Читать книгу The World We Live In - Louis Bromfield - Страница 4

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It was a still night with the stars very brilliant overhead. You could see them shining through the fronds of the tall slender betel palms like diamonds set in filigree against the dark velvet of the tropical sky. The two boys, one stripped to the waist, the other clad only in a pair of bathing trunks, sat leaning against the trunks of two of the palm trees. One of them was fair. He looked a little like a Swede, young, tall, good-looking and fresh with rather large features. The other boy was small and dark, tough and wiry. The tall blond boy was the one who wore the bathing trunks.

In the tents under the coconut palms behind them someone was playing a banjo. In the stillness of the night the only other sound came from the lazy beating of the surf on the beach a little way off. The air was hot but here on the knoll beneath the betel palms there was a breeze which kept off the mosquitoes.

Sometimes the two boys talked and sometimes they merely sat there, relaxed and silent. They were both fighter pilots on rest and the stillness of the night was like a sedative. Every now and then the boy in the bathing trunks would go down to the edge of the Pacific, throw himself headlong into the warm water and swim lazily for a while and then in a circle return to the white beach.

They both knew what it was like to be close to death but they were young and much of their talk was very young. And now in the stillness of the night they had time to think lazily and they were homesick.

"Funny," said the dark boy, "I never dreamed when I was growing up that some day I'd be way out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I used to go down on Saturdays to Long Beach and go swimming and kind of wonder how far it was to the other side but that's about as far as it went."

"What were you going to do when you grew up?" asked the blond boy.

The other boy laughed, "I never thought anything about it. I was just going to work in my father's garage when I grew up and some day inherit it ... and that was about all."

"It must have been swell to have the ocean so near when you were a kid."

"I never thought anything about it. It was just always there, about half an hour from the house. Sometimes when it was foggy in winter we wished we lived a little farther away."

Then they fell silent again and presently without saying anything the tall blond boy rose and went down to throw himself into the water and swim for a time. The other boy lay supporting his head on one arm, vaguely conscious of the beauty of the spectacle. The water was full of phosphorescence and when his companion threw himself into it, it was as if he had thrown himself into fire. The splash was like flame, every drop of water sparkling and glowing like a jewel. And then as the blond boy swam lazily he seemed illumined by light. At each thrust of his arm the water sparkled and shone and at last as he came close to the beach, stood up and walked out of the water, his whole body was outlined in phosphorescence. He was lean with lithe muscles and strong arms and broad shoulders.

The dark boy thought suddenly, "That's the way a fellow must look arriving at the Gates of Heaven." And then quickly, half-ashamed, and half-frightened he put the thought out of his mind. It was a crazy thought. It was one of those thoughts which was taboo. It might bring Tom bad luck. It was funny what this island country and the life did to you, making you think crazy things you'd never think of back in Long Beach.

His companion rejoined him, sitting again to lean against the trunk of the betel palm. He shook the phosphorescent water from his fingers, took a cigarette from the package on the ground beside him and lighted it, leaning back lazily and tilting his blond head to inhale and savor the goodness of the cigarette.

The dark boy, whose name was Jimmy, said, "You never get enough of that water, do you?"

"No," said Tom. "You see, I was born and brought up in Dakota. I never saw the ocean until a year ago."

"Funny," said Jimmy, "about the kids from the Middle West. Porky was tellin' me the other night that about three-fourths of the guys in the Navy come out of the Middle West--kids that never saw the ocean in their lives until they joined up."

Tom stirred and looked out toward the beach where the water rolled up slowly, flickering, iridescent and glowing in the darkness.

"It's a funny thing," he said, "if I ever crash I want to crash in the water and not on land. When I'm over land I'm always kind of uneasy and queer, but when I get out over the ocean everything's okay and I feel fine."

The banjo went on tinkling in some distant tent and after a little while Tom continued, "All the water I ever saw until I was fifteen years old was a pond on the farm. It wasn't much of a pond--just a couple of acres and sometimes in hot weather it very nearly dried up ... wasn't much more than a mud puddle." He laughed suddenly, "But it was the only water for miles around. The country's kind of flat up there, no trees to speak of ... it just stretches away as far as you can see. It's kind of lonely. A pond like that made a lot of difference. When I was a little kid it was like a whole ocean to me. I used to wade in it and sail boats on it. When I began to learn geography I used to pretend it was the Atlantic--one side was America and one side Europe. I used to pretend the boats were ocean liners. When I got a little older I saw an advertisement in a Chicago newspaper saying to send for information about trips to Europe. I wrote and sent for it and they sent me back a lot of pictures of ocean liners--inside and out. They were wonderful and after that I built little boats that looked like ocean liners."

He was talking suddenly as if he were alone and talking to himself.

"In spring and fall the wild duck and geese used to stop there sometimes. It was way off their course and I don't know why they came except that when the first ones came my mother used to take wheat and corn out to them. She always had to slip out and do it at night because my father didn't want to see good feed wasted on wild birds. She'd take it to the far end of the pond where it was hidden by the cat-o'-nine-tails and the hazel bushes. The birds would eat it up early in the morning and my father never found out. And so they got to stopping at the pond on the way north and south."

The dark boy yawned and said, "Yeah, it's funny the things you think about when you get homesick. I always think about my old man and the garage."

The blond boy lighted another cigarette. "I think about my mother and my wife ... and the pond."

"I ain't married. I never had a real girl friend. I used to run around a lot but I didn't go steady."

They were talking suddenly like old experienced men.

