Nineteen Forty-One
by Kathy Hepinstall

The bobcats laid low and the snakes burrowed. The birds circled and the squirrels moved higher, for the woods were filled with soldiers that summer, learning how to fight by fighting each other in the greatest of pretend wars, the Louisiana Maneuvers. The fake blue army against the fake red army. American against American, because they were about to join the battle overseas, and needed the practice.

They bathed in streams. They dug foxholes. They slept in yards and dreamed of cooler nights. They washed their faces with water splashed from their tin helmets-a gift from their fathers of World War I. They came with duffle bags, horses, half-tracks, pigeon vests. Dog tags and rations. They were a little better equipped than the soldiers who trained in 1940-real guns instead of broomsticks-but they were disoriented, itchy, hot, and far from home.

Before it was all over, some of them would die. Heart attacks, drownings, accidents, snake bite. And one soldier hanged himself from the limb of a sycamore tree and fled forever from the heat and the dancing bugs. A soldier here and a soldier there, cut down in the battle before the battle, the war before the war. Sent back home with promises to his family that he had been as brave as a real soldier could be in a pretend war.

• • •

In town, the stores were packed with fighting men, as were the barbershops and the bars. The threat of war made them thirsty for Mexican beer, which they threw on each other when the nights stayed hot.

A fight between the regular army and the national guard had to be broken up by the house band striking up the national anthem, which forced the men to stop fighting for the required salute. One soldier, denied his tenth beer, drove his tank up to the saloon and butted open the swinging doors with his gunnel until the bartender reconsidered.

At curfew the men would stagger back to their base camps for another night under the stars, in a land that disoriented them, among strange creatures and crawling bugs.

The army that moved through Louisiana knocked limbs off pecan trees, ran sheep to death, dug foxholes and forgot to refill them. They crowded the streets for hours on end with their horse cavalry. They set off explosions that made nervous country women drop cakes. One night the drunken men took down all the signs and barber poles in town and stacked them by the railroad depot. No one cared. The town was brimming with patriotism and starving for commerce. Soldiers had money and bullets for the Germans. They were heroes before the war began.

• • •

Many of them were Yankees, and some had never seen a cow or a chicken. They stared at the pigs running through the front yards of camelback houses, swore at the mosquitoes, scratched at the chiggers. A young private killed a snake with the butt of his rifle and proudly showed it to the woman-Lorraine Sands-whose yard he had slept in the night before.

"See, Ma'am?" the private said proudly. "You won't have to worry about your kids being bitten now."

"That's was a king snake, dumb ass," Mrs. Sands replied. "King snakes kill poisonous snakes. I hope a copperhead crawls in your sleeping bag tonight."

The soldier turned white, and after Mrs. Sands had calmed down she went inside to call her best friend from church (who could be reached on the telephone after three long cranks and two short ones) and tell her about the stupid Yankee who did not know a friend from an enemy.

"My God," Mrs. Sands said into the phone, "he'll kill the English and have tea with the Germans once he gets overseas."

Charlotte's mother thought this was very funny, and when she put down the phone she repeated the story to her husband.

Charlotte was at the piano, laboriously revisiting the Toreador song. All day she had been playing it to the distant sound of marching hooves on the macadam road that led into town. She paused, heard the punch line and her father's laughter.

Then the sound of a kiss. The same kind of kiss she had practiced the year before, with a boy named Kane, under the muscadine vines. Charlotte resumed playing, contemptuous of her parents' open and guiltless love.

A short time later her mother would be kissed by fire, all over, with the same quiet smacking sound.

• • •

Late in the summer the soldiers began to sleep on Charlotte's lawn, on their blankets or in pup tents festooned with mosquito netting. Charlotte had her friend Loretta over for the night, and the two of them watched the soldiers through the chintz curtains of Charlotte's bedroom.

"What color hair do you want? How tall?" Loretta whispered, because there were five hundred thousand soldiers out there in the dark. Plenty to choose from.

"Black hair. Six foot two," Charlotte said.

"Blond hair. Six foot three," Loretta said.

They raised the window and pressed their noses to the screens. Late summer came into the room. The scent of mandevillea and the sound of the crickets. Light snores from chigger-ravaged men. Charlotte and Loretta smiled. With all these soldiers around they were safe from the Germans, and from the prospect of becoming someone's spinster aunt.

