Brave Hearts Page 15
“Time for a break,” Amea called out. She smiled at her husband.
Woody clapped Spencer on the shoulder. “Amea’s right. Let’s play hooky for a while.”
At Spencer’s quick frown, Woody continued, “We can combine business with pleasure. Let’s take the girls to see the vault. We need to check on those trunks from the Central Bank.”
Spencer hailed a marine corporal and ordered a car. Soon the four of them bucketed along a narrow, unpaved road on the way to Middleside, a five-minute drive. This was Catharine’s first foray to this part of the Rock since the bombing began. The utter devastation appalled her. All the trees were dead, their branches splintered, the leaves ripped away by blasts. Craters pocked the ground. Nothing remained of the glistening white wooden buildings which had once topped Middleside.
The jeep jolted to a stop near a low stone building surrounded by a grove of shriveled trees. Spencer led the way, unlocking the heavy wooden door. It swung inward on creaking hinges. Naked light bulbs hung on dangling cords from the low stone ceiling. Old whisky crates, wooden boxes, tin trunks, and steel lockers were piled haphazardly on the hard-packed earth floor. Spencer and Woody studied a diagram on ruled paper which gave the provenance of each container. As they moved about, talking in low tones, Catharine stared at the motley assortment of boxes and at other loose mounds of gold. She moved closer to a pile of gold in one corner. Some of the dirty yellow bars were the size of butter cubes.
Spencer finished his tour of the rooms and came up to Catharine. He wore an expression she knew well: confident, satisfied, supremely arrogant.
“We did it,” he said simply. He waved his hand around the room. “There it is, Catharine, more than forty-one million dollars’ worth of gold and silver. We got it away from the Japs and when we get it back to San Francisco, I’ve got the lists to show who every bit of it belongs to, without question.”
“Back to San Francisco,” she said slowly. For a moment, she wondered if he was mad, if the long hours in the dank, dusty heat of the tunnel had snapped his reason. This gold was seven thousand miles from San Francisco, seven thousand miles across an ocean controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Spencer bent down and struggled to pick up a dark brown lump of gold. “I know who this belongs to.” He smiled. “When the gold arrives in San Francisco, they’re going to know we did this job right.”
“San Francisco.” Her voice rose. “Spencer, we’re cut off, we’re marooned here.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Don’t you understand how important this is?” Once again, his hand gestured at the boxes, crates, and piles of gold. “They’re sending a submarine for the gold, of course.”
A submarine. She’d seen one once, moored at Cavite, a dark, rounded hull, sloping deck, and conning tower.
A submarine for the gold.
Horror curled inside her. They were going to rescue the gold, but not the people—not the men who stood by their guns and died every day, not the nurses who tried to keep life flickering in a world where mutilated bodies happened before breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon, in the dark watches of the night.
She said nothing as they walked back to the waiting jeep. She carried with her the picture of the dark little rooms and their piles of treasure, but superimposed were other pictures: a nurse with pale, drawn face bending over a stretcher, a pail filled with amputated limbs, the strain on gray and dusty faces when the tunnels rocked with concussion.
The jeep was almost back to the east entrance when the flight of Zeros screamed across the North Channel. Bombs glinted against the sun like pieces of silver. The jeep squealed to a stop. The four of them and the driver jumped free, ran for the ditch, and flung themselves down. Catharine pressed her face against the grit, closed her eyes, and felt her body draw in upon itself as if she could make herself small and be safe. Heavy, thrusting noise as a coming bomb exploded, and enormous pressure pummeled her body and her mind.