The sound of the banjo died away with the final whirring vibration of a string, and there was only the velvety black silence and the sound of insects and the lazy lapping of the surf.

"What's your wife like?" asked Jimmy in a sleepy voice. You could tell he wasn't really very interested. He was half-asleep.

"She's not very big and kind of shy. I've known her ever since I was a kid. Her folks have a big farm about ten miles from us. It's a nice place but it hasn't got a pond. When she was a kid, she was always beggin' to come over to our place to see the pond."

Jimmy didn't say anything and after a long time Tom said, "My wife's going to have a baby."

"When?"

"Any time now."

"It must make you kind of nervous."

Tom laughed, "It seems kind of funny ... havin' a kid of my own. It don't seem true."

Again the silence intervened and Jimmy said, "I suppose you want a boy."

Tom laughed again, "I don't really care much. I'd kind of like a boy to begin with. I'd like to think of him growin' up there and playin' around the pond like I did when I was a kid."

Jimmy stood up, yawned and stretched and said, "I'm goin' to turn in."

"Okay. I'm goin' to have another swim."

Sleepily Jimmy asked, "Don't you ever get enough of that ocean?"

Tom only laughed and Jimmy walking off toward the tents said, "Don't let the sharks get you."

But Tom was already running down the slope to the sea. He called out, "I'm not scared of sharks or anything in this whole damned ocean."

Jimmy turned to watch Tom's entry into the water in a ring of light. He stood there watching, a little bewildered again by the beauty of the sight. He found himself thinking, "It's like a sea god returning to the sea." And then he turned away and went slowly back to the camp thinking, "I must be going nuts--thinking screwy things like that. It's these damned Pacific islands. I'd better get back to the garage in Long Beach before I really go nuts."

Three times Tom made the lazy circle in the warm phosphorescent water and when he came out he stood there on the white beach looking across the channel toward the dark mass of the island opposite. There was no moon but in the brilliance of the night, there was enough starlight to silhouette the rims of the palm fronds. As he stood with his feet planted in the warm sand he was aware of a faint sense of ecstasy, as if he were no longer himself, an individual, a man standing there on the white beach but only an atom, an infinitesimal particle belonging to this whole universe of palm trees and white sand and space and stars and phosphorescent water, an atom forever immortal and indestructible because he was part of something far greater than himself.

And then quickly the sensation passed and he was himself again--a man, strong and young, who might even now be the father of a baby who would live and grow and become a part of this same universe and go on long after he himself was dead. The fact of death was always there, quite near at hand, but now it seemed to have no great significance, being lost in this greater thing. He felt a sudden desire to weep, not out of any personal sorrow, but out of a sadness that was vast and incomprehensible--the sadness of the whole human race.

A great coconut crab crawled across his foot, rousing him with a start. He did not attempt to kill it or even to touch it. He only stood there watching it waddle ridiculously up the bank toward the knoll where he and Jimmy had been sitting. There was something clumsy and comical and important in its queer gait, something out of a world which had existed before there was any man on earth. He found himself smiling in the darkness.

Then slowly he shook himself and walked up the knoll and back to the tents. They were silent now and dark for all the other boys were asleep.

He did not fall asleep at once for he could not shake off the excitement of the moment on the white beach and he was tormented by homesickness. Lying there in the darkness, beneath the mosquito netting, he kept seeing again the pond and his mother and Sally. But he saw the two women always in relation to the pond. They were standing beside it feeding the ducks which swam there or Sally was cutting the wild iris that grew on the edge of the pond, or they were watching the wild ducks which came to join and feed with their tame cousins. And sometimes he saw Sally and himself as children playing on the shallow, muddy edges of the pond, pushing out their small boats, building little harbors and ports where the tiny boats might tie up. It was a whole ocean--that muddy little pond--a whole universe over which he and Sally were God and Goddess. And he thought how much the pond had been a part of his life and Sally's, how they had grown up there beside it taking each other quite for granted until one day his body told him what love was and how different it was from friendship. Vaguely the pond seemed to have a part in that too. It was beside the pond he had first touched Sally's hand in a new way. It was beside the pond he had first kissed her, knowing that they belonged to each other as simply as the birds on the pond belonged to each other. It was beside the pond that he had said, "I'm going to air cadet school. Maybe we'd better be married before I go away."

He could not say what made him say it just that way, why he'd asked her to marry him when he was going away almost at once to leave her alone. Something more powerful than himself, something more powerful even than his conscious love for her. It was something that had to do with that strange sensation he had experienced a little while before on the beach, a sense of being only an infinitesimal part of something vast and splendorous which had to be carried on. There had been a kind of fierce urgency about it, and a sense of time running short. Perhaps that was the reason so many young people were getting married all over America, why so many young people were having babies when in ordinary times they didn't get married and if they did, they didn't have babies right away.

And he thought about a lot of other things too, among them the conversation he had had with Jimmy as they sat there against the betel palms on the edge of the sea. He didn't think about what they had said but what they had not said, pondering what it was that shut men off from each other so that they could not reveal what lay deepest in their hearts. What had happened to him just now there on the edge of the phosphorescent water, for example--that he would never be able to tell anyone, and never would he be able to tell anyone really how he felt about the pond, how much he loved it, how much it was a part of himself, how much it had to do with his life, as if he himself had been born out of its very depths.

While he and Jimmy talked there in the darkness the communication had been through halting, inadequate words. Jimmy was a tough little guy, but for all that or because of it, much shyer than himself. Jimmy had talked about Long Beach and the garage and his father but he hadn't really said anything at all. The things that were important were the things they had not said, but felt there in the darkness--that it was good to be young, that it was wonderful to fly, that being in love was wonderful even for a Don Juan like Jimmy, that both of them were thinking it would be wonderful to have their girls there with them, there in the warm starlit darkness--he, his own Sally, Jimmy just any pretty warm-blooded girl.

