HE SPOTTED HER right away. Beautiful smile, gorgeous hair. And the way she moved, out there on the dance floor, every guy in Elmo Club watching her.1
She was sitting with her girlfriend now at a nearby table. That’s Bobbie Mellis, Ben Steele told Porky Dillon. All grown up from the girl he once knew. Must be eighteen, nineteen, “kind of a knockout.” They should go over, he said, introduce themselves, buy the girls a drink.
She remembered him from before the war, working with her father out at the Clark ranch. So Bud Steele was back. No worse for the wear, apparently. He still had that shock of dark hair, those deep brown eyes.
The four of them ordered steaks and rounds of whiskey and beer. They talked, they danced. When the Elmo closed at 4:00 a.m., they drove down from the heights to a diner on Montana Avenue for breakfast.
BEN STEELE was twenty-eight, Roberta Mellis twenty, a bookkeeper at the Billings Gas Company. They dated almost every night for two weeks. At the end of his leave, sitting in the Elmo Club again, he said he had a question. He took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote something on a cocktail napkin.
“Marry me?” it said.
“Yes,” she answered.
Back at the convalescent center in Spokane, his doctors told him he wasn’t ready for marriage. He wasn’t “normal” yet. “Take it easy,” they said. “Get back on your feet first. Don’t fall in love with the first girl that comes along.” His family was against it, too. “She isn’t a Catholic,” his mother said.
In Spokane he bought Bobbie a wedding dress. A few weeks later, on February 16, 1946, at the Little Flower Catholic Church in Billings, they were married. She was in white, he was in uniform. Bobbie and Bud.
They honeymooned in Miami at the Embassy Hotel, a fancy art deco hostelry on the beach that served as an army rest and recuperation center for former prisoners of war. Then during the spring and summer they lived in a bungalow on the grounds of Fort George Wright in Spokane while he finished his treatment. On December 12, 1946, Bobbie gave birth to a daughter, Rosemarie.
They returned to Montana and set up housekeeping in a bedroom in his in-laws’ house east of town near Shepherd, not far from the old Clark ranch. He was home, married to a Montana girl, living on the land he knew. He sketched, saw friends, thought about his future. In the fall he planned a trip to New London, Ohio, to spend time with an old comrade, Father John E. Duffy.
THE PRIEST had come west to see him that summer. He’d driven out from New London in his brand-new Pontiac, met the folks at the ranch the Old Man was managing in Broadview, said hello to Bobbie and the baby.
They traded war stories for a while, then Duffy asked about his plans, and when the priest discovered that Ben Steele was at loose ends—thinking about this, thinking about that—he suggested he come to Ohio. They could work together on a book. He’d been thinking about a book since Bilibid Prison, a book that would include the kind of sketches that went down on the Oryoku Maru. Duffy would write the text, he said, and Ben would create the drawings.
Bobbie did not want him to go. Neither did his parents. Something about that priest, they said, the way he kept complaining about how Montana’s gravel roads were ruining the tires on his new car. Besides, Duffy hadn’t written anything yet. He’d been thinking about it, he said, working on the book in his head. Would Ben like to hear the title? ‘We Met Them at the Beaches.”
That spring, to spur him along, the priest sent him carfare, and Ben Steele sat down to sort things out. He wanted to draw, of that he was sure, and here was a man who supported his work, a man with a little influence. He knew that in Cleveland, just sixty miles from New London, there was an excellent institute of art. He might matriculate, if they’d have him.
AT FIRST he got along well with the priest. He liked New London, a town that looked like a village—sleepy squares and greenswards, maples, oaks, and buckeyes. Duffy’s old stone church, Our Lady of Lourdes, was on Park Street, across from some schools and a block from the town center. There in a room in the rectory, Ben Steele sat down to draw.
He drew from memory, drew all day every day and into the night. In the evening, when Duffy’s clerical duties were done, the priest would return to the rectory to inspect the work of his protégé. He liked what he saw, he said, but he had a few suggestions. They should do a scene about this, they should do a scene about that, battle scenes mostly, keeping up the good fight.
Ben Steele had something else in mind, the other side of war, tableaux from the death march, O’Donnell, Tayabas Road. After several weeks of this back-and-forth, he began to wonder about the book and asked the priest to see some pages.
“Oh, there’s lots of time,” Duffy said. “Time isn’t an element here.”
“It is for me,” Ben Steele said.
IN AUGUST that year, 1947, he bought a small place in New London with his back pay from the army, took a part-time job as a housepainter, and brought Bobbie and the baby out to live with him.
