Grantville Gazette, Volume 40 (2 page)

She felt the tears return and slammed the picture down on the coffee table. The tea cup rattled, dropped to the wooden floor, and shattered.

"Are you okay, Mama?" Clyde asked as he walked in.

Ella Lou raised her head, wiped her tears away, and nodded. She smiled at her son's concerned expression. Clyde was a good boy, if not a little preoccupied with business most of the time. The Ring of Fire had affected him as much as it had his mother and father, though he rarely spoke of it. He was quiet and very professional. The third of the bunch, after John Junior and Molly, but he had always been the most serious of all of them, given over to entrepreneurial pursuits, or, as his father might say, "pipe dreams." At the time of the event he had owned a storage business and had tried to maintain it, but around every corner, he saw another opportunity, another way to make money. He had gone into partnership with a down-timer from Jena and had given the management of the storage facility to him in order to pursue other, more lucrative, business ventures. Clyde was not rich, but he wasn't poor either.
I should at least be thankful for that
, Ella Lou thought.

"I'm fine, Honcho," she said, using Clyde's nickname. "I just wish your brothers and sisters were here to say goodbye to your father. He would have liked that."

Clyde nodded and scooped up the broken tea cup. "Yes." He held up the pieces and smiled. "You're rough on these cups, Mama. This is the third you've broken since we've been here."

"The first wasn't my fault," she said. "It was that damned Ring of Fire that broke it. I was drinking tea at the time, and your father was napping. A big flash happened, and I thought I was having a heart attack. I dropped the cup and yelled to John. Once we realized that I wasn't having an attack, we knew something bigger, something more serious, had happened. We didn't realize what exactly
had
happened until many days later."

Ella Lou rose slowly and walked over to a glass cabinet that contained a few porcelain frogs, a couple Hummel figurines, and a small cedar box. She opened the cabinet, took the box out, then returned to the couch. Clyde helped her sit down.

She placed the box onto the coffee table and opened it. On a small piece of velvet lay two medals. Ella Lou reached in and drew out John's Purple Heart.

"We were terrified," she continued. "We tried calling you all but couldn't get through. The lines weren't working. Then you showed up and we were glad you were safe, but we kept trying to call the others . . . with no luck, of course. John just paced back and forth all day, and with his arthritis no less. We thought maybe it was some kind of dream, that we'd wake up and everything would be back to normal. But weeks went by and it didn't right itself, this so-called cosmic event that people were beginning to assign to divine providence." Ella Lou huffed and shook her head. "Divine, my ass. No God in heaven—if there is one and I'm not so sure there is—would ever do such a terrible thing to His children. If there is a devil, this is his doing."

Clyde laughed. "They don't call it the Ring of Fire for nothing. But we can't do anything about it, so we might as well—"

"I want to go home, Clyde!" Ella Lou said, interrupting her son. "I want to go home. I hate it here! I hate this goddamned place. We don't belong here. We're not German. We're Americans, not United Europeans or whatever the hell they want to call us. I want to see
my
skies, my clouds, my stars. I want to watch CNN and go to the movies. I want—"

Clyde took her in his arms and rubbed her back gently. "I know, Mama, I know. I do too. But we've had this conversation before. We can't go back. Whatever happened cannot be changed, at least as far as I can tell. This is Germany, 1635. We've been here three, four years now. So," he said, pulling away from her and giving her a big, warm smile, "let's not talk about it anymore. This is Pop's day. Let's talk about him." He motioned to the Purple Heart in her hand. "Tell me how he got that."

"I've told you before, haven't I?" she asked, wiping away tears with her small, frail hand.

"Yes, but I like how you tell it. Dad always left out the gory parts."

"Well, he lived it, and I suspect that that's much different than hearing about it secondhand like I did. It was painful for him to talk about." She sniffled and cleared her throat. "But he got this in 1944 during the Elsenborn Ridge battle. He said the Germans hit the ridgeline hard, but were thrown back in chaos. It was the only place along the entire line of attack in the Ardennes that held. He was very proud of that fact."

