regretted that because of rationing, I hadn't been able to purchase nylons to wear.

This man, Ray Singleton, didn't look anything like my sisters' husbands, but then again, I didn't look like my sisters. My body was lean and firm over the bones, not the sort that had ever lent itself to wolf whistles or men's admiring comments.

I pulled out my compact and powdered my nose. I ran the puff three times over the birthmark above my upper lip, which softened its color. But until I started to pin the hat back in place on my head, until I began dropping hatpins that clinked and bounced on the concrete flooring, until I crouched down to retrieve the pins, I hadn't noticed what I'd done to my shoes. On the train, I'd crossed the heels of my pumps over each other so many times that I'd worn ruts into the leather.

Two.

Upon my return, Reverend Case advised Mr. Singleton to carry my suitcase, and then he led us to his aged DeSoto motorcar, a square-looking vehicle with balding tires and torn seats. I sat on the front bench seat beside Reverend Case, and Mr. Singleton sat directly behind me.

Just as a troop train was steaming into the station, we pulled away and headed east on the two-lane dirt and gravel road out of La Junta toward Las Animas, pa.s.sing through the rural, nearly flat farmlands of the Arkansas River Valley. I'd come here once before, on a field trip to the old Bent's Fort, arguably the most important trading post in U.S. history, but hadn't taken much notice of the surroundings. With the windows down and the wind taking those loose hairs out from underneath my hat again, I gazed out at land that appeared more akin to Kansas than to the state that boasted the highest mountains on the mainland. We pa.s.sed by straight rows of fields irrigated by ca.n.a.ls, herds of cattle in numerous shades of brown and black, and shallow livestock ponds. How different from the clipped campus of the university where I had spent so much of my time before leaving to care for my mother. Reverend Case kept up a running description of every well, farm, and outbuilding we pa.s.sed along the way.

"Now, Olivia, you should know this. The Singletons," he said, nodding toward the man in the backseat, "have some of the best acreage in all of Otero County. Held it in the same family since the homesteading days. Isn't that right, Ray?"

"Yes, sir."

The reverend smiled and nodded to himself as he continued. "Out here we grow sugar beets, vegetables, and a bit of grains. And what with the war going on, farmers are held in highest regard." He tapped the steering wheel with the heel of one hand and glanced my way. "No gasoline shortages for farmers. They get all they want. Right, Ray?"

"Yes, sir."

"Farming," the reverend said. "Feeding hungry mouths." He wrapped his hand around the steering wheel now and nodded. "It's a good life, Olivia."

Outside my window, locoweed growing along the side of the road made me recall the story of Johann Gottfried Zinn, an explorer who wandered the mountains of Mexico. When he discovered some purple flowers he had never seen before, admiring them, Zinn pulled the flowers and put them in his bag. When thieves later attacked him, they tore open his sack and found the wilted flowers. a.s.suming he was a simpleton, they let him go, believing it to be bad luck to harm the dim-witted. Perhaps if I bolted from the car and dove out headfirst into the wild gra.s.s, maybe they'd deem me unfit for marriage. Maybe they'd let me go, too.

We came to the town of Wilson, which lay along the Fort Lyon irrigation ca.n.a.l. North of the Arkansas River and surrounded by farms and ranches that ranged from modest to impoverished, the town consisted of a church, cemetery, school, and post office. The reverend parked in front of a wood-framed church building covered with red peeling paint and topped with a narrow steeple complete with belfry. As Reverend Case showed us inside the church building, I again found it difficult to envision the friends.h.i.+p between my father and this man. Reverend Case had once studied alongside my father at one of the finest seminaries in the country. Certainly he could have served in many churches, but it seemed he focused his ministry out here by choice. After ushering us into the kitchen, the reverend said he would leave Mr. Singleton and me to ourselves for a spell, that he would await our decision in his office.

Before the ceremony, it was one final chance to change our minds.

Ray Singleton poured lemonade from the icebox and sat down across from me at a long table where I could easily imagine the church buffets spread out on Sunday after services. He cleared his throat but seemed unable to speak.

"Mr. Singleton," I began.

His cheeks reddened before he spoke. "Ray, please."

"Ray, then."

I hoped he wasn't too bashful to answer the question that had plagued me ever since first mention of this arrangement. Since the beginning of the war, the pressure on women to marry soldiers had been as powerful as the pressure put on men to enlist. It was everywhere: in the newspapers, magazines, songs, and movies. After all, the soldier was often heading to war to risk it all-his health, his body, his youth, even his life. A good girl didn't have s.e.x before marriage, so if a soldier wanted her, the best choice was marriage. In the popular movie The Clock, Judy Garland agreed to marry a serviceman within hours of meeting him. Women had been marrying soldiers they barely knew out of some patriotic code, but I wondered why a single man would agree to a union such as this one, sight unseen, and for no apparent benefit of his own. "I was wondering ..." But I was having trouble asking it. "I was wondering why you have agreed to this marriage."

He s.h.i.+fted his weight in the chair, and one deep line sank into the center of his forehead. "When the pastor come out to see me and told me about your situation, I thought ..." He paused and swallowed hard. "I thought, maybe it'd be G.o.d's will."

G.o.d's will. Hadn't I been d.a.m.ning G.o.d and His will of recent? And had the reverend imposed some kind of religious pressure on Ray, similar to the patriotic pressure that had been placed on so many girls?

Ray waited long enough to take one deep breath. "And seeing as how my folks are pa.s.sed on, and my brother got killed over there at Pearl Harbor ..." He cleared his throat again, raised a loose fist to his mouth, and half coughed into it. "Out there at my place, it's been right lonely lately."

Lonely, he said. Loneliness was a reason to marry I could accept. After all, marriages of convenience had inked the scrolls of history far back into earliest recorded time. Politics, power, greed, and graft, not to speak of family honor, had spurred on many a union between man and woman, but how many marriages had come to pa.s.s simply because of a need for human companions.h.i.+p ? Out of simple loneliness? And how many more arranged marriages had come to fruition than those of personal choice? I remembered back to my study of Bent's Fort. One of the Bent brothers had married Owl Woman, the daughter of a Cheyenne priest, to keep the peace with Plains Indians, upon whose land the post was located. I found it fitting that I, who had always rev eled in learning the history of humankind, would now be partic.i.p.ating in one of its longest, time-honored traditions: a marriage of convenience.

But in our modern days, I felt that no one should enter marriage without free will. I said to Ray, "Now that you've had a chance to meet me ..." I tried to get him to look at me. "To see me in person, Ray, have you any doubts?"

"Oh, no, mah'm," he said, finally looking up at me with soft eyes. "You're so fine, I can't believe no man would ever do this to you."

I had to look away, down to the linoleum flooring. No man would ever do this to you?