Mushawie off the Hill by Tom Sheehan

Jimmy Mac, on the second-floor porch of his Smith Road house and the early sun barely creasing the edge of Baker Hill, looked over the top of the box scores, the Sox winning their fifth in a row, and saw, for the first time in he’d later guess to be about eight years, Mushawie just coming to the bottom of the Cinder Path. Coming off Baker Hill. He couldn’t remember Mushawie being off the hill. My God! Jimmy, said to himself. Nobody saw Mushawie unless he wanted them to see him, him socked away back in on the Delmere property the way he’d been since VJ Day in ’45.

Now and then, and always after dark and often after Tate had closed his little Variety Store on Western Ave, Mushawie would come to the back door, and with meager pennies and odd coin get tobacco, a couple of cans of soup, some real day-old bread old man Tate’d hold for him like it was barely suited for the birds, once in a great while a bar of soap. Mushawie never bought a razor, matches, tools, or containers of any sort. Tate was sure of that. Now and then a hill denizen would mention his long-handled spade had disappeared from the back yard, or his hoe or his rake “had just got up and walked off the damn hill.” People counted off such losses as contributions.

“Jeezus, Martha,” Jimmy Mac said, urging his wife out of the hallway and onto the porch. He hurled his 135-pound body up out of the wicker rocker as if he’d come off a launching pad. “That’s him,” he said loudly, surprise rampant in his voice. “That’s Mushawie. That’s him. Jeezus, Martha, he must be sick or something. I can’t remember the last time I saw him. I can’t remember him ever being off the hill. I never saw him off the hill! I wonder if he got burned out, if he got the bum’s rush finally from the Delmere clan. The old man would have a friggin’ bird.” Jimmy’s arms were thin, his face was thin and coppery, and energy appeared to leak out of him as if he had enough for the next guy.

Martha McLaughlin had never seen Mushawie. Twenty years married to the widower Jimmy Mac, and she had never seen this empty-looking man, clothes obviously dirty though his khaki shirt was buttoned at the collar, his pants tucked into dark socks. She could remember Jimmy saying that the man she had never seen, who lived in a shack on the hill, used to blouse his pant legs all the time. “That reaffirms military to me,” Jimmy had added. She knew she’d remember that word, the pictures coming with it. Jimmy was loyal to anything to do with the army, the navy, the marine corps, the coast guard, World War II, Korea, veterans organizations, old vets he could pick out at the shopping mall, the way the light folded down and back in their eyes, the way they held their heads in a crowd of any sort, perimeter checking, ears cocked like a .45.

They watched the man Mushawie come off Cinder Path the way some people come off a roller coaster, trying to gain his legs back, looking around, detecting places, things, almost as if he were looking for the enemy, or for friends. Jimmy had told her years ago about the strange man who came up the hill one day, walked to the back of the Delmere property, found the old chicken house way in the back end of a mess of apple trees, and took up his lodgings. It was VJ-Day, 1945, the silence at last coming across the vast oceans of the world, coming to rest on quaint streets, hushed dales, secret cul de sacs, and the quietly agonized farms across America. Plenty of veterans were soon loose in the world, some of them guaranteed never to go home again, keeping company with the dead, with their lost comrades, with the unreported.

Mushawie walked down the edge of Smith Road cautiously. Martha said, “Tell me what happened up there when Mr. Delmere found him.”

Jimmy had his eye on Mushawie, looking for signs, looking for a single sign, and could find none. “The old man, he was with the 69^th in France in the First World War, got a dose of gas for his troubles, goes up there one day and there’s a Purple Heart on a ribbon hanging on the door of the chicken coop, which had really undergone a few quick changes, two windows had been added, a tin flue was coming out the side wall, some ground turned over like there’s going to be a garden if there’s time for it.”

“What did he do?”

“Old man Delmere?”

“Yes, the owner.”

“He just pointed to the Purple Heart hanging on the ribbon on a nail on the door of his old chicken coop and said, ‘Is this yours?’ Said Mushawie just nodded. The old man asked his name, he said, ‘Mushawie.’ Not another word. Went back to his family, did Delmere, sat them all down at his dining room table, every last one of them, grand kids and all, said, ‘If I go out from this life and anyone of you so much as says a bad word to that man, I’ll goddamn come back in the middle of the night and haunt you. That old shack is his house for as long as he wants, for his lifetime if need be. You all swear by that this very minute, on my blood, on my screwed up lungs, on my soul, so help you god.’ Never was another word said. The old man was gone in two-three years, and none of them, ‘til this latest ramble about houses coming up there, saying or doing anything, yet some of the young ones starting a sneak attack from what I hear.”

“Look,” Martha said, leaning against the screen of the porch, “he’s sitting down on the curbstone. I bet you’re right, Jimmy. He’s probably sick. You better go down there.”

Jimmy was going down the front walk and Harry Matthers came out of his house two doors away. “See what I see, Jimmy?”

“I got a sinking feeling he’s sick, Harry. Let’s check him out.”

