Prudence (23 page)

“Your husband’s name is Gephardt Miller and he is from my city. Before the war. He was there and he was an engineer. He makes things.”

It made no sense. The stranger was trying to get her to see something. But there was nothing to see. She saw everything already. Everything she needed to know. Before the war. Well, that was a long time ago. Six years? Ten? Beyond that phrase, Mary had understood nothing the stranger said. Gephardt had told her about the war—how he was in a ship, not a regular one. Not a boat like they had on the big lake. He had been in a ship that went underwater. A submarine. He’d tried to explain it to her but she’d waved away the explanation. White people were always inventing new ways of killing one another. But there were only a few ways, really: burn, drown, cut, shoot, or hit.

The gun still sat on the table, a dull thing. More like a toy. And could this stranger even use it? It was hard to tell with white people.
At the drum dance, when Felix danced his position and spoke, he was clearly a great man, a great warrior. He spoke for each feather on the belt—how he had clubbed three men to death with his rifle, had shot nine, and had stabbed five with his bayonet, all before he turned twenty. When he danced she averted her eyes and looked only at his feet, delicately stamping on the floorboards. With him, it was easy to believe he had done those things, had touched blood, because delicate as his steps were, even dainty, she felt a chill come over her whenever he walked by. But this stranger at their table, in his black suit, with the sweat cooling on his face and the empty soda bottle he must have bought at the Wigwam? It was hard to imagine he could do anything at all to them, not to them and everything they had built together.

Gephardt shook his head again. “I am not that man. I am not him. I know him. He is dead.
Er ist tot
.”

“You have his name.”

“I take his name. Yes, I take it. I am not him. I am from Lübeck. I am a welder then.
Jetzt.
I join metal. The man you seek. He is dead. He drown in the river.”

The stranger looked at Gephardt steadily. Mary could see he wasn’t sure what to believe.

“Look!” said Gephardt and he held up his hands—pocked with scars from working with iron and steel, strong, gripping hands. He wasn’t handsome. His legs were bowed, and though his back was broad, one shoulder dipped lower than the other and the muscles of his neck were bunched. In the village they called him “the crab.” He couldn’t understand them anyway. It didn’t matter. They needed him, which was why they said such mean things. “No engineer. He is dead. That one drowned. I take only his name.”

What could he mean? Whatever the stranger wanted, Gephardt couldn’t give it to him. That was clear to Mary. It should be clear to the stranger. He was looking for a man, but Gephardt wasn’t him, so he should just leave. He should leave and leave them alone.

“You try to trick me.”

“I am no Göttingener. I am not from there. Gephardt Miller. Yes, he is from there. I am not that man. I am Herman Jünger. I am from Lübeck. That man, he tries to escape. They have a big search but no one finds him. He disappears from them and then they find his body on shore. Half in the water, rotting away. That is Gephardt Miller. I take only his name.”

“You are a Nazi!”

“
Kein Nazi. Nein, nein. Kein Nazi
. Politics I don’t care. War I don’t care. Fighting I don’t care. I wanted work. I find work, welding work, on the U-boat. I find work there welding. The Nazis never want me and I never want them.”

Mary understood that word.
Nazi
. She’d heard it all during the war years—
Nazi, German, Kraut
—the men who left and the few who came back used these words. They must all mean the same thing. They must just mean the enemy. And who cared about that, anyway? When the fighting was over, it was over. When the blood price had been paid, it was all over. Her grandfather spoke of fighting the Nadisoog. They would stop fighting and be brothers.
Gii-paabiindigaadiwag owiigiwaamiwaang gaa-ishkwaa-miigaadiwaad.

“It doesn’t matter. You helped them. You helped them kill my family.”

“I help no one kill.”

“You lie.” The man hit the table and the gun jumped. The water sloshed in the jar.

“I don’t kill anyone for purpose.” Gephardt looked meaningfully at Mary. And then down at the table.

“You lie. Now is the time for truth,” said the man.

“I kill one man,” said Gephardt mournfully. “I kill him before the war, you see. I kill him in Lübeck. It was accident.”

