Shwartz. Pro bono. It meant Kurtz Heineman would be in Berlin by Sunday. “Give me Cutter’s number.”
***
“I’d rather see Disneyland than Morganfield, Jerry Wayne,” Gloria said. “So, you’d better give me a damn good reason why we’re changing our destination.”
At thirty-seven, Gloria was everything he’d fallen in love with the first day they met: Christmas Eve, 1941. Enlistments after Pearl Harbor had emptied Rockville of every able bodied male eighteen and over. But Jerry Wayne was seventeen, a senior at Rockville High, and no entreaty made his Mama agree to sign a waiver so he could join his Daddy and brother, Earnest. “I swore when I left Kentucky my children would get the schoolin’ I never got, and it’s a vow I’m keepin’,” she said as she stood over the stove frying up a chicken for the two of them, waiting for the grocer’s boy to deliver the eggs and flour he was supposed to bring the day before.
But, when she opened the door, there was fifteen-year-old Gloria, eggs in one hand and the flour between her parka and her red flannel shirt. “Good Lord, child, get in here where it’s warm!” Mama said as she pulled her inside. “Jerry Wayne, call Mr. Petty and ask him why he sent this baby out on a winter day.”
Gloria laughed and said, “I’m no baby. I’ve been working since I was eleven.”
“Lord, I thought that would stop when Mr. Roosevelt put the men back to work.”
“Now that my Daddy’s gone to war, me and my Ma is staying with my Aunt Jean and Uncle Roy. Roy Jr. left for the Army at seven this morning.”
And Jerry was grateful he had five months of making grocery deliveries after school before he kissed Gloria goodbye. “I’m coming back a grown man, Gloria. Maybe I’ll see action in Europe. Maybe the Pacific.”
He saw action in hot and wet Fort Stewart, Georgia, from there to cold, wet Britain, and then made a wet landing on the coast of Algeria, racing to rain-drenched Tunisia to support Montgomery’s fight against Rommel. By 1943, he was back in the states, sick of rain and recovering from three machine gun bullets in his leg that put him behind a desk in Camp Ulm—a German POW camp near Morganfield, Wisconsin.
Gloria’s letters followed him all the way, each one closing with an “I love you,” and, it seemed, a PS. about another family in Rockville hanging a gold star in the window. His Mama wrote too: Your Daddy is home, Jerry Wayne. Still no word about Earnest.