Homefront Hero

Leanne handed him the yarn and needles, and despite the fact that they had looked so enormous in her own grasp, they looked nearly small in his. He turned the objects over in his hands, peering at them as if with the right look they’d give up secrets. He shifted his eyes from the dull green yarn to look at her. They were an exquisite indigo, his eyes. A deep-sea blue, like mussel shells or the last hour of a summer’s evening. “Wait a minute, there are four needles here. My mother knits with only two. You’re not pulling one over on me or anything, are you? It is easy?”

So his mother knitted. She tried to imagine little Johnny Gallows sitting at his mother’s feet while she knitted him a Christmas sweater and couldn’t bring up the image. The man in front of her looked like he’d never been small—or innocent—a day in his life.

He certainly looked far from childlike now. It was as if his personality only intensified the closer one stood. And he was so fond of standing close. She moved her chair back an inch. “Oh, some take to it naturally.” She made her voice sound more casual than she felt. If he’d noticed her retreat, he didn’t show it. “Minnie Havers,” she went on, “why, she had her first sock done almost within the week. Took to it like a fish to water. Others, well, I’d say it’s more of a struggle. And no, Captain, I quite assure you all socks are knitted with four needles like these. Surely a man of your aptitude should master it in no time.”

John held up the needles. “No time, hmm?”

“Most do. Well, most women, that is. I haven’t taught my first class of soldiers yet. Those start next week.”

“I am your first male student?” He enjoyed that far too much.

Leanne cleared her throat rather than answer. “I find it’s a matter of dexterity. Do you have a great deal of dexterity, Captain Gallows?”

She regretted the question the moment she asked it. “I’ve been told I have the hands of a surgeon.” He said it in a way that made Leanne sure she didn’t want him to elaborate.

“Let’s get started.” Leanne had never actually taught a man to knit before. Normally it involved a lot of her holding the yarn and needles together with the student, repositioning fingers, adjusting the tension of the yarn. Touching. She’d never given it a moment’s thought before, but now it meant touching a man’s hands. This man’s hands. The air between them was charged enough as it was. It seemed foolish, but Leanne was afraid to touch him. It would cross some kind of line she hadn’t even realized was there.

She attempted, in response, to teach him without touching his hands. This resulted in nothing short of disaster. His frustration built on her tension, tangling their composure tighter than the yarn in their fingers.

“It feels like wrestling a porcupine,” Captain Gallows grunted when a needle slipped through the stitches and fell to the carpet at his feet. “The annoying little sticks won’t stay put.” She knew it would pain him to reach over and fetch the needle, so she bent and picked it up as quickly as she could. The look on his face—reflecting the limitation she knew he would never speak of—almost made her shudder. Captain Gallows was obviously used to mastery of anything he attempted, and the effort required to do what he clearly deemed a simple task simmered dark behind his eyes.

“It’s much more difficult for larger fingers.” While she’d meant the remark to soothe his feelings, it did just the opposite. He looked as if he’d snarl at the yarn within minutes. A shameful corner of her heart enjoyed watching the arrogant captain meet his match, but the part of her that could see through his bravado winced at causing him further pain. No one likes to have their weaknesses displayed. “You know,” she confessed in the hopes of easing his nerves, “you were right to keep this first lesson between us.” Under any other circumstances the phrase “between us” would have been harmless. When “between us” meant between her and Captain John Gallows, however, the words darted between them like an electrical charge.

He grunted again. “Ease up, Captain. Hold that yarn any tighter and you’ll lose circulation in your fingers.”

He dropped the knitting to his lap and closed his eyes. “If I’m going to make a complete fool of myself in front of you, we might as well drop the formalities. Let’s just watch John Gallows fail at knitting for the moment, rather than the spectacle of Captain Gallows botching needlecraft, shall we?”

Leanne wasn’t sure what drove her to lead his hands back down to the needles, and gently position them in the correct way. It wasn’t a wise choice. They were tanned, strong hands; large and well-groomed. It was the warmth of them that struck her most of all. She wasn’t sure why that surprised her. Perhaps because it served as a reminder that he was human, flesh and blood with fears and feelings like any other man. She’d forgotten that he’d been dragged into this bargain as much as she. He shifted his weight in a way that told her his leg was starting to ache, but anyone could see he wasn’t giving in until he’d done a respectable stretch of successful stitches. He was making a genuine effort.

She tried again to reposition his fingers. Some odd little shudder went through his hands when she touched him. Or was it her hands that shuddered? Or had she merely felt a tremble but not seen it? She forced a casualness to her touch as she showed him again how to wrap the yarn around his right index finger—the one with the long scar down the side. “You don’t need to strangle it, Captain, just let this finger do the work.”

“John,” he corrected as he fumbled his way through a stitch—labored but correctly done. “At least off camera.”

