The Telegram Read online

The Telegram

  Tony Spencer

  Copyright © 2013 Tony Spencer

  Beth Wojciechowicz opened the telegram as soon as it arrived on July 1st and smiled. It was confirmation that she had been expecting, accepted as part of the USA Olympic Team going to Munich, departing in five weeks’ time, on August 18th 1972.

  In fact she had three different roles confirmed by the telegram, her main role was doctor, part of the medical team, but she was also a reserve for the 100 and 200 meters as well as a squad member of the 4 x 100 meters relay team. At 27, she was probably at her peak of fitness but still regarded herself as a purely amateur athlete. Most of the top athletes were totally professional. Although she had won a sports scholarship at college, she’d had to self-finance her way through med school and, as a consequence, her athletics training and participation in competitions had taken a back seat. Mostly, she was delighted to be involved in her first Olympics as a doctor, even though her aunt would have to take up much of the slack in the community hospital during her absence.

  This was also going to be a first return to the continent of her birthplace for her, too, since she was about three years old. Although she had most of the features of a pale-skinned black woman, this was 25 years before the term African American became the acceptable term for her racial description, she had been born in England to mixed-race parents, neither of them natives of those islands.

  Her surname indicated that one of her parents was of Polish origin, her mother was an American, both of them brought to England by separate routes to play their part in defending the idea of freedom. Each contributing in their own way, the soldier and the doctor, one to fight or defend, the other to keep alive and to heal.

  Beth was tall and willowy, like both her parents, soft brown-eyed with mid-brown rather frizzy hair, worn big in the style of the day, which she would tie back neatly behind her head when running.

  It was so close to the upcoming Fourth of July that most people were busy making preparations for the celebrations. That reminded her of another telegram, an older one, now twenty years old. Beth didn’t need to see it or read it again, she knew every single word of that terse but positive message by heart. Beth knew exactly where she kept it, in her bedside dresser, where it remained for her a symbol of hope.

  ***

  Nora Molyneux, more often called “Molly” by her friends, was in what was designated as the city hospital on July 4th 1952 when the shipwrecked seaman was brought in on a stretcher.

  Calling her office a hospital was a fairly loose description. It was just an office of three rooms, situated right next door to the Sheriff’s Office in Main Street and handily opposite the Dispensary, which was housed in the General Store. There was a waiting room, treatment or consulting room and a small two-bed ward, with separate bathroom facilities at the back. There was a small apartment above the office, which Molly used most of the time, when she wasn’t staying at her parents’ farm at the edge of the county. The hospital was open for emergencies only on this public holiday, there were no outpatient appointments booked, but Molly was available as ever for anyone overcome by the expected heat wave or minor accidents during today’s traditional history pageant and the fireworks display later.

  To even call the city a city was a gross exaggeration. It was a rather basic settlement, maybe a hundred and thirty years old. The couple of thousand inhabitants scratched a living either from the sea or the land. It wasn’t much more than subsistence living either way. There was no mill, mine, or factory, no railway depot, just a bus which came thru twice a week and a school bus as required to take students to the High School inland aways.

  Most of the farmers had a truck or two, the majority of them pretty ancient. The better off farmers and a few city tradesmen had station wagons or utilities. Some folk even had horses and traps to get around and the keen gardeners would eagerly shovel up any horse-borne bounty almost as soon as it was delivered to the dusty street, so the city was generally pretty neat and tidy.

  There was little to interest folk beyond self-entertainment in the place. The nearest movie house was a fifty-mile drive away. There was a diner at a truck stop up on the interstate highway but that was thirty miles distant. There was a soda fountain in the general store, which attracted the teenagers and you could get breakfast and coffee at the hardware store at the end of Main Street, near the harbor.

  Any kid with any gumption got away to the nearest big city as soon as they could and never came back, except to visit. Nora Molyneux did go to the state university to learn nursing and she was the exception to the rule. She was still single, as everyone of her age in the neighborhood wasn’t of a sufficient quality to be regarded by her as a suitable suitor. That didn’t stop them trying, though, of course.

