Chapter Fourteen

A tremor strangely unlike distant thunder rattled the bathroom mirror as I finished brushing my teeth and clomped downstairs to the kitchen. I’d awakened groggy, and the bright eye of a lazy Sunday morning winked through my window to announce the time. Johnny had been outside scanning the skies—a dusty pair of binoculars hung around his neck as he sat down to a bowl of oatmeal.

“There must be more maneuvers down at Pearl Harbor,” he said. “A bunch of planes passed over the house before I could tell if they were Navy or Air Force.” He took a spoon of cereal. “Geez, they were low.”

“And they were making a racket way too early for a weekend. It’s not even eight o’clock.” Auntie May held a covered pot in her hands. “Lei, I made enough oatmeal for two if you want to fix a bowl for yourself.”

I thanked her and poured milk on my cereal. “How was the band concert?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

“It was Battle of the Bands,” Johnny said. “The band from the battleship Arizona won. They played a crazy jitterbug.”

I stole a quick look at Auntie who didn’t look perturbed at the way the concert had gone. “We brought along Johnny’s school friend from up the road. Rose Yamamoto.” She poured a mug of coffee and inhaled the steamy aroma before turning to me. “How was your night? Did you have fun? I didn’t hear you come in.” There was a devilish gleam in her eye.

“It was late.” I remembered the grandfather clock at the house had chimed at midnight. “I had more fun than I thought I would. Jerry knows a lot of people, and remember Violet from the library? She was there, so I invited her over for lunch next weekend.”

“That’s nice.” Auntie brought her cup of coffee over to the sit-in and wedged me in beside Johnny as if ready to get down to business. “And what about Jerry?”

“We danced quite a few times.” By her look, I knew that wouldn’t satisfy her curiosity. “There was the jitterbug, and a foxtrot. Oh, he gave me an orchid corsage—I left it on the telephone table, if you want to wear it to your orchid club meeting.”

“But you’ll want to keep it as a memento, won’t you?” Her voice rose slightly before she took a sip of coffee.

I thought of Jamison’s rose pressed into my favorite book. “I’ll save something from another date. The orchid will be perfect for you.”

“You have some of the strangest ideas, Merrylei Wentworth,” she relented.

I was grateful I was eating and stuck in the middle of the sit-in when the phone rang. I mumbled something noncommittal as Auntie got up to answer. “It might be Edward getting off duty,” she said to Johnny who had risen to his feet then sank down again beside me. “So how did things go last night?” I asked.

“Good, really good. There were fighter planes all lined up close together, and the bands were hot.”

I gave him a penetrating look. “You know what I mean.”

“Oh, yeah.” He gave me a shy smile. “That was good, too.”

Auntie shouted from the living room, “Turn on the radio!” then more loudly, “Turn on the radio!”

Johnny jumped up and took two strides to the kitchen counter, where we kept the GE tabletop radio. A church hymn drizzled out. “Turn to KGMB,” I cried. We needed to find a newscast.

“…This isn’t a drill,” the announcer’s voice quivered. “This is the real McCoy, the Japanese are bombing us.”

I was stunned. Am I dreaming this? Auntie was white faced in the doorway. “Lei, get your arm band. That was the Red Cross headquarters on the phone. We’ve got to get to our stations at Queen’s right away. I think it’s going to be a long day.”

Dazed, I absently reached for Auntie’s coffee cup, but no amount of caffeine could cure what was wrong with me. The bombing was shocking enough, but more shattering was the realization that my first thoughts weren’t for myself, but for Jamison. The local Japanese might be blamed for the attack. Worse, he might be injured, dying somewhere without knowing the truth. That I loved him, and hadn’t told him how much he meant to me.

“This is the real McCoy,” the announcer repeated.

I had to pull myself together. People were depending on me.

“Did you talk to Edward?”

“I couldn’t reach him.” Auntie shook her head. “You drive, okay?”

