Carry Me Home Read online

  Ma’s still got her nose stuck in that book.

  “She says that doctors have it all wrong, putting polio victims in braces and immobilizing them like they do. They do it to stop deformity from occurring, but she says that is the very thing that causes the deformity. This Sister Kenny—who, incidentally, is not a real nun at all, but that’s what nurses are called in England, where she was working before she came here—well, she believes that a patient’s muscles need to be reeducated.”

  Edna Pritchard, she keeps flapping her gums until she’s told Ma about everything there is in that book. Ma sets the book down. “Well, thank you for bringing it by, Edna. I’m sure Pearl will appreciate it. I only hope it doesn’t give her false hope if there is no real hope to be had.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Pritchard says, as she lifts her head up high, her chins wobbling, “it seems to me that she could not make these claims in a book if they weren’t true.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Ma says. “I’ll have Earl run it over to Pearl right away.” Ma, she gets out a little piece of paper to jot Mrs. McCarty a note explaining where the book come from, then she tucks that note into the book and gives it to me and tells me to run it over to her. “But no staying, Earl, it’s a workday, remember.”

  When I get back to the store, that Edna Pritchard, who said she didn’t have time to run the book over to Mrs. McCarty herself, she’s still there, propped on Ma’s stool, gossiping her fool head off. I go back to work and think about how I hope that book ain’t no goddamn lie.

  Mrs. McCarty gets all happy after she reads that book and she calls the hospital where that sister, who ain’t a real sister, works. She sets up an appointment for Eddie and tells Ma on the phone that she don’t care if they have to use every cent of their savings and a whole month’s supply of gas coupons, Eddie’s gonna get into that hospital and get the best help he can get.

  I go see Eddie before he leaves. Eddie, he don’t want to go back to no hospital and he’s crying. Mrs. McCarty, she is crying too ’cause she don’t want Eddie to go away either, but she tells Eddie that if this lady can make his legs work again, then he’s got to go. “You want to be able to walk again without braces, don’t you, honey?” she says, and Eddie nods.

  I bring Eddie some of my comic books to take along, and he sniffles and says, “Thanks, Earwig.”

  “How long does Eddie got to be gone, Mrs. McCarty?”

  “I don’t know, but it will be awhile.”

  “How long is ‘awhile’?”

  “It’s some time, Earl. I don’t know for sure.”

  Eddie wipes the snot off his lip. When his ma tries to kiss his face, he pushes her away, probably on accounta a guy don’t like his ma getting all mushy on him, at least not when his growed-up buddy is watching.

  “You’ll have a good time there, Eddie,” she says—like he is going on a fishing trip or something. “They told me when I called that there are hundreds of children there.”

  “Oh, great,” Eddie says. “Just what I want, a couple hundred creepy, crippled kids gawking at me.”

  “Hey, Eddie,” I say, “them kids got the polio too. If they laugh at you for having crippled-up legs, you can laugh at them for having crippled-up legs too.”

  Eddie is gone for a long, long time. I go to his house every day after work, on days that I don’t have to work at the Ten Pin, and every time Mrs. McCarty says no, he ain’t comed back home yet, then she asks me if there’s any word on Jimmy, and I tell her no, we ain’t heard nothing yet. Then one day Mrs. McCarty says to me—just like she said when Eddie was in the hospital in Ripley—“Earl, how about I call you on the telephone when Eddie comes home? And if it takes a long time, I’ll call you every few days to give you any news I get.” I tell her she ain’t gotta do that, ’cause I gotta give Lucky some more exercise anyway, ’cause, like Dad says, Lucky is getting fatter than a pig and needs more running.

  So I keep walking Lucky around the same blocks, and I keep stopping at the McCartys’ every day. Then one day, after the summer is almost gone, Mrs. McCarty says that her and Mr. McCarty is going to Minneapolis to pick up Eddie on Friday! They says Eddie had one of them miracles and now he can walk real good! So good he don’t even have to wear them braces no more! I get so happy when Mrs. McCarty says that that I give her a big hug that lifts her right off the ground. She is giggling when I set her down. “Oh, Earl, isn’t this a blessing?”

