Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood

Part I

THE FARM

1944

He was not literally an orphan, but he was a lost child. He was born in 1939 and his father was in the army—a low-level officer on General George S. Patton’s staff who was gone for the whole of the Second World War—and they would not meet each other until he was seven years old. 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 had grown up on a small northern Minnesota farm, wearing handsewn dresses made out of flour sacks and earning, if she was lucky, twenty-five cents a week. 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. Caught up in a life of heavy drinking and wild partying, she no longer had the time or attention to raise the boy right. She didn’t even celebrate his birthday.

Word of her newfound lifestyle found its way back to a small army of the boy’s relatives in northern Minnesota. His grandmother was working as a cook for a road crew of old men—almost all the young men had been drafted for the war—who were building a road into Canada. A road connecting the United States to the interior of Canadian bush country was thought to be necessary in case the war dragged on or the U.S. was attacked. At that time, no one was remotely certain that America was safe from invasion. The Japanese surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and, six months later, their invasion of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska were both still recent and frightening memories.

Grandmother was critical, then concerned, and finally horrified after learning that the boy’s mother was not only going out more than was good for her, but was also taking him with her to bars, dressed in a small army uniform to sing on tabletops: Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. A kid’ll eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you? Except his five-year-old version came out: Marezeedotes. Andoezeedotes. Anlittlelamzeedivy. Akidleedivytoowoodenyou? The silly song he sang meant more attention for her.

He thought it was wonderful fun, because the men who wanted to meet his mother—a blue-eyed blonde who turned heads wherever she went—showered him with Coca-Cola and candy bars and fried chicken and hamburgers, all of which were hard to get because of strict wartime food rationing. He was, at age five, becoming something of a celebrity in the beer joints near the war plant.

Despite the fact that time is, of course, a constant, he learned it is differently paced at various points in life. When you’re old, the years race by, but when you’re young, very young, days and weeks seem to crawl and even stop. The period he spent working the bars in Chicago, singing to draw men for his mother, lasted only a month or so, but it seemed a forever way of life before his grandmother—now past horrified and well into scandalized—arranged to end it and save him from a life, she felt, of degradation and waste.

The way she solved this problem said worlds about how the rest of his life would go. Her way of thinking taught him, early on, to deal with problems in a really practical, simple way: If it doesn’t work Here, go over There.

His grandmother showed him this lesson the first time that summer in Chicago. His life wasn’t working well Here, she thought, and she had an astonishing number of relatives available There, on farms in the northern part of Minnesota, not to mention that she herself was available to take him where she was, in the southern Canadian bush cooking for a road crew, living on a cot in a cook-shack trailer.

Simple. Problem solved. Get him out of the clutches of the fleshpots in the big city and send him to stay, in turn, on one of the numerous family farms she found available and, eventually, with her in the trailer in the cook camp itself. She ordered his mother in a short and tersely worded letter to put him on a train in Chicago.

And his mother obeyed. She dropped him off at the train station to make the four-hundred-mile run to Minneapolis to connect to a different, slower north-woods train that would take him north another four hundred or so miles to International Falls, Minnesota, on the Canadian border, where he would be met by a total stranger to take him the final rough distance to the first farm his grandmother had selected.

A five-year-old child. Completely and totally alone.

He made this trip during the height of wartime, when masses of people were moving around the world, across the United States; vast, desperate herds of soldiers and civilians shifting from city to city, coast to coast—going to the war, coming from the war, fighting in the war. 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.

But railroad tracks went everywhere, which meant that anybody who wanted to move across any real distance traveled by train. Consequently, every train, no matter the day or the destination or the hour, was always, always packed with people. Short trips, long trips, slow hauls, fast hauls—it didn’t matter. If you were fortunate enough to find space—because the military had seating priority—you went by train.

His mother took him to the station in Chicago, carrying his small cardboard suitcase. She pinned a note to the chest of his faded corduroy jacket scribbled with his name and destination, shoved a five-dollar bill in his pocket, hugged him briefly, and handed him over to a conductor. He was a kindly-looking older man wearing Ben Franklin glasses and holding a silver hand punch to make holes in tickets, who assured her that the boy would be carefully watched. As soon as his mother’s back was turned, he jammed the boy in a seat between two wounded soldiers coming home to recuperate, and disappeared—he would not be seen again for the whole trip.

