The usual twenty minutes had elapsed. Then she’d started in. Same thing most evenings after work. Her recitation might have kept my attention if it ever varied. Once in a while the tone changed, a higher pitch, a few tears, but the timing had become predictable—always as soon as she doled me a beer, shortly after I emptied the trash, and while I washed the dishes left from breakfast and the night before. Splitting the housekeeping chores was the deal we’d made. The agreement hadn’t included the time of day I’d wash those few dishes.
With my hands in the dishwater longer than necessary because the slickness of detergent-foamed water soothed something in me, I half-listened as the litany began, just after she set my beer on the kitchen table. Hers was half-empty already.
I’m an older man now, but I’m blessed with an excellent memory, amazing given the sheer volume of things I’ve stored over the years. Have another glass of wine?
I realize I should have explained. What I just launched into without preface is a recollection from among those I entitle Important Life Lessons: Shit I Should Have Paid More Attention To At The Time. This particular one contains when and what I learned about war and true love, all on the same night. If you’re interested, I’ll continue.
Yes, I was living here in Surface City then, too. Okay, back to 1987.
Sometimes an event of the day created a logical entre to the first part of this ceremony she conducted, the first complaint. If I played my part, mine would have been the first response. Small congregation, well practiced litany. But long ago I’d stopped answering.
That night she hardly hesitated between topics. “Did you apply for any jobs today? My supervisor dumps all the work that Julia doesn’t finish on me. Do I even get a thank you from either of them? She makes nearly twice what I do. I don’t intend to be a teller there forever, standing on my feet all day. Did you return Daddy’s call? He has a good opportunity for you—in insurance. Mother says we must come home for New Year’s Eve. Big party, lots of contacts for you.”
Finally, she took a breath and cut her eyes around the room, her gaze landing on the two books I’d brought in. She said, “Library, again?”
A change in the order of things. So I answered. “Bookstore.”
“Just what we need around here, more books. If you’d spend more time…”
I’d finished the little pile of dishes, left them in the drainer. Her mother had taught her the proper procedure—scald and dry them. I did them my way. Wiping my hands, taking a slow drink of the brew, I watched a wrinkle form above her left eye as she read the title of the top one upside down. I sat across from her at the kitchen table and eased the two books toward me.
“Art?” she said.
“Edward Hopper.”
That wrinkle turned into a whole-face frown.
I won’t belabor this part. You get the drift. There’s a point at which all marital arguments sound alike. She got up and pulled something out of the refrigerator. Then she clattered the pots and pans and ended up with a skillet. Cooking was her chore.
That was when I said, “Going for a walk. Don’t wait supper on me.”
I’d become good at silent exits. No door slamming. As I walked, I ran through the responses I’d held back, a satisfying affirmation of my self-control. Cold day in hell before I’ll work for your father. I have my own business. You don’t like your job, get another one.
I had the perfect job. Just watch my machines do the work. Plenty of time to read. Created my own one-man company.
After about a mile, I slowed my pace. A Dallas September evening, by then twilight, invited me to stroll and observe. I did, and I stopped a few times to make notes for a poem I’d been working on.
As dark fell, I passed a bar that didn’t look like most bars—windows, no neon out front. Two booths and a long stretch of the dark mahogany bar were visible through the window fronting on Knox Avenue. A bartender stood behind the bar facing the window. He busied himself, head down, washing glasses. A woman, visible only from the back, perched on a barstool close to the opposite end. Although her body was small, her posture suggested she carried a heavy weight. The only other patron sat between those two, on the inside edge of the pew-like, unpadded booth on my left. The three of them formed a triangle, each somehow lit from above. Shadows and sadness hovered in the spaces. No notes required. I’d remember that, a set that could have been imagined by a painter or an Irish playwright.
That twitch of your mouth tells me you think you’ve figured out the rest. Top off our drinks, would you? Nature abhors an empty glass.
The only thing I learned that night was that walking away takes less time than walking back. Thirty minutes and thirty-three city blocks of steady pacing found all the lights out at our house. I stood below the street lamp out front wondering where my shadow disappeared to, and then I went in.
Fall came on fast that year. October brought rain and required a jacket. I could say nothing had changed, but that wouldn’t be quite true. It took me a while, but one night I figured it out. I was barely in the door when she started talking. Louder, more urgent. “You never listen to me. We have to move out of this neighborhood. It’s filling up with trash. No place to raise kids when we have them. This house is falling apart. Who has an attic fan and not air conditioning anymore? Daddy said he’ll help us with a down payment.”
I nursed my beer and watched her mouth. All softness had disappeared. I closed my eyes for a second and it came to me. That was the first real skirmish in a war that could go on forever. Larger battles would follow.
She took a breath and then started again. “Are you going to eat?”
“Not soon.”
“I’m not cooking, then.”
