Summer of My German Soldier (23 page)

“Well, just the same, it didn’t sound like God. I think, actually, it was truth. Truth growing inside like a baby, and for a long time it was just too little, too weak to say anything. But day by day it gains strength.”

“And to what use is you gonna put this truth?”

“Well, maybe, I don’t know right at this moment, but I do know that in spite of everything I did and everything people say about me I don’t feel bad, not anymore. I’m not bad, and right now that seems important.”

Ruth drew me to her and I could tell that she understood too.

21. Rise up singing

T
OGETHER WE WATCHED
an icy rain make slapping sounds against the window. After a while Ruth said something, something about her galoshes which I didn’t quite hear, probably because I had become too deeply encased in comfort. With my eyes closed, feeling the warmth of Ruth against me, I could believe in so many things. Ruth had never been fired; I had never been found out; and Anton had never been killed. He was waiting for me now, alive in
the hide-out, and when night came, we’d go away. Morocco or Mexico. Somewhere, anywhere, together.

“And I was halfways out the door when I said to myself, ain’t no guarantees about no weather so I went right back and got ’em.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I’m glad you remembered.”

We fell into quiet again, and it was comfortable. Then Ruth began humming and soon she found the words, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen. Glory hallelujah.”

“I don’t want to go home again,” I said with a suddenness that surprised even me.

“Well, you ain’t got nowhere else for going. You’s too old for ’dopting and too young for marrying.”

“Even so—”

She looked me full in the face. “Even so what? What you planning on doing, girl?”

“I ain’t—I’m not planning on anything ’cause I can’t think of anything to plan on! I just don’t want to look back. If they didn’t like me before all this happened, they’re sure not going to love me now. So what I was thinking was I might get a job. Go somewhere.”

“So you thought you’d up and run away and find yourself a job, that what you thought, girl?” I recognized her I-ain’t-gonna-listen-to-none-of-your-nonsense voice. “Well, now I’m right glad you told me ’cause ole Ruth can tell you something. I keeps a clean house, minds the chillun, and cooks the evening supper, and for doing all these things it takes me six workdays to earn seven dollars and fifty cents. Now how many of those things can you do? And how much you reckon you’d be earning for doing them?”

“There are other jobs.”

“There’s plenty more jobs. They got judges, doctors, and sheriffs. Which one you qualified for, girl?”

“There has to be something.”

“There is something. Now, you listen hard ’cause Ruth gonna tell you jest like I’d tell my own child, which you is! You is goin’ back home and finishing up with your high school education. Nevah you mind what folks say, most folks don’t know what they is saying nohow. Then you tells your daddy that you wants to go ’way to college to be somethin’. And you bees somethin’! A teacher or a nurse, don’t matter what you takes a notion to being as long as it’s something.”

“I know the something I’d like to be,” I said, pausing just long enough to build interest. “A reporter. I already have my first assignment and my
nom de plume
too.”

“Your what?”

“
Nom de plume.
Pen name. What do you think of Antonia Alexander?”

“Antonia Alexander,” repeated Ruth, like she was tasting the words. “Mighty fancy.”

I was pleased that its elegance hadn’t escaped her. “I got the Antonia from Anton, and I picked Alexander because of the alliteration, both names starting with the same letter.”

“What is you fixin’ to write?”

“An article about the conditions at the Bolton Reformatory for the
Memphis Commercial Appeal.
” I checked Ruth’s face to see if she was as impressed as I was. “Charlene Madlee said if it was good, they’d run the story in their Arkansas edition.”

“I’se glad, Honey Babe. You shore is gonna be somethin’.” Ruth gave a sigh filled with pride for my future accomplishments.
“And then you won’t have to go home ever again, less’n you want to.”

“I guess sometime I’ll have to come home again to see you.”

I heard the footsteps first and then the rattling of keys.

Miss Laud appeared in the archway. “Visiting time is over. Separate and leave immediately.”

“Not yet, Miss Laud, please. Ruth just now got here.”

“She has been here for thirty minutes. Her time is up. Leave immediately.”

I knew I was going to beg. “Miss Laud, please, she came so far. She’s the only visitor I’ve had since I’ve been here, and she’s the only one I’m gonna get, I know.” The cracks sounded in my voice.