"And how did he get that?" Clyde said, pointing to a silver medallion resting inside the box.

Ella Lou's eyes lit up as she put the Purple Heart down and pulled out the medallion, running the red leather cord tied to it through her fingers. "Oh, this thing? You know exactly where he got this."

Indeed he did, but it was a game they played. All the children played it. Every year on the vigil, their father would put it around his neck and wear it proudly, and the Rice kids would all say, "Where'd you get that, Daddy?" And he would tell them, his face beaming with delight, his eyes wet with tears. It was a great story, a painful story, and John Thomas Rice made sure his children heard it every year.

"He got this during that very same battle," Ella Lou said. "It's an old family heirloom."

"How did he get it?"

Ella Lou leaned back on the couch and held it to her chest. She closed her eyes and told the story, as she remembered it, from her husband's own words. . . .

December, 1944, near Wahlerscheid, Siegfried Line, Belgium-German Border

John Thomas Rice hated recon duty, especially in the frigid wind that now cut across his vision, blinding him in a bitterly cold white mist. Why he was out here was anyone's guess. Hadn't the 2
^nd
Infantry Division cleared this area once already? But reports of heavy German movement near the Siegfried Line had spooked HQ, and Lieutenant Colonel McClernand Butler wanted a peek. The lieutenant colonel had reconstituted part of his own 395
^th
Infantry Regiment, combined with elements from the 393
^rd
, to form a new regimental combat team, and had loaned it out for special duty.
The Second shits and the 395 scoops,
was the saying among the men. Rice could not argue with that. He growled and spit into the rising snow.

"Spitting into the snow? Onto God's green earth? For shame!"

Rice recognized the high-pitched, impetuously youthful voice. He smiled. "Stow it, Davis. We ain't in Kansas anymore."

"You know I'm not from Kansas," Davis said in his best country boy drawl, picking up a handful of snow and casting it toward Rice. It scattered in the wind. "I'm from the greatest place in the world. Wild, and
wonderful
, West Virginia."

Davis was no older than eighteen by Rice's estimation. Perhaps even younger; it didn't happen often, but once in a while a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old faked papers and got in. This West Virginia boy had the unmistakable exuberant immaturity of youth, coupled with a sense of faith that both impressed and annoyed Rice. He'd never been religious himself, and never intended to be. But it would be nice in times like this to give oneself up to some higher power, to not worry about what lay on the path tomorrow, or what lay beyond the tree line before them today.

What did lie beyond those trees? Rice did not know. The world was quiet, deathly so, and Rice would give anything in the world to be back in Höfen, bundled up in some foxhole, smoking a cigarette and drinking black, bitter coffee. The small German village was just a few miles behind them; not very far at all, but a world away in terms of safety. That's what Davis did not understand. None of the young men around them had that much combat experience; their regiment had just recently been put into the field. But Rice was twenty going on twenty-one, and Davis was . . . not. A big difference there as well.

They reached a narrow road that wound its way through the woods. They stopped, went prone and held their rifles forward, watching the sparse tree line, a line that had already experienced heavy fighting, tree bursts, downed foliage, and abandoned bunkers. "West Virginia, eh?" Rice said, keeping the mood light while he fumbled through his coat pocket for a smashed pack of Luckys. "Where from?"

Davis held his rifle forward, his hands bone white from the cold but his face brilliantly lit with the thought of home. "Oh, a great little town. Best of the bunch. Grant—"

"Quiet!" Sergeant Greene said, waving his hand down. "No talking!"

Rice shook his head and chagrined. Greene was a pain in the ass, but soon the wisdom of the order became clear.

The ground began to shake, lightly at first, like the impact trees might make in falling. Along the road, the snow danced and spread down the bank in tiny avalanches. Rice let the cigarette he had placed to his lips fall, unlit.

