On Distant Shores (3 page)

Ponte Olivo Airfield, Sicily
July 17, 1943

In the pressing heat of the tent, Georgie set up the mosquito bar so the netting on its boxy frame encased her cot. As long as she tucked the bottom edge under her bedroll, she’d be protected from mosquitoes and malaria while she slept. She smiled at the four other women in the tent. “Tell yourselves you’re sleeping in a romantic Victorian canopy bed.”

“Looks like a coffin to me.” Vera Viviani shook back her dark hair.

Rose wiggled her fingers near Vera’s face. “At least it keeps the Sicilian bugs off.”

Alice Olson shuddered and ran her fingers up into her pale blonde hair as if insects had invaded. “Please stop talking about bugs.”

Georgie opened her little canvas musette bag and set her photos and mementos on an upturned crate. Thank goodness she’d been raised on a horse farm and felt comfortable with dirt and bugs and the great outdoors.

Kay Jobson picked up the framed photo of Virginia Ham, Georgie’s horse. “Mellie and I are taking guesses on how long it’ll take you to sew curtains for this place.”

Georgie tapped her finger on her chin and grinned. “Do you suppose they’ll let me cut out windows?”

A trio of thumps in the distance sent shivers through her shoes. Artillery, and not far away. Her fingers itched for needle and thread and fabric and something, anything, to do.

Lieutenant Lambert poked her head into the tent, letting in a swirl of a breeze. “Ladies, we have evac flights. I need you down at the airstrip immediately.”

Georgie’s heart flipped like an egg over-easy. She stuffed her mementos back into her musette bag. Wherever she went, her family and Ward and Hammie went with her.

“Georgie . . .” Lambert gave her a slight frown and a patting motion, telling her to sit.

She had nowhere to sit. She sent the chief nurse a curious look.

Lambert repeated the patting motion. “Where’s Mellie?”

“She went out a few minutes ago, looking for—” Georgie shut her mouth tight. Looking for her engineer, but no one was supposed to know about him except Georgie and Rose and Kay. “Looking around. You know how adventurous she is.”

“Now isn’t the time for adventure.” The chief nurse leaned out of the tent and looked around. “There she is. Lieutenant Blake! Hurry up! Get to the plane. We’ve got an evac flight.”

Rose, Kay, Vera, and Alice stepped outside, knotting neckties, adjusting garrison caps, and chattering in excitement.

Georgie could work up some chatter. That was her specialty.

Lambert extended her hand back into the tent like a traffic cop telling Georgie to stop. “Head on down, ladies. Captain Maxwell will brief you. Georgie and I have a special project.”

A special project? She shifted the mosquito netting so she could sit on the cot.

Lambert came back inside.

“What’s our project?” Georgie gave her a big smile.

The chief nurse crossed her arms, gazed toward the tent entrance, and tapped one long finger on her upper arm, ticking, ticking, ticking.

Time to get busy. Georgie unpacked her musette bag and set her photographs in an attractive arch, Ward on the left, Ham on the right, and in the middle Mama and Daddy and her sisters, Freddie and Bertie. In front, she set her sewing kit and the windup alarm clock from Daddy.

“You seem jittery today.”

“Pardon?”

Lambert inclined her head, her brown eyes kind. “Are you all right?”

“Goodness, yes. I’m excited to be in Sicily, and I can’t wait to fly.”

Lambert’s mouth pursed, and her gaze meandered over Georgie’s face. “Not today.”

Could she see through the smile? Georgie let out a disappointed sigh. “Too bad.”

Lieutenant Lambert headed out of the tent and motioned for Georgie to follow. “You and I are taking this jeep to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital, just over that rise there. I need to talk with the physicians about the criteria for selecting patients for air evacuation. We could walk, but we have a few crates of meds for pharmacy that came with us from Tunisia. That’s your project.”

Lambert didn’t need Georgie to haul crates. She needed a burly medic. But that wasn’t the point. At home, whenever Georgie was nervous or afraid, Mama put her to work in the kitchen or on the sewing machine. Lambert must have suspected Georgie needed busywork to keep her occupied.

The pampering turned up the corners of her mouth. “May I drive?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not even sure I can make this thing go. Now hush, or they’ll send a man to drive us.”

After they climbed in, Lambert started the engine, and the sturdy olive drab vehicle lurched forward. Georgie grabbed the dashboard and held on tight. Each gearshift made the ladies bounce and laugh.

