Take Me Home (9781455552078) (4 page)

“Which is it?”

Unable to hold the truth back any longer, she took a deep breath and answered, “He asked me to marry him…”

Even though Olivia knew that her father's success as a sheriff came from remaining unfazed by the most unexpected of occurrences, she saw that her revelation had stunned him, even if he didn't let it show for long. He nodded as he puffed on his cigarette, the drag undoubtedly deeper than he'd originally intended.

Now that Olivia had begun, the story tumbled quickly out of her. “He was so wound up, pacing out in front of the hardware store, that I started to worry,” she explained. “I thought something bad must have happened, but the next thing I knew, Billy was down on one knee with a ring in his hand,” she continued. “He proposed, and then…and then…”

“And then?” her father echoed.

“I said ‘yes,'” Olivia answered, finally allowing her hand, and the ring on her finger, to show. At that moment, she finally felt the enormity of her decision, the weight of it; maybe by admitting it to someone else, it had become real.

Olivia had expected her father to frown, to say that she wasn't ready, that she was too young to get married, the same sort of sentiments expressed by his deputy, but instead, he surprised her. John dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushed it beneath his boot, and smiled as he walked over and pulled his daughter close; Olivia was so shocked by his reaction that it took her a moment to return his embrace. After a moment, her father stepped back and said, “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

Too dumbstruck to respond, Olivia could only stare.

Noticing, John said, “Usually when someone decides to get married, they're a bit more excited than this.”

“I'm just…I'm just still in shock I guess…”

“That's understandable,” her father replied. “After I asked for your mother's hand, I stumbled around in a daze for a week or so before things got back to normal. It'll eventually pass.”

“Isn't it normal for a man to ask his prospective bride's father for permission?” Olivia prodded, asking another of the questions that had gnawed at her all afternoon. “Didn't Billy say anything to you about it?”

“Not a word,” John answered. “But what with him getting ready to leave for training, he might not have felt he had time.” Pausing, he added, “If it makes any difference, if he
had
asked, I can't think of a reason why I wouldn't have given him my blessing.”

How about the fact that I don't think I'm in love with him?
Olivia thought.

“Have you told your mother?” John asked.

“Not yet,” she answered with a shake of her blond hair.

“I'm sure she'll be excited.”

Olivia had no reason to doubt her father. Elizabeth Marsten had always encouraged her daughter to better herself through marriage. To her, Billy couldn't have been more ideal; his family was one of the wealthiest in town. She could already hear the shriek of joy that would meet her announcement; just thinking about it made Olivia queasy.

“How much longer does Billy have left before training?” her father asked.

“Just about five weeks.”

Tenderly, John took his daughter's hand in his own, his fingers rough against her skin. “It's not easy being married to a man who'll be heading off to war,” he said. “Your mother might never admit to it, but she suffered plenty while I was gone.”

In 1918, back during the first war in Europe in which the United States took part, Olivia's father had been an i
nfantr
y­man. For months, he'd slogged across mud-strewn battlefields, marched through trenches, fighting against the kaiser's army. Decades later, he still didn't talk about those days, although one of the things he had acquired during that long year of war was an undying hatred of Germans. He enthusiastically supported the war against Hitler and his nation.

Olivia understood what her father was saying, but how could she admit that this was one of the reasons she'd accepted Billy's proposal? That she was afraid that if she had not agreed to marry him, he would go off to fight with a broken heart. That if he were killed in action, she would never be able to forgive herself. Holding her tongue seemed easier.

“I'll manage,” she said simply.

Her father nodded solemnly; Olivia knew that she'd given him no reason to doubt her desire to marry, and it made her ashamed.

“Now run on home,” John said. “Once I finish up with Dale I'll be along so we can celebrate as a family.”

This time, when he took his daughter in his arms, it was Olivia who held him close, her eyes shut tight to hold back tears. Maybe it was because she'd begun to understand what accepting Billy's proposal meant. Or maybe it was because even though she didn't love him, at least not in a romantic way, Olivia couldn't imagine taking back what she'd done; it would kill him inside.