The quiet and cold air made the echo of German tanks ring loudly. Through the wood and down the winding path, diesel engines for sure, but how many wasn't clear. Rice tried to squint through the relentless snow, tried to pick out some motion, some flash of a barrel or the shaped hull of a Tiger or Panzer IV. It was a game the men played, trying to figure out the composition of the enemy armor by sound alone. He tried but could not make an accurate account.

"The Germans mustn't be too happy with the ass kicking they got from the 2
^nd
," Davis whispered. "They're sending a few tanks our way." He said the last words as if here were disappointed, as if he wanted more.
Poor young fool
.

Rice nodded but wasn't so sure. This wasn't just a few tanks. This was many; more than he had ever heard before. And where there were tanks, there was infantry, Grenadiers, half-tracks, and artillery. He gripped his rifle tightly and tried to think of Ella Lou, his beautiful girlfriend.

The muffled
boom
of artillery filled the air, and Sergeant Greene screamed, "Back! Back! Take cover!"

The men were moving before the order was finished. Rice tucked his rifle close to his chest and rolled down the bank. He disappeared under the snow and felt the hard stomp of a boot on his shoulder as another man bolted for the tree line. He came out of the snow, shook his face clear and fell again, this time from the impact of young Davis against his back. Rice fell forward, further down the bank and under a pile of broken limbs. He paused. This might be a good place to hide, he considered. But no. The Germans were moving forward fast, too fast. Stay here and they'd be found and killed.

He pushed Davis away and got up. "Get off!"

"I'm sorry," was all Davis could say, his face bleached with fear.

Rice grabbed him by the collar and pulled forward. "Stay with me."

Through the artillery barrage, they ran. Trees burst apart as each strike pounded the space around them. It was foolish, really, to be running through the forest. It would be more sensible to stay in the open. Among the trees, an artillery barrage was far more deadly with nasty chunks of wood flying through the air. But surely somewhere nearby lay a vacant foxhole, an abandoned bunker in which to crawl. The Germans had held this line efficiently for a long time. Rice kept running and looking for cover.

Davis was about ten yards behind. Rice turned to tell him to get his ass on the move, but the boy stumbled on a root and planted his face square into the snowy mud and leaves. Despite the situation, Rice couldn't help but smile.
It's not a winter wonderland anymore, is it, boy? You're getting a real education now.

"Get up, you country bump—"

A shell burst behind Davis and blew him apart, scattering his body into a dozen bloody pieces. Rice screamed and fell away from the impact. The sting of hot shrapnel pierced his right arm and chest, cutting through layers of clothing and striking his neck as well. A wince of pain cut across his cheek. A warm trickle of blood ran down his face.

He panicked. He had promised himself when he had disembarked at Le Havre, France, that he would not do so, that he would keep his cool no matter the circumstances. But this was a far cry from the comfort of a transport ship, and he had never been struck in battle before, had never felt so much pain.

He ran, and ran, and ran. Was he going in the right direction, toward Höfen? He could not say; he had changed course a couple times, trying to avoid the incessant shelling. He kept running and in time, the sound of the guns tapered off until they seemed leagues away. He stopped, his heart racing, his blood pounding in his ears.

He leaned against a tree. He panted heavily and looked left and right. Where were his men? Where was Sergeant Greene? Had they all died? Sweat filled his eyes and his neck felt wet and mushy. He reached in and drew his hand back. Blood, a lot of it. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
I'm going to die . . . alone
. He fought the urge to cry, stood upright and turned around the tree to run again.

And there they stood. Two of them: German soldiers dressed head to toe in winter camo, difficult to see even this close with the wind and snow and sweat in his eyes; forward observers, perhaps. Rice put up his rifle and pointed it at the closest, the one screaming, "
Runter! Runter!
"The man motioned down with his rifle, while the one behind trained a pistol at Rice's chest.