The Visitor

Gretchen Hammond had finished a tough day on the farm. She had help, but on many days, it was still overwhelming. Having a three-and-a-half-year-old did not make running the small farm any easier. After dinner, then getting little Henry to bed, doing the dishes and straightening up, she sat down for seemingly the first time since rolling out of bed just before sunrise.

Once again, the lights burning low, she thought about her husband. She and Henry’s father had married when she was just seventeen, she was still in high school, a few months before her graduation. It had been hurried, but it had to be. Henry Hammond Junior was going to war. She didn’t know as he climbed on the bus in Chillicothe that he’d left her a little present to remember him by… Henry the third.

That wasn’t true. She had a lot more to remember him by. There were a few pictures, and a farm. The farm was his birthright. He had a younger brother and sister, but as the oldest, he was the one the farm would be willed to. It was the Hammond way.

But all that had ended the following year, 1943. First had been the telegram telling her that Henry had been lost over Germany, his B-17 shot down on a daytime bombing mission. Weeks later, another telling her that he had been captured and was being held in a POW camp… a prisoner of war.

When she got the one about his POW status, she’d cried teas of relief. He was alive, and though she would have to wait until after the war, he would come home to her. It had allowed her to continue living with renewed vigor.

Gretchen Wilcox had developed a crush on Henry Hammond Junior the moment she met him. She was a knobby-kneed ten-year-old, missing teeth and looking every bit the tomboy she was. She’d never “liked” a boy before. She had some friends that were boys, but that was different. He was different.

The crush developed into full blown love by the time they were in high school. She never imagined a life without Henry. There was no other boy that could catch her attention, and she was sure that no other girl caught his. They had been almost inseparable. Even after he graduated, he managed to pick her up from school each day, taking her home and helping with her homework. She knew that he was up before dawn to work the family farm.

On her seventeenth birthday, in August, he proposed. That night, for the first time, they made love in the old barn. It was everything she hoped it would be. She knew they would be together forever. They had planned the wedding to be the following year, after she graduated. There was a small house on the other side of the field, his great grandmother had lived there until she passed ten years before, and Henry was going to renovate it for them.

And then came Pearl Harbor. The attack changed everything. After that, for the next few weeks, she could see it in his eyes. She knew he was going to volunteer. She thought about trying to tell him not to, but she knew in the end, he would probably get drafted anyway.

“I signed up today,” Henry said excitedly as he picked her up from school. “I’m going into the Air Corps. Maybe I can be a pilot.”

Gretchen choked back her tears and swallowed her fears. At least, volunteering, he got to pick what service he went into. And hopefully what he did. “What about us?”

“I talked to your parents today. We have their permission to get married,” he said, his smile beaming and brightening her mood.

“When do you leave?” she asked, hoping it wasn’t soon.

“Tuesday next,” he replied.

Eight days. She leaned over and grabbed him in a desperate hug. Partly because she longed to feel his body against hers, and partly so he wouldn’t see her cry. She continued to hold him as tears rolled down her cheeks, soaking into his jacket.

I have to be strong, she thought to herself, for both of us. He can’t be worried about me. He’ll have enough to be worried about. She wiped her tears away and plastered a smile on her face and pulled back and looked into his eyes, his beautiful soft brown eyes. She melted a little inside each time she looked into those eyes. “When can we get married?” she asked.

“How about Friday? We can go up to Chillicothe, get married, then spend a couple of days there before I ship out. I know it’s not much, but after the war we’ll have a great honeymoon trip. Anywhere you want.” She nodded and smiled.

That night, they lay together in the barn again. His son was conceived that week, but they wouldn’t know then.

It was fourteen months later that Henry Hammond Junior’s plane was shot down. Gretchen had a handful of photos that he’d sent. Some from the training camp, a couple more from England. She had a picture of him in front of Big Ben, blimps tethered in the background.

And little Henry. She had little Henry. Every time she saw him, she saw his father. He had those same brown eyes. That dark brown hair… it stood up, kind of crazy. And that lopsided grin. He even walked like the daddy he’d never laid eyes on.

A knock at the door woke her from her dream. She hadn’t been asleep, but she might as well have been.

“Who is it?” she called out, rising from the sofa she’d been reclining upon.

“Hi, Gretchen, it’s Ted,” was the reply from the other side of the door. Ted was her brother-in-law. He was a year younger than her, two years younger than her brother, twenty-one.