  The day Eddie comes home, I wait on their steps with Lucky. It takes a long time, but finally I see their car coming down the street, and there is Eddie, bouncing on the backseat, waving so fast that his hand ain’t nothing but a blur. I wave back just as fast as he does.

  I can’t hardly believe my eyes when Eddie jumps right outta the car and runs over to me and Lucky. He ain’t even got no braces on his legs. Lucky jumps all over him and licks his face, and I pat Eddie on the back, while Mrs. McCarty smiles and cries, and Mr. McCarty just smiles.

  A few days later, Eddie walks home with me to show Ma and Dad his fixed legs. Ma slaps her hands over her cheeks when she sees Eddie walking so good. “My legs got reeducated, Mrs. Gunderman,” Eddie says. Then he tells Ma and Dad what he telled me. How that Sister Kenny sure was a nice lady and that his ma says she’s an angel. “She felt around my legs when I first got there,” Eddie explains. “She was looking for some twitching that told her my legs weren’t all the way dead, I guess. She took my braces off and left them off. Lots of times, I had to have hot wool rags wrapped over my legs. That felt good, though, because polio makes your legs hurt bad and those rags sure made them feel better. Then she had me work real hard, doing that physical therapy stuff. It was a lot of work but, little by little, my legs started moving again. Ma says Sister Kenny is a miracle worker.”

  “Well, I’d say she is!” Ma says.

  Dad says, “Well, the way Edna Pritchard is carrying on, you’d think that she was the miracle worker. She’s making sure that everybody in town knows it was her idea for you to go see Sister Kenny.”

  “You can say that again,” Eddie says, while he rolls his eyes. “She brings over ladies from her clubs, and she tells them all about the book about Sister Kenny that she sent over. She makes me walk in circles and jump up and down to show them how I’m all better. Then she tells me to show them how bad I was before she sent over that book. When I won’t, she shows them herself. She gets out of her chair and walks all stiff-legged and wobbly and groans like she’s dying or something.” Eddie rolls his eyes again. “I told Earwig that if I looked like that when I had polio, I would have had him come over with a twelve-gauge and shoot me.”

  Dad laughs and shakes his head, and Ma, she says, “Well, thank goodness Edna found that book.” Then she gets up and says she’s gonna make some hot chocolate so we can celebrate Eddie’s reeducated legs.

  While we is drinking our hot chocolate, I realize that, for a whole buncha days, my head was so stuffed up with worry about Eddie that I plum forgot to worry about Jimmy. I get real scared when I realize this, and I jump up and run out the back door. “Where you going, Earwig?” Eddie calls, but I ain’t got time to answer. Down them porch steps I go and circle round the house so fast Lucky can’t hardly keep up. I let out the breath I been holding ever since I left the table.

  Yep, Jimmy’s star is still blue.

  Chapter 19

  One morning, Lucky is barking like crazy out by his doghouse. Ma is counting them paper coins that the ration board gived out a long time ago so customers can get change. Ma is counting away, then she stops and slaps her hands down on the counter. “That barking dog messed me up. I was almost done too. Shoot! Go see what he’s barking at.” I don’t have to go outside to find out, though, ’cause I can see the mailman heading up the steps, and I know it was him that got Lucky all skittery. Lucky ain’t a puppy no more and he don’t bark for just any old reason. It takes a mailman, a squirrel, a car, a bird, a blowing leaf, or a tumbling scrap a paper to get him stirred up now.

  “Morning, Mrs.
Gunderman,” Mr. Peale says, then, slow-like, he hands Ma a letter that any fool can see is from the army.

  “Oh, good Lord, what’s this?” Ma says. I hurry to the counter.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” Mr. Peale says. Ma turns that letter over in her hands, like she’s looking for them two red stars, but there ain’t none.

  I get scared clear down to my toes, waiting for Ma to finish ripping open that letter. Mr. Peale, he stands right there, like he’s thinking maybe he’s gonna have to catch her if she gets the shock.

  Ma’s hands shake as she reads. “Ma, is it bad news?”

  Ma shakes her head then and she starts crying and laughing at the same time. “It’s a letter confirming that Jimmy is in a prison camp! In the Pacific. Earl, he’s alive! He’s still alive!” Ma reaches over the counter then, and she gives me a hug, and she hugs Mr. Peale too. “Over three years now, and all we had was hope. Now this letter!”