  Molly was a local girl, born twenty-seven years earlier and raised in the small coastal city. She knew everybody and everyone knew her. She was the only nurse for fifty miles, in fact the only medical practitioner around, other than the vet and the dentist, as there was no doctor for the same distance, so anybody who required medical attention from time to time needed to see Molly.

  The injured man brought in was pulled out of the water by fishermen sailing out before dawn on the outgoing tide. They found him drifting on his way back out to sea and his general condition decided for them that they had to bring him straight back to the hospital without delay.

  He was suffering from exposure, his skin very badly burned from wind, salt and sun. It had been very hot and sunny so far this summer and as a result there were a lot of short sharp storms. The coast had been on the edge of a hurricane just three days earlier and this man was discovered clinging to a piece of driftwood, so it looked like his ship must have gone down in that storm.

  The first thing that Molly did was set up a saline drip and insert it into a vein, having swabbed the area of skin in the man’s arm where she inserted the needle.

  She tried talking to the man, but he was delirious and speaking a strange foreign language. Understanding him wasn’t helped by his tongue and lips being so swollen through dehydration and the affects of salt spray. After a few minutes of being on the drip, though, he became a little more coherent but the name he tried to say, Stanislaw Wojciechowicz, was so slurred that all Molly comprehended was “Stan”.

  Deputy Chuck Hanson, who came in from the office next door, the three fishermen and an unknown number of onlookers who followed them to the office, could understand was “Stan”, too. So just Stan he was.

  The fishermen said that when they found him he was holding onto a piece of driftwood so hard and for so long that he couldn’t even lift his arms once he had relinquished his grip. They thought he must’ve stayed awake for the whole time he was in the water otherwise he would have lost his hold and gone under. To keep himself awake he must have been biting his lower lip continually, which was a pulpy mess. The fisherman, as was their habit, had gone out before dawn and brought the shipwrecked seaman straight back with them, all thoughts of continuing onto the fishing grounds at an end.

  Roy Cavenagh was just a young teenager, in seventh grade, but he was big for his age, virtually full grown. His intellect was, unfortunately, not in proportion to his size. He was slow at best, or pretty damn dumb to anyone less inclined to think kindly of him. Roy, like a number of the kids his age, had heard about the stranger found floating in the ocean and went down to the hospital to find out what this was all about.

  News sure spreads fast in a small community with few distractions, notwithstanding the preparations for the history pageant.

  Roy, being big for his age and socially insensitive due to his lack of intelligence, was inclined to use both of those attributes to his advantage. He pushed through the crowd gathered in the doorway of the hospi
tal treatment room until he was in a position to hear some of the exchange taking place between nurse and patient.

  “I nee’ to ge’ ‘ome to see m’girl” Stan seemed to say, in a thick accent, affected by his swollen lips and tongue. This was the point where Roy heard the conversation.

  “You need to get home to see your girl, Stan?” queried Nurse Molyneux.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a Russkie spy!” chipped in Roy, voicing his thoughts exactly the same time as they were formed in his head, “He should be arrested, Deputy Hanson!”

  Deputy Chuck Hanson was in charge of policing in the city at that moment. His boss, Sheriff Mike Horne, had been away for a couple of days visiting with his sister further up the coast and was not due back until late in the morning, hopefully in time for the commencement of the pageant. Hanson, as a young man, was keen to make an impression in the job, with the Sheriff in his late fifties and therefore a change of sheriff likely to happen in the next few years. He was also one of the young men quite keen on improving his relationship with Molly, who he went to High School with, and the potential for promotion in his chosen profession would, he thought, help no end in that direction. His ears pricked up at Roy’s comment, so he couldn’t allow it to slide without establishing control of the situation. He was about to speak up when Molly beat him to it.