The rain had turned to drizzle, but it was too wet to walk. I exited, and took the car. No destination in mind, I prowled, stopped for a beer in a bar on Greenville, then two more on Lemmon. Then I was on Knox. And there was that bar with the puddles of light and poetic shadows. I wandered in and headed to the stools. Looking in the mirror back of the bar, I caught the sight of her in that same seat near the end. Familiar.
I pulled up to the very end at the corner. The bartender wasn’t happy because I was too close to his olives, but he brought me a beer. I stared into the mirror and spoke to the woman. She’d caught my reflected gaze and smiled. Still addressing the space beyond the bartender, I said, “I’ve decided this will be one of my favorite rainy night places.”
She said, “It’s mine most nights.”
The place smelled the way it should—stale beer, popcorn, the faint aroma of a burger cooked hours ago.
You’re nodding. Yeah, the way a bar should smell. Right. Wooden floor soaked in alcohol and mixed with tobacco smoke says, “Welcome.”
I reached my cigarette pack, lying next to my glass, and gave the blue box a tap against the side of my left forefinger. Two cylinders popped their filtered tips out like soldiers ordered to attention. I tilted the pack toward the woman and said, “Join me?”
She gave me another long look in the mirror. When I turned to face her, she assessed me at close range and said, “Thanks.”
I offered her a light and watched her across the flame as I lit mine.
She nodded, “A gift from a stranger.”
I said, “You work around here?”
She shook her head. “Used to. Parkland Hospital. ” After a puff on the cigarette, which she didn’t inhale, she said, “Was a nurse. It used me up. I ran out of caring. At the end I worked in Central Sterile—equipment and supplies, no people.”
“How many years?”
“Nursing? Want to guess?”
I shook my head. “No idea.”
“Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m old. I could be your mother, maybe your grandmother.”
I said, “Hello, Ma’am.” A half-second’s worth of a smile flitted upward across her features and disappeared.
Then I introduced myself, and she said, “I’m Mattie. Mattie McDonald I am.”
“And grand it is to meet you,” I said.
“What does a young man do these days? A man like you?”
Slick as a magician, I produced my business face and told her I worked in medicine, handling computing chores like accounting and billing, and assisting with cardiovascular research.
“I was a nurse in the war, on Buna.” Although she faced me, her gaze was directly through me, really. She said, “Beer helps.”
The bartender caught my signal, another for each of us. “You mean the place they called Bloody Buna?”
I remembered seeing, in an old 1942 Life, the first published photograph of American battle deaths after the U.S. entered WWII. Propaganda, I’d read later, to sway public opinion. Real people, dead on a tropical beach, used for purposes they didn’t sign up for.
I let the silence drop in. She would get there when she was ready. I had nothing but time.
“I was working at the University of Chicago, surgical nursing. Worked my way up to Assistant Head Nurse after seven years. After Pearl Harbor, the Army recruited nurses for the war effort.”
Her voice took on a harsh edge as she pronounced those last two words. She planted her glass on the bar as punctuation. Just then I began trying to guess her age.
She said, “How do you know about Bloody Buna?”
I took my turn taking my time. The bartender glided by, caught my nod, and returned with two more beers. “Student of history, student of life,” I said. “An uncle was in the Pacific—Luzon, Saipan—and told me some about it. Read the rest in books.”
She slid from her stool, stood, and pushed it nearer to me. “Sorry, I’m slow,” she said as she adjusted the seat and slipped smoothly back onto it. Spry for the occasion with a young man interested in history, her history.
Back then I wasn’t as good a listener as I should have been. Young and full of myself, I guess. Waiting would have been the right thing to do, but I said, “Wasn’t that was when scientists at the University of Chicago were working on building the Chicago pile, the reactor?”
She nodded. “Under the stadium. They told us to avoid going back there.”
My interest in the history pushed me to ask too many questions for her. She nursed her beer and puffed the Dunhill. After a long silence, she said, “You ever watch MASH on television?”
I nodded. “Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Different war. Korea.” Then I shut up and listened.
She said, “Our hospital was one of the early ones. Prototype, I suppose. Theory was good. Fast triage, immediate surgery near the battlefront could save lives. We did the best we could, but we never had the supplies we needed. Not even enough food or proper uniforms for jungle warfare. MacArthur was ill-informed, poor intelligence. ”
I lit another cigarette for each of us. A deep shadow hung between our shaft of light and the bartender’s at the other end.
“That history you’ve read…I’ve read some, too. Never tells the whole truth. Makes war seem orderly. Plans made, troops commanded, battles won, losers vanquished. Numbers tallied. Acceptable losses. It’s not orderly. It’s chaos. Pure chaos. Always another war. Or the same war in another place.”
Without a signal, the bartender appeared with another for each of us. The old nurse never hesitated, matching me drink for drink, but she’d gone somewhere in her mind, seeing scenes I could only imagine. I relaxed against my stool’s back and waited.
