But then the troubles began overseas.
Ulysses had always imagined that, should the time come, he would answer the call of his country just as his father had in 1917. But when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor in December of ’41 and all the boys began converging on the recruitment office, Macie—who had waited in solitude for so many years—met his gaze with narrowed eyes and a slow-motion shake of the head, as much as to say: Ulysses Dixon, don’t you dare.
As if the US government itself had been persuaded by Macie’s unambiguous gaze, in early ’42 it declared that all linemen with two years’ experience were too essential to serve. So even as the war effort mounted, he and Macie woke in the same bed, ate breakfast at the same table, and went off to their jobs with the same lunch pails in hand. But with every day that passed, Ulysses’s willingness to sidestep the conflict was being sorely tested.
It was tested by the speeches of FDR on the wireless as he assured the nation that through our shared resolve we would triumph over the forces of evil. Tested by the headlines in the papers. Tested by the neighborhood boys who were lying about their ages in order to join the fight. And most of all, it was tested by the men in their sixties who would look at him on his way to work with sideways glances, wondering what in the hell an able-bodied man was doing sitting on a trolley at eight in the morning while the rest of the world was at war. But whenever he happened to pass a new recruit in his newly issued uniform, there was Macie with her narrowed eyes to remind him of how long she had waited. So Ulysses swallowed his pride, and as the months ticked by, he rode the trolley with a downward gaze and burned his idle hours within the walls of their apartment.
Then in July of ’43, Macie discovered that she was with child. As the weeks passed, no matter what the news from either front, she began to radiate an inner illumination that would not be denied. She started meeting Ulysses at his trolley stop, wearing a summer dress and a wide yellow hat, and she would hook her arm under his to stroll with him back to their apartment, nodding at friends and strangers alike. Then toward the end of November, just as she had begun to show, she persuaded him against his better judgment to put on his Sunday suit and take her to the Thanksgiving dance at the Hallelujah Hall.
As soon as Ulysses walked through the door, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. For everywhere he turned, he met the eye of a mother who had lost a son, a wife who had lost a husband, or a child who had lost a father, each individual gaze made all the more bitter by Macie’s beatitude. Even worse was when he met the eyes of the other men his age. For when they saw him standing awkwardly at the edge of the dance floor, they came and shook his hand, their smiles tempered by their own manner of cowardice, their spirits relieved to find another able-bodied man to share in the brotherhood of shame.
That night when he and Macie returned to their flat, before they had even taken off their coats, Ulysses had announced his decision to enlist. Having prepared himself for the likelihood that Macie would grow angry or weep, he expressed his intentions in the manner of a foregone conclusion, a decision that broached no debate. But when he was finished with his talking, she didn’t tremble or shed a tear. And when she responded, she didn’t raise her voice.
—If you have to go to war, she said, then go to war. Take on Hitler and Tojo with one arm tied behind your back for all I care. But don’t expect to find us here when you get back.
The next day, when he walked into the recruiting office, he feared that he’d be turned away as a man of forty-two, but ten days later he was at Camp Funston and ten months after that he was on his way to serve in the 92nd Infantry Division under the Fifth Army in the Italian campaign. All through those unforgiving days, despite the fact that he did not receive a single letter from his wife, he never imagined—or rather, never let himself imagine—that she and the child would not be waiting for him upon his return.
But when his train pulled into St. Louis on the twentieth of December 1945, they were not at the station. When he went to Fourteenth Street, they were not in the flat. And when he tracked down the landlord, and the neighbors, and her friends from work, the report was always the same: Two weeks after giving birth to a beautiful baby boy, Macie Dixon had packed up her things and left the city without leaving word of where she was headed.
Less than twenty-four hours after returning to St. Louis, Ulysses put his bag on his shoulder and walked back to Union Station. There, he boarded the very next train, unconcerned with where it was going. He rode that train as far is it went—to Atlanta, Georgia—and then without setting foot outside the station, he boarded the next train headed in a different direction and rode that one all the way to Santa Fe. That was more than eight years ago. He had been riding ever since—in the passenger cars while his money held out and in the boxcars once it was gone—back and forth across the nation, never allowing himself to spend a second night in any one spot before jumping the next train to wherever it was bound.