  “That’s real good news, Mrs. Gunderman,” the mailman says. “I’m glad when I can deliver some good news.”

  Ma hops all over the store after Mr. Peale leaves. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you!” she says, right up to the ceiling, like God is in them boards. “Oh, Earl, this is wonderful news. All these months. These horrible months. He could have been dead the whole time. . . .” Then Ma, she does the damnedest thing. She sits down on her stool and she cries like there ain’t no tomorrow. I think maybe she is just getting rid of some of them sorrows she’s been carrying around all this time.

  Ma don’t wait ’til Dad is off work and back at the boardinghouse that he says always smells like sauerkraut. She calls him right at work and asks whoever answers the phone to please get Hank Gunderman. When Dad comes on the phone she is about shouting as she reads him the letter. “Yes, Hank! That’s what it says!” And Ma, she starts laughing up a storm. Ma, she hands me the phone, and then me and Dad, we laugh together for a bit.

  Friday night when Dad gets home, he tells me Jimmy might be coming home soon, ’cause it looks like we is winning the war. We winned some islands called the Marianas Islands and that’s good news, he says, but the Germans didn’t win at clipping off that Hitler guy last month, which is a damn shame, ’cause that crazy Nazi is killing a whole bunch of people just ’cause they is Jews. He’s killing ’em all, putting ’em in ovens. Gobs of ’em. That’s what Dad says while we is eating our breakfast. He says Hitler don’t like any people ’cept people with blond hair and blue eyes on accounta he thinks they’re the best, smartest kind. It don’t make no sense to me. That Nazi bastard ain’t got blond hair, and he ain’t smart either, so what’s he got to brag about?

  “Hank! Don’t go telling Earl that awful stuff.”

  Dad’s eyebrows scrinch down. “Well, it’s the truth.”

  “No one knows that for sure,” Ma says.

  “Jesus, Eileen, we’ve known about this for two years now. What do you mean, no one knows for sure? The New York Times reported it back in ’42. It’s no goddamn secret.”

  “What does ‘Jews’ mean?” I ask Dad.

  “Well,” Dad says, “a Jew is just a person. They go to a different kind of church, and Hitler doesn’t like that, I guess you could say.”

  “Why’s he killing them just ’cause he don’t like their church?”

  Dad thinks a minute, then he says, “Who to hell knows what’s going through his mind, Earl. He’s a goddamn lunatic who’s trying to play God.”

  “I think he’s trying to play devil,” I say.

  Ma drips syrup on the tablecloth and hurries to the sink to get a dishrag. She comes back all crabby and says, “Let’s change the subject now.”

  I know I should shut up, but I can’t. Not just yet. “Dad? Do we go to a church that lunatic likes?”

  “Yes, Earl.”

  I think a minute and I ask Dad what kinda church that Hitler guy goes to, ’cause seems to me it can’t be worth a damn, if what he’s learning there is that it’s okay to go around killing people just ’cause you don’t think they’re the right kind. Ma tells me to never mind and to finish my pancakes.

  Ma says we can’t talk about the war at the table no more, so we don’t. That is, until a couple months later, when Dad says we got troops back in the Pacific now, and that soon we’ll take back that thumb of an island from them Japs.

  For a long time, I didn’t listen to the nightly news, but I listen now on nights I ain’t working at the Ten Pin. And even on nights when Dad ain’t around to explain some of what I’m hearing, I understand enough of it to know that we are kicking some ass now.

  It about knocks the wind out of me when I hear the news that President Roosevelt is dead. Dropped dead, just like that, from a vein popping in his head, blood exploding all over in there. I’m on the back steps pluckin’ wood ticks off of Lucky when Ma opens the porch door and tells me the news. I don’t even bother picking off that gray, swelled-up one next to his eye after she tells me the news, ’cause I feel too heartsick to do anything but follow Ma back inside.

  Everybody is heartsick, just like me, when they hear the news. Eddie’s school and all the stores, even Gunderman’s Grocery, close up tighter than a drum.

  When Dad comes home that night, he says he can hardly believe it. He is walking real slow, like his best friend up and died. He says that Harry Truman will make a good President, but that there ain’t never gonna be another President like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ma says she hopes the war won’t drag on longer now that we lost our President. Dad says he don’t think it will.

