An ode to Maxy Noble. (the ghosts of war) (Cover Story).

An autumn chill settled grey and dreary over the harbor as water churned between the U.S.S. Leonard Wood and its ratty old pier. New York City's spires jutted from misty shrouds as wind sliced into the matching cap and coat Mom had bundled me in that morning. Then, while our ocean liner's bow cut through the bay, gulls circling its stern screeched warily at a blast from the ship's horn. Looking back, it was a lonely, ominous sound.

Our first night out, the ship plunged through foaming Atlantic swells that sent Mom to bed with what she called "terminal mai de mer," but dawn broke on a tranquil ocean and balmy skies. After entering the Panama Canal, my father, a U.S. Army doctor with orders to the Philippines, took us on a shopping spree in Cristobal. I got a toy gun, and Mom picked a Chinese rug from a rack that soared to the shop's ceiling like in "Jack and the Beanstalk." The shopkeeper wrapped the rug around a wooden peg then had it stowed in our cabin; but when the sun struck our porthole just right, I would peel back its fringes and the deep blue nap glistened as if it had been kissed by a morning dew. At last it was unrolled in our new house on a sunny street bordering the parade ground, two blocks from Wheeler Field, but I digress.

While the Leonard Wood's wake melted into a slate green Pacific, its wireless operator translated the dashes and dots of a communique to my father from the War Department. Did we know it was a reprieve, a call from the governor's office to our executioner? Not then, but our destination had been changed from Manila to Honolulu, Hawaii. If that spinning ball hadn't dropped into just the right slot, my children would never have been born.

What followed our arrival in Hawaii were breezes perfumed by fragrant tropical flowers, tasty avocados falling from a tree in our front yard, and surf pounding the sands of Diamond Head. Mom would read to me from A. A. Milne's Pooh Bear series, and I would tag along some golf course with my father and Maxy.

We still had horse soldiers in those days. Major Maxy Noble, a West Pointer, cavalry officer, and my father's best friend, would drop by our house for "one" beer, then he and Dad would spend lazy afternoons in the backyard, swapping lies and cussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But every time he knocked on our lanai's screen door, Maxy gleamed and glittered. A saber dangled from his left hip and silver spurs spun on cavalry boots that held a spit-shine like I've never seen since. A Sam Browne belt's diagonal strap ran across his chest to disappear under a khaki epaulet. But mostly it was the hat. Its leather noose rose jauntily from just below his dimple, hugging square jaws up to a wide brim with a dome circled by gold braid and tassels on its front. Shazzam! He was Captain Marvel, Superman, and Hannibal riding an elephant into battle.

A pat on the head from this swashbuckler would be enough for most pre-TV preschoolers, but it got better, much better. I told you there was a parade ground across our street. The U.S. Cavalry drilled there; twice a month Maxy would lead three columns of mounted, steely-eyed soldiers to "troop the line." Awestruck, I squatted on a curb with the neighborhood kids, waiting for him to spur his steed toward us, then with practiced dexterity he'd reach down and I'd vault into space. Straddling his charger I'd clasp that Sam Browne belt while we cantered to a reviewing stand amid pennants popping in tropical breezes. A metallic whisper of steel and sunlight glinting on his saber was a prelude to his crisp command, "Eyyyes, RIGHT!" His blade would flash, tip freezing at a perfect forty-five-degree angle to the ground quivering with hoofbeats, and every head in the trailing columns snapped right. After the last trooper cleared the reviewing stand, Maxy would wheel his mount, spur it into a gallup, and return me to the peanut gallery. His horse would slow when we approached my pals, and Maxy would lower me into a sprint, usually resulting in an end-over-end tumble. But I'd rise like a victorious phoenix; these kids were now my troopers!

Then the long shadow fell across my world: Maxy and his band were ordered to Manila. I wept when he left because the elegance of our island dissolved like wisps of rising smoke. Even though other people inhabited my life, Maxy Noble was gone.

Under the avocado tree, if I faced our front door, the Momms lived on our left. Captain Momm, a signal officer, was built like a tank: short, wide, and with a nose like a cannon. His wife Anna, lithe and stately, saw darker visions that I yet understood. My mother said her parents were white Russians and that during the revolution there a Red Army firing squad had forced her to watch their execution. No wonder her smile seemed to come from the moon.

The Walkers lived to our right. I don't remember his name or rank, but she and her daughter have tugged at my memory for six decades. Jewell and Billie Jewell. On weekends, if I got up early enough, Jewell Walker served fluffy pancakes or magic waffles, dripping in Log Cabin syrup, with crispy bacon as an extra. Sometimes Billie Jewell--a worldly, older woman of twelve, with glowing cheeks and honey-colored hair--would attend. I adored her.

A couple of months after Maxy sailed, Miz Walker took me to a circus and, when we got home, Adams was there; that meant my parents were going out. Adams was an orderly at my father's dispensary and had this marvelous scar on the back of his right hand where a tattoo had been removed. As my parents drove away in our grey 1938 Olds, a swooping fighter plane rattled the rafters--no rare occurrence, since our house had been built in Wheeler Field's flight path. Adams fed me supper that evening, on December 6, 1941, and was telling me about his scar for the zillionth time as I fell asleep, not knowing or caring that the next day's dawn would change history.

BOOM! When I leapt from bed, sunshine sparkled on rattling panes. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

"Pat!" Mom screamed. "Did a plane hit the house?" My father looked out the bathroom window. "Plane hell," he yelled. "It's the god-damned Japs!"

