Kindle Edition
Download from Smashwords (eBook)
Amazon
CKBooks Publishing
Amazon
Smashwords
Category:
Historical Fiction
Type: Fiction
Pages: 358
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN-13: 9780988199316
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Book III in the Rose series. Rose returns home from the war only to find out she's pregnant. She has trouble coping with this and her return to civilian life, plus the two men that are pursuing her.
Shell shock, battle fatigue, post traumatic stress disorder―it all means the same thing to veterans who have served their country by putting themselves in harm’s way. But for women veterans of WWII like Rose Krantz, it also meant coming back to a country that, even during the war, hadn’t given them the rights that the lowest-ranking male soldier enjoyed, barely acknowledged the sacrifices they had all made, and, in some cases, chastised them for even participating.
So in 1945, when Rose came home to bury her husband only to find out she was pregnant with his child, her nightmares, her daily anxieties, and the two men who wanted to protect her, had to be put aside until Rose was finally forced to come to terms with it all.
Rose From the Ashes is the third and fitting end to the Rose series.
Excerpt
With her eyes shut tight against the smoke, Rose covered her head with her hands to try and feebly protect herself from falling debris. All Rose could think was: Is this it? After all this time has my luck finally run out?
Rose could feel the body next to hers without opening her eyes. She could hear the breathing. It was deep and heavy. It obviously wasn’t a fellow nurse; it was a man breathing. Alfee must have been walking me to the mess tent. She thought absentmindedly as she waited for the next blast to come. I really should have brought my helmet, came the quick afterthought. Bea will spit tacks if I die from a piece of shrapnel to my head. She hates it when soldiers are brought in with head wounds ʼcause they didn’t put their helmet on. It just burns her britches, as she would say in her funny Texas drawl. Rose smirked at the thought, even though she knew she was not in a funny situation. It all seemed funny in a sick sort of way, after a while.
Rose let her eyes open a slit. The smoke was starting to clear but something larger was blocking the sun from her face. She opened her eyes completely and saw a pair of boots. Those aren’t Army regulation. And they were peeking out from under a pair of denim pants, worn and tattered on the bottom.
Rose sighed and closed her eyes again.
When she finally got the gumption to open them again, she looked at the man next to her. He had risen to his knees. She didn’t look up into his face, she was too embarrassed. He was wearing his dress greens, but he didn’t have Alfee’s slender frame. This man was stocky and well built.
At least I wasn’t the only one who hit the dirt, she thought—her only solace as she envisioned how she must look laying face down in the grass in her black mourning dress.
“Rose? Are you okay?” came the familiar voice of her father, the owner of the boots and the well-worn overalls that covered them.
Rose pushed herself to her knees and looked at the two men who were now both looking down at her. They both held out a hand. She didn’t know which one to take, so she took them both. “I’m fine,” she said, not looking either man in the eye.
“It happens to me all the time,” the soldier next to her said. “But it hurts a bit more when you do it out of a sound sleep and flop onto a hard wood floor!” He chuckled.
Rose smiled and nodded in acknowledgement. That hadn’t happened to her yet. She hadn’t been sleeping very well since…well, since her husband, Malcolm, had been killed in Germany over a month ago now. She did duck at loud sounds, but strangely to Rose, not at someone’s unexpected touch. She had lost that reflex after a conversation with a strange Indian soldier in Germany one cold January night.
Rose looked at the man in uniform standing smartly next to her, and she grinned.
“I’m sorry I startled you…you both.” Rose’s father hesitated as he looked at the young soldier that he didn’t know but who looked familiar to him somehow.
Rose caught his questioning tone.
“I’m sorry, Dad. This is Earl. You remember Earl Hadwig?”
Her father cocked his head.
“He helped Lilly Mae and me when we went in the ditch that night after the fireworks,” she said, jogging his memory with a night she thought he would surely remember.
She would never forget it, and a soft blush filled her cheeks as she glanced at Earl, thinking of that night, their embrace, their kiss on the kitchen porch, just a few feet from where they stood now but so many more experiences further away.
