If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Novel

Copyright © 2017 by Donn Teal.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2012908889

ISBN:   Hardcover           978-1-4771-1378-3

              Softcover            978-1-4771-1377-6

              eBook                 978-1-4771-1379-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/10/2017

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Contents

MOTHER LOVE 1944–1945

THOU SHALT NOT 1945–1946

MOTHER LOVE

1944–1945

1

The woman sees her husband’s hand slip from the car’s steering wheel. As the light turns green, the ‘44 four-door Pontiac drifts toward the grass and loose pebbles at the edge of the roadway, she quickly reaches across and, with a strong grip on the wheel, steadies the car. Bill, for God’s sake, pull over and let me drive! she yells.

Bill shakes his head from side to side in order to waken himself. At Helen’s urging, he slows the car down and guides it onto the grass.

At once, Helen snaps open the dashboard and pulls out a small, cylindrical canister. "Thank God I put hot coffee in the thermos before we left home. Here, drink!" she says.

It is late afternoon on a rainy Saturday in November 1944. Bill and Helen Osborne have parked alongside a tree-lined road in the suburbs of Indianapolis. She is a slender thirty-eight-year-old brunette, her hennaed hair set in page-boy style. Bill, a husky forty-year-old with blond hair and a well-trimmed mustache, raises the thermos to his lips and downs the coffee. After the last swallows, he hands the container back to Helen. Then, scowling, he puts both hands on the steering wheel and presses his foot on the accelerator.

Before the car can move, however, Helen gently kicks her husband’s foot loose and insists, Bill, let me drive the rest of the way.

I’m okay, he answers, sulking.

"Please, Bill!!

He glares at her.

There’s a bottle of beer in the dash. You can wet your whistle while I drive, Helen ventures.

Bill slowly opens the car door and lumbers around the Pontiac, one hand on its smooth chrome to keep from falling. Helen slides over to the driver’s side of the car and awaits him. Then, at the 35-mile-an-hour speed limit, they are once again on their way.

The traffic is light, and two miles later Helen slows the Pontiac down, turning the car into the small parking lot of a yellow-brick municipal gymnasium and indoor swimming pool and easing it gently into a space at the side of the building. Her husband slowly gets out and stands at the side of the car. Helen walks around the car to join him.

I don’t like you drivin’ this Pontiac! Bill snarls. You have your own car, dammit! As he lumbers away toward the door, he almost falls on the macadam.

Helen lights a Kool cigarette, her favorite, then laughs softly, and, with a sparkle in her eyes, replies with a question, "Do you really think I would let you bring Freddie and his friend home, in your condition? As long as you drink, and drive, Freddie’s not going to be with you in the passenger seat! Why, in God’s name, don’t you stop before it’s too late?"

Give me—he belches—one good reason!

"I’ll give you two. You always feel lousy afterward. And there’s our son!"

Bill glares at Helen as they make their way to the door. Inside, they cross the gym, empty now, and enter the pool area, where at the far end, in knee-deep water, several girls are clowning around, splashing each other. At the near end stands the lifeguard. Below him, the Osbornes’ ten-year-old son, Freddie, a green-eyed boy with curly brown hair, sits at the pool’s edge, laughing and kicking water in the face of his friend, Davie, who is still in the pool. Davie, a blue-eyed eleven-year-old with straight flaxen hair, doesn’t seem to mind; he smiles at his tormentor and tries to duck his friend’s assaults.

Seeing the Osbornes, the guard circles around the diving board and walks over to join them. ’Afternoon, folks! he says.

How’s my boy doin’, Dan? Bill asks the guard. "Does it look like he’s going to be a champ?"

The lifeguard turns to look at Freddie and Davie, and hesitates before answering. Then, Freddie’s…good, Mr. Osborne, he says. "Maybe not enough for a champ. But he’s a swell teacher! This afternoon, he got David here—he points to the blond boy hanging on to the side of the pool and gazing upward at his friend’s parents—to learn the basic strokes and swim almost the length of the pool!"

Bill staggers dangerously at the pool’s edge and is pulled back by Helen. "He’s got t’ be a winner, Dan! A champ!" Again Bill belches loudly.

Not just a teacher or coach. I wantcha t’ keep on pushin’ him!

Embarrassed by his father, Freddie attempts to get out of the water, but slips on the wet tiling. The guard steps to the pool’s edge and, with his left hand, grips Freddie’s right. As he rises, the boy reaches out with his left arm and grasps the guard’s bare foot. Smiling at the man, Freddie slowly and, it appears, reluctantly, releases his grip, rises, and crosses the tiles to the other side of the pool.

Helen interrupts Bill’s interrogation of the guard. Bill, we’ve got to get the boys home. I haven’t even started supper yet. She turns to her son. Freddie, you and David go and get into your clothes.

His hands and arms wet, Davie has difficulty getting out of the pool. The guard reaches an arm down and pulls him up near the diving board, and the boy joins Freddie in a dash for the locker room. As they pass through the locker-room door, Freddie squeezes his friend’s shoulder in affirmation of Davie’s new prowess.