She was going to become Billy Tate's wife, and there was nothing that could change that fact now.

So when a lone tear finally did fall, Olivia wiped it away quickly.

P
ETER
B
ECKER ROCKED
back and forth on his hardback seat as the train jostled its way down the tracks, the sound of its passing steady and rhythmic. Three dozen men shared the train car with him, yet it was oddly quiet; no one spoke, the silence occasionally broken by a cough or sneeze. Most heads were turned to stare out of the windows at the passing landscape. Brilliant sunlight shone down from a cloudless sky, bright on the endless fields as they rushed past, sparkling across the water of trickling rivers and streams, only to disappear when the train passed through a thick copse of trees. Once, a trio of deer had looked up from the tall grass they were eating. Peter would have liked to get up and move around, to take in all of these new yet strangely familiar sights, but that was impossible.

He could be shot just for getting out of his seat.

Heavy iron handcuffs shackled both of Peter's wrists. A chain ran down through a bolt in the floor, connecting him to the man sitting to his right. An American soldier stood two seats in front, his back to the door that led between the train's cars, his gun held at the ready, and his eyes vigilant for the first sign of trouble.

Peter was a German soldier.

He was the enemy.

Nearly three months had passed since Peter's infantry unit had accidentally stumbled onto an American patrol in the forests of western Germany. He still remembered the bitter cold of that day, the way the wind burned the bare skin of his face, but nothing could compare to the icy fear that filled him when the Americans revealed themselves, the morning filled with their shouts demanding surrender. Two of his fellow soldiers had refused and raised their guns, only to be shot full of bullets, dead before their bodies even hit the frozen, snow-covered ground. Wisely, Peter and the rest had done as they were ordered.

After their capture, they had been treated well. For years, Peter and his fellow soldiers had been warned about what would happen to them if they were to fall into Allied hands; that the Americans would torture them mercilessly, shooting them like dogs when they'd had their fill. But that hadn't happened. Far from it, they had been given warm clothes and food, far better than they'd been receiving from Germany's beleaguered home front. Following weeks of endless questions aimed at determining what, if anything, they knew about German war plans, they had ridden trains to the Atlantic coast, boarded enormous transport ships, and then sailed west for the United States. After landing, it was more questions and more trains. Their final destination was to be a system of internment camps in Minnesota. For Peter, all sense of time had been lost; one day bled right into the next.

For all of those on the train, the war was mercifully over.

“When are we getting something to eat?!”

Peter stiffened as the man beside him, the soldier on the other end of his handcuffs' chain, shouted in German, his voice menacing; the suddenness of his voice in the silence of the train car made it sound much louder than it was.

Otto Speer was the rare soldier who relished the violence of war. He was squat and thick-necked, and his hands were so large that his rifle had always looked tiny in them. With short-cropped black hair, dark eyes set a little too closely together, a nose bent awkwardly to one side, probably broken in a tavern brawl, and a jaw that looked as if it had been chiseled out of granite, Otto had been one of the most bloodthirsty members of Peter's unit. A passionate believer in Hitler and the Nazi cause, he constantly railed against the Jews, berated any of his fellow soldiers he felt were shirking their duties, and had once killed a French farmer in cold blood when the man had refused to part with a pair of rabbits, laughing while the man's wife screamed in sorrow. Otto claimed to be a distant relative of Albert Speer, the Nazi armaments minister, but no one believed him. Peter would have expected Otto to be one of the men the Americans had shot dead during their capture, but while Otto was undeniably dangerous, that didn't mean he was stupid. While most of their unit had been dispersed to who-knew-where, sent on different boats and trains to different places, Peter had unfortunately found himself with Otto every step of the way.

“I want something to eat!” he again demanded.

The American soldier was doing his best to ignore Otto, but Peter could see that he was becoming annoyed.

“It's been hours since we last stopped!”

“He doesn't understand a word you're saying,” Peter hissed, trying to defuse the situation before it got worse.

