The Time Will Come (1941)

Whipple’s sense of estrangement from her community is strongly portrayed in this story of a mother who reluctantly allows her only son to enlist. Elements of both feminism and pacifism are readily apparent, as is Whipple’s sensitivity for the Pueblo culture—an aspect which broadens the story’s theme and expands its setting from a 1940’s southwestern town to the red canyons of its distant past.

The character of the unnamed protagonist was based on Maurine’s neighbor, Elsie Hafen, whose son, Keith, had recently enlisted (and would later die) in the service of his country. Moved by Hafen’s voiceless heartache over her son’s departure, and the suffering of all Gold Star mothers, Whipple writes defiantly in the story about the “Elder Statesmen” of the town, “beating drums and flying flags” for the “young swashbuckling columns” in the village’s farewell parade, while, in contrast, the grieving mother sees the “waste” that lies ahead, as her boy goes off to war.

In Spring 1941 Whipple sent a draft of the story to her literary agent, Max Lieber. He replied that “the piece is out of step with the country’s [patriotic] mood.” She wrote four drafts of the story in the 1940s, experimenting with different narrators. In 1991, Veda Hale and Whipple collaborated on a revision of the story. The 1991 version is Whipple’s last piece of creative writing.

     

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Lizards aren't interested in tears. When the springs of your life run dry lizards are excellent company.

            She watched them, fugitive and aimless, dart away from her feet among the rubble. Man had no business patronizing lizards—lizards who at least had sense enough to mind their own business. She pitched a stone and quite astonishingly hit the tail of one sunning on a rock. With what dispatch it scurried away to lick its wounds! That's what I am doing, she thought, licking my wounds. What else was there for a woman to do in a world managed by men? A woman who must be efficient as a lizard in hiding, too, so as not to annoy men with her grief! Her throat ached with helpless anger.

            Pulling herself up over the steep footway which worked the lungs of city dwellers to bursting, she stopped to rest and stared upward at the terraced ruins just showing above the flat top of the mesa. It seemed more as if the great rock pedestal had grown windows and doors than as if those ancient masonries had been built by man.

            Thinking to snare the tourist whose dollars were the life-blood of this crazy country, the townsfolk had cut steps out of the sandstone, lured him to climb to this "point of interest" by an easy stairway.                    

            "THIS WAY!" shrieked the signs along every highway. "THIS WAY TO THE INDIAN RELICS!" The community was still so childishly proud of its museum. She thought, THIS WAY TO THE RELICS FROM VIOLATED GRAVES! How would you like to think your baby would someday be a "curiosity" for "civilized" folk to stare at? 

            But even then, the "civilized" folk weren't safe from civic pride. That mockery of a monument to the World War dead, that old cannon inscribed with their names on the courthouse lawn. She wondered why the Elder Statesmen didn't come out in the open, didn't line the highways with signs proclaiming their actual intent: THIS WAY TO THE CEMETERIES OF YOUNG MEN! THIS WAY TO THE GRAVES OF THE BOYS WHO DIED THAT WE MIGHT GET RICH!

            What a bright idea, she thought. Funny the Chamber of Commerce hadn't cooked it up long ago. As a matter of fact, she'd have had a lot more respect for them if they'd used signs like that in the parade. But at the memory of the parade, the hard lump in the pit of her stomach began to swell again . . .

            The usual trouble with a parade, she had decided, was that everyone wanted to be in it and there was no one left to watch. But this time it was different. The press of bodies, necks craning behind her, tag-ends of conversation. . . 

            "'Scuse me! Didn't mean to push you in the ditch!"

            Recovering her footing among the slippery weeds, she turned to smile politely into his quizzical, you've-never-quite-been-one-of-us-glance. A glance that today forgave her for her strangeness, because she was a mother. And then his gaze sharpened, shifted to the roadway beyond her, glowed with pride and tenderness.

            She almost hated turning around, almost hated to look. It would be too hard to mask the hurt in her eyes. Funny, the different way men and women regarded these things. While the man behind her saw only the young swashbuckling columns, his two strapping boys, she saw waste. The Elder Statesmen all over again, strutting like small boys showing off, beating drums, flying flags, mouthing big words, and getting rich.

            Bud was not quite eighteen. She could have kept him out by so little a thing, just refusing to sign a paper. But he had presented his viewpoint with such earnestness: "This is right, Ma. When I remember that my great-grand-dad fought in '76, my grand-dad in '6l, Dad in 1917, why I--"

            Words threadbare with time and overwork. Listening, she only wondered if all the other mothers who had listened felt as thwarted as she. For that was the vicious thing about it all, of course. Sooner or later the Elder Statesmen convinced youth itself. Or was it that the lust for war was inherent, even in a man-child?

   

[For the rest of the story, including the protagonists' climb up through the Pueblo ruins, where she has a vision of ancient Pueblos, and sees how Pueblo women shared with her the suffering of seeing their sons go off to war, see A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple. BCC Press, 2020. Edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson]

https://www.amazon.com/Craving-Beauty-Collected-Writings-Maurine/dp/1948218364