Jack finished sharpening the pencil stub with his penknife, then looked at it wryly. No typewriters, no ink, no telephones, nothing but jungle and the erratic but vicious battles that exploded without warning in bamboo thickets or groves of banyan trees. It was like blindman’s bluff with a deadly goal as the Japanese soldiers slid up and down steep-sided ravines and hacked their way with machetes through the ferns and vines that formed almost impenetrable barriers. The fighting was bitter, but the Americans and Filipinos had already fallen back from their first line of defense from Moron to Abucay. The Japanese surprised them by scaling what the Americans thought to be an impassable mountain. The Japanese slipped behind Allied lines to form pockets behind the defenders. The Americans and Filipinos withdrew again by the end of January, taking up a line midway down the Bataan peninsula along the fifteen-mile cobblestone Pilar-Bagac road.
Jack shaded his eyes against the blistering midday sun. Sweat burned in the stubble of a three-day growth of beard. His clothes were sweat dampened and board-stiff from dirt and earlier sweat. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. He was smelly, hungry, and tired. He willed it all away and concentrated on a half-filled sheet of paper. He had a half ream of paper stuffed into his backpack, the sheets crammed with his small, precise printing. He’d recorded what he’d seen this past month on Bataan. Would anybody ever read it? He shook his head. There was no point in worrying about that. He was recording a monumental struggle of gallant, stubborn, frightened men fighting fanatical attackers, malaria, dengue fever, yaws, and starvation . . . a struggle foredoomed to failure.
As he wrote, his face puckered in concentration, artillery shells crumped monotonously in the jungle a half mile ahead. The Japanese were saturating the area. Jack paused to light a cigarette, then wrote with renewed vigor, the words spitting onto the page.
“The battling bastards keep on fighting . . .”
Correspondent Frank Hewlett’s bitter doggerel had become the byword of the men trapped in the sweltering jungle. Hewlett captured the aching hurt of the defending troops: We’re the battling bastards of Bataan; No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam; No aunts, no uncles, no nephews or nieces; No rifles, no guns, no artillery pieces, And nobody gives a damn.
Jack wrote fast, trying to tell it all: the captain who choked back tears when he described his men—riddled with malaria, cramped with dysentery, yet struggling to their feet to meet another Jap charge; the nurses who ignored bombing aircraft to protect their patients; the doctors who donated their own blood when the plasma ran out; and the love and reverence of the troops for gaunt, gangling, sunburned General Jonathan M. Wainwright.
Jack stopped when the sheet was full and lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. He wiped his face with a grimy handkerchief. It was late March, the hot season. The jungle steamed during the day and was sharply cold at night. He stared down at his paper. There was so much else to write: the Japanese soldiers who fought blindly, scrambling over barbed wire and using the bodies of fallen comrades as a bridge; the American wounded who lay in blood and filth for twelve hours, twenty hours, forty-eight hours; the mess sergeant who scrounged in the jungle for his desperately hungry men and served them carabao, wild pig, iguana, and monkey stew.
Jack drew deeply on his cigarette. He had private thoughts that no one shared. Very private thoughts. Every night the deep velvet darkness reminded him of Catharine. He could trace her profile in the spangle of stars glittering above him. He thought of Catharine when he stared across the North Channel at Corregidor. He’d written to her; in the letters he tried to fashion words gentle as a touch. He’d written about the way he carried the thought of her as a talisman to see him through each day’s fear and horror. He could feel the syllables of her name on his tongue and in his heart. He understood Tennyson’s gentle wisdom. To have loved Catharine for even a moment in time made his life so much richer. He’d touched the deepest mystery of existence and knew now that the healing properties of love couldn’t be explained or understood—but love was the only reality in life.
He hadn’t seen her since Christmas Eve. Now it was late March. For a moment, his throat tightened. Everyone knew how heavily the Japanese had bombed Corregidor. Determinedly, he pushed the thought away.
Catharine would be there.
Shuddering explosions rocked the tunnel. Dust wavered in the dim bluish light. The wounded men ignored the noise, the choking swirls of dust, and the whining scream of the diving airplanes audible even so far below.
Catharine willed herself to look relaxed. She bent forward. “How do you feel today, Dennis?”
