Summer of My German Soldier (18 page)

The sheriff rubbed his chin. “Did anything else happen? I mean, did he hurt you in any way?”

“Oh, no, sir.”

“Well, did he touch you anywhere on your body?”

“Oh, no, sir. Except—”

“Except what?” Something of the guns-and-bullets quality returned to his voice.

“Except when we touched hands to shake good-bye.”

Sheriff Cauldwell released a low chuckle, shaking his head. “And that’s all there was to it, huh? Where was your colored woman when you were feeding this man?”

“Well, she was in the house, cleaning the living room, I think. But she didn’t know anything about his being there.”

The sheriff was looking at me with his heavy, yet strong-jawed face, and I got to liking him, this man of power who didn’t like to hurt. “And you’re saying your colored woman was close enough that if you hollered she’d have heard you and come a-running?”

“Oh, yes, sir! She would have run so fast—Ruth wouldn’t let anybody hurt me.”

Sheriff Cauldwell let out a deep sigh. “Well, now, Harry, I’m gonna tell you; I’m real satisfied. You?”

“No, I’m not.” My father’s voice sounded stretched, like rubber bands, to the breaking point. “I’m a long way from being satisfied. Why’d he give her the ring, can you answer me that? Twenty-four carat gold?”

“I reckon I’m not above asking. Why did he give you the ring, Patty?”

“Well, I mean, you want to know the real reason?” I asked, waiting for my brain to send forth some kind of message.

“Yep,” said Sheriff Cauldwell.

I rubbed the ring’s indented crest across my lips and waited for its powers to surge forth. “Well, I suppose it’s what he said to me after eating the food—” Then the reason came to me, dropping like a highly accurate weapon into my shooting hand. I turned and aimed it directly at my father. “‘Patty,’ said the old man, ‘I could go through this world proud and happy if only God had seen fit to give me a daughter exactly like you.’”

16. My Summer, My Anton

T
HE SUMMER OF
my Anton was gone; fall was here and winter was coming. It felt like the right time to add up the gains and subtract the losses.

My losses were only one, only him. And yet that far outdistanced any gains. My fingers held his ring while my eyes explored, for an uncountable time, the mysteries of its princely crest.

There has been something to the good, I guess, because
somehow it’s different with my father. He sees me differently, maybe with more power. Yes, that’s it! I tried to remember how it came to be and at what moment. I only knew that it was there, unmistakably there. The new ingredient wasn’t love, it wasn’t as good. It was, I guess, respect. Respect for a person who he’s incapable of destroying.

I thought of last April when the tornado came roaring through town like the Missouri Pacific, taking with it the roof on Mr. McDonald’s dairy barn. Tommy McDonald himself told me how all eleven of the milking cows were hurt except for the one which was outright killed. Only one animal, Esmeralda, a ten-year-old striped cat with one eye, survived intact.

And that’s what he didn’t know before. He knows that I’m an Esmeralda too for, whatever he may say or do, I’m going to survive pretty much intact. One gain.

Then there’s my mother. Any gains there? Same mother with the same little hit-the-victim-and-run comments. But now at least it’s not my hair. She has a newer one: “How come Edna Louise has all the friends?” Just being in the same room with you, Mother, is like being feast for a thousand starving insects.

Tally it up: one loss, one gain, and one tie score.

From Anton’s hide-out I watched a random leaf from a sturdy oak cut its family ties and float free on a small current of air.

Wish I were like that leaf. Someday, when the time is ripe, I’ll soar away on my own air current. At eighteen the law says a person is no longer a child, and I’ll have graduated from high school. Then there’s the war bond, the one whole thousand-dollar war bond that Grandma and Grandpa Fried
bought for me. Did they say for my college education? I don’t remember. Well, what if they did? A person can do whatever she wants with her own money.

How far is it? And how much does it cost? A thousand dollars must be money enough, yes, of course, I can do it. But why didn’t I think of it before? Suddenly I felt as though I had something to look forward to.

Something that I had once said to Sister Parker now seemed to carry the seeds of prophecy. That story I told about the ring and the man who promised me I would be rewarded on my eighteenth birthday. Could a made-up story carry a prophecy?