And he wondered whether men who weren't fighting ever had these feelings without being able to communicate them. Perhaps back home in the daily round of civilian life there wasn't time to think or feel things like these, or perhaps all feelings and emotions were blunted by the daily round of monotonous living. Maybe it all had something to do with flying, with fighting, with being near to death. He knew that he was too young to know how it would have been to marry in the monotonous times of peace, to have a wife you loved who was going to have a baby, your baby, in the next room instead of far away from you on the other side of the world.

Maybe it was good--all this he was going through now. Maybe he was lucky to be young and healthy and to be a flier. Maybe if you got through a thing like this you'd know things which other men didn't know--the stay-at-homes who weren't so lucky. What had happened in the last six months he knew suddenly and without doubt would make all the rest of his life richer and bigger.

Sleep wouldn't come and he went on thinking about the things he and Jimmy hadn't said to each other. Jimmy hadn't mentioned his mother at all. Maybe she'd died when he was a kid or maybe, worse than that, she left his father to run off with another man. Of course he hadn't spoken of his own father because there wasn't much he could tell Jimmy. He wouldn't say that his father was a hard man who squeezed every penny--a man who didn't seem to have much human feeling. He'd never understood about the pond or why his wife and his son loved it so deeply. He'd always talked about draining it and using the land to grow crops. No, there wasn't much he could say about his own father.

And presently the humming of the insects made him drowsy. He turned and quickly went to sleep.

The pond had always been there, little more than a depression in the endlessly flat prairie, stretching away to the horizon--a depression where the water from the surrounding flatness collected. Before the appearance of the white man the buffalo had come there by the thousand to find water. Indians pitched their tepees beside it during the hunting season, and when the first covered wagons began the long trek across the continent they stopped there to camp and water their horses and cattle. None of them stayed there for they were bound further west, none of them until Abner Wade claimed four sections of land and built a sod house for himself and his family. It was good grazing land with deep soil that would raise wheat, acres and acres of wheat stretching away as far as one could see.

But it wasn't the richness of the land so much as the pond that led Abner to settle there. It was the only piece of water for two days travel in any direction and around it grew a little grove of big cottonwood trees. And all around the edge of the pond there was a little thicket of wild shrubs broken only by the ancient buffalo trails. It was like an oasis in the vast flat desert of buffalo grass.

Abner left the farm to his son who in turn left it to a daughter. The daughter married a Swede, a newcomer into the country, and the Swede was killed a little while afterward, leaving a son who became Tom Peterson's father. The sod house beside the pond became in time a two-room wooden house and at last the farm house where Tom was born and grew up and met Sally and married her. The good land still held out and raised good crops of wheat two years out of three. Tom's father was a good man with cattle and with wheat. He drilled wells and had no more need for the pond.

His wife, Tom's mother, didn't come from the wide, flat prairie country. Axel Peterson, Tom's father, found her at the Iowa State Fair when he went to buy cattle from her father. He was a good-looking, strong, straight-backed fellow of twenty-eight with cold blue eyes and a hard jaw and Annie Wallace, daughter of one of the best cattle breeders in the state, fell in love with him. A half dozen times he went south to court her and at last she married him and went to live in the house by the pond in the bleak, rich wheat country. The first year she bore him a daughter and a year later she had a son they named Thomas after her father and then the doctor told her she could never have any more children. When the little girl was four years old she died of diphtheria. And by that time Annie Wallace no longer loved her husband. By that time she discovered that she came fourth in his heart. His land, his cattle, his bank account all came before her. She knew by then that she had married a peasant very different from the stock she had come from with its comfortable way of life among the streams and rolling, wooded green hills of Iowa.

It was, she knew, a tragedy, but she was a strong woman and made the best of it. When she looked across the table at her husband she understood what had happened to him. The jaw had grown harder, the lips thinner. He was meager and wiry and the long hours he worked in the fields and barns had given him the wrinkled, weather-beaten look of a man ten years older. Being a strong woman, she understood that she was a disappointment to him. He had wanted a peasant for a wife, a big-buttocked woman who would bear him many sons and daughters and, drawn by her pretty face, he had married a woman who came of people whose women had never worked in the fields, a woman who bore him two children and then went barren. She knew what he would do with a Hereford cow who went barren after two calves: he would fatten her up and send her off to the market. Because he was a good Lutheran and a religious man he could not do that with his wife.

And so she tried to fill her life with church work and sewing and a garden, but it was a bleak life. Really all she had in it was the boy Tom and the pond. Tom was a tough little fellow, always tall for his age like his father. He looked like his father's Swedish ancestors but without the hardness in the jaw and mouth and eyes. He had a good hand with cattle and he worked hard in the hours out of school. Very early he had the feeling that he must somehow make up to his father for the brothers he would never have.

But it was the pond that made life endurable for Annie Wallace. She didn't belong in this bleak, flat, treeless country. At home there had been groves of trees and springs and streams and hills. In hill country one lived always with mystery and romance, for over each hill there was a new and unknown world. In this prairie country there was nothing, nothing as far as one could see, nothing to break the horrible monotony but the pond. Sometimes Annie thought but for the pond she would go mad. Beside the streams and lakes of her Iowa hill country, the muddy little pond wasn't much, really nothing at all, but in the interminable unbroken flatness it was a miracle. On moonlit nights its surface turned to silver with the cottonwoods surrounding it black against the vast dome of the sky. In June it was rimmed by the blue and yellow of wild iris. Thrushes and quail hid in the shrubs that bordered it, and in the spring and fall the wild birds came--the ducks, the geese, the herons and once a pair of wild swan.

