Youth

Youth.

It sprinkled over the trees when springtime came, kissed the birds’ nests and bloomed on the riverbanks, white, yellow, and red. Deer perked up with warm new fawns at their flanks, rabbits poked from their holes and the stream bubbled, flashing with droplets where a frog or two sprung. The trees rustled with new leaves as if speaking to one another, housing the chattering brown squirrels who conversed like good neighbors where the branches swayed, dipped in the daytime rhythm. Some miles from the forest lay San Fernando, the little settlement not far from bustling Los Angeles that carried a life of its own, just as bright and sprightly. From the confines of winter’s berth, the world stirred and rose, giving way as the first sun of March yawned over the horizon.

His parents used to come often to the town, allured by the sweet breeze and smiling as easily as life would let them, the husband holding his wife’s hat down from the wind as she laughed with a smile that seemed as if it could charm any living thing. Joseph and Marion Hayes, newcomers that rapidly turned to lightened regulars — they were right-on pictures of the new century, beautiful before the war came. Tall, dark-haired Joseph with his trim dress jacket, crossing the walk with a “How do you do?” to the good-buyers and stragglers alike, Marion on his right arm, prettier than sunlit petals and crowned by a wave of golden brown.

The town knew them sooner than they knew the town. In all its clamor and shouting, the knick-knack of blacksmiths’ hammers and tailors’ shears, heads turned quite often to watch them pass or wave them on. As it would happen to be, they’d come from golden San Francisco to seek a life of quiet warmth and humility. They sold or left behind their furniture, block apartment, telephones and clocks, but brought suitcases to drag out one by one and somehow, the sparkling, fleeting, light of the Bay. It would come by, brightly glowing, to talk and joke and laugh — then there were errands to be run and new tables to haul in and it had gone, leaving a vestige of its homely presence behind.

Time followed them everywhere. Years came and went like a motley bunch of leaves, scattered and dried before the wind turned them into fine dust, ground by the unchanging stones of Mother Nature. Back and forth from the cabin in the woods to town’s streets they went, always together like two peas in a pod. Joseph found work as a carpenter, and his wife was a nurse. It was like the cold parted to let them through, and Marion soon gently carried a bundle in her arms. Their little son, Jonathan Carter Hayes, was born on the eleventh of July when summer had just begun to peak — their warmth only grew.

When she showed him to the tailor or shoemaker or anyone else in the quiet farm-town, it was like he’d already known them for some time. He laughed wide-eyed in the way babies do but with a soft familiarity that nobody could quite name. The postman’s son was not yet the postman or a man at all, yet saw something in the innocent stare that made him feel very far and old.

Even that was not enough for fate to allow them a long life of peace. Bitter and placid, winter came to grow bored; the Great War had been raging for over three years already when the snares of recruitment came and whisked twenty-five-year-old Joseph from his home and family. Goodbyes were said and tears wrung. The sullen headshakes of townspeople were seen often around that day as he shouldered his pack, ever smiling, and was driven away on the main road with a rumbling of dust. Marion clung to hope and their little boy, not yet two years of age, knew nothing of it all.

The postman’s son was Henry Rusterd. He was eighteen years old when he’d been put on that bus and nineteen when he returned home to San Fernando — Mess Sergeant Joseph Howard Hayes had come back months earlier in a casket and pall, topped with a letter of condolence from a department office that, in all its glorified rigid typewriter ink and flimsy paper, could never bring back his smile. All the empty grievances and wavering flags of honor hung still for months after the funeral like a leaden sheet of black and trembling there, threatening to collapse upon them.

Once Marion had stopped by the grocer’s and post office every morning on her way to the local hospital, laughing and ringing doors wherever she went, going up and down the cobbled streets. She’d danced and drank her fill at the bar, music trilling and holding its highs when she swung on the arm of her husband and dropped with a refined grace that all the more emphasized her beauty — after the news came that he’d gone, it was as if she had faded in the space of a few days. She hurried to the building with her papers fussed and white nurse’s apron wrinkled harshly, hair escaping its clasp and her footsteps sharp one after the other. With the loss of her other half and a great sweeping gloom, she became only a shadow that flickered on the wall, faint and far and unconsolable by anybody, even those she spoke a rare word to in the years after. Her presence dwindled and died. Her light was more tired and withdrawn by the hour, and she began to fall back to the closed curtains of silent reclusion.

Once she had chatted sociably with the other women in a warm nook of the town’s largest tavern, cozy and rocking by the fire, knitting tools clicking in her rapid slender fingers as she knitted a woolen scarf — now she toiled as if she spun her sorrow into fickle silk, fragile and scant to the touch with the hair-thin needle in her teeth, pursed between those fair lips like a red-smoking blunt burnt half away in place of the warm hearth and always in danger of drawing bright blood, faint droplets of dew-like sweat tracing her forehead. The finches and jays of the early dawn seemed to sing her name softly with a halting sadness, and the willows whispered. Marion. Marion.

