Three days of hazy, hot and humid yield to clear dry air and a fresh breeze. Muted colors turn crisp. Birds chirp and in the near distance I hear halyards dinging off sailboat masts in the harbor. I amble through headstones at the Block Island Cemetery, pausing now and then to wonder about the schooner captain lost at sea, his ship never found, or the sisters, aged 12 and 15, who passed within weeks of each other in February 1890. The flu? Pneumonia?
I notice a man I’d seen before. The two days prior he sat in is car, parked in the same spot, but today he walks slowly a few tens of yards away. I hesitate and turn to give him room, but he gives me a wave, somewhere between recognition and welcome, and so I continue toward him.
We exchange the usual pleasantries and comment on the weather. The day seems almost autumnal and he wears a denim jacket. Leaning on his cane, gnarled hands matching the gnarled wood, he says he’s seen me before and I tell him I’d come by the previous couple days. He volunteers that he visits his wife every day and asks who I visit. Slightly embarrassed I tell him that I have only a distant relation by marriage over there. I point toward a group of headstones. “It’s a peaceful place to be, even if you don’t know anyone here,” he says.
We chat about life on the island and I tell him I recently read that the number of year-round residents is roughly the same now as it was in the late 1800’s but that so much else must have changed. As a tourist’s moped buzzes by in the distance he says “Block Island used to be a home; now it’s just a business.”
I ask Frank what he did prior to coming to the island. He grew up in Palisades, New York, but his family lost everything in the Depression. His father sent his mother and siblings back to a family farm in Pennsylvania while he tried to start over in New York. Frank and his brothers enlisted in the Navy when World War II broke out and he was assigned to the USS Massachusetts.
The United States Navy commissioned the USS Massachusetts on May 12, 1942. The South Dakota class Massachusetts stretched 680 feet from bow to stern had a beam of 108 feet, and a massive displacement of 35,000 tons. One of the Navy’s “fast battleships,” Big Mamie, cruised at 27 knots, and carried three aircraft and a wartime crew of over 2,000 sailors. Armament on the Massachusetts included twenty five-inch, 38-caliber guns.
Frank tells me that his job was to load and fire the big 38-caliber guns and tells me one of his most vivid memories is the shelling of Casablanca.
The USS Massachusetts started in the war as part of the Atlantic Fleet, and between November 8 and November 12, 1942, found itself an integral part of Operation Torch, a military operation extending across much of northern Africa. The Massachusetts was part of a group of ships tasked with shelling the harbor at Casablanca in an effort to neutralize several French battleships laying at anchor. Frank tells me that what he remembers most is that he was told to use a church steeple in the harbor as a reference point for his shelling. “A church steeple!” he says, his voice trembling at the irony.
Later in the war, the Massachusetts protected convoys in the Pacific as part of the Solomon Islands and Philippines campaigns. Frank tells me that one day they rescued a sailor who’d been in the water swimming for days after his ship had been torpedoed and sunk. “Even when we had him on the stretcher and in sick bay he kept flailing his arms like he was swimming; for two days he did that.” Frank tells me that the war changed him. It changed everyone. Frank’s brother returned from the war to his farm and didn’t leave to the day he died 19 years later.
Frank came to Block Island with his wife 65 years ago. After the war he was in and out of hospitals suffering from Shell Shock, what we’d now call PTSD. I ask if the hospitals helped him. “Dorothy helped me.” At one time he and his Dorothy had a large vegetable garden. As they grew older and as Dorothy got sick the garden shrank. Last to go was the flower garden his wife tended with love, then, after a long illness Dorothy passed. Now he no longer farms though he still owns the land.
A crow flies over us and Frank watches as it passes and settles on a nearby headstone where it starts conversing to no one in particular as crows do. Frank pauses and then: “The crows like this cemetery. I wonder if they are the connection to the past.” I tell him that I’d heard that crows can’t keep a secret and maybe they like cemeteries for all the stories they hold. “That sounds right, “ He says.
We walk slowly as we’re talking and eventually we are at his car. “I’ve got all these memories, all this history, my kids don’t want it. I’ve got notes and pictures. I just don’t know what to do.” I thank him for sharing his story with me and I tell him to save his memories, save his pictures, tell his stories; that they are important. Frank looks at me and after a pause says “Thank you for saying hello. I hope to see you again.” And with that he opens the door to his car and I continue my walk. No, Frank, thank you.
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