When Tom was sixteen he went to Des Moines to school. She paid for his education out of her own money as well as for the services of an extra hired hand to replace him, since that was the only way his father would permit him to go. The father asked, "What education does a boy need beyond how to run a farm and know how to raise cattle, especially when he's going to have this farm some day?"

She knew that whatever it cost her she must save her son from being forced into the mold of his father.

When Tom went away to school, the pond became the center of Annie Wallace's whole existence. Sometimes she would sit in the grass, dreaming, very still, half-hidden in the bushes watching the wild birds for hours at a time. And then when she thought of her husband, she was filled with a sudden rush of pity that he was so hard and so narrow, that he knew and understood so little of the richness of life, that he never saw the beauty that lay in the sheen of a mallard's wing, in the lettuce green of the cottonwood leaves in spring or the warmth that came of a calf's nose nuzzling your hand. He had made all of his land and the animals that lived upon it no more than a factory.

When Tom was seventeen her husband first began to talk about draining the pond. It was, he said, good land going to waste. The cattle were watered from wells on the range, they didn't need it any longer.

When she heard him say it the first time she thought wildly, "If he drains the pond, I'll go away and never come back. I couldn't live without the pond."

But she pretended indifference for she knew that by now his resentment of her had turned at times into a cold hatred because she was so useless. She no longer went near the pond when he was in the house or the barn for fear that simply out of contempt for her and her feelings, he would drain it and stifle all the life that centered in it. She pretended always that she had lost interest in the pond. But secretly, when he did not know it, she still fed the birds and sometimes on hot nights she would leave the house and spend half the night there lying in the grass listening to the croaking of the frogs and the sounds made by the night birds.

The pond was somehow tied up with Tom and Sally. They had played there as children and slowly fallen in love by its side. Sally was a good girl. Annie knew that she couldn't have had a better daughter-in-law, nor one whom she could have known better. When Tom finally went away looking very straight and handsome in his flier's uniform, both she and Sally turned to the pond because it made his absence seem less painful. So long as the pond was there a part of Tom still remained. After Sally found out that she was having a baby they sat together beside it in the long still northern evenings. It meant almost as much to Sally as to herself. She knew that Sally came from her mother's home as much to see the pond as to see her mother-in-law.

And then a month before Sally's baby was expected the two of them went on a visit back to Annie Peterson's home down among the hills and streams and woods of Iowa. It was August and the wheat harvest was over and all that flat dusty country lay hot with an aching heat. It was hot in Iowa but the country was green and the woods and streams made everything different and more bearable. It was the first time Sally had ever seen that lovely, rolling, wooded country and it was like Paradise to her.

They stayed there for three weeks--longer than they had planned because Sally loved the Iowa country so much. They would have stayed and let Sally have the baby there save that her mother wanted so much to have the baby born at home. Annie Peterson didn't protest. Sally's mother deserved that much satisfaction. Back in the flat country she didn't even have a pond.

They had a letter from Tom every week or two, telling them not very much. He didn't write about what it was like to fly, or how he felt about shooting down Japs. He couldn't tell them where he was. But he did write about the islands and the sea, and a little about the life on a flat-top. He wrote mostly about the sea--what it was like close at hand when the great moving ship left a long trail of fire behind it in the dark waters, about the flying fishes that darted like arrows of silver through the green foam, how from high in the air it was blue and purple and green and around the coral reefs translucent like jade. And almost always he wrote about the pond. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous to them that with all that water around and under him, he should think of that poor little muddy pond there in the flat plains of Dakota.

And so when Annie Peterson thought they couldn't risk waiting any longer, they left Iowa for the Dakota farm. The long trip was hot and wearing and when they arrived at last at the little depot ten miles from the farm, there wasn't any pleasure in returning home. The country stretched away flat and brown as far as the eye could see, trembling a little drunkenly in the heat. Even the Ford which Sally's mother drove to the station was brown with the prairie dust. They climbed in and as Annie Peterson settled herself in the rear seat she thought, "Anyway, there'll be the pond. It'll be cool there tonight. I'll go out and sit by it and listen to the frogs and the birds."

Sally's mother drove slowly and carefully while Sally talked about her visit and how pretty it was down in Iowa. Sally's mother was a tired woman, from the outside world, beaten down by work and the monotony of life in the flat country. Looking at the back of her thin neck under the dusty black hat, Annie Peterson thought, "When Tom comes back, he'll have to take Sally away out of this country. It's too hard and lonely a life for any woman." Then she thought, "If they go I won't have anything left but the pond." But she was a strong woman. She was prepared to face that. In any case she was middle-aged now, getting old. She mustn't stand in the way of young people. Whatever was life in her was passing on through Tom into the baby that was being born soon. It was like a cycle, like the cycle of the life of the pond. There was order and rhythm in it.

The old car rattled slowly along through the dust, past the Heinrich place, past the Downings, past the Lausches. In a moment against the horizon she would be able to see the tall cottonwoods that grew beside the pond. They passed the Gertner place and turned at right angles along the section road. In a second now the feathery cottonwoods would come into view against the gray sky.

The second passed while the old Ford moved slowly along and Sally told her mother about the streams and hills. Then another second and another, but no trees appeared against the horizon. Annie Peterson leaned forward and then actually rubbed her eyes. She thought, "It must be that I need glasses. I've been afraid of that."