Henry replaced his father as the post office’s main man after his retirement in ’24. More and more often he would see eight-year-old Jonathan cling to his mother’s hand in the roads of the town, there to help her carry bags or hold her belongings while she ran errands with an air of lost old habits and purpose. Despite it all, she gave everything she could to her son, loved him, held him close like he filled the void that had opened in her being. Gone was the sun and smile of joyous lightness, the girl in the square and the one who whooped, rebelled, giggled in the doorway and braced a challenge like no other would; Marion was a shell. But somehow she still held onto that mother’s love for her child.

Joseph had passed in the woods of France long decades too soon, and she filled his outsized shoes with a grating determination that seemed to consume her. Henry soon became known as good Mr. Rusterd to the people, fair and well-humored to anyone that crossed him in and out of the office, but underneath he knew he could not give the same light that young couple had years before. Marion rushed as if she was running out of time, hastened and dry-eyed, tight-lipped where smiles crossed far less frequently, and soon she did. Sickness and what was said to be heartbreak took her away and left her young son to fend for himself. He was only sixteen years old and still in high school. She seemed not to die, but rather faded like summer giving way to fall, gone with a soft breath of hazy air and a sigh that shivered through the aspens, round and round to the place she rested beside her husband. Marion Edith Hayes was thirty-six years old and had saved more people with her kindness and grace than anybody in town could count, and it was felt as heavily as the day her husband had left them. Alone in the world, her son Jonathan abandoned school and cared for himself in the small tree-flanked cabin.

Rusterd had seen him a few times in the office when he delivered packages or shopped for his mother. From that very day he’d seen the baby in the cloth, it was as if he’d aged in his mind another decade or two, whelmed and quiet like he had never known before. Already a few scattered parts of his hair showed gray at thirty-two, and he wondered often why it was people called middle-aged men silver foxes, almost as if they leapt fair through the forests and embraced the young grass with their paws, one with the forest and its harmony. If he was to be anything like one or a part of nature as such, he’d be a weeping willow inside, silent, frayed in the wind reaching for what it could no longer touch and dredged in tears shed for the lost light of the world. Rusterd had already had enough of forests. France and Belgium, even with the very short time he’d been on the front lines, weighed in his dreams like uninvited wisps of dust and webs that always returned to gather in the basin of his mind.

The Depression had hit their homeland hard. His father was a resourceful, well-off man; the post office had remained in operation with his help and ran as it always did, with the only difference being the younger man at the counter. For a few months after his mother’s death, young Jonathan’s trips to town had become much less frequent, repeating in the terrible pattern Marion had taken. Then nearly out of the blue he seemed to come back, smiling his father’s smile and walking with his mother’s lively stride, strangely, suddenly wholly there again.

He had Marion’s beauty and Joseph’s chiseled looks in his features, startling green eyes and a smooth crop of brown hair that stood up slightly in the gale. Whenever he returned to run his errands, it was like the homely warmth of old had come back to greet a friend. Those who knew his folks would turn their heads, smile and wave; he’d throw back a laugh or stop to help a stranger for no reason other than the simple standing fact that he could. He was the image of both his parents, bless their souls.

With his presence came a summery breeze, the same that had passed the month he was born, a warm feeling that tickled and embraced the people around and left them with a pleasant goodbye. He often carried laden paper bags of supplies in his arms — ones he would never let Rusterd help him take back home, no matter what was said. He wore a trim maroon vest that would have been seen on Joseph half the days of the year, crisp sleeves rolled to the elbows and his dark pants ironed stiff. An air of humble belonging rested around the young man every moment of every day, one of inheritance and down-to-earth kindness, and it was almost like he never knew it. He went about his days like anyone else, talking and laughing in the square or tipping the waiter with a twinkle in his eyes. He was only never seen to court a girl or bring one home on his arm as Rusterd often saw his schoolmates do, in fact something he’d done himself a few times in his early years. The golden fringe of times before the war came back riding on the shoulders of peaceful joy to settle about their town and its people.

Yet underneath all his smiles, Rusterd saw a lingering sadness. The same eyes he’d seen look up at him with wondering light held in them some sort of regret and distance, though it had flared in the few months following his mother’s passing, so Rusterd was one of the few who even noticed it anymore. Jonathan was often out around the people, yet he always seemed to hide something. Still, he’d walk into the office after an amiable conversation with a man nearby, “How do you do?”, then wave a letter, render a compliment and promise to bring back anything needed from the general store.

His benevolence must have been one of the things that filled his lonely trance of life, perhaps even something he did in hopes that others did not suffer the same. Along with all his neat mannerisms and extroverted heart, he still held the impartiality of nature’s good side his mother had, indifferent of who it was he spoke to and addressing every businessman or beggar in the same forgivingly polite, lightly formal way. And to those he seemed closer to, he was the dancer and the ever-so-slight joker his father had been. Time passed the same, coming and going and whispering warnings when the winter came, singing songs in the spring and feigning frost in the fall. Summers were sultry and quite placid, but beautifully warm.

