Free Harry & Ruth by Howard Owen Page A

best I can tell,” Ruth wrote to Harry, “the departed Randall Phelps was a blond-haired Baptist womanizer from Ohio with a slight limp in his left leg, although Aunt Charlotte slipped up and said right leg the other day. He likes to play cards, and before the war he worked in a hardware store. He smokes Camels. It gets very confusing to Uncle Matty, who said the other day he wished I’d married ‘that pretty dark-haired boy’ instead of ‘that damn Randall Phelps.’ If Granddaddy hasn’t made the delinquent Mr. Phelps real to anyone else, he has apparently made him real to Matty. I rather fear for the safety of any stranger he might come across with the name of Randall or Phelps.”
    Despite T.D. Crowder’s efforts, there was embarrassment enough when Ruth had a daughter on September 12. Even with the backdated marriage certificate, only seven months had passed since Valentine’s Day. And Ruth only fed the rumors with her silence. She stopped going to church, and in July she quit her job at the lumber yard. The other Crowders living next door on either side, T.D.’s brothers and their families, more or less stopped talking to her, although they closed ranks and didn’t talk about her, either.
    Each grandparent assured her that her willful behavior would bring about the death of the other, and that she would pay for her sins on Judgment Day. Charlotte and Jane were kinder, and Matty only harbored a grudge against the Randall Phelps he couldn’t quite remember, but whom he was ready to travel to England, by car if necessary, to kill.
    When T.D.’s sister Goldie, then in her 69th year, died from pneumonia the following winter, Ruth’s heedlessness was considered to be a contributing cause.
    It was not Ruth’s intention to make her family suffer, but she wasn’t going to have an abortion, and she wasn’t going to give the baby up. She did her crying mostly in private. By the time she told them all, in April, she had reached her own crossroads. For a week, when it was still her secret—hers and Harry’s—she imagined herself not going to college, not moving to a big city, not living the life she could if she traveled alone. And she knew, after a week, that she could forgo all that. She just wanted the baby.
    She narrated the various phases of her pregnancy for Harry, even as Gloria was filling him in on the week’s social highlights in Richmond. It was not fair, Harry told himself, to think Gloria frivolous for this. He was sure she could be heroic, too, if circumstances had forced her to be.
    If the Crowders suspected Harry was the father, they never said so outright, burying any suspicions under the ruse T.D. and the judge had invented. Ruth continued to withhold the father’s name, and no one ever again mentioned the name of Harry Stein in the Crowder household.
    Harry worried more about Ruth than about himself. Boredom and anxiety attacks were the imminent dangers. They would drill for hours at a time, trying to lose themselves in minutiae. They would hear of the Allied victories in North Africa and Sicily, and then the Italian mainland. The Italians surrendered by early September, and, trying to be tough outside so they might build up some calluses where it mattered, the college boys and store clerks and farmers complained bitterly about the lack of Krauts to kill.
    Once in a while, though, Harry would turn a corner and there would be a young man, his age, just looking up into the sky, clearly wondering if he could do whatever had to be done.
    Outwardly, Harry was impatient to kill. Inwardly, he couldn’t always stop himself from thinking of what death the Nazis would reserve for a captured soldier who was also a Jew.
    Usually, Harry saved Ruth’s letter for last. This day, it took all his discipline not to tear it open while he was still among the anxious men hoping to be remembered. He knew her due date was near. He was