• • •

Charlotte and her friends went scavenging in the woods, browsing through the old encampments. Souvenir-hunting. They found canteens, duffel bags, a pair of boots, a field jacket, cigarette butts and one condom still in its packet. These things they gathered carefully and brought to the attic in Loretta's house, where they arranged their treasure. Each of them wanted to marry a soldier, one who would have gladly died in battle but did not. Instead, this pretend soldier returned from the war with all his disciplined habits, to marry her and treat her like a queen.

The girls closed their eyes and imagined the Americans in battle. Charging. Yelling patriotic slogans through white and perfect teeth. Disciplined even in the pitch and roil of war, as they would also be in peacetime, making love on cotton sheets. When the girls opened their eyes in Loretta's attic, they could almost see the Germans lying around them, dead.

The attic was insufferably hot in the August heat. Sweat ran down Loretta's face. "Those men out there need us," she said meaningfully. "They itch. They've got scratches on their arms. They're lonely. And their clothes need washing."

Charlotte laughed, loud enough that Loretta frowned. "I'm not going to just be a nurse to a man," she said. "Or a maid. True love is when a woman is equal to a man."

"You're just saying that because your mother is the boss of your father," Loretta said.

"She's not the boss," Charlotte returned hotly. "He makes rules too."

But truly, in her mind, she wondered why her father was not like the other men. His gentleness seemed off course here, out in the woods. He was softer than her friends' fathers. More pliant. When Charlotte played the piano, he joined in, his tenor a silky thing. Other men would have laughed to hear him sing, or to see him wash the dishes.

Later, he would be quietly scorned. Something was wrong with that man, people would decide. What he did to try to save his wife. So stupid. So horribly comical.

• • •

Charlotte's little brother Milo fell in love with the coming war. Milo and his friends lost interest in skipping stones and killing snakes. Now they wanted to be soldiers.

War and its prospects thrilled them, filling the woods with a deadly sense of tragedy and meaning. They divided themselves into two armies of three boys each, and fought against each other more ruthlessly and with less concern for safety than the soldiers themselves. Each side pictured the other as Germans and thus worthy of considerable malice and fear. Milo led the Red Army, and his arch rival Tom led the Blue one.

They moved from tree to tree with their broomstick rifles, fighting pitched battles and trampling the wild asters. Milo painted his face with mud, and because he owned nothing olive drab, he wore another ugly color. He moved in slow motion, a pocket knife in his belt and one hand outstretched in front of him, as he had seen soldiers do. He crouched, then sank to his belly, collecting pine straw in his belt buckle as he inched along the ground. The movement of a squirrel made his heart stop. Initials carved in a tree became German code. In this dreamy confusion, in a world half America and half Europe, half war and half peace, half playground and half bunker, enemy ships were struck up between boy and tin can, boy and bush, boy and bird. So many enemies and the supper bell just around the corner.

One of the boys drew the short stick and shimmied up a black gum tree to dump flour down on the boys, which was meant to designate the strafing from enemy planes. Milo crept forward on his belly, a sack of old pine cones over his shoulder, which he would hurl like grenades when the time was right. His own age-twelve-disappointed him in a way that a girl hadn't yet. He wanted so badly to fight, to carry a real gun and ride around in a tank.

A clot of flour hit Milo's face, blinding him. He wiped his stinging eyes. From the top of the tree came a high-pitched voice: "You're dead, Kraut."

• • •

Milo's friends/enemies took him to an abandoned sawmill, to an old concrete kiln that had become their clubhouse, and tied him up with a rope that one of their fathers had once used to whip a horse.

"Tell us where your army is hiding," they demanded.

Milo shook his head.

They stripped his shirt off, and Tom whipped him with bull nettles. A few drops of blood ran down Milo's bare chest.

"Tell us," they said again.

Milo knew the value of a secret, even a pretend one, and so he remained silent as a stone, silent as the blood drops that hardened quickly, for the kiln was hot with high summer. Milo's lips pursed tight. Sweat ran down his face. He was proud of his defiance, of his silence.

• • •

All around the parish, all around the world, there were little spaces full of secret things. Charlotte and her friends had the attic. Milo and his friends had the kiln. And Milo himself had the tool shed, out in the back of the house, so leaky and full of holes that blue jays would sometimes flutter in Milo's face when he opened the sagging door. All the good tools had been moved to a new, waterproof shed on the other side of the lawn, a fine shed complete with asbestos shingles. The old tools had remained to rust. There was no floor, only the hard ground, a few scattered pieces of pine straw and a weed or two.

