The Light in the Woods Read online

  Ray’s parents didn’t say much as they embraced on the train platform. When they stopped kissing Ray’s mother buried her face in her lace handkerchief. Hal put his hands on his knees, bent over and looked at Ray at eye level.

  “You take care of your mother, you hear? You’re the man of the house now.”

  Ray sucked in some air and puffed out his chest. All he could do was nod as a tear crept over his eyelid. He couldn’t open his mouth. He knew he needed to be as brave as his father and if he opened his mouth all the fear and sadness would come blowing out in a wail. His father’s eyes sparkled gray as he smiled wide, as if his smile could stretch out the pucker and tears that were threatening to overtake Ray’s face. Hal grabbed the back of Ray’s neck so that he had to keep his chin up.

  “I love you, Big Ray. And when I come home, we’ll take those racers out for a heck of spin. A really Grand Prix. OK?”

  Ray answered by throwing his arms around Hal. He never wanted his dad to leave but couldn’t say it. That would be weak and now, as everyone kept saying, was a time for courage. The train that sat idling behind the three gave another whistle signaling that it was time for Ray to let go.

  Hal gave kisses to Ray and his wife and then jumped on the train. As it pulled out of the station, Hal remained in the doorway so that he could see his family. Ray just stood clutching his mother’s hand as she buried her face in the other. As the train pulled away his father fixed his tweed cap firmly on his head and yelled out to Ray.

  “First to the oak!”

  Ray broke free from his mother’s grasp and took off down the platform. After school, when it was still light outside, the neighborhood kids would gather for a game of baseball on Ships Drive, the quiet road that cut through the woods behind the Kozak’s house. Hal was always the impartial pitcher for all the kids. He made sure that the game always ended in a tie. He would pitch fast balls to Ray, lob easy ones over to little Tommy Goldsmith, never let Olive get tagged out and always conferred with Paley, Olive’s slow older brother, on any calls that needed an expert opinion. After the game, Hal and Ray would walk through the woods towards their home until one of them yelled, “First to the oak!” This phrase caused them to tear off like hunted deer through the woods toward their backyard. Hal always whooped, laughed, and yelled after Ray as they leapt over logs and beat away brush. Hal made sure that Ray knew he was behind him, nipping at his heels. He would pick Ray up if he tripped or fell back if he got too close. But Hal never outran him. He never passed. Saying those words were like a shot from a starting gun. Hal had thrown down the gauntlet. The fire that burned in Ray’s chest suddenly shot into his heels.

  “I got ya beat, my boy!” Hal cried from the train. He smacked the side of the car as if it were the rump of a racehorse. “Come on ya old mule! Move it!”

  Ray ran to the edge of the platform then launched himself over the railing. He hit the dirt path that ran alongside the train tracks with a thud and a cloud of dust. Ray followed next to the train, running as fast as his size seven Buster Browns could take him. All the while, Hal hooted and hollered from inside the car until the train picked up speed and passed Ray.

  “Adventure awaits!” he heard his dad cry out. “Adventure awaits!”

  Ray kept running until he thought his chest would tear open. When his feet finally slowed down he panted and stared at the 6:35 direct fly off in the distance. He could only see his father’s arm waving his tweed cap from the train until it turned into a dot and then into nothing.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ships Drive – Southold, New York, 1944

  Ray never had any intention to let the cat out of the bag. Tommy Goldsmith wasn’t an enemy. In fact, Ray rather liked him. A chubby kid whose family owned the five and dime in town, Tommy always got the best toys for Christmas. Since he was an only child, he never had a problem sharing them with Olive and Ray. Ray was an only child as well and considered Tommy a little brother. He taught Tommy how to catch a pop fly and how to keep a kite up in the air. Ray figured it was his duty to teach Tommy certain life lessons. Unfortunately for Tommy, while walking home from school with Ray and Olive three weeks before Christmas, Ray decided his misery needed company.

  “So is Santa still coming? Even with the war and all?” Tommy questioned Olive as the three trudged through the snow. Tommy struggled to keep his book bag from scraping the top of the drifts as Olive kept a watchful eye out for cars. Ray lagged a few feet behind with his fists clenched and stuffed in his coat pockets.

  “War or no war, Santa will still make it here,” Olive reassured Tommy. “Don’t you worry about that.” Olive looked back at Ray. His angry expression pointed down at the snow he kicked up. It was an expression he wore more and more since he got the news about his father nearly two months ago. Ray’s normal smile appeared to be slowly dissolving into a steady frown. And the more everyone got excited about Christmas, the angrier Ray seemed.

  “Good, ’cause I’m asking for a Mickey Owen catcher’s mitt. It might be big and all but one day it’ll fit right,” Tommy said as they walked past Oscar Taglieber’s small ranch house. Tommy and Olive gave a slight wave as they watched Oscar shovel his driveway. Oscar, dressed in stained overalls and large rubber boots, stopped shoveling briefly to nod at the three. Ray did not look up or care.

  Tommy continued on as he waddled through the snow. “What are you asking Santa to bring you, Olive?”

  “I’m asking for a telescope. A pirate telescope.”

  Tommy stopped and scratched his head. “Are pirates hard to find?”

  Olive laughed. “I wouldn’t be looking for pirates. I’d use it to look at the stars. And Paley would use it to look out for the enemy.” Olive looked up at the snow-covered trees and sighed. Olive normally only received homemade gifts for Christmas. A scarf with her name on it. A doll with a fabric face, buttons for eyes, and a sewn-on smile. A tin of homemade Ginger Snaps. All were always well received. Ray didn’t say anything but thought the odds of Olive getting a telescope would be the same as Olive getting an actual reindeer for Christmas. None.

  The Mott’s house was packed with people instead of things. With five kids, one grandmother, and one mom every member of the Mott house had a job. Mrs. Mott cleaned houses. Olive’s three older sisters worked as waitresses. Olive’s job was taking care of her older and only brother Paley. Which as jobs go, was not all that hard. At seventeen, he could dress and wash himself fine but didn’t go to school with all the other kids. Instead, he spent every morning cleaning and sorting the tools at Mick’s shop. Hal got this for him after Mr. Mott went to Doc’s Tavern for something to drink and never came back. But every afternoon Paley’s job would change from mechanic’s helper to enemy lookout. He would stand in the front yard rocking back and forth, staring in the sky, looking for enemy aircraft using the plane spotter guide on a worn Pep cereal box. If the Germans or Japanese were going to fly their bombers over the east end of Long Island, Paley would spot them. Between Olive’s love of star-gazing and Paley’s hunt for enemy aircraft a telescope would be in constant use.

  “Did you write Santa for it?”

  “Sure did,” Olive said. Ray looked up and saw her fingers crossed behind her back.

  “What about you, Ray? What did you ask for?”

  Ray didn’t answer. Too lost in his anger, he grew heated by the hopeful talk of baseball mitts and letters to Santa.

  “Nothing,” he spat.

  “Nothing?” Tommy shook his head in disbelief. “How could you ask for nothing?”

  “I don’t want anything, all right?”

  Oblivious to Ray’s anger, Tommy kept prodding. “Come on, Ray. You can’t want nothing.” Tommy lopped his head from side to side as he walked. “How about a Dodgers’ cap or a train set? You don’t have those.”

  “I don’t want that stuff.”

  “But what’s Santa going to leave you when he comes? He
has to give you something.” Tommy stopped in thought. “What about another one of those racecars?”

  A racecar. That’s all it took to break Ray. Last time he saw his father, he said he would set up a Grand Prix when he came home. He would have probably made Ray some new cars. But that would never happen. After The Worst Day, things like midget racecars, block baseball games, Christmas, and toys lost all their joy and shine. His dad and Mrs. Stelzer’s son were going to win the war. Then he was going to come back home and teach him everything about cars. Then later, when Ray got older, he would teach him how to fix an engine on a Cadillac and then how to drive it. Now all of those things he’d have to learn from someone else. There was no more banging through the family room door and into the basement to listen to Terry and the Pirates. No more Captain Ryan. Dads could fix things. And Ray’s dad knew how to fix everything. But everything in Ray’s world was broken. There was no dad to make it better. And if his dad didn’t exist anymore, there certainly wasn’t a Santa Claus. And in Ray’s mind the sooner that Tommy knew that, the better off he’d be.

  “He’s not going to get me anything, alright?” Ray yelled.

  Tommy rubbed his hat in confusion. “But Ray, you’ve been good. He’ll want to give you a present. You don’t want to get stuck with a doll?”

  Ray threw his hands up in the air and yelled so loud that snow fell off branches. “It doesn’t matter! He’s not coming! Not now. Not ever!”

  Tommy’s lips began to quiver. Ray never yelled in real anger before. Certainly not at Tommy. Tommy looked at Olive, whose jaw and math book both dropped.

  “But…Mom said that if I’m good…” Tommy said quietly.

  “Good? Who cares if you’ve been good? That’s just something grown-ups made up. There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

  “Take that back!” Olive barked. “That’s not true, Tommy. Santa does exist.”

  “No he doesn’t,” Ray snapped back. “He never did.”

  Oscar Taglieber could hear Ray’s yelling but only moved when he heard Tommy’s wail. He let his shovel drop and ran as quickly as his old legs could take him.

  Tommy wiped his nose on his sleeve as Olive tried to calm him down. Through his huffs he tried to argue with Ray. “But I got trains last year. Dad said he saw Santa put them there.”

  “That’s a load of pucky, Tommy. Your parents put them there. Santa Claus is just a made-up story for babies. Are you a baby?”

  “Stop it, Ray. Please…” Olive begged.

  Ray leaned over and got close to Tommy’s face. “Are you a baby?”

  Tommy looked at Ray with his pursed lips and swollen eyes. He blinked each time Ray spat out a word. Olive stood motionless, too frightened of Ray to move.

  “Are? You? A baby?”

  “N…no?” Tommy whimpered.

  “Then why are you crying like one!”

  “Raymond,” Oscar’s voice, firm and low in timbre, calmly cut through the tension. He wrapped his large arm around Ray’s chest and pulled him away from Tommy. “Raymond, that’s enough.”

  “No, he ought to know there’s no Santa.”

  By this time, Tommy’s crying drew out the people from the neighboring houses. Soon, Tommy’s mom came running to them, her arms flailing around as she squawked through the snow. Her rotund figure was perched precariously onto skinny legs, which punctured the foot-deep snow like ski poles when she walked. Her pipe curls too blond and too young for her age dangled below her fox fur-trimmed hat.

  “Tommy-kins! What’s going on?” she asked as she bent over and cupped Tommy’s face.

  Tommy looked at Ray and rubbed his eyes. Nervous vowels sputtered and fell out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: having his mother confirm Ray’s beliefs on Santa or getting Ray into so much trouble that he’d lose his friend. “Santa’s real. Right, Mom?”

  “Of course he is, my Sweetness,” Mrs. Goldsmith answered as she petted Tommy’s apple plump cheeks. The question, however, began to dawn on her and she slowly rose up and cocked her curls to the side. She stared down at Ray, who stood breathless with Oscar’s arm still wrapped across his shoulders. “Isn’t that right, Raymond?” she leered.

  Ray swore that underneath the snow Mrs. Goldsmith was tapping her foot as she waited for his answer. It seemed like a year before Ray let out his breath.

  “I was taught that lying is a sin, Mrs. Goldsmith.”

  Mrs. Goldsmith’s nostrils flared open as wide as her eyes as she rose on her toes in disgust.

  “Your mother will hear about this!” she yelled, raising her pointed finger up over her hat. She grabbed Tommy’s arm and whirled him around in the direction of their house. Tommy looked back at Ray, who stood with a clenched jaw and furrowed brow staring at the snow.

  As the three stood in the center of the street, Olive quietly picked up her book. In a hushed tone and without looking up, she spoke.

  “You should tell Tommy you were wrong. Before your mom comes.”

  “Why?” Ray whined. “He’s not real. Why does he get to live in a fantasy world?”

  “That wasn’t a kind thing to do to a child,” Oscar said. “For some, Santa’s very real.”

  “Well, he’s not. And it doesn’t matter how good we are. It doesn’t matter what we do. No one’s coming. Nobody cares. Nobody watches. And the sooner he stops believing and hoping for this junk that’s never going…”

  “Raymond!” his mother’s cry echoed through the neighborhood. In Ray’s fury he didn’t notice his mother marching through the woods. What took Oscar an arm to control only took his mother one hand as she grabbed Ray up by his armpit and pulled him down the path she carved in the snow.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Kozak Kitchen – Southold, New York, 1944

  The ladle smacked the bottom of Ray’s bowl with each scoop. Since it was only the two of them, Ray considered his mother’s silence a far worse punishment than her yelling. Her anger, however, needed a voice and that was the metal ladle dishing out the stew she made for dinner. Instead of hollering she let the hard “ting” that the serving spoon made on the bottom of the bowl convey her displeasure.

  “Pray now,” she ordered. Ray lowered his eyes but couldn’t get the spirit to bow to anyone. His mother, however, clasped her hands together so tight her knuckles turned white.

  “Dear Lord, thank You for the food we are about to eat. Bless this house and all who dwell in it. We ask for Your love, protection, and guidance for ourselves and for our country, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

  Ray grunted out an “Amen” and hunched over his soup. Protection, Ray thought. What protection? Who protected his father? What patron saint looked after his dad and the rest of those men who died with him in that building? Were angels not strong enough to lift the bricks off of them? Could they not fly faster than the planes dropping bombs? Ray wondered time and again what his father was thinking on The Worst Day.

  The report from the field said that Henry Lee Kozak and seven members of his squad rescued a group of schoolchildren from a building that was on the verge of collapsing due to heavy enemy fire. In the final attempt to get the children out, the men headed back into the building as it took a hit from the air. The building collapsed with all eight still inside. Every child, however, made it out alive.

  Ray stabbed his stew as he wondered if any one of those kids reminded his dad of himself and the gang from the neighborhood. They must have. Why would he run back into a falling building to save the enemy? Or maybe, you needed to be a certain age to be the enemy. Maybe ten? Thirteen? People said his dad died a hero. But every time someone mentioned that word “hero” Ray felt horrible in two ways. The first because he didn’t want him to be a hero. He wanted him to be a mechanic. A designated pitcher. A sprinter in the woods. Someone to stay up with him on Christmas Eve and read The Night Before Christmas. The second m
ade him feel even worse. He wished those German children were old enough to be the enemy. Maybe then his dad and the other men wouldn’t have gone inside to rescue them. Maybe they would have watched the building fall into a pile of rubble from a safe distance, thinking those people were too old to be saved.

  His mother stopped eating and took a breath. She placed her elbows on the table and folded her calloused, cut hands in front of her chin. After a long pause she asked, “Why would you tell him there was no Santa? Why would you take that away from him?”

  Ray kept his head down and mumbled into in his bowl. “He doesn’t need Santa. He still has his dad.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Did that matter to you?”

  Ray kept quiet and shook his head. She was right. A hundred days before it would not have mattered. Dad and Santa were both larger than life. Both existed. Now, neither did.

  “What would your father think of what you’re doing now? What would he say about all this?”

  Ray could feel tears drip down his cheeks, off his chin, and onto the potatoes floating in his soup. He wanted to know what his father would think. But he didn’t. And he wouldn’t. For the rest of his life he would have to guess what his father thought from what he could remember of him. Ray looked up from his bowl at his mother, meek as a dog when it came home after a feeble attempt to run away. Ray’s mother extended her thin arm over the pot and grabbed his soggy chin. With no smile, she furrowed her brow, tilted her head forward, and with her cold green stare dug into Ray’s eyes.

  “We will find a way out of this,” his mother said over the soup.

  And by the looks of her hands it appeared as if she had already started digging.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dart’s Christmas Tree Farm – Southold, New York, 1944

  One would have thought they were giving away trees at Dart’s Christmas tree farm. Children buzzed and scurried through the rows of Douglas, Fraser, and Balsam firs and blue spruces yelling and pointing out their top choices to their parents. Fathers lumbered along, holding their saws, and mothers gripped cups of hot tea, vetoing each child’s choice of tree after spotting a gaping hole on the side or noticing needles sprinkle over the ground after a slight shake. Ray and his mother quietly walked up and down the rows. Ray held the saw, taking over the job his dad had last Christmas. His mother promised that if he came with her she would let him cut down the tree. It would be a small tree. Nothing that Ray couldn’t handle.