“Sure.” I pushed away the bowl of half-eaten oatmeal and stood up. The room spun for a crazy moment, the way it did when I got up too quickly. Then my head cleared. “We should take your car so we can listen to the radio.”

I didn’t know if she’d heard me. She was telling Johnny, “Stay here and listen to the news. I’ll be back tonight, but don’t, don’t come looking for me if I’m late.”

Upstairs I pulled the armband over the sleeve of my white blouse and was about to grab the headscarf when I noticed Pride and Prejudice, slightly bowed in the middle with the rose pressed between the pages. A terrible black emptiness nearly engulfed me as I clawed my way to clarity.

What a fool I’ve been.

I’d been pouring every last bit of my energy into the guesthouse to restore my family heritage. Establishing my own independence had been the single driving force in my life. Now, when it was too late, I could see what a hollow replacement that had been for what really mattered. Jamison. I loved him heart and soul. I had been searching for him all along.

Across the hall I could hear Auntie tearing through her closet. “Are you ready, Lei?” she called. “I’ll finish buttoning my uniform while you drive.”

We almost collided in the hallway, then ran down the stairs and out to her car. Johnny opened the passenger door for her, and they hugged for a long moment while time stood still. “Pack some clothes in a bag, in case we have to leave in a hurry,” she told him as he closed the door. The latch clicked with finality while I wondered where in the heck any of us could go to escape the bombing.

I cranked the ignition and spun the tires of the nimble little Ford onto the valley road. An ominous black plume of smoke was rising above the trees in the direction of Pearl Harbor. “See if you can find any news on the radio,” I asked Auntie. Her uniform was buttoned, and she was arranging her nurse’s cap over her brown curls.

We left the valley and were out on the pavement when puffs of shellfire started going off in the sunny sky. It might have been our boys firing at a formation of planes that careened over Punchbowl then went diving toward the ocean. Suddenly there was a sharp whistling sound, and from over my shoulder, toward School Street, a rooftop flew into the air like a kite torn loose from its string.

For a minute I felt the numbing dread that Londoners must have experienced for months during the blitz. There is a terrible helplessness to not knowing where or how or when to avoid danger, except to fall face down, hoping and praying you won’t be ripped apart by shrapnel slicing off an arm or leg, then bleeding quietly under the Hawaiian sun until blackness takes over. I floored the accelerator and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white.

Webley Edward’s voice broke through the radio static long enough to say, “…Next to Pearl Harbor itself, Hickham field seems to have suffered the worst damage.”

Queen’s Hospital was normally less than fifteen minutes from home. A traffic cop waved us through the jam of trucks and cars that were honking and piling up with traffic being redirected away from School Street, while a siren shrieked alongside us into the hospital’s emergency room driveway.

In the main lobby, two Filipino orderlies were pushing together desks to make more emergency room beds. “We can sort the wounded over here,” one called.

An unconscious Chinese man was wheeled in from the ambulance, his bleeding leg dangling by only a flap of skin. An explosion had ripped it apart.

“I’ll get a tourniquet on that leg,” said a nurse with a nametag that read Bonnie. She was holding his hand, though he didn’t respond.

“Is the Blood Bank being set up in the Pauahi wing?” Auntie asked the nearest orderly.

“I don’t think there’s been a call put out for donors yet,” he rushed by without making eye contact, then stopped and turned on his heel. “Sorry. There’s so much to do,” he apologized. “The hospital’s lab technician is on the second floor—in the Liholiho surgical ward. She’s taking blood from any of the male ambulatory patients who are up to it. We’re on short staff during weekends, so you can try starting there.”

Auntie thanked him, and we wound our way around the maze of desks toward the stairs. Nurse Bonnie was still holding the Chinese man’s limp hand and was reciting, “…as we walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil.” Her voice was calm with a sympathetic glow lighting up her features.