She looked again but still there were no trees. She started forward to interrupt Sally and ask her to look and then suddenly she checked herself, terrified, because she already knew what had happened.

Quietly she covered her face with her hands. The tears ran silently down the dry Dakota dust that coated her cheeks. Her face burned with shame for the moment Sally would stop talking and look for the trees which she had loved since she was a little girl, the trees she had begged to be taken to see as a child.

In a little while they turned in at the Petersons to drop off Annie Peterson.

The odd thing was that neither Sally nor her mother said anything about it. They acted as if the ancient trees had not been cut down, as if they did not see the scars in the brown soil where they had once stood nor the ugly gashes in the sun-burnt grass where the caterpillar tractors had moved about their ruthless task. They never spoke of the baked mud where the lovely water of the pond had once been.

Annie Peterson got down and pulled her suitcase out of the car after her. The suitcase seemed filled with lead. Sally leaned down and kissed her. "If anything happens," she said, "I'll send Mama over to get you."

Still she did not say anything but her eyes were brimming with tears. Annie Peterson stumbled into the house. That night there was no sound of croaking frogs or night birds. In all the hot interminable flatness there was only an oppressive silence.

Tom found it good to be back on the ship again. After a time the lazy life in the islands had become tiresome and the men had grown bored with each other. Back on the carrier, there was nothing but the sky overhead and the sea all around, that sea that was blue and purple and emerald and jade colored. On the carrier the wind blew all day and all night, smelling clean of salt and spray.

The carrier turned north among the reefs and atolls. With her went a whole fleet of ships, big and small, cruisers, destroyers, tenders. They moved northward, spread out on the blue sea, looking from high in the air like the fleets of little boats which Tom had once sailed on the pond. After two days a big bomber came out of the clouds from the south and dropped bags of mail on the big deck of the flat-top. A little while later Tom and Jimmy and the other boys stood waiting for letters from home.

There were two for Tom, one from his mother and one from Sally. The one from Sally he read first. It was a long letter, filled with the account of her trip to Iowa with his mother. She wrote of the trees and hills and green pastures. Toward the end she said that she was feeling well and that the doctor said there shouldn't be any trouble about the baby. There wasn't anything to worry about--absolutely nothing at all. As soon as it was born she would send him a radio. She missed him. She loved him. She wished he could be there to see the baby as soon as it was born. She said his mother was writing by the same mail. She enclosed a picture of herself and Annie Peterson standing in front of the big red brick house under the maple trees of Iowa where his mother had been born and had lived as a girl.

The letter from his mother wasn't very long and there was a kind of deadness about it, as if somehow each word had caused her a great effort. It was a tired letter; and slowly as he read it, he felt depression creeping over him. And then at the very end he found the reason. She wrote simply, "Your father drained the pond while I was in Iowa." And then, after her name she had added, "You must not worry about the pond. It makes less difference than I thought it would."

But he didn't believe the lie. He knew why she had written a tired letter. The last thing she had to hang on to was gone from her life. There was Sally and there would be the baby, and perhaps the baby would help take the place of the pond. Suddenly sitting there with the sea wind in his face he found himself praying. "Please Lord, don't let anything go wrong with the baby. They need it so badly--more than I need it. Please, Lord, let everything be all right." And then he thought, "The kid won't have any pond. He won't have any trees or birds or water or mud to play with. He won't have anything but that God-forsaken flat country!"

He felt a sudden wave of hatred for his father and then it seemed to go away, swept clear by the fresh salt air of the sea. It was growing dark and behind the flat-top the sea was becoming alive again with light. The crest of each wave sparkled with light.

Then suddenly Jimmy was standing there behind him. He said, "What's the matter? Not bad news, I hope?"

"No," said Tom, "nothing. I'm just kind of homesick."

"It's wonderful to get letters," said Jimmy, "if they only didn't make you think about home."

Tom thrust the letters into the pocket of his shirt and stood up.

Jimmy said, "Looks like we'd get some action tomorrow."

"How do you know?"

Jimmy grinned, "We didn't come all the way up here just for an airing."

It turned out that Jimmy was right. They got their briefing a little after noon the next day. Their job would be to protect the bombers in an assault on an island that lay a little way off, still too far for the range of the land-based fighters. Tom was glad of the prospect for action. The news about the pond had left him alternately depressed and furious. Late that night he had written an angry letter to his father and then torn it up, believing it would do no good and only perhaps make things worse for his mother. Instead he wrote a letter to his mother saying that when the war was over and he returned, he would take her and Sally and the baby back to Iowa, to the country she loved. That he knew would be the best thing he could promise her; that would give her hope. It would make it a little easier to go on living on that bare, treeless, plain.

That night he dreamed of the pond.

It was three o'clock when the attack began. The empty deck was filled suddenly with men hurrying here and there, with the roar of motors tuning up as the great ship turned round and headed into the wind. And then one by one the planes took off.

In Tom, standing there, waiting for his fighter to move up into line, the old excitement came burning back into his veins. He was one of those who were made for flying. Something happened to him, something queer and unearthly. From the moment the plane started into motion, he became a man no longer earthbound who entered upon another level of existence. It was the take-off and the landing which he loved best--that moment when suddenly you were free of the earth and the moment when returning out of vast heights, out of the clouds you once more came back to the ship. It was like being a god descending among men. Flying for him wasn't just a matter of gasoline and engines and steady nerves and quick reactions. He had the nerves and the reactions to make him a good flier but it was more than that. A first-rate flier became one with his plane so that nothing separated them until one or the other was wounded or failed.