By this time, I was in Mom's bed. "Everybody downstairs," Dad ordered. "Hurry!" Our stairwell featured a tall window facing Wheeler Field, where the Army Air Corps had fighter squadrons. "They'll make short work of these bastards," Dad snarled. But as we clattered down our stairs, the window, sill to sill and side to side, showed only billowing black smoke lined with flashes of orange. Dad pushed us into an alcove under the stairs, tried to call the hospital, then switched on our kitchen radio. An announcer's excited voice confirmed that Hickam and Wheeler Fields were under attack, as was Pearl Harbor. When Dad returned to the stairwell, he wore a braided cap. "There'll be a lot of wounded boys, Helen."

"You can't leave!" Mom wailed. But he did. On foot. Dodging and weaving between buildings all the way to the hospital--if he'd taken our Olds, Japanese bullets would have riddled him. Minutes later, Jewell and Billie Jewell bounded across the backyard and pounded on our kitchen door. Mom let them in, then calmly set her coffee pot on a burner to heat.

The bombs were closer now. And louder. They really whistle on the way down, you know, and their explosions rattled our house like earthquakes. The radio reported that ships were blazing in the harbor and columns of smoke were drifting over the airfields. Then suddenly our lanai door banged and Anna Momm, eyes flashing like a frightened colt's, raced into the living room. When she yanked our couch away from the wall and scrambled behind it on all fours, Mom shrugged, then Jewell followed her into the kitchen. Billie Jewell was crying in the alcove under the stairs when I jumped onto the couch and peeked over its back; Anna was curled up, sobbing and shaking so hard I was afraid she'd shatter.

As I ran for the kitchen to tell Mom, the roar of a plane shook our walls; she was carrying her coffee pot.... The howling engine became chattering machine gunfire! A window over our sink exploded into spraying glass and wood, knocking the pot from her hand and slamming it against a wall as Jewell's screams ricocheted through the plane's exhaust fumes.

The rest of the morning we huddled in our living room, listening to a radio tell us to boil the water we cooked with or drank, and reporting death and casualty counts. Bombs still whistled, sometimes closer, sometimes more distant. A house up the street was blown off its foundation, and there were still those desperate moans from behind the couch. With childish bravado, I found my toy gun which fired small corks, then watched patiently from a window for planes emblazoned with red circles, but my corks wouldn't reach. If only Maxy....

That afternoon my father returned with two gas masks--I spied them when he walked in. They were grotesque: bluishgrey rubber with black hoses and round glass eyes staring vacantly. He was trying to fit one on me when Mom asked how he'd gotten them. He said they had belonged to soldiers who had been killed that morning. Blood pounding, I fled, but he told Mom to do it because there could be an invasion that night. When he returned to the dispensary I wondered if I'd ever see this aloof, pensive man again.

Fouled by smoke and flame, twilight glimmered across my tropical paradise while large army trucks, covered from cab to tailgate by arched brown canvas, lumbered down our street. They stopped for grim-jawed military police to extricate women and children from houses along our block, and when our time came an MP lifted me into the truck; shadowy specters loomed under its canvas so I snuggled next to the cab, shivering against its cool metal. Finally, at the main thoroughfare, our truck joined a convoy and the MP told us we were being taken to an abandoned schoolhouse in the mountains. It was dark now, and after awhile I noticed a strange orange flicker on the canvas, then a wisp of wind caught its flap, blowing it back from the cab. In that instant I saw what our priest once described at mass as a flaming hell.

Pearl Harbor was on fire! Dark superstructures swayed gently on a flame-laced tapestry while other vessels, listing severely, had cables running to less damaged ships. That was the United States' smoldering Pacific fleet! And the water was burning! The truck flap dropped quickly but its revealed vision had seared my brain. It is what "Remember Pearl Harbor!" still means to me.

We survived and, a month later, boarded a Pan American clipper for San Francisco. During the flight, I watched two officers with stars gleaming on their shoulders, particularly the one crying. Years later I learned who General Short and Admiral Kimmel were: the army and navy's ranking Hawaiian officers. Kimmel's tears must have been about what history now considers the unfair, fingerpointing allegations the men would face at the end of their journey.

I've often wondered about the Momms. Did that aristocratic woman ever recover from two of the twentieth century's versions of politics run amuck? And I hope Adams survived to have children who pestered him, as I had, about his scar. I thought about the Walkers--particularly Billie Jewell. Incredibly, I spotted her in a San Francisco department store and bolted from Mom's side. She was mad until she saw Jewell. They hugged, then cried, then we took the same taxi and Billie Jewell sang along with the songs on the radio--she was very sophisticated. They dropped us at a depot where Mom and I boarded the train for Arkansas. I wish I could see them all once again.

Mom waited until after the war to disclose Maxy's fate, and at the risk of political incorrectness, I'll share it with you. The Imperial Japanese Army captured him when the Philippines fell. He obviously irritated some savage among that infamous horde, because he was lashed to a tree, facing the sun, then his eyelids were sliced off. After he went blind, they cut him down and decapitated him. The bastards.

Many of that war's heros now sleep in eternal repose, but it's said they once bore witness to the passing of our nation's innocence. Some gallantly paid the full measure so that my children and your children might see and smell and touch this place and time. Now in night's nestling silence, I still dream of a tropical sunset with palm trees filtering that last glow of a long forgotten sky. Silver taps, echoed mournfully by a ghostly bugler, drift across a flag-draped coffin, and rifles crack while I step from the crowd to salute Maxy and his comrades all. Then if you listen very, very closely, "Eyyyes, RIGHT!" whispers from the universe.

Ralph Patterson, an attorney from North Little Rock, Arkansas, and a freelance writer, has smelled the gunpowder of courtrooms for over three decades and served three terms in the Arkansas state senate.