“He might not know the words but he damn well knows the meaning!” Otto snapped, turning his fury on his fellow prisoner. “How many of these pathetic Amerikaner shitholes do we have to go through before we stop?”

Most of the towns they passed whizzed by so fast that there wasn't time for more than a glance: homes with gardens ready for planting; shopkeepers unfurling their awnings, ready to open their businesses; old men behind the wheel of their trucks, idling beside the tracks as they waited for the train to pass; a congregation leaving church, the ringing of bells filling the air. Once, some boys had pelted their car with rocks; Peter had wondered if it was because they knew the train was filled with German prisoners, or if it was just childish fun. It always seemed like it was simply another day in their lives; remembering the destruction of Germany's cities, Peter wondered if any of these Americans truly knew that their nation was at war.

The only time the train stopped was to give the prisoners something to eat and allow them to use the restroom. The breaks were infrequent; it wasn't unusual for Peter's stomach to grumble or for his bladder to feel close to bursting. But instead of simply bearing it like everyone else, Otto had chosen to fight back. It was at moments like this that Peter wished he was sitting somewhere else, anywhere but beside the rabble-rouser who seemed hell-bent on causing a scene.

“How much longer are we going to put up with this?!” Otto roared, rattling the chain on his handcuffs, looking around the cabin as if he was trying to encourage the others to join his tirade.

“Shut up!” the American soldier snapped, his patience at an end.

“The driver of this train must be a Jew!”

“I said that's enough, you damn Nazi!” The soldier took a step closer; Peter saw the barrel of the man's gun lower, the knuckles on his hands white from gripping the rifle's stock so tightly.

“Let me out of these chains,” Otto growled, “and I'll—”

“You keep your mouth shut or it'll be—”

“He's just tired and hungry,” Peter said without thinking, forcing himself to be heard over the growing argument. But unlike Otto's shouted German, he immediately grabbed the soldier's attention. The man's head snapped to the side as he stared, his mouth slightly agape.

Peter had spoken in perfect, unaccented English.

“It's been a long journey for all of us, you included,” he kept on. “We just want to get where we're going without any problems.”

“How in the hell're you talkin' like that?” the soldier demanded, but before Peter could answer, he snapped, “Just shut up! Don't say a damn word!”

Angrily, the soldier lowered his gun so that the muzzle swiveled back and forth between Peter and Otto; the prisoners sitting in the seat in front of them ducked their heads to stay out of the line of fire. Just like that, Peter was considered as dangerous as Otto, all because he'd spoken English. All he could do was look helplessly at the gun barrel pointing at him; with his hands shackled, he couldn't even raise them to try to calm the situation.

“You two just sit there and be quiet!” the soldier snapped. “If I hear another word out of either of you, there's gonna be trouble!”

Otto chuckled, too low for anyone other than Peter to hear.

Peter did his best to calm himself, but his heart thundered. Once again, the truth of who he was had nearly gotten him killed.

He was German.

He was a prisoner of war.

But Peter Becker was also an American.

Like millions of other young American men thirsting for adventure, Thomas Becker, Peter's father, had enlisted in the United States Army and gone to Europe to fight against the kaiser. He'd trudged through the rain and muck, had listened to thunderous volleys from cannons as large as a streetcar, and had seen far more men die than he would have ever thought possible. But unlike most, when the war finally ended in November 1918, Thomas had chosen to stay behind. Over a century earlier, his kin had left the Rhine River valley for America; now Thomas was making the journey in reverse.

A bricklayer by trade, Thomas had brought with him only the battered trunk he'd hauled from Pennsylvania and the smattering of German he remembered his grandmother teaching him as a boy. He'd settled in a village just to the north of Munich, rented an apartment from a kindly cobbler and soon found employment. In the months that followed, life was hard but rewarding. Thomas had trouble imagining he could be any happier.

Until the day he met Mareike Herrmann.