It was different with Jimmy. He felt a plane the way he ran an earthbound automobile, skillfully at high speed, but in his heart and mind the machine was something he drove, always apart from it. When he climbed aboard it was like jumping into the old coked-up jalopy which he used to drive in races along the city block back in Long Beach.

Just now he was standing near Tom, his legs spread a little to balance himself against the gentle rocking of the big flat-top in the long ground swell of the Pacific. He was watching the curious expression on Tom's face and suddenly he shouted above the wind and the roaring of the motors. "What are you lookin' at?"

The rapt expression disappeared and Tom grinned. "Nothing," he shouted back, "just thinking."

Then Jimmy thought, "It must be the hick in him. Everything is always new and wonderful." Then he moved forward to his ship.

At the same moment across the deck came running a boy called Skippy. He was one of the radio operators. He'd worked in W.T.A.M. in Cleveland before the war. He carried a bit of paper in his hand and came running straight for Tom who didn't see him. Skippy had to come quite close and shout in his ear.

He handed Tom the paper and shouted, "She came through all right, Pappy! Thought you'd like to know!"

Then it was Tom's turn up and as he ran he read what was typed on the bit of paper. It was brief enough. It read: "Fine boy. Everybody okay. Love Sally."

He thrust the bit of paper into his pocket, climbed aboard and opened her up. She gained speed, reached the edge and leapt off into the air above the brilliant blue water, banking a little and climbing to reach her place in the formation.

Below on the deck Skippy the radio operator stood shielding his eyes against the sun as Tom's ship climbed toward it and disappeared into the brilliance of its light. Then he turned and said to the sailor standing next to him, "It was against the rules ... givin' him that message but Hell, goin' off like that and maybe never comin' back, I thought he'd like to know about the kid."

Higher and higher the plane climbed toward the sun until Tom found his place in the formation. Then he turned and over his shoulder watched the last few planes leaving the deck. It was a pretty sight--like the barn swallows coming out at dusk to dart over the pond, hunting insects. The big ship slowly churning the dark green water into a pale jade color grew smaller and smaller and more remote.

Then he heard a voice speaking to him: "This is Jimmy ... Jimmy. Not bad news, was it?"

He answered back, "No. Good news! It's a boy--everybody's fine."

Then he heard Jimmy relaying the news exuberantly to the others, and then the Commander's voice, "Congratulations, Peterson ... and now let's muffle all the gossip."

But Tom, high above the sea, alone in his plane, pulled out the bit of paper and read the message again. He couldn't quite believe it. He felt warm all over and then thought, "What's there to be proud about? You're not the only father in the world." And then suddenly he experienced a curious feeling of awe and fright. He was responsible for another life in the world ... he and Sally together. It kind of scared you.

High up now, all the air about him was filled with clouds, those great white, lazily drifting clouds that hung over the blue South Pacific night and day. Suddenly one by one the ships in the formation would plunge into the mist and be lost for a time as if they had gone out of this world into a white, still misty, eternity. And then suddenly, one by one, they would emerge again into the brilliant light of the sun.

Tom's heart and body were singing.

The target showed up after a little over an hour. It was a little cluster of islands grouped haphazardly about a bigger green island with a small bay on one side and the white streak of a runway made of broken coral rock. In the little bay there was a big ship and what looked like a destroyer and a lot of barges.

The orders began to come in out of the air. He was aware suddenly that the clouds about them seemed bigger and there were more of them. Then out of a cloud on the left appeared three Zeros. They darted at the bombers but two of the boys ahead, breaking formation, went after them and drove them off. Then suddenly Tom's turn came and he let her drop straight down, leveling off at just the angle to catch a Zero full in the middle with a burst of fire. The burst seemed to break the back of the Jap plane. It exploded in flames and then plummeted downward, falling in two smoking bits of debris.

After that it became a general dog-fight, the fighters darting and dodging like hawks while the bombers did their work. Now and then he had a sudden glimpse at a freakish angle of what was going on, like pictures in a kaleidoscope--the big ship burning, bombs falling on the long white runway going up in great flowers of flame and smoke, bombs falling among the barges and on the crescent of the white beach. And in the midst of all the fighting there was a lot of flak. Sometimes it came quite close and again it was far away.

And Tom, a part of the plane itself, kept wheeling and turning and diving and climbing. He was laughing with excitement and thinking now and then, "Tommy. Your pappy is up here in the clouds having a grand time." There was no sense of time. It was as if everything was happening at once. There were more planes and more flak than they had expected.

Then suddenly he was again on the tail of a Zero in the long darting swoop of a bank. It brought him in low over the island. The Zero swooped into a cloud and Tom followed. It was a big cloud and in it he lost the Zero. It seemed impossible to get out of it, out of the swirling, drifting veils of mist. The few minutes seemed like hours and then suddenly he was in the sunlight again directly over the island and there was a violent explosion close beside him which turned the plane over on its side and then another which came all at once with the shattering of the instrument panel in front of him. The plane started to slip and he pulled her back and then he realized that something was blinding him and wiping the back of his hand across his left eye he discovered that blood was running into his eyes. He knew too that the radio had gone dead and that something was wrong with the left wing of the plane. It wouldn't respond.

He thought, "It can't be very bad if I don't feel anything." And then, "Hell, I'd better get out of here. I'm in no shape to fight anything." He looked back over his shoulder and high above coming toward him there was another Zero. It was the Jap's turn now.

