Feast for Thieves (37 page)

“There,” she said. “Just over that rise. Up ahead is what I wanted you to see, Rowdy. Stop the car and we’ll walk the last bit.”

The sun’s rays were coloring the skies of the eastern horizon now, straight in the direction we were driving, and I pulled the jeep over, switched off the headlights, and pulled the key out of the ignition. She reached up to the red ribbon in the back of her hair to make sure it wasn’t mussed, then brought her hands down and smoothed the pleats of her dress.

She was wearing this blue-checked country job that looked mighty swell on her willowy frame. The dress tapered around her waist, and she was keeping the skirt of the dress tucked underneath her legs to keep it from billowing in the breeze of the open jeep. She fluffed out the skirt, then sat perfectly still until I remembered my manners and shuffled around the front of the jeep and over to her side, gave her my hand, and helped her out.

Not like the girl ever needed help from me, I thought. I’d come to know this girl as a true sassafras, that she was, a right capable and free-thinking girl. Yet she didn’t let go of my hand when we started walking away from the jeep neither, and I certainly didn’t let go of hers. Bobbie’s hand felt warm and small inside mine, and I wondered how long it might be before she remembered her propensity toward independence and let go. I decided to speak first, while I still had a shot, and cleared my throat.

“Mert wants to know if you’re still bound to go to Haiti and be a missionary.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watched for Bobbie’s reaction. She was still looking far off to the right, far off away from me, and she said simply, “So, Mert wants to know, does she?”

We walked a few more steps and I cleared my throat again and added, “Well, she’s not the only one.”

Oh, for ever so many years I’ve always been so confident with the opposite gender. I’ve never been the fella to clear his throat before speaking, never been the one to mince at words. But with Miss Bobbie, and what I needed to lay on the line this morning, all was different. Sure, I knew the plan. I knew it well. I’d been thinking it through, wandering around it, scratching my head and pondering if anything might be different. But it was no use.

When the spring was over in a few short days the girl was still headed off to language school in Dallas for all of next year. Her particular course of study began earlier than most—at the start of June, not the start of fall—so as to stretch in a longer frame of studying. The university was a fourteen-hour drive away, maybe more like sixteen, and surely we were bound to see each other at holidays when she came home, but it wouldn’t be much.

Worse yet was when that next year was over her plans were now set more firmly than ever. Those plans involved a train ride from Texas to Florida, and from Florida a boat ride south to Port-au-Prince where she was already contracted to work as a nanny in an orphanage. That was another year of her being away. Maybe two, if they liked her work and extended the contract, which they was sure to do. Dang her competence. Worst of all yet was that it might even be more time away—maybe a lifetime. Going to Haiti for an indeterminate stretch of time was what God was laying on Bobbie’s heart to do, and I wasn’t one to fight against God no more.

“So … uh,” I said, “what I’m asking directly is that when you reckon your time in the orphanage is over … uh, whenever that is … if things might change for you then.”

“Well,” Bobbie said—and here she glanced my direction, then quickly looked the other way again, out to the fields, far away from me. “I guess any plans can change.”

Oh, she was a sassafras. A real sassafras. We were silent for
another ten paces and we’d nearly crested the hill when Bobbie let go of my hand and stopped abruptly.

“The surprise is just over there,” she said. “I should have brought something to tie your sight with. You need to close your eyes the rest of the way, Rowdy—promise me you’ll keep your eyes shut tight until I say when. Promise. Okay?”

I inhaled sharply. I knew no man who hankers for surprises. But I nodded anyway and in faith scrunched tight my eyes. She grabbed hold of my hand again to guide me the last steps. Together we walked to the top of the hill.

“Open,” she said.

On the other side lay an ocean of coreopsis blooms as far as the eye could see—that brash yellow flower that looks like a black-eyed Susan. Everywhere I looked was carpeted with bright and golden yellow; a sprinkling of red gaillardia mixed in with the blooms, and scattered underneath were smudges of green prairie grass. With the sun coming up, everything was haphazard and crazy and untamed and stunning, and I marveled at how such a sight of beauty ever grew in the desert. There must have been a spring nearby to water this one particular field and provide it with so much color. I looked at the field a long, long time, and then I looked at Bobbie.

She was already looking at me.

I closed my eyes and pulled her close and breathed her in. Both her hands were held up around my chest and she clenched her hands and gave me a little pound with her fists, her body tense in my arms. Then she settled down and settled in, and she wrapped her arms around me in return.

This time I kissed her first. I didn’t know if a girl like Bobbie Barker could ever truly love a man like me, even changed as I was, but this time she didn’t slap me nor turn away, but instead kissed me right back. All this kissing made me more certain things would work out one day between this girl and me. I would marry
her when the time was right. I just didn’t know when.

“I’m still going away,” she murmured in the midst of my mouth.

“I know,” was all I said.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Meet the man who inspired the character of Reverend Rowdy

O
ver the past six years, I’ve interviewed World War II veterans for various nonfiction projects, mostly related to the Band of Brothers (E Co, 506th PIR, 101st A/B), the elite group of paratroopers who jumped into Normandy and fought their way through Europe.