Helen stands talking animatedly with the guard. Bill, meanwhile, rests, half dozing on a step of the diving board. Moments later, the boys emerge from the locker room and, Freddie waving at the guard, the four exit the building. Outside, the rain has ceased but the sky remains cloudy.

Glancing toward the highway, Helen sees that the traffic has increased.

Bill, why don’t you climb into the backseat and take a nap, she suggests as they approach the Pontiac. You’ve worked overtime two nights running, and you’re exhausted! Thank God, neither of us has to work tonight. Go on, stretch out and get some shut-eye. The two kids’ll sit up front with me!

Huh? Oh, okay, Bill snorts. But don’t drive too fast! I don’t want this baby, he reaches out to pat the hood of the Pontiac all smashed up!

Indeed very weary, Bill opens a back door and almost falls onto the car’s double seat. Helen climbs in on the driver’s side and Freddie opens the other front door and urges Davie in, then crowds in after his friend.

Helen turns her key in the starter, and, looking both left and right, backs the car out onto the road and drives for a mile or two. Then, as she approaches a straight stretch of road on which there is no traffic, she adjusts the car’s rearview mirror in order to have a better view of the backseat, but is unsuccessful: she is far shorter than Bill.

Nodding conspiratorially to the two boys, she addresses her son, Freddie honey, peek over the seat and see if Ole Sourpuss is asleep yet.

You’re not working at Mitchell-American tonight, are you, Mama? he asks.

She shakes her head. No, neither of us is going to the war plant tonight, she replies, intent on her driving.

Freddie, a smile on his face, turns around in the seat he shares with Davie and peers over it. Turning back around, he nods his head yes and tells her, His mouth’s open, Mama. I think he’s going to start to snore!

"My dad snores a lot! Wakes us all up!" freckle-faced Davie puts in.

With her right hand, Helen affectionately rumples Davie’s blond hair and then Freddie’s dark locks. If he’s asleep, then we can have some fun—without him complaining. Boys, do either of you see any police cars in back of us?

The two turn, and then, a moment later, almost in unison they say, Nothing’s in sight!

Then Davie, even more excited than his friend, adds, Yep. Looks like it’s all clear.

Helen reaches across the car’s dashboard and turns the radio on softly. Immediately the voices of the Andrews Sisters can be heard singing one of Helen’s favorites, Shoo Shoo Baby. Her hands keeping time with the song on the steering wheel, Helen now pushes her foot down hard on the gas pedal, and the car picks up speed to about 60, then 65 miles per hour. Finally, after a mile or two at that speed, Helen slows down.

There! We’re back to the wartime limit, she tells the boys.

That’s 35, isn’t it, Mrs. Osborne?

That’s right, Davie. But going 65 was fun, wasn’t it, for a minute?

"It sure was!

Both boys laugh, until Freddie’s soprano voice rings out in "Row, row, row your boat…," and is soon joined by his mother and Davie. A few minutes later, as the automobile turns into a quiet street, a street lined with maples and elms in a suburb of the city, the sun begins to set rapidly in the sky.

2

About eight-thirty that same evening, a cold wind tosses branches of the trees and shrubbery that surround the Osbornes’ house on Ridge Street, an imposing 1920s structure in brick and stone. Streetlights have come on, as have lights in many of the neighboring homes.

Freddie, with his two-month-old pet beagle, Bouncer, stands close to a wire chicken coop that has been added to the side of the garage. He scatters feed through the wiring behind which he is raising chickens as part of the war effort; afterward, from a bucket he empties water into a trough inside the coop.

The bucket swinging in his left hand, Freddie looks up as his mother calls to him from the back door of the house. Bouncer limps along beside the boy as he heads for the kitchen, tugging at Freddie’s shoestrings. Grinning, Freddie lifts the dog in his arms and makes his way across the remainder of the lawn. Crossing a newly constructed patio, Freddie joins his mother, who stands just outside the kitchen door. As her son meets her, Helen kisses him full on the mouth, roughs up the fur of Bouncer’s back, and reaches inside the door to turn on a kitchen light. Then, glancing up into the cloud-streaked November sky, Helen pulls Freddie and the lively pup inside, out of the wind, her arm around the boy’s shoulders.

At about nine-thirty that evening, Helen enters her son’s cozy bedroom with its orange wallpaper and deep-red carpeting, both Freddie’s choices, made when she had the room redecorated a year earlier. A bathrobe around his shoulders, the boy is sitting up in bed, reading. Helen rests for a moment on the side of Freddie’s bed—a double, for the boy has always feared falling out of a single. He closes his book, The Collected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and sets it on his night table. Leaning across the bed, Helen plants a kiss on her son’s cheek, then rises, blows another kiss to him, and, turning out the overhead light, leaves the room.

3

Freddie is asleep in his bed. Bouncer lies on the blanket at the foot of it. At about 1 A.M., a sudden noise, like that of a chair being upset somewhere, awakens both the boy and his pet. Rubbing his eyes, Freddie half rises, looking immediately down at Bouncer and reaching down to pet the dog.

How do you feel, Bouncie? he asks. Is that foot you hurt any better? I guess I shouldn’t have let you go out running all around the backyard tonight.

Freddie sits up, releasing the dog when he hears a woman’s scream. At once he throws off his bed covers, scattering some movie