He acted quickly. Softly he said, "Come on, honey" and turned the ship toward the great cloud. He was nearer to it than the Zero but the Zero was coming at terrific speed. He couldn't turn and fight back now. That thick, white, soft, fleecy cloud was safety, life. The plane responded. He turned sharply. The Zero fired but the angle was wrong. It dropped close beside him, so near that his plane shuddered a little.

Then suddenly he was in the cloud.

It was thicker than the other clouds had been. He drove the plane straight forward, deeper and deeper into the white drifting mist. Crippled, his plane could not possibly hope to fight. There was only one course, to drive straight ahead until he was out of range of attack and then turn and limp back to the others or the carrier. And then he remembered suddenly--the instrument board was smashed and the radio dead. He could not talk to the others. He did not know his direction. He was alone.

After a time he veered a little to the left thinking he would swing round in a wide circle. The cloud thinned for a moment and he came out into the sunlight. Ahead of him only a little way loomed another great cloud painted rose by the light of the setting sun. He thought, "I am lost and the sun is going down." Down below there was nothing but water, dark now, almost lead-colored.

There was only one thing to do--drop down out of the cloud and hope to find one of his own squadron or a ship or an island. Quietly in a long slow dive he dropped out of the immense cloud into the gathering darkness.

Down below there was nothing but the sea as far as he could see--not a ship, not a plane, not a piece of land. He did not even know where he was. Only the sun, slipping down to the edge of the horizon, showed him where the west lay.

"We came out of the sun," he thought. "If I fly back into it I will be going in the right direction."

The blood no longer ran into his eyes. He was alone in the universe above the darkening sea. Ahead of him the red sun slipped lower and lower, quickly, as it does in the tropics. He thought quite calmly, "I must get back. I've got to get back somehow on account of the kid."

Below him the water grew first red and then purple and as the sun slipped below the horizon it was suddenly black and the stars came out overhead.

For a moment he had a strange sensation of being already dead--as if he and his plane had become no more than a spirit speeding toward the sun. Quickly he experienced again that strange feeling he had known for a moment on the beach, of being only a part of the universe, no more than a grain of the powdered coral beneath his feet.

Then he was aware that the motor was sputtering and thought, "The gas line must have been hit. The gas must have been leaking. She's running out of gas." And then quite calmly, "This is it! This is where I go over the line."

He wasn't afraid. He felt very calm and still and his head ached a little. The plane was dropping lower and lower, pitching forward a little. He thought, "Now I'll never take Ma and Sally and the baby away to Iowa." And he thought suddenly of the pond, seeing it very clearly as he had seen it as a boy with the tall cottonwoods breaking the dreariness of the flat plains, the water ruffled a little by the hot breeze of summer, glittering in the Dakota sun. And then he remembered that it was no longer there--that his father had drained it. He thought desperately, "The boy must have a pond! The boy and Ma must have it back again!"

Then the world crashed about him in utter blackness as his head struck the metal of the shattered instrument board.

In the dark sea beneath the stars there was an uprushing of water as if it sought to embrace the stricken plane and its pilot. Like flame the leaping water glittered and flared with phosphorescence, scattering tiny jewels over the surface of the sea. Then all was still again with only the stars overhead. And far off on the horizon a lonely new moon.

The baby was born a week after Annie Peterson and Sally returned from Iowa. Its coming made the disappearance of the pond a little less awful for Annie. In the days of waiting she never looked out of the windows on the side of the house where the pond had been, and in the hot nights when she could not sleep, there was no longer any place for her to go to listen to the rustle of leaves and the croaking of frogs and the sounds made by the night birds. Outside there was only stillness like the stillness of a dead, empty world.

For three days before the baby was born, Annie went every day to the house of Sally's mother, staying late so that when she came home it was too dark to see the place where the pond had been. In the hot sun, the mud had dried quickly and Peterson was already breaking it up to plant winter wheat.

The baby came early on a Thursday morning and the first thing Annie did was to drive into town to send a radio to Tom. The telegraph office hadn't even opened by the time she got there and she had to wait outside for nearly half an hour.

Impatiently she asked Olaf Jensen, the operator, how long it would take for the radio to reach Tom and he said he didn't know. It depended on where Tom was. Sometimes it took only a day or two and sometimes a week. They'd have to find out where Tom was.

Then Annie went to the drugstore and got a roll of films and when Sally felt well enough to sit up Annie took three pictures of her holding the baby and then three pictures of the baby naked save for a diaper. He was a fat baby with a little blond fuzz on the top of his head and Sally said he looked like Tom and had Tom's blue eyes, and Annie, although she knew you couldn't tell what a baby looked like at that age or what color his eyes were going to be, agreed with her because she knew that was what Sally wanted. Each day they speculated a good deal as to when the radio message would reach Tom and what he would say in his reply.

The thing happened five days after the baby was born. It was a hot night and Annie Peterson wakened at the still hour of the morning when tired, old people die, conscious of the faint light from the new moon shining through the window across her bed. For a long time she lay there trying to go back to sleep, but her mind kept her awake, darting here and there to thoughts about Tom, far away in the South Pacific, to Sally and the baby and the baby's future and now and then to memories of the vanished pond. And presently when she grew drowsy again it seemed to her that she heard the sound of lapping water among reeds as she had heard it so many times before the pond had vanished.

