Thomas Prescott Superpack (45 page)

Chapter 33

For some reason they celebrated New Year’s Eve on the thirtieth. Seriously, it was like they operated on some different calendar altogether. They probably celebrated Easter the sixth Sunday after the first Joseph died. And Labor Day two weeks after the first hip broke.

Harold was decked out in his Sunday best.
He looked sharp. Dead, but sharp.

I could describe my wardrobe selection in one word.
Camel-hair. I looked ridiculous so, needless to say, I fit in perfectly.

We retired to the cafeteria, which had been decorated a la millennium party and I felt like I was in my seventh-grade gymnasium.
A table near the door was strewn with cheap top hats, plastic tiaras, noisemakers, and kazoos. I visualized all these old-timers blowing on kazoos at midnight. I hope they had a couple defibrillators handy.

Dinner was prime rib, potatoes, and cornbread.
Most of the old-timers had a glass of wine. Harold had his, plus mine, and his Titleist-sized eyeballs had glassed over by the time we did a champagne toast.

A couple dustbusters stood, or attempted to, at any rate, and gave toasts.
Mostly they toasted to still being alive, to loved ones that had already moved on, that we lived in such a great country—one lady toasted to cats—but more or less their toasts put life in perspective, and I was pretty choked up by the end.

They did a mock countdown at 7:00
P.M.
and the party raged until 7:13. Harold and I were the last to leave.

Sitting just outside the cafeteria was a piano and Harold stopped to rest. We generally stopped every hundred yards, so naturally, I thought nothing of it.
He sat on the small bench and took deep inhales on the oxygen tank.

It might have been the wine, or the champagne, or the fact he was up an hour past his bedtime, but he looked especially old.
Old and tired. He reminded me of one of those old trucks you see parked on the side of people’s houses. Rusted, dented, weathered, what’s left more spare parts then originals. But every time you turned the key, it would start. It would cough and sputter, it would choke and wane—almost as if it was on its hands and knees begging
not
to start—but eventually it would always turn over. 

The old truck swiveled and faced the piano.

Harold stretched out his fingers and laid them gently on the keys.
I wasn’t sure if his fingers were hovering over the thin white keys or if they lacked the weight, and he the strength, to elicit sound. And then suddenly his fingers became music. The notes were deep and long, hanging in the air above the piano like London fog.

I watched—memorized, really—as Harold played snippets, small delicate pieces of songs long forgotten.
His eyes were closed, his head swaying from side to side. I wondered where Harold was. And what year it was. And who he was with.

Somehow I knew.

Harold stopped playing.
He laid his hands by his sides, opened his large eyes, and said, “I walked past the King house every day for a year.”  

For the first month, Harold walked past the King place two, sometimes three times a day.
After a twelve-to fifteen-hour day in the field, he would walk the seven miles to the King mansion. Sometimes he would walk up the stone path and bang on the door a couple times, but mostly he would just toss rocks into the thin lake.

The long days in the sun gave him plenty of time to ponder what had happened.
Had she fallen out of love with him? Had he said, or written, something horrible that he didn’t know about? How could someone say the things she said, say the things she felt, then just up and disappear?

These questions ate at him as the hours crept by.
On more than one occasion Harold found himself huddled between the stalks of corn, legs curled up to his chest, tears dribbling down his cheeks.

His life had been nearly perfect.
He couldn’t have asked for anything more. And then, just like that, just like Thad’s final breaths, it was all gone.

Harold decided Elizabeth’s father had to be at fault.
He visualized the skinny man dragging Elizabeth from the house kicking and screaming. Her yelling at him how much she loved him. That she had to be with him. That he was coming for her. That she wasn’t whole without him.

Harold hated the man, a hate he didn’t think he was capable of.
A hate that during the throes of war he would have thought utterly impossible.

He would think about Mr. King, then he would think about his own father.
When Harold had walked through the door the night he’d returned, he’d tried to be strong—after all, he was a soldier—but when he’d seen his mother and his sisters, his facade had broken. His mother and sisters cried with him. As for his father, he didn’t say a word, simply stuck out his hand and Harold shook it. His father might not be the smartest man, but he was a good man, and he worked hard. His father was nothing like Elizabeth’s father.

He’d started back in the fields the very next day.
It was a large planting and Harold kept busy. The days slowly turned into weeks and the weeks into months.

Harold had asked around, local merchants, other farmers, even his father, and no one knew where the Kings went.
Just that they were gone. His father was especially elated. If a year went by and no one heard from the Kings, the land would become his.

And it did.

It was late August of the following year. They were in the middle of the second harvest and Harold’s father had even thought they might squeak out a third if the weather stayed the way it did. Harold had just finished up a twelve-hour day in the field. His back felt as though it might never again be straight, his arms as if they were destined to stay at his sides for the rest of eternity, his feet as if there was a nail driven through each heel.

He overheard his mother tell his father that while coming back from town, she’d seen a bunch of cars at the King place.

Harold didn’t waste a moment.
He jumped off the rocking chair and started running. Barefoot. His three sisters called after him, asked what in the devil had gotten into old Harold, but he didn’t hear them. His Elizabeth had returned. He knew she would come back. They’d probably been on vacation. Maybe they’d gone to California. Or Florida. Or even overseas. But it didn’t matter where they’d been, or why. They were back. His Elizabeth was back.