It was the most natural thing in the world. The war would be over by then, and surely for Anton I could grow at least a little beautiful. And Greyhound buses go to New York and boats to Germany and trains to Göttingen. Six more years isn’t tomorrow—but it isn’t forever either. I’d be eighteen and grown-up with gentle curves and long shiny hair. My hand felt some of the remaining brittle handiwork of Mrs. Reeves, and I remembered what Ruth is always saying, “Folks keep forgetting that wishing don’t make nothing so, but prayer sometimes do.”

“Oh, Lord,” I called out like he had suddenly grown hard of hearing, “please give me long beautiful hair for him to love, Amen.” And then as an afterthought, “And a bosom.” My hand struck across the flat terrain of my chest. “I want a bosom of my very own!” Then it hit me that what I had asked for might come under the heading of blasphemy, so I quickly added, “If it’s not too much trouble. I mean if it’s O.K. with you that I should have one—I mean two.”

“Patty! Oh-de-ho-ho, Patty!” Ruth always had this way of
making a call from the back porch sound like a little song. She was waiting for me with a put-upon look. “How come he’s a-coming home this time a day? What does he want to see you fer?”

“Who’s coming home? Who wants to see me?”

“Him. Your daddy.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” I looked into Ruth’s face, but the only thing there was a reflection of my own confusion. “Did he sound mad?”

Ruth’s face registered mild surprise. “No. Not any madder than usual.”

The tension gushed from my body like air from a punctured inner tube. “He just wants me to do something for him, don’t you think?”

Ruth nodded in agreement. “Now, whatever he wants done, you jest shake your head and tell him, ‘Yes, sir.’ You hear me talking to you, girl?”

I gave Ruth a half nod.

“And if you knows of a faster way, or a cheaper way, or even a nicer way, you jest keeps that information to yourself. He don’t wanna hear nothing like that from you.”

Annoyed, I answered, “I know all that.” Yet, I was grateful for the reminder. I gave my ring a kiss for luck. “You don’t suppose Sheriff Cauldwell told my father that he could take my ring away, do you?” Then I answered my own question. “The sheriff wouldn’t do such a thing. Besides, this is the most valuable thing I own. It’s like—like my Bible, know that?”

“It tells one of them same stories the Bible do, love thy neighbor.”

I pulled the ring from my finger, dropping it into the
pocket of Ruth’s apron. “Well, nobody’s going to take it from me, not as long as I live.”

From the distance of two blocks I heard the motor of the car gun itself up like it was just beginning the journey of a thousand miles, all up mountain. I didn’t want him to think he had me concerned, so I grabbed a copy of the
Reader’s Digest
and belly-dived to the bed.

The front door opened and slammed shut. I heard the sound of his voice without catching his words. But Ruth’s voice came through unmistakably clear: “In her room, I reckon.”

As the door swung open my eyes continued keeping company with the
Reader’s Digest.
A rattle from a throat sent my gaze towards the door. Two men. And my father too. What do they want?
Danger
!

One of the men took a step forward. “Well, young lady, I’m Mr. Pierce. Remember me?”

Yes, so that’s who it is. “No sir,” I lied.

“Well, I just stopped by to chat.”

“You tell him everything he wants to know,” said my father, “or so help me you’re gonna wish you’d never been born.”

“Lots of times I wish that,” I said in a normal voice, surprised that my thoughts came out in hearable words.

“God damn you, girl,” he said, his face fired with sudden redness. “Who in hell do you think you’re talking to?”

Mr. Pierce looked shocked or frightened or both. “Now, Mr. Bergen, please. She’s only a kid.”

I watched my father’s face change to a color that more closely resembled purple. “A kid! Now, you listen here, Mr.
FBI”—he pointed a trembling finger at me—“that’s no little kid, never has been, ’cause when she was born her brain was bigger than yours is now. Understand?”

Was it possible that he was actually giving me a compliment?

Mr. Pierce’s ears seemed to catch my father’s coloring. “I fail to understand what insulting me has to do with the matter at hand?”

“I wasn’t insulting you, I was warning you. You just be careful of that girl, she can make lies sound like the truth and the truth sound like a pack of vile lies. But no matter how she lies, she wouldn’t spit on a Nazi if his body was on fire.”

Pierce nodded. “Let’s get on with it. I’d like to ask your daughter a few questions.”

“So question. Question!”

