The German (21 page)

“Your father is missing,” Ma said with a cracking voice.

Then the tears came, and she pulled me into her arms, whispering about hope and prayers and telling me to be brave. From her hair and neck came the substantial fragrance of factory oil, and I remembered that before the war, she’d always smelled of flour and cinnamon. “Missing” became an enigma. It carried too many meanings in those moments, effectively making it meaningless. My father wasn’t dead; he was “missing,” and I no longer knew what the word meant, but every time the word appeared in my mind, a shock of sickness hit me in the stomach, an ice-cold spear driven through my navel, revolving and jabbing the tender tissues.

The word filled me, as unrelenting as the reek of factory oil wafting from my mother’s flesh. There was no Cowboy. Harold Ashton and David Williams had never existed. I couldn’t even picture my disturbed neighbor’s face. There was only the feel of my mother’s arms around me, the oil offending my nose, and the cryptic word.

The house soon filled with familiar faces. Rita Sherman was the first to arrive. She stormed into the house and immediately commandeered the place, setting on a pot of coffee and ushering me into my room to “clean up for company.” My mother’s parents arrived soon after, and my grandmother went to the table to join the other women while my grandfather stood in the corner of the kitchen – his pants hiked high on his great belly and arms crossed – with a hard frown cutting across his face as he gazed down on the women. Neighbors began arriving. I walked from the living room to the kitchen and back again, sorrowful faces hovering over me like ugly blossoms on tall plants, and they all said the same things: “We’ll pray for Fred,” “He’s a strong man,” “You be brave for your daddy.”

Soon the odors from cooking food filled the house. The women who had gathered in the kitchen had begun the process of preparing a feast, and the men sat on the sofa and in the chairs in the living room, speaking quietly and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t distract myself with frying catfish or making biscuits. The freezing spear in my belly kept twisting, and I thought to dislodge the point with movement not understanding that it was the thing dragging me.

Unable to grasp what was expected of me, I disappeared into my bedroom and went to the window and pressed my cheek against the cool glass. A row of cars had formed in the dirt track next to the road. Across the street, Mr. Lang stood in his front yard staring at my father’s house, and the sight of him incensed me.

This was his fault. Men like him had captured my father and thrown him in a cell, and they would cut him and beat him, and they’d laugh as they tortured him because that’s the way Germans were. I thought about what I’d seen through Mr. Lang’s window, the thing he’d done to that man – the worst thing one man can do to another – and the icy blade in my belly changed. It burned hot, searing the tissues so recently chilled.

I looked at his scarred face bathed in sunlight and found it monstrous. My fists tightened at my sides, mentally daring the German to come across the street and try to walk into my father’s house. Right then, I believed I’d kill him if he tried it.

The Kraut son of a bitch.

The disgusting queer.

~ ~ ~

I was still sitting on the windowsill when my grandfather walked into my room. The German had disappeared into the shadows of his porch some time ago, but I kept my eyes on his house the way you keep an eye on a rabid dog in a distant field. My grandfather closed the bedroom door and crossed his arms over his enormous belly. The frown remained carved deep. Swollen pockets of wrinkled skin surrounded his eyes like small wasp nests, and his fleshy cheeks were red as if sunburned.

“Come away from the window, son,” he told me.

I cast a final look at the yellow house across the street, and then did as I was asked, except I didn’t know where else in the room to go. I settled for the bed and dropped onto it.

“You got a lot of people out there come to pay respects for your daddy,” he said, his voice thick and warbling as if his vocal cords were as laden with fat as his belly. “It’s not right you leaving your Ma alone with all of them folks, but I suspect you need some time to grieve on your own, and it’s good not to make a show of it.”

“Daddy’s not dead,” I muttered.

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” my grandfather said, “but one way or the other the man you knew won’t be coming home. If he got himself hurt bad or if he got himself captured by the Krauts he’s going to be changed. Even if those things didn’t happen, he’ll be changed because war does that to a man. Sometimes it’s for the worse and sometimes it’s for the better. You just don’t know, and you have to be ready for that, because he may not be able to tell you it himself, and I know your ma isn’t good at explaining things like this – complicated and all. So the sooner you get it in your head as a fact, the easier it’s gonna be. We’re praying your daddy is alive, but sometimes just being alive isn’t the best thing for a man.”

My grandfather had never said so many words to me before, and I wanted more than anything for the fat old man to shut up. His advice smacked of cruelty and inevitability, and maybe he didn’t want Daddy to be dead like he said, but it sure sounded like he’d already buried the man.

“You think over what I said, and then you come on back out to be with your ma.”

“Yes, sir.”

Except I had no intention of thinking over what he’d said. My mind already raced with terrible thoughts of my own and there was no room for the callus old man’s theories. After rising from the bed, I returned to the window and glared at the yellow house across the street.

The German was probably inside soiling some strange man, treating him like an animal. The memory of what I’d witnessed returned virulently, making my face hot and my stomach knot with sickness. He might have been killing another boy in there as friends and neighbors gathered in my daddy’s house to pay their respects.

Eventually I left my room and found that the number of people in the house had tripled and swarms of concerned men and women huddled in the kitchen and living room, reminding me of the repast following David Williams’ funeral, only no one had put on their Sunday clothes, and amid all of the quietly chatting neighbors and family, I wanted to scream, “He’s not dead. He’s just missing. Don’t you stupid hayseeds know the difference?” but I kept the fury contained and wandered through the crowd, accepting premature condolences and falsely optimistic words of faith, prayer, and hope. Every palm that fell on my shoulder or patted my back took a little of me away on it. My grandfather stood against the back door, arms still crossed, watching over the room like a clean-shaved Santa Claus supervising a crew of inept elves. Women fussed and bickered at the stove as if they could create an adequate cure for grief by adding the right amount of salt or butter to a recipe. Ma sat at the kitchen table, flanked by her mother and Rita Sherman, and I pushed my way through to them. My grandfather approved of my actions with a shallow nod of his round head.

