Spider Web (19 page)

I looked up at her calm face. “I don’t even know what to ask you. Isaac’s book has to do with home, specifically San Celina as home.” I looked down at a black and white photograph of a list of handwritten names. “What’s this?”

She folded her hands in her lap. “When we were captured in Bataan we wanted to leave a record of who we were. You know, in case they never found us. So we all signed this piece of bedsheet. See, there’s my name.” She pointed to her scrawled signature—Winifred Eliza Norman. “The photo was sent to me by one of the nurses I stayed in touch with. She lived in Washington, D.C., until she passed away three years ago. A historian she knew found the photo in some museum there, and he made a copy for her. I’m not sure if the original sheet survived the war.”

I stared at the lists of names, trying to imagine what it must have felt like, how terrified the women must have been. “How long were you there?”

“Almost three years.” Her brown eyes looked past me.

“Where was Frank?”

“He was over in Sicily, but we didn’t even meet until after the war.” She brushed at the crocheted afghan spread over her legs. “We became acquainted at the Los Angeles VA hospital in 1949. He was having a hernia repaired.” Her laugh was a young-sounding tinkle. “I was his nurse.”

“Tell me about him when he was young.” I didn’t want to jump right into her time in the prison camp. Talking about Frank would be a good warm-up. While she talked, I flipped through the third section of the album, photos of a triumphant return to the States and newspaper articles about their capture and time in the camps. What an invaluable piece of history. Though I was a little afraid it might sound insensitive, I wanted to make sure this scrapbook wasn’t lost. After all, Miss Winnie was in her late eighties.

“I hope you’re leaving this album to someone in your family who realizes its importance.” I carefully closed the album, resting my hand on its cover.

“I am. The Coffin Star girls have been after me for ages to make sure that it was properly taken care of in case I unexpectedly kick the bucket.” She gave another girlish laugh. “Not that it would exactly be unexpected at eighty-eight and a half. Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. I want to donate it to the historical society with the assurances that it will be properly cared for.”

“Miss Winnie, that’s so generous of you! You know the historical society would love to add it to their collection. I’ll catalog it myself. Are you sure it’s okay with your family?”

She sat forward in her chair, pushing back the afghan. “Billy’s fine with it. You can give him a call to set your mind at ease that you’re not swindling an old lady. I think he was relieved not to have to deal with it. And my granddaughters—they’re sweet girls, but right now all they think is important is boys, shoes and those funny little things they carry their music on.”

I smiled at her. “That’ll change.”

“One can certainly hope.”

“I’ll propose to the historical society that we have these pages scanned. That way I can have a copy made for your family. They have funds for this sort of thing.” I would also look into having her copy bound into a book. I knew there were places that did that because Emory and Elvia had recently had Sophie’s first six months of photos made into a bound book. I’d ask Emory where he got Sophie’s done. No matter what the cost, I would pay for it myself.

“Take it with you,” she said, waving her hand as if she were casually giving me the last two cookies in a Christmas tin.

“Not now,” I said. “Don’t you want to keep it so you can look at it?”

She tapped her temple. “I have it all up here, Benni. Nobody can take that from me.”

I set the book on her chenille bedspread. “Now I want to ask you the questions for our book. Isaac will be in touch with you soon about taking your photo.”

“Will you come with him?”

“Depends. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Whatever makes you more comfortable.”

She gave me a flirtatious smile. “Oh, I don’t mind being alone with Mr. Lyons. He’s quite the handsome gentleman.”

I laughed. “Yes, he is. Did you know he was a photographer during the war? You and he could probably exchange war stories for days.”

We decided to finish the interview out in the garden so she could get some sun and observe what was blooming.

“Flowers really became important to me when we were in the jungle hospital, before we were put in the camp,” she said, while I pushed her wheelchair down the carpeted hallway toward the garden. “The flowers in the Philippines were gorgeous—bright red hibiscus and gardenias so fragrant you’d think you were living in a perfume factory. After a twenty-four-hour shift in the operating rooms, I’d sometimes lie on my cot and just stare at the flowers. Somehow, they gave me strength. Like God was telling me that there was hope.”