“We worked the surgical cases, all that rushing to save a life here and there. But more of the soldiers, us and the Aussies, too, were sick and dying without ever stopping a bullet. Scrub typhus, malaria, dysentery.”
She turned directly toward me. Back in the present now. “I doubt you’ve ever seen a man die of dysentery. But you probably read about it. By the time they got to the hospital, some had been marching, dragging the ones who were sickest, with the ass end of their pants cut out. They knew if they stopped to drop their drawers, they’d die. And scrub typhus. They said the chiggers on the vegetation carried it. Those poor guys had high fever, headache, swollen livers, g.i. symptoms, and joint pain so bad they would cry constantly. No antibiotics to stop it. They suffered and then they died.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Any of that in the history you read?”
I shook my head, imagining the odor without words to describe it. “Must have been awful for you.”
“You get tough or die. The heat and the mosquitoes, you learn to deal with. But the worst of that war came in waves—silence, snipers, artillery, guns, bombs, repeat. The tents were close together—triage, preop, op, postop, mortuary. But the snipers. They shot at us from the trees, us moving litter cases from one tent to the other. Snipers. Never knew when in those silences to expect them. We thought they must live up in the trees and never come down. Deadly quiet. Deadly accurate. We scuttled from one tent to another like roaches. Talk was that if you heard the shot, you were still alive. If not, you’d already been hit.”
It seemed like a long time before she spoke again. And for once I had the sense not to utter a word.
She said, “No one can imagine the blood, the constant carnage. In the silence after one of the bombs was when he was taken from me, my doctor.”
I leaned nearer, spoke softly. “Yours?”
“We were close.”
I offered a cigarette to replace the long, neglected ash hers had turned into. Another silent nod answered. She inhaled and coughed, a brief, dry hack. She turned toward the window, then back to me. She said, “Looks like it could rain all night.”
“If it does, I’ll drive you home.”
A shrug. Then she said, “I won’t melt. As long as it’s not one hundred fifteen degrees.”
Telling a forty-four year-old story can take a long time. After a bit, she said, “Back then, when the silence fell, we huddled together waiting for the next. The work, the heat, the pressure, drove us all to cling together. For sanity. For now, not tomorrow. But the two of us had plans, if only for the next minute. And then in the silence after the bombs, he was killed.”
“You were young.”
“Not that young. I’d had my thirtieth birthday on the Liberty Ship that took us out there. He was older, but not much. Married, not happily. She wanted a society doctor, plastic surgery.” Then, her voice stronger, she said, “It was love that we had.”
A benediction if I ever heard one. She studied the bottom of her glass and I watched another smile skitter by, replaced soon by deep sadness. “Stepping outside a tent in one hundred fifteen degree heat to catch a breeze and grab a smoke shouldn’t be an act of courage. We’d done it before. But that night a sniper’s bullet took a talented surgeon and left me there behind.” She looked up at me, making certain I was there with her, in Buna. “I have not recovered even now.”
There was nothing for me to say. It was her story.
The bartender ambled our way and she shook her head. Then she said in a quiet voice, “In case you wonder, I’ve never loved like that again. I love him still.”
A quick intake of breath and she straightened on her stool. She said, “Looks like it’s slowing down out there.”
I drove the few blocks she directed. She held my hand as I helped her up the three steps to her door. “My key’s right here in my purse.”
I got it out and hugged her, if for no other reason than that she knew what it was to love truly and for so long. Then I opened the door, and she said, “I’m glad you read books. You remind me of him.” After a long pause while she studied me, she said, “Good night.”
I heard the door lock and then I drove away slowly, trying to figure out what that night had been about. Then I tried to figure out how to get back to that house with the attic fan in the going-bad neighborhood. The car must have known the way. I arrived at the front door without realizing it. Inside, in the living room, I stood and looked out at the now intermittent drizzle, the shadows cast by the streetlight. No mosquitoes. Only silence.
I see you nodding again. Now you understand. That’s the tale. Thanks for listening. Have some more wine?
When did I switch from beer to wine? I can tell you exactly. It was 1988. But that’s another story.
Teddy Jones is the author of a collection of short stories, Nowhere Near, and six published novels. Those include Halfwide; Well Tended; and four in the Jackson’s Pond, Texas series; Jackson’s Pond, Texas, Slanted Light, Making It Home, and Marva Cope, all from Midtown Publishing, a small independent firm. Her short fiction received the Gold Medal First Prize in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in 2015. Jackson’s Pond, Texas was a finalist for the 2014 Willa Award in contemporary fiction from Women Writing the West.
Jones received degrees from Incarnate Word College, University of Texas System School of Nursing, University of Texas at Austin, and the MFA from Spalding University. She has worked as a nurse, a nurse educator, a nursing college administrator, and as a nurse practitioner in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. For the past twenty years, she and her husband have lived in the rural West Texas Panhandle where he farms and she writes.