The Painted Table(4)

“Pretty good?”

“Well, no. Gorgeous.” He turns serious again. “Yeah,” he says, “and when I’m gone, promise to keep yourself, well, covered up with somethin’ when you’re out, okay?”

Flattered, because she knows she attracts male attention, she says, “What should I wear, a tent?”

The brief levity passes. Drafted. He’ll be leaving. Joann puts her face into her hands and sobs.

At their feet, Saffee whimpers and raises chubby arms. “Up, Daddy, up!”




About nine they ready for bed, speaking low so as not to wake the little one in her crib. Nels sets the alarm clock for three thirty.

At 12:50 a.m., Joann still tosses in their bed. With whiffling snores, Nels embraces sleep with the same enthusiasm he gives his waking hours. How can he sleep tonight, knowing he’s going off to war? She’s already lost both mother and father. By her own choice she’s essentially lost her siblings. And now Nels? She presses her hands against her face, sensing her irregular breathing. Across the room, the baby sighs in slumber.

From the start, Joann hated the idea of Nels shoveling coal into a hot furnace.

“But, Joann,” he countered, “it’s not dangerous. In fact, it’s a wunnerful thing! Who else gets free rent nowadays?”

She relented, but regularly cautions him to be careful around the flames.

As she listens to his breathing, she worries that Mr. Resslar will ask her and the baby to move out when his stoker leaves for war. How will she live without Nels? She’s even lonely when he’s at work.

Tomorrow he’ll get up . . . so early . . . She finally drifts into troubled sleep . . .

“Joann! Joann!” . . .

. . . and a new episode of her recurring nightmare . . .

Nels scoops flames, tosses, shovels, tosses, shovels . . . Joann is propelled toward the hideous conflagration . . . “Nels! Nels! Hide me!” . . . Burned faces sneer, taunt, laugh . . . Tongues of fire uncoil, lick at her . . . Armies of menacing, charred figures march lockstep . . . “Hide me! Please hide me! Where can I hide?” . . .

Joann slams upright, hands grip sheets, breath heaves to expel imagined, smothering smoke. Who is crying? Her mother? Her sisters? Who is burning? She bounds from the bed unsteadily, crazily.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” With heart pounding, she snatches up her startled baby from the crib, holds her tightly in the darkness, and slumps against the wall.

Encroaching fear advances like a cancer.





CHAPTER TWO



WAR





At the door early Monday morning, she clings to him. “Now, sweetheart,” Nels pleads, “don’tcha go worryin’. Today is only the meetin’ with the draft board. I’ll call you before they pack me off to boot camp.” But Joann doesn’t try to be brave. He cups her face in his hands as they kiss; she wills it is not their last.

By the time he calls Wednesday night, she is frantic. “I’ve been so worried! Why haven’t you called sooner?”

He tries to soothe her. Tells her that in the military everything takes a long time and there are always long lines of inductees at the telephones. “But guess what? I’m a navy man!” He sounds proud. “Took three days of arguin’ with the Fort Snelling draft board, but in the end, I won.” He will go to Idaho for boot camp, he says. To a place called Farragut. He leaves tonight.

“Tonight? How can you sound happy about it?” she demands, one hand gripping the receiver, the other clenching and unclenching.

“Oh, now, Joann. You know I’m not happy ’bout goin’ to war or leavin’ you; just happy I won the argument so I don’t have to go to the fightin’ over in Europe. Besides, bein’ a sailor suits me more.”

“Suits you!” She abruptly stands to her feet. “How can anything about going off to war suit you?” Just as abruptly, she sits again, rubbing her temple. Doesn’t he understand? He is her life.

Nels tells her it must be done. “But it’s going to be so hard!” she whines. “For me too, you know.”

There’s a painful silence. She attempts to pull herself together and asks how he convinced the draft board to transfer him to the navy. He says that after three days a sergeant got tired of his face and stamped his papers.

Her fingers race through her hair. “What does that mean?”

Nels hesitates. “Well, they might have it in fer me.”

She tightens her grip on the receiver. “In for you?”

He tells her that when the navy sees that the army didn’t take him, they might think he is a troublemaker. The sergeant told him that as a consequence, he might be assigned to hazardous duty.