“You asked for a map,” the nurse said. “Don’t you remember?” She gave me a piece of paper wide as it was long. The doctor didn’t seem happy about that. Still the nurse moved my tray to straighten the map out. “Look.” She pointed. “That’s France. We’re in the east, near the Belgium border. And there’s England across the Channel. In the south, near the Schonholz Woods. That’s where they picked you up.”
“That’s where they picked me up,” I said.
“That’s right.” The nurse smiled with her mouth closed.
“Right,” the doctor said, sharp. He signed a piece of paper on his board, tore it off. When he left, that paper sat on my legs, but I couldn’t reach it. I didn’t even try.
The nurse pointed again at the map. I couldn’t remember asking for maps. The shapes didn’t add up to nothing much. And there wasn’t one piece of land looked bigger than my thumb. “Private Hess,” the nurse said. She was watching me now too. She’d pulled up a chair, her hand on the rail. I blinked, trying to read the map again. There was France and Belgium, their borders a hazy green. Then Germany to the east, England at the center. But to the west, only a wide drop. “We’ve received a telegram for you,” the nurse said. “It’s about your mother.” Her eyes looked wet. “The doctor has signed your release. You can leave anytime you want.” She dropped her hold on the rail and touched my wrist. Her hand was some cold. This nurse wasn’t anywhere close to the same as Esther. Private Hess, she said again, but it was all a buzz. Hush. That’s the name the boys liked. But better than that, the one Mother had picked from the start.
II
“Lee, ma’am,” I told the woman next to me on the Chicago train. “Lee Hess.” From the look on the woman’s face, she didn’t know what to do with a name like mine. Almost two years after the war and Dutchy by the sound of it. She squinted to fish me out. “I was with the 351st Infantry, in the 88th,” I hurried on. At that, she smiled.
It was late afternoon. I’d been traveling since dark the day before. “Two girls who’ve lost their mother,” the deputy had said. “Two girls like that.” A strange thing, that empty room of theirs. Stranger yet, that chair against the door. Without Myrle and Esther, the beds seemed cast off in so much space. There wasn’t any reason for the girls to leave, but Esther didn’t need reasons. I can find them, I’d told Nan, though her face said not. With all the work before winter, the farm couldn’t run more than two weeks with another hand gone. Her face said that too. Two weeks is more than plenty, I said. I didn’t have a dollar more to last longer. Now on that bench, my legs were a twitch from sitting, my back a rail. Out the window, there was never so much as a tree or post in the fields to catch a person’s eye.
“You’re going to ruin that hat,” the woman said.
I looked down. The hat in my lap I’d creased once and again. Like a fat piece of skin. Skinned and trying to be something. The woman said her name was Helen. She only gave her first.
“A man without a hat,” Helen said. “That’s not even polite. Not if you step off this train. Let me take it before you turn it to ribbons.” She pulled the hat from my fingers and rested it on her knees, working to smooth it out. That smile of hers, it was still there. Her hands were soft and white. The cheeks of a mother, that’s what she had.
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“I’ve been watching you. You haven’t eaten all this time.”
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
“No you’re not. I know boys. They have to eat every minute. And pretty soon you’re going to take a bite out of this hat.” She opened her bag to show a napkin, blue and stitched at the edges with birds. Inside, five rolls the color of wheat. “Here you are.” She dropped one on my knee. “I have too many for myself.”
I bowed my head.
“Don’t you worry. I had a boy your age, though he wasn’t so quiet. Sometimes I wish he had been. Slow down, I was always telling him. Try to listen. You’re a listener, I can tell. It will do you good, listening to people instead of always going on. Like me.” She laughed. “But if you aren’t going to say much, you should at least do me a favor and eat.”
I took a bite and tasted butter. Raisin bursts and poppy seeds.
“My, you liked that one, didn’t you? Here’s another.”
“No, ma’am. I couldn’t.”
“You can because you will. As I told you. I had a boy like you. If he was still with me, I’d fill him till he popped.” Her cheeks fell. She hid a sigh behind her hand. “The 88th,” she said, but I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear. “That sounds just fine.” She folded her napkin as if bundling a living thing. After that, she fell asleep or seemed to. I thought of her boy and the age he must have been. The war had taken nearly all of us one draft after another. All except Ray, but he got hit with something almost as bad.
Mother would have fixed me plenty of rolls. She’d have tied an apron to her waist and filled the stove with wood. I could have done that for her, filling the stove, but she always shook her hand at me and did it herself. Mother’s apron was white with blue stitches. It had flowers instead of birds. That apron of hers smelled of bread and something else. The smell of the river and the high cutting grass. I’d smelled it up close after the accident, when I sat at the table and she pressed my head to her chest. She wouldn’t let me go for days after that.
If Helen had asked, I’d tell her that’s why I was on the train. It was the accident that drove me to the war. It was the war Mother couldn’t stand. Somehow, some way, something got broke. That’s how I figured it. And when Esther and Myrle went off, it felt the same. It was me who broke it from the beginning. Me and the stone in my pocket. Now I was going to bring my sisters back.
The woman next to me woke with a kind of yip. “Ah, you’re still here,” she said. The train was moving again. Out the window, the fields whipped by like a wind. Helen looked as if she’d aged five years just by sleeping.
“Ma’am?”
“You don’t need to call me ‘ma’am.’”
“Sorry, ma’am. Do you know Chicago?”
“A nasty place, those factories. No place for a farm boy.” She yawned. “But I suppose they need them. The factories. My sister lives farther out of the city. That’s why I’m going. Otherwise, I’d never step foot. A boy like you, you’re not going there for work?”
I frowned. What kind of boy did she mean? Closer to Chicago, other trains cut past, near as spitting. Far off, towers smoked, buildings shouldering each other and too many people. Since the war, I’d forgotten there could be so many at once. The kind of boy who forgot, I guessed. The car was shaking. I thought it’d shake us straight off. But with the woman next to me and my stomach full, I grew some sure of myself.
“No work,” I said. “My sisters live there too.”
The train station in Chicago was brownstone and granite, close to a river and smelling the way rivers do. Grand Central they called it. But the words sounded wrong. Central wasn’t so grand, not the way a sky was, or a summer storm. But words were better than numbers. It was numbers I forgot. How many months it took to get me home from the war. How many days this time I’d been gone. The station was high as barns. Higher than that. Glass and steel, the floor a shiny kind of stone. From the roof, a rush of voices dropped like a single thing. Outside the streets went off in every direction, the smell of burning. The clock tower was the tallest structure yet, pinning the station to the ground. I crouched against it. That wall was steady, at least, my head full of engines. All I knew about the place was that my sisters didn’t belong.