We sat in the center of the garden where a stone bench dedicated to nature lovers had been placed by the local rose society. A western meadowlark landed on a stone birdbath and dipped her copy head to take a drink. Its marigold-colored belly exactly matched the knitted shawl around Winnie’s shoulders.

“Are you warm enough?” I asked, glancing up at the sky, where large patches of blue argued with rapidly expanding battleship clouds. “Looks like we might get more rain soon.”

“I’m fine,” she said, stroking her covered arm. “This cashmere shawl my granddaughters bought me for my birthday is surprisingly warm.” She reached over and touched the bud of a tangerine rose. “You have some questions?”

I pulled out my tape recorder and turned it on. “Just a few. Once I write your story, I’ll let you look at it to verify that I recorded the details correctly. Since the subject for this book is home, where were you born?” I scooted to the edge of the stone bench, resting my elbow on the armrest and holding the recorder a few feet from her.

She folded her hands in her lap. The thin diamond wedding band on her left finger twinkled in the wan sunlight. “I was born in 1909 in a little two-room house way up in north county. It’s gone now. Termites ate it clean up. It was down the street from Mission San Miguel. Daddy was the foreman of a ranch up there about ten miles east. Mama came to town to stay with a friend when I was close to being due. She didn’t want to be out in the middle of nowhere when I was born. She wanted another woman there. A midwife came up from San Luis Obispo to help deliver me, but I was fast. I got there a half hour before she did.” She gave a delighted laugh. “I was always fast. That’s why the surgeons liked me in the camp. The other nurses too, because I’d finish my work, then help them with theirs. They nicknamed me Speedy.”

“How did you end up being in the Philippines?” This was off the subject of the book, but my historian’s heart couldn’t help delving into her incredible history.

“I was looking for adventure, so once I finished nursing school, I signed up for the army. Nothing scared me, not the meanest bull or the biggest rattlesnake.” She smiled, her teeth the pale yellow of churned butter. “I killed many a snake in my younger days. When we were in the camp, I was the snake killer. Some of the others girls weren’t raised out in the country, and snakes just scared them silly. Killer was another name they called me, but they weren’t being mean. They appreciated my talent with the sharp edge of a shovel.” Her round face, dotted with age spots, softened in memory. “The city girls had it so much harder than us country girls. We were used to doing things by kerosene light, used to critters like rats and spiders.” She sighed. “I wanted adventure, and I sure got it.”

“It must have been hard for your mother,” I said.

“Oh, Lordy, it was. I was her only girl, you know. I had five brothers; all of them but one joined up. One in each service—army, navy, air corps and marines. The youngest, William—that’s who my Billy is named for—had a bad heart, so he couldn’t serve. He died a week after VJ day. But he was with Mama the entire war, helping her and Daddy on the ranch as best he could.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He was a real comfort to her, especially when I was captured.”

I reached over and took her hand. The skin felt like warm tissue paper. “I’m so sorry, Miss Winnie.”

She pursed her lips; her head gave a small jerk. “But we made it. That’s what is important. You know, I told some of my stories to that lady who was writing the book, but I didn’t tell her everything. That would have taken much too long.”

“Maybe what I can do is write up a bunch of questions to get you started, and you could work on it when you felt like it. I could read them, then ask you for more details where I think it’s relevant. Only a little of it will be in Isaac’s book, but I think it would be great to get your whole story down for people to read. People need to hear your story.”

“I can do that,” she said. “But, you know, the others have their wartime stories too. Did you know that Thelma Rook wrote me every day without fail the whole time I was in the prison camp? She didn’t mail the letters because they probably would have never gotten to me. But she saved them and handed me the whole lot of them when I got back because she said she knew I’d be back. Took me a month to read them all. I still have them.”

“Wow,” I said. For oral history research, they would be invaluable. So many of the people of her generation had passed on already, and who knows what happened to their letters, pictures and memories?

“Billy’s got ’em. Bet he’d give those to you too if you asked.”