Harold’s feet pounded against the gravel for seven miles, but he didn’t feel a single solitary step.
As he closed in on the house, he could see four cars parked in the drive. The cars were larger, newer, shinier. 

Harold ran up the drive.
It never occurred to him what he looked like or what he was wearing. Harold never stopped to think what it would look like when a boy ran up to the house in overalls, no undershirt, covered in two days’ worth of sweat and grime, barefoot, feet calloused and spurting blood. No, Harold was too preoccupied with twirling his precious Elizabeth in his arms and telling her he would never let her go. That he would die before he let her go.

As Harold neared the front door, a black man removed a large box from one of the cars.
The man dropped the box and blocked Harold’s path to the front door. He said slowly, with almost an air of superiority, “This here is private property, young lad.”

Harold asked to see his Elizabeth.
The black man shook his head and told him that no one named Elizabeth lived there.

The family that moved into the King estate was the Grangers.
They’d bought the property from the Kings.

Harold could feel his heart, which just minutes earlier he was sure would leap right out of his chest, fall into his stomach.
He doubled over and vomited.

The black man told him to run along, giving him a slight push in the direction of the road, and began kicking dirt on Harold’s mess.
 

Harold wiped his mouth and turned on his heal. His head lowered, he slowly made his way down the dirt road.
He could hardly lift his raw bloody feet, more of a scraping than walking. When he was halfway down the long drive, the black man yelled at him.

Harold turned.
The man’s outline was hazy through his stream of tears. From what he could tell, the man was no longer angry. Then the man said one word. One word that would forever change Harold’s life.

“Seattle?”

He smiled. “
Seattle
.”

I had a cramp in my right cheek from smiling.
“And let me guess—you moved to Seattle.”

“I hopped on a train the next day.”

It was 1947. Harold had some money saved up from his days in the Army, plus his father now owned the land and had given him some money on his departure.

Harold found a small apartment in the city.
He’d been in big cities before—he’d had to make train transfers in both Chicago and Pittsburgh, and he’d seen the ruins of major cities in Europe—but this was the first time he’d been part of a city.

There were so many people.
People in cars, people on bikes, people walking about. How was he ever supposed to find his dear, sweet Elizabeth with so many people around? He tried the phone books, but there were quite a few Kings, and the hours he spent on the phone were wasted hours.

He spent a month searching for her.
Walking around the city day and night. After five weeks, Harold was beginning to run out of money. He saw an ad in one of the papers for airplane builders. Harold was skilled with his hands and he had a good understanding of airplanes from time in the army. He started three days later.

The hours were long and hard, but nothing could compare to a sixteen-hour day in the field.
As the days passed, Harold found himself thinking of Elizabeth less and less. It was slowly donning on him that it wasn’t meant to be.

Walking around one evening, Harold, stumbled across a movie theater.
In all of his twenty-three years he’d never seen a cinema. He was quickly addicted.
The Lady of Shanghai
,
The Bicycle Thief
,
Unfaithfully Yours
,
Letter from an Unknown Woman
,
Moonrise
,
Force of Evil
. Harold saw them all. His favorite was
Fort Chief
with John Wayne.

In December of his first year, he’d been grocery shopping.
He hadn’t been paying attention and bumped into a young woman. She’d called him a “doofus.” He’d never been called a doofus before and found himself laughing uncontrollably. The woman quickly apologized for the remark. They had dinner two nights later. Harold and Gwen didn’t spend a day apart for the next six months.

He had a good job.
He’d bought a car, a brand new Chevy. He had a great girl. Life was good.

Harold, along with nearly everyone else, had been waiting impatiently for the next John Wayne film.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
opened on a rainy night in February of 1948.

It was the best movie he’d ever seen, Harold remarked to Gwen as they were leaving the bustling theater.
There was something about that John Wayne. Something magnetic. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Gwen held his arm and whispered softly in his ear, “He’s almost as handsome as you.”

But Harold was a million miles away.
And if it weren’t for the dark corridor, Gwen would have seen that Harold was white as a ghost. She did notice his body had gone stiff and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Harold shook his head and continued to stare at the raven-haired woman ten feet in front of him.
She was with a group of six or seven other girls. All their hair was done up the same, curled up and under, and they were giggling as they moved through the doors and into the drizzle. Harold didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

Without a word, he unhooked his arm and pushed through the crowd.
Gwen asked where he was going, but he didn’t hear her. He pushed into the drizzle, spotting the group of ladies starting up a side street. He followed behind them. The group—huddled beneath a collection of umbrellas—stopped. One of the girl’s shoes had fallen off. It was the girl Harold hadn’t taken his eyes off for the past sixty seconds.

She knelt down, grabbed her shoe, and hopped around trying to put it back on her foot.
Then suddenly she stopped, the shoe dangling from her hand, her right foot hanging in the air. She was staring directly at Harold.

One of the girls in the group said, “What’s wrong?
Elizabeth, what’s wrong?”

It was her.

Harold ducked behind a post. Why hadn’t he run to her? Why hadn’t he picked her up and twirled her? What would John Wayne have done? Would John Wayne have hid behind a street lamp until she left. Harold smacked his head backwards against the post, then peeked out. The girls were getting into a car. His Elizabeth was the last to get in. She gave one final look in his direction before getting in the car.