During the process, I discovered the story of a man named Wayne “Skinny” Sisk. Not much is known about him and he’s deceased now, although he’s mentioned a few times in historian Stephen Ambrose’s book
Band of Brothers
. I attempted to contact Mr. Sisk’s relatives but was never able to track them down. Nor is anyone in Easy Company still in contact with them that I know.

From talking with other veterans who knew him, I learned that Skinny Sisk was generally thought of as “Easy Company’s best yet most incorrigible paratrooper.” It isn’t known exactly how he was incorrigible, but we know that Skinny had a genuinely warm streak through him as well.

We know he was well liked because, a few years back, I wrote a book about Shifty Powers, the sharpshooter in the company. Shifty was the warmhearted family man whom everyone in the company loved and respected, and Shifty’s son in real life today is named Wayne, in Skinny Sisk’s honor. So if Shifty Powers thought well of Skinny Sisk, then Skinny Sisk was genuinely a good-hearted guy, incorrigible as he may have been.

From Ambrose’s book, we also know that Skinny was one of
the first privates in Easy Company who trained at Camp Toccoa. Skinny had a good sense of humor and broke the tension during the flight to Normandy by asking the men in his plane, “Does anybody here want to buy a good watch?” (which brought a roar of laughter to the men). Once, while on the march on the Cotentin Peninsula, the men traversed by the body of a dead man whose hand was sticking out in the air, and Skinny shook hands with the corpse. While on a special mission in Austria immediately after the war’s end, Skinny helped track down and execute a high-ranking German officer.

Ambrose recorded that after the war Skinny had a hard time shaking his war memories. Skinny turned to alcohol, that generation’s drug of choice, and was often seen drunk and hungover.

Then in 1949, Skinny experienced a genuine spiritual conversion when his four-year-old niece shared the gospel with him. Skinny repented, chose to follow Jesus, and was later ordained into pastoral ministry. He wrote to his commander, Dick Winters, “I haven’t whipped but one man since, and he needed it.”

The Reverend Skinny Sisk lived and ministered in West Virginia. He died in 1999.

The example of Skinny Sisk inspired the creation of this novel’s main character, Rowdy Slater. Every other detail about Rowdy’s life has been fictionalized, including the company he fought with, and none of the specifics of Skinny’s life were used in this novel. Other than the mention of Colonel Robert Sink as commander of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, every other character, plot line, and conversation in the book is purely fictitious.

Still, I began this novel with one big story idea and question in mind—an elite paratrooper becomes a minister. Here’s a man used to solving problems with a rifle or his fists …
What sort of wild-hearted minister might such a man make?

THE HISTORICITY OF DIALECT

Why Rowdy speaks the way he does

I
’ve always been fascinated by classical novels such as
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and
The Catcher in the Rye
, which all recounted stories in the dialect and spoken attitude of the respective day. As Mark Twain wrote in an explanatory note to
Huck Finn
, “The [use of dialects has] not been done in a haphazard fashion; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these forms of speech.”

The same is true for Rowdy Slater. Here was my protagonist—born in a small town in western Texas, educated to tenth grade, a manual laborer in Roosevelt’s CCC camps, a paratrooper in an elite army unit, a prisoner in a military jail, a drifter, an outlaw, and finally a student of Scripture. I envisioned Rowdy as an older man, leaning against the mantel of a fireplace, dictating this book. He would say, “Well, years ago, this is how it all began …” And then I asked myself, How might such a man talk and write?

To create Rowdy’s speech patterns, as part of the process of researching this book, I pored through almanacs, visited cities and towns in Texas, researched jail systems, read dozens of nonfiction books and novels, studied innumerable war and Western movies, and spoke to Texas pastors. Central to my research was interviewing WWII veterans.

Rowdy’s army experience posed a unique challenge. When divisions such as the 101st were created, men were brought together
from all across America and from all walks of life. Rowdy would have been exposed to this smorgasbord of dialects for the nearly three years he was in the service.

Below is a sampling of some speech patterns from WWII veterans.

Use of double negatives:

J. B. Stokes: “I wasn’t at Toccoa where they’d formed up. But I didn’t have no trouble with the guys.”

Swapped verbs:

J. Anderson: “When we got to the north end of Peleliu, we was put on amphibian tractors again.”

Colloquialisms:

Clancy Lyall: “Swimming in that nasty [Sabine River in Texas] are water moccasins and copperheads. Dad threw me right in. I doggied out of that place like you never saw.”

Using “aggravation” to describe trouble:

Bill Wingett: “I certainly didn’t have any aggravation with the Indians.”

Use of larger words despite lack of schooling:

Hank Zimmerman: “I didn’t have much schooling. I had to quit school, which I hated. I didn’t want to quit but my old man told me to go out and get a job. My old man was a tyrant…. I was working at Phelps Dodge. There were a lot of promises of good things to come that never materialized.”

Continuous present tense (“ing” verbs):

Rod Bain: “I was minding my own business as a student when suddenly we were in a world war with no apparent limitations.”

Use of “reckon” to mean guess or judge:

Dewitt Lowrey: “My family was pretty close. I don’t reckon we could have had a better mother. But she also had a temper and knew how to use a switch.”