The privacy of failed shelter. The House of Milo.

One day Milo entered to find a surprise. A carrier pigeon had somehow grown tired of his route and had defected to the old gun cabinet at the far end of the tool shed. A message was still tied to one leg, although the pigeon would not let Milo get close enough to untie it.

And so the pigeon and the mysterious message remained. The pigeon had come closer to being a real soldier than Milo ever had, and Milo took it as a sign. Instead of flying to the powers that be, the pigeon had detoured into Milo's shed. The tool shed, then, became Milo's war center, and the pigeon, his general. Worthy of a salute, which it never returned. As the days passed it began to favor the leg holding the message, in the way that old soldiers favor knees that host buried shrapnel. It sometimes cooed softly, for the other pigeons, perhaps. For the cool fall months. For peace.

Milo found the yellow braid from a cavalry hat and wore it in his belt loops, and crept through the woods with his face covered by a piece of torn mosquito netting. When he returned to the shed he reported all he'd seen and heard to the pigeon, in a whisper, sweat running down his face.

• • •

The maneuvers went on. Mosquitoes and heat and snakes, and rumors of Patton coming to join them. The soldiers trained in this unfamiliar country, growing used to the shape of the trees, the force of the legends, the local do's and don'ts, the vagaries of Southern women, the word "pop" as opposed to the word "soda," which they drank on friendly porches in their dress khakis.

Milo and his friends watched them train. The soldiers would blow up a section of railroad, build it back and then blow it up again. Once something went amiss with the procedure and a huge oak tree caught on fire. Milo's eyes lit up. He imagined war itself as one great fire, men running into the flames, heroes rushing out again. German bodies burning up, even their straw hair now nothing but kindling.

• • •

Sometimes Charlotte's mother had the soldiers over and cooked for them, not because she cared that much to have them in the woods, but because the other women at church had begun to host dinners, and Charlotte's mother wanted bragging rights for her own dinners. Chicken, rice, black-eyed peas. The soldiers tried not to bolt their food. Their eyes opened wide at the Southern cooking. This amazing taste in the middle of this bug-roiling, heat shimmering land over which black-eyed Susans had spread like a carpet. Some of them had gone to the barber shop in town to be clean for the table. Their hair was slicked down with Wildroot Creme-Oil. They had shaved closely and smelled good.

They sent shy looks in Charlotte's direction.

It had been almost a year since Charlotte had kissed Kane under the grape arbor, a joyless boy who never smiled near an open Bible and who had moved away the next month, to Mississippi. Now grapes were ripening and falling in arbors all over the parish, and wild out in the woods. Charlotte was hungry for another kiss, which would buzz like a bee and soothe like the pulp of a grape.

Her mother watched the looks shoot across the table with some annoyance. She had no awareness of how close she was to dying, and so she allowed herself a self-righteous clearing of her throat and began to sprinkle salt on her yellow squash, still bound to the ordinary gestures of the living.

"Ma'am," said a soldier, looking at Charlotte's mother. "This is the best eating I've ever done."

The other soldiers murmured their agreement. Their hats off and their backs straight. Charlotte watched their lips.

After dinner her mother left the room, and went out on the porch to add Argo starch to a willow tub of steaming water. This was her signal that the gaiety could begin, and that she would thoughtfully turn her back while Charlotte played the piano and the soldiers and Milo and her father, and even some girls from down the road, sang and danced.

Roll out the barrel, and we'll have a barrel of fun. I wish I was in Dixie, away, away. Milo danced with the soldiers, his hair ruffled by their brotherly fingers. Over his ruffled hair they placed an army-issued cap, too big for him. It fell down over his eyes and yet he wouldn't removed it.

Spinning round and round. Milo was in the ecstasy of war. Whirling in a musical confusion that both terrifies and exalts. Charlotte played faster and her father laughed.

Charlotte looked over her shoulder at the men. Too many to choose from. Perhaps that was what war was for-to thin out a woman's choices. Make it easier for her. This sacrilegious thought made Charlotte's fingers slip off the F sharp. No one noticed. Milo was too happy to be dancing with the soldiers, and Milo's father was too busy singing.

