Cherries in Winter by Suzan Colon

Author:Suzan Colon [Colon, Suzan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53258-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen-year-old Charlie Kallaher thought his father, Edmund, would be proud to hear that he’d left the military academy to fight in World War I, enlisting with his older brother, George. But Edmund merely sighed with disapproval. “Well, Charles, you’ve done things your own way.”

Charlie was sent to France, where he was shot at and gassed, and on one terrible day he had to amputate a buddy’s leg right on the field. Sharp beyond his years and determined to stay alive, he defied a commanding officer who, whether knowingly or not, was ordering his men out of a foxhole and directly into the line of enemy fire. “Over the top, Johnny! Over the top!” he shouted as the men leaped out and were killed, one by one. “Over the top, Johnny!”

“After you,” Private Kallaher responded.

“What did you say, soldier?” the officer demanded.

“I said ‘After you,’ sir.”

The argument ended when a shell landed nearby. The commanding officer was killed, and the soldiers scattered away from the hail of artillery fire and flying shrapnel. Charlie and his buddies hid from enemy troops in a barn, and in the morning he woke up with rats nestling against his body to stay warm. For food, the men ate potatoes straight out of the dirt.

“You’d think he would have hated eating them raw again, considering the memories that must have brought back,” I say to Mom.

She shrugs. “The taste reminded him of how they kept him from going hungry,” she says. “That’s a good memory.”

Charlie came home alive but no longer a kid, having seen too much of the war before he was even of legal age to fight. A few months after his return his girlfriend Molly got pregnant. Edmund was painting trim on the side of the house when Charlie told him he was getting married.

“Well, Charles,” Edmund said, his paintbrush evenly skimming the wood, “you’ve done things your own way again.”

“Will you come to the wedding, Pop?”

“I think not,” his father said.

The marriage was brief; Molly died of influenza just a few years later. Charles was a war veteran, a widower, and the father of two small children—Charles Jr., nicknamed Chick, and Mary, who was called Midge—all by the time he was twenty-one years old. (No longer a stranger to medical events, he’d delivered both babies himself, at home.) Molly’s sisters took the children to live with their families in Connecticut, and Charlie spent the next ten years or so as a bachelor. Able to live quite well on his own with the skills his stepmother had taught him, he felt no hurry to find a new bride.

“Your grandfather was a happy widower for years—it was almost a career with him,” says Mom. “When he got the job as a milkman and the Depression hit, not only was he making steady money when nobody else was, but he got to visit all the lonely housewives. He was famous in the dairy company as ‘The Heartbreaker of Sheffield Farms’ by the time he met your Nana at Orchard Beach in 1930.

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