She was the daughter of the town's baker and the most beautiful woman Thomas had ever laid eyes on. As the weeks and months passed, he found more and more reasons to stop by the shop besides the freshly baked loaves of bread and sweet rolls. Mareike was patient with him; she waited as he tried to express himself in his halting German, laughed loudly at his most ridiculous mistakes, but she also became his teacher, helping his grasp of her language to grow. By the following spring, they were married.

A year later, Peter was born.

Thomas doted on his son, happy for the life the family lived in Bavaria, but he also wanted the boy to know where his father had come from. To that end, he taught Peter about baseball; that he should root for the Philadelphia Athletics and hate the New York Yankees, and also how to position his fingers on the ball's seams to make it curve. He told him stories about growing up on a dairy farm, taught him songs that would have made Mareike angry if she knew the true meaning behind the words, and encouraged him to read every book he managed to find about America.

And so, Peter grew up speaking both German
and
English.

But all was not perfect. Times in Germany were hard. The reparations that had been imposed on the defeated nation by the victors caused inflation so great that people paid for their food with wheelbarrows full of money. When the global depression hit, times got even harder. To make matters worse, Bavaria was a hotbed of nationalism, with racist groups using violence to express their mounting anger. Nearby Munich was the birthplace of Hitler's National Socialist, or Nazi party. Thomas hated what these groups stood for, but he knew enough to keep it to himself; some who dared speak out found their store windows smashed, their businesses burned, and in some cases, paid with their lives.

They talked about leaving, about going to America, but before they could do little more than dream, Thomas had fallen ill. No matter what they did, no matter what doctor they saw, nothing made him better. Peter's father grew thinner, weaker by the day, until one autumn morning he was gone. Only twelve, Peter had taken up his father's mantle and done his best to provide for his heartbroken mother. More years passed. Hitler became chancellor. Then came the war. Then the Army. And the next thing he knew…

Peter jolted awake as a deep rumble of thunder shook the train car. Outside, the weather had soured. Gone was the clear blue sky of the afternoon; in its place was an ominous darkness. A light rain fell, drumming across the roof and splattering the window, the water running in horizontal streaks because of the movement of the train. As Peter watched, a fork of lightning snaked from the heavens and crisscrossed the sky, brilliantly bright; a second later it was gone, everything plunged back into darkness, and then the thunder rumbled once again. Soon, the storm would come in earnest.

Peter sighed; the last dregs of his dream lingered. He'd been back in the forest just after his unit's capture. An American officer had walked up and offered a cigarette, all smiles, as if they were old friends. But when Peter had given his thanks in English,
unaccented
English, the smile had disappeared and he'd once again been the enemy…

Looking around the dark train car, Peter saw that most of his fellow prisoners were sleeping, even as the raging storm continued to grow; even the guard at the front of the train looked as if he was about to nod off. But then, just as Peter was about to try to get a bit more sleep of his own, someone spoke.

“He thinks you're dangerous.”

As startled as Peter had been by the thunder, it was worse when he understood that it was Otto speaking to him. The man had been so quiet, so still, that Peter hadn't noticed he was awake when he'd first glanced out the window. Looking over at him in the gloom, he saw Otto nod toward the American soldier, his face twisted in a sneer.

“When you speak their language,” the brutish man continued, “it unnerves them. It makes them afraid.”

“I was only trying to calm him down.”

Otto laughed; the sound made Peter think of the ogre who lived under the bridge in the fairy tales his father used to read to him. “And yet you ended up with the gun pointed at you, no different than me.”

“He could have shot you,” Peter insisted. “Shot us both.”

“Not that one,” Otto disagreed, again nodding at the drowsy soldier. “One look at him tells me he's never fired that gun, not for real, not to kill. If I'd kept shouting, you would have seen piss running down his leg.”

Outside, another flash of lightning forked out of the night, punctuated by a booming rumble; it was so deep that Peter could feel it in his bones.

“My only regret is that the Amerikaner didn't come closer,” Otto continued, jangling the steel that bound his hands. “A few more steps and I would have wrapped these around his neck and choked him to death.”