Orphan Train(85)

Dutchy completes his technical training and aircraft carrier flight deck training, and after he’s been in San Diego for a month, he learns that soon he’ll be shipping out. Given his training and the desperate situation with the Japanese, he figures he’ll be heading to the Central Pacific to assist Allied forces in that region, but nobody knows for sure.

Surprise, skill, and power—this, the navy tells its sailors, is what it will take to win the war.

The Central Pacific. Burma. China. These are only names on a globe. I take one of the world maps we sell in the store, rolled tightly and stored in a vertical container, and spread it on the counter. My finger skims the cities of Yangon, near the coast, and Mandalay, the darker mountainous region farther north. I was prepared for Europe, even its far reaches, Russia or Siberia—but the Central Pacific? It’s so far away—on the other side of the world—that I have a hard time imagining it. I go to the library and stack books on a table: geographical studies, histories of the Far East, travelers’ journals. I learn that Burma is the largest country in Southeast Asia, that it borders India and China and Siam. It’s in the monsoon region; annual rainfall in the coastal areas is about two hundred inches, and the average temperature of those areas is close to ninety degrees. A third of its perimeter is coastline. The writer George Orwell published a novel, Burmese Days, and several essays about life there. What I get from reading them is that Burma is about as far from Minnesota as it’s possible to be.

Over the next few weeks, as one day grinds into the next, life is quiet and tense. I listen to the radio, scour the Tribune, wait anxiously for the mail drop, and devour Dutchy’s letters when they come, scanning quickly for news—is he okay? Eating well, healthy?—and parsing every word for tone and nuance, as if his sentences are a code I can crack. I hold each blue-tinted, tissue-thin letter to my nose and inhale. He, too, held this paper. I run my finger over the words. He formed each one.

Dutchy and his shipmates are waiting for orders. Last-minute flight-deck drills in the dark, the preparations of sea bags, every corner filled and every piece in place, from rations to ammunition. It’s hot in San Diego, but they’re warned that where they’re going will be worse, almost unbearable. “I’ll never get used to the heat,” he writes. “I miss the cool evenings, walking along the street holding your hand. I even miss the damn snow. Never thought I’d say that.” But most of all, he says, he misses me. My red hair in the sun. The freckles on my nose. My hazel eyes. The child growing in my stomach. “You must be getting big,” he says. “I can only imagine the sight.”

Now they’re on the aircraft carrier in Virginia. This is the last note he’ll send before they embark; he’s giving it to a chaplain who came on board to see them off. “The flight deck is 862 feet long,” he writes. “We wear seven different colors, to designate our jobs. As a maintenance technician, my deck jersey, float coat, and helmet are an ugly green, the color of overcooked peas.” I picture him standing on that floating runway, his lovely blond hair hidden under a drab helmet.

Over the next three months I receive several dozen letters, weeks after he writes them, sometimes two in the same day, depending on where they were mailed from. Dutchy tells me about the tedium of life on board—how his best friend from their basic training days, another Minnesotan named Jim Daly, has taught him to play poker, and they spend long hours belowdecks with a revolving cast of servicemen in an endless ongoing game. He talks about his work, how important it is to follow protocol and how heavy and uncomfortable his helmet is, how he’s beginning to get used to the roar of the plane engines as they take off and land. He talks about being seasick, and the heat. He doesn’t mention combat or planes being shot down. I don’t know if he isn’t allowed to or if he doesn’t want to frighten me.

“I love you,” he writes again and again. “I can’t bear to live without you. I’m counting the minutes until I see you.”

The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less clichéd. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.





Hemingford, Minnesota, 1943


It is ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and I’ve been in the store for an hour, first going over accounts in the back room and now walking down each aisle, as I do every day, to make sure that the shelves are tidy and the sale displays are set up correctly. I’m in the back aisle, rebuilding a small pyramid of Jergens face cream that has toppled into a stack of Ivory soap, when I hear Mr. Nielsen say, “Can I help you?” in a strange stiff voice.