An open-air stairway went up to the next floor, and a long breezeway led to the large post-operative surgery ward. Ten or twelve men in hospital smocks looked up as we entered. “The nurse has gone upstairs to match up some blood types,” one volunteered. “She’ll be back soon.”

Just then a blonde nurse about my age walked into the ward carrying several pages of a report. In my Red Cross training class, I’d learned that the blood from all donors was screened for syphilis, then re-screened if necessary, before being given to the Red Cross. All the samples were written up in a report and any that tested positive were referred to a doctor, so that an infected person could be informed. The men in the recovery ward had been cleared prior to surgery, so they could donate without additional testing.

Without standing on formality, Auntie stepped forward. “I’m Mrs. Goodhue, and this is my niece, Merrylei Wentworth. We’re from the Red Cross.” She pushed up her sleeves. “How can we help?”

“Jane Howard,” she said with a hurried scan around the room, as if to weigh the priorities. “You could make up three gallons of normal saline,” she decided after a pause. “We have three one-gallon bottles in the lab on the fourth floor.” She smiled at us for the first time. “And thanks. I’m alone here this weekend except for my aid, Melba.”

I followed Auntie up two more flights to where there was a rooftop library, squeezed between the laboratory and the surgery. A shudder rocked the building, made more violent by our height from the ground, and we rushed out to the rooftop to see what was happening.

Eight miles away, across all the roofs in downtown Honolulu and the spire of St. Andrews Cathedral, Pearl Harbor was engulfed in a haze of smoke so dense, that a leaden piece of nightfall seemed to have settled on it completely apart from the morning sunshine. Several planes darted above the smoke in elegant swooping circles but confined their flight patterns to the distance. If I didn’t know better, routine military maneuvers might have been going on at the base. Until a solitary fighter broke ranks from the squadron and headed toward the hospital.

There was a mesmerizing quality to the course he was on that kept Auntie and I rooted to the spot. I wasn’t as familiar with the large red circle of the rising sun on the wings as I became later in the morning. Certainly two women on a rooftop weren’t his target. The pilot must have thought we were crazy standing in the open with our hands up to shield our eyes from the glare. He passed over the roof so low I could see his face behind the goggles and the white headband wound around his forehead. To this day, I swear I would recognize that pilot anywhere. In the wake of an ear-splitting roar, the sweetly nauseating stench of burning aviation fuel filled the air around us. It was the first of many strange new sensations that assaulted me that day.

I don’t know what time it was when Edward found Auntie and me in the laboratory. We had finished mixing the saline and were about to carry the bottles down to the Liholiho ward by hand, because the elevators weren’t running. Melba’s almond-shaped eyes widened in apprehension when one of the orderlies suggested sabotage. She was closeted away in the laboratory preparing slides to do blood typing when the donations came in.

Edward introduced us to the middle-aged woman at his side who was dressed in a khaki uniform. “This is Miss Ennis from the Red Cross field office.” He was in a white doctor’s coat that he hadn’t worn around the carriage house since his first house call. “The Commanding Officer at the Naval Hospital asked her to recruit volunteers. I knew she could count on you.”

Auntie searched Edward’s face for a minute, and I thought I saw him nod ever so slightly. “The naval hospital at Pearl Harbor?” she asked.

Miss Ennis nodded. “Injured men are coming in from the sinking ships. Swimming in, most of them. We need every hand we can find.”

Auntie appeared to deliberate before she spoke. “I worked in an emergency room, quite a few years back,” she said. “Yes. That’s where I can be the most help. We’ll take the back stairs and cut through the lobby to our car. Coming, Lei?”

“I’m not really a trained nurse,” I explained my hesitation to Miss Ennis.

“Can you make beds and turn mattresses?”

“I can do that.”

“Good.” She pressed her lips together. “The men are…there’s a lot of oil in the water that’s caught on fire. The men have to swim through it and need clean beds.”