Karl’s face brightened, and he extended a hand to the relieved soldier.
“Of course! Earl! Welcome! Welcome back, son!” he said, placing his free hand on Earl’s shoulder. “Sorry about that truck. Carburetor needs cleaning, but I never seem to get around to it. I’ll make sure I warn you next time I start it up.”
“That’s all right, sir. I think my jumpiness is getting better,” he lied. “Hopefully, in a couple more weeks…”
He trailed off then looked at Rose. He didn’t believe it himself, but he wondered if Rose did or if she had nightmares too.
The nightmares hadn’t eased anymore than the duck and cover reaction he still had at loud noises. But the dreams were worse, in Earl’s eyes. They were so real; the screaming of incoming mortars filling his ears and burrowing into his brain; the feel of dirt on his lips as he buried his face in the ground, wondering if he had time to dig a trench, just a shallow trench, anything to get him out of the open. But most easily his dreams brought up the acrid taste of fear, the wrenching in his gut, the sweat on his brow, or the stream of perspiration running down his back while he hoped and prayed that bomb, that bullet, that piece of shrapnel didn’t have his name on it.
But what Earl feared even more than being killed was being wounded, wounded so badly that he would lose an arm or a leg and be returned home as just part of a man. He had seen plenty of that in his own unit and, like most of the men, he felt he’d rather be dead then live like that.
And the thing that Earl just couldn’t get over in the war was the randomness of it all. You could be sitting next to your jeep, having a smoke and suddenly, the guy next to you stops talking. You look over at him and his head is bent to his chest and there is a dark, wet stain building on the front of his shirt. Or when you get up in the night to take a leak and a shell lands on the tank you were just sleeping under and it goes up like a Ronsin― they would all joke—just like the lighter.
Earl knew you had to laugh sometimes and make fun of the absurdity of it all. You had to laugh or you would break down and cry, or worse go off your nut like some of the guys did and start shooting at anything that moved or just curl up in a ball and fade away.
He hoped Rose didn’t have dreams like he had. She couldn’t, Earl thought. She was too lovely to have such bad dreams. He looked over at her and smiled warmly at the thought. He had thought a lot about Rose over there. In between the skirmishes there were long, boring marches or just times when they sat around waiting for things to happen. Those were easy times to think about home, about Rose: her wavy auburn hair, her crystal blue eyes, the lavender scent she always wore. It got him through many a long night. And now he was standing next to her again. But a lot of things happened between the last time he had seen her and now. His inexorable optimism was wrestling his trepidation, and he was determined it would win. Earl wasn’t going to squander their safe return home.
Rose smiled sheepishly back at Earl then looked down at the ground. His eyes seemed to boor right through her.
As they stood in awkward silence, the wind changed direction, and the small group was engulfed in smoke once more.
“Here, let’s step out of the path of this smoke. I’m burning garbage and the wind’s blowin’ every which way. I should have waited until evening to do this when the wind dies down. Sorry ʼbout that,” Karl said.
“No problem, Mr. Krantz. It’ll give Rose and me a good reason to take a walk.”
Rose looked up. “Walk? Sure! We…we can head out the field road,” she said with some hesitation. Nervous, she headed between the barn and the house, not waiting to see if Earl was following.
Rose didn’t want to walk on the road. Someone might see them, then rumors would start to fly. “Her husband’s not even dead a month and she’s walking with some stranger and a soldier on top of it!” “I saw Rose Krantz walking with a young man the other day, and they were alone!” She could hear the party-line a buzz with the news.
Frankly, it was surprising news to her, as well. Rose hadn’t thought about Earl since Malcolm had told her he had come across him on his way back from England. Earl had been wounded, and he was waiting in France for a plane to take him to England. Malcolm had been on his way back from his own time in a hospital on the British isle.
That’s a safe topic of conversation, Rose thought cheerfully, other than the weather, but they had already talked about that.
“I hear you were wounded,” she said.
