The German (2 page)

Outside I pause with no destination clear in my mind. I dare not seek shelter with friends, because I no longer know who my friends are. Going home could mean further confrontation with those who had me imprisoned, and my face is too well known to allow sufficient anonymity on these streets. The stolen pockets carry no money, and the private resources I might access are secured in a foreign bank. I leave the yard and walk to the darkened road, and I look first to the north and then to the south – uncertain.

Where is a dead man to go if not into flame or earth?

The Barnard Register, D-Day 1944

INVASION
!

Allied Troops Begin a Sweeping Campaign Across Northern France

Great invasion is underway in Havre-Cherbourg region.

We got it wrong. All of it.

Everyone who knew Harold Ashton was convinced he had run off to join the war. It was after all, a patriotic and reasonable thing for young men to do, particularly when the country faced such icons of villainy as Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler. Many heroes had been born in Barnard, Texas, and now an entire generation of them was noticeably absent from the streets and the shops and the beds of their loved ones. Dozens of Barnard’s finest boys were buried in graves across the ocean in Europe – some underneath markers of wood and stone, and others lay anonymously beneath low rises of dirt in nameless fields. Others still fought, like the Richardson brothers, who were somewhere in Normandy, and Delbert Himmelmann who was stationed in the South Pacific. Of course, some men had returned. Ervin “Eagle-eye” Seagle came home the fall before, missing a foot, an ear, and half of his teeth. Stanley “Uncle Stan” Moffat stepped off the train in Austin, looking like the strapping man who had left the city two years before, only to proceed to his house in Barnard and blow a good part of his skull apart with the Parker shotgun his papa had given him. Brett Fletcher returned with a broken back after a mortar turned over the Jeep he was driving. Brett was the first casualty from Barnard, Texas, and he’d been home for a year before the allies landed at Omaha Beach. When asked about his injury, Brett cursed it, not because the doctors had told him he’d never walk again, but because it had taken him away from the cause, the battle, the moral imperative. “I still had me some work to do,” he often complained to the groups of boys and girls who frequently visited his farmhouse out on Bennet Road. Harold Marker Ashton was a regular visitor to Fletcher’s porch, where he’d looked on in wonder as the man in the wheelchair spun verbal tapestries of heroism. Often enough, Harold told his friends and his mama that he couldn’t wait to face off on the Krauts or the Japs and show them what a boy from Barnard, Texas, could really do. So when he went missing on the night of June 7th, folks naturally assumed Harold had tired of waiting, and he’d run away to enlist. He was nearly seventeen years old and big for his age. The flimsiest of lies would have convinced any recruitment officer he was mature enough to fight. His mother sat at the kitchen table on the morning of June 9th and cried. She couldn’t have been prouder of her brave son.

Many residents of Barnard felt the same way. Despite grief and fear, it was a good fight.
The
good fight. And the war brought the community together, just as it had the entire nation.

Minor tensions remained in the city of Barnard, certainly. How could they not? Though most residents had never seen an Oriental face outside of a movie theatre or a magazine, nearly one quarter of Barnard’s population was of German descent, and petty squabbles became amplified by misunderstanding and doubt. Such uncertainty was to be expected, but rarely had the speculations erupted into overt violence. If anything, it was all treated as a source of humor like the time Cedric Palmer called Old Man Reinhardt a “Goddamn Kraut” for buying the last ham from the butcher one Saturday afternoon. Palmer laughed and slapped his knee. The butcher, who certainly heard the comment – because he was meant to and a German himself – produced a crooked smile in return.

I never noticed this passive animosity on my street. The four-block stretch that ended at Kramer Lake was quiet and peaceful with folks helping their neighbors and smiling politely as they passed on the sidewalks. The houses were of a neat ranch-style design, and all but two were painted white.

Mrs. Reginald Watley had painted her house blue because she’d thought it pleasant, and Ernst Lang owned the yellow house at the end of Dodd adjacent to a broad grassy slope, running to the water’s edge.

Mr. Lang had lived on Dodd Street for over seven years, moving to America after fleeing the encroaching rise of the Nazi regime. He made furniture, mostly rocking chairs, that he sold at the hardware store in town. His accent remained strong, but he spoke English very well. Though he mostly kept to himself, Mr. Lang was a respected member of the community and could be counted on by his neighbors to help with the odd chore or errand when asked politely. Even Mildred McDowell, who had lost a son and a husband to the war, tolerated him as a neighbor.

As for me, I looked on the German with a bit of awe. He was not tall, but his brawny build and scarred face gave him an authority that his stature couldn’t diminish. Further, he was a good man. He helped me once. He might have even saved my life, but that isn’t something I’ll ever know for certain.

I will always regret that night in August. What we did to that man was unforgivable.

~ ~ ~

The day they found Harold Ashton’s body on the far side of Kramer Lake was the first scorcher of the summer. My best friend, Bum, and I had gotten an early start and spent the morning riding our bikes through the city, traveling south toward the fairgrounds and the stockyards and looping up to the east of town. Barnard was shaped like an anvil, with Kramer Lake scalloping the west side and ranchlands pushing in from the east. We pedaled along the smooth gray city roads and their shabbier cousins, the farm roads, to see the factory where my mother worked to support the family while my daddy was overseas, and the greasy stink of the place – an odor that seemed to have worked into my mother’s pores and oozed from her every garment – rolled through the hot morning air. In town we walked our bikes over the sidewalks, peeking in windows that revealed the exact same things we’d seen a hundred times before. Sun-baked buildings and windows smeared with glare drew us, and we saw Milton Teague running his barber’s razor over a strop and Hattie Barnes adjusting the sapphire-blue hat on a mannequin’s head. We didn’t go into any of the shops. Our journey was less about a destination than it was simply to be going and doing and seeing, but as the morning progressed, the beating sun turned up the fire, and Bum complained about feeling like a Sunday roast, and I told him it wasn’t so bad, but I was just playing tough. Often enough, Bum and I calibrated the weather by how much lemonade it would take to cool off, and leaning against our bikes in downtown Barnard, we agreed that that sweltering Wednesday in the latter part of June was building up to be a two-galloner – no question in our twelve-year-old minds.