  “Can we clear this room please, this is a hospital treatment room not a city hall social and I need to examine and treat my patient, now,” she said firmly, “Chuck, can you get everyone out?”

  “Yeah, come on folks, out you get!” spoke up Deputy Hanson, good humoredly, and he turned to face them, spread out his arms and started to herd people out of the treatment room and back into the waiting room.

  Once he had got them out of the room, he closed the door and turned to face Molly, who he could see was already dealing with her patient, applying a lotion from a jar thickly to his face and neck.

  “You, too, Chuck,” she said as she lifted her head from her task, with a grateful smile as a reward for his efforts, “I need to treat my patient.” They were about the same age and had known each other since sixth grade.

  “Sure, Molly,” Chuck said, “Just need to ask Stan to establish his nationality briefly before I go.”

  “American,” Stan answered with his thick accent, without further prompting.

  “How long you been an American, Bud?”

  “Two year’,” Stan replied.

  “Where were you from before that?” Chuck persisted.

  “I cum ‘ere ‘47,” came the reply, “Before that Englan’ sin’ ‘39, born Krakow, Polan’ in 1917 an’ fam’ly moved to Gdynia ‘25.”

  “Do you have any identification papers on ya?”

  “Nah, ev’thin’ wen’ down wi’ ship,” came the reply.

  “OK, Chuck, that’s enough, leave us now.” Molly was insistent, Chuck already had the information he said he needed.

  Chuck nodded and took his leave, closing the door behind him and set about sorting out the crowd still packed into the waiting room, with more people gathered outside on the sidewalk. He shooed them all through that outer door in swift fashion so they were all out on the sidewalk, spilling into the street. Most of them went without much fuss. Roy Cavenagh was the main exception but he had a few stubborn adherents who added their voices to Roy’s objections.

  Roy’s father was a veteran of the first world war, wounded in the trenches and then served as a reservist in the second war, although he remained Stateside during that conflict. Roy’s older brother, Lenny, was killed fighting the Communists in Korea in 1951. As far as Roy was concerned, the enemy identified as communism was the biggest threat to his country. Now he could see with his own eyes that a Russian spy was right here within his own community and this intrusion needed dealing with before the rest of them Reds invaded in his wake.

  Roy also happened to be dressed in his historic costume for the pageant, his great-grandfather’s Confederate Army officer’s uniform, complete with gun belt and antique gun. There were no shells in the curious nine-cylinder weapon but it was still a gun. This alone probably made Roy feel even bolder than usual.

  “What’ya doin’ ‘bout the Russkie Commie, Dep’ty Hanson?” asked Roy.

  “He ain’t a Russian, Roy,” answered Chuck, “He’s Polish.”

  “Well, them Polish guys is Reds, too!” retorted Roy.

  “Well, he used to be Polish, he says he’s now an American Citizen,” said Chuck.

  “So he says,” Roy replied, “He got papers to prove it?”

  “Nah, says he lost ‘em when his ship went down.”

  “More like,” suggested Roy, “There’s a Red Sub lyin’ offshore, ready to land soon as the scout signals ‘em to come ashore an’ kill anyone who gets in their way.”

  A number of other kids and even some of the adults gathered around started to agree with Roy, adding their voices to what was becoming a general clamour. Young Chuck wished the Sheriff was already back from his sister’s. He was due by lunchtime when the pageant was programmed to begin but it was still mid-morning.

  Meanwhile, Molly had finished treating Stan’s face and turned her attention to his body. His coat had already been removed by the fishermen and was dumped on a chair by the side of the bed, dripping steadily on the floor. Stan’s shirt and trousers were also sodden. He had long since lost his shoes while he was out there treading water.