“I understand,” I said, fighting not to picture the horror of bodies scalded in a sea of burning oil with no other way to shore but to swim. The keys to the Ford were in a deep pocket of my skirt because I had forgotten to bring a purse. I fished for them to have a reason to duck my head and hide the pained expression I knew must be on my face. I was going to ask Auntie if I should drive, but she was saying goodbye to Edward.

“Come back to us tomorrow when the Blood Bank is taking donors,” he told her. There was a long pause. “Come back to us safely.”

My mind travelled to wherever Jamison might be at this moment and echoed, “Come back to me safely. Oh, please, Jamison, wherever you are right now, please come back to me.”

****

I maneuvered the Ford behind Miss Ennis’ green staff car down Beretania past the bus stop the servicemen used to get back to the naval base. No one was on the street. Auntie had the car radio on and the announcer was shrieking, “We are under attack. Stay off the streets. Stay off the telephone. Do not drive your car. This is war.”

A station wagon with a couple of sailors in the back careened around the corner ahead of me, cutting me off from Miss Ennis. The men waved their arms and shook their fists out the window when, Wham! right in front of them something exploded. We were in front of the only Chevrolet agency in town. Shrapnel flew up and hit the sign, knocking a big hole in the wall. Then there was another explosion, and I don’t know what happened, but the station wagon’s engine caught fire. Before I had time to do more than screech to a stop, all three men crowded around Auntie’s open window.

“Hey! Red Cross! We got to get back to the ship.” One of the guys in navy whites had a cut on his forehead from the explosion.

“We can take you as far as the main gate,” Auntie said, “then we’ve got to get to the naval hospital.” The guys climbed into the back seat while Auntie looked at me with a worried expression. “Lei, are you all right?”

I was gripping the steering wheel so hard that my fingernails bit into my palms. “Umm hmm,” I mumbled, and loosened my right hand to reach for the gearshift. With single-minded concentration, I shifted into First without my fingers shaking or grinding the gears. “What time is it?” I asked over my shoulder. Our unexpected passengers were just boys, only a couple years older than Johnny. I could see them in the rear view mirror.

“Ten minutes after nine,” the guy in a flower-patterned shirt said. He tapped the watch crystal with his fingernail a couple of times, then held it up to his ear. “Yep, ten after nine.”

In less than an hour since we’d left the carriage house, more than a lifetime had passed.

“Look at the fires.” One of the sailors pointed out the window. Flames leaped through smoke billowing along the waterfront and across the harbor. “The oil tanks must be burning.”

“It couldn’t have been Japs making those direct hits. How could they plan a surprise attack this big? It must have been Germans in Jap planes. Damn Germans!” he let slip, in excitement. “Sorry ma’am for the cussing.”

“It wasn’t Germans.” I shook my head to make the point.

“How do you mean?”

“I saw one of the pilots—he was Japanese. He was about as close to me as you are.” The pilot’s face was fixed in my mind’s eye. He had been leering down at Auntie and me as he passed. Confident and determined. “Not as close as you are,” I reconsidered, “but it seemed that way at the time.”

Auntie explained how we had gone to Queen’s Hospital and wound up on the roof. I concentrated on negotiating a short cut to the main gate through a housing area. An Army truck with armed guards had barricaded the road ahead, so I zigzagged around the block, thankful that I was driving Auntie’s Ford and not the unwieldy Nash.

“Turn up the radio for a minute,” one of the guys said. “Is that Webley Edwards?”

“Sounds like him. He must be broadcasting to the Mainland.”

“The total extent of the damage is entirely unknown at this time…” The voice then crackled into static.

“Can you believe those sneaky Japs? And their Zeros can fly rings around our P-40s.”

“What do you know about it? You’re no wing man, Shorty.”

“I know, but I got eyes, don’t I?”

Marines were posted at the main gate with machine guns pointed ominously toward the slowly moving chain of vehicles edging onto the base.

