Brother Fish (42 page)

The weeks crawled by. Wade Fernance, the amputee, died, and Gary Reilly, in civilian life an Olympic horseman, lost his leg to gas gangrene, which had also been the ultimate cause of Wade's death. Though we'd cleaned up the best we could, we all suffered from dysentery, and the latrine bucket in the corner added to the foul surroundings. This was also where the lice I talked about earlier established themselves under my plaster cast and behind my left knee – there seemed to be hundreds of them and they were driving me half-crazy with itch. I'd pull a thin twig from the thatched roof and push it down the back of my plaster in an attempt to scratch the bastards until the blood ran out at my ankle, but the irritation never seemed to stop and the scratching seemed only to stir them up further. But there wasn't any point whingeing and there were lots worse off than me. This was also when Chuck Ward, the American B29 tail gunner I mentioned before, who'd walked for hours with frostbite after his plane was shot down, was brought in across the frozen landscape and where we heard his screaming coming at us from way out. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese doctor to save his feet, they were finally amputated. Another Yank died of blood poisoning and it seemed, even when the Chinese were trying, desperately short of medical supplies, they couldn't keep us alive.

Apart from the lice, the pain in my leg gradually ceased and Jimmy and I began to practise walking, him on his modified ‘Captain Hook' crutch and me on the bamboo pair the Chinese had given me at the previous farmhouse hospital. The weeks turned into months, winter into summer and with it unbearable heat. After winter I thought I'd never find a summer too hot for me, but I was wrong. Dirt, sweat, suppurating wounds and open sores were a lousy combination and attracted flies in such numbers that their buzzing made it hard to hear what your neighbour was saying – not to mention the irritation they caused and the maggots from where they laid their eggs in your open flesh.

The passing of time also brought healing, and prisoners seen to be mobile and not running a fever were considered by the Chinese to be healed. We knew our time was close when my plaster was finally removed and the bizarre scene with the lice escaping took place. The day to leave finally arrived and, with a warning to go easy on our newly healed legs and still needing the support of our crutches, we were lifted into a truck to make the journey to a POW camp. So far so good – Jimmy and I had survived. With the UN prisoner-exchange negotiations with the Chinese well under way we even began to feel a tad optimistic. I guess hope springs eternal in the human breast, but then, if something can go wrong it usually does. As things turned out we were far from being out of the woods.

CHAPTER TEN

Learning Good How to be Bad

Victory over Japan was declared and, while all of America rejoiced, a dark cloud appeared in the hitherto clear blue skies of the relationship Jimmy and Frau Kraus enjoyed. While they said nothing to each other, each concerned with their own private fears, they knew it wouldn't be long before the Kraus twins would be returning from the Pacific. In the two and a half years Jimmy and Frau Kraus had been left on the farm on their own they'd become a prosperous working partnership while, at the same time, becoming firm and loving friends.

Their newfound prosperity had nothing to do with the didactic farm-maintenance plan laid out for Frau Kraus by her dead and long-forgotten husband. This had proved to be unworkable on every front with the exception of her vegetable garden, though that had never been his concern anyway. The Thanksgiving turkeys made barely enough to pay for the feed required for the poultry. Frau Kraus's dressed-duck business all but disappeared when most of her ethnic German customers were sent to an internment camp. The eggs from her chickens brought in scarcely enough to buy bread and salt – with eight million men away in the armed forces the consumption of eggs had fallen and so had the price, while the price of grain to feed poultry and livestock had skyrocketed. Finally, the orchid market proved to require a horticultural expertise they had yet to perfect and the flower market much harder to enter than Otto Kraus had anticipated.

Otto Kraus's will, in the end, left nothing to his wife other than a caveat that required their twin sons, who inherited everything, including a surprisingly sizeable bank account, to provide for Frau Kraus until her death. Initially it had been hard to make ends meet, and the newly found wartime partnership was forced to rely on vegetables from the garden and eggs from the ducks with an occasional scrawny chicken killed when it stopped laying. Finally, in desperation, Frau Kraus and Jimmy had turned back to tomatoes, a decision that came about in a most fortuitous way.