Earl looked at her a little surprised. He remembered coming across Malcolm in an airplane hangar that day. Earl hesitated, knowing he should say something, but not wanting to bring up a sore subject: Rose’s dead husband.
Earl had wanted to tell Rose how sorry he was about his death. He had practiced saying it a hundred times before he knocked on their door that morning, but he thought he’d have time to warm Rose up to the touchy subject by talking about nicer things, other things.
Earl couldn’t believe Rose’s bad luck, both her and Malcolm being hit by a sniper while on their honeymoon in Germany. He wondered if the story was true, that Malcolm had caught it right in the neck and that the same bullet grazed Rose before it went into him. But he had to answer her. There was no way of getting around it.
He sighed. “Yeah, I suppose Malcolm told you about that,” he said slowly. “That was quite a surprise to meet him there. The world is a small place sometimes.”
He stopped walking and turned to face Rose.
“I’m so sorry, Rose. Sorry about your loss,” he said looking into her eyes. “I came by as soon as I heard. Mrs. Ripp called my folks when she heard you were on your way home and told them what had happened. She filled in all the details, of course. You can be sure that hasn’t changed; she’s still the biggest busy body in Crawford County.”
Rose smirked and started walking again.
Earl brightened at her reaction and stepped up next to her, chattering away like a nervous magpie.
“I’m not sure what I thought I could do, coming here, but I just had to tell you how sorry I am. I couldn’t talk to you on the phone; I knew you had a party-line, and a letter didn’t seem right.”
Rose didn’t answer right away, she was trying to think of something to say. She had said “thank you” to so many people now. She was losing count.
It had started at the hospital. Nurses and doctors she hadn’t even known apologized for what they had no control over. That was a little easier to take, really. It was when she had to face her comrades of the 95th Evacuation Hospital that the sorrys were harder to swallow. And when she saw Alfee, a corpsman and a good friend, for the first time after Malcolm had died, she cried so long on his shoulder, he had to not only change his shirt but his tee-shirt underneath.
Dory, Mo, and Bea, her close friends and tentmates, had all taken turns sitting by her bedside as she recuperated from her own wound, and they had done their share of comforting her when crying jags would overcome her for what she thought was the most ludicrous reasons. Sometimes it was as minor as a nurse speaking French, reminding Rose of the Creole Malcolm would so innocently mix with his English. That sing song accent was one of the things she loved about him. She could listen to him talk for hours.
Then there were the soldiers on the ship on the way home. Most had wounds of their own or were missing part of an arm or a leg, so when they saw a lone nurse with a black band around her arm, most knew better than to ask her about her sad story. They all had sad stories of their own they were trying to forget.
Once back in the states, most people on the train didn’t know what the black band on her arm meant, so they chatted happily with the pretty lady in uniform, assuming Rose had been stationed in the states somewhere, and was just going home on leave. It was easier for Rose to go along with their assumptions then bring up the whole mess. It was actually a load off her mind to pretend she had served somewhere else, not seen what she had seen, not endured what she had endured.
Then there had been all those people at the train station in Prairie. Her family had rushed her past most of them, allowing only a polite nod or a quick “Hello.” But since the three days she had been home, most of the neighbors or family friends had found some excuse to visit the farm. They seemed to want to see the poor, young widow themselves, and politely squeeze any details out of her about what had happened. And if Rose wasn’t up to the task, her mother, Lilly, would discreetly fill in the gaps.
Rose almost felt guilty about it all. But she wanted to forget about that night, if she could, though her dreams were making that hard to do. They had intensified as of late. Maybe there were fewer things to occupy her mind since she had been home. She wasn’t quite sure why. She kept herself busy during the day, but at night, the quiet chirping of the frogs and the crickets song was all that came between her and her vivid memory of that awful night.
Rose finally spoke. “I appreciate you coming all the way from LaCrosse, Earl. That was very thoughtful of you.”
