American Blonde (2 page)

N
o one was waiting to meet us because they didn’t know we were coming. A few old men sat outside Deal’s General Store drinking Coca-Colas and chewing tobacco, but I didn’t recognize their faces. They narrowed their eyes in our direction, like we were strangers and not to be trusted.

We walked past them, past Deal’s, up the hill toward Sleepy Gap, which sat high up in a holler on the side of Fair Mountain. As we walked up the hill, Johnny Clay and I didn’t speak a word. His leg was giving him trouble, but the closer we got to Sleepy Gap, the faster he started walking. I walked faster too, until we were practically running. Then we were racing, just like we used to when I was ten and he was twelve and we were trying to get home for supper.

We came up over a rise in the hill and I could see the big red barn, the chicken house, the smokehouse, the root cellar, and Daddy Hoyt’s fiddle studio, where he made his violins. The first of the houses was a narrow weatherboarded two-story. It had a tin roof and a porch on the front. I could picture the newspapers, yellowed and curling, that lined the walls inside and filled in the cracks. They were the ones I’d learned to read from.

Johnny Clay threw our bags down in the grass and we were past Mama’s house and around to the back, where another house sat. This one was made up of two log cabins connected by a dogtrot, or breezeway, and a shared red roof. Five blue stars hung in the front window—for my brothers Linc and Beachard; Johnny Clay; Sweet Fern’s husband, Coyle Deal; and me.

The front door stood open and just as Johnny Clay was getting ready to holler, an old woman walked out onto the porch, shading her eyes with one hand.
Granny.
She was thin and tough as a strip of tanned leather. Her white hair was pulled back in a bun. You could see the Cherokee in her—in the cheekbones, in the eyes—as she took her hand away. She blinked against the sun and let out a shout. Then her arms were around us, and she was small but strong and she was crying. I breathed her in—the smell of lavender and lye soap that she made every year.

A man came out of the house.
Daddy Hoyt.
He was tall and sturdy, even with the rheumatism that made his back ache and caused him to stoop. He wore his herb-gathering pants, overalls with what seemed like a hundred pockets, which meant he was planning to spend the day in the woods, collecting the healing plants he needed. Granny was talking and crying and calling out to Aunt Zona, to Ruby Poole, to everyone on the mountain to come see, come now, the children are home.

They were all around us, and suddenly a man was hugging me. At first I didn’t recognize him and almost pushed him away. His black hair was cropped close and there was a long scar at the hairline.
Linc.
My oldest brother. His wife, Ruby Poole, was crying and Aunt Zona’s girls were crying, and I heard myself say, “Where’s Aunt Bird?” at the same time Johnny Clay said, “Where’s Hunter Firth?” and started to whistle for that old brown dog.

Someone said they’d died last winter, both of them old, both of them weary from living such full, long lives. Then a voice rose up behind us, coming up over the hill, traveling toward us like a bullet.

“Is it true? Are they back? They said at Deal’s—the train just came—and two people, a boy and a girl . . . Where are they?”

A woman appeared. Her brown hair had gone almost gray and was pinned up off her neck. Her face was round and plain except for a smudge of pink lipstick. An old blue apron was tied around her waist and she was followed by one, two, three, four children of various ages.
Sweet Fern.
She must be thirty-two now, almost thirty-three. She’d been twenty when Mama died, when she was left to raise Johnny Clay and me.

My granddaddy was looking at me. He had seen Johnny Clay’s hand and leg, had noticed the missing finger and the limp. Nothing ever got past him. Daddy Hoyt was a healer and a medicine man, trained by the Cherokees, the wisest person I knew. He was looking us both over, making sure.

That night, I sat at Granny’s table and held hands with Ruby Poole to the left of me and Linc to my right as Daddy Hoyt said grace. “Well, sir, here we are. We’ve had quite a time of it lately, but it seems the worst is over. I want to thank you for getting these young people home to us. It’s not Thanksgiving, but we’re giving thanks just the same.”

Linc and Coyle had both come home early, Coyle in January and Linc in May, discharged because of injuries. Coyle, shot through the arm, which now hung at his side, still working, still movable, but crooked. Linc, sent home with a head injury, minor enough to survive, major enough to end his war career. He looked up now and caught my eye. He squeezed my palm, and I glanced around the table, bowed head by bowed head, taking everyone in. I had my own scars but I wasn’t wearing them on the outside.

Daddy Hoyt said, “If you would continue to look after Beachard who’s still fighting in the Pacific, we certainly would appreciate it. And look after the rest of the brave men and women who aren’t lucky enough to be home yet with the folks that love them.”