One of the great pleasures of their relationship was Jimmy reading the weekly newspaper to Frau Kraus after dinner at night. While Jimmy's limited education meant he wasn't a fluent reader, his slow and measured pace ideally suited her even slower comprehension of the English language. Each night of the week they would read most of the newspaper, and in particular the farm page, which contained snippets of interest to local farmers, orchardists and market gardeners. On one such occasion Jimmy read about M. Charles Byers, who ran a truck-repair business in West Virginia and, as a hobby, propagated tomatoes. He'd come up with what the newspaper described as a new variety of the traditional beefsteak tomato, not overpulpy and with a surprisingly sweet taste, weighing two and a half pounds and, better still, maturing in seventy-nine days. He'd named the cultivar ‘Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter', and in the article offered to sell a packet of seed for one dollar plus ten cents postage to anyone in the United States.

‘Ma'am, we gotta get dis bif-steak tomato,' Jimmy declared, ‘ 'cos da orchids dey ain't doin' no damn good. Folks gonna buy a tomato plant dat grow a two-and-a-half-pound tomato dat juicy an' sweet, dat for sure,' Jimmy declared.

Frau Kraus needed no persuasion – in tomatoes, she trusted. ‘
Ja
, Jimmy – we send Mister Charlie Radiator
schnell
zat money!' she exclaimed excitedly.

Pretty soon the hothouse was filled with tomato plants in papier-mâché pots made by Frau Kraus from the newspaper off-cuts collected by Jimmy from the
Messenger-Gazette
in Somerset. The plants were raised to eight inches and attached to each pot using bright-red twine was a ticket that carried the words ‘Each Famous Mortgage Lifter Tomato Ways 2lbs'
.
Twice weekly the plants were taken in the Dodge truck to Somerville, where Jimmy despatched them by freight car on the Central Railroad of New Jersey to their agent, Solly Shakenovsky, at the New York markets. There they soon became the latest fad in suburban backyards and apartment balconies. A two-and-a-half-pound tomato grown by a housewife or her husband was something to boast about in any neighbourhood.

Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter proved to be a robust plant that delivered the goods with a minimum of fuss. The label claimed a two-pound tomato but the half-dozen or so tomatoes the plant produced usually exceeded this claim, giving the domestic gardener additional pride in the fact that they'd personally exceeded the grower's claim. Apart from seeing the potential of Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter as an individually sold plant for domestic gardens, this simple understatement of weight on the misspelled label was yet another indication of Jimmy's instinctive ability to think outside the square.

Purchased for the exorbitant amount of one dollar per pot, the beefsteak tomato brought in a clear profit of seventy-five cents per plant and it wasn't long before they were earning several dozen times more than all Frau Kraus's barnyard enterprises put together. As a further indication of Jimmy's instinctive marketing nous, he was insistent that the plants be priced high to make them seem exotic and worthy of possessing. ‘Ma'am, when everybody got somethin' it ain't got no value to nobody.' He laughed. ‘We done no damn good wid dem orchids cos dem other growers dey got da market first, but dem bif-steak tomatoes dey gonna be da orchids o' da tomato fam-bly an' dis time we gonna get dem first.' Frau Kraus, even if she hadn't understood Jimmy's logic, agreed and it worked – the high price made the buyers see them as exotic and rare and they were often given as gifts.

With the poultry no longer the source of the odd couple's livelihood, the hens and ducks multiplied. As Thanksgiving approached, the turkeys didn't have to look anxiously over their shoulders, Frau Kraus being much too busy making pots for her beefsteak tomatoes to find time to pluck and dress the turkey meat for her New York customers.

For his birthday, Jimmy received a pair of hand-stitched western riding boots, a fine Stetson hat, a tooled leather belt with a fancy buckle that sported two large turquoise stones set into the silver surround, new blue jeans and a long-sleeved tartan wool shirt, all ordered by Frau Kraus from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. In addition she knitted him two pairs of bright-red woollen socks. These were the first new clothes Jimmy had ever owned, and he wore them when he drove Frau Kraus to church on Sunday. He'd wait under a large oak tree outside the Lutheran church and raise his Stetson to the members of the congregation, thinking himself the best-dressed dude in Somerset County. After the white folk had filed into church Jimmy would remove his Stetson and, along with the other coloured folk, enter and sit in the very last pew with the hat on his lap, his work-calloused thumb constantly running along the nap of its brim.