“Well, John.” The familiarity felt more daring than she liked, even though she worked to hide it from her voice. “It feels odd to everyone at first, not just war heroes.” John rolled his shoulders and scowled as he produced a second stitch—also correct but less forced. “See? There’s no need to mount a battle here.” She leaned over to adjust his far hand again, catching a whiff of his aftershave. He smelled exotic and sophisticated.

“This must get easier.” She couldn’t tell if it was a question or a demand.

“Yes.” She felt the first smile of the afternoon sneak across her lips. “It does.”

He looked up at her for the first time. Were she knitting at the moment, she would have surely dropped a stitch. He would have enjoyed that. “It must. I’ve seen young boys do this.”

“That is the idea, isn’t it?” And it was. It wasn’t just some general’s folly to decide to convince America’s boys to knit. The clicking needles of American women and girls simply weren’t enough. The Red Cross was so desperate for woolen socks that this “farfetched scheme” to recruit boys was, in fact, important to brave men risking their lives across the ocean.

“And you’ll teach injured soldiers to do this?” he asked. “To pass the time in the hospital as well as meet the need for socks?” What he hadn’t realized was that five tidy stitches had worked their way onto his needle while he spoke. While many might accuse John Gallows of great arrogance, his only knitting sin was the universal fault of trying too hard.

“Yes, that’s the idea. It’s been done successfully in some other hospitals, so I am eager to try it here.”

“Done successfully, you say? Well, then, I simply can’t allow this to elude me, can I? My own grandmother,” he went on, “who can barely see well enough to know which Gallows is who, can do this.” Three more stitches.

“Your grandmother knits?” Keep him talking, Leanne urged herself, realizing that talking was the key to keeping him from overthinking the simple stitches.

“Constantly. I have several holiday sweaters in the most atrocious patterns you can imagine. And a few scarves that could scare away the enemy.” He looked down, a little stunned to realize he’d made it all the way to the end of the double-pointed needle. “Now what?”

She didn’t have to force herself to take his hands and show him how to switch to the next needle. And while she didn’t dare look up at him while she touched those hands, she could feel his smile behind her. “See, just like that. All lined up like soldiers, they are. Well done.”

He said nothing until the silence forced her to look up at him. When she did, Leanne felt it burrow its way under her ribs and steal her breath. “Well taught, Nurse Sample.”

“Leanne,” she heard herself say, but it was as if Ida’s daring nature had inhabited her voice. “Off camera.”

Chapter Seven

“One more inch…just one inch farther…ugh!” John growled in exasperation at the joints that would not bend to his will. It was as if the plaster cast on his leg had never come off—the stubborn limb refused to regain the needed flexibility. He gripped the bench harder and set his teeth against the pain, leaning into another push. It was probably no accident that the “reconstruction clinic,” the gymnasium on base that housed the staff and equipment designed to rehabilitate wounded soldiers, was olive-green rather than hospital white. To John, the gymnasium was no less a battlefield than the front line. It reminded him that he was a soldier—and that a soldier belonged on the front lines, where he intended to return as soon as possible, even if he had to thrash his leg into submission every step of the way.

“Whoa there, stallion. You’re not going to get what you want out of that leg by beating it up.” Dr. Charles Madison pushed John’s leg back down. John hated how easily the small doctor could do it, too. The weakness in his leg made him crazy, and Madison had a gift for showcasing just how much strength John had lost.

“It doesn’t bend a single inch farther this week.” Complaining felt childish, but John’s frustration stole his composure as easily as the dirigible stay lines had shredded his leg. Patience was not a virtue Gallows men either possessed or cherished. John pulled himself upright with something just short of a snarl.

“This isn’t the kind of thing that goes in a straight line.” Dr. Madison, his Bostonian accent sounding entirely too fatherly, sat down on the bench next to John. He set his clipboard down with a weariness that spoke do we have to go over this again? without words. “It’s going to be back-and-forth. And if you push it too far too fast, I promise you it will be more back than forth. Flex your foot.”

John shot him a look but obeyed. The doctor could make “flex your foot” sound like “go sit in the corner.”

“You’ve got more rotation than you did last week. You tore nearly every tendon from your hip down. It’s a wonder you’ve still got use of the leg at all, Gallows. Those tether lines could have ripped the whole thing off.”

“Yes, yes, I’m so fabulously fortunate.” John launched himself up off the bench and hobbled to the bars on the wall nearby. Did Madison think he didn’t know that? And if those lines—those horrid steel lines that felt like they were slicing his leg off from the inside out while he dangled—had severed his leg, where would he have been? Falling thousands of feet out of the sky to drown in the ocean. If he lived through the fall. The mere thought of that terrifying, helpless hanging sensation, those minutes of absolute dread that felt like hours of twisting over what he was certain would be the site of his death, sent that icy sensation through his chest again. He hated this sniper-fire fear of that memory which could attack him without warning. A wrong comment or even the slightest hint of falling—and he slipped all the time these days—would catapult him back to those moments in the sky. Somehow he knew that if he ever had to hang upside down again for any reason—some exercise or calisthenic someone dreamed up to rehabilitate him—he’d stop breathing altogether. Die of remembered fright on the spot. Just the kind of way every war hero ought to behave.