That couldn’t be true. Could it be? Mary crossed her arms. Her husband was not the man he’d said he was. And he had blood on his
hands that no one had washed off. It was still there on his hands. Gephardt turned to Mary.

“I kill a man in a fight. I hit him too hard. Here”—he pushed both hands into the right side of his rib cage—“I hit him here,” he explained to Mary and then to the stranger. “It was an accident.”

“Liar!”

“It is true. I tell the truth. I tell the truth to you.”

“Damn liar!”

“This is why I take his name. I take his name when they want to send us back to Germany. They put me back in prison. I don’t go back to prison. I love America. I love freedom. My wife”—he gestured at Mary—“she does what I say. I make this house. I have life.”

“You lie. You helped them. I don’t care you were in prison. I don’t care you join the U-boat from prison. I don’t care! You helped them. So you are not Gephardt.” The stranger sat lower in his chair. “So you are not him. You still must pay.”

The stranger closed his eyes and reached out and took the pistol in his right hand and fired. Gephardt flinched and grabbed his left forearm. He looked in surprise at the small hole that opened up in the muscle.

“You’ve hit me. I am shot!” he said in surprise.

“I shoot again,” said the stranger.

He aimed at Gephardt’s face and shot once more. Gephardt’s head snapped back.

But then once, twice, Mary hit the stranger in the head with the blunt side of the kindling ax. His chair tipped and he fell on the floor. She tried to hit him again, but he fell against the wall and his chair blocked the way.

Gephardt bent low over the table, his face in his hands. Blood dripped between his fingers and pooled on the oilcloth.

Mary set down the ax and lifted Gephardt’s head in her hands. Satisfied, she lowered herself back down to the table and then took
his left arm in her hands and looked at it this way and that before setting that down, too. He moaned through clenched teeth but didn’t say anything. Mary righted the stranger’s chair. Gephardt stayed quiet while Mary dragged the stranger’s body away from the table into the middle of the kitchen floor.

“Dead?” asked Gephardt through his hands. His voice sounded strange. Thick.

“Not dead,” she said. A pump knot had risen on the back of the stranger’s head. He jerked a little, but that was all.

“Will he die? Is he dying?”

Mary shrugged grimly.

She set the metal handle of the ash rake in its socket and tumbled the grate and added some cedar shavings to the firebox. When that was done she opened the damper wide and put water to boil and limped out into the yard. She broke off some red willow growing near the swamp edge and took the shoots back into the house and peeled them and put the peelings in the boiling water.

She approached Gephardt again. He hadn’t moved. A large puddle of blood had collected on the oilcloth and dripped to the floor. She took off his flannel and eased his head back off the table and set him straight in his chair. The first pistol shot had passed through his arm without hitting the bone. The second shot had gone through his cheek. She felt his cheekbone with her fingers. He cried out. She grimaced but said nothing. His cries were not important.

“Bad?”

“Not bad.”

“Is it broken?”

Mary shrugged again.

“I can’t feel it.”

She soaked strips of flour sacking in the willow tea and cleaned his face. The wound in his cheek was black around the edges, as though smudged with pencil or soot. She could see a gray line
running along the wound channel under the skin. Every time she pressed the wet rags to his face, dark red blood oozed down to his jaw and dropped onto his long johns.

She worked on his wound in silence. When she was satisfied, she packed his pipe for him and stuck it between his lips and lit it for him with a sliver of cedar from the wood box. He nodded in thanks and pulled at the corncob pipe, and with every suck on the pipe he winced but didn’t say much. Then she bathed and dabbed at his arm until it stopped bleeding.

*   *   *

W
hen the stranger woke, he saw much the same scene he had left. Gephardt sat in his chair smoking, with his back to the door. His cheek was swollen and he didn’t use his arm. Mary stood with her back to the counter by the icebox, her arms crossed over her apron. The stranger sat up and scooted back until he rested against the wall. He looked at Mary. She handed him a tin cup of tea and then stepped back to observe him. He took a drink, but before the weak tea could settle in his stomach he retched and threw up on the plank floor.

“I am sorry.”

Mary said nothing. With great sighs and grimaces, she mopped up the vomit with more torn rags and then retreated next to the icebox.

