Return from Berlin: The Eye of a Navigator

Prologue

Prologue Robert Earl Grilley got his draft number and induction notice in short sequence. He was exceptionally physical, so before you could say Jack Robinson, or more timely, Jack Pershing, he'd easily passed muster, and began studying war as a doughboy at Camp Grant in Rockford-close order drill with a Springfield rifle out in the hot sun in a khaki woolen uniform. Then suddenly, just before he shipped overseas with the 32d Red Arrow Division, he and his Ella Louise were married in the camp chapel. I don't know whether they had time and place for consummation. Mother never talked about such things, but she did say, more than once, that he clung awfully tight to her until moments before he had to leave. During the Argonne campaign in 1918, the exact date is unknown to me, my brave doughboy father was cut down by mortar fire and smothered in mustard gas. It was nip and tuck, but he made it through with a measure of true grit, and our thin thread of life was preserved. Thus, after the long convalescence, my begetting was safely accomplished, and I was born, a seven pound, twelve ounce, chronically happy child in Lancaster, Wisconsin, early on Sunday morning,~ovemberl4' 1920. 3 Robert Earl Grilley, my brave doughboy father, 19I7. Prologue In fact, as I understand it, I was so unaccountably happy, even in the beginning, that my very well-educated mother could not have been blamed if she suspected, for only the briefest moment, that I might be slightly simple. However, in the unlikely event that such a notion ever occurred to her, it would have been fleeting, and as things came into focus for me, I was assured that she considered me to be a future prodigy. Of course happiness, like beauty, is a matter of perception, and my mother was a mistress of illusion, so when I was young, very young, the sweet birds sang in spite of hard times and our particular condition , a dying father and more-than-occasional spells of genteel poverty. I got offto a good start though, and hadn't the slightest hint until I was four that some degree of privation could be common; and even after the blow fell, the first crisis you might call it, my playful indolence simply changed to a travel and adventure mode. But thinking back about it, I can say that mother had remarkable selfcontrol and kept from me whatever forebodings she must have felt in the face ofsuch a calamity, and prepared for the trip as ifwe were going on vacation. But, long before it ever came to that, when I was first learning the rudiments of life, she told me, as her closest confidant, that my father had been hurt in the war, although not too badly, and that by then he was well again and everything would be all right. For sure, it seemed to be. We lived in a big white house, and I had ice cream often. Mamma played with me a lot and sang "Listen to the mocking bird, listen to the mockingbird," and I would listen and sometimes hear a robin high in the elm tree where I couldn't see him, or maybe just sparrows bickering in the vines, but when we sat out on the porch after supper there'd be a mourning dove calling when it was getting dark. It sounded like he was asking someone a question over and over again. That was before we had a radio, and Mamma often sang songs she learned when she was a little girl, mostly from her grandfather 5 Return from Berlin Cruger in Waterloo, who had been shot in the Civil War fighting to free the slaves but who was still, in spite of it all, happy as the day was long. She was awfully proud of him, and never tired of telling that he went on to become justice of the peace and to teach people how to behave themselves and get along with each other. His closest friend was also a "man of peace," as Mamma would say, a Catholic priest; but though he, her grandpa, was a strict Methodist, they never ever argued about what Jesus was supposed to have said. They were true Christians. The calamity I spoke of, which in effect, sent us off by railroad pass to live with relatives in gulf-coast Texas, was my father's sudden relapse , a...