He responded to her now. She came every day to visit. Sometimes they talked about baseball. He’d told her five times about the day he saw Babe Ruth. Sometimes they talked about digging for clams and how quick you had to be. Sometimes they talked about Cindy. But he still wouldn’t let Catharine write a letter.
Dennis smiled up at her. “I’m fine, Mrs. Cavanaugh. Are you okay?”
“Just fine, Dennis.”
Another tremendous explosion thundered above them. The lights flickered.
Catharine swallowed, then spoke quickly. “I’m the letter express this afternoon.” She held up a stack of letters. She’d been up and down the aisles, helping several men write home.
“Maybe they think we’ll get out of here pretty soon, and they don’t want the folks at home to be mad because they didn’t write.”
Catharine didn’t answer. So many of the soldiers and sailors and patients still believed help was coming. “When the convoy gets here, we’ll go home.” That’s how they started so many conversations. Catharine and other State Department wives listened, smiled, and nodded, but their insides shriveled in pain because they knew the truth: no one was coming—no help, no convoys, nothing.
“Listen, Mrs. Cavanaugh, somebody told me, and this is pretty secret. They said the word was that they’ll come by April. What do you think?”
April. The cruelest month.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I haven’t heard. Oh, Dennis, the other night at the outlet I was listening to KGEI, and I heard your song.”
He looked surprised.
“Don’t you remember? You told me it was your favorite, yours and Cindy’s.” She began to hum.
His expression changed, and she knew he was no longer thinking about the convoy. He smiled. “Oh, yeah, yeah. ‘Harbor Lights.’ Yeah, that was our song.” His face crinkled. He looked like a puzzled child. “I never thought about what it said, not then. But it’s true. Harbor lights mean good-bye, don’t they?”
Catharine plunged into a recital of the other songs beaming in from San Francisco and what happened at the outlet and who she’d talked to, but when she left him lying there, the mournful lyrics echoed in her mind. What had possessed her to mention the song to Dennis? But did it really matter? Any of the songs would cause an ache now. Happy songs brought back times that were lost, and sad songs threatened to loose emotions just barely held in check.
Everyone was hungry, frightened, worn down by the bombing that always came again. At any hour of the day. The long, hot, horrible nights were worst of all—the uneasy rustle of others lying so near in the close air, the erratic muffled explosions, the quivering flicker of the lights.
Sometimes, she slipped off her cot, walked into the hospital lateral, and saw the night nurses bending over beds, carrying pails, giving injections. She envied the nurses. They were exhausted and strained, but they were needed.
Whereas Catharine had never in her life felt so useless, so unimportant, nothing but a burden, a mouth to feed when food was so precious, a body taking up room but giving nothing back to the beleaguered community. Oh, she read to the patients, wrote letters home. She rolled bandages every day and helped with the records. She even assisted in the dreadful, heartrending task of tagging the wounded when they arrived after each bombardment, mangled, maimed, hideously disfigured. One night as she knelt beside a stretcher and looked down at the young marine’s legs, or what was left of them, she didn’t think she would ever find strength to rise again.
Catharine shook away the images and tried to see through the thick fog of dust to find her way to the outlet. She felt a rising tide of hysteria. She couldn’t bear any longer being trapped in this choking, fetid haze, feeling the shuddering of the earth above as the bombs exploded. She walked faster and faster, brushing by the sullen groups of men who lounged along the sides of the tunnel. As she neared the outlet, the sounds of the explosions grew louder, harsher, almost deafening, but she didn’t care. She had to be out in the air. She was almost to the end when an arm reached out and grabbed her.
“Mrs. Cavanaugh, wait, there’s a raid on.”
She looked up and recognized a chaplain from the hospital wards. She tried to pull away.
His grip tightened, but his voice was gentle. “Oh now, my dear, wait here a moment. You’re like a moth flying blind. I know how you feel. It’s too much for all of us sometimes, but you can’t be going outside just yet. It would be worse. That I know. I’ve just come from there. It’s a scene from Dante’s Inferno.”