Rose hesitated before she continued. She realized she felt strangely comfortable around this man, even though she hadn’t seen him in over four years. Has it been that long, Rose thought as she looked at him. He hasn’t changed much. Though maybe a little taller and a little broader through the shoulders. Or maybe that’s just the uniform. Malcolm looked so handsome in his uniform, too.
Rose smiled to herself then sighed.
Earl looked up at the sound. “I’m sorry, Rose. We don’t have to talk about this. I just wanted to let you know I was thinking about you, and that if you need anything, anything at all, just let me know.
“I know you have family and all, but…but I also know it’s hard for people to understand. I’m sure you saw your share of terrible situations, Rose, and I wanted you to know you can count on me if you need someone to talk to, or just take a quite walk with…” Then Earl chuckled at himself. “Though I don’t think I’ve shut up since we started this little stroll.
Rose smiled.
“Did I talk this much that night, on the fourth?”
“You did seem to have a lot to say on the way home in the truck. But I thought you were just trying to keep the boys from thinking too much about the accident. And it worked!” she said with a grin.
“Well, I’m sorry to admit I was nick-named CC in my platoon.”
“CC?”
“Camel Costello.”
“As in Abbott and Costello?” Rose snickered. “Sorry,” she said, literally wiping the smirk off her face.
“That’s okay. I guess it’s well deserved.”
“Actually, I think it kept me and a lotta the guys sane. Whenever we were in a tight spot somewhere, waiting around for the mortars to start dropping on us or the machine guns to open up, like we seemed to do a lot of the time, the guys would ask me to tell ’em about what I was learning in college before I signed up or what I did on my dad’s fishing boat on the Mississippi or what I would do summers down here on the Ripp farm,” he said with pride. “I could talk for hours.”
“I don’t get the ‘camel’ part.”
“That’s what they called the infantry, the camel corps.”
“I thought they were called gravel crushers, or blisterfoot. That one was well deserved.”
“Then there the ever popular dog face,” Earl said.
“Oh yah, I remember that one, too. When I first heard that, I thought the guy was just talking about his buddy who…well…
“Got hit with an ugly stick?”
Rose tried to subdue a laugh. “Yah.”
Then he shook his head again. “But there I go again, doin’ all the gabbing when I really want to find out how you’re comin’ along. Not with the loss of your husband,” he said matter-a-factly. “I can imagine how hard that is. I mean being home, among you family again. Are you managing that okay?” He looked straight at Rose. “I know how that can be.”
Rose looked back at him and nodded.
Of course, she thought. He’d understands what I’m going through, the conflicting feelings of wanting to be home, but feeling like I’m going to crawl out of my skin if I don’t keep busy and quick! He’s got to have the same problem. Maybe worse.
Rose realized that they had already walked to the edge of the Krantz property and back. During their time together Rose had managed to lose that itchy feeling that she had most of the time, that is until they walked up to the back of the house and the line of clothes that her mother was hanging up on the line.
Rose looked up at a pair of slim denim pants, followed by a larger pair of overalls and two faded, sky-blue cotton shirts that undulated softly in the breeze. These were pinned next to the well worn sack cloth skirts and light colored blouses her sisters wore and a bright red handkerchief that normally hung out of her father’s back pocket.
The whites came next on the line right next to the red handkerchief: a white sock… Rose stopped walking and looked hard at the handkerchief next to the sock then at a white shirt flapping right next to it. Rose reached up the felt the scar where the bullet had grazed the back of her neck and a slight sweat instantly formed across her forehead. The red and the sock; the sock she had used to staunch the blood where the bullet had entered Malcolm’s neck. The red and the shirt; the white shirt she had used on the larger exit wound, the wound that had compromised his carotid artery and ultimately killed him. Rose swallowed hard. Somehow her mouth tasted like an old, dirty penny, like that night when she had been squirted in the face as blood pulsed out of his injured major blood vessel. The red and the white, and the red… Rose stopped talking and stared at the two colors until it all began to blur. Her vision narrowed, the colors swimming together as her world dropped out from under her feet.
|
