CHAPTER NINETEEN

March had arrived at Sunbridge like the proverbial lion and was leaving like a lamb. Seth watched Billie’s advancing pregnancy with a knowledgeable eye. This time it would be a boy, a grandson; he could feel it in his bones. Billie herself seemed pleased with the pregnancy. She was more confident, healthier. There was no nausea and sickness with this child as there had been with Maggie and Susan. Seth thought there was a peacefulness about Billie that had never been there before.

Agnes also watched her daughter. Although Billie was only beginning her fourth month, Agnes satisfied herself that the signs were there. Billie was carrying high and straight, instead of round and hippy as with the girls. It was definitely a boy this time. Seth would grunt whenever she mentioned it to him, but he believed every word.

Billie smiled. Neither of them could be one hundred percent certain. Only her. Billie Coleman would have her son.

Billie had announced her pregnancy only two weeks before, on the same day she’d written Moss telling him about their “little accident.” She’d hugged the letter to her breast before she’d mailed it. By now, Moss would know another child was on the way and that she was certain it would be a boy.

As Billie settled down to write to Moss, she looked at the calendar as she did every day and crossed off the date. It was six weeks and three days since she’d heard from Moss. Even Seth hadn’t had word. It worried her but it wasn’t unusual. Often a pack of letters would arrive at once. Moss was fine; she felt it. If something had happened to him, she would know.

The bedside clock read 11:20 when Billie decided to go downstairs for a glass of warm milk. As she was crossing the wide, central hall the doorbell shrilled, startling her.

“Telegram for Mrs. Moss Coleman. Sign here.” Billie’s trembling hands reached for the yellow envelope. The delivery boy’s face was a study in sympathy and pity. The return address was the War Department.

“Mother!” she screamed.

She experienced everything after that through waves of blackness, in slow motion. Agnes coming down the stairs. Seth stepping out of his study. She knew that in reality Agnes had flown down the stairs and Seth had exploded from his study.

Seth sat down on the cowhide-covered bench and stared at the rectangle of yellow paper. He seemed unable to move.

“Would you like me to open it, Seth?” Agnes asked quietly. He suddenly looked old and beaten. Two pairs of eyes watched as Agnes deftly slit the envelope. The words jumped off the page:

 

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU LT. MOSS COLEMAN HAS BEEN LISTED AS MISSING IN ACTION.

 

Missing, not killed. Missing. Missing. It was all Billie had to hold on to.

“That’s all it says.” Agnes relinquished the telegram to Seth’s shaking hands. She straightened and belted her blue chenille robe more tightly about her. “I’ll make coffee. Follow me to the kitchen, both of you. We will not have hysteria. Moss is missing. It did not say he was wounded or dead, only missing. Until we know something definite we will carry on as before. Billie! Get hold of yourself! You have a baby to think of. We’re going to have coffee and even some cake and we’ll talk, all of us together. And then we’ll all go to bed because that’s all we can do.”

“Those Jap bastards have him. They torture, they—”

“Not another word, Seth,” Agnes said sharply. “I don’t want you upsetting Billie. She’s pregnant, or have you forgotten? We’ll have no more of that kind of talk. And you, Billie, you have to believe that Moss is well and will come back. He promised he would come back and we must believe he will. Now, that’s good enough for me and it has to be good enough for both of you.” Billie nodded miserably as she dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her dressing gown.

“All right, Aggie. Where the hell is that coffee you said you were making?”

“It’s right here. What did I tell you about swearing in front of me? I know you’re upset now but don’t let it happen again. It has to perk. Five more minutes. Tita had the pot all ready for morning. I can’t seem to find any cake, so we’re having cornbread with butter. And some blackberry jam would be good.”

Billie noticed the slight tremble in her mother’s hands as she set the table. Busy. Always keep busy so you don’t have to think. Agnes would keep busy and she and Seth would eat. They would chew and swallow. Then when Agnes dismissed them they would go to their respective rooms and cry like babies. Seth for his son, she for her husband, and Agnes for the good life.

They carried on; it was all they could do. Agnes prodded and poked at them to busy themselves. Her tongue was sharp and they obeyed.

Billie managed to fill her days with the girls and writing letters to Moss which she hid away in her lingerie drawer. It made no difference if she could mail them or not. It was something to do. She didn’t cry; she didn’t know why exactly. It had nothing to do with her mother, more with Moss’s conviction that he would return. She hung on to that thought. It was the letters that arrived from Thad Kingsley that bolstered her sagging spirits. They arrived weekly and were full of nonsensical news that made her smile. He always mentioned Moss at the end, expressed certainty that he was safe somewhere and would manage to make it back home.

It never occurred to Billie to question how Thad’s letters managed to be delivered weekly, with no in-between skips. He was fighting the same war as Moss, flying in the same squadron, serving on the same ship. It was enough that he wrote.

In a month’s time Billie knew every member of the squadron and all about their personal lives. She knew about the girls they’d left behind and the pets they had grown up with. She learned about the inside of the planes and what made them fly. She learned Thad’s middle name and what New England looked like in autumn. Her mouth watered for some Vermont maple syrup. The letters were long, written in a close, cramped style with many, many words to the page. Billie treasured the man’s thoughtfulness. Someday, she would find a way to make it up to him. The comfort his letters gave her, the hope, could never be measured.

Seth stomped into the house late one afternoon, his shoulders bent and his face filled with misery. Billie’s heart almost stopped. “What is it, Seth? Have you had word about Moss?” she asked anxiously.