  She used a pair of shears to cut off his shirt to avoid removing the saline drip. She noticed that he was painfully thin and his skin was puckered due to the water exposure. His temperature was stable and she was confident that he would quickly recover. His body was slender but then he was tall and well proportioned and his muscles firm and well-formed, she thought. He had nice, warm brown eyes and he was only 32. Not too old, she thought, but he had said he had a girl, probably had one in every port. She gave him a bottle of water to sip slowly and thought that she would heat up some soup in her kitchen upstairs for him later when she had finished her examination and initial treatment.

  She noticed several old bullet wounds and other scars on his torso.

  “You look as though you’ve been in the wars before, Stan,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he winced as he smiled, his lips, particularly his lower one, were very sore, “Got hit twice in North Africa late ‘42, an’ shrapnel Arnhem ‘44.”

  “They seem to have healed up alright, do they give you any problems?”

  “Yeah, splinter at back sometime come thru skin an’ snag on shirt.”

  “It looks alright now, anyway,” she said, having a look at his back for him. “So, you are heading back home to see your girl?”

  “Yeah, should’ve been there today.”

  “No bus due here until the day after tomorrow, that’ll get you to the train depot,” Molly said, even though she knew this would take the stranger away forever. Nobody interesting ever stayed, for that matter they never even came here to begin with.

  “Hold on, Roy,” Chuck said, “Nurse Molyneux is treating him now. Sheriff Horne’ll be back in a coupla hours and he’ll know what’s best done with the stranger.”

  “By time Sheriff gets here we could be overrun with Commies an’ all of us murdered in our beds. We gotta stop him before he sends a signal to invade. He could have a radio on him or hidden somewhere.”

  Somebody shouted out from the back, “Let’s drag him outta there and quiz ‘im!”

  Roy agreed, “Yeah!” he shouted and drew his weapon, an ancient hand gun, and started waving it about.

  Hanson felt naked, he didn’t have his gun on him. It was another quiet morning without the Sheriff and he had just been sitting with his feet up quietly in the office, thinking he’d have time to strap on his heavy snub-nosed revolver when required. The arrival of the stranger on a stretcher had rung quite different alarm bells in Chuck’s head, so his gun belt was still tucked in the locked desk drawer.

  “Now, hold on fellas,” he said,
hesitating. He knew he didn’t have anywhere near the same presence and authority as the Sheriff, and so did the men in front of him, who were rapidly turning into a mob.

  They didn’t pay much attention to Hanson and it was Roy who first pushed past him, followed by a dozen others, who entered through the waiting room and burst into the treatment room, to the shock of Molly, who was still treating Stan’s blisters. Molly was pulled, protesting, to one side by a couple of boys.

  Roy hauled Stan up with one hand around his throat, shouting at him and threatening him with his antique pistol. Stan still didn’t have the use of his arms which hung uselessly by his side, the muscles overcome by their continuous straining to hold him to the wood over the previous three days.

  “Where’s the submarine?” screamed Roy, “Where are the Red Army comin’ ashore?”

  Others chorused Roy’s questioning and more young men forced their way into the room, ignoring Nurse Molyneux’ protests that this was her patient.

  “There’s no sub,” insisted Stan, “I am American citizen!”

  Impatient with the lack of a suitable response, Roy pulled Stan off the bed onto the floor one-handed, maintaining his grip on his handgun. The tall, slim, lightly-built man was easily dragged to the ground, the saline drip torn from Stan’s arm. Then Roy sat on his chest, pinning him down helplessly, while waving the gun in his face and shouting almost unintelligible questions, carried away by the excitement. Around about them the mob closed in and Molly was pushed even further to one side near to the doorway, despite her protestations.

  She turned and shouted through the door for Hanson, but he had run off back to his office to collect his own gun in order to restore order.

  Suddenly there was an explosion in the room, that echoed loudly against the walls.

  Magically, the mob melted away, some by the doorway near where Molly stood in shock, others through the back of the room, through the ward and out the back yard, leaving just Roy, still sitting astride Stan with a smoking gun in his hand. Stan was clearly dead, his face blown apart by the force of the large wound centred between the eyes. Blood and brain was sprayed everywhere.