Ruth Bennington was fourteen when Pearl Harbor was bombed and turned fifteen before Midway—a good age to become romantic.
When you are romantic you can weave lovely daydreams even from the sun-baked, barbed-wire-bounded fields of a Texas farm, but more especially from things just over the horizon, things you have never seen but think you know all about. The war gave Ruth plenty of threads for weaving, from the radio, the newspapers, things learned in the schoolroom, and local gossip; and most of all from the nearby flight training school that sent its fighter planes droning and spiraling through the skies above the flat fields.
It was Ruth’s secret lament that she never saw any pilots: they took their evening and weekend passes to the big town that lay in the other direction from the base, and were never seen in the small town nearest the farm. Fighter pilots, in their khaki and sunglasses, with their legendary daring, their skill in handling those banking and looping planes, were romance in the abstract. And Ruth, in the abstract, was smitten. She would stand stock-still in the middle of gathering eggs or taking laundry off the line, craning her neck and squinting into the brassy glare of the midday sky, watching them practice, and weaving long, fascinating daydreams about them—what they looked like, and sounded like, and walked like when they were on the ground, and what they did and said.
She had heard about a bomber that had to make a forced landing in a pasture not many miles away, its crew needing to hitch a ride from the rancher to the nearest telephone. If only one of the fighters would have the same thing happen here. Nothing dangerous; just like the bomber: a stuttering engine, a little too risky to take a chance on, and the long flat stretch of the Benningtons’ fields handy for a runway. Her father would have to drive him into town—or maybe the pilot would even have to wait around until the MPs and the mechanics came for the plane. And in the meantime she would get to come near the plane as it rested there, to see the pilot close as life, and maybe even speak to him.
Ruth didn’t pray for it to happen, because it was too frivolous a thing to ask God for, but she wished for it in a secret, steady way that was almost like praying. I wish they’d come down. I wish one of them would come down.
Then one evening just as the family was sitting down to supper, they heard it. An engine cutting out, the choking stutter as it tried to start again, with ominous chunks of silence in between. And then, before they had time to do more than look questions at each other across the table, a dull, distant, bone-jarring impact.
Ruth’s father was on his feet, shooting his chair back with a jerk. “That one’s down!”
There was a scramble around the table and then they were banging out through the screen door one by one, running for the truck, Ruth’s mother trying to untie her apron strings and then giving it up and climbing in with them trailing, the children swarming onto the running boards and over the sides into the back. And Ruth’s mind repeating as she ran, repeating again as she hung on while the truck bounced and jolted its way out over the fields: I’ve killed him. I wanted him to come down, and I’ve killed him. Dear God, please don’t kill him because of me!
But when they pulled up alongside the twisted silver wreck of the plane, a quarter of a mile from the house, a quick inspection showed it was empty. “He must have bailed out,” said her father. He glanced at the clouds and the skyline. “If they were flying the same pattern as usual it was probably to the south. Pile in and we’ll go look for him.”
It wasn’t far. Ruth saw the pool of white silk spread out and shining in the setting sun, and at first nothing else, and shut her eyes and thought she was going to die. But she opened them as the truck stopped with a jerk and saw the pilot sitting on the ground a few yards from the parachute, his elbows on his knees and his leather helmet and goggles beside him. He was smoking a cigarette, and he grinned crookedly as the Benningtons poured out of the truck and toward him.
“Sorry to disturb you folks,” he said. “I think I lost an airplane somewhere around here, have you seen it?”
He got up, and those clouds of intricate daydreams wavered a little, overawed by reality. He seemed dauntingly bigger, but also more boyish-looking than Ruth had expected (though it was many years before she realized how young he must have looked to her mother, clutching a hand over the calico apron near her heart as she slid from the truck). Rather like a big country boy, a little rough and bulky in his leather jacket and parachute harness, but still with the easy daredevil gleam in his eye that belonged to the flyboys alone.
He winked at Ruth, and she couldn’t even smile, just stared, like her barefooted little brothers clustered around her.
She couldn’t think of a word to say, the whole time he stood there talking to them. Even back at the house, while he sat at the kitchen table with the family gathered around him, right up until when the jeep from the base came for him, she was wholly dumb. Ruth had learned in a few hours what it usually takes all of age fifteen and a few years afterwards to learn: that the kind of romance one weaves at fifteen is two parts terror and one part bashfulness if you ever meet it in real life.
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Ah, I love it