It was in about 1937 when Rusterd finally figured part of it out, the endless puzzle that was the kindly young man who looked free as the wind, gave away with a fair smile and might have called birds to his hands in the forest like some faerie of long-lost tales. Saying he was the one who helped run Jonathan’s homestead, now in the valley fields just near the woods, Karl Heinrich Steiner entered the office himself and stamped a letter to his family, which the other had been doing for him all this time.

He was seldom seen in town, quiet, withdrawn and as broad-shouldered as he could be with his lithe frame. From the outskirts of Göttingen, he was quite the opposite of his friend in many ways, always a silent and rare presence in the streets that blended with the crowds or shadowed storefronts like he would much rather not be noticed. Oddly enough, Rusterd had yet to see the two together in the neighborhood — it was one or the other by himself, much more often Jonathan, who made longer trips and carried out more work. That was something nobody — not Rusterd, not the mayor, not the people Jonathan had spoken to outside shops for months or years — knew. They went alone each time to avoid suspicion. The construct of their mere “friendship” was a facade; instead, they were partners, closely bound by the same love men and women had around them but would never even try to understand. The law held all within by its unforgiving iron fist, cold and vigilant, harsh upon those deemed sinners. So from here to there they went on San Fernando’s trim blocks, always the individual who sent off some post, helped move crates or bought tools from the shop West Woodworks across the street, only daring to embrace in the closure of their cabin. Jonathan cared for, assisted and treated as equals the very people who would turn upon him simply for being thought to love another man, and not a single soul knew it. He graced the town that would not do the same for him in face of the truth.

The years pressed on. With them again came the imminent threat of a war, uneasy and always lingering in their minds. Newspaper headlines screamed loud and bold, children played with wooden warplanes in the street, men gradually disappeared from their homes to serve and a tense, hesitant feeling nestled in Rusterd’s chest. For the majority of his life, he’d heard, seen, recalled and known well what war was, and it was certain it would be no different this time, if not worse. Campaigns and proud parades could march on all they wanted. War drained souls, rampaged nations and took lives like no other hell did, unbiased and unforgiving in the grim hands of fate. Graves and ballads would not bring those men back, he always thought, eyes shut and head shaking with pity when he thought of them. How terrible it was, and how much worse to know it would likely come upon them again soon.

Come late the year after, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. What he feared was already here. People shouted, rung their bells and waved their flags; around the state the shops, businesses and homes of Japanese-Americans emptied, sifting into the shadows and replaced flawlessly by newer fronts or arrivals that all acted as if they’d never been there. Rusterd watched and read with bitter resignation. So once had not been enough for them, and it was to come again. Each time a letter of recruitment was delivered, he closed his eyes and slipped it quickly into the right compartment. The PO boxes slowly stacked and filled one by one like settling masses of muddy sandbags on a trench parapet, only there to stop a fraction of what inevitable death was well on its way. He had been more than lucky to live and return to a loving home, a to-be wife and the laughter of townspeople. It was without a doubt that not all others had not met the same fate.

Jonathan came to his counter with a ring of the bell and glass-front door, pack on his shoulder and the same steady smile Joseph had worn on his boarding the streetcar bus that day twenty-four years ago. With a dreadful sullen movement, Rusterd reached for his draft letter and handed it to him; he had clearly caught no wind of the word from the US Army but acted as if he’d already known the whole time — like he wanted to go. When asked why, he simply said, “For my father.” Then he turned on heel, the door swung, and he was gone down the road like a wisp in the wind.

Rusterd walked out from behind his desk and stood at the storefront to watch him depart for home one last time, likely to tell the friend on his homestead he’d be going. He could not shake the feeling of terrible guilt from his thoughts even hours later as he watched the young man, a few years older than his father had been that long gone day, make his way into the storehouse that had turned to a recruitment station as a line began to form, eager and bustling for the most part. Unknowing.

That day waned and died and dried in the sun. The birds were not heard to sing as sweetly and the moon was pale and still, visible from the window before Rusterd drew the curtains and spent hours trying to drift himself to sleep. Ash and dust would rain upon the cities of the world, brought on from the arid smoke of bombings and burning of bodies, long before the war came to a close. And nobody knew when that would be. Whatever started would end, must end, but only at a terrible price.

He watched the bus leave town for one of many bases scattered across the land, wringing his hands in silence, not daring to reach or call out to something he could not touch. Rusterd felt pityingly sullen and sorry for the young men, perhaps more so than they did for themselves. He felt an old piece of him depart with the exhaust that faded in the streets moments after the vehicle took off on the main road. People hardly seemed to notice as it went away, maybe never to return, wheels tracing in the dirt and forming thin tracks to a place unknown, ultimately to the hell where youth and laughter went.

The sun shone, children laughed, a breeze rustled in his hair, and Rusterd gazed with longing resignation at the bus that receded to a speck on the horizon, looking on as the familiar light of San Fernando’s happy grounds felt to leave them a second time. Spring was coming again, and it would do so forever, no matter how many years passed or lives were lost. Mother Nature was cold and nonpartisan, powerful in these ways as she was warm, loving and beautiful.

How it came and went like anything.

Youth.