“Miss Laud, if you’d kindly be so kind—” Ruth knew what to say. She’d listen to Ruth—“as to give us a few more minutes to say our last minute things, that’d help make the parting less hurtful.”

Miss Laud’s eyes jumped, all the time jumping from Ruth to me and back again. Something about them I saw for the first time. There was the palest circle of blue surrounding pupils the size of points on an ice pick. Miss Laud raised a trembling finger and pointed it toward me. “That’s why you’re in trouble. Not happy getting what others got, are you?” She shook her head. “Trouble is you’re a greedy, spoiled girl. Don’t like anything we try to give you, do you? Don’t like our religion, don’t like our laundry, and you don’t think our food is worth eating. You told that to one of the girls, didn’t you? Tell the truth!”

She waited for me to answer her charges, but the only answer I gave was a direct stare.

She wet her lips with her tongue. “Truth is you only like Nigras and Nazis!”

“Miss Laud!” said Ruth in as loud a voice as I’d ever heard her use. “Leave the child alone! I’se goin’ now. See me goin’?”

I threw my arms around Ruth’s neck. “Take me with you. Find a way to take me with you!”

“Shush, Honey Babe, shush now.”

“Don’t leave me here, Ruth! Please, please don’t leave me alone.”

“Honey Babe, you know better’n to ask Ruth to do what she jest ain’t got the power to do.” Ruth patted my cheeks as she wiped away the wetness. “Everything gonna be all right,” she whispered. “One fine day, you is gonna wake up and your heart gonna rise up singing, everything gonna be all right.”

“Wallace!” shouted Miss Laud. “Wallace, Rogers! Here! Come here!”

I hung onto Ruth with all my might; she was my life raft and without her the icy waters were waiting to pull me under.

Footsteps raced across linoleum. As Matron Wallace and Matron Rogers came through the archway Ruth raised her hand as though she were stopping traffic. “You leave this child be! Now, I’m a-telling you, jest
leave
this child be!”

The traffic stopped short. The matrons looked as though their very breath had been sucked out of them.

“Jest seems like,” said Ruth under her breath, yet loud enough for hearing, “some white folks ain’t nevah learned how to be decent.”

And with her arm around my waist and her strength supporting
my weakness she led me through the archway and into the center hall. “Go on back to your room, Patty Babe,” she whispered. “Go on back.”

The three matrons had followed us at a respectful distance, but Miss Laud’s distance was the most respectful of all. Suddenly, Ruth whirled on her. “Miss Laud, the red shopping bag in the waiting room. Patty’s Christmas. Would you fetch it, please?”

The head matron looked confused. She turned to Matron Wallace. “Well, get it, Wallace! Don’t just stand there. Go get the bag!” Then Miss Laud started up the flight of stairs followed closely by Miss Rogers.

As soon as Miss Wallace dropped the bag at Ruth’s feet she took the stairs, two at a time. And it was just Ruth and me.

“I reckon they is gonna give us our good-bye time, after all,” said Ruth.

I tried to sound all put back together. “Well, Ruth, I sure do appreciate your visit.”

She gave me some gentle pats on the back. “And you be strong and don’t let them folks get you down ’cause better times a-coming for you. I feels it in my bones.”

“Do you really? You really and truly think so?”

“I shore enough do.”

Yet Ruth’s face was filled with the deepest kind of sadness.

“And for you, Ruth, are better times coming for you too?”

“Mostly things don’t get no better for old colored ladies.”

“Oh, but I want them to be. I want everything to be good for you. Everything!”

She turned her head. “Good-bye, Honey Babe.” She released her hold on me and where her arms had been turned
cold. It felt as though something inside me were being torn away. I watched her walk with careful steps back to the bench where she had left her belongings. And watching her, she seemed older and more fragile than I had remembered.

Suddenly I had to give her something, something like the world! I quickly indexed the valuables from my upstairs room—the blue Schaeffer pen and pencil set (a birthday present from my grandparents), a collection of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, and
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Nothing there for Ruth. She moved slowly towards the door, buttoning her gray coat.