Our hands broke apart and the food was passed—the very same food I used to dream about at Fresnes prison in Paris, where we were given coffee made of sawdust and bread rotten with maggots.

The children were practically grown. The youngest, Russell, was nearly eight. He sat next to his mama. Ruby Poole—dark hair curled over her shoulder, lips painted red, pretty as any Hollywood starlet in the movie magazines she loved to read—rested one hand on his head, the other on her stomach. She was pregnant, barely a month along.

Johnny Clay said to Linc, “You sure didn’t waste a minute once you got home.”

Sweet Fern said, “Johnny Clay.”

For a long while I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t talk, which was fine because Johnny Clay was doing enough talking for everyone. At some point, he pulled out the gold bookmark that he swore had belonged to Hitler and passed it around. He said, “Careful now. Don’t you drop it or lay a scratch on it.” Johnny Clay took the bookmark from Dan Presley, Sweet Fern’s oldest, and held it up to the light so that we could all see the inscription there. The words were in German but the initials were clear:
A.H. herzliche Grüße von
E.B.
Then he carried the bookmark over to Granny, as if he were bringing her something holy. He said, “I brought this back for you. I thought you could put it on your mantel along with these.” He fished two bullets out of his pocket. They were clean, nearly as bright gold as the bookmark, but there was a time they’d been covered with my brother’s blood.

Just as everyone finished eating, I picked up the fork with my left hand, which was the way I’d learned to do in France so that no one would suspect I was American. Across the table, Sweet Fern and Coyle watched my hand and then looked at each other. No one had asked me yet what had happened to me, what I’d been through, and I was grateful.

The story of my brave escape made it from the
New York Post
all the way to the
Hamlet’s Mill Gazette
, and when the newsreel clip played at the theater in Waynesville, everyone on the mountain found a way to go and see it. I signed autographs for folks I’d known all my life who brought me casseroles or homemade pies or samplers they had stitched. The papers called me Miss Star-Spangled Banner, Miss Stars and Stripes. Margaret Truman, daughter of the President, wrote to me from Washington, D.C., to tell me I was “an inspiration,” not only to her but to America. General Henry Arnold sent me a telegram. Jacqueline Cochran, head of the WASP, wrote to congratulate me on my bravery and my “fine example to women everywhere.”

The newsreel called me Miss Red, White, and Blue:
She’s the little girl who rescued an important operative! Government secrets were in her hands! This All-American sweetheart was one of the vital keys to the Allied effort in this war! She saved herself from the hands of the Germans and stole an enemy plane to rescue her dying brother and return him to Allied land. This little girl deserves more than just her brother’s gratitude— she deserves the gratitude of a grateful nation.

Johnny Clay was getting mail too—mostly from girls who saw him in the newsreel and sent him pictures of themselves. They wanted to take care of him and help him get better. My brother threw these letters in the trash, all except one—a package from Helen Stillbert, my friend from the WASP, which contained a note for me and some books for him, which was funny because I’d never known Johnny Clay to be one for reading.

He began taking off in the mornings with his gold pan or one of Daddy’s old guns. He’d come back hours later and I would hear him whistling up the hill. Sometimes I smelled liquor on him, which made me think of Daddy, and other times he smelled like the woods and the earth, as if he was a part of them. One night, he got into a fight outside the Hamlet’s Mill Theatre, and the next morning Sheriff Story walked him up the mountain so he could have a word with Daddy Hoyt. He said if that boy wasn’t careful, he’d get himself locked up for good, or worse.

We’d been home a little over a month when, on August 15, Dan Presley came hollering up the hill followed by the rest of Sweet Fern’s children and Sweet Fern herself. Her face was wet, her eyes red. Before Dan Presley could holler again, she said, “Japan surrendered, Velva Jean. The war is over.”

That night, everyone came down from the mountains—Blood and Bone and Witch and Fair and Devil’s Courthouse. We gathered in Alluvial, slapping each other on the back and shaking hands and congratulating one another on winning the war, as if each of us had single-handedly been responsible. There was food and music and homemade wine, and the children drew their names in the air with sparklers.

“What are you going to do now that the war is over, Velva Jean?” someone called out.

“I don’t know,” I said. A voice inside me was telling me to be on my way, stop wasting time, go, go, go.

The world after a war is a good world, I told myself. A happy world. A secure world. In this world, I might do anything.

One month later, just past noon on Friday, September 28, a stranger came walking up our hill. He found me on Granny’s front porch, where I was helping Daddy Hoyt separate the plants we’d collected that morning.