Dan Wakefield - Under the Apple Tree - A Novel

The Chief, relighting his pipe, called out “Good Scouting!” as Artie charged out of the room and into the bright day.

That night after taps, Artie couldn’t help worrying about how he was going to get through the next nine years without going crazy.

That September Artie started the seventh grade and the Allies invaded Italy. American and British troops had finally hit the mainland of Nazi-held “Fortress Europe.” Our team was really on the offensive now!

Artie came home one day from delivering his paper route to find Mom and Dad in the living room, dressed up like it was Sunday. Their faces were so darn white it looked like they might have just given blood to the Red Cross.

“Whatsamatter?”

Mom’s mouth opened but no sound came out, and she shook her head and looked down at the floor.

“ Roy ,” Artie said. “He’s okay, isn’t he?”

“God willing,” Dad said.

He went and put a hand on Artie’s shoulder.

“Billy Watson was killed.”

“ Wings ? You mean Wings Watson?”

Dad nodded.

“At Salerno. Over in Italy.”

“I know. In ‘the ankle.’”

“Son, he was hit by a shell. It wasn’t just in the ankle.”

“No, I meant—”

Artie felt like someone had punched him in the gut, and it was hard to talk, the words coming out between gasps of breath.

“I meant ‘the ankle’ on—on ‘the Italian Boot,’ where we landed. Is where—Salerno—is.”

He leaned against Dad and put an arm around him, holding on.

“Thousands of miles from home,” Mom whispered. “Our Boys, dying.”

Artie felt sick and scared at the same time.

He had known that lots of Our Boys would get killed invading Italy, but that was the Price of Victory, so even though it made him feel sad there was no use getting down in the dumps about it. He had thought of the casualty figures in the War sort of like the opponents’ score in a ball game. It was bad if their score was high, but you didn’t think of each number of the total as a real American guy who was all the sudden dead. It was too hard to picture when you didn’t even know the guys who had changed into nothing but numbers.

Now it was different.

Now it was Wings Watson.

Artie could picture him, flying down the basketball court, leaping for a rebound; horsing around with Roy and Bo at the filling station, grinning and playing the peanut machine, giving Artie a friendly poke in the ribs, spitting through the little gap between his front teeth.

Dead now.

Gone.

Where?

They didn’t even have his body, or what was left of it, at the funeral.

The service was held in the living room of the Watsons’ rickety old gray farmhouse a few miles from town. Sam Watson mostly raised chickens and his wife Eldora was known as “the Egg Lady” because she delivered fresh eggs to people in town. She and her husband stood gripping each other’s hands by the table where they’d put the silver-framed picture of Wings in his uniform along with a vase of flowers. That was all there was of Wings at the funeral. The picture of him. He was smiling.

Later, his “remains” would come home in a box that no one was allowed to open. Some people wondered if the rule was really for “health reasons” like the government said or whether what was left was too awful to look at or whether it was only rocks and sand in the plain pine box, at least his family would have something to bury while all the time whatever was left of the real flesh and bones was somewhere in the bloody foreign ground of a country shaped like a boot.

How come he had to go clear over there from Illinois?

That was just one of the questions that nagged at Artie’s mind, even though he knew all the right answers about us having to save the world for democracy.

Even worse than those kind of questions were the ones about what really happened to a young guy who died. Somehow it seemed fairly natural for an old person to die; they were tired out from living a long time and even though it was sad, everyone had to go sometime. Lots of young guys were dying every day in the War of course, but Artie hadn’t known any of them personally, so he hadn’t really thought a lot about it till Wings Watson was killed.

The scariest part was that now Artie understood that Roy could really get killed. He knew it in his mind all the time, of course; thousands of American guys had been killed on Guadalcanal when Roy was there with them fighting the Japs, and more were getting killed right now in the Solomons where Roy was right this very minute. But he had always before just thought of those guys as “casualties,” part of the score against us, and he didn’t believe in his guts that Roy would really die way out in those weird little islands with palm trees and coconuts. But if his own buddy and teammate was killed in Italy, it suddenly seemed possible that Roy could really get killed in some crazy place like Vella Lavella.

On a clear afternoon at the end of September when Mom was hanging the wash on the backyard clothesline, Artie went out and offered her some of the Coke from a bottle he’d opened when he came home from school.

She took two clothespins out of her mouth and had a swallow of the Coke.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a pal.”

“Mom? I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“Do you believe in Heaven? I mean, like it’s really a place people go when they die, unless they’re so terrible they have to go the other way?”

“A place? You mean like Birney is a place?”

“Aw, c’mon. Birney’s just a town.”

“Oh—you mean a bigger place? Like Chicago?”

“Stop pulling my leg, Mom.”

“Well, lots of people seem to think Heaven is a ‘place.’ Clouds instead of houses, and angels playing harps.”

“But you don’t think that way.”

“Not really, no.”

“So what do you think it is? If it is?”

“Oh, I think it’s there, all right.”

“Where? Out in the universe, you mean?”

“No. I think it’s all around us. In the grass, trees, sky. Even clean laundry.”

“So you think if a person dies they come back as a tree—or a sheet?”

“Not exactly. I think they become a higher part of things. In a way we can’t see or understand.”

“But how do you know? ”

“I don’t ‘know’ like in a book. I have Faith.”

She unfurled a sheet and it billowed out in the wind.

“Just like I have Faith that Roy will come home from the War,” she said.

“But what about Wings Watson?”

“Is that what you’ve been brooding about?”

“I’ve just been thinking is all.”

“Thinking is fine. Sometimes praying is better.”

“I do that too.”

“I know,” she said.

She pinned up one end of the sheet, standing on the toes of her old blue Keds. Artie grabbed the other end, and took a clothespin out of the basket to hitch it in place.

“I get scared too,” Mom said. “So does Dad. So does everyone. There’s lots to be scared about.”

“So what do you do? Besides pray?”

“Think about what’s next.”

“You mean, like when the War’s over?”

“No. That’s too far away.”

“Like what, then?”

“Supper,” she said. “I think about what we’re going to have for supper.”

“What are we?”

“Tuna fish with noodles.”

“Dessert?”

“Tapioca.”

“That’s neat.”

“See? It’s even nice to think about.”

“I get it.”

Artie tried to concentrate on saying his prayers for Roy and America, and thinking about good stuff, like tuna fish with noodles and tapioca for dessert, and keeping his mind off sex.