The boy was, of course, in awe of the soldiers and wanted to ask them many questions: Had they killed any Germans or Japanese? Did they know his father? Where were their rifles? But they slept, perhaps drugged unconscious by painkillers, the entire journey from Chicago to Minneapolis. He had to satisfy his curiosity about them by merely peeking at the bloodstains seeping through their bandages.

Although meant to be an express, or high-speed, journey, the train virtually crawled. The distance from Chicago to Minneapolis should have taken ten or eleven hours to cover, but the numerous stops along the way stretched the trip over a full day and night.

In a short time the boy became bored, and then restless, so he pushed his suitcase under the seat, eased gently from between the two sleeping men, and set off to explore the train. He immediately learned that the cars were, in fact, a moving hospital. Wounded men were in nearly every seat, and many of them were much worse off than the two men the conductor had put the boy between. He saw half–body casts; shoulder and arm casts that made the arm stand out to the side; countless bound and leaking wounds; horrible red, shiny burns; missing arms and legs.

What he saw on that train was not the face of war that had been shown to the public. This was long before television, but there were newspapers at stands on every corner that reported on men fighting and being hit and killed. Every now and then they might print a picture of a dead enemy soldier, but the pictures were always clean; tidy, intact bodies that could have been sleeping. The pictures in the newspapers never showed open wounds, eviscerated or blown-apart bodies, or burned flesh crawling with flies and maggots.

But here, on the train, was the brutal truth, the true cost of war. He was too young to understand much of what he was seeing. Even so, he knew that America was a big place, covered with train tracks and countless other trains, and he thought, if every train had this many wounded and shattered men, how could there be any men left to fight in the war?

Before he walked through those train cars, he had somehow believed that if any of our soldiers were unlucky enough to get hit, the end result would only be a small flesh wound that healed quickly under a small bandage. He had never considered that anyone in war could ever be this badly injured.

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 them, 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.

He thought suddenly of his father. His mother had a black-and-white headshot of him on her dresser—which she would lay facedown when she was entertaining men—with his cheeks hand-tinted pink to make him look more alive. He wondered if his father was on a train somewhere like these men, and if he was alone and, worse yet, if he would be gone before they ever had the chance to meet. The thought made him violently ill.

He was huddled, retching, in a corner near the end of the car when a tall man wearing a starched white jacket appeared behind him, leaned out and over the boy like a living shelter, and asked in a voice so deep it sounded like thunder: What is it that makes you so sick, little man?

My daddy, he gasped through the vomiting, he’s in the war and I thought … he might be on another train like this somewhere … or hurt like these soldiers … I might never get to see him.

The porter, his name was Sam, wrapped the boy in long, strong arms and held him, making a small sound, like singing from far away, soft and gentle, until the boy settled down.

Don’t you worry, mister man, Sam said in a hushed voice, don’t you worry long. Your daddy’ll be all right, all right.

The boy peeked at the porter holding him. How do you know?

I see it, he answered, see it in you. You got the light, the right light coming on, coming in, coming out—shows all over you, so bright you could read by it in the night. Your daddy’s going to be all right. But some of these boys… His voice trailed off. Some of these boys are having to be men too soon and they need help. You want to help me help them?

The boy had no idea what he was talking about, but Sam’s voice was so soothing and his eyes were so gentle and kind that he nodded. I want to help.

Then here, you take this bucket full of sandwiches and I’ll take this other bucket with the good juice. You follow me and hand out food to those who are hungry. I’ll hand out what I’ve got to those who are just thirsty. Then he set off for the front of the club car, and the boy followed him, gripping the heavy silver bucket with both hands, his stubby legs churning to keep up.

After they moved to the front of the club car and entered the regular passenger cars, he went seat to seat to the wounded men and, if they were awake, offered them food while Sam offered drink from the good juice bucket. Hardly any of them wanted to eat, but many, most of them it seemed, wanted to sip from the brown bottle Sam carried in his bucket. A bottle just like many of the bottles he saw his mother and her guests drinking from in Chicago.

Many of the men smiled at them, but some did not. Those men seemed to not see at all and, especially if they sipped from the bottle, kept looking away, off and away, through them, clean through them, as if Sam and the boy weren’t even there, as if they weren’t there either, as if the train did not exist and nothing was there and never had been there and never would be there.