“That is incredibly generous. Thank you.” I clicked off the tape recorder. “You know, I love all this, but I need to focus now. What I’m here for today is something for Isaac’s book, so we need to concentrate on home as a specific concept.”

She shifted in her wheelchair. “Ask away.”

I clicked the recorder back on. “What specifically did you miss about the Central Coast, about your home here, when you were in the prison camp?”

She pressed her lips together, thinking. “Besides the obvious things like my mama’s voice and her sourdough biscuits, I guess I’d have to say that I missed the tule fog.”

“Tule fog?”

“Just any kind of cool fog, actually. It was so hot there, so tropical. Now, at first, it didn’t bother me. The first two months I lived there, before Pearl Harbor was bombed, it was like living in a paradise. We had a houseboy for the nurses’ quarters, and he used to deliver us fresh-squeezed papaya juice every day. You could go to the movies, polo matches, bowling.” She touched her cheek with her hand and, for a split second, the daring young woman with the dark lipstick returned. “Monkeys swung from vines and parrots darted through the trees with feathers as bright and pretty as circus balloons. I thought someone had dropped me off in heaven. It was so different from our ranch.”

“You didn’t think about home much when you first got there?”

“I thought about it, but like I said, it was the people I missed. Mama and I were very close. I’d only been away from her for the time it took me to attend school in San Francisco. When I went to the Philippines, I was unmarried and on my first big adventure. I thought I’d only be there a little while. I felt like home, my home here, was a place that would always be here.”

“Once you were captured, what were your feelings then?”

“The jungle lost its appeal real quick once we had to live in it. And the poor boys who were trying to fight the Japanese . . .” She shook her head, sighing deeply. “They tried so hard. They were so
valiant
. But they didn’t have a chance. We’d been caught by surprise, and no one was ready.”

“How did you keep going? Specifically, how did thoughts or memories of your home keep you encouraged?”

“You know, some of the other girls and I used to play a game called ‘What do you miss most about home.’ We’d play it when we were too tired or scared to sleep. Someone would start, and we could continue for hours. The memories would start out normal and expected, like I said, my mama’s voice and the taste of her sweet milk biscuits. All the girls had similar memories. But we played it enough times that people began to get creative. We would try to one-up the other, see who could come up with the most original or unusual memory. We came from all over the United States, so we were learning about backgrounds other than our own. One girl from Chicago, an Italian girl with the most gorgeous black hair—Teresa Daniello, her name was—said she missed the meaty juicy Italian roast beef sandwiches her grandma made. Another girl, Bridget—oh, I don’t recall her last name—she was from a Wisconsin dairy farm. She said she missed the feel of a cow’s udder. Oh, we teased her about that one.”

“What were some of your memories specific to the Central Coast?” That was exactly what I was looking for. Her answer might help Isaac decide how to photograph her.

She cocked her head, resting her cheek in her hand. “The smell of eucalyptus. Mama’s Coty powder. Daddy’s Saturday night boots.”

“His boots?”

She laughed softly. “I missed the sound of the shoe brush as he shined his good cowboy boots.” She moved her hand back and forth over her feet. “
Shush, shush, shush.
It meant we were going to town. Mama, the boys and I went to the picture show at the Fremont Theater in San Celina, and Daddy met his friends for a beer at the Bull Corral. Then we’d all eat pancakes and sausage afterwards at the Golden Horseshoe. It was where Liddie’s Café is today.”

“The Bull Corral? The bar across from the Chamber of Commerce?” It was a bit of a dive bar now, where tourists poked their heads inside to see if they could catch a glimpse of a real cowboy.

“The very one. It has been there forever. Anyway, those were my original memories. Eucalyptus and Daddy shining his black leather cowboy boots. Those were the things that made me think of home.” Her body seemed to sag slightly, and I realized we’d been talking for almost an hour. It was easy to forget that Miss Winnie was in her late eighties.

I stood up and brushed off the back of my jeans. “I have enough for now. Besides, I can come back another time. “Would you like me to take you back to your room?”

“That would be nice,” she said, her eyes blinking rapidly. “All this remembering is making me crave a good long nap.”