“We’ll have to leave you off here,” Auntie said. Nearby a big gun was firing, and what with the noise and the smoke and the dust and the marines waving us on, I gritted my teeth in the face of what lay ahead.

“Good luck,” I yelled as the three men ran toward a receiving station. The sailor named Shorty turned briefly and waved before my words were buried under the weight of gunfire. Amazingly, Miss Ennis’ staff car, with its distinctive red cross on the door was only two cars ahead of us as we pulled through the gate. I swung behind her, heading toward the docks where a blaze behind the three-story hospital was being hosed down by a crew of firemen. The massive wing of a bomber, with its Rising Sun emblem turned up to face the sky, had landed on the front lawn after a fiery crash into the hospital’s laboratory building. From the lawn, it looked as though on a clear day you could see Ford Island, where all the battleships put into port. Nothing but black smoke filled the harbor now.

The front entrance to the Naval Hospital was crowded with injured men who had dragged themselves from the oily water and made their way in singles and groups across the lawn. Wounded men were also being brought in military trucks and cars that must have belonged to officers on base. Ahead a makeshift stretcher was unloaded from a milk delivery truck as I pulled into a parking space. “Carry that patient to the surgical unit in the back,” a uniformed officer barked at the driver. He greeted Auntie and me with a fleeting smile. “Glad to see you ladies. No time for triage, this morning. We’re not setting up a receiving ward.”

“I’ve had some intensive care experience,” Auntie offered.

“You’ll be needed in recovery, then.” He pointed to one of the tents.

I looked around for Miss Ennis but couldn’t pick out her khaki uniform among the confusion of wounded men who were still on their feet. I wanted to know who I should report to, but the officer walked away shouting for a stretcher.

Just then, three men covered in oil piled out of an old sedan and flopped on the pavement in front of me. I couldn’t tell if they were white or black or brown. I knelt and used the corner of my headscarf to wipe the eyes of the driver. He said, “Thanks,” then jumped to his feet, oblivious to the black greasy splotches dripping from his pants. He was bare from the waist up. “I’m going to try pulling a couple more out of the water.” He climbed back behind the wheel and drove off. I never saw him again and sometime later, I wondered whatever happened to him.

The larger of the two wounded men on the pavement motioned me closer. “Can you help me with my young friend here?” he croaked through blistered lips, and raised himself on one elbow. The big man’s t-shirt had been burned off except for the rim of the collar, and raw flesh was bleeding through the oil all the way to his shoes. His shoestrings and socks were charred to nubs, and his head was scorched bare of any hair except a patch over one ear. I had to breathe several times through my mouth until my stomach quit churning.

“I ain’t hurt so bad, just feeling a little cold, is all.” His teeth were chattering as he spoke, and I was afraid he was going into shock.

“Let’s get both of you to a bed,” I said. “Do you think you can walk?”

As we got the younger man to his feet he was mumbling, “Up the hatch, Jake. Man, you saved my life.”

I wrapped his arm around the back of my neck and staggered to my feet under his weight. Jake took his other side, and we stumbled together into the first medical ward inside the entrance. There didn’t seem to be any order to the way patients were being grouped, so I let the younger man collapse into the first empty bed in the room and pointed Jake to one down the row.

“Cut off that man’s clothes,” a doctor ordered, “and get him covered.” He tossed a bloodstained blanket on the bed and moved off to the next bed. “Morphine over here,” he shouted.

In a nearby cabinet, surgical knives were arranged on metal trays. I picked one to cut off the collar of Jake’s shirt, then his wristwatch. The buckle on the watchband had melted into a twisted clot of metal. “You’d better keep a knife like that with you if the Japs invade,” he said.

The two-inch blade was razor sharp, but I didn’t think it would be much defense in an attack. I said only, “I’m not sure I could use it against anyone.”

He tapped the inside of my wrist feebly with his forefinger and whispered, “Not to use on someone else.”