After a while he tried drinking the tea again. This time it stayed down.

“Thank you,” he said. He reached back to feel the knot on the back of his head. His hat was on the table but he made no move to get it. Gephardt packed another pipe. He held out the tobacco pouch and papers to the stranger, but the stranger motioned them away with his hand.

“You sit in chair?” asked Mary after the stranger finished his tea.

He nodded his head yes, testing it. Mary helped him rise and walk the few steps to the chair. He sat down as he had before. His hat and his pistol rested in the middle of the table. Four .22 short cartridges glinted dully in the light of the kerosene lantern, which Mary had lit and set back on the small plank nailed to the wall above the table, next to a fillet knife and a spool of thread with a needle stuck through the outermost windings. The sun had sunk lower but the heat was still heavy on the land and in the house. The stranger took out his pocket watch. It was six thirty.

Mary stood again to the side and watched Gephardt. His wounds would heal. The boys from the village had gone off to war and come back with worse, missing legs and fingers, and they had healed. Maybe there was nothing that could kill except death.

“Mary,” said Gephardt, “our guest is hungry. You are hungry, yes?”

The stranger nodded.

Mary grabbed a fistful of starter from the bowl of sourdough setting in the warming rack and mixed it with soda and lard and flour and fried it. She set the plate of steaming bread between the two men, along with the jar of lard. With her fingernail, she broke the seal on one of the precious jars of raspberry jam she’d canned the week before, then broke the wax and extracted it. A few red seeds clung to the wax, and these she licked off before she set the wax in a bowl to be melted and used again.

“We eat,” said Gephardt.

The stranger said, “Yes. We eat.”

Afterward, the stranger stood, and Mary helped him into his coat and handed him his hat. She wrapped the rest of the pan bread in a grease-stained bit of flour sacking and handed it to him.

“I keep the gun,” she said. “We keep that but you go now. Your work here is done. You are done here.” She put the gun in her apron pocket along with the shells.

“Yes,” said the man, unsteady on his feet.

“No more trouble for us. You go.”

“Yes,” said the stranger. “Yes.” He turned to face Gephardt, who stood up to face him. They shook hands.

The stranger turned out of the shack onto the road. They watched him walk slowly down the road. It wasn’t long before he was gone.

Gephardt sat back down in his chair. Mary looked at him; his arm must hurt and his face, too, but they would heal. He would once again be the strong man, the man who fixed things and smiled at her. Whoever he might have been long ago and whatever he might have done in those times were not who he was now. Now and for as long as she was there he would be Mary’s husband.

Out the window, there was no longer anything to see. The man had gone, and with him everything he had known and the evil he had brought into their house, as though it were any old house and not hers, not the house that she had helped build and made into a home. Not just any home, but a place where such bad things would never happen, as they did when she was a girl.

The gun was heavy in her apron. She took it out and put it on top of the icebox, and the bullets she put with the others in the old Blue Tip matchbox, which held the stray shells that turned up around the house like seeds, in their pockets and pants and coats. They had a .22 rifle but it would be nice to have the pistol. In a few months the snow would come, and with it the ice; it would be a relief to bend the stove wire into snares and set them around the weeds and willows bordering the yard and down the tote road, where the hazel brush grew close, hiding all the many living things that were out there. With the gun she could check her snares, and if there were rabbits that were not yet caught, maybe sitting in the sun, maybe just sitting there out of reach, they might as well be miles away, because even a few feet off the trail, there was no way to catch them; but with the gun it would be different, because with the gun she could take them, yes, she could,
she could level off and shoot them, and when they got shot in the head, they jumped and jumped, and their blood would be on the snow—yes, it would, it would be on the snow—and would slick up the brush; their blood was something not like ours, because their blood nourished us and made a fine brown gravy when she gutted them, but she would leave the blood sopping in their rib cages and set them carefully in the water. Their blood was not like ours because theirs was life for us and ours was not. With that gun she would be able to shoot them down, and their life would spray out on the snow, the bright red life waiting, like the raspberries in the jar, which she closed now, to be
eaten.