Seth shook his head and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Nessie died.”

“Your horse?” Billie said stupidly.

“Yes, my horse, Nessie. She died. Just now. I have to call the vet.”

“If the horse is dead, why do you have to call the vet?”

“Because I do,” Seth snarled. “Because I do.”

It was as if the horse had been a flesh-and-blood person. It was almost more than Billie could bear.

Agnes’s summary of the situation was simple: She and Billie didn’t understand because they weren’t born-and-bred Texans.

But Billie did understand. Nessie had been more important in Seth’s life than his wife. There had been no tears for Jessica. She watched him make daily pilgrimages to the place where the horse was buried, and he always returned with red-rimmed eyes and a surly tongue. This, too, shall pass, Billie told herself. And it did. Seth, though, hovered over Billie after that. This child was his last hope—nothing must go wrong. It was all he had left. God help me, Billie thought, if this baby fools us all.

Moss was flung against the cold, damp bulkhead. The sea was rough tonight. He’d been blindfolded when they’d thrown him down here, but he could tell from the sounds of the engines and the slick sliding behind the steel wall that he was below the waterline in the hold of the Japanese transport ship. The hold was blacker than a cave and twice as cold. For mates he had several other Americans, a few Australians, and a rat.

Shortly after being rescued from the sea he’d been questioned mercilessly and then hoisted over to this passing transport. The poop had it that they were on their way to Japan. That had been eight days ago—he’d kept count by moving the end of his bootlace into successive holes and knotting the end. Once a day the forward hatch would open and uniformed soldiers, armed and at attention, would bring in a pail of water and rice balls for each of them, eight in all.

While Moss had been flying the Ranger, he’d thought of the Japanese as faceless robots of a corrupt government, enemies to the American way and all it stood for. Now the enemy had a face, yellow and flat and menacing, and he hated them, not just their government, not as a nation, but each and every one of them individually.

The prisoners’ lives had become an eternity of blackness, of sensations of cold and filth. One marine, wounded on Iwo Jima, had died two days before. His body lay somewhere in the dark. One of the Aussies knew a bit of Japanese and had told the soldiers of the marine’s death. Instead of removing the body, they’d merely withheld a rice portion, and tossed a dipper of precious water onto the metal plate floor. When an Australian infantryman had hauled himself to his feet and begun shouting at the Japs, he’d received a solid blow from a billy club as his reward. No one had spoken after that for a very long time.

Hours were endless, time meaningless; yet each day, after their one poor meal was served, Moss moved his bootlace into another eyelet. Now he was working on the holes in his left boot. He wondered if he would still be alive by the time he reached the top. He wondered if he wanted to be.

 

One cold gray dawn the transport ship’s engines were cut and the ship rolled with the tide. The eight beaten, sick, half-starved prisoners came out on deck, into the fresh offshore wind, and saw that they were part of a larger group than they’d realized. There were sixty other prisoners. Word spread that they were all going ashore to a place named Muishi. Moss tried to remember his geography but he couldn’t place it. Muishi, as it turned out, was a coal-mining camp deep in the hills of northern Japan.

Life became a living hell. Each dawn, shirtless, shoeless, the prisoners were herded into Muishi’s coal mine, half walking, half crawling for almost two miles underground where the air was stale and noxious and the temperature dropped nearly thirty degrees. Each night they were herded out again, more dead than alive.

Nearly four hundred men slaved in the mines, working to their last breaths to dig and haul the coal from the earth for their Japanese masters....

Food became an obsession in Muishi. The hard rice balls and an occasional watery stew and hard biscuits were hardly enough to keep the men alive.

The Japanese were ruthless and cruel taskmasters, but they respected religious ceremonies. So when the prisoners told their captors that it was the custom when a man died to leave food by the body and that the living smoked cigarettes and prayed and spoke praise of the dead, they were believed. And from then on, whenever a man died, the guards would provide bowls of rice, which they placed at his head, and a basket of fruit, which they rested by his feet. And cigarettes were given to the mourners.

In time, the prisoners’ appetites faded; the mindless work anesthetized them; hope became a dim memory. But home was something shared by all, remembered by all, even though to each it was a different place and different people.

The desire to live strengthened in Moss. He wanted to see his children again, to hold his wife in his arms. Each day became a battle to hold on to his mental agility and to his toughness. And the only way he could do this was to hate, hate the enemy, hate the Japs. Hate.

Those who gave in to hopelessness soon died, believing the Japanese braggarts who insisted the war would last a hundred years. There was so little information coming from the outside that there were moments when Moss almost believed them, too. Those were the moments he nearly broke, nearly gave up. But he would remind himself he was a Coleman. Colemans never stopped fighting. Colemans were tougher than beef jerky and more stubborn than mules. He clung to his heritage and dreamed of his children. Maggie. Susan. The son that would never be if he gave in to despair. . . .

Early during the heat of August, Moss and the others noted that something was happening. Food became more plentiful, drinking water more available. No one was punished or beaten for being too sick to go down in the mine. Something was happening.

President Harry Truman had given the go-ahead. The ultimate weapon was dropped on Japan. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese government agreed to an unconditional surrender. Muishi was so far north that word didn’t reach them until two weeks later.

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered formally aboard the USS Missouri. V-J Day. Victory over Japan. Moss and his fellow prisoners were brought aboard an Australian troop transport and into the arms of the victors.

Early that same day, as his missing father was being welcomed by the jaunty Australians, Riley Seth Coleman was delivered into his mother’s arms. Billie had finally achieved her victory.