“You okay, Mushawie,” Jimmy said, as he and Harry Matthers stood a few feet away from Mushawie. Jimmy first noticed how time itself really had folded itself down in the backside of Mushawie’s eyes, the palest green he could remember, and distance knocking itself further away. A ring of bites circled one ear looking nearly savage in their redness, and more bites were on Mushawie’s hands, as if the black flies had hung resolutely back on the sides of Baker Hill from spring’s onslaught, or the green horseflies had come up from Rumney’s Marsh. A few prominent black spots behind Mushawie’s lips announced serious dental lapses had occurred. His nose was thick and wide at its bottom, his forehead wide, his hair was full and still as black as night itself. The brows above the distance-seeking eyes were hemp-thick, the cheekbones like new shellac in a drying stage. The hands clasped on his knees were huge hands. If he walked out of a teepee he could have been home, if he swung a quiver and bow across his shoulder, Jimmy McLaughlin would not have been surprised. The man from the backside of Baker Hill looked to be about seventy-five years old, and he looked tired, a sense of loss or displacement evident about him. If it were steaming out of him it could not be more noticeable.

“Are you okay, Mushawie?” Jimmy shivered and put a hand out to touch the shoulder of the strange man who had pinned the Purple Heart on a chicken coop door so many years before.

Mushawie, his head still up as if he were standing in the ranks, said, “My name is Clinton Baker Thurstbody, my serial number is 11270952.” His voice was droning and his eyes began to float. He repeated the name and serial number half a dozen times, the voice thick, phlegmy, and dull in its monotone. Perhaps a day or two earlier he had shaved, showing depressions below the lacquer-like cheeks.

Mushawie’s words hit Jimmy McLaughlin right in the middle of his gut, like a sledgehammer had come home from way out in space, like Lucifer’s hammer. Whack! Bam! Whack! The Been-there Done-that buzz came on him. Years before, the slight German corporal had leered at him every time he’d asked a question, his eyes yellow, his teeth full of food not yet fully chewed, morsels at the corners of his lips, sort of bragging how good he had it, living like a king, good food all the time, America on its way down to her goddamn knees just like the Poles and the Slavs and the Danes and the Norwegians and soon the stubborn Brits holding on for nothing at all. All of it came back in one resounding rush that slammed him in the gut again. Jimmy Mac put his hand out for Harry Matthers.

“Jeezus, Jimmy, not you too!” He spun and yelled to Martha on the second floor porch. “Martha, quick, call the goddamn ambulance. Call the medics. Call the fire department.” He heard a door slam in the neighborhood, then a second door. He sat Jimmy Mac down on the curbing. Mushawie said it again, “My name is Clinton Baker Thurstbody, my serial number is 11270952.” This time he added, “United States Marine Corps.”

Martha rode to the hospital with Harry Matthers. Jimmy Mac rode with Mushawie, both on their backs. Jimmy came home with Martha and Harry a few hours later, flabbergasted at what had hit him. One doctor said it was too much recall all at once. That night, just after midnight, the man known for years as Mushawie died peacefully in his sleep. And Harry Matthers and Jimmy McLaughlin set about to recover the life of Clinton Baker Thurstbody, USMC.

It did not take too long. Through the long arms of the Legion and the VFW magazines the story unfolded. Clinton Baker Thurstbody had come out of the University of Iowa when the war started, joined the Marine Corps, ended up in Naval Flight School, chose to be a Marine fighter pilot, and shot down five Japanese planes on his very first day in combat in the South Pacific. Twenty-two Japanese planes fell from his shooting accuracy, until the day he did not come back from his flight out over a small group of islands whose occupancy was still being contested. His wingman said small arms ground fire had claimed him and he had bailed out. Five months later, with the aid of a Japanese soldier who knew the end was coming, he had slipped away from a prisoner of war compound and was picked up at sea by a Navy submarine that had surfaced at dusk. Captain Thurstbody had been awarded a host of medals, shipped home in June 19, 1945, the same day that Marine ground forces were forcing Japanese troops back toward the cliff lines of Okinawa where many leaped to their deaths rather than be captured. Not long thereafter the big bombs went off.

Official reports, eventually surfacing in Saugus, said that Captain Clinton Thurstbody was last seen when he flew (commandeered was the word whispered at an aside) a Navy fighter from Pensacola and took it due south, out over the Gulf of Mexico, not to be seen again. He was written off as missing while on routine flight assignment, a last fateful and justifiable task the base commander could do in accounting for “one helluva pilot.”

Now, even after a small fire had started at the old chicken coop and had been beaten back by neighbors, even as the coop has begun its journey into eventful dust, even with the threat of that whole side of Baker Hill being smothered in new houses or condominiums and the apple orchard being leveled by Cal Delmere’s grandchildren, each August 10th for a whole lot of years, a group of veterans have gathered there and remembered a man who ran away from it all, from what he had trouble remembering in the first place, and where he had found solace, they had hoped, in a rude hillside home, back of the apple trees on Baker Hill.

Tom Sheehan

Image:  Purple Hearts medal. With repect, this was issued to Staff Sgt. Scott Tynes, and is in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons