“Oh You Kid!” by Jeanne Murray Walker
After heavy Allied bombardment of the Japanese islands, American troops landed in Okinawa on April 1st, 1945 for the “beginning of the end” of World War II in the Pacific Theatre. The Battle of Okinawa was fought until mid-June and called the “typhoon of steel” for its intensity and the ferocity of Japan’s kamikaze attacks. Less than two months after Japan’s loss on Okinawa, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally ended the bloody conflict. According to nebraskahistory.org, nearly 140,000 Nebraskans joined the fight against the Axis and served in every branch of the military; an estimated 40,000 are still living in Nebraska today.
Jeanne Murray Walker’s wartime poem “Oh You Kid!” was published in the fall of 1996. That autumn (which, with a seasonal average of 50°F, became one of Lincoln’s top-ten coldest falls), the Lincoln Stars ice hockey team began their career at the Ice Box arena. They proceeded to make the playoffs nine of their first ten seasons and are still a popular fixture for Lincoln’s sports fans.
-Tory Clower
Jeanne Murray Walker
Oh You Kid!
“The body’s coming later,” the cop shouts,
tossing the arm to her, and driving off
as she stares at red hair riding the hump of forearm,
feels cold fingers flop like rubber. She’s
the night nurse, my mother, younger than my daughter
as I write this, telling the story after fifty years.
I imagine outside streetlights burning low to save juice
for boys in Okinawa and inside, the hemorrhage
spreading across her white uniform,
her nurse’s oath billowing like a MISS AMERICA
banner across her chest! Oh no! she laughs.
She was stupid, she says, with cow eyes,
like the disciple Peter in the window
of First Baptist Church, fixed in a collision
of colored glass, pinned to that arm, not knowing
how she got there. She tells how she scrubbed,
but even righteous, undiluted bleach would not
erase the stain. She had to throw her uniform away,
go without breakfast for a month to buy another.
It’s coming back to her, now that she’s eighty,
how nothing she did was ever wasted. She’s
shifting into high gear. She wants us to know
how she stuffed the arm into the freezer,
and when the body came in, she helped sew
the thing back on, Raggedy Andy style.
Years later, the man stopped in to thank her.
“Oh, you kid!” he shouted, and shook her hand,
using the arm. She presses his handshake
into my palm. I pass it to my laughing daughter.
It is the vagrant lost-arm signal, the secret
message, proof of how far down the road
toward dead a thing can be and still
get turned around in the other direction.