They drove out of the tent complex surrounding Ponte Olivo Airfield and down a dirt road. Toasty golden hills encircled the plain, and olive trees graced the hills with touches of deep green.

Artillery rumbled, and a putrid smell hit Georgie’s nose. By the side of the road lay a dead horse.

She slammed her eyes shut and clapped her hand over her nose and mouth. Why did innocent animals have to pay for man’s violence?

Lambert swung the jeep up to another large tent complex. “Be glad graves detail has already come this way.”

Georgie nodded. As a nurse, she’d seen plenty of death, but not lying twisted and dismembered on the roadside.

“Here we are.” Each tent bore a large red cross in a white circle on its roof to protect it from enemy air attack. A wooden sign with an arrow read “93 EH Information, Registrar.”

They passed a clump of pyramidal tents in a neat grid. Living quarters, from the looks of it. A few nurses chatted and washed laundry. They gave Georgie and Lambert strange looks. While the hospital nurses wore belted khaki GI coveralls, the flight nurses wore dark blue trousers and crisp light blue blouses, their dark blue waist-length jackets abandoned due to the heat.

Georgie waved. “Good afternoon, ladies!”

The women smiled and waved back. Some nurses resented the “glamour girls” of medical air evacuation, so
Georgie was determined to stamp a friendly face on the image.

The jeep approached the large ward tents, set up like a typical four-hundred-bed evacuation hospital and labeled with wooden signs: two tents marked Receiving, then Bath; Dressing and Dental; Pharmacy and Laboratory; Headquarters and Registrar; and Officers’ and Nurses’ Mess.

Lambert turned the jeep around and parked it between two olive drab ambulances across the road from Pharmacy and Laboratory. Medics hustled around, carrying stretchers and assisting ambulatory patients. The Americans had made significant progress, but the front lay a meager twelve miles from Gela.

Lambert pointed to her left. “I’ll be in HQ. Tell the pharmacy staff to get the crates from the jeep. Ask if they have any aspirin while you’re at it.”

“Good idea.” They had none at Ponte Olivo or at the hospitals in Tunisia.

The tent flaps were tied back, and Georgie stepped in. “Hello?”

A red-haired young man grinned. “Look, Dom. We got ourselves a girl. Tie her up and make her stay.”

“I’ll get the rope.” A wiry, dark-haired man stepped around a makeshift counter of wooden crates and right up to Georgie. He sniffed. “Smells like a girl too.”

She laughed. “I’m Lt. Georgie Taylor, one of the flight nurses at Ponte Olivo. Is this pharmacy or laboratory?”

“Pharmacy.” The redhead extended his hand and bowed to Georgie. “Ralph O’Shea, Technician Fourth Grade.”

“You can do better than him, toots. Dominic Bruno, Technician
Third
Grade.”

Georgie shook both their hands. “You don’t get many women in here, do you?”

“It’s the neighborhood.” By a counter filled with glass bottles, a third man stood, tall and dark-haired, his back to Georgie. He wore five stripes on the sleeve of his khaki shirt, identifying him as a technical sergeant, same as the men she flew with in her squadron.

“That’s Hutch,” Dom said. “He thinks he’s in charge here.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m the only one working.” He shifted glassware around, but a note of humor rang in his voice. He gave Georgie a quick nod, then went back to work.

“I have three crates for you.”

“Crates?” Hutch spun to face her, light in his dark eyes.

“Now you’re speaking his language,” Ralph said.

“What did you bring?” He strode to the tent entrance and leaned out. “Any aspirin?”

“I wish.” Georgie led him to the jeep and motioned for the other men to follow. “I hoped you’d have some.”

“Nope. I was about to compound some. Would you like me to double the batch?”

“Compound? You can make it?”

“Sure.” He stood a full foot taller than she, and he was quite good-looking when he smiled. “I learned a few things in pharmacy school.”

Dom clapped Hutch on the back. “He’s a real, live, honest-to-goodness pharmacist.”

Georgie patted the side of the jeep. “And you aren’t?”

“Me?” Dom snorted and hefted up one of the crates. “I’m a grocer. Ralph’s a welder.”

“How’d you end up in pharmacy?”

“Simple.” Ralph’s face reddened as he wrestled out a crate. “The Army gave us tests, threw away the results, and sent us to training school.”

Dom headed back to the tent. “Three months to try to teach us what college boy here learned in four years.”