  Couple weeks or so later, that scary Nazi with the chopped-off mustache, he kills hisself. Dad says he did it ’cause he knew the war was over and he knew we was coming to get him. I think he knew that when we found him where he was hunkered down in that bunker we woulda strung him up by his balls. Least that’s what the guys are saying down at the Skelly.

  A few days later, them Germans surrender. Me and Eddie whoop and holler when Sam steps out of the barber shop and stops us on the street to tell us. “I hate them goddamn Krauts!” I tell Eddie after Sam goes back inside and we get to walking again.

  “You shouldn’t say that, Earwig,” Eddie says. “You’re a Kraut too.”

  “You’re a goddamn liar, Eddie!”

  “You are,” Eddie says, and he don’t even flinch, even though I’m so mad I’m wanting to pop him right on the head. “Your name is Gunderman, and that’s a German name. Lots of folks around here are Germans.”

  Soon as we get to the station, I give Dad his lunch and I ask him if we is Germans.

  “Well,” Dad says, “my daddy was born in Germany and immigrated here with his family when he was still a boy.”

  I scratch my ear a bit while I’m thinking, then I turn to Eddie. I stand up real tall so he knows I mean business. “Well, there, Eddie. We used to be Germans, ’til Dad’s daddy come over here, then we started being Americans. Ain’t that right, Dad? We is Americans now—no matter what we used to be—and that means we ain’t bad no more. You wouldn’t see us Americans go around killing a whole buncha people like them Germans is doing, just ’cause we don’t like the church they go to, or just ’cause we think they ain’t the right colors.”

  Dad, he is pouring himself a cup of coffee and he sighs. “Well, Earl, I wish that were true, but it isn’t. We killed off a whole bunch of Indians and coloreds for the same reasons.”

  I don’t know what the hell to make of any of it, after Dad says that, ’cause now I don’t know who in the hell is the good guys and who in the hell is the bad guys. When I tell Dad this, he just pats my arms and says, “Maybe we’re all just a little bit of both.”

  Something ain’t right when Dad comes home the next weekend. I can tell. He asks me how my job at the Ten Pin is going, but he ain’t hardly listening when I tell him. He tells Ma that she made a fine roast for supper, and he says it’s suppose to warm up next week. His words say that everything’s all right, but his face don’t say it. I go upstairs early and I go straight to Jimmy’s room
and lay down by the vent, ’cause I think Dad was waiting for me to get out of the room so he can tell Ma what’s wrong.

  I scratch Lucky ’til he lays down quiet, and wait for Dad to start talking.

  Finally, Dad says, “I went to a town meeting in Janesville, Eileen. There was this boy there, Red Lawson. When the Japs were shuffling prisoners around from camp to camp, he got left behind somehow. He was one of the Janesville ninety-nine.”

  “Oh, my!” Ma says. “Did you ask him if he knew Jimmy? Did you, Hank? And Floyd? Did you ask him about Floyd?”

  My heart pounds itself right up to my throat when Ma asks that question.

  “Those Janesville boys are a tight-knit bunch. He knew Jimmy and Floyd, and he said that as far as he knows, they’re still alive. But that was a while back, Eileen.”

  “Well, thank goodness you could learn at least that much!”

  Dad clears his throat, but when he talks, it still sounds like he’s got something in there. “Eileen, he told horrible stories about what those boys have endured. He said after Bataan fell, the Japs marched them miles in that jungle heat. They were starved and sick with malaria and dysentery and jungle sores, and the Japs wouldn’t even let them have water when they came across it.”

  Ma, she’s got both hands held over her mouth, so she ain’t saying nothing. I got my hand stuck over my mouth too. Dad, he’s crouched forward and he is rubbing his hands together. “They crowded them on a train then and took them to this training camp that once belonged to the Philippine soldiers. Camp O’Donnell. A lot of our boys didn’t make it, Eileen.”

  Ma starts waving her hands. “Stop. Hank, stop! I can’t hear this!” Ma, she gets up and her hands jump from her mouth to her heart, then to the hairs on the back of her neck. “Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to hear this.”

  Dad says, “I know, Eileen, but I thought you should know. When the war ends and Jimmy comes home, well, I thought you should know what he’s been through.”