I looked into his face to see if I had understood him correctly. He had a kindly smile on his lips and a gentle glow in his eyes that grew faint and then slowly went blank. For several seconds I held his limp hand, then repeated what I could remember hearing this morning at Queen’s, “though we walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil…” I offered these parting words to nameless men many times during the following hours.

A doctor was bending over Jake’s young friend, so I went over to let him know there was a bed that could be freed up for another patient. “I’ll change the sheets, but I don’t know where—”

“The morgue is full, so the Red Cross office in the basement is being used,” the doctor interrupted, anticipating my next question. “Can you get me that blanket?”

I pulled it off Jake’s lifeless form and tucked it around the man he had saved. With a clean corner of my headscarf, I wiped off the lower half of his face.

“What’s your name, son?” the doctor asked.

“Private Bobby Joe Callahan, sir.”

“How old are you?” He took Bobby Joe’s pulse and recorded it on a scrap of paper taped to the foot-end of the metal bed frame. None of the patients had medical charts.

“Nineteen, sir,” he sang out.

With some of his face showing through the oil, I could see he looked younger than Johnny.

“How old?”

“Nineteen, sir,” he repeated.

“Well, whatever your age, the country’s proud of you.”

A short time later his bed was empty. We didn’t have any more clean linen, so I turned over the sheets, and pushed the image of Bobby Joe Callahan to the back of my mind. In-coming casualties lay on blood-soaked mattresses grateful to have what little comfort we could offer. Doctors were calling out for more plasma, but when I asked the wounded if there was anything I could do for them, as often as not they asked for a cigarette. One seaman who had dark creases etched into his cheeks took a deep drag on a Camel and sighed. “This’ll do a lot more good than the shot they gave me.” He had an orange letter M painted on his forehead in mercurochrome, showing that he’d gotten a dose of morphine.

Over the years, I haven’t looked back very often to that Sunday on December 7th. Some who were there might remember it as a blur of faces drenched in the smell of burning oil. I can recall each man that I washed and bandaged. You’d think those hours would grow dimmer over time. Not like a candle snuffed out by the wind, but one steadily burning shorter until it gutters out on its own. Somehow that didn’t happen for me. The memories are always there, ready to surface with a frightful clarity.

As the day wore on, I sprayed burns with a mixture of mineral oil and sulfanilamide, following the example of nurses who appreciated every extra hand they could get. The supply room shelves were completely empty in no time, so I twisted my headscarf into a makeshift tourniquet, and pressed a gum wrapper on a cut to staunch the bleeding. We were no longer trying to clean oil out of the wounds. We just bandaged what we could. When there weren’t more clean surgical gloves, I boiled-up used ones in a big pot of water, and the doctors fished around in the cooling pot for a left and a right one in their size.

I was helping the wife of a Navy officer ease an injured man onto a cot—she was a volunteer in the Motor Corps that ferried the wounded from the docks to the hospital—when Auntie May came searching for me in a hallway that now doubled as a ward. Her uniform was drenched in blood from her chest to her knees. I wiped my hands on my stained skirt, for the first time noticing dried blood under my fingernails.

“We have to leave now, Lei, before the curfew.”

I felt myself staring at her. “Curfew?”

“The governor declared Martial Law about two hours ago.” She pried a scrap of torn gauze from my grip and wrapped it around the injured man’s wrist. “No one can be out between sunset and sunrise.”

“What time is it now?”

What a day to have come out without my watch, I thought stupidly.

“Almost five-thirty. We can get to the valley if we hurry.” To the Navy wife she explained, “My son’s at home alone. I haven’t seen him since morning.”

The woman patted Auntie on the shoulder and gave her a weary smile.

I simply stood there, numb and lightheaded. I had been on my feet for nine hours without so much as a glass of water. I wasn’t tired, or hungry or thirsty. I had been in a trance, now rudely awakened as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water right in my face.