My presence was wholly unnecessary and I saw that right from the start. Ma cried and the women at her sides held and consoled her as best they could, and I thought to leave her to them, worried that the women would turn their comfort on me. Imagining their soft perfumed bodies crushing in from both sides struck me as no different from drowning, and my nerves were too agitated to endure such a suffocating prospect. It was better to move and keep moving. I stopped long enough to put my arm around my mother to let her know I was there, and she stroked my cheek and asked if I wanted something to eat, and I told her I didn’t, and I stayed for a minute – though it felt more like an hour – and excused myself, making my way back to the living room, not checking with my grandfather for his approval.

Then I was back in the theater of the absurd, its performers sending me conflicting messages. “You be strong. You’re the man of the house now.” “He’ll be home before Christmas, just you wait and see.” “He was a fine man. You should be very proud.” “He just got separated from his men. I bet he’s already back at camp and the telegram hasn’t gotten here yet.” And they insisted on patting me and squeezing my arm and shaking my hand, and bits of me clung to their hands like mud, and before I’d made it to the front door, I felt empty. Even my anger had receded to a ticking rhythm at my temples, hardly distinguishable from the hum of desolation in my chest.

More people had gathered on the porch, but there was nothing left of me for them to take, so I let them bestow their hope and grief and I let them pat my back, and I stared at the German’s house across the street. Dust and pollen – or maybe it was just my agitation – cast a scrim of grit across the scene. I imagined I could see every sun-bleached speck in the air, every piece of filth that separated me from the degenerate who’d chosen my street to live on.

I thought of Daddy trapped in that house, imagined his Nazi captors had shipped him home to be tortured by our neighbor. The German’s disgusting grimace eclipsed my father’s face, and his muscled body moved perversely against him, and then Hugo Jones was standing beside me, and he said, “Hey, kid.”

The blemishes on his face looked particularly inflamed on that afternoon, and it occurred to me that perhaps Hugo wore his anger in his skin instead of in his chest the way I had before its retreat to tick away like a beetle in my head.

It never occurred to me to ask why Hugo had come to my house. We weren’t friends and our families weren’t close, but the house had filled with a spectrum of well wishers – some familiar and others nameless, so his presence struck me as normal enough.

“It’s just we can’t take any chances these days,” he said. “It’s like we’re at war here, too, and I know you’re not a snitch or anything – you’re a good guy – but when I heard you were following us….”

Though I hadn’t been following him and his friends that night, I didn’t bother correcting him. Instead I kept my eyes on the shadowed porch of the German’s house.

“Sheriff didn’t do a damn thing about that faggot,” Hugo said as if we’d been talking about my neighbor all along. “My daddy told him what we saw, told him everything, and the fool sheriff went on over to have a nice chat with the guy, like they were buddies or something.”

“That’s not right,” I replied.

“Damn straight it ain’t right. He’s over there killing our friends. Hell, he’s probably got Little Lenny tied up in his attic right now, and what’s the sheriff doing about it? Nothing, that’s what. If Sheriff Tom Rabbit had an ounce of man about him, we’d already have that Nazi fucker strung up in the center of town.”

“Somebody ought to do something,” I said.

“You’re right about that. Get some men and some guns and show that faggot what God thinks of his Nazi ass.”

Then someone was calling my name, and I turned to the front walk and saw Bum hurrying over the grass. At first, he looked like a stranger or someone long removed from my acquaintance, as if he didn’t belong in my life anymore. Sweat ran over his face and had painted dark ovals on his shirt beneath his armpits, and his black hair lay messily over his brow. Before he reached the porch, I threw another glance at the yellow house, and the last words I’d said to Hugo whispered through my thoughts:
Somebody ought to do something.

August 9, 1944 – translated from the German

I feel sad for my neighbor Tim today. I hear the cars pulling up to the house and the people in the street, and my first thought is that Tim and his mother are having an afternoon party. The drawn expressions of concern on the guests’ faces quickly snuff such light-hearted thoughts. I walk up to a man and woman just stepping out of their car. Both appear to have been molded from bread dough, their faces lumpy and pale. When I inquire of this flabby couple what is happening, the woman scowls at the sound of my voice, but the man responds curtly as if speaking to a servant, telling me that Tim’s father is missing in battle, and the man adds that I should think twice about visiting the house.

I take his meaning and retreat to my yard, where I stand for some time watching the grieving people arrive and those who have gathered on the porch, and I think that I should pay my respects, but understand I may not be welcome as I share the nationality of those who have hurt this family, and besides have nothing in the way of gift – food or flower – to offer with my sympathies, so I stand at the foot of my porch and observe until the ringing of the phone draws me inside.

It is the unremarkable man, and my sorrow for Tim and his family is distracted. A tingle rises on the back of my neck and trickles down my shoulder blades to gather and warm in my chest. My physical reaction to the sound of his voice startles me, and I soon feel the pull of a smile stretching my lips. He tells me that his mother and sister will be returning soon and he cannot stay on the telephone long, but he wanted to hear my voice, and I tell him that I am glad he has called.

“I may be in Barnard in a couple of days,” he says. “The factory orders are still coming in, and I have a meeting with a manager at the paper mill to look at some of their equipment.”

“Then you should come to dinner,” I tell him.