Bodark Creek - 27. Chapter 27

Gordon was the first one we lost. He was Dougie’s oldest son, the one Dougie adopted when he married Virginia. They’d held together when Virginia died and even after Dougie remarried. For his twenty-first birthday, as a surprise, Gordy changed his last name to Bronner.

“It was the biggest present I ever got,” Dougie told everyone at Gordy’s funeral.

Gordon was just thirty-four. After Sonny’s son Lyle lured him out of the auto shop, he’d moved his new wife onto the farm my brothers owned, and he and Lyle pretty well ran it. When the war came, forgetting the fact that Gordy’s wife was expecting their first baby, he and Lyle almost raced each other to join the Army, pulling Gordy’s half-brother Dennis along with them.

“Mama’s gonna kill me,” Dennis said. He was barely eighteen. “Then she’s gonna kill both of you.”

“We’ll be on the other side of the world,” Gordy said, laughing. But he and Lyle didn’t go there together. The Army wanted Gordy to work on airplanes, so he got shipped almost straight to England. Lyle and Dennis were trained to fight.

“I’ve never worked on airplane motors before,” Gordy wrote us. “I’d hardly ever seen one. But now I’m fixing ‘em every day..”

That lasted for less than a year, then Gordy was killed in a bombing raid. “When we first got here,” he wrote, “people said they happened all the time. But that was mostly in the cities, and we’re out here in the country, even with all the new airfields being built. And even if you hear a German bomber, you just run for cover. The worst is you lose a little sleep that night, then clean up in the morning. It’s not like London, where the papers say they bomb every day.”

Only one weekend Gordy was in London. He’d been trying for months to get a pass. And when morning came, the hotel Gordy was staying in wasn’t there.

Dougie was pretty broken up. “I keep thinking about him when he was eight years old. He didn’t like me much. His daddy had just died, and I was first starting to see his mama. Gordy wanted things back the way they were though he knew that couldn’t happen. And after a while, we got close.”

“You were very close,” Rosalind told Dougie.

“I hope so,” Dougie said. “I sure miss him. And I’m glad he finally got married like we all wanted. It’s like there’s a little piece of him and Virginia still around.”

Gordy’s wife was a sweet woman from Dallas. She had the baby and worked in the mill throughout the war. But afterwards, she said it was too hard to be so far away from her family, and she moved back home. Eventually, she married again.

The second one we lost was Brodie, Dougie’s second daughter Grace’s husband. “I don’t mean to wish bad luck on anyone else,” Dougie said. “But I wish the Lord hadn’t taken two boys from one family.”

“Maybe he just lost track,” Dock suggested.

Someone could have reminded Dock that Jesus didn’t forget things. But he was just trying to make Dougie feel better.

Brodie had only been part of our family for a year, but he came from town, so he’d been in our lives far longer. He and Grace had been going together since high school.

“He’s the only boy I ever wanted,” Grace said. “Then I got him, and now he’s gone.”

There wasn’t much anyone could say to her, except that Brodie had been a good man, and we’d all loved him. But she knew those things already.

Brodie didn’t even die fighting. He died in an accident in Sicily. An Army truck was going too fast, then it went out of control. Brodie wasn’t driving. He wasn’t even on the truck. He was standing in a line, waiting to eat.

His dying was hard because it was so ordinary. It could have happened anywhere. He could have gone into town for a newspaper or been standing in front of our church. He and Grace didn’t have any children yet, so at least that was easier. Grace stayed on at the mill and became a supervisor. For a long time, she wouldn’t even talk about getting married again. “I want Brodie,” she’d say. “Can you do that for me?” And she never did remarry.

For a while after Brodie died, we got lucky. Charley’s letters continued to come though, because of censorship, we could never figure out much from them. And Sonny’s part of the family just seemed safer. His son-in-law, Jack, his younger daughter Madeline’s husband, spent the entire war in Oklahoma. Sometimes, he even came home on weekend passes.

“They took one look at me,” Jack said, “and asked, ‘Did you play football?’ When I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ they put me in charge of training.” Jack spent almost the entire war doing calisthenics.

Sonny’s son Lyle was also lucky. He was trained to fight but never did. “Somehow they found out I was good at organizing things, and I got moved into supplies.” He spent most of the war in Europe, “But I was always behind the fighting, sending the troops everything they’d need.”

Sonny’s older daughter Gayle’s husband was in Europe as well, but Earl was fighting. First, he went to Africa, as part of the early invasions. Then he was in Italy. Finally, he was part of the troops that went into Germany. Sometimes for months, we had no idea where he was, and there were weeks we were positive he was missing. Gayle didn’t take it well, and for a while she and her daughter were living with us. “It just makes me feel better,” she said. “It gives me a home.” When Earl did come back, he said he was almost never in danger. But he was just the kind of man who’d always say something like that. Years later, Gayle told me Earl was still having nightmares.

“It’s always the same one,” she confided. “He’s in a minefield and thinks he knows where all the mines are buried. Then he keeps getting blown up.”

“How horrible,” I said.

“It’s worse than that,” she admitted. “In the war, he watched one of his best friends die that way.”

Dougie’s second adopted son, from his marriage to Leona, went into training at the same time as Lyle. But Dennis was so young that he had nothing special working in his favor. “They pretty much saw me as a farm boy who’d do anything. So they’d trained me to do anything.”

Dennis went to the Pacific. He fought in the Philippines and Okinawa, and he got hurt a couple of times but nothing so serious they’d send him home. “They’d just bandage my hand, or put stitches in my jaw, and send me right back into fighting. Still, in a lot of ways, I’m better off than most guys,” he wrote. “And I’ve got a couple of silly scars to scare the girls when I get home. All in all, I’m not having a bad war.”

“The only ones having a bad war are the Germans,” Dock insisted.

“And the Japanese,” Sonny added.

“The Italians aren’t doing so well,” Martin said.

“Well, they all had it coming to them,” Dougie decided. “They started this.”

Dougie’s other son-in-law, Henry, was the one who’d started taking courses at the college while he was still working at the mill. “It probably saved my life,” he wrote. “Otherwise, I’d just be another soldier. But the Army liked me right off, soon as they found out I could type. That and my bookkeeping put me right onto tracking men. And filing orders and doing budgets. And they only thing I can blame the Army for is their trying to freeze me to death through this whole darn war.”

Henry had been sent to Alaska. “To the Aleutians,” he always reminded us, “the coldest place anyone could ever think to attack. Who could use all that ice? But the Army thinks that if the Japanese snuck up on Pearl Harbor, they could sneak into America the back way.”

“At least, he’s out of danger,” his wife Doris told us. “I hope he stays that way.”

“I don’t know why this war’s taking so long,” Dock grumbled. “I know there’s a lot to do, but we seem to be doing it the slowest possible way.”

“They don’t want to leave things unfinished,” Martin replied. “Like they did the last time.”

“The last time, they got the whole thing done inside two years,” Dougie said.

“That was a different war,” Sonny pointed out. “We went in there like heroes, when everyone else was worn down. This time we got attacked.”

“We weren’t attacked first,” Martin said. “There were the British and the French.”

“But we were minding our own business.”

“We must’ve done something.”

“No, just keeping to ourselves.”

“It’s never that simple,” Walter said, and no one ever questioned Walter about the war. When he spoke, it stopped conversation. Not that we really talked all that much about the fighting. We were too superstitious. It was almost like we all silently agreed that if we didn’t talk about the war, everyone we loved would come back alive. Though it hardly worked.