“I don’t have anything to give you,” I said. “I have nothing at all to give you.”

“You got love to give, Honey Babe, ain’t nothing better’n that.”

“Just the same, I wish I could—say, how about taking back some of the chicken breasts to eat on the bus?”

She clicked open her simulated alligator pocketbook, giving me a view of the inside. “I got me a tuna-fish sandwich and a hard-boiled egg, and I reckon that’s plenty for me. Thank you kindly.” Then Ruth reached out, patted my cheek, and with aging steps moved towards the door.

I watched her. It was like watching my very own life raft floating away towards the open sea. And yet somewhere in my mind’s eye I thought I could see the faintest outline of land. Then it came to me that maybe that’s the only thing life rafts are supposed to do. Taking the shipwrecked, not exactly to the land, but only in view of land. The final mile being theirs alone to swim.

As Ruth pulled open the heavy front door my heart felt as though it was spilling over with so many things I wanted
to say, but I didn’t have the words for a single one of them. For a moment I thought I was about to call out, “Good-bye,” but I didn’t. The door closed. And the moment and Ruth were gone.

For moments or minutes I stood there. Not really moving. Barely managing to tread water. Was it possible for a beginning swimmer to actually make it to shore? It might take me my whole lifetime to find out.

Sneak Preview

Morning is a Long Time Coming

1

A
T THE VERY MOMENT
M
RS
T
URNER BEGAN PIANO PLAYING
“Pomp and Circumstance,” we graduates were given the nod to march on “with dignity.” Our gym was divided for the occasion into two equal sections of people, most of whose behinds overlapped their narrow metal folding chairs. Even though a gym is always a gym, the freshly strung crepe paper, along with the grandeur of Sir Edward Elgar’s music, made it feel as though this was a place where something important was about to happen.

But unless I’m mightily mistaken, it didn’t smell altogether different. For I could still smell the sour sweat of yesterday’s basketball players mingling with the soap and perfumed dusting powder of today’s graduates.

“With dignity,” I took my seat on the stage along with the other seventeen graduates of Jenkinsville High School (class of 1950) and began searching the audience for familiar faces. I knew practically everybody by sight and most of those I could hang a name onto. In the first row was the biggest landowner in all of Rice County, Arkansas, Mr. J. G. (for James Grady) Jackson and his wife. And next to them was Gussie Fields, who has been clerking in my father’s store since even before her husband died.

And two rows behind Gussie were my father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Harry M. (for Morry) Bergen, and my kid sister, Sharon (alias “the pretty Bergen girl” and I’ve even heard her referred to as “the sweet Bergen girl”). It’s her black hair with just a hint of a widow’s peak and her oval face that encourages people to say, “She’s the spitting image of her mother.” But the thing that really amazes me about Sharon is that she’s the only one of us Bergens who seemed to be born in this world knowing exactly the right thing to say … and do.

And next to Sharon are my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Fried, who drove all the way from Memphis—forty miles—just to see me graduate.

Standing before the lectern, Superintendent Begley (he hates being called Coach Begley on formal occasions) was saying, “We’re all real pleased and honored today to have as our commencement speaker one of Arkansas’s up-and-coming young politicians. so lets give a big hand of welcome to, State Representative Billy Bruce Stebbins.”

A whole burst of welcoming applause greeted Mr. Stebbins, who folks say is a good bet to be governor someday. He’s got about every qualification. A few years ago he was a star football player at the University of Arkansas and later on he killed enough Germans to qualify as a genuine World War II hero. And frankly speaking, his poppa’s money—the E. P. Stebbins of E. P. Stebbins & Sons, Ginners—won’t hurt him. Not a bit.

With his back against us graduates and his face toward the guests, Billy Bruce Stebbins said that he was here today to bring a “personal message” to us graduating seniors. Right off, it struck me strange that anybody would say something personal with their back against you, but maybe that was only because he hadn’t as yet reached the personal part.

“Six years ago, I was honored to have helped my country win their world war. I was there, ladies and gentlemen, when America called me. I was there when, with some help from our allies, this great Christian country of ours crushed the Axis powers to smithereens.” He stuck his hands in his pockets in a way that showed that here at last was one man who’d never run from a fight.