Rousing herself she put the notion forcibly out of her head but she still kept hearing the sound despite everything. After a time she thought, "Maybe it's just something I dreamed. Maybe he didn't drain the pond. Maybe it was only a nightmare." But when she thought back, she connected it up with many things and how she had always come home from Sally's mother's house after dark so she wouldn't see the bare dry place where the pond had been. She knew, sadly, that it wasn't a dream but she still kept hearing the lapping of the water although it was a still night without the sign of a breeze.

When the experience became no longer bearable, she rose and in her nightdress walked the length of the house and looked out of the window on the other side where the pond had been.

And there in the moonlight was the pond like a burnished sheet of silver, just as it had been before save that the cottonwoods were gone and the bushes and the reeds. Slowly as if in a trance, Annie Peterson walked down the stairs, opened the door and barefooted crossed the burnt grass down to the edge of the pond. She was crying now and still she could not believe it. She did not believe it until she had walked into the water and stood there, still weeping hysterically, wet with cool water halfway to the waist. She thought, "How glad Tom will be! I must send him a radiogram." He would be almost as happy as he'd be about the baby.

The news of the miracle spread quickly over the county. The words "Peterson's pond is back" went from mouth to mouth and by nine o'clock people were driving from all over the countryside to look at it. The miracle was even greater than Annie Peterson had guessed, for this time the pond was a live pond. Somewhere in the bottom a spring had come to life. It wasn't any longer just a seepage hole. Living water had filled all the depression and was running over, making its own channel across Peterson's wheat ground into the ditch that bordered the long straight highway. There was running water in the county where before there had never been any water but Peterson's muddy pond surrounded by cottonwood trees.

Among the onlookers the speculations grew. Annie Peterson was among them telling over and over again of how she had wakened in the middle of the night to go out and find the pond. And Sally was there, who should still have been in bed, for Annie had hurried over at daylight to fetch her.

The county engineer said there must have been underground water there all the time and that Peterson's blasting of the cottonwood stumps had loosened the shale underneath so that the water worked its way upward. But most people thought that a fishy explanation which was the only one the county engineer could think up. A lot of people said, "Tom'll be glad to hear about this. He always liked that pond."

The whole crowd was filled with the kind of mystical awe and excitement which touches dry-country people at the sight of running water, for water is a source of life and ties all living things together. Only one man among them all was disgruntled and that was Peterson himself. The new spring had wasted all his good land and all the money he had spent clearing and draining the pond. He wouldn't try it again. It wasn't any good fighting a spring.

A week later came Tom's letter saying that when he returned he would take his mother and Sally and the baby away from that dry, flat country now that there wasn't any more pond. Reading it, Annie Peterson paused and looked up at Sally, saying, "He must know about the pond coming back by now. He must have got my radiogram by now. He's sure to know about it."

The baby was doing fine and Sally had come over to spend a week with her mother-in-law. They spent a lot of time making plans about the pond. You couldn't get back the cottonwoods. It had taken God a hundred years to make them. But you could plant other trees and shrubs and iris to replace the wild iris Peterson had killed so ruthlessly. They sent for nursery catalogues and marked the trees and shrubs they would buy in the spring to plant around the water. This time they'd plant a little grove where thirsty people from all the dry flat country around could come for picnics by the edge of the pond. They wanted it well started before Tom came back. Peterson couldn't stop them now. He could never drain the pond for God had taken a hand in the matter.

Henry Orr was the postman for their part of the county. He was an old man with a huge mustache and he was very slow in delivering the mail because he was a gossip as well as a postman and stopped to talk at every house along the way. There wasn't anything Henry didn't know about the county--when a cow died or a girl got into trouble or how Grandma Beattie's rheumatism was. He read postcards and had a power of divination concerning the contents of letters he never quite dared to open. And so he was the first to know that Tom Peterson was dead. He knew it as soon as he saw the envelope, and all along his route he hinted darkly that there was bad news for Annie and Sally Peterson.

It was noon by the time old Henry arrived at the Peterson Place and found Annie and Sally Peterson outside by the edge of the pond planting something, with the baby in the carriage by their side.

At sight of them old Henry lost his courage. As they called out, "Good morning" to him, he carefully rearranged the packet of mail. There was a letter from Iowa and two nursery catalogues and some advertising from a mail-order house. Carefully old Henry placed the awful envelope in the middle and retied the bundle, knotting it so that it would take them a long time to undo the string. That would give him time to get away, so he wouldn't have to see their faces.

Annie Peterson was coming toward him now and he got briskly down and went to meet her.

"A mighty fine morning," he said. "It's sure fine to have the pond back again. Always makes me feel good to see it."

Then he gave Annie Peterson the packet of mail and turned toward his battered car, hurrying but trying not to run. Once in the car he drove off as if the devil were after him.

By the edge of the pond the two women sat down again on the grass and Annie picked out the knots old Henry had tied so tightly. By the time she had it open, Henry's old car was far out of sight in a cloud of dust.

Almost at once Annie saw the envelope and almost at once she knew. She wanted to make the envelope vanish out of sight into thin air for Sally's sake, but Sally was watching, hoping there would be a letter from Tom. And Sally knew too.

Slowly, as if the slowness made it easier and more casual, she tore open the envelope and read what she knew she would read.

Neither she nor Sally said anything nor looked at each other. They simply sat there looking at the pond where the little waves of clear spring water danced and glittered and sparkled in the autumn sunlight.

And then Annie, as if unbelieving, looked at the bitter sheet of paper again, and presently a strange look of wonder came into her face. Her eyes seemed suddenly to shine and slowly she turned to Sally looking at her for the first time.

"Sally," she said in a quiet voice filled with awe, "it happened on September 16th ... that was the night of the new moon--the same night the pond came back."