Georgie studied the stripes on Hutch’s sleeve as he lifted out the last crate. Most college graduates ended up as officers.

He looked down at her, his face serious but still nice-looking. His jaw tightened. “The job of pharmacist is one of few in the Army that requires a college degree but doesn’t earn a commission.”

Georgie frowned. “How strange. Why is that?”

He marched back to the tent. “History, tradition, a system run by physicians who look down on my profession.”

“We nurses have the same prob—” But she wore second lieutenant’s gold bars on the shoulders of her uniform. “Well, some doctors look down on us, but we do have commissions even though we don’t have college degrees. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“That’s the Army.” Hutch set the crate behind the counter. “They commission you ladies to protect you from the unwashed rabble of us enlisted men.”

“Nonsense.” Georgie waved him off. “You seem like quite a gentleman for a Yankee.”

His laugh had a rich rumble to it. “See? We Northerners aren’t all savage brutes, and you Southerners aren’t all uneducated hicks.”

“Glad we got that straight.” Georgie leaned her forearms on the counter. “What does Hutch stand for?”

“John Hutchinson. My best friend came up with the nickname.” He pried the lid off the crate. “Good. Ethanol. Dom, Ralph, after you stock that, please make the delivery to pre-op.”

The three men bustled around. Hutch had a quiet confidence about him that reminded her of Daddy and Ward. While he wasn’t shy, he wasn’t flirtatious either. “Hutch, you have a sweetheart at home, don’t you?”

Brown eyebrows rose. “How’d you know?”

“I have a sweetheart of my own back home. I can tell these things.”

He nodded to his technicians. “Thanks. Why don’t you make that delivery? I’ll get the aspirin started.”

Georgie nestled her chin in her hand. “How do you make aspirin?”

He pulled a bottle off the shelf. “Salicylic acid has the same properties as aspirin, but it’s hard on the stomach. Mix it with acetic anhydride and sulfuric acid, let it crystallize, and you get acetylsalicylic acid.”

“Aspirin.”

“Right. Then I put it in capsules. It takes awhile though. You don’t need to wait around.”

“I have to wait for my chief anyway. But kick me out if I annoy you.”

A slow grin. “I’ll do that.”

“Tell me about your girlfriend.” Asking about a fellow’s sweetheart was the simplest way to assure him she wasn’t flirting.

“Fiancée. Her name’s Phyllis.” He lined the pans of a scale with paper.

“Where’d you meet her?”

A pause while he checked something in a handbook. “My best friend introduced us.”

“Was it love at first sight?”

Hutch selected weights from a box and set them in the left pan. One side of his mouth twitched. “That would require speed. I don’t do anything quickly.”

“Slow and methodical. A good trait in a pharmacist.”

“Yes.” He shot her a glance through lashes too thick for a man. “But not a good trait in a date. If it weren’t for Bergie, we wouldn’t be together.”

“Your best friend?”

“Yep. He’s a physician here.”

“Right here? In the 93rd? That is so sweet.”

“Sweet? We’re men.”

She laughed and adjusted her elbow on the rough crate. “My best friend’s in my squadron, and it’s very sweet having her here.”

“You’re girls.” Teasing warped the words.

“You must have little sisters.”

“I do.” He shook white crystals from the bottle into the right pan of the scale. “I thought you were a nurse, but apparently you’re a psychologist as well.”

“Oh, I just like people. They’re infinitely fascinating. Which brings me back to my first question. Phyllis—what’s she like?”

He spooned some crystals back into the bottle. “She’s pretty. Blonde. Kind of tall.”

Georgie clucked her tongue at him. “That wasn’t what I meant. What’s she
like
? Shall I help you? I have a hunch she’s a social dynamo who pries your nose out of the books.”

“Phyllis? She’s even quieter than I am.”

“Really?” Ward said he needed Georgie’s spirit to coax him into society. “Well, you’ll have a peaceful home someday.”

“That’s the idea.” Hutch lifted the paper filled with crystals, folded the edges together, and held it over an Erlenmeyer flask. The crystals slid down the paper chute into the flask.

Georgie settled her chin into her other hand and watched the man pour some stinky fluid into a graduated cylinder. His home wouldn’t be peaceful. It would be dull. Too much seclusion wasn’t good for the soul.

One of those two would have to become more social, and it would have to be Hutch.

With her help, Rose had gone from school outcast to the girl named most likely to succeed. With her help, Mellie had gone from painfully shy to a well-liked member of the squadron.