Pierce took out a gold fountain pen from his breast pocket and opened a stenographic pad to a clean page. “Tell me,” he said after a pause, “what grade are you in?”

“Seventh,” I said, relieved at the way the questions began. I’d feel even more relief if I knew what this was about.

“Who are your teachers?”

“Teachers? I only have one,” I said. “Miss Hooten, unless you—do you want to know who my study hall teacher is?”

“All right,” he answered.

All right he did or all right he didn’t? I had the feeling I shouldn’t make any mistakes. “Do you want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Coach Rawlings,” I said as Mr. Pierce wrote something in his pad. “But he’s not my teacher or anything. We can go to the library on Fridays and read or study, and he just sits
there and keeps the kids quiet.” I knew I was making too much of it.

Pierce looked up from his pad. “You have a lot of friends?”

“Well, I guess so,” I answered, grateful my mother wasn’t here to contradict.

“Name them,” said Pierce.

“Well,” I said, thinking of Anton and Ruth, “they’re just kids.”

“Who are they?”

“Well, there’s Edna Louise Jackson, she’s one of my friends.” I wondered if Edna Louise would ever list me as one of her friends. “And Juanita Henkins, and I guess, Donna Rhodes. I guess those are my main friends.”

“Anybody else?”

I thought of good-old-raggedy-old Freddy Dowd who couldn’t be mentioned in my father’s presence. “No, sir, that’s about all.”

Mr. Pierce looked down. “Patricia, did you within the last five months give food to some tramp, somebody that you’d never seen before?”

It was plain he’d been talking to the sheriff and now he wanted to find out if the tramp could be Anton. “Yes, sir, I sure did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, sir, during the summer I met this man and he looked an awful lot like a tramp and he told me that he hadn’t eaten in—I forgot how long. Is it important? Should I try to remember?”

“Just go on with the story,” said Pierce.

“Anyway, he asked if I could spare him some food and I
told him that I could. And so I did—give him some food from our fridge. Is that what you want to know?”

“What was his name?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t tell me.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Just some old clothes that weren’t clean.”

“What did he look like?”

“He didn’t look like anything too special. He looked tired ’cause his eyes had this redness like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep.”

“About how old would you say he was?”

“Well—” I began conjuring up my original vision of the tramp, the one I had used for Sister Parker and Sheriff Cauldwell. “He wasn’t too young, some of his whiskers were getting grey. He may even have been forty, as old as that.”

“Anything of a special nature that you noticed about the tramp?”

“Well, if there was any one thing I guess I’d have to say it was his politeness. He thanked me for every bit of food that I brought him.”

Then Pierce asked his height, but before I had finished telling him that he wasn’t too tall the FBI man was off on another question. “Did he talk like people from these parts?”

“Well, sir—” As he deliberately speeded up his questions, I deliberately slowed down my answers. “I’m not sure that he did.”

The other FBI man led my father from the room saying something that sounded like, but it couldn’t be, “Show me your clothes.”

“How did he talk different?”

“Well, for one thing, he had polite manners.”

“You told me that. I want to know about his accent. Did he, for example, sound like a Southerner?”

“No, sir, I really don’t think so.”

Pierce picked up a briefcase at his feet. “Where do you think he came from?”

“New York,” I said automatically before even deciding whether it could do any harm. How could that help the FBI? After all, Anton wasn’t from New York. Still, I felt uneasy.

Pierce slipped a glossy black-and-white photograph from his briefcase. “Is this the tramp?” he asked, placing the picture before me.

It was him. Anton! “Sir?”

“I asked you if this man was the tramp?”

“Well, sir—,” I said, not really sure of what to say. I couldn’t quite figure out if it would hurt or help Anton if the FBI believed he was the tramp.

“Surely, you know whether or not this was the tramp. You gave him food; he gave you his ring. Why aren’t you wearing it?”

“I lost it.”

Pierce struck the photograph with his fingers. “Well, is it him?”

I held the photo close and then out to arm’s length. Ideas crashed head-on into other ideas. One idea revived itself: Make Mr. Pierce believe that I want to help him. “Well, Mr. Pierce,” I said, finding his eyes. “It sure doesn’t look too much like him, although, it could be if he were wearing a disguise. Do you think he wore a disguise?”