It was a sunny Friday afternoon in mid-March of 1946. Mamma and I were finishing the last of the cleaning of our ten-room house with a long downstairs hall. Suddenly, I heard a car door slam and looked towards the open front door. Though the screen somewhat obscured my view, I saw a young man in a blue sailor suit get out on the far side of the car.
“Mamma, Kirby is here. Go into the guest bedroom,” I screamed.
“I’d like to see him too,” she replied like a beaten dog.
“You’ll see him, but let us have a few moments alone now,” I answered from down the hall, feeling she understood. It had been 19 months since we said “goodbye” at the airport in Richmond, Virginia. That was the day he left for the unknown battlefields of World War II. In time, he was in the South Pacific.
Kirby approached the house slowly. But I didn’t give him time to reach the door after he entered the newly screened porch.
He was thin, very thin, but it was Kirby. We fell into each other’s arms and hugged and kissed as he’d written we would do. “No one will stop us,” he wrote. It was a precious few moments.
“Come in and see Mamma,” I said. “I have her waiting in the downstairs bedroom.”
“I think that we’d better let her out,” he said with a soft laugh.
“Mamma, come see Kirby,” I called. They greeted each other in the hall before Kirby and I retreated into the freshly cleaned living room on the front of the house.
“I arrived home from Norfolk Naval Base late Wednesday,” he explained. “I found that Daddy’s Model A played out while I was away. I might be able to repair it now that parts will be available, but my little brother, Justin, pulled the dashboard out. Land knows where all those parts are with the car parked in the woods.
“I phoned Granddaddy, and he met me at Boa’ Harbor,” he continued. “I walked from his house home carrying my suitcase. When I entered the yard, Justin ran to Mother screaming. He thought I was a stranger.”
“Didn’t he know you were on your way home?” I asked.
“He didn’t recognize or remember me,” Kirby said with a sigh. “You know he was only eight years old when I left home.”
I could tell his brother not knowing him bothered Kirby. However, he looked like another person. His pictures from overseas showed him as a robust young man, but that had changed. Besides being both pale and thin, his sky blue eyes had a hue of gray.
“I was just too weary to try to walk six miles here and back,” he said. “So, I lay around and slept yesterday. I walked to “Bubba’s” this morning to see if I could borrow his car if I replaced any gas that I used. After a bear hug, he told me it would be mine most days while I’m home on leave.” Bubba was Kirby’s uncle—his mother’s only brother.
As he talked, I noticed his hair was soft and looked much better than when he came home from boot camp. It waved much like my daddy’s, but it was light brown instead of almost black. He had lost all of his tan. The travel home across the Pacific aboard a tender transport ship and then on the train from California, covering a month’s span, could be blamed for that. Since he was so thin and pale, I hoped he was well physically.
On and on we talked for over an hour. He would be back Saturday evening, but Bubba and Bessie needed the car to buy groceries. He promised to have it back by five o’clock.
After Kirby left for home, I stopped and thanked my Heavenly Father for bringing him back safely. Then, I made my way to the kitchen to fetch the egg bucket, which sat inside the pantry. It was past time for evening chores.
After supper on Saturday, I bathed and dressed in fresh clothing before time for Kirby to arrive. He brought an album containing photos of places that he’d been in the Philippines and people he’d known in the Navy. I asked about the loose pictures under the album.
“They are just war pictures, and you wouldn’t enjoy them,” Kirby said.
The truth was that he didn’t want to remember the battles that left him trembling so badly, and after which he found it hard to write me. He never explained anything about those photos to me, but our son told me things that he’d told him about them. Awful battles, when even the quartermaster manned a gun in the heat of battle. He fired on Japanese planes when ordered. He left the results in God’s hands.
Kirby told about his trip home aboard the tender, a transport ship, where the men were packed like sardines with no privacy. When they arrived at a Hawaiian port, they had a layover for two days. The officers arranged for the boys aboard ship to see a Hula dance at a luau on their last night in port. After only seeing native girls for months, they enjoyed the evening. I told him to come to church the next morning prepared to come to our house since he wouldn’t have a car. We talked until almost 11 p.m., but he made no mention of the Bible study he wrote we would do each night when he got home. He seemed like a different young man than the one who had written me five weeks earlier.