She was lonely right from the start. Her husband was always working, and she was pregnant again. She liked New London well enough, a picture-book place with small-town manners and ways, but she had never really lived outside Montana, and she missed the West, missed her friends and family. The locals tried to welcome her, invited her to garden parties and the like, but with a baby on her hip and another on the way, she had little time for soirees. And she found no society in the church, either. She’d converted to Catholicism to marry Bud, but she never took to her new religion, and now Duffy was nagging her about skipping confession and missing Mass.
Early that fall, at the urging of an alumnus who’d seen his work, Ben Steele applied to the Cleveland Institute of Art, a well-regarded four-year studio program. The freshman class was full, the registrar said, but he was welcome to come by with his portfolio and a professor would take a look and tell him if he had any talent.
He gathered up his drawings and charcoals, got in his 1939 black Ford Victoria, and headed east along Lake Shore Drive into downtown Cleveland. Carl Gaertner, a well-known painter, happened to be at school that day. Ben Steele opened his portfolio. There was the water line at O’Donnell, the bars of Bilibid, a guard bayoneting a marcher on the Old National Road. A few hours later, he was admitted to the freshman class.
More than a third of the class that year were veterans, but, as far as he could tell, he was the only prisoner of war. In the company of other vets, he kept silent about his service. If someone sought his particulars, he’d say something like, “I just was ground crew in the Air Corps,” or change the subject, rush off to class.
“What’s this I hear about you?” his design teacher said one day.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“I’m talking about being a POW and all that.”
“I don’t know,” Ben Steele said. “I just was.”
He didn’t want to talk about it. Those other guys on campus, they’d won the war, but he’d surrendered, and the stain of that sometimes left him uncertain, shamefaced.
HE LIKED HIS CLASSES A LOT. One semester the great German caricaturist George Grosz held a workshop at the school. Ben Steele was dazzled by his war work, especially the artist’s haunting pen-and-ink Survivor. His favorite class was with John Teyral, a master draftsman who could suggest a world with just a few well-placed lines. As artists say, he knew how to get the thing right, something his new student, Ben Steele, had been struggling with.
He was up every day at 6:00 a.m. Made himself a brown-bag lunch, filled a thermos with coffee, and left immediately for school, often arriving at the old redbrick building on Juniper Road before eight, ahead of everyone else. He spent all day in class, often staying late for extra instruction. Back in New London, he’d grab a bit of dinner and sit at a drawing board half the night.
Bobbie was miserable. Bud always seemed someplace else, and the loneliness was consuming her. He knew there was trouble and ignored it. Art was his religion now, and school was his sanctuary. The way he saw it, he’d been a long time getting here. All the way from Bilibid Prison, those first charcoal scratches on the concrete floor. How could Bobbie understand that? How could he explain it to her?
In November they had another baby, Julie Margaret. He was a sophomore now, busier than ever. Through the winter and into the early spring, Bobbie, brooding, started to lose weight and write home about her troubles. In the fall of 1948, her parents drove east for a visit, took one look at her—she’d lost twenty-five pounds—and told her to pack. “I thought maybe we had a future together,” she told them.
He was determined to finish school and didn’t try to stop her. He thought, she’ll be back. She just needs time home. He’d stay in school, make bus trips back to Billings, rebuild the marriage.
He sold their house to save money and sent her the furniture. A few months later, he received an envelope from a law firm in Billings. “Mental cruelty,” the divorce papers said.
He phoned her that night. Why was she doing this?
“That’s what I want,” she said.
He didn’t believe it. He was going to come west during break week, he said. They could talk, sort the mess out. She said nothing.
After that, the letters started to arrive, letters from his friends and family in Billings. They had seen Bobbie around town, they said, seen her with other men.
His work and grades started to slip. He suffered from dyspepsia, woke up from pillow-tearing war dreams. In the late spring of 1949, he got on a bus for the long ride home.
He went to her folks’ house in Shepherd to talk to her and see the girls. She hardly looked at him. A few days later he asked her to lunch.
Bobbie was back working as a bookkeeper in Billings, her folks helping to raise the girls. He met her at a restaurant downtown. She seemed in a hurry, ate quickly. She had to get back to work, she said, then left.
He finished his lunch and wandered out into the sunlight, and as he looked back toward her office, he spotted her crossing the street and entering another restaurant.
The cuckold in him couldn’t resist. When he came through the door he saw her at a table, cooing with a local celebrity, a singing cowboy. The man spotted him before she did and almost knocked her over running out the back door.
“Oh,” she said, “I just—”
“Goddamn you!” he said. “That’s just about your speed, by God.”
________
THE NEXT DAY he got on a bus back to Ohio. Past prairie, past farmland, one tiny town after another. An endless ride, alone.
He thought about the war, about coming home, about the beautiful girl he’d married. He remembered telling himself back then, “I’ve already been through hell, so everything’s going to be easy from now on.”
He’d made a mess of it, he could see that now. And then he realized, “I still love her. I don’t know why, but I still do.”
He loved his girls too and never imagined he would miss them so much, ache for them. His eyes started to water.
“Goddamn it,” he thought. “Goddamn it.”
Then, for the first time in his life, he started to feel sorry for himself. He’d never been so low. Imagine, after everything, this.
“I should end it all,” he told himself. “Get a gun. Blow my brains out.”
IN THE SPRING of 1950 he got ready to receive his diploma. His mother alone came out to cheer for him.
“I never thought I’d see you graduate from college,” Bess Steele said, a big smile on her face.
He enrolled right away at Kent State University to earn education credits and by the fall of 1951 was certified to teach art. He was living in a rooming house in New London now, dating a bit, teaching art at the junior high and high school, drawing and painting on the side.
That November he attended the high school’s annual Thanksgiving alumni dance, a big event in New London. He was wandering around the gym, drinking punch, when he spotted a woman he’d met in passing several times in town, Shirley Anne Emerson.
He knew a bit about her from her aunt Nonie, his landlady. She had graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, a journalism major and art minor. She had worked as a buyer in a department store in Mansfield for a while, then had moved home to help her ailing grandfather. She was in the accounting department at a local factory now and was writing freelance articles for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. All in all an interesting gal, twenty-six years old, easy to look at.
She was sitting with friends, talking, when he wandered over.
“Would you like to dance?” he said.
She looked up, recognized him.
They danced a lot that night. He was like no one she’d ever known, this cowboy turned artist, this former prisoner of war.
They started to have dinner regularly, sometimes at Aunt Nonie’s, sometimes at her mother’s. When the town of Wakeman invited him to show some of his war art and give a talk about his experience, she went with him and was impressed.
Truth was, she’d liked him from the first, and it wasn’t long before she was telling herself, “This is the one,” this nice-looking man with a wonderful laugh and dark piercing eyes. She wondered how such a man could suffer so much and still have such “boyish appeal.”
In May he said to her, “We better talk about getting married.” She didn’t know the difference between a steer and a cow, but he didn’t care.
“Yes,” she said, “we should.”
She told him she might not be able to bear children, a consequence of an old operation.
“Well, that’s all right,” he said. “We have two girls.”
AFTER THE WEDDING they went to Denver, where he got his master’s degree, then he took a job with the Department of the Army setting up craft shops on army bases and posts in Kansas, Washington, D.C., Georgia. Finally, in 1959, he told Shirley he wanted to move back home to Montana, and he applied for a job as an assistant professor of art at Eastern Montana College in Billings. The next year they built a trim little split-level about a mile and a half down the road from the college. The house sat in an enclave of small streets tucked up against the long wall of rimrocks that frames the city’s north side and separates it from the vast prairie beyond.
He was a natural teacher, popular with the students. Then on the first day of his second semester, he walked into his classroom and saw a ghost, a Japanese.
The student’s name was Harry Koyama, the son of beet farmers from out Hardin way, the first Japanese that Ben Steele had encountered since the war. He looked at those dark, almond-shaped eyes, and his heart hardened and filled with hate. And when he found out that the boy’s family had been locked up in an internment camp during the war, he assumed the boy hated him as well.
“This is awful,” Ben Steele thought. “What am I going to do?” After class he went back to his small office to think.
He told himself, okay, the war is over. He wasn’t a prisoner anymore and this wasn’t Japan. It was America, and “this kid’s an American, too.” That being the case, “I have to treat him like everybody else, no different.”
For a while it worked. He seemed okay with Harry, and Harry seemed okay with him. Then the student discovered that his professor had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and Ben Steele could feel the boy pulling away, withdrawing.
That troubled the teacher in him, and he sat the student down for a talk. By the end of the semester, Harry Koyama was among the best students in the class. And Ben Steele was beginning to wonder what had happened to all that hate he’d brought home.
IN 1999, THE MORNING after his eighty-second birthday, Ben Steele, long retired from the classroom, awoke early, after six. Shirley would not stir for another hour but he was up before the sun, an old man long off the range holding to the habits of a young Montana cowboy.
He sat on the side of the bed for a moment, shaking off the numbness of the night, then he pushed himself to his feet, performed his morning ablutions, and made his way down the darkened hall and around a corner into the kitchen. The morning light was just beginning to fill the room, and he stood at the glass doors to the back patio, watching the first rays of sun play on the towers of rimrock that rose up behind the well-ordered neighborhood of ranch houses and split-level homes in suburban Billings where they lived.
Since he was a man of habit, it is easy to guess what was going through his mind that cool November morning as he watched the rim-rocks change color from gray to light brown, the color, he once remarked, of the young antelope that come down from the mountains in the spring to romp among the sage by the highway and feed on the first green shoots of prairie grass. He was happy to be free. Every morning for fifty-four years he’d had the same first thought:
“I can go where I want to go, I can do what I want to do, it’s wonderful.”
And this notion, this simple sense of emancipation that came to him as he cleaned his teeth and combed his hair and pulled on his blue jeans and plaid shirt, made him a most agreeable man, a man with a warm handshake and an irresistible smile.
He had errands to run that morning, and after cereal and toast he settled himself behind the wheel of his pickup, a new gray Dodge Dakota with a camper top. He was not an acquisitive man—the salary of an art professor had never allowed for luxury, and what’s more he was cheap, so “tightfisted,” his grown daughters liked to joke, he could make the face on an Indian-head nickel cry out in pain—but he had to have that new truck.
His first stop was the ophthamologist to prepare for cataract surgery a week hence. Old men, he liked to joke, were like old cars—some damn part or other was always wearing out. Overall he was healthy enough, a bit overweight perhaps (Shirley fed him sensibly but he had a sweet tooth and kept candy hidden in the cab of the truck) and a little slow of foot (poor circulation often left him leg weary), but he could still climb into a canoe to fish the Big Horn or wade out into the icy currents of the Stillwater to chase the trout in the eddies. He even planned to get on a horse again. A friend from the East was due that night, a tenderfoot eager to understand the open range and ride side by side with an old cowboy, a man who believed in the boundless.
After the eye doctor, he headed east on Broadwater Avenue to a branch post office to mail something to his adopted son, Sean, then he turned the truck back up toward the rimrocks, looking for KEMC, Billings’s public radio station, where he was scheduled to give an interview on his life and work.
Artist and educator Ben Steele was born November 17, 1917, in Roundup Montana to Benjamin Cardwell Steele and . . .
It was just before 10:50 a.m. and Elizabeth McNamer was taping her show Speakers Corner in studio B at KEMC radio. McNamer was something of a personality in Billings. An Irishwoman educated in England, she had lived long in the American West but had held hard to her Anglican intonations. An odd voice for cowboy country, but then Billings was a town where the word “character” seemed to apply to a lot of folks.
Ben grew up on the family homestead south of Musselshell on Hawk Creek. He attended school . . .
McNamer had known Ben Steele for years, which is to say that like most who claimed his acquaintance, she really knew his work.
In forty years of days, Professor Steele had trained hundreds of painters and draftsmen, a handful of whom enjoyed some renown: Clyde Aspevig, Jim Reineking, Elliott Eaton, Kevin Red Star. Outside the classroom, their teacher had developed something of a reputation as well. In forty years of nights and weekends, Ben Steele had holed up in the studio behind his house in the lee of the rims producing his own work, art that reflected his life.
Ben volunteered for the United States Army Air Corps and served from 1940 to 1946. Present at the bombing of Clark Field in the Philippines . . .
He painted the West and he painted the war. And though his “war stuff,” as he liked to call it, was in every sense art, almost everyone tended to look at it as testimony, an affidavit of the suffering of those days.
Elizabeth McNamer described that work for her listeners, then asked her interviewee what it had been like to make the infamous death march. Ben Steele leaned forward.
We were so thirsty on the death march that we would . . .
Seven or eight minutes into the interview, Elizabeth McNamer noticed that her guest seemed suddenly unsettled. The bright brown eyes, usually so relaxed, looked distressed.
“What’s the matter, Ben?”
He sat very still for a moment.
“I’ve got this pain in my back,” he said.
McNamer reckoned he was getting stiff from leaning forward at the microphone.
“Why don’t you stand up for a minute,” she suggested. But he could not raise himself, and the pain was getting worse.
“Lois,” said Elizabeth, “can you get Ben a glass of water? He’s not feeling very well. And maybe someone should call an ambulance.”
Lois Bent, the producer, was sitting on the other side of the glass window that separated studio B and the control room. When she came around the corner into the studio, she found Ben Steele slumped forward in his chair.
“Mm-my back . . . ,” he mumbled.
“Ben! Ben!” Lois was bending over him, yelling.
“Oh my God!” said Elizabeth.
She was just about to make a second call for an ambulance when two paramedics, Michelle Motherway and Julia Johnson, rushed into the room.
To Motherway the man looked ashen, “like the color of the wall.” And his blood pressure was low, “eighty over sixty,” she told Johnson, dangerously low. His symptoms suggested a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He had “that look,” as paramedics say, that “impending sense of doom.”