Years later, when he was in the army himself, he would remember those men and the way they stared. Only then did he understand the ripping, tearing, burning thought-pictures that only someone who has been in combat could ever know. The look they called the thousand-yard stare.

Of course he did not know that when he was five years old. He saw only that they seemed to be in a daze. As he and Sam handed out the food and drink in the silver buckets and went back to the club car to replenish the buckets—the men drank up the brown fluid much faster than they ate the sandwiches—the wounded soldiers were so completely silent that all the passengers in the train cars seemed ghost-like.

By the third or perhaps fourth or fifth refill, the boy was so exhausted that he started weaving more than walking. He was not sure how or when it happened, but Sam picked him up, buckets and all, and carried him back to the couches at the end of the club car. He did not know anything else until he awakened hours later to a gentle nudging at his shoulder and opened his eyes to see Sam smiling down at him. He was curled up on one of the couches, wrapped in a light green blanket of soft wool, and had been dreaming of something that filled him and made him comfortable. Though he couldn’t remember the dream itself, he hated to wake up and lose the feeling.

We here, little man, Sam said, nudging his shoulder again. We in Minneapolis. The conductor’s got to take you off this train and put you on a different one. Open up, open those eyes, and see me.

The boy was so thick with sleep and bone-tired that he couldn’t wake up. His eyes closed as he felt himself being picked up and handed to another man—another older man like the first conductor. He carried the boy and his suitcase off the train and into the crowds of people flowing between trains. Set him down on the platform—even though he was still not fully awake—and held the boy tightly by the hand as they moved through the masses of men and women. 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. This was another conductor dressed in a dark work suit with a small, semi-military black cap, and he, too, picked the boy up and deposited him on a landing between two railroad cars, before climbing the steps and pulling him into the open end of the car.

He jammed the boy in another seat—alone this time as there were not as many wounded soldiers on this train nor, blessedly, any smell of alcohol or urine—and covered him with a coarse woolen blanket, his suitcase at his feet.

Stay here, the conductor said. When we’re moving, I’ll bring you something to eat and drink. Then he was gone.

The boy was suddenly wide awake, and as he looked around, he saw that this second train was different from the first. 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. The boy would find later there was no dining car or porters—but the conductor soon handed him a sandwich and a small bottle of milk, which he ate in the seat in the passenger car.

Filling his belly led him to the discovery that the bathrooms at the end of the car—again, while sparkling clean—were not even remotely designed to be used by a small boy. Alert now, having left home nearly a day ago, and now with a full stomach, he needed to use the toilet. 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. So, after the conductor pointed out the facilities to him, he entered the all-metal cubicle full of confidence and pulled the door closed behind him.

But the commode was absolutely nothing like the toilets in the saloons or the apartment they had lived in. This one had complicated rods and levers and faucets of shiny steel, and the seat was so high above the floor that he had to climb up, using the steel-covered toilet-paper roller for a handhold.

He stood, flummoxed, for a moment, but his pride would not let him go back out, find the conductor, and ask for help. And his stomach pointed out with urgent enthusiasm that he had no time for a delay of any length.

So he lowered his pants, grabbed the steel toilet-paper roller like a mountain climber attacking Everest, and squatted. The toilet fixture had, of course, been designed for an adult bottom with adult dimensions and he was only five and small for his age. He did his business but then his grip slipped and he dropped like a stone down inside the toilet, jammed tail down with his shoulders against the back of the seat and his knees on either side of his face. Wedged in that position he could no longer reach the toilet-paper bracket—the only possible handhold—to pull himself up and out.

A sudden knock on the door brought home to him the fact that he was not only trapped in a toilet, but also on a train with many other people who needed to share the one toilet.

The person who had first knocked politely, now rattled the handle of the door impatiently. The boy panicked and struggled harder, jamming himself still farther in the bowl.

After a few moments of silent, frantic effort to free himself, the door to the toilet opened—thankfully, he had not locked it—and a soldier stood in front of him wearing a wool uniform with stripes on the left sleeve. The right sleeve had been cut away to allow for a shoulder-to-arm plaster cast that forced his arm straight out to the