I suggested we stop in at Delrubio’s Drug Store for a soda, but Bum wanted the lake, and though I usually won such arguments, I had to admit the cool water sounded good to me. Besides, a pitcher of tea waited in the icebox at home, and I knew where my mother kept her secret tin of sugar. Rationing had made the sweet crystals valuable and had made me a sneak.

Bum wrestled with his bike until he got the seat under his plump backside, and we set off toward the west side of town.

My best friend was a pudgy kid who had attached to me like metal to a magnet on our first day of school. We’d spent most of the summer together, because Bum didn’t like being at home. When he was at home he holed up in his bedroom, reading books he’d checked out from the Barnard library to avoid his troublesome family. And yes, Bum was his real name: Bum Craddick. His daddy had a sad sense of humor; so all eight of the Craddick kids were saddled with unfortunate names. The worst was his oldest brother, whose birth certificate read Mudbug Francis Craddick. Their mama let it happen, but she was slow. Folks around Barnard said she was “touched in the head.” My mother said only insanity could explain why such a pretty girl would marry an ox like Clayton Craddick.

There were times I envied Bum’s family, having so many brothers and sisters. I didn’t have close family to speak of except my mother and her family, and Daddy, of course, but he was off fighting. I wondered what it would be like to share the house with other kids. Then, Bum would come on by with his knees scraped up or an eye blackened – wounds caused by one of his older brothers – and I’d figure things were okay the way they were.

Before the war, my mother was always home. When I woke up, breakfast waited for me on a plate, and after the dishes were done, she swept and dusted and mopped and did laundry, and sometimes she would sit in the kitchen with her best friend Rita Sherman, talking and listening to music drifting in from the RCA console in the living room. She still did all of these things, but now Ma rushed through the chores so that she could accomplish them all before her shift at the factory started. As for my daddy, he had worked as a sales manager at the stockyards before going overseas, and his job required him to take frequent trips to Dallas, Houston, and Austin, and even when his work didn’t take him out of town, we didn’t see much of him. He liked to spend his evenings at the Longhorn Tavern talking with “the boys” or playing cards over to Deke Williams’ house. What little time we had spent together had been on the edge of Kramer Lake where we’d fished for catfish and bass, or up north in the scrublands hunting wild pigs. Those excursions had been rare and had all but dwindled to nothing before he’d been called to service. He gave me my bicycle when I was seven, but didn’t have the time to teach me how to ride, so I’d done it myself, leaving a lot of my knee and elbow skin on the street in the process, and for Christmas one year he gave me a baseball glove, but he’d never had the time to toss me a ball. I hated thinking that he’d never get the chance – hated thinking he’d never come home.

The summer had been dry. Too dry, some folks said. The old men who gathered at Milton’s Barbershop to play pinochle talked about drought and what it would do to the crops. I didn’t know much about that. I just knew the dust was heavy, and the gnats were swarming, and nothing really came into focus no matter what the time of day.

“It’d be worth it. Skeeter bites ain’t nothing compared to riding around in this. All the dirt sticking to my neck and arms. Feel like I got scabbed over head to toe.”

Spy Commander was a game we’d built around a cheap tin spyglass Bum had received for his birthday. Whenever the notion hit us, we’d write the name of a neighbor on a scrap of paper, and that was our assignment. Since my mother worked the swing shift and since Bum stayed over at my house more times than not that summer, Bum and I could go out late at night, and we’d carry the spyglass like it was government issue. Then we’d find an advantageous angle – a tree branch, some shrubs, the roof of a shack – and we’d observe whoever’s name appeared on our assignment sheet, the glass taking us through windows and into living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. We didn’t know our game was against the law, though I guess we both knew it was wrong. I suppose it wouldn’t have been any fun if it weren’t.

At home, I reminded Bum to be quiet, because my mother would be asleep for at least another hour, and I fixed us glasses of tea, retrieving the secret sugar tin from my daddy’s tackle box, which Ma kept in the pantry. Only a half-inch of sugar covered the bottom of the tin. I showed it to Bum and he shook his head and I returned it to the pantry, knowing that even a spoonful would likely be missed.

With our glasses empty and placed carefully in the sink, we crept to my room and changed into our swimming shorts, and then left the house, wandered down to the field at the lake’s edge. Only a few people lounged on the grass or splashed in the water. The men that remained in town were at work, and so were many of the women. Besides, most folks gathered at a park on the southern edge of the lake for sunbathing and swimming, which made this little patch something of an oasis for the neighborhood. I saw Little Lenny Elliot talking excitedly with a bunch of older kids on the right, and Mrs. Lafferty lying on her back on a plaid blanket in a blue bathing suit that was so tight it looked like her thighs and chest were attempting to escape like a butterfly from a chrysalis. I didn’t immediately recognize any of the people in the water, except for my neighbor, the German.

Mr. Lang bobbed with his back to us, looking across the lake at the finger of land owned by Jerome Blevins. A great mane of pine and oak rose over the low hills there in the west, sweeping north and south along the lake’s perimeter.

I always enjoyed seeing my neighbor. Sometimes I thought he was the only man left in my neighborhood, which more and more resembled a land of women and children. He pushed through the water toward the shore and climbed over a narrow beach of rocks to the grass. After yanking a towel from the limb of a pecan tree, he began scrubbing his face and hair. “The water’s good,” he said.