“For a talented spokesman, I wonder sometimes if I ought to punch you for the thoughtless things you say.” Madison cornered him against the wall and pinned him with severe eyes. “Look around you, son. Wake up and see just how fortunate you are. That imperfect leg you so despise is at least still there. You’ve your wits about you and the admiration of many. Take a walk with me over to another hall of the hospital—the one with no visitors—and see some of the ghosts we can barely call men. Complain to them as they sit in chairs mumbling because not only their arm but their mind is gone.”

John was in no mood to be smothered by the silver lining of his own survival. Madison didn’t get like this often, and it bothered John to no end when the doctor lectured him on his advantages. He needed no reminding. “I know I ought to be glad I’m alive,” he mumbled with reluctance. That was, in fact, part of the problem. Part of the thing niggling at the back of his mind, taunting him on the edges of sleep. He was alive. He was fortunate. More than that, he was lauded and admired. He just never felt like he earned it. And that wasn’t the sort of thing one mentioned to anyone. Humility was one thing—and another one of those virtues not especially prized by Gallows men. Feeling like a fraud? That was another. “I let my frustration get the better of my mouth.”

John had been down that particular hospital hallway. He knew soldiers who, once maimed, wanted nothing more than to get back out on the front lines so they could be shot down and end their misery. They wouldn’t put their families through the shame of suicide, yet they couldn’t face the prospect of a lifetime without a limb or an eye or whatever. Those men clamored back to the battlefield with a dangerous “death wish.”

He wasn’t one of those. John wanted back in the battle so he could prove to himself he was the hero everyone seemed to think he was. Whatever he did—and honestly, he didn’t even clearly remember most of it—up there to those dirigible lines was sheer, terrorized survival, not heroism. Grab this or fall. Secure that or risk it ripping off and taking him with it. He climbed out onto that airship not because he wanted to be brave, but because it was try something or die. He was working only to save himself, and that other lives would benefit from his actions was the last thing on his mind. That wasn’t the kind of thing one ought to get a medal for. The fellows who had risked their lives to pull in wounded mates, who went back out into gunfire to drag their captain to safety? Those were the men who should be making speeches and wearing medals. He wasn’t here stirring up patriotism because he was brave. He was here because his name was Gallows, he had a silver tongue, took a good photograph and had somehow managed not to die.

* * *

Ida tossed her nurse’s hat down on her bureau. “You know, I thought I was an admirer of the male physiology.”

Leanne looked up from the outline of reconstructive exercises she’d been studying. “You’re not?”

“I think how God put us together is one of the most amazing things ever. Y’all would think there’s no way to make it tedious.” Ida leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling, her long auburn mane tumbling down behind her. She had a gift for striking dramatic poses.

They sat in their shared bedroom at the Red Cross House. It was comfortably furnished by army standards, with a pair of beds, bureaus and desks much like the dormitory rooms she’d had at the university. It had color and comfort, two things the bland army housing clearly lacked. She found she couldn’t fully approve of the way the U.S. Army piled soldiers into barracks that looked more like hospital wards than homes. The standardized, militarized buildings utterly lacked the pleasant feel of the Red Cross House. Not that the Red Cross House was perfect, but Leanne had come to appreciate privacy for the dear commodity it was in military life. It made her grateful she enjoyed Ida’s company so much. “I take it you’re not fond of your current rotation?”

“I have babysat my five-year-old cousins and heard less complaining. And I declare, I could be tending a ship of pirates and hear more civilized conversation. To think I thought being surrounded by soldiers would be a good thing!” She flung out one hand as if addressing the universe. “I had to smack one private’s hand three times for attempting to get…too private.”

Leanne laughed at Ida’s pun. “Your sense of humor serves you well.” Ida’s vibrancy made her a grand friend to have in trying times. “I imagine you’re just the kind of care some of those boys need. Have you drawn any of them yet?” Ida was an immensely talented artist. She’d tacked a few of her better sketches up on the wall of their room and Leanne thought they rivaled some of the things she’d seen framed on the best walls in Charleston.

Ida opened one eye from her dramatic recline and shot Leanne a look. “I have not. They don’t merit my talents. Truly, I’m not askin’ for chivalry. Just a little civility would be fine with me. Goodness knows, with the work I put into seeing them healed and healthy, it’s the least they could do. A man’s broad shoulder is one of the finest things God has ever made, but I had to muck out the gouges in one today that rivaled a Tennessee swamp. By rights, he should owe me nothing less than a fine dinner for my troubles.”