They picked him up in his chair and hustled him into the ambulance.
“We’re fighting time,” Motherwell told the emergency room doctor, Ron Winters, on the radio, then, turning to the driver, Alicia Kraft, she said, “Get going . . . and go as fast as you can.”
The ambulance raced down Twenty-seventh Street to Deaconess Hospital. Dr. Winters was waiting at the emergency room door. Motherway had been right, it was an aneurysm. This guy is in trouble, Winters thought, and he grabbed for a phone and summoned a surgeon.
Meanwhile, in the shadow of the rimrocks, in their gray clapboard house on Cascade Avenue, Shirley Steele had just returned from her own errands and was standing at the ironing board in the laundry room downstairs when the phone rang.
“Shirley, it’s Elizabeth McNamer. We’re taking Ben to the hospital. He’s very ill.”
When Shirley Steele arrived at the emergency room, she found her husband in cubicle 13, lying on a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses. His face and head were swollen out of all proportion. He was screaming and moaning. She should leave, a nurse said, ushering her to a small waiting room.
A few minutes later a doctor appeared in the doorway.
“Excuse me, are you Mrs. Steele?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Scott Millikan.”
“Yes?”
“He’s bleeding badly and we have to stop it,” the doctor said.
The rent in his aorta was pouring blood into his viscera, drowning his organs and driving his blood pressure down to forty and sending his body into a deep and dangerous state of shock.
“If I do nothing,” Millikan continued, “he will be dead in ten minutes, and if I do something he may still be dead in ten minutes.”
“Go ahead,” Shirley Steele said.
The surgeon sprinted for the operating room. He had an hour—“the golden hour of trauma,” clinicians call it—sixty minutes from the onset of bleeding to arrest the flow or lose the patient.
Studying the ambulance log, Millikan calculated that the aneurysm had ruptured around 10:55 a.m.; Motherway was at the patient’s side by 11:02; Winters received him at 11:18; Millikan was attending by 11:32; and at 11:45 Ben Steele was on an operating table, saline solution dripping into one arm, plasma in the other, and an oxygen tube down his throat. Scott Millikan was leaning over the patient, a scalpel in his hand and ten minutes left.
He cut the patient lengthwise from the sternum to the pubis. Five minutes to find the fissure. They saw the aneurysm almost immediately, a balloon in the aortic wall three and a half inches wide, the largest the surgeon had seen. And there was the rent with blood pouring out of it.
It was speed work, a kind of medical sprint, and after they had clamped the aorta and cut off the bleeding, the surgical team paused before beginning their distance run, the hours it would take to remove the aneurysm and try to repair the damage.
“All right,” said the anesthesiologist, taking a breather, “who is this guy? What’s the story here?”
A nurse said, “This is Ben Steele.”
“Wait a minute,” Millikan said. “I know that name.”
“He was an art professor,” the nurse said, “and he was in that death march of Bataan.”
The surgeon turned to his assistant. “This is great, ’cause now I know this son of a bitch is tough. He’s already proved he’s a survivor.”
Five hours later Millikan wandered into the waiting room and flopped into a chair in front of the family—Shirley, Rosemarie, and Julie. The doctor had changed into clean green scrubs and was wearing hospital slippers but no socks.
“Sorry about the bare feet,” he said wearily. “It got a little deep in there.”
Then he gave them the news: the patient had lost a lot of blood; they had given him thirteen units during the operation. His main worry now was Ben’s blood pressure: a sudden or sustained drop would likely cause a brain hemorrhage, and if that happened, it was unlikely the patient would survive.
And there was more: Ben’s kidneys or heart might fail; his lungs might fill with fluid and he might drown; a blood clot might form and shoot to the brain; his internal organs, which had been swimming in blood, might have been damaged and could shut down.
Adding it all up, Millikan said, the patient’s prognosis was no better than “minute to minute.”
Julie asked a few questions, Rosemarie was too frightened to speak, and Shirley shut her eyes and took several deep breaths.
“Hold it together,” she said to herself. “You have to hold it together.”
The next day, Friday, Millikan revised his prognosis. Now it was “hour to hour.” By Saturday Ben had improved to “day to day.” He could manage a few words at that point, and early Saturday morning Shirley was able to speak with him.
She stood by his bed in the intensive care unit, her left hand on the bed rail, her right hand wrapped around two of his fingers.
“How ya doin’, kid?” she said and touched his cheek. “Hey! You need a shave.”
He looked at her and blinked.
“I thought—” He blinked again. “I thought they had killed me,” he said.
Then he turned his head and smiled.