She pulled the door open to see Ted standing in the doorway. He was so much like his brother, yet so different. But it was the man next to him that drew her attention. He was about her height, so shorter than average, close-cropped hair a few days growth of beard. He was slight and wore a thoughtful expression.

“Mrs. Hammond,” he said in German-accented English, “my name is Heinrich Schultz. I am pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand to her.

“Mr. Schultz was with Henry in Germany,” Ted said, quietly.

“Please, come in. Allow me to put on some tea.”

“Thank you,” Heinrich said.

Ted stayed at the door, “I’d love to Gretch, but I have a date with Mary. I’m already running a little late. If you’d like, I can bring her by in a bit.”

“That would be fine, Ted.”

The younger man slipped from the door as the older one stepped inside. She ushered him to the table in the kitchen as she put water on for tea. They chatted a little as she put out cakes to go with it.

“Mrs. Hammond, I should get to the real reason for my visit,” he said after some light conversation. From inside his coat, he produced a package and laid it on the table between them. “As I told your brother-in-law, I was with Henry Hammond in Germany. I came across this and wanted to make sure it came to you.”

“So, how did you come to know my Henry, Mr. Schultz?”

“I was a guard in the stalag,” he said, leaving the words hanging in the air between them. “I don’t think I told his father that before I was brought here. I apologize,” he added as he saw the look of shock on her face.

“You were Henry’s guard?”

“Yes, but also, I think… before the end… I was his friend. Henry Hammond was a good man. A wonderful man.”

Gretchen stared at the man in front of her for what seemed an eternity. A man who kept her husband imprisoned. Who’d been with him when he died. Who said that despite being on opposite sides of a war, was her husband’s friend.

“Tell me about… the… end,” she finally managed to say.

“Sergeant Hammond contracted pneumonia. He fought it for a long time, but by the time we were able to get medication… antibiotics… it was too late. The camp doctors could not get many medicines, they were in such short supply.

“But before that, I found out he spoke German. He’d overheard me telling one of the other guards that my wife and daughter were killed in a bombing raid. The next day, he told me he was sorry for my loss. It was a simple thing. And it was coming from a man that a few months before may have been dropping the bombs. But his gesture was more than I got from my fellow soldiers.

“I would have dismissed it, but I saw how he was with the other prisoners. He made sure all the men in his barracks were fed and clothed. He was one of the youngest men there, but he was their leader… not their senior man, but the one they looked to for leadership. A good man.”

“Thank you, Mr. Schultz. I appreciate you telling me.”

She slid the package closer and opened it, untying the neat bow on top and then unfolding the brown paper package. Inside was a journal. It was simple, a black leather cover and thin pages. Tucked in the end was a stubby pencil. The end was rough, looking like it had been sharpened on rocks.

“I ran across that one day while away from camp. I brought it to Henry as a gift… for his kindness.”

She opened it up and saw the words. Immediately she recognized his handwriting. So many nights she had sat with him, each doing their schoolwork, the same writing on papers in front of him.

“When the camp was liberated by the Americans, we were all taken into custody and processed. They let me go not long after, and I went back to the camp to get a few personal effects. On a whim, I walked over to his barracks. I recognized the journal sitting on a shelf and took it with me.

“As soon as I looked at it, Mrs. Hammond, I knew I had to bring it to you. I was only allowed to travel a few weeks ago. I don’t know your pain, but I know mine. The war cost me my family as it cost you your husband. My hope is that you can find some small measure of comfort in his words.”

Heinrich Schultz stood up from the table. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his eyes. He put out his hand to shake hers, but she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him, kissing him on the cheek.

“Thank you, Mr. Schultz. What will you do now?”

“I have to get back home. I have other family there that need me. Seeing you, talking with you and handing you that journal was something I needed to do first, though.”

He turned and headed for the front door. He opened it just as Ted and Mary showed up.

“Is everything ok?” Ted asked.

She clutched the book to her chest, “No, but it will be. And Mr. Schultz, thank you again. You can’t know how much this means to me.”

He nodded and smiled before walking out the door and down the steps.

***

“This is your father’s journal,” Gretchen said to little Henry, although he wasn’t so little anymore. She handed to book to the young man. “Treasure it.”

“I will, Mom,” he said before he opened it up and read about the man he’d never known.

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Next in the series is "Love Grew Among the Marigolds."