Her tongue licked dry lips. “I can’t bear being trapped any longer.”
“Ah now,” and his voice was cheerful and soothing, “it’s not so bad as all that. You know these tunnels are truly a miracle. They can bomb us forever, and these tunnels will still stand.”
The chaplain’s arm came around her shoulders; she felt herself being turned away from the end of the corridor. “I’ve some coffee in my thermos. That will be soothing for both of us.”
She permitted him to guide her to his desk, and she accepted a cracked mug filled with steaming coffee. She managed a smile, but the horror inside her was very near to bursting. She drank the coffee, and they talked pleasantly. Finally, she returned to the women’s lateral and lay awake until morning.
All that next day, she could feel the tight quiver. She couldn’t bear it, not another night.
She ate a spare serving of canned weenies and sauerkraut for dinner outside the outlet. She stayed as the hours slipped away. She didn’t want to go in. She didn’t know if she would be able to force herself to go in. The sun began to go down, and it would be dark in just minutes, the swift, velvety darkness of the tropics. She knew she was gambling because the shelling from Cavite might start at any moment. At least with the bombs, they would hear the planes first. A shell was upon them instantly with only a high shrill whine to announce the arrival of death. Tonight, Catharine didn’t care. She knew she was close to breaking.
She looked up incuriously as a group arrived from Bataan. There were new arrivals every evening, usually with messages for HQ command.
And Jack walked out of the group.
She scrambled to her feet, her heart thudding, and felt such a tumultuous wash of feeling that she knew that he was life itself to her. The flood of joy transformed her, took a flagging, beaten spirit and suffused it with strength and happiness.
When they stood face to face, she saw her joy reflected in his face.
Catharine didn’t know where they found the strength to stand apart.
Then dusk made its swift transition to the luminous tropical night. She reached out and took his hand.
“There’s a path behind me, Jack. Sometimes at night I walk up the path and reach the flame tree on the point; then I climb down to a cove so that I can be alone.”
They found their way with the aid of the fat golden moon, a bomber’s moon. It was a difficult descent, but Jack held firmly to her elbow. At the bottom, the surf boomed and the moonlight threw the jagged boulders into relief. They walked around a huge boulder, and Catharine led the way to a small sandy patch protected from above by an overhang.
They came into each other’s arms; Cath
arine clung to him. She held him with all her strength; then roughly, raggedly, she began to cry, her shoulders shaking, her body trembling.
“It’s all right, love,” he said gently. “It’s all right. I’ll always come, love. Believe in me. No matter what happens, I’ll be there for you.”
She wanted to believe. She wanted to feel confident that Jack was invincible, but she knew that no one had immunity. The handsome captain who laughed while playing bridge one night would be dead the next. The smiling corporal with the carroty hair kidded the chaplain at breakfast and died before dinner. She clung to Jack all the harder.
He whispered to her, stroked her hair, and dried her cheeks with his handkerchief; then he held the damp handkerchief up in the moonlight. “This proves what I’ve been saying.”
She looked at him blankly.
Laughter bubbled in his voice. “I’m the only son of a bitch on Bataan with a handkerchief, so that means I’m fated to care for a damsel in distress. That’s fate. You can’t quarrel with fate.”
She choked back a sob. “Oh, Jack, it doesn’t help to joke about it.” But she was almost laughing, too, and she loved him, loved his bravery, his gallantry, and his absolutely pigheaded conviction that he, Jack Maguire, would always come out on top. “Oh, Jack, you’re a crazy fool.” But she wasn’t crying any longer. “A crazy, wonderful fool—and I love you desperately.”
“I love you desperately, too.” There was no laughter in his voice now. He touched her cheek with his hand. “I think of you, and it makes everything all right. At night, I look up into the sky, and I see your face. Catharine, I love you and knowing that you care for me has been God’s greatest gift.”
“Care for you? That’s such a pale, lifeless way to say it. I love you. I love you more than anything in the world.”