Sundays were special – other than feeding the poultry and checking the heating in the hothouse in the winter, they observed the Lord's Day by not working. They'd eat their main meal after returning from church. Frau Kraus would cook a chicken or a duck with vegetables and roast potatoes from the garden, leaving it to slow-roast in the oven while they attended the church service. At this weekly feast she'd wear her special ‘Thank you, Charlie' apron, which featured a life-size embroidery of Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter and, emblazoned under it, ‘
Danke
, Charlie'. In the afternoon Frau Kraus would take a nap and Jimmy would retire to his room to practise his reading. As the only book in the house was the bible in the German language he used the Somerset
Messenger-Gazette
for this purpose, practising the more difficult words so when he read it a second time to Frau Kraus over the following week he would sound less hesitant. As they say in the classics, ‘All good things must eventually come to an end.' The partnership consummated in the bathroom came to an abrupt end in Frau Kraus's kitchen. With the surrender of Japan and the end of the war in the Pacific, the Kraus twins were among the first Pacific war troops to steam up New York Harbor at dawn on the 17th of October 1945. They were on board the light carrier USS
Bataan
, a part of the advance armada of nine ships, the greatest among them being the giant USS
Enterprise
, queen of the Nimitz navy.

Naturally enough they hadn't bothered to inform their mother of their homecoming. The Greyhound bus had dropped them at the farm gate the following morning at six-thirty a.m. and they'd walked down the neatly pruned elm-lined driveway and, as they'd always done, walked to the back of the house to enter through the laundry and into the kitchen. Their return home was to bring an abrupt end to the happiest days of Frau Kraus's life in America.

She was fixing ham and eggs in the kitchen when she heard the commotion at the laundry door. Thinking it was Jimmy coming in early from the hothouse for breakfast, she called out, ‘
Guten Morgen, meine
Liebling!
' Then, sensing something amiss, she glanced back at the door to be confronted by her twin sons. She screamed and dropped the cast-iron skillet, spilling ham and eggs over the scrubbed kitchen floor. Then she sank to her knees and began to howl.

Not having any idea of how to pacify their mother, the twins left her where she knelt weeping and went through to their bedroom to drop their kit. Here they discovered Frau Kraus had a boarder who owned a pair of highly polished western riding boots, a carefully brushed white Stetson, a neatly ironed tartan shirt and a pair of freshly laundered blue jeans. They returned to the kitchen to find her now lying prostrate, sobbing into her folded arms.

‘Who's the cowboy staying in our room?' Fritz demanded.

Frau Kraus clutched Fritz around his ankles. ‘Jimmy
gut
boy!' she pleaded.

‘Jesus Christ! She's let the nigger stay in our room!' Henrik exclaimed. ‘The dirty black bastard is staying in
our
room!'

‘The old bitch is probably shagging him,' Fritz declared contemptuously. ‘You sleeping with the nigger, Frau Kraus?'

Frau Kraus was too overcome to answer, other than to repeat, ‘Jimmy
gut
boy!' and then commence to sob afresh, repeating the three words over and over.

‘Why, you dirty old bitch!' Henrik shouted down at her. ‘Where is he?'

This only caused Frau Kraus to sob with greater gusto.

Jimmy was in the tomato hothouse cleaning and scrubbing the large structure. Cleaning and making potting mix, as well as preparing the seed trays they would plant in mid-January, took from mid-October until the early part of January. It was cold and dirty work, and Jimmy was looking forward to his breakfast when he heard footsteps outside the hothouse and looked up to see two uniformed soldiers enter, each armed with a baseball bat.

Jimmy recognised the Kraus twins immediately. ‘You done come home!' Jimmy called, walking towards them, wiping his hand on his overalls before extending it to greet them.