Gone to the Woods: Part I

When he was four, his mother took him—dragged might be a better word—to Chicago, where she went to work in a munitions plant making twenty-millimeter cannon shells.

She now had a seemingly endless supply of pocket money from her steady hourly wage but was not even remotely prepared to resist the temptations of the big city.

She ordered his mother in a short and tersely worded letter to put him on a train in Chicago.

Air travel—simple two-motor prop planes with limited altitude or distance ability—was virtually nonexistent for the average citizen, and since it was nearly impossible to buy gasoline or tires or oil, which were strictly rationed for the war effort, traveling any distance by car was equally out of reach.

The pictures in the newspapers never showed open wounds, eviscerated or blown-apart bodies, or burned flesh crawling with flies and maggots.

He staggered from car to car, dizzied by the overwhelming numbers of wounded men, the cloying smell of blood and wounds, the sickening odor of medical alcohol, and the dead tang stench of stale urine.

Finally, after moving through three or four cars, careful to jump over the clacking cracks between cars, he found the dining car, where he smelled food, pungent and crisp, frying in grease, which could not entirely cover the odor of the wounded men.

The boy trundled next to him, staggering along, dragged by the one hand for what seemed an impossibly long time until he was handed to yet another man standing in front of yet another train.

The car was much older than the previous train and, though clean, more threadbare and worn, with cracked leather seats and worn spots through the rubber floor in the aisle.

For many previously disastrously embarrassing reasons—usually occurring in the bars where his mother had him singing—he had worked very hard and become inordinately proud of being able to properly use the big boy potty.

He stood, flummoxed, for a moment, but his pride would not let him go back out, find the conductor, and ask for help.

One of the women gave the boy two hard-boiled eggs and a huge sandwich made with great chunks of meat on thick-cut homemade bread slathered with salted lard that tasted like butter, enough food to make two meals for a small person.

The train did not stop long at any of the stations, but, at each one, a number of people left the train—usually soldiers, both wounded and not—and other people came on, usually older women carrying dented galvanized-metal farm buckets filled with food they handed out to people on the train.

Even with the stop-and-go slow progress, the gentle motion of the train lulled him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Although full and sleepy, he slept fitfully, dreaming of his father sitting on a train with his cheeks tinted pink, as they were in the photo—the only way he had seen him—even though all of the other soldiers were pale and wan.

Although full and sleepy, he slept fitfully, dreaming of his father sitting on a train with his cheeks tinted pink, as they were in the photo—the only way he had seen him—even though all of the other soldiers were pale and wan.

He didn’t see anyone and he thought—even having lived in the city with thousands of cars and trucks, all old because no new vehicles were being manufactured as a result of war rationing—that he had never seen a vehicle so decrepit. He assumed it was an abandoned, ancient wreck left to rot.

It must have been some sort of old-fashioned car, but the original body had been hacked, turned into something like a small truck with a wooden box-like structure on the rear.

He spit now, a great brown dollop, wiped his chin haphazardly with his sleeve and, seeing the boy, waved an arm hook-like to motion the boy to come across the tracks to him.

Used to have a horse and wagon and a sleigh in the winter. But the horse got colic and died, so now I use my old truck.

“The lever on the wheel pipe! Give her some more throttle, now! Push the lever up a few notches.”

A cloud of heated smoke-gas spewed from the engine compartment, rising into a hot gray mushroom, and through this cloud, Orvis was airborne, flying through the smoke with an outpouring of Norwegian obscenities.

And the vehicle did not run straight, but seemed to wobble, sliding of its own volition to the left and then back to the right in a gentle S-pattern.

The engine alone made a deafening buckity-buckity-buckity noise, and everything else on the car seemed to be rattling all the time and when they started up any hill—and there were many—the cacophony grew much louder as a growling came from beneath the seat.

And then he’d lapse into Norwegian, just ripping off words, spitting and hacking, clawing at the boy by the jacket to catch him when he started to fall out of the side of the truck, which was often, and then grab a breath, spit a gob, and pitch into it again.

Rex, as the dog turned out to be named, gave a really good account of himself—judging by the quantity of feathers in the air—and it occupied the geese long enough for the boy to pick up his box and the envelope and make his way around the melee.

Their place, Edy and Sig’s homestead, was a fairy tale kind of farm with a small white house with red trim nestled in towering oak trees.

Mostly...the faint light through dingy shades with the sounds of traffic and elevated trains nearby.

There was a narrow screened porch that led into the kitchen and, inside the kitchen door, the boy was assailed by such wonderful odors that he had to stop again.

Then she poured the water over the pen rail and into the pigs’ trough. From another bag inside the barn door, she poured a thick grain mixture into the water in the trough, and the pigs dived in.