• • •

One night, as the soldiers were leaving, one of them pulled Milo aside and gave him a small bottle filled with a thin amber liquid which did not fizz like pop when Milo shook the bottle.

"This is what men drink," the soldier assured him, leaning down and whispering so that Milo caught his foreign breath.

The next day, Milo showed it to his friends in the woods.

"Whiskey," said one boy. "It tastes terrible."

"Real men drink it," Milo said, and that was enough. They passed the bottle around between them until they sucked it dry. Then they tried to play their war games with their broomstick rifles and their bags of flour, but the boy in charge of bombing fell out of the sycamore tree, and the rest of the boys looked up at the treetops and the clouds and found everything simply spinning around and around and around, until they fell and lay still. The drone of dragonflies impossibly painful. The cracked earth against their backs. In the shimmering afternoon with the spiraling motes of spilled flour like so much smoke. What dying is like for a soldier.

• • •

One day Milo and his two-man army discovered Tom's secret hideout, a tiny shack at the far edge of the Burgess property. Inside were crudely drawn maps, a set of rules for Tom's two men, two warm bottles of Orange Crush, and an empty pack of Lucky Strikes.

"We have found the enemy's fort," Milo told his friends. "Now there's only one thing to do."

"What's that?" asked Brian Loften, Milo's palest friend and least supportive recruit.

Milo smiled. "Burn it," he said.

The wind kept putting out Milo's match, and Brian Loften sighed in relief.

• • •

Charlotte is sitting with the other girls in her friend Loretta's attic. August is ending, the attic is hot and the hair looping through Loretta's fingers is wet with perspiration. She has a story to tell.

She is standing in a meadow in her new gingham dress because she felt pulled there. Just a feeling she had when she woke up that morning. The heat turns her face wet and cool, and the meadow grass is an endless green. A bee lands on Loretta's hand and she does not disturb it, but lets it crawl up her arm. The sunlight on her face has the tingle of a fairy tale. She waits.

Her new life begins as a sound. The hum of a plane engine. The plane drops out of the clouds and comes so low over the tree line that the birds in the highest branches are frightened away. Loretta raises her head and sees the plane's underbelly. She waves. The plane circles back and dips lower over the meadow, so low that Loretta can see the outline of a pilot. She waves again and the plane suddenly darts away.

But Loretta knows that there has been some understanding between girl and plane, soldier and civilian, sky and earth, aluminum and gingham. Sure enough, the plane comes back. It passes over once more, and Loretta sees a tiny parachute making its way to earth. It falls into a clump of goldenrod, which Loretta is allergic to, but never mind. She plunges into the yellow weeds and picks up the parachute. Attached is an empty grapefruit juice can. Inside the can is a note. It reads:

HELLO. THIS IS A SILLY WAY TO MEET BUT I FEEL THAT HEAVEN SENT YOU. WHAT ARE YOU DOING STANDING IN A FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE? YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. MY NAME IS RICHARD. WILL YOU MEET ME ON SUNDAY IN THIS FIELD? WEAR THE SAME DRESS.

And so Loretta had gone to meet her soldier of the sky. And wading through the grass in his dress khakis he was no less magical. Blond hair, blue eyes. Six-foot-three and a soon-to-be hero. They talk. They hold hands. They embrace. They kiss among bees and Johnson grass, Loretta holding back the sneezes of her allergies like older women hold back their true age.

The other girls sigh. The attic so hot. Charlotte fights tears of rage, for Loretta's kissing story is better than hers. A meadow better than a grape arbor. A soldier of the sky better than a pious red-lipped boy who dreaded Armageddon. Even meadow bees are somehow more romantic than the grape-arbor kind.

Loretta smiles. "He is mine," she says. "We are in love."

• • •

Milo came back from playing war games and opened the door to his shed, noticed how quiet it was inside. He left the door open and moved through the dark space carefully, ducking his head and squinting. He saw his pigeon dead on the ground and he stopped short, fighting sudden tears. He knew that soldiers die in war, and so do birds, but he was unprepared for the motionless pose and the feathers that suddenly seemed randomly attached. He bent down on one knee, thinking. Burial was for pet birds who never did anything special or brave. His bird was different. Its funeral called for flame. Milo left the shed, returned with the can of gasoline his father kept under the front porch.

It was five o'clock.

Inside the house, Charlotte sat before the pier glass mirror, watching tears slowly roll down her face, impressed by her own weeping. She hated Loretta who now owned the best legend of girl and soldier and had won, hands down, the competition over who could find the best fairy tale and bring it to life. She imagined Loretta and her soldier, flying together across Europe, kissing among clouds even as the soldier dropped fire on blonder men. A soldier elevated by war and by his plane. Fighting for freedom. Patriotic. Blue-eyed. Weightless.

• • •

Milo knelt over the body of his bird. The anointing of valor. The bathing in glory. Fumes began to fill up the shed, and Milo's eyes watered. The gasoline soaked through the feathers and ran onto the ground beneath it. It ran across the dead bird's eye, but the eye did not blink. Milo gently untied the message from the bird's leg and set it aside, fighting the urge to read it. Secrets were secrets. Honor was honor. And yet...Milo decided to put off that particular decision. He stood up slowly, stooping a little so that his head would not bump against the tin roof, and took a book of matches out of his pocket.

• • •

Charlotte's mother went to the stove to check on the consistency of the rice, looked in the sink to see if the stains on her apron had loosened, and threw a glance in the direction of the far bedroom, where her daughter was weeping in secrecy. She opened the cabinets and pulled down the dinner plates, folded the napkins, stirred the gravy and growled at the lumps.

Lately she'd been feeling discontent, for she was tired of soldiers sleeping in the yard, tired of the summer and the hounds that seemed to multiply each year around the porch. She was tired of her old shoes and her new permanent. She wanted to lie down and sleep for months. In her mind was the cobwebbed mass of things undone and enough idle thoughts to unravel through three different countrysides. Dinner was almost ready and she wondered where her husband was. And Milo.

She went down to her daughter's bedroom and opened the door without knocking. Charlotte looked up from the mirror. Two tears were halfway down her face, and she wiped them away quickly.

"What are you crying about?"

"I'm not crying."

"Where's Milo?"

"I think I saw him playing around the tool shed."

"Get ready for supper." Charlotte's mother went into the kitchen, checked on the gravy and parted the curtains so she could look into the back yard.

It couldn't be.

Black smoke and fire. All the hot colors-orange and red and yellow-were using the old boards as platforms to leap at the blue in the sky.

Petty thoughts and middle-aged irritations vanished from her body. Her mind froze. Her hands flew to the doorknob and jerked it open.

"Milo! Milo!" she shouted. "Milo!"

She slammed the door behind her and rushed through the yard, gone mad from the sudden drama, her feet pumping, her arms thrown out in front of her, hurtling toward the shed and the possibility that her only son was dying inside.

"Milo!" The rusted latch on the shed door had been made new and hot by fire, and it burned its shape into her palm as she yanked the door open and plunged inside. She dropped to her knees, moving quickly through the shed, covering every space with her frantic hands even as her breath scorched the back of her throat.

In the far corner, near the gun rack, she put her hands out and touched the cotton shirt she had ironed that morning. Inside the shirt a body shivered. She seized her son and pulled him back through the shed door and into the yard, where the grass was still green and the dogs weaved and barked.

Her curly hair was heavy with flames, as was her cotton dress. Milo fainted on the grass while his mother twirled around and around, flames making kissing sounds but otherwise covering her so quietly that inside the house, Charlotte watched two more tears fall down her face and sighed at her lot in life.

The woman danced. She danced. While the chickens muttered in the tin coop and the cows looked shyly her way and ashes floated toward the standing water in the ditch by the road.

Life is a riot of failed space. Hiding places found, or diminished, or destroyed. Milo's shed burned while his mother twirled and he lay in a dead faint, not a blister on his body.

Milo's father pulled in the driveway and saw the smoke. He leaped from his car, rushed to the back yard, and found his wife in a coat of many colors. He tripped over Milo running to her, got up, took her in his arms, carried her to the edge of the yard and dropped her down the well.

A quick thinking man with a wife already past quick thinking. Already singing. Already in heaven with the God she feared. Laughing at herself now. Laughing with God over her earthly fear of Him, her frantic efforts to please.

Milo's father sank down in the grass with his head in his hands.

Milo stirred on the ground. He would live.

Charlotte sat